The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “And kept all her windows locked up, too, I daresay,” I said. “Well, your elders and betters know best, no doubt … But I mean to say, what did you do with yourself? Play with dolls?”

  “Sometimes. Or sometimes I did sewing, or read books.”

  “Ah, you’re a great one for reading, Titania,” I said, “like your poor mother used to be. Why, Titania is a name out of a fairy story, isn’t it? A clever girl like you could read anything she could get her hands on, if she were locked up with nobody to talk to. I bet you read your poor brother’s old books, too. I remember noticing on the mantelpiece a bound volume of the Boy’s Own Paper. And also … now let me see … a book with a black and red cover entitled Ten Thousand Things a Young Boy Can Do—is that it?”

  She said, “Not things! Tricks.”

  “And right you are! And I’ll bet you mastered every one of those tricks, didn’t you?”

  She said, “Not all of them. I didn’t have the right things to do most of them with—”

  “There’s one trick in that book, which I have read myself,” I said, “which you did master, though, and which you did have the right apparatus for, Titania, my dear. Tell me what it is. You get a medium needle and stick it down the center of a soft cork. Then you get a penny and place this penny between two little blocks of wood. Put your cork with the needle in it on top of the penny, and strike the cork a sharp blow with a hammer. The cork will hold the needle straight, so that it goes right through that penny. That’s the way you killed your poor Auntie Lily, isn’t it, Titania?”

  Finishing the last of her meringue, she nodded. Having swallowed, she said, “Yes,” and to my horror, she giggled.

  “Why, then,” I said, “you must come back to London with me, and tell my Inspector about it.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Only you mustn’t say anything to Auntie Edith.”

  I told her, “Nobody will do anything dreadful to you; only you must confess and get it off your poor little mind.”

  Titania’s second cousin Edith, by courtesy called “Auntie,” came with the child and me to London—and there, in the police station, she flatly denied every word of everything, and cried to be sent back home.

  Put yourself in my position, stigmatized as a madman and a brute! I lost my temper, one word led to another, and I “tendered my resignation.”

  I shall never forget the sly expression on the girl Titania’s face when she went back with her Auntie Edith to Luton.

  I have no idea what has happened to her since. She will be about thirty-eight or thirty-nine by now, and I should not be at all surprised if she had turned out to be quite a handful.

  THE DOCTOR’S CASE

  REMARKABLY MAINTAINING his position for nearly four decades as the most famous and beloved writer in America, Stephen Edwin King (1947–) was born in Portland, Maine, and graduated from the University of Maine with a BA in English. Unable to find a position as a high school teacher, he sold some stories to various publications, including Playboy. Heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and the macabre stories published by EC Comics, he directed his energy toward horror and supernatural fiction, although he has dabbled in other genres, including mystery, western, and science fiction. The manuscript of his first book, Carrie (1973), about a girl with psychic powers, was thrown into a wastebasket and famously rescued by his wife, Tabitha, who encouraged him to polish and submit it. It received a very modest advance but was published as a hardcover and then had great success as a paperback, launching a career of such spectacular magnitude that King is a celebrity as recognizable as a movie star or athlete—not commonplace for authors.

  In addition to writing numerous novels and short stories, King has written screenplays and nonfiction, proving himself an expert in macabre fiction and film. More than one hundred films and television programs have been made from his work, most notably Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), Stand By Me (1986, based on the novella “The Body”), The Shawshank Redemption (1994, based on the short story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”), and The Green Mile (1999).

  “The Doctor’s Case” was originally published in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Carol-Lynn Rössel Waugh, and Jon L. Lellenberg (New York, Carroll & Graf, 1987).

  STEPHEN KING

  I BELIEVE THERE WAS only one occasion upon which I actually solved a crime before my slightly fabulous friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I say believe because my memory began to grow hazy about the edges round the time I attained my ninth decade; now, as I approach my centennial, the whole has become downright misty. There may have been another occasion, but I do not remember it, if so.

