The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “Do you want to leave?” I was a bit alarmed. I had once seen a case of near asphyxiation as the result of such an aversion to sheep.

  “He’d like that,” Holmes said. I did not need him to tell me who he meant. Holmes sneezed once more (a large red welt was appearing on his normally pale forehead) and then we passed between the constables at the study door. Holmes closed it behind him.

  The room was long and relatively narrow. It was at the end of something like a wing, the main house spreading to either side from an area roughly three-quarters of the way down the hall. Thus there were windows on both sides and the room was well-lit in spite of the gray, rainy day. There were framed shipping charts on most of the walls, but on one was a really handsome set of weather instruments in a brass-bound case: an anemometer (Hull had the little whirling cups mounted on one of the roof-peaks, I supposed), two thermometers (one registering the outdoor temperature and the other that of the study), and a barometer much like the one that had fooled Holmes into believing the bad weather would finally break. I noticed the glass was still rising, then looked outside. The rain was falling harder than ever, rising glass or no rising glass. We believe we know a great lot, with our instruments and things, but we don’t know half as much as we think we do.

  Holmes and I both turned to look at the door. The bolt was torn free, but leaning inward, as it should have been. The key was still in the lock, and still turned.

  Holmes’s eyes, watering as they were, were everywhere at once, noting, cataloging, storing.

  “You are a little better,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, lowering the napkin and stuffing it indifferently back into his coat pocket. “He may have loved ’em, but he apparently didn’t allow ’em in here. Not on a regular basis, anyway. What do you make of it, Watson?”

  Although my eyes were slower than his, I was also looking around. The double windows were all locked with thumb-turns and small brass side-bolts. None of the panes had been broken. The framed charts and weather instruments were between these windows. The other two walls, before and behind the desk which dominated the room, were filled with books. There was a small coal-stove at the south end of the room but no fireplace … the murderer hadn’t come down the chimney like St. Nicholas, not unless he was narrow enough to fit through a stove-pipe and clad in an asbestos suit, for the stove was still very warm. The north end of this room was a little library, with two high-backed upholstered chairs and a coffee-table between them. On this table was a random stack of books. The ceiling was plastered. The floor was covered with a large Turkish rug. If the murderer had come up through a trap-door, I hadn’t the slightest idea how he could have gotten back under that rug without disarranging it, and it was not disarranged in the slightest: it was smooth, and the shadows of the coffee-table legs lay across it without a ripple.

  “Did you believe it, Watson?” Holmes asked, snapping me out of something like a hypnotic trance. Something … something about that coffee-table …

  “Believe what, Holmes?”

  “That all four of them simply walked out of that parlour, in four different directions, four minutes before the murder?”

  “I don’t know,” I said faintly.

  “I don’t believe it; not for a mo—” He broke off. “Watson! Are you all right?”

  “No,” I said in a voice I could hardly hear myself. I collapsed into one of the library chairs. My heart was beating too fast. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. My head was pounding; my eyes seemed to have suddenly grown too large for their sockets. I could not take them from the shadows of the coffee-table legs upon the rug. “I am most … most definitely not … not all right.”

  At that moment Lestrade appeared in the study doorway. “If you’ve looked your fill, H—” He broke off. “What the devil’s the matter with Watson?”

  “I believe,” said Holmes in a calm, measured voice, “that Watson has solved the case. Have you, Watson?”

  I nodded my head. Not all of it, perhaps, but most. I knew who; I knew how.

  “Is it this way with you, Holmes?” I asked. “When you … see?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Watson’s solved the case?” Lestrade said impatiently. “Bah! Watson’s offered a thousand solutions to a hundred cases before this, Holmes, as you very well know—all of them wrong. Why, I remember just this late summer—”

  “I know more about Watson than you shall ever know,” Holmes said, “and this time he has hit upon it. I know the look.” He began to sneeze again; the cat with the missing ear had wandered into the room through the door, which Lestrade had left open. It headed directly for Holmes with an expression of what seemed to be affection on its ugly face.

