Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

A shriek is different from a scream. Take it from someone who served two years as an MP in Germany. A scream blends loud and distressed. A shriek combines horror and fright. Screams are bad, shrieks are much worse.

Tucking my case under one arm, I leapt over the guide rope and sprinted in the general direction of the shrieks. The location wasn’t far, around a twenty-foot long wall of fine marble. I skidded to a stop five feet from the spot. A young woman, dark hair, dressed in a bank uniform, was frozen solid in front of an elevator door. Her hands covered her eyes while her mouth continued to howl like a police siren. One of the bank’s security guards, an old geezer with white hair, had his arms around the woman, trying to calm her down. Another five or six people, all dressed in business clothes, surrounded the elevator door. More were arriving every second. White faces were changing to vomit green. A man about my age, dressed in a three-piece suit that cost my salary for a year, stumbled hurriedly out of the crowd. He looked ready to heave up his breakfast. Wordlessly, I pointed to the nearest bathroom. Then, using my considerable weight and muscle, I shouldered my way through the growing crowd to see what had caused the ruckus.

The elevator was a fancy one. There were no mirrors like in most elevators. The rich prefer not to look at their wrinkles. Instead, the walls were decorated with fine mahogany panelling, highlighted with gold leaf. A large dropped light fixture on the ceiling provided bright white illumination. The thick green carpet seemed to be an expensive weave. A wall plate indicated that the elevator was for the private use of Cyrus Calhoun, the bank’s CEO.

As to Mr Calhoun, he was the cause of the woman’s shrieks. Or to be precise, his two parts were the cause of her distress. The body of the millionaire was sprawled in the rear right corner of the elevator, shoulders wedged tight against the walls. They were able to make such close contact because there was nothing between them to serve as a barrier. Calhoun’s head, a limp, bloody ball, rested on the green carpet in the middle of the car. The banker’s eyes were wide open, as if curious about the stir his appearance had caused.

Obviously, the decapitation had taken place in the elevator car. The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered with blood. Blood still trickled down his chest in a small but steady stream. I’m no doctor but I knew enough about killing to know Calhoun hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes. The scene was one of the most striking sights I’ve encountered in all my life. A man’s head and body, chopped apart, in what essentially was a locked room. From what I could gather from the babbling of the shrieker, she had been walking past the private elevator when the doors opened and she saw the corpse. One point she made perfectly clear. No one else had been in the elevator when it came to rest. The corpse had been all alone.

Sensing a mystery and perhaps some money, I flipped out my pocket phone and dialled home. Penelope answered on the fourth ring.

“Hello,” she said in that odd way of hers, making the word into a statement, not a question.

“No time for pleasantries,” I said. “I’m at the bank. Cyrus Calhoun, in two separate pieces, just arrived by his private elevator to the first floor. Head’s on one side of the car, body’s on the other. A witness who saw the door open claims nobody else was inside. Sound interesting?”

“Possibly,” said Penelope. “Manhattan National Trust can’t afford a long, drawn-out mystery. Notoriety is bad business, especially for banks. If there’s no rational explanation found, call me back when possible. Give my regards, as always, to Inspector Norton. I’m sure he’ll be there shortly.”

“Speak of the devil,” I said, as I switched off the phone and snapped it closed. Give bank security an A for effort. They had New York’s top homicide cop, flanked by an entire team of specialists, here quicker than dialing 911. He glared at me with his usual “what the hell are you doing here, O’Brien?” stare but didn’t bother to stop and say hello. Once he spotted me, Norton always concluded I was at the scene of the crime for a reason. More often than not, he was right. I work for Penelope Peters, and her job is solving problems. Including such problems as murder, robbery, arson, and kidnapping. Penelope hates crime like any good, upstanding citizen. Only in her case, she makes it pay.

“What a mess,” declared the good Inspector, looking inside the elevator. His voice sounded like a truck driving over gravel. A big-boned man, he stood six feet four and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. Entirely bald, with sunken cheeks and a beak-like nose, Norton looked like a walking skeleton. A bout with lung cancer five years ago had nearly killed him. No more cigars for the Inspector. Unable to function properly without something in his mouth, he constantly chewed gum. “What a stinkin’ bloody mess.”

His hawk-like gaze swept the crowd of onlookers like a vulture sizing up possible meals. “Nobody leaves. I want statements from everybody in this hall.” His brows curled into a deep frown when he looked at me. “Especially you, O’Brien. I want to know exactly how you’re involved in this disaster.”

Immediately, everyone near me moved two steps back, as if they’d suddenly discovered a rabid dog in their midst. Norton knows how to make a guy feel two feet tall. That’s one of his more endearing talents.

He waved his team of experts forward. “Find me some answers,” he said. “The sooner the better.’

The interrogations lasted about an hour. The Inspector handled some, his assistant Stanley Dryer the rest. Nobody had much to tell. Norton, of course, left me for last. He was about to give me the third degree when three middle-aged men dressed in thousand-bucks-a-pop suits emerged from an elevator across the hall. They headed in a beeline for Norton. Following them, dressed in a green-grey uniform was a short, stocky man with a confused expression on his face. The name-tag on his outfit identified him as Roger Stern, building engineer.

Standing only a few feet from Norton, I tried valiantly to blend in with the scenery. Fortunately, nobody paid much attention to me. At my weight and size, remaining unnoticed is not one of my greatest talents.

“I’m Garrett Calhoun,” said the tallest of the men. Lines of grey streaked his black hair and his lips were thin and bloodless. “Cyrus is my brother. A terrible tragedy, Inspector. Terrible, terrible. Any clues about how it happened? Was his death an accident?”

Norton snorted. His tongue emerged, wrapped in gum, then retreated. “Accident? Unlikely when a man’s been decapitated. Not the usual method to commit suicide. Sorry, Mr Calhoun, but your brother was murdered.”

“Impossible,” interjected the second suit. Shorter than Cyrus Calhoun’s brother Garrett, this one was plump, wore thick brown plastic glasses, and had a trace of black moustache. “All three of us saw Cyrus enter the elevator alone. It’s his private car. He only rides it between the fortieth floor and the lobby. Entire journey takes less than a minute. You’re not suggesting someone climbed into the elevator somehow, chopped off my father-in-law’s head in one minute, and then disappeared? That’s absurd.”

“I don’t believe I caught your name?” said Norton.

“Tom Vance,” said the guy with the glasses. “I’m married to Grace Calhoun, Cyrus Calhoun’s daughter and Garrett’s niece.”

“Well, thanks for the info, Mr Vance,” said Norton, ever calm and polite. He could have been discussing the weather instead of a brutal murder. There was no outrage left in Norton. He’d seen too many dead bodies to get angry. To him, solving crime was a job, not a crusade.