The Crooked Hinge Page 14

  He was speaking to a very quiet group. Molly, whose expression had altered, seemed to be trying to hold fiercely to accepted rules. Dr. King had been a lifelong friend of her father, and they stood on no ceremony with each other.

  “Uncle Ned, I want to know. I’d do anything for Betty, and you know it. But I never realized—that is, it’s not really what we can call serious, is it? It can’t be. People get frightened, but it’s not the same thing as being actually ill? It’s not dangerous?”

  “Oh,” said the other, “it’s not dangerous. Fine, lusty wench you are; no nerves; surplus energy; see something and biff it one. Yes, you would. Well, maybe it takes people differently. Maybe it was a mouse or wind in the chimney. Only I hope I don’t run across it, whatever it was.” His tone softened. “No, it’ll be all right. No help, thanks; Mrs. Apps and I can manage. But you might have some tea sent up.”

  The door closed.

  “Yes, my good friends,” observed Patrick Gore, with his hands deep in his pockets, “I think I am safe in saying that something has happened. Shall we go upstairs?”

  He went over and opened the door opposite.

  The staircase inside was steep-pitched and had that faint, sour smell which comes from old stone enclosed within walls. It was as though you saw the ribs and bones inside the house, unsmoothed by modern crafts. The servants’ quarters, Page knew, were at the other side of the house. There was no window here; and Elliot, who went ahead, had to use an electric torch. Gore followed him, then Dr. Fell, then Molly, with Madeline and Page in the rear.

  Nor had any of this part of the attic been altered since Inigo Jones sketched out his small windows and backed his brick with stone. On the landing the floor sloped in such humped fashion towards the stairs that an unwary footstep might send you down. There was a mighty strength of oak beams, too huge for the picturesque, conveying only power to uphold or crush. Faint gray light entered; the air was thick, damp, and hot.

  They found the door they wanted at the far end. It was a heavy door, black, suggesting a cellar rather than an attic. The hinges were of the eighteenth century; the knob was gone and a more modern lock disused; a tight chain and padlock now secured it. But it was not at the lock that Elliot first directed his light.

  Something had been flung down and partly crushed by the closing of the door.

  It was a half-eaten apple.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WITH THE EDGE OF a sixpence as a screw-driver, Elliot carefully unscrewed the staple which held the chain of the padlock. It took a long time, but the inspector worked carefully, like a carpenter. When the chain had fallen the door swung open of its own accord.

  “The lair of the Golden Hag,” said Gore with gusto, and kicked the half-eaten apple out of the way.

  “Steady on, sir!” said Elliot sharply.

  “What? Do you think the apple is evidence?”

  “You never know. When we go in here, please don’t touch anything unless I tell you to.”

  “When we go in” was an optimistic phrase. Page had expected to see a room. What he found was a kind of book-closet hardly six feet square, with a sloping roof in which a small and thick-grimed pane of glass showed opaque. There were many gaps in the shelves, where ragged calfskin mingled with more modern bindings. Over everything was a film of dust; but it was that thin, blackish, gritty dust of attics, in which few decipherable marks are left. An early Victorian armchair was pushed into it—and the hag herself seemed to jump out at them when the light of Elliot’s torch fell inside.

  Even Elliot jumped back a little. The hag was not a beauty. She might once have been an alluring charmer, but now only one eye looked out of half a face: the other side of the head was ruined, like the remnants of the velvet brocaded gown which might once have been yellow. Her appearance was not improved by the cracks opening out across her face.

  Had she been standing up, she would have been something under life-size. She sat on an oblong box, once gilded and painted to resemble a couch, but not much broader or deeper than she was, and set up off the floor on wheels which were evidently of later date than the automaton itself. The hands were partly lifted with burlesque and rather horrible coquetry. The whole squat, ponderous machine must have weighed two or three hundredweight.

  Madeline uttered a kind of giggle, as of nerves or relief. Elliot growled, and Dr. Fell swore. The doctor said:

  “Shades of Udolpho! Is this anti-climax?”

