The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes

by Mike Ashley

“Let me go!” she panted. “Oh, I implore you!”

  “I’ll not let you go,” said Christopher, in a voice as low as hers, but mercilessly determined. “This game is up. You shall tell me everything, or I swear I’ll alarm the house, send for the police, and have you arrested, you and your husband.”

  “Not my husband!” faltered the “dear little cousin,” the pretty, timid creature who had always seemed to Christopher pathetic in her gentle self-effacement, her desire to help Cousin Sidney. “He – he has nothing to do with this. I—”

  “Oh, yes, he has; everything to do with it,” insisted Christopher, brutally, meaning to frighten her. “You couldn’t have managed this yourself. I’m not an ordinary guest. I’m here as a detective, and I’ve been working up the case for a fortnight. Now, I want your confession. Be quick, please, or you’ll regret it.”

  “How cruel you are!” sobbed the woman.

  Christopher laughed. “How cruel you have both been to those who trusted you – and to others likely to be suspected in your stead.”

  “I would do anything for Morley,” said Morley’s wife.

  Still holding her wrist, he pulled her gently, but firmly, up to the top of the steps, and did not loosen his grasp until he stood between her and the stairway.

  “If you wish to save him you know what to do,” the young man said.

  “You won’t send us to prison if I tell you the whole story?”

  “I’ll do my best for you, if you make a clean breast of it; but the contents of these boxes must be restored to their owners, for your cousin’s sake if nothing else. I promise to shut my eyes to your escaping with your husband, before any public revelation is made, provided I’m satisfied that you tell me the whole truth now.”

  “I will, oh, I will! You know, Morley would have had this place if common justice had been done – if the entail hadn’t been broken.”

  “Ah, he is the heir of whom Miss Chester spoke!”

  “Of course, who else could be? He’s the only one left in the male line. And think what it was for him to find out through an expert, whose word he couldn’t doubt, that there’s coal enough under the park to make him an immensely rich man, if only he hadn’t been robbed of his rights.”

  “He didn’t tell Miss Chester of this discovery?”

  “Naturally not. If she or her mother gave up living here the estate would come to him after all. He hoped for that. And when he heard of her plan to open a kind of hotel he helped her get a licence and offered to manage the business. That was because he had an idea, which he hoped he could work. His father, who died when Morley was a boy, was a professor of chemistry, and made some clever inventions and discoveries, but they never brought in money. There was one thing he found after spending a year in Persia for his health. He discovered that out of a plant there – a plant no one had ever thought of importance before – an extract could be produced which would make people unconscious, at the same time causing their muscles to remain so rigid that if they were standing they would remain on their feet, or would not drop what they might be holding in their hands. When they came to themselves again they would not feel ill, would not even know they had lost consciousness for a moment.

  “Morley’s father was much excited about this preparation and hoped it would be as important as curare, if not chloroform. He named the stuff arenoform, as nearly as possible after the plant, and published his discovery to the medical profession. But then came a dreadful blow. After many experiments to change and improve it, nothing could be done to prolong unconsciousness enough to make arenoform really useful to doctors and surgeons. The effect wouldn’t last longer than five or six minutes, and the patients were terribly exhausted next day, so that the stuff would not do even for dentists in extracting teeth, as it was more depressing than gas. One of the most wonderful things about it was that a lot of people could be made unconscious at once, even in a big room, by a spray of arenoform floating in the air. But though that was curious and interesting, it was not of practical use, so arenoform was a failure.

  “The disappointment was so great that Morley’s father was never the same again. He always hoped that some experiment would make the thing a success, and, instead of gaining the fortune he’d expected, he spent more money than he could spare from his family in importing quantities of the plant from Persia, and manufacturing the extract in his own laboratory. Then he died, and there were hundreds and hundreds of the bottles in the house, of no use to anybody; but Morley had promised his dying father not to let them be destroyed. Everyone forgot the discovery of arenoform, for you see Dr Chester has been dead twenty years. Only Morley didn’t forget; and it was the existence of that quantity of arenoform in the house left him by his father which put the idea of coming here into his head. He experimented with the stuff on a dog, and found it was as powerful as on the day it was made. Then he told me, and I promised to help in any way I could.

