Содзи Симада - Murder in the Crooked House

“Why would the suspect want to remove that doll from the display room? Was it one of Hamamoto’s most expensive antiques?”

“Not particularly. There were plenty of items in that room that were worth a lot more.”

“Hmm… I don’t get it… There are too many strange things about this case. For a start, if someone held a grudge against Hamamoto, then why do away with Kikuoka’s chauffeur?…”

“I have a theory about how it might have been done. Although Room 10 was a locked room, on the corner of the east wall there’s that small ventilation hole, twenty centimetres square. It faces the west wing staircase, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I wonder if it could have been used in some way?”

“It doesn’t look possible. If you look you see that the staircase on the middle floor goes to the opposite side from Room 10. If you look up from the corridor in front of Room 12, directly below it on the ground floor, you’ll see that the ventilation hole in Room 10’s wall is really high up in the wall and far away from anything. So if you tried to reach up there, you’d have to scale the full height of Room 12’s wall and then the whole of Room 10’s. It’s about the height of a prison fence. I can’t see anyone being able to do it.”

“That vent is in all the rooms of the house?”

“Almost every one. It looks as if they planned to put a fan in every room, but didn’t get around to it yet. Every room has the same kind of hole facing onto the nearest stairwell.

“There’s one more thing I should mention about these vents. The way the house is constructed, the west wing rooms 8, 10, 12 and 14 are identical, piled on top of one another like building blocks, so that the vent is in the identical spot—in the far south-east corner of the east wall. However, Rooms 9, 11, 13 and 15 are also identical and built directly on top of one another, but in their case, in order for the vent to face out into the space of the stairwell, their ventilation hole is up near the ceiling in the middle of the south wall, slightly towards the east side.

“Then if you go over to the east wing, Rooms 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the top and middle floors match up with their counterparts in the west wing. So 1 and 3 have the vents in the south corner of the east wall like 8, 10, 12 and 14. Rooms 2 and 4 in the middle of the south wall like 9, 11, 13 and 15.

“Rooms 6 and 7 in the basement are different though. Room 7’s vent is the same as Rooms 2 and 4 above on the south wall, but over to the west side. Room 6 is the one that’s different from the rest. It’s the only room in the entire building that has its ventilation hole in the southern corner of its west-facing wall. Room 5 is, of course, the salon, and I imagine if it were to have a ventilation hole facing the stairwell, it would have been in the same west wall as Room 6 below, but in fact the salon doesn’t have a vent. And that’s all the rooms. I don’t suppose any of it is really relevant to our investigation though.

“But while I’m on the subject, I’ll go on to the windows. None of the walls that contain a ventilation hole has a window. Besides Room 3, all the rooms have exterior-facing windows. In other words, windows you can open to let in fresh air. The vent holes and the doors face the interior of the building, the windows face the exterior. Anyway, that appears to be the basic concept of the mansion’s layout.

“If you imagine the rule as being that all the exterior walls have a window in them, and all the interior walls facing a stairwell have a ventilation hole and a door, you’ve got the idea. Then we move onto the floors, ceilings and walls shared with the next room. Obviously, nobody would think about making holes in any of those.

“Take this library, for example, there’s something slightly strange about the position of the door in relation to the corridor. There’s something slightly off about it, but it still follows the general rule. Right where the east wing stairwell should be, in the south-facing wall, in the corner towards the east—look, there’s the ventilation hole. But there’s no window, because this wall is facing an interior space. And as you can see, the windows are on the north and east sides, which both are exterior-facing walls. The position of the door, as I just mentioned, is not quite the same as Room 2 above us or 7 below us; or even 9, 11, 13 and 15 in the west wing. You can see it’s at the westerly edge of the south wall. It’s because of the construction of the corridor outside, but you can see that the rule that there is always a door in the wall with the ventilation hole has not changed.”

“Huh? This is getting too complicated. I don’t follow.”

“But there is an exception—Room 3. That’s the only room in the building without a window in the south-facing exterior wall. Instead, it has a large window in the interior-facing west wall. In addition, in that same wall, there’s a door. The ventilation hole is in the opposite wall, on the east. Hamamoto probably set it up that way to protect his valuable antiques from direct sunlight. And so he needed to put in an extra-large window for ventilation.”

“All right, all right. That’s quite enough. You’ve definitely done your homework. You could become an architect after all this is over. I’m really not getting half of it, but do you think it’s relevant to this case?”

“Probably not.”

“I hope you’re wrong, because otherwise this is getting too complicated for no reason. We’re brand-new students of this house of mirrors, and right now we don’t understand a thing. The guests are mostly way ahead of us. This winter isn’t their first visit, is it?”

“No, but in fact there are some first-timers amongst them—Kumi Aikura and Kanai’s wife, Hatsue. Kikuoka and Mr Kanai were here in the summer.”

“Hmm. But still, the majority of the folks here are used to this cursed jack-in-a-box of a place. They might have even worked out a clever way of using this cockeyed construction to do away with someone. Personally, I’m still suspicious of that air vent in Room 10.”

Ushikoshi fell silent, and spent a few moments gathering his thoughts.

“Just now, you said that the hole is far away from everything else, high up in the wall. You said you were looking up from the corridor on the ground floor in front of… let’s see… er, Room 12?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Incidentally, the staircase we took to get here was made of metal, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“The section that leads up from the salon to the middle-floor landing is made of wood. It’s covered with a red carpet—a good quality one. But all the rest of the stairs are made of metal. Now why would that be? Even the stairs back at Sapporo police HQ are better than that. These ones—they’re new but made of the kind of cheap stuff you find in a public building. If you’re not careful and walk too heavily, they make a terrible clanging noise. Rather out of place in a medieval European-style mansion, don’t you think?”

“You’re right. But the angle is pretty steep, so I guess they needed to make it from something durable and safe.”

“I suppose… they certainly are steep. Maybe that’s it. And the landings—I guess I should say corridors—the corridors on every floor seem to be metallic too.”

“Yes.”

“This floor’s different, but with the ground floor of the west wing and the top floor too, all the corridors seem to be L-shaped.”

“They are. The top floor in the east wing here is the same. This floor is the only one constructed differently.”

“The tips of the L—in other words the ends of the corridors, look as if there was some kind of design flaw or something. I don’t know why, but they’re not joined completely up to the walls. There’s about a twenty-centimetre gap there at each end.”