  “Sir?”

  “You know what I mean. Did that girl try to get into Bluebeard’s room, see this thing for the first time, and—” He paused, blowing out the ends of his moustache. “No. No, that won’t do.”

  “I’m afraid it won’t,” agreed Elliot soberly. “If something happened to her here, that is. How did she get in? And who carried her downstairs? And where did she get the Thumbograph? You can’t tell me that the mere sight of this thing would affect her as badly as she seems to have been affected. She might scream, or something of the sort. It might give her a turn. But nothing like this, unless she’s a hysterical case. Lady Farnleigh, did the servants know about this dummy?”

  “Of course,” said Molly. “Nobody has seen it, except Knowles or possibly Mrs. Apps, but they all knew about it.”

  “Then it wouldn’t even come as a surprise?”

  “No.”

  “If, as I say, she was frightened by something in this little two-by-four place—of which we haven’t any evidence______”

  “Look there,” said Dr. Fell, pointing with his stick.

  The beam of the torch played on the floor by the base of the automaton. It found a heap of crumpled linen which, when Elliot picked it up, proved to be a maid’s frilled apron. Though it had recently been freshly laundered, it was stained with patches of dust and dirt; and, in one place, there were two short jagged rents in it. Dr. Fell took it from the inspector and handed it to Molly.

  “Betty’s?” he said.

  Molly examined a minute tab, with an even more minute name in ink, sewn to the hem of the apron; and Molly nodded.

  “Stop a bit!” urged Dr. Fell, shutting his eyes. He began to lumber back and forth by the door, pressing on his eyeglasses as though to keep them from falling off. When he took his hand away again, his face was lowering and grave. “All right. I’ll tell you, my lad. I can’t prove it, any more than I could prove the part about the apple and the apple-room. But I can tell you what happened in that book-closet as certainly as though I had seen it. It’s no longer mere routine: it’s the most vital thing in the case that we should know just when, between lunch-time and four o’clock in the afternoon, that girl was frightened, and what the various people here were doing at that time.

  “Because, my lad, the murderer was here—in this book-closet. Betty Harbottle found him here. I don’t know what the murderer was doing; but it was vital that nobody should know he had been here at all. Something happened. Afterwards he used the girl’s apron to remove possible footprints, fingerprints, marks of any kind in this dust. He carried or dragged her downstairs. He put into her hand the useless Thumbograph he had stolen the night before. And then he went away, as they all do, and left the apron lying neatly in the middle of the floor. Eh?”

  Elliot raised his hand.

  “Steady on, sir. Not so fast.” He thought it over. “There are two bad objections to that, I’m afraid.”

  “Which are?”

  “One. If it was so vital to conceal the fact that he’d been in this little room, doing whatever he was doing, how was he covering his tracks just by moving the unconscious girl from one place to another? He wasn’t preventing disclosure; he was only postponing it. The girl’s alive. She will recover. And she’ll tell who was here, and what he was doing—if anything.”

  “Apparently a poser,” said Dr. Fell. “Apparently a stinger whang in the gold. And yet, do you know,” he spoke with some violence, “I should not be surprised if the answer to that seeming contradiction is the answer to our problem. What’s the other o
bjection?”

  “Betty Harbottle wasn’t hurt. Physically, she wasn’t touched. She was put into the shape she was in by plain old-fashioned fright at something she saw. Yet all she could have seen was an ordinary human being doing something he shouldn’t. It’s not reasonable, sir; girls are pretty tough these days.—What could have put her into that state, then?”

  Dr. Fell looked at him.

  “Something that the automaton did,” he answered. “Suppose it reached out now and took your hand?”

  Such is the power of suggestion that every person in the group shied back. Six pairs of eyes turned to the ruined head and the curious hands of the dummy. They would not be pleasant hands to take or touch. Nothing about that figure, from the mildewed gown to the cracked-open wax of the face, would be good to the touch.

  Elliot cleared his throat.

  “You mean he made the dummy work?”

