The Crooked Hinge Page 18

  “You have probably seen such mallets if you have crossed the Atlantic. One of them hangs by each of the steel doors which are set at intervals along the passages below decks in a modern liner. These steel doors are, or are supposed to be, water-tight. In the event of disaster they can be closed, to form a series of bulkheads or compartments against water flooding in. And the mallet by each door—a somber reminder—is for use as a weapon by the steward in case of panic and a stampede on the part of passengers. The Titanic, you remember, was famous for its water-tight compartments.”

  “Well?” prompted Page, as the doctor paused. “What of it?”

  “It doesn’t suggest anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Second point,” said Dr. Fell. “That interesting automaton, the Golden Hag. Find out what made the automaton work in the seventeenth century, and you will have the essential secret of this case.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense!” cried Madeline. “At least, I mean, it doesn’t have any connection with what I was thinking. I thought you were thinking just the same things as I was, and now—”

  Inspector Elliot looked at his watch. “We shall have to be moving, sir,” he said in a flat voice, “if we want to catch that train and still stop in at the Close on our way.”

  “Don’t go,” said Madeline abruptly. “Don’t go. Please. You won’t, will you, Brian?”

  “I thought we should come to it, ma’am,” Dr. Fell told her in a very quiet voice. “Just what is wrong?”

  “I’m afraid,” said Madeline. “I suppose that’s why I’ve been talking so much, really.”

  The realization of something different about her, and the reason for it, came to Brian Page with a kind of shock.

  Dr. Fell laid his cigar in the saucer of his coffee-cup. Striking a match with great care, he leaned across and lit the candles on the table. Four golden flames curled and then drew up steadily in the warm, still air; they seemed to hover as though disembodied above the candles. The twilight was pushed back into the garden. In the snug little nook on the edge of it, Madeline’s eyes reflected the candlelight; they were steady but dilated. It was as though in the fear there showed a measure of expectancy.

  The doctor seemed uneasy. “I’m afraid we can’t stay, Miss Dane. We shall be back tomorrow, but there are some ends of the case we’ve got to gather up in town. All the same, if Page could—?”

  “You won’t leave me, will you, Brian? I’m sorry to be such a fool and to bother you—”

  “Good Lord, of course I won’t leave you!” roared Page, feeling such a fierce protectiveness as he had never known before. “I’ll cause a scandal. I won’t let you beyond arm’s length until morning. Not that there’s anything to be afraid of.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting the date?”

  “The date?”

  “The anniversary. July 31st. Victoria Daly died a year ago tonight.”

  “It is also,” supplied Dr. Fell, looking curiously at both of them, “it is also Lammas Eve. A good Scot like Elliot will tell you what that is. It’s the night of one of the Great Sabbaths and the powers from down under are exalted. H’mf. Hah. Well. I’m a cheerful blighter, eh?”

  Page found himself puzzled and nervy and angry.

  “You are,” he said. “What’s the good of putting nonsense into people’s heads? Madeline is upset enough as it is. She’s played other people’s games and done things for other people until she’s worn out. What the devil do you mean by trying to make it worse? There’s no danger here. If I see anything hanging about I’ll wring its ruddy neck and ask permission from the police afterwards.”

  “Sorry,” said Dr. Fell. For a moment he stood looking down from his great height with tired, kindly, vaguely troubled eyes. Then he took his cloak, his shovel-hat, and his crutch-handled stick from a chair.

  “Good night, sir,” said Elliot. “If I’ve got the geography of the neighborhood right, we can go up that path to the left from the garden here, and through the wood, and down to Farnleigh Close on the other side? Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—er—good night, then. Thank you again for everything, Miss Dane, for a very pleasant and instructive evening. And just—keep your eye out, you know, Mr. Page.”

  “Yes. And watch out for bogles in the wood,” Page shouted after them.

  He stood in the French window and watched them go down the garden among the laurels. It was a very warm night, and the scents of the garden were thick and enervating. In the east stars were brightening against a slope of sky, but they winked dimly as though distorted by heat-waves. Page’s irrational anger grew.

