The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “Well, Bailey’s obviously still on the station. Or else somewhere on the train. I wonder what the devil he thinks he’s up to?”

  “In spite of you and your men, he must have been able to leave his cabin without being observed.” They were passing the cabin as Fen spoke, and he stopped to peer at its vacant interior. “As you see, there’s no way through from it into the remainder of the train.”

  Humbleby considered the disposition of his forces, and having done so: “Yes,” he admitted, “he could have left the cabin without being seen; and for that matter, got to shelter somewhere in the station buildings.”

  “Weren’t the porters on the platform when the train came in?”

  “No. They got so overwrought when I told them what I was here for—the younger one especially—that I made them keep out of the way. I didn’t want them gaping when Goggett got off the train and making him suspicious—he’s the sort of man who’s quite capable of using a gun when he finds himself cornered.”

  “Maycock?”

  “He was in his office—asleep, I suspect. As to the Guard, I could see his van from where I was standing, and he didn’t even get out of it till he was ready to start the train off again.…” Humbleby sighed. “So there really wasn’t anyone to keep an eye on the motorman’s doings. However, we’re bound to find him: he can’t have left the precincts. I’ll get a search-party together, and we’ll have another look—a systematic one, this time.”

  Systematic or not, it turned out to be singularly barren of results. It established one thing only, and that was that beyond any shadow of doubt the missing motorman was not anywhere in, on, or under the station, nor anywhere in, on, or under his abandoned train.

  And unfortunately, it was also established that he could not, in the nature of things, be anywhere else.

  Fen took no part in this investigation, having already foreseen its inevitable issue. He retired, instead, to the Station-master’s office, by whose fire he was dozing when Humbleby sought him out half an hour later.

  “One obvious answer,” said Humbleby when he had reported his failure, “is of course that Bailey’s masquerading as someone else—as one of the twelve people (that’s not counting police) who definitely are cooped up in this infernal little station.”

  “And is he doing that?”

  “No. At least, not unless the Guard and the two porters and the Station-master are in a conspiracy together—which I don’t for a second believe. They all know Bailey by sight, at least, and they’re all certain that no one here can possibly be him.”

  Fen yawned. “So what’s the next step?” he asked.

  “What I ought to have done long ago: the next step is to find out if there’s any evidence Bailey was driving the train when it left Borleston.… Where’s the telephone?”

  “Behind you.”

  “Oh, yes.… I don’t understand these inter-station phones, so I’ll use the ordinary one.… God help us, hasn’t that dolt Maycock made a note of the number anywhere?”

  “In front of you.”

  “Oh, yes … 51709.” Humbleby lifted the receiver, dialled, and waited. “Hello, is that Borleston Junction?” he said presently. “I want to speak to the Station-master. Police business.… Yes, all right, but be quick.” And after a pause: “Station-master? This is Detective-Inspector Humbleby of the Metropolitan C.I.D. I want to know about a train which left Borleston for Clough and Bramborough at—at——”

  “A quarter to midnight,” Fen supplied.

  “At a quarter to midnight.… Good heavens, yes, this last midnight that we’ve just had.… Yes, I know it’s held up at Clough; so am I.… No, no, what I want is information about who was driving it when it left Borleston: eyewitness information.… You did?… You actually saw Bailey yourself? Was that immediately before the train left? … It was; well then, there’s no chance of Bailey’s having hopped out, and someone else taken over, after you saw him? … I see: the train was actually moving out when you saw him at the controls. Sure you’re not mistaken? This is important.… Oh, there’s a porter who can corroborate it, is there? … No, I don’t want to talk to him now.… All right.… Yes.… Goodbye.”

  Humbleby rang off and turned back to Fen. “So that,” he observed, “is that.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “And the next thing is, could Bailey have left the train between Borleston and here?”

  “The train,” said Fen, “didn’t drive itself in, you know.”

  “Never mind that for the moment,” said Humbleby irritably. “Could he?”

  “No. He couldn’t. Not without breaking his neck. We did a steady thirty-five to forty all the way, and we didn’t stop or slow down once.”

