The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  THE BURNING COURT

  Born in 1906, John Dickson Carr was an American author of Golden Age ‘British-style’ detective stories. He published his first novel, It Walks by Night, in 1930 while studying in Paris to become a barrister. Shortly thereafter he settled in his wife’s native England where he wrote prolifically, averaging four novels per year until the end of WWII. Well-known as a master of the locked-room mystery, Carr created eccentric sleuths to solve apparently impossible crimes. His two most popular series detectives were Dr. Fell, who debuted in Hag’s Nook in 1933, and barrister Sir Henry Merrivale (published under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson), who first appeared in The Plague Court Murders (1934). Eventually, Carr left England and moved to South Carolina where he continued to write, publishing several more novels and contributing a regular column to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In his lifetime, Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of only two Americans ever admitted into the prestigious – but almost exclusively British – Detection Club. He died in 1977.

  THE BURNING COURT

  JOHN DICKSON CARR

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2011 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  The Burning Court © 1937 The Estate of Clarice M Carr, Richard H McNiven, Executor

  ISBN 978-1-78002-003-7

  CONTENTS

  I

  INDICTMENT

  II

  EVIDENCE

  III

  ARGUMENT

  IV

  SUMMING-UP

  V

  VERDICT

  I

  INDICTMENT

  “Here we supped very merry, and late to bed; Sir William telling me that old Edgeborrow, his predecessor, did die and walk in my chamber, did make me somewhat afraid—but not so much as, for mirth sake, I did seem.”

  —SAMUEL PEPYS, April 8th, 1661

  I

  “There was a man lived by a churchyard—” is an intriguing beginning for a story left unfinished. Edward Stevens also lived by a churchyard, in more senses than one: which is the soberest possible statement of the fact. There was a miniature of the sort next door, of course, and the reputation of Despard Park had always been unusual; but that was not the most important churchyard.

  Edward Stevens, who was not much different from you or me, sat in a smoking-car of a train which would reach Broad Street station, at 6:48. He was thirty-two years old, and he had a tolerably important position in the editorial department of the publishing house of Herald & Sons, Fourth Avenue. He rented an apartment in the East Seventies, and owned a cottage at Crispen outside Philadelphia, where he spent many week-ends because both he and his wife were fond of that countryside. He was going there to join Marie on this Friday evening (which was in the far-off days of spring, 1929); and in his briefcase was the manuscript of Gaudan Cross’s new book of murder-trials. Such, baldly stated, are the facts. Stevens himself now admits that it is a relief to state facts, to deal with matters that can be tabulated or arranged.

  It must be emphasized, too, that there was nothing unusual about the day or the evening. He was not stepping across a borderland, any more than you or I step across it; he was simply going home. And he was a robustly happy man with a profession, a wife, and an existence which suited him.

  The train was on time at Broad Street. He stretched his legs round the station, and saw on one of the black number-boxes over the gates that he could get a train for Crispen in seven minutes: an express, first stop Ardmore. Crispen is some thirty-odd minutes out on the Main Line, the next stop after Haverford. Nobody has ever yet discovered why there should be a stop or a separate division there at all, between Haverford and Bryn Mawr. There were only half a dozen houses, all set very far apart, on the way up the hill. But it was (in a way) a community of its own: it had a post-office, a druggist’s, and a tea-room almost hidden in the noble copper beeches where King’s Avenue curved up to Despard Park. It had even—though this was scarcely either customary or symbolical—an undertaker’s shop.

  This undertaker’s had always surprised and puzzled Stevens. He wondered why it was there, and who patronized it. The name J. Atkinson was on the windows, but in letters as discreet as a visiting-card. He had never seen so much as a head or a movement beyond those windows, which displayed a couple of shapeless little marble blocks—presumably you stuck flowers in them—and black velvet curtains run waist-high on brassy rings. Of course, it was not to be presumed that an undertaker’s anywhere drove a roaring trade, or that a stream of eager customers would constantly animate its doors. But undertakers, by tradition, are merry men; and he had never seen J. Atkinson. It had even given him the vague germ of an idea for a detective-story. The plot (he thought) should concern a mass-murderer who was an undertaker, and was thus able to explain the presence of inconvenient bodies in his shop.

