The Judas Window

by Carter Dickson

  His companion I recognized as the young man whom I had seen sitting at the solicitors’ table, and to whom Dyer had given a sign of recognition. He was a good type: lean, with a fine carriage of the shoulders and sharply defined jaws. The tailor had done well by him, and he was absently hitting the edge of his hand on a bowler hat.

  The two took a quick look at each other, and descended with that shuffle-fall which is the march of the Old Bailey. They decided to notice each other’s presence. I wondered whether the atmosphere would be hostile; but, as they spoke, they appeared to decide. The atmosphere between them, palpable and sticky as glue, was hypocrisy.

  Reginald Answell spoke in that tone exclusively reserved for funerals.

  “How is Mary taking it?” he inquired in a hoarse whisper.

  “Pretty badly, I’m afraid,” said the doctor, shaking his head.

  “Too bad!”

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  They descended another step.

  “I didn’t see her in court,” observed Reginald out of the side of his mouth. “Are they calling her as a witness?”

  “The prosecution aren’t,” said Dr. Hume in a curious tone. He looked sideways. “And I notice they’re not calling you?”

  “Oh, no. I’m not concerned in it. The defense aren’t calling me either. I couldn’t do him any good. I only got to the house after he—you know, fainted. Poor old Jim. I thought he was made of stronger stuff than that, big as he is. Mad as a coot, of course.”

  “Believe me, I quite appreciate that,” murmured Dr. Hume, looking quickly over his shoulder; “and I myself should have been only too willing to testify—But there seems to be some doubt on the part of the Crown, and he himself, you know, says—” He stopped. “No hard feelings?”

  “No. Oh, no. There is insanity in the family, you know.”

  They descended nearly the whole flight.

  “Nothing much, of course. Only a touch, a few generations back. I wonder what he’s eating?”

  The doctor was sententious. “Ah, that’s difficult to say. I expect ‘He’s drinking bitter beer alone, the Color-sergeant said.’”

  “Why the hell,” asked the other quietly, “do you bring up the army?”

  They stopped.

  “My dear fellow, it was only in a manner of speaking! Besides, I didn’t know you were any longer connected with the army,” Dr. Hume told him, with an air of concern. They stopped under the great rotunda and dim mural paintings of the Central hall; Dr. Hume became gravely kind. “Now let’s face it. It’s a sad business. I’ve lost a brother myself, you know. But there it is: the world must keep on, and men must work, and women must weep, as they say. So the most sensible thing to do is to get this unpleasant matter off our minds and forget it as soon as possible, eh? Good-by, captain. I’d better not be seen shaking hands with you; it wouldn’t look seemly, under the circumstances.”

  He bustled off.

  For they’ve done with Danny Deever; you can hear the

  Dead March play;

  The regiment’s in column, and they’re marching them away—

  There is something about the atmosphere of this place which impels people to moralize in just the way those lines were going through my head. It was dispelled in a moment by the surprising and welcome spectacle of Lollypop, H.M.’s blonde secretary, pushing her way through the crowd towards us. Evelyn was beginning to say, “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here—” with her very attractive face flushed, when she stopped.

  “Hooray!” said Evelyn, expelling her breath.

  “It’s H.M.,” said Lollypop, rather unnecessarily. “He wants to see you.”

  “Where is he? What’s he doing?”

  “At the moment,” said Lollypop doubtfully, “I should think he was breaking furniture. That’s what he said he was going to do when I saw him last. But by the time you arrive I expect he’ll be eating his lunch. You’re to go to the Milton’s Head Tavern, Wood Street, Cheapside—just round the corner, it is. Oh, dear.”

  H.M.’s extensive knowledge of obscure eating houses is due to his extensive knowledge of obscure people. Everyone seems to know him, and the more disreputable the better. The Milton’s Head, tucked up into a crazy little alley off Wood Street, looked as though it had not had its little-paned windows cleaned since the Great Fire. There was now a great fire burning in the taproom against the raw March cold, and artificial geraniums in the windows emphasized that cold. We were directed upstairs to a private room, where H.M. sat behind an immense pewter tankard and a plate of lamb chops. With a napkin tucked into his collar, he was chewing at the side of one lamb chop in that fashion which popular film tradition attributes to King Henry the Eighth.

