The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes

by Mike Ashley

  “What should he have talked about?”

  Breall wasn’t about to forget his grudge. “I once asked him for an advance. My folks needed a loan, hospital stuff. He wouldn’t even listen to me.”

  “And you’d worked for him for how long?”

  Sally answered for him, a little acidly. “Six months.”

  I kept my eyes on Breall. “I take it Mr Harrison wasn’t much of a sportsman – never talked about baseball or world soccer or anything like that.”

  He gave me a fishy look – I was putting him on – then shrugged. I could have told him that the only game left for Harrison in his old age had been stocks and bonds and buyouts and they’re not something you can chat about with twenty-five-year-old chauffeurs. But the antagonism was pretty standard. Harrison had a lot of money and Breall had very little, if any.

  Unfair.

  I asked a few more questions, then gave them the same instructions I’d given the cook. Stay in touch and stick around.

  What was important was not what they’d said but what they hadn’t. Breall was probably right. All Harrison had cared about was money. No hobbies had been mentioned, no parties, no guests, no friends, no relatives dropping by. An old man counting his coins and hoping he got to God knows how many millions before life foreclosed on him.

  As for Sally, she had shed no tears, had looked neither bereaved nor distraught nor even unhappy at the loss of her employer of almost sixteen years.

  I started for the door and Breall pointed to the couch. “You forgot your paper.”

  I said “Thanks,” retrieved it and watched them as they walked out the door and down the walk. They weren’t holding hands but it almost seemed as if they were in lockstep. I stared until they disappeared around the corner of the house and wondered if they were going to his rooms or hers.

  O’Brien had been waiting by his car. He was staring after them, too. “Quite a pair, aren’t they?”

  “Why do you say ‘pair’?”

  “For the same reasons you’re thinking,” he wheezed. “And I think we’re both wrong. No knives, no guns, no struggle and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Harrison didn’t eat anything that fatally disagreed with him. Somewhere between nine and eleven he bought the Big One.”

  He suddenly frowned. “Look, Sam, trust me. He was alone that morning, nobody else was around, and there are no signs anybody hit him, stabbed him, shot him or strangled him. He died of old age – some people do, you know.”

  “They pay me to be suspicious,” I said. “You find out anything different, you let me know.”

  “You’ll be the first, Sam.” Then, curious: “What are you going to do?”

  “Wait until they leave, then take out the garbage.”

  It was an hour until Breall left in his Honda, Sally beside him. I’d spent the time sitting in my own car around the corner, reading the paper.

  I was going to have to buy one, after all. The Local News section was missing.

  Bummer.

  I saw O’Brien three days later in his office. He had his feet up, his hands across his paunch, staring out the window at a pleasantly green and sunny spring day. His eyes were at half mast; I’d interrupted the start of his afternoon siesta.

  “On your way out, tell Coral not to let you back in without notifying me first.”

  “It’s always nice to feel welcome,” I said. I helped myself to a cup of lukewarm coffee from the Mr Coffee on the filing cabinet, then made myself comfortable in the battered easy chair facing his desk.

  “I thought you were going to let me know all about Harrison, from his broken heart to the tattoo on his heinie.”

  He yawned and opened his eyes wide for a moment, then swivelled around to face me.

  “No tattoo and nothing to tell you about his heart that you don’t already know.”

  “I made a guess,” I said. “I didn’t say I knew for a fact.”

  “Sudden heart failure, Sam – I’ll send over an official report in the morning. Somewhere around ten in the morning the old pump decided to give up the ghost and it was all over in a second or two. Don’t think he felt a thing. Maybe a brief warning and ping, that was it. Doc Sturdevant was surprised he lasted as long as he did. Didn’t eat right, never got out, pressure of business . . . After eighty or so, it’s all borrowed time anyway. He lived life the way we all do, which is never the right way. Hell, when I was in private practice I never followed the advice I gave my patients. You might live longer but who the hell would want to?”

