The Crooked Hinge

by John Dickson Carr

  A: I should say a ragged or uneven blade some four or five inches long. There was much laceration of tissue. It is a matter in which it is difficult to speak precisely.

  Q: We quite appreciate that, doctor. I shall presently call evidence to show that there was found in a hedge some ten feet to the left of the deceased a knife with a blade such as you describe. Have you seen the knife to which I refer?

  A: I have.

  Q: In your opinion, could the knife in question have inflicted wounds such as you describe on the throat of the deceased?

  A: In my opinion, it could.

  Q: Finally, doctor, I come to a point which must be put with some care. Mr. Nathaniel Burrows has testified that a moment before the deceased’s fall the deceased was standing at the edge of the pool with his back to the house. Mr. Burrows is unable to say definitely whether or not the deceased was alone at this time, though I have pressed him to do so. Now, in the event—I say in the event—that the deceased was alone, could he have flung a weapon away from him to a distance of say ten feet?

  A: It is well within the physical possibilities.

  Q: Let us suppose that he had a weapon in his right hand. Could this weapon instead have been thrown towards the left?

  A: I cannot venture on a guess as to the convulsions of a dying man. I can only say that such a thing is physically possible.

  After this high-handed carrying of matters, the story of Ernest Wilbertson Knowles left no doubt. Everybody knew Knowles. Everybody knew his likes, his dislikes, his nature. Everybody had seen for decades that there was no guile in him. He told of the view from the window, the man alone in a closed circle of sand, the impossibility of murder.

  Q: But are you satisfied in your own mind that what you saw was the deceased taking his own life?

  A: I am afraid so, sir.

  Q: Then how do you account for the fact that a knife held in the right hand was thrown to the left rather than the right?

  A: I am not sure I can properly describe the gestures the late gentleman made, sir. I thought I could at first, but I have been thinking it over and I am not sure. It was all so rapid that his gestures might have been anything.

  Q: But you did not actually see the knife thrown from him?

  A: Yes, sir, I am under the impression that I did.

  “WOW!” said a voice among the spectators. It sounded rather like Tony Weller speaking out from the gallery. And it was, in fact, Dr. Fell, who throughout the proceedings had remained wheezily asleep with his red face smoking in the heat.

  “I will have silence in this room,” shouted the coroner.

  Cross-examined by Burrows as counsel for the widow, Knowles said that he would not swear to having seen the deceased throw the knife. He had good eyesight, but not such good eyesight as that. And his patent sincerity of manner kept the sympathies of the jury. Knowles admitted that he spoke only from an impression and admitted the (remote) possibility of an error, with which Burrows had to be content.

  There followed to an inevitable end the police evidence, the evidence of the deceased’s movements, to a rounding-up. In that hot shed, with rows of pencils going like spiders’ legs, there was determined for practical purposes the imposture of the dead man. Glances were being cast at Patrick Gore, the real heir. Quick glances. Appraising glances. Hesitant glances. Even friendly glances, under which he remained bland and impassive.

  “Members of the jury,” said the coroner, “there is one more witness to whom I shall ask you to listen, though I am unacquainted with the nature of the witness’s testimony. At the request of Mr. Burrows and at her own request, the witness comes here to make a statement of importance, which I trust will be of assistance to you in your painful duty. I therefore call Miss Madeline Dane.”

  Page sat up.

  There was a puzzled stir in the court, the reporters quickening with interest at Madeline’s very real beauty. What she was doing here Page himself had no idea, but it disturbed him. Way was made for her to come to the witness-chair, where the coroner handed her the Book and she took the oath in a nervous but clear voice. As though for a kind of distant-mourning, she wore dark blue, with a dark blue hat the color of her eyes. Something of the corrugated-iron feeling was removed. The corrugated-iron self-consciousness of the men on the jury relaxed. They did not actually beam on her, but Page felt it was not far off. Even the coroner fussed with consideration. Among the males of the population Madeline was a favorite who had few competitors. A handsome feeling went through the inquest.

