“ ‘And where is your nose?’ quoth Sancho, seeing him now without disguise. ‘Here in my pocket,’ and so saying, he pulled out the nose of a varnished pasteboard vizard, such as it has been described. … ‘Blessed Virgin!’ quoth Sancho. ‘Who is this? Thomas Cecial, my friend and neighbor?’ ‘The same, friend Sancho,’ quoth the squire; ‘I will tell you anon by what tricks and wheedles he was inveigled to come hither.’ ”
—Life and Achievements of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha
The little stone house under the elm trees, near which ran the broad walk of crazy paving, had its door wide open. All mist had now lifted into a clear, cool day with a freshening breeze that stirred the new leaves of the elms, like green lace. At the end of the pavement the ruined chapel stood up against a pale sky, the door of the chapel boarded over. And, some distance out among a litter of gravel and smashed stones, a tennis-court tarpaulin was spread over the entrance to the crypt, with stones at each corner to hold it firm.
Inside Henderson’s house, in the little living-room where they had sat last night, Henderson lay on a leather couch and looked with half-open eyes at the ceiling. His expression was one of sullen defiance mixed with genuine physical illness. There was a bad bruise on his hollowed left temple; his scanty hair looked more than ever like a disarranged cobweb. He was fully dressed, just as he had been last night, and he did not seem to have washed. A blanket was drawn up to his breast, and his hands lay on it snake-veined—and shook. When he heard footsteps outside, he twitched up his head suddenly, without seeming to move the body at all; but he lay back again.
Mark, Brennan, and Stevens stood in the doorway, surveying him.
“Good morning, Joe,” Mark said, sardonically.
Some twitch passed over the man’s face, some change which might have been humiliation; yet his expression seemed to say that his particular sufferings were more than a human being ought to bear, and it kept his eyes squeezed up with sullen fixity on the ceiling.
“Easy, old boy,” Mark told him, not without sympathy. Mark went over and put his hand on Henderson’s shoulder. “You’ve been overdoing it. You’re an old man, and you’ve been working like a dog.—What’s this nonsense about your seeing Uncle Miles?”
“Look here, Mr. Despard,” said Brennan, quietly: “what’s the idea in having it both ways? Why do you say it’s nonsense? Not five minutes ago you were all for ghosts and non-deads. And then, when this turns up, you turn around the other way.”
“I don’t know,” said Mark, struck with this. He stared. “Except… that is, I know what you’re going to think about this. You were too much impressed with Ted’s theory. And, directly on top of that, here’s another member of the Henderson family who’s seen a ghost. I know how it will sound to you: it’ll sound a little too fortuitous.” He turned back to the old man and spoke sharply. “Buck up, Joe! No matter how you feel, try to pull yourself together. The police are here.”
Henderson’s eyes flashed open; the expression of his face seemed to say that this was too much, that this was a final be-devilment. After looking as though he were going to cry, he pushed himself up to a half-sitting position and looked at them with rheumy eyes.
“The perlice,” he said. “Who sent for ’em?”
“Your wife,” said Brennan, briefly.
“She never did! You can’t fool me. I don’t believe it.”
“Let’s not fight about it,” said Brennan. “What I want to know is what you told Mr. Ogden Despard about seeing his uncle’s ghost. …”
“It wasn’t any ghost,” protested Henderson, with a wrench in his throat. Stevens, with a twinge of uneasiness, saw that the man was almost literally frightened out of his wits. “Leastways, it wasn’t like any ghost I ever heard tell of. If it had been, I wouldn’t have been a-skeered of it. It was—it was——”
“Alive?”
“I dunno,” said Henderson miserably.
“Whatever you saw,” Mark told him, “just tell us about it. Take it easy, Joe. Where did you see it?”
“In the bedroom there.” He pointed to a door. “It was this way. I got to think before I forget. Last night, you remember, Miss Edith and Lucy came here while we were—you know. And all of you went up to the house. Miss Edith, she told me to stoke up a big fire in the furnace. So I did. Then you were all talking in the front room, but you broke up before three o’clock. You remember?”
“Yes.”
“I got to get this straight,” said Henderson, nodding. “You and I was going to get the tarpaulin from the shed by the tennis court, and put it over the opening to that place. But then I thought you looked mighty tired, and it wasn’t anything of a job; so I told you to go to bed, and I’d do it. And you said thanks, and gave me a drink. It wasn’t till I went out the back door, and heard you locking it… it sort of came to me that I’d have to go all down that walk, and sleep here alone. What’s more, that tennis court is way over in the south field, and to get there I’d have to go through that little bit of woods I’ve never liked.
“But I hadn’t no more than got started for the south field when I remembered I wouldn’t have to go there, after all. Because I’d been mending that tarpaulin for this year, and it was right here in my house—under the sewing-machine over there. So I come back, and in here. Then I saw the lights were out in this room, and I tried ’em, and the bulb wouldn’t work. I didn’t like that, but I had my lantern. So I grabbed up that tarpaulin from under the sewing-machine, and ran out again, and started to lay it over the opening. I was working faster all the time, holding it down with stones at the edges. Because I thought: Suppose something should sort of push up that tarpaulin from underneath, like somebody coming up the steps and trying to get out?
“I got it done, and I was mighty glad. I told you before, I’ve never been a-skeered of things like that. It’s like what I told you, that Mr. Ballinger told me years ago. ‘Joe,’ he says, ‘don’t you be a-skeered of any dead people; it’s these livin’ sons-of-bitches you want to watch out for.’ But I didn’t like putting down that tarpaulin.
“So when I was through I come in here, and I locked that door. I tried the lights again, but they still wouldn’t work. Then I thought my lantern wasn’t giving enough light, and I tried to turn up the wick. But I must ’a’ got mixed up, or my hand wasn’t right, because I turned it the wrong way, and the light started to go out. I didn’t have time to monkey with it. I knew there was lights in that bedroom there, and I wanted to get inside with the door locked.
“So I went over to the bedroom. The first thing I heard when I got in there was the rocking-chair creaking. It has a kind of squeak you can always tell. It’s over by the window. Then I looked, and I seen something sitting in the chair, rocking back and forth.
“There was enough light for me to see it was your uncle. He was sitting there rocking just like your uncle did when he used to come to see me. I could see his face plain. I could see his hands, too. They was whitish, but they didn’t shine much, and they looked soft. I knew it because he reached out his hand and tried to shake hands with me.
“I run out of there. Or leastways I run somewhere, and I slammed the door. Only the key was on the other side. Then I could hear him get up and walk across to the door after me.
“I fell over something in here, and hit my head. After that I don’t remember much, except that I fell against the edge of this couch here, and there was a blanket or something on it. I think I had an idea of rolling over the couch, down to the other side, so it would hide me. But that’s all I can tell you, until your brother Ogden—he climbed through the winder over there, and he was shaking me.”
For a few more sentences, which were incomprehensible, Henderson remained propped on his elbow, his forehead sweated and snake-veined. Then he lay down and closed his eyes.
The others looked at one another, while Mark patted Henderson’s shoulder. Brennan was irresolute. After a hesitation, he walked across the room and snapped the catch of the light-switch: the light came on. He clicked it a few times, looking from it to Henderson. Stevens walked past him and out into the fresh air under the trees. As he did so he saw Brennan going towards the bedroom. After a minute or two Brennan also came out of the house.
“If you have no more immediate use for me,” Stevens said, “I’m going down home to get some breakfast.”
“Go ahead,” Brennan said. “But I want to see both you and Mrs. Stevens today; so I’d rather you stuck pretty close to home. She’d better get back from this shopping-trip before evening. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot to do. A whole hell of a lot,” he added, drawing out the words slowly and heavily, “to do.”
After turning away, Stevens swung back. “What do you think of—?” he nodded towards the house.
“Why, I’ll tell you. If that fellow’s a liar, he’s the slickest liar I’ve met in thirty years.”
“I see. Well—until this afternoon.”
“Until this afternoon. You’d better see your wife’s back by that time, Mr. Stevens.”
In his walk through the Park and down the hill he did not hurry. He did not hurry until he glanced at his watch and saw that it was past eleven o’clock. By this time she might have returned. But she had not returned, as he discovered when he reached his cottage. Ellen had come in and gone again; the whole house was tidy, and a note (another note) in Ellen’s Alpine handwriting informed him that his breakfast was in the oven.
He ate hard fried eggs and bacon on the kitchen table, eating slowly. In the midst of it he got up and went out into the front hall. On the telephone table in the hall, Cross’s manuscript still lay half out of its container and the briefcase, as he had left it. He drew it out so that he could see the title page. A Study of Motives for Poisoning throughout the Ages. Gaudan Cross, Fielding Hall, Riverdale, N. Y. He straightened the sheets carefully, sat down at the table, and picked up the telephone receiver.
“Operator. Operator? Can you tell me whether any long-distance call was put through from this number last night?”
Evidently they could.
“To where?”
“Yes, sir. Riverdale thhr-rr-ee six one,” replied the brisk voice.
Replacing the receiver, he wandered into the living-room and took down a copy of Gentlemen of the Jury from a shelf. On the back of the jacket the picture of Cross looked out at him, a thin, intelligent, rather sombre face, with hooded eyes and dark hair having only a touch of grey. He recalled the statement of the learned judge, quoted as a blurb, that the man who wrote Cross’s account of Neill Cream must have been in the courtroom; he recalled the newspaper comment, during the controversy, on the fact that Cross’s age was given as forty. He put the book back, patted it into place among the others, and went upstairs. In the bedroom he opened the door of Marie’s wardrobe, looking at each of the dresses that hung there. Since most of her clothes were at the New York apartment, there was not much to be seen.
Upstairs, downstairs, the clocks went on ticking; the usual tap drizzled in the bathroom; a creak or crack sported on the stairway: there rose up in loneliness the fifty noises of an empty house. He tried to read. He turned on the radio. He wondered whether he ought to have a drink; and, in his present mood, decided against it. At four o’clock it was a relief to find that he was out of tobacco, and that he must go down the road to the drug store for it. For he was on edge lest he should hear Brennan’s step coming up the walk; it was too quiet; some rolling devilry must have gathered again round Despard Park.
A few drops of rain struck him in the face when he went out of the house. He walked across King’s Avenue and up the short road to the railway station. The tops of the big trees nodded and danced; all things seemed dusky here. He had almost reached the druggist’s, where already lights glowed behind glass vats of red and green, when he heard what he thought he had heard the night before—his name called in the street. The door between the two windows labelled J. Atkinson, Funeral Director, was open. In the doorway some one was beckoning to him.
He crossed the street. The person who hailed him was a brisk, business-like, middle-aged man, growing somewhat portly, and very well dressed in a severely formal way. He had thin black hair, parted in the middle and brushed in strands across his head like the skeleton of a fish. His face was cherubic and genial, his manner pleasant.
“Mr. Stevens?” he said. “We haven’t met, but I know you by sight. I’m Mr. Atkinson—Jonah Atkinson, junior. My father has retired. Would you mind coming inside for a moment? I think I have something for you.”
Those discreet dark curtains beyond the windows were deceptive from the outside; they were higher then Stevens had expected. They shadowed the little waiting-room, a muffled soft-carpeted room with a curiously dream-like quality. It had an air of peace, as perhaps it was meant to have, and there was nothing to suggest its purpose except an immense marble urn, rather like the urns in the crypt, on either side of a rear door. Jonah Atkinson, whose every movement was unobtrusive, went to a table at one side of the room. If a certain curiosity was apparent in his manner, he seemed to be doing his best to repress it.
