Chapter 13:The Truth
Inspector Tazuka looked around the cluttered attic. "Is this a joke? This looks exactly the same as the last time I saw it."
"Almost the same," Saguru said. "You see, we found something here that showed the truth of how Edmund Kett was killed."
"But Kett was clearly killed by Alex Rider there," Tazuka protested. "I know you're friends with him, Hakuba-san, but consider the facts. He was seen entering the library with the victim and then found beside his body, in a room whose doors and windows were all locked and bolted."
"Yes, but ya see, there was somethin' 'bout that scene which didn't make sense, if Alex really was Kett's killer," Heiji said. "Somethin' all four a' us picked up on." Tazuka still looked confused.
"It was Kett's corpse," Masumi said. "It was warm inside the library, but Edmund Kett's body was already completely cold by the time we got there."
Saguru took up explaining. "When a person dies, their body will drop from 37 degrees Celsius to whatever the ambient temperature is at the rate of around 1.5 degrees Celsius per hour. We entered the library to investigate at 12:03pm. If Alex really killed Kett at around 11:30 am or so, his body should have been around 36 degrees Celsius, especially given the warmth of the room. But instead it was much colder than that—colder than the air inside the library, in fact."
"Which meant two things: that Edmund Kett was not killed inside the library at all, and he was not killed around eleven but much, much earlier." Masumi pointed to the large wooden rocking chair Alex was standing besides. "And that proves it."
"But that's impossible!" Inspector Tazuka exclaimed. "I hate to repeat myself, but Kett was seen walking into the library by multiple people! He couldn't do that if he were a dead man already, could he?" Still he walked across the attic to the rocking chair, peering down at it in puzzlement.
"No, he couldn't," Conan piped up in agreement. "So the man Raina and Ines Suarez saw was not Edmund Kett, but an impersonator. Someone who lured Alex into the library as Kett, making sure they were both seen, and then knocked him out and staged the scene to look like Alex had killed him. Someone who then carefully directed how the body was found to create the illusion of a locked room."
Twin metallic clinks sounded as a pair of handcuffs snapped around wrist and rocking chair arm. Conan's eyes shone a brilliant blue.
"Isn't that right, Inspector Tazuka? Or should I say, Vermouth—GET HER!"
All four detectives had worked out that Inspector Tazuka was actually an impostor not long after seeing the setup in the library. After they found the traces of blood on the engawa Conan and Heiji informed Alex, Saguru and Masumi that this pretender was an extremely dangerous criminal they knew of. They also said that they had called for backup, but didn't give much more details than that. Sometimes Alex really despaired of the detectives' love of using big dramatic summation gatherings to explain what the hell was going on. In a way, it reminded him of a super-villain's need to monologue his plans to whoever the captive audience was (usually him).
So Alex waited rather impatiently as their plan to draw the impostor Inspector up to the attic room unfurled. Masumi fibbed that the rocking chair besides Alex was a vital piece of evidence, causing the fake Inspector to draw closer to it—and Alex. As soon as the Inspector's attention was diverted, Alex took out the hidden pair of handcuffs Saguru had given him earlier and cuffed one of the Inspector's wrists to the arm of the heavy, bulky rocking chair.
The man glanced down at his wrists, one imprisoned by the steel cuffs and the other by Alex's firm grip.
"—Isn't that right, Inspector Tazuka? Or should I say, Vermouth?—"
Vermouth stared straight into Alex's eyes, and smiled.
"—GET HER!" Conan yelled, and the others rushed forward.
"Not bad, Alex Rider," an unknown woman spoke out of the Inspector's mouth, smooth and amused and softly enough that only Alex could hear her. Then her voice deepened into a tone and timbre Alex had last heard in a forest in Lymstock, and before that on Air Force One. "No wonder Gregorovitch is so fond of you."
Alex froze at the mention of Yassen's name, spoken in the assassin's voice. Vermouth took advantage of his shock, drove her knee into his stomach, twisted her wrist out of his weakened grip and kicked him back towards the others.
Then Vermouth contorted her left arm behind her back, produced a concealed revolver, and aimed it at Saguru with one hand. They all froze.
"Don't move," she said softly. Her right hand fiddled with a steel strip and was freed from its cuff a moment later. She walked to the ladder in the southern corner, keeping Saguru in her aim the entire time.