  “Again I must insist on silence in this room!” said the coroner. “Now will you give your name, please?”

  “Madeline Elspeth Dane.”

  “Your age?”

  “Th-thirty-five.”

  “Your address, Miss Dane?”

  “Monplaisir, near Frettenden.”

  “Now, Miss Dane,” said the coroner, brisk but gentle, “I believe you wished to make a statement regarding the deceased? What is the nature of the evidence you wish to give?”

  “Yes, I must tell you. Only it’s so difficult to know where to begin.”

  “Perhaps I can help Miss Dane out,” said Burrows, on his feet with perspiring dignity. “Miss Dane, was it______”

  “Mr. Burrows,” snapped the coroner, losing all control of his temper, “you have constantly interrupted these proceedings with a lack of respect for your rights and mine which I cannot and will not tolerate. You are entitled to question the witness when I have done questioning her, and not until then. In the meantime you will remain silent or leave this court. Hrrrr! Ahem. Now, Miss Dane?”

  “Please don’t quarrel.”

  “We are not quarrelling, madam. I am indicating the respect due to this court, a court gathered to determine how the deceased met his death, and a respect which, whatever may be said of it from some sources”—here his eye sought out the reporters—“I have every intention of upholding. Now, Miss Dane?”

  “It’s about Sir John Farnleigh,” said Madeline earnestly, “and whether he was or was not Sir John Farnleigh. I want to explain why he was so anxious to receive the claimant and the claimant’s solicitor; and why he didn’t show them out of the house; and why he was so eager to have the fingerprint taken; oh, and all the things that may help you decide about his death.”

  “Miss Dane, if you merely wish to give an opinion as to whether the deceased was Sir John Farnleigh, I am afraid I must inform you______”

  “No, no, no. I don’t know whether he was. But that’s the whole dreadful thing. You see, he didn’t know himself.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  BY THE STIR IN the dim shed, it was beginning to be felt that this might be the sensation of the day, even if nobody knew what it meant. The coroner cleared his throat, his head turning like an alert marionette’s.

  “Miss Dane, this is not a court of law; it is an inquiry; and therefore I can allow you to give what testimony you like, provided only it has some bearing which will help us. Will you be so good as to explain what you mean?”

  Madeline drew a deep breath.

  “Yes, if you let me explain you’ll see how important it is, Mr. Whitehouse. What is hard to say in front of all of you is how he came to tell me about it. But he had to confide in somebody, you know. He was too fond of Lady Farnleigh to tell her; that was a part of the trouble; and sometimes it worried him so horribly that you may have noticed how ill he looked. And I suppose I’m a safe person to confide in”—she wrinkled her forehead half wryly and half smilingly—“so that’s how it was.”

  “Yes, yes? How what was, Miss Dane?”

  “You’ve let them tell all about the meeting the night before last, to argue over the estate and take the fingerprints,” resumed Madeline, with a probably unconscious thrust. “I was not there, but I heard all about it from a friend of mine who was there. He said what impressed him most was the absolute assurance of both claimants, right up to the taking of the fingerprints and afterwards. He said that the only time poor John—I beg yo
ur pardon: Sir John—smiled at all or looked relieved was when the claimant was talking about that terrible affair on the Titanic, and about being hit with a seaman’s mallet.”

  “Yes; well?”

  “Here is what Sir John told me months ago. After the wreck of the Titanic, as a boy, he woke up in a hospital in New York. But he didn’t know it was New York or about the Titanic. He didn’t know where he was, or how he had got there, or even who he was. He had had concussion of the brain, after getting some knocks on the head accidentally or deliberately in the wreck of the ship, and he was suffering from what they call amnesia. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Perfectly, Miss Dane. Continue.”

  “They told him his clothes and papers had identified him as John Farnleigh. There was a man standing over the bed in the hospital, a man who said he was his mother’s cousin—oh, that’s badly put, but you know what I mean—and told him to go to sleep and get well.

