Murder in the Crooked House

by Soji Shimada

  “It was just after five past one,” Hatsue Kanai interjected. “Six minutes past, to be precise.”

  “I see.” Ushikoshi sounded perplexed. “This is a very worrying problem. Anyway, is there anyone else who saw or heard anything else strange last night?”

  “Just a minute. I haven’t finished yet,” said Kumi.

  “There’s more?” asked Ushikoshi warily.

  Kumi felt a bit sorry for the policeman. If he’d got so upset over the scream, how was he going to react to the next part of her story? However, she decided not to pull any punches and recounted the whole story exactly as it had happened. As she’d expected, Ushikoshi listened open-mouthed.

  “Did you think I’d have screamed just because I heard a man’s voice?” asked Kumi.

  “Is this for real? But, but, it can’t possibly…”

  “Wasn’t it just a nightmare?”

  The two detectives spoke at once.

  “Everyone kept saying the same thing to me. But I am absolutely sure. Being here now feels more like a dream than what happened in the night.”

  “Is there anyone living around here who looks like that? I mean with dark skin and burn scars on his cheeks?”

  “And something of a sleepwalker to boot.”

  It was Okuma who’d decided to throw this in.

  “A monster who decides to go for a walk in the snow by the light of the moon,” he elaborated.

  “There are definitely no such people around here!”

  Eiko spoke as if it were her own honour that was being impugned.

  “And of course, there’s nobody fitting that description within the mansion?”

  Ushikoshi’s question managed to offend Eiko even more. She laughed scornfully.

  “Obviously not!”

  From then on, she sat there in annoyed silence.

  “And the residents of this mansion are: Mr Kozaburo and Ms Eiko Hamamoto, Mr and Mrs Hayakawa and Haruo Kajiwara. There’s no one else?”

  Kozaburo shook his head.

  “Well, this is very depressing news. Ms Aikura, I believe you were sleeping on the top floor? Specifically… let’s see… Room 1. Now, there are no footholds beneath the window of Room 1, nor were there any footprints in the snow below. So this monster somehow came floating through the air and peered in through your window?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know how he did it. And I never said it was a monster!”

  “Tell you what, it’d be a lot more bloody helpful if you could make up your mind whether you heard a scream or saw some creepy bloke.”

  It was Okuma again, unable to resist commenting.

  Kumi flashed him a look that said she wasn’t prepared to say any more if he insisted on making disparaging remarks.

  “Right, then… Is there anyone else who would like to throw a spanner into our investigation?”

  Everyone looked as if they were trying to think of something. At that moment, one of the uniformed police officers standing guard outside hurried into the salon and began to whisper something into the ear of Chief Inspector Ushikoshi. The lead detective got up and approached Kozaburo.

  “Mr Hamamoto, it seems we’ve found what appears to be the missing head from your doll. It’s out in the snow, quite a distance from Room 10.”

  Kozaburo jumped to his feet.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful news!”

  “Please go with this officer. For now we may be keeping it for forensics, but what will you do with it when you get it back?”

  “Well, obviously I’m going to reattach it to its body, and return it to Room 3—my display room.”

  “Understood. You’re free to go.”

  Kozaburo and the police officer left the room.

  “So, is there no one else who observed anything odd? Mr Togai, you were right below Mr Ueda’s room?”

  “No, nothing. I went to bed around 10.30.”

  “Nothing unusual happening outside your window?”

  “My curtains were shut. And the window’s double glazed.”

  “And yet, the killer took that massive doll from Room 3—for what purpose I have no idea—and carried it into the back garden. And after that, he carefully took it apart, tossing only the head farther away from the other parts. The head section that we found was buried in the snow, at such a distance from the rest of the body that it suggests someone flung it with all their might. It’s quite deep, and there are no footprints around it.

  “The snow stopped falling around 11.30 last night. From the state of the doll’s body, we can guess that the killer arrived shortly before then. Right outside Mr Togai’s window. Are you sure you didn’t hear anything at all?”

  “I’m sorry. I was already asleep soon after 10.30. I didn’t even hear Mr Ueda scream.”

  “Everyone seems to have gone to bed surprisingly early.”

  “Yes. We tend to get up early here.”

  “Ah!”

  Sasaki suddenly cried out.

  “What is it?” asked Ushikoshi, who looked as if nothing could shock him any more.

  “The stakes! The stakes sticking out of the snow. Two of them. It must have been a few hours before the murder!”

  “What do you mean? Could you explain more clearly?”

  Sasaki explained how, looking out of the salon window the evening before, he’d spotted two wooden stakes sticking out of the snow.

  “And what time was that?”

  “It was after we’d eaten, right after we finished drinking tea. So I reckon about 8 o’clock, or maybe half past.”

  “Um, Mr Kajiwara, 8 o’clock-ish, would that be about the time people finished drinking their tea?”

  “Yes, I think that would be about right.”

  “Did anyone else besides Mr Sasaki notice these two stakes?”

  Everyone shook their head. Sasaki remembered the moment he’d spotted them. He really should have called somebody else over to take a look.

  “Was it snowing at the time?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “And then in the morning, when you went out to wake Mr Ueda, how was it then?”