He came back, and held out to Stevens the photograph of Marie D’Aubray, who had been guillotined for murder in 1861.
“I was asked to return this to you,” he said. … “Good Lord! is there anything wrong?” he added.
How to explain a feeling of nightmare? Even Jonah Atkinson’s comfortable personality, even the black fishbone hair across his inclined forehead, partook of it. It was not merely caused by the picture. But Stevens, looking at the table from which he had taken the photograph, saw that on this table were unobtrusive magazines; and that, projecting from one of the magazines, a piece of string lay crookedly, and that the string was tied irregularly with knots.
“No. Oh no. No. Nothing,” Stevens told him, remembering the detective-story fantasy he had once had about this place. “Where did you get this?”
Atkinson smiled. “I don’t know whether you remember, but you got to Crispen last night by the 7:35 train. I was in the waiting-room here, after something or other, and I happened to look out of the window and see you——”
“Yes, yes, I noticed somebody!”
The other seemed puzzled. “There was a car waiting for you outside here. Just as the car turned round, I heard some one shouting out in the street. I thought I saw some one waving and shouting from the direction of the steps up to the railway platform. I opened the door there to see what was going on. The man who does part-time duty at the ticket office came down the steps when you drove away. It seems you dropped this photograph out of some manuscript, or something, in the train. The conductor noticed it, and tossed it out of the vestibule just before the train started again, to the man at the ticket office—he was just going off duty.”
Stevens’s thoughts flashed back to the train. In order to examine the photograph better, he had detached it from its clip to the paper. Then, when accosted by Welden, he had hurriedly shoved it out of sight under the manuscript. …
“The man,” Atkinson said, with a touch of irritation, “came across here after you’d gone, when I was still standing in the door. He said he was going off duty, and would I mind giving this to you if I saw you. He thought it was very funny, that fellow did: he showed the photograph to me and said it was more in my line than his.” Atkinson pointed to the inscription along the foot of the photograph, “guil—” “Anyhow, there it is. I thought you might want it.”
“I don’t think I could tell you,” Stevens said, slowly, “how glad I am to get this back. I wish all the questions were as easily solved. Look here. I want to ask you something, but I don’t want you to think I’m altogether crazy. It’s very important.” He pointed to the table. “How did that piece of string get there; the one with the knots in it?”
Atkinson, whose curiosity had clearly been about the picture, roused himself and peered round. Grunting he swept up the piece of string and put it into his pocket.
“That? Oh, that’s my father’s work. It’s a habit of his; he leaves ’em all over the place. He’s getting a little—well, you know. But he’s always done that. He takes a piece of string and ties knots in it, the way some people smoke and others twist buttons or rattle keys, to keep his hands busy. They used to call him The Old Man in the Corner. Read detective stories? Remember those Baroness Orczy stories where the old man sits in his corner, in the ‘blameless teashop,’ and eternally ties knots and designs in a piece of string?” Atkinson looked at him sharply. “He’s always done it, but he didn’t use to be so careless. Why do you ask that?”
The last few minutes had seemed to Stevens a vista of memory. He recalled Partington’s words last night, in speaking of Jonah Atkinson, senior, when he had thought Partington was drunk: “Old Jonah was a great favorite of Mark’s father; Mark’s father, with some sort of private joke, used to ask him whether he was still in his ‘blameless teashop’ or his ‘corner’; I don’t know what he meant.”
“I’d like to ask a favor in return,” Atkinson persisted. “Why do you ask that? It might be important to me. Has there been any—” He stopped. “I know you’re a great friend of the Despards. We officiated at Mr. Despard’s funeral. Has there been any——?”
“Trouble? Oh no.” He wondered what, if anything, he was allowed to tell. “But could one of those pieces of string have—well, could it have got into Miles Despard’s coffin?”
“I suppose it could. My father is still officially in charge,” Atkinson replied. He added, with a somewhat unprofessional note in his voice: “Hell’s bells! That’s inexcusable! I hope——”
Yes, but was it to be supposed that Atkinson the elder, with such convenience, invariably made nine knots in a string? And how did that explain the fact that a string tied in nine knots was found under Miles Despard’s pillow on the night he died, before the services of J. Atkinson were required? To Stevens, who was absently agreeing with everything Atkinson the younger said, this clarified very little with certainty.
It was both clarified and muddied; it explained the photograph; last night it might have explained everything. But now… At least he might make certain that Miles’s body had actually been in the coffin when it was carried down into the crypt. Telling the undertaker as much as he dared, he asked his questions. And Atkinson was emphatic.
“I knew,” he said, striking the table softly with his hand—“I know there was something queer going on at the Park! I’ve heard it everywhere. Oh yes; it’s between ourselves, of course. But I can certainly tell you what you want to know. There’s no doubt whatever that Mr. Despard’s body was put into the coffin. I helped do it myself. The pallbearers took over directly afterwards. My assistants will confirm all this. And the pallbearers, as you know, carried it directly to the crypt.”
Quietly the front door of the waiting-room opened and a man came in from the street.
In the street there was a dull grey light, with streaks and slurs of rain on the windows. The newcomer was silhouetted against it. He was a very small man, and much shrivelled, despite the fact that he wore a big fur coat. Some dandyism about the fur coat, or about the rakish brown soft hat drawn down in front, gave an unpleasant suggestion of Miles Despard. Yet dead men do not have limousines, like the Mercedes which was drawn up at the curb outside, with a chauffeur at the wheel. Above all the newcomer had only to take two steps forward, and it became clear that this was not Miles.
The fur coat was not extravagant dandyism; it had the antiquity of what conservative men wore thirty years ago. This man was over seventy. He had a face of remarkable ugliness; a wizened face, an almost simian face despite a good beak of a nose: yet it was not unattractive. Stevens had an impression that the face was familiar and that he had seen it many times, though he could not place it—it was blurred like a drawing. The newcomer’s monkey-bright eyes, cynical and rather savage, darted round the room. They rested on Stevens.
“Pray excuse this intrusion,” he said. “May I have a word with you, sir? I followed you in. I have come a long way in order to see you. My name is Cross—Gaudan Cross.”
“Yes, it is quite true,” the newcomer said, composedly. He reached into the furs and extracted a card. Then he regarded Stevens with a sort of quizzical impatience. “You were thinking that this face of mine,” he pointed to it, “is a somewhat older and less attractive one than I insist on having published on the jackets of my books. Obviously. Otherwise I should not have it published there. If you look closely, however, you will see some resemblance to me as I was some thirty years ago. That picture was taken before I was sent to prison.”
Again he lifted a gloved hand.
“You were further thinking,” he went on, “that my royalties, while tolerable enough, are hardly sufficient to pay for—” He pointed to the car outside. “You are quite right. When I went to prison I had a passable sum of money. A beneficent rate of interest, while I was unable to spend any of the money, brought it up to something like a fortune; and I contrived to add to it by literary work while I was in prison. That is the difference between financiers and authors. Financiers make money and then go to prison. Authors go to prison and then make money. Mr. Atkinson, I hope you will excuse us. Mr. Stevens; please come with me.”
He held open the door; and Stevens, in dumb astonishment, followed him out. The chauffeur opened the door of the car.
“Get in,” said Cross.
“Where are we going?”
“I have not the slightest idea,” said Cross. “Drive anywhere, Henry.”
The car hummed softly. It was warm in the grey-upholstered back of the limousine. Cross sat in one corner, regarding his guest intently. Over his face had come the same expression of savagery and cynicism, tempered with something Stevens could not read. He gravely took out a cigar-case and tendered it. Stevens, whose nerves needed tobacco badly, accepted one.
“Well?” said Cross.
With the same air of gravity or cynicism he removed his hat and held it above his head. Though his hair was thick enough at the sides, this revealed a shrunken bald head with one hair standing up and waving above it. Oddly enough, the effect was not ludicrous; it may have been because the monkey-bright eyes were grim.
“Well what?”
“Are you still aflame with jealousy?” inquired Cross. “I refer to the fact that your wife, whom I never saw before in my life, drove innumerable miles last night in order to wake me up at a damned hour and ask me questions. Your wife slept in my house. But you should perceive now that it was no assignation. Altogether aside from the fact that I sleep with Mrs. Murgenroyd, my housekeeper, my age should be a good enough guarantee of that. I hope, sir, you guessed that your wife had gone to me. You will have done so if you have any intelligence, which I am inclined to doubt.”
“You have,” said the other, “aside from Ogden Despard, probably more unadulterated nerve than any person I know. And, since plain speaking seems to be in order, I’ll admit that you’re not exactly my idea of a dangerous co-respondent.”
“Ah, that’s better,” chuckled Cross. He added, sharply: “And yet why not? You have youth—yes. Health—I dare say. But I have intelligence. Did your editorial head—what’shis-name, Morley?—tell you anything about me?”
Stevens thought back. “No. He asked me if I’d met you, that’s all. Where is Marie now?”
“At your house. No, wait!” He shot his arm across towards the door of the car. “Don’t get out—not yet. Plenty of time.” Then Cross sat back, smoking his cigar thoughtfully, and his face grew less wizened. “Young man, I am seventy-five. I have studied more criminal cases than a man of a hundred and seventy-five ought to have studied. That was partly because I had a first-hand opportunity: I spent twenty years in prison. As a favor to your wife, I am here to advise you.”
“I thank you,” said his guest, in the same grave tone. “I shouldn’t have spoken as I did a minute ago. But in that case”—he took the photograph of Marie D’Aubray out of his pocket—“will you in the name of sanity tell me what this means? And why she went to you? And the origin of your name, or ancestry, if your name is really Gaudan Cross?”
Again the dry chuckle convulsed Cross before he became grave.
“Ah, so you have been attempting deduction. Your wife was afraid you had. Yes, my name is really Gaudan Cross, in the sense that I have a right to it. I changed it to that by deed-poll when I was twenty-one years old. I was born with the name of Alfred Mossbaum. Do not misunderstand me. I am a Jew, and, like all the great men of my race, I am proud to be one. If it were not for us you would live without foundations and I think your tidy world would go to hell. But I am also,” Cross said, rather superfluously, “an egotist. The name of Alfred Mossbaum was not euphonious enough to describe me. You agree?
“You had better know something about me. Crime was my hobby; it has always been my hobby since I was a young man. Of course I was in England when Cream was caught and tried. Of course I was in France when Pranzini was caught and tried. Of course I know the Borden case as few others know it. In my late thirties, in order to show that crime was a matter of simplicity, I committed a crime. You immediately retort: As a matter of demonstrating how simple it is to escape punishment for crime, you spent twenty years in prison. That is true. But I was detected in the only conceivable way I could have been detected—by detecting myself. I got drunk and I boasted.”
He blew out a cloud of smoke and brushed it away. Then he turned his monkey-bright eyes round again.
“But what an opportunity! In prison I became the warden’s right-hand man. Do you realize what that means? It means that I had direct access to the full records of every criminal case; not only of that place, but of every other place to which the warden chose to send for particulars. In some cases I knew the men themselves, better than the judges who tried them or the juries which condemned them. I knew the man-hunters who caught them. Consequently, I made no application for parole or shortening of sentence. Where could I live better? I lived at some one else’s expense while my money was being saved for me. When I came out I should be a rich man.”
“That,” said Stevens, “is undoubtedly one way of looking at it.”
