Fire, Burn!

by John Dickson Carr

  “And pray what takes you so long, my pet?” That was Vulcan’s soft bass.

  “Ah, ducky, but blast your bloody eyes—!” That was Kate’s refined contralto.

  “I have warned you before, my pet, against using unseemly language.”

  The tiny screw fell into Cheviot’s hand, just as the waxen spill flashed into flame from the candle outside the door.

  As it did so, Cheviot’s heart jumped into his throat for fear the bell-wire would clatter down inside the wall, or the knob fall off inside the room.

  But the wire, from long fixture in that position, remained as it was. So did the knob. There was just time for Cheviot to slip both screw and screw-driver into his pocket. He was well out from the wall, bending over to pick up his hat, when the glow of the waxen spill sent a wavering light out across the carpet.

  “Now here, Mr. Cheviot,” Vulcan’s rich voice went on, “we have what the newspapers are wont somewhat vulgarly to call my sanctum sanctorum. Kate, be good enough to light both lamps.”

  Cheviot could dimly make out the lines of the good-sized if low-ceilinged room. Its walls were papered, after a French Empire fashion long dead, in vertical stripes of orange and green. Two smallish windows, heavily muffled in orange-plush curtains, were in the rear wall opposite the door.

  “Observe the table,” Vulcan suggested rather smugly.

  There was little furniture. Cheviot had already noted the table.

  At first glance, in gloom, it appeared to be a roulette-table. It was eighteen feet long, set longways to the windows, and a roulette-wheel had been let down into the middle.

  But this was decorative. The table, on either side of the wheel, had a top of polished mahogany. Some distance out, on either side, stood a solid-looking china figure: each one about a foot high, tinted in natural life-colours and with a high, hard glaze. Beyond these, at both ends of the table, loomed up a lamp in a cut-glass orange-coloured shade.

  “Observe again!” said Vulcan, as Kate tilted the shade and lighted the lamp on the right.

  An orange glow, dull and rather menacing, filtered through a room whose windows had not been raised in years.

  The figure to the right of the roulette-wheel represented the popular notion of Vulcan: black from the forge, stooped and yet broad and powerful, a hammer in one hand and a net in the other.

  “Yes,” agreed Cheviot. “I see. And the figure on the left—” He stopped.

  Pop went the wick on the other orange cut-glass lamp, as Kate moved quickly to the other end of the table and lighted it.

  The other figure, nude, represented Venus rising from the sea. So much power or skill had seldom been breathed out by the potter, the fire-glazer, the painter, in what appeared living sensuality.

  “In classical mythology,” pursued Vulcan, “Venus or Aphrodite is usually represented as being fair-haired. You, Mr. Cheviot, were perhaps thinking of …”

  He paused, coughing delicately.

  “But this Venus,” he went on, and even his glass eye seemed to gleam, “is dark. See how the black hair streams down over her shoulders. Her eyes are half-closed; her arms straight down at her sides, hands turned outwards. You do see?”

  “Very well. It is admirable, if unorthodox.”

  Vulcan laughed his soft laugh. Kate de Bourke, her thick lips drawn down, had been standing above the second orange-gleaming lamp. She ran along the line of the table to the right of the room.

  Against the right-hand wall stood a large and deep cabinet of painted Chinese lacquer, with double-doors. Before this background Kate posed and poised, chin up, eyes half-closed, arms down at her sides with hands turned out.

  “It’s me,” she said, dropping the refined speech. “I’m proud it’s me! Ah, so-and-so, why pretend?”

  “Kate!”

  Kate ran at Vulcan, greedy-mouthed, and threw her arms round his neck.

  “Give us a kiss, ducks. ’Tain’t as if—”

  With sudden violence Vulcan’s shoulders twitched. He flung her off, so that she staggered backwards. Her spine and head banged against the edge of the Chinese-lacquer cabinet on the wall to the right of the open door.

  But Kate only laughed, delighted. This time she sidled toward him with a coyness which, despite or perhaps because of her beauty, was almost grisly. It flashed through Cheviot’s head that this was a deliberate imitation of Flora Drayton.