  “You mean the stakes? Now that you mention it, this morning they were gone.”

  “How about a trace or mark where they’d been?”

  “Ah, I’m not sure. I wasn’t really paying attention, but I don’t think there was anything. One was near the area we found the doll’s parts, so I guess I was even standing around that spot this morning… Oh, do you think the killer put those stakes there?”

  “No idea, but I have to say it’s yet another mysterious story. Mr Hayakawa, did you not notice these stakes?”

  “We hardly went out into the garden yesterday. I’m afraid I didn’t notice anything.”

  “These stakes, were they standing completely upright?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, perpendicular to the ground?”

  “Yes, pretty much.”

  “Do you think they were stuck all the way into the ground?”

  “No, that would be impossible. There’s stone underneath the snow in both spots.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I mean that part of the back garden is covered with a kind of paving stone.”

  “Hmm. Do you think you could show me whereabouts these stakes were?”

  Ushikoshi handed Sasaki a pen and paper, and the younger man drew him a sketch of the back garden. As soon as he’d finished, Okuma came over to look. (See Fig. 5.)

  Fig. 5

  “Aha! Now it’s getting interesting!”

  “How far away from the building were the stakes?” asked Ushikoshi.

  “About two metres, I think.”

  “And the doll, was it about the same distance away?”

  “Probably.”

  “So a line drawn between the two stakes would be about two metres away from, and parallel with the wall of this building?”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But say they were connected to the crime, w
hat on earth would they be used for?” asked Sasaki.

  “Never mind that for now. We’ll think about it later. It could very well be a completely unrelated matter. By the way, last night, who was the last person to go to bed?”

  “That would be me,” said Kohei Hayakawa. “Every night I lock up before going to bed.”

  “What time last night?”

  “After half 10… I don’t think it was as late as 11.”

  “And did you notice anything unusual?”

  “Everything seemed the same way it always is.”

  “So you noticed nothing in particular.”

  “No.”

  “When you say lock up, that includes the door from the salon to the garden, the front door and the kitchen door? Can all of these be opened again easily from the inside?”

  “Yes, they can. If it’s from the inside…”

  “The room that normally houses the doll that was in pieces at the corner of the main building, is that door kept locked?”

  Ushikoshi turned to Eiko.

  “Ms Hamamoto?”

  “Yes, it is. But there’s a large window facing the corridor and that isn’t kept locked. If you wanted, you could get something out that way. And the doll was kept in the corner by the window.”

  “A window facing the corridor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ha! I see, I see. Well, that will be all for now. Next I’d like to ask each of you a few questions privately. And then we police need to have a meeting. It doesn’t need to be a very big room, but do you happen to have a place we could use?”

  “You’re welcome to use our library,” said Eiko. “I’ll show you the way.”

  “Much obliged. It looks as if we still have enough time today. So shortly we’ll begin calling people one by one. When you hear your name, please make your way to the library.”

  SCENE 6

  The Library

  As soon as the butler, Kohei Hayakawa, had shown them to the library, Sergeant Ozaki lost it.

  “I can’t believe what kind of shit people are into! Just for the hell of it, building a mansion with crazy sloping floors. I don’t even own a decent house of my own. This guy’s a total whack-job, if you ask me. The hobbies of the filthy rich. It really pisses me off.”

  Outside, the wind had begun to howl. The sun was already going down.

  “Forget it,” said Chief Inspector Ushikoshi, trying to calm down his colleague. “The rich have their hobbies, while we regular people struggle to get by. It’s the way of the world. Just ignore him.”

  Ushikoshi pushed one of the chairs with its filed-off legs towards Ozaki.

  “If everyone in the world was exactly alike, then it would be a very boring place. There’s the rich lot like him, and poor coppers like us, and I think that’s all right. Money doesn’t necessarily make you happy, you know.”

  “Talking of coppers, what do you want me to do with my lot?” asked Inspector Okuma.

  “I think you can let them go now,” said Ushikoshi, and Okuma left the room to go and tell his local officers they could leave.

  “But like I was saying, the layout of this house is completely insane, it’s a total nuthouse. I was checking it out earlier.”

  Ozaki clearly wasn’t ready to drop the subject.

  “I tried to make a drawing of the place as I went around. Take a look.” (See Fig. 1) “It’s like a real mansion you’d find in a European country, and they’ve even given it a fancy name: the Ice Floe Mansion. It’s made up of the main building here which has one underground floor and three above ground, and that Leaning Tower of Pisa-thing next to it. The thing that makes this tower different from the Pisa one is that, except for Kozaburo Hamamoto’s own room at the top, there are no rooms whatsoever in the whole tower. There’s not even a staircase. Which means there are no doors or other entrances anywhere. You can’t even enter the bloody thing at ground level and climb up.

  “So how, you ask, does Hamamoto get to his own bedroom? He lowers a drawbridge complete with chains and everything from this main building and climbs across to go to sleep. When he gets to the tower he pulls the chains and raises the bridge again. Like I said before, he’s a complete whack-job.