"You wouldn't shoot him," Conan said, moving closer to her despite frantic gestures from Masumi and Alex. "Hakuba's the son of the Superintendent General; your Boss wouldn't be pleased at the attention hurting him would bring."
"A good point, Cool Guy," Vermouth conceded as she climbed up the ladder with one arm. "But what about Akai's little sister?" Her aim switched from Saguru to Masumi, and she fired.
Conan dove towards the girl as Masumi fell to the ground. "Sera-san!"
She propped herself up almost instantly, bleeding from a scratch across one cheek but otherwise unharmed. "Never mind me, get her!" She pointed to the roof. Vermouth had gone up and then toppled the ladder so they couldn't follow.
Alex ran to the window on the northwest side, grabbing some rope along the way. He climbed onto the wooden window ledge, and used the rope to help him clamber up to the tower's steepled roof top.
Vermouth was already there. She heard his steps and turned to face him, a Cheshire smile on her lips. Sometimes during his climb she had ditched her Inspector Tazuka disguise. Her new face was beautiful and vaguely familiar (he thought he might have seen it on TV or in a magazine before), with clear blue eyes and long hair the same pale gold as Marie Semple's—and Alex suddenly realized that it must have been her and not Marie who Ines Suarez had seen on the morning after the storm. Her revolver was held loosely at her side, and she made no move to aim it at him.
Alex half-stood on the slanted shingles, keeping his knees bent and center of gravity low. He forced himself to focus on the woman in front of him instead of the vast, empty air surrounding them. They were four stories up, plus another hundreds of yards above sea level. If he slipped, there was a long way to fall.
"Who are you? And how do you know Yassen Gregorovitch?" he asked, calculating the space between them. Even if he could make it to her before she got a shot off, it would be too easy for one or both of them to stumble and trip over the edge.
The cornflower eyes were bright and gleeful. "So you know him too," she said, Yassen-voiced once more. "Me? I was the one who woke him up."
"You stole him from MI6's hospital?"
"Both breakout and outbreak," she nodded carelessly.
Alex's mind recoiled at the thought of the agents she had consigned to an excruciating death. Then he saw the tip of a black-haired head poke up from the hole in the roof behind her. "Why?"
She shrugged. "He is rather unique, and MI6 wasn't doing anything useful with him, so why not?"
Conan leapt up to the roof with a clatter. Vermouth saw him and backed up, all the way to the end of the corner, the thin tiled beam all that separated her from the long drop to the deep blue sea below.
"You don't have any darts or soccer balls left, Cool Guy," she said.
Conan glared. "You were the smuggler who got away. The one with bleached hair. And Spider was working with, or for you too, wasn't he?"
"He screwed it all up rather badly, didn't he? If he hadn't been killed, I may have had to punish him myself," she said. "Goodbye for now, silver bullets." Vermouth gave them a look of twisted fondness, and leapt backwards off the edge of the roof. She fell for a few seconds, and then a strip of long black fabric blossomed out above her and formed into what looked like a paraglider.
Conan whipped out his phone. "Jodie-sōsakan, Vermouth jumped off the top of the tower with some sort of paraglider. Tell your agents to watch out; she's armed. It looks like she's heading south towards the middle of the island…"
"Who the hell is that woman?" Alex asked in frustration once he hung up. "You obviously know her."
Conan grimaced. "It's a long story." Alex glared at him, and the boy sighed. "We can have a private talk later, when this is all over. First though, we need to finish this business with the murders and the Delacey heirs. Let's get back down."
"Edmund Kett found out about Masako Hirokawa's smuggling," Heiji explained to the confused gathering after they returned one Inspector short. "We think he tried to blackmail her for it, but whatever the reason he needed to be silenced. The man you all knew as Geoffrey Geskel was in fact a criminal and assassin called Spider, here to help Masako Hirokawa with the most recent load of smuggled goods. She asked him to kill Kett for her, and he complied."
"But two problems showed up. One was the storm, which flooded the tunnel the smugglers were using. The other was us detectives. Spider realized that Hakuba recognized him, and would probably spend the night being a nuisance to his plans, possibly with our help as well. He decided to call in a colleague for back-up, but due to the storm she wasn't able to arrive until the next morning, by which time he was already dead."
