The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr Page A

again.
    “Mother of Go—” said Henderson, and stopped.
    “You—you don’t suppose we’ve got the wrong coffin, do you?” asked Mark, rather wildly.
    “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles we haven’t.” Henderson declared. His hand was trembling so much that Mark took the light from him. “I saw him put into that. Look, there’s the nick in it they made when they bumped it coming downstairs. Besides, what other coffin? All the others—” He pointed to the tiers of steel ones.
    “Yes,” said Mark, “that’s his coffin all right. But where is he? Where’s he got to?”
    They looked at one another in the gloom, and into Stevens’s mind had come unnatural notions which were as stifling as the air of the crypt. Partington alone seemed to remain quiet, steady with either common sense or whisky; even a trifle impatient. “Buck up,” he said to Mark, sharply, and put his hand on the other’s shoulder. “Here! all of you! Don’t get any fool ideas about this. The body’s gone; well, what of it? You see what it means, don’t you? It only means that somebody’s got here ahead of us and stolen the body out of there—for whatever reason.”
    “How?” asked Henderson, in a blank, querulous tone.
    Partington looked at him.
    “I said, How?” repeated Henderson, his voice rising doggedly. He backed away, his hands feeling behind him, as the full presentiment of what had happened soaked like water into every corner of his heavy mind. Mark put the light in his face, and the old man cursed and brushed the face with a corduroy sleeve as though to wipe something off. “How did somebody get in and out? That’s what I want to know, Doctor Partington. I said a minute ago I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that was Mr. Miles’s coffin, and I saw him put into it and carried down here. And I’ll tell you something else, Doctor Partington: nobody could ’ve got in and out of this place! Look at it. It took four of us, working two hours and making a racket fit to wake the dead, just to open the entrance. Do you think somebody could get in here—opening itup with me and Mrs. Henderson sleeping twenty feet away from it, with the windows up, and not hearing one single sound; and me a light sleeper, too?—and not only that, but of them putting all the things right back again, mixin’ their own concrete right there and setting the pavement down again? Do you think that? Yes, sir, and I’ll tell you something more. I laid that pavement myself, a week ago; I know how I laid it; and it’s exactly as I put it down myself. I’ll take my oath before God that nobody has touched that pavement, or monkeyed with it in any way, since then!”
    Partington regarded him without anger. “I’m not questioning your word, my friend. But don’t make too much of it, that’s all. If the body-snatchers didn’t get through that way, they got through some other way.”
    Mark spoke with slow reasonableness. “Granite walls. Granite roof. Granite floor.” He stamped on it. “There’s no other way in; it’s all granite blocks set together. Were you thinking of a secret passage, on something like that? We’ll look, but I’m dead sure there isn’t one.”
    “May I ask,” said Partington, “just what you think did happen here? Do you think your Uncle Miles got up out of his coffin and left the crypt?”
    “Or do you think,” said Henderson, with peevish timidity, “that somebody might have taken his body and put it in one of the other coffins?”
    “I should think it highly unlikely,” said Partington; “because in that case your problem is just as bad. How did somebody get in here to do it, and then get out again?” He reflected. “Unless, of course, the body was somehow stolen between the time the coffin was put in that niche and the time the crypt was sealed up?”
    Mark shook his head. “That’s decidedly out. The actual burial service—that ‘dust-to-dust’ business—was read in here by the minister, with a whole