  “And then this main building’s got fifteen rooms, and they’re all numbered, starting from the top on the east side, the side next to the tower, and working down. Okay, now look at this drawing. This is Room 3, the one that had the doll in it, a kind of display room. And next to it, Room 4, is the library—where we are now. Underneath us is Room 5, the salon we were in before, and the kitchen. And then over to the west side, there’s Room 10 where the murder took place, which is normally a storeroom for sports equipment. They don’t usually put guests up in that room. Room 11 next door is set up for table tennis only.

  “The reason I’m telling you all this is that apart from the six rooms I’ve just mentioned, every room has its own en suite bath and toilet. The place is like a five-star hotel. Ten guest bedrooms, all sorts of leisure activity rooms—it’s a fully equipped non-paying hotel.”

  “Hmm. Hmm. I see.”

  At this point Inspector Okuma returned and joined in the conversation.

  “So that means that Ueda didn’t get put in one of those rooms with its own bathroom. He got stuck in a storeroom, right?”

  “That’s right. When they have a large number of guests they sometimes run out of rooms, they said. So they move a folding bed into Room 10.”

  “Which means that there weren’t enough guest rooms last night?”

  “No, in fact there were enough. Room 15 was empty. In other words—”

  “In other words, someone thought the humble chauffeur deserved to sleep in a storeroom. Who was in charge of allocating the rooms?”

  “That would be the daughter, Eiko.”

  “Of course.”

  “There are four storeys, including the basement. The building is divided up into an east and a west wing, so there are eight mini-floors in total. Each of these floors is divided again into north and south, so sixteen rooms. Except that the salon is extra-large, two rooms in one, with an adjoining kitchen. I’ve labelled the kitchen Room 16 on the plan.

  “Then, I noticed that all the rooms on the north side are larger than the ones on the south. The staircases are all on the south, and that takes a little space from the rooms on that side.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s why both of the couples were given rooms on the north side. Mr and Mrs Kanai and the house staff, Mr and Mrs Hayakawa. The Kanais were on the top floor in Room 9, and the Hayakawas in the basement room number 7. Of course the Hayakawas have been living in that room since the mansion was built.

  “Now about the staircases—this is totally bizarre. There are two, one in each of the east and west wings. The east staircase leads up from the ground-floor salon. You’d take this one if you were going to Rooms 1 and 2 or to Kozaburo Hamamoto’s room in the tower. But for some reason those are the only places you can get to that way. It completely skips Rooms 3 and 4 on the middle floor. You can’t get to the middle floor at all by those stairs.”

  “Really?”

  “I couldn’t work out why anybody would have created something so weird. Why would you want to go upstairs from the salon directly to the top floor, skipping the middle? And on top of that, the east wing doesn’t have any stairs down to the basement at all. It’s like a bloody maze—the more you walk around the more irritated you get.”

  “So what you’re saying is if you want to go up to the middle floor or down to the basement, you have to use the stairs in the west wing that we used to get here? But I thought that staircase went beyond the middle floor. It looked like there were steps leading farther up.”

  “That’s right. To get to the middle floor and the basement you have to use these west wing stairs. As the east wing stairs go up to the top floor, you’d think there was no need for the west stairs to go any farther than the middle floor, but they do go all the way up to the top.”


  “So anyone staying on the top floor can choose either of the staircases?”

  “As a matter of fact, no, they can’t. The west stairs only go up to Room 8 and 9 in the west wing. The occupants of Room 1 and 2 have to use the east stairs. On the top floor, there’s no corridor at all joining the east and west wings. And so the occupants of Rooms 8 and 9 have no way of going and visiting the occupants of Rooms 1 and 2. They’d have to go all the way down to the ground floor, walk through the salon and climb up again.”

  “What a pain!”

  “That’s what I mean when I say this place is a nuthouse. It’s a proper maze. I tried to go and check out Room 1, where Kumi Aikura says she saw the freaky man, but I took the west stairs. I got completely confused and had to come back down to the salon to ask the way.”

  “I suppose you would have.”

  “This bloke, Kozaburo Hamamoto, seems to love watching people being shocked or confused. I reckon that’s why he had all the floors made on a slope like this. I’m sure people keep falling over until they’ve got used to it. Once you’re used to it, you can use the windows on the east and west sides for reference, but you end up guessing wrongly which way is uphill and which is down.”

  “Yes, the windows look like they’re leaning at an angle. They have me defeated. Somehow the side of the window frame that’s farthest from the floor is the uphill side.”

  “But the floorboards are lying in the direction of the slope.”

  “I don’t get it at all—it’s like one of those house-of-mirror things you get at funfairs. Anyway, can you get from the north side rooms to the south? For example, if you’re in Room 8 can you get to Room 9 next door to it?”

  “That’s possible. They’re at the top of the same staircase. And then another thing about these stairs. The way they’re arranged, they bypass the two rooms at the west end on the middle floor completely. The west staircase is just like the east one in that way. Room 10 where the murder was committed and the table tennis room, Room 11, next to it can’t be accessed at all from inside the mansion.”

  “Hmm… Yes… That’s right.”

  Ushikoshi was checking the diagram as he answered. It wasn’t easy to make out.