Fire, Burn!

by John Dickson Carr

They clattered past, the voice beginning to fade. Someone screamed at them; no more.

  “But, Jack,” protested Flora, who was surprised rather than distressed, “this happens every day. Where is our concern in it?”

  “Not today or tonight, at least. All the same—”

  He was still standing up in the swaying carriage, holding the handrail behind the driver. He could not go on speaking, because he was gripped uncannily by that past of which he was a part.

  On the right, serene beyond antiquity, rose the towers of the Abbey. On the left, beyond Westminster Bridge, he saw another tower: squat and square, beside a huddle of carved and painted buildings stretching towards the massive stone of Westminster Hall. In five years all of this on the left, except Westminster Hall, would be gutted by fire, and perish. He was looking at the old Houses of Parliament, with a flag flying from the square tower to show Parliament was sitting.

  And, glimpsed past Westminster Bridge and the square tower, flowed the Thames: too close without embankments, brown-coloured from mud and sewage, the kindly river that would yet bring the cholera.

  “Jack,” said Flora, “what on earth are you gabbling about?”

  He had not known he was speaking at all. He sat down beside her and took her arm.

  “Forgive me. That drunken tailor, I daresay, seemed to you oafish and ridiculous? And yet he’s right. It will come about.”

  “You? Preaching reform?”

  “Flora, I preach nothing. I only regret the unhappiness I have caused you, and may still cause you, because of what I cannot explain. Meanwhile, we go to the country. For God’s sake, if we can, let’s forget all else.”

  It seemed that they did forget. When they crossed Vauxhall Bridge, iron-built and comparatively new, the Surrey side of the river opened with a drowsy beauty of autumn. No life stirred in Vauxhall Gardens: the winding walks, the bandstand, the two statues of Apollo and one (a strange companion) of Handel.

  But it was pleasanter to be alone. The carriage presently reached an open space, surrounded by trees. Against the trees at the back of it gleamed the thin white marble of a small semicircular temple with a statue inside. Since the temple was after the Greek fashion, the statue must be given her Greek name of Aphrodite.

  Robert swung the horses round and came to a stop near the temple. He wound the reins round the whip-stock, put on the drag, and climbed down to make Flora a formal little speech.

  Her ladyship, he said, doubtless would not require him for an hour or two. Near the entrance to Vauxhall Gardens, he said, there was a public-house, the Dog and Vulture, and might he beg leave of absence for a time?

  Flora made a little speech meaning that he could. They hardly heard his footsteps in the grass as he went away.

  “And now, sir,” declared Flora, with a mock-prim air but a deadly coldness at her heart, “you will be kind enough to expound all the hints you have been giving. Do you wish to drive me mad? I … What’s wrong?”

  Cheviot had been looking at the sky.

  “The time,” he answered without thinking. “It must be well into the afternoon. Later than I thought.”

  It would have been easier to look at his watch. But he dared not do it.

  “The time?” Flora echoed indignantly. “Does the time matter?”

  “No, no, of course not! Except—”

  “Do you wish to eat or drink?” asked Flora, haughtily tapping the hamper with her foot. “There is much here, if you find my company so tedious.”

  “Stop that! Don’t coquette. This isn’t the time for it.”

  “Oh, I know! But last night, or rather this morning, was so—so—”

  “Yes.” He spoke with some violence. “It was perfect and complete. Perfect and complete, I say again. That’s why I must ask you: Flora, have you and I ever been married?”

  “Married?”

  “Yes. I am quite serious.”

  “Well, really! What a question! If—if we ever have,” cried Flora, “I must have made vows at the altar in a dream. Besides, you—you never asked me.”

  “You’re sure of that? You never thought it? Because I did. When I crept downstairs this morning, and let myself out without rousing the house, I wondered …”

  “What I wondered,” she said, “is how you could have left without awakening me. I always wake when you do. I put out my arm, and you were not there. It was dreadful. It seemed as though you had gone forever.”

  “Flora, stop! Say no more—just for a moment!”

  He lowered his head. Beside the wicker hamper stood the green writing-case. But he was not thinking even of that. The trees, which yet retained green in tattered foliage amid yellows and reds, whispered faintly round the Greek temple.

