by Ellery Queen
“Very well, I’ll do that.”
“Thanks. Would you care to undertake a little inquiry for me?”
“Certainly.”
“Then talk guardedly to those men you sent to meet Reynolds every Monday and ascertain from them the relationship which existed between Reynolds and Harry Larkin. As is often the case with lonely men stationed near the boundary fence of two properties, according to Larkin he and Reynolds used to meet now and then by arrangement. They may have quarreled. Have you ever met Larkin?”
“On several occasions, yes,” replied the manager.
“And your impressions of him? As a man?”
“I thought him intelligent. Inclined to be morose, of course, but then men who live alone often are. You are not thinking that—?”
“I’m thinking that Reynolds is not in your country. Had he been still on your property, I would have found him dead or alive. When I set out to find a missing man, I find him. I shall find Reynolds, eventually—if there is anything of him to find.”
On the third evening that the manager went out to the little hut, Bony showed him a small and slightly convex disk of silver. It was weathered and in one place cracked. It bore the initials J.M.M.
“I found that in the vicinity of the site of a large fire,” Bony said. “It might establish that William Reynolds is no longer alive.”
Although Harry Larkin was supremely confident, he was not quite happy. He had not acted without looking at the problem from all angles and without having earnestly sought the answer to the question: “If I shoot him dead, burn the body on a good fire, go through the ashes for the bones which I pound to dust in a dolly pot, and for the metal bits and pieces which I dissolve in sulphuric acid, how can I be caught?” The answer was plain.
He had carried through the sundowner’s method of utterly destroying the body of the murder victim, and to avoid the million-to-one chance of anyone coming across the ashes of the fire and being made suspicious, he had shot a calf as kangaroos were scarce.
Yes, he was confident, and confident that he was justified in being confident. Nothing remained of Bill Reynolds, damn him, save a little grayish dust which was floating around somewhere.
The slight unhappiness was caused by a strange visitation, signs of which he had first discovered when returning home from his work one afternoon. On the ground near the blacksmith’s shop he found a strange set of boot tracks which were not older than two days. He followed these tracks backward to the house, and then forward until he lost them in the scrub.
Nothing in the house was touched, as far as he could see, and nothing had been taken from the blacksmith’s shop, or interfered with. The dolly pot was still in the corner into which he had dropped it after its last employment, and the crowbar was still leaning against the anvil. On the shelf was the acid jar. There was no acid in it. He had used it to dissolve, partially, buttons and the metal band around a pipestem and boot sprigs. The residue of those metal objects he had dropped into a hole in a tree eleven miles away.
It was very strange. A normal visitor, finding the occupier away, would have left a note at the house. Had the visitor been black, he would not have left any tracks, if bent on mischief.
The next day Larkin rode out to the boundary fence and on the way he visited the site of his fire. There he found the plain evidence that someone had moved the bones of the animal and had delved among the ashes still remaining from the action of the wind.
Thus he was not happy, but still supremely confident. They could not tack anything onto him. They couldn’t even prove that Reynolds was dead. How could they when there was nothing of him left?
It was again Sunday, and Larkin was washing his clothes at the outside fire when the sound of horses’ hoofs led him to see two men approaching. His lips vanished into a mere line, and his mind went over all the answers he would give if the police ever did call on him. One of the men he did not know. The other was Mounted Constable Evans.
They dismounted, anchoring their horses by merely dropping the reins to the ground. Larkin searched their faces and wondered who was the slim half-caste with, for a half-caste, the singularly blue eyes.
“Good day,” Larkin greeted them.
“Good day, Larkin,” replied Constable Evans, and appeared to give his trousers a hitch. His voice was affable, and Larkin was astonished when, after an abrupt and somewhat violent movement, he found himself handcuffed.
“Going to take you in for the murder of William Reynolds,” Evans announced. “This is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.”
“You must be balmy—or I am,” Larkin said.
Evans countered with: “You are. Come on over to the house. A car will be here in about half an hour.”
The three men entered the kitchen where Larkin was told to sit down.
“I haven’t done anything to Reynolds, or anyone else,” asserted Larkin, and for the first time the slight man with the brilliant blue eyes spoke.
“While we are waiting, I’ll tell you all about it, Larkin. I’ll tell it so clearly that you will believe I was watching you all the time. You used to meet Reynolds at the boundary fence gate, and the two of you would indulge in a spot of gambling—generally at poker. Then one day you cheated and there was a fight in which you were thrashed.
“You knew what day of the week Reynolds would ride that boundary fence and you waited for him on your side. You held him up and made him climb over the fence while you covered him with your .32 high-power Savage rifle. You made him walk to a place within a mile of here, where there was plenty of dry wood, and there you shot him and burned his body.
“The next day you returned with a dolly pot and a sieve. You put all the bones through the dolly pot, and then you sieved all the ashes for metal objects in Reynolds’ clothes and burned them up with sulphuric acid. Very neat. The perfect crime, you must agree.”
“If I done all that, which I didn’t, yes,” Larkin did agree.
“Well, assuming that not you but another did all I have outlined, why did the murderer shoot and burn the carcase of a calf on the same fire site?”
