The Crooked Hinge

by John Dickson Carr

  “The smallest group in the organization for the worship of Satan was (may I say?) the coven. The coven consisted of thirteen persons, twelve members and a masked leader. To be the Janus-masked leader of such a cotillion must have appealed to our person as a fine dream; but no more than a dream. It was not only that the practical difficulties were too great to be overcome. It was also that for the thing to be interesting—to be shared with a few others—the number of persons concerned must be very small. As the interest was secret, so it must be narrow and personal and individual.

  “This, I emphasize, was no measured affiliation with the powers of evil, supposing any such powers to exist. It had no such high ambition; or, to put it more properly, no such high-falutin. It was not carefully planned. It was not managed by a person of any great intelligence. It was not a cult as we know cults seriously developed. It was simply an idle and greedy liking for such things, a kind of hobby. Lord love you, I don’t suppose any great harm would have been done—if the person had kept away from poisonous drugs to produce hallucinations. If people choose merely to act the fool, if they don’t violate any laws or even any conventions, then it’s no concern of the police. But, when a woman just outside Tunbridge Wells dies from the application of belladonna to the skin (which is exactly what happened eighteen months ago, though we’ve never been able to prove it), then, by thunder, it is a concern of the police! Why do you think Elliot was sent here to begin with? Why do you think he’s been so much concerned with the story of Victoria Daly? Hey?

  “Do you begin to see what somebody has been doing?

  “This person chose a few suitable and sympathetic friends to confide in. There were not many: two or three or four, perhaps. We shall probably never know who they are. This person had many talks with them. Many books were given or loaned. Then, when the friend’s mind was sufficiently stuffed and excited with wild lore, it was time. It was time to inform the friend that there really was a Satanist cult hereabouts, to which the candidate could now be admitted.”

  There was a sharp noise as Dr. Fell struck the ferrule of his stick on the floor. He was impatient and he was annoyed.

  “Of course there never was any such thing. Of course the neophyte never left the house or stirred from one room on the night of the gatherings. Of course it was all a matter of an ointment whose two chief ingredients were aconite and belladonna.

  “And of course, as a rule, the person who instigated this never went near the friend, much less joined any gathering, on the night of an alleged ‘meeting.’ That might have been too dangerous, if the poisonous effects of the ointment were too great. The pleasure lay in spreading this gospel: in sharing accounts of (mythical) adventures: in watching the decay of minds under the effects of the drug and under the effects of what they thought they had seen at the Sabbaths: in short, of combining a degree of rather heavy-witted mental cruelty with the pleasure of letting loose this interest in a safe and narrow circle.”

  Dr. Fell paused. And in the silence that followed Kennet Murray spoke thoughtfully.

  “It reminds me,” he said, “of the mentality which writes poison-pen letters.”

  “You’ve got it,” said Dr. Fell, nodding. “It is almost exactly the same, turned to different and more harmful outlets.”

  “But if you can’t prove the other woman died of poison—the one near Tunbridge Wells, whom I hadn’t heard of—where are you? Has the ‘person’ done anything which is concretely illegal? Victoria Daly didn’t die of poison.”

  “That depends, sir,” observed Inspector Elliot suavely. “You seem to think that poisons aren’t poisons unless they are taken internally. I can tell you different. But that’s not the point now. Dr. Fell was only telling you the secret.”

  “The secret?”

  “This person’s secret,” said Dr. Fell. “In order to preserve that secret, a man was murdered beside the pool in the garden two nights ago.”

  There was another silence, this time of an eerie quality as though everyone had drawn back a little.

  Nathaniel Burrows put one finger inside his collar.

  “This is interesting,” he said. “Very interesting. But at the same time I feel I’ve been brought here under false pretences. I’m a solicitor, not a student of heathen religions. I don’t see that the heathen religions have anything to do with the only thing that matters to me. In the story you outline, there is no connection whatever with the proper succession to the Farnleigh estates______”

  “Oh, yes, there is,” said Dr. Fell.

