The Decagon House Murders (21 page)

And then there were only the three of them still alive in the Decagon House: Ellery, Poe and Van.

5

After going back to his room and getting dressed, Ellery sat down on the corner of his bed and took out his Salem cigarettes. After two of them had been turned into ash, he left the room.

The other two were already in the hall.

Poe was examining the bandage he’d put over the wound on the back of his right hand, while smoking another cigarette. Van had brought a kettle with hot water and poured some coffee.

‘I’d like some too, Van.’

Van shook his head and, covering his cup with both hands, sat down in a chair away from Poe.

‘That’s not very nice.’

Ellery shrugged and went into the kitchen.

He carefully washed a cup and a spoon. He also took a look at the drawer of the cupboard. The six plates that had announced the murders were still there.

‘“The Last Victim,” “The Detective,” and “The Murderer,”’ muttered Ellery as he returned to the hall and poured his own coffee. Poe and Van stayed silent. He looked from one to the other.

‘Assuming “The Murderer” is amongst us, I guess he won’t admit to that at this stage?’

Poe frowned and blew out a cloud of smoke. Van turned his head away and sipped his coffee. Ellery sat down on a chair away from both of them, his hands around his cup.

There was a disquieting silence. The three men sat apart from one another in the hall of the Decagon House and did not even try to conceal the distrust they had for each other.

‘Can you believe it?’ said Poe in an unnatural voice: ‘One of us here has killed four of our friends.’

‘It might’ve been Nakamura Seiji,’ replied Ellery.

An irritated Poe shook his head.

‘I won’t say it’s absolutely impossible, but I say you’re wrong. I don’t even agree with your idea of him being still alive. It’s just too incredible.’

Ellery snorted.

‘So the murderer is one of us?’

‘That’s what I said.’

Poe banged the table angrily. Ellery ignored the gesture and brushed his hair back.

‘Let’s examine everything from the beginning once again.’

He leaned back on his chair and looked up at the skylight. The sky was as dark as ever.

‘It started with those plates, yes? Someone had to prepare them beforehand and bring them to the island. They don’t take up that much space, so it would be easy to bring them along without anyone noticing. So the murderer could be any of us. Are we agreed on that?

‘But, listen. On the morning of the third day, the murderer started to commit the deeds announced by the plates. “The First Victim” was Orczy. The murderer entered her room through the window or door, and strangled her. Poe, you said the murder weapon, a cord, was still wrapped around her neck. The cord probably won’t serve as a meaningful clue. But the first problem we need to look at is,
how did the murderer enter Orczy’s room
?

‘When we found the body, the door and window weren’t locked. It’s possible that Orczy hadn’t locked them in the first place, but I think it’s unlikely. Especially the door. It was Orczy who had first discovered those plates. She appeared to be very scared and anxious.

‘So what do we have? There are a number of possibilities, but I think we can basically bring it down to two. One: Orczy forgot to lock her window and the murderer came in from there. Two: The murderer woke Orczy up and had her open the door.’

‘If the murderer came in through the window, why unlock the door?’ asked Van.

‘Either to find a plate, or to affix a plate he had already brought to the door. But if we limit ourselves to Poe’s idea, that the murderer is one of us, then I think we should focus on the hypothesis that Orczy herself opened the door to the murderer.

‘Even in the early morning, even if Orczy was still asleep, sneaking into the room through the window would have made some noise. It would have been all over if the murderer had been seen then. If the murderer is one of us in the Mystery Club, he wouldn’t have run the risk of doing that, but would’ve just woken Orczy up with some kind of excuse and have her let him in peacefully. Orczy was like that. She might have thought it strange, but she wouldn’t have said no to one of us.’

‘But Orczy was still wearing her sleeping gown. Would she have let a man inside?’

‘She might have. If he’d said it was urgent, she couldn’t very well turn him down, even if she’d wanted to. Except for Carr. But going on that assumption….’

Ellery shot a sidelong glance at Poe.

‘You’re the prime suspect, Poe. You were childhood friends, so she wouldn’t be as much on her guard against you as with me or Van.’

‘Rubbish.’

Poe leaned forward.

‘You say I killed Orczy? That’s not funny.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be funny. At least with regard to Orczy’s murder, you’re the most likely suspect. If you are, I also find it easier to understand the psychology behind the murderer’s peculiar act of neatly arranging Orczy’s body.’

‘What about her hand? Why would I want to cut off her hand and take it with me?’

‘Easy, Poe. I know this isn’t the one and only answer. There are also other possibilities. It could have been Van, it could have been me. I just say that you are the most
likely
suspect.

‘And as for the problem of the hand, it’s obvious the murderer had in mind the incident that happened in the Blue Mansion last year, but I’ll be honest and say I have no idea why the murderer is alluding to it. What about you, Van?’

‘Maybe to confuse us?’

‘Hm. Poe?’

‘I don’t think the murderer would do something like that just to confuse us. Cutting off the hand without making too much noise must have been difficult.’

‘True. So there must have been a reason to cut off Orczy’s hand. What could that reason be?’

Ellery cocked his head and took a deep breath.

‘Let’s just leave that problem for the time being and continue. The Carr murder. To start with the conclusion, I don’t think we can come up with the one perfect answer for this case either. From the discussion we had after the murder, we can at least conclude that Van didn’t have the chance to put poison in Carr’s coffee. If the cup itself had been poisoned beforehand, then anyone had a chance to do it, but there is no way to distinguish the poisoned cup from the others. This bothers me though.

