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

“Cyanide gas kills people almost instantly,” I said, Penelope’s words starting to sink in. “The results mimic a heart attack, and all traces dissolve into the body within hours. But how could a mosquito deliver enough gas to kill Schneider?”

“It was all a matter of waiting for the proper moment,” said Penelope. “Klax knew that sometime during the night Schneider would lift one of the monkeys out of its cage. With both his hands occupied, the professor couldn’t stop the attack that killed him.”

“The mechanical mosquito-”

“- flew into Dr Schneider’s nose and squirted the hydrogen cyanide into his nasal passage,” said Penelope, finishing my thought. “A small dose inhaled at such close range would kill in seconds.”

“But why?” said Mary Winfree, her questions directed at Klax, not us. “Why on earth would you want to kill Carl?”

Klax rose from the table, and towering six foot six, and having wrenched his hands free, lifted both fists in the air. “How can you even ask that question, Mary? I did all the work. He won all the awards. He got the money, the fame, the glory. And because of all that, he got you.”

“Me?” she said. “What do I have to do with this?”

“He lusted after you , and I couldn’t allow it,” said Klax, a very strange note creeping into his voice. “I wanted you, and you never even looked my way, Mary. My robot spies heard him talking to you on the phone last week. Trying to seduce you. Take you on another trip. That’s when I decided he had to die. He couldn’t have the awards that were supposed to be mine, the money and honors that were supposed to be mine, and now you , too! I just couldn’t allow it!”

“You,” said Mary Winfree, “are a very sick and misguided man. You’re crazy, Klax!”

And so it was jealousy, after all, that killed Dr Schneider. Not a monkey. Not a bat. And to my surprise, something deadly was able to penetrate the fortress called The Slab. Where nothing goes in and nothing comes out, murder took place.

The Marines found a fistful of tiny machines in Klax’s right pocket, a miniature control device in the other. Proof positive that he had used such micro-machines for murder and a grim reminder that Penelope’s subterfuge had saved anyone else from being killed.

“I had Captain Rackham bring the two of you with Klax tonight so he wouldn’t guess we specifically suspected him,” explained Penelope to Arronds and Winfree, once the Marines had left with their prisoner. “I also thought, since you were Dr Schneider’s friends, you would want to help capture his murderer.”

“An amazing deduction,” said Arronds. “How did you figure out it was Klax?”

“She asked Sherlock Holmes,” I answered.

Arthur Porges (1915-2006) was another of those writers who wrote prodigiously for the magazines but had very few works preserved between hard covers. You will, though, find a slim volume of his Sherlock Holmes parodies, featuring Stately Homes, in Three Porges Parodies and a Pastiche (1988), whilst The Mirror and Other Strange Reflections (2002) is a collection of his weird fiction. Porges wrote scores of ingenious impossible crime stories and a volume of those is long overdue. Here’s just one example.

I was beginning to think that Lieutenant Ader had finally run out of bizarre cases. He hadn’t bothered me for almost six months, or since that “Circle in the Dust” affair.

But I should have known better; it was just a breathing spell. His jurisdiction, mainly the city of Arden, isn’t likely to be free of skulduggery for long. Not that I minded too much; in fact, I like playing detective. For that matter, who doesn’t?

This was something of a switch, however; because instead of asking me to help solve a murder, it was more a matter of unsolving one first, you might say.

I’m used to being called on by Ader. As the only reasonably well qualified expert in forensic medicine in these parts – I’m chief pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, serving the whole county – I do work for a number of communities in the area. You see they don’t trust their local coroners, since most of them are political hacks long out of practice. So whenever they need a dependable autopsy, especially the kind their man would just as soon not handle – say somebody buried a month – they send for Dr Joel Hoffman: me.

Last Tuesday I was happily preparing a slide of some muscle section; it had a bunch of the finest roundworm parasites that you’ll ever see. Oddly enough, it occurred to me that these organisms, so loathsome to the laymen, were not only gracefully proportioned, and miracles of design, but never killed each other through greed or hate, and would never, never build a hydrogen bomb to destroy the world.

Well, think of the Devil-in this case, murder – and he’s sure to appear. Into the lab came Lieutenant Ader with a young girl in tow. Him I’ve seen before, but never in such company, so being a man first and a pathologist second, I looked at her. A small girl, dark, and just a bit plump. What my racy old man used to call a “plump partridge.” She had been crying a lot; it didn’t need eight years of medical study to tell that. As for Ader, he was half angry, and half ashamed.

“This is my niece, Dana,” he said gruffly. “You’ve heard me mention her occasionally.”

I smiled. She fixed her enormous, smoky grey eyes on me, and said: “You’re the only one who can help us. Everything adds up all wrong. Larry couldn’t have done it, and yet there’s nobody else who went out there.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Back off a few paragraphs, and start over again.”

“Larry’s her fiance,” Ader explained. “I’m holding him on a first degree murder charge.”

I must have looked surprised, because he reddened slightly, and snapped, “I had to, but she thinks he’s innocent. Why, I don’t know. I’ve told her about your work before, and now she expects you to perform a grade A miracle to order. In other words, Dana’s picked you to smash my nice open-and-shut case to little pieces.”

“Thanks a lot, both of you,” I said sardonically. “But I only do wonders on Wednesday and Friday; this is Tuesday, remember.”

“That’s all right; you can solve the whole case tomorrow,” the lieutenant said, giving his niece a rather sickly grin. It was a noble attempt to cheer her up, and of course a complete failure, as such things always are.

“Look,” he added, obviously on a hot spot, and not enjoying it, “I’ve got the boy cold; the evidence is overwhelming. You’ll see what I mean in a minute. But Dana here isn’t convinced, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t see Larry bludgeoning an old man to death for money, myself. He’s pretty hot-tempered, but gets over it fast. I don’t think he goes in for physical violence, anyhow. Still…” He broke off, and I could almost read his mind. When you’ve met enough murderers, one thing soon becomes as clear as distilled water: there’s simply no way to tell a potential killer in advance of the crime.

“Why are you so sure he didn’t do it?” I asked Dana.

Her round little chin rose stubbornly; I liked her for that. I hate the passive, blonde, doughy kind of girl.

“I know he couldn’t kill anybody,” she said, “especially an old man lying on the sand. He might punch another fellow his own age, if they were both on their feet, but that’s all. Do you think I could love a murderer, and be ready to marry him?”

I looked at Ader, and both our faces must have become wooden at the same time, because she gave a little cry of pure exasperation.