Murder Impossible Page 7

'Like me, he was immobilized. In his case, sheer laziness and bulk. But he solved some very puzzling cases from his armchair, with brother Sherlock doing the leg work.' He gave Black a quizzical stare. 'Why don't we try that, eh?'

  'I'll try anything,' the sergeant said. 'I'm good at leg work. Sometimes I think that's all I'm good at.'

  'Nonsense. You have brains and imagination,' The professor assured him a in a gruff voice. 'No, here's what I'd like you to do. Get me large, clear photos of the lab, inside and out, all four sides. And of the view from the place in all directions.' His eyes clouded briefly, and he said: 'Are you sure the bolt is brass, and not just painted that colour?'

  'Painted? No, but why—' He bit the question off short. 'I'll certainly find out,' he promised, his voice hard.

  'You do that, and let me know. Is there a phone in the lab?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then call me from there. And bring the pictures as soon as they're available.'

  'I'll phone you in three hours. We should have pictures by tomorrow afternoon.'

  'Good.' Middlebie watched the sergeant stride to the door. When Black had left, the old man opened a drawer in his desk, took out a fifth of bourbon, and after some painful limping about, made his favourite tipple of whisky, beer, and brown sugar. He sipped it appreciatively, his brow knitting with thought every few moments.

  Two hours and forty-eight minutes later Black phoned.

  'The bolt seems to be brass,' he said. 'At least, it's not iron, steel, aluminum, or lead.'

  'Hmph,' Middlebie said, his voice indicating some disappointment. 'That's a pity.' After a moment's silence, he spoke again, his tone sharper. 'I want you to scrape that bolt all over, and study it with that magnifying glass you were bragging about. Call me back if you spot anything interesting.'

  'What am I looking for?' the sergeant demanded irritably.

  'Just make a careful examination and see what develops,' the professor said. And he hung up.

  Half-an-hour later, Black called back; there was a hum of excitement in his voice.

  'I don't know how you knew,' he said, 'but somebody's been at the bolt, all right. Looks as if he drilled a hole, and put in a plug of some kind.'

  'Ann,' Middlebie purred. 'Soft iron, I'll bet anything. First hypothesis verified.'

  'What's it all about?' Black queried eagerly.

  'Tell you when we get those pictures,' the professor said. 'Bring 'em over tomorrow, will you?'

  'Damn right, I will. But tell me—'

  'Tomorrow,' was the firm reply. 'It's not all clear yet. Not at all.' Again he hung up.

  The next day, early in the afternoon, the sergeant appeared with a stack of glossy eight-by-tens. Middlebie took them, and shuffled through the pile in an impatient way, finally fishing out a shot of the interior. He peered at it, and groaned.

  'S'matter?' Black demanded.

  'The table.' Middlebie's voice was full of disgust. 'It's too far from the window. If only it had been right next to it. . .1 don't suppose,' he said wistfully, 'there was any way to introduce the coffee and cigarette after the door was bolted.'

  'None,' the sergeant declared. 'Oh, there is a chimney from the fireplace, but I'd like to see the man dexterous enough to get a nearly full cup of hot coffee and a lighted cigarette down that. And with the chimney in plain sight of Wilson—he's the boatman.'

  'Another good theory gone to pot,' the professor said. Then he asked: 'By the way, was the coffee pot also hot?'

  'Had to be,' Black said. 'It was still on a tiny gas fire.'

  Middlebie shook his head in admiration.

  'That killer, whoever he was—and if he was—has brains. Pity he's warped. The lad even avoided anybody's finding a discrepancy between boiling hot coffee in a cup, and a pot only lukewarm. He just left the coffee on the flame—damned foresighted.'

  A bit dubious now, he studied the pictures. Suddenly his gaze grew sharp.

  'What's that behind the cabin—this thing on the pillar. It looks like an astronomical telescope.'

  'That's just what it is,' the sergeant said. 'Denning dabbled in astronomy, too. They say he even found a new comet.'

  'This seems to be a refractor.'

  'Could be. I didn't pay much attention.'

  'You'd better pay more. I want the name of the manufacturer. But don't touch it; there may be prints.'

