Содзи Симада - Murder in the Crooked House

“Break it.”

At Ushikoshi’s command, Ozaki and Anan threw their shoulders against the door. After a few tries, it broke.

Sasaki was lying face up in the middle of the room. On the table there was a medical textbook that he’d apparently been reading. The room looked completely undisturbed.

Straight through Sasaki’s sweater, right at the level of his heart, was a hunting knife, identical to the ones used in the previous two murders, with the same white string trailing from the handle. But the biggest difference from the previous cases was that Sasaki’s chest was occasionally rising and falling.

“He’s still alive!” cried Kiyoshi.

Sasaki’s face was drained of colour, but his eyelids seemed to be ever so slightly open.

Ozaki turned his head 360 degrees, surveying every inch of the room. I did the same and, simultaneously, we noticed on the wall something which shed light on the strange nature of these serial killings. There was a small piece of paper attached with a pin. (See Fig. 8.)

“What did you see? Did you see something? Answer me!” shouted Ozaki, clutching Sasaki by the wrist. Kiyoshi put out a hand to stop him.

“Mr Banana, there’s a stretcher in the van outside. Bring it here!”

“What the hell?”

Ozaki was immediately riled up.

“How dare you think that we take orders from a pain in the arse like you? Shut up, you freak, and get out of our way! Leave this to the experts.”

“Of course I intend to leave it to the experts. We’ll get out of your way. Doctor Sano, if you please.”

The white-coated Dr Sano pushed his way through the crowd.

“It’s dangerous for him to try to talk right now,” he said to Ozaki. “Please don’t speak to him.”

The expert had given his opinion. And right then, just as Kiyoshi had instructed, the stretcher arrived. Dr Sano and Kiyoshi quickly lifted Sasaki onto it.

There was not a lot of blood, in fact Sasaki was hardly bleeding at all. But just as Dr Sano and Constable Anan picked up the stretcher to leave the room, a very unexpected thing happened. Eiko Hamamoto burst into tears and clung to the stretcher.

“Sasaki! Don’t die!”

Togai, who had materialized out of nowhere, watched in grim silence.

Ozaki carefully removed the pinned scrap of paper from the wall. It looked to be something the killer had left behind.

He didn’t immediately tell us what was written on the paper, but he showed it to us later. In very simple lettering, it read as follows:

I will have revenge on Kozaburo Hamamoto. Very soon you will lose the most precious thing—your life.

Ozaki had regained his habitual professional composure; it seemed that coming face to face with someone on the verge of death hadn’t fazed him much at all. He quickly ascertained that it was not only the door of Room 13 that had been completely locked, but both of the windows had been too, and the glass was entirely intact. He immediately and thoroughly checked the built-in wardrobe and cupboard, under the bed, and the bathroom for anyone hiding. He didn’t find anyone or anything that shouldn’t have been there.

But the thing I really should point out here is that this time the one previous (excuse my pun) break in the case, the twenty-centimetre-square ventilation hole in the wall, was completely blocked by a thick piece of plywood. This time it really was the perfect locked room. The door frame was entirely intact, and there was no gap or crack to be seen.

What’s more, the door had been broken down by two of the police officers themselves, and they had been the first to set foot in the room. And this had been witnessed by a large crowd of onlookers. There had been no time for anyone to have tried some sort of trick. Our only hope was that Sasaki himself had seen something.

Around an hour later, we were all gathered in the salon when the news came that Sasaki had passed away. The time of death was after three in the afternoon, and the cause was, of course, the knife in his chest.

“Where were you around 3 o’clock, Mr Togai?”

Chief Inspector Ushikoshi had called Togai over to the corner of the room and was questioning him in a low voice.

“I’d gone for a walk. The weather wasn’t too bad and I needed space to think.”

“Is there anyone who can back up that story?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“No surprise. I don’t like to put it this way, but you can’t say you didn’t have a motive to kill Sasaki.”

“That’s horrible! His death is more of a shock to me than anyone else.”

Both Eiko and Kumi insisted that they had been alone in their separate rooms. Their testimony was nothing out of the ordinary, but the evidence given next by Haruo Kajiwara was enough to make the detectives’ own hearts stop.

“I never thought it was important until now, so I never mentioned it. It’s nothing to do with Mr Sasaki’s murder, but the night that Mr Kikuoka was killed I was leaning on the door frame in the doorway of the kitchen when I heard a different noise mixed in with the sound of the snowstorm—a kind of rustling noise. A bit like a snake slithering. But I definitely heard it.”

“A snake!”

The detectives almost jumped out of their skins.

“What time was that?”

“Well, I guess it must have been around 11.”

“Right when he was killed.”

“Did anyone else hear it?”

“I asked Kohei and Chikako but they said they didn’t hear it. I thought I must have been hearing things, so I didn’t say anything. I’m really sorry.”

“Tell us more about the sound.”

“I don’t know. It’s difficult to explain… Sort of sniff, sniff, like a woman sobbing… But very faint. I didn’t hear it when Sasaki died.”

“A woman sobbing?!”

The detectives exchanged glances. This sounded like some sort of ghost story.

“And when Ueda was killed?”

“I didn’t hear anything. I’m sorry.”

“So you only heard it with Kikuoka?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

The police officers individually questioned every other person about the mysterious sound, but nobody besides Kajiwara had heard it.

“What do you reckon? Do you think it’s real?” Okuma asked the other two. “I’ve had enough of all this crap. It’s driving me crazy. Blasted if I can work it out.”

“I’m at my wits’ end too.”

“I’m beginning to believe there’s some sort of evil demon living in this place. Or this house itself is the demon. It’s like the place has a mind of its own and has decided to start murdering people. Especially with the murder of Sasaki—that’s not the work of a human. If we’re looking for a killer, then it’s this house!”

“Or someone is managing to play the most extraordinary trick ever,” said Ozaki. “Like some kind of mechanical thingamajig that somehow pops up in the rooms, or a flying knife, or… something in the rooms that somehow switches around.”

“Well, if it’s any of those things, then the suspect can’t be one of the guests. It has to be one of the hosts,” muttered Ushikoshi.

Okuma continued the thought.

“But it isn’t one of them. If you ask me, out of the eleven of them, it has to be Aikura. I reckon it’s a load of crap that story about the doll looking through her window. No way any of that happened. Impossible. It has to be a made-up story. Those kind of women—total liars. And she doesn’t have an alibi for any of the murders.”

“But Inspector, if she’s the killer then there’s something that doesn’t add up,” said Ozaki. That Kumi woman couldn’t have seen the face of the Golem doll before the 29th of December when she went to Room 3. But in her testimony from the night of the first murder, she described his face perfectly.”