The Judas Window

by Carter Dickson

  This time the Attorney-General’s pause was of the slightest. Sir Walter Storm was warming up: though he remained fluently impersonal, and still read out quotations with the same painstaking articulation. His only gesture was to move his forefinger slowly at the jury at each word he read. Sir Walter is a tall man, and the sleeve of his black gown flapped a little.

  “At this point, members of the jury, Dyer knocked at the door and asked whether anything was wrong. His employer replied, ‘No, I can deal with this; go away,’—which he did.

  “At 6:30 Miss Amelia Jordan came downstairs, on her way out of the house, and went to the study. She was about to knock at the door when she heard the voice of the prisoner say, ‘Get up! Get up, damn you! ‘Miss Jordan tried the knob of the door, and found that it was bolted on the inside. She then ran down the passage, meeting Dyer, who was just coming into it. She said to him: ‘They are fighting; they are killing each other; go and stop them.’ Dyer said that it might be better to get a policeman. Miss Jordan then said, ‘You are a coward; run next door and fetch Mr. Fleming.’ Dyer suggested that Miss Jordan had better not be left alone in the house at that moment, and that she herself had better go after Mr. Fleming.

  “This she did, finding Mr. Fleming just leaving his house to go out. Mr. Fleming returned with her. They found Dyer returning from the kitchen with a poker, and all three went to the study door. Dyer knocked; after a minute they heard a noise which they correctly believed to be that of the bolt being slowly withdrawn from its socket on the other side of the door. I say ‘correctly,’ members of the jury. That the bolt was indeed withdrawn at this moment, and that it was a stiffly working bolt which required some effort to draw, has repeatedly been acknowledged by the prisoner himself.

  “The prisoner opened the door a few inches. On seeing them, he opened it fully, and said, ‘All right; you may as well come in.’

  “You may or may not think the remark a callous one under the circumstances. The circumstances were that Mr. Hume was lying on the floor between the windows and the desk, in a position you will hear described. An arrow had been driven into his chest, and remained upright in the body. You will hear that arrow identified as one which, when the deceased was last seen alive in the company of the prisoner alone, had been hanging on the wall of the study: this, indeed, has been acknowledged by the prisoner himself.

  “With regard to this arrow, we shall demonstrate by medical evidence that it had been driven into the body with such force and direction that it penetrated the heart and caused instantaneous death.

  “You will hear, on the testimony of expert witnesses, that this arrow could not possibly have been shot or fired—as, that is to say, one might discharge it from a bow—but that it must have been used as a hand-weapon, as one might use a knife.

  “You will hear from police officers that there was on this arrow (which had been hanging for some years against the wall) a coating of dust. This dust had been disturbed at only one place, where there were found clear fingerprints.

  “You will hear, finally, that these fingerprints were those of the prisoner at the bar.

  “Now, what happens when the prisoner opens the door of the study to Miss Jordan, Mr. Fleming, and the butler? He is alone in the room with the dead man, as they establish. Mr. Fleming says to him, ‘Who did it?’ The prisoner replies, ‘I suppose you will say I did it.’ Mr. Fleming says, ‘Well, you have finished him, then; we had better send for the police.’ Still, they proceed to examine the room: discovering the steel shutters still barred on the inside, and the sash-windows locked on the inside as well. The prisoner, it will be our course to demonstrate to you, has been found alone with a murdered man in a room rendered inaccessible in this fashion; and nowhere, we may say literally, can there be shown a crack or crevice for the entrance or exit of any other person. During the time that Mr. Fleming searched the room, the prisoner sat in a chair with what was apparently complete calm (but you must hear this from the witnesses); and smoked a cigarette.”

  Someone coughed.

  It was an inadvertent cough, since every face in the court wore a strain of gravity; but it caused a stir. How most of the people had taken all this I could not tell. Still, such things have an atmosphere; and this atmosphere was sinister. Behind us in the seats of the City Lands Corporation were two women. One was good-looking and wore a leopard-skin coat; the other was plain, not to say ugly, and made up her aristocratic face several times. It is only fair to admit that they did not shift round or laugh or make their voices carry; the metallic whispers reached only us.