  I picked a newspaper out of his wastebasket and started leafing through it professionally, starting with the comics first.

  O’Brien looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Don’t you have an office of your own you can waste time in? Or did you drop by to tell me something?”

  I hesitated, struck by a headline, but not exactly sure of why I had hesitated.

  “The saga of the secretary and the chauffeur,” I said. “Or, to be more accurate, the tale of the secretary – no pun intended.”

  O’Brien leaned forward, suddenly interested.

  “And?”

  “Harrison had no relatives, no deep philanthropic interests, he hadn’t contributed a dime to his Alma Mater in years so it was unlikely he remembered it in his will. And as a matter of fact, he didn’t. Guess who his ‘great and good friend’ was who inherits?”

  “Our gal Sal.”

  I nodded.

  “Very sharp; those afternoon naps help. His attorney let me see his Living Trust. Sally doesn’t have to wait for probate, she can cash in right away.”

  “What happened to attorney – client privilege?”

  I yawned; the chair was too damned comfortable. “Come on, it’s a small town, everybody knows where the bodies are buried and besides, he owed me a favour.”

  O’Brien looked thoughtful.

  “So she had motive.”

  “She didn’t seem heartbroken that Harrison had shuffled off.” I looked expectant. “I was hoping you could tell me how.”

  “How she did it? She didn’t. Nobody did. God pulled the rug out from under him and that was that. Judging from the smile on his face, it wasn’t all that bad.”

  I stood up and started to drop the newspaper back in the basket beneath his desk, then stopped and stared at the headlines. Damn. Our modern society. If they recycled the news every few days, nobody would ever notice. I’d been hitting on three-day-old headlines.

  Then I remembered where I had seen them before and sat back down.

  “You got the rest of this?”

  “In the trash basket, help yourself. Coral’s on a work slowdown, she only empties it once a week.”

  I pawed through the papers and found the missing news section for the paper on Harrison’s desk. I had to leaf through it twice before I realized what I was looking for.

  Then I figured I knew how. I also doubted there was any jury on God’s green earth that would send Sally Fitzgerald or Mike Breall to the slammer.

  I went back to the Harrison mansion the next day, along with O’Brien – I hadn’t told him much and he was dying of curiosity – and a couple of uniforms just in case.

  Sally had let her hair down – a nice cascade of blonde – and changed out of her suit-like uniform into something looser and more appealing. For mid-thirties, she was doing very nicely. Breall had ditched his chauffeur uniform and looked more like an ageing delinquent than he had the day before. His personality fit his appearance – surly, apprehensive, defiant and if he had been any younger, I would have called him snotty.

  I looked at Sally and said how sorry I was she had lost such a good friend and employer.

  “I’ll live,” she said.

  She was handling her grief real well, I thought.

  “Mr Harrison died of natural causes,” I said.

  That cheered them both up, though Sally still looked uneasily at the two uniforms by the door. I stared at Breall.

  “How badly did you hate Mr Harrison?”

/>   “I told you I thought—” He caught the warning look from Sally and shot a quick glance at the uniforms. “Not that badly.” Then, blurting: “I thought you said he died of natural causes?”

  “Falling down a flight of stairs can be an accident,” I said. “Unless somebody pushes you. And for a guy with a bad heart, walking up behind him and yelling ‘boo!’ might qualify you for a homicide rap.”

  A frown. “I didn’t—” And then he caught another look from Sally and shut up. He could drive a limo and he must have been good in bed, otherwise I couldn’t understand why Sally put up with him. But then, she hadn’t planned to for very long.

  I took the piece of crumpled paper out of my pocket and pushed the yellow tablet to the front of the desk. I crooked my finger toward Breall and he reluctantly walked over.

  “Do me a favour, Mike, and write the following numbers on the paper.” He hesitated, then picked up the pencil. “Thirty-six,” I said. “Fifty-four, twelve, eleven, forty-five and twenty-two.”

