The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes

by Mike Ashley

  “No. Like I said, she didn’t phone . . . post-mortem suggests . . . late Wednesday or early Thursday.”

  “Did she call anyone at all?”

  “I don’t know . . . hold on . . . wasn’t there a phone bill in that heap I just brought up? That’ll be itemized!”

  He went to get it. I tried to imagine the scene in that room: above, the peaceful image of Morrigan floating up toward the sunrise, unsuspecting as the nude in Jaws; below the real Megan, troubled in ways I could not analyze, sinking far too deep into the sea of sleep.

  “It is a phone bill . . . that’s good, it’s itemized right up to last Friday, when . . . no, those look like the calls I made . . . nothing for Thursday and not much Wednesday either . . . wait a minute . . . there’s one some hours after the rest.”

  He stopped and shuddered. “Sounds like that last call.”

  I said: “Do you recognize the number?”

  “No. Do you think we should try it?”

  “Why not?” I didn’t want Megan to have made a last, despairing call to someone who failed to help; but my reputation, and therefore my living, depended on being prepared to ignore what I wanted to believe and find out what really happened. I got Edwin to show me the phone in the lounge and the number to dial. It rang twice, then an automated voice began: “The Department of Clinical Biochemistry of St Dunstan’s University Hospital is closed. Please leave a message after the tone. If you need to make urgent contact, the following staff members have mobiles: Dr Alan Glade, Senior Lecturer and Director of the . . .”

  “Our old friend Dr Glade. Let’s just get this mobile number. Shall I ring it?” Edwin nodded, and I dialled the number. It was another answering service. I left him a message to contact us, then looked back at the phone bill.

  “Apart from the Glade call in the late afternoon, we only have three calls, all to one number, all late morning.”

  Edwin May looked over my shoulder. “I think that’s her Internet Service Provider. She’d have been logging on. That’s it . . . why didn’t I think of it! Her last message must have been an e-mail.”

  “They were some time before the call to Dr Gla . . .” I petered out, as Edwin hurried to the bedroom and started booting up the PC. I followed, wondering uneasily what he would find. If she had died by her own hand, I cursed my incompetence in not adequately evaluating the risk. She just hadn’t seemed like a danger to herself. Could someone have somehow fed her extra pills? I had suspected Edwin May himself, but it was a farfetched theory, inspired by his own odd idea that BattleSpear could have been directly not indirectly responsible. But May seemed far more excited by her professional than her sexual life. He found something on the computer and said: “Look at this: ‘It’s a real downer that everything I write for BS has to be redone so often. I do have other projects and the stress is undermining my health’”

  “What e-mail is this?” I asked. “Is it dated?”

  “It’s to her friend Molly Brown, another top pro writer, someone who’d understand!” he said in a tone which implied a mere psychologist had no hope of understanding any writer. “It’s quite recent. Not Wednesday. One pm Monday. Oh, God, listen to this, they were really upsetting her! ‘Things have been a lot worse since 20K got going! Everything has to be redone twenty thousand times!’”

  “What’s TwentyK?” Monique asked. “Some kind of Millennium project?”

  “No, futuristic BattleSpear. Really, it’s just the usual Trulls and Urks with ray-guns. But some of it is seriously pervy, not really pre-teen stuff. The ironic thing is, Megan rather threw herself into BS, till they started hassling her. She joined SLOBS . . . that’s the Super League of BattleSpear, watched their videos . . . I think she’s still got the latest crud in the video now! You need to see this!”

  He jumped up and hurried back to the lounge. On the shelf between TV and VCR, there was an open cassette case, depicting the usual leatherette-clad woman in conflict with some humanoid monstrosity, both armed with futuristic weapons. “Let’s see.”

  He remoted the set and it rapidly flickered to life. Flickered was the word. The picture on the screen flashed on and off like a strobe as heavy nightclub music thumped through the flat. Edwin could just be heard above it: “That’s crap! They’ve really done it now! How can BS have sent her something like this! Strobe lights brought on her fits like crusties give you nits!”

