Murder in the Crooked House Read online

  And with that, he took his seat again.

  “And next we have a boy who seems to have caught the sun out on the ski slopes, my nephew—well, technically Daddy’s older brother’s grandson—Yoshihiko. He’s rather good-looking, don’t you think? Still only nineteen, and a first-year student at Keio University. He’s staying with us for the winter break.”

  The suntanned boy in the white sweater got to his feet, shyly said hello and sat straight back down.

  “Is that it? Sorry, Yoshihiko, you have to speak properly.”

  “But I haven’t got anything to say.”

  “Of course you have. You’re too shy. Your hobbies or something about your university, there are plenty of things you could talk about. Come on, speak up!”

  But there was no reaction.

  “Well, I believe I’ve covered all of our dear guests. Now I’d like to introduce our staff to you. First of all, the gentleman standing over there, Kohei Hayakawa. He’s been with our family ever since we lived in Kamakura—about twenty years. He’s our butler and our chauffeur and general odd-jobs man.

  “Next to him is his wife, Chikako. She’s our housekeeper and is an invaluable help to us all. Please feel free to ask her for whatever you need.

  “The man standing closest to us is our wonderful chef, Haruo Kajiwara. As you can see, he is still in his twenties, but his skills are world class. We managed to lure him away from the Hotel Okura, which didn’t want to let him go. Very soon, everyone will be able to taste for themselves how skilled he is.”

  She turned to the three members of the staff.

  “Thank you, everyone. That will do. Please get back to what you need to do.

  “So that completes the introductions,” she continued, addressing her guests once more. “I’m confident you are all excellent at remembering names and faces.

  “And now, while dinner is being served, and you enjoy the view of our Christmas tree, I’m sure you have much to discuss. So without further ado, Yoshihiko, Sasaki, Togai, would you light the candles for us? As soon as that’s done, we’ll lower the salon lights. I wish you all a very enjoyable evening.”

  The middle-aged contingent immediately flocked around Kozaburo Hamamoto and began to chat, but it was noticeable that the loudest laughter was from the president of Kikuoka Bearings. Kozaburo’s pipe remained firmly in place.

  Eiko realized that thanks to the business with Kumi Aikawa and Hatsue Kanai, she had been guilty of one more blunder. She had forgotten to introduce Ueda, Kikuoka’s chauffeur, probably because he had been blocked from view by the large-set figure of Togai. But she soon shrugged it off: He’s just a driver, after all.

  Dinner was served. The guests were treated to roast turkey with all the trimmings. As Eiko had promised, here at the very northern tip of Japan they were able to enjoy the flavours of a top-class Tokyo hotel.

  While the other guests were finishing their after-dinner cup of tea, Sasaki got up and went to the window to take a closer look at the Christmas tree. It continued its lonely blinking from beneath its layer of snow.

  Sasaki watched the tree for a while, but then noticed something strange. Near the French windows that led from the salon out into the garden, there was a thin stake or pole of some kind sticking out of the snow, about two metres out from the wall of the house. Somebody must have stuck it there. The section visible above the snow was about a metre. The stake itself resembled a piece of the wood that was piled up by the salon fireplace. Except that whoever had done this had apparently selected a particularly straight piece. Earlier that day, when he had been helping Eiko with the tree decorations, the stake hadn’t been there.

  What on earth? thought Sasaki, wiping the condensation from the window pane to get a better look. He peered out into the night and as he did so he noticed that over towards the west corner of the house, only vaguely visible through the whirling snowflakes, there was a second stake. Because of the distance it was hard to be certain but it seemed as if this too was another thin branch of firewood, protruding about a metre from the snow. As far as he could tell, there were no other stakes visible – at least from the salon window. Just these two.

  Sasaki wanted to call Togai over and ask him what he thought they might be, but he was deep in conversation with Eiko. Yoshihiko was in the circle of older guests including Kozaburo, Kikuoka and Kanai, and Sasaki didn’t want to disturb their conversation, although whether it was business talk or idle chat wasn’t clear. Kajiwara and the Hayakawas were nowhere to be seen—probably back in the kitchen.

