“Nobody ever does know,” I admitted. “Honestly, the very fact that he’s so quiet about it means that he’s got something up his sleeve.”
She gestured. “Oh, I suppose so. But I can’t feel easy about something I don’t know. What good is it just to say everything will be all right?”
She spoke with great intensity. Getting up from the fireside seat, she walked round the room with her shoulders hunched and her hands clasped together as though she were cold.
“When I told him as much as I knew,” she went on, “the only two things that seemed to interest him at all were things that simply made no sense. One was something about a ‘Judas window’”—she sat down again—”and the other was about Uncle Spencer’s best golf suit.”
“Your uncle’s golf suit? What about it?”
“It’s gone,” said Mary Hume.
I blinked. She made the statement as though it ought to convey something. My instructions were to discuss the case if she offered to do so, but here there was nothing to do but apply the spur of silence.
“It ought to have been hanging up in the cupboard, and it wasn’t: though,” said the girl, “I cannot see what the inkpad can have had to do with it, can you?”
I could quite agree with that. If H.M.’s defense in some fashion depended on a Judas window, a golf suit, and an inkpad, it must be a very curious defense indeed.
“That is, the inkpad in the pocket of the suit, that Mr. Fleming was so keen to get. I—I hoped you’d know something. But the fact is that both the suit and the inkpad have gone.—Oh, my God, I didn’t know there was anyone in the house!”
The last words were spoken so low that I barely heard them. She got up, throwing her cigarette into the fire; and an instant later she was a composed, docile hostess turning on her guest a face as blank as a dumpling. I glanced over my shoulder, and saw that Dr. Spencer Hume had come in.
His tread was brisk but subdued, as though it became the situation. Dr. Hume’s round face, with its well-brushed hair showing a parting that must have been a quarter of an inch wide, showed domestic worry as well as sympathy. His rather protuberant eyes—like those in the pictures of his dead brother—passed incuriously over me, and seemed to study the room.
“Hello, my dear,” he said lightly. “Have you seen my eyeglasses anywhere?”
“No, uncle. I’m sure they’re not here.”
Dr. Hume pinched at his chin. He went over and looked at the table, and then on the mantelpiece; finally he stood at a loss, and his glance towards me was more interrogative.
“This is a friend of mine, Uncle Spencer. Mr.—”
“Blake,” I said.
“How do you do,” said Dr. Hume without inflection. “I seem to recognize your face, Mr. Blake. Haven’t we met somewhere before?”
“Yes, your face is familiar too, doctor.”
“Perhaps at the trial this morning,” he suggested. He shook his head, and glanced meaningly at the girl; you would never have recognized in her the vital personality of a few minutes ago. “A bad business, Mr. Blake. Don’t keep Mary too long, will you?”
She spoke quickly. “How is the trial going, Uncle Spencer?”
“As well as can be expected, my dear. Unfortunately”—I was to learn that he had a trick of beginning speeches with a hopeful assertion, and then saying, “Unfortunately,” with knitted brows—”unfortunately, I’m afraid there can be only one verdict. Of course, if Merrivale knows his job properly he’ll have medical evidence there to prove insanity beyond any doubt. Unfortunately—By Jove, yes! I remember where I’ve seen you now, Mr. Blake! I think I noticed you talking to Sir Henry’s secretary in the hall of the Old Bailey?”
“Sir Henry and I have been associates for a good many years, Dr. Hume,” I said truthfully.
He looked interested. “You are not appearing in the case, though?”
“No.”
“H’m, yes. May I ask (strictly between ourselves) what you think of this unfortunate business?”
“Oh, he’ll be acquitted, undoubtedly.”
There was a silence. Only the firelight illumined this room; the day had turned black and windy. What effect I was having in pursuing my instructions to “spread a little mysterious disquiet” I could not tell. But Dr. Hume thoughtlessly took a pair of black-ribboned eyeglasses out of his waistcoat pocket, fitted them on his nose with some care, and looked at me.
