The Judas Window
( sir henry merrivale - 8 )
John Dickson Carr
The Judas Window by John Dickson Carr (writing as Carter Dickson).
One of the five best locked room mysteries, as selected by 14 established mystery authors and critics (All But Impossible!, 1981. ed. E. Hoch).
The Case: Avory Hume is found dead with an arrow through his heart—in a study with bolted steel shutters and a heavy door LOCKED FROM THE INSIDE. In the same room James Caplon Answell lies unconscious, his clothes disordered as though from a struggle.
The Attorney for the Defense: That gruff and grumbling old sleuth, Sir Henry Merrivale, who proves himself superb in court—even though his gown does tear with a rending noise as he rises majestically to open the case.
The Action: Before H.M. can begin his defense, Answell, his client, rises and cries out that he is guilty. Sir Henry doesn't believe it. But proof, circumstantial evidence, and the man's own confession point to his guilt. So the great, explosive detective gets down to serious sleuthing and at last startles the crowd in the Old Bailey with a reconstruction of the crime along logical, convincing lines.
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE JUDAS WINDOW
CARTER DICKSON
First published 1938
Published In Penguin Books 1951
Reprinted 1955
PROLOGUE
What Might Have Happened
ON the evening of Saturday, January 4th, a young man who intended to get married went to a house in Grosvenor Street to meet his future father-in-law. There was nothing remarkable about this young man, except that he was a little more wealthy than most. Jimmy Answell was large, - good-natured, and fair-haired. He was just such an easygoing sort as people liked, and there was no malice in him. , His hobby was the reading of murder mysteries, like your ' hobby and mine. He sometimes took too much to drink, and he sometimes made a fool of himself, even as you and I. Finally, as heir to the estate of his late mother, he might be considered a very eligible bachelor indeed.
It will be well to keep these facts in mind during the murder case of the painted arrow.
Here are the facts behind his visit to Number 12 Grosvenor Street. During a Christmas house-party in Sussex, Answell met Mary Hume. Their love affair was sudden and serious. They were mentioning this subject as early as twelve hours after their first meeting, and by New Year's Day they were engaged. On the strength of it Answell's cousin - Captain Reginald, who had introduced them - attempted to touch him for fifty pounds. He gave Reg a cheque for a hundred, and did similar delirious things. Mary wrote the news of their engagement to her father, who wrote back congratulations.
This was gratifying. Mr Avory Hume, a director of the Capital Counties Bank, and formerly manager of the St James's office of that bank, was not a man to take such matters lightly. He might be said to be made up equally of integrity and suspicion, which he had shown since the time he began his career at a mill town in the north. Therefore, when on January 4th Jim Answell was compelled to leave the house-party for one day and go to London on business, he intended to call on his future father-in-law immediately. There was only one thing he could not understand. When Mary saw him off at the station at nine o'clock, he could not understand why her face was so white.
He was thinking about it on the way to Grosvenor Street, at a little past six o'clock in the evening. It had not been necessary for him to get in touch with Avory Hume. The old man had himself rung up Answell's flat that afternoon, and invited him to the house. He had been courteous, but of a freezing formality which Answell vaguely supposed proper to the occasion. 'Considering what I have heard, I thought it best that we should settle matters concerning my daughter. Would six o'clock be convenient?'
It was not exactly hail-fellow-well-met, Answell thought. The old boy might at least have invited him to dinner. Besides, he was late for the appointment: a raw white mist impeded the traffic, and his taxi had to creep along. Remembering Mary's scared face, he wondered. Damn it all, Hume couldn't be such a terror as all that I If he were, his obedient son-in-law was prepared to tell him exactly where he could get off; and then he told himself that this was nonsense. Why should he be nervous? For anyone to be ill at ease about meeting the bride's family, especially in this day and age, came to the edge of comedy.
It was not comedy.
Number 12 Grosvenor Street was just such a solid yellow-sandstone house, with inconvenient window balconies, as he had expected. A conventional butler admitted him to a conventionally solid hall, filled with the ticking of a grandfather clock whose hands pointed to ten minutes past six.