  “Ar,” said H.M., opening one eye.

  I waited, to see which way the mood would go.

  “Well,” growled H.M., only half malevolently, “I suppose you’re not goin’ to keep that door open all day? You want me to die of pneumonia?”

  “In the past,” I said, “you’ve got out of some almighty tight places in the face of evidence. Is it possible that you can get out of this one?”

  H.M. put down the lamb chop and opened his eyes wide. Over his wooden face crept an expression of amusement.

  “Ho ho,” he said. “So you think they’ve got the old man licked already, hey?”

  “Not necessarily. H.M., is this fellow guilty?”

  “No,” said H.M.

  “Can you prove it?”

  “I dunno, son. I’m goin’ to have a very good try. It depends on how much of my evidence they’ll admit.”

  There was no raising of defenses. The old man was worried, and almost showed it.

  “Who’s instructing you in the case?”

  He rubbed his hand across his big bald head, and looked sour. “Solicitor? There’s no solicitor.{*} Y’see, I’m the only feller who’d believe him. I got a fancy for lame dogs,” he added apologetically.

  There was a silence.

  “What’s more, if you’re lookin’ for any dramatic last-minute eruption of the hidden witness bustin’ into court and causin’ a row, get it out of your heads. You’d no more cause a row in Balmy Bodkin’s court than you’d find one on a chessboard. It’s all goin’ to be on the table all the time—and that’s how I want it. One quiet move to another. Like chess. Or maybe like hunting. You remember the way the lines swing in John Peel? ‘From a point to a check: from a check to a view: from a view to a kill in the morning.’”

  “Well, good luck to you.”

  “You could help,” roared H.M. suddenly, wishing to get this off his chest.

  “Help?”

  “Now, shut up, dammit!” insisted H.M., before I could say anything. “I’m not playing any games now, or gettin’ you thrown into jail. All I want you to do is take a message, which won’t compromise you any, to one of my witnesses. I can’t do it myself; and I’ve got a suspicion of telephones since I’ve heard what they’ve done in this business.”

  “Which witness?”

  “Mary Hume....Here comes your soup, so eat and keep quiet.”

  The food was excellent. At the end of it H.M.’s tension had relaxed, and he was in such a (comparative) good humor that he had fallen to grousing again. There was a good fire in the dingy grate: H.M., with his feet on the fender and a large cigar drawing well, broached the subject with a scowl.

  “I’m not goin’ to discuss this business with anybody,” he said. “But if there’s anything about it you’d like to know that won’t concern what the defense knows or has had the gumption to find out—meanin’ me—”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn. “Why on earth did you have to bring this business to court? That is, of course, if you could show the police—?”

  “No,” said H.M. “That’s one of the questions you can’t ask.”

  He sniffed, staring at the fire.

  “Well, then,” I suggested, “if you say Answell isn’t the murderer, have you got any explanation of how the real murderer got in and
out of the room?”

  “Burn me, I should hope so, son! Or what kind of a defense do you think I’d have?” asked H.M. plaintively. “Do you think I’d be such an eternal blazin’ fathead as to go chargin’ in without an alternative explanation? I say, it’s a funny thing about that, too. It was the girl herself—this Mary Hume—who put the idea into my head when I was dead stumped. She’s a nice gal. Well, I was sittin’ and thinkin’, and that didn’t seem to do any good; and then she mentioned that the one thing in prison Jim Answell hated most was the Judas window. And that tore it, you see.”

  “Did it? What’s the Judas window? Look here, you’re not going to say there was any hocus-pocus about those steel shutters and locked windows, are you?”

  “No.”

  “What about the door, then? Are they right in saying that the door really was bolted on the inside: and that it was a good solid door, so that the bolt couldn’t be and wasn’t tampered with in any way from the outside?”

  “Sure. They’re quite right in sayin’ all that.”

  We all took a drink of beer. “I won’t say it’s impossible, because you have been known to pull it off before. But if this isn’t some kind of technical evasion—?”