  He slowly printed them out and I compared them to the figures on the paper. The handwriting experts could probably prove they matched up.

  Now it was Sally’s turn.

  “Would you call Mr Harrison a gambler?”

  She shook her head. Cool but wary.

  “Not at all. He was very shrewd in making investments—”

  “But it amused him to play the state lottery, didn’t it?”

  She froze. “I . . . really don’t know.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you do,” I said. “He never left the house so you would’ve had to buy the lottery tickets for him. You or Mike. There were a lot of discarded tickets in the trash.’

  Her face was a mask.

  “I bought him anything he wanted. I might have bought him some tickets.”

  I wasn’t paying much attention to either she or Breall – that was the uniforms’ job. I opened up the drawer where Harrison had kept his pills. Three tickets; I had spotted them when I’d first checked for his pills but hadn’t thought anything of them. One of them had all the numbers that Breall had written down.

  I sighed and leaned back in the chair, fanning the tickets between my fingers, then opened the three-day old section of newspaper that I’d found in O’Brien’s office.

  “When Harrison found that the Local News section was missing from his newspaper – the section that always prints the lottery results, the section you removed before giving him the paper, Mike – he asked you to find out the winning numbers. Sally knew the numbers on his tickets – she had seen them when she refilled his prescription. She gave you a set of six, you copied them down and gave them to Harrison. What was the jackpot? Fifty-five million? Harrison was a businessman so he always went through the financial pages first, before he indulged himself and checked the numbers you gave him against his lottery tickets. Of course, he didn’t have the winning numbers. He just thought he did.”

  I looked up at the now-pale Breall. “Harrison thought he’d finally hit the Big One and the excitement was too much for his heart.”

  Sally was acid.

  “That’s not much of a case.”

  “You were with him for sixteen years, Sally, you probably knew his medical condition better than he did. For a heart patient, good news can be as bad as bad news. Harrison had to avoid stress – and you hit him with a ton of it.”

  “The old bastard died happy,” Breall chimed in, bitter.

  “Shut up,” Sally said dully. “They can’t hold us.”

  I nodded to the uniforms. “Not for me to judge,” I said. “But I think you’ll have to delay that trip to the Bahamas.”

  Breall was a quicker study than I thought. He whirled on Sally. “What trip?”

  I played it innocent.

  “Lois at the travel agency said that you would be gone for a month, right, Sally? A real gossip, Lois. She couldn’t understand why you’d be going by yourself.”

  The uniforms grabbed Breall just as he lunged at her.

  “That was dirty pool,” O’Brien said. We were at the local McDonald’s and O’Brien was on his second Big Mac and fries.

  I’d ordered coffee and was nibbling on some of the fries out of his basket.

  “Murder’s murder, whether Harrison was cheated out of two more days or another decade. Sally got impatient – she could see the best years of her life slipping by. Breall was a wild card. He was a recent hire and as the chauffeur probably had as much face time with Harrison as she did. She had a foolproof plan and enlisted Mike to cover all bases just in case.”

  “Flimsy stuff,” O’Brien said around his hamburger. “It won’t stand up.”

  I shrugged. “A lot of murder cases are made of flimsy stuff. But if they get off, they still won’t be a pair of happy campers. I suspect by now that love has turned pretty sour.”

  O’Brien blinked owlishly at me.

  “They’ll be at each other’s throats.”

  I sprayed one of his fries with catsup.

  “Ain’t that a shame,” I said.

  BLIND EYES

  Edward Marston

  Edward Marston is the best known pseudonym of author and playwright Keith Miles (b.1940). A former lecturer in modern history, Miles has written over forty original plays for radio, television and the theatre, plus some six hundred episodes of radio and television drama series. He has also written over twenty-five novels. These include a series featuring Nicholas Bracewell and his company of Elizabethan actors, which began with The Queen’s Head (1988), plus a series featuring Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret, who resolve crimes as they travel the country helping compile the Domesday Book in 1086. That series began with The Wolves of Savernake (1993). For a change, however, the following story is not historical.

