“You’re right. But let’s imagine for now that the sofa and table were somehow instrumental in the locked-room trick. By knocking over both pieces of furniture, somehow a cord was pulled and the bolts on the door were unlocked. You’d need to use a really strong piece of cord to do that, and then the cord would have to be retrieved from the ventilation hole. You told us, didn’t you, Chief Inspector, that you knocked on the door of Room 14 last night?”
“Well, technically it was Mr Hamamoto who knocked.”
“What time was that?”
“Around 10.30.”
“At that time was there any string or anything hanging from the ventilation hole?”
“No. In fact, when there was no reply, I glanced up at the vent. There was nothing there.”
“No, probably not. At that point, Kikuoka was still alive and sleeping. And yet about thirty minutes later he was dead. And at 11.30 the three members of staff passed quite close by on their way to their rooms. None of them looked towards the air vent specifically, but it makes sense that by that time the cord had already been removed.
“We already found out that the ventilation hole is so high up in the wall that you can barely see into the room, even standing on a bedside table, so unless the killer used a step stool or a ladder, there must have been a long piece of cord hanging from the vent. And with people passing so close by, even if they didn’t go right by the door, it would have been impossible to leave it like that without it being noticed.”
“So what you’re saying is that the murder was committed very quickly and done by about 11.10 p.m.”
“Yes, that’s right, but it just happens that the household staff went down to the basement at 11.30. It doesn’t always happen that way—it was pure coincidence. Because normally they’d be going to bed much earlier than that. If the killer hadn’t been careful, he could easily have been seen pulling the string. That’s the flaw in that plan.
“If I were the killer I’d have done the deed much, much earlier. The later it became, the more likely the staff would have been coming down to the basement.”
“Right. It would make sense to have committed the murder and removed all traces by the time I was at the door of Room 14.”
“Yes, but the time of death can’t be moved from around 11 o’clock. So with that in mind, we can narrow it down to who could physically have been there. Who among our suspects could have visited Room 14 at that time, unseen by anyone? Only the occupants of Room 9.”
“That may be true… But I’m not convinced about the 11 o’clock time frame. It makes the whole plan much too risky. Don’t you think?”
“Well, I wouldn’t think of attempting it, but then again I’ve never thought about murdering anybody either.”
“There is an alternative possibility that we could consider. A clever trick that gets the knife in Kikuoka’s back by 11 o’clock. If the suspect can pull off a stunt like that, he’s free to play a leisurely game of billiards with a police constable, or relax over a drink with the head detective on the case.”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too,” said Okuma. “But it would be really difficult to set up a murder in a locked room with a piece of string. I mean if Room 14 was already set up ahead of time, well, you couldn’t even have walked into the room.”
Ozaki resumed his commentary.
“Room 14 itself had nothing particularly special about it. There’s nothing there that lends itself to setting up a murder from outside the room. On the writing desk in the corner there was nothing but a pot of ink, a pen and a paperweight; the bookcase didn’t seem to have been touched at all. Mr Hamamoto says that the books all seem to be in place. To the right of the fireplace there’s a built-in wardrobe, but there’s nothing strange inside it. The door was closed.
“If anything’s unusual about the room, it’s the number of chairs. There’s the desk chair, which was in its usual place, pushed under the desk. Then a rocking chair in front of the fire which was also more or less in its normal position. Then the set of sofa and two armchairs. Without even counting the bed, which is a kind of converted chair too, that makes a total of five different seats. I suppose some sort of trick could be set up by using all of them. But the two armchairs hadn’t been moved much either.
“Anyway, the important thing is that no one could get in there besides Kikuoka himself. There was no spare key for Room 14. I don’t know whether they’d lost it, never had one made in the first place, or that Hamamoto was too neurotic to allow there to be more than one key for his personal study, but it has been confirmed that there was definitely only the one. And last night, Kikuoka had it. This morning our men retrieved it from the pocket of his jacket which he’d thrown off.”
“So he left the key lying around in his room. What if he’d accidentally pushed the locking button on the inside of the doorknob and gone out, closing the door? That would’ve caused a bit of a problem, wouldn’t it?”
“No, that would have been okay. If you push the button in first and then close the door, it doesn’t work. The button pops back out and the door doesn’t lock.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, we were told that while Kikuoka was staying here, he always made sure to lock the door from the outside every time he left his room. It seems he left his money in there. The Hayakawas and several others have attested to that.”
“All right. So there’s no way that anyone could have got into the room before the murder?”
“No, no way. All the other rooms had two keys. The Hayakawas would show the guests to their room and hand them one of the keys. The duplicates are with Eiko Hamamoto. Room 14 was the exception, so I guess they decided to put the richest bloke in there.”
“Huh,” said Okuma, sounding deflated.
“It’s not something I’m going to admit to in front of all those folks in the salon, but I’m on the point of throwing in the towel on this whole thing. Just like you said yourself, Inspector Okuma, there is no killer. There is no murderer among those eleven people out there.”
“Hmm…”
“It’s the same as the last case,” said Ozaki. “There’s plenty about the Ueda killing that we’ve put on the back burner. We still haven’t worked out why there were no footprints in the snow. That locked room had the simplest of locks on it, it could have been manipulated somehow, but the snow outside the door was completely undisturbed. By any of the entrances or exits to and from the main building, or anywhere around the house, even on the steps up to Room 10, there was nothing. As long as everyone is telling the truth, and Sasaki isn’t lying either, the ground that they crossed to get to the scene of the crime was all covered in pure virgin snow. That’s the first problem.
“And then the two stakes in the ground that Sasaki had seen the night before. Not to mention that disgusting-looking Golem doll… And then…oh, yes, that’s right, Chief Inspector Ushikoshi, Ueda was murdered on the night of the 25th. How about the daytime of the 25th? We said we were going to check whether the doll was really in Room 3 earlier that day. Did we?”
“It was. Mr Hamamoto says he definitely saw it sitting there during the daytime.”
“I see. So the suspect took it from the room shortly before committing the crime… Hang on! Just wait a minute while I go next door to check on the doll.”
The doll had already been returned to its place in the Tengu Room. Ozaki leapt to his feet and ran out of the library. Okuma took the opportunity to offer a few words of his own.
“Me, I don’t think anyone got into Room 10 by way of that door facing the outside. But the ventilation hole was facing inwards towards the rest of the house. Someone got up to no good with that open hole, I’ll warrant.”