by Tom Cutler
Shimmering in the heat of the noonday sun, the Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt are a truly awe-inspiring sight and even the birds circling high in the wrinkled air do not reach their summit.
The pyramids are the work of the Old Kingdom society that dominated the Nile Valley after 3000 BCE. The most majestic, the Great Pyramid of Giza, is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still intact.
The Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids in just 85 years, between 2589 and 2504 BCE. During their lifetimes these man-made mountains have watched over plague, famine, glory and disaster. Once, long, long ago, they were silent witnesses to a mysterious double death.
It is the year 30 BCE, and, under the scorching August sky, the dead bodies of Antony and Cleopatra have been found lying together on the tile floor of a smart Egyptian dwelling that stands in the shadow of the pyramids. Both bodies are soaking wet, as is the floor.
There is no blood to be seen, there are no visible wounds on the bodies, and there are no obvious weapons nearby, although on the ground next to the deceased are several pieces of clear glass that look like large shards of a smashed round bowl. There is no blood on the glass.
Both Antony and Cleopatra have their eyes open and both are without clothes, shoes or jewellery. In fact, there are no clothes in the house except those of the owner. There are no signs of a struggle.
The owner is a rich trader, an animal lover with many pets including a boisterous dog that he keeps at home during the day to guard the property. Despite chewing the furniture and breaking the occasional vase, the dog never takes food from the table and is a good guard dog. But in spite of the double death he has not barked once.
The problem
Antony and Cleopatra have not been poisoned, nor have they committed suicide, and neither have the bodies been moved. So how did they die?
Tap here for the solution.
Bird strike
The mystery
If someone presented you with the flight record of Captain Ruby Darling, you’d be impressed by the almost unblemished history of this successful and experienced airline pilot.
Ruby began her career in 1999, piloting domestic flights around the UK. She then moved on to European trips before finally achieving her ambition of flying jumbo jets out of London Heathrow to various cities across the USA.
Being one of relatively few female pilots, there were initially years of friendly teasing for Ruby to deal with, together with a certain amount of blunt sexism, sometimes from colleagues but more often from unkind or ill-informed passengers. But by building up more and more experience Ruby’s confidence also increased and she developed good methods for handling all this. Her husband, Trevor, who says his drinking buddies call him ‘the captain’s wife’, claims that for every ten flights another anti-sexist comeback was added to Ruby’s list of funny ripostes.
Over her decade-long international career, more than one airline has benefited from Ruby’s skill and experience. Flying for two main companies, she quickly built up a reputation for capability and calmness under pressure. Her 2013 tally for successfully captaining flights across the Atlantic was 1,729. This is an interesting number, being the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
Most of Ruby’s early flights proved happy but uneventful, though once, in 2008, as she was coming in during a bad squall over Dallas, her bumpy landing slightly damaged the undercarriage.
The most serious incident occurred in 2013, when the plane she was captaining was struck by birds just as it was taking off from JFK airport, in New York. The incident report, which complimented Ruby’s expertise, also noted the unfortunate death of the captain, who suffered a fatal heart attack. Luckily, though, nobody else was harmed.
In fact, Ruby dealt with the bird strike exactly as she was supposed to. As they were ascending, she saw a small flock of gulls rise up from nowhere and hit her starboard (right) engine. All her training clicked in and she made a brief call to air traffic control: ‘Bird strike. Coming back.’ She had lost power in the engine but managed to turn the plane successfully and bring it back to the airport.
Unfortunately, something went wrong as she was coming in and the landing wheel partially collapsed. There were sparks and screeches and a few bumped heads, but the cabin crew remember evacuating all the passengers successfully, in a perfect operation of its kind.
Ruby’s husband Trevor ruefully laughs that, out of superstition, their children no longer feed the birds in the garden.
The problem
Ruby had flown 1,729 flights. On precisely which flight did the bird strike accident happen to her?
Tap here for the solution.
Contradictio in adjecto
The mystery
In Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Mr Brownlow is discussing the niceties of the law with Mr Bumble: ‘You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and, indeed, are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.’
‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is an ass – a idiot.’
Along with estate agents and bankers, the law and lawyers still have a bad name today, and there are many lawyer jokes, like the one about the man who asks his solicitor what his fee rate is. The solicitor tells him he charges £200 to answer three questions. ‘Isn’t that rather expensive?’ asks the man. ‘Yes,’ says the solicitor. ‘Now what was your third question?’
A friend of mine recently had to ring up one of these solicitor firms to get them to advise him on a vital but obscure point of English law. He finally got through to a partner, who he was told could deal with his query.
‘Good morning,’ said a voice down the phone. ‘What can I do for you, sir?’
My friend explained that he had a question about marital law, a question that, until it was answered, would continue to cause his family tension and doubt. ‘The question is this,’ he said: ‘Is it legal in English law for a man to marry his widow’s sister?’