  “If this is how it is for you,” I said, “I’ll never envy you again, Holmes. My heart should burst.”

  “One becomes enured even to insight,” Holmes said, with not the slightest trace of conceit in his voice. “Out with it, then … or shall we bring in the suspects, as in the last chapter of a detective novel?”

  “No!” I cried in horror. I had seen none of them; I had no urge to. “Only I think I must show you how it was done. If you and Inspector Lestrade will only step out into the hall for a moment—”

  The cat reached Holmes and jumped into his lap, purring like the most satisfied creature on earth.

  Holmes exploded into a perfect fusillade of sneezes. The red patches on his face, which had begun to fade, burst out afresh. He pushed the cat away and stood up.

  “Be quick, Watson, so we can be away from this damned place,” he said in a muffled voice, and left his perfect locked room with his shoulders in an uncharacteristic hunch, his head down, and with not a single look back. Believe me when I say that a little of my heart went with him.

  Lestrade stood leaning against the door, his wet coat steaming slightly, his lips parted in a detestable grin. “Shall I take Holmes’s new admirer, Watson?”

  “Leave it,” I said, “but close the door.”

  “I’d lay a fiver you’re wasting our time, old man,” Lestrade said, but I saw something different in his eyes: if I’d offered to take him up on the wager, he would have found a way out of it.

  “Close the door,” I repeated. “I shan’t be long.”

  He closed the door. I was alone in Hull’s study … except for the cat, of course, which was now sitting in the middle of the rug, tail curled neatly about its paws, green eyes watching me.

  I felt in my pockets and found my own souvenir from last night’s dinner—bachelors are rather untidy people, I fear, but there was a reason for the bread other than general slovenliness. I almost always kept a crust in one pocket or the other, for it amused me to feed the pigeons that landed outside the very window where Holmes had been sitting when Lestrade drove up.

  “Pussy,” said I, and put the bread beneath the coffee-table—the coffee-table to which Lord Hull would have presented his back when he sat down with his two wills—the wretched old one and the even more wretched new one. “Pussy-pussy-pussy.”

  The cat rose and walked languidly beneath the table to investigate.

  I went to the door and opened it. “Holmes! Lestrade! Quickly!”

  They came in.

  “Step over here.” I walked to the coffee-table. Lestrade looked about and began to frown, seeing nothing; Holmes, of course, began to sneeze again. “Can’t we have that wretched thing out of here?” he managed from behind the table-napkin, which was now quite soggy.

  “Of course,” said I. “But where is it, Holmes.”

  A startled expression filled his eyes above the napkin. Lestrade whirled, walked toward Hull’s writing desk, and behind it. Holmes knew his reaction should not have been so violent if the cat had been on the far side of the room. He bent and looked beneath the coffee-table, saw nothing but empty space and the bottom row of the two book-cases on the north wall of the room, and straightened up again. If his eyes had not been spouting like fountains, he should have seen the illusion then
; he was right on top of it. But all the same, it was devilishly good. The empty space under that coffee-table had been Jory Hull’s masterpiece.

  “I don’t—” Holmes began, and then the cat, who found Holmes much more to its liking than the bread, strolled out from beneath the table and began once more to twine ecstatically about his ankles. Lestrade had returned, and his eyes grew so wide I thought they might actually fall out. Even having seen through it, I myself was amazed. The scarred tomcat seemed to be materializing out of thin air; head, body, white-tipped tail last.

  It rubbed against Holmes leg, purring as Holmes sneezed.

  “That’s enough,” I said. “You’ve done your job and may leave.”

  I picked it up, took it to the door (getting a good scratch for my pains), and tossed it un-ceremoniously into the hall. I shut the door behind it.

  Holmes was sitting down. “My God,” he said in a nasal, clogged voice. Lestrade was incapable of any speech at all. His eyes never left the table and the faded red Turkish rug beneath its legs: and empty space that had somehow given birth to a cat.

