The Crooked Hinge Read online

  “Miss Dane,” he declared, “you’re a born politician. No, I’ll say diplomat; it sounds better; I don’t know why. That touch about the football pools was sheer genius. It brought things home to the jury as certainly as sixpence and two wrong. How did you come to think of it?”

  In the long, warm afterglow of sunset, Elliot, Dr. Fell, and Page were having dinner with Madeline at the unfortunately named but comfortable Monplaisir. The table stood by the French windows of the dining-room, and the French windows opened on a deep garden of laurels. At the end of it were two acres of apple-orchard. In one direction a footpath went through the orchard to what used to be Colonel Mardale’s. In another it wound across a brook and up through the Hanging Chart, whose slope of trees showed dark against the evening sky to the left of the orchard. If you followed the latter path up through the chart, over its shoulder, and down again, you came to the back gardens of Farnleigh Close.

  Madeline lived alone, having a woman who came in by day to cook and “do.” It was a trim little house, bright with military prints that were a heritage from her father, full of brass and bustling clocks. It stood rather isolated, the nearest house being that of the unfortunate Victoria Daly; but Madeline had never minded the isolation.

  She sat now at the head of the table beside the open windows, beyond polished wood and silver in a dusk which was not quite dark enough for the lighting of the dinner-table candles. She wore white. The great, low oak beams of the dining-room, the pewter and the busy clocks, all were a background for her. Dinner over, Dr. Fell had lit a Gargantuan cigar; Page had lit a cigarette for Madeline; and, at Elliot’s question, Madeline laughed in the light of the match.

  “About the football pools?” she repeated. She flushed a little as well. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t think of it. It was Nat Burrows. He wrote it out and made me get it word-perfect like a recitation. Oh, every word I said was true. I felt it terribly. It was the most awful cheek of me to carry on like that before all those people; and every second I was afraid poor Mr. Whitehouse was going to stop me; but Nat said it was absolutely the only way. Afterwards I went upstairs at the Bull and Butcher and had hysterics and cried and felt better. Was it very awful of me?”

  They were certainly staring at her.

  “No,” said Dr. Fell quite seriously, “it was a remarkable performance. But, oh, Lord! Burrows coached you? Wow!”

  “Yes, he was here half of last night doing it.”

  “Burrows? But when was he here?” asked Page, surprised. “I brought you home.”

  “He came here after you left. He was full of what I had just told Molly, and terribly excited.”

  “You know, gents,” rumbled Dr. Fell, taking a meditative pull at the large cigar, “we mustn’t underestimate our friend Burrows. Page here told us long ago that he was an unco’ intelligent chap. Welkyn seemed to run rings round him at the beginning of this circus; but all the time, psychologically—confound that word—he had the inquest exactly where he wanted it. He’ll be fighting, naturally. It will naturally make a big difference to the firm of Burrows & Burrows whether they keep the management of the Farnleigh estate. And he’s a fighter. When, as, and if the case of Farnleigh v. Gore ever comes to trial, it ought to be a sizzler.”

  Elliot faced something else.

  “Look here, Miss Dane,” he said stubbornly. “I’m not denying you did us a good turn. It’s a victory, if only an outward and newspaper victory. Now the case won’t be closed officially, even if the A.C. tears his hair and swears the jury were a pack of thick-witted yokels under the spell of a good-looking—er—female. But what I want to know is why you didn’t come to me with all this information in the first place. I’m not a twister. I’m not—er—a half bad fellow, if you can put it like that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The odd and almost comic part of it was, Page thought, that he sounded personally hurt.

  “I wanted to,” said Madeline. “Honestly I did. But I had to tell Molly first. Then Nat Burrows made me swear all kinds of horrid oaths I wouldn’t breathe a word of it to the police until after the inquest. He says he doesn’t trust the police. Also, he’s working on a theory to prove—” She checked herself, biting her lip, and made an apologetic gesture with her cigarette. “You know how some people are.”

