Fire, Burn!

by John Dickson Carr

  “Dead certain.”

  “But—!”

  “Stop, stop! Let me think!”

  He stared at the carpet. A woman can’t be dead of a bullet wound when there is no human hand to fire the bullet; yet it happened. Mainly Cheviot was conscious of the watch ticking in his waistcoat pocket.

  This roused him. Snatching at the watch again, he found it was three minutes past midnight. That waltz must stop soon; it had been going on long enough. Miss Renfrew had been on her way, or so she said, to announce supper. In a short time the whole crowd must come pouring out. If they found a dead body in the passage …

  “Just a moment!” Cheviot said to his two companions.

  He went to the ballroom doors, opened the right-hand one, and looked inside.

  Nobody noticed him, or seemed to notice him.

  A hot gush of air, stuffy yet scented, swirled out at him with the dipping and whirling of the dancers. The dozen fiddlers sawed and sweated like mad on their little platform. Women’s gowns, wide-skirted and some with puffed sleeves like day-dresses, wove a flying pattern of pink, blue, green, white, and primrose-yellow.

  He saw the half-dozen hair-styles; many girls had flowers threaded in their hair, some wore feathers. From each slender wrist, a dance programme hung on a thin thread. All the ladies were gloved to the elbow, as the black-coated men wore white kid gloves.

  Some people, Flora had said, still considered the waltz improper. Cheviot couldn’t understand this. Each man held his partner almost at arm’s length. And yet …

  And yet, in that dream scene under dim fluttery gaslight, there pulsed underneath a queer, repressed excitement. Cheviot himself could feel it. The women’s faces were flushed with exercise; the men’s with exertion or drink. On a floor waxed to glassiness, past windows with very heavy green curtains looped back, emotions were unloosed and uncovered.

  “What accompanies all this?” he wondered. “Yes, the first thought is easy. But the second is something just as primitive; it could lead to murder.”

  On the inside of the door, he saw, there was a large brass key in the lock. Cheviot stepped a pace inside the ballroom. Unobtrusively he put his hand over the key, worked it out of the lock, and slipped it into his pocket.

  “On the surface,” ran his racing thoughts, “it’s as proper and decorous as a nursery school. But underneath the surface?”

  Look out!

  A circling couple, unseeing in the colour-whirl and uncertain light, bore down on him. He had no time to dodge.

  There was a soft, flesh-thudding shock. The dancers lurched, but did not lose their footing. Instantly Cheviot was all apologies to the young lady.

  “Madam, I entreat you to forgive me. The fault was entirely mine. I had ventured out too far.”

  The young lady, a pretty and breathless girl with light-brown hair and wide-set hazel eyes, in a blue silk gown and with forget-me-nots in her hair, breathed fast from the tempo of the dance.

  But she did not forget to curtsey prettily, raise her large eyes, smile, and lower her eyes.

  And at last Cheviot understood the quality common to all these women, especially Flora herself. It was their intense femininity, the strongest weapon a woman can possess and the one which makes most trouble among men.

  “I beg you won’t mention it, sir,” smiled the girl, gasping at him as though the matter were of earth-shaking importance. “Pray don’t mention it! Such accidents are quite usual. I am sure my partner agrees?”

  She turned. Cheviot found himself looking straight into the eyes of the Guards officer, Captain Hogben, with whom he had already exchanged words on the stairs.

  For a few seconds Captain Hogben, exuding wrath and brandy-punch, spoke no word. Yet he did not seem angry; only tall and languid. He stroked his moustache and side-whiskers.

  “You again, fellow?” he drawled. “Well! I must chastise you pwopewly, fellow; at the pwopew time and place. Meanwhile, fellow, be off with you!”

  His long right arm darted out to give Cheviot a contemptuous shove in the chest.

  It was still more strange a thing. Wrath, which Cheviot seldom felt and never showed, none the less boiled up inside him. By inches and half a second he beat the companion to the shove. His open left hand, with weight behind it, struck like a battering-ram against the Guards officer’s padded chest.

  Captain Hogben’s heels twitched and twitched on the waxed floor. He sat down with a crash which shook the gas-jets. Immediately he was up again, sure-footed in his pointed military boots under the thin black trousers, but with furious eyes.