  Some inner irony seemed to appeal to H.M.

  “No, son. I mean exactly what I say. The door really was tight and solid and bolted; and the windows really were tight and solid and bolted. Nobody monkeyed with a fastening to lock or unlock either. Also, you heard the architect say there wasn’t a chink or crevice or rat-hole in the walls anywhere; also true. No, I’m tellin’ you: the murderer got in and out through the Judas window.”

  Evelyn and I looked at each other. We both knew that H.M. was not merely making mysteries: he had discovered something new, and he turned it over and over in his mind with fascination. “The Judas window” had a sinister sound. It suggested all sorts of images without a definite one emerging. You seemed to see a shadowy figure peering in; and that was all.

  “But damn it,” I said, “If all those circumstances are true, there can’t be any such thing! Either there is a window or there isn’t. Unless, again, you mean there was some peculiar feature in the construction of the room, which the architect didn’t spot—?”

  “No, son, that’s the rummy part of it. The room is just like any other room. You’ve got a Judas window in your own room at home; there’s one in this room, and there’s one in every courtroom in the Old Bailey. The trouble is that so few people ever notice it.”

  With some difficulty he hoisted himself to his feet. He went to the window, his cigar fuming, and scowled out at the clutter of roofs.

  “Now, now—” continued H.M. soothingly. “We got work to do. Ken, I want you to take a letter to Mary Hume in Grosvenor Street. Just get an answer yes or no, and come back straightaway. I want you to hear the afternoon siftin’, because they’re first going to put Randolph Fleming in the box, and I’ve got some very searchin’ questions to put to him—about feathers. Fact is, if you follow very closely the testimony that has been given and will be given in court, you’ll see just where I went to get my witnesses, and why.”

  “Any instructions?”

  H.M. took the cigar out of his mouth and contemplated it. “Well...now. Considerin’ that I don’t want you to get into any trouble, no. Just say you’re an associate of mine, and give the note I’ll write for you to Mary Hume. If the little gal wants to talk about the case, go right ahead and talk, because your knowledge is pretty limited. If anyone else tackles you about it, let your tongue rattle freely, and it wouldn’t do any harm to spread an atmosphere of mysterious disquiet. But don’t mention the Judas window.”

  It was all I could get out of him. He called for paper and an envelope; he scribbled a note at the table—and sealed it. The problem seemed to be one of words as well as facts, in those three words of the Judas window. When I went downstairs I had a confused idea of thousands of houses and millions of rooms, piled into the rabbit-warren of London: each respectable and lamplit in its long lines of streets: and yet each containing a Judas window which only a murderer could see.

  V—“Not an Ogre’s Den”

  THE taxi-driver who set me down before number 12 Grosvenor Street eyed the house with interest. It was one of those narrow dun-colored places in whose windows there are nowadays many To Let signs, set up from the street inside a little paved patch of yard with an iron railing round it. A narrow paved passage separated it from the house on the left. I went up the steps to the vestibule, out of a raw wind that was raking Grosvenor Street at the turn of the afternoon. The trim little maid who answered the doorbell began to close the door before the words were out of my mouth.

  “Sorry-sir-can’t-see-Miss-Hume-ill—”

  “Will you tell her I have a message from Sir Henry Merrivale?”

  The maid darted away, and the door wavered. She had neither invited me in nor closed it on me, so I went inside. In the hall a great grandfather clock looked at you with a no-nonsense air, and seemed to rustle rather than tick. By an agitation of draperies on an arch to the left you could follow the maid’s flight. There was a slight throat-clearing inside, and Reginald Answell came out into the hall.

  Seeing him now face to face, an earlier impression was confirmed. His long-jawed and saturnine good-looks seemed to give him a darkish tinge which did not go well with his light hair. Under a long slope of forehead his eyes were a little sunken, but completely straightforward. Though subdued, he was not now bowed down by that thick humility-before-death he had shown on the stairs of the Old Bailey, and I judged that ordinarily he would be engaging enough.

