The Judas Window

by Carter Dickson

  “Believe me, Miss Hume, we quite appreciate your sincerity in this matter, and your courage in offering this somewhat unusual picture. At the same time, you had no hesitation in posing, I believe, for a dozen of this nature?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Very well; eleven.” Again he waited for a time, pushing some books into an even line on the desk. “All these things to which you have testified, Miss Hume—I take it that you were aware of them at the time of the murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “I believe you have stated that, when you learned of your father’s death, you hurried back from Sussex and arrived at the house on that same night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Quite so,” remarked the other, meticulously pushing another book into line. “Yet you did not mention to the police, then or at any other time, the remarkable circumstances to which you have just testified?”

  “No.”

  “Did you mention them to any other person?”

  “Only to—” Her slight gesture indicated H.M.

  “Are you aware, Miss Hume, that had you given this information to the police, and demonstrated to them that Captain Answell had attempted to blackmail you, it would not have been necessary to bring this photograph into court at all? Or to expose yourself to any such humiliating examination as this must be?”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Oh, you knew that?” inquired Sir Walter, quickening with interest and looking up from the book.

  “Yes, I—I read up on it.”

  “I presume this experience cannot be pleasant for you?”

  “No, it is not,” replied the girl. Her eyes looked strained.

  “Then why did you not mention it, and do the prisoner what good you could without bringing matters to this?”

  “I—”

  “Was it because you believed the prisoner must be guilty; and therefore that these photographs bore no relation to his actual guilt?”

  H.M. got up with painful effort. “Appreciatin’ my learned friend’s consideration, we’d still like to know what line that question takes. Is it now accepted by the Crown—as we’ve been suggesting all along that a mistake was made between Caplon Answell and Captain Answell, and that the deceased got one in attemptin’ to settle the hash of the other?”

  Sir Walter smiled. “Hardly. We accept the photograph as a fact; we accept the suggestion that Captain Answell took the photograph; but we shall be compelled to deny that these two points have any bearing on the matter at hand—the guilt or innocence of the prisoner.”

  At my side, Evelyn nudged me sharply.

  “But surely they don’t dispute that now?” Evelyn asked. “Why, it seems as plain as the sun to me.”

  I told her she was prejudiced. “Storm’s quite sincere: he believes Answell is a common-or-garden variety of murderer, wriggling in front of the facts. He’ll show that the girl is simply inventing lies to cover him: that there were goings-on between Reginald and Mary Hume, but no attempt at blackmail by Reginald: and that they’re simply making a last-minute effort to construct a defense.”

  “Well, it sounds silly to me. Do you believe that?”

  “No; but look at the two women on the jury.”

  Black looks from various directions brought us to silence while the Attorney-General proceeded.

  “Perhaps I did not make myself quite clear,” said Sir Walter. “Let me try again. All the things you tell us here today, you could have told at the very time of the prisoner’s arrest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would they not have been as valuable to him then as my learned friend wishes us to believe they are now?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Yet you did not mention them?”

  “No.”

  “You preferred (please excuse the term. Miss Hume, but I fear this is necessary) you preferred to make a show of yourself here rather than to explain all this before?”

  “That is a little strong, Sir Walter,” interposed the judge sharply. “I must remind you that this is not a court of morals. We have suffered so much in the past from those who appear to have labored under this impression, that I feel constrained to mention it now.”

  The other bowed. “As you wish, my lord. I myself was under the impression that I remained well within the rights of cross-examination....Miss Hume: you tell us that on Friday evening, January 3, Captain Answell left Frawnend for London, in order to see your father on the following day?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the purpose of extracting blackmail money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is it, then, that he did not see your father?”

  The witness opened her mouth, and stopped. Fragile as she looked, she had been holding up well until now.

