“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?”