Murder in the Crooked House

by Soji Shimada

  “But as these two rooms are just a games room and a sports storeroom, I suppose it doesn’t really matter if you can only access them from the outside.”

  “I get it now. It’s pretty well thought out.”

  “To get into these two rooms you have to use the steps on the exterior west wall of the house. So whoever got assigned this room to sleep in must have found it tough in this season having to go around the outside of the house to get to his room. Well, I suppose they thought he’s just the chauffeur, so he’d have to put up with it.”

  “It’s a hard life when you’re a lowly employee.”

  “Since they began to use Room 10 for guests, they had to store all the dirtiest stuff elsewhere, like gardening equipment, brooms, an axe and a scythe, and all the other odds and ends; so they built a shed at the bottom of the garden. The Hayakawas look after all that.

  “And so Eiko allocated the guests their rooms, taking into consideration the unique layout of the house. First of all, there’s Kumi Aikura, the woman with the face that all the men fall for. This morning, Tokyo HQ got right on the case. They’ve dug up plenty of information for us. It’s an open secret at Kikuoka Bearings headquarters in Otemachi in Chiyoda Ward that Kumi Aikura is Kikuoka’s mistress. And so to avoid anything going on at night, Eiko placed them at the very opposite ends of the house: Aikura in Room 1 on the east wing’s top floor, and Kikuoka in Room 14 in the basement of the west wing.

  “It seems that it was planned well in advance that Kikuoka would be in Room 14. That’s normally Kozaburo Hamamoto’s study. He keeps personal items—important books and stuff like that in there. The wall decorations and light fixtures are imported from England, and there’s a priceless Persian rug on the floor. A lot of money has been spent on that room. Normally, people don’t sleep in there—the bed is very narrow. Well, it’s more of a couch really, but the cushions are supposed to be very comfortable.

  “Kikuoka is the guest of honour in the party, so it follows that he was put in the most expensive room. And why did Hamamoto choose that room to use as a study? It seems that out of all the rooms in the main building, it’s the warmest due to being in the basement. All the other rooms, despite being double paned, are rather cold through the windows’ contact with the outside air. But Hamamoto seems to go backwards and forwards on his feelings about there being no windows. When he feels like it, he heads back up to his bedroom in the tower and enjoys a perfectly unobstructed 360-degree view.

  “And it also looks like Eiko put Kumi Aikura in Room 1, next door to her own bedroom, Room 2, so that she could keep an eye on her. And for the very same reason, she put Yoshihiko Hamamoto in Room 8 on the top floor. As I mentioned before, there was no way to come and go between Room 1 and Room 8, even though they’re physically so close. I reckon Eiko was worried that Aikura might use her charms to tempt the young lad.

  “Next we come to Rooms 3, 4 and 5—as I’ve already said, they can’t be used as guest rooms. Room 6 in the basement belongs to the chef, Kajiwara. Room 7 is also occupied by staff—the Hayakawas. I’d say, no matter how warm the rooms, might be, I can’t see how staying in a room with no windows would be appealing to short-term guests. Ever since the house was built, those two east-wing basement rooms have been reserved for the staff.

  “Now, moving over to the west wing and starting from the top, Room 8 was Yoshihiko Hamamoto, Room 9, Mr and Mrs Kanai. The middle floor had Ueda in Room 10, of course. On the ground floor in Room 12 was Togai, and next to him in Room 13, Sasaki. Room 14 in the basement was occupied by Kikuoka, and Room 15 next to him was empty. And that’s everybody.”

  “Way too complicated to take in in one go. For a start you’re saying that Kumi Aikura in Room 1 and Hamamoto’s daughter in Room 2 wouldn’t be able to slip downstairs and remove that doll from the Room 3 display room? There are no stairs between the top and middle floors in the east wing at all?”

  “That’s right. While you could come down one flight of stairs from Room 8 or 9 in the west wing and be right in front of that display room, from 1 and 2 you’d have to take a long detour down to the salon and back up the west stairs. Even though the room is right underneath you.”