  “I should have seen,” Holmes was muttering. “Yes … but you … how did you understand so quickly?” I detected the faintest hurt and pique in that voice … and forgave it.

  “It was those,” I said, and pointed at the shadows thrown by the table-legs.

  “Of course!” Holmes nearly groaned. He slapped his welted forehead. “Idiot! I’m a perfect idiot!”

  “Nonsense,” I said tartly. “With ten cats in the house and one who has apparently picked you out for a special friend, I suspect you were seeing ten of everything.”

  Lestrade finally found his voice. “What about the shadows?”

  “Show him, Watson,” Holmes said wearily, lowering the napkin into his lap.

  So I bent and picked one of the shadows off the floor.

  Lestrade sat down in the other chair, hard, like a man who has been unexpectedly punched.

  “I kept looking at them, you see,” I said, speaking in a tone which could not help being apologetic. This seemed all wrong. It was Holmes’s job to explain the whos and hows. Yet while I saw that he now understood everything, I knew he would refuse to speak in this case. And I suppose a part of me—the part that knew I would probably never have another chance to do something like this—wanted to be the one to explain. And the cat was rather a nice touch, I must say. A magician could have done no better with a rabbit and a top-hat.

  “I knew something was wrong, but it took a moment for it to sink in. This room is extremely well lighted, but today it’s pouring down rain. Look around and you’ll see that not a single object in this room casts a shadow … except for these table-legs.”

  Lestrade uttered an oath.

  “It’s rained for nearly a week,” I said, “but both Holmes’s barometer and the late Lord Hull’s”—I pointed to it—“said that we could expect sun today. In fact, it seemed a sure thing. So he added the shadows as a final touch.”

  “Who did?”

  “Jory Hull,” Holmes said in that same weary tone. “Who else?”

  I bent down and reached my hand beneath the right end of the coffee-table. It disappeared into thin air, just as the cat had appeared. Lestrade uttered another startled oath. I tapped the back of the canvas stretched tightly between the forward legs of the coffee-table. The books and the rug bulged and rippled, and the illusion, nearly perfect as it had been, was dispelled.

  Jory Hull had painted the nothing under his father’s coffee-table; had crouched behind the nothing as his father entered the room, locked the door, and sat at his desk with his two wills, the new and the old. And when he began to rise again from his seat, he rushed out from behind the nothing, dagger in hand.

  “He was the only one who could execute such a piece of realism,” I said, this time running my hand down the face of the canvas. We could all hear the low rasping sound it made, like the purr of a very old cat. “The only one who could execute it, and the only one who could hide behind it: Jory Hull, who was no more than five feet tall, bow-legged, slump-shouldered.

  “As Holmes said, the surprise of the new will was no surprise. Even if the old man had been secretive about the possibility of cutting the relatives out of the will, which he wasn’t, only simpletons could have mistaken the import of the visit from the solicitor and, more important, the assistant. It takes two witnesses to make a will a valid document at Chancery. What Holmes said about some people preparing for disaster was very true. A canvas as perfect as this was not made overnight, or in a month. You may find he had it ready—should it need to be used—for as long as a year—”

  “Or five,” Holmes interpolated.

  “I suppose. At any rate, when Hull announced that he wanted to see his family in the parlour this morning, I suppose Jory knew the time had come. After his father had gone to bed last night, he would have come down here and mounted his canvas. I suppose he may have put down the false shadows at the same time, but if I had been him I should have tip-toed in here for another peek at the glass this morning, before the parlour gathering, just to make sure it was still rising. If the door was locked, I suppose he filched the key from his father’s pocket and returned it later.”

  “Wasn’t locked,” Lestrade said shortly. “As a rule he kept it closed to keep the cats out, but rarely locked it.”

  “As for the shadows, they are just strips of felt, as you now see. His eye was good; they are about where they would have been at eleven this morning … if the glass had been right.”

  “If he expected the sun to be shining, why did he put down shadows at all?” Lestrade grumped. “Sun puts ’em down as a matter of course, just in case you’ve never noticed your own, Watson.”

