The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes

by Mike Ashley

  Four weeks in the food trade had convinced Nick this career was not for him. Apparently his great-grandfather had been a master chef. Good luck to the old codger. Then Dad had changed his mind and said he was a detective. Yeah, great, Nick had thought jealously. The Case of the Stolen Spotted Dick maybe. Detection was his thing, he didn’t want to tread in family footprints.

  Les seemed to have a point about the cowpats, judging by the approving noise level as dinner was served. And now it was being raised even higher, as the Bubbling Berties, seated at a bar across the rear of the stage with their backs to the audience, went into action:

  “Oh, what a bubbling gent I am . . .”

  The three top-hatted, tuxedo-clad men burst into song as they whizzed round on their barstools, raising glasses of something that sparkled, whether champagne or not. The glasses were twirled, and raised again as the Berties simultaneously (or almost) drank a toast to the audience.

  Directly in front of Nick, an upright piano on floor level by the low stage was being pounded by a middle-aged woman in a tight black evening dress she’d outgrown several sizes earlier. That must be Greta Hobbs, he decided. She was some sort of cousin of Les’s, and apparently it was she who had persuaded the misguided owner of the club into making use of Les’s services. Greta picked up a glass standing on the piano top, to swig champagne in a toast to her troupe, and as the bubbles in it sparkled in the brightness of the spotlight above her, the Berties awarded her a toast in return.

  Nick’s mind began to fantasize. Suppose inside that piano there was a gun rigged up ready to shoot the pianist, as in Ngaio Marsh’s novel? Or even a poisoned dart? That way suspicion would fall on someone on stage, but because everyone was watching, no one could possibly have done it. It would be the impossible murder. Yes! He liked it.

  Somewhat reluctantly, it seemed to him, the Berties were launching themselves into an inefficient dance routine, as various items of outer clothing and then shirts were discarded, and the audience began to rehearse their war whoops. The top hats, however, remained firmly on the Berties’ heads.

  On retiring to their stools, a skinny individual who didn’t look as if he gained much work satisfaction wove his way in a double shuffle, glass once more in hand, to the corner where the piano top provided a convenient resting place for it as he proceeded to remove his trousers. He tossed them into the wings, crooning his solo verse:

  “I bubble every evening and I bubble every day . . .”

  Nick decided the loud roars of enthusiasm could only be anticipation for future revelations when the scarlet bikini briefs disappeared. The elderly gent sitting at the end of the front row behind her was already waving his stick in excitement.

  “What’s that old geezer doing amongst all these women?” he asked Les.

  “That old geezer, son, is Colonel Tony Hobbs, retired, Greta’s ever-adoring husband and the Bubbling Berties’ manager.” Les cast a scornful look at the Bertie currently bubbling in the limelight. “And that’s Hamish Scott. Greta took pity on him when he cracked up –” Les was a fair man, so he added, “– if you can call it that. She fancied a bit of intellect, she said, even though he’s not much better than Tony in the how’s your father department.’

  With obvious relief, and abandoning his glass, Hamish wriggled his way back to the bar to join his colleagues for the next chorus. The solo routine was then repeated, first by the beefy white-briefed Bertie (“Paul Duncan”, Les sniggered. “All three of them are her ex-lovers, but in Paul’s case not so much of the ‘ex’.”) and then by the younger one sporting natty bright blue bikini briefs. Les obliged again. “Jason Knight, replaced at work by a computer. Greta offered him the job no computer can do.”

  All three Bubbling Berties were back at the bar for the last chorus, displaying their patriotically-clad lower limbs. Their three glasses remained with Greta’s on the piano-top, but still they hung on to their top hats. It gave a remarkably seedy, almost obscene effect, and those hats began to exert a fascination over Nick. When – if ever – would they come off?

  Not yet. The removal of the briefs was discreetly managed behind the stools, and as the music changed to the traditional stripper music the audience was treated to the sight of three G-stringed Berties standing at the bar, first Paul on stage left, then Hamish in the middle, then Justin, and drinking from a second set of champagne-filled glasses. Smoke and audience noise reached a crescendo, as the be-thonged trio, hands on hips, legs apart, faced their increasingly appreciative audience.