  “Let me make my question clearer. Several witnesses have testified here—have been pressed to do so, in fact, by my learned friend—that all day Saturday your father received no visitors, no messages, no phone calls, except those which have been indicated. Captain Answell did not come near him or attempt to communicate with him. How do you reconcile this with your statement that Captain Answell rushed off to London for the purpose you have declared?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The other shot out his hand. “I put it to you, Miss Hume, that on Saturday the fourth Captain Answell was not even in London at all.”

  “But that can’t be, I tell you!”

  “Will you accept my suggestion, Miss Hume—which comes from the reports of police officers who have investigated the movements of everyone connected with this affair—that on Friday evening Captain Answell left Frawnend, drove to visit friends in Rochester, and did not arrive in London until nearly midnight on Saturday?”

  “No!”

  “Will you further accept my suggestion that he announced to several persons in Frawnend his intention of going to Rochester: not London?”

  No reply.

  “You will agree at least that if he were in Rochester he could not be in London?”

  “Perhaps he lied to me.”

  “Perhaps he did. Let us take another aspect of it. These photographs, you tell us, were taken a year ago?”

  “About that, maybe a little more.”

  “How long afterwards did you sever your relations with Captain Answell?”

  “Not long; a month or so; not long.”

  “And during the entire course of the time afterwards, has he ever attempted to extort money from you?”

  “No.”

  “Or to use these photographs as a threat in any way whatever?”

  “No. But didn’t you see his face when he ran out of here?”

  “That is not a matter which can come to our attention, Miss Hume. However, I can conjecture why the subject might be embarrassing to him for reasons quite apart from blackmail.—Can’t you?”

  “Do not answer that,” said the judge, putting down his pen. “Counsel has just informed you that the matter cannot come to your attention.” “You have told us, then, that all this time no suggestion of blackmail was ever made by Captain Answell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the nature of an oath?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I suggest to you that this entire account of Captain Answell’s blackmailing activities, and your father’s alleged wish to ‘settle his hash,’ is an unfortunate fabrication from end to end!”

  “No, no, no!”

  Sir Walter contemplated her steadily and gently for a moment; then he shook his head, lifted his shoulders, and sat down.

  If anyone expected H.M. to re-examine, that person was disappointed. With an almost weary air H.M. got up. “In order to establish this business once and for all,” H.M. said very distinctly, “call Dr. Peter Quigley.”

  I was certain that I had heard the name somewhere before, and recently, but the man who went into the witness-box was a stranger. He was a strong-featured Scotsman with a quiet manner but a voice whose every syllable was distinct.
Though he could not have been more than in his early thirties, he gave the impression of being older. H.M. began in his usual offhand manner.

  “What is your full name?”

  “Peter MacDonald Quigley.”

  “Are you a graduate in medicine of Glasgow University, and have you a degree in scientific criminology from the University of Salzburg?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘M. How were you employed durin’ the month of December 10 to January 10, last?”

  “I was employed as assistant to Dr. John Tregannon in Dr. Tregannon’s private nursing home at Thames Ditton, Surrey.”

  “How did you come to be there?”

  “I should explain,” answered Quigley, spacing his words, “that I am an agent of the International Medical Council, employed in England under the Commissioners in Lunacy, for the purpose of investigating rumors or charges which cannot be substantiated—in the ordinary way—against those practicing as mental specialists.”

  “Is the substance of what you are goin’ to tell us contained in your report to the British Medical Council; and is it approved by that body?”

  “It is.”

  “Were you acquainted with the deceased, Avory Hume?”

  “I was.”

  “Can you tell us whether Captain Reginald Answell was attemptin’ to extort blackmail money from the deceased?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, he was.”

  “Yes. Now, will you tell us just what you know about this matter?”

  “On Friday, January 3, last—”

  The witness’s first words were drowned by the stir in the court, and by Evelyn’s whisper. Here was a witness whose credibility they could not shake. With deadly leisureliness, H.M. was taking the Crown’s case to pieces. He let them cross-examine as long as they liked; he did not re-examine; and then he went waddling on. Again there came into my head the swinging lines from the song, which H.M. had quoted, and which seemed less like a refrain than like a formula. “From a find to a check: from a check to a view: from a view to a kill in the morning.”

