John Carr - The Judas Window

'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.'

'H'm. How were you employed durin' the month of December 10th to January 10th, 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 rumours or charges which cannot be substantiated - in the ordinary way - against those practising 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 3rd, 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 3rd, last -'

XIII

'The Ink-pad 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 fat-heads. 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 waste-paper 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 I - 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 coram' 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 quite honestly and sincerely didn't believe her to-day.' 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 finger-prints 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 deceive 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 syphon on the sideboard. He bolted the door of the study on the inside, when Answell was alone with him. He sang put 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 putting 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 to-day. Don't we know, for instance, that there was insanity in Reginald's branch of the family?'