  I was starting to make out the picture from the brief flashes of moving image. It didn’t look like a futuristic battle scene. A girl was dancing wildly, dressed only in a red and green bikini with gold tassels and matching gloves. Behind her, other girls danced in similar outfits without the gloves, around a muscular black youth with multi-coloured dreadlocks. They appeared to be on the stage of a club.

  Monique said: “Isn’t that the Glove Girl?”

  I nodded, pleased she’d spoken first. “The Glove Girl and Clive” is one of those nocturnal shows respectable psychologist types seldom admit to being up late enough to know about.

  Suddenly the music stopped and the Glove Girl was shown mopping the sweat off her face and starting to interview one of the dancers. Just as suddenly the screen went grey and snowy, then another flickering began, not strobe-like this time, but the usual damage one gets on a tape which has been partially over-recorded. This settled to show figures armed with rayguns against a crude graphic of spaceships landing.

  Monique asked: “Could she have surfed onto the show with the strobe, had a fit, then accidentally pressed ‘record’?”

  I wondered. Someone had stopped recording “The Glove Girl” when the strobe ended. Before I could comment, the doorbell rang. Edwin was so stressed he didn’t move at first. I said: “I’ll deal with it.”

  The caller was Alan Glade. The sight of him filled me with irritation and suspicion, though as he wasn’t suspected of anything, and in fact had lost his earlier belligerent manner, politely waving his mobile and saying: “This thing’s bust. I keep meaning to get it fixed. It takes messages but I can’t ring out. So, when I saw you wanted to contact me and I was still in the area . . .”

  Uncertainly, I invited him up, explaining that Megan’s last call had been to his lab. He said: “Actually, that was me,” then paused, looking alarmed, and went on: “She was sort of OK when I left, though I was worried about the way she mucked about with her medication. She’d been totally taken in by this healing crap and got out of her depth. That’s why I stayed so long.”

  Edwin said anxiously: “You mean she didn’t make a last phone call? After she’d taken the overdose?”

  “Not to me. I don’t think she had the lab number. As for overdose, well, I think it was more an accident than something planned.

  “We’d been meeting to talk about this bloody faith healing book. Frankly, she’d got the emphasis all wrong. She talked about a control group, but she didn’t have one. She was just collecting cases, isolated one-offs. I went round, it would have been the Tuesday, to show her some real evidence and talk it over.

  “Megan was in an odd mood. She wouldn’t listen to reason. She’d been using faith healing and other quack techniques to control her fits, and it hadn’t worked. She’d gone back on anti-convulsants, too many as far as I could see, her system wasn’t used to the dose she’d gone back to.

  “I was so worried, I stayed over on Tuesday night.” He glanced anxiously at May. “Not in the bedroom. I dozed off in here on the couch. Megan slept very late in the morning . . . it was hard to wake her. I decided to take the day off work. When she woke up, I went and did some shopping for her, then spent some time trying to get her to see someone to get the medication changed. She said it was only stress, she was trying to write two books at once, the healing book . . .”he indicated a blue folder on a low desk in one corner, “. . . and the next BattleSpear book. Well, at least that one was meant to be sci-fi. She said she’d soon have it sorted out. Actually, she was looking a bit better when I got a call on this.” He held up the defective mobile. “It doesn’t r
ing out . . . can be handy sometimes, but that time, there was a serious problem at the lab. I had to get over there.”

  I glanced at Monique. Reason told me we should make an excuse and leave. No note, no last call, no last e-mail.

  But I didn’t like Glade, and I especially didn’t like the way he was obsessively trashing those of his dead ex-student’s beliefs which he hadn’t drilled into her. I didn’t necessarily disagree that faith healing was a kind of placebo: but if some people could direct the placebo, what harm could they do?

  I opened the blue file. The top document was headed: MY OWN CASE. It began: “Twice now, I have succeeded in going for six months without having epileptic fits or taking damaging medication. I attribute this partly to meditation and holistic techniques, but also to the power of Healing . . . not explicitly religious, but a power science cannot yet explain, but should start trying to explore.”