'My - er - name is Answell,' he said. 'Mr Hume is expecting me.' 'Yes, sir. May I have your hat and coat?' At this point, for no reason at all, Jim dropped his hat. It was a bowler, and it bounced clear across to the other side of the hall. He felt himself growing hot round the neckband, especially at the picture of himself standing like a great gawk among the sedate furnishings, and at the calm way in which the butler retrieved his hat. He said the first thing that came into his mind.
'I'll keep my coat on,' blurted Jim Answell. As he made this idiotic remark, his voice sounded almost savage. 'Take me to Mr Hume.'
'Yes, sir. Will you come this way, please?'
The room to which he was taken was at the rear of the house. As they passed the great staircase in the hall, he could see someone looking down at him, and he thought he could make out the not unpleasing face of a woman: in spectacles. This must be Miss Amelia Jordan, of whom Mary had spoken, who had been with her father for many years. He wondered if the old man's brother, Dr Spencer Hume, were also there to give him a formal inspection.
'- to see you, sir,' said the butler.
His guide opened the door of a high room which was furnished like an office, except for the sideboard. There was a modern desk-lamp burning on a modern flat-topped desk in the middle of the room. Another hint of an office (or even a strong-room) was in the two windows: both were shuttered, and the shutters looked like steel. The place had been fashioned out of a tall and rather chilly back-parlour of the last century, having black paper once patterned in gold, and a few grudging chairs. In the wall opposite the door was a white marble mantelpiece, ostentatiously devoid of ornament. The only ornament in the room had been fastened to the wall above this mantelpiece: three target-arrows arranged in the form of a triangle. They had once been painted in different colours, and seemed to have been inscribed with dates; but the three feathers attached to the end of each arrow looked crooked and dry. In the centre of the triangle was a bronzed plaque or medallion.
Mary Hume's father got up from behind the desk with the light on his face. He had evidently just closed a chessboard and put the chess-pieces into their box, which he pushed to one side. Avory Hume was a middle sized, heavy-boned man, vigorous at sixty-odd, with a heavy expression round the eyes. What remained of his greyish-black hair was brushed carefully across a big skull. He wore a grey tweed suit, with a high old-fashioned collar and crooked tie. At first Answell did not like the expression of his rather protuberant eyes, but this changed.
, 'That will be all, Dyer,' he told the butler. 'Go and | bring the car round for Miss Jordan.' His voice was non-committal. The look he turned on his guest was neither I; cordial nor hostile, but merely non-committal as well. “Please sit down. We have a great deal to talk about, I think”
Hume waited until the door had closed. Then he sat back in the chair behind his desk and inspected his hands.
The fingers were thick and blunt-tipped, but well kept, He added suddenly: 'I see you are looking at my trophies.'
Answell, flushing again and feeling that something was very much wrong, drew his glance back
from the arrows on the wall behind his host. The bottom arrow of the triangle, he noted, was a dusty yellowish-brown, and inscribed with the date 1934. 'Are you interested in archery, sir?'
'When I was a boy in the north, we drew a forty-pound bow as boys here play cricket and football. Here I have found it fashionable.' The heavy voice stopped. Avory Hume seemed to consider every idea as though he were walking round it and inspecting it, like a man inspecting a house. 'I am a member of the Royal Toxophilite Society, and of the Woodmen of Kent. Those arrows are trophies of the grand target, or annual wardmote, of the Woodmen of Kent. Whoever first hits the gold -'
'The gold?' repeated his guest, feeling that there had been a sinister emphasis on this. 'The centre of the target. Whoever first hits the gold becomes Master Forester of the society for the-ensuing year. In twelve years I have won it three times. They are still good arrows. You could kill a man with them.'
Answell restrained a desire to stare at him. 'Very useful,' he said. 'But look here, sir, what's up? I didn't come here to steal the spoons, or to murder anyone unless it becomes absolutely necessary. The point is, I want to marry Miss Hume, and - well, what about it?'