  “And yet, dearest, may I not remain while you speak with this gentleman?”

  “No. This is business. Leave us!”

  Vulcan, his hand at her back as he turned her towards the open door, recovered his mantle of benevolence.

  “Come, Mr. Cheviot, I neglect you! Pray be seated—there.”

  His gesture was so quietly commanding that Cheviot looked round behind him.

  Against the wall to the left of the door, not far beyond the brass knob in the wall, stood a large and weighty flat-topped desk of Regency design. Its polished top was inset with green leather; on either side, two tiers of drawers had metal handles with the metal design of a lion’s head on each.

  At either side of the desk, sideways, stood outwards a wide-backed armchair upholstered in green plush, with green buttons to indent its bulges.

  Then Cheviot’s eye caught something else. Propped against the far edge of the long table were two of Vulcan’s famous collection of walking-sticks. One of them, twisted like a corkscrew, was of very heavy black wood with a silver top. The other, its handle curved, appeared to be much lighter.

  A remembrance of advice tapped out a warning:

  Don’t let him get behind you! Don’t let—

  But Vulcan was some distance away.

  The thick mahogany door closed with a slam as Cheviot swung round. Vulcan, using the longer key from his ring, carefully locked the door.

  “Merely a precaution,” he explained, “against intruders on our privacy.”

  “Of course,” Cheviot agreed, and sat down in the far armchair his host had indicated.

  Vulcan replaced the key-ring in his waistcoat pocket.

  His air of self-satisfaction seemed almost to burst his evening clothes. He towered up as he approached, a massive shadow of him spreading out behind on the orange-and-green walls.

  “Is it not strange?” he asked in a musing tone. “Strange, I say, that a man—a man, I again explain, with so few natural advantages—should yet hold a compelling fascination for so many women? Even women (I do not mention Kate, though I am fonder of her than any), even women of high birth and refined tastes?”

  Here Vulcan glanced down over his white shirt-front, his immaculate cuffs, the rings a-flash on his fingers.

  “Yet I know such a man,” he added, and almost smiled.

  “Oh, yes,” said Cheviot, without looking at him. “So do I.”

  Vulcan stood very still, beside the desk and in front of the other armchair.

  It was as though an arrow had struck home, with mysterious effect, as Cheviot meant it to strike.

  “May I offer you a cigar, Mr. Cheviot?”

  “Thank you.”

  Most of the cigars he had bought and smoked in this age were the vilest of weeds. This one, offered from a thin deep sandalwood box on the desk, was the finest Havana. With the cigar-cutter in his right-hand waistcoat pocket, at the end of the chain which ran to his heavy silver watch in the other pocket, he snipped off the end.

  Vulcan took a cigar, and did the same.

  “A glass of brandy, my dear sir?” he beamed. “Tush, don’t hesitate! This is the Napoleon cru, of admitted excellence.”

  “I can’t resist that, I thank you. I have never tasted true Napoleon brandy.”

  Vulcan unstoppered a cut-glass decanter, on a silver platter amid glasses. He poured the brandy into two glasses, without moving them. Cheviot rose to his feet and moved across. There, apparently, he stumbled, slipped, and bumped straight into Vulcan with a heavy thud.

  “Come, I do beg your pardon!” Cheviot blurted, disengaging himself. “It
was unpardonably clumsy of me!”

  “Not at all,” said Vulcan.

  Taking the glass of brandy, Cheviot sat down again. Vulcan, still standing, whisked an inch-long metal rod across the base of a gold-and-silver toy pagoda. Oil-soaked flame curled up. Vulcan carefully lighted Cheviot’s cigar, moving the flame back and forth.

  Next he lit his own cigar, took up the glass of brandy, and settled his weight back comfortably into the green-padded armchair.

  “As we were saying—” Cheviot began, drawing smoke into his lungs.

  A brief smile, like a shark opening its jaws, flashed across Vulcan’s face and was gone.

  “Yes,” he said, “it really was clumsy when you pretended to stumble against me. It was to test my weight, was it not? And you found me solid enough, I think?”

  Cheviot did not reply.

