Tom Charke’s death and its investigation become a locked-room mystery whose apparent proof of suicide is overturned only after another crime exposes the house’s hidden means of entry. The inquiry’s failure to identify the concealed window leaves the case open to suspicion; Doctor Bryerly’s later inspection finally supplies the physical explanation that the original search missed.

The Inquest and the Sealed Room

At the inquest, Mr. Manwaring of Wail Forest was the only juryman who seemed to think that Charke might have died by another person’s hand. The evidence initially supported the conclusion that he had taken his own life: the window was fastened from within, the room was high above the ground, and no ladder could reach it. The door, too, was locked on the inside with its key in the lock. It opened onto an enclosed court that appeared inaccessible, and investigators found no sign of entry.

That arrangement made the room seem hermetically sealed. The chimney was also ruled out: an iron bar crossed the flue near its top. Though the ground beneath the window was moist, investigators found no footprints. When the scandal grew louder months later, the wainscoting was removed at the direction of Silas Ruthyn, but the search revealed no concealed access. The inquiry could identify no ordinary route into the room, and the apparent impossibility of entry became the case’s central contradiction.

Doubts and the House’s Recollection

The suicide verdict did not extinguish suspicion. Charke had reportedly gone to bed drunk and had been heard singing and making noise, circumstances that seemed inconsistent to some with a deliberate suicide. His betting memorandum book was missing, although his keys and valuable trinkets remained. These details clouded an otherwise conclusive-looking scene without, at the time, establishing who else might have been involved.

The room later returns as a physical memory embedded in Bartram-Haugh. After arriving at the decaying mansion, Maud explores its locked, little-used rooms with Milly. High hatches interrupt the corridors and galleries, and a steep back stair leads them to a chamber overlooking a neglected inner quadrangle. Its stripped wall-panelling recalls the earlier search for a second door. Maud recognizes it as the room where Charke died and explains that the panelling had been removed to look for a murderer’s hidden entrance. The house’s architecture thus preserves the unresolved question long after the inquest has closed.

A Second Locked-Room Attempt

The old case acquires new meaning when Maud is confined in a bedroom at Bartram-Haugh. She finds iron bars fixed across its window and the windows screwed shut, precautions that make the room a prison. Later, Dudley Ruthyn enters by a window that swings open with its bars as one section. He descends on a rope, and Maud sees him work at the window with a specially altered hammer. The room’s supposed security proves deceptive: what appears to be a solid barrier can be opened through a concealed mechanism.

The resemblance to Charke’s room is not merely atmospheric. Doctor Bryerly subsequently examines the windows in the room where Charke had slept and finds that one has powerful steel hinges, craftily sunk into the frame and concealed in the timber. An iron pin secures it from outside; removing the pin allows the window to swing open. It is the same room in which Maud had been placed, and the concealed hinged window provides the missing means of entry. The later evidence resolves the earlier puzzle by showing that the original investigators mistook a hidden opening for an impossible one.

Resolution and Aftermath

The investigation’s resolution comes after Dickon Hawkes is arrested, nearly a year after the events at Bartram-Haugh, for an older crime committed in Lancashire. After his conviction, he discloses what he knows about the previously unsuspected death of the Frenchwoman. Her body is found buried in Bartram-Haugh’s inner court and, after a legal inquiry, is buried in the churchyard of Feltram. This discovery confirms that the secluded court had concealed evidence of another crime, though the disclosure does not itself identify the mechanism by which Charke’s room could be entered.

That explanation comes from Bryerly’s examination of the window, prompted by Lady Knollys’s account of Dudley’s entry into Maud’s room. The solution changes the status of the original inquest: its observations about the locked door, barred chimney, and apparently inaccessible window were accurate, but its conclusion depended on an incomplete inspection of the window frame. The mystery turns on the difference between a room that seems sealed and one whose means of access has been deliberately concealed. In revisiting Charke’s death through Maud’s later confinement, the novel makes the house itself the repository of evidence—and makes the hidden architecture of one crime illuminate another.