Chapter 4: PART - 4
Murderers had come to the old house on the street called the Rue Morgue! Murderers had come and gone and left behind the dead bodies of an old woman and her daughter. The daughter's body was in the bedroom on the fourth floor. The old woman was lying outside, behind the house, her head almost cut off; but the knife which killed her was up in the bedroom, on the floor. The door and the windows were all firmly closed, locked on the inside; there was no way for anyone to go in or out. Voices had been heard. One voice was speaking in French; the other voice had not spoken even one word that anyone could understand. But there was no one in the room when police arrived.
This much we had learned from the newspapers, my friend Dupin and I. Interested by it, we had gone to look at the house and the bodies. Dupin was now explaining to me what he had learned there.
"That is what we learned from the newspapers. Please remember it; for that much was enough to tell me what I must look for when we were in that house on the Rue Morgue. And I found it!
"Let us now take ourselves again, in our thoughts, to the room where the murders were done. What shall we first look for? The way the murderers escaped. All right. We agree, I am sure, that we do not have to look for anything outside of nature, for anything not having a real form, a body. The killers were not spirits; they were real. They could not go through the walls. Then how did they escape? There is only one way to reason on that subject, and it must lead us to the answer. Let us look, one at a time, at the possible ways to escape. It is clear that the killers were in the room where the daughter was found. From this room they must have escaped. How?
"At first I saw no way out. It had been necessary for the neighbors to break down the door in order to enter the room. There was no other door. The opening above the fireplace is not big enough, near the top, for even a small animal. The murderers therefore must have escaped through one of the windows. This may not seem possible. We must prove that it is possible.
"There are two windows in the room. Both of them, you will remember, are made of two parts; to open the window one must lift up the bottom half. One of these windows is easily seen; the lower part of the other is out of sight behind the big bed. I looked carefully at the
first of these windows. It was firmly closed, fastened, like the door, on the inside. To keep the window closed, to fasten it, someone had put a strong iron nail into the wood at the side of the window in such a way that the window could not be raised. At least it seemed that the nail held the window closed. The nail was easy to see. There it was. And the people who discovered the killings used their greatest strength and could not raise the window. I, too, tried to raise the window and could not.
"I went to the second window and looked behind the bed at the lower half of the window. There was a nail here, too, which held the window closed. Without moving the bed, I tried to open this window also, and again I could not do so.
"I did not stop looking for an answer, however, because I knew that what did not seem possible must be proved to be possible. The killers — or perhaps I should say, the killer, for I am almost certain there was only one — the killer escaped through one of these windows. Of this I felt certain. After the murderer had left the bedroom he could have closed the window from the outside; but he could not have fastened it again on the inside. Yet anyone could see the nails which held the windows tightly closed. This was the fact that stopped the police. How could the murderer put the nail back in its place?"
"Perhaps — perhaps if you pulled out the nail…."
"Yes! That is just what I thought. Two things seemed clear: first, there had to be something wrong with the idea that the nails were holding the windows closed. I didn't know what was wrong. Something was. Second, if it was not the nails which were holding the windows closed, then something else was holding them closed, something hard to see, something hidden.
"I went back to the first window. With great effort I pulled out the nail. Then I again tried to raise the window. It was still firmly closed. This did not surprise me. There had to be a hidden lock, I thought, inside the window. I felt the window carefully with my fingers. Indeed, I found a button which, when I pressed it, opened an inner lock. With almost no effort I raised the window.
"Now I knew that the killer could close the window from outside and the window would lock itself. But there was still the nail. Carefully, I put the nail back into the hole from which I had taken it. Then I pressed the button and tried to raise the window. I could not.The nail also was holding the window closed!"
"Then…then the murderer could not possibly have gone out the window."
"He could not have gone out that window. Therefore, he must have escaped through the other window. The other window was also held closed by a nail. But I knew I must be right. Although no one else had looked carefully at the window behind the bed, I went to it and tried to see whether the two windows were in some way different. The nail in the second window looked the same as the one I had just seen. I moved the bed so that I could look closely. Yes. There was a button here, too. I was so sure I was right that without touching the nail I pressed the button and tried to raise the window. Up it went!
"As the window went up it carried with it the top part of the nail, the head. When I closed the window the head of the nail was again in its place. It looked just as it had looked before. I took the head of the nail in my fingers and it easily came away from the window. I saw that the nail had been broken. But when I put the nail head back in its place, the nail again looked whole.
"What seemed to be not possible we have proved to be possible. The murderer indeed escaped through that window. I could now see, in my mind, what had happened.
"It was a hot summer night. When the murderer first arrived he found that window open, open to let some of the fresh night air come in. Through the open window the murderer went in and came out again. As he came out he closed the window, perhaps with a purpose to do so, perhaps by chance. The special lock inside the window held the window firmly closed. The nail only seemed to be holding it closed. And that which was possible looked not possible."
Dupin had been talking not to me, it seemed, but to himself. His cold eyes seemed to see only what was in his own mind. Now he stopped and looked straight at me. His eyes were now hard and bright. And I understood that using his unusual reasoning power to find the answer to those bloody murders was giving Dupin great pleasure!
At first I could think only of this. Then I said: "Dupin — the windows are on the fourth floor, far above the ground. Even an open window…."
"Yes. That is an interesting question: how did the murderer go from the window down to the ground? Once I was quite certain that the murderer had in fact gone through that window the rest was not so hard to know. And the answer to this question told me still more about who the murderer was!
"When you and I first came to the house on the Rue Morgue we walked around the house. At that time I noted a long, thin metal pole which went from the top of the building to the ground — a lightning rod, put there to carry down to the ground a charge of electricity that might come out of the clouds during a bad summer storm. Here, I thought, is a way for someone to go up or down the wall, and then to go in or out the window. He would have to be very strong. Although certain animals could easily go up the pole, not every man
could do it — only a man with very special strength and special training. This told me more about what the murderer was like. But I still had the question: who?"
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