The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “He did no such thing. His friend went away; he remained. Show us to his bedroom!”

  “I swear to you, Monsieur le Sous-prefect, he is not here! he—”

  “I swear to you, Monsieur le Garçon, he is. He slept here—he didn’t find your bed comfortable—he came to us to complain of it—here he is among my men—and here am I ready to look for a flea or two in his bedstead. Renaudin! (calling to one of the subordinates, and pointing to the waiter) collar that man and tie his hands behind him. Now, then, gentlemen, let us walk upstairs!”

  Every man and woman in the house was secured—the “Old Soldier” the first. Then I identified the bed in which I had slept, and then we went into the room above.

  No object that was all extraordinary appeared in any part of it. The Sub-prefect looked round the place, commanded everybody to be silent, stamped twice on the floor, called for a candle, looked attentively at the spot he had stamped on, and ordered the flooring there to be carefully taken up. This was done in no time. Lights were produced, and we saw a deep raftered cavity between the floor of this room and the ceiling of the room beneath. Through this cavity there ran perpendicularly a sort of case of iron thickly greased; and inside the case appeared the screw, which communicated with the bed-top below. Extra lengths of screw, freshly oiled; levers covered with felt; all the complete upper works of a heavy press—constructed with infernal ingenuity so as to join the fixtures below, and when taken to pieces again to go into the smallest possible compass—were next discovered and pulled out on the floor. After some little difficulty the Sub-prefect succeeded in putting the machinery together, and, leaving his men to work it, descended with me to the bedroom. The smothering canopy was then lowered, but not so noiselessly as I had seen it lowered. When I mentioned this to the Sub-prefect, his answer, simple as it was, had a terrible significance. “My men,” said he, “are working down the bed-top for the first time—the men whose money you won were in better practice.”

  We left the house in the sole possession of two police agents—every one of the inmates being removed to prison on the spot. The Sub-prefect, after taking down my “procés verbal” in his office, returned with me to my hotel to get my passport. “Do you think,” I asked, as I gave it to him, “that any men have really been smothered in that bed, as they tried to smother me?”

  “I have seen dozens of drowned men laid out at the Morgue,” answered the Sub-prefect, “in whose pocketbooks were found letters stating that they had committed suicide in the Seine, because they had lost everything at the gaming-table. Do I know how many of those men entered the same gambling-house that you entered? won as you won? took that bed as you took it? slept in it? were smothered in it? and were privately thrown into the river, with a letter of explanation written by the murderers and placed in their pocketbooks? No man can say how many or how few have suffered the fate from which you have escaped. The people of the gambling-house kept their bedstead machinery a secret from us—even from the police! The dead kept the rest of the secret for them. Good-night, or rather good-morning, Monsieur Faulkner! Be at my office again at nine o’clock—in the meantime, au revoir!”

  The rest of my story is soon told. I was examined and re-examined; the gambling-house was strictly searched all through from top to bottom; the prisoners were separately interrogated; and two of the less guilty among them made a confession. I discovered that the Old Soldier was the master of the gambling-house—justice discovered that he had been drummed out of the army as a vagabond years ago; that he had been guilty of all sorts of villainies since; that he was in possession of stolen property, which the owners identified; and that he, the croupier, another accomplice, and the woman who had made my cup of coffee, were all in the secret of the bedstead. There appeared some reason to doubt whether the inferior persons attached to the house knew anything of the suffocating machinery; and they received the benefit of that doubt, by being treated simply as thieves and vagabonds. As for the Old Soldier and his two head myrmidons, they went to the galleys; the woman who had drugged my coffee was imprisoned for I forget how many years; the regular attendants at the gambling-house were considered “suspicious” and placed under “surveillance”; and I became, for one whole week (which is a long time) the head “lion” in Parisian society. My adventure was dramatized by three illustrious play-makers, but never saw theatrical daylight; for the censorship forbade the introduction on the stage of a correct copy of the gambling-house bedstead.