  Nick gulped. The whole affair was repulsive. Perhaps women viewed it differently, although none of his girlfriends had ever been into this kind of thing. It occurred to him uneasily they were hardly likely to tell him, even if they were.

  The music crashed out towards its finale, with all eyes glued to the thongs. At last they were whipped away and the Bubbling Berties displayed all their glory to a now hysterical audience. (Nick must have been the only spectator looking at those terrible top hats.) Some women were climbing on their seats, others seemed ready to rush the stage.

  In a crowning act of bravado the Berties marched to the piano, and reclaimed their abandoned glasses. At long last the hats were discarded, tossed to a waiting hand from the wings, as they toasted their pianist once again. Greta rose to her feet, toasted them, and resumed her seat to continue the triumphant musical finale.

  “Amazing, ain’t it?” Les seemed admiring of this ghastly performance. “You’d never think they loathed each other – and that they hate old Greta even more.”

  “I thought you said they were her lovers.”

  “She blackmailed them into starting this game by saying she’d tell their wives. She’s a sexy old thing is Greta, and her husband’s useless. Now she won’t let them leave.”

  “They’ve got minds of their own, haven’t they?”

  “If they had once, Greta brainwashed them with dreams of fame and fortune in Hollywood, and by pointing out how upset their wives would be to miss out on the Oscars and the Tony. And how much their wives wouldn’t like to hear their housekeeping cash comes from other women screaming at their husbands’ pride and joys. Someone will do the old bag in one day,” he added casually.

  “Murder? You’re not serious, Les?”

  A harsh jangle rang out from the piano, as Greta’s fingers slipped from the keys, her face convulsed. Her body first slumped, then took the stool with it as it crashed to the floor.

  It was his knowledge of first aid that sent Nick unwillingly to the Greta’s side. It was one thing to fantasize on poisoned darts, quite another to face a possibly dead body. Her husband was hobbling around in shock waving his stick at all and sundry, but that was a fat lot of use.

  First aid looked redundant, and if Nick’s suspicions about its being some sort of cyanide poisoning were right, he had to act quickly. She might not be dead, and if she were, there might be evidence lying around. Poisoned darts? Standing tall to every one of his 5 foot 4 inches, he croaked to the club owner: “Call the police as well as the ambulance, and keep the audience here. No one should touch anything. Not even—” he yelled, seeing Paul halfway into his thong, “that”.

  “Listen, mate,” Paul said viciously, “I ain’t proposing to stand here like a limp chili pod waiting for the fuzz just because old Greta’s had a drop too much.’

  Nick summoned up his courage. “She may have been murdered.”

  That stopped all three Berties, thongs or no thongs, and a red-faced Tony Hobbs came charging onto the stage, yelling, “It was one of you, wasn’t it? You bastards, you murdered my wife. Which one of you did it?”

  “I said may,” Nick shouted. “But I can’t see how. It would have been impossible, except by a poisoned dart – unless –”

  “Impossible’s enough for me,” Paul interrupted. “I’m putting my thong on. Want to make anything of it, nipper?”

  Nick didn’t, and the other two Berties quickly followed Paul’s lead.

  “Aren’t we the little hero,
then?” Les was torn between his usual sneer and reluctant admiration. “The club won’t be offering you any medals for inviting the fuzz, though, they come all too often without asking.”

  “Tough.” Nick still felt shaky at his own daring.

  The ambulance arrived at the same time as the patrol car, and it became clear that Nick’s diagnosis of unnatural death might be correct.

  “How do you know so much about it, anyway?” Les averted his eyes from his cousin’s corpse, lying by the piano by itself, awaiting the arrival of higher police authority. It looked lonely, and Nick felt protective of the late Greta Hobbs.

  “She smelt like your Turkish Salsa gone wrong, that’s why. And she’d blue lips and thrown up.” It didn’t seem right talking about it.

  “Maybe that was the chicken,” Les said uneasily. He’d sent some food to the group before the show began.