“There was one drawback. It was, I think you will admit, a social hindrance afterwards, especially when I began to write. I had served my sentence under the—you acknowledge—unusual name of Gaudan Cross. I flew my own banner. I did not become Alfred Mossbaum again when it became necessary to hide my head. But the name was easily remembered. I did not wish too many people to connect Gaudan Cross, the new and brilliant literary figure, with the Gaudan Cross who had gone to prison for murder in the year 1895. That is why my age is firmly given as forty, and a photograph so early as to be indistinguishable is on every book.”
“It was murder, was it?”
“Naturally,” answered Cross, with a simplicity of evil which startled his guest. Cross’s gloved hand brushed ash off his coat. “But I wished you to understand why I wrote with authority. You ask me why your wife came to me? I will tell you. Because, as she was aware from a glance at the first chapter of my new book—there is not one paragraph which is not annotated with documentation—I knew the facts. And she did not.”
“The facts about what?”
“About Marie D’Aubray in 1676. About Marie D’Aubray in 1861. About her ancestry; or, more properly, what she thinks is her ancestry.”
“You seem to know, or to follow,” Stevens began, slowly, “a good deal of what I’m thinking. I am thinking something now… not only about the present, but about the past and the long past… about the dead and the non-dead. Is there any truth in it?”
“There is not—I regret to say,” snapped Cross. “At least, in her own case.”
Stevens’s thoughts were something like this: I am sitting in a comfortable limousine, smoking a very good cigar, with a self-confessed murderer whom I both trust and distrust. Yet the very presence of this engaging little mummy has done more to lift a weight off my mind, and make me see things in decent perspective, than all those explanations in the undertaker’s parlor. He looked out of the window of the car, where grey rain was beginning to shroud the Lancaster Highway.
“You have been married three years, I understand,” said Cross, blinking, “Do you know anything about her? No, you do not. Why don’t you? All women chatter. If you mention an uncle of yours, she mentions an uncle of hers. If you tell how a respected great-aunt of yours once threw a tomato at a cat and hit a policeman instead, she will reply with a family anecdote of a similarly improving nature. Why didn’t you hear any family anecdotes? Because she had something locked up inside. Why was she always condemning certain things as morbid? Because she was afraid of them herself. Bah! I got the whole story out of her in ten minutes. And I was naturally in a position either to confirm or dispel her notions.
“Listen to me. At a place called Guibourg, which is a dismal hole in north-western Canada, there really is a family of D’Aubrays which is remotely descended from the D’Aubrays who hatched the Marquise de Brinvilliers. They also hatched the Marie D’Aubray whose picture you have there. So far, so true. I know this because, in preparation for the essay in my new book, I underwent the martyrdom of spending two weeks in Guibourg, tracing the family records. I wished to see whether there were any more examples of this ‘non-dead’ legend. I do not listen to legends: I examine birth certificates and parish registers. Your esteemed wife is not even connected with the family, although she thinks she is. She was adopted, at the age of three, by Miss Adrienne D’Aubray, the sole remaining branch of a rotten tree. Her name is no more D’Aubray than mine is Cross. Her mother was a French Canadian and her father a Scotch laborer.”
“I don’t know,” muttered Stevens, “whether we’re now in the province governed by the laws of witchcraft or the laws of sense. But look at that picture. There’s an amazing resemblance, even to——”
“Why,” said Cross, “do you think she was adopted at all?”
“Adopted at all?”
“Yes. Because of that resemblance. No other reason. Because Miss Adrienne D’Aubray, figuratively speaking, is an old witch herself. If I lived all the year round in Guibourg, I should begin to believe she was a real one. Listen. In Guibourg the sky is dark, and it snows a good part of the year. Do you know where even the name Guibourg comes from? In the seventeenth century the Black Mass was known as La messe de Guibourg. The family lives in a long low house against a hill with fir trees on it. They own timber, and they are well-off, but they do not go out much even if there were anywhere to go. The weather shuts them in to look at pictures in the fire. Miss Adrienne D’Aubray adopted the child of a Scotch laborer for the sole purpose of bringing her up to think she had the blood of the non-dead, and that one day the non-dead would creep into her skin. She showed her pictures. She told her stories, and pointed out things among the fir trees. When the girl was punished, she was punished as her alleged ancestress was, with a funnel and water. She was burnt, to show what it would be like. Do I need to elaborate?”
“No,” said Stevens, and put his face in his hands.
Cross had an extraordinary animation, as though he admired all this as a work of art. Then he sat back and puffed his cigar complacently. The cigar was too big for him; it destroyed any effect at the Mephistophelian on his part.
“That, young man, is the girl you have been living with,” he said, more gently. “She kept the secret well. The trouble was… I gather it was this. Her marriage to you, it appears, almost succeeded in getting the past out of her system. Then, through your association with this Despard family, it seems that a few accidents began to bring it back again. Mrs. Mark Despard, one Sunday afternoon, started a conversation about poisons in the presence of a nurse who was taking care of a sick uncle—” Cross looked at him sharply.
“I know.”
“Oho! You know? Well, your spouse had been repressing the goblins too long, putting them in a box and shutting the lid on them; and all of a sudden they got out. The talk about poisons did it. In her own hardly descriptive phrase, ‘she felt queer all over.’ ‘The curse is come upon me, cried the Lady of Shalott,’ ” said Cross, disgustedly, and spat smoke at the glass partition. “Good God! She was even foolish enough to run out of the room after the nurse and gabble something about poison. She informs me that she can’t think why she did it. A brain specialist could tell her. Actually, there is nothing in the least the matter with her. She is too fundamentally normal and sound. If she had not been, I dare say Aunt Adrienne’s teaching might have produced a weird graduate. However, it appears that—not three weeks after this conversation about poisons—the old uncle of the family died. On top of that, you walked in with my manuscript and uttered sinister sounds. On top of that, this Mark Despard entered with a tame doctor, and informed you (while she was listening at the door), first, that he had positive proof his uncle was poisoned, second, that a woman in a Marquise de Brinvilliers dress had been seen in the uncle’s room. He didn’t do much explaining, but he hinted at many extra-normal things. If you are unable to imagine her state of mind at this point in the business, you are even duller than I think you are. She had to know the facts about her own ancestry.”
Stevens remained with his head between his hands, staring at the grey carpeting on the floor of the car.
“Tell the chauffeur to turn back, will you?” he requested, after a pause. “I want to get back to her. So help me God, I’ll see that she never has the hobgoblins again as long as I live.”
Cross gave an order into the mouthpiece, “This is a most interesting study,” he observed, with monkey-like lordliness. “The role of soother of the waters is new to me; and one, I may inform you, which pains my neck insufferably. However, I—a complete stranger—have been delegated to tell you all this before she faces you, because she does not seem to like the task. It seems, for some reason wholly inexplicable to me, that she loves you. Is there anything else you would like to ask?”
“Well, yes, if she said anything about it… did she say anything about morphia tablets?”
Cross was irritable. “Yes. I forgot that. Yes, she stole morphia. Do you know why? No, don’t answer; you do not know why. But carry your mind back. You and she were at this famous (and to me painful) Despard Park on a certain night. Do you remember the date?”
“Without any trouble. It was the night of Saturday, April 8th.”
“Yes. Do you remember what all of you were doing at Despard Park?”
“Why, we went up to play bridge, but—” He stopped. “But we didn’t. The evening was devoted to telling ghost stories.”
“That’s true. You were telling ghost stories, and I gather some highly unpleasant ones, in the dark, before a woman already half insane with a fear she could not reveal to anyone.
There was only one thing she wanted. She wanted sleep. She wanted sleep beyond the remote possibility of remaining awake an instant after she had gone to bed; she wanted to blot out dreams and hags as you turn out a light. I am not surprised you didn’t notice, but how it escaped the attention of the Despard family is beyond me. The Despards as an influence seem to be bad for both of you. They are great invokers of witches. …”
Outside a faint growl of thunder followed the smooth humming of the car. Rain began to tick more steadily on the windows. Cross, letting down one window to throw away his cigar, swore as the rain blew in. But Stevens felt that his mind had been cleaned and swept—of all except one thing. There remained the problem.
“Invokers of witches,” he repeated. “Yes, that’s just exactly true. Things seem in different focus now, somehow. But still there’s the round, flat, immovable fact of impossibility. A man’s body disappears from a crypt——”
“Oh, it does, does it?” demanded Cross, jumping like a monkey on a stick. He leaned forward. “That’s what I was coming to. I said I was here to advise you, as a favor to your wife, and I insist on knowing what happened. It will take ten minutes before we get back to your house. Tell me about it.”
“Glad to. I was only wondering how much I’m supposed to tell. Of course, the police are there now, so it will have to come out, anyway. Captain Brennan——”
“Brennan?” demanded Cross, and put his hands on his knees with an air of alertness. “Not Francis Xavier Brennan? Foxy Frank? Fellow who’s always telling anecdotes about his father?”
“That’s the man. Do you know him?”
“I have known Frank Brennan,” said Cross, cocking a meditative eye, “since he was a sergeant. I get a Christmas card from him every year. He plays an admirable hand of poker; but he is limited. In any case, they all listen to me. Now go on with the story.”
As he listened, by some illusion Cross’s face seemed to grow alternately younger and older as some point pleased or displeased him. Occasionally he said, “Beautiful!” or gave a fillip to the brim of his rakish hat; but he only interrupted once, which was to tell the chauffeur to go slower.
“And you believed all this?” he asked.
“I don’t know what I believed or still believe. When they brought in that witchcraft business——”
“Witchcraft be blanked,” observed Cross, using a pungent term. “I trust that you will not insult the nobility of the black arts by comparing them to this piece of charlatanism. It’s murder, man! It’s murder: rather well stage-managed, and perhaps with a fine aesthetic conception behind it; but the contriver was of hesitant and bungling mind, and the best part of it was pure accident.”
“Are you going to tell me you have an idea how it was worked and who worked it?”
“Of course I have,” said Cross.
An enormous crash of thunder struck low and rolled in split echoes down the sky; it was followed almost instantly by the lightning, and then the windows grew even darker with driving rain.
“In that case, who is the murderer?”
“A member of that household, obviously.”
“I’ve got to warn you that they all have cast-iron alibis. Except, of course, the Hendersons——”
“I think I may assure you that the Hendersons had nothing to do with this. Besides, this was some one rather more intimately concerned with the death of Miles Despard, and affected by it, than the Hendersons could have been. As for your alibis, do not be impressed. When I murdered Royce (who, I may add, quite deserved death) I had a complete alibi: twenty people, including the waiter, were willing to testify that I was having dinner at Delmonico’s. It was an ingenious and amusing device, which I shall be happy to explain to you when there is more time. The same thing occurred when I committed the robbery by which I obtained my original means of livelihood. In this case there is scarcely an original feature. Even the means by which the body was stolen from the crypt, while executed with some degree of finesse, was improved on by my friend Bastion. Bastion finished his sentence in ’06; unfortunately, when he left us and returned to England, they were compelled to hang him; but in the meantime he did certain things which were, from an artistic standpoint, commendable. However, I see that we are slowing down.”
Stevens was out on the sidewalk almost before the car had stopped at the familiar gate. No lights showed in the house. But at the beginning of the walk leading up to the door stood a familiar bulky figure under an umbrella. The figure stared, so that the umbrella wobbled and rain splashed inside upon the neat overcoat of Captain Brennan.
