The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr Page A

me, even when Lucy brought in the tablet and a glass of water. He hung to my cloak, talking of a wooden coffin, over and over. He had a difficult time swallowing the pill, for he’d been vomiting a good deal; but I got it down him at last. Then he muttered something about being cold, and wanting a quilt, and closed his eyes. There was a folded quilt at the foot of the bed. Lucy, without saying anything, picked it up and tucked it around him.
    “I got up and looked for something else to put over him. There’s a big cupboard in the room, where he kept most of his fancy wardrobe, so I thought there might be a blanket on the top shelf. The door of the cupboard was a little ajar. There was no blanket, but there was something else.
    “On the floor of the cupboard, just before a line of shoes neatly arranged in their trees, was the tray that had been brought up earlier that night. So was the glass, empty but for a blur of milk. So was a thing that had not been brought up: a fat silver cup, about four inches in diameter—curious embossed thing, of no special value so far as I know. It’s been downstairs on the sideboard for as long as I can remember. I don’t know whether either of you has ever noticed it? Well, in the cup were the dregs of some sticky-looking substance. And stretched out beside it was the body of Joachim, Edith’s cat. I touched the cat, and found that it was dead.
    “Then was when I knew.”
V
    For a minute or two Mark Despard remained quiet, regarding his clasped hands.
    “I suppose,” he reflected, “it’s possible for suspicions to accumulate at the back of a man’s mind, and pile up and up intangibly, without his ever being aware that they’re there; then something crystallizes, or a door opens all of a sudden——
    “Yes, I knew. I turned round to see whether Lucy had seen what I had seen. Evidently she hadn’t. She was standing with her back nearly turned towards me, at the foot of the bed, her hand on the bed-rail; and I thought she looked pretty helpless in contrast to her usual briskness. There was only one light in the room, the dim one at the head of the bed, but it brought out her costume—a reddish-colored silk thing with blue and diamonds in it, and a wide skirt.
    “While I was standing there everything came back to my mind in Uncle Miles’s past symptoms. His trouble in eating; his catarrh of the nose and eyes—the reddish puffed way he looked at you—the husky voice; the rashes and thickening of the skin; even the way he walked, so that his legs seemed too rickety to support his body. Arsenic poisoning. You could hear Miles breathing heavily under the covers, and from out in the hall you could even hear Edith’s low, savage voice sizzling at the telephone operator.
    “I didn’t say anything. But I closed the door of the cupboard; there was a key in the lock, so I locked the door and put the key in my pocket. Then I went out in the hall and down to the landing where Edith was telephoning. We’d got to get a doctor, that was all. The nurse wouldn’t come back until next morning. I tried to think what in God’s name you did in cases of arsenic poisoning, but I couldn’t remember. Edith had just put down the phone; still calm, though her hands looked shaky; she couldn’t get Doctor Baker at his house, and we knew nobody else within striking distance. But I knew there was a doctor at the residential hotel about a mile down the road, though I couldn’t remember his name. I started to ring up the hotel, while Edith hurried up to Miles’s room—she always has an idea she can do something in sickness, although she isn’t sure what it is—but Lucy came out into the hall before I’d got the number.
    “ ‘You’d better come up here,’ she said. ‘I think he’s gone.’
    “He had. No convulsions; his heart simply stopped, and he wasn’t hurt any longer. While I was turning him over to make sure, my hand went under the pillow and I found the piece of string you’ve