  Leopard-Skin said, “Do you know, I met him at a cocktail party once. I say, isn’t it frightfully exciting? Just think, in three weeks he’ll be hanged.”

  Plain-Face said: “Do you find it amusing, darling? I do wish they would give one a comfortable place to sit.”

  Sir Walter Storm leaned against the back of the bench, spreading out his arms along it, and contemplated the jury.

  “Now, members of the jury, just what does the prisoner himself have to say to all this? How does he explain the fact that he, and he alone, could have been with the deceased when Mr. Hume died? How does he explain the presence of his fingerprints on the weapon? How does he explain, a fact which will further be presented to you, that he went to that house armed with a pistol? You will hear in detail the various remarks he made to Mr. Fleming, to Dyer, to Dr. Spencer Hume, who arrived shortly after the discovery of the body.

  “But most of these remarks are also contained in the statement he made to Divisional Detective-lnspector Mottram at 12:15 A.M. on January 5. The prisoner accompanied Inspector Mottram and Sergeant Raye to Dover Street, where he voluntarily made the statement which I now propose to read to you. He said:

  “‘I make this statement voluntarily and of my own free will, having been told that anything I say will be taken down in writing and may be used as evidence.”

  “‘I wish to clear myself. I am absolutely innocent. I arrived in London at 10:45 this morning. The deceased knew I was coming, since my fiancée had written to him saying that I would take the nine o'clock train from Frawnend, in Sussex. At 1:30 Mr. Hume rang me up on the telephone, and asked me to come to his house at six o'clock. He said he wished to settle matters concerning his daughter. I went to his house at 6:10. He greeted me with complete friendliness. We spent a few minutes talking about archery, and I then noticed the three arrows hanging on the wall. He said that you could kill a man with one of those arrows. I said, meaning it as a joke, that I had not come there to kill anybody unless it became absolutely necessary. At this time I am certain that the door was not bolted, and I did not have any kind of weapon on my person.

  “‘I told him I wished to marry Miss Hume, and asked his consent. He asked me if I would have a drink, and I said I would. He poured out two glasses of whisky and soda, giving me one and taking the other himself. Then he said that he would drink my health, and he gave his full consent to my marriage with Miss Hume.’”

  Sir Walter lifted his eyes from the paper. For what seemed a long time he remained looking steadily at the jury. We could not see his face; but the back of his wig was eloquent.

  “The Crown will indeed ask you to believe that the deceased invited him there to ‘settle matters concerning his daughter.’ You will have to decide whether you think this statement reasonable, or probable, on the face of it. He goes there, they fall to talking of archery as soon as the prisoner enters the room, and Mr. Hume in the friendliest possible manner announces that you could kill a man with one of those arrows. You may think this extraordinary conduct, although it allows the prisoner to make his joke about murder. You may think it still more extraordinary that the deceased, having expressed before other witnesses such sentiments towards the prisoner as you will hear, should drink success to the prisoner and approval to the marriage. But what follows?

  “‘I had drunk about half of the whisky and soda when I felt my head going round, and I knew I must be losing consciousness. I tried t
o speak, but could not. I knew a drug must have been put into that drink, but I felt myself falling forward, and the last thing I remember is Mr. Hume saying, “What is wrong with you? Have you gone mad?”

  “‘When I came to myself again I was sitting in the same chair, though I believe I had fallen out of it before. I felt ill. I looked at my watch, and saw it was half-past six. Then I noticed Mr. Hume’s foot on the other side of the desk. He was lying there dead, just as you saw him. I called to him to get up. I could not think what had happened. I went round the room, noticing that one of the arrows had been taken off the wall. I tried the door, and found it was bolted on the inside. I also examined the shutters, and they were locked as well. It occurred to me that possibly I might be suspected of having killed him, so I went to look for the glasses of whisky that Mr. Hume had poured out. I could not find them. The decanter of whisky was full again on the sideboard, and the siphon of soda did not seem to have been used. There were four clean glasses: but two of them may have been the glasses we used; I don’t know.”