“You tell me,” said Larkin.
“Good. I’ll even do that. You shot Reynolds and you disposed of his body, as I’ve related. Having killed him, you immediately dragged wood together and burned the body, keeping the fire going for several hours. Now, the next day, or the day after that, it rained, and that rainfall fixed your actions like words printed in a book. You went through the ashes for Reynolds’ bones before it rained, and you shot the calf and lit the second fire after it rained. You dropped the calf at least two hundred yards from the scene of the murder, and you carried the carcase on your back over those two hundred yards. The additional weight impressed your boot prints on the ground much deeper than when you walk about normally, and although the rain washed out many of your boot prints, it did not remove your prints made when carrying the dead calf. You didn’t shoot the calf, eh?”
“No, of course I didn’t,” came the sneering reply. “I burned the carcase of a calf that died. I keep my camp clean. Enough blowflies about as it is.”
“But you burned the calf’s carcase a full mile away from your camp. However, you shot the calf, and you shot it to burn the carcase in order to prevent possible curiosity. You should have gone through the ashes after you burned the carcase of the calf and retrieved the bullet fired from your own rifle.”
Bony smiled, and Larkin glared.
Constable Evans said, “Keep your hands on the table, Larkin.”
“You know, Larkin, you murderers often make me tired,” Bony went on. “You think up a good idea, and then fall down executing it.
“You thought up a good one by dollying the bones and sieving the ashes for the metal objects on a man’s clothes and in his boots, and then—why go and spoil it by shooting a calf and burning the carcase on the same fire site? It wasn’t necessary. Having pounded Reynolds’ bones to ash and scattered the ash to the four corners, and having retrieved from
the ashes remaining evidence that a human body had been destroyed, there was no necessity to burn a carcase. It wouldn’t have mattered how suspicious anyone became. Your biggest mistake was burning that calf. That act connects you with that fire.”
“Yes, well, what of it?” Larkin almost snarled. “I got a bit lonely livin’ here alone for months, and one day I sorta got fed up. I seen the calf, and I up with me rifle and took a pot shot at it.”
“It won’t do,” Bony said, shaking his head. “Having taken a pot shot at the calf, accidentally killing it, why take a dolly pot to the place where you burned the carcase? You did carry a dolly pot, the one in the blacksmith’s shop, to the scene of the fire, for the imprint of the dolly pot on the ground is still plain in two places.”
“Pretty good tale, I must say,” said Larkin. “You still can’t prove that Bill Reynolds is dead.”
“No?” Bony’s dark face registered a bland smile, but his eyes were like blue opals. “When I found a wisp of brown wool attached to the boundary fence, I was confident that Reynolds had climbed it, merely because I was sure his body was not on his side of the fence. You made him walk to the place where you shot him, and then you saw the calf and the other cattle in the distance, and you shot the calf and carried it to the fire.
“I have enough to put you in the dock, Larkin—and one other little thing which is going to make certain you’ll hang. Reynolds was in the Army during the war. He was discharged following a head wound. The surgeon who operated on Reynolds was a specialist in trepanning. The surgeon always scratched his initials on the silver plate he inserted into the skull of a patient. He has it on record that he operated on William Reynolds, and he will swear that the plate came from the head of William Reynolds, and will also swear that the plate could not have been detached from Reynolds’ head without great violence.”
“It wasn’t in the ashes,” gasped Larkin, and then realized his slip.
“No, it wasn’t in the ashes, Larkin,” Bony agreed. “You see, when you shot him at close quarters, probably through the forehead, the expanding bullet took away a portion of the poor fellow’s head—and the trepanning plate. I found the plate lodged in a sandalwood tree growing about thirty feet from where you burned the body.”
Larkin glared across the table at Bony, his eyes freezing as he realized that the trap had indeed sprung on him. Bony was again smiling. He said, as though comfortingly, “Don’t fret, Larkin. If you had not made all those silly mistakes, you would have made others equally fatal. Strangely enough, the act of homicide always throws a man off balance. If it were not so, I would find life rather boring.”
Asia
JAPAN
Matsumoto
HAWAII
Garfield
Seicho Matsumoto
The Woman Who Took the Local Paper
Seicho Matsumoto is recognized and acclaimed in the East as Japan’s leading mystery writer and the most important figure on the Japanese detective-story scene today. He ushered in the second period in the history of the modern Japanese detective story. The first period, called the Tantei Era, began with Edogawa Rampo and ended just before World War Two; the second period, called the Suiri Era, shifted technique from “unrealistic” puzzles to “social” detective stories, and in this second period Seicho Matsumoto was the dominant influence, as he continues to be in the current period, called the Neo-Social Era.
Mr. Matsumoto’s novels, which epitomize contemporary life in Japan, are consistently among Japan’s best sellers. He has published approximately 50 books, with an average sale of 400,000 copies each, 100,000 in hardcover, 300,000 in paperback. His indefatigable curiosity and his enduring passion to learn have led him recently into the world of archeology and history, and his studies of Japanese society and economy have been praised for their depth and insight.