“Frank,” said Cross, “come here. Get into the car.”
“So it’s you—” said Brennan, “Sorry, Mr. Cross, I can’t stop now. I’ve got business here. Afterwards——”
“You foxy-faced bandit,” said Cross, “I have learned more about this case in fifteen minutes than you have learned in a day. I’ll smarten things up. I’ll make the fur fly and take the watch-springs out of the miracles! Get into this car. I have somewhat to say unto you.”
Brennan, the umbrella flapping inside out, was in some fashion impelled into the car. Stevens, with the rain beating gratefully on his face, watched them drive away. He could not have spoken. His throat was thick, and relief left him almost physically dizzy. But he turned round and went up the walk to the front door, and Marie was waiting for him there.
They stood presently by a rear window of the living-room, looking out into the garden. He had his arm round her, and upon both of them was peace. It might have been six o’clock. The rain had almost ceased to stir and scamper on the eaves; though it was not yet twilight, there was a white mist in the garden. Dimly through it they could see the sodden grass, the shape of the elm tree, the flower-beds which had lost form and color. Their separate stories had been told.
“I don’t know why I couldn’t tell you,” she said, and her hand tightened round his waist. “Sometimes because it seemed too ridiculous, and sometimes because it seemed too awful. And then you were so—so easy. About everything. But people don’t easily get away from things like Aunt Adrienne. I broke away from her, of course, when I came of age.”
“It’s all over, Marie. There’s no reason to talk about it now.”
“But there is!” Marie said, and lifted her head up a little. Yet she did not tremble; the grey eyes were smiling. “That’s what’s caused all the trouble, not talking about it. I’ve always been trying to find out about it. You remember the first day we ever met each other, in Paris?”
“Yes. Number 16, rue Neuve St. Paul.”
“The house of—” She stopped. “I went there, and sat in the courtyard, and wondered whether I should feel anything. It sounds so completely absurd, now I do talk about it, that Aunt Adrienne must have had horrible powers. You never saw my home, Ted. I don’t want you ever to see it. There was a hill behind. …” She put her head back, so that he could see the full line of her throat, and it quivered, but not with fear. She was laughing. “Now, I’ve a sure cure for all this. If I should ever happen to get the blue devils again, or flinch, or have a nightmare sleeping or waking, I want you to do just one thing. You whisper, ‘Maggie MacTavish’ to me and I’ll be all right.”
“Why Maggie MacTavish?”
“That’s my real name, darling. It’s a lovely name. It’s a magic name. You can’t turn it into anything else, no matter how hard you try. But I wish the Despards weren’t so… so… I don’t know what I mean. That house up there is so much like the one I used to live in that it brought the whole thing back to me when I thought you’d chased it out of my system. It’s funny; I couldn’t keep away from that house. It haunted me, or I haunted it. And listen, Ted, I really did ask about buying arsenic! That was the horrible part. I don’t know what——”
“Maggie,” he said, “MacTavish.”
“Oh, that’s all right. But I think the climax was that Saturday night when they were telling those ghost stories, and Mark told that foul one about… Any minute I thought I was going to start screaming. I felt I had to forget it for a little while or I would go out of my mind. And I did steal those drug tablets, though I put the bottle back next day. Ted, I don’t wonder at what you were thinking! Now the evidence against me is all piled up, it would have convinced myself if I’d thought of all of it. People have been burned at the stake on less.”
He drew her round to face him, and touched one of her eyelids.
“As a matter of academic interest,” he asked, “you didn’t happen to dose both yourself and me on the following Wednesday night, did you? That was the thing that stuck in my head most. I was dog tired that night, and I went to sleep at ten-thirty.”
“No, I honestly didn’t,” she told him. “That’s true, Ted. And, anyway, I couldn’t have, because I only took one tablet, after all, and I cut that in half when I——”
“One tablet! But there were supposed to be three missing.”
She was puzzled. “Then somebody else must have been at the bottle,” she said, with positiveness and obvious truth. “I was afraid of the things, really; I didn’t know but what I might kill myself, or something. Ted, I wonder what on earth the whole mess is about? Somebody did kill poor Miles. I know I didn’t, not even in a dream, because I couldn’t get to sleep until half-past eleven on that night. I wasn’t drugged and I wasn’t drunk, and I was lying right beside you and I remember it. You don’t know how much it’s helped to remember that. But I think that somebody up in the Park guessed what was worrying me. You say Edith…”
She broke off, brushing the subject away.
“But, oh my God! Ted, as much as I talk about being free now, it’s nothing to how I’ll feel if it’s shown there’s a natural explanation for all this! I mean—the murder. Is there? Can there be? You say Mr. Cross… What do you think of him, by the way?”
Stevens considered. “Well, he’s an old brigand, of course. By his own story he’s a murderer and a thief and I don’t know what else: that is, unless it’s all hot air. If I had something he wanted, I should keep my eye open in case he cut my throat to get it. He seems completely without moral sense; if there were really any hang-over from the seventeenth century in human form, my guess is that it would take the form of Cross…”
“Don’t say that.”
“One moment, Maggie. I was going to add that, even when you say all this, the man is immensely likable—he seems to have taken a great fancy to you—and he is about as shrewd as they make ’em. Furthermore, if he manages to solve this mystery I’m going to boost his royalty rate up to twenty-five per cent on the first three thousand.”
She shivered. Leaning forward, she started to open the window, and he opened it for her, so that they could both smell the clean air.
“It’s misty, though,” she said. “I thought I smelt smoke. When this is all over, couldn’t you get leave of absence so we could take a trip somewhere? Or maybe I ought to have Aunt Adrienne down here, to see how she looks away from her setting at Guibourg, and prove that she’s only an ugly old woman, after all. Do you know, I really can recite the ritual of the Black Mass? I saw it— It’s a foul thing; I’ll tell you about it sometime. And that reminds me. Just a minute.”
She broke away from him and ran out into the hall; he heard her going upstairs. When she returned she was holding out, as though it might burn her, the gold bracelet with the cat’s head. Even in the gloom by the window he could see that her face was flushed and her breast was heaving.
“There it is. That’s the only thing of hers I have now,” she said. She lifted her eyes, and he could see the pin-point black pupil in the grey iris. “I kept it because it was rather pretty and because it was supposed to bring good luck. But now I’ve seen it in the photograph of your eighteen-sixties lady, I want to have it melted down or—” She looked out of the window.
“That’s right. Fire it out the window.”
“It—it cost a lot of money, though,” Marie said, doubtfully.
“Be damned to that. I’ll buy you a better one. Here, give it to me.”
All his own rage at himself seemed to have become centred in that bracelet as a symbol. With a long, low whip, like a catcher to second base, he sent it flying out of the window; and relief welled up in him with the very swing of his arm. It curved past the elm tree, flicking a branch, and was lost in the mist; and at the same time there rose out of the mist the sudden squall and snarl of a cat.
“Ted, don’t—” cried Marie. Then she said, “You heard that.”
“I heard it,” he said, grimly. “That’s a good heavy bracelet, and there was steam behind it. If it caught that cat in the ribs, there was good reason for the cat to yowl.”
“But there’s somebody coming,” she told him, after a pause.
First they heard footsteps in wet grass, then on the gravel path. A figure began to loom up out of the mist, hurrying and taking stumping steps.
“Agreed,” he replied. “But did you think you were calling spirits out of the vasty deep? That’s only Lucy Despard.”
“Lucy?” said Marie, in a queer tone. “Lucy? But why is she coming the back way?”
They both went out to the back door before Lucy had knocked. Lucy came into the kitchen, pulling off a sodden hat, and rather fiercely smoothing down her dark hair. Her coat had been put on in such a hurry that her dress was disarranged, and the lids of her eyes were red, though she was not crying now. She sat down in a white chair.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to inflict myself on you for a while,” she said. She looked at Marie as though in appraisal and wonder, but new worries seemed to come into her head and she dismissed the first thought. Her voice was husky. “I couldn’t stand it up there any longer. Yes—I will have a drink, if you’ve got one. There have been awful things happening up there. Ted… Marie… Mark’s run away.”
“Run away? Why?”
She remained silent for a moment, looking at the floor. Marie put a hand on her shoulder.
“Because I sent him, in a way; and other things,” answered Lucy. “It—it was all right until lunch. We wanted that rather nice police officer—Foxy Frank, you know—to have lunch with us. But he wouldn’t; he insisted on going out to a lunch-wagon. Up to then Mark had been very quiet. He still was quiet. He didn’t say anything or even show any temper, but that’s why I knew something was up. We all went into the dining-room, and just as we were going to sit down at the table, Mark walked up to Ogden and hit him in the face. Then he beat him. How he beat him! I couldn’t stand watching it, and nobody could pull him off. You know what Mark is. He beat him until… well, afterwards Mark just walked out of the room without saying anything, and went to the library and smoked a cigarette.”
She drew a shuddering breath and looked up. Marie, puzzled and uneasy, glanced from Stevens back to Lucy.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to see it,” Marie said, with a higher color; “but, honestly, Lucy, I can’t see anything to make much fuss about. There, if you want the truth! Why somebody hasn’t done that to Ogden before I’ve never been able to understand. He’s been asking for it for a long time.”
“He has,” agreed Stevens. “It was for writing that letter and sending those telegrams, I suppose? Good for Mark.”
“Yes, Ogden admitted he did that. But that wasn’t all. The person who antagonizes Ogden,” said Lucy, in a colorless voice, “is a fool.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” observed Marie. “I’m willing to antagonize him. He—well, he tried to make up to me, once, in a more or less subtle way; and he seemed completely staggered that I wasn’t in the least impressed.”
“Just a minute,” said Lucy. “That’s not all. Edith and I washed his face and brought him round; he was beaten clear insensible, you see. As soon as Ogden could get on his feet he called us all together and said he had something to tell us. He took the room next to the one Mark was in, so Mark could hear. … I—I don’t know how much you’ve heard about Tom Partington’s case. Doctor Partington. He used to be engaged to Edith. But it was discovered that he performed an abortion, and he only escaped criminal prosecution by getting out of the country. Edith always believed, or said she believed, that the girl was his mistress. As a matter of fact, I don’t think Edith ever really cared for him. Edith’s a grand person, but she’s cold, cold as ice; and I believe she was only getting married for the show of the thing. So she broke it off because of this girl—Jeannette White. … But Ogden told the truth today. The girl wasn’t Tom Partington’s mistress. She was Mark’s.”
After a pause Lucy added, in the same colorless voice: “Tom was Mark’s best friend, and yet Mark never told him, never told anybody else. He let Edith go on thinking what she did think. Tom Partington never knew who the man was, for the girl wouldn’t tell. So Mark kept quiet in spite of how much Tom cared for Edith. You see, Mark was engaged to me at the time, and he was afraid to speak.”
Stevens paced up and down the kitchen. He thought: Affairs are too much tangled and incomprehensible in this world. If Mark Despard did that, he did a meaner thing than Ogden has ever done; and yet it does not particularly lower Mark in my opinion; for to me Mark will always remain likable, and Ogden, to put it civilly, something else altogether. He found, with some surprise, that Marie felt the same way.
“So Ogden,” said Marie, with contempt, “played tattle-tale.”
“That’s not the point,” interposed Stevens. “How did Partington take it? Was he there?”