  I doubt if I should ever forget this particular case no matter how murky my thoughts and memories might become, but I suspect I haven’t much longer to write, and so I thought I would set it down. It cannot humiliate Holmes now, God knows; he is forty years in his grave. That, I think, is long enough to leave the tale untold. Even Lestrade, who used Holmes upon occasion but never had any great liking for him, never broke his silence in the matter of Lord Hull—he hardly could have done so, considering the circumstances. Even if the circumstances had been different, I somehow doubt if he would have. He and Holmes might bait each other, but Lestrade had a queer respect for my friend.

  Why do I remember so clearly? Because the case I solved—to the best of my belief the only one I ever solved during my long association with Holmes—was the very one Holmes wanted more than any other to solve himself.

  It was a wet, dreary afternoon and the clock had just rung half past one. Holmes sat by the window, holding his violin but not playing it, looking silently out into the rain. There were times, especially after his cocaine days were behind him, when Holmes could grow moody to the point of surliness when the skies remained stubbornly gray for a week or more, and he had been doubly disappointed on this day, for the glass had been rising since late the night before and he had confidently predicted clearing skies by ten this morning at the latest. Instead, the mist which had been hanging in the air when I arose had thickened into a steady rain. And if there was anything which rendered Holmes moodier than long periods of rain, it was being wrong.

  Suddenly he straightened up, tweaking a violin string with a fingernail, and smiled sardonically. “Watson! Here’s a sight! The wettest bloodhound you ever saw!”

  It was Lestrade, of course, seated in the back of an open waggon with water running into his close-set, fiercely inquisitive eyes. The waggon had no more than stopped before he was out, tossing the driver a coin, and striding toward 221B Baker Street. He moved so quickly that I thought he should run into our door.

  I heard Mrs. Hudson remonstrating with him about his decidedly damp condition and the effect it might have on the rugs both downstairs and up, and then Holmes, who could make Lestrade look like a tortoise when the urge struck him, leaped across to the door and called down, “Let him up, Mrs. H.—I’ll put a newspaper under his boots if he stays long, but I somehow think—”

  Then Lestrade was bounding up the stairs, leaving Mrs. Hudson to expostulate below. His colour was high, his eyes burned, and his teeth—decidedly yellowed by tobacco—were bared in a wolfish grin.

  “Inspector Lestrade!” Holmes cried jovially. “What brings you out on such a—”

  No further did he get. Still panting from his climb, Lestrade said, “I’ve heard gypsies say the devil grants wishes. Now I believe it. Come at once if you’d have a try, Holmes; the corpse is still fresh and the suspects all in a row.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why, what you in your pride have wished for a hundred times or more in my own hearing, my dear fellow. The perfect locked-room mystery!”

  Now Holmes’s eyes blazed. “You mean it? Are you serious?”

  “Would I have risked wet lung riding here in an open waggon if I was not?” Lestrade countered.

  Then, for the only time in my hearing (despite the countless times the phrase has been attributed to him)
, Holmes turned to me and cried: “Quick, Watson! The game’s afoot!”

  On our way to the home of Lord Hull, Lestrade commented sourly that Holmes also had the luck of the devil; although Lestrade had commanded the waggon-driver to wait, we had no more than emerged from our lodgings when that exquisite rarity clip-clopped down the street: an empty hansom cab in what had become a driving rain. We climbed in and were off in a trice. As always, Holmes sat on the left-hand side, his eyes darting restlessly about, cataloguing everything, although there was precious little to see on that day … or so it seemed, at least, to the likes of me. I’ve no doubt every empty street-corner and rain-washed shop window spoke volumes to Holmes.

  Lestrade directed the driver to what sounded like an expensive address in Saville Row, and then asked Holmes if he knew Lord Hull.

  “I know of him,” Holmes said, “but have never had the good fortune of meeting him. Now it seems I never shall. Shipping, wasn’t it?”

