by Tom Cutler
The pathologist removes the straw hat, which is still on Sir Herbert’s head. He finds in the centre of the bald cranium a wound the size of a ten-penny piece. Sir Herbert has been struck once, hard, from directly above.
Meadows the butler points out that the pole used for opening the vents in the ceiling is, unusually, resting upside-down with its handle against the trunk of a banana tree and its business end on the coconut matting. He says Sir Herbert was most particular, and never left it upside-down: ‘It always went back in its clip by the door once he’d shut the vents.’
Constable Ferry chips in: ‘Maybe the murderer slunk up while the old man was looking at those flowers,’ he says. ‘Then he picked up the pole, walloped him on the head, and escaped across the lawn.’
‘Brilliant!’ exclaims Inspector Jibson. ‘So our motiveless murderer picks up this long pole, and, visible through the glass from all parts of the estate, strikes an expert blow with its tip, in the middle of the man’s head. Then he leans the pole against this plant, strolls across the lawn in the sunshine, climbs the fifteen-foot walls, dives noiselessly into the moat, and swims away. The dead Sir Herbert then helpfully gets up and locks the door after him.’
But if Sir Herbert locked the door from the inside with the murderer already in the conservatory, the man must still be in the room. A quick search is made but the murderer is nowhere to be seen.
If, on the other hand, the murderer locked the room, then he’s escaped, goodness knows how, because apart from the ceiling ventilators, which are far too high to reach, there are no windows, and only one door, which was locked from the inside.
Inspector Jibson points out that the only person who could have been in the locked conservatory when Meadows first spotted the body was Sir Herbert Hardcastle himself.
‘It must be suicide then,’ says Constable Ferry. Inspector Jibson gives him a withering look.
‘So he picks up this hammer, say, and bangs himself on the head hard enough to kill himself. Then he puts it back on the table, drops that broken hook thing into his tea, and lies down dead. Or do you mean that the hook fell out of the blue sky into his tea and he then hit himself with a great big window ventilator pole? I don’t think that’s even possible.’
A scenes-of-crime officer is examining the handle of the pole. There is a piece of straw stuck to the end, which matches Sir Herbert’s straw hat. The tip has broken off the other end. He picks up the metal hook from the glass table and places it against the end of the pole. It fits.
‘Pole leaning neatly against the plant but upside-down’, he says. ‘Hook busted off. Coconut matting. Of course! I see the answer. It’s quite simple.’
The problem
With such a wound, Sir Herbert cannot have committed suicide, but any murderer must have evaporated through the conservatory glass. So how was the old fellow killed in a room locked from the inside? And where is the weapon?
Why is the ventilator pole upside-down? What is significant about the coconut matting? And, finally, what is that rusty hook doing in Sir Herbert’s tea?
Tap here for the solution.
A Game of Roulette
by Sigismund Firthkettle
The mystery
My uncle Bob once told me that it is absolutely impossible to lick your own elbow. I don’t know whether that’s true, I’ve never tried, but one thing’s for sure, there are some enigmas in this world so difficult to unwrap that you feel they are similar in difficulty to the elbow-licking problem. The following mysterious story by Sigismund Firthkettle is one of these puzzles.
As far as most people knew, Jim ‘Smiler’ Jackson was, before his failure to report for work, an unremarkable, 50-year-old employee of Fernsby Intaglio, a medium-sized security-printing firm near Cheltenham. The firm deals in tamper-proof labels and low-grade security-pass printing for a few government departments.
But Fernsby’s is more than it appears. Since the Second World War the company has been doing a lot of highly secret government work. This work is handled by their so-called ‘Shredding Section’, and ‘Smiler’ Jackson was their ‘Shredding Manager’.
But the picture is even more complex, because Jackson, a morose man who lived alone, is suspected by his bosses of treason. Intelligence from the nearby GCHQ has recently shown that he has been emailing secret photographs of the Yrdenob Desert nuclear reactor, along with names of certain Fernsby Intaglio employees, to an email address belonging to the government of the Republic of Apocrypha.
