The Decagon House Murders (15 page)

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a magic trick that starts like this.’

Ellery coughed softly, and then peered into Agatha’s eyes.

‘Okay, ready, Agatha? Think of any of the fifty-two cards, any one you want, except for the joker.’

‘Just think of it?’

‘Yes. Don’t say it out loud—done?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then—.’

Ellery took the case from his coat pocket again and put it on table. It was the blue bicycle card deck.

‘Take a good look at this case. And then think hard of the card you chose and repeat the name of the card in your head.’

‘Okay. Just think of it hard, right?’

‘Yes. And that’s enough.’

Ellery picked up the card case with his left hand.

‘Now Agatha, what card did you think of and did you project onto this case?’

‘I can tell you now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Queen of Diamonds.’

‘Heh. Let’s take a look at the case then.’

Ellery opened the lid of the case and took the cards out face up. He slowly fanned them out between his hands.

‘Queen of Diamonds, right? Oh!’

Ellery stopped fanning out the cards and directed Agatha’s attention to one of them with his eyes. One single card was facing the other way round.

‘One card is the other way round, you see.’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you take it out and show us the face?’

‘Yes—but it can’t be.…’

With a doubtful look, Agatha took out the card and placed it on the table face up. It was, without any question, the Queen of Diamonds.

‘Unbelievable!’

Agatha was surprised.

‘Neat trick, don’t you think?’ Ellery smiled, put the cards back in the case and the case in his pocket.

‘Ellery, that was really an impressive trick.’

‘Hadn’t I shown it to you before, Leroux?’

‘First time I saw it.’

‘This is one of my best card guessing tricks.’

‘Agatha wasn’t in on this, right?’

‘I wasn’t, Leroux.’

‘Really?’

‘There was no set-up here. And I’ll also tell you that this wasn’t a probability trick, betting on the 52 to 1 chance that Agatha would choose the Queen of Diamonds.’

Ellery lit a Salem cigarette and took a slow drag.

‘Let’s do a little riddle now. I need to raise my voice here. WHAT’S BOTH TOP AND FINAL?’

‘What?’ Leroux asked and Ellery repeated the question.

‘Got it.’

Agatha clapped her hands together.

‘A horizontal line! Of the T and L?’

‘We’ve got a winner.’

‘Oh, I get it, the horizontal line of the letters T and L when you write the words TOP and FINAL in capitals
[x]
.’

‘Next. How do you read the following combination of letters: THNQ?’

‘What is that?’

‘I think I saw it in a magazine once.’

‘Oh, I saw it at the university lab a while back,’ said Poe, as he put a new packet of Lark cigarettes into his birch wood case.

‘There’s no vowel there, but you have to read the letters like you pronounce them. Thenkyu
[xi]
.’

‘“Thank you?”’

‘Precisely.’

‘Wow, that’s sort of forced.’

‘It’s basically a secret code.’

‘Speaking of codes, they say that the first book featuring a secret code is the Old Testament. I think it was the Book of Daniel.’

‘That long ago?’

‘Even here in Japan we’ve been using secret codes for quite a long time, you know. There’s that famous question-and-answer poem between Yoshida Kenkō and Ton’a in the
Shoku Sōanshū
[xii]
. Didn’t you learn about it in high school?’

‘No, what kind of code is it?’ Agatha replied.

‘Kenkō’s poem to Ton’a went:

“The night is cool / Oh, the harvested rice ears when I wake / My hand pillow / Even both my sleeves in autumn / Blow in the unrelenting wind.”

‘Take the first letters of each line of the original text and it says
yonetamahe
, or “Rice please.” He was asking for food. And if you take the last letters of each line and read them the other way around, you get
zenimohoshi
, or “Also need money.”’

‘That’s a miserable story.’

‘And the Buddhist priest Ton’a replied:

“Night is depressing / My dear friend / You did not come / But something will work out / So come around for a while.”

‘Take the first and last letters again, and you get the message
yonewanashi
,
zenisukoshi
: “No rice. Little money
.
”’

‘They must have spent quite a bit of time thinking that up.’

‘I think there was another famous secret code in a question-and-answer poem in the
Tsurezuregusa
[xiii]
. What was it again, Orczy?’

None of them had been paying much attention, but at the sound of the name they all caught their breath and each of them froze.

‘I—I’m sorry. Slipped out of my mouth.’

So even Ellery could lose his head. Such a mistake was unlike him.

There had been a tacit understanding between them since dinner that they would not mention what happened to Orczy, but Ellery’s slip immediately brought them all back to the inescapable reality. An oppressive silence filled the room.

‘Ellery, don’t you have any other stories?’

Leroux tried to help Ellery, who was at a loss for words.

‘Ah, yes.…’

Making fun of Ellery, who was trying his best to conjure up his usual smile, Carr hit the table.

‘Agatha, go make some coffee.’

A brazen grin appeared in the corner of Carr’s mouth as he gave Ellery a scornful look. Ellery started to say something, but Agatha immediately cut him off.

‘I’ll make some coffee. Everyone wants some, I think.’

She stood up hurriedly and went to the kitchen alone.

‘Hey.’

Carr glared at the faces of the remaining four in turn.

‘We’re holding a wake for poor Orczy tonight, right? So stop pretending nothing has happened and let’s all be nice to each other.’

*

‘And here you are. Sugar and milk as well.’