  “‘A short time after this I went over and looked at the door again. I then noticed the dust on my hand, as you called my attention to it later. I went back and looked at the arrow. While I was doing so, someone knocked at the door; and I saw there was nothing else to do, so I opened it. The big man you call Fleming came charging in, and the servant behind him carrying a poker, and Miss Jordan hanging about the doorway. That is all I can tell you. I never touched that arrow at any time.’”

  There was a rustle as Sir Walter flipped over the flimsy typewritten sheets, and put them down. That rustle went through the court.

  Leopard-Skin whispered: “Why, he’s as mad as a hatter.”

  Plain-Face said: “Do you really think so, darling? How terribly naive of you. That’s what he wants them to think, I dare say.”

  “Ss-t!”

  “Members of the jury,” continued Sir Walter, spreading out his hands with a gesture of magnanimity and even perplexity, “I shall not offer to comment on that statement, nor on such physical evidence as will be outlined by the witnesses and the police officers. What explanation can be made for these extraordinary statements, what interpretation will be placed on them by the prisoner or by my learned friend, it is not within my province to say. The contention of the Crown is that this man, finding in Avory Hume an angry, unexpected, and determined opposition to a cherished project, quarreled with him and brutally killed an old man who had done him no harm.

  “In conclusion, I need remind you only of this: The matter before you is to determine whether or not the evidence which the Crown will lay before you supports the charge of murder. That is your painful task, and your only task. If you think that the Crown have not proved their case beyond any reasonable doubt, you will have no hesitation in doing your duty. I tell you quite frankly that the Crown can supply no reason for the victim’s sudden antagonism towards the prisoner. But that, I shall submit, is not the point at issue: The point at issue is what effect this antagonism had on the prisoner. The antagonism itself is a fact, and you may think a starting point in the chain of facts we shall lay before you. If, therefore, you think that the case for the Crown has been fairly proved, you will not allow a weakness of character on the part of the prisoner to be turned into a strange link for his defense; and you must have no hesitation in condemning him to the extreme penalty of the law.”

  II—“Look at Photograph Number 5”

  THE Attorney-General sat down with some rustling, and a glass of water was handed up to him from the solicitors’ table below. An officer of the court, who had been tiptoeing past the jury-box with his back bent down so as not to obscure the jury’s view of counsel, straightened up. Mr. Huntley Lawton, Sir Walter’s junior, rose to his feet to examine the first witnesses.

  The first two were official, and were speedily out of the box. Harry Martin Coombe, an official photographer, testified to certain photographs taken in connection with the crime. Lester George Franklin, surveyor to the Borough of Westminster, gave evidence as to his survey of the house, 12 Grosvenor Street, and produced plans of the house. Copies of all these were given to each member of the jury. Mr. Huntley Lawton, whose manner had an innocent pomposity which seemed to go out into a beak of a nose, detained the latter witness.

  “I believe that on January 5th, last, at the request of Detective-Inspector Mottram, you made an examination of the room called the study at number 12 Grosvenor Street?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you find any means of entrance or exit in that room except the door and the windows? That is to say, was there anything in the nature of a hidden entrance?”

  “There was not.”

  “The walls were, in fact, homogeneous?”

  Silence.

  The little judge looked round slightly.

  “Counsel asks you,” said Mr. Justice Bodkin, “whether there were any holes in the walls.”

  It was a soft, even voice: and you awoke to several things. You suddenly became aware of a sort of concentrated common sense, whittling down all things to their real values. You also became aware of absolute mastery, which the whole court felt. The judge, sitting perched out on the edge of his tall chair, kept his head round until the witness said, “Holes, my lord? No holes”; then he blinked at Mr. Lawton with some curiosity; and then the pen in his plump hand continued to travel steadily over his notebook.