Fernsby Intaglio informs the police of Jackson’s absence. They break into his house, which is locked and bolted on the inside, and discover his dead body lying on the sofa. On the table beside him are a glass of water and a box of supermarket aspirin. The packet contains a single plastic insert of eight pills, two of which have been popped out through the foil, and presumably taken. The other insert is absent, probably having been thrown away once empty.
The coroner asks for tests on the pills. It is known that Jackson was not allergic to aspirin; he was a frequent headache sufferer and often carried a packet in his pocket. When the tablets are analysed they are found to contain nothing suspicious. They are simply aspirin. The water is found to be just water.
A man comes forward to say that he recently met Jim Jackson in a local casino, where he was playing roulette. He says Jackson was flustered and told him he believed a person, whom he refused to name, was trying to kill him.
The coroner orders drug screening, but no narcotics, alcohol, sedatives, marijuana, cocaine or amphetamines are found in Jackson’s blood, though there is a trace of aspirin, just the amount you’d get from one of the pills on the table.
His stomach is empty and the coroner suggests that he might have recently vomited. The signs are that he was feeling under the weather but, when it comes to it, the coroner has little to go on and is unable to decide what has killed him, so he records an open verdict.
But he has missed the true reason for Jim Jackson’s death, which is that a long-planned murder plot by a secret government agent known as Bunce has finally come to fruition. Everything had been carefully set up. There was nothing to do but wait. Nobody needed to go anywhere near the victim, yet his death was certain to happen, and its cause would be undetectable. Its timing, however, has been impossible to predict, and its occurrence just as Jackson is starting to communicate with the hostile forces of the Apocryphans has been, for the security services, merely a happy accident.
The problem
Bunce has never met his victim and nobody else has done him violence. No one has broken into Jackson’s house, and for some weeks he has cooked and eaten his meals alone. It is true that Bunce did sneak into Jackson’s office on a hot summer’s day six weeks ago but Jackson was not there. He was smoking a cigarette, outside in the sunshine, and Bunce was unable to see him. He left rapidly, being spotted by nobody.
So how has the killer Bunce done away with Jim ‘Smiler’ Jackson?
Tap here for the solution.
The Two Bottles of Relish
by Lord Dunsany
The mystery
Smithers is a small-time travelling salesman who sells bottles of a relish called Num-numo for meats and savouries.
Looking for a flat in London he bumps into a young Oxford graduate named Linley, who is being shown round the same property. It is a nice flat but too expensive for either of them, so Smithers suggests that they become flatmates and go halves on the rent.
Smithers has an ulterior motive. He hopes to improve his sales technique by picking up some of Linley’s ‘Oxford manner’. He reckons you can make a quarter of an education go far, if you’re careful with it. As he says, ‘You don’t have to quote the whole of the Inferno to show that you’ve read Milton.’
Linley agrees to the idea and they move in together.
Linley teaches him a little chess, which takes his mind off Num-numo in the evenings. Then one day Smithers reads about a ghastly murder in Unge. A man named Steeger has gone down to live with a g
irl in a bungalow on the North Downs, but she has disappeared. Scotland Yard is on the case but there is no sign of the girl and nothing definite to implicate Steeger in her disappearance, and, the police suspect, murder.
The Otherthorpe police have found out everything they can about Steeger, except what he has done with the girl. One thing which particularly attracts Smithers’s attention to the case is that Steeger had bought two bottles of Num-numo relish.
He wonders why, with all Linley’s knack in tackling chess problems, he doesn’t have a go at the Otherthorpe mystery, which has knocked Scotland Yard endwise. Linley tells Smithers that he is uninterested in anything except chess problems. But he asks for the facts.
The girl was a pretty blonde called Nancy Elth who had £200 and had moved into the bungalow with Steeger for five days. After that she disappeared, and nobody ever saw her again. Steeger stayed in the bungalow for another fortnight, never leaving the place. When asked, he claimed that she has gone to South Africa, or South America, he’s not sure which.
