Read Online The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr - Free Book Online

have been suicide, for no person could have swallowed such an enormous dose without noticing it at the time. Undoubtedly it had an effect on the verdict—the Scotch verdict of ‘Not proven,’ which they say is the equivalent of ‘Not guilty, but don’t do it again.’—Still, six years after that business a woman named Hewitt was tried at Chester for the murder of her mother. The old lady had died without suspicion; the doctor said death was due to gastro-enteritis; and it wasn’t until the body was dug up that they discovered a hundred and fifty-four grains of arsenic in the stomach alone.”
    Partington’s tongue was loosened; he even seemed to be enjoying himself; though the judicial expression remained on his blue-jowled face.
    “Then again,” he went on, waggling an empty glass, “there was the case of Marie D’Aubray at Versailles, in the early ’sixties. A bad business. Very little motive to her various bumpings-off, it would seem… just the pleasure of watching them die. … One of the victims got as little as ten grains of arsenic, another as much as a hundred. She wasn’t as lucky as Madeleine Smith. She got the guillotine.”
    By this time Stevens had risen and was sitting on the edge of his desk. He tried to nod casually and understandingly, but he was looking across at the white-painted door to the hall. For some moments he had been noticing something about that door. The light in the hall was brighter than the one in here. As an ordinary thing, you could see a glow shining through the large keyhole; but no chink was visible now, for someone must be listening outside the door.
    “However,” said Partington, “that’s not the most important thing: I’ll do the post-mortem. The important thing is when the poison was administered. If you’ve got all your times straight, it was damned rapid. Say a very large dose is given. Ordinarily the acute symptoms will come on anywhere from minutes to an hour afterwards—depending whether it was in solid or liquid form—and death will ensue from six to twenty-four hours afterwards, or even longer. It’s been known to hold off for several days. So you can see how quickly your uncle went. You left him at half-past nine, in at least tolerably good health. You returned and found him on his last legs at half-past two, and he died not long afterwards. Is that right?”
    “Yes.”
    Partington brooded, “Well, it’s entirely on the cards, of course. It’s even probable. He was already eaten up with the organic disease; he was being slowly poisoned on top of it (if you’re right); so he’d be finished off quickly with a heavy dose. If we knew just when he took the last one–—”
    “I can tell you exactly when it was,” snapped Mark. “It was at a quarter past eleven.”
    “Yes,” put in Stevens, “and that’s this mysterious story Mrs. Henderson told, isn’t it? That’s what we want to know, and you keep putting it off. What the devil was the story? Why don’t you like to talk about it?”
    He was afraid he had shown more excitement, more of a trace of nerves, than he ought to have allowed, but Mark did not notice it. Mark had the air of one coming to a decision.
    “For the moment,” he said, “I’m not going to tell it”
    “Not going to tell it?”
    “Because you’d think I was crazy, or Mrs. H. was,” the other answered, as though he were groping in his mind. He raised his hand. “Wait! Wait a minute, now! I’ve been over this whole thing a hundred times. I can’t sleep for thinking of it. But when I tell somebody for the first time, when I put out each fact as plain as beef… why, I see that the other part of the story would be plain incredible. You might even think I was leading you on a wild-goose chase over opening the crypt. And Uncle Miles’s death has got to be settled. Will you give me a couple of hours’ leeway? That’s all I want, until we can settle the first part of it.”
    Partington stirred. “You’ve changed,