The Judas Window

by Carter Dickson

  “Which brought me up against the revealin’ fact that Amelia Jordan was the only person who was known to be alone in the house with Hume and an unconscious man. And she was alone there for seventeen minutes, until Dyer returned with the car at 6:32.

  “Oho? Think about this woman for a minute. How would she fulfill the specifications for somebody who’d homed into the plot? She’d been livin’ with the Humes for fourteen years: fourteen years, my children, which is certainly enough to qualify her as a member of the family. She was, or seemed to be on the surface, fanatically devoted to Avory. When she got excited—as you noticed she did at the trial—she called him by his first name, which was more than anybody except his own brother had the nerve to do. She was in a position to find out a good deal of what was goin’ on in that house. If Avory had to confide his design to anybody, the likeliest person seemed to be a practical, swift-workin’, hard-workin’ woman who’d been there long enough to grow up in the closed circle of the family honor.

  “Still only theories, d’ye see: so let’s look at what she did durin’ those mysterious seventeen minutes between 6:15 and 6:32. At 6:30 (she says) she came downstairs after having finished packin’ the bags. Here I’ll ask you to follow the testimony she gave at the trial, because it was exactly the same testimony she gave the police a long time ago—when I studied it with uncommon close care, like everybody else’s testimony. She says she packed a small valise for herself and a large suitcase for Uncle Spencer, and down she came.

  “Now right here is an interestin’ bit from Dyer’s testimony which fits into that. Dyer returns and finds her standin’ in front of the study door—in front of the study door, mark’ee. She flies into a wailin’ frenzy, tells him that the fellers inside the study are killing each other, and orders him to run next door after Fleming. At this time, says Dyer, ‘she fell over a big suitcase belonging to Dr. Spencer Hume.’

  “I rather wondered what that suitcase was doin’ back in the passage that leads to the study. The main staircase in that house—you’ve seen it, Ken—is towards the front. It’d mean that she walked downstairs with the bags; and, intendin’ to go to the study to say good-by to Avory, she walked back into the little passage still carryin’ the bags—or at least, you notice, the suitcase. What’s the game? When people come downstairs with a couple of bags, my experience is that they always plump ‘em down at the foot of the stairs where they’ll be convenient for the front door. People don’t go to the trouble of luggin’ ‘em to the back of the house and walkin’ about with them firmly clutched while they say good-by.

  “Right here I began to get a strange, bumin’ sensation at the back of the brain. I began to see things. I wrote a question-mark on my time-schedule opposite Amelia Jordan’s activities. Just what did I know, so far, about the murder? For my certain beliefs as opposed to the police’s, I knew (a) Avory had been killed with an arrow fired from a crossbow through the Judas window, and the crossbow had been missin’ from the shed since that night; (b) Amelia was the only person who had been alone in the house for seventeen minutes; (c) Amelia was found near the study door in the inexplicable lovin’ company of a large suitcase, which nobody seems to have heard of since that time; and then there fell into my obtuseness the fact that (d) Uncle Spencer’s fine tweed suit has been missin’ out of the house since that night.

  “Wow! We even know when that suit was found missin’. Directly after the discovery of the murder, you’ll observe, Randolph Fleming conceives the idea of takin’ the prisoner’s fingerprints. Dyer mentions that there’s an inkpad upstairs in the pocket of Spencer’s suit. Dyer flies up to get it—and the suit’s gone. Dyer can’t understand it, and comes downstairs in a weird state of perplexity. But where was the suit? If everyone hadn’t been rattled off balance by the discovery of a corpse in the study, where’s the first place you’d have thought the suit must be? Hey?”

  There was a silence.

  “I know,” said Evelyn. “You’d know it must have been packed.”

  “Sure,” agreed H.M., spitting out smoke and glowering. “A certain woman had just finished packin’ a bag for the owner of that suit. Uncle Spencer was goin’ into the country for a weekend. Well, what the jumpin’ blazes is the first thing you’d think of shovin’ into a suitcase for a man who was goin’ to do that? A tweed sports-suit, England, my England.