  'Whose prints? And what difference? I wish I knew what was going on in your head these last few days.' The sergeant was obviously exasperated.

  'I'll tell you when I'm sure myself,' the old man soothed him. 'Wouldn't want you to think I'm senile. Be a good lad, and check that scope. Get the maker's name, and if that isn't on it, measure the diameter of the objective—the big lens at the end. But hands off. Got it?'

  'All right,' Black said. Then he smiled briefly. '. . . Mycroft!'

  Middlebie blinked. That was the first time the sergeant had ever dared come back at him. Good! It was time they had a less formal relationship.

  'Before I go,' Black said, gazing directly into the grey eyes. 'Please explain that bit about the bolt. Certainly you're sure of that part.'

  'Oh, yes. I didn't mean to conceal anything,' the professor said. 'Open that right hand cabinet, and take out what's on the second shelf up.'

  The sergeant obeyed him, and was amazed at his own former incomprehension.

  'Right,' Middlebie said. 'That's a magnet; a big one. It weighs five pounds, and has a two thousand gauss rating. Which means, I would guess, that even through a thick wooden door it has enough pull on a bit of iron imbedded in a brass bolt to slide the thing into its socket. Did you notice if the assembly was smooth working— oiled, perhaps?'

  'You bet it was!' Black exclaimed. 'So that's it. What a chump I've been. All Doss had to do was step out, shut the door on his dead uncle, and move this kind of magnet from left to right at the proper height against the door.' He flipped the piece of heavy metal from hand to hand in his enthusiasm. Then his face darkened. 'But we're still up the creek on that coffee and cigarette bit. We know he was away from the cabin for over half an hour. The coffee would have cooled by then, and the smoke gone out.'

  'I am aware of the difficulty,' the professor said. 'That's why I hoped the table would be nearer the window. By the way,' he asked, 'what kind of a day was it—the weather, I mean?'

  'Nice one; cool, clear, sunny. Anybody but an old idiot would have been outside, or at least had a window open to enjoy the fresh air.

  'It takes all kinds,' Middlebie said. 'Go check on that telescope like a good lad.'

  Black seemed about to ask more questions, but the old man's face was forbiddingly wooden. With a sigh, the detective left.

  When he returned that evening, Middlebie was working with a binocular microscope, and seemed almost reluctant to shift his line of thought. He shoved his chair back, gave a grunt of resignation, and raised one eyebrow questioning^.

  'Well?' he demanded.

  'No maker's name that I could find. But the objective was five inches across.'

  'Good. A five incher could have a focal length of from sixty to ninety inches.'

  'What does that mean?' Black's voice was querulous. He was tired of driving up and back, and almost sorry he hadn't certified the case as suicide. Only sheer persistence—plus the nature of a good cop made him stay with it.

  'Here's how it must have happened,' Middlebie said, sounding the least bit smug. 'Doss visits his uncle; maybe works with him a bit in the lab. Then they have coffee, either as normal routine, or at the boy's suggestion. There are cases of standard chemicals against the south wall; your pictures show them plainly. It's easy for Doss to put cyanide in the old man's cup. The moment his uncle collapsed, the boy wiped his own prints off the cup, pressed Denning's on, and left, closing the door behind him. But first he put an unlighted cigarette on the edge of the ceramic ashtray.

  'Once outside, he unobtrusively—in case somebody was watching— stood facing the door, and with a magnet taken probably from his un
cle's lab, shot the bolt. I assume that at some earlier visit, when left alone by the old man, he drilled out some of the brass and inserted an iron plug so the magnet would work.

  'Now, then. He went to the dock and established that half hour alibi. After that, Doss approached the cabin from the rear, where neither the boatman nor anybody else could see him, took the objective glass—already loosened, I imagine, the boy being so thorough—and stood a foot or two from the window. There, he focused the bright sunlight—'

  'By God!' Black exclaimed, almost in a whisper, and Middlebie frowned at the interruption.

  'An ordinary magnifier wouldn't work unless the table was only inches from the glass, but this thing focuses at from sixty to ninety inches. The window glass would cut a lot of the heat, but there would be plenty to bring the coffee cup to boiling, and then light the cigarette.'