  “He did not make it work,” interposed Gore. “I thought of that years ago. That is, he did not make it work unless some electrical system or other trickery has been shoved into it since my time. Damn it all, gentlemen, nine generations of Farnleighs have tried to discover what made it work. And I’ll make you a flat offer. I will pay a thousand pounds to the man who can show me how it does work.”

  “Man or woman?” said Madeline. Page could see that she was forcing a laugh, but Gore spoke in very desperate earnest.

  “Man or woman or child or anybody else. To the man or woman who can make it work without modern hocus-pocus, and under the same conditions as it was exhibited two hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “The offer’s generous enough,” said Dr. Fell cheerfully. “Well, wheel her out and let’s have a look at her.”

  With some effort Elliot and Page, laying hold of the iron box on which the dummy sat, pulled it out of the book-closet with a bump over the sill. She jerked her head and quivered; Page wondered whether the hair would come off. Yet the wheels moved with surprising ease. With a heavy creaking and a faint rattling noise, they pushed her over into the light from the window near the head of the stairs.

  “Go on. Demonstrate,” said Dr. Fell.

  Gore made a careful examination. “To begin with, you will find that the body of the thing is full of clockwork. I am no mechanical expert, and I can’t tell you whether all the wheels and whatnots are genuine, or whether they were put there for effect. I suspect that most of them are dummies even if some are genuine. Anyhow, the point is that the body is completely filled. There’s a long window at the back. If it still opens, put your hand through, and—oh, you scratch, do you?”

  Gore’s face darkened, and he jerked his own hand back. In his absorption he made a gesture too close to the sharp fingers of the automaton; a crooked scratch drew blood on the back of his hand. He put it to his mouth.

  “My good old clock-guts!” he said. “My faithful old clock-guts! I ought to knock the rest of your face off.”

  “Don’t!” cried Madeline.

  He was amused. “As you wish, little one. In any case, inspector—will you poke about among the works? What I want to establish is that the body is full of them and that nobody could hide in there.”

  Elliot was as serious as ever. The glass had long gone from the window at the back; with the aid of his flashlight he examined the mechanism and groped inside. Something seemed to startle him, but he only said:

  “Yes, that’s right, sir. No room for anything here. You mean it was suggested that somebody was hiding in the thing and working it?”

  “The only suggestion anybody could hazard. Now, then. That takes care of the automaton itself. The only other part of it, as you can see for yourself, is the couch on which she sits. Watch.”

  This time he had more difficulty. At the left of the couch’s front there was a small knob; Page could see that the whole front opened out like a little door on a hinge. With some manipulation he managed to get the door open. The interior of the box, bare iron badly corroded with rust, was well under three feet long and not more than eighteen inches high.

  Gore beamed with pleasure.

  “You remember,” he said, “the explanation that was advanced for the chess-playing automaton of Maelzel? The figure sat on a series of large boxes, each with its own little door. Before the demonstration, the showman opened these doors to show that there was no hoax. It was said, however, that inside lurked a small child, who deftly contorted himself from one compartment to another; and these movements were so synchronized with the shrewd manipulation of doors that the spectators believed they had seen all of an empty inside.

  “Something like that was said about the hag here. But spectators have written that this could not be the case. I don’t need to point out that, first, it would have to be a very small child; and, second, no exhibitor could possibly travel all over Europe with a child and have nobody aware of that fact.

  “But in the hag there is only one small space and one door. Spectators were invited to feel inside the space and make sure there was no deception. Most of them did so. The figure stood by itself, raised well off the ground and on a carpet provided by the host. Yet, in spite of there being no means by which she could come alive, at the word of command our lively lady received a cittern— played any tune whose name was called out by the spectators—returned the cittern—conversed with the spectators by dumb-show, and performed other antics of a nature suited to the time. Do you wonder that my respected ancestor was delighted? But I have always wondered what made him change his mind when he learned the secret.”

  Gore dropped his lofty manner.

  “Now tell me how it worked,” he added.