“Oh yes,” Lucy replied, nodding with a dry, bright glaze in her eyes. “And that wasn’t so bad. It didn’t seem to bother him greatly. He just shrugged his shoulders—and spoke pretty sensibly. He said ten years was too long a time to bother over anything much, particularly a love-affair. He said that by this time he was more in love with liquor than he could be with any woman. No, it wasn’t Tom that made the trouble. It was I. I said some pretty awful things. I also told Mark I never wanted to see him again, and in that quiet, solemn way of his he took me at my word.”
“But what on earth for?” cried Marie, opening her eyes. It surprised her husband that this Dresden-china doll, now wearing her spiritual expression again, could go so practically to the point. “I mean, why did you have to say that? After all, it can’t be because he—did things to this girl ten years ago. Lucy dear, you find me a man who hasn’t done that, and he’ll be rather awful, won’t he? And it was ten years ago. What’s more, it can’t be because he let this Mr. Partington down so badly. That’s very wrong and terrible, no doubt; agreed; but, after all, it only showed Mark loved you, didn’t it? And that’s all I’d care about.”
Stevens had prepared a drink for Lucy, who took it with eagerness. She hesitated over it, put it down, and the color in her face grew higher.
“Because I’m afraid,” she said, “he’s been seeing the girl again since.”
“The same girl? Jeannette White?”
“The same girl.”
“And is Ogden,” asked Stevens, bitterly—“is Ogden, as usual, the source of information? Personally, I think Ogden must be unhinged. He’s had to conceal his malice for so long, under a sort of good-fellowly and pleasant unpleasantness, that, now he’s come into his uncle’s money, it’s gone to his head.”
Lucy fixed her eyes steadily on him. “You remember, Ted, the mysterious phone call which almost took me away from the dance at St. Davids, so that except for a freak of luck I shouldn’t have had an alibi? That call was anonymous——”
“Ogden’s touch is discernible again.”
“Yes, I think it was Ogden.” She took up the glass. “That’s why I almost obeyed it. Whatever else Ogden is, he’s invariably accurate. That call said that Mark was tied up again with his ‘old flame, Jeannette White.’ You see, at that time I hadn’t heard—or at least I couldn’t remember—the name of the girl in the Partington scandal; I never connected the two. But it was a woman. And Mark… doesn’t seem to care much about me any longer.”
She got the words out with difficulty. Then she emptied her glass very quickly, and remained staring at the opposite wall.
“The call said that on that very night, using the convenience of masks so that I shouldn’t know where he was, Mark was going back to our house and see this girl. In our own house. The call said that, if I would take fifteen minutes out and drive to Crispen, I could see for myself. At first I didn’t believe it. Then I looked all over the house where the masquerade was being held, and I didn’t see Mark. (As a matter of fact, he was playing billiards in a room at the back of the house with two friends of ours; I found that out later.) I started to go out; then I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and I came back. But then, this afternoon, when Ogden came out with the name of Jeannette White as being the girl in the Partington scandal, I—I——”
“But are you sure it’s true?” demanded Stevens. “If Ogden’s phone call was wrong that night, why shouldn’t this accusation be wrong?”
“Because Mark admitted it. And now he’s gone. Ted, you’ve got to find him! It isn’t for me; it’s for his own sake. When Captain Brennan learns Mark’s gone, he’s likely to think all sorts of things that haven’t anything to do with this case.”
“Doesn’t Brennan know it yet?”
“No. He went out a while ago, and came back with an odd little man in an awful fur coat, who’s most amusing, but I’m not in the mood for being amused. Captain Brennan asked me whether I’d mind having the man around, because he says this man—Croft or Cross I think his name is—knows criminals’ minds as he knows the palm of his hand. They went down into the crypt, and when they came up again Captain Brennan was red in the face and this little man was laughing fit to burst. All I could gather was that they didn’t find a secret passage there. I asked Joe Henderson what they were doing, and… You know that old wooden door at the foot of the stairs into the crypt, that won’t quite close?”
“Yes. Well?”
“Cross was moving that back and forth, Joe says, and laughing again. I don’t know what’s up, but it scares me. Then they went up to the sun porch—you know, with the glass door looking into Uncle Miles’s room. They fiddled with the curtain, and sighted through it, and had a fine time of one sort or another. Have you any idea what they meant?”
“No. But,” said Stevens, “there’s something else on your mind, Lucy. This isn’t all. What else is worrying you?”
Lucy’s jaw became set.
“It doesn’t worry me, exactly,” she responded, with such rapidity as to be almost incoherent. “That is, it might be in any house. Captain Brennan admitted that himself, when he found it; it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. All the same, it would worry us horribly if we hadn’t known we all had perfectly good alibis for Wednesday night. The fact is, not very long after you left, Ted, Captain Brennan found arsenic in the house.”
“Arsenic! Good God! Where?”
“In the kitchen. I could have told him myself it was there, if I’d remembered it. But I had no reason or occasion to think of it, had I? Nobody so much as mentioned arsenic until today. …”
“Who bought it, Lucy?”
“Edith bought it. For the rats. But she’d forgotten all about it.”
There was a silence. Lucy again tried to drain an empty glass. With a little shiver, Marie went over and opened the back door.
“The wind has changed,” she said; “there’s going to be another storm tonight.”
There was another storm that night, while Stevens endlessly drove round Philadelphia in search of Mark. Mark might not necessarily have gone into town, of course; but he had not taken a car or packed a bag. He might have gone anywhere. Stevens’s first belief, that he had merely reached a point of bedevilment beyond his nerves’ capacity and had, therefore, gone on a spree, changed to uneasiness when there was no trace of him at his clubs, at his office, or any usual haunt.
Wet and dispirited, Stevens returned late to Crispen. It had been arranged that Cross should spend the night at his cottage; but he did not see Cross until nearly midnight. He went first to Despard Park, giving Lucy false reassurances about Mark. The house was very quiet, and Lucy seemed the only one still up. When Stevens went back to his own house, he found Cross and Brennan in the former’s limousine, just outside.
“Have you—?” he asked.
Brennan seemed rather gloomy than otherwise. “Yes, I think we know the murderer,” Brennan answered. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to verify; I’m going in to town to do it now. And then… yes, I’m afraid it’ll be all up.”
“Although in general,” said Cross, sticking his neck out of the car, “I deplore these humanitarian notions, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the study of crime, this time I cannot agree with my foxy friend. This, sir, is an ugly business, a damned ugly and unpleasant business, and I shall not be sorry to see the guilty person electrocuted. Mr. Stevens, I regret to say that I shall be unable to avail myself of your hospitality tonight, much as I am obliged for the invitation to spend it under your roof. I must continue with Brennan and prove my case. However, I promise you a solution. If you and your good lady would care to call at Despard Park tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock precisely, I shall introduce you to the murderer.—Henry, forward. Step on her tail.”
Marie, she confessed, was not sorry Cross could not remain there for the night. “He’s been very nice, and I’m terribly grateful to him,” she said, “but there’s something creepy about him. He seems to know exactly what you’re thinking about.”
Though they went to bed at midnight, and though he had had no sleep the night before, Stevens could not close his eyes; he was too strung-up and over-tired. The clock in the bedroom ticked loudly. Thunder was incessant for the first part of the night, and there seemed to be an unusual noise and disturbance of cats round the house. Marie fell into an uneasy doze; towards two o’clock she was stirring and muttering in her sleep, and he turned on the bedside lamp, intending to wake her if she wandered into a nightmare. She was pale, her dark-gold hair spread out on the pillow. Whether at the light, or the rain, or the congested weather, the noise of cats seemed to have come in close round the house. He looked round for something to throw, but he could find nothing except an empty jar of cold cream or something like it in the drawer of Marie’s dressing-table. When he opened the window and threw a missile for the second time that day, he was rewarded by a squall of such almost human savagery that he closed the window. He fell into a troubled doze himself about three o’clock, and did not awake until he heard church bells on the following Sunday morning.
When they set out for Despard Park just before two o’clock, they dressed as carefully as though for church. It was a rather heavy spring day, with the sun behind clouds, yet of warmth and kindliness. A Sunday hush was on Crispen and on the Park when they walked up through it.
The front door was opened by Mrs. Henderson.
Stevens examined her with a refreshed air of interest, as though he had never seen her before. She was stout and very plain, with a hard but kindly face, buns of greyish hair over her ears, an ample bust, and a petulant chin. You would diagnose her as a woman who might nag, but who would not see ghosts. Her Sunday-best clothes sat on her with an air of creaking. In the last fifteen minutes she had evidently been weeping.
“I saw you come up the path,” she told them, with dignity. “They’re all upstairs. All but Mrs. Despard. Why she—” Mrs. Henderson broke off plaintively, as at some grievance she thought better to repress in deference to Sunday. She turned round, her shoes squeaking, and began to lead the way. “But I say,” she added, darkly, over her shoulder, “this is no day for games.”
Apparently she referred to the fact that a hoarse voice, of inhuman loudness, was talking somewhere upstairs. It was evidently the radio in the sun porch, for she was leading them towards the sun porch. As they passed along the upstairs hall in the west wing, Stevens saw a figure dodge back into one of the doors. It was Ogden, for he also caught sight of a discolored face; Ogden was evidently not going to attend the conference in the sun porch, but Ogden was going to listen. Ogden’s shadow followed them round the turning, seeming very long-necked.
The sun porch was a long and wide room, built chiefly of glass towards the west. Its dark-rose curtains were pulled back before a watery sun. On the side opposite were the French windows opening into the nurse’s room, from which that room received its light. At the far end of the oblong was the glass door to Miles’s room. Though this was muffled now with the brown curtain, Stevens thought he saw two chinks of yellow light shining through.
The furniture of the porch was wicker painted white, with bright coverings, and there were some unfortunate potted plants. A stiff, formal, brushed air pervaded the company. At one corner, standing sheepishly, was Henderson. Edith sat with some primness in a large chair, and near her Partington (quite sober, and rather Mephistophelian today) lounged on a sofa. Captain Brennan leaned uneasily against the frame of one window. Miss Corbett, with the same formal air, was handing out sherry and biscuits. There was no sign of Lucy, or of Ogden, though they could all sense Ogden’s presence in the background. What was most notable was the absence of Mark—a sort of vast absence, as though with a gap in the normal, which you could feel.
Nevertheless, it was Cross who dominated that room, if only by showmanship. At one end of the porch, Cross leaned on the radio as he might have leaned on a lectern or a reading-desk. His bald head, with the one long fluttering hair, was inclined; his simian features showed great suavity. Miss Corbett handed him a glass of sherry, and he placed it on top of the radio as though he could not be interrupted in listening. Out of the radio the hoarse voice was still talking. It was preaching a sermon.
“They’re here,” said Mrs. Henderson, rather superfluously, pointing to the two newcomers. Edith’s eyes went quickly to Marie; something indecipherable changed behind them; but nobody spoke. “Even on the Sabbath,” Mrs. Henderson bawled, in a state of nerves, “do you need to have that radio so loud as——”
Cross touched the switch. The voice was cut off so abruptly that stillness was a clang. If he had meant to play on their nerves, he had succeeded.