  Here I was at a loss. I looked at Holmes, who seemed grateful to have any part in the answer.

  “Don’t you see? That is the greatest irony of all! If the sun had shone as the glass suggested it would, the canvas would have blocked the shadows. Painted shadow-legs don’t cast them, you know. He was caught by shadows on a day when there were none because he was afraid he would be caught by none on a day when his father’s barometer said they would almost certainly be everywhere else in the room.”

  “I still don’t understand how Jory got in here without Hull seeing him,” Lestrade said.

  “That puzzled me as well,” Holmes said—dear old Holmes! I doubt if it puzzled him a bit, but that was what he said. “Watson?”

  “The parlor where the four of them sat has a door which communicates with the music room, does it not?”

  “Yes,” Lestrade said, “and the music room has a door which communicates with Lady Hull’s morning-room, which is next in line as one goes toward the back of the house. But from the morning-room one can only go back into the hall, Doctor Watson. If there had been two doors into Hull’s study, I should hardly have come after Holmes on the run as I did.”

  He said this last in tones of faint self-justification.

  “Oh, he went back into the hall, all right,” I said, “but his father didn’t see him.”

  “Rot!”

  “I’ll demonstrate,” I said, and went to the writing-desk, where the dead man’s cane still leaned. I picked it up and turned toward them. “The very instant Lord Hull left the parlour, Jory was up and on the run.”

  Lestrade shot a startled glance at Holmes; Holmes gave the Inspector a cool, ironic look in return. And I must say I did not understand the wider implications of the picture I was drawing for yet awhile. I was too wrapped up in my own recreation, I suppose.

  “He nipped through the first connecting door, ran across the music room, and entered Lady Hull’s morning-room. He went to the hall door then and peeked out. If Lord Hull’s gout had gotten so bad as to have brought on gangrene, he would have progressed no more than a quarter of the way down the hall, and that is optimistic. Now mark me, Inspector Lestrade, and I will show you how a man has spent a lifetime eating rich foods and imbibing the heavy waters ends up payi
ng for it. If you doubt it, I shall bring you a dozen gout sufferers who will show you exactly what I’m going to show you now.”

  With that I began to stump slowly across the room toward them, both hands clamped tightly on the ball of the cane. I would raise one foot quite high, bring it down, pause, and then draw the other leg along. Never did my eyes look up. Instead, they alternated between the cane and that forward foot.

  “Yes,” Holmes said quietly. “The good Doctor is exactly right, Inspector Lestrade. The gout comes first; then (if the sufferer lives long enough, that is) there comes the characteristic stoop brought on by always looking down.”

  “He knew it, too,” I said. “Lord Hull was afflicted with worsening gout for five years. Jory would have marked the way he had come to walk, always looking down at the cane and his own feet. Jory peeped out of the morning room, saw he was safe, and simply nipped into the study. Three seconds and no more, if he was nimble.” I paused. “That hall floor is marble, isn’t it? He must have kicked off his shoes.”

  “He was wearing slippers,” Lestrade said curtly.

  “Ah. I see. Jory gained the study and slipped behind his stage-flat. Then he withdrew the dagger and waited. His father reached the end of the hall. He heard Stanley call down to his father. That must have been a bad moment for him. Then his father called back that he was fine, came into the room and closed the door.”

  They were both looking at me intently, and I understood some of the Godlike power Holmes must have felt at moments like that, telling others what only you could know. And yet, I must repeat that it is a feeling I shouldn’t have wanted to have too often. I believe the urge for such a feeling would have corrupted most men—men with less iron in their souls than was possessed by my friend Sherlock Holmes is what I mean.

  “Jory—old Keg-Legs, old Stoat-Belly—would have made himself as small as possible before the locking-up went on, knowing that his father would have one good look round before turning the key and shooting the bolt. He may have been gouty and going a bit soft about the edges, but that doesn’t mean he was going blind.”