  “Next to the dining-hall on one side, and separating it from the two rooms used as private sitting-rooms for guests, is a long, rather ugly room which Morley asked Sidney to give him as a private office. Night after night he worked there before the house was opened to the public, and afterwards too, perfecting his scheme. He perforated the walls, so that, by means of a little movable machine which I could work, a spray of arenoform could be showered through the oak wainscoting either into the dining-hall on one side or the two sitting-rooms on the other. Then he had the tables ranged along the wall; and as one peculiarity of arenoform is that it smells like wood – wonderfully like old oak – no detective could have suspected anything by coming to sniff about the place afterwards. Besides, the perforations in the wainscoting are so small that they seem no different from the worm-holes which are slowly spoiling the old oak.

  “When Morley was in the dining-hall or one of the sitting-rooms – which ever place we planned to have something happen – I would be in the locked office, and at a signal which he would give me when most of the servants were out of the room waiting to bring in a new course, I would turn on the spray. He always kept at the very farthest end of the room, behind the screen, and put his face to an open window there. Then, when everybody in the room was under the influence, which they were in a minute or two, he would take whatever he wanted from some unconscious man or woman, or even several persons, before anyone woke up. We’ve had no one to help us except an assistant of the cook, whom I bribed to make it as long between courses as possible. When I was ready to have the servants go in with the next dish I would touch a little electric bell in the office which Morley had arranged to communicate with the kitchen. The cook’s assistant knows nothing, though, except that for some reason it was convenient to me not to have the meals hurried, and to be able to regulate exactly the moment when the different courses should go in.

  “Of course, the horrid stuff has affected our health – Morley’s and mine – as well as that of everybody else, who has been near when the machine was worked, or lived in the house for any length of time. But we hoped that Sidney and her mother would soon give up. Then the place would be Morley’s, and we would be repaid for everything. While if they held on we should at least have the jewels.

  “When Morley was working at the walls he discovered the way into this secret place out of our office – not the only ‘hidie hole’ in the house – but neither Sidney nor her mother knows of its existence. We thought it would be useful to get things out of the way, for fear of detectives searching our boxes, and so it has been. Morley has always sent me up, because I am so light and small and don’t make as much noise on the creaking stairs as a man would. Now you know the whole story. And if you have any sense of justice you’ll admit that Morley isn’t to blame, when the place should have been his, and not Sidney’s or her mother’s.”

  Long before dawn Mr and Mrs Morley Chester left Wood House. Next day Christopher told Sidney and Sir Walter Raven the tale as it had been told to him. Also, he mentioned the coal. Also, he showed them the store of jewels and bank-
notes.

  Where the Morley Chesters went Christopher and others did not know, and did not want to know; but when an advertisement was put into all the most important papers that the mysterious thief at Wood House had been discovered, and that everybody who had lost anything could have it returned by claiming it, the enlightened police were unable to get upon the track of the missing ones.

  Christopher would not accept any payment from Sidney Chester. But he would like to have a piece of her wedding-cake to “dream on.” He did not think that it would cause him to dream of old oak.

  THE MOTOR BOAT

  Jacques Futrelle

  One of the many tragedies linked with the sinking of the Titanic was the death of author Jacques Futrelle (1875–1912). Futrelle was the creator of Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, better known as “The Thinking Machine” because of his remarkable grasp of logic and deduction in solving apparently impossible crimes. Van Dusen came to prominence in one of the best known of all locked-room mysteries, “The Problem of Cell 13”, serialised in The Boston American in 1905. Dusen claimed that he could escape from a locked cell in the strongest prison kept under constant watch. The story was run as a contest to see if anyone could come up with the solution. The way in which Futrelle achieves his escape is perhaps the most ingenious in all fiction. I have not selected that story here, partly because it is almost constantly in print in some book or another, but mostly because it is not a crime story, but an extremely clever challenge. After this story Dusen is consulted, usually by newspaper reporter Hutchinson Hatch, on all manner of bizarre and seemingly impossible crimes. The following story, which first appeared in the Sunday Magazine (9 September 1906) is much less well known, though it is wonderfully bizarre.