All the girl’s money has disappeared from her bank account and, at the same time, Steeger seems to have come into £150.
Having watched Steeger night and day, the police have discovered nothing except that he is a vegetarian. They say that this is what made them suspect that there was something wrong about the man in the first place, for a vegetarian is something new to the local constabulary. They continue to watch him, but he has never left the bungalow since the girl’s disappearance, and nobody has visited him.
They also know that when he came to the bungalow there were ten larch trees in the small garden, and from the time that Nancy Elth must have died he began cutting them all down. Three times a day he went at it, for nearly a week, and when they were all down he cut them up into short logs and laid them in heaps.
These were the facts that Smithers gave Linley, along with the interesting information that Steeger had bought a chisel and a big butcher’s knife. The police assume that he used these tools to chop up the girl, but they have found no blood on them.
There are some negative facts too. He hasn’t buried the girl. None of the chalk under the bungalow or the garden has been disturbed. Neither has he burned her. He only has a fire in the small stove every now and then, and uses it only for cooking. There has never been any smell of flesh burning, just ordinary food.
Smithers asks Linley what he thinks has happened to the girl.
‘Drains?’ wonders Linley.
But no, the drains are clear. Nothing has gone down them – nothing that wasn’t meant to, that is.
The body just doesn’t seem to be anywhere. It isn’t in South America, or South Africa either.
The police are stumped, Linley is stumped, and Smithers is stumped. And all the time the main clue, all that larchwood, is staring everybody in the face.
Smithers decides to visit Unge. He finds it a beautiful place to bring a girl to and he looks into the garden of the bungalow, where he sees the heaps of larch logs. He notices that the logs have been chopped roughly, any old way, and that the man who did it evidently didn’t know much about chopping – it looks as though the axe was blunt.
Linley too cannot understand why Steeger should have spent so much time chopping all those logs, every day for a fortnight. If it hadn’t been for a chance remark made by Smithers the mystery would have gone unsolved.
It is on the next day, when Smithers and Linley are sitting down to dinner and Linley is having a salad, that he asks Smithers to pass him some of his famous Num-numo to put on his salad. Smithers tells him, ‘You don’t take Num-numo with salad. Only for meat and savouries. That’s on the bottle,’ though he admits he has no idea what savouries are.
So Num-numo is no good for vegetables, then?
Linley goes quiet. After a moment he tells Smithers to call Scotland Yard to tell them they’ll never find Nancy Elth. If they send a policeman round, Linley will tell him why.
The problem
What has happened to Nancy Elth? Why did Steeger buy two bottles of Num-numo relish? And why did he spend two weeks of back-breaking work chopping up ten larch trees with a blunt axe?
Tap here for the solution.
The Problem of Thor Bridge
by Arthur Conan Doyle
The mystery
Ruthless American businessman Neil Gibson has settled with his Brazilian wife Maria and their two children in Thor Place, a grand old manor house in England. The Gibsons’ children are being schooled by a beautiful young governess, Miss Grace Dunbar, with whom Gibson has fallen in love. His wife, who is described as ‘past her prime’, is bitterly jealous.
Late one night the body of Mrs Gibson is found on Thor Bridge, a single broad span of stone over a shallow lake, half a mile from the house on the Gibsons’ historic estate. She is clad in her dinner dress and shawl and has a bullet through her brain. No weapon is nearby but a revolver with one recently discharged chamber, and of a calibre matching the bullet, has been found hidden in the wardrobe of Miss Dunbar, the young governess. A note signed by Miss Dunbar making an appointment with Mrs Gibson at Thor Bridge has been found in the victim’s hand.
Neil Gibson has asked Sherlock Holmes to help clear the name of his children’s governess, whom he is convinced is innocent. Holmes has learned from a member of Gibson’s staff that Mr Gibson was a man of violent temper, hated for the vicious way in which he treated his wife, who was much liked by the staff. Holmes is warned to be on his guard, because Gibson, who sleeps with a revolver under his pillow, is plausible and cunning.