  “On Friday, January 3, last—”

  XIII—“The Inkpad Is the Key”

  BUT it was two o'clock in the afternoon, with the sensational testimony which had held the court beyond its morning sitting, before H.M., Evelyn, and I sat again at lunch in the upper room of the Milton’s Head Tavern, Wood Street. Nearly all of the pattern in this business lay before us: and yet it did not. H.M., a great Chinese image in the firelight, with a cigar stuck at an angle in his mouth, glowered and pushed his plate away.

  “Well, my fatheads. You see what happened now, don’t you?”

  “Most of it, yes. The links in it, no. And how the blazes did you get on to Quigley?”

  “By sittin’ and thinkin’. Do you know why I took up this case to begin with?”

  “Of course,” said Evelyn quite sincerely. “Because the girl came to you and burst into tears; and you like to see the young folks have a good time.”

  “I expected that,” said H.M. with dignity. “Burn me, that’s the thanks I get from anyone; that’s the view you take of a strong silent man who—bah! Now listen to me, because I mean it,” and evidently he did believe in it so fiendishly that we listened. “I love to be a Corrector of Cussedness. You’ve heard me talk a lot in the past about the blinkin’ awful cussedness of things in general, and I suppose you thought that was only my way of lettin’ off steam. But I meant it. Now, ordinarily, this cussedness is supposed to be funny. You can’t help bein’ amused even when you kick the wastepaper basket all over the room. I mean that the one morning you’ve got an important engagement is the one morning you miss the train. The one time you take your best girl out to dinner is the one time you call for the bill and find you’ve left your wallet at home. But did it ever occur to you to think how that applies to whackingly serious matters too? Just think back over your own life, and see whether most of the important things that happened to you were prompted by anybody’s effort to do malice, or anybody’s effort to do good, or, burn me, by anybody’s effort at all: but simply by the sinful, tearin’ cussedness of things in general.”

  I looked at him with some curiosity. He was smoking furiously—the outburst being produced, I think, by relief. His chief witness had left Sir Walter Storm flat, without a rebuttal in the Attorney-General’s nimble brain.

  “You don’t make a religion of that, do you?” I asked. “For if you think that things in general are all banded together in a conspiracy to administer a celestial kick in the pants, you might as well retire to Dorset and write novels.”

  “Y’see,” said H.M., with ghoulish amusement, “that goes to show that the only sort of cussedness you can imagine is the kind that lands you in the soup. Like the Greek tragedies where the gods get a twist on some poor feller and he’s never got a chance. You want to say, ‘Hey, fair play!—take a few wallops at him if you must, but don’t load the dice so far that the feller can’t even go out in a London fog without cornin’ home with sunstroke.’ No, son. Everything works both ways, especially cussedness. Cussedness got Answell into this affair, and the same sort of workin’ principle handed me the way to get him out of it. The point is that you’ll never explain it rationally—as Walt Storm would like to do. Call the whole process by any fancy name you like: call it destiny or Mansoul or the flexibility of the unwritten Constitution: but it’s still cussedness.

  “Take this case, for instance,” he argued, pointing with his cigar. “As soon as that girl came to me, I saw what must have happened. You probably did too, when you heard the evidence. Jim Answell had got the wrong message and walked straight into the middle of a scheme designed to nobble Our Reginald. But neither Answell nor the Hume gal could realize that at first. They were too close to it; you can’t see a piece of grit in your own eye. They only knew the grit was there. But, when I sort of dragged the whole story out of her a month ago, and showed what must “a’ happened, it was too late—the case was up for trial. If she had gone to ‘em then, they wouldn’t have believed her: just as Walt Storm quiet honestly and sincerely didn’t believe her today.”

  He sniffed.