  “But you know what boys of that age are. He was very frightened and horribly worried. For he didn’t know anything about himself. And worst of all, like boys of that age, he didn’t dare tell anybody for fear he might be mad or there might be something wrong with him or they might put him in gaol.

  “That’s how it seemed to him. He hadn’t any reason to think he wasn’t this John Farnleigh. He hadn’t any reason to believe they weren’t telling the truth in all they told him about himself. He had a hazy recollection of shouting or confusion, something to do with open air or cold; but that was all he could remember. So he never spoke a word about it to anybody. He pretended to his cousin—a Mr. Renwick from Colorado—that he remembered everything. Mr. Renwick never suspected.

  “He nursed that little secret for years. He kept reading his diary, and trying to bring things back. He told me that sometimes he would sit for hours with his hands pressed to his head, concentrating. Sometimes he would think he remembered a face or an event faintly, like something you see under water. Then again it would seem to him that there was something wrong. The only thing he ever brought out of it, as a phrase rather than an image, had to do with a hinge: a crooked hinge.”

  Under the iron roof the spectators sat like dummies. No papers rustled. Nobody whispered. Page felt his collar damp and his heart ticking like a watch. Smoky sunlight came through the windows, and Madeline winked the corner of her eye in it.

  “A crooked hinge, Miss Dane?”

  “Yes. I don’t know what he meant. Neither did he.”

  “Go on, please.”

  “In those early years in Colorado he was afraid they would put him in gaol if there should be anything wrong and they found out about it. Handwriting was no good, because two of his fingers were nearly crushed in the wreck and he could never hold a pen properly. He was afraid to write home; that’s why he never did. He was even afraid to go to a doctor and ask if he might be mad, for fear the doctor should tell on him.

  “Of course, in time it got fainter. He convinced himself that it was an unfortunate thing which happens to some people, and so on. There was the War and all that. He consulted a mental specialist who told him after a lot of psychological tests that he really was John Farnleigh, and that he had nothing to worry about. But he never lost the horror of those years, and even when he thought he had forgotten it he dreamed about it.

  “Then it was all revived when poor Dudley died and he inherited the title and estate. He had to come to England. He was—how can I say this?—academically interested. He thought at long last he must remember. And he didn’t. You all know how he used to go wandering round like a ghost, a poor old ghost who didn’t even know whether he was a ghost. You know how jumpy he was. He loved it here. He loved every acre and yard of it. Mind you, he didn’t honestly doubt he was John Farnleigh. But he had to KNOW.”

  Madeline bit her lip.

  Her luminous, now rather hard eyes wandered among the spectators.

  “I used to talk to him and try to make him quiet. I would ask him not to think too much; then perhaps he would remember. I used to arrange it so that I reminded him of things, and made him think he had remembered them for himself. Maybe it would be a gramophone playing, ‘To thee, beautiful lady,’ far away in the evening; and he would remember how we danced to it as children. Maybe it would be a detail of the house. In the library there’s a kind of cupboard with shelves of books—built into the wall by the windows, you know—and instead of being just a cupboard, it’s got a door that used to open out into the garden. It still will open if you find the right catch. I persuaded him to find the right catch. He said he slept well for nights after that.

  “But he still had to know. He said he wouldn’t mind so much if he could only know, even if it turned out he was not John Farnleigh. He said he wasn’t a wild adolescent boy any longer. He said he could face it quietly; and it would be the greatest thing in the world just to know the truth.

  “He went to London and saw two more doctors; I know that. You can see how worried he was when he even went to a person who was supposed to have psychic powers—a horrible little man called Ahriman, in Half-Moon Street—who was all the rage then. He took a crowd of us along under pretext of having our fortunes told, and pretended to laugh at it. But he told this fortune-teller all about himself.