  The first explosion came at midnight. No warning was given. Oxford Street was surprisingly busy at that time on a Saturday. People waited for buses, hovered for taxis, searched for somewhere to eat, headed for nightclubs or simply walked aimlessly along. Drunks relieved themselves in dark corners. A man with an accordion played evergreen favourites with fitful enthusiasm. A group of young women, fresh from a hen party, laughed and joked their way boisterously along the pavement. Curled up in sleeping bags, self-appointed tenants of the various shop doorways had already counted the day’s takings and turned in for the night. Two burly uniformed policemen studied the suits on display in Next and shared their misgivings about the prices. A lone cyclist headed towards Marble Arch.

  The explosion sounded far louder than it really was. It came from a card shop near Oxford Circus and terrified everyone within earshot. The plate glass window became a thousand deadly missiles that shot across the road. Cards were scattered everywhere. Those in the “Get Well Soon” rack were the first to ignite. Women screamed, men yelled, residents lifted bedroom windows or came dashing out of front doors. The two constables abandoned their shopping and ran towards the scene of the blast, one of them raising the alarm on his mobile while the other warned bystanders to keep well clear of the danger area. It seemed only minutes before police cars converged on Oxford Circus to investigate the crime and to control the gathering crowd. A fire engine arrived soon afterwards with an ambulance on its tail. The noise was deafening.

  It was a scene that was repeated elsewhere in the city. A second bomb went off in the Euston Road, a third near Victoria Station and a fourth in Baker Street. No sooner had the emergency services reached one devastated area than another explosion was heard. Nor were the bombs confined to central London. Blackfriars, Belvedere, Chingford, Whitechapel, Pentonville, Clapham Common, Greenwich and other sites were targeted. The Metropolitan Police were at full stretch, the Fire Service pushed to the limit. Chaos reigned for hour after hour. The one consolation was that there seemed to be very few casualties.

  At the height of the crisis, the biggest explosion of all went off in an electricity sub-station and the whole of the West End was suddenly blacked out. Panic spread uncontrollably. Older inhabitants were reminded all to
o vividly of the Blitz, younger people were convulsed with fear. Everyone rushed around wildly, wondering what was happening. A foreign invasion? A bombing campaign by Irish dissidents? A visit by aliens? The end of the world? It was only when dawn finally lifted the blanket of night that another crime was uncovered, a theft so shocking that it was totally impossible to believe even though the evidence was there for all to see.

  Lord Nelson had been stolen from atop his column in Trafalgar Square. In his place, usurping his position of honour, gazing down Whitehall with a smile of triumph and outraging every true English patriot, was a huge statue of Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Fluttering at his boots was a self-explanatory banner.

  VIVE LA FRANCE!

  Commander Richard Milton was not pleased to be hauled back from his holiday. His week in Cornwall had been curtailed before it had even begun and he was determined to make someone pay for his loss. With his wife’s complaints still ringing in his ears, he was flown back swiftly to London to take charge of an inquiry that was dominating the media like the outbreak of the Third World War. A tall, thin, angular man with a face like a Victorian poisoner, Dick Milton had the experience, the guile and the stamina to lead a large team of detectives in the investigation of what appeared to be a series of interrelated crimes. He got results. That was why he was chosen. When he worked in harness with his old friend, Detective Inspector Kenneth Hurrell, results tended to come quickly.

  An incident room was set up in Scotland Yard. By the time that Milton came charging in, Hurrell had already been busy for hours.

  “What the hell is going on, Ken?” demanded Milton.

  “I wish I knew,” sighed Hurrell. “A series of bombs went off all over London last night. Soft targets. Extensive damage to property. Minor injuries but no fatalities. And then – this other bombshell!”

  “Nelson can’t have disappeared!”

  “He has, Commander.”

  “How?”

  “That’s the bit we haven’t worked out.”

  “And is it true that someone else is up there?”

  “Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  “Bloody hell!”