  It would not be true to say that the brown-haired girl fastened on him. Yet she seized his hands in a position for the dance, pouring out low-murmured, soothing, indistinguishable words.

  Cheviot waited, looking Captain Hogben in the eyes.

  But decorum prevailed. Captain Hogben bore his partner away. Nobody else, deeply absorbed, had so much as glanced at the incident. A girl in lilac giggled loudly. Round-faced Freddie Debbitt, entranced, sailed past holding at less than arm’s length a queenly brunette in a pink gown.

  Cheviot backed out of the ballroom. Closing the door, he took the key out of his pocket and locked both doors on the outside. The key he left in the lock.

  But a bead of sweat ran down his forehead.

  What the devil was wrong with him? Had he too been affected by the atmosphere of the ballroom? Or was it, more deeply buried in his mind, some scratching and nagging doubt about Flora—and Flora’s innocence, after all?

  Flora herself, moving farther and farther away from that dead body, cried out at him in the quieter passage.

  “Jack! What in mercy’s name were you doing in the ballroom? At a time like this?”

  Cheviot was himself again.

  “Locking them in.” He spoke lightly. All the time he studied the limpid sincerity of Flora’s eyes and mouth. “We can’t have the place overrun, can we? Gently, now! There’s no need for haste.”

  “But this is horrible.” She nodded her golden-haired head towards Margaret Renfrew without looking there, and wrung her hands. “What’s to be done?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Flora nearly screamed when he left them again. He hastened to Lady Cork’s boudoir. After knocking, he twisted the knob—which always opened or closed with a loud snap—and went in.

  Lady Cork drowsed in the armchair, by the dying fire, her frilled cap sagging, her hand on her stick. Even the macaw’s eye was closed. But, at the snap of the lock, she reared up and rolled round her head.

  She was a sharp-witted old lady. Something of Cheviot’s errand must have showed in his face.

  “What’s amiss, lad?” she demanded, getting to her feet. “Come; I’ve eyes in me head! What’s amiss?”

  “I regret to tell you that your niece, Miss Renfrew—”

  “She’s no niece o’ mine!” said Lady Cork, her face hardening. “Or kin either, for that matter. What’s she done now?”

  “Nothing. She has met with an accident. To be quite blunt, she is dead.”

  “Dead,” Lady Cork repeated after a pause, and seemed to go white under the eyes. Then her eyes narrowed. “Accident, ye say?”

  “No. That’s only a police formula for softening a blow. She was shot through the heart from the back, and is lying out in that passage. That, madam,” Cheviot caught and held her gaze, “is where I ask your assistance. As a police-officer, I must not have a great number of people trampling over that passage until I have properly examined it. Will you be kind enough to assist me by detaining your guests in the ballroom, with a speech or the suggestion of another dance or what you like? Detaining them for ten or fifteen minutes, without telling them (as yet!) that anything is amiss? Can you, will you, do this?”

  “Ay!” retorted Lady Cork, striking her stick on the floor. “I can and I will. And there’s ten dowagers in there, as chaperones, who’ll help me!”

  She bustled forward. Then she stopped, lips pursed up.

  �
�Shot,” she said flatly. “Who did it? Her lover?”

  This time Cheviot’s face betrayed nothing.

  “Then Miss Renfrew had a lover, Lady Cork?”

  “Pah! Don’t tell me! To be sure she had!”

  “His name?”

  “How should I know? The jade was too close-mouthed. But couldn’t ye see it in her eyes?”

  “I saw something, yes.”

  “Pride and shame, at the same time? Tetchy and savage, for fear somebody’d read it in her face? When it was printed there for all to read, with rouge and lip-salve? And where was the need for that, at thirty-one? Pah! These nowadays non-conformist consciences!”

  Anger moved across her old face, like dough with water bubbling underneath.

  “That’s what I misliked, and I don’t deny it. Sly, curs’t sly! Lawks! Did she think I’d mind?” Lady Cork suddenly cackled, either with laughter or something else. “In my time, lad, a gel wasn’t a gel unless she’d had half a dozen before she was twenty. If ye want to find Peg’s macaroni, he’s in the ballroom there. But she denied she had one.—And now she’s dead.”