  “Bunch of old women,” he said. “Trying to—”

  He turned round and saw the fleeting of Madeline’s smile. She was calm again; but she looked flushed.

  “I’m sorry to make such an exhibition of myself, Brian,” she said gently. “I know there’s no danger of any kind.” She got up. “Will you excuse me for a moment? I want to go upstairs and powder my nose. Shan’t be a second.”

  “Bunch of old women. Trying to—”

  Alone, he lit a cigarette with care. After a very brief time he was able to laugh at his own annoyance, and he felt better. On the contrary, an evening alone with Madeline was one of the pleasantest things he could imagine. A brown moth flashed through the window and dived in a long sweep towards one flame; he brushed it away, and shifted as it passed his face.

  This little core of candlelight was very soothing and pleasant, but they might as well have more light. He went to the electric switch. Subdued wall-lamps brought out the grace of the room and the pattern of chintzes. It was odd, he thought, how clear and sharply defined the ticking of a clock could be. There were two of them in the room; they did not vie with each other, but each filled up the beats the other lacked, and produced a kind of quick rustling. The tiny pendulum of one switched backwards and forwards in a way that drew the eye.

  He went back to the table, where he poured himself some almost cold coffee. The noise of his own footsteps on the floor, the rattle of the cup in the saucer, the clink of the china coffee-pot on the edge of the cup: all these made sounds as clearly defined as those of the clocks. For the first time he became aware of mere emptiness as a positive quality. His thoughts ran progressively: this room is absolutely empty: I am alone: what of it?

  The emptiness of the place was emphasized by the clearness of the lights. To one subject he kept his mind closed, though he had guessed a certain secret that afternoon and confirmed it from a book in his library. Something cheerful was indicated—for Madeline, of course. This house, neat as it might be, was too isolated. Round it was a wall of darkness stretching for half a mile.

  Madeline was taking rather a long time to powder her nose. Another moth zig-zagged through the open window and flapped on the table. Curtains and candle-flames stirred a little. Better close the windows. He went across the bright, hard room, stood in one French window looking out into the garden, and then stood very still.

  In the garden, in the darkness just beyond the thin edge of light from the windows, sat the automaton from Farnleigh Close.

  Chapter Seventeen

  FOR THE SPACE OF perhaps eight seconds he stood looking at it, as motionless as the automaton itself.

  The light from the windows was faint yellow. It stretched out ten or a dozen feet across the grass, just touching the once-painted base of the figure. Even wider cracks gaped across her wax face; she leaned a little sideways from her fall downstairs, and half of her clockwork insides were gone. Some effort had been made to mend this by pulling the decayed gown across the wounds. Old and smashed and half-blind, she looked at him malignantly from the shadow of the laurels.

  He had to force himself to do what he did. He walked out slowly towards her, feeling that his steps took him farther than need be from the lighted windows. She was alone, or seemed alone. Her wheels had been mended, he noticed. But the ground was so baked from long July drought that the wheels
left hardly a trace in the grass. Not far to the left was a gravel drive which would leave no traces.

  Then he hurried back to the house, for he heard Madeline coming downstairs.

  Carefully he closed all the French windows. Then he picked up the heavy oak table and carried it to the middle of the room. Two of the candlesticks rocked. Madeline, appearing in the doorway, found him steadying one of them as he set down the table.

  “Moths getting in,” he explained.

  “But won’t it be awfully stuffy? Hadn’t you better leave one—”

  “I’ll do it.” He set the middle window open about a foot.

  “Brian! There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

  Again he became aware, with intense clarity, of the ticking of the clocks; but most of all of the sympathetic presence of Madeline, exuding the wish to be protected. Uneasiness takes people in strange ways. She did not now seem so remote or self-effacing. The aura of her—there is no other word for it—filled the room.

  He said:

  “Good Lord, no; of course there’s nothing wrong. It’s just that moths are a nuisance, that’s all. That’s why I closed the windows.”