  “Still, where do we stand?” asked Page. “After this morning, have we gone round in the old circle to wondering which of them is the real heir? If Murray swears Gore is, and if they don’t upset that fingerprint evidence, that seems to end it. Or so I thought. This morning, once or twice, I wasn’t quite so sure. Certain hints and innuendoes—you made them yourself—seemed to center round good old Welkyn.”

  “Really, Brian! I only said what Nat told me to say. What do you mean?”

  “Well, possibly that the whole claim to the estate might have been engineered by Welkyn himself. Welkyn, the spooks’ solicitor and spiritualists’ advocate. Welkyn, who collects some rather rummy friends, and may have collected Gore as he collected Ahriman and Madame Duquesne and the rest of them. I said when we met Gore he was some kind of showman. Welkyn, who said he saw a ghost in the garden at the time of the murder. Welkyn, who at the time of the murder was only fifteen feet away from the victim and with only a sheet of glass between. Welkyn______”

  “But surely, Brian, you don’t suspect Mr. Welkyn of the murder?”

  “Why not? Dr. Fell said______”

  “I said,” interposed the doctor, frowning at his cigar, “that he was the most interesting person in the group.”

  “It usually amounts to the same thing,” said Page gloomily. “What’s your real opinion, Madeline, about the real heir? You told me yesterday you thought the late Farnleigh was an impostor. Do you?”

  “Yes, I do. But I don’t see how anybody could keep from feeling sorry for him. He didn’t want to be an impostor, don’t you see? He only wanted to know who he was. As for Mr. Welkyn, he couldn’t possibly be the murderer. He was the only one of us who wasn’t in the attic when—well, it seems horrible to talk about after dinner and on a nice evening, but who wasn’t in the attic when that machine fell.”

  “Sinister,” said the doctor. “Very sinister.”

  “You must be terribly brave,” said Madeline with the utmost seriousness, “to laugh about that iron idol tumbling down______”

  “My dear young lady, I am not brave. The wind was blowing violently and I felt ill. Afterwards I began, like St. Peter, to curse and swear. Then I made jokes. Harrumph. Fortunately I began thinking about that girl in the other room, who hasn’t my padding to sustain her. And I swore a mighty oath myself—” His fist hovered over the table, huge in the twilight. They had the impression of a dangerous force behind jokes and absence of mind, a force that could fall and bind. But he did not bring the fist down. He looked out into the darkening garden, and continued to smoke mildly.

  “Then where do we stand, sir?” asked Page. “Have you found you can trust us by now?”

  It was Elliot who answered him. Elliot took a cigarette out of the box on the table. He lit it with careful movings of the match. In the light of the match his expression was again brisk, impassive, but as though conveying a hint Page could not interpret.

  “We must be moving along soon,” the inspector said. “Burton is driving us to Paddock Wood, and Dr. Fell and I are catching the ten o’clock train for town. We have a conference with Mr. Bellchester at the Yard. Dr. Fell has an idea.”

  “About—what to do here?” Madeline asked eagerly.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Fell. For a time he continued to smoke with a sleepy air. “I was wondering. Perhaps it would be as well if I gave a few hollow subterranean whispers. For example, that inquest today served a double-barrelled purpose. We hoped for a murder verdict and we hoped that one of the witnesses would make a slip. We got the murder verdict; and somebody blundered.”

  “Was that where you said ‘wow’ out loud?”

  “I said ‘wow’ many times,” answered the doctor gravely. �
�To myself. At a price, the inspector and I will tell you what caused both of us to say ‘wow,’ or at least a hint of it. I say: at a price. After all, you ought to do for us what you did for Mr. Burrows, and under the same pledge of secrecy. A minute ago you said he was working on a theory to prove something. What theory? And what does he want to prove?”

  Madeline stirred, and crushed out her cigarette. In the semi-darkness she looked cool and clean in white, her short throat swelling above the low-necked dress. Page always remembered her at that moment: the blonde hair done into something like curls above the ears, the broad face even more softened and etherealized by twilight, the slow closing of her eyes. Outside a faint wind stirred in the laurels. Towards the west over the garden the low sky was thin yellow-orange, like brittle glass; but over the mass of the Hanging Chart there was a star. The room seemed to have retreated, as though it were waiting. Madeline put her hands on the table and seemed to push herself back.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “People come and tell me these things. They think I can keep a secret; I look the sort of person who can keep a secret; and I can. Now it seems as though all the secrets were being dragged out of me, and I feel as though I had done something indecent by all that talking today.”