  “There was not,” pursued counsel, murmuring a formula, “even a crevice large enough to admit the shaft of an arrow?”

  “No, sir. Nothing of the kind.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was no cross-examination; H.M. only shook his head and humped the shoulders of his gown. He was sitting down there in the same immobile fashion, and you might hope that he was not glaring in his usual malevolent way at the jury.

  “Call Amelia Jordan.”

  They brought Miss Jordan into the witness-box, that narrow roofed-over cubicle which stands in the right angle between the jury-box and the judge’s bench. Ordinarily she must have been a calm and competent woman. But she stumbled in going up the steps to the box, and was on the edge of a bad state of nerves when she took the oath. Whether nerves caused this stumble, or the stumble itself caused the nerves, we could not tell: but she flushed a dull color. Also, she had manifestly been ill. Amelia Jordan was in her early or middle forties. She had the remains of solid, easy good looks, shriveled a little from their pleasantness by illness, but not detracted from by those streamlined chromium spectacles which contrive to suggest that no spectacles are there at all. She had no-nonsense brown hair and no-nonsense blue eyes. Her clothes caused favorable comment from the two women behind us. She was wearing black, I remember, with a black hat whose brim had a peak like a cap.

  “Your name is Flora Amelia Jordan?”

  “Yes.”

  The reply came out in a quick throat-clearing of her voice trying to find its proper level. Without looking at the judge or the jury on either side of her, she fixed her eyes on the soothing figure of Mr. Huntley Lawton, who was putting forth his fullest personality.

  “You were Mr. Hume’s confidential secretary?”

  “Yes. That is—no, I have not been his secretary for a long time. I mean, he had no use for a secretary after he left—That is, I kept house for him. It was better than having a paid housekeeper.”

  “My lord and the jury quite understand,” said counsel, with gentle heartiness. Her last words had come out in a rush, and he was even more soothing. “You were a sort of relation, I take it.”

  “No, no, we were not related. We—”

  “We quite understand, Miss Jordan. How long had you been with him?” “Fourteen years.”

  “You knew him intimately?”

  “Oh, yes, very.”

  The first part of Miss Jordan’s examination was taken up with producing and proving two letters dealing with Mary Hume’s engagement, one from the girl to her father, and one from her father to her. The first of t
hese Miss Jordan had seen; the second, she explained, she had helped to write. Characters emerged. To judge by her letter, Mary Hume was impulsive, flighty, and a little incoherent, just as you would have imagined from the photograph of the blonde with wide-set eyes which had adorned the Daily Express that morning; but with a streak of strong practicality in her nature. Avory Hume showed himself as kindly and cautious, with a taste for preaching in pedantic terms. Above all, one idea seemed to delight him: “I trust I do not anticipate the future too many years when I say that I am certain I shall one day have a grandson.”

  (At this moment the man in the dock went as white as a ghost.)

  “—and I am so certain of this, my dear daughter, that I mean to leave everything I have in trust for the son I know you will have; and I am certain that I can look forward to many years of a happy life in the company of all of you.”

  There was some uneasy coughing. Answell in the dock sat with his head inclined a little forward, regarding his hands on his knees. Mr. Huntley Lawton continued the examination of Amelia Jordan.

  “Do you recall any particular comments Mr. Hume made on the engagement in general?”

  “Yes, he kept saying, ‘This is a very satisfactory business. I could not wish for anything better.’ I always said, ‘But do you know anything about Mr. Answell?’ He said, ‘Yes, he is a fine young man; I knew his mother, and she was very sound.’ Or words to that effect”

  “In other words, he regarded the prospect of the marriage as definitely settled?”

  “Well, we thought so.”

  “We?”

  “The doctor and I. Dr. Spencer Hume. At least I thought so; I can’t speak for anyone else.”

  “Now, Miss Jordan,” said counsel, and paused. “Between December 31 and January 4, did you observe any change in Mr. Hume’s attitude?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “When did you first observe a change?”