  He went on:

  “It is, in fact, at the root of the whole matter, as I hope to make you understand in about two seconds.

  “But you,” he looked argumentatively at Page, “you, my friend, asked a little while ago what caused this person to take up such practices. Was it sheer boredom? Was it a kink inherited from childhood, never lost, and increasing from year to year? I’m inclinded to suspect that it was a little of both. In this case all things grow up together, like the poison Atropa bella donna plant in the hedgerow. They are entwined and inseparable.

  “Who might be a person with these instincts, always obliged to repress them? Who is there in whom we can trace the kink, with all the evidence before us? Who can be shown to be the one person, and the only one, with direct access to the toys of both witchcraft and murder? Who did undoubtedly suffer from the boredom of a loveless and miserable marriage, and at the same time suffered from the super-abundant vitality which______”

  Burrows sprang to his feet with a ringing oath of enlightenment.

  And at the same time, in the open door of the library, there was a whispered conference between Knowles and someone outside.

  Knowles’s face was white when he spoke.

  “Excuse me, sir, but they—they tell me her ladyship is not in her room. They say she packed a bag some time ago, and took a car from the garage, and______”

  Dr. Fell nodded.

  “Exactly,” he said. “That’s why we don’t have to hurry to London. Her flight has blown the gaff. And we shall have no difficulty now in obtaining a warrant for the arrest of Lady Farnleigh on a charge of murder.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “OH, COME!” SAID DR. Fell, rapping his stick on the floor and peering round the group with an air of benevolent expostulation. He was both amused and exasperated. “Don’t tell me it surprises you. Don’t tell me it shocks you. You, Miss Dane! Didn’t you know about her all along? Didn’t you know how she hated you?”

  Madeline passed the back of her hand across her forehead. Then she reached out and took Page’s arm.

  “I didn’t know about her,” Madeline said. “I guessed. But I could hardly tell you that outright, could I? I’m afraid you’ve thought me enough of a cat as it is.”

  For Page some readjustment of thought was necessary. So, it appeared, was it necessary for the others. Yet a new notion caught and held in Page’s brain even as he tried to assimilate the first. The thought was:

  This case is not finished.

  Whether it was a slight expression flickering in Dr. Fell’s eyes, a turn of his hand on the stick, a slight quiver even in that mountain, he could not tell. But the impression was there, and Dr. Fell still held the room as though he had not ended with revelation. Somewhere there was an ambush. Somewhere there were guns to be fired on the brain.

  “Go on,” said Murray quietly. “I don’t doubt you; but go on.”

  “Yes,” said Burrows in a vacant way—and sat down.

  The doctor’s big voice sounded sleepily in the quiet library.

  “From the physical evidences,” he continued, “there could hardly have been much doubt about it from the first. The center of all disturbances, psychic and otherwise, was always here. The center of all disturbances was that locked book-closet in the attic. Somebody had been haunting it. Somebody had been juggling with its contents, removing and replacing its books, playing with its trinkets. Somebody, always distinguished for exuberance of action, had made it into a
kind of lair.

  “Now, the notion that some outsider had done this—that some neighbor had crept into the nest—was so fantastic as not to be worth serious consideration. Such a course of action would have been impossible, both psychologically and practically. You do not make a sort of one-man club in the attic of someone else’s house, particularly under the eyes of a staff of curious servants. You do not come and go through that house at night, unseen by servants or anybody else. You do not so casually treat a new padlock watched by the master of the house. For it will be observed that though Miss Dane, for instance”—here there was a broad and cherubic beam on Dr. Fell’s face—“though Miss Dane had once possessed a key to that little room, it was the key to a lock no longer in use.

  “Next question: what ailed Sir John Farnleigh?

  “Just reflect on that, ladies and gentlemen.