'It is an honourable estate,' said Hume, smiling for the first time. 'May I offer you a whisky-and-soda?'
'Thanks, sir,' said the other with relief.
Hume got up and went to the sideboard. He drew the stopper of the decanter, splashed in the soda for two weak drinks, and returned with them.
'May I wish you prosperity?' he went on. His expression changed a little. ' "Mr James Caplon Answell",' he said, repeating his guest's name and looking at him steadily, 'I will be frank with you. That marriage would be advantageous - to both sides, I might say. As you know, I have already given my consent. I can find absolutely nothing against it' - Answell said something to the rim of his glass - 'I had the honour to be acquainted with the late Lady Answell, and I know that your family financial position is sound. Therefore I propose to tell you ... Man, man, what's wrong with you? Have you gone mad?'
Answell saw his host stop with his own glass half-way to his lips, and an expression of consternation on his face. But he saw it strangely. Something seemed to be burning his throat, and along his shoulders, and up into his temples. His head began to whirl, so that vision spun with it. The desk tilted forwards, and he knew he must be falling against it when he tried to rise. His last wild thought before he lost consciousness was a realization that his drink had been doctored; but even this was blotted out by the roaring in his ears.
A line of ideas was unbroken even in pain. 'There-was-something-in-the-whisky' kept swimming round in his mind, as though it were swimming back to life with him.
He sat up, feeling his back cramped in a hard chair. His head seemed to be rising towards the ceiling in long spiralling motions. First, before he could get back his eyesight, he must conquer this sickness at his stomach. It took some time, and the light hurt his eyes. He blinked at it. It was a desk-lamp in a curved green shade.
A moment of complete panic was succeeded by a vague realization of where he was. Then he got it all at once. As Hume had been in the act of giving a blessing to the marriage, something had knocked his guest out. Hume must have put something into the whisky. But that was nonsense. Why should Hume put anything into the whisky? And where in God's name was Hume?
Feeling suddenly that he had got to find Hume, Answell pushed himself to his feet. His head ached violently; and his mouth tasted as though he had been eating mint and slobbering a little. If he could only talk to someone he would be all right. This business was like missing a train, or watching the end of a procession disappear down the end of a street just before you could move. What had happened and how long had he been like this? He still wore his overcoat, which was clumsy when he groped inside after his watch. When he came into this house, it had been ten minutes past six. An unreal-looking watch in his hand now said six-thirty.
He put his hands on the desk and looked down at the floor to steady his swimming eyesight. That was how, glancing along the bottom of the desk to the left, he saw an old-fashioned laced boot and a few inches of tightly drawn sock. He stumbled over the foot when he walked round the side of the desk.
'Get up!' he heard himself saying. 'Get up, damn you!'
And again his own voice, more plaintive: 'Get up off that floor and say something!'
Avory Hume did not get up. He was lying on his left side between the windows and the side of the desk, so close to the desk that his sprawled right hand touched it as though he were trying to embrace it. Answell rolled him over on his back. Something rolled up and over with the body, so that Answell jerked back to avoid being touched by it. He also saw blood. A length of thin, rounded wood rose up to some height from Hume's chest. At the end of the arrow, which had been driven eight inches into Hume's heart, were attached three bedraggled and dusty feathers.
The man was dead, but still quite warm. In death the dour face looked surprised and angry; the high collar and tie were rumpled; there was dust on his hands and a cut on the palm of his right hand.
Trying to get to his feet and jump away at the same time, Answell almost fell over backwards. He felt then -though what it was he did not know until later-some sort of bulge in his hip pocket under the overcoat. It was impossible that Hume should be lying in the middle of his own carpet, skewered like a hen, with blood all over his coat. The desk-lamp shed a business-like light over the blotter, over the light brown carpet, and over the dead man's open mouth.