  “You little—ape!” said Molly Farnleigh. She spoke in her sweetest manner, but her hands were clenched at her sides. “Will you always prance, no matter what happens? Aren’t you satisfied? Would you like to play trains or toy soldiers? My God, Brian, come here; I can’t stick this. And you too—and you, a police-officer—fiddling with a dummy—crawling round it like a lot of children, when—don’t you realize a man was killed last night?”

  “Very well,” said Gore. “Let us change the subject. Then, for a change, tell me how that was worked.”

  “I suppose you will say it was suicide, of course.”

  “Madam,” said Gore, with a gesture of despair, “it makes no difference what I say. Somebody invariably jumps down my throat in any case. If I say it was suicide, I am assaulted by A, B, and C. If I say it was murder, I am assaulted by D, E, and F. I have not suggested that it was accident, if only to avoid incurring the wrath of G, H, and I.”

  “That’s very clever, no doubt. What do you say, Mr. Elliot?”

  Elliot spoke out of a personal honesty.

  “Lady Farnleigh, I’m only trying to do the best I can in the most difficult business I was ever put into, which isn’t helped by the attitude of any of you. You must see that. If you’ll think for just a minute, you must see this machine has something very much to do with the case. I only ask you not to talk out of plain temper. For there’s something else to do with the machine as well.”

  He put his hand on its shoulder.

  “I don’t know whether the clockwork inside this is dummy clockwork or not, as Mr. Gore says. I’d like to have a go at it in my workshop and find out. I don’t know whether the mechanism might still be expected to work after two hundred years; though, if clocks still go after that time, why shouldn’t it? But this much I did find out when I looked into the back. The mechanism in this has been recently oiled.”

  Molly frowned.

  “Well?”

  “I was wondering, Dr. Fell, whether you—” Elliot turned round. “Here! Where are you, sir?”

  Page’s conviction that anything might happen was strengthened by the disappearance of so very tangible a bulk as the doctor. He was not yet used to Dr. Fell’s trick of fading from the scene and reappearing somewhere else, usually engaged in some meaningless occupation. This time Elliot was answered by a flicker of light from the book-closet. Dr. F
ell had been striking a series of matches and blinking with fierce absorption at the lower shelves.

  “Eh? I beg your pardon?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to this demonstration?”

  “Oh, that? Harrumph, yes. I can hardly claim to succeed off-hand where so many generations of the family have failed, but I should rather like to know how the original exhibitor was dressed.”

  “Dressed?”

  “Yes. The traditional magician’s costume, I daresay, which has always seemed to me singularly unimpressive but suggestive of possibilities. However, I have been pouncing and poking in that cupboard, with or without results______”

  “The books?”

  “The books are the usual orthodox collection of the unorthodox though there are several witch-trials that are new to me. I did find what seems to be an account of how the automaton was exhibited, which I hope I may borrow? Thank you. But particularly there’s this.”

  While Gore watched him with bright, wicked eyes of amusement, he lumbered out of the closet carrying a decrepit wooden box. And at the same time it seemed to Page that the attic was filling with people.

  It was only that Kennet Murray and Nathaniel Burrows, evidently having grown restive, had insisted on following them upstairs. Burrows’s big spectacles, and Murray’s towering calm face, appeared over the attic stairs as though out of a trap-door. For the moment they did not come nearer. Dr. Fell rattled the wooden box. He balanced it as well as he could on the narrow ledge of couch round the automaton.

  “Here, steady the machine!” said the doctor sharply. “This floor’s got a bad canter, and we don’t want her rolling downstairs on us. Now have a look. An odd collection of the dust of years, don’t you think?”

  In the box they saw a number of child’s glass marbles, a rusty knife with a painted handle, some fishing-flies, a small heavy ball of lead into which four large hooks had been welded like a bouquet, and (incongruously) a woman’s garter of many years ago. But they did not look at these things. They looked at what lay on top: a double false-face or mask made of parchment on wire, and forming a kind of head with a face back and front like the images of Janus. It was blackish, shrivelled, and without features. Dr. Fell did not touch it.