Copyright

HARPER

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

FIRST EDITION

© Tom Cutler 2015

Illustrations © Bart Aalbers

Match diagrams © Alexei Penfold

Cover layout design Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Tom Cutler asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008157210

Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008157203

Version: 2016-02-25

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Dr John H. Watson,

‘the one fixed point in a changing age’.

Epigraph

‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’

Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of the Four (1890),

by Arthur Conan Doyle

About the Author

Tom Cutler began his career with numerous false starts, as a teacher, set designer, speechwriter, printer, wine waiter, City drone and radio reporter, before settling down in book and magazine publishing. After building up extensive scar tissue he finally threw caution to the wind and launched himself as a humorous writer upon a reading public that had done nothing to hurt him.

Tom’s books cover a variety of subjects, including language, sex and music. Among his several international bestsellers are, A Gentleman’s Bedside Book and the Amazon number-one blockbuster, 211 Things A Bright Boy Can Do. His work has been translated into more languages than you can shake a stick at. Tom has written for the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Huffington Post and BBC radio, and he has a regular column in The Chap magazine.

He is a practising magician and member of the Magic Circle, as well as a detective story fan and longstanding Sherlock Holmes aficionado. A lifetime’s experience as a very devious bugger has helped him in the writing of this book.

Tom lives at the seaside, where he enjoys kicking pebbles.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

LATERAL THINKING CLASSICS

The sailor who ate the cream tea

The Wishing Cup of Keriput

Murder in the snow

The Yorkshire factory

The riddle of the Burns supper

The annoying computer password

Terry’s girlfriends

The lorry driver slaying

The magic bucket

The impossible brothers

Arms and the child

The window cleaner in the sky

The troublesome signpost

The Knightsbridge barber

The fastest beard in the world

The high window

The confusing coach trip

The pilot who wore a dress

Picking up the children from school

The car in the river

The sad end of Felicity Ffolkes

The blind beggar

A birthday message from the Queen

Talking rubbish

The Flood

Hospital assault

The two Italians

House painting made simple

The absent-minded taxi driver

Plane crash in no man’s land

The strange story of Antony and Cleopatra

Bird strike

Contradictio in adjecto

Unconscious sexism

The short week

The man in the lift

Mary’s mum

The deserted prairie cabin

The two prime ministers

LOCKED ROOMS AND IMPOSSIBLE MURDERS

The Tea-leaf

The Adventure of the Speckled Band

The Glass Coffin: an Inspector Jibson Mystery

A Game of Roulette

The Two Bottles of Relish

The Problem of Thor Bridge

LATERAL THINKING MYSTERIES FROM REAL LIFE

Arsenic and Old Luce

The rather-short-very-long baseball game

The curious case of dihydrogen monoxide

The Mary Celeste affair

The story of Big Ben

The Euston Road poisonings

Kentucky blues

Uncle Bob’s magic pipe

The incredible story of Kaspar Hauser

The great Epping Jaundice mystery

The fastest submarine in the world

LATERAL THINKING BETCHAS AND GOTCHAS

The cocktail glass

Nailed it!

Five into four will go

The kiss

Twelve minus two equals two

Nine plus nothing makes ten

Betting edge

The house move

Blind date

Magnetic matches

The glass mousetraps

Fire under water

Saucer sorcery

How to put your head where your bottom should be

Bend me your ears

The easy restaurant bill-dodging betcha

Thinking outside the box

THE SOLUTIONS

Also by Tom Cutler

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If you put your lateral thinking cap on you’ll realise that the more people I put in my acknowledgments the more books I will sell. This is because everyone I mention will buy at least one copy as a souvenir, and more to give to their friends to make them envious. Maybe The Book of Acknowledgements will be the next big seller.

Anyway, I’d like to offer a genuine thank-you to the following people. First, my editor at HarperCollins, Jack Fogg, whose idea this book was, and who first approached me to write it. Second, my always-encouraging agent Laura Morris, for sensible advice, several disgraceful lunches, and at least one wild champagne party that I only dimly remember. Third, my illustrator Bart Aalbers, who has added an exuberant twang to the whole shebang.

Hats off to two