  “Follow this not-too-complicated line of thought. At 6:39, you’ll see by your table, Fleming asks Amelia to go to the hospital and get Spencer. At the very same time and in the very same breath, he tosses out his idea of takin’ the fingerprints. If only, he says, they had an inkpad! Dyer mentions the one in the golf suit, and goes to get it. Mind you, as you’ll see in the table, the woman is still there. She hears this. Why, therefore, don’t she pipe up and say, it’s no good going up and looking for that suit; I’ve got it in the suitcase right out in the passage?’ (Even if she’s taken the inkpad out of the suit before packin’ it, she’d say, ‘Don’t look in the suit; I’ve put the inkpad in such-and-such another place.’) In either event, why don’t she speak up? She can’t have forgotten she packed it so recently; and she’s a severely practical soul who’s learned to think of everything in Avory Hume’s employ. But she says nothin’. Why?

  “You notice somethin’ else. Not only is that suit missin’ at this time—but it continues missin’. It never turns up at all. Add to this the fact that a pair of loud red leather Turkish slippers (noticed because they’re so conspicuous) are also missing; and you begin to see that the whole ruddy suitcase has disappeared.

  “That’s another why. Do we know of anything else that’s vanished as well? We smackin’ well do. A crossbow has also vanished. Let’s see: a stump crossbow, but with a very broad head? It’d be much too big (say) to go into a little valise...but it would fit very neatly into a suitcase, and out of sight.”

  H.M.’s cigar had gone out, and he drew it querulously. Privately, I thought this reconstruction was among the best he had ever done; but I hesitated to pass any compliments, for he would only bask woodenly and delight his soul with more mystification.

  “Go on,” I said. “You didn’t drop any hint to us that Miss Jordan was guilty until your closing speech in court; but you must have your way; so go on.”

  “Assumin’,” said H.M., with as close to a look of pleasure as he could get, “assumin’ for the sake of argument that the crossbow was stowed away in that suitcase, you have good reason why the woman didn’t sing out and tell Dyer the golf suit wasn’t upstairs. She’d hardly tell him to open the suitcase and find the crossbow. She’d hardly open it herself in the presence of anyone else. Quite to the contrary, what would she do? Dyer was goin’ upstairs after the suit. She’d think—you can lay a small wager on this—that as soon as he discovered the absence of the suit it’d be all up. The cat would come out of the bag with a reverberatin’ yowl. Dyer would think of the obvious thing. He’d say, ‘Please, miss, will you open the suitcase and let us have that inkpad.’ Consequently, she would have to get that suitcase out of the house in a blazin’ hurry. Fortunately, she had a magnificent excuse to leave the house: she was going for the doctor. Fleming was in the study, Dyer was upstairs; she could snatch up the suitcase and get away to the car with it without being observed.

  “So far I thought I was treadin’ pretty safe ground. But—”

  “Please wait a bit,” interposed Evelyn, frowning. “There’s one thing I don’t understand here, and I’ve never understood. What did you think was in the suitcase? I mean, aside from Uncle Spencer’s clothes?”

  “Something like this,” said H.M. “One crossbow. One cut-glass decanter. One siphon partly emptied. One bottle of stuff to destroy the smell of whisky. Probably one screwdriver, and certainly two tumblers.”

  “I know. That’s what I mean. Why did Avory Hume or anyone else need to have a lot of stuff carried out of the house or stowed away? Why did they have to have two decanters? Wouldn’t it have been easier to have emptied the drugged whisky out
of the ordinary decanter, rinsed it, and filled it up with ordinary stuff? Wouldn’t it be easier to rinse out the tumblers and put them back? And if you simply put the siphon of soda on a shelf in the pantry, what would be suspicious about that?—I don’t say anything about the crossbow, because that wasn’t Hume’s idea; it was the murderer’s; but what about the rest of it?”

  H.M. gave a ghostly chuckle.

  “Ain’t you forgettin’,” he inquired, “that originally there was nobody in this scheme except Avory and Spencer?”

  “Well?”