Agatha put the tray with six moss-green cups down on the table.

‘Sorry we ask you do it every time,’ Ellery said, as he took the cup closest to him. The others also reached out for cups. Agatha took one for herself and pushed the tray with the last remaining cup to Van, who was sitting next to her.

‘Ah, thanks.’

Van placed his half-smoked Seven Stars cigarette in the ash tray and placed his hands around the cup, warming himself.

‘How’s your cold, Van?’

‘Ah, much better. Ellery, we didn’t really talk it over, but is there really no way of contacting the mainland?’

‘Doesn’t appear to be one.’

Ellery drank his coffee black.

‘There’s a lighthouse in J—Cape, so I thought we could try waving a white flag from here. But I think it’s an unmanned lighthouse.’

‘Yes, I think you’re right.’

‘Then one of us would need to risk his own life to swim to the mainland, or we could make some sort of raft.’

‘Neither of those plans sounds much good.’

‘We could make a fire,’ Poe said.

‘But I don’t think the outside world will notice us if we just burn some pine leaves.’

‘We could also just burn down this Decagon House if necessary.’

‘I think that would be going too far.’

‘It would be stupid and dangerous. However, Poe, Leroux and I weren’t just looking for a means of communication just now.’

‘What were you looking for?’

‘We didn’t find what we were looking for, even though we searched pretty much the whole island…No, wait.’

‘What?’

‘The Blue Mansion—we didn’t search the ruins of the Blue Mansion,’ Ellery muttered as he put his fingers to his forehead.

‘There might be an underground room there.’

‘An underground room?’

It happened just at that moment.

Cutting through the discussion between Poe and Ellery, someone groaned in horrible pain as he fell on the table.

Agatha screamed.

‘What’s wrong?’

Everyone stood up. The table trembled. Brown liquid flew from the half-drunken cups. He
thrashed about and kicked his chair to the floor as his legs jerked like a broken mechanical doll’s. His upper body finally slipped off the table onto the blue tile floor.

‘Carr!’

Poe shouted and ran to his side. Thrust aside by Poe, Leroux stumbled and pushed over his own chair.

‘What happened to Carr?’ Ellery exclaimed. Poe examined Carr’s eyes and shook his head.

‘I don’t know. Anyone know whether Carr has some chronic disease?’

Nobody answered.

‘This is bad.’

Carr’s weak breathing continued, making a shrill wheezing sound. Poe put his large arm around Carr’s upper body.

‘Help me, Ellery. We need to make him throw up. I think it’s poison.’

Carr’s body convulsed strongly, pushing Poe’s arm away. Only the whites of his eyes were visible as he lay on the floor, doubled over like a shrimp. After a while there was another heavy convulsion. Brown vomit came out of Carr’s mouth, accompanied by a terrible cry.

‘He will live, won’t he?’ Agatha asked Poe with a terrified look.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can’t you help him?’

‘I don’t know what poison it is. But even if I knew, there’s little I can do here. We can only hope it wasn’t a fatal dose.’

*

The same night, half past two in the morning.

Carr died lying on the bed in his room.

5

Everybody was too exhausted to say anything. It wasn’t fatigue they were suffering from, it was something closer to paralysis.

It was different from what had happened to Orczy: this time someone had suffered, collapsed and died a horrible death in front of their eyes. The visceral, vicious breakdown of everyday life had numbed their senses.

Agatha and Leroux stared into space with half-opened mouths, their minds elsewhere. Van kept sighing, his head resting on his hands. Poe, his eyes fixed on the window, didn’t once reach for his cigarette case. The look on Ellery’s face never changed, like a
Nō
mask with its eyes closed.

No moonlight came in from the skylight.

Occasionally light from the lighthouse cut through the darkness. The light of the oil lamp flickered as if it were alive. The monotonous rhythm of the waves could be heard, coming and going, coming and going.

‘Let’s get this over with. I want to sleep.’

Ellery spoke, barely able to open his sleepy eyes.

‘Agreed.’

Poe replied sluggishly, after which the other three seemed to recover.

‘The only thing I can tell you is that some kind of poison was used. I don’t know the type of poison.’

‘Can’t you make a rough guess?’

‘Well, maybe.’ Poe frowned deeply. ‘Based on how fast it acted, I think it’s a very strong poison. It caused shortness of breath and convulsions, so there is a good chance it was a neurotoxin. Common poisons that fall under that category are potassium cyanide, strychnine, and atropine. It might also have been nicotine, arsenic or arsenous acid. But atropine and nicotine would cause dilation of the pupils, and I didn’t see that. Cyanide would have caused a unique smell—you know, the so-called smell of almonds. But I didn’t detect that either. So it was probably strychnine, or some sort of arsenic or arsenous acid.’

The six half-drunk cups were still on the table. Agatha had been staring at them while listening to Poe’s explanation, but now she suddenly burst out laughing.

‘That means that I’m the only candidate for the murderer.’

‘Yes, Agatha,’ Ellery replied dryly. ‘Was it really you?’

‘Would you believe me if I told you it wasn’t me?’

‘That’d be unreasonable.’

‘I guessed as much.’

The two laughed silently. Everyone, especially they themselves, noticed the bizarre, abnormal tone of their conversation.

‘Would you two stop it?’ reprimanded Poe in a low, grim voice, after which he put a cigarette in his mouth and offered his birch wood cigarette case to Ellery.