The Crooked Hinge

by John Dickson Carr

  In the vast silence they heard the tap of Dr. Fell’s stick on the floor, and the wheezing of his breath, as he walked over to Knowles and put his hand on Knowles’s shoulder.

  “I know she didn’t,” he said gently.

  Knowles stared at him with blurred frenzy.

  “Do you mean,” shouted Burrows, “that you’ve been sitting here telling us a pack of fairy-tales just because______”

  “And do you think I like what I’m doing?” asked Dr. Fell. “Do you think I like one word I’ve said or one move I’ve had to make? Everything I told you about the woman and her private witch-cult and her relations with Farnleigh was true. Everything. She inspired the murderer and directed the murder. The only difference is that she did not kill her husband. She did not make the automaton work and she was not the person in the garden. But”—his hand tightened on Knowles’s shoulder—“you know the law. You know how it moves and how it crushes. I’ve set it in motion. And Lady Farnleigh will hang higher than Haman unless you tell us the truth. Do you know who committed the murder?”

  “Of course I know it,” snarled Knowles. “Yah!”

  “And who was the murderer?”

  “That’s an easy one,” said Knowles. “And that silly beggar got everything that was coming to him. The murderer was______”

  * Criminal Investigation: A Practical Textbook for Magistrates, Police Officers, and Lawyers, Adapted from the System de Kriminalistik of Dr. Hans Gross, Professor of Criminology in the University of Prague, by John Adam, M.A., Barrister-at-Law, and J. Collyer Adam, Barrister-at-Law; edited by Normal Kendal, Assistant Commissioner, Criminal Investigation Dept., Metropolitan Police. (London, Sweet & Maxwell, 1934.)

  IV

  Saturday, August 8th

  THE FALL OF A HINGE

  There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If Valentin’s quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot. But all along his train there was nobody who could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than a cat could be a disguised giraffe.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON, The Blue Cross

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Being a letter from Patrick Gore (born John Farnleigh) to Dr. Gideon Fell.

  Outward bound,

  At a certain date.

  MY DEAR DOCTOR,

  Yes, I am the culprit. I alone killed that impostor, and produced all the manifestations which seem to have alarmed you.

  I write you this letter for a number of reasons. First: I retain (however foolishly) a genuine liking and respect for you. Second: You have never done anything better. The way in which you forced me step by step through every room, through every door, and out of the house into flight, rouses my admiration to such an extent that I should like to see whether I have correctly followed your deductions. I pay you the compliment of saying that you are the only person who has ever outwitted me; but then I have never been at my best against schoolmasters. Third: I believe I have found the one really perfect disguise, and, now that it is no longer of use to me, I should rather like to brag about it.

  I shall expect an answer to this letter. By the time you receive it, I and my adored Molly will be in a country which has no extradition-treaty with Great Britain. It is rather a hot country, but then both Molly and I are fond of hot countries. I will drop you a line as to the address when we are settled in our new home.

  One request I should like to make. In the débâcle of horrified talk which will follow our flight, I shall doubtless be presented by newspapers, judges, and other distorters of the public eyesight as a Fiend, a Monster, a Werewolf, and so on. Now, you are quite well aware that I am nothing of the sort. I have no liking for murder; and if I cannot feel any repentance over the death of that swine it is, I hope, because I am not a hypocrite. Certain people are constituted in certain ways, like Molly and myself. If we prefer to make the world a more exciting place with our studies and our day-dreams, I should think it would be an inspiration to Suburbia and a hint towards better things. When, therefore, you hear someone indulging in maudlin speech about the Fiend and his Witch-bride, kindly inform the person that you have had tea with both of us, and perceived no sign of horns or stigmata.

  But now I must tell you my secret, which is also the secret of the case you have been so earnestly investigating. It is a very simple secret, and can be expressed in four words:

  I have no legs.