  “You’re from Sir Henry Merrivale?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He lowered his voice and spoke with some intensity. “Look here, old chap: Miss Hume is—not very well. I’ve just come round to see about it. I’m a—well, I’m a friend of the family, and certainly of hers. If you have any message, I could easily take it.”

  “Sorry, but the message is for Miss Hume.”

  He looked at me curiously, and then laughed. “By gad, you lawyers are a suspicious lot! Look here, I really will give her the message, you know. This isn’t an ogre’s den or a—” He stopped.

  “Still, I think it would be best to see her.”

  At the rear of the hallway there was a sound of footsteps descending the stairs quickly. Mary Hume did not look ill. On the contrary, she looked strung up under a sort of hard docility which you could swear was assumed. The newspaper, photograph had been surprisingly accurate. She had wide-spaced blue eyes, a short nose, and a plump chin: which features should not make for beauty, but in her they did. Her blonde hair was parted in the middle and drawn to a knot at the nape of the neck, but without an effect of curtness. She wore half-mourning, and displayed an engagement ring.

  “Did I hear you say you had a message from H.M.?” she asked without inflection.

  “Miss Hume? Yes.”

  Reginald Answell had begun to rummage in a hatrack. His face appeared round the ring of hats with a smile or broad charm.

  “Well, I’ll be pushing off, Mary.”

  “Thanks for everything,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s all right. Fair exchange,” he told her with jocularity. “It’s all agreed, though?”

  “You know me, Reg.”

  During this cryptic little exchange she had spoken in the same tone of affectionate docility. When he had nodded and gone out, closing the front door with considerate care, she took me to the room at the left. It was a quiet drawing-room, with a telephone on a table between the two windows, and a bright fire burning under the marble mantelpiece. She took the envelope, and went close to the fire to break the seal. When she had read the brief message inside, she dropped it carefully into the fire, turning her head from side to side to watch until each corner had burned. Then she looked back at me, and her eyes were shining.

  “Just tell him yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes!—No, please; just a moment; don’t go. Were yo
u in court this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please sit down for a moment. Have a cigarette. In the box there.” She sat down on the broad low seat round the fender, and tucked one leg up under her. The firelight made her hair look more fluffy. “Tell me, was it—pretty awful? How was he?”

  And this time she did not refer to H.M. I said he was behaving very well.

  “I knew he would. Are you on his side? Do have a cigarette, please do. There,” she urged. I offered her the box, and lit one for her. She had very delicate hands; they were trembling a little on the cigarette, which she held with both hands, and she looked up briefly over the match-flame. “Did they prove very much? How would you have felt if you had been on the jury?”

  “Not very much. Besides the opening speech, there were only two witnesses, because the examinations were fairly long. Miss Jordan and Dyer—”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Amelia,” said Mary Hume with practicality, “doesn’t really dislike Jimmy, because she’s too obsessed with love’s young dream; and she’d like him even better if she hadn’t liked my father so much.” She hesitated.

  “I—I’ve never been at the Old Bailey. Tell me, how do they act to the people who go as witnesses? I mean, do they go and yell in their ears, and storm and rave the way they do in the films?”

  “They certainly do not, Miss Hume. Get that idea out of your head!” “Not that it matters, really.” She looked sideways at the fire, and grew more calm. But a long puff of cigarette-smoke blew out against the flames, billowing back again, and she turned round once more. “Look here, tell me the truth before God: he’ll be all right, won’t he?”

  “Miss Hume, you can trust H.M. to take care of him.”

  “I know. I do. You see, I was the one who went to H.M. in the first place. That was a month ago, when Jimmy’s solicitor refused to have anything more to do with the case because he believed Jimmy was lying.

  I—I hadn’t been keeping anything back deliberately,” she explained incomprehensibly, but evidently thinking I knew. “It was only that I didn’t know or guess. At first H.M. said he couldn’t help me, and raved and thundered; and I’m afraid I wept a bit; and then he roared some more and said he’d do it. The trouble is, my evidence may help Jimmy a little; but it won’t get him out of that awful business. And even now I haven’t the remotest idea how H.M. intends to do it.” She paused. “Have you?”