The Crooked Hinge Read online

  “You’re giving the theories, sir.”

  “No, that is a fair question,” said Murray rather sharply. Page felt that he only just checked himself from adding, “Come, come, sir!” “Otherwise we shall get nowhere.”

  “We shall get nowhere if I say I believe an impossibility, Mr. Murray.”

  “Then you do believe in suicide?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Which do you believe in, then?”

  Elliot grinned faintly. “If you get the bit in your teeth, sir, you’ll convince me that I ought to answer you. Knowles’s story is supported by—um—contributory evidence. For the sake of argument let’s say I believe he was telling the truth, or thought he was telling the truth. What happens then?”

  “Why, it follows that he did not see anything because there was nothing to see. That can hardly be doubted. This man was alone in the middle of a circle of sand. Therefore no murderer went near him. Therefore the murderer did not use that notched and suggestively stained knife you have there; and the knife was, in fact, ‘planted’ in the hedge afterwards to make you think it was used for the crime. You follow that? Since the knife could not have flown out of the air, cut his throat three times, and dropped into the hedge, it is evident that the knife could not have been used at all. That argument is plain?”

  “Not exactly plain,” objected the inspector. “You say it was some other weapon? Then some other weapon hung in the air, cut his throat three times, and disappeared? No, sir. I don’t believe that. Definitely not. That’s worse than believing in the knife.”

  “I appeal to Dr. Fell,” said Murray, evidently stung. “What do you say, doctor?”

  Dr. Fell sniffed. Mysterious wheezes and noises of internal combustion suggested argument; but he spoke mildly.

  “I abide by the knife. Besides, you know, there certainly was something moving in that garden; something of damned bluish cast of countenance, if you’ll allow me. I say, inspector. You’ve taken the statements. But d’you mind if I probe and pry into them a bit? I should very much like to ask a few questions of the most interesting person here.”

  “The most interesting person here?” repeated Gore, and prepared himself.

  “H’mf, yes. I refer, of course,” said Dr. Fell, lifting his stick and pointing, “to Mr. Welkyn.”

  Superintendent Hadley has often wished that he would not do this. Dr. Fell is, possibly, too much concerned with proving that the right thing is always the wrong thing, or at least the unexpected thing; and waving flags with both hands above the ruin of logic. Certainly Page would never have taken Harold Welkyn for the most interesting person there. The fat solicitor, with his long disapproving chin, evidently did not think so either. But, as even Hadley admits, the old beggar is often unfortunately right.

  “You spoke to me, sir?” inquired Welkyn.

  “I was telling the inspector a while ago,” said Dr. Fell, “that your name seemed very familiar. I remember now. Is it a general interest in the occult? Or are you a collector of curious clients? I rather imagine you collected our friend here,” he nodded towards Gore, “in the same way you collected that Egyptian some time ago.”

  “Egyptian?” asked Elliot. “What Egyptian?”

  “Think! You’ll remember the case. Ledwidge v. Ahriman, before Mr. Justice Rankin. Libel. Mr. Welkyn here was instructed for the defense.”

  “You mean that ghost-seer or whatever he was?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Fell, with great pleasure. “Little bit of a chap; hardly more than a dwarf. But he didn’t see ghosts: he saw through people, or so he said. He was the fashion of London; all the women flocked to him. Of course, he could have been prosecuted under the old Witchcraft Act, still in force—”

  “A most infamous act, sir,” declared Welkyn, slapping the table.

  “—but it was a question of a libel suit, and Mr. Welkyn’s ingenious defense, combined with Gordon-Bates as counsel, got him off. Then there was Madame Duquesne, the medium, who was up for manslaughter because one of her clients died of fright in her house. (Fascinating point of law, eh?) Mr. Welkyn was also instructed for the defense there. The trial, as I remember it, was rather grisly. Oh, yes! And another one: a girl, good-looking blonde as I remember her. The charges against her never got past the Grand Jury, because Mr. Welkyn—”

  Patrick Gore was looking at his solicitor with quick interest. “Is this true?” he demanded. “Believe me, gentlemen, I did not know it.”