  Sherlock Holmes used to be treated with more respect, Nick reflected bitterly, as he retired to a corner with Les. He was an aficionado of crime fiction from Poe through Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Christie, right up to Peter and Phil Lovesey, Chaz Brenchley and anything he could lay his hands on. He was addicted, whether it be hard-boiled realism or soft-boiled cosy, and irrespective of whether great-grandad used to dabble with a magnifying glass in deepest Muckshire. Tonight Nick’s nose had twitched just as it had in protest at Les putting dried parsley in the prawns. Something hadn’t been right.

  When higher police authority arrived, Nick had visions of Jack Frost clapping him on the back, or Inspector Morse reluctantly congratulating him. Unfortunately Detective Superintendent Bishop wasn’t like either of them. His amiable smile gave him the look of everybody’s ideal family doctor. While the police doctor was examining the corpse and most of the audience were filing out under the guidance of a sergeant, he was ambling around the taped-off areas of stage and auditorium like a lazy trout, but Nick couldn’t help noticing his eyes darted everywhere like a particularly hungry piranha fish. They fell on Nick and Les.

  “Who might you be? Two more strippers?”

  “Catering staff,” Les growled. “We done the supper.”

  Nick nudged him, seeing pitfalls ahead, but the piranha spotted him.

  “I don’t wonder you’re worried, sir,” he said soothingly to Nick. “We won’t know for sure this is poison till the PM’s done, but you’ll have a few questions to answer if it is. You won’t mind that, I’m sure.”

  “I was the one who said you should be called in,” Nick yelped.

  Bishop shook his head sadly. “The last fellow who tried that double bluff on me is doing life.”

  “If it was cyanide,” Nick said desperately, “it must have been on a poisoned dart unless—” An eyebrow was raised, and he continued hastily, “Our dinner was over by nine o’clock and she didn’t die till ten-twenty.” Too late, he realized poisoned darts were out, for he wouldn’t have smelled almonds then.

  “Fancy you knowing what poison it might have been, sir. Washed everything up, have you?”

  “Yes,” Les answered bleakly.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, sir. We’ll find something,” Bishop assured him cheerily. “If there’s anything to find,” he added as a throwaway.

  “Did any of the glasses on the piano smell of almonds?” Nick asked hopefully.

  Bishop’s smile became even more genial. “Why? Didn’t drop anything in, did you?”

  “No.” It came out as a bleat.

  “Just joking, lad. You’ll get used to my merry sense of humour. Why do you think the poison was in a glass?”

  “I don’t, because although she had just drunk from one—”

  “Who filled it?”

  “I don’t know, but she couldn’t have died that way.” Nick could wait no longer to produce his ace. “She’d drunk from it earlier without ill-effect, and the Berties had all drunk from the other three glasses on the piano. Suicide is out because she couldn’t have added anything to the glass between the two toasts. So unless the poison was added intentionally by someone on stage, murder would be impossible.”

  A silence, then Bishop said: “Impossible isn’t a word I like.” He beckoned to the three Berties, still sitting miserably on stage in their thongs, resentful of the scene of crime’s photographers’ ill-concealed smirks.

  Bishop saw Nick’s struggles to control an insane desire to laugh. “Shock, lad. Seen many corpses, have you?”

  “No.”

  “I have, and thank God I never get over it. When you do, that’s the time to quit.”

  Tony Hobbs was sitting in the first row of seats outside the tape, declaring at intervals that he was used to shock, making it sound as if his wife got murdered every day. He was ashen-faced, though, and in Nick’s opinion looked about to pass out as the Berties joined him.

  “Our street clothes are over there,” Hamish told Bishop hopefully, pointing to the “wings” – an all-purpose room at the side of the stage where the lighting and curtain controls were.

  “Now bagged up and the temporary property of Her Majesty’s Police Force, sir.”

  A stunned silence. “You expect us to bloody well go home like this?” Justin screeched.

  “No, we’ll need those thongs too.”

  Hamish began to weep, and Bishop relented. “The sergeant will organize something. Can’t have you frightening the horses. Now, gentlemen, I want you to repeat exactly what you did this evening. And you,” he jabbed a finger at Nick, “keep out of it.”