  “Consider the little pictures we draw,” said H.M., gesturing with his dead cigar. “Dyer knows nothin’ about the scheme. Neither does Amelia Jordan. The good Reginald Answell will walk in, and be closeted in the study with Avory. Between that time and the time Reginald is discovered as a gibberin’ loony, how can Avory leave the study? Either Dyer or Jordan will be in the house all the time; Jordan will be there while Dyer goes after the car, Dyer will be there when Jordan drives off after Uncle Spencer. You see it now? Avory couldn’t dash out to the kitchen sink, empty the whisky, rinse the decanter, fill it up, and walk back again—with his guest lyin’ unconscious in an open room, and one of his witnesses watchin’ him rinse the decanter. You can’t do that when there’s somebody in the house, particularly someone on the alert for trouble: as Dyer had been warned to be and as the woman certainly was. Similarly, Avory can’t rinse the glasses, wipe ‘em, and put ‘em back. He can’t go shovin’ siphons into pantries. He’s got to lie low in that study. That’s why I said, and emphasized: Only two people were in the scheme to begin with.

  “We’d better deal with that part of the business, and tie it up with my growin’ consciousness that Amelia was guilty. As originally planned, Avory had his sideboard set; the duplicates of all his properties were in the sideboard underneath, ready to be put in the places of the others. Lord love a duck, keep one concrete fact in mind! It’s this: in Avory’s scheme, he had no intention whatever of dealin’ with the police. There wasn’t goin’ to be any fine-tooth-comb search of the room and even the house. He only meant to fool his own little witnesses, his private witnesses, who would not pry at all. All he had to do in the world was simply to shove decanter, siphon, glasses, and mint-extract into the bottom of the sideboard—and lock the sideboard door. Lemme impress on your minds that it was his private witnesses he had to fool, and he mustn’t leave the room. He could then get rid of the stuff after a dazed Reginald had been led away gibberin’.

  “But, when Amelia stepped into the scheme, she had no intention of leavin’ it at that. She was goin’ to kill him. And that meant the police in. And all those incriminatin’ souvenirs couldn’t merely be left in the sideboard; they had to be got out of the house, or the blame wouldn’t be fastened on the wrong feller who was lyin’ unconscious.”

  “I liked her,” said Evelyn suddenly. “Oh, dash it all!—I mean—”

  “Listen,” said H.M.

  He pulled open the drawer of his desk. Taking out one of those terrible blue-bound folders I had seen often enough before (this one had not been there long enough to accumulate dust), he flipped it open.

  “You know she died at St. Bartholomew’s last night,” he said. “You also know she made a statement before she died; the papers have been full enough of it. Here’s a copy. Now listen to a paragraph or two.”

  “...I worked for him for fourteen years. I did more than that; I drudged for him. But I did not mind that, because for a long time I thought I loved him. I thought that when his wife died he would marry me, but he did not. I had had other offers of marriage, too, but I turned them all down, because I thought he would marry me. And he never said a word about it; he said he would always be faithful to his wife’s memory. But there was nothing else to do, so I stayed on at the house.”

  “I knew that in his will he had left me five thousand pounds. It was the only thing in the world I had to look forward to. Then we learned that Mary was going to get married. All of a sudden he told me this mad idea that he was going to change that will, and put every penny he had into trust for a son that was not even born. The horrible part was I suddenly saw he meant it. I could not have stood that, and I did not mean to stand for it.”

  “...of course I knew all about what he and Spencer and Dr. Tregannon were going to do. I knew about it from the beginning, though Avory did not know I knew. He thought women should not be concerned with things like that, and he would not have told me. There is something else I must tell you, and it is that I like Mary very much. I never would have killed Avory and tried to put the blame on Mr. Caplon Answell; this Reginald Answell was blackmailing Mary, and I thought he would get what he deserved if I put the blame on him. How was I to know it was not the right man?”

  “That’s true,” growled H.M. “It’s a good half of the reason why she broke down when she discovered what she’d done.”

  “But she didn’t own up afterwards,” said Evelyn. “She swore there in court that old Avory had been after Jim Answell all the time.”