  'Then, very quickly, to the front door, there to pound and finally hail the boatman. Very neat!'

  'You've got it,' Black said. 'No doubt of that.' He shook his head gloomily. 'But how to prove anything in court.'

  'Well,' the old man said. 'The drilled bolt has some evidential value.'

  'Not enough, I'm afraid.'

  'Prints on the telescope?'

  'Weak,' the sergeant said crisply. 'After all, the boy helped out in the scientific stuff.

  'Ah,' Middlebie said. 'But if you're lucky, there'll be some on the inside of the objective. They would be harder to explain; much harder, since few astronomers ever dismount the objective. There are realignment problems, and dust—all sorts of reasons to leave it alone. But frankly, I think if you go at it right, the boy may crack. He doesn't dream we're onto him. Feeling plenty smug, I imagine.'

  Black looked at the lean face and seemed to see cats' whiskers twitching.

  He's not the only one who feels that way, the sergeant reflected with amusement. But aloud he said only, 'In any case, you've done your share. No Mycroft could have done better.'

  W. HOPE HODGSON

  Bullion!

  It is as the possessor of an extraordinary and fantastic imagination, a writer of powerful and disturbing weird tales, that William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) will be remembered. Two novels stand out: The House on the Borderland (1908), in which the narrator is besieged by hideous swine¬like beings from a bottomless abyss and experiences an awesome journey through time and space (prompting the thought that Hodgson may have experimented with hallucinogens), and The Night Land (1912), a 200,000 word epic of an odyssey into absolute nightmare, billions of years hence when the sun is dead and darkness shrouds the dying earth.

  He was equally imaginative in his short stories, many of which reveal a profound horror of the sea, although a horror more than tinged with fascination. Hodgson spent eight years before the mast, twice circling the globe, before returning to England to write for his living.

  Some of his finest tales were set in the Sargasso Sea, in Hodgson's lively imagination a nightmarish place alive with giant rats, giant octopi, giant sealice, giant poisonous mushrooms and slug like Weedmen with tendrils for arms. He also wrote love stories, a Western or two, science/fantasy, and mysteries such as 'Bullion!'

  'Bullion!' itself is, in a sense, a lost story, its finding as perfect an example of serendipity as has ever happened to me. In 1989 I was doing some research on the Strand Magazine in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. On the final day, with—quite literally—half an hour to spare before the Stack was locked up for the night, I began strolling along the narrow tome lined alleyways, idly pulling out volumes that took my eye, in much the same way that Adelaide Proctor's organist's fingers meandered over the noisy keys. The chord he struck Ms Proctor likened to the sound of a great Amen. It has to be admitted that my own vocal reaction, on tugging down a tall thin volume labelled Everybody's Weekly (a title unknown to me, at least from this pre-Great War period) and opening it in the middle of the first issue, fell somewhat short of that, since what shattered the hush of G Floor in the Bodleian Stack was a yelped four letter word an Anglo Saxon midden-forker would have had no difficulty in recognizing. Never mind.

  Here, in cold print, was the story Hodgson arch votary Sam Moskovitz had assumed had never been published (probably because he'd been looking in the wrong place: the American Everybody's Magazine. Not only that, but it featured an Impossible Vanishment.

  JACK ADRIAN

  This is a most peculiar yarn. It was a pitchy night in the South Pacific. I was the second mate of one of the fast clipper ships running between London and Melbourne at the time of the big gold finds up at Bendigo. There was a fresh breeze blowing, and I was walking hard up and down the weather side of the poopdeck, to keep myself warm, when the captain came out of the companionway and joined me.

  'Mr James, do you believe in ghosts?' he asked suddenly, after several minutes of silence.

  'Well, sir,' I replied, 'I always keep an open mind; so I can't say I'm a proper disbeliever, though I think most ghost yarns can be explained.'

  'Well,' he said in a queer voice, 'someone keeps whispering in my cabin at nights. It's making me feel funny to be there.'

  'How do you mean whispering, sir?' I asked.

  'Just that,' he said. 'Someone whispering about my cabin. Sometimes it's quite close to my head, other times it's here and there and everywhere—in the air.'