  “Why did that restless Puritan, already be-dazed with troubles of his own, never find any solace at home? What else was on his mind? Why does he, on the very night his great inheritance is to be challenged, do nothing but pace the floor and talk of Victoria Daly? Why is he so uneasily concerned with detectives asking ‘folklore’ questions in the vicinity? What is the meaning of his cryptic hints to Miss Dane? In moments of emotion he used to ‘look up at the church, and say that if he were in a position to—’

  “To do what? Speak out against the defamers of the church? Why does he once visit that attic with a dog-whip in his hand; but come down white and sweating, unable to use the whip on the person he finds there?

  “The points in this case are mental ones, as revealing as the physical clues with which I shall deal in a moment; and I can’t do better than to trace them.”

  Dr. Fell paused. He stared heavily and rather sadly at the table. Then he got out his pipe.

  “Let’s take the history of this girl, Molly Bishop: a resolute woman and a fine actress. Patrick Gore said one true thing about her two nights ago. He appears to have shocked most of you by saying that she had never fallen in love with the Farnleigh you knew. He said that she had seized upon and married a ‘projected image’ of the boy she had known all those years before. And so she had. Whereupon she discovered, with what fury we may never know, that it was not the same boy or even the same person.

  “What was the origin of that obsession or kink, even in the brain of a child of seven?

  “It’s not difficult. That’s the age at which our essential tastes begin to be stamped on us by outside impressions. They are never eradicated, even when we think we have forgotten them. To my dying day I shall like pictures of fat old Dutchmen playing chess and smoking churchwarden pipes, because I remember one hanging on the wall of my father’s study when I was a small child. You may like ducks or ghost-stories or motor-mechanisms for the same reason.

  “Well, who was the only person who had idolized the boy John Farnleigh? Who was the only one to defend him? Whom did John Farnleigh take to gipsy-camps (I call the gipsy-camps to your attention as significant), and take with him into the wood? What manner of Satanist lessons did she hear him recite, before she understood them or even before she understood the lessons she learned at Sunday School?

  “And the intervening years? We don’t know how the taste grew and developed in her brain. Except this: that she spent much time among the Farnleighs, for she had enough influence with old and young Sir Dudley to get Knowles his position as butler here.—Didn’t she, Knowles?”

  He peered round.

  From the moment he had made that announcement Knowles had not moved. He was seventy-four. The transparent color of his face, which seemed to show every emotion there, now showed nothing at all. He opened and shut his mouth and nodded in pantomime of reply; but he did not say anything. About him there was only a look of horror.

  “It is probable,” continued Dr. Fell, “that she was borrowing books from that sealed library a long time ago. When she first instituted her private Satanist-cult Elliot has not been able to trace; but it was several years before her marriage. The number of men in the district who have been her lovers is large enough to surprise you. But they cannot or will not say anything about the Satanist business. And that, after all, is the only thing with which we are concerned. It is the thing with which she was most concerned, and it brought about the tragedy. For what happened?

  “After a long and romantic absence, the supposed ‘John Farnleigh’ returned to the supposed home of his fathers. For a short time Molly Bishop was transfigured. Here was her ideal. Here was her preceptor. Him she was determined to marry in spite of hell and himself. And something over a year ago—to be exact, a year and three months—they were married.

  “Oh, Lord, was there ever a worse match?

  “I ask that quite solemnly. You know who and what she thought she was marrying. You know instead the sort of person she did marry. You can guess the silent, cold contempt he had for her; and the frigid politeness he had for her when he learned. You can imagine what she felt for him, and the mask of concerned wifeliness she had to adopt, knowing always that he knew. And between them lay always the polite fiction that neither was aware of the other’s knowledge. For, just as he knew about her, so she as certainly knew after a very short time that he was not the real John Farnleigh. So there together they shared each other’s secret, in unadmitted hate.