  “Lady Cork!”

  The latter had bustled past him and was almost at the door.

  “Hey?”

  “Am I correct in assuming, as I have assumed for some time, that it was Miss Renfrew who stole your jewellery? Or, at least, you believe she stole it?”

  The music stopped.

  It left a great void in the old, musty house. There was a spattering of applause from the ballroom, but this sounded merely polite. It was evident that momentarily exhausted guests, male and female, desired large quantities of food and drink.

  “Yes, Lady Cork? Did you suspect Miss Renfrew?”

  “Lad, lad, make haste! Can’t ye hear what I hear? Whether supper’s announced or not, they’ll gallop downstairs like horses for a trough. Come!”

  “They can’t gallop yet. I locked the doors on the outside.”

  “Lawks!” screeched Lady Cork, rather like her macaw. Her bearing altered. She regarded him with formal, drawn-up sarcasm. “Now that will quench their curiosity, I daresay, when you desire to keep all things dark? That will discover them rejoicing, when they find locked doors?”

  “Will you answer my question, Lady Cork?”

  “Young man, are you bullyin’ me?”

  “No, madam. Nevertheless, if you don’t reply, I must assume you do suspect Miss Renfrew. And act accordingly.”

  She stared at him.

  From her expression he was sure he had found the truth. He could have sworn she was within a hair line of barking out, “Yes,” but her strange mind altered again. She sniffed, opened the door handle with a snap, and marched out.

  Cheviot, in despair, could only follow.

  Lady Cork paid no attention either to Flora or to Mr. Henley, who stood as they had stood before. For an instant the short, squat little figure stood blinking down at Margaret Renfrew’s body.

  “Poor gel,” Lady Cork said gruffly.

  Without another word she bustled to the ballroom doors, unlocked them, marched inside, and closed the doors. The murmur of voices changed to a ripple and then a burst of applause.

  “Now!” Cheviot said to Flora. “Let’s see what can be done.”

  He should not have allowed the body to be disturbed, of course. It was necessary to disturb it so that he, he of all people, could distract the chief clerk’s attention and hide a recently fired, still-warm pistol.

  But that was a minor matter. Margaret Renfrew had fallen hard. An outline of her fall, including the position of arms and legs, was printed in the dust of the carpet. Rolling her over again, he set every finger and shoe-tip into line.

  Even as he did so, the full helplessness of his position swept over him.

  He could not take photographs. He had no chalk, no magnifying lens, no tape-measure. But these were still small matters; he could find rough substitutes for them.

  Not a modern ballistics expert on earth could identify a bullet fired from a smooth-bore barrel. Even granting Flora’s innocence, and some plausible explanation of the weapon in the muff, he could never prove from what pistol the shot was fired.

  Fingerprints, on which he had staked so much in his proposed experiment for Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne, were worse than useless here. Aside from servants like Solange, aside from himself and Mr. Henley and Lady Cork, every person in the house was wearing gloves.

  His fine advantages had crumbled to ruin. He was left alone to his own wits.

  “Mr. Henley!” he said, looking round and measuring distances with his eye. “In that writing-case of yours, have you by any chance a piece of chalk?”

  “Chalk, Mr. Cheviot?” the other blurted, and backed a step away. “Egad, sir, what do you want with chalk?”

  “To draw an outline round the body. We can’t keep her there forever.”

  “Ah!” breathed Mr. Henley, relieved to hear sanity. “I have a stick of charcoal, if that’s of use?”

  “Yes! Thank you! I think the carpet is light-coloured enough for that. If you don’t mind, you had better give me the writing-case. I must take sketches and measurements for myself.”

  For fully ten minutes, while they watched him, and Flora neared the verge of hysterics, he worked swiftly. For measuring distances he used his own big silk handkerchief. He prowled back and forth, from the body to the walls, and then to the rear of the passage.

  Louder and louder grew the clamour of voices from the ballroom. Again Cheviot feared invasion. His pen scratched on bad paper; ink flew wide. There was no damned blotting paper; he forgot the sand.