  “No,” he said in a baffled kind of way, “it can’t be true. You are a prisoner in this age, and have always been of this age. Whereas I …”

  “Yes?”

  “Listen! Only three nights ago I promised to tell you all. I must do so, and yet you will not credit me. Just as at Lady Cork’s, you will shrink back and think me mad-drunk though my eyes are clear and my speech unstumbling. …”

  “If you told me what?”

  “Still I must say it,” he insisted, without seeming to hear her, “because there are dreams and premonitions inside the mind, perhaps even inside the soul. And I think, Flora, that soon we shall be separated from each other.”

  “No!”

  Then she was in his arms, but not in the way of love-making. As he held her, it was more like a whispered and desperate quarrel.

  “But what could separate us? You mean—death?”

  “No, my dear. Not death. And yet, in a fashion, something like that.”

  Flora cried out in protest. Whereupon, while he clung to her even more fiercely, there ensued one of those endless, aching scenes in which each person misinterprets the other’s words; and it cannot be set right. Flora maintained he said he was going to die; and he retorted that he hadn’t said anything of the kind. On and on it went, while the shadows deepened and heart-sickness grew.

  “Then be pleased,” Flora sobbed, “to say what you do mean!”

  “Only this, as I have tried to explain. At some hour soon, at what seems an hour of victory and triumph, the dimension called time will move and change. All will dissolve. All! What is it about ‘the unsubstantial pageant’? Never mind! But on this occasion it won’t be easy. It will be terrifying.”

  “I don’t understand! I don’t!”

  “A dream I had—”

  “Oh, dreams. Everybody knows dreams go by contraries!”

  “One day, my dear, they will make dreams rather more complicated than that. No: perhaps I shouldn’t have said a dream.” He drew his breath in deeply. “Very well. You had better hear the truth. When you once said I seemed like somebody out of another world, that was truer than you knew. I am …”

  “My lady! Sir!”

  Those two, locked away in their own world, had failed to hear the loud fit of coughing which had been going on at a distance for some seconds. When Robert the coachman felt that his tact would only strangle him, he gave a respectful hail instead.

  Both of them lifted heads from a world lost.

  A light, dazzling into Cheviot’s eyes, made him blink and stare round. The light was lowered. But shadows were so heavy that he could scarcely see Robert, with a lantern in his hand.

  The air felt misty and damp. The lines of the Greek temple glimmered white.

  “Forgive me, my lady,” Robert called respectfully. “But I thought you’d wish me to return. It’s twenty-five minutes past five.”

  Cheviot’s hand went to his watch-pocket. “Past five?”

  “Yes, sir. Much more than that, too. That was the time I left the Dog and Vulture, and it’s a bit of a walk from there.”

  This was the point at which they heard hoof-beats on the road by which Robert had come from the pub. Horses, more than one and at the gallop, pounded hard and pounded closer. He thought there were thre
e of them. The wink of a swinging lantern, held in the right hand of the leading horseman, brushed greenish-yellow foliage.

  Then Hogben would be here, after all. The other horsemen must be Lieutenant Wentworth and Freddie Debbitt. On the other hand, if Hogben had sent someone else …

  “Robert,” he said quietly, “please get up on the box and drive Lady Drayton home as soon as may be.”

  “Robert,” said Flora in a high but calm voice, “you will do nothing of the sort. We remain here.”

  The leading horseman swept into the clearing, with the others behind him. They rode lathered horses, blowing through the nostrils. As the first horseman held his lantern high, Cheviot saw what he had never expected to see.

  True, the third horseman was Lieutenant Wentworth. But the second was Sergeant Bulmer. The first was Inspector Seagrave, with the silver lace glinting at his collar.

  “Sir,” croaked out Seagrave, holding the light, “can this coachman of yours drive fast? He’ll need to.”

  “What’s this?” Cheviot demanded. “What are you doing here? I expected to meet Captain Hogben. I—I have an appointment for five o’clock.”

  Seagrave and Bulmer exchanged glances.

  “Then that’s it!” the latter blurted. “Well, sir, Captain Hogben made another appointment for five o’clock. As like as not, to be sure you’d be here and out of the way. His appointment was with the Colonel and Mr. Mayne at Scotland Yard.”