“My good lady,” said Cross, drawing himself up, “how many times must it be necessary for me to inform the illiterate that Sunday is not the Sabbath? Sabbat is a Hebrew word meaning Saturday. The Witches’ Sabbath, for example, is a Saturday. But the choice of words is fortuitous; for we are about to discuss witchcraft and sham witchcraft. You, Mrs. Henderson, have been the enigmatic witness throughout this investigation. You can settle our difficulties. You have told at least a tangible, if not altogether coherent, story concerning what you saw through that door…”
“I don’t believe it,” said Mrs. Henderson. “Our minister calls it the Sabbath, and it’s Sabbath in the Bible, so don’t you talk silly. As for what I saw, never you mind what I saw. I know what I saw all right, without anybody telling me. …”
“Althea,” said Edith, calmly.
The woman checked in mid-flight. They were all, it was clear, afraid of Edith, who remained sitting bolt upright, with one finger beginning to tap the arm of the chair. Partington sipped sherry without relish.
“I ask you that,” pursued Cross, unruffled, “because I should like to make sure you know what you did see. Look down at the door now. You will see that I have adjusted the curtain as I am led to believe it was adjusted on the night of Wednesday, April 12th. Kindly inform me if there are any points of difference. You will also note that a light is burning in that room. It is the light over the head of Mr. Miles Despard’s bed. The curtains are drawn in that room, and we have a passable darkness there. Now will you go down, look through the left-hand chink in the curtain, and tell me what you see?”
Mrs. Henderson hesitated. Her husband made a gesture as though to lift his hand. And, behind, Stevens heard footsteps as Ogden Despard approached; but nobody looked round. Mrs. Henderson, a trifle pale, glanced at Edith.
“Do as he says, Althea,” said Edith.
“And, in order to reproduce the conditions more or less as they were on that night,” Cross went on, “I must turn on the radio again. However, I think it was music then? Music? Good. Therefore——”
As Mrs. Henderson went down to the other end of the porch, Cross spun the radio dial. A hollow and broken confusion came tumbling and spinning out of the loud-speaker; followed, with silver clearness, by the tinkle of a banjo and a sugary voice. “Oh, I went down south,” sang the voice, “for to see my Sal, singing polly-wolly-doodle all the day. My Sal she am a lovely gal, singing polly-wolly—” and then they heard it no longer, for Mrs. Henderson screamed.
Cross clicked the switch, and there was silence. Mrs. Henderson, her eyes looking dull and hungry, had whipped away from the window to face them.
“What did you see?” inquired Cross. “Keep your seats, the rest of you! Don’t get up. What did you see? The same woman?”
She nodded.
“The same door?”
“I—yes.”
“Once again,” said Cross, inexorably. “Take another look. Don’t flinch, or I’ll have your hide. Once again.”
“—for I’m off t’Louisiana for to see my Susie-anna, singing——”
“That’s all,” said Cross, switching off the radio again. “I must repeat, I should not like anyone to get up yet. Frank, you had better stop that young man; he is too precipitate,” Ogden had come round the turning of the sun porch, and, though his face was not pleasant to look at, he had evidently forgotten all about it. Ogden was making for the glass door when Brennan easily put out a hand and restrained him. “With your permission,” said Cross, “I will deal first with the smallest, most obvious, and accidental part of this case. It was not intended to be a part of the case at all. On the contrary, it was a chance (or mischance) which almost wrecked the plans of the murderer. It was a matter of un spectre malgré lui.
“Throughout this case you have been pelted constantly with two facts concerning Mr. Miles Despard and his room. The first fact is that he spent so much time locked up in his room, having little to do but change his clothes through varying hues and styles; although he was sensitive on this point of vanity. The second fact is the extreme meagreness of lighting arrangements there. There are, in fact, only two lights—neither one of great power. The first is over the bed; the second is high up on a cord between the windows. Finally, most of the time Miles Despard spent in his room was during the evening.
“If you will endeavor, by a concentration of intellect which you all no doubt find fatiguing, to focus your minds on these points, you will at least dimly perceive the significance of this. What are the two necessities of a man who is constantly admiring his own appearance by changing his clothes? Aside from the clothes themselves, he needs two things: he needs a light to see himself by, and a looking-glass to see himself in.
“There is, it is true, a bureau and a glass in that room. But the bureau is placed in an impossible position, where it would get very little light from the windows in daytime, and none at all from the two electric bulbs by night. But there is one curious point. Between the windows, where it does not illuminate anything except a chair and a picture, is a high-hung lamp serving no apparent purpose on a perfectly blank wall. What sort of lamp is it? It is the sort which hangs over a bureau. Now if, for the purpose of better illumination, the bureau were rolled between the windows at night…
“If this were done, it would be necessary to hang the picture (a very valuable one) somewhere else: as a temporary measure, until the bureau was rolled back again. Where could it be hung? There are no other hooks or nails, unoccupied, in the room—except one. This is the nail in the door to the nurse’s room, where this afternoon I saw a blue dressing-gown hanging up at about picture height on the door. Similarly, the chair must be placed somewhere. To avoid anyone coming in unexpectedly (which we are informed Mr. Despard hated) it must be placed with its back propped, as a wedge, under the knob of the nurse’s door.
“We have the following conditions. We have the light now turned out over the bureau, so that there is no illumination except a glow over the bed so dim that a witness cannot tell the color of a woman’s hair. We have a tiny chink in the curtain, which gives a view only high up, for the mysterious woman was seen only above the waist. We have—across from the mirror of the bureau—a door set into the panelling which goes round the room. This is the door to the nurse’s room, which would be dimly reflected in the glass, and which is panelled like the wall. On the door to the nurse’s room we have the Greuze picture hung up, and the chair beneath. The whole scene takes place almost in darkness. Any noise of footsteps, the click of a lock on the closing of a door, is masked by music on the radio. It is therefore certain that what the witness saw was the reflection of the door to the nurse’s room in the mirror over the bureau.
“I think, Mrs. Despard,” Cross added, “you may come in now…”
The glass door at the end of the sun porch opened; there was a swishing of skirts, and Lucy, in a sombrely brilliant gown of satin and velvet, came out into the porch. The dark red and blue colors were kindled by a glitter of sham diamonds. Lucy, throwing back a gauze scarf off her head, looked slowly round the group.
“Mrs. Despard,” Cross went on, “kindly assisted me in a little experiment. She simply walked in and out of that room in almost complete darkness, reflected in the mirror of a bureau now placed between the windows.
“But here again, if we accept this,” he continued, enjoying himself so hugely that his monkey-bright eyes opened wide, “we have another apparent impossibility. However the mysterious woman got into the room, it is absolutely certain that she must have left it—in a quite ordinary way—by means of the communicating door to Miss Corbett’s room. It is now clear that Mrs. Henderson saw her reflection when she went out. But, on that particular night, Miss Corbett had done certain things. In the first place, Miss Corbett had bolted that door on her side. Next, on the door of her own room giving on the hall, she had taken apart and so altered the lock that it could not be opened except by manipulation of the key in her hand.
“We have, then, two impregnable doors. The mysterious woman, leaving the room after having poisoned Miles Despard, could not have walked through a bolted door. Even had she done so, she could not afterwards have escaped through still another trick-locked door into the hallway, and, though there are windows in the room, she could not have gone out into the sun porch here, leaving the windows locked on the inside—especially since Mrs. Henderson was actually in the sun porch. Therefore it is certain that one person in this whole case, and only one, could have committed this murder. The only person who could have committed it was one who returned to the house near eleven o’clock; who opened the hall door of the nurse’s room by means of a key she alone knew how to use; who passed through her own room; who unbolted the door to Miles’s room; who went in with a poison-cup disguised as medicine; who forced him to take it in her own role; who afterwards went back through her own room, bolting the door again on her side and relocking the hall door after she had gone…”
Cross brought his hand down softly on the top of the radio, so softly that the glass barely shook. He bowed a little. He said:
“Myra Corbett, it gives me great pleasure to inform you that you are under arrest. The warrant is, I think, made out in your real name rather than the one you have assumed—Jeannette White.”
She had backed away very slightly, towards the French windows opening into the room she had formerly occupied. She was not wearing a uniform now, but a neat blue dress which became her. In spite of a none-too-good complexion, the sudden color in her face gave it animation and showed that she had good looks. Her corn-colored hair showed flat and lifeless, plastered in waves against her head. But again, as a sign of animation, her eyes were terrified—and unpleasant.
Myra Corbett moistened her lips.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You crazy little man! You can’t prove that.”
“Just a moment,” interrupted Brennan, moving forward heavily. “You can say what you like; this doesn’t have to be a formal arrest; but I can warn you to be careful. Do you deny that your real name is Jeannette White? Don’t answer; there’s somebody here who ought to know. What do you say, Dr. Partington?”
After a pause Partington, who had been staring at the floor, lifted a dark, heavy, ugly face. “Yes, she is Jeannette White,” he answered. “As you say, I ought to know. I promised her yesterday I wouldn’t say anything, but if she’s done this——”
“Yesterday, Doctor,” Brennan said, smoothly—“yesterday, the first time I met you, you were jolted up so much I thought you were going to faint. I knocked on the door of this house; I said I came from police headquarters; and right away, over my shoulder, you saw the girl who used to work in your office, on whom you performed an illegal operation. I’ve heard that you only escaped criminal prosecution by getting out of the country. You risked it again by coming back when Mr. Mark Despard sent for you. Isn’t it true that the reason why you were knocked endways was because you saw me and this girl together?”
“Yes, it’s true,” said Partington. He put his head in his hands.
Brennan turned back to Myra Corbett. “I’ll ask you something else. Do you deny that, a year or so ago, you met Mr. Mark Despard again and picked up this same affair?”
“No, why should I deny it?” she cried. They heard the noise of her finger-nails scratching on the sides of her dress. “I don’t deny it. I’m proud of it. He’s fond of me. I was a better——than any of his women, present company included. But that’s a different thing from murder!”
Brennan looked savage and tired. “I can further tell you,” he went on, “that your alibi for the night of Wednesday, April 12th, is blown higher than a kite. It’s a funny thing. Yesterday the first person I pounced on was Mrs. Stevens, there,” he nodded towards Marie, who was looking curiously at the nurse; “and the reason for it, among others, was that her alibi for that night depended on the word of only one person—her husband, who was sleeping in the same room. It didn’t seem to occur to anybody that there was only one other person in the whole shebang whose alibi also depended on a single person’s testimony—yours, Jeannette White. That testimony was the girl’s who occupied the same room with you at the Y.W.C.A. You got her to swear you were there from ten o’clock on. All the others had half a dozen witnesses; even the maid was out on a double-date. … Actually, you were here, weren’t you?”
At this point the woman almost lost her nerve.
“I came here to meet Mark, yes,” she said, breathlessly. “But I didn’t see the old man; I didn’t want to see him; I didn’t even go upstairs. And Mark stood me up. Mark never came here, after all. He must have tumbled to it that she was wise, and so— Where’s Mark? Mark will tell you! He’ll tell you! He’ll prove it. But he isn’t here, and…”
“No, by God! he isn’t,” Brennan said, softly but, grimly. “I think it’s going to take a whale of a time to find him, too, even with the drag-net out. The trouble was, he saw it coming. The trouble is, you and Mark Despard planned this murder together. You were to do the actual dirty work, and he was to cover up.”
For the space of about twenty seconds nobody spoke. Stevens glanced covertly round the group. Ogden Despard was standing in shadow, the better to hide the condition of his face; but on the puffy lips there was satisfaction.
“I don’t believe that,” said Lucy, calmly. “Whatever I may think of her, naturally I don’t believe that. What do you say, Mr. Cross?”
Cross, savoring the situation, remained poised over the radio.