  Captain Hank Barber, master mariner, gripped the bow-rail of the Liddy Ann and peered off through the semi-fog of the early morning at a dark streak slashing along through the grey-green waters. It was a motor boat of long, graceful lines; and a single figure, that of a man, sat upright at her helm staring uncompromisingly ahead. She nosed through a roller, staggered a little, righted herself and sped on as a sheet of spray swept over her. The helmsman sat motionless, heedless of the stinging splash of wind-driven water in his face.

  “She sure is a-goin’ some,” remarked Captain Hank, reflectively. “By Ginger! If she keeps it up into Boston Harbor, she won’t stop this side o’ the Public Gardens.”

  Captain Hank watched the boat curiously until she was swallowed up, lost in the mist, then turned to his own affairs. He was a couple of miles out of Boston Harbor, going in; it was six o’clock of a grey morning. A few minutes after the disappearance of the motor boat Captain Hank’s attention was attracted by the hoarse shriek of a whistle two hundred yards away. He dimly traced through the mist the gigantic lines of a great vessel – it seemed to be a ship of war.

  It was only a few minutes after Captain Hank lost sight of the motor boat that she was again sighted, this time as she flashed into Boston Harbor at full speed. She fled past, almost under the prow of a pilot boat, going out, and was hailed. At the mess table later the pilot’s man on watch made a remark about her.

  “Goin’! Well, wasn’t she though! Never saw one thing pass so close to another in my life without scrubbin’ the paint offen it. She was so close up I could spit in her, and when I spoke the feller didn’t even look up – just kept a-goin’. I told him a few things that was good for his soul.”

  Inside Boston Harbor the motor boat performed a miracle. Pursuing a course which was singularly erratic and at a speed more than dangerous she reeled on through the surge of the sea regardless alike of fog, the proximity of other vessels and the heavy wash from larger craft. Here she narrowly missed a tug; there she skimmed by a slow-moving tramp and a warning shout was raised; a fisherman swore at her as only a fisherman can. And finally when she passed into a clear space, seemingly headed for a dock at top speed, she was the most unanimously damned craft that ever came into Boston Harbor.

  “Guess that’s a through boat,” remarked an aged salt, facetiously as he gazed at her from a dock. “If that durned fool don’t take some o’the speed offen her she’ll go through all right – wharf an’ all.”

  Still the man in the boat made no motion; the whizz of her motor, plainly heard in a sudden silence, was undiminished. Suddenly the tumult of warning was renewed. Only a chance would prevent a smash. Then Big John Dawson appeared on the string piece of the dock. Big John had a voice that was noted from Newfoundland to Norfolk for its depth and width, and possessed objurgatory powers which were at once the awe and admiration of the fishing fleet.

  “You ijit!” he bellowed at the impassive helmsman. “Shut off that power an’ throw yer helium.”

  There was no response; the boat came on directly toward the dock where Big John and his fellows were gathered. The fishermen and loungers saw that a crash was coming and scattered from the string piece.

  “The durned fool,” said Big John, resignedly.

  Then came the crash, the rending of timbers, and silence save for the grinding whir of the motor. Big John ran to the end of the wharf and peered down. The speed of the motor had driven the boat half way upon a float which careened perilously. The man had been thrown forward and lay huddled up face downward and motionless on the float. The dirty water lapped at him greedily.

  Big John was the first man on the float. He crept cautiously to the huddled figure and turned it face upward. He gazed for an instant into wide staring eyes then turned to the curious ones peering down from the dock.