  “Shall we go into the other room?”

  Better not be out of touch with it. Better not have it free to go where it liked.

  “Oh, let’s stay here and smoke another cigarette.”

  “Of course. What about some more coffee?”

  “Don’t trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble. It’s all prepared on the stove.”

  She smiled, the bright smile of one strung up by nerves, and went across to the kitchen. While she was gone he did not look out of the window. She seemed to be in the kitchen a long time, and he went in search of her. He met her in the doorway, carrying a fresh pot of coffee. She spoke quietly.

  “Brian, there is something wrong. The back door is open. I know I left it shut, and Maria always closes it when she goes home.”

  “Maria forgot it.”

  “Yes. If you say so. Oh, I’m being silly. I know I am. Let’s have something cheerful.”

  She seemed to wake up, with an apologetic and yet defiant laugh, and a brighter complexion. In one corner of the room, unobtrusive like Madeline herself, there was a radio. She switched it on. It took a few seconds to grow warm; then the resulting volume of noise startled them both.

  She toned it down, but the flooding jingles of a dance-orchestra filled the rooms like surf on a beach. The tunes seemed as usual; the words rather worse than usual. Madeline listened to it for a moment. Then she returned to the table, sat down, and poured out their coffee. They were sitting at right angles to each other, so close he could have touched her hand. Her back was to the windows. All the while he was conscious of something outside, waiting. He wondered what his feelings would be if a cracked face were poked against the glass.

  Yet, at the same time his nerves were touched, his brain stirred as well. It seemed to him that he woke up. It seemed to him that he was rationally reasoning for the first time; that bonds fell apart and the brain emerged from iron bands.

  Now what were the facts about that dummy? It was dead iron and wheels arid wax. It was no more dangerous of itself than a kitchen boiler. They had examined it, and they knew. Its only purpose was to terrify, a human purpose managed by a solid hand.

  It had not pushed itself across the path from Farnleigh Close, like a malignant old woman in a wheel-chair. It had been brought here to terrify, again the solid purpose managed by the solid hand. And it seemed to him that this automaton was fitting itself into a pattern which the case had taken since the beginning, and which from the beginning he should have seen. . . .

  “Yes,” said Madeline, into his thoughts. “Let’s talk about it. That would be better, really.”

  “It?”

  “This whole thing,” said Madeline, clenching her hands. “I—I may know rather more about it than you think.”

  She swam into his vision again. Again she had put the palms of her hands flat on the table, as though she were going to push herself back. The faint, frightened smile still lingered about her eyes and mouth. But she was quiet, almost coquettish; and she had never been more persuasive.

  “I wonder if you know,” he said, “what I’ve guessed?”

  “I wonder.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the partly open window. It seemed to him that he was talking less to Madeline than to something out there, something waiting, whose presence surrounded the house.

  “It’ll probably be best to get this out of my system,” he went on with his eye still on the window. “Let me ask you something. Had you ever heard of a—a witch-cult hereabouts?”

  Hesitation.

  “Yes. I’ve heard rumors. Why?”

  “It’s about Victoria Daly. I had the essential facts yesterday from Dr. Fell and Inspector Elliot; I even had the information to interpret them; but I hadn’t the wits to put the whole thing together. It’s come to daylight now. Did you know that after Victoria’s murder her body was found smeared with a substance composed of the juice of water parsnip, aconite, cinquefoil, deadly nightshade, and soot?”

  “But whatever for? What have all those beastly things got to do with it?”

  “A great deal. That is one of the formulas for the famous ointment—you’ve heard of it right enough—with which Satanists bedaubed themselves before going off to the Sabbath.* It lacks one of the original ingredients: the flesh of a child: but I suppose there are limits even to a murderer’s efforts at realism.”

  “Brian!”

  For it seemed to him that the picture which was emerging from these sly and tangled events was less that of a Satanist than that of a murderer.