  “And now, Mr. Superintendent Cheviot,” said Vulcan, with absolutely no change of tone, “what do you really want of me?”

  Cheviot’s voice remained just as detached.

  “As I told you,” he answered, blowing out smoke and studying it, “a fair business-bargain. An exchange …”

  “Of what?”

  “Information. It will benefit both of us, believe me.”

  “Forgive my frankness, sir,” Vulcan said dryly, and shook his big head, “but I think you have very little to offer. However! Speak on.”

  “You’ve heard, I suppose, of the murder of Margaret Renfrew at Lady Cork’s house last night?”

  Vulcan looked shocked.

  “My dear sir! Who has not? The columns of the Morning Post were full of it.”

  “Well! A diamond-and-ruby brooch, shaped like a full-rigged ship, was pledged here at your establishment by a person we believe to be the murderer. Four other pieces of jewellery, of which I have a list here,” and Cheviot touched his breast-pocket, “may have been pledged too.”

  “It distresses a gentleman to say so. But I have a fully legal pawnbroker’s licence.”

  “These jewels were stolen.”

  “And was I to know that?” inquired Vulcan.

  For a moment he sipped brandy and drew at his cigar.

  “If they were stolen,” he continued, mighty in virtue, “they shall be returned. But think of my difficulties! What was it you said? A diamond-and-something brooch, shaped like a ship? Have you any notion how many such trinkets pass through my hands, or those of my chief croupier, in the course of a year? Yet you ask me to remember one of them?”

  “Oh, come off it,” Cheviot said vulgarly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said come off it,” retorted Cheviot, finishing his brandy and setting down the glass on the desk. “You don’t issue pawntickets, I understand. You keep account-books, with a description of the article set down opposite the name of the person who pledged it. Yes or no?”

  “Yes.” Vulcan spoke after a pause. “I keep account-books. What, exactly, do you wish to know?”

  “The name of the man who pledged that brooch.”

  “And what do you offer in return?—One moment!”

  Vulcan lifted the hand which held his glass. He sat up straight. The sheer force of his personality, apart from any size or weight, seemed to dwarf Cheviot and pin the latter in his chair.

  “Let me,” he suggested, “tell you. Any offer you make must concern my gaming-house here. True, to keep a gaming-house is illegal. But the law is seldom enforced. Why? Because you cannot convince any man that gambling is a crime, provided the play at the tables be fair. As mine, notoriously, is fair.

  “So I will give you three good reasons,” he continued, “why you cannot help me; still less hurt me. First, if the new police meditated any attack on my premises, I should be warned beforehand.”

  Cheviot nodded.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was aware of that.”

  Again it was as though a driven arrow had struck home.

  The force of Vulcan’s personality did not alter. His tone did not change. But his glass eye, in the orange light, remained dead; his good eye took on a glitter of malice.

  “Second,” he said, “you could never find witnesses to testify against me in the box. The high-born, fearing scandal, would not testify. The—shall we say medium or even base-born?—dare not testify—”

  “Because they would be bribed, intimidated, or beaten within a gasp of death by your blacklegs?”

  “I don’t like your tone, Mr. Cheviot.”

  “Nor I yours. May I hear your third reason?”

  “Willingly!” said Vulcan, softly putting down his cigar on the edge of the table and his glass beside it. “Third, your police could not get in. You took note of my iron door, which is four inches thick in a thick wall. By the time your police could force that door, with axes or what tools you like, it would take twenty minutes or even half an hour. You agree?”

  “Yes.”

  “By that time, dear sir, no evidence of gambling would remain. My guests, or such as wished to do so, would have disappeared. The intruders would surprise only quiet talk in a gentleman’s drawing-room.”

  Cheviot laughed.

  It was a jarring sound, as he meant it to be.

  “Vulcan,” he said, “you disappoint me.”

  There was no answer. The cut-glass bowls of the lamps seemed to grow dull and darken their orange light.

  “Forgive my frankness,” said Cheviot, in mockery of the other’s voice, “but you are like any other householder, in any other street. You make your front door so strong, so impregnable, that no intelligent bur—housebreaker would think of attacking it. Then, like another householder, you completely neglect your back door.”