  “With …?”

  “Sir! He’s denounced Lady Drayton for murdering Miss Renfrew, and you for helping her. He’s done that already, he and a Miss Louise Tremayne. They say they saw Lady Drayton fire; and the pistol fell out of her muff; and you hid it under a lamp. And they’ve got Mr. Mayne mor’n half convinced!”

  Cheviot stood up in the carriage. His mind went back, vividly, to that passage at Lady Cork’s house on the night of the murder. He remembered his impression that one of the orange-and-gold doors to the ballroom had opened and closed, with what might have been black hair in the opening …

  He had been seen. He had been seen after all, and by Hugo Hogben.

  19

  Counter-Stroke

  IN THE WHITEHALL Place office of Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne, at a quarter past six, question and answer had reached their height.

  “You are prepared, Captain Hogben,” asked Mr. Mayne, “to sign the statement of which two fair copies are now being made by our clerk?”

  “I am.”

  Mr. Richard Mayne showed neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction; he was a lawyer; but his voice almost purred. He sat behind the scarred table, with the red-glass lamp burning in the red weapon-hung room. Colonel Rowan, however, stood by the table with a faint angry flush under his cheekbones.

  “Be very sure, Captain,” he said curtly. “Both Mr. Mayne and I are magistrates. This is a deposition under oath.”

  Hogben, in front of the table with his arms carelessly folded, eyed him up and down. It was evident that he did not think much of a Colonel who had commanded the 52nd Light Infantry. Hogben’s face showed as much.

  “What’s the good of the clack?” he asked, opening his little eyes wide. “I said it, didn’t I?”

  “And you, Miss Tremayne?” Colonel Rowan inquired with much politeness. “You are prepared to sign a statement, too?”

  Louise Tremayne, in a padded chair well back from them all and towards the windows, had come to a state not far from hysterics. After all, she was little more than nineteen. Clasping a muff of silver-fox fur against a silver-fox jacket, she raised a pale face in which the hazel eyes seemed enormous.

  Even her turban, of dove-grey silk, added to that child-like appearance. And yet something stubborn and tenacious, something perhaps inherited from him she called her dear, good, kind papa, kept her from giving way to her feelings.

  “I vow to you, as I have vowed before,” Louise told them, without blurring a syllable, “that I did not see Lady Drayton … well! I did not see her fire a shot.”

  The last three words horrified her, as though she could not imagine herself speaking them.

  “Not that, no!” she insisted. “Hugo saw that. The rest of it I saw with my own eyes, and I vow it. Indeed, I tried to tell Mr. Cheviot yesterday. But I did not see Lady Drayton k-kill anyone.”

  “Careful, m’dear!” Hogben dropped his arms and spoke threateningly. “You said to me—”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Captain!” And Colonel Rowan snapped it like an order. Hogben stiffened by instinct, then sneered when he remembered. “If you please,” Colonel Rowan added, “we will not have this young lady intimidated.”

  Mr. Mayne, seated at his ease and very bland, held up a deprecating hand.

  “Come, my dear Rowan,” he said. “There has been no intimidation here. We have seen to that. But there is evidence, I fear; yes, a great deal of evidence. Do you now so greatly favour our own Mr. Cheviot?”

  “We have not heard his side of it.”

  “True. True. But he lied to us, my dear Rowan. Can you doubt it? Do you imagine Captain Hogben and Miss Tremayne have spun this story out of whole cloth, especially since every word they say confirms what I have already suggested?”

  Colonel Rowan hesitated, and Mr. Mayne went on.

  “Not one word did he say about that pistol or any other pistol. He lied to us, in the most serious matter which can affect a police-officer. As a barrister—”

  “As a barrister, then, you already prejudice the case.”

  “Pardon me, Rowan. It is you who prejudice it. You like Mr. Cheviot because he is of your own sort and kind. He is well-mannered. He is quiet. He is modest—to you. He never strikes until first he is struck; and then, I grant, he strikes back quickly and hard.”

  “Another English principle,” Colonel Rowan said politely, “which I commend to your attention.”