  There was a silence. “Well, I give up,” said Humbleby. “Unless this wretched man has vanished like a sort of soap-bubble——”

  “It’s occurred to you that he may be dead?”

  “It’s occurred to me that he may be dead and cut up into little pieces. But I still can’t find any of the pieces.… Good Lord, Fen, it’s like—it’s like one of those Locked-Room Mysteries you get in books: an Impossible Situation.”

  Fen yawned again. “Not impossible, no,” he said. “Rather a simple device, really.…” Then more soberly: “But I’m afraid that what we have to deal with is something much more serious than a mere vanishing. In fact——”

  The telephone rang, and after a moment’s hesitation Humbleby answered it. The call was for him; and when, several minutes later, he put the receiver back on its hook, his face was grave.

  “They’ve found a dead man,” he said, “three miles along the line towards Borleston. He’s got a knife in his back and has obviously been thrown out of a train. From their description of the face and clothes, it’s quite certainly Goggett. And equally certainly, that”—he nodded towards the platform—“is the train he fell out of.… Well, my first and most important job is to interview the passengers. And anyone who was alone in a compartment will have a lot of explaining to do.”

  Most of the passengers had by now disembarked, and were standing about in various stages of bewilderment, annoyance, and futile enquiry. At Humbleby’s command, and along with the Guard, the porters, and Mr. Maycock, they shuffled, feebly protesting, into the waiting-room. And there, with Fen as an interested onlooker, a Grand Inquisition was set in motion.

  Its results were both baffling and remarkable. Apart from the motorman, there had been nine people on the train when it left Borleston and when it arrived at Clough; and each of them had two others to attest the fact that during the whole crucial period he (or she) had behaved as innocently as a newborn infant. With Fen there had been the elderly business man and the genteel girl; in another compartment there had likewise been three people, no one of them connected with either of the others by blood, acquaintance, or vocation; and even the Guard had witnesses to his harmlessness, since from Victoria onwards he had been accompanied in the van by two melancholy men in cloth caps, whose mode of travel was explained by their being in unremitting personal charge of several doped-looking whippets. None of these nine, until the first search for Bailey was set on foot, had seen or heard anything amiss. None of them (since the train was not a corridor train) had had any opportunity of moving out of sight of his or her two companions. None of them had slept. And unless some unknown, travelling in one of the many empty compartments, had disappeared in the same fashion as Bailey—a supposition which Humbleby was by no means prepared to entertain—it seemed evident that Goggett must have launched himself into eternity unaided.

  It was at about this point in the proceedings that Humbleby’s self-possession began to wear thin, and his questions to become merely repetitive; and Fen, perceiving this, slipped out alone on to the platform. When he returned, ten minutes later, he was carrying a battered suitcase; and regardless of Humbleby, who seemed to be making some sort of speech, he carried this impressively to the centre table and put it down there.

  “In this suitcase,” he
announced pleasantly, as Humbleby’s flow of words petered out, “we shall find, I think, the motorman’s uniform belonging to the luckless Bailey.” He undid the catches. “And in addition, no doubt … Stop him, Humbleby!”

  The scuffle that followed was brief and inglorious. Its protagonist, tackled round the knees by Humbleby, fell, struck his head against the fender, and lay still, the blood welling from a cut above his left eye.

  “Yes, that’s the culprit,” said Fen. “And it will take a better lawyer than there is alive to save him from a rope’s end.”

  Later, as Humbleby drove him to his destination through the December night, he said: “Yes, it had to be Maycock. And Goggett and Bailey had, of course, to be one and the same person. But what about motive?”

  Humbleby shrugged. “Obviously, the money in that case of Goggett’s. There’s a lot of it, you know. It’s a pretty clear case of thieves falling out. We’ve known for a long time that Goggett had an accomplice, and it’s now certain that that accomplice was Maycock. Whereabouts in his office did you find the suitcase?”