  Next to the folder was a lurid paperback. It was called The Warrior. The cover had a BattleSpear logo and showed the usual black-suited and helmeted figure, brandishing a laser-sword and charging down the gangplank of a spacecraft. Unlike the other Morrigan May books, it was one I had seen in shops . . . indeed, indeed, huge displays of them. I was about to say that it must have been a stress on a writer to work on two so contrasting projects, when Glade went on: “Y’know, the tragic thing was, she was never the same after her accident.” He indicated the area of wall with her personal photos. “Back then,” pointing to shots of a slightly younger Megan in obvious fancy dress, Vampirella, Magenta from “Rocky Horror”, “She dressed up, but she knew it was a game. Later, this . . . madness!”

  He was indicating a group photograph, Megan in the centre of smiling thirty-somethings clustered round a motorcycle. All wore bike-gang gear, but the black leather had been replaced by white. May said defensively: “White Riders. Well, Megan was obviously a pillion rider. They wanted to get magic and spirituality away from the Satan-idiots on one side, and the china teacup set on the other.”

  Glade ploughed on: “It’s as if the real Megan died in the accident. As if her damaged brain wasn’t her real self. The real Megan did not believe in Magic.”

  The words came into my mind then, like a strobeflash, that if her mind was dead, he had only killed her body. That hadn’t been the part of her he needed, or not officially.

  Intuition wasn’t something I liked to rely on, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s all one has. I realized that when the thought came, when Glade spoke, I had been looking at a Radio Times, which was on the table by the couch, open to Tuesday night late. The item I was looking for was there, and with a cold feeling of disgust I realized it had been underlined.

  I said: “Well, at least something can be salvaged. Just think of the publicity: ‘Healer Author met mysterious, Marilyn-like death.’” I looked at Glade and tapped the blue file. “I’m sure the publishers can edit her book up from these notes. And the TV, there’ll be out-takes from other shows she did, all these stills. She didn’t live for nothing!”

  “But that’s madness! Publish the ravings of a demented, braindamaged . . .” He strode toward the desk as if meaning to grab the blue file and run with it. I held it up and said: “You’d like to destroy this, wouldn’t you! I should think that’s why you came back! To destroy it, that and the tape!”

  He made a grab at it, but I was bigger than him, and held it over my head. I feared he would have a go at me, and I might need to bring it down sharply as a weapon, but he just stood there breathing heavily and shaking with anger. May was staring, totally bewildered: I noticed Monique slide silently to the phone. I said: “You remind me of an Evangelical Christian I once treated.” He opened his mouth and I cut him off: “He wouldn’t learn Yoga or anything similar because it was Hindu, Pagan, Unchristian, and therefore of the Devil!”

  “There’s no Devil!” he said. “There’s no Christ. There’s no proof of any of the things she was asserting in that bloody book!”

  “That’s what you told her on Tuesday, but she wouldn’t listen. Brain-damaged. That was what she’d been, since she had her accident and stopped being your student.”

  “She was my best ever student! She should have been a scientist . . . not this! The real Megan would never have . . .”

  “That’s what you thought, when she wouldn’t listen to you on Tuesday and crashed out on her pills. You lay down on the couch. You tried to sleep, but you were just thinking, watching TV. Looking through the Radio Times. You saw a warning that a show was due to come on with dancing to strobe light.

  “Then it came to you. You grabbed the remote and recorded the strobe, recording it over whatever was in the video. Maybe you didn’t know then if you were going to do it. But the next day she was still ignoring what you said. She wasn’t your student any more, your scientist. It was her life’s work or yours, and yours was more important. You rang off work, and went shopping. You bought some joss sticks and lighted them in the spare room.” I thought I saw him nod then, but he stiffened and began to disagree. I spoke over him: “Megan began to panic. She thought she was having the aura for a fit. You said, ‘Don’t worry, take your pills, maybe have one extra’. . . of course you didn’t remind her, she’d have had some already, she was taking too many. You said, ‘Sit down, take you pills, let’s watch a video.’ And as soon as she’d taken them, before they could take effect, you put on the tape with the strobe, and it must have worked and given her a fit.