  “But,” replied Mr. Mayne, tapping the table, “he is a man of notoriously loose morals. Either he shielded his mistress, Lady Drayton, who is known to have hated Miss Renfrew; or else, being himself entangled with Miss Renfrew and wishing to be rid of her, he himself planned the whole crime.”

  Here Mr. Mayne spread out his hands.

  “I say this with evidence, Rowan. When we have fair copies of the statement—” Hearing a pen scratch, Mr. Mayne scowled and craned round. “Tush, tush, Henley, have you not yet finished making the copies in longhand?”

  The green lamp was burning on the desk of the chief clerk in the corner. Behind it Mr. Henley lowered his pen.

  “With all respect, sir,” Mr. Henley answered in his hoarse, heavy voice, “it’s not easy when my hand shakes like what it does. And, again with all respect to the Captain and his lady, this can’t be true.”

  “Henley!”

  “Mr. Mayne,” said the chief clerk, “I was there!”

  Alan Henley could be unobtrusive when he liked. But he could seldom hide his strong, forceful personality. The heavy face with the thick reddish side-whiskers, the brown eyes glowing, was thrust out past the lamp.

  “If I was there, which I was,” and the pen seemed small in his fist, “I should have seen it. If a pistol dropped out of the good lady’s muff, and Superintendent Cheviot hid it under a lamp, wouldn’t I ha’ seen it?”

  “No.” Hogben, the inarticulate, got out his words fast enough. “And I’ll tell you why, clerkie. Your back was turned. You were shifting a dead ’un over on her back, face up. Weren’t you, fellow? Yes or no?”

  “Yes or no, Henley?” Mr. Mayne asked without inflection.

  Beads of sweat glimmered on Mr. Henley’s forehead.

  “It may be,” he said, “I shouldn’t ha’ seen that.” He nodded towards the half-fainting Louise Tremayne. “But, as the young lady tells you, Lady Drayton fired no pistol from her muff. Why, I watched her! And the muff had no bullet-hole. And she couldn’t ha’ done it.”

  “Not even,” Mr. Mayne inquired quietly, “by turning the muff quickly sideways, thus,” his hands illustrated,
“and firing through the opening at one end, so that there would be no burns of powder?”

  “I—”

  “On your oath, Henley, do you swear that could not have occurred?”

  Mr. Henley began to prop himself up on his thick ebony stick. He stumbled and almost fell. His gaze shifted away and dropped.

  “Well …” he said uncertainly.

  “Then you cannot swear it?” Mr. Mayne demanded.

  “No, sir, I can’t swear on my oath as—”

  “Then your testimony is valueless. You have only half a dozen lines to write. Sit down, my good Henley, and complete them.”

  A slight smile twisted Hogben’s mouth, ineffable and superior, as the chief clerk slumped down and picked up the pen. It was Colonel Rowan who suddenly held up his hand.

  “Listen!” he ordered.

  For five or six seconds nobody spoke. There was no noise except for the dogged scratching of the chief clerk’s pen. Louise Tremayne put her face in her hands. Perhaps only Colonel Rowan’s quick ear had caught the faint roaring sounds very far away. In any case, he plucked up a hand-bell from the table and rang it with loud clangour.

  The door to the passage was instantly opened by a sergeant, with the numeral 9 on his collar.

  “Sergeant!” said Colonel Rowan. “What’s the latest report from that—that small disturbance in Parliament Street?”

  “Sir!” said the newcomer, saluting. “No rioting yet, sir. But the crowd’s a-getting bigger. The pint is …”

  “Yes? Continue?”

  “Well, sir, it’s not only that tailor-cove, Pinner. They’ve got more’n half a dozen speakers. As soon as our lot persuade one of ’em to shut his potato-trap, another bobs up in another door with people holding torches all round him.”

  “Who is in attendance, Sergeant?”

  “Inspector Blaine, sir. Sergeant Crossley, too, and his constables ten to nineteen. There’s complaints from the ’Ouse of Commons, sir.”

  Mr. Mayne interposed. “I tell you, Rowan, we can spare no more men!”

  “Not from our division, perhaps.” Colonel Rowan smiled coldly. “But with your permission, Mayne, C and D divisions have provided eighteen more. Sergeant! They may join the others. No violence unless it be unavoidable.”