  “Stuffed behind some lockers—not a very good hiding-place, I’m afraid. Well, well, it can’t be said to have been a specially difficult problem. Since Bailey wasn’t on the station, and hadn’t left it, it was clear he’d never entered it. But someone had driven the train in—and who could it have been but Maycock? The two porters were accounted for—by you; so were the Guard and the passengers—by one another; and there just wasn’t anyone else.

  “And then, of course, the finding of Goggett’s body clinched it. He hadn’t been thrown out of either of the occupied compartments, or the Guard’s van; he hadn’t been thrown out of any of the unoccupied compartments, for the simple reason that there was nobody to throw him. Therefore he was thrown out of the motorman’s cabin. And since, as I’ve demonstrated, Maycock was unquestionably in the motorman’s cabin, it was scarcely conceivable that Maycock had not done the throwing.

  “Plainly, Maycock rode or drove into Borleston while he was supposed to be having his supper, and boarded the train—that is, the motorman’s cabin—there. He kept hidden till the train was under way, and then took over from Goggett-Bailey while Goggett-Bailey changed into the civilian clothes he had with him. By the way, I take it that Maycock, to account for his presence, spun some fictional (as far as he knew) tale about the police being on Goggett-Bailey’s track, and that the change was Goggett-Bailey’s idea; I mean, that he had some notion of its assisting his escape at the end of the line.”

  Humbleby nodded. “That’s it, approximately. I’ll send you a copy of Maycock’s confession as soon as I can get one made. It seems he wedged the safety handle which operates these trains, knifed Goggett-Bailey and chucked him out, and then drove the train into Clough and there simply disappeared, with the case, into his office. It must have given him a nasty turn to hear the station was surrounded.”

  “It did,” said Fen. “If your people hadn’t been there, it would have looked, of course, as if Bailey had just walked off into the night. But chance was against him all along. Your siege, and the grouping of the passengers, and the cloth-capped men in the van—they were all part of an accidental conspiracy—if you can talk of such a thing—to defeat him; all part of a sort of fortuitous conjuring trick.” He yawned prodigiously, and gazed out of the car window. “Do you know, I believe it’s the dawn.… Next time I want to arrive anywhere, I shall travel by bus.”

  THE LOCKED BATHROOM

  STARTING HIS WRITING CAREER as a journalist, Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating (1926–2011), known to all as “Harry,” worked for several newspapers until 1960, when he became a full-time author, producing several general novels and mysteries, achieving success with The Perfect Murder (1964). Introducing his most famous character, Inspector Ganesh Ghote of the Bombay CID, it won the (British) Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Gold Dagger for the best novel of the year; it also was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Ghote (pronounced GO-tay), one of the most revered characters in British crime fiction for more than four decades, is the homicide expert in Bombay but is nonetheless a man beset by doubts. He is dominated by his wife and gives the impression while on the job of being bullied or victimized by his superiors, tough criminals, and powerful witnesses or suspects. Nevertheless, in spite of his simple naïveté, he is often shrewd and seems always to come through with the correct solution to any mystery with which he is confronted. Although praised for his accurate and sensitive portrayal of life in India in the Ghote novels, Keating did not visit India until he had written nine books set there.

  Keating was born in Sussex and, after joining the BBC Engineering Department as a youth-in-training, served in the army from 1945 to 1948. He attended Trinity College in Dublin, then returned to England to work at various newspapers. As a freelance writer, he reviewed for the Times (London) for fifteen years, beginning in 1967. Regarded as one of the great writers of fair-play detective fiction, Keating served as president of the prestigious Detection Club (1985–2000) and was awarded a Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement by the CWA in 1996.

  “The Locked Bathroom” was first published in the June 2, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  H. R. F. KEATING

  MRS. CRAGGS HAD very often nearly left the cleaning job she had with Mrs. Marchpane, of Fitzjames Avenue. But somehow, for some reason or no reason, she stayed on week after week. And so she was there, a witness, when in that luxury flat—as later the newspaper headline writers were to insist on calling it—there occured one of the great mysteries of our time. Or, anyhow, a mystery. And one that made the papers for nearly two weeks.