A very panicky young man looked round the room. In the wall behind him was the door. In the wall to his left were the two shuttered windows. Against the wall to the right stood the sideboard. And on the wall straight ahead of him hung the arrows - but there were only two arrows now. The one which had formed the base of the triangle, inscribed with the date 1934, had been driven through Hume's body. Painted a dingy yellowish-brown, it had three feathers; and half the central feather, coloured blue, had now been torn or broken off.
At the back of his mind he had known there was something wrong with this house from the moment he had walked into it. His interview with Hume had seemed fantastic. The grizzled butler, the great clock ticking in the hall, the woman leaning over the banisters, all seemed a part of a trap or an illusion. Someone had come in here while he was unconscious, and had killed Hume. But in that case where was the murderer now? He obviously was not here; the room was completely bare, without even a cupboard.
Moving back still further, he became aware of a loud and insistent noise somewhere in the region of his hand. It was the ticking of his watch. He put back the watch in his pocket, and went to the door; but he wrenched several times at the knob before he realized that the door was bolted on the inside.
But somebody got out of here I He went over more slowly to the windows. The steel shutters on each window were also locked, secured with a flat steel bar which had been shoved into its socket like a bolt. Then he began to hurry round the room. There was no other entrance. The only thing he had not previously noticed was a two-bar electric heater, set into the grate of the white marble mantelpiece. No way in or out by the chimney, either; the flue was only an inch wide and choked with soot which had not been disturbed. The fire seemed to throw out a blaze of heat, and made him conscious of how warm he was with his overcoat on. Also, he was walking fast. Had Hume killed himself? Had Hume gone mad and staged a weird dance of suicide in order to incriminate someone else: a situation very popular in his favourite form of reading? Nonsense! The only other alternative -
But surely nobody would believe he had done it? Why should he? Besides, he could easily explain: he had been given a drugged drink. It was true he had not seen Hume put anything into the glass; but the whisky bad been doctored somehow and by someone. He could prove it. With a flash of clearness he recalled that he had not even finished his drink. As the first black wave of nausea came over him, he had automatically put down the glass on the floor beside his chair.
He hurried over to look for it now. But the glass was gone, and he could not. find it anywhere in the room. Nor was there any trace of the whisky and soda which Hume had mixed for himself.
By this time in a collected, rather abstract state of fear, he examined the sideboard. On it were a cut-glass decanter of whisky, a syphon of soda-water, and four tumblers. The decanter was full to its stopper: not a drop of soda had been drawn from the syphon; the four glasses were clean, polished, and obviously unused.
He afterwards recalled that at this point he said something aloud, but he had no notion of what it was. He said it to cover his thoughts, as though by speaking rapidly he could prevent himself from thinking. But he had to think. Time was going on: he could still hear the ticking of the watch. If the one door and the two windows were both' locked on the inside, he was the only person who could have killed Hume."It was like his own favourite novels turned to a nightmare. Only, with the police of this material world, they did not believe in your innocence, and they hanged you. Also, it is all very well to talk of ingenious devices by which a door is bolted on the inside by someone who is actually outside the room - but he had seen this door, and he knew better.
He went back to look at it again. It was a good heavy door of oak, fitting so tightly into the frame and against the floor that the floor was scraped where it had swung. There was not even a keyhole for any flummery: a Yale lock had been set to the door, but it was out of order and stuck fast in the 'open' position of the lock. Instead the door was now secured by a long, heavy bolt so stiff from disuse that, when he gave it a tentative wrench in its socket, he found that even for him a powerful pull would be needed to move it at all.
From the bolt he found himself inspecting his own right hand. He opened the palm and studied it again: after which he went over to the light to get a better look. The fingers, the thumb, and the palm were now smudged with1 a greyish dust which felt gritty when he closed his hand. Where could he have got that? He knew for a certainty that he had touched nothing dusty since he had come into this room. Again he felt the bulge in his hip pocket; an unaccustomed bulge; but he did not investigate because he was half afraid to find out what it was. Then, from the hypnotic light of the desk-lamp, his eyes strayed down to the dead man.
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