  One good result was produced by my adventure, which any censorship must have approved: it cured me of ever again trying “Rouge et Noir” as an amusement. The sight of a greencloth, with packs of cards and heaps of money on it, will henceforth be forever associated in my mind with the sight of a bed canopy descending to suffocate me in the silence and darkness of the night.

  THE TWO BOTTLES OF RELISH

  IN HIS EPONYMOUS MAGAZINE, Ellery Queen once ran a survey to determine the ten greatest mystery stories ever written and, to the surprise of no one who has ever read it, “The Two Bottles of Relish” made the list. Eighty years after it was written, it remains amazingly puzzling and, ultimately, shocking, resulting in its being one of the most anthologized stories of the twentieth century. Lord Dunsany, the byline used by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878–1957), is best known as one of the giants of fantasy and horror fiction, both for his own work and for his influence on such subsequent masters of the genre as H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, and J. R. R. Tolkien. He was the scion of one of Ireland’s oldest families, the Plunketts, tracing back to the eleventh century. Lord Dunsany lived in and cared for Dunsany Castle (construction of which began in 1180), Ireland’s oldest residential castle. A polymath, he was a brilliant chess player, being the Irish National Champion who once played the great Capablanca to a draw. He also was an artist, poet, playwright, hunter, and unsuccessful politician.

  “The Two Bottles of Relish” was adapted for the stage in 1961 by Edward Darby in Two Bottles of Relish: A Play in One Act. The story was first published in the November 12, 1932, issue of Time & Tide; it was first published in book form in the anonymously edited Powers of Darkness: A Collection of Uneasy Tales (London, Philip Allan, 1934) and first collected in The Little Tales of Smethers (London, Jarrolds, 1952).

  LORD DUNSANY

  SMITHERS IS MY NAME. I’m what you might call a small man and in a small way of business. I travel for Num-numo, a relish for meats and savouries—the world-famous relish I ought to say. It’s really quite good, no deleterious acids in it, and does not affect the heart; so it is quite easy to push. I wouldn’t have got the job if it weren’t. But I hope some day to get something that’s harder to push, as of course the harder they are to push, the better the pay. At present I can just make my way, with nothing at all over; but then I live in a very expensive flat. It happened like this, and that brings me to my story. And it isn’t the story you’d expect from a small man like me, yet there’s nobody else to tell it. Those that know anything of it besides me are all for hushing it up. Well, I was looking for a room to live in in London when first I got my job. It had to be in London, to be central; and I went to a block of buildings, very gloomy they looked, and saw the man that ran them and asked him for what I wanted. Flats they called them; just a bedroom and a sort of a cupboard. Well, he was showing a man round at the time who was a gent, in fact more than that, so he didn’t take much notice of me—the man that ran all those flats didn’t, I mean. So I just ran behind for a bit, seeing all sorts of rooms and waiting till I could be shown my class of thing. We came to a very nice flat, a sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, and a sort of little place that they called a hall. And that’s how I came to know Linley. He was the bloke that was being shown round.

  “Bit expensive,” he said.

  And the man that ran the flats turned away to the window and picked his teeth. It’s funny how much you can show by a simple thing like. What he meant to say was that he’d hundreds of flats like that, and
thousands of people looking for them, and he didn’t care who had them or whether they all went on looking. There was no mistaking him, somehow. And yet he never said a word, only looked away out of the window and picked his teeth. And I ventured to speak to Mr. Linley then; and I said, “How about it, sir, if I paid half, and shared it? I wouldn’t be in the way, and I’m out all day, and whatever you said would go, and really I wouldn’t be no more in your way than a cat.”

  You may be surprised at my doing it; and you’ll be much more surprised at him accepting it—at least, you would if you knew me, just a small man in a small way of business. And yet I could see at once that he was taking to me more than he was taking to the man at the window.

  “But there’s only one bedroom,” he said.

  “I could make up my bed easy in that little room there,” I said.

  “The Hall,” said the man, looking round from the window, without taking his toothpick out.