  “And?” prompted Dr. Fell.

  “All the same, you ought to know this. You really and truly ought to know it. Nat Burrows suspects someone of the murder, and hopes he can prove it.”

  “And he suspects­—?”

  “He suspects Kennet Murray,” said Madeline.

  The glowing end of Elliot’s cigarette stopped in the air. Then Elliot struck the table with the flat of his hand.

  “Murray! Murray?”

  “Why, Mr. Elliot?” asked Madeline, opening her eyes. “Does it surprise you?”

  The inspector’s voice remained impersonal. “Murray is the last person who should be suspected, both in the real sense and in what the doctor here calls the detective-story sense. He was the person everyone was watching. Even if it might have been only a joke, he was the person they were all thinking of as the victim. Burrows is a damned sight too clever by half!—I beg your pardon, Miss Dane: ’ware language. No. And again no. Has Burrows got any reason to think this, except the idea of being clever? Why, the man’s got an alibi as big as a house!”

  “I don’t understand part of it,” said Madeline, wrinkling her forehead, “because he didn’t tell me. But that’s the point. Has he got an alibi, really? I’m only telling you what Nat told me. Nat says that if you go by the evidence there wasn’t anybody actually watching him except this Mr. Gore, standing down by the library windows.”

  The inspector and Dr. Fell exchanged a glance. They did not comment.

  “Go on, please.”

  “You remember my mentioning at the inquest today the little cupboard or book-closet built into the wall of the library—like the one in the attic? The one that’s got a door opening into the garden if you find the spring?”

  “I do,” said Dr. Fell rather grimly. “Humph. Murray mentioned that place to us himself, when he said he went in there during his vigil to change the bogus Thumbograph for the real one so that he shouldn’t be seen from the windows. I begin to understand.”

  “Yes. I told that to Nat, and he was terribly interested. He said to be sure to mention it so that it could go into the records. If I understood him at all, he says you’re concentrating your attention on the wrong man. He says all this is a trumped-up conspiracy against poor John. He says that because this ‘Patrick Gore’ has a clever tongue and an interesting way with him, you’ve mistaken him for the leader of the group. But Nat maintains that Mr. Murray is the real—what’s that horrid word they use in thrillers—?”

  “Master-mind?”

  “That’s it. Of the gang. Of a gang composed of Gore and Welkyn and Murray; Gore and Welkyn being puppets who wouldn’t have the courage for any real crime.”

  “Go on,” said Dr. Fell in a curious voice.

  “Nat was wildly excited when he explained it. He points to the rather odd behavior of Mr. Murray all through this. Well, of course I—I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t seen enough of him. He does seem a bit different from the old days, but then I know we all must be.

  “Poor Nat has even got a theory of how the scheme might have been worked. Mr. Murray was in touch with a shady lawyer (Mr. Welkyn). Mr. Welkyn was in a position to tell him, through one of the fortune-tellers of his clientele, that Sir John Farnleigh was suffering from loss of memory and mental trouble over you know what. So Murray, the old tutor, thought of presenting an impostor with forged credentials. Through Welkyn he found a suitable impostor (Gore) among Welkyn’s clients. Murray drilled him for six months in every particular. Nat says that’s why Gore’s way of speaking and conducting himself is so much like Murray’s: the thing Nat says you noticed, Dr. Fell.”

  The doctor stared across the table at her.

  He put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, so that Page could not tell what he was thinking. The air stirring through the open windows was very warm and full of fragrance; yet it is a fact that Dr. Fell shivered.

  “Go on,” Elliot prompted again.

  “Nat’s idea of what happened is—is horrible,” replied Madeline, closing her eyes again. “I could see it, even if I didn’t want to see it. Poor John, who had never done anybody any harm, had to be killed so that there would be nobody to fight their claim, and so that it should be believed he had killed himself. Just as most people do believe, you know.”

