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

“This was arranged by someone who knew that friend Gray had a weakness and banked on it. Gray didn’t like to take his inhaler in public and would find a quiet corner. The plan worked out very well and nearly presented an impossible crime, an almost insolvable crime. Initially it appeared that the victim had been shot in the mouth in a locked toilet.”

Hector Ross smiled indulgently at his colleague.

“You imply that you already have the solution?”

“Oh yes. Remember the song that we used to sing at school?

“Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.”

Hector Ross nodded.

“It’s many a day since I last sang that, laddie. Something by Longfellow, wasn’t it?”

Fane grinned.

“It was, indeed. Based on some lines from the Book of Genesis - ‘ terra es , terram ibis – dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return’. Get Captain Evans here, please.” He made the request to the Chief Steward, Jeff Ryder, who had been waiting attendance on Ross. When he had departed, Fane glanced back to his friend. “There is something to be said for Latin scholarship.”

“I don’t follow, laddie.”

“Our murderer was too fond of the Latin in-jokes he shared with his boss.”

“You mean his secretary?” He glanced at Frank Tilley.

“Tilley claims that he couldn’t even translated memento mori. ”

“Remember death?”

Fane regarded his friend in disapproval.

“It actually means ‘remember to die’ and a memento mori is usually applied to a human skull or some other objection which reminds us of our mortality.”

Captain Evans arrived and looked from Fane to Ross in expectation.

“Well, what news?”

“To save any unpleasant scene on the aircraft, captain, I suggest you radio ahead and have the police waiting to arrest one of your passengers on a charge of murder. No need to make any move until we land. The man can’t go far.”

“Which man?” demanded Evans, his grim faced.

“He is listed as Oscar Elgee in the tourist class.”

“How could he…?”

“Simple. Elgee was not only Gray’s manservant but I think you’ll find, from the broad hints Mister Tilley gave me, that he was also his lover. Elgee seems to confirm it by a death note with a Latin phrase in which he emphasized the word homo , meaning man, but, we also know it was often used as a slang term in my generation for ‘homosexual’.”

“How would you know that Elgee was capable of understanding puns in Latin?” asked Ross.

“The moment he saw Gray’s body, young Elgee muttered the very words. Terra es , terram ibis – dust you are, to dust you will return.”

“A quarrel between lovers?” asked Ross. “Love to hatred turned – and all that, as Billy Shakespeare succinctly put it?”

Fane nodded.

“Gray was giving Elgee the push, both as lover and employee, and so Elgee decided to end his lover’s career in mid-flight, so to speak. There is a note in his attache case that Elgee was to be sacked immediately without compensation.”

Tilley, who had been sitting quietly, shook his head vehemently.

“No there isn’t,” he interrupted. “We went through the list. I told you that the initials O.T.E. referred to Otis Elliott. I had faxed that dismissal through before we boarded the plane.”

Fane smiled softly.

“You have forgotten F.T.”

“But that’s my…”

“You didn’t share your boss’s passion for Latin tags, did you? It was the F.T. that confused me. I should have trusted that a person with Gray’s reputation would not have written F followed by a lower case t if he meant two initials F.T. I missed the point. It was not your initials at all, Mister Tilley. It was Ft meant as an abbreviation. Specifically, fac , fiomfacere : to do; and totum : all things. Factotum. And who was Gray’s factotum ?”

There was a silence.

“I think we will find that this murder was planned for a week or two at least. Once I began to realize what the mechanism was which killed Gray, all I had to do was look for the person capable of devising that mechanism as well as having motive and opportunity. Hold out your hands, Mister Tilley.”

Reluctantly the secretary did so.

“You can’t seriously see those hands constructing a delicate mechanism, can you?” Fane said. “No, Elgee, the model maker and handyman, doctored one of Gray’s inhalers so that when it was depressed it would explode with an impact into the mouth, shooting a needle into the brain. Simple but effective. He knew that Gray did not like to be seen using the inhaler in public. The rest was left to chance and it was a good chance. It almost turned out to be the ultimate impossible crime. It might have worked had not our victim and his murderer been too fond of their Latin in-jokes.”

Bill Pronzini (b.1943) is a prolific writer of mystery stories, westerns and science fiction, and also a fine anthologist, selecting material from his enviable collection of pulp and digest magazines. Indeed the old pulps are crucial to solving the following story. In the mystery fiction field, Pronzini is probably best known for his stories and novels featuring the Nameless Detective, which began with The Snatch (1971) and include two story collections: Casefile (1983) and Spadework (1996). Quite a few of the stories are impossible crimes.

The address Eberhardt had given me on the phone was a corner lot in St Francis Wood, halfway up the western slope of Mt Davidson. The house there looked like a baronial Spanish villa – a massive two-story stucco affair with black iron trimming, flanked on two sides by evergreens and eucalyptus. It sat on a notch in the slope forty feet above street level, and it commanded an impressive view of Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Even by St Francis Wood standards – the area is one of San Francisco’s moneyed residential sections – it was some place, probably worth half a million dollars or more.

At four o’clock on an overcast weekday afternoon this kind of neighbourhood is usually quiet and semi-deserted; today it was teeming with people and traffic. Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both fronting streets, among them half a dozen police cruisers and unmarked sedans and a television camera truck. Thirty or forty citizens were grouped along the sidewalks, gawking, and I saw four uniformed cops standing watch in front of the gate and on the stairs that led up to the house.

I didn’t know what to make of all this as I drove past and tried to find a place to park. Eberhardt had not said much on the phone, just that he wanted to see me immediately on a police matter at this address. The way it looked, a crime of no small consequence had taken place here today – but why summon me to the scene? I had no idea who lived in the house; I had no rich clients or any clients at all except for an appliance outfit that had hired me to do a skip-trace on one of its deadbeat customers.

Frowning, I wedged my car between two others a block away and walked back down to the corner. The uniformed cop on the gate gave me a sharp look as I came up to him, but when I told him my name his manner changed and he said, “Oh, right, Lieutenant Eberhardt’s expecting you. Go on up.”

So I climbed the stairs under a stone arch and past a terraced rock garden to the porch. Another patrolman stationed there took my name and then led me through an archway and inside.