  “Just like the way you can’t get down from Room 8 or 9 to the scene of the murder in Room 10. This place really is a damn maze. No exaggeration. Anything else we need to know?”

  “Room 3, right there next door to us, seems to be known by the other occupants of the mansion as the ‘Tengu Room’. If you look inside it you’ll understand why. It’s full of all this junk that Kozaburo Hamamoto spent a fortune on when he was travelling around Europe, and the walls are decorated with masks of Tengu, the red-faced, long-nosed goblin.”

  “Whoa!”

  “The south side wall is completely red from floor to ceiling with Tengu faces. And the east wall is pretty much covered too. That room doesn’t have any windows facing the exterior of the building, so the surfaces of those two walls have completely uninterrupted surfaces. Plenty of room to hang all his masks.

  “The wall on the west side has a large window facing the interior corridor. The north wall slants inwards and overhangs the room, so no masks can be hung on the north and west walls.”

  “Why does he have so many?”

  “Tokyo police visited the headquarters of Hama Diesel in Chuo Ward to ask about that. The story goes that when he was a kid, the thing he was most afraid of were Tengu masks. Apparently, he wrote about it somewhere. For his fortieth birthday, as some kind of joke, his older brother gave him a mask, and so Hamamoto made up his mind to collect them. Went all out and hunted down some of the most unusual Tengus in Japan.

  “Hamamoto was already quite the celebrity, so when people heard about it they fell over themselves to be the first one to send him an interesting mask, and before he knew it he ended up with all those. The story has been published several times in trade magazines. Anyone who knows Hamamoto has heard about it.”

  “Hmm… And what’s happened to that doll that got taken to pieces?”

  “Forensics have taken it for the time being, but it looks as if they’ll be able to return it soon.”

  “And when they do give it back, can it be restored to its original condition? The head and the limbs?”

  “Yep.”

  “So it was made to be taken apart easily?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “So it wasn’t damaged… What sort of doll was it?”

  “Something that Hamamoto bought at a specialist shop in Europe. Apparently, it was made in the eighteenth century. I don’t know any more than that. Should I ask Hamamoto directly about it?”

  “Why would the suspect want to remove that doll from the display room? Was it one of Hamamoto’s most expensive antiques?”

  “Not particularly. There were plenty of items in that room that were worth a lot more.”

  “Hmm… I don’t get it… There are too many strange things about this case. For a start, if someone held a grudge against Hamamoto, then why do away with Kikuoka’s chauffeur?…”

  “I have a theory about how it might have been done. Although Room 10 was a locked room, on the corner of the east wall there’s that small ventilation hole, twenty centimetres square. It faces the west wing staircase, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I wonder if it could have been used in some way?”

  “It doesn’t look possible. If you look you see that the staircase on the middle floor goes to the opposite side from Room 10. If you look up from the corridor in front of Room 12, directly below it on the ground floor, you’ll see that the ventilation hole in Room 10’s wall is really high up in the wall and far away from anything. So if you tried to reach up there, you’d have to scale the full height of Room 12’s wall and then the whole of Room 10’s. It’s about the height of a prison fence. I can’t see anyone being able to do it.”

  “That vent is in all the rooms of the house?”

  “Almost every one. It looks as if they planned to
put a fan in every room, but didn’t get around to it yet. Every room has the same kind of hole facing onto the nearest stairwell.

  “There’s one more thing I should mention about these vents. The way the house is constructed, the west wing rooms 8, 10, 12 and 14 are identical, piled on top of one another like building blocks, so that the vent is in the identical spot—in the far south-east corner of the east wall. However, Rooms 9, 11, 13 and 15 are also identical and built directly on top of one another, but in their case, in order for the vent to face out into the space of the stairwell, their ventilation hole is up near the ceiling in the middle of the south wall, slightly towards the east side.