“I was wondering,” he said, “when the obviously distracted state of this company would allow it to turn for assistance to a cooler mind and a more developed intelligence. Mrs. Despard, I do not think you had better appeal to me. Appealing to me seems to have become a general habit. The unfortunate truth, Mrs. Despard, is that your husband did plan the murder with Miss Corbett, and that he did cover it up afterwards. He is accessory before and after the fact; but there is one thing to be said in his favor. He had nothing to do with the attempt to throw suspicion on you. He never knew of it—until it was done. That was why he tried to shift suspicion off you again, and in doing so he confused, complicated, and made nonsensical a perfectly ordinary murder case.
“Let us consider the matter esthetically. If you are unable to consider it esthetically, pray try to consider it less like howling asses. The most significant point in this case—the point which betrays it—is the curious way in which two murderers, two intelligences, seemed to be pulling against each other.
“As originally planned, it had no flourishes. Mark Despard and his lady of the blunt speech had determined to kill Miles Despard because Mark Despard needed the money. But the victim was to die, apparently, from natural causes. Who could question it? Why should it be anything else? Miles was dying of gastro-enteritis in any case; the family doctor was of little curiosity and moss-grown wits; there could be small chance of any suspicion whatever. There was to be no revealing silver cup, containing arsenic, left so conveniently in a cupboard along with a dead cat and—later—a book on witchcraft.
“That was the simple plan conceived by Mark Despard—a death from natural causes. But it did not satisfy Miss Myra Corbett. No. She not only wanted Miles Despard out of the way; she particularly wanted Mrs. Lucy Despard out of the way as well. It is not unknown, I believe, for a paramour to cherish such sentiments towards her lover’s wife. If Miles died, it is obvious that it must be murder and that Lucy Despard must be convicted of that murder.
“To execute such a plan, without the knowledge of Mark, was not difficult. From the beginning of this case it was apparent that the mysterious woman in the Brinvilliers dress came from this house. I have declared to my friend Stevens that I place no particular reliance on alibis. But, in order to believe in the guilt of Mrs. Despard or Miss Edith Despard, we should have been compelled to discredit corporate alibis of such gigantic dimensions that even my suspicions turned pale. The masquerader in the Brinvilliers dress, was not, then, either of them. But who? As some one has shrewdly pointed out, somebody had to make a duplicate of that dress. It could not have been an outsider. In the first place, it was not known outside the house that Mrs. Despard planned to make a dress on the model of the picture in the gallery; in the second place, it was impossible that an outsider should have been able to study that same picture in order also to make a copy good enough for the purpose of deceiving Mrs. Henderson. But if a painstaking second copy were in the process of being made, and made in absolute secrecy, there is one thing that the maker most certainly had to do…”
“Well?” Stevens heard himself demanding.
“She had to keep her room locked up,” replied Cross.
“It is true,” he continued affably, “that—with miraculous good fortune—an excuse was supplied to her for doing this. An excuse was supplied when Mrs. Stevens stole a bottle of morphia tablets from her room on Saturday night, and returned it on Sunday. It was not (I think we have heard) until Monday that Lucy Despard decided to make a Brinvilliers costume and wear it to the masquerade. Henceforward Myra Corbett had her excuse for a locked room. For the rest, it was easy. She wears a dress like that of Mrs. Despard; she wears a mask; she even, I suspect, wears a wig. Not only is it of small consequence whether she is seen, but she wants to be seen.
“One precaution, however, must be taken. She must put through a phone call to the house where the masquerade is being held, intending to lure Mrs. Despard away—not only to lure her away, but to lure her to this house. Thereby will be achieved complete damnation beyond alibi.
“Our murderess comes to this house and puts on her disguise. She knows that Mrs. Henderson will be in this sun porch at eleven o’clock to listen to the Soothing Hour. She can, at her leisure, make that wine-and-egg mixture in the kitchen, because there is nobody there to see her: Mrs. Henderson is in the stone house beside the crypt. It is the sort of drink, medicinally, which she can force him to accept. She can get to his room before eleven. Her costume will not surprise Miles; he knows there is a masquerade that night, even if he had not been aware she was invited. Even the wig will rouse no curiosity, because it is a masquerade.
“Nevertheless, she wishes to be observed—hence the chink in the curtain. I call your attention to one point which, from the first, should have resolved any doubts. Kindly examine this sun porch. Mrs. Henderson was sitting here by the radio, where I am, at one end of the room. Completely at the other end, behind a closed door with a muffling curtain, is Miles’s room. Finally, a radio is playing. Yet our witness distinctly heard a woman’s voice speaking in that room. It is conceivable that a murderess would speak in a low tone. It is even conceivable that she might speak in an ordinary tone. But it is not conceivable that she would speak with such shattering and obvious loudness—while handing a poison-cup to her victim—unless she deliberately wished to call attention to her presence. I leave you to imagine why she wished to call attention to it.
“The one flaw in the calculation, of course, was that extra chink by which she was seen in a mirror. But her work was over by that time. She had given her victim the drink, of which he did not take all. She fed the dregs to a convenient cat. She placed the cup conspicuously on the floor of a wardrobe—all the actions of a woman wishing deliberately to call attention to murder, to underline it in the heaviest pencilling. I also call your attention to the point that no person, wishing it to be believed that a man had died of natural causes, would have given so enormous a dose of arsenic—a dose of which two grains remained in the very dregs of the cup.
“Very well. Miles Despard has no suspicion that he is poisoned. He pushes the bureau back to its original position on the other wall; he hangs up the picture again and replaces the chair. It is this exertion which brings on so quickly the shattering cramps and renders him helpless in so short a time. He was cut off in the house; he could reach nobody.
“At past two o’clock Mark Despard returns—to find his uncle dying, as he had expected. But also to find (with, I should suspect, no small degree of horror) plain evidences of murder blazoned round the room like bloodstains. I here wish to point out that all the evidence of Miles’s weird and supernatural actions that night—his babbling sinister words to Mark, his request that he be buried in a wooden coffin, even the finding of the string tied with nine knots under his pillow—rest on the testimony of one person—Mark Despard. Did anybody else hear him ask for a wooden coffin? Did anybody else, at that point, see the string with nine knots? No; those things were afterthoughts. Thus:
“Mark Despard had good reason to feel sweat and panic. He had good reason to hide the glass and the cup, and to bury the cat’s body deep. But there was worse. On the following morning he learned from Mrs. Henderson that a woman—in a dress like the one his wife had been wearing—was seen giving the poison-cup to Miles. He knew now that his lady-friend and ally had deliberately planned to throw the blame on his wife. And he did not know what to do. First he swore Mrs. Henderson to secrecy, with, I venture to say, complicated and frightful oaths. …”
Cross paused, and glanced at Mrs. Henderson. The woman, who was oily white, nodded.
“I can’t be saved,” she answered. “But him”—she stabbed her finger at Brennan—“him, with his soft soap, he got me to tell it.”
“First, however,” Cross continued, “he had to make sure that these really were murder intimations, and that either the silver cup or the glass actually contained poison. When he received the chemist’s report, he was sure. But there was still worse. It has been constantly reported how, from the very beginning of the case, a formless but insistent report has everywhere been circulated that this was murder—a report dating from the day of Miles Despard’s death. Mark could not stop this rumour. Sooner or later (he realized this on Thursday, the day after the death) such a rumour must culminate in exhumation. I think we know who started the rumour.
“That must be prevented. The body must disappear with the tell-tale arsenic in the stomach. The funeral was to be on Saturday. But, up to and including the time of the funeral, he had no opportunity for disposing of it without suspicion; first, because officialdom was in charge; second and more important, because his ever-watchful ally was on guard, and would have prevented it. If he moved, he had to move secretly.
“The course pursued by Myra Corbett, I concede, had been extremely ingenious. She might, it is true, have announced immediately after the death of her patient that she believed he had been poisoned; she might have told the doctor to order a post-mortem immediately. But this was far, far too dangerous. She could not afford to be in the limelight in any way whatever. It was possible and even probable that her past connection with Mark might have been dug up. It was even possible that some one might inquire how she came to figure in the business. From her safe position as X, as a nurse, as an automaton, publicity might turn her into something else. The safest course was to let Miles be buried, while she declared to everyone how he died a natural death… and then let secret channels, let the evidence she had planted, do its work in the course of a month or so. She would be safe, because by that time she would be inconspicuous.
“And now it becomes pull-baker, pull-devil, pull-murderer. Mark turned over plans of his own. It is probable that the idea was first put into his head by the story, which he heard on Thursday morning, about a woman ‘walking through a wall.’ What he actually thought of this we shall not know until he is caught. But it gave him his idea, along with the remembrance of a book on witchcraft which Miles had once read, and which seems to have impressed Miles enormously—especially the chapter concerning the Non-Dead. So Mark, at this moment bent on befogging the issue as much as possible, first told his story about finding under Miles’s pillow a string tied with nine knots, and also tried out tentatively the ‘walking through the wall’ story on a friend of his, Edward Stevens. He threw all this dust to cover up the one really vital and essential part of his scheme, his unsupported statement that Miles had asked to be buried in a wooden coffin.
“An unusual request, surely. One that must arouse suspicion on merely human grounds; but we have the word of King James the First that, ‘such convicted of the horreid cryme of witchcraft are thought to be commonlie fond of wood or stone, but Steele they cannot abide’; and this afforded excellent camouflage——”
Partington got up out of his chair.
“Camouflage for what?” he demanded, stung out of his stolidity. “If Mark stole that body out of the crypt, how did he do it? What difference did it make whether the coffin was steel or wood?”
“Because it could be more easily moved,” said Cross, impatiently. “Even for a man of Mark Despard’s enormous physical strength, a steel coffin would have been too much.”
“Moved?” said Partington.
“Let me now enumerate a few facts concerning the body and the crypt. These are (1) the coffin, although its two bolts require strength, can be opened instantly; (2) Miles Despard was a very tiny and light man who weighed only one hundred and nine pounds; (3) at the foot of the steps leading down into the crypt, blocking any view inside, is a rotted wooden door which you on your Friday night investigation found closed; (4) in the crypt are two enormous marble urns, stuffed with flowers——”
Stevens interrupted, with a vivid picture of the place in his mind.
“Look here,” he protested, “if you’re going to say the body was doubled up in one of those urns, it won’t work. We looked in them.”
“If those who have asked my assistance,” Cross said, testily, drawn out of his relish at telling the story, “would kindly refrain from interrupting until I have explained, I think I can make clear what I do mean.
“And the last point, which points irrefutably to the truth, is (5) that, when you penetrated into the crypt on Friday night, you noticed a great many scattered flowers lying on the floor under the urns. Why were those flowers on the floor? They came, obviously, from the urns. But funerals are usually characterized by neatness, and it is not reasonable to suppose that they were flung there during any rioting at the funeral itself.
“Now let us examine what happened at the funeral, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 15th. Mark Despard told you about it, and he gave (substantially) quite a correct account. He had to do so, since it could be confirmed by disinterested witnesses. But kindly recall what happened.