  Tony Hobbs elected to fill Bishop in on the background. “These three gentlemen worked to my wife’s choreography. At the beginning six glasses were put on the bar, two each for the men, and a seventh on the piano for my wife, and just before the show Greta filled them all herself. Any poison would have had to be added after that, I suppose,” he added forlornly, “since everyone drank from the same bottle.”

  “Who,” Bishop enquired, “put the glasses in position before the show?”

  “Hamish,” said his two colleagues gleefully.

  “But we all drank from them earlier,” Hamish reminded Bishop anxiously as they began the routine, miming the striptease, and using seven glasses from the kitchen. “Murder’s impossible, just like the kid said.”

  “Where did you get the glasses from?” Bishop asked.

  “We bring them with us,” Hamish replied miserably. “I got them out of their case.”

  Hamish couldn’t have doctored one beforehand, Nick realized happily; he was right. The poison could only have been added on stage.

  As Hamish took his glass to the piano to begin the final stages of the striptease, Bishop interrupted. “Is that exactly where you placed your glass tonight?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Try,” Bishop suggested in his best family doctor manner.

  Hamish slowly inched it somewhat nearer to the one representing Greta’s, which was on far stage left of the piano top, to be accessible for her right hand. When his turn came, Paul placed his just to the right of Hamish’s, leaving the three glasses in a row.

  “It wasn’t there, mate,” Justin pointed out. “Yours was dead behind Greta’s, as it usually is. I saw you put it down, both times, and I put mine behind Hamish’s.”

  “Maybe. I’ve other things on my mind,” Paul said sullenly.

  “She told me Paul was going to be her blue-eyed boy tonight,” Les whispered to Nick.

  “What did her husband think of that?”

  “Doubt if he thought much of it, but he was used to it. Anyway, he thought she was the greatest thing since whisky.”

  It seemed strange to Nick, but then what made one marriage work and another not was a mystery anyway. What he did know was that husbands were the natural suspect in the case of a murdered wife.

  As if on cue, Tony returned to the attack. “I repeat, which one of you bastards did it?” he asked quietly. “It had to be one of you three and you all hated her. None of you appreciated her.”

  “Tell me more,”
Bishop suggested politely, as the trio remained silent.

  It was Hamish who threw the first stone. “Why couldn’t someone have crept up from behind her? They could have added the poison, when Greta was watching us. She wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “How about you, Tony?” Paul chimed in viciously. “You were nearest.”

  Justin leapt on this convenient bandwagon. “Find out Paul was still hard at it, did you, Tony?”

  Tony stared at them reproachfully. “Even if,” he said heavily, “I had any reason to wish harm to Greta, gentlemen, I was a good three feet away from the piano, I am a tall man, and I would have been visible in the light of the spot above her had I moved to poison my poor wife’s drink.” He sat down again, shaking with emotion. It looked genuine enough to Nick, and the facts were on Tony’s side.

  “I would have seen you for a start,” Nick volunteered.

  “You don’t think,” Bishop suggested mildly, “one of the two hundred ladies in the audience would have noticed too? Not one of them did.”

  “Perhaps it was at the psychological moment.” Nick was suddenly inspired.

  “What the hell’s that?” Paul grunted.

  “When we showed our willies.” Hamish displayed his intellect. “Everyone’s eyes were riveted on us then. They wouldn’t have noticed anything else.”

  “Ever taken an eye test?” Bishop smiled regretfully. “Most people have a field of vision that would be aware of some movement to the right or left, no matter what was going on. No murderer could take the risk of showing himself, spotlight or not. I fear the evidence so far suggests Mr Didier is right, that suicide is ruled out, and the poison could only have been added on stage.”

  “Cheers, Nick,” Les said gratefully but prematurely.

  “However,” Bishop beamed, “there is something none of you gentlemen seem to have considered, even you, Mr Didier.” Nick waited for the jaws to snap. “Poison isn’t a murderer’s manna, descending from the heavens. It has to come in something, whether it be a bottle for liquid or as in the case of cyanide, some form of box or wrapping for crystals.” Bishop sighed as he saw the blank faces around him.