  Then, abruptly, he stopped in his walk and faced me, as if determined to say the thing that was on his mind.

  'What did Captain Avery die of on the passage out?' he asked quick and blunt.

  'None of us knew, sir,' I told him. 'He just seemed to sicken and go off.'

  'Well,' he said, 'I'm not going to sleep in his cabin any longer. I've no special fancy for just sickening and going off. If you like I'll change places with you.'

  'Certainly, sir,' I answered, half pleased and half sorry. For whilst I had a feeling that there was nothing really to bother about in the captain's fancies yet—though he had only taken command in Melbourne to bring the ship home—I had found already that he was not one of the soft kind by any means. And, so, as you will understand, I had vague feelings of uneasiness to set against my curiosity to find out what it was that had given Captain Reynolds a fit of the nerves.

  'Would you like me to sleep in your place tonight, sir?' I asked.

  'Well,' he said with a little laugh 'when you get below you'll find me in your bunk, so it'll be a case of my cabin or the saloon table.' And with that it was settled.

  'I shall lock the door,' I added. 'I'm not going to have anyone fooling me. I suppose I may search?'

  'Do what you like,' was all he replied.

  About an hour later the captain left me, and went below. When the mate came up to relieve me at eight bells I told him I was promoted to the captain's cabin and the reason why. To my surprise, he said that he wouldn't sleep there for all the gold that was in the ship; so that I finished by telling him he was a superstitious old shellback.

  When I got down to my new cabin I found that the captain had made the steward shift my gear in already, so that I had nothing to do but turn in, which I did after a good look round and locking the door.

  I left the lamp turned about half up, and meant to lie awake a while listening; but I was asleep before I knew, and only waked to hear the 'prentice knocking on my door to tell me it was one bell.

  For three nights I slept thus in comfort, and jested once or twice with the captain that I was getting the best of the bargain.

  Then, just as you might expect, on the fourth night something happened. I had gone below for the middle watch, and had fallen asleep as usual, almost so soon as my head was on the pillow. I was wakened suddenly by some curious sound apparently quite near me. I lay there without moving and listened, my heart beating a little rapidly; but otherwise I was cool and alert. Then I heard the thing quite plainly with my waking senses—a vague, uncertain whispering, seeming to me as if someone or something bent over me from behind, and whispered some unintelligible thing close to my ear. I rolled over,
and stared around the cabin; but the whole place was empty.

  Then I sat still, and listened again. For several minutes there was an absolute silence, and then abruptly I heard the vague, uncomfortable whispering again, seeming to come from the middle of the cabin. I sat there, feeling distinctly nervous; then I jumped quietly from my bunk, and slipped silently to the door. I stopped, and listened at the keyhole, but there was no one there. I ran across then to the ventilators, and shut them; also I made sure that the ports were screwed up, so that there was now absolutely no place through which anyone could send his voice, even supposing that anyone was idiot enough to want to play such an unmeaning trick.

  For a while after I had taken these precautions I stood silent; and twice I heard the whispering, going vaguely now in this and now in that part of the air of the cabin, as if some unseen spirit wandered about, trying to make itself heard.

  As you may suppose, this was getting more than I cared to tackle, for I had searched the cabin every watch, and it seemed to me that there was truly something unnatural in the thing I heard. I began to get my clothes and dress, for, after this, I felt inclined to adopt the captain's suggestion of the saloon table for a bunk. You see, I had ot to have my sleep, but I could not fancy lying unconscious in that cabin, with that strange sound wandering about; though awake, I think I can say truthfully I should not really have feared it. But to lie defenceless in sleep with that uncanniness near me was more than I could bear.

  And then, you know, a sudden thought came blinding through my brain. The bullion! We were bringing some thirty thousand ounces of gold in sealed bullion chests, and these were in a specially erected wooden compartment, standing all by itself in the centre of the lazarette, just below the captain's cabin. What if some attempt were being made secretly on the treasure, and we all the time idiotically thinking of ghosts, when perhaps the vague sounds we had heard were conducted in some way from below! You can conceive how the thought set me tingling, so that I did not stop to realize how improbable it was, but took my lamp and went immediately to the captain.