  “Still he kept wandering about the place. He used to say, ‘Well, I am a good steward’; and you know he was. He used to go into the church a lot, too; he liked the hymns best; and sometimes, when they played, ‘Abide with Me’—anyway, when he was near the church, and looking up at the walls, he used to say that if ever he were in a position to______”

  Madeline paused.

  Her breast rose with a deep breath. Her eyes were fixed on the front rows, and her fingers opened wide on the arms of the chair. All passion and mysticism seemed in her then, as deep as roots and as strong as hearts; yet she was, after all, only a woman making what defense she could in a hot and stuffy shed.

  “I’m so sorry,” she blurted. “Perhaps it is better not to talk about that; it does not concern us, anyhow. I’m sorry if I’m taking up your time with things that don’t matter______”

  “I will have silence in here,” said the coroner, flinging round his head at the rustle that grew. “I am not sure I think you are taking up our time with things that do not matter. Have you anything else to tell the jury?”

  “Yes,” said Madeline, turning and looking at them. “One other thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “When I heard about the claimant to the estate and his lawyer, I knew what John had been thinking. You know now what was in his mind all along. You can follow every step of his thoughts and every word he said. You now know why he smiled, and why the relief was almost too much, when he heard the claimant’s story about the seaman’s mallet and the blows on the head in the wreck of the Titanic. For he was the one who suffered from concussion of the brain and a loss of memory that lasted for twenty-five years.

  “Please wait! I don’t say the claimant’s story isn’t true. I don’t know, or profess to decide. But Sir John—the one you call the deceased as though he had never been alive—must have felt a mighty relief when he heard something that in his eyes couldn’t possibly have been true. He saw his dream being fulfilled at last, that his identity should be proved. You know now why he welcomed that fingerprint test. You know why he was the most eager of all. You know why he could hardly wait, why he was all wire and nerves, to learn the result.”

  Madeline grasped the arms of the chair.

  “Please. Perhaps I’m putting all this stupidly, but I hope you understand me. To prove things one way or the other was the one end of his life. If he were Sir John Farnleigh, he would be happy to the end of his life. If he were not, it wouldn’t matter so much once he really knew. Like winning a football pool, you know. You put your sixpence on it. You think perhaps you’ve won thousands and thousands of pounds. You’re almost sure of it, you could swear it’s true. But you can’t be sure until the telegram comes. If it doesn’t com
e, you think, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and let it go. Well, that’s John Farnleigh. This was his football pool. Acres and acres of things he loved: they were his football pool. Respect and honor and sound sleep at night forever: they were his football pool. The end of torture and the beginning of the future: they were his football pool. He believed now that he had won it. And now people are trying to tell you he killed himself. Don’t you think it for a minute. You know better. Can you believe, dare you believe, that he’d have deliberately cut his throat half an hour before he could learn the result?”

  She put her hand over her eyes.

  There was a genuine uproar, which the coroner put down. Mr. Harold Welkyn was on his feet. Page saw that his shiny face was slightly pale, and he spoke as though he had been running.

  “Mr. Coroner. As a piece of special pleading, all this is no doubt very interesting,” he said acidly. “I shall not be impertinent enough to remind you of your duties. I shall not be impertinent enough to point out that no question has been asked in the last ten minutes. But if this lady has completely finished her remarkable statement, which if true tends to show that the deceased was an even greater impostor than we believed, I shall ask leave, as counsel for the real Sir John Farnleigh, to cross-examine.”

  “Mr. Welkyn,” said the coroner, flinging round his head again, “you will ask questions when I give you leave and you will remain silent until then. Now, Miss Dane______”

  “Please let him ask questions,” said Madeline. “I remember seeing him at the house of that horrible little Egyptian, Ahriman, in Half-Moon Street.”

  Mr. Welkyn got out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

  And the questions were asked. And the coroner summed up. And Inspector Elliot went into another room and privately danced the saraband. And the jury, throwing the case straight to the police to handle, brought in a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ANDREW MACANDREW ELLIOT LIFTED a glass of very passable hock and inspected that.