  Suddenly Kozaburo raised his voice above the chit-chat.

  “All you youngsters, haven’t you had enough of listening to old people prattling on? Come on, let’s hear something amusing.”

  Sasaki took this cue to sit back down at the table, and with that, the mysterious stakes in the snow were forgotten.

  To tell the truth, Kozaburo Hamamoto was fed up with listening to the empty flattery from tonight’s guests. In fact, his mood was turning sour. The very reason he had built this eccentric home up here in the far north was to escape the clutches of suck-ups like this.

  And yet, like a herd of wild animals they came stampeding after him across hundreds of kilometres. However weird the sloping floor, however eccentric his collection of antiques, they just blindly praised everything in sight. As long as he still had the scent of money, they would hunt him down to the ends of the earth.

  His hopes were with the younger generation, and he addressed them now.

  “All right, do you like mysteries? I’m very fond of them myself. I’m going to set you a puzzle to solve. Everyone here is attending, or has attended, a top university, so I’m sure you have some of the smartest minds in the country.

  “How about this one? In the gold-panning region of Mexico, right by the US border, there was a young boy who piled up bags of sand on his bicycle and crossed the border from Mexico into the United States every single day. The US customs officials assumed that he was a smuggler and would open and search the suspicious sandbags. However, all they ever found inside was plain old sand, and not a single nugget of gold. So what was the boy up to? Here is your quiz: What was he smuggling, and how was he doing it? How about it, Mr Kikuoka? Can you solve it?”

  “Let’s see… No, I can’t.”

  Kanai immediately echoed his boss.

  “I can’t get it either.”

  Neither man looked as if he were giving the problem any thought whatsoever.

  “Yoshihiko, how about you?”

  The boy silently shook his head.

  “Do you all give up? This one wasn’t difficult at all. The boy was smuggling bicycles.”

  The loudest laughter came from Kikuoka. Kanai also offered his own fawning reaction,

  “It was bicycles! I see. Very good.”

  “Now that puzzle was one thought up by Perry Mason’s friend Drake and his secretary, Della. Pretty good, wasn’t it? If you want to smuggle bicycles, the way to do it is to base your operation right in a gold-panning region.

  “Okay, let’s think of another one… This time I’m not going to give you the answer. Let’s see… What would be a good one…? All right, here we go. This one is a true story—something that a friend of mine used to boast about long ago. I’ve told it many times in my speech to the new recruits at the company. The story is set in the 1950s.

  “These days, all the railway companies in Japan, both public and private, have what look like little burners on the rails to prevent a thick layer of snow from building up on the tracks or the rails freezing. But back in the fifties, Japan was still a poor country, and no railway companies had anything like that.

  “One winter, maybe 1955, Tokyo had a very heavy snowfall. Fifty centimetres fell in one night. Of course, all the private and public railway companies were forced to suspend operations. I’m not sure what would happen these days, but in Tokyo where they weren’t used to so much snow, they didn’t have snow ploughs. Back then, all the railway company employees u
sed to be put to work shovelling the snow by hand. It was a terrible task and took hours. It was impossible to get the tracks clear by the morning rush hour.

  “However, Hamakyu Railways, whose current president is that good friend I mentioned at the start, managed to get their trains running after only the shortest of delays. And by rush hour, all their trains were running on time. So how do you think they did it?

  “My friend used a method; I suppose we could call it a trick. However, I must stress that he wasn’t the president back then, and was in no position to mobilize a whole army of employees to help deal with the snow. Nor did he have access to any specialized equipment. He had to rely on his own brilliance. He rose to fame overnight within the company.”

  “That really happened? Sounds like a miracle,” said Kikuoka.

  Kanai had to chime in too.

  “Yes, you’re right. A true miracle…”

  “Yes, I know it was a miracle! But I’d like to hear the answer,” said Kozaburo, a little frustrated.

