Fire, Burn!

by John Dickson Carr

  Whack!

  A streak of fire, a report echoed back in iron concussion. The wafer, struck dead-centre, flew to pieces or disintegrated in flame.

  In a leisurely way Hogben put down the first pistol and moved on to the second.

  His second shot clipped the upper edge of the wafer; it split, with tearing edges, but still stuck to the wall as the bullet clattered down and rolled.

  His third shot was a complete miss.

  The flattened bullet freakishly bounced back and bumped along the floor halfway towards those who watched. Hogben stood for a moment with his head down, the black hairs at the back of his neck bristling over the collar, but still unruffled. Acrid smoke-haze thickened round them; he waited until it had lifted.

  With his fourth bullet he got more than an edge of the target. His fifth and sixth shots were straight on the wafer. In fact, the sixth wafer flashed into flame as it vanished.

  Hogben put down the last pistol, straightening his shoulders still more.

  “There!” he said jauntily, with one eye on the notes and gold. “Beat that, fellow.”

  It was first-class shooting. Everyone knew it. But no one said anything, as Hogben washed his hands and face at the sink, and Joe Manton jabbed and scratched with his wet cloth to clean the target-wall. He put up six new wafers.

  Whistling between his teeth, Captain Hogben lounged with arms folded. Joe began the business of cleaning and reloading the six pistols. It seemed to take an interminable time, while the clock ticked and Hogben whistled “A Frog He Would.”

  “Your turn, Mr. Cheviot,” said Lieutenant Wentworth.

  Cheviot’s throat felt dry. He did not look out at Flora. Freddie touched his arm; he hesitated, and walked to the barrier at the left-hand side.

  Whereupon Freddie, despite the rules, jumped and cried aloud to his Maker.

  Whack!—Whack!—Whack!—Whack!—Whack!—Whack!

  Cheviot, in fact, was not moving and firing as fast as it seemed to his startled companions. But the stunning concussions rolled back. The black-powder smoke, spurting and clouding, blotted out heads, faces, and the barrier as well. Six shots were fired in as many seconds.

  In the street, bay horses stirred and clattered. Cheviot put down the last pistol and joined Freddie in the window. Smoke presently lifted, gushing out of skylight and window.

  Each of the six wafers, shot squarely in the middle, had burnt or disappeared. Except for a few white adhering bits, and a few bits floating up with the smoke, the target-wall was as clean as when Joe had last wiped it.

  The earnest-minded Wentworth, who had been regarding Hogben in a thoughtful way, spoke very politely to Freddie.

  “I think, Mr. Debbitt, there can be no doubt your principal has won the match?”

  “N-no! N-no! Deuce take it, none at all!”

  “Very well.” Wentworth turned to Cheviot. “Sir, we agreed to give you certain information—”

  But Cheviot, coughing smoke out of his throat, stopped him.

  “Sir, this information is no longer necessary to me. I absolve you from giving it.”

  “That’s good. That’s damn good!” said Hogben, and laughed. “Because you wouldn’t have got it anyway.”

  Wentworth’s fair complexion flushed red.

  You might have thought such shooting would have taken down the gallant Captain a little. At very least it meant that a duel at twenty paces would be fatal to them both. But Hogben remained as loftily superior as ever.

  “Oh, I keep my promises,” he said, plucking up his cloak from the floor and throwing it round his shoulders. “You’ve made the mistake, fellow. I said I’d give information. I didn’t say who I’d give it to, remember? I didn’t say to you.”

  Here he opened his eyes wide, pleased at his own cunning, and laughed again.

  “I’ll give it fast enough to your superior officers, What’s-their-names, at Whitehall Place. I say, Wentworth. You’ve arranged with Debbitt for the time and place of the meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re usin’ my pistols?”

  “Stop!” said Freddie, seizing at his own smudged face. “I forgot to mention—”

  “Any pistols,” Cheviot interrupted curtly, and went over to wash at the sink.

  “Then that’s settled, fellow,” grinned Hogben, “and you’re settled.” He shouldered towards the door. “Coming, Wentworth?”

  “No.”

  “Coming, Debbitt?”