  “She was protectin’ the family,” said H.M. “Does that sound very rummy to you? No, I think you understand. She was protectin’ the family as well as protectin’ herself.”

  “...I did not say anything to Avory at all, about my knowledge of his scheme, until just a quarter of an hour before I killed him. When Dyer had gone out of the house to get the car, I came downstairs with the bags. I went straight to the study door and knocked, and I said, I know you’ve got him in there, drugged with brudine; but there’s nobody else in the house, so open this door and let me help you.”

  “The odd part of it was that he did not seem terribly surprised. He needed support, too: it was the first crooked thing he had ever done, and when he came to do it he had to lean on me. Well, it was the first crooked thing I had ever done, too; but I was much better at it than he was. That was how I was able to make him do what I told him.”

  “I told him he was a very foolish man to think that when Captain Answell—that is who I thought it was—when Captain Answell woke up, he would not make a terrible fuss and demand to have the house searched. I said Mr. Fleming would be there, and Mr. Fleming would be just the man to insist on having the house searched for glasses and siphons and the other things. He knew that was true, and it frightened him. It is about seven years, I think, since I have been in love with Avory; and right there I hated him.”

  “I said that I had my valise outside, and I was going to the country in a few minutes. I said I would take all the things along, and get rid of them. He agreed to that.”

  “We put the automatic in the man’s pocket—he was lying on the floor then—and we poured some of the stuff down his throat.I was afraid we had choked him. I must admit something else too. Then was when I began to suspect it was really Mr. Caplon Answell after all; because I saw the tailor’s label in both his overcoat and his jacket. But I had gone too far to back out. After we had given the arrow a pull and dragged it down, and cut Avory’s hand to make it look real, we had to put the fingerprints on it. The hardest part was for me to get the arrow out in the hall now without him suspecting anything. This is how I did it. The decanter and glasses and things were all out there already. I pre-tended I heard Dyer coming back, and I ran out of the room holding the arrow by the tip, and cried to him to bolt the door quick. He did it without thinking, because he is an old man and this is not his kind of work.”

  “Then I had to hurry. I had already put the crossbow in the dark hall; I meant to take it back to the shed after I had finished. And the thread was already inside the knob on the door...”

  H.M. tossed the blue-bound sheets on his desk.

  “The worst of it bein’,” he said, “that, just as she had finished her work, she did hear Dyer comn’ back. That was the trouble, I suspected at the time: she hadn’t allowed for the delay in persuadin’ and arguin’ with old Avory, and she cut it too fine. Just as she finished sealin’ up the door again (with Avory Hume’s gloves, which we
found), up comes Dyer. She had no intention of shovin’ away the crossbow in a suitcase. The thing to do was to take it back to the shed, where nobody’d suspect it. But she hadn’t time now. She hadn’t even time to disengage the piece of feather from the windlass. Burn me, what was she goin’ to do with that crossbow? In thirty seconds more, Dyer will be there and see everything.

  “That was what caused me the trouble at the start, and nearly sent me wrong. She had a little valise and a big suitcase, and both of ‘em were back there in the hall. What she intended to do, of course, was put the other preparations in her own valise, disposin’ of ‘em later, and take the crossbow back to the shed: as I tell you. But—Dyer appearin’ too soon—the bow had to go in Spencer’s suitcase since it was too big to fit into the little bag.

  “It made me suspect (at the beginnin’) that Spencer himself must certainly be concerned in the murder. Hey? She’s used his suitcase. When the whole weekend kit suddenly disappears, and later Spencer makes no row about it—”

  “He certainly didn’t,” I said. “On the afternoon of the first day of the trial, he went out of his way to declare he’d sent the golf suit to the cleaner’s.”

  “Well, I assumed that he must be tangled up in the murder,” said H.M. querulously. “And possibly that he and our friend Amelia planned the whole show together: Spencer carefully preparin’ an alibi at the hospital. We’ve now got the reconstruction of the story up to the time Amelia runs out of the house, to drive to St. Praed’s after Spencer; and that seemed almighty likely.