  “Then if you go over to the east wing, Rooms 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the top and middle floors match up with their counterparts in the west wing. So 1 and 3 have the vents in the south corner of the east wall like 8, 10, 12 and 14. Rooms 2 and 4 in the middle of the south wall like 9, 11, 13 and 15.

  “Rooms 6 and 7 in the basement are different though. Room 7’s vent is the same as Rooms 2 and 4 above on the south wall, but over to the west side. Room 6 is the one that’s different from the rest. It’s the only room in the entire building that has its ventilation hole in the southern corner of its west-facing wall. Room 5 is, of course, the salon, and I imagine if it were to have a ventilation hole facing the stairwell, it would have been in the same west wall as Room 6 below, but in fact the salon doesn’t have a vent. And that’s all the rooms. I don’t suppose any of it is really relevant to our investigation though.

  “But while I’m on the subject, I’ll go on to the windows. None of the walls that contain a ventilation hole has a window. Besides Room 3, all the rooms have exterior-facing windows. In other words, windows you can open to let in fresh air. The vent holes and the doors face the interior of the building, the windows face the exterior. Anyway, that appears to be the basic concept of the mansion’s layout.

  “If you imagine the rule as being that all the exterior walls have a window in them, and all the interior walls facing a stairwell have a ventilation hole and a door, you’ve got the idea. Then we move onto the floors, ceilings and walls shared with the next room. Obviously, nobody would think about making holes in any of those.

  “Take this library, for example, there’s something slightly strange about the position of the door in relation to the corridor. There’s something slightly off about it, but it still follows the general rule. Right where the east wing stairwell should be, in the south-facing wall, in the corner towards the east—look, there’s the ventilation hole. But there’s no window, because this wall is facing an interior space. And as you can see, the windows are on the north and east sides, which both are exterior-facing walls. The position of the door, as I just mentioned, is not quite the same as Room 2 above us or 7 below us; or even 9, 11, 13 and 15 in the west wing. You can see it’s at the westerly edge of the south wall. It’s because of the construction of the corridor outside, but you can see that the rule that there is always a door in the wall with the ventilation hole has not changed.”

  “Huh? This is getting too complicated. I don’t follow.”

  “But there is an exception—Room 3. That’s the only room in the building without a window in the south-facing exterior wall. Instead, it has a large window in the interior-facing west wall. In addition, in that same wall, there’s a door. The ventilation hole is in the opposite wall, on the east. Hamamoto probably set it up that way to protect his valuable antiques from direct sunlight. And so he needed to put in an extra-large window for ventilation.”

  “All right, all right. That’s quite enough. You’ve definitely done your homework. You could become an architect after all this is over. I’m really not getting half of it, but do you think it’s relevant to this case?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I hope you’re wrong, because otherwise this is getting too complicated for no reason. We’re brand-new students of this house of mirrors, and right now we don’t understand a thing. The guests are mostly way ahead of us. This winter isn’t their first visit, is it?”

  “No, but in fact there are some first-timers amongst them—Kumi Aikura and Kanai’s wife, Hatsue. Kikuoka and Mr Kanai were here in the summer.”

  “Hmm. But still, the majority of the folks here are used to this cursed jack-in-a-box of a place. They might have even worked out a clever way of using this cockeyed construction to do away with someone. Personally, I’m still suspicious of that air vent in Room 10.”

  Ushikoshi fell silent, and spent a few moments gathering his thoughts.

  “Just now, you said that the hole is far away from everything else, high up in the wall. You said you were looking up from the corridor on the ground floor in front of… let’s see… er, Room 12?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Incidentally, the staircase we took to get here was made of metal, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The section that leads up from the salon to the middle-floor landing is made of wood. It’s covered with a red carpet—a good quality one. But all the rest of the stairs are made of metal. Now why would that be? Even the stairs back at Sapporo police HQ are better than that. These ones—they’re new but made of the kind of cheap stuff you find in a public building. If you’re not careful and walk too heavily, they make a terrible clanging noise. Rather out of place in a medieval European-style mansion, don’t you think?”