  “I don’t suppose it made it more difficult, watching her convulsing, wetting herself, brain-damaged and no longer a scientist. You turned off the video, and as soon as she came to, you said: ‘You’ve had a fit, you must have forgotten your pills!’ Of course, by then she’d forgotten she had taken them!

  “You began to clean up. You got her out of her jeans and pants and put them in the washing machine. You didn’t know it was broken.

  “You got Megan into bed. You didn’t take her top off. I don’t know if you realized she usually slept nude . . . it was one detail that wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t had the call from work. You made the mistake of calling back from here. Something important, was it?”

  He stood silent for a second. I guessed he wasn’t used to lying about killing, or to killing itself for that matter. In the end he said: “It was a serious problem. Contamination caused by a spillage. One of my students had made a total lash-up.”

  “Even your students make lash-ups. Now it was your turn to panic. You had to get back to the lab and not say where you’d been. You rushed off and the door locked behind you. Later, you realized you’d left the doctored tape in the machine, other odds and ends like the joss sticks. You came back saying it was for your notes. My guess is you came back several times when no one was here.”

  He looked terrified. I can only say, he didn’t look like an innocent man. All he could say was a cliche, especially for him. He said: “You can’t prove any of this . . .” but as he said it, not actually denying his guilt, Edwin May charged at him, sending him flying. He crashed into the desk, smashing it and knocking the Warrior book to the floor. But they were not warriors, and I found it relatively easy to separate them while Monique phoned the police.

  All he would say later was repeat: “There’s no proof.” I thought it ironic, as well as sad. Morrigan May had gone from a world in which proof, or at least disproof, was considered possible. She had dared to go into a world where there was no proof of anything. And he had followed her.

  THE SECOND DRUG

  Richard A. Lupoff

  Richard A. Lupoff (b.1935) first established his reputation as a writer of uncategorizable science fiction and fantasy, influenced by but clearly not imitating the early pulp adventure writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doc Smith. However, no one reading One Million Centuries (1967) or Into the Aether (1974) would regard the stories as looking backward, and others, like Sword of the Demon (1978) and Lovercraft’s Book (1985) establish their own niches. More recently Lupoff has turned to writing
crime novels featuring San Franciscan insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey. The first was The Comic Book Killer (1988). The following story features a new detective, Abel Chase, and hopefully will be the first of a series.

  The great Bosendorfer piano responded eagerly to Abel Chase’s practised hands, its crashing notes echoing from the high, raftered ceiling of the music room. Beyond the tall, westward-facing windows, the January night was dark and wind-swept. The warm lights of the college town of Berkeley sparkled below, and beyond the black face of the bay the more garish illumination of San Francisco shimmered seductively.

  The sweet tones of the Guarnarius violin bowed by Chase’s confidante and associate, Claire Delacroix, dashed intricately among the piano chords. Clad in shimmering silver, Claire offered a dramatic contrast to Chase’s drab appearance. Her platinum hair, worn in the soft style of an earlier age, cascaded across the gracefully rounded shoulders that emerged from her silvery, bias-cut gown. A single diamond, suspended from a delicate silver chain, glittered in the hollow of her throat. Her deep-set eyes, a blue so dark as at times to appear almost purple, shone with a rare intelligence.

  Abel Chase’s hair was as dark as Claire’s was pale, save for the patches of snow which appeared at the temples. Chase wore a neatly-trimmed black moustache in which only a few light-coloured hairs were interspersed. He was clad in a pale, soft-collared shirt and a tie striped with the colours of his alma mater, a silken dressing gown and the trousers of his customary midnight blue suit. His expression was saturnine.

  “Enough, Delacroix.” He ceased to play, and she lowered her bow and instrument. “Stravinsky has outdone himself,” Chase allowed. “A few corrections and suggestions, notably to the second eclogue, and his manuscript will be ready for return. His cantilène and gigue are most affecting, while the dithyrambe is a delight. After his more ambitious orchestral pieces of recent years, it is fascinating to see him working on so small a canvas.”