Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen. Ellery Queen
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near the victim's house around that time. This substantiates the first confession.
5. This court has considered the evidence, and come to the following decision. The court concludes that there is insufficient evidence of guilt and, in accordance with Article 336 of the Criminal Actions Law, pronounces a verdict of not guilty.
6
A year passed. Naomi Harajima was in the habit of reading legal volumes during his free time. One night, as he glanced through Studies of Not-Guilty Verdicts by the English judge James Hind, his eyes locked on an arresting section. He sat bolt upright in his chair. He read on and experienced an unpleasant thumping in his chest.
In 1923, Peter Cammerton, a worker in a sail factory in Manchester, England, was arrested and charged with murdering a wealthy widow, Mrs. Hammersham, and then setting fire to her home. Because he was in need of money, Cammerton planned to kill her and steal whatever he could. Going to her house around seven in the evening, he struck her several times in the face with an iron rod, about fifty centimeters long. He then strangled her with his leather belt, took one hundred and fifty pounds in cash, along with some jewelry from her room, and fled.
To conceal traces of his act, he returned about nine in the evening, intending to burn her house. Lighting a kerosene lamp, he placed it on a book atop the bureau. Half of the lamp-base projected over the edge of the book. The lamp leaned because of unstable support. On the floor, he piled waste paper and clothing, which would ignite when the lamp fell. The fire would spread to the entire house. He knew the lamp would tumble when a freight train passed on tracks behind Mrs. Hammersham's house in the next hour. The ground and house foundation trembled whenever a train came along. Three hours later, the house was in flames. Firetrucks raced to the scene. They were unable to extinguish the blaze.
Peter Cammerton was arrested soon after. He confessed, but later denied his confession. He was pronounced not guilty through lack of evidence.
Was Peter Cammerton, in fact, the person who robbed and killed the woman and set fire to the house?
There were no fingerprints or other objective evidence to link him with the crime. More, there was little circumstantial evidence to establish his guilt. Many of his friends testified that he had said and done nothing unusual between the time of the crime and his arrest. On the day of the murder, he had taken a pleasure trip to London. He returned eagerly to Manchester, knowing full well he would undergo a police investigation. This spoke in his favor.
Cammerton confessed to the police, but later denied the confession, claiming he had been coerced into making it. The court uncovered no foundation for coercion and ruled the confession acceptable as evidence.
But close examination of the confession, in comparison with other evidence, revealed serious discrepancies. In the confession, he said Mrs. Hammersham first opened the door only a crack. He had waited to strike her with the iron bar when she put her whole face out of the door. Two days after, he claimed she invited him into the house and that they sat opposite each other and talked. He waited for her to be off her guard and then struck her.
When he struck her was a point of major importance. Cammerton would not forget such a major action. Why would he lie? This conflict of statements was difficult to understand.
At first, Cammerton said he struck Mrs. Hammersham once in the face with the iron bar. Two days later, he said it had been twice. One week later, he claimed he struck her with all his might once and that, as she lowered.her head, he hit her again four or five times. A medical expert said the condition of the bones in the victim's face verified the assumption that the attack really consisted of only one blow.
So, what Cammerton said later also did not agree with his original confession. Lapse of memory was unthinkable. Increasing the number of times he struck the victim could scarcely be to the defendant's advantage. Still, there was little reason to suspect him of deliberately falsifying. All of this cast serious doubt on the veracity of the initial confession.
Immediately upon arrest, the police confronted Cammerton with the steel rod and asked if he'd ever seen it. He said he thought his fingerprints would be on it. He seemed to recall the rod, but there had been several where he picked up the weapon. He could not be certain. Holding the rod, he placed it under his right arm, measured its length, and finally said there could be no mistake—it was the one he had used.
The wound in the victim's face was measured and found to be three times as wide as the rod (2.5 centimeters). This meant that the rod could not be the murder weapon. Why had Cammerton claimed it was? Would the real killer be unable to recognize his weapon? The fact that Cammerton claimed the rod as the weapon and also mentioned fingerprints awakened the possibility that he identified the weapon to please the police, even though he knew it was unrelated to the crime. Why would he do this?
Investigations failed to reveal traces of the kerosene lamp on the floor by the bureau. If it had been there, even though it may not have started the fire, it could scarcely have been overlooked. Had there been no lamp? Many questions remained unanswered. The judge pronounced the defendant not guilty, due to insufficient evidence.
Finished reading this passage, Harajima felt as if the words on the page had leaped out and struck him in the face. The two cases closely resembled each other. Coincidence? It was too close for that. A strong gut feeling told him Torao Ueki had read the same book.
From eighteen to twenty-five, Torao Ueki had worked in a second-hand book store, opening the noodle shop only after getting married.
Harajima checked a copy of the case record, found the name of the book store. He then called a book collector friend, and learned the store specialized in legal volumes. They would certainly have Hind's Studies of Not-Guilty Verdicts, which had been translated into Japanese before World War II. As an employee of the shop, Ueki would have had ample time to read it.
It is not easy for a criminal to escape the police. Many criminals have been executed or imprisoned because they have become entangled in their own clever subterfuges. Those who do escape detection often lead lives of anxiety and suffering in some ways worse than a long prison sentence. The ideal thing is to allow the police to make an arrest, then be declared not guilty. When he decided to kill Jin Yamagishi, the moneylender who had caused him much grief, Torao Ueki must have considered this and recalled the volume he once read in a second-hand bookshop.
In the Manchester case, Peter Cammerton claimed that a piece of iron rod the wrong size was the murder weapon. Believing him, the police admitted the wrong item as evidence. Ueki had done the same thing with the firewood. After his arrest, Cammerton identified the iron rod, measured its length under his arm, and suggested his fingerprints would be on it. Ueki had done something very similar with the piece of wood. Learning much from the English murder case, Ueki made self-incriminating statements in his confession, which he later denied. He then created the impression that the confession was made under police pressure.
As the inspector said, Ueki had been cooperative and friendly. The police fell for this and were too pleased with the way things were going to substantiate their evidence. Both Cammerton and Ueki changed the number of times they claimed to have struck their victims. In each case, only one blow had been used. Ueki's knowledge of Yamagishi's habit of never offering cushions to business customers was put to his own advantage when he said he'd been offered such a cushion and had returned it to its corner pile. He had employed the trick of leaving his own promissory notes in the cashbox to convince police he would not have done so if he'd been the murderer. It made no difference that the notes weren't destroyed. Yamagishi had no children, no relatives for heirs. At his death, all debts would be canceled.
What would the police think if they knew Harajima's notions of the truth? In court, when Ueki indignantly accused them of coercing a confession, tricking him with leading questions, bribing him, why had the police allowed it to end in a draw? Had they given up before Ueki's tremendous brass? It was true, when he observed the staunch courage with which Ueki testified, Harajima had become convinced the confession had not been freely given.
Harajima was very nervous. He paced back and forth in his study. At length, trying to calm himself, he removed a slender volume from the bookshelf and thumbed through the pages.
"Never