  “Yes, yes! That’s to say, not with you. Got no horse. ’Nother appointment. Jack, old fellow! Congratulations, and shake hands. There!” Freddie lowered his voice. “No doubt about this evening. You’ll wing him. Meet you there. Goodbye!”

  Outside the window, Flora was standing up in the carriage and contemplating Cheviot uncertainly. He waved and smiled at her as he finished washing.

  The door slammed as Hogben strode out. He mounted a white horse and galloped south towards Berkeley Square. Freddie followed him. Stopping only to lift his hat, bow deeply to Flora, and pay her (it seemed) flowery compliments, he hurried north towards Oxford Street.

  With no notion of the thunderbolt to fall in the next few seconds, Cheviot paid the modest charges asked by Joe for the use of the gallery, and received Joe’s compliments. Leaving Joe sweating with relief, he retrieved the green writing-case from where he had left it below the barrier.

  Lieutenant Wentworth had also drifted towards the sink, examining a grimy face in the looking-glass above. Cheviot, murmuring something polite to him, opened the front door.

  “Good day, sir!” called Joe Manton the younger. “I thought, for a while, there’d be trouble here. So help me Harry, I did!”

  Abruptly Wentworth yanked down the metal handle. Water splashed into the sink, and out over his clothes. His face, reflected in the mirror, was twisted into a look nobody would have cared to see.

  “Mr. Cheviot,” he said, with his countenance smoothed out again, “may I have a word with you on a matter of the most vital import?”

  18

  The Trap by Vauxhall Gardens

  THE DOOR WAS partly open. The air, though tinged with autumn decay, was mild and mellow. Cheviot held the door open.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  He turned back with reluctance. Flora, whose fear of the proprieties would not let her step down from the carriage and enter a shooting-gallery, made a mouth of impatience. Cheviot’s head ached; he had had less than half an hour’s sleep, and a terrifying dream.

  “Sir,” said Lieutenant Wentworth, “it may be that I betray a trust. Or doubt a friend. But it is my duty to speak out. Did you mark nothing strange in Hogben’s manner?”

  Cheviot made a gesture with the writing-case.

  “Frankly, sir,” he said, “I grow weary of Captain Hogben. Even if we kill each other in the duel, as seems likely—”

  “In my opinion,” said Wentworth, “there will be no duel.”

  “What?”

  They were now alone in the gallery. At first mention of that word “duel,” flat and ominous, Joe Manton slid out from the gate in the barrier and disappeared into the shop.

  Wentworth splashed water on his face, dried it without troubling about soap, and moved closer. Out of uniform he seemed less a soldier than, say, a student: correct, formal, yet far less haughty, like a man who has gained much experience overnight.

  “What do you tell me?” Cheviot demanded. “No duel? No—no danger?”

  “I did not say that. There may be very great danger. For you.”

  “But Hogben …?”

  “Oh, Hogben will risk nothing. There are many who will tell you that he never gives fair play.”

  Flora had said that. Cheviot looked out of the window. Flora stood holding at her hat, the wind whipping her skirt against her knees, while her lips formed the words, “What is it? Why do you stay?”

  “But what can Hogben do?” Cheviot insisted. “You yourself will be there, I take it? And my own second?”

  “Ye
s, if Hogben is there. I can tell you no more, sir; I don’t know; I only suspect. I have tried to be the man’s friend, but it won’t do. If we are not there—”

  “Yes?”

  “Someone else may meet you in the twilight. And Hogben is much desirous of your death.”

  Cheviot, realizing he had forgotten his cloak, fetched it from the ledge of the bow-window. The open door creaked and swayed. Hogben’s image rose up, grinning, still with all the honours and an ace of trumps up his sleeve.

  “Someone else may meet you in the twilight.” The twilight of All Hallows’ Eve.

  “Lieutenant Wentworth,” said Cheviot, twining the cloak round him and with his hand again on the knob of the door, “I thank you deeply for your warning.”

  He bowed, closed the door after him, and hurried across to Flora.

  Even while he sprang up the step, and Flora made room for him to sit down, neither of them would speak what was uppermost in both their minds. True, Flora began: “What time did you leave me this morning?” but swallowed it back after four words as she noted the stolid back of Robert, the coachman. There were no footmen up behind.