  “And I’d have the bed out of the way and hid in the cupboard by any hour you like,” I said.

  He looked thoughtful, and the other man looked out over London; and in the end, do you know, he accepted.

  “Friend of yours?” said the flat man.

  “Yes,” answered Mr. Linley.

  It was really very nice of him.

  I’ll tell you why I did it. Able to afford it? Of course not. But I heard him tell the flat man that he had just come down from Oxford and wanted to live for a few months in London. It turned out he wanted just to be comfortable and do nothing for a bit while he looked things over and chose a job, or probably just as long as he could afford it. Well, I said to myself, what’s the Oxford manner worth in business, especially a business like mine? Why, simply everything you’ve got. If I picked up only a quarter of it from this Mr. Linley I’d be able to double my sales, and that would soon mean I’d be given something a lot harder to push, with perhaps treble the pay. Worth it every time. And you can make a quarter of an education go twice as far again, if you’re careful with it. I mean you don’t have to quote the whole of the Inferno to show that you’ve read Milton; half a line may do it.

  Well, about that story I have to tell. And you mightn’t think that a little man like me could make you shudder. Well, I soon forgot about the Oxford manner when we settled down in our flat. I forgot it in the sheer wonder of the man himself. He had a mind like an acrobat’s body, like a bird’s body. It didn’t want education. You didn’t notice whether he was educated or not. Ideas were always leaping up in him, things you’d never have thought of. And not only that, but if any ideas were about, he’d sort of catch them. Time and again I’ve found him knowing just what I was going to say. Not thought reading, but what they call intuition. I used to try to learn a bit about chess, just to take my thoughts off Num-numo in the evening, when I’d done with it. But problems I never could do. Yet he’d come along and glance at my problem and say, “You probably move that piece first,” and I’d say, “But where?” and he’d say, “Oh, one of those three squares.” And I’d say, “But it will be taken on all of them.” And the piece a queen all the time, mind you. And he’d say, “Yes, it’s doing no good there: you’re probably meant to lose it.”

  And, do you know, he’d be right.

  You see, he’d been following out what the other man had been thinking. That’s what he’d been doing.

  Well, one day there was that ghastly murder at Unge. I don’t know if you remember it. But Steeger had gone down to live with a girl in a bungalow on the North Downs, and that was the first we had heard of him.

  The girl had £200, and he got every penny of it, and she utterly disappeared. And Scotland Yard couldn’t find her.

  Well, I’d happened to read that Steeger had bought two bottles of Num-numo; for the Otherthorpe police had found out everything about him, except what he did with the girl; and that of course attracted my attention, or I should have never thought again about the case or said a word of it to Linley. Num-numo was always on my mind, as I always spent every day pushing it, and that kept me from forgetting the other thing. And so one day I said to Linley, “I wonder with all that knack you have for seeing through a chess problem, and thinking of one thing and another, that you don’t have a go at that Otherthorpe mystery. It’s a problem as much as chess,” I said.

  “There’s not the mystery in ten murders that there is in one game of chess,” he answered.

  “It’s beaten Scotland Yard,” I said.

  “Has it?” he asked.

  “Knocked them endwise,” I said.

  “It shouldn’t have done that,” he said. And almost immediately after he said, “What are the facts?”