  Certainly Mrs. Craggs had no regard at all for her employer, silly, gabbling Mrs. Marchpane, wife of Squadron Leader John (Jumping Jack) Marchpane, retired. Every other week at least, when it came to the Friday, the second of the two days on which she “did” for Mrs. Marchpane, she had been on the point of saying, “Sorry, madam, but I shan’t be able to oblige after next Friday,” and then she had said nothing. It might, to some extent, have been because of the Squadron Leader. There he was, a hero, called “Jumping Jack” in the war because he had had to bail out on twenty-three different occasions and had gone back to pilot another Spitfire next day every single time. But now he was retired with only a bit of a job to keep himself occupied and spending all the rest of his time being given orders by Mrs. Marchpane. And ridiculous orders, too, often as not.

  So, although the Squadron Leader was always very nice to her, never failing to ask about her rheumatism—and listening to her reply—producing a little bunch of flowers when he discovered it was her birthday and sending her a card at Christmas, she could not help mingling her liking for him with a little half-contemptuous pity.

  The trouble was that Mrs. Marchpane was such a fusspot. Everything had to be just right for her. If the frail figurines on the sitting-room mantelpiece were not each one at its exactly accustomed angle when Mrs. Craggs had finished dusting, it was as if the whole fabric of society had been made to totter. If each one of Mrs. Marchpane’s delicately scented toilet articles was not in its exact place on the shelf in front of the bathroom mirror, to a hair’s-breadth, it was as if the very foundations of the ever-spinning world had been lifted up and moved. If after Mrs. Craggs had taken the vacuum cleaner over the hall carpet the Squadron Leader was forgetful enough to walk across it and leave footmarks in the immaculate pile, it was as if someone had impiously challenged the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England and had to be rushed to the stake forthwith.

  Yet Mrs. Craggs stayed on. Which did at least mean she was there on the day of the Great Locked Bathroom Mystery.

  It happened just after she had finished the hall carpet, a task Mrs. Marchpane liked done first of all. Both the Squadron Leader and his wife were in the bathroom. They did not get up early, and it was very much a regular thing that the Squadron Leader should be taking his shower at this time. Mrs. Marchpane insisted—o
f course—that any husband of hers should shower each morning and she even timed her own twenty minutes spent at the bathroom basin to coincide with his. She insisted too that he should have a complete change of clothes each day, in summer even putting his lightweight trousers into the Ali Baba dirty-linen basket in the corner of the bathroom.

  And hair. What a fuss she made about hair caught in the bath wastepipe.

  You’d think, Mrs. Craggs used to murmur to herself whenever she heard from the other side of the locked bathroom door that unending sing-song voice, poor old Jumping Jack’s hairs were great poisonous tropical wrigglies, the palaver she’s making. “Really, John, if I’ve asked you once I’ve asked you a thousand times.” Mrs. Marchpane never called her hero husband by any other less dignified name than John. “Really, John, I can’t have the charwoman finding hair in the plug-hole.” Though Mrs. Craggs’s own feelings were that life made its share of muck, and muck had got to be cleared up.

  But on this memorable day, just as she had switched off the vacuum cleaner, she heard from behind the bathroom door, not a comparatively restrained rebuke, but a sudden ear-shattering scream.

  “Gone. Gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.”

  Then there came the sound of the bolt on the door being banged back with desperate force and the next second Mrs. Marchpane came rushing out full pelt into the hall.

  At first Mrs. Craggs thought the Squadron Leader must have had a heart attack as he stood there in the shower. But Mrs. Marchpane’s next shrill words dissipated the notion in an instant.

  “He’s disappeared. John. My John. He’s gone. He’s vanished.”

  “What you mean ‘gone’?” Mrs. Craggs was eventually forced to shout sharply into Mrs. Marchpane’s ear.

  “Mrs. Craggs, my husband. He was there in the shower. I was looking at him in the mirror. I was massaging my face. Then—then I looked again and he wasn’t—he wasn’t there, Mrs. Craggs.”