  “It is true, isn’t it?” inquired Dr. Fell. “You’re the same chap?”

  Welkyn’s face was full of cold wonder.

  “Of course it is true,” he answered. “But what of it? What has it to do with the present case?”

  Page could not have said why it seemed so incongruous. Harold Welkyn, examining his pink finger-nails, then glancing up sharply from little eyes, was a model of business decorum; and yet why not? The white slip inside his waistcoat, the glossy wings of his collar, had no connection with the clients he sought or the beliefs he held.

  “You see, Mr. Welkyn,” rumbled Dr. Fell, “I had another reason for asking. You were the only one who saw or heard anything queer in the garden last night. Will you read out the part of Mr. Welkyn’s statement I mean, inspector?”

  Elliot nodded, not taking his eyes from Welkyn until he opened the notebook.

  “ ‘I heard a kind of rustling noise in the hedges or shrubbery, and I thought I saw something looking at me through one of the glass panels of the door, one of the panels down nearest the ground. I was afraid that certain things might be happening which were no affair of mine.’ ”

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Fell, and closed his eyes.

  Elliot hesitated, debating two courses; but Page had a feeling that the matter was out in the open now, and that both Dr. Fell and the inspector thought it was better so. Elliot’s hard, sandy-haired head bent forward a little.

  “Now, sir,” he said. “I didn’t want to ask you too much this morning, until we—knew more. What does that statement mean?”

  “What it says.”

  “You were in the dining-room, only fifteen feet or so away from the pool, yet you didn’t once open one of those doors and look out? Even when you heard the sounds you describe?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘I was afraid that certain things might be happening that were no affair of mine,’ ” read Elliot. “Does this refer to the murder? Did you think that a murder was being committed?”

  “No, certainly not,” said Welkyn, with a slight jump. “And I still have no reason to suspect that one was committed. Inspector, are you mad? Clear evidence of suicide is brought to you; and you all go star-gazing after something else______”

  “Did you think that suicide was being committed last night, then?”

  “No, I had no reason to suspect it.”

  “Then what were you referring to?” asked Elliot practically.

  Welkyn had the palms of his hands flat on the table. By lifting his fingers slightly he conveyed the effect of a shrug; but his bland dumpling countenance betrayed nothing else.

  “I’ll try to put it in another way. Mr. Welkyn, do you believe in the supernatural?”

  “Yes,” said Welkyn briefly.

  “Do you believe that someone is attempting to produce supernatural phenomena here?”

  Welkyn looked at him. “And you from Scotland Yard! You say that!”

  “Oh, it’s not as bad as all that,” said Elliot; and he wore a curious, dark expression which his countrymen have understood for centuries. “I said ‘attempting,’ and there are various ways of doing that. Real and unreal. Believe me, sir, there may be queer doings here—implanted here—growing from one ancestor to another—queerer doings than you think. I came down here because Miss Daly had been murdered; and there may be more behind that than a purse of money stolen by a tramp. All the same, I wasn’t the one who suggested there might be something supernatural here. You suggested it.”

  “I did?”


  “Yes. ‘I thought I saw something looking at me through one of the glass panels of the door, one of the panels down nearest the ground.’ You said ‘something.’ Why didn’t you say ‘someone’?”

  A small bead of sweat appeared on Welkyn’s forehead, up near the large vein by the temple. It was his only change of expression, if it can be called that; at least it was the only moving thing on his face.

  “I did not recognize who it was. Had I recognized the person, I should have said ‘someone.’ I was merely attempting to be accurate.”

  “It was a person, then? A ‘someone’?”

  The other nodded.

  “But, in order to peep at you through one of the lower panels, this person must have been crouched down to the ground or lying on the ground?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly? What do you mean by that, sir?”

  “It was moving too quickly—and jumpily. I hardly know how to express what I mean.”

  “Can’t you describe it?”

  “No. I only received the impression that it was dead.”