  “Shipping it was,” Lestrade returned, “but the good fortune was all yours. Lord Hull was, by all accounts (including those of his nearest and—ahem!—dearest), a thoroughly nasty fellow, and as dotty as a puzzle-picture in a child’s novelty book. He’s finished practicing both nastiness and dottiness for good, however; around eleven o’clock this morning, just—” he pulled his turnip of a pocket-watch and looked at it “—two hours and forty minutes ago, someone put a knife in his back as he sat in his study with his will on the blotter before him.”

  “So,” Holmes said thoughtfully, lighting his pipe, “you believe the study of this unpleasant Lord Hull is the perfect locked room I’ve been looking for all my life, do you?” His eyes gleamed skeptically through a rising rafter of blue smoke.

  “I believe,” Lestrade said quietly, “that it is.”

  “Watson and I have dug such holes before and never struck water yet,” Holmes said, and he glanced at me before returning to his ceaseless catalogue of the streets through which we passed. “Do you recall the ‘Speckled Band,’ Watson?”

  I hardly needed to answer him. There had been a locked room in that business, true enough, but there had also been a ventilator, a snake full of poison, and a killer evil enough to allow the one into the other. It had been devilish, but Holmes had seen to the bottom of the matter in almost no time at all.

  “What are the facts, Inspector?” Holmes asked.

  Lestrade began to lay them before us in the clipped tones of a trained policeman. Lord Albert Hull had been a tyrant in business and a despot at home. His wife was a mousy, terrified thing. The fact that she had borne him three sons seemed to have in no way sweetened his feelings toward her. She had been reluctant to speak of their social relations, but her sons had no such reservations; their papa, they said, had missed no opportunity to dig at her, to criticize her, or to jest at her expense … all of this when they were in company. When they were alone, he virtually ignored her. And, Lestrade added, he sometimes beat her.

  “William, the eldest, told me she always gave out the same story when she came to the breakfast table with a swollen eye or a mark on her cheek, that she had forgotten to put on her glasses and had run into a door. ‘She ran into doors once and twice a week,’ William said. ‘I didn’t know we had that many doors in the house.’ ”

  “Hmmm!” Holmes said. “A cheery fellow! The sons never put a stop to it?”

  “She wouldn’t allow it,” Lestrade said.

  “Insanity,” I returned. A man who would beat his wife is an abomination; a woman who would allow it an abomination and a perplexity.

  “There was method in her madness, though,” Lestrade said. “Although you’d not know it to look at her, she was twenty years younger than Hull. He had always been a heavy drinker and a champion diner. At age sixty, five years ago, he developed gout and angina.”

  “Wait for the storm to end and then enjoy the sunshine,” Holmes remarked.

  “Yes,” Lestrade said. “He made sure they knew both his worth and the provisions of his will. They were little better than slaves—”

  “—and the will was the document of indenture,” Holmes murmured.

  “Exactly so. At the time of his death, his worth was three hundred thousand pounds. He never asked them to take his word for this; he had his chief accountant to the house quarterly to detail the balance sheets of Hull Shipping … although he kept the purse-strings firmly in his own hands and tightly closed.”

  “Devilish!” I exclaimed, thinking of the cruel boys one sometimes sees in Eastcheap or Piccadilly, boys who will hold out a sweet to a starving dog to see it dance … and then gobble it themselves. Within moments I discovered this comparison was even more apt than I thought.

  “On his death, Lady Rebecca Hull was to receive one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. William, the eldest, was to receive fifty thousand; Jory, the middler, forty; and Stephen, the youngest, thirty.”

  “And the other thirty thousand?” I asked.

  “Seven thousand, five hundred each to his brother in Wales and an aunt in Brittany (not a cent for her relatives), five thousand in assorted bequests to the servants at the town-house and the place in the country, and—you’ll like this, Holmes—ten thousand pounds to Mrs. Hemphill’s Home for Abandoned Pussies.”