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’m going to say that the first train of the day had a snow plough attached to the front.”

  “No, they didn’t have anything like that back then. Besides it would have been impossible—the snow was too deep. And if that kind of equipment had been available, then for sure all the other train companies would have owned the same thing. No, he used nothing like that. Just what was already available.”

  “Mr Hamamoto, all of your friends are really amazing people.”

  Kozaburo paid no attention to Kanai’s gratuitous flattery.

  “I’ve got it.”

  It was Sasaki who spoke. Next to him, Togai’s expression was inscrutable.

  “They kept the empty trains running all through the night.”

  “Well done! You got it. As soon as it began to snow and looked like it was going to stick, my friend got the trains to run at ten-minute intervals throughout the night. And back then it took a lot of determination on his part to get something like that done. There are hard-headed bosses who resist new ideas everywhere. But thanks to that level of resolve, he now sits in the president’s chair. What do you think? Are you ready to try another one?”

  Togai, eager to recover from his slow start, nodded energetically.

  Unfortunately for him, all of the puzzles that Kozaburo came up with were successfully solved by Shun Sasaki. Every time Sasaki opened his mouth and came out with the next impressive correct answer, Togai’s face would turn steadily more crimson, until it matched the lights on the Christmas tree.

  Kozaburo glanced at the young man’s expression. He realized what his eccentric quiz had become. A chance to win the ultimate prize.

  Both young men, or Togai at least, were treating this quiz as a way to win Eiko’s favour. If he succeeded in coming first, Togai believed that his prize would be a ticket for that most romantic trip around the world—a honeymoon. And then on his return, the rest of his prize money would be the legacy of a lifetime in this mansion.

  Kozaburo had predicted this might happen, and with a level of cynicism that had been perfected over many years, he had prepared these puzzles purposely to get this reaction.

  “Mr Sasaki, you seem very good at this. Would you like a more challenging problem?”

  “If possible,” Sasaki replied, clearly emboldened by his success.

  And then Kozaburo said something that made everybody assembled think they’d lost their hearing for a moment.

  “Eiko, have you decided yet who you’re going to marry?”

  Naturally, Eiko looked horrified.

  “What are you talking about, Daddy? Where did that come from all of a sudden?”

  “If you haven’t made your decision yet, how about one of these young men sitting here tonight? How about whoever is able to answer the question I’m about to set them?”

  “Daddy, stop joking around!”

  “Actually, I’m not joking at all. I’m perfectly serious. This eccentric house, the ridiculous pile of junk I’ve collected that sits in Room 3, that can all be called a joke. But this, right now, is me being serious. Here before you are two fine young men. I would have absolutely no objections to you choosing either one of them. To be honest, I don’t have the energy to object. And if you don’t know which to choose, you have nothing to worry about. Leave it to me. I can choose for you—with a puzzle. I’ve come prepared with a question for that very purpose.”

  That’ll do it, thought Kozaburo. Now we’ll see their true colours.

  “Of course this is no longer the olden days when the man who solves the riddle gets a reward of the daughter’s hand in marriage. Instead I’ll say that the kind of man who can solve a puzzle like this one will get no objection from me. Apart from that it’s up to my daughter to choose.”

  The two young men’s eyes gleamed, possibly reflecting the mountain of gold coins that they had in their sight. In contrast, Kozaburo was inwardly grinning. His full intentions wouldn’t be clear until the puzzle was solved.

  “The matter of Eiko aside, I’m very interested in tackling another puzzle,” said Sasaki.

  “Not to mention a chance for Mr Togai here to redeem himself… Anyway, this man you see before you both has spent a long life in a forest being buffeted over and over by the wind, and now I’m just a dead tree that has dropped all its leaves. I’ve had enough of all the manoeuvring and haggling that my life requires. I no longer recognize nor care for the marks of what we call ‘good birth’ or ‘pedigree’. It’s what inside that matters. I’ve said it repeatedly, but as you get older, or as your status in society rises, you start to forget about, or cease to care for, the things that others are obsessed with. And so, this quiz I offer not only to Togai and to Sasaki, but also to Mr Ueda and Mr Kajiwara.”