"We think Spider sneaked into Edmund Kett's room through the room's courtyard window and killed him," Masumi continued. "We were keeping a watch on the hallway, but the night was too dark. After killing Kett he went out the window, moved across one room and attacked Hakuba-san. We all gave chase, leaving the hallway unguarded, and at some point he circled back and moved Kett's body up into the attic, where he stored it in one of the fridges there." They had found strands of Kett's hair inside the storage fridge earlier.
Saguru took over: "Spider's colleague is a master of disguise. She came here under the guise of Inspector Tazuka, and after meeting Masako-san she wandered through the house, supposedly to secure Geskel's room. While everyone else was gathering on the ground floor, she disguised herself as Kett, lured Alex into the library on a pretext and knocked him out. She then fetched Kett's body from the attic, arranged it beside him so it looked like Alex killed him, locked and bolted the courtyard window, and then left the library."
"The stage was now ready for a clever illusion. 'Inspector Tazuka' pretended that she couldn't open the library door and sent Marie Semple around the hallway to see what was going on through the window there. In reality, as soon as Marie turned the corner the fake Inspector entered the library and locked and bolted the door behind her. Then she simply moved right beside the window, so that when Marie looked from her position in the hall she could see how the library door and window were bolted, and not that there was an extra person hiding in the room."
Marie frowned, thinking it over. "But then how did this person get out?"
"She waited until you left your hallway post—she could check through a small gap in the curtains without being seen, then climbed out the window, closing the frame with the iron bar extended out so it would appear bolted from a distance. Then she moved along the roof over to Kett's room, and re-entered the house through the unlocked window there. You had to travel halfway around the house—she only needed to move one room over. As long as she was quick, it was easy for 'Inspector Tazuka' to be waiting impatiently outside by the time you ran back to the library."
"And once the door was broken down, Marie, all she needed to do was to keep you from taking a close look at the not-properly-barred window. Not a difficult task—you already expected it to be barred, and there were two bodies lying on the ground as a distraction."
"The Inspector sent me to fetch Masako and call emergency services right after we broke down the door," Marie recalled.
"A moment was all that was needed for the Inspector to bar the windows properly again. And voila; a locked room, complete with both witness testimony and photographic evidence that Alex was the only person who could have killed Kett."
There was a slightly dazed silence as the others processed all the information they were just given. "Wait, so who is this woman then?" Ines Suarez asked. "Being able to disguise herself like that and then setting up such a complicated frame job… you're making her sound like some sort of super criminal or something."
"Oh, the police will catch up to her, don't worry!" Conan chirped. Saguru narrowed his eyes — they were definitely going to have a chat later. "But don't you want to hear about who's going to get the Delacey fortune?"
As expected, mention of the reason they had all come here in the first place distracted the heirs from all thoughts of Vermouth. "The riddle's really been solved?" Marie asked, wide-eyed.
"Yes it has." Saguru laid out the sheet of paper with the three strange shapes on the table in front of everyone. "I thought that the black and white squares perhaps spelled out a message," he said. "I was wrong; the way they were distributed had nothing to do with anything. It was a rather clever diversion which Mr. Delacey came up with; most people would have spent all their time trying to break the 'code' and gave up when they couldn't get anything meaningful no matter how they tried."
"You see, where the black and white squares were placed wasn't important," Masumi continued. "The true solution lay in how many of them there were."
"We have the sheet here. As you can see, the first shape is a square made up of smaller squares, thirty-two of each colour. The second is made up of thirty-six black squares and fifty-two white ones. And in the last row, the numbers five and six are spelled using twelve black squares and twenty white ones."
Mrs. Scialdone and the other adults looked blank. "Let's start with the easiest one first!" Conan piped up. "What's square, and made from thirty-two black squares and thirty-two white ones?"
"A chessboard," Ines Suarez breathed out after a moment of thought.
"Exactly. The next one is harder, but follows the same principles. What object has thirty-six black pieces and fifty-two white ones?" The silence lasted longer this time. Saguru added: "And some of the pieces look like the overall shape there—a rectangle with a smaller rectangle sticking out of it."
Ling Gengxin straightened, his dark eyes widening. "A piano! Of course—it's in the shape of a piano key."