  “No wonder he didn’t stop,” he said in an awed tone. “The durned fool is dead.”

  Willing hands gave aid and after a minute the lifeless figure lay on the dock. It was that of a man in uniform – the uniform of a foreign navy. He was apparently forty-five years old, large and powerful of frame with the sun-browned face of a seaman. The jet black of moustache and goatee was startling against the dead colour of the face. The hair was tinged with grey; and on the back of the left hand was a single letter – “D” – tattooed in blue.

  “He’s French,” said Big John authoritatively, “an’ that’s the uniform of a Cap’n in the French Navy.” He looked puzzled a moment as he stared at the figure. “An’ they ain’t been a French man-o’-war in Boston Harbor for six months.”

  After awhile the police came and with them Detective Mallory, the big man of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation; and finally Dr Clough, Medical Examiner. While the detective questioned the fishermen and those who had witnessed the crash, Dr Clough examined the body.

  “An autopsy will be necessary,” he announced as he arose.

  “How long has he been dead?” asked the detective.

  “Eight or ten hours, I should say. The cause of death doesn’t appear. There is no shot or knife wound so far as I can see.”

  Detective Mallory closely examined the dead man’s clothing. There was no name or tailor mark; the linen was new; the name of the maker of the shoes had been ripped out with a knife. There was nothing in the pockets, not a piece of paper or even a vagrant coin.

  Then Detective Mallory turned his attention to the boat. Both hull and motor were of French manufacture. Long, deep scratches on each side showed how the name had been removed. Inside the boat the detective saw something white and picked it up. It was a handkerchief – a woman’s handkerchief, with the initials “E.M.B.” in a corner.

  “Ah, a woman’s in it!” he soliloquized.

  Then the body was removed and carefully secluded from the prying eyes of the press. Thus no picture of the dead man appeared. Hutchinson Hatch, reporter, and others asked many questions. Detective Mallory hinted vaguely at international questions – the dead man was a French officer, he said, and there might be something back of it.

  “I can’t tell you all of it,” he said wisely, “but my theory is complete. It is murder. The victim was captain of a French man-of-war. His body was placed in a motor boat, possibly a part of the fittings of the warship and the b
oat set adrift. I can say no more.”

  “Your theory is complete then,” Hatch remarked casually, “except the name of the man, the manner of death, the motive, the name of his ship, the presence of the handkerchief and the precise reason why the body should be disposed of in this fashion instead of being cast into the sea.”

  The detective snorted. Hatch went away to make some inquiries on his own account. Within half a dozen hours he had satisfied himself by telegraph that no French was craft had been within five hundred miles of Boston for six months. Thus the mystery grew deeper; a thousand questions to which there seemed no answer arose.

  At this point, the day following the events related, the problem of the motor boat came to the attention of Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, The Thinking Machine. The scientist listened closely but petulantly to the story Hatch told.

  “Has there been an autopsy yet?” he asked at last.

  “It is set for eleven o’clock today,” replied the reporter. “It is now after ten.”

  “I shall attend it,” said the scientist.

  Medical Examiner Clough welcomed the eminent Professor Van Dusen’s proffer of assistance in his capacity of MD, while Hatch and other reporters impatiently cooled their toes on the curb. In two hours the autopsy had been completed. The Thinking Machine amused himself by studying the insignia on the dead man’s uniform, leaving it to Dr Clough to make a startling statement to the press. The man had not been murdered; he had died of heart failure. There was no poison in the stomach, nor was there a knife or pistol wound.

  Then the inquisitive press poured in a flood of questions. Who had scratched off the name of the boat? Dr Clough didn’t know. Why had it been scratched off? Still he didn’t know. How did it happen that the name of the maker of the shoes had been ripped out? He shrugged his shoulders. What did the handkerchief have to do with it? Really he couldn’t conjecture. Was there any inkling of the dead man’s identity? Not so far as he knew. Any scar on the body which might lead to identification? No.