  “You’re joking!” I cried, although if Lestrade expected a similar reaction from Holmes, he was disappointed. Holmes merely re-lighted his pipe and nodded as if he had expected this, or something like it. “With babies dying of starvation in the East End and homeless orphans still losing all the teeth out of their jaws by the age of ten in the sulphur factories, this fellow left ten thousand pounds to a … a boarding-hotel for cats?”

  “I mean exactly that,” Lestrade said pleasantly. “Furthermore, he should have left twenty-seven times that amount to Mrs. Hemphill’s Abandoned Pussies if not for whatever happened this morning—and whoever who did the business.”

  I could only gape at this, and try to multiply in my head. While I was coming to the conclusion that Lord Hull had intended to disinherit both wife and children in favor of an orphanage for felines, Holmes was looking sourly at Lestrade and saying something which sounded to me like a total non sequitur. “I am going to sneeze, am I not?”

  Lestrade smiled. It was a smile of transcendent sweetness. “Oh yes, my dear Holmes. I fear you will sneeze often and profoundly.”

  Holmes removed his pipe, which he had just gotten drawing to his satisfaction (I could tell by the way he settled back slightly in his seat), looked at it for a moment, and then held it out into the rain. I watched him knock out the damp and smouldering tobacco, more dumbfounded than ever. If you had told me then that I was to be the one to solve this case, I believe I should have been impolite enough to laugh in your face. At that point I didn’t even know what the case was about, other than that someone (who more and more sounded the sort of person who deserved to stand in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace for a medal rather than in the Old Bailey for sentencing) had killed this wretched Lord Hull before he could leave his family’s rightful due to a gaggle of street cats.

  “How many?” Holmes asked.

  “Ten,” Lestrade said.

  “I suspected it was more than this famous locked room of yours that brought you out in the back of an open waggon on such a wet day,” Holmes said sourly.

  “Suspect as you like,” Lestrade said gaily. “I’m afraid I must go on, but if you’d like, I could let you and the good doctor out here.”

  “Never mind,” Holmes said. “When did he become sure that he was going to die?”

  “Die?” I said. “How can you know he—”

  “It’s obvious, Watson,” Holmes said. “It amused him to keep them in bondage by the means of his will.” He looked at Lestrade. “No trust arrangements, I take it?”

  Lestrade shook his head.

  “Nor entailments of any sort?”

  “None.”

  “Extraordinary!” I said.

  “He wanted them to understand all woul
d be theirs when he did them the courtesy of dying, Watson,” Holmes said, “but he never actually intended for them to have it. He realized he was dying. He waited … and then he called them together this morning … this morning, Inspector, yes?”

  Lestrade nodded.

  “Yes. He called them together this morning and told them that he had made a new will which disinherited them one and all … except for the servants and the distant relatives, I suppose.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, only to discover I was too outraged to say anything. The image which kept returning to my mind was that of those cruel boys, making the starving East End curs jump with a bit of pork or a crumb of crust from a meat pie. I must add it never occurred to me to ask if such a will could not be disputed before the bar. Today a man would have a deuce of a time slighting his closest relatives in favor of a hotel for pussies, but in 1899, a man’s will was a man’s will, and unless many examples of insanity—not eccentricity but outright insanity—could be proved, a man’s will, like God’s, was done.

  “This new will was properly witnessed?” Holmes asked, immediately putting his finger on the one possible loophole in such a wretched scheme.

  “Indeed it was,” Lestrade replied. “Yesterday Lord Hull’s solicitor and one of his assistants appeared at the house and were shown into his study. There they remained for about fifteen minutes. Stephen Hull says the solicitor once raised his voice in protest about something—he could not tell what—and was silenced by Hull. Jory, the third son, was upstairs, painting, and Lady Hull was calling on a friend. But both Stephen and William saw them enter and leave. William said that when the solicitor and his assistant left, they did so with their heads down, and although William spoke, asking Mr. Barnes—the solicitor—if he was well, and making some social remark about the persistence of the rain, Barnes did not reply and the assistant seemed to actually cringe. It was as if they were ashamed, William said.”