Neil Gibson arrives at 221B Baker Street. He is a formidable character, and when Holmes asks his visitor whether he has been romantically attached to his children’s governess he nearly loses his cool, but strongly denies anything of the sort. At this moment Holmes gives one of his famously airy replies, ‘I am a rather busy man, Mr Gibson, and I have no time or taste for aimless conversations. I wish you good morning.’
Gibson is furious at the implication that he is lying, but finally sees that he must be absolutely truthful.
When the beautiful new governess arrived in his house, Gibson developed a passionate regard for her. He admits treating his wife very harshly and suggests that her ‘crazy hatred’ of the governess might have caused her to threaten Miss Dunbar with a gun that went off in a scuffle, fatally wounding Mrs Gibson. Holmes agrees that it is the only obvious alternative to deliberate murder by Miss Dunbar.
Holmes and Watson decide to visit Gibson’s country estate, where a policeman shows them the spot on the bridge where Mrs Gibson was discovered. Holmes is told that the deadly gunshot was fired from just behind the right temple. There was no trace of a struggle, and no weapon. The victim was lying on her back with the note from Miss Dunbar clutched in her left hand and it is clear that nobody could have put the paper in the victim’s hand after her death. The note reads, ‘I will be at Thor Bridge at nine o’clock. G. DUNBAR’.
Why, he wonders, was the lady still clasping the note in her hand? Why should she carry it so carefully?
With his famous lens Holmes inspects the opposite parapet of the bridge. There is a newly made white chip out of the grey stone, as if it has been struck a sharp blow. It has not been made from above but from below, and is on the lower edge of the parapet.
The stolid policeman points out that the mark is fifteen feet from where the body lay and Holmes agrees that it may be irrelevant.
Watson, as usual, is mystified by everything but Holmes points out that although the case looks black against the governess there is one point in her favour, which is the finding of the pistol in her wardrobe.
‘We must look for consistency,’ he says. ‘Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.’
Holmes goes over the actions of a woman who, in a cold, premeditated fashion, is about to get rid of a rival. She has planned it. A note has been written. The victim has come. She has her gun. The crime is done. It has been workmanlike and complete. Would so crafty a crimin
al carefully carry the weapon home and put it in her own wardrobe, the very first place that would be searched, when she might easily have flung it into the reed beds? Holmes believes that they are in the presence of ‘a serious misconception’.
The governess disclaims knowledge of the gun, which she says is one of a pair belonging to Mr Gibson. By Holmes’s new theory, she is speaking the truth. Therefore it must have been placed in her wardrobe by someone who wished to incriminate her.
‘You see,’ he says, ‘how we come at once upon a most fruitful line of inquiry.’
Watson accompanies Holmes to interview Miss Dunbar in prison. She explains that on the day in question she received a note from Mrs Gibson imploring her to meet her as she had something important to tell her. She asked Miss Dunbar to burn the note and to leave an answer on the sundial in the garden, as she wanted nobody, including her husband, whom she greatly feared, to know that they were meeting.
The governess says she did as she was asked and in the evening went down to Thor Bridge as she had promised, where Mrs Gibson was waiting. ‘She was like a mad woman … subtly mad with the deep power of deception which insane people may have,’ says the governess.
Miss Dunbar explains that Mrs Gibson poured out her ‘whole wild fury’, and that she just put her hands over her ears and rushed back to her room.
Holmes raises the subject of the chip in the stonework of the bridge. Miss Dunbar cannot explain it but says that it must have been made with great violence. Holmes is suddenly overcome with excitement. He bundles Watson out of the jail, calling out to the bemused Miss Dunbar, ‘With the help of the god of justice I will give you a case which will make England ring … take my assurance that the clouds are lifting and that I have every hope that the light of truth is breaking through.’