  “I have heard,” she said instead, “you were an expert pistol-shot. I loathe to watch even practice. But how you showed it against Captain Hogben!” Proud, intensely happy and yet uneasy, she added: “There—there was no quarrel with him, I hope?”

  “None whatever, as you saw.”

  “But I heard nothing, dearest! Except the shots.”

  “There was little else to hear.”

  “I thought,” Flora said eagerly, and nodded towards a wicker hamper on the floor, “we could go for a drive into the country, if it pleased you? There is food and wine in the hamper there. And we could be from London all day?”

  “Yes! I must visit Scotland Yard, but only briefly. What should you say, Flora, to somewhere past Vauxhall Gardens?”

  “The very place!” Flora’s eyes shone. “To be sure, the Gardens are closed for the season. And none but the vulgar people have gone there since my grandparents’ time, though they still have fireworks and balloon-ascents.”

  “Flora, don’t use those words!”

  She was appalled. “Don’t use … what words?”

  “‘Vulgar people.’ It is time we understood—!” He gulped and checked himself.

  “Jack! Have I offended you?”

  “No, no! You could never do that; I spoke from vapours; pardon me. There is a Greek temple, I think, north-east of the gardens?”

  “Oh, there is!” She lifted her voice. “You heard, Robert?”

  “My lady,” said the coachman. “I heard.”

  The carriage clopped away towards Berkeley Square, with the mild air in their faces under a changing sky. From under the short brown fur jacket, its seams outlined in blue-and-white, Flora slipped her arm through Cheviot’s. Because she wished so much to speak of themselves, as he did, she would not do it.

  “To Scotland Yard, you said?” she went on with unnatural brightness. “I daresay it’s all those people you captured at Vulcan’s. You never told me, you know. But all sorts of rumours are going round, and the most tremendous praise for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Well, and for your police too.”

  “Ah, that’s better! That’s what I hoped!”

  “But do tell me! If the police attack a gaming-house, aren’t the punters supposed to be as guilty as those who keep the house? Aren’t they arrested too?”

  “In theory, yes.”

  “And yet they say you didn’t arrest any of the punters! You shook them by the hand, and congratulated each on his prowess as a warrior, and assured them their names would never be mentioned in the affair. Is that true?”

  Cheviot laughed. It loosened his taut nerves to roar with laughter.

  “My dear, could I arrest those who had assisted me?” he pointed out. “Besides, it gave me a helpful suggestion. You should have seen Inspector Seagrave and Sergeant Bulmer in that broil. As one blackleg after another went down under a truncheon—”

  “Not all of it, please!”

  “—then Seagrave or Bulmer would haul the leg up to a sitting position, and cry, ‘Here’s Jimmy So-and-so; he’s wanted for housebreaking,’ or ‘Here’s Tom Crack-’em-Down: highway robbery, arson, God knows what.’ I should have seen it before then: Vulcan had drawn in half the fraud-and-flash world to pack the house. When we rolled ’em downstairs into wagons—”

  “Don’t laugh! It is not funny!”

  “Darling Flora, but it is funny. I was able to assure the punters this was no gambling raid, but the biggest haul of known criminals in years. Which it was. B, C, and D Divisions had to open their cells to accommodate ’em all. That’s why I was so late.”

  “Yes. You were late.”

  The carriage had swept through Berkeley Square, where nursemaids in fantastic tall caps pushed perambulators in the garden under foliage still yellow-green. It had rattled down Berkeley Street, and left into the tumult of Piccadilly.

  Flora, deep-dreaming, spoke again.

  “Vulcan!” she muttered. “Vulcan and that woman of his! Jack, what …?”

  “That was not pleasant. He’s in a cell now.”

  “Then I don’t wish to hear a word of it. No; stop; tell me all the same.”

  “The woman we released. But Vulcan had been—well, put to sleep, in handcuffs, in his office upstairs. By the time I found the key to the jewel-drawers (Kate de Bourke dropped the key-ring in the gallery), Vulcan was up and trying to destroy his ledger even in handcuffs. I never guessed he was carrying a pistol.”

