The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes

by Mike Ashley

  Everything checked except Zara’s statement. The fingerprints taken at the autopsy matched the prints we had from Soames’s file at the National Identification Service. His mugshot was exactly like the man his wife and girlfriend had identified and the pathologist had dissected.

  I tried discussing it with my boss, but Johnny was relentless. “Constable, you’re making a horse’s arse of yourself. Soames is dead. You attended the autopsy. What other proof do you want?”

  “If he had a twin, or a double—”

  “We’d have heard. Drop it, lad. Zara may be a charmer, but she’s an unreliable witness.”

  “I know it sounds impossible—”

  “So leave it out.”

  I was forced to press on without official back-up. I won’t bore you with all the theories I concocted and dismissed. In the end it came down to whether Zara could be believed. And after hours of wrestling with the problem I thought of a way of checking her statement. She’d told me Soames had said he was going to the Benefits Office after he left her. If they had a record of his visit –after he’d died – Zara would be vindicated.

  I called the Benefits people and got a helpful woman who offered to check their records of Monday’s interviews.

  She called back within the hour. Zilch.

  I was down, down there with the Titanic.

  Then something triggered in my brain. I asked the woman, “Do you have security cameras?”

  “Sure.”

  “Inside the office?”

  “Yes.”

  I drove down there and started watching videotapes.

  “Guv, I’d like you to look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Pretty sensational I’d call it.”

  I ran the video. Two sergeants from CID who remembered Soames from before he went to prison came in to look. The screen showed tedious views of people waiting their turn to speak to the staff. I pressed “Fast Forward”, then slowed it to “Play”.

  “Look behind the rows of seats.”

  A slight man with straight, silver-streaked hair came into shot and hesitated. He stared at one of the desks where a young woman was being interviewed, partially screened from the rest of the room. He took a step to the right, apparently to get a better view of what was going on.

  I touched the “Freeze Frame” and held a mugshot of Soames against the screen. “How about that, guys?”

  “My God, it could be him.”

  “No question,” said one of the sergeants. “The face, the way he moves, everything.”

  “And look at the time.”

  The digits at the bottom right of the screen were frozen at 10:32.

  “All right. Joke over,” said Johnny. “How did you fix it?”

  “I didn’t. This is on the level.”

  “Run it again.”

  White-faced and muttering, my boss continued to stare at the screen until the figure of Soames turned away and walked out of shot.

  “That man died at 9.20. It can’t be.”

  “It must be.”

  We spent the next half-hour debating the matter. Johnny Horgan, desperate to make sense of the impossible, dredged up a theory involving false identification. Zara had lied when she came to view the body: Soames had put her up to it, seeing an opportunity to “die” and get a new name, and maybe plastic surgery, before resuming his criminal career. She, the dumb blonde, had stupidly blown his cover when I called on her.

  It was a daft theory. How had he persuaded his wife Felicity, who had shopped him, to join in the deception? And why would he be so foolish as to parade in front of cameras in the Benefits Office?

  “Anyroad,” Johnny said when his theory was dead in the water, “we can’t waste time on it. The post office job was the crime. Attempted robbery. There’s no argument that the robber died of a coronary, whether he was Jack Soames or bloody Bill Sikes. The case is closed.”

  For me, it was still wide open. While the arguments were being tossed around, my mind was on a different tack. What had Soames been up to in the Benefits Office? He hadn’t been interviewed, so he didn’t collect a payout.

  When the others had left the room, I ran the video again and made a stunning discovery. There had been a crime, and it was far more serious than a botched hold-up. Zara hadn’t lied to me; hadn’t even made a mistake. Impossible, it had seemed, because none of us made the connection. I slipped out of the building.

  I found Felicity Soames in her place of work – at one of the desks in the Benefits Office. “It took a while for the penny to drop,” I told her. “I was in here this morning to examine the security videos and I didn’t spot you.”

  “Were you expecting me to be here?”

  “To be honest, no. You told me you were a civil servant, but I didn’t link it with this. You must have had a shock like a million volts when your husband walked in here on Monday.”

  She flinched at the memory. “I was terrified. He stood staring at me, putting the fear of God in me.”

  “We have it on tape. I watched it five times before I saw you behind your desk. We were all so gobsmacked at seeing him alive that we didn’t give anyone else a look.”

  “He wasn’t there for an interview. He just came in to check on me.

  “To let you know he was out.”

  “Yes, I’ve lived in terror of him for four years. I put him away, you know. My evidence did it.”

  “And you’re all alone in the world?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you’re not, love. You’ve got a big brother. And you called him and poured out your troubles.”

  At the mortuary, I asked to see the body of the post office robber.

  “I had the impression you’d seen enough of him already,” said Dr Leggatt, smiling.

  “Would you get him out, please?”

  The pathologist sighed and called to his assistant. “Norman, fetch out number seven, the late Mr Soames, would you?”

  I said mildly, “Jack Soames isn’t the post office robber.”

  The doctor hesitated. “How do you work that out?”