“Guilty but insane, you mean?”
“Sane and not guilty.”
“But that’s preposterous! Utterly preposterous! The boy is mad. Why, his evidence about the whisky alone—I beg your pardon; I suppose I really shouldn’t be discussing this. I believe they expect to call me as a witness this afternoon. By the way, I always had an impression that witnesses were herded together and kept under surveillance like jurymen; but I learn that this is so only in some cases. The prosecution does not think this is one of them, considering that the—er—issue is so clear.”
“If you’re a witness for the prosecution, Uncle Spencer,” said the girl, “will they let you say Jimmy is crazy?”
“Probably not, my dear; but I shall manage to suggest it. I owe you that much, at least.” Again he looked at me meaningly. “Now see here, Mr. Blake. I quite appreciate your position. I know you want to give Mary all the comfort you can, and keep her spirits up at a time of great trial. But to encourage false hopes is—confound it, sir, it’s heartless! That’s what I said: heartless, and there’s no other word for it. Just remember, Mary, that your poor old father is lying out there, dead and murdered and under ground; and that will be all the support you need.” He allowed a pause, after which he consulted his watch. “I must be getting on,” he added briskly. “‘Time and tide wait for no man,’ as they say. Er—by the way, Mary, did I understand you to be talking some nonsense about my brown tweed suit, that old suit?”
She was sitting on the fender-seat, her hands clasped round her knees. Now she looked up briefly.
“It was a very good suit, Uncle Spencer. It cost twelve guineas. And you want to get it back, don’t you?”
He regarded her with concern. “Now there, Mary, is a fine example of the way people will catch at trifles at a time of—of bereavement! Good Lord, my dear, why are you so concerned over that suit? I’ve told you I sent it to the cleaner’s. Naturally, afterwards, I was not concerned with an old golf suit when there were so many other things to think of! I simply neglected to call for it, and it’s still at the cleaner’s, so far as I know.”
“Oh.”
“You understand that, do you, my dear?”
“Yes,” she said. “Did you send it to the cleaner’s with the inkpad and the rubber-stamps still in the pocket? And what about the Turkish slippers?”
There would seem nothing in this calculated to disturb anyone, though it was not very intelligible. But Dr. Hume removed his eyeglasses and put them back into his pocket. At the same time I noticed that the draperies at the doorway had stirred, and a man was looking through. The light was not strong enough to see him well: he appeared to be a thin man with white hair and a nondescript face: but one hand was holding to a fold of the curtain, and seemed to be twisting it.
“I suppose I must have done so, my dear,” said Dr. Hume, in such an altered voice that it was like the sudden grip of that hand on the curtain. Yet he was trying to speak lightly. “I shouldn’t trouble about it, if I were you. They are honest people, these cleaners. Well, well, I must be getting along. Er—? Oh, I beg your pardon. This is Dr. Tregannon, a friend of mine.”
The man in the doorway dropped his hand and bowed slightly.
“Dr. Tregannon is a mental specialist,” explained the other, smiling. “Well, I still must be getting along. Good day, Mr. Blake. Don’t stuff up Mary’s head with nonsense, and don’t let her do the same thing to you. Try to get some sleep this afternoon, my dear. I’ll give you some medicine tonight, and it will make you forget all your troubles. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,’ doe
sn’t Shakespeare say? Yes. Quite so. Good day.”
VI—“A Piece of Blue Feather”
THE man in the witness-box of Courtroom Number One, Central Criminal Courts, had a large and confident voice. He was in the middle of a sentence when I came creeping in.
“—and so, of course, I thought of the inkpad. Like ‘precautions to take before the doctor comes,’ you know. Only this was a policeman.”
Mr. Randolph Fleming was a large, burly man with a stiff red mustache which forty years ago would have been remarkable even in the Guards. He had a bearing of the same sort, and was not abashed. With the darkening of the day, the concealed lights under the cornices of the oak paneling threw a theatrical glow up over its white dome. But, crawling in some minutes after proceedings had begun, I thought not so much of a theater as a church.
