Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Poison was not a common form of killing in the West – at least, not in what people were now calling the “old” West.

“And you would know what kind of poisons those were, wouldn’t you?” Bat asked.

Vartan looked embarrassed and said, “Well, I am an expert on things Egyptian.”

“Yes, you are,” Bat said.

“That’s fascinating,” Dr Ford said.

“Well,” Bat said, “I think we’re done here, Doctor. Obviously, Mr Vartan won’t help us with anything more.”

Bat got to his feet, stumbled and almost fell, righting himself by catching the edge of Vartan’s desk. He knew the man must have been thinking, “What an old fool.”

“Can’t,” Vartan said.

“Excuse me?” Bat asked, back on solid footing.

“You said I won’t help you with anything more,” Vartan said. “You meant ‘can’t’.”

Bat looked the man in the eyes and said, “Did I?”

Outside the museum Dr Ford said, “What a rude man. He never looked at me the entire time.”

“That’s because he was lookin’ at me,” Bat said. “He’s the one.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He did it. He killed those women and removed their organs.”

“How can you-”

“He looked me in the eyes the whole time, challenging me. Believe me, Doctor, I know what that look means. He did it.”

“Is that what you will tell the Chief? Would they arrest him on your word?”

“No,” Bat said, “they wouldn’t, but I don’t think they’ll have to.”

“Why not?”

Bat put his hand in his pocket and came out with the bronze hook from Vartan’s desk. Carefully, he wrapped it in a handkerchief and handed it to the doctor.

“How did you – you took that when you stumbled.”

“Yes. Check it. I’m sure there’s some flecks of blood on it. He’s so arrogant that he still keeps it on his desk. And I’m sure there’ll be some rare poison in that museum somewhere-unless he’s destroyed it all now.”

Dr Ford looked down at the hook in her hands. “You think he used this?”

“I’d bet on it. But even if he didn’t, he knows I know,” Bat said. “He knows if he stays in Denver, I’ll have him.”

“But… if he leaves, and goes somewhere else… is that good enough?”

“It’ll have to be, Doctor,” Bat said. “It’ll have to be.”

But it wasn’t, not for Bat Masterson. That evening, as Vartan came out of his apartment carrying a suitcase Bat was waiting, leaning against the building. He hadn’t been wearing his gun that afternoon in museum, but he was wearing it now. He chose one with a pearl handle, so that it gleamed in the moonlight.

Vartan saw him and stopped. There was no slump to the man’s shoulder, no diminishment of his arrogance.

“You stumbled on purpose,” he said. “I realized it afterward.”

“I was going to let you go,” Bat said, “let you run, but I decided I had to know why. Why would you do that to those poor women?”

“I am afraid my explanation will not give you much satisfaction.”

“Try me.”

The man shrugged.

“To see if I could. I have studied the Egyptians for so long. I believe they were a master race. I wanted to see if I could do what they did. And after I did it once, I knew that if I kept trying, I would succeed.”

“Did you do more than those three?”

“No,” Vartan said, “Just those-so far.”

“Just those, period, Mr Vartan.”

“Now that you know the why, perhaps you would…?”

“Put the suitcase down, Mr Vartan,” Bat said, pushing away from the wall so Vartan could see the pearl handle, “you won’t need it where you’re going.”

Time for a couple of really old classics. In my earlier volume I looked at the dawn of the impossible crime story and the flurry of interest following the success of The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill in 1892. Over the next couple of decades the locked-room mystery blossomed. Conan Doyle used it for at least one Sherlock Holmes story, and the American writer Jacques Futrelle, who alas went down with the Titanic, created the first great impossible-crime expert with the Thinking Machine, Professor S.F.X. van Dusen. His story “The Problem of Cell 13”, first published in 1905, remains one of the classics of the impossible.

The years before the First World War saw many writers turning their hand to creating baffling crimes, but not all of these stories became as well known, and many are forgotten in old magazines. One of the most original writers of the years around the First World War was Australian-born (though of German descent) Max Rittenberg (1880-1965). He wrote a couple of popular series for the monthly magazines. One featured the strange cases of psychologist, Dr Xavier Wycherley, which were collected in book-form as The Mind Reader (1913). But the other series, which featured an early forensic scientist known as Magnum, and which ran in The London Magazine during 1913, never made it into book-form. Magnum is the prototype irascible scientist, far more interested in his research than in any social graces, but once presented with an unsolvable problem, nothing will deter him from seeking the truth.

After the First World War Rittenberg became an advertising consultant, establishing his own firm, and stopped writing fiction all together.

“What does it matter whether it were accident or suicide?” said Magnum into the telephone with decided irritation, because he was being interrupted in the midst of a highly complex calculation of a formula based on crystallographic angles and axes, requiring quaternions and perfect quiet.

“It matters fifty thousand pounds,” replied the legal voice at the other end of the wire. “That’s the value of his insurance policy. The company contend it was a case of suicide, and therefore the policy is null and void.”

“At the present moment,” snapped Magnum, “I don’t care if he were insured for the National Debt! Find a detective, and don’t bother me! ”

Leaving the receiver off the hook, so that he could not be rung up further, Magnum plunged again into the world of sin ∝ and cos β.

The interrupter was the junior partner in East, East, and Stacey, a young man of some pertinacity as well as legal ability. He happened to have a very special interest in the case of the deceased, because the next-of-kin was a particularly charming young lady; at least, particularly charming to himself. So he jumped into a taxi and drove from Clifford’s Inn to Upper Thames Street, where the scientific consultant had his office and laboratories.

“The deuce!” was Magnum’s welcome for him.

“Awfully sorry to interrupt. How long will you take to finish?” was the soft answer designed to turn away wrath.

“Till midnight!” snapped Magnum, hunching his bushy reddish eyebrows, and thrusting out his straggly reddish beard belligerently.

“I’ll wait,” decided Stacey. “I’ll go and talk scandal with Meredith.”

Ivor Meredith was a young Welshman, an analytical genius and Magnum’s right-hand man. He was the very essence of shyness and modesty. Stacey went into the laboratories and began to chaff him in order to kill time.

“What’s this I hear about you and a certain fascinating widow?” was his opening gambit.

Young Meredith, blushing furiously, protested that he didn’t know any fascinating widow. Which was perfectly true, as he was mortally afraid of all the feminine sex.

In an hour’s time Magnum appeared from his office. His crystallographic analysis had borne out his personal guess exactly, and the thundercloud temper had vanished from his skies. He found that his young Welsh protégé had scored off Stacey by challenging him to blow a glass bulb, which looks delightfully simple and in reality requires months of practice. Stacey, perspiring over the blow-lamp, was surrounded by a score of horrible bulbous monstrosities.