  But, after all, J. Atkinson had probably been called in at the death of old Miles Despard so recently. …

  If there were any reason why Crispen existed at all, that reason was Despard Park. Crispen had been named after one of the four commissioners who, in the year of grace 1681, had been sent out to prepare the site of a city in the newly ceded territory of Pennsylvania, just before Mr. Penn himself came to make peace with all men in the gracious woods between the Schuylkill and the Delaware. William Crispen, a kinsman of William Penn, had died on the voyage out. But a cousin named Despard (the name, according to Mark Despard, was originally French and had undergone some curious changes of spelling) had obtained a grant of land in the country, and there had been Despards at the Park ever since. Old Miles Despard—that stately reprobate, the head of the family—had died less than two weeks ago.

  Waiting for his train, Stevens wondered idly whether Mark Despard—the new head of the family—would drop in for a chat that night, as he usually did. Stevens’s cottage was not far from the entrance-gates of the Park; they had struck up a friendship two years ago. But he hardly expected to see either Mark or Lucy, Mark’s wife, tonight. True enough, old Miles’s passing (he had died of gastro-enteritis, after reducing the lining of his stomach to a pulp with nearly forty years’ high living) would be not much lamented: old Miles had lived so much abroad that the rest of the family scarcely knew him. But there would be a great deal of business on the skirts of death. Old Miles had never married; Mark, Edith, and Ogden Despard were the children of his younger brother. Each should inherit substantially, Stevens thought without great interest.

  The entrance-gates to the station platform had rattled open now; Stevens swung aboard the Main Line train and pushed forward to the smoking-car. The spring night had turned from grey to black. But even in the gritty air of the shed, even in the thick air of the car with its pale dispirited roof lights, there was a smell of spring that would stir the blood in the countryside. (This led his thoughts to Marie, who would meet him at Crispen with the car.) The train, less than half full, had its usual somnolent air of people crackling fat newspapers and blowing smoke over their shoulders. Stevens settled down with his briefcase across his knees. With the idle curiosity of a contented man, he fell to turning over in his mind two rather puzzling happenings which had been occurring to him all day. It was characteristic of the man that he did not try to reason them out; he only tried to devise imaginative explanations which would fit them.

  For instance? Well, for instance, he had in his briefcase the manuscript of Gaudan Cross’s new book. He had been looking forward to reading it. Gaudan Cross (which, strangely enough, was the man’s real name) was a discovery of Morley, the head of the editorial department. Cross appeared to be a recluse who devoted himself to rete
lling the histories of murder cases from real life. His great talent lay in a narrative vividness which was like that of an eye-witness; a sort of devilish reportorial ability in things he had not seen. It was often deceptive. An eminent judge had unwarily written that the man who gave such an account of Neill Cream as that in Gentlemen of the Jury had, beyond any doubt, been in the courtroom at the time. “Since Cream was tried in 1892,” commented the New York Times, “and Mr. Cross’s age is given as forty, he must indeed have been a precocious infant.” But it was no bad advertisement for the book.

  However, Cross’s popularity did not depend so much on his style as on his selection of materials. He took one or two celebrated cases for each book. But chiefly he devoted his research to unearthing picturesque crimes of which few people seemed to have heard at all: wonders in their own time, unquestionably, but appearing with a shock of novelty to modern readers. Despite photographs and documentary evidence, some of the accounts were so remarkable that one critic accused the whole thing of being an elaborate hoax. After another stir—again no bad advertisement—Cross was proved to have invented nothing. In this case, which was that of an atrocity at Brussels in the eighteenth century, the doubting critic received a furious letter from the Burgomaster of Brussels, who was very proud of the local monster. Thus Gaudan Cross, without being a national best seller or hit-of-the-year, was among the props of the Herald list.