Evelyn glowered at me, and then whispered excitedly: “Sh-h! He’s just confirmed all Dyer said about finding the body, up to the time Answell swore he had taken a drugged drink; and they found none of the whisky or the soda had been tapped. Sh-h! What was the blonde like?”
I shushed her in reply, for heads were turning towards us, and that mention of an inkpad had caught me. Mr. Randolph Fleming took a deep breath, expanding his chest, and looked round the court with interest. His enormous vitality seemed to enliven counsel. Fleming’s large face was somewhat withered, with a pendulous jowl dominated by the stiff red mustache; his eyelids were wrinkled, and the eyes very sharp. You felt that there should be a monocle in one of them, or some sort of helmet on his stiff brown hair. At intervals in the questioning—when there was a cessation of movement like the clogging of a motion-picture film—he would study the judge, study the barristers, and look up to study the people in the gallery. When he spoke, Fleming’s jowl moved in and out like a bullfrog’s.
Huntley Lawton was examining.
“Explain what you mean about the inkpad, Mr. Fleming.”
“Well, it was like this,” answered the witness, drawing in his jowl as though he were trying to smell the flower in the buttonhole of his pepper-and-salt suit. “When we had looked at the sideboard and seen that the decanter and the siphon were both full, I said to the prisoner, I said”—pause, as though for consideration—“‘Why don’t you be a man and admit you did it? Look at that arrow over there,’ I said. ‘You can see there are fingerprints there; and they’ll be yours, won’t they?’”
“What did he say to that?”
“Nothing. Ab-so-lutely nothing! Consequently, I thought of taking his fingerprints. I’m a practical man; always have been; that’s how I came to think of it. I said to Dyer that if we had an inkpad—you know the sort of thing: one of those little pads that you press rubber stamps on—we could get a good clear set. He said that Dr. Hume had just recently bought some rubber stamps and an inkpad, and that they were upstairs in one of the doctor’s suits. He remembered because he had intended to take the stamps out in case they soiled the pocket, so he offered to go upstairs and fetch—”
“We quite understand, Mr. Fleming. Did you get the inkpad and take the prisoner’s fingerprints?”
The witness, who had been thrusting out his neck with earnestness, seemed ruffled at the interruption.
“No, sir, we did not. That is, not that particular inkpad. Dyer couldn’t find the suit, it seems, or it wasn’t there. But he did manage to fish up an old one from the desk, in violet ink, and we got a set of the prisoner’s fingerprints on a piece of paper.”
“This piece of paper? Show it to the witness, please.”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“Did the prisoner make any objections to this?”
“Yes, a bit.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing much.”
“I repeat, Mr. Fleming: what did he do?”
“Nothing much,” said the witness in a heavy growl. “He caught me off balance. He gave me a sort of shove with his open hand. My feet were off balance, and I went over against the wall and fell down a bit.”
“A sort of shove. I see. What was his manner when he did this: angry?”
“Yes, he was in a devil of a rage all of a sudden. We were trying to hold his arms down so we could get his prints.”
“He gave you a ‘sort of shove’ and you ‘fell down a bit.’ In other words, he struck hard and quickly?”
“He caught me off balance.”
“Just answer the question, please. All of a sudden he struck hard and quickly. Is that so?”
“Yes, or he wouldn’t have caught me off balance.”
“Very well. Now, Mr. Fleming, did you examine the place on the wall of the room, shown in photograph 8, from which the arrow had been taken down?”
“Yes, I went all over it.”
“Did the small staples—the staples that held the arrow to the wall—show signs of having been wrenched out violently, as though the arrow had been suddenly jerked down?”
“Yes, they were all over the floor.”