  “And that’s where you got the bullet-hole in your sleeve. Isn’t it?”

  Cheviot’s mirth had left him.

  “That’s not important. No,” he repeated, “I never guessed he was carrying a pistol. He never tried to draw it when we fought across the table. Vulcan, in his own twisted way, is a sportsman. But Hogben—!”

  “What of Hogben?” Flora asked very quietly. “There is something more, as I well know. Surely it would be easier for me if I heard?”

  “Don’t trouble your head about Hogben. He has some ace of trumps up his sleeve, or thinks he has. I wish I knew what it was. That’s all.”

  He would say no more. The carriage turned down the slope of the Haymarket at its junction with Piccadilly, left into Cockspur Street, and down Whitehall.

  “Flora, may I give an order to your coachman? Robert! Be good enough to stop at number four Whitehall Place. Don’t drive into the yard; pull up at the gas-lamp outside it.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  And then, to Flora, as he got down from the carriage outside the red-brick house:

  “I shall not be a long time. Afterwards, I hope, we can both laugh.”

  But he was a long time. Flora, cradling her muff, felt the minutes as hours as she waited. The coachman’s back was straight and unmoving. All about the carriage a rumble and rattle of wheels, the shouting of those who drove them, beat against a woman torn between intense happiness and intense apprehension.

  It was, actually, more than an hour before he returned: apologetic but grim-faced as he climbed into the carriage, and gave the signal for Robert to go on.

  “I am afraid,” he said, “you must stay by me until this evening.”

  “But what else?” Flora cried. “That is no penance. Are we to—to laugh?”

  “No, unfortunately. I should not keep you by me, yet perhaps that may be best. You see, I have promised to deliver Margaret Renfrew’s murderer by eight o’clock tonight.”

  The carriage, with its deep upholstery, swayed and rattled faster.

  “And,” he added, “I am excused one duty. Should there be any riot outside Pinner’s, I need not command the division.”

  “Jack,” a stifled voice answered him, “I beg you to cease speaking riddles. Riot?”

  “There is a tailor, it seems, named Pinner. I think that yesterday,” and he pressed his hands over his eyes, “someone
mentioned a tailor with a taste for making inflammatory political speeches. I’ve just heard of him from Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne. His shop is in—Parliament Street, they said.”

  So far as confusion mattered, he was in a worse state than Flora.

  As the carriage rapidly bowled south, gone was every vestige of Whitehall as he seemed to recall it in his other life.

  Ahead loomed up a triangular wedge of buildings, smoke-clouded from piled chimney-stacks, dividing it into two streets. The right-hand street, he decided, could only be King Street since the left-hand one, along the river, must be Parliament Street.

  He was right. Robert reined the horses left, where there were few wheeled vehicles and the house-fronts showed ancient, darkened, of stone or brick crumbling away. Most were shops—a tallow-chandler’s, a mirror-maker’s, a butcher’s—amid some private houses which bore no brass plates or polished bell-handles.

  “A crazy ruin,” he muttered. “Look there!”

  Across Parliament Street a small crowd had gathered round a small man, with a big chest and a shock of white hair, who was standing on a wooden box outside the door of a shop lettered T. F. Pinner, Tailor and Cutter above its window.

  A policeman sauntered on the left-hand side of the street, eyeing the crowd but not interfering. The little man with the big chest and the white hair, a bottle of gin stuck in the pocket of his surtout, had worked himself into a fury.

  “Don’t you want the Corn Laws repealed?” he was shouting. “You can’t argue with starvation. They can’t argue with it. Is there one man among you,” his arm went up, fist flourishing, “who hasn’t starved or seen his family starve?”

  A voice yelled, “No!” The crowd, small enough indeed, moved and shuffled. It spilled out across the roadway. Robert’s back stiffened; his whip-hand drew back and up.

  “Drive on!” said Cheviot, standing up in the carriage. “Don’t touch anyone. Drive on!”

  “Then the only way to get it,” bawled the orator’s voice, “is by a Reform Bill and a Reformed Parliament. The facts, the true facts …”