  “But I’d like to see his body, just the same.”

  Leggatt exchanged a world-weary look with Norman, who went to one of the chilled cabinets and pulled out the drawer.

  It was empty.

  Leggatt snapped his fingers. “Of course. He’s gone.”

  “Not here?”

  “Storage problems. I asked the undertaker to collect him.”

  “Along with the real post office robber, I suppose?”

  Leggatt said, “You’re way ahead of me.”

  “I don’t think so, doctor. The man who held up the post office probably died of a heart attack triggered by stress, just as you suggested.”

  “What a relief!” Leggatt said with irony. But he wasn’t looking as comfortable as he intended.

  “You came out to Five Lanes and collected him. On the same day, Jack Soames, recently released from prison, decided to let his wife know he was at liberty. After a passionate lie-in with his girlfriend, he made his way to the Benefits Office where Felicity worked. She was terrified, just as he wished her to be. He had a four-year score to settle. When he’d gone, she phoned you.”

  “Me? Why me?” said Leggatt in high-pitched surprise that didn’t throw me in the least.

  “Because she’s your sister, doctor. She’s really suffered for blowing the whistle on her husband. Waking up screaming, night after night, all because she stood up to him. You told us about that after DI Horgan made his insensitive remark about the sub-postmistress.”

  “Idiot,” said Leggatt, but he was talking about himself. “Yes, that comment angered me at the time. I’d forgotten. So much has happened since. And you made the connection?”

  He’d virtually put up his hand to the crime. Elated, I held myself in check. “I think you saw an opportunity and seized it. You’d already taken in the body of the post office robber, a middle-aged man with greying hair, not totally unlike your broth
er-in-law. No one seemed to know who he was, so he was heaven-sent. You had a marvellous chance to kill Soames and end your sister’s suffering without anyone knowing. You’re a pathologist. You know enough to kill a man swiftly and without any obvious signs. An injection, perhaps? I think you believed your sister was in real danger.”

  “She was.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Leggatt shook his head. “There was no ‘maybe’ about it. He was waiting outside the Benefits Office for her. He wasn’t there to make a scene. He intended violence.”

  “And you approached him, invited him into your car, killed him and drove him here. You chose a time when Norman was out of the mortuary – possibly at night – to unload the body into a drawer, the drawer supposedly holding the bank robber. You changed the tag on the toe.”

  “You watch too much television,” Leggatt commented.

  “When I came here with Zara, you wheeled Soames out. You knew I wasn’t likely to take a close look at the face, seeing that I’d been so troubled by the sight of death. Anyway, I hadn’t taken a proper look at the real robber.”

  “Your inspector did.”

  “Yes, but he delegated everything to me. He’s new to our patch. He didn’t know Soames, except from mugshots, so when he saw the security video from the Benefits Office he had Soames imprinted on his memory.”

  “You’ve got Soames on video? Thank God for that.”

  I nodded. “I expect your defence will make good use of it. Extenuating circumstances – is that the phrase?”

  “Professional misconduct is another,” said Leggatt. “Doctors who kill don’t get much leniency from the courts.”

  “You carried out the autopsy on Soames, deciding, of course, that he died of a coronary, and it wouldn’t be necessary to send any of the organs for forensic examination. But what did you plan to do with the other body – the poor old codger who dropped dead when the sub-postmistress looked him in the eye?”

  “Not a serious problem,” said Leggatt. “This is a teaching hospital and bodies are donated for medical research. We keep them here in the mortuary. It could all be fixed with paperwork.”

  “I wonder if we’ll ever discover who he was,” I said, little realizing that it would become my job for the next six weeks. A DC who solves an impossible crime doesn’t get much thanks from his superior. The reverse, I discovered. I’m still looking for promotion.

  AFTERWORD

  Impossible Crimes: A Quick History

  Mike Ashley

  The impossible crime story has been around as long as the mystery story has existed. The gothic mystery, so popular in the late eighteenth century, abounded in stories of purportedly haunted rooms, though the solution usually related to a secret passage. Such was the case in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and even E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Mademoiselle de Scudari” (1819), even though the latter gives some pretext to being a genuine locked-room murder.

  The first real locked-room mystery that did not rely on a secret passage – despite its title – was “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published in The Dublin University Magazine for November 1838. Le Fanu is best remembered today for his macabre novels like Uncle Silas (1864), which also includes a variant on his locked-room idea, and the vampire story “Carmilla” (1872). The only feature that Le Fanu’s story lacks is that of a detective intent on solving the mystery. That was soon provided by Edgar Allan Poe who, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1841), provided the firm footing for the detective story. Needless to say Poe’s story is grotesque and bizarre, but it is a bona fide locked-room mystery.

  A few other locked-room stories appeared during the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps the best known being “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (Household Words, 24 April 1852). The story was published by Charles Dickens, and I’m a little surprised that Dickens did not turn his hand to the impossible crime story as he would certainly have brought considerable ingenuity to it. By and large the mid-Victorian impossible crime story retains too many trappings of the gothic era and, though original at the time, today seem a little too trite. That’s the main reason I have not reprinted them – beyond the fact that most are easily available in the authors’ collected stories. The only one I have selected is from Out of His Head (1862) by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, which is both original and feels far more modern than its contemporaries.

