He stopped and glowered around the room. “The three shots that were heard by the two witnesses were the ones already on the tape recorder! Cozzens even remarked that they were somewhat muffled!… The tape recorder ran itself out silently again, till Gertie, in the excitement that followed the discovery of Gosling’s dead body, managed to flip the switch off.”
“Good God!” muttered somebody in the room,
Banner cleared his throat with a big sea lion noise. “Haaak! Although Gertie had been terrorized into helping Lockyear remove a threat to his existence as a spy, she wanted desperately for one of us to know the truth. She knew she was being watched by everybody, their side as well as ours, so she couldn’t come right out and tell us about it. She drew two circles, one inside the other, on a piece of paper. She didn’t dare hint further. She was trying to call our attention to the reel of the tape recorder – circular. Yunnerstand? And she was trying to help us, boys. If she had completely obeyed the instructions of the murderer, I never would’ve found the tape still on the recorder in that office – she would’ve destroyed it. Last night the murderer killed her as a safety measure, thinking that his trail on tape had been completely wiped out.”
Locked in Death by Mary Reed & Eric Mayer
Those of you who have seen my anthologies of historical whodunits will know that Mary Reed and Eric Mayer are the authors of the stories featuring John the Eunuch, set in 6th-century Constantinople. One or two of those stories have been locked-room mysteries. John the Eunuch also features in a series of novels that began with One for Sorrow (1999). Besides John, they also have another continuing character, Inspector Dorj of the Mongolian Police, who first appeared in “Death on the Trans-Mongolian Railway” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (March 2000). The following is a brand new Inspector Dorj story involving a travelling circus and a puzzling corpse.
During his years with the Mongolian police Inspector Dorj had witnessed crimes in sufficient variety to inspire several Shakespearean tragedies, but until the crowbar-wielding midget sent the locked door of the circus caravan flying open the inspector had never seen a man murdered by a corpse.
Hercules the lion-tamer was, it is true, an exceptionally large and powerful corpse, but a corpse nevertheless. He lay wedged between the bed on which Dorj had last seen him and the blood-smeared door of the ancient caravan’s lavatory cubicle. His enormous hands were still reaching for his victim. Nikolai Zubov, sprawled partly under the table near the door, was now beyond Hercules’ reach, but the ugly welt ringing the circus owner’s neck made it clear what must have happened. Dorj said so.
“Clear?” muttered Dima, the midget, peering around Dorj into the disordered caravan. Dima’s bone white clown makeup ran with sweat from his efforts with the crowbar, turning his face almost as ghastly as Zubov’s. “How can you say it is clear when it seems Zubov was strangled by a dead man?”
“Of course the lion-tamer was dead,” said Batu, Dorj’s assistant. “The lion went berserk and practically disembowelled him. No one could have survived a gaping wound like that. You’re lucky you got bored and left the performance before the lion-taming act started.”
Dorj now regretted dragging the young man to the circus, which had turned out to be a sorry affair even before the accident. “You kept an eye on the caravan while I returned to town to make arrangements?”
“I would have seen anyone approaching.”
“So only Zubov and Hercules were inside?”
A cloud-like frown passed over Batu’s round, flat moon of a face, a typical Mongolian face in contrast to Dorj’s sharper-angled features. “The names of those deceased should not be spoken so soon after death. Souls linger. So many people, saying their names – they may call the dead back from the lower world.”
Dorj had long since abandoned trying to talk Batu out of his native beliefs and instead had taken to occasionally exposing the young man to some culture – unfortunately, as it turned out, in the case of the circus. So now he simply instructed his assistant to begin the tedious collection of evidence and then, to be alone to consider the conundrum, walked away from the caravan and the abandoned Russian airplane hangar the circus had borrowed for its performances.
A rutted track led into the desert where a cold September wind rolled small bits of gravel against his carefully polished shoes. Unlike Batu, who had grown up in a ger, the traditional movable tent of the Mongolian nomads, Dorj was city bred. Until the great earthquake that some called freedom had driven him to a posting in the Gobi, he had rarely strayed far from the relatively cosmopolitan world of Ulaanbaatar.
He was not comfortable in his own country. He hated the Gobi, a featureless immensity beside which men and the culture Dorj valued so highly seemed small and insignificant. Out here Batu’s half-civilized ideas about returning souls seemed almost plausible. Or at least as good as any explanation the inspector had for a murderous corpse.
Staring out to the far off horizon where mountains sat like clouds, Dorj tried to recall what he had witnessed earlier. It was possible those events might have something to tell him about Zubov’s mysterious death. But since the lion-tamer’s death had been a grisly accident, Dorj had not examined the scene as carefully as he would have if a crime had been committed, and he regretted it now.
The inspector had arrived at the hangar door just as the lion-tamer’s corpse was being laid beside it, beneath a line of carelessly slapped on posters advertising that those who visited the circus would, among other delights, view a recreation of:
“The First Labour of Hercules. See The Mighty Hercules Slay the Nemean Lion.”
Dorj had been struck by the irony of Hercules’s death because, while some survived the vagaries and misfortunes of life by seeing dark humour in it all, he survived by noting the irony.
And thinking back now, what else had he noticed, aside from distressed circus-goers edging past the corpse?
Zubov was standing outside the hangar, still wearing his ringmaster’s top hat, speaking to a muscular young man decked out in spangled tights.
“Perhaps if I go back and perform my act, it will distract the crowd,” the young man suggested.
“Conceited fool!” the older man snapped back. “Go help direct them out the exits and make sure they don’t panic. Do you think anyone wants to see you preening and swinging like a monkey, with a man lying dead right outside?”
Zubov was soft featured, chubby around the middle, but his voice was harsh. His magic tricks involving a red ball and three boxes with obviously false bottoms had driven Dorj outside.
Dorj also remembered a woman standing beside the door, head bent. She was a tall, striking blonde, perhaps nearing middle age but it was difficult to be certain, given her heavy make-up. She was dressed in layers of diaphanous sequined material that billowed in the bitter wind, but she stood motionless, a great glittering icicle.