“By his own admission, he was the last to leave the crypt. All the others had gone—except the parson, whom Mark had detained. But was the parson actually in the crypt? No; again by Mark’s own confession; for no human being cares to stand the air of that crypt longer than necessary. The parson was waiting up the stairs, near the top where he could get air. Between him and the crypt was a wooden door shutting off his view. Meanwhile, Mark had remained behind on the pretext of gathering of some iron candle-brackets. He states that he remained behind not much longer than a minute; and I see no reason to doubt him. Sixty seconds would suffice for what he had to do. If you will take the trouble to consult your watch, and execute in pantomime the following movements, you will see that the time is sufficient. Thus:
“He went through the following movements. He slid out the coffin; he drew the bolts; he picked up the body and walked across the crypt with it; he thrust the body, doubled up, into one of the urns; he relocked the coffin and returned it to the niche. Any noises he might have made—a bump, a metallic rasp of a bolt—would have been easily disguised to the ear of the parson under the guise of handling iron brackets. The body was now covered by a vast mass of flowers. The only trace he left to anyone looking into the crypt was (necessarily) some spilled flowers on the floor.
“All these things were only preliminaries. For the stage was now set; he was ready to perform his ‘miracle.’
“This miracle had a double purpose. If—after all the atmosphere of mystery and secrecy he had created—his dupes thought that the theft of the body was supernatural, he had no objection. His purpose was to throw a veil over things, in order that an arsenic-filled body could be removed. But, until the body actually was out of the crypt, until the miracle had been performed, he must not press the supernatural element too far, or his dupes might think he had gone mad and merely refuse to help him. And they had to help him. It was essential that the crypt should be opened in complete secrecy. No light of day, no interfering policemen, nothing that would mitigate against the cloud of suggestion with which he had surrounded it. …
“I will first deal briefly with the mechanics of how he fooled you. It is the one part of the business on which I am disposed to praise him, for it was undeniably excellent acting. He was bargaining on the psychological effect of your finding no body in the coffin, and he had calculated to a nicety how it would make you feel.
“You descended into the crypt. Mark was the only one who had a light—a flashlight. He refused to let you take lanterns down there, saying that it would use up too much air. You opened the coffin… and found nothing. You were, I dare say naturally, stunned. After a first impulse not to believe your eyes, what suggestion was immediately put into your head as Mark had anticipated, and, if I am correct, is a suggestion he actually made himself? What were the first words spoken after you discovered the body was missing? Does anyone remember?”
“Yes,” replied Stevens, blankly, “I remember. Mark looked up at the tiers, and flashed his light on them, and said, ‘You don’t suppose we’ve got the wrong coffin, do you?”
Cross bowed gravely.
“It served,” he said, “to fix your attention firmly on the idea that, since the crypt was bare, the body must be somewhere there. All this time, of course, the body was actually in the urn covered by flowers. But Mark had one enormous advantage: he had the light. He could direct it just as he could direct proceedings, and all of you believed the body must be in one of the other coffins. Well, what happened? First, you searched the lower tier: with no result. Then it was suggested that the body might have been put higher up; and so we come to the simplest part of the whole affair. Mark Despard’s entire purpose was to create some excuse whereby all those present except himself would leave the crypt for just a few minutes, and would return to the house; while he was left alone there. He got his excuse, as you know. Henderson and Stevens were dispatched back to the house to procure step-ladders. Partington was dispatched back to the house (not a difficult matter) to get a drink. We have the word of a police officer who was watching you that, at 12:28, Stevens, Partington, and Henderson left the crypt and came up to the house. Stevens and Henderson did not return until 12:32, the doctor not until 12:35. If that police officer had only remained watching at the crypt during those crucial times, the whole plan would have crashed. But he did not remain; he followed the three to the house. Hence from 12:28 to 12:32 Mark Despard had four minutes entirely alone and unobserved.
“Do I need to tell you what he did? He simply picked the body up out of the urn, went upstairs with it, crossed over to Henderson’s house, and hid the body there—probably in the bedroom. Then, when the others came back to the crypt, he was ready to suggest: ‘As a last resort, let’s turn out the urns.’ Which you did: with, of course, no result.”
At this point Joe Henderson came forward shakily. He had not spoken heretofore. The bruise on his temple was an ugly blue.
“Are you telling me, sir,” he said, “that when I saw old Mr. Miles sitting in my bedroom that night—by the winder, in the rocking-chair——”
Cross lifted his glass of sherry from the radio, but he set it down again.
“Ah yes. The entrance of the supernatural folly, the first appearance of a manipulated ghost, had better be dealt with here. That was another completely unintentional business, which Mark Despard had forced on him. You did not see Miles’s ghost, my friend. But you really did see Miles.
“As is evident from even a short consideration of the course of events, once Mark had removed the body from the crypt, his plan was now on its way to a conclusion. Now he could tell his story of the phantom woman walking through the wall. Now he could plant his book on witchcraft in Miles’s room—where Miss Despard later found it. I shall also always wonder whether the piece of string found in the coffin was not, as a matter of fact, left there by that Old Man in the Corner, Mr. Jonah Atkinson, senior. If so, it must have given Mark a turn. I also think that, when he suddenly discovered yesterday what a case could apparently be made out against Mrs. Stevens, he must have wondered whether his brain had not given way and whether the dark world had not pressed through. It appears to me the one thing which caused him genuine surprise.
“As for disposing of the body, his intentions had been simple. Once the body was out of the crypt, he intended—as soon as he could—to get rid of Stevens and Partington. The first he would send home, the second he would send to the house, drunk. Henderson alone remained, and the body was at the time concealed in Henderson’s bedroom. But that was not difficult. We have heard at great length about the theft of some morphia tablets. Mrs. Stevens took them—but, as a matter of fact, she took only one tablet. Two more had been abstracted by Mark himself, with or without his accomplice’s knowledge.
“As soon as he had got rid of Messrs. Stevens and Partington, Mark intended to give Henderson a strong drug in a drink of liquor. When the old man slid out of sight and tension, Mark could then take the body up out of the bedroom and destroy it——”
“Destroy it?” Edith spoke out suddenly.
“By fire, appropriately enough,” said Cross. “In the roaring blaze which has been going so hard for the last two days in that furnace downstairs; you have all, I think, noticed the pall of smoke over this house outside, and the extreme heat inside. … But there was a hitch in the plan. For Mrs. Despard and Miss Despard, summoned by telegrams, unexpectedly appeared on the scene. That threw the scheme out of gear; the body was still hidden in that bedroom; but the scheme, after all, was only deferred. When everyone had retired for the night, and the visitors were gone, Mark prevailed on Henderson to go down alone and cover the crypt with a tarpaulin. … But, in order to get that tarpaulin (as both of them thought) Henderson would have to walk several hundred yards through a wood to a field on the other side of the estate. This would be time enough for Mark to get the body out of Henderson’s house and ready for the furnace.
“Unfortunately, Henderson remembered that the tarpaulin was not near the tennis court, but in his house. When Henderson returned, Mark was actually in that little stone house. Fortunately, however, he had taken one precaution—he had given Henderson a drink drugged with morphine, and its effects were already being felt. A light unscrewed in its socket… a corpse propped up in a chair, used as a doll or dummy for a ghost scare… a man behind, rocking that chair and even lifting the hand of the corpse… it all had its effect on a man already frightened half out of his wits; and the morphia took care of the rest. Mark was then free to carry the body to the fire”
Cross paused, and turned on them a broad smile of urbanity and charm.
“I may add something which you have doubtless already noticed: the house is unusually cold this afternoon. That is why I thought we should remain upstairs. Captain Brennan’s men are now engaged in dragging out that furnace. They may not find anything, but——”
Myra Corbett took two steps forward, and it was apparent that her knees were shaking. She was clearly so horrified that it produced in her a drawn ugliness.
“I don’t believe that! I don’t believe it,” she said. “Mark never did that. If he did, he’d have told me. …”
“Ah,” said Cross. “Then you do admit that you poisoned Miles Despard. By the way, my good friends, there is just one point remaining in connection with our friend Jeannette. It is true that she told a story yesterday which appeared to incriminate Mrs. Stevens. To the surprise of everyone (including herself), Mrs. Stevens really did ask where arsenic could be bought; just as Miss Edith Despard actually bought some. But don’t you see the significance of the story, the part our nurse was trying to stress? Who actually began that conversation, who asked ten thousand questions about poisons and their effects? She said it was Lucy Despard; she corrected you sharply and insisted on that. She was still being consistent. And her accusations were only shifted when it became apparent that Mrs. Despard had an unmistakable alibi. So, if she admits that she poisoned…”
Though she marred the gesture with something very like a snarl, Myra Corbett put out her hands as though she were praying.
“I didn’t kill him. I did not. I never thought of it. I didn’t want any money. All I wanted was Mark. He didn’t run away because he did anything like that. He ran away because of that——that’s his wife. You can’t prove I killed the old man. You can’t find the body, and you can’t prove it. I don’t care what you do to me. You can beat me till I die, but you won’t get anything out of me. You know that. I can stand pain like an Indian. You’ll never——”
She broke off, choking. She added, with sudden rather terrifying misery: “Doesn’t anybody believe me?”
Ogden Despard, smashed and ugly, put out his hand. “I’m beginning to think I do,” he said. He looked at them. “Whatever I’ve done in the past,” he added, coolly, “I’ve had a perfect right to do, and I advise none of you to question it. But there’s one thing I must correct you on. This woman at least never made any telephone call to St. Davids, on the night of the masquerade party. I did that. It struck me that it would be amusing to see Lucy’s reactions when she heard Mark had picked up his old affair again. You can’t do anything to me, you know, so you might as well take it calmly.”
Brennan stirred and stared. Cross, with an air of simian courtesy, lifted his glass of sherry, saluted Ogden, and drank.
“I drink your health,” he said, “on the pretext of what I am compelled to recognize as the one time in your doubtless useless life when you have attempted to do anyone a service. Though I am never wrong in my diagnoses, I can assure you that I preserve a mind sufficiently open to acknowledge an error. If it were the last word I ever——”
He stopped, making a slight gesture with his glass. They had looked at the nurse, who was coming forward, when they heard a small bumping sound. Cross had gone forward across the radio, and seemed to be trying to writhe over on his back. They saw his eyeballs; he seemed to be trying to draw air through lips too thick for him. He succeeded at last in writhing over, but resistance was gone, for he fell on his back. It seemed to Stevens’s stupefied wits a long time before anyone moved. Cross lay convulsed in a fawn-colored suit, spilled beside the radio, with the glass in his hand; but he had stopped moving by the time Partington reached him.
“This man is dead,” Partington said.
Stevens thought afterwards that if the doctor had made any other statement in the world, however incredible, any horror of fantasy or reality, then he might have believed it. But he could not believe this.
“You’re crazy!” shouted Brennan in the midst of a pause. “He slipped. He fainted, or something. He couldn’t just—like that——”
“He’s dead,” said Partington. “Come and see for yourself. By the smell of him I’d say it was cyanide. It’s as nearly instantaneous as anything in the codex. You had better preserve that glass.”
Brennan put down his briefcase very carefully, and came over. “Yes,” Brennan said—“yes, he’s dead.” Then he looked at Myra Corbett. “He took that glass from you. You were the only one who touched either the decanter or the glasses. He took that glass from you, and walked over there to the radio by himself. Nobody was near him, nobody could have put cyanide there except you. But he didn’t drink immediately, as you hoped. He was too much of an actor. He waited until he could get a good excuse for a toast.—You devil, there wasn’t enough jury-evidence against you before. But there is now. You know what’ll happen to you? You’ll fry in the electric chair.”
The woman was smiling, weakly and foolishly and almost incredulously. But her former self-control had almost gone, and when Brennan’s men came upstairs they had to give her a supporting hand while she walked down.