  “That’s all, I think,” he concluded, handing back the writing-case and waving the paper in the air to dry it. “Mr. Henley, I dislike making this request. But you have a horse here. Will you go and fetch a surgeon? Any surgeon, but by preference a good one.”

  “Mr. Cheviot! The lady’s dead! A surgeon can’t bring her back to life.”

  “No. But he can probe for the bullet, and tell me the direction of impact.”

  “S-sir?”

  “Now listen to me!” said Cheviot, fixing the chief clerk’s rather large and cow-like brown eyes with his own. “We agree, don’t we, that Lady Drayton fired no shot?”

  “Ay! That there I do!”

  “You will further observe,” Cheviot insisted gently, “that Lady Drayton carries no firearms of any kind?”

  “Ay again!”

  “Very well.” He did not dare look at Flora. “But there’s no weapon in the passage. I’ve just finished searching. Next remark the position of Miss Renfrew’s body. She was shot in the back. We all saw that; we all know it. She lies, as you see, in the middle of the carpet, facing the stairs, and well ahead of any door opening on this passage.”

  “Ah! Then it means—”

  “It means, as a possibility, that one of those doors might briefly have opened and closed.”

  “But you said—!”

  “I know I said it. I still believe no door was opened. Nevertheless, unless we accept this possibility, we are left with a belief in miracles or devilry or witchcraft.”

  “Here, sir! Steady! Pull up! There may be witches, for all they say it’s lies!”

  Cheviot ignored this. He took another step forward.

  “You ask me what a surgeon can do. In extracting the bullet, he can say whether it was fired in a straight line or diagonally. If diagonally, was the direction from left or right? You understand the vital nature of this? You see it will show where a murderer, visible or invisible, was standing at the time?”

  “Ah-ah-ah!” breathed Mr. Henley, and stood up straight.

  “Sir,” he added rather huskily, “I asks your pardon. I see now there’s much more to this detective-police business than handling your fives, or beating the truth out of a house-breaker just because you think he may ’a’ done it. I’ve been wasting your time, Mr. Cheviot; but I won’t waste any more of it. I’ll be off, now, to fetch that surgeon.”

&nb
sp; With much dignity he inclined his half-bald head. He turned round, hobbled towards the stairs, and was gone.

  For a moment Cheviot stared after him.

  “Handling your fives,” he knew, was current slang for using your fists. Despite all his heavy reading in political and social history, so that he might interpret the meaning of the new Metropolitan Police, he could not hope to understand every catch-or-cant phrase.

  He could only lurch along as best he could, as in this crime, under the bitter load which time had burdened him with.

  Bending down, with one arm under Margaret Renfrew’s shoulders and another under her knees, he lifted up that dead, heavy weight.

  “Flora!” he said sharply. “We have to move her somewhere.”

  Flora, about to speak, changed her mind. With the muff dangling from her right hand, she ran over and opened the single door nearer the stairs.

  Cheviot, in the act of carrying the body there, hesitated and swung round.

  He could hear the babble from the ballroom. Lady Cork couldn’t hold them back much longer. It was unlikely, when they came pouring out, that anyone would look under a hollow-based lamp to find a pistol concealed there. All the same—

  With a violent effort, the woman’s body across his forearms as he bent down, he lifted the lamp with one hand and with his other hand he caught up the small pistol whose lozenge-shaped gold plate in the handle bore the initials A.D.

  He couldn’t put the pistol in his pocket, or he would have dropped the woman’s body. He nearly dropped her as it was; her cheek rolled up, grisly, against his own.

  Flora moistened her lips. She was as pale as dead Miss Renfrew. Though Flora’s heavy, smooth, silky hair was not at all disarranged, she made a wild gesture with both hands to her exposed ears.

  Cheviot followed her quickly through the open door, which led to the dining-room. At each end of a long Chippendale dining-table, cleared and polished, stood a massive silver candelabrum of seven branches. They lit the candles, which had burnt far down, in stiffened drippings of white wax. The flames sputtered, throwing dim and fluttery cross-lights in the big room.

  “Jack! What are you doing?”

  “Putting her body on the table. They’re not making use of this room tonight. Lock the door.”