The solicitor gave him an immediate answer and said that his secretary would, in due course, be submitting notice of his fee. ‘How much?’ asked my friend, expecting the worst. ‘Well,’ replied the solicitor, ‘it’s £260.00 for my time, £22.00 for the phone call and £12.50 for receptionist services, putting you through. Then there’s the preparation of my bill – that’s £50.00 for typist services – £25.00 for my verbal estimate just now, and an amount for the letter setting out our discussion of this morning, which will be another £30.00 or so in secretarial time, depending on just how long is spent on it. So that’s £399.50.’
‘How much?’, expostulated my friend.
‘Plus VAT,’ said the solicitor.
‘In that case I’ve got another question for you,’ said my friend: ‘If you were a goose, what would you be able to do that a duck can’t do that a solicitor doesn’t want to do?’
‘What a delightful riddle,’ replied the solicitor. ‘I have no idea.’
‘Stick your bill up your arse!’ said my friend, wittily slamming down the phone.
The problem
What answer did the solicitor give to the question about whether it’s legal in English law for a man to marry his widow’s sister?
Tap here for the solution.
Unconscious sexism
The mystery
Petworth House in West Sussex is a grand stately home housing paintings by Turner and intricate curlicued carvings by Grinling Gibbons. Its lush rolling grounds, designed by Capability Brown, are home to the largest herd of fallow deer in England.
Mentioned in the Domesday Book, Petworth stands at the junction of the east–west Heathfield-to-Winchester road and the coast road that takes drivers from Milford to the pretty bustling town of Shoreham-by-Sea.
But it is a stretch of the A285 between Petworth and the cathedral city of Chichester that has caused the town to be most freque
ntly mentioned in the newspapers. In 2014 this length of road was officially recognised as the most persistently dangerous in Britain.
It was on an overcast, drizzly afternoon one November that a young woman driver, who had borrowed her husband’s black BMW, was seen by portly, greying, middle-aged police officer Chris O’Brien, speeding dangerously along this stretch of road.
O’Brien set off in pursuit, aware that the woman was not the only motorist breaking the speed limit. Many men drivers were also going much too fast, some even overtaking the traffic officer’s motorbike, which was itself going at speeds above 90 mph. But O’Brien decided that the woman driver was the right target.
For miles the woman zoomed along, spray flying, apparently oblivious to the police motorcycle behind her, but after some time, with blue light flashing and siren blaring, the officer, who was by now pretty grumpy, finally got the woman to pull over, which she did in an ungainly, some might say typically female way, ending up with her hubcaps scraping noisily along the kerb.
The officer dismounted and walked purposefully towards the woman’s car. But the driver was not in the mood to be questioned and, jumping out of her vehicle, she unleashed a tirade of invective, swearing at the astonished officer in an eloquent stream of old-fashioned short English words well known to every stevedore and football hooligan.
Dumbfounded by the woman’s fury, O’Brien, who was standing in the roadway, still helmeted, could do little but wait for the lady’s screaming and yelling to die down. The nature of her complaint appeared to be that she had only been stopped because she was a woman, that many other drivers were speeding, and that most of them were men. ‘You are a sexist pig!’ she shrieked, larding her cliché with juicy swear words.
The dignified police officer did nothing for a moment, then passed a scribbled note to the woman driver. Still breathing heavily, she read it closely, running her scarlet fingernail beneath the words. It said, ‘You are wrong. I stopped you because you were speeding and I cannot stop everybody. You may think I am a sexist pig but I am not, and I can prove it.’
‘OK, then,’ said the woman snottily. ‘Prove it!’
‘I think I just have,’ replied the officer.
At once the woman realised that she had been quite wrong and agreed to listen to a friendly warning, which some might say was rather less than she deserved.
The problem
Normally it would take a long discussion, with lawyers, to demonstrate that the police were not motivated by sexism in a particular case. How did the officer prove so quickly that the driver’s accusation of sexism was false?
Tap here for the solution.
The short week
The mystery
In the days of the California Gold Rush it wasn’t the gold diggers who became millionaires; it was the entrepreneurs in what today we would call the service industries: the people who sold pans and shovels, the saloon bar owners, the grocery store proprietors and the cathouse madams. A man called Levi Strauss even starting selling the forty-niners blue denim. I don’t know what happened to his company.
The Midwest had its own gold towns too. Deadwood, in what was then Dakota Territory and is now South Dakota, began as a Wild West gold-panning city. Lawless and drunken, the place became notorious for the murder of gambler and gunman ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. This is the story of that murder.
On the first night of a hot August in 1876 Jack ‘Crooked Nose’ McCall was drinking at the bar in Nuttal & Mann’s saloon. He joined a poker game with ‘Wild Bill’ and was soon losing badly. His luck failed to improve during further games and by the end he had lost his shirt. Hickok offered McCall some money to buy breakfast and though he took it he felt insulted.
The next night Hickok was again playing poker in the saloon, sitting with his back to the door. McCall approached Hickok and, shouting ‘Damn you! Take that!’, shot him in the back of the head. Hickok’s cards dropped to the table as he fell, revealing a pair of aces and a pair of eights. Since that day aces and eights has been known as ‘Dead Man’s Hand’.
