The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr Read Free Book Online

uncle’s behavior being odd towards the end—shutting himself up in his room, and the rest of it. When did that behavior start?”
    Again Mark hesitated, opening and shutting his hands.
    “It’s easy to give a wrong impression,” he said, “and that’s what I want to avoid. Don’t get the idea that he’d turned wildly eccentric, or was a crank, or disrupted the household; he always prided himself on his old-school manners. I suppose it was the difference in him from the old days. We first noticed a trace of that difference not quite six years ago, when he returned from Paris after my parents died. He wasn’t the genial uncle any longer; not that he’d become depressed, but simply that he seemed abstracted, or puzzled, and that something had got into his mind. He didn’t shut himself up then, either. That began… h’m.” Mark reflected. “By the way, Ted, how long have you been living here in this house?”
    “About two years.”
    Mark nodded, amused by the coincidence. “Well, it was a couple of months after that. He didn’t exactly shut himself up; he only had his lunch and dinner there, and spent the evening there. You know his routine. He would come down-stairs to breakfast, and walk in the garden in good weather, and smoke a cigar. He spent some time in the picture-gallery, too. He was just—puzzled, you’d have said; wandering round in a fog. By noon he’d be back in his room for the rest of the day.”
    Partington scowled. “But what did he do there all that time? Reading? Studying?”
    “No, I don’t think so. You couldn’t call him a man of books. There’s a back-stairs rumor that he just sat in a basket-chair looking out of the window. There’s also a rumor that he spent a lot of time changing his clothes, apparently for lack of something else to do. He had an enormous wardrobe; he was always very proud of his appearance, and the figure he cut.
    “Six weeks ago he began to have these attacks—vomiting, cramps, the rest of it. And he wouldn’t hear of having a doctor in. He said: ‘Nonsense! I’ve had this before. A mustard plaster and a glass of champagne will put me right again.’ Then he had such an acute one that we got Dr. Baker in a hurry. Baker shook his head—gastro-enteritis, all right. Too bad. We got a nurse in, and whether or not it had really been only stomach trouble before, it’s a notable fact that from that time on he began to get well. At the end of the first week in April he was so much improved that nobody had any more anxiety. And so we come to the night of April 12th.
    “There were eight people in the house: Lucy, Edith, Ogden, and myself; old Henderson—you remember, Part? he’s a sort of groundkeeper-gardener-general-utility man—and Mrs. Henderson ; Miss Corbett, the nurse, and Margaret, the maid. Lucy and Edith and I went to a masquerade ball, as I told you. Moreover, the arrangements were such that nearly everybody was to be out of the house that night. Like this:
    “Mrs. Henderson had been away for nearly a week. She was standing godmother to some relative’s kid in Cleveland; she likes being a godmother. There was to have been a big family celebration there and she had a good stay of it. The 12th, a Wednesday, was Miss Corbett’s regular evening off. Margaret had an unexpected date with a boy-friend about whom she raves, and didn’t have much difficulty persuading Lucy to let her go out. Ogden was going into town—a party somewhere. That would leave only Henderson in the house with Uncle Miles.
    “Edith, as usual, fretted about that. She has the usual idea that only a woman is any good when somebody’s sick, so she was going to stay at home herself. But Miles wouldn’t hear of it. Besides, Mrs. Henderson was due back home early that evening; she was to be on the train that comes into Crispen at 9:25. Then Edith got a new cause for worry. Henderson was going down with the Ford, to meet the old girl at the train, which would leave a full ten