  “You’re right. But the angle is pretty steep, so I guess they needed to make it from something durable and safe.”

  “I suppose… they certainly are steep. Maybe that’s it. And the landings—I guess I should say corridors—the corridors on every floor seem to be metallic too.”

  “Yes.”

  “This floor’s different, but with the ground floor of the west wing and the top floor too, all the corridors seem to be L-shaped.”

  “They are. The top floor in the east wing here is the same. This floor is the only one constructed differently.”

  “The tips of the L—in other words the ends of the corridors, look as if there was some kind of design flaw or something. I don’t know why, but they’re not joined completely up to the walls. There’s about a twenty-centimetre gap there at each end.”

  “Whoa! That’s a bit creepy if you ask me. I suppose someone could lean over and press their head against the wall and see all the way down to the bottom of the house. For example if you stood by the gap at the end of the corridor in front of Room 8 on the top floor, with a gap on every floor you could see all the way down to the corridor in the basement. Even though there’s a handrail, it’d give me the creeps.”

  “So what I’m thinking is that you could use that gap, push a rope or a wire through the ventilation hole and manage to pull off some sort of clever trick. At any rate, the ventilation hole in Room 10 is directly under the gap on the top floor, right?”

  “Yes, I thought of that too. I tried getting right up against the wall at the very end of the corridor by Room 8, but the ventilation hole to Room 10 is far below, way out of reach. It’s at least a metre down. I guess you could possibly work out some kind of plan with two people working together, but it would be very difficult.”

  “You can’t see into Room 10 through the hole, then?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “Pity. Anyway, I suppose that a twenty-centimetre-square hole is too small for anything like that.”

  “Yes, too difficult to pull anything off through that kind of space.”

  And with that, Detective Sergeant Ozaki’s lecture on the nuthouse mansion was complete.

  Ushikoshi turned to the local detective, who had sat there throughout the discussion in a kind of stunned silence.

  “Inspector Okuma, is there anything you’d like to add?”

  “Nah, nothing special,” he replied automatically. His expression suggested he was relieved not to be responsible for such a complicated case.

  “Reckon there’ll be a blizzard tonight,” he added.

&n
bsp; “You may be right. The wind’s really getting up,” said Ushikoshi. “But then again this is a pretty desolate location. There’s no other human habitation for miles around. You know, I can’t imagine wanting to live out here. It’s just the kind of place you’d expect murders to happen.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I don’t understand how anyone can live in a place like this,” said Sergeant Ozaki.

  “I guess if you’re filthy rich, you’re always surrounded by hangers-on, people sucking up to you, after your money. Anyone would be about ready to escape a life like that.”

  For someone from such meagre circumstances, Ushikoshi seemed to have a pretty good handle on the way the rich thought.

  “So, who shall we call first?”

  “Well, I’m most interested in the three staff members. I’d like to have a go at getting them to talk,” said Ozaki. “I bet you with that kind of employer they’ve got a whole bunch of grievances to get out of their system. In a big group they’d keep a lid on it, but get them alone and it’ll all come pouring out. They’re probably total wimps when it comes down to it, just shake them up a bit and they’ll spill.”

  “Do Kohei and Chikako Hayakawa have children?”

  “It seems they had a child who died. We haven’t found out the details yet.”

  “So they don’t have any kids at all?”

  “Seems not.”

  “And Kajiwara?”

  “He’s single. Still young—only twenty-seven. Who do you want me to call first?”

  “You know, I don’t think we ought to call the staff first. Let’s call that medical student, Sasaki. Would you mind?…”

  *

  The police officers arranged themselves in a row like the three judges of the underworld, forcing each witness to sit across the table from them. As Sasaki took his seat he joked that it felt like a job interview.

  “Please don’t include any unnecessary chat. Just answer the questions as we ask them,” said Ozaki sternly.

  Ushikoshi opened the questioning.

  “You’re staying here to check Kozaburo Hamamoto’s health. Is that correct?”