  “It makes no difference to me whether a man can solve some puzzle or not,” interrupted Eiko. “If I can’t stand him, I can’t stand him.”

  “Well, obviously, my dear. I know you’re not the type to quietly acquiesce if I tell you to marry one of these men.”

  “I do what you tell me on other matters, but not this.”

  “You’re from a good family, so I know you’re much more discerning than I am. So on that matter I’m completely confident.”

  “If I solve the puzzle, may I marry your daughter?”

  This last question was from Kikuoka.

  “If the young lady is agreeable, then I suppose you may,” said Kozaburo generously. Kikuoka laughed.

  And then Kozaburo had one more surprise announcement.

  “So please go and call Mr Kajiwara. I’m going to show everyone my room at the top of the tower.”

  “What did you say?” Eiko couldn’t believe her ears. “Why are we going up there?”

  “Because that’s where the puzzle is.”

  Kozaburo got to his feet.

  “At any rate,” he added, as if an afterthought, “I’ve got a special trick up my sleeve.”

  SCENE 3

  The Tower

  Kozaburo set off up the stairs from the salon, his guests filing after him. He called back over his shoulder as he climbed.

  “My puzzle is a bit of a silly, self-indulgent thing, but it’s something that I was thinking about when I built this house, and I always hoped this day would come. Ladies and gentlemen, next to this building is a tower, which houses my bedroom. At the base of the tower there’s a rather strangely shaped flower bed. Have you ever wondered about its layout? The mystery that I’m challenging you to solve is, One, What is the significance of its design? And Two, Why is it there? That’s all.”

  The higher they climbed, the narrower the staircase became, until eventually it came to a dead end. An imposing black door made of iron blocked their way, feeling rather like an exit from this world to the next. The metal had broad horizontal folds over its whole surface, giving the impression of some kind of avant-garde sculpture—a hulking, graceless monument.

  Everyone watched as Kozaburo reached for a looped chain that
hung from the wall and pulled on it. There was a great rattling sound that seemed to come from a long-gone era, and then something unexpected happened. The assembled guests had expected the door to swing open towards them, hinged on the left or the right, but instead it began to fall slowly away from them—downwards and outwards.

  Everyone stayed frozen in one line on the narrow stairs. The staircase was lower on the right side than the left and the roof sloped down over their heads, making the wall appear to lean towards them. Right now everything was disorientating.

  Like the second hand of a giant clock, the door very slowly moved from its number twelve position, and continued to revolve downwards. Now there was a second surprise in store for the observers.

  What had been visible of the door from the inside—well, if you could call it a door—had been no more than one small section of the whole. As it continued to fall, it became clear that they had been looking at just the lower extremity of a massively tall metal slab. The top reached way up into the heavy black sky and was swallowed up in the darkness. As it fell away from the wall and the gap opened up farther, the noise of the wind was added to the loud rattling of the chain, and a few snowflakes fluttered in. The waiting guests finally began to understand why the operation was taking so long.

  The structure was in fact a sort of drawbridge, which led across to the tower. The horizontal folds in the welding weren’t decorative after all; they served a very practical purpose—that of steps in a massive outdoor staircase. The party had climbed the regular stairs from the salon to the top of the main building, but the summit of the neighbouring tower was farther up yet.

  The bridge was about to reach its target, and now through the newly exposed rectangular opening, the assembled guests were treated to a view of the night sky. Beyond the madly whirling snowflakes, the turret of the tower loomed out of the darkness, majestic as a religious painting.

  The circular tip of the tower looked rather like the highest turret of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Around the outside was a kind of covered walkway with a fenced handrail. From the eaves above the walkway hung several giant icicles, looking disturbingly like vicious fangs in the midst of the furiously whirling powder snow.