  That Friday afternoon Stevens had been called into the editorial head’s office. Morley sat behind his desk in the quiet-carpeted room, blinking at a neat pile of sheets in a buff container.

  “That’s the new Cross,” he said. “Will you take it home with you over the week-end? I’d like to have you talk about it at the May sales conference. You’re particularly enthusiastic about that sort of thing.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Yes,” said Morley, and hesitated. “It’s the best thing he’s done, in a way,” Morley added, hesitating again. “The title will have to be changed, of course. He’s given it some thundering long and technical thing that the sales force will never stand for; but we can worry about that later. It’s a gallery of women poisoners, and it’s strong stuff.”

  “Good!” said Stevens, heartily.

  Morley remained half abstracted, half puzzled, looking round the room. There was evidently something on his mind. He asked, “Ever meet Cross?”

  “No. I think I’ve seen him in the office once or twice, that’s all,” Stevens answered, with a recollection of a broad back ducking round a corner or pushing through a door.

  “Well… unusual sort of fellow, About his contracts, I mean. There’s one clause he insists on having in every contract, and it’s not what you could call a common clause. Otherwise he doesn’t care; I don’t believe he even bothers to read the contract through. The stipulation is that the back of the jacket on every one of his books must contain a large photograph of himself.”

  Stevens made a noise in his throat. The wall was lined with shelves of bright-jacketed books; he reached up and flipped down a copy of Gentlemen of the Jury.

  “So that’s the reason for it,” he remarked. “I’d wondered about that, but nobody seemed inclined to mention it. No biographical details; just a large photograph with his name under it—and on a first book.” He studied the picture. “Well, it’s a strong face; an intellectual face; I should think a good face. But why is he so proud of it that he wants it plastered round ——?”

  Morley shook his head, still immobile in the chair. “No. It isn’t that. He’s not the sort who would want any personal publicity of the kind; far from it. There’s some other reason.”

  Again Morley looked at him curiously, but dismissed the matter by picking up something from his desk. “Never mind; take the manuscript along with you. Be very careful of it. He’s got photographs attached. Oh—and you might come in and see me first thing Monday morning.”

  With that last casual word he had left it. Sitting now in a train that was rattling towards West Philadelphia, Stevens half-opened the catch of the briefcase to have a look at the manuscript. But he hesitated, his mind still full of idle puzzles.

  If the business of Gaudan Cross had been neither important nor clear-cut, that of old Miles Despard was even less so. Stevens’s thoughts went to Despard Park, to the old smoky stone among the beeches, and the gardens that would be stirring from sleep. He remembered old Miles, the previous summer, walking in the sunken garden behind the house. “Old” Miles had not been really old, as time went; he had been only fifty-six when they screwed down his coffin. But his punctilious bearing, his scrawny neck emerging from shiny white knives of collars, his curled grey moustache and air of far-off hilarity, had always seemed to put him in a different age. Stevens remembered him in the warm sun, formally raising his rakish hat. His eyes looked puffed and troubled.

  Gastro-enteritis gives no easy passing; Miles Despard, returned to his home after wandering the earth, had found a slow and cruel death which he bore with a stoicism that had roused the blubbering admiration of the cook. Mrs. Henderson—cook, general housekeeper, and tyrant—said that sometimes he had screamed, but not often. They buried him in the crypt under the private chapel, where nine generations of Despards had been set away in tiers like outworn books, and the stone slab which sealed the crypt had been put back into place again. But one thing seemed to have impressed Mrs. Henderson very deeply. Before he died, Miles Despard had in his hands an ordinary piece of string, tied at equal spacings into nine small knots. They found it under his pillow afterwards.

  “I thought it was so nice,” Mrs. Henderson had confided to the Stevenses’ cook. “I suppose he thought it was a rosary, or something like that. Of course the family aren’t Catholics, but all the same I thought it was so nice.”