  I have no legs. Both of them were amputated in April, 1912, after being crushed by that swine in a little affair aboard the Titanic, which I shall describe in a moment. The admirable set of artificial legs I have since worn have not altogether, I fear, disguised this disability. I saw that you noticed my walk—which is not exactly a limp, but is always clumsy and sometimes awkward enough to betray me if I attempt to move rapidly. I cannot, in fact, move rapidly; and with this also I shall deal in a moment.

  Have you ever thought of the remarkable opportunity presented by artificial legs for the purposes of disguise? We have had mummeries of wig and beard and greasepaint; we have had faces altered with clay and figures with padding; we have had the subtlest turns to the subtlest illusion. But, astonishing to state, we have never had the eyes deceived in the simplest way, and there has always been the statement, “This and that a man can do, but there is one thing he cannot disguise: his height.” I beg leave to state that I can make my height anything I please, and that I have been doing so for quite a number of years.

  I am not a tall man. That is, to be strictly accurate, I believe that I should not be a tall man had I any means of estimating what my height would have been. Let us say that, without the interference of my small friend on the Titanic, I should have been about five feet five inches tall. The removal of under-pinning (observe my delicacy) leaves my actual body less than three feet high. Should you doubt this, measure your own height against a wall and observe the proportion taken up by these mysterious appendages we call legs.

  With several sets of limbs made to order—this was first done in the circus—and a good deal of painful practice in the harness, I can make my height what I choose. It is interesting to discover how easily the eye is deceived. Imagine, for example, a small and slender friend of yours appearing before you as a six-footer; your brain would refuse to take it in, and the smallest dexterity in other branches of disguise would render him completely unrecognizable.

  I have been several heights. I have been six-feet-one. And again, in my famous role as “Ahriman,” the fortune-teller, I was almost a dwarf: with such success as completely to deceive the good Mr. Harold Welkyn, when I later appeared before him as Patrick Gore.

  Perhaps it would be best to start with the business aboard the Titanic. Now, when I returned to claim my inheritance the other day, the story I told to the assembled gapers in the library was true—with one slight distortion and one notable omission.

  We changed identities, as I said. The gentle-hearted lad did in reality try to kill me, as I said. But he attempted to do it by strangling, since he was at that time the stronger. This little tragic-comedy was played among the pillars of high tragedy; and you have guessed its background. Its background was one of the great white-painted steel doors, bulkhead doors, which shut a liner into compartments and can swing several hundredweight of ponderous metal against the creeping water. The crumpling and dissolving of its hinges as the ship lurched was, I think, as terrifying a spectacle as I have ever seen; it was like the breaking of all ordered things or the fall of the gates of Gath.

  My friend’s purpose was of no great complexity. After squeezing my windpipe until I was unconscious, he meant to shut me into the flooding compartment and make his escape. I fought back with anything within reach—in this case, a wooden mallet hanging beside the door. How many times I hit him I cannot remember, but the snake-dancer’s son did not even seem to mind it. I was able to dodge, unfortunately for myself, to the out
er side of the door; the snake-dancer’s son threw himself against it, and, with the settling of the ship, the hinges gave. All of me, I need scarcely say, got out of the way of it except my legs.

  It was a time of heroisms, doctor: heroisms never set to music or told afterwards except stammeringly. Who rescued me—whether it was a passenger or one of the crew—I do not know. I recall being picked up like a puppy and carried out to a boat. The snake-dancer’s son, with his blood-stained head and wandering eye, I thought had been left behind to die. That I did not die myself I suppose I must attribute to the salt-water, but it was not a pleasant time for me and I remember nothing of what happened until a week later.