  “Yes,” said Elliot. “Just as most people do believe.”

  “Welkyn and Gore, the sawdust-men without the courage, had their parts to play. They had the two sides of the house guarded, you see. Welkyn was in the dining-room. Gore was to watch the library windows for two reasons: first, to swear to Mr. Murray’s alibi; and, second, to keep any other person away from looking in the window while Mr. Murray was out of the library.

  “They stalked poor John like a—oh, you know. He never had a chance. When they knew he was in the garden, Mr. Murray came out ever so softly. He’s a big man. He caught John and killed him. He didn’t do it until the last moment. That is, they hoped that John might break down and confess he had lost his memory and might not be the real heir. Then they mightn’t have had to kill him. But he didn’t. And so they did. But Mr. Murray had to explain why he had been so unnecessarily long in ‘comparing fingerprints.’ So he invented the story of juggling with Thumbographs, and stole one and later returned it. And Nat says”—she concluded rather breathlessly, looking at Dr. Fell—“he says you tumbled straight into their trap, as Mr. Murray planned you should.”

  Inspector Elliot carefully put out his cigarette.

  “That’s it, eh? Does this Mr. Burrows explain how Murray committed a murder unseen under the eyes of Knowles and practically under the eyes of Burrows himself?”

  She shook her head.

  “He wouldn’t tell me that. Either he didn’t want to, or he hasn’t got it worked out yet.”

  “He hasn’t got it worked out yet,” said Dr. Fell in a hollow voice. “A slight slowness of cerebral activity. A little late with the homework. Oh, my ancient hat. This is awful.”

  Once again that day Madeline had talked herself into a state of quickened breathing. It was as though she herself, at the end of a great nervous strain, had been touched by that wind from the garden or the sense of expectancy and waiting from the house.

  “What do you think of it?” she asked.

  Dr. Fell reflected.

  “There are flaws in it. Bad flaws.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Madeline, looking straight at him. “I don’t think I believe it myself. But I’ve told you what you wanted to know. What were the hints you were going to give us, about what really happened?”

  He regarded her in a curious way, as though he wondered.

  “Have you told us everything, ma’am?”

  “Everything I—I can or dare to. Do
n’t ask me any more. Please.”

  “Still,” argued Dr. Fell, “at risk of seeming to make more mysteries, I’m going to ask you another question. You knew the late Farnleigh very well. Now, the point is nebulous and psychological again; but find the answer to the following question and you come near the truth. Why did Farnleigh worry for twenty-five years? Why was he weighed down and oppressed in the blindness of his memory? Most men would have been troubled for a while; yet it should not have left such a terrifying scar in his mind. Was he, for instance, tortured by a memory of crime or evil?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I believe he was. I’ve always thought of him as being like those old Puritans in books, brought up to date.”

  “But he couldn’t remember what it concerned?”

  “No—except this image of the crooked hinge.”

  Page found the words themselves disturbing and bothersome. It seemed as though they ought to convey something or suggest something. What was a crooked hinge? Or, for that matter, a straight hinge?

  “Sort of polite version of a screw loose?” he asked.

  “N-no, I don’t think so. I mean, it wasn’t a figure of speech. Sometimes he seemed to see a hinge; a hinge on a door; a white hinge. It would become crooked as he looked, and droop or crack somehow. He said it stuck in his mind in the way you notice the pattern of a wall-paper when you are ill.”

  “A white hinge,” said Dr. Fell. He looked at Elliot. “That rather tears it, my lad. Eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A long sniff rumbled in the doctor’s nose.

  “Very well. Now let’s see if there are any suggestions of the truth in all this. I will give you a few.

  “First. There has been much talk from the beginning about who was or wasn’t battered on the head with what has been described as a ‘seaman’s wooden mallet.’ There has been a great amount of curiosity about the fact, but very little about the mallet. Where did anybody get such an implement? How was it obtainable at all? Such an article wouldn’t be of much use to sailors aboard modern mechanized ships. I can think of only one thing answering the description.