  The real explosion in the impossible crime story came in 1892 as a result of two significant publications. The first was a novel, The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill, serialized in the London evening paper The Star. This is the first full-length novel written solely round a murder in a locked room. Zangwill had thought about the problem for several years before he wrote the novel and his creativity and originality shows. Gone are the secret passages and other devices. Here was a novel where the crime had been committed with incredible ingenuity and had to be solved with equal skill and deduction. Needless to say during its serialization readers of The Star wrote in suggesting their own solutions – none of which was right – and the thrill and enticement of the locked-room mystery became only too evident.

  The other publication was a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (The Strand Magazine, February 1892). The immediate success of the Holmes stories in The Strand is well known. Arthur Conan Doyle was fascinated with the idea of unusual crimes, and what makes the Holmes stories stand out is that all of the crimes are bizarre, a real test for Holmes’s deductive powers. Holmes had no interest in the run-of-the-mill crime. Perhaps, because of that, it is surprising that there are not more impossible crimes amongst the Holmes canon. Strictly there are only two, the other being “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (The Strand Magazine, February 1922) where a murder is committed but no visible weapon.

  The Big Bow and “Speckled Band”, coming together just at the time when the popular fiction magazine was blossoming, opened the door for the impossible crime story. The late Victorian and Edwardian writers loved them. Conan Doyle wrote one further example, “The Story of the Lost Special” (The Strand Magazine, August 1898) where a train vanishes from a stretch of rail. L.T. Meade produced ever more bizarre solutions to her crimes, especially those collected in A Master of Mysteries (1898).

  The next major breakthrough, however, came in 1905. In America the author Jacques Futrelle published “The Problem of Cell 13” as a serial in The Boston American (30 October – 5 November 1905), challenging the newspaper’s readers to solve the story. It introduced Futrelle’s character Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, known as the Thinking Machine, who has such a power of deduction that he is able to resolve any problem, no matter how impossible it seems. In this first story he set himself the challenge of escaping from a locked cell in a high-security prison, kept constantly under watch. How he did it remains one of the most remarkable stories ever written. Over the next six years Futrelle wrote several dozen Thinking Machine stories, not all of which appeared in book-form. They included stories in which things disappear from guarded rooms, a car vanishes from a stretch of road, and even an entire house disappears. It was such a tragedy that Futrelle was killed when the Titanic sank in 1912.

  It was also in 1905 that Edgar Wallace published The Four Just Men, along with much publicity and gimmickry. Wallace had published the book himself and deliberately left the ending open, offering a prize to the reader who could solve the baffling murder of a man in broad daylight surrounded (but not touched) by policemen in a locked room. Needless to say the redoubtable Edgar Wallace employed the locked-room idea many times in his books and stories, with perhaps the most ingenious being in The Crimson Circle (1922), where a man is found gassed in a locked room.

  Soon after The Four Just Men came one of the most popular of all locked-room mysteries, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). The author was Gaston Leroux, best known for The Phantom of the Opera (1911). The novel, which is still in print, is one of
the best developed of all locked-room deaths, and is all the more fun because of the rivalry between the detective, Frederick Larson, and the newspaper reporter, Joseph Rouletabille, to solve the crime.

  If the impossible crime story needed any final seal of approval it came in 1911 with the publication of The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton. The stories had already caused a sensation in The Story-Teller, where they had started to appear from the September 1910 issue. The editor of The Story-Teller, Arthur Spurgeon, was so impressed by the stories that he announced them with the proclamation that: “the plots are so amazing and so cleverly worked out that I believe they will prove to be the best detective stories of our time.” There were in total five volumes of Father Brown stories, many of them falling into the category of the impossible crime, especially those in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926).

  By another remarkable instance of synchronicity, at the same time as Father Brown appeared so did Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner. Although the first collection, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, did not appear until 1918, the stories were being run in The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines from 1911 on. Alas, all too few of them are miracle murders, though the best, “The Doomdorf Mystery”, which David Renwick refers to and which is reprinted in this anthology, most certainly was.

  Chesterton and Post provide the link across the Great War and into the 1920s. There were less impossible crime stories written during this period than one might expect, though the form was well enough established for P.G. Wodehouse to spoof it in the perfectly acceptable “The Education of Detective Oakes” (Pearson’s Magazine, December 1914), where a man in a locked room appears to have been killed by snake venom.

  S.S. van Dine, the creator of Philo Vance, gave it a good stab in The Canary Murder Case (1927) and later novels. Agatha Christie also turned her mercurial mind to the matter. Several of the stories in The Thirteen Problems (1932), such as “The Blue Geranium” (The Story-Teller, December 1929) are seemingly impossible crimes which Miss Marple is able to solve simply by applying her mind.