  In my story to the group at Farnleigh Close some nights ago, I told of my reception as “Patrick Gore” by old Boris Yeldritch, since dead, the proprietor of the circus. I explained something of my state of mind. If I did not explain my entire state of mind, you know the reason. Boris easily found a use for me with the circus, since I was (not to put too fine a point on it) a freak with a knack for telling fortunes gained from my studies back home. It was a painful and humiliating time, especially in learning to “walk” by using my hands. I do not dwell on this part of it, for I would not have you think I am asking for pity or sympathy: the notion angers me furiously. I feel like the man in the play. Your liking I will have if I can. Your respect I will have or kill you. But your pity? Damn your impudence!

  It occurs to me, too, that I have been posturing like a tragedian over something which, after all, I had almost forgotten. Let us take matters more amiably and be amused at what we cannot correct. You know my profession: I have been a fortune-teller, a bogus spiritualist and occultist, and an illusionist. I somewhat imprudently hinted at this when I came to Farnleigh Close the other night. Yet I have been so many different persons, and served under so many different aliases as He Who Knows All, that I did not greatly fear detection.

  I cheerfully assure you that the absence of legs has been, in fact, a boon to me in my business. I would not have it otherwise. But the artificial ones always hampered me; and I fear I have never learned to manage them properly. I early learned to move myself about by the use of my hands: with, I venture to think, incredible speed and agility. I need hardly tell you in how many ways this was useful, to me in my business as a fraudulent spiritist medium, and what remarkable effects I was able to produce for my sitters. Reflect on it a while; you will understand.

  Whenever I am up to such tricks, I am in the habit of wearing under my artificial limbs and ordinary trousers close-fitting breeches equipped with leather pads, which serve as my limbs and leave no traces on any sort of ground. Since speed in change has often been of the utmost necessity, I have learned to remove or put back my artificial harness in exactly thirty-five seconds.

  And this, of course, is the painfully simple secret of how I worked the automaton.

  A word concerning it, since history has repeated itself. It not only could have happened before; it did happen before. Are you aware, doctor, that this was how the automaton chessplayer of Kempelen and Maelzel was run?* With the simple assistance of a man like myself inside the box on which the figure sat, they baffled Europe and America for fifty years. When the hoax deceived men of such different temperaments as Napoleon Bonaparte and Phineas Barnum, you need not feel cast down if it deceived you. But it did not, in fact, deceive you; and this you gave me clearly to understand by your hints in the attic.

  I have no doubt that this was the original secret of the Golden Hag in the seventeenth century. Do you see now why the automaton fell into such disrepute when my respected ancestor Thomas Farnleigh, after buying it for a whacking price, learned the truth? He had been told the inner mystery; and, like many others who have learned inner mysteries, he was furious. He thought to get a miracle. Instead he paid for an ingenious trick with which he could not hoax his friends unless he kept a special kind of operator on the premises.

  This is how the whole effect was originally managed: The space inside is big enough, as you have observed, for a person like myself. Once you are inside the box or “couch,” and the door closed, the shutting of the door opens a small panel in the top of the box communicating with the works of the figure. Here—worked by simple mechanical weights—are a dozen rods communicating with the hands and body. Concealed holes by the knees of the automaton, which can be opened from inside, allow the operator to see. That was how Maelzel’s dummy played chess; and how the Golden Hag played the cittern over a hundred years before.

  But, in the case of the hag, one of the best features of the illusion was the device by which the operator was conveyed inside the box unseen. There, I think, is where the inventor of the hag outdid Kempelen. At the beginning of the performance the magician in charge opened the box and let everybody inspect the inside to show that it was empty. How, then, was the operator spirited in?

  I don’t need to tell you. By your remarks in the attic the day after the murder—carefully aimed at me—about the costume worn by the exhibitor, you demonstrated that you knew; and I knew that my goose was done to a cinder.

  The traditional wizard’s costume, as everybody knows, consists of a huge flowing robe covered with hieroglyphics. And the original inventor merely applied a principle later used by the somewhat clumsy Indian fakirs. That is, the robe was used to cover something: in the case of the fakir, a child who climbs into a basket unseen; in the case of the exhibitor of the hag, the operator who slid into the machine while the magician in his great robe fussed with it at the dimming of the lights. I have made use of the trick successfully in many of my own entertainments.

