Содзи Симада - Murder in the Crooked House

“Anyway, the important thing is that no one could get in there besides Kikuoka himself. There was no spare key for Room 14. I don’t know whether they’d lost it, never had one made in the first place, or that Hamamoto was too neurotic to allow there to be more than one key for his personal study, but it has been confirmed that there was definitely only the one. And last night, Kikuoka had it. This morning our men retrieved it from the pocket of his jacket which he’d thrown off.”

“So he left the key lying around in his room. What if he’d accidentally pushed the locking button on the inside of the doorknob and gone out, closing the door? That would’ve caused a bit of a problem, wouldn’t it?”

“No, that would have been okay. If you push the button in first and then close the door, it doesn’t work. The button pops back out and the door doesn’t lock.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, we were told that while Kikuoka was staying here, he always made sure to lock the door from the outside every time he left his room. It seems he left his money in there. The Hayakawas and several others have attested to that.”

“All right. So there’s no way that anyone could have got into the room before the murder?”

“No, no way. All the other rooms had two keys. The Hayakawas would show the guests to their room and hand them one of the keys. The duplicates are with Eiko Hamamoto. Room 14 was the exception, so I guess they decided to put the richest bloke in there.”

“Huh,” said Okuma, sounding deflated.

“It’s not something I’m going to admit to in front of all those folks in the salon, but I’m on the point of throwing in the towel on this whole thing. Just like you said yourself, Inspector Okuma, there is no killer. There is no murderer among those eleven people out there.”

“Hmm…”

“It’s the same as the last case,” said Ozaki. “There’s plenty about the Ueda killing that we’ve put on the back burner. We still haven’t worked out why there were no footprints in the snow. That locked room had the simplest of locks on it, it could have been manipulated somehow, but the snow outside the door was completely undisturbed. By any of the entrances or exits to and from the main building, or anywhere around the house, even on the steps up to Room 10, there was nothing. As long as everyone is telling the truth, and Sasaki isn’t lying either, the ground that they crossed to get to the scene of the crime was all covered in pure virgin snow. That’s the first problem.

“And then the two stakes in the ground that Sasaki had seen the night before. Not to mention that disgusting-looking Golem doll… And then…oh, yes, that’s right, Chief Inspector Ushikoshi, Ueda was murdered on the night of the 25th. How about the daytime of the 25th? We said we were going to check whether the doll was really in Room 3 earlier that day. Did we?”

“It was. Mr Hamamoto says he definitely saw it sitting there during the daytime.”

“I see. So the suspect took it from the room shortly before committing the crime… Hang on! Just wait a minute while I go next door to check on the doll.”

The doll had already been returned to its place in the Tengu Room. Ozaki leapt to his feet and ran out of the library. Okuma took the opportunity to offer a few words of his own.

“Me, I don’t think anyone got into Room 10 by way of that door facing the outside. But the ventilation hole was facing inwards towards the rest of the house. Someone got up to no good with that open hole, I’ll warrant.”

“But it was way up high in the wall.”

“Well, the only other explanation is that the bugger must have got in using some secret passageway, or some other trick like—”

“Chief!”

Ozaki was back.

“The doll’s right hand—there’s string wrapped around it.”

“What?”

“Come and see!”

The three detectives rushed out of the library and over to the interior-facing window of the Tengu Room. The Golem doll was sitting just under the window, leaning back against the wall, and as Ozaki had said, wrapped around its right wrist was a piece of white string.

“This stinks,” said Ushikoshi. “Let’s go back. I’m not falling for this kind of bullshit.”

“The suspect must have done this.”

“They must have. Right after forensics returned it to the house. Someone’s playing silly buggers with us.”

They went back to their seats in the library.

“Getting back to the matter of the footprints, if they were made to disappear by some sort of clever ruse, I don’t think it would mean very much. Since for Kikuoka’s murder it’s almost one hundred per cent certain that the killer is inside the house. If, back at the time of Ueda’s murder, the killer had already planned to kill Kikuoka next, he might as well have left the footprints to cast suspicion on an outsider for the crime.”

“Perhaps… Well, never mind. So in that case, where are we?”

“We’re back to assuming that there were never any footprints in the first place, and that the killer used some kind of trick to commit the murder from inside the house—”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all along!” said Okuma loudly.

“But how does that doll fit in with things? Did it fly through the air under its own power and land out there in the snow? It’s not possible. And even though we’re quite sure that someone in this house is responsible for these murders, there would still have been a surprising amount we could have learnt from footprints. For example, whether they were made by a man’s or a woman’s shoe. The stride can also tell us their height and their gender. If the length of the stride seems to indicate it’s a woman, but the shoes are definitely a man’s, then we could suspect a woman deliberately wearing a man’s shoes. It would still have been safer to get rid of the footprints. As much as possible, anyway.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Yes?”

Taken off guard, the three detectives all answered at once. The door opened very slowly to reveal a very nervous-looking Kohei Hayakawa.

“Um… Sorry to disturb you, but lunch is almost ready.”

“Ah. Is it? Thanks.”

Hayakawa started to close the door again.

“Mr Hayakawa? Did Kikuoka’s death bring you some relief?”

Ushikoshi was as blunt in tone as he was in words. Hayakawa’s eyes widened and his face turned ashen. His hand gripped the doorknob.

“Why are you asking me a question like that? You think I had any connection with—”

“Mr Hayakawa, please don’t underestimate the police. We’ve looked into the business with your daughter, Yoshie. Tokyo police know that you attended your daughter’s funeral in Tokyo.”

Hayakawa’s shoulders slumped.

“Please, take a seat.”

“No, thank you. I’d rather stay standing… I don’t have anything to tell you.”

“He told you to sit!” yelled Ozaki.

Hayakawa shuffled towards the detectives and sat down.

“Last time we spoke, you sat in that very chair and deliberately hid the truth from us. Now we can forgive that just the once, but if you try lying to us again, I have to tell you we won’t be able to let it go.”

“Inspector, I don’t mean to hide anything from you. I wasn’t hiding anything back then either. I wanted to tell you. The words were right there on the tip of my tongue. But even though Mr Kikuoka is dead now, at that time it was Mr Ueda who had been killed. I thought bringing up that story would have seemed suspicious…”

“And how about today? Now it’s Kikuoka who’s dead!”

“And you suspect me? How on earth could I have done it? It’s true that when my daughter died I hated Mr Kikuoka for it. My wife too—we lost our only child. I’m not denying it. But I couldn’t kill him, no matter how much I might have thought about it. I was in the entranceway between the salon and the kitchen. And besides I’m not permitted to go into the rooms.”