McCall fled the saloon, jumping on to a horse which was not his own. The startled animal threw him off and he fled on foot but was soon found skulking in a local butcher’s shop. For once in Deadwood justice was done – ‘Crooked Nose’ McCall was found guilty of murder and hanged.
The horse that threw the murderer, McCall, may well have belonged to a mysterious visitor to the town. His name was Elmer Nemo, and he had ridden into town on Friday and stayed three nights, before leaving on Friday.
The problem
How did Nemo, who stayed in the town on three consecutive nights, arrive on Friday and leave on Friday?
Tap here for the solution.
The man in the lift
The mystery
Gordon Gordon is a well-to-do man of 38, with a memorable name and a forgettable face. He works as an investment banker in a City firm, tucked away in a bland office in London’s Canary Wharf.
At the weekends, when he can escape, Gordon likes to drive his flash car up to his country house near Broxbourne, in Hertfordshire, where he keeps his green Wellington boots and his Land Rover, which he’s had souped up, painted a remarkable red colour, and adapted in other costly ways. Gordon entertains his friends by taking them clay-pigeon shooting or rolling around naked with them on the rug in front of his snapping log fire, depending on whether they are male friends or female ones.
In the country Gordon has a Labrador called Stan and a beagle called Ollie. They are looked after by Mrs Johns, who lives nearby, because most of the time he is at work in London, crawling home late and tired to his so-called ‘crash-pad’, a small but comfortable studio flat in London’s fashionable and pricey Docklands neighbourhood.
Gordon always turns himself out well. He has the latest phone, suit, shoes, spectacles and other things that he thinks matter. He is polite, charming and a good fee-earner, and expects to be a partner in his firm one day.
Punctuality is another of Gordon Gordon’s strengths. He gets up at 5.30, brews up some strong Colombian coffee in his swish machine, and then does half an hour in the gym, which is along the corridor from his flat, on the tenth floor. When he moved into the block he tried to get a flat below the eighth floor, but this was the only one going.
After his shower, and a quick inspection of the state of his fast-disappearing hair, Gordon puts on his expensive suit, gets his stuff together, and locks his door. It’s usual for him to be out of his flat by 6.45 so he never sees a neighbour.
He strolls along to the lift and gets in. It is a very reliable lift and never goes wrong. He travels down to the ground floor and walks along the River Thames to a little café he knows, where he has breakfast, and then over to his office in a building owned by a foreign financial conglomerate. He says hello to the ladies on reception, especially Monica, who has daughters taking exams and a soft spot for him. Then he travels up to the sixth floor where he works.
He is at his desk by 8.00 most days, and at the end of the day, which is often long, Gordon frequently takes a taxi home, though in traffic this can take longer than walking. But sitting idly in the back of a cab is one of the relaxing extravagances he allows himself.
When he gets into the lift on the ground floor of his apartment block he always travels only as far as the seventh floor, where he gets out, even though his flat is on the tenth floor. Despite often being exhausted after his very long days in the office, he always continues his journey by trudging up the last three floors to his flat, even if he is carrying heavy shopping, and even though he detests walking upstairs. The only time he makes an exception is if he is travelling with someone else, a friend or neighbour, say.
The problem
Gordon Gordon is a man of intelligence and means, so why does he always travel all the way down in the lift in the morning but, when he comes home, get out at the seventh floor and walk up the last, exhausting three floors? He is obliged to do this for a reason that has nothing to do with the lift, the
building, his thoughts or feelings, or other people.
Tap here for the solution.
Mary’s mum
The mystery
Mary’s mum is a busy lady, juggling work and domestic life as a single parent. She has four children, all girls, and is eccentric in the way she has named them.
Her first daughter, now a successful businesswoman employing six men in her two bicycle shops, is called April. She likes scuba diving and riding. The second girl, a year younger than April, has just graduated from university and has landed a job at the Met Office as a junior weather forecaster. Her name is May. The third daughter, the prettiest, is called June. She is doing badly at school and spends most of her time staring into her smartphone. She wastes a lot of time on loutish boys and tells her exasperated mother that she wants a rich man to look after her. The final daughter has always enjoyed dressing up and putting on shows for the family. She is hoping to study drama at college. She likes modern jazz and makes a good pizza.
The problem
What is the name of the pizza-making youngest daughter, the fourth girl?
Tap here for the solution.
The deserted prairie cabin
The mystery
Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt (1858–1919) was an author, explorer, soldier and taxidermist who, in a spare moment, decided to be the 26th President of the United States. He was what you would call a man’s man. He loved the great outdoors, and, at his Elk Horn ranch on the banks of the Little Missouri, in North Dakota, he hunted wild animals and roped cattle, riding Western-style, with a cowboy hat on and possibly whooping.
On 14 October 1912 Roosevelt was kissing babies on the campaign trail in Milwaukee when he was shot by a disgruntled voter. The bullet was impeded by his metal glasses case, and the not un-long 50-page speech he had in his pocket. It made nice holes in both before lodging in his chest. Refusing to go to hospital, Roosevelt delivered the speech. During the hour and a half this took him, blood gradually seeped into his shirt. You simply can’t buy publicity like this.