  One other thing had induced in Mrs. Henderson a kind of hysteria, so that nobody had been able to straighten out the matter even yet. It was Mark Despard, the nephew, who had mentioned the matter to Stevens, with annoyed amusement.

  Stevens had seen Mark only once since Miles’s death. The old man had died on the night of April 12th, a Wednesday: Stevens remembered the date particularly because he and Marie had spent that night at Crispen, and it was not usual for them to visit the cottage except at week-ends. They had driven back to New York next morning without hearing anything of the tragedy, and only learned of it through the newspapers. When they visited Crispen again on the week-end of the 15th, they had paid formal condolences at the house, but had not attended the funeral: Marie had an almost shuddering horror of death or the sights of death. And on the evening after the funeral Stevens had met Mark striding along in the gloom and emptiness of King’s Avenue.

  “Our Mrs. Henderson,” Mark had said, abruptly, “has been seeing things.”

  It was a raw and windy twilight, with the buds barely opening in the woodland through which King’s Avenue curved up to Despard Park. Nevertheless, the great trees seemed to shake and move over Mark’s head like shadows. Mark’s hook-nosed face was pale if boisterous under the light of a street lamp; he leaned against the lamp-post with his hands in his pockets.

  “Our Mrs. Henderson,” he repeated, “has been seeing things. I’m not even quite certain what it was that she didn’t see, because she’s kept it to hints and prayers. But it would appear that on the night Uncle Miles died there was a woman in his room, talking to him.”

  “A woman?”

  “No, not what you’re thinking,” said Mark, formally. “I mean merely that a woman—in what Mrs. Henderson describes as ‘queer old-fashioned clothes’—was in his room, talking to him. Now that’s possible, of course. On that night several of us, Lucy and Edith and myself as well, went to a masquerade ball at St. Davids. Lucy was dressed as Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s favorite. Edith was somebody in bonnet and hoopskirts; Florence Nightingale, I believe. With my wife as a great courtesan and my sister as a great nurse, I was well protected.

  “However,” he added, scowling, “it’s rather improbab
le. You didn’t know Miles very well, did you? He was an amiable old devil. He kept by himself in his own room, and wouldn’t let anybody go into it—you knew that—although he was always polite. He even had his meals sent up to him. When he was taken bad, of course, I had a trained nurse brought in. He kicked up a hell of a polite row about that. We put the nurse in the room next to his, and we had a lot of trouble preventing him from locking the communicating door so that she couldn’t come in whenever she liked. … Consequently, Mrs. Henderson’s vision of a woman in ‘queer old-fashioned clothes,’ though it’s possible——”

  Stevens could not understand what was bothering him.

  “Well, I don’t see anything particularly strange about it,” he said. “Have you asked Lucy or Edith about it? And, anyway, if nobody was allowed in the room, how did Mrs. Henderson see the woman at all?”

  “Mrs. Henderson claims to have seen her through a window, which Miles usually kept curtained, giving on an upper sun porch. No; I haven’t mentioned it to Lucy or Edith.” He hesitated, and then laughed boisterously. “For a very good reason. That doesn’t bother me; I’m not trying to make any mystery of it. It’s the other part of Mrs. Henderson’s tale that puzzles me. According to her story, this woman in the old-fashioned clothes—now attend to me carefully—first had a little talk with Miles, and then turned round and went out of the room by a door which does not exist.”

  Stevens looked at him. Mark Despard’s thin hook-nosed face wore a gravity which may or may not have been satirical.

  “You don’t say so,” Stevens observed, with a noncommittal noise. “Ghosts?”

  “I mean,” said Mark, frowning over a careful definition of terms, “a door which has been bricked up and panelled over for two hundred years. Mysterious visitor simply opens it and walks out. Ghosts? No; I doubt it very much. We’ve managed to struggle along for a very long time without producing any ghosts. We’ve been too cursed respectable. You can’t imagine a respectable ghost; it may be a credit to the family, but it’s an insult to guests. More likely it’s something wrong with Mrs. Henderson, if you ask me.”