Содзи Симада - Murder in the Crooked House

“But then, ironically, that one piece of bad luck was followed by another unexpected stroke of good luck. Mr Kikuoka had—how should I say it—a cowardly side to his character. His chauffeur had just been murdered, and he was so terrified that he wasn’t satisfied with setting all three of the locks on the door; he had also dragged the sofa over to block it, and even put the coffee table on top of that. And that’s why when, severely injured and on the point of death, he wasn’t able to get out of the room and get help.

“As the knife hadn’t reached his heart, if he hadn’t built that barricade, he might have got out of his room and maybe even staggered up to the salon and got help. Instead, he ended up using his last ounce of strength to push over the table and sofa before collapsing. And so the crime scene ended up with another similarity to Mr Ueda’s, which Mr Hamamoto had never intended: traces of the murderer having been in the room.”

“It’s true. I was very lucky. There was only the one bit of bad luck—that a talented investigator like you came along to solve the crime.”

Kozaburo Hamamoto didn’t seem particularly upset by his misfortune.

“Hang on! I just remembered!” cried Ushikoshi. “Right at 11 o’clock, the time of Mr Kikuoka’s death, when we were drinking cognac together in the tower, you played that piece of music. It was—”

“It was ‘Chanson de l’adieu’—Farewell.”

“Yes, of course. That’s what it was.”

“I told you my daughter hated it, but for me it was the very first piece by Chopin that I ever heard.”

“Me too,” said Ushikoshi. “But in my case, I still don’t know anything else of his.”

“Because that one’s in the school textbook,” offered Okuma.

“If only I’d remembered its title that night,” said Ushikoshi regretfully.

But I couldn’t help thinking that if Chief Inspector Ushikoshi had guessed the truth that night from the title of a tune, the outcome would have been so much less satisfying.

“I guessed the truth,” said Kiyoshi, getting to his feet, “when I heard that Golem had peeped in through Ms Aikura’s window; I guessed immediately that it had to be the work of someone used to passing to and fro across that drawbridge. Nobody else would have come up with a plan that involved leaving the door to the drawbridge open—to what was essentially Mr Hamamoto’s domain.

“But when I thought about it, the only way of establishing proof of the crime was to establish proof of the identity of the criminal. By experimenting, I could easily explain how the killer had managed to commit the crimes, but as to the who —well, there were other people besides Kozaburo Hamamoto who could have done it.”

Everyone pondered the meaning of his words.

“To cut a long story short, the occupants of Rooms 1 and 2 could have done it, and if Chikako Hayakawa had been in the room in the tower around the time of death, she could have done it too.

“Right then, the hypothesis was that the icicle was sent all the way down the slide from the very top. But imagine the point on the slide just beyond Room 3, in other words, the staircase that you have to climb to get up to Room 3 from the ground floor. I couldn’t completely rule out the possibility that someone quite different might have sent the icicle from that much lower point with a very strong push. As long as the motive for this murder remained so vague, I had to assume that anyone could have prepared a similar icicle under the eaves outside their own bedroom window. Outdoors is the perfect freezer.

“So I decided that the only way to be sure was to hear an explanation from the killer himself. In other words, to corner him so that he would be encouraged to confess everything in his own words. I’m not personally into tying someone up and forcing it out of them. That’s not the way I work.”

Kiyoshi threw Sergeant Ozaki a sideways glance.

“Obviously, I had already guessed the identity of the killer, but the method I devised to flush him out was by using the thing most beloved to him, that is, the life of his daughter. I made him fear that someone was planning to kill her in the exact same manner as Mr Kikuoka had been murdered. The only way to do that was to have her sleep on the bed in Room 14.

“But her father wasn’t able to confide in the police why he was anxious for her life without explaining his own part in Kikuoka’s murder, so he made up his mind to protect her by himself. He was a murderer himself. And the conditions were perfect—there was a blizzard outside. Oh… it seems to have stopped.”

It was true—the noise of the wind had become much softer.

“For Kikuoka’s murder there needed to be something loud like that storm. The icicle made quite a noise at it slid down the stairs.”

“I see. So that’s why Kikuoka’s murder came so close after Ueda’s!” I said.

“That’s right. He couldn’t squander the chance of using a stormy night like that one. There was no way of knowing when the next blizzard would blow in. However, anyone with their ear close to a door frame or a pillar could hear the sound of the icicle slithering down the stairs. That was—”

“The snake!”

“The sound like a woman sobbing!”

“And as it was an icicle the conditions needed to be full-on winter. But in my case, it wouldn’t matter if the night outside was silent as a cemetery, I planned to go ahead with the trick I was going to play on Mr Hamamoto. I had everything set up.

“Of course Mr Hamamoto didn’t know for sure that someone planned to kill his daughter. And he couldn’t confide in anyone. But he knew the exact way Mr Kikuoka had been murdered, and feared that someone was going to try to take their revenge the same way. Perhaps he thought that Kikuoka’s employee was the one who was going to do it.

“This is what he decided. If the door to the drawbridge was shut, it would be practically impossible for whoever it was to open it and lower the bridge without making a lot of noise. So he figured the theoretical killer would probably push the icicle from the point on the east wing staircase just below the drawbridge.

“It was more difficult for me to imagine what he would decide next. What would be his next course of action? I couldn’t read him with a hundred per cent accuracy. Would he go to the east wing staircase? That would mean coming face to face with the person planning to kill his daughter. Would Kozaburo Hamamoto choose this route? Or would he go to the west wing staircase and try his best to stop the icicle as it came sliding down? No, that would be difficult to achieve. There were several courses of action he might have taken. He could have placed bricks on the west staircase and then headed up to the east one. But in the end I was convinced that he was going to try something completely different. And that was to go to Room 3 and take down the Tengu masks from the wall.”

For the umpteenth time that evening, the “aahs” could be heard around the room.

“Obviously I couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure about that either. He might have left the masks intact and used another method to stop the icicle. It was a gamble, but a good one. There was a long time until morning, and Mr Hamamoto had no idea what time the killer would strike. It was better for him not to be seen. Putting bricks on the stairs might not succeed in stopping the icicle, and he really didn’t want to hang out on the stairs all night waiting for the killer to arrive.

“But the position of the Tengu masks was crucial. If he took some down, burned them or just bent the noses of a few of them, the attack from the east wing was almost sure to be blocked. I believed he’d go for it.

“Thus I figured that if Mr Hamamoto could be caught red-handed removing the masks from the wall, then he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of it. By this point I was sure that Mr Hamamoto was the killer. His own daughter was in danger, but he didn’t ask the police for help, because this would have revealed his knowledge of the method used to kill Kikuoka.