‘Anyway, with Agatha now dead, the one most capable of putting the poison in the coffee with a magician’s sleight of hand, would have to be, I regret to say, myself. However….’

‘You’re about to suggest I could have given Carr a slow-dissolving poison capsule, aren’t you?’ Poe interrupted. Ellery smiled.

‘Precisely. Not that I think it would be a smart move. Suppose you had successfully given Carr the capsule. You would be lucky if he went down just as he was drinking coffee, but if the poison had started working when he wasn’t putting anything in his mouth, then our doctor-in-training would be the first to be suspected. I don’t think that you’re that foolish.’

‘Sharp observation.’

‘But there’s another possibility.’

‘Hmph, and that is?’

‘Poe is a star of our medical faculty and his family owns one of the most prominent private hospitals in O—City. It could be that Carr hadn’t been feeling well for a while and that he had been asking Poe for advice. Or he might have visited Poe’s hospital. Anyway, let us suppose that Poe was familiar with the details of Carr’s health.

‘On that fateful night, Carr had an attack. An epileptic seizure or something. Poe, who immediately ran to Carr’s side, pretended to help him, but, taking advantage of the confusion, slipped some arsenic or strychnine in Carr’s mouth.’

‘You really seem to think I did it, but your story is just too far-fetched. Not even a sliver of reality.’

‘Don’t take me too seriously. I’m just discussing possibilities. But if you deny this theory because you say it’s too far-fetched, I’d like to do the same with the sleight-of-hand theory for the same reason.

‘I’m not sure whether I should be happy about it or not, but I think you are overestimating my magic skills. Hiding poison in my hand and putting it in another cup just as I reach out for my own cup is not as easy as it sounds. If I were the murderer, I would avoid such a dangerous method. It would be much easier and safer to smear some poison on one of the cups and mark it in some manner.’

‘But the actual cup didn’t have any marks or signs on it.’

‘Precisely. That’s what’s bothering me.
Was there really no mark on that cup
?’

Ellery cocked his head as he looked at the cup in his own hands.

‘There’s no chip. No crack. No botched paint job. Just like the others, a moss-green, decagon… no, wait.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘We might have overlooked something. Something incredible.’

Ellery got up from his chair.

‘Poe, we set Carr’s cup aside just as it was, I think?’

‘Yes. It’s in the corner of the kitchen counter.’

‘Let’s take another look at the cup—.’

Ellery was already on his way to the kitchen before he had even finished his sentence and he ordered the others to follow.

‘You two come as well.’

The cup stood on the table, covered by a white towel. Ellery pulled the towel away smoothly. There was still a little of the two-day old coffee left in the cup.

‘…I was right.’

Ellery looked straight down at the cup and clicked his tongue angrily.

‘We’ve been had. It’s a mystery why we didn’t notice it then.’

‘What do you mean?’

Van cocked his head. Poe too had a puzzled look on his face.

‘It appears the same as the others to me.’

‘But it isn’t,’ said Ellery solemnly.

‘A decagonal building with a decagonal hall, a decagonal table, a decagonal skylight, decagonal ashtrays and decagonal cups….
Distracted by this grand collection of decagons all around us, our eyes stopped working
.’

‘What?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s something that sets this cup apart. There’s something that makes it fundamentally different from the others. You still don’t see?’

After a while, both Poe and Van yelled out simultaneously.

‘You see?’

Ellery nodded with a contented expression.

‘The decagon theme in this building was a major piece of misdirection.
This cup doesn’t have ten sides, but eleven
.’

6

‘So, back to the beginning.’

After returning to the table in the main hall, Ellery looked once more at the other two.

‘Now we’ve discovered the cup was different, Van, Poe and of course myself, all had equal chance to poison Carr. One cup with eleven sides among the decagon cups. The murderer smeared poison on that cup, and if it had been passed to him, he would simply not have drunk his coffee.’

‘I wonder why that cup was there in the first place?’ asked Van.

‘Maybe one of Nakamura Seiji’s jokes.’

A smile appeared on Ellery’s delicate mouth.

‘Hiding a single eleven-sided object in a house of decagons. Fantastic joke, right?’

‘Could it really be just that?’

‘I believe so. It might also have another meaning. The murderer happened to discover that eleven-sided cup and decided to use it. I don’t believe it was something he prepared. You can’t get something like that unless you have it specially made. The murderer just happened to notice the cup after arriving on the island. And all three of us had an opportunity to do so.’

Ellery put both elbows on the table, and joined his fingers at eye-level.

‘The murderer waited until everyone had gone to sleep and sneaked into the room where Carr’s body lay. He then went to all the trouble of cutting off the corpse’s left hand and throwing it in the bathtub, just as with Orczy. I’ve no idea why he did that, though.’

‘Agatha said she heard something. That was probably what it was.’

‘Yes, Poe. Everyone had started to get on edge by then. The murderer committed himself to quite a risky job. So that means that there is some kind of important reason to cut off the hands. But it remains a mystery to me.’

Ellery frowned and continued:

‘Anyway, all three of us had an equal opportunity to commit either of those murders. Let’s go to the next.’

‘Next is Agatha… No, Leroux first?’ Van said. Ellery shook his head.

‘No, first was the attempt on my life. Me, Ellery. In the underground room yesterday. The night before that—I think it was just before Carr collapsed—I mentioned the underground room of the Blue Mansion. I suppose that having heard that, the murderer—probably after cutting off Carr’s hand and sticking the plate to the door—sneaked outside and laid the trap. Everybody was there when Carr collapsed, so anyone could have done it. Since I almost became one of the murder victims, I should be ruled out, shouldn’t I?’