  To which history of my life I must return.

  My most successful role was in London as “Ahriman,” if you can forgive the name of a Zoroastrian devil as applied to an Egyptian. Poor Welkyn, whom you must not suspect of any part in my dirty work, does not know to this day that I was the bearded dwarf of whom he took such good care. He defended me nobly in that libel suit; he believed in my psychic powers; and, when I reappeared as the missing heir, I thought it only fair to make him my legal representative.

  (Magister, that libel suit still tickles my fancy. I hoped fervently that I should be able to give some demonstration of my psychic powers in court. You see, my father had been at school with the judge; and I was prepared to go into a trance in the witness-box and tell his Lordship some realistic things about himself. My father, indeed, had been well-known socially in London during the nineties: which fact is less a tribute to Ahriman’s awesome insight into his sitters’ hearts than to the power of information on which he had to draw. But a weakness for spectacular effect has always been one of my characteristics.)

  It is as Ahriman, then, that my story properly begins.

  I had no notion that “John Farnleigh” was supposed to be alive, much less that he was now Sir John Farnleigh, baronet—until he walked one day into my consulting-room in Half-Moon Street, and told me his troubles. That I did not laugh in the man’s face I simply state as a fact. Monte Cristo himself never dreamed of such a situation. But I think, I say I think, that in applying balm to his fevered mind I contrived to give him some unpleasant days and nights.

  However, the matter of importance is less that I met him than that I met Molly.

  On this subject my views are too fervent to be fashioned into smooth prose. Don’t you see that we are two of a kind? Don’t you see that, once having found each other, Molly and I would have come together from the ends of the earth? It was a love-affair sudden, complete, and blinding; there was burning pitch in it; it was, in the terms of an American pastime called Red Dog, “high, low, jack, and the goddam game.” I must laugh at this, or I shall find myself fashioning incoherence into poetry and curses into endearments. She did not think (when she learned) my crippled body either funny or repulsive. I had not, before her, to sing the refrain of Quasimodo or He Who Gets Slapped. Do not, I urge you, make light of love-affairs whose inspiration is infernal rather than of celestial gentleness. Pl
uto was as true a lover as the lord of Olympus, and helped to fertilize the earth; whereas Jove, poor wretch, could go about only as a swan or a shower of gold; and I thank you for your kind attention on this subject.

  Molly and I planned the whole thing, of course. (Didn’t it strike you that in our thrust-and-parry at the Close we were just a little too much at each other’s throats? That she was a little too quick with flat insults and I with elaborate barbs?)

  The ironical part was that I was the real heir, yet there was nothing we could do about it except what we did. The swine back there had found out about what you call her private witch-cult; he was using it against her as pure, sharp-clawed blackmail to cling to his place; and if he were dislodged he would dislodge her. If I were to regain the estate—as I was resolved to do—and if I were to regain her for my lawful wife so that we could live without furtiveness in our mutual interests—as I was also resolved to do—I had to kill him and make it look like suicide.

  There you have it. Molly could not bring herself to murder: whereas I, with the proper concentration, can bring myself to anything. I say no word of the fact that I owed him something, and when I saw what he had grown into after his pious beginnings I knew what makes Puritans and why they have been wiped from the earth.

  The crime was timed to take place at some time on the night it did: I could not lay my plans any more closely than that. It could not take place before then, because I must not appear at the Close or risk showing myself prematurely; and the fellow could hardly be expected to commit suicide until he knew the weight of evidence against him. You know the admirable opportunity afforded me when he walked into that garden during the comparison of the fingerprints.

  Now, my friend, a word of congratulation to you. You took an impossible crime; and, in order to make Knowles confess, you spun out of sticks and stones and rags and bones a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation of the impossible. Artistically I am glad you did so; your hearers would have felt cheated and outraged without it.