Содзи Симада - Murder in the Crooked House

“Why would it? There are twenty-centimetre gaps between the walls and the south end of each of the landings.”

“So you could be sure that the icicle would pass through those gaps at the end of each landing? But the staircases are pretty wide. Surely you couldn’t predict the exact course the knife would take? What if it had slid down the centre of the staircase? How could you make sure it stayed over… to the… side… Oh, I get it!”

“That’s right. That’s the only reason that I built this house on a slant. If the house is sloping to one side, then it follows that the stairs are too. This long staircase slide, to exaggerate a little, becomes a kind of V shape between the staircase and the wall. The house leans towards the south, so the knifecicle was sure to travel down the southern edge of the stairs.” (See Fig. 9.)

“Wow!”

I wasn’t the only one lost in admiration. If Eiko had been here too, what kind of praise would she have been heaping on her beloved father right now?

Ushikoshi took over the questioning.

“So the icicle would have definitely slid through that twenty-centimetre space at the end of the corridors… I would never ever have imagined that someone could build a whole house with the sole purpose of killing another human being. Especially one so crooked… And then, Mr Hamamoto, you are saying that the icicle entered Room 14 through the ventilation hole?”

From here, Ushikoshi began to sound a little pained.

“You experimented over and over to make sure the hole was in the exact right position, so that you could place the icicle at the top of the drawbridge and have it fall without any extra force straight down into Room 14.”

I realized what Ushikoshi was trying to say.

“But right in the middle of the long slide was Room 3, the Tengu Room. There’s no slide in there to support an icicle!”

“But there is,” said Kiyoshi.

“Where?”

“The Tengu mask noses!”

“Oh!”

I wasn’t the only person to exclaim in surprise.

“The southern wall is covered in Tengu masks. The window in that room was always kept open about thirty centimetres, supposedly for ventilation. Didn’t you think that was strange?”

“Of course! Somewhere among those hundreds of Tengu masks there must have been a pattern of noses arranged in a diagonal line, acting as an extension of the staircase. But it was concealed by all the other masks that filled up the whole wall. Camouflage! Now that was clever!”

“You must have practised for ages, Mr Hamamoto,” said Kiyoshi.

“Yes. It took a long time to get the position of the masks just right. It all depended on the speed of the icicle. There were so many other points I had to take into consideration, I don’t want to sound as if I’m bragging…”

“No, we’d like to hear it all,” said Ushikoshi.

“Anyhow, I had plenty of time. I made excuses to get Mr and Mrs Hayakawa and my daughter out of the house and kept practising. I was worried that the icicle might snap in two on the way down, or because I was sliding it over quite a distance, whether the heat produced by friction would melt it. It was easy to make sure the icicles I prepared in advance were long and thick, but if too much ice remained when it arrived in Room 14, no matter how high the heating was turned up, I was afraid that it might not have completely melted by the morning. Likewise, too much water remaining after the icicle melted would also pose a problem. Therefore, I had to make the icicle as short and thin as possible, but still strong enough to reach its target in Room 14 before melting. Luckily, it turned out that the icicles always slid so quickly that they reached the bottom in an instant, and friction caused a surprisingly small amount of melting.”

“But weren’t you still worried about the amount of water it produced as it melted?”

“Indeed. At times I gave serious thought to creating them out of dry ice. But I’d have to purchase the dry ice from somewhere, and that might mean I could be traced. So I gave up on that plan, and that’s why in the end, to avoid suspicion, I had to spill water over Kikuoka’s body from the flower vase.

“Actually, the water created other problems too. First of all, there was always a small amount of water remaining on the stairs. And then as the icicle entered Room 14, it always dripped a slight amount of water into the basement corridor and down the wall below the ventilation hole. It was always possible that somebody might notice. However, the corridor down in the basement was dimly lit, and the heating would be on all night, so I figured it should evaporate completely by the morning. There wasn’t much of it.”

“But it’s the Tengu noses that surprised me the most,” said Kiyoshi. “I remember the discussion about the export of Tengu masks.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“In the past, Japan received an order from the United States for a large number of Tengu masks. The mask manufacturers made a huge profit from these sales. So they went on to manufacture great numbers of Okame and Hyottoko, the comic man and woman masks, and exported those too, but they failed to sell at all.”

“Why was that?”

“Apparently, Americans were using the Tengu masks to hang hats and other stuff on. Perhaps it’s only Japanese people who failed to see those noses as something useful.”

“But there was nothing to support the icicle between the stairs and the ventilation holes either,” Okuma pointed out.

“Yes, just outside the ventilation hole to Room 14. That’s true. But by that point it was travelling so fast there was no need for anything. Outside the ventilation hole into Room 3, there’s a decorative wall carving, part of which juts out at just the right level to support the icicle.

(On this point, the author feels he may have been unfair to the reader. However, he believes that it will not cause any lasting damage to those with a vivid imagination.)

“I see. After leaving the noses in the Tengu Room, the second staircase would take care of the rest,” I said.

“And that’s why there was such a narrow bed in Room 14 with feet that couldn’t be moved…”

This was the first time that Sergeant Ozaki had spoken since leaving the Tengu Room.

“It was so the victim’s heart would be in the right location,” continued Kiyoshi. “And that’s why he only had a thin electric blanket to cover him—so he could be killed while he was in bed. If he’d had a thick duvet or a blanket, it would have made it difficult for the knife to penetrate his body.

“But reality is stranger than fiction. At this point Mr Hamamoto had an unforeseen stroke of luck along with another similar piece of bad luck.”

“What was that?” asked Ushikoshi and Okuma in accidental unison.

“The brilliance of this whole trick was that the icicle would melt, leaving just the knife stuck in the corpse, so it would look like a stabbing. To add to the illusion, just one night earlier Kazuya Ueda had in fact been stabbed to death, making it even more likely that everyone would believe that the same method was used in both murders.”

“Yes, I see.”

“And to make sure that the ice did melt, Mr Hamamoto instructed that the heating that night be turned up. The good stroke of luck was that Mr Kikuoka was so warm that he had taken off the electric blanket, and was sleeping with nothing over him. And so the knife went straight into his body unimpeded. The bad luck was that he was sleeping on his stomach.

“This whole trick was devised to pierce the heart of someone sleeping face up on that bed. But it seems that Mr Kikuoka was in the habit of sleeping face down. And so the knife ended up going into the right side of his back.