  “Oh, yes, it’s true. I know something about that subject, and I can’t imagine why I didn’t remember it from the first. Now, I want you to think of the obvious deductions we can draw from that fact, the deductions Dr. Fell and the inspector made long ago. I don’t mean about Victoria’s indulgence, or pretended indulgence, in Satanist practices. That’s clear enough without any deduction.”

  “Why?”

  “Follow it out. She uses this ointment on Lammas Eve, the night of one of the great Satanist meetings. She is murdered at 11:45, and the Sabbath begins at midnight. It’s clear that she had applied this ointment some minutes before the murderer caught her. She is murdered in her ground-floor bedroom, the window of which is set wide open: traditionally the way in which Satanists left, or thought they left, for their gatherings.”

  Though he was not looking directly at her, he thought that a slight frown had gathered on Madeline’s forehead.

  “I think I see what you’re getting at Brian. You say ‘thought they left’ because—”

  “I’m coming to that. But, first, what deductions can we make about her murderer? Most important, this: Whether or not the tramp killed Victoria Daly, there was a third person in that house at the time of the murder or just afterwards.”

  Madeline sprang to her feet. He was not looking at her, yet he felt that her large blue eyes were fixed on his face.

  “How so, Brian? I still don’t follow that.”

  “Because of the nature of the ointment. Do you realize what a substance like that would do?”

  “Yes, I think I see that. But tell me.”

  “For six hundred years,” he went on, “there’s been a vast mass of testimony from those who claim to have gone to Witches’ Sabbaths and seen the presence of Satan. What impresses you as you read it is the absolute sincerity, the careful detail, with which people have described things that couldn’t possibly be true. We can’t deny, as a matter of history, that the Satanist cult really existed and was a powerful force from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. It had an organization as carefully arranged and managed as the Church itself. But what about these miraculous journeys in the air, these wonders and ghosts, these demons and familiars, these incubi and succubi? They can’t be accepted as facts (not by my practical mind, anyhow); and yet t
hey are firmly presented as facts by a great number of people who weren’t demented and weren’t hysterical and weren’t tortured.—Well, what would make a person believe them to be facts?”

  Madeline said quietly: “Aconite and belladonna, or deadly nightshade.”

  They looked at each other.

  “I believe that’s the explanation,” he told her, still with his attention on the window. “It’s been argued, and I think reasonably, that in a great number of cases the ‘witch’ never left her own house or even her own room. She thought she had attended the Sabbath in the grove. She thought she had been conveyed by magic to the defiled altar and found a demon lover there. She thought so because the two chief ingredients of the ointment were aconite and belladonna. Do you know anything about the effects of poisons like that, rubbed into the skin externally?”

  “My father had a Medical Jurisprudence here,” said Madeline. “I was wondering—”

  “Belladonna, absorbed through the pores of the skin—and under the quicks of the nails—would rapidly produce excitement, then violent hallucinations and delirium, and finally unconsciousness. Add to this the symptoms produced by aconite: mental confusion, dizziness, impaired movement, irregular heart-action, and an end in unconsciousness. A mind steeped in descriptions of Satanist revels (there was a book dealing with them on the table by Victoria Daly’s bed) would do the rest. Yes, that’s it. I think we know now how she ‘attended the Sabbath’ on Lammas Eve.”

  Madeline walked her fingers along the edge of the table. She studied them. Then she nodded.

  “Ye-es. But even suppose that were true, Brian? How does it prove there was anybody else in the house the night she died? Anybody, I mean, aside from Victoria and the vagabond who killed her?”

  “Do you remember how she was dressed when the body was found?”

  “Of course. Night-gown, dressing-gown, and slippers.”

  “Yes—when the body was found. That’s the point. A careful new night-gown, to say nothing of the extra flourish of a dressing-gown, over that sticky, oily, soot-colored ointment? Acute discomfort and unusual marks afterwards? A dressing-gown for the Sabbath? The costume for the Sabbath consisted of the merest rags, which would not impede movement or get in the way of the ointment, when it consisted of any costume at all.