  Something like horror had got into Brian Page’s bones; how it had come there, even when it had come, he could not tell. Almost imperceptibly the conversation had moved into a new element, yet he felt that this had always been in the background of the case, waiting for a touch to be wakened. Harold Welkyn then made a very quick movement. He took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket, wiped the palms of his hands quickly on it, and replaced it. When he spoke again he had recovered something of his old solemn, careful manner.

  “One moment, inspector,” he put in before Elliot could speak. “I have been trying to tell you truthfully and literally what I saw and felt. You ask me whether I believe in—such things. I do. I tell you frankly I wouldn’t go into that garden after dark for a thousand pounds. It seems to surprise you that a man of my profession should have such ideas.”

  Elliot pondered. “To tell you the truth, it does, somehow. I don’t know why it should. After all, I suppose even a lawyer may believe in the supernatural.”

  The other’s tone was dry.

  “Even a lawyer may,” he agreed; “and be none the worse man of business for doing so.”

  Madeline had come into the room. Only Page noticed her, for the others were too intent on Welkyn; she was walking on tiptoe, and he wondered whether she had heard what had gone before. Though he tried to give her his chair, she sat down on the arm of it. He could not see her face: only the soft line of chin and cheek: but he saw that the breast of her white silk blouse was rising and falling rapidly.

  Kennet Murray’s eyebrows were pinched together. He was very polite, but he had the air of a customs-officer about to examine luggage.

  “I presume, Mr. Welkyn,” Murray said, “you are—er—honest about this. It is certainly extraordinary. That garden has a bad reputation. It has had a bad reputation for centuries. In fact, it was remodelled in the late seventeenth century in the hope of exorcising the shadow by fresh prospects. You remember, young Johnny, how your demonological studies tried to raise up things there?”

  “Yes,” answered Gore. He was about to add something, but he checked himself.

  “And on your homecoming,” said Murray, “you are greeted by a crawling legless something in the garden, and a housemaid frightened into a fit. Look here, young Johnny: you’re not up to your old tricks of frightening people, are you?”

  To Page’s surprise, Gore’s dusky face had gone pale. Murray, it appeared, was the only person who could sting him or rouse him out of his urbanity.

  “No,” Gore said. “You know where I was. I was keeping an eye on you in the library. And just one thing more. Just who the hell do you think you are, to talk to me as though I were still a fifteen-year-old child? You kowtowed to my father; and, by God, I’ll have decent respect from you or I’ll take a cane to you as you used to do to me.”

  The outburst was so unexpected that even Dr. Fell grunted. Murray got to his feet.

  “Is it going to your head already?” he said. “Just as you like. My usefulness is over. You have your proofs. If I am wanted for anything more, inspector, I shall be at the inn.”

  “That, John,” interposed Madeline softly, “was rather a rotten thing to say, don’t you think? Forgive me for interrupting.”

  For the first time both Murray and Gore looked at her fully, and she at them. The latter smiled.

  “You are Madeline,” he said.

  “I am Madeline.”

  “My old, cold light-of-love,” said Gore. The wrinkles deepened round his eyes. He detained Murray, and there was apology in his voice. “It’s no good, magister. We can’t pick up the past, and now I am quite certain I don’t care to. It seems to me that for twenty-five years I have been moving forward, mentally, while you have been standing still. I used to imagine what would happen when I returned to what are poetically known as the halls of my fathers. I used to imagine myself moved by the sight of a picture on a wall or letters cut with a pen-knife into the back of a bench. What I find is a group of alien sticks and stones; I begin to wish I had not intruded. But that is not the point now. Something seems to have gone out of line. Inspector Elliot! Didn’t you say a minute ago that you had come down here because ‘Miss Daly had been murdered’?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  Murray had sat down again, evidently curious, while Gore turned to the inspector.

  “Victoria Daly. That’s not by any chance the little girl who used to live with her aunt—Ernestine Daly, was it?—at Rose-Bower Cottage on the other side of the Hanging Chart?”