“The Woman Who Took the Local Paper” is shrewdly plotted, its details released slowly to keep the reader in suspense until the very end. . .
Yoshiko Shioda sent in her money to the Koshin newspaper for a subscription. This newspaper company is located in Kofu city, which is about two hours by express train from Tokyo. Although it is a leading paper in that prefecture, it is not sold in Tokyo, and if one wants to read it, one has to become a subscriber.
She sent the money by registered mail on February 21 and enclosed the following letter: “I would like to subscribe to your newspaper. Enclosed is my payment. The serialized novel, The Brigands, in your paper looks interesting and I want to read it. I would like my subscription to begin from the issue of February 19th.”
Yoshiko Shioda had seen the Koshin newspaper only once before. It had been at a small restaurant located in a corner of a building in front of Kofu station. The waitress had left the paper on the table while Yoshiko was waiting for her order of Chinese noodles. It was a typical local paper, with rather old-fashioned type, very provincial actually. The third page was devoted to local news. A fire had destroyed five homes. An employee in the village office had embezzled six million yen of public funds. The construction of an annex to the primary school had been completed. The mother of a prefectural assemblyman had died. That sort of news.
At the bottom of the second page there was a serialization of an historical novel. The illustration showed two samurai warriors engaged in a sword fight. The author was Ryuji Sugimoto, a name unfamiliar to Yoshiko. She had read about one-half of the serial episode when her noodles were served and she put the paper aside. But first Yoshiko wrote down in her notebook the name and address of the newspaper and publisher. She also remembered that the name of the story she had been reading was The Brigands. Under the title there was a notation that it was the 54th installment of the serial. The newspaper was dated the 18th. Yes, that day had been the 18th of February.
It was about seven minutes before three when Yoshiko left the restaurant and walked around the town. The square in the middle was crowded with people. Above their heads fluttered white banners printed with the words: Welcome Home, Minister Sato. A new cabinet had been formed the previous month and Yoshiko realized that the name on the banner was that of a local diet member who had been appointed one of the new ministers.
Then suddenly there was a stirring in the crowd and the people became agitated. Some of them cried, “Banzai!” A great clapping arose. People who were walking some distance away ran to join the crowd.
The speech began. A man had mounted a platform and his mouth was moving. The winter sun struck his bald head. A large white rose was pinned to his breast. The crowd became silent but at times the applause was thunderous.
Yoshiko looked around. A man standing near her was also watching the scene and he too was not listening to the speech. He seemed to have his way blocked by the crowd.
Yoshiko stole a look at the man’s profile. He had a broad forehead, sharp eyes, and a high-bridged nose. There had been a time when she had thought of them as an intelligent brow, trustworthy eyes, and a handsome nose. But that memory was now an empty one. The spell the man held over her, however, remained the same as it had been before.
The speech ended and the minister descended from the platform. The crowd began to disperse. An open space appeared in the crowd and Yoshiko began to walk. The man also began to walk away—with another person.
The Koshin newspaper arrived five days later. Three days’ issues came together. There was a polite note thanking Yoshiko for her subscription.
As she had requested, the subscription began with the issue of the 19th. Yoshiko opened it. She turned to the local news. A robbery had occurred. Someone had died in a landslide. Dishonesty had been exposed in the Farmers Cooperative. Elections for assemblymen had begun. There was a large photo of Minister Sato in front of Kofu station.
Yoshiko opened the issue of the 20th. There was nothing special in it. She looked at the issue of the 21st. Here too there was only the usual news. She threw the papers into the corner of the closet. They could be used later for wrapping paper.
The ne
wspaper arrived by mail daily after that. Her name and address were mimeographed on the brown kraft-paper wrapper. After all, she was now a monthly subscriber.
Every morning she went to the mailbox in the apartment house to get her paper and slowly read it from beginning to end. There was nothing which attracted her special attention. Disappointed, Yoshiko threw the papers in the closet.
This was repeated for ten days. And every day she was disappointed. In spite of this, she was always filled with anticipation before cutting the brown wrapper.
On the fifteenth day a change occurred. It wasn’t an article in the paper but an unexpected postcard she received. The card was signed by Ryuji Sugimoto. Yohiko remembered seeing that name somewhere. It wasn’t someone close to her, but she had a clear recollection of it. Yoshiko turned the postcard over. The handwriting was almost indecipherable, but managing to read it, she immediately knew who it was.
“I understand you are reading my novel, The Brigands, which is being serialized in the Koshin newspaper and I would like to thank you for your interest.”
No doubt someone had told the author that she had subscribed to the paper because she wanted to read his story. The author had evidently been touched and had sent a card of thanks.
It was a small change from the daily newspaper routine. It was something different, however, from what she had expected. She hadn’t been reading the novel—like the handwriting on the postcard, it was probably poor.
But every day the paper arrived promptly. Of course, this was only natural because it had been paid for in advance.
One morning, nearly a month after she had subscribed to the paper, she glanced over the various items of local news. The head of the Farmers Cooperative had fled. A bus had fallen from a cliff and fifteen people had been injured. A mountain fire had destroyed three acres. The bodies of a man and woman who had committed suicide had been found at Rinunkyo.