  We were both sitting at supper, and I told him the facts, as I had them straight from the papers. She was a pretty blonde, she was small, she was called Nancy Elth, she had £200, they lived at the bungalow for five days. After that he stayed there for another fortnight, but nobody ever saw her alive again. Steeger said she had gone to South America, but later said he had never said South America, but South Africa. None of her money remained in the bank where she had kept it, and Steeger was shown to have come by at least £150 just at that time. Then Steeger turned out to be a vegetarian, getting all his food from the greengrocer, and that made the constable in the village of Unge suspicious of him, for a vegetarian was something new to the constable. He watched Steeger after that, and it’s well he did, for there was nothing that Scotland Yard asked him that he couldn’t tell them about him, except of course the one thing. And he told the police at Otherthorpe five or six miles away, and they came and took a hand at it too. They were able to say for one thing that he never went outside the bungalow and its tidy garden ever since she disappeared. You see, the more they watched him the more suspicious they got, as you naturally do if you’re watching a man; so that very soon they were watching every move he made, but if it hadn’t been for his being a vegetarian they’d never have started to suspect him, and there wouldn’t have been enough evidence even for Linley. Not that they found out anything much against him, except that £150 dropping in from nowhere, and it was Scotland Yard that found that, not the police of Otherthorpe. No, what the constable of Unge found out was about the larch trees, and that beat Scotland Yard utterly, and beat Linley up to the very last, and of course it beat me. There were ten larch trees in the bit of a garden, and he’d made some sort of an arrangement with the landlord, Steeger had, before he took the bungalow, by which he could do what he liked with the larch trees. And then from about the time that little Nancy Elth must have died he cut every one of them down. Three times a day he went at it for nearly a week, and when they were all down he cut them all up into logs no more than two foot long and laid them all in neat heaps. You never saw such work. And what for? To give an excuse for the axe was one theory. But the excuse was bigger than the axe; it took him a fortnight, hard work every day. And he could have killed a little thing like Nancy Elth without an axe, and cut her up too. Another theory was that he wanted firewood, to make away with the body. But he never used it. He left it all standing there in those neat stacks. It fairly beat everybody.

  Well, those are the facts I told Linley. Oh yes, and he bought a big butcher’s knife. Funny thing, they all do. And yet it isn’t so funny after all; if you’ve got to cut a woman up, you’ve got to cut her up; and you can’t do that without a knife. Then, there were some negative facts. He hadn’t burned her. Only had a fire in the small stove now and then, and only used it for cooking. They got on to that pretty smartly, the Unge constable did, and the men that were lending him a hand from Otherthorpe. There were some little woody places lying round, shaws they call them in that part of the country, the country people do, and they could climb a tree handy and unobserved and get a sniff at the smoke in almost any direction it might be blowing. They did that now and then, and there was no smell of flesh burning, just ordinary cooking. Pretty smart of the Otherthorpe police that was, though of course it didn’t help to hang Steeger. Then later on the S
cotland Yard men went down and got another fact—negative, but narrowing things down all the while. And that was that the chalk under the bungalow and under the little garden had none of it been disturbed. And he’d never been outside it since Nancy disappeared. Oh yes, and he had a big file besides the knife. But there was no sign of any ground bones found on the file, or any blood on the knife. He’d washed them of course. I told all that to Linley.

  Now I ought to warn you before I go any further. I am a small man myself and you probably don’t expect anything horrible from me. But I ought to warn you this man was a murderer, or at any rate somebody was; the woman had been made away with, a nice pretty little girl too, and the man that had done that wasn’t necessarily going to stop at things you might think he’d stop at. With the mind to do a thing like that, and with the long thin shadow of the rope to drive him further, you can’t say what he’ll stop at. Murder tales seem nice things sometimes for a lady to sit and read all by herself by the fire. But murder isn’t a nice thing, and when a murderer’s desperate and trying to hide his tracks he isn’t even as nice as he was before. I’ll ask you to bear that in mind. Well, I’ve warned you.

  So I says to Linley, “And what do you make of it?”

  “Drains?” said Linley.

  “No,” I says, “you’re wrong there. Scotland Yard has been into that. And the Otherthorpe people before them. They’ve had a look in the drains, such as they are, a little thing running into a cesspool beyond the garden; and nothing has gone down it—nothing that oughtn’t to have, I mean.”

  He made one or two other suggestions, but Scotland Yard had been before him in every case. That’s really the crab of my story, if you’ll excuse the expression. You want a man who sets out to be a detective to take his magnifying glass and go down to the spot; to go to the spot before everything; and then to measure the footmarks and pick up the clues and find the knife that the police have overlooked. But Linley never even went near the place, and he hadn’t got a magnifying glass, not as I ever saw, and Scotland Yard were before him every time.