"Yes. You two were searching the attic before, you probably saw this in one of the boxes but dismissed it," Masumi said as she brought out a box, from which she took out the broken keyboard.
"And this was in the cabinet downstairs, along with the other board games," Heiji continued, taking out a chessboard.
"The last puzzle is probably the hardest to solve, but I think we all solved it first. Probably because we were playing with one for hours the first day we were here," Conan said, retrieving the final object from the box. It was round, and covered with twelve black pentagons and twenty white hexagons.
Raina burst out laughing: it was a soccer ball.
Using a craft knife and screwdriver from a toolbox, they dismantled the keyboard, cut a thin slit on one of the patches of the soccer ball, and pried the individual squares off of the chessboard's backing. Tucked away in each of the objects was a long thin strip of paper, which when placed together formed a single document with Delacey's signature at the bottom. Saguru scanned over the legal jargon and landed on the relevant passage:
…I leave the sum of this fund (less the finder's prize) to be divided equally between the legal progeny of Edmund Kett, Elena Semple née Kett, Gengxin "Jerry" Ling, and Ines Suarez, defined as such before the end of this current calendar year…
It made sense, in a way, Saguru thought. Terence Delacey had badly wanted children. Even after the three he adopted had left or disappointed him, he simply shifted his hopes onto the next generation.
Raina's jaw dropped. "But that means…Marie, that means you!"
"Her and Ling Gengxin, I believe," Saguru said. When Ling looked confused, he explained: "This says the money will go to any of Delacey's grandchildren-by-adoption living or born before the end of this year, if I've read it correctly. You said your first child is due in November, correct?"
"Yes, that is valid," Mrs. Scialdone agreed. "The money will be divided evenly between Ms. Semple and Mr. Ling's child. Unless Ms. Suarez also manages to acquire a child before the end of the year, in which case it will be split three ways."
Ines snorted. "You mean either I get knocked up or somehow go through the entire adoption process before December? No thanks, I wasn't planning on having children, and I'm certainly not going to get one just to inherit a pile of cash. I don't care if that's what Mr. Delacey wanted—that's a crappy reason to raise a kid for."
Ling looked at Mrs. Scialdone. "Can't we agree to give some part of our portion to Ines? I don't want her to be the only one left out of the inheritance."
Mrs. Scialdone shook her head. "I'm sorry, the fund can only be divided according to the terms of the will."
"But the prize for finding the will, that's still open, right?" Conan piped up.
"Yes, now that you've mentioned it." The woman looked around at the gathered teenagers. "So which one of you solved this puzzle first?"
Saguru, Alex, Masumi and Heiji all looked at each other. Then by silent consensus their gazes went to Conan. "Conan-kun did," Heiji said. "I think he figured it out right after our soccer game the first night we were here, didn't you?"
Mrs. Scialdone stared, obviously skeptical, but no one contradicted Heiji. "Then how are we supposed to figure out who to give the finder's prize to? He doesn't represent anyone, does he?"
"Of course I do!" Conan said, smiling beatifically. "I'm representing Ines-neechan!"
After a pause, Ling said slowly: "Yes, that's right. I agreed to work with Hattori and Hattori alone. That is what was written down in the contract."
"And you agree that this child had been representing you?" Mrs. Scialdone asked Ines Suarez. She gave a dazed nod. "I guess that's decided, then."
Ling Gengxin leaned back with a grin on his face, then leaned forward for a high-five from Ines, then almost fell when she wrapped him in a tight hug instead. Raina took up Marie's hands in her own and swung them, beaming a smile like the sun at her friend, who was clearly still processing the fact that she was a heiress now. The atmosphere was almost jubilant.
What a pity it was, Saguru thought, that they couldn't stop here and leave thing like this.
"Unfortunately, we're still not finished," he said.
"When we started we said there were three mysteries, didn't we? The death of Edmund Kett and the solution to Mr. Delacey's puzzle has been explained, but there is still one more truth to reveal: who killed the assassin known as Spider, and how."
"Yes, we've figured that out too. What's more, Spider's killer is standing here in this room, right now."
A/N: I ran out of time to make my final round of editing checks, but hopefully there aren't any major blunders here.
As always, thank you all for reading!