  Cheviot nodded to the two windows, closely muffled in orange curtains, in the rear wall.

  “Outside those windows,” he said, “two steeply pitched tile roofs slope down to a back wall in a mews. When I visited the mews very late this afternoon, the back door was wide open for air. It gives on a scullery and kitchen. These lead, left and right, to a ground-floor supper-room and dice-hazard room.”

  Still Vulcan did not move or speak.

  “When I visited the mews late this evening,” Cheviot went on, “your back door was still on the jar. Vulcan, Vulcan! If I had fifty constables outside that back door at this minute, they could be up into your gaming-room within twenty seconds.”

  Then Vulcan moved.

  Amazingly, in so vast a man, he bounced to his feet like an india-rubber cat. He darted behind his chair. His right hand shot out towards the brass knob to the bell-wire, seized it, and pulled hard. The knob came away in his hand.

  “No,” said Cheviot. “You can’t summon your blacklegs like that.”

  The knob dropped on the carpet with a faint thud. Without speaking, without smiling, Vulcan moved across to the mahogany door.

  His big fingers fished in his waistcoat pocket, fished again, then flew across to his other pocket. …

  “No,” Cheviot told him, “that won’t do either.”

  Reaching into his side pocket, he drew out Vulcan’s key-ring with the two keys.

  “I greatly fear,” he said, “that I picked your pocket when I bumped into you. Was that so very clumsy, do you think?”

  Vulcan’s bald head turned slowly round. His good eye gleamed and burned.

  “It is true,” Cheviot added, “you can always hammer on the door and scream for help. And yet, since you are known to be alone with only one unarmed man two or three stone lighter than yourself, I think you would be ashamed to do it.”

  “Yes,” Vulcan agreed, “you are right. But what need have I,” and at last he smiled, “when I can always take the keys from you myself?”

  Cheviot considered this.

  “Now I wonder if you could?” he mused. “But reassure yourself. There are no constables outside your back door.”

  “If this is a lie, or a piece of bounce—!”

  The latter term, which in after years would come to mean bluff, stung Cheviot far worse
than he had stung Vulcan.

  “I never lie,” he said, “and I never use bounce. I despise those who do.” He controlled his voice. “Besides, you have talked a great deal. You haven’t even heard what I offer in exchange for a murderer’s name.”

  “Very well. Speak.”

  Cheviot leaned across and carefully put down his half-smoked cigar on the silver platter of the decanter. He stood up, bracing himself on his right foot.

  “Your roulette-wheel is rigged,” he said. “And I can prove it. If I do, it will ruin you.”

  Only Cheviot’s next words, sharp-pierced with common-sense, stopped Vulcan’s charge at him.

  “Gambling?” Cheviot said. “What matter to me if you fleece a thousand young blockheads, provided I can avenge one human life? Human life means little to you? By God, it means all to me! I want no violence, no fight, if we can make terms. Nor do you. Shall I demonstrate how your wheel downstairs is rigged?”

  Without waiting for an answer he backed away. He backed past his chair, round the left-hand side of the table where the two walking-sticks were propped up, and behind the roulette-wheel with his back to the curtains.

  In the wheel lay a small ivory ball. Cheviot picked it up.

  Whereupon, without even glancing at Vulcan, he went down on his knees against the thick green carpet. His fingers explored the carpet to the right of where a croupier’s chair would have stood. They ran along the carpet to the left.

  Cheviot stood up.

  Vulcan was looking at him from just across the table, two and a half feet wide.

  “Yes?” prompted Vulcan.

  “This table is not rigged. But I can show you the principle. It is so old, so old and primitive, that no one would use it in any modern—” Cheviot stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “The croupier’s right foot,” returned Cheviot, “controls four (yes, four) very small buttons under the carpet. These, connected by taut wires, lead to rods up the legs of the table and inside it. A very slight pressure sets in motion three separate coiled springs driven by compressed air. You are acquainted with the principle in your—our time. But the full weight of each spring must never be uncoiled at once. If it did, it would explode mightily.”