Counsel consulted his brief. After this little brush, Fleming squared his shoulders, lifted his elbow, and put one fist on the rail of the witness-box. He took a good survey of the court, as though challenging anyone to question his answers; but his forehead was ruffled with small wrinkles. Once, I remember, he happened to look straight into my eyes from across the room. And I wondered, as you always do on these occasions, “What’s that fellow really thinking?”
Or, for that matter, you might wonder what the prisoner was really thinking. He was much more restless this afternoon than he had been this morning. Whenever a man in the dock moves in his chair, you are conscious of it; like a movement on an empty dance-floor such as the dock resembled. A shifting, an unquiet stealing of the hands, seems to come close to you. Often he would glance towards the solicitors’ table—in the direction, it seemed, of the grave and cynically preoccupied Reginald Answell. The prisoner’s eyes looked rather wild and worried; his big shoulders were stooped. Lollypop, H.M.’s secretary, was now at the solicitors’ table, wearing her paper cuffs and poring over a typewritten sheet. Counsel cleared his throat to resume.
“You have told us, Mr. Fleming, that you are a member of several archery societies, and have been an archer for many years?”
“That’s so.”
“So that you could describe yourself as something of an authority on the subject?”
“Yes, I think I could safely say that,” returned the witness, with a grave nod and a bullfrog swell of the throat.
“I want you to look at this arrow and describe it.”
Fleming seemed puzzled. “I don’t know what you want me to say, exactly. It’s the standard type of men’s arrow: red pinewood, twenty-eight inches long, quarter of an inch thick, iron pile or point footed with bullet-tree wood, nock made of horn—” He turned it over in his hands.
“The nock, yes. Will you explain what the nock is?”
“The nock is this little wedge-shaped piece of horn at the end of the arrow. There’s a notch in it—here. That’s how you fit the arrow to the bowstring. Like this.”
He illustrated with a backward gesture, and banged his hand against the post supporting the roof of the witness-box: to his evident surprise and annoyance.
“Could that arrow have been fired?”
“It could not. Out of the question.”
“You would call it definitely impossible?”
“Of course it’s impossible. Besides, the fellow’s fingerprints were the only marks on—”
“I must ask you not to anticipate the evidence, Mr. Fleming. Why is it impossible that the arrow could have been fired?”
“Look at the nock! It’s been bent over and twisted so much that you couldn’t possibly fit it to a string.”
“Was the nock in this condition when you first saw it in the deceased’s body?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Will you just pass that along for the inspection of the jury? Thank you. Having established that the arrow could not have been fired:
in the coating of dust you tell us you observed on the arrow, did you observe anywhere—anywhere—any marks except those which you knew to be fingerprints?”
“I did not.”
“That is all.”
He sat down. While the arrow traveled among the jury, a long and rumbling throat-clearing preceded the rise of H.M. There are sounds and sounds; and this one indicated war. It struck several people, for Lollypop made a quietly fiendish sign of warning, and for some reason held up the typewritten sheet over which she had been poring. Trouble blew into that room as palpably as a wind, but H.M.’s opening was mild enough.
“You’ve told us that on that Saturday night you were goin’ next door to play chess with the deceased.”
“That’s right.” (Fleming’s truculent tone added, “And what of it?”)
“When did the deceased make an appointment with you?”
“About three o'clock in the afternoon.”
“Uh-huh. For what time that night?”
“He said to drop in about a quarter to seven, and we’d have a bite of cold dinner together, since everybody else in the house was out.”
“When Miss Jordan ran over and brought you, you’ve told us you were already on your way to keep that appointment?”
“Yes. I was a bit early. Better early than late.”
“Uh-huh. Now take a dekko—hurrum—just glance at that arrow again. Look at those three feathers. I think I’m right in statin’ that they’re fixed edgeways to the arrow about an inch from the nock-end, and they’re about two and a half inches long?”
“Yes. The size of the feathers varies, but Hume preferred the biggest ones.”
“You notice that the middle feather is torn off pretty sharply about halfway down. Was it like that when you found the body?”
The Judas Window Page 7