The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“Then our elm showed signs of what is called ‘doatiness’ – incipient decay. It, together with all the others in the avenue, was felled, hollowed out, and used for an aqueduct. Y’see, old man, elm is the one wood which never changes if kept constantly wet. They’ve actually dug Roman elm- wood conduits out of the middle of Piccadilly, as sound as the day on which they were laid…

“This is a queer countryside, Ingram. And the elm is a queer tree. Get those facts in mind.

“That chamber which held the bullet also held the gases of the elm’s former disruption, and to these were added those similar gases which lurk in peaty land. ‘Similar,’ did I say? Identical would be a better word… You heard old Koffard talk about marsh-gas; natural gas, that is… Well, that’s what we’re considering. You saw that chemist fellow, Sowerby, with a retort full of elm-wood burning such gas at the mouth of the apparatus.

“Methyl-hydride; methane; carburetted-hydrogen – call it what you will, and still you’re right – is marsh-gas. Also it’s the dreaded and terribly explosive thing which miners call fire- damp... when mixed with air.

“You see it burning away in every fireside in the land. It’s the illuminating property of coal. And it always results when bodies of a peaty, woody or coaly constituent are subjected to great heat.”

I began to have an inkling of what Hildreth was getting at.

“However, to the mechanics of the situation.” He laughed and drank some beer. “Ralph Westmacott, the furniture man, buys some old weathered elm-wood from Derbyshire in order to fake his manufactures. What he has to spare – useless – he gives, as usual, to his brother, Henry Leonard. Our good Henry Leonard diligently saws it up into chunks and fills the family woodshed.

“Now comes a rainy and dismal October night. Henry puts a log on the open-hearth fire, extends his slippered feet and prepares to enjoy the evening.

“But the wild mystery of the ever-burgeoning earth comes into the simple household of The Nook and claims him… He hears a violent hiss. That was air rushing into the vascular tissue of that hot elm-log, combining with the incredible chemistry of Nature with the terrible potential of that hydro-carbon, methane, in the hollow where the bullet lay concealed.

“Nigel Koffard’s powder had not half the fulminating property, in the steel barrel of his pistol, that fire-damp had in the smooth wound of the elm-log… Pressure increased, since the hollow was filling every second with more and more gas, and air was in combination with it. At last, the hungry fire, eating away the inner face of the log, reached the terribly explosive mixture. Then bang, up and outwards shot the ball into Henry’s shoulder.

“So we’re back at our beginning – the very first point I made: that the ball was fired from somewhere about Westmacott’s feet. I recalled flying fragments of coal and co-related things… allowing, always, for the unusual.

“But, instead of coal and cinders, the well of the grate was filled with half-burned fragments of wood – like fragments of furniture, surmounted by a big tricorne hunk of charred elm-wood. I wondered, vastly, about those fragments. Then, when I saw the little boy, Brian, playing with his home-made building blocks, I was definitely set on the second line which led me to solution.”

He picked up his tankard and smiled.

“That green network you saw on the surface of that spar was pitch-blende! I’m told it’s more than usually rich in radium and uranium salts.

“The land on which Skelter’s Pot is situated belongs to the Commissioners. It’s an open common land. Anyone procuring the necessary faculty, and entering into serious negotiations, can mine it… So, with the joyous approval of Mr Henry Leonard Westmacott, I have entered my innocent ally Master Brian’s name on our list-”

“‘Our list’?” I was puzzled by his most deliberate pause. “What list?”

“Oh, the little company I’m forming: myself, yourself, Koffard, Westmacott and young Brian, to exploit the pitch-blende deposits of our property in Skelter’s Pot, Derbyshire.” He laughed and stretched his long arms. “It ought to provide for us in our old age, if nothing else!”

… Judging by my latest returns from that adroitly-contrived concern, I am inclined, stoutly, to agree.

The 45 Steps by Peter Crowther

Here’s another brand new story. It was written for the last locked-room anthology I compiled but arrived too late for me to squeeze in. I was thus delighted to find that the story was still available as it includes one of the most audacious methods of murder I have yet encountered – and in the smallest locked room of them all. Peter Crowther (b. 1949) is a highly respected author, editor and publisher primarily of science fiction and fantasy, but of all things unusual. He runs PS Publishing which has won many awards, and which includes books by Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury, Michael Swanwick and Ramsey Campbell. Amongst Peter’s own books are Escardy Gap (1996) with James Lovegrove and Songs of Leaving (2004) with Edward Miller, as well as the fascinating anthology sequence that began with Narrow Houses (1992). Several of Peter’s stories have common settings and amongst those is the northern town of Luddersedge, which will one day coalesce into another book. In the meantime, we can peer into part of the town’s strange life in the following disquieting tale.

***

To say that hotels in Luddersedge were thin on the ground was an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Although there were countless guest houses, particularly along Honeydew Lane beside the notorious Bentley’s Tannery – whose ever-present noxious fumes seemed to be unnoticed by the guests – the Regal was the only full- blown hotel, and the only building other than the old town hall to stretch above the slate roofs of Luddersedge and scratch a sky oblivious to, and entirely disinterested in, its existence.

The corridors of the Regal were lined with threadbare carpets, hemmed in by walls bearing a testimonial trinity of mildew, graffiti and spilled alcohol, and topped by ceilings whose anaglypta was peeling at the corners and whose streaky paint-covering had been dimmed long ago by cigarette smoke. The rooms themselves boasted little in the way of the creature comforts offered by the Regal’s big-town contemporaries in Halifax and Burnley.

For most of the year, the Regal’s register – if such a thing were ever filled in, which it rarely was – boasted only couples by the name of Smith or Jones, and the catering staff had little to prepare other than the fabled Full English Breakfast – truly the most obscenely mountainous start-of-the-day plate of food outside of Dublin. Indeed, questions were frequently asked in bread-shop or bus-stop queues and around the beer-slopped pub tables at the Working Men’s Club, as to exactly how the Regal kept going.

But there were far too many other things to occupy the attention and interest of Luddersedge’s townsfolk and, anyway, most of them recognized the important social part played by the Regal in the lives of their not-so-distant cousins living in the towns a few miles down the road in either direction. Not that awkward questions were not asked about other situations in which the Regal played a key role, one of which came to pass on a Saturday night in early December on the occasion of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party, and which involved the one hotel feature that was truly magnificent – the Gentlemen’s toilet situated in the basement beneath the ballroom.

To call such a sprawling display of elegance and creative indulgence a loo or a bog – or even a john or a head, to use the slang vernacular popular with the occasional Americans who visited the Calder Valley in the 1950s, the heyday of Luddersedge’s long-forgotten twinning with the mid-west town of Forest Plains – was tantamount to heresy.

A row of shoulder-height marble urinals – complete with side panels that effectively rendered invisible anyone of modest height who happened to be availing themselves of their facility – was completed by a series of carefully angled glass panel splashguards set in aluminium side grips and a standing area inlaid with a mosaic of tiny slate and Yorkshire stone squares and rectangles of a multitude of colours. It was an area worn smooth by generations of men temporarily intent on emptying bladders filled with an excess of John Smith’s, Old Peculiar and Black Sheep bitter ales served in the bars above.

Two wide steps down from the urinals was a row of generously sized washbasins, set back and mounted on