  “But what the blazes, I ask you, was the girl goin’ to think at first? She hears her father is dead. She comes home. She finds her fiancé alone with him in a space locked up like a strong-room, with his fingerprints on the arrow, and everything pointin’ straight to him. How is she goin’ to suspect a frame-up against him? How is she goin’ to connect it with Our Reginald, unless someone points it out to her?”

  “And that somebody was you?”

  “Sure. That was the position when I first began to sit and think about the case. Of course, it was clear that old Avory Hume himself had arranged that little bit of hocus-pocus with intent to receive Our Reginald. You heard it all. He kept ringin’ up the flat as early as nine in the morning—though right in the middle of Answell’s original statement to the police is the news that Hume knew he wouldn’t arrive until 10:45. He gave the cook and the housemaid an unexpected night off. He ordered the shutters in the study to be closed, so that nothin’ could be seen. He called the butler’s attention to the fact that there was a full decanter of whisky and a full siphon on the sideboard. He bolted the door of the study on the inside, when Answell was alone with him. He sang out the words loud enough for the butler to hear, ‘What’s wrong with you? Have you gone mad?’ That was a blunder. For, if you assume Answell really had drunk hocused whisky, no host in the world would ever naturally say, ‘Have you gone mad?’ when he saw a feller topplin’ into unconsciousness. He’d say, ‘Don’t you feel well?’ or ‘Are you ill?’ or even, ‘Drunk, hey?’

  “Granted, then, that Avory Hume was puttin’ up some game. What did he intend to do? He intended to shut Our Reginald’s mouth; but he didn’t mean to offer money. Do we know anything about Our Reginald that might give an indication? I got it from the gal—as you tell me you overheard it today. Don’t we know, for instance, that there was insanity in Reginald�
�s branch of the family?”

  For some time there had been in my mind a very vivid memory, of voices rising above the sound of feet shuffling down the stairs of the Old Bailey. Reginald Answell and Dr. Hume were descending together; and between them there was thick hypocrisy for the common good, with an edge of malice showing through. Reginald Answell had made the thrust, as though casually: “There is insanity in our family, you know. Nothing much. Only a touch a few generations back—”

  “But enough for the purpose,” commented H.M. “Oh, quite enough. I wonder what those two chaps were thinking about then? Each of them knowin’ the truth; but both of them ruddy well goin’ to keep their mouths shut. In any case, let’s go on. There’s insanity in Reginald’s family. And Avory Hume’s brother is a doctor. And a very rummy kind of drug must have been required for the purpose. And one of Spencer Hume’s closest pals is a Dr. Tregannon, a mental specialist, who’s got a private nursing-home. And it takes two doctors to certify—”

  “And so, as we know, they were going to lock Reginald up as a lunatic,” I said.

  H.M. wrinkled his forehead.

  “Well, there at the start, I was only considerin’ the evidence,” he pointed out, putting the cigar in his mouth and sucking at it in the fashion of a child sucking a peppermint-stick. “But it looked probable that Avory and Spencer Hume had arranged just that game. Let’s see how the hocus-pocus would have worked out. It’s true they made a howlin’ error and got Jim instead of Reginald. But did that affect the details as we found ‘em? Let’s see.

  “Reginald is to be invited to the house. Why might he, with insanity in his family, be presumed to go off his rocker? That’s easy. He was known to be pretty well tied up with Mary Hume; even Jim Answell knew that.”

  “Did he know about the photographs?” inquired Evelyn, with interest.

  “Ho ho,” said H.M. “The photographs. No, he didn’t know it at the time; he knew it afterwards, in clink—because I told him. It caused me an awful lot of trouble. Jim Answell is no posturin’ young hero who’d rather walk fat-headedly to the rope rather than let it be known his gal had been havin’ an affair with another man. But that wasn’t it. When it came to the question of the pictures, he couldn’t—he literally and physically couldn’t—say all that in court, to be blurted out across the world. He couldn’t do it to save his life. Could you?”