  “I don’t know about her aunt,” returned Elliot, “but that’s where she lived. She was strangled on the night of July 31st, last year.”

  The claimant was grim. “Then I can at least produce an alibi there. I was happily in America then. All the same, will somebody take us out of this fen? What has the murder of Victoria Daly got to do with this business here?”

  Elliot gave an inquiring glance towards Dr. Fell. The doctor nodded sleepily but violently; his great bulk hardly seemed to breathe, and he was watching. Taking up the brief-case from beside his chair, Elliot opened it and drew out a book. It was of quarto size, bound in dark calf-skin at some comparatively recent date (say a hundred years ago), and had on its back the somewhat unexhilarating title of Admirable History. The inspector pushed it across to Dr. Fell, who opened it. Then Page saw that it was a much older volume, a translation from the French of Sebastien Michaelis, published at London in 1613. The paper was brownish and ridged, and across from the title-page there was a very curious book-plate.

  “H’mf,” said Dr. Fell. “Has anybody here ever seen this book before?”

  “Yes,” said Gore quietly.

  “And this book-plate?”

  “Yes. That book-plate has not been used in the family since the eighteenth century.”

  Dr. Fell’s finger traced out the motto. “ ‘Sanguis eius super nos et superfilios nostros,’ Thos. Farnleigh, 1675. ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children.’—Was this book ever in the library here at the Close?”

  Gore’s eye quickened and gleamed as he looked at the book; but he remained puzzled. He spoke sardonically.

  “No, it certainly was not. That’s one of the books of darkness which my father, and his father before him, kept locked in the little room in the attic. I stole his key once, and had some duplicates made, so that I could go up there and read. Lord, the time I spent there—under pretext, if anyone should find me, of getting an apple from the apple-room next door.” He looked round. “Do you remember, Madeline? I took you up there once to give you a glimpse of the Golden Hag? I even gave you a key. But I am afraid you never liked it.—Doctor, where did you get that book? How did it get out of captivity?”

  Inspector Elliot got up and rang the bell for Knowles. “Will you find Lady Farnleigh,” he said to a scared butler, “and ask her if she will come in here?”

  With great leisureliness Dr. Fell t
ook out pipe and pouch. He filled the pipe, lit it, and inhaled with deep satisfaction before he spoke. Then he made a flourishing gesture and pointed.

  “That book? Because of the innocuous title, nobody at the time even glanced into it or thought twice about it. Actually, it contains one of the most unnerving documents in recorded history: the confession of Madeleine de la Palud, at Aix in 1611, or her participation in ceremonies of witchcraft and the worship of Satan. It was found on the table by Miss Daly’s bed. She had been reading it not long before she was murdered.”

  Chapter Twelve

  IN THE QUIET OF the library, Page heard very distinctly the footsteps of Molly Farnleigh and Burrows as they came in.

  Murray cleared his throat. “Meaning—?” he prompted. “Didn’t I understand that Miss Daly was killed by a tramp?”

  “Quite possibly she was.”

  “Well, then?”

  It was Molly Farnleigh who spoke. “I came in here to tell you,” she said, “that I am going to fight this ridiculous claim, your claim,” her whole vigorous nature went into the glance of cold dislike she gave Gore, “to the end. Nat Burrows says it will probably take years and we shall all lose our shirts, but I can afford that. In the meantime, the important thing is who killed John. I’ll call a truce for the time being, if you will. What did I hear you all talking about when we came in here?”

  A certain sense of relief went through the group. But one man was instantly on guard.

  “You think you have a case, Lady Farnleigh?” asked Welkyn, all solicitor again. “I am bound to warn you—”

  “A better case than you may have any idea of,” retorted Molly, with a curious significant look at Madeline. “What did I hear you talking about when we came in?”

  Dr. Fell, fiery with interest now, spoke in a kind of apologetic thunder.

  “We’re on rather an important aspect of it just now, ma’am,” he said, “and we should very much appreciate your help. Is there still, in the attic of this house, a little room containing a collection of books on witchcraft and kindred subjects? Eh?”