  “Why didn’t he ever give her away? It wasn’t merely that she was what he in his Puritan soul condemned first to the pit. It wasn’t merely that he would have taken a whip to her if he had dared. But she was a criminal (make no mistake about that, gentlemen) as well. She was a supplier of more dangerous drugs than heroin or cocaine; and he knew it. She was accessory after the fact in Victoria Daly’s murder; and he knew it. You have heard of his outbursts. You know his thoughts. Why, then, didn’t he ever give her away as he longed to do?

  “Because he was not in a position to do so. Because they held each other’s secret. He didn’t know he was not Sir John Farnleigh; but he feared it. He didn’t know she could prove he was not, and might do so if he provoked her; but he feared it. He didn’t know whether she might suspect; but he feared it. He had not quite the character of sweetness and light which Miss Dane gave him. No, he was not a conscious impostor. His memory was blind and he groped there. Very often he was sure he must be the real Farnleigh. But he would not, in the depths of a natural human soul, challenge fate too far, unless it pinned him in a corner and he had to face it out. For he might be a criminal as well.”

  Nathaniel Burrows jumped to his feet.

  “I cannot put up with this,” he said in a shrill voice. “I refuse to put up with this. Inspector, I call on you to stop this man! He has no right to prejudice an issue not yet decided. As a representative of the law, you have no right to say that my client______”

  “Better sit down, sir,” said Elliot quietly.

  “But______”

  “I said sit down, sir.”

  Madeline was speaking to Dr. Fell.

  “You said something like that earlier tonight,” she reminded him. “Something about his ‘laboring under a sense of crime,’ even though he did not know what it was. His ‘sense of crime,’ that made him a worse Puritan, seems to run all through this; and yet, really and truly, I can’t see what that has to do with it. What’s the explanation?”

  Dr. Fell put the empty pipe in his mouth and drew at it.

  “The explanation,” he answered, “is a crooked hinge, and the white door the hinge supported. It’s the secret of this case. We shall come to it presently.

  “So these two, each having a secret like a dagger in the sleeve, mopped and mowed and pretended in front of the world: even in front of themselves. Victoria Daly died, a victim of the secret witch-cult, only three months after they had been married. We know what Farnleigh must have felt by that time. If I were ever in a position to—had become with him a fetish and a refrain. So long as he was never in a position to speak out, she was safe. For over a year she was safe.

  “But then oc
curred the thunderclap that a claimant to the estate had appeared. Whereupon certain eventualities presented themselves to her as flat and clear and inevitable as a, b, c. Thus:

  “He was not the real heir, as she knew.

  “It seemed probable that the claimant would prove to be the real heir.

  “If the claimant were proved to be the real heir, her husband would be dispossessed.

  “If he were dispossessed, he would no longer have a reason for not speaking out about her, and he would speak out.

  “Therefore he had to die.

  “As simple and certain as that, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Kennet Murray shifted in his chair, taking away the hand with which he had been shading his eyes.

  “One moment, doctor. This was a long-planned crime, then?”

  “No!” said Dr. Fell with great earnestness. “No, no, no! That’s what I want to stress. It was brilliantly planned and executed in desperation on the spur of the moment two nights ago. It was as quickly flung out as the automaton was pushed downstairs.

  “Let me explain. As she believed from the time she had first heard of the claimant (farther back, I suspect, than she would admit), she had nothing to fear just yet. Her husband would fight the claim; she must make him fight, and, ironically, fight for him. Far from wishing to see the hated one ousted, she must clasp him even more tightly than before. It was quite possible that he would win his claim, the law being what it is and the courts being very wary of claimants to an established estate. At all events the law’s delays would give her breathing-space to think.

  “What she did not know, what had been carefully concealed by the other side until two nights ago, was the existence of the fingerprints. Here was solid proof. Here was certainty. With that deadly fingerprint, the whole question could be settled in half an hour. Knowing her husband’s mind, she knew he was coldly honest enough to admit the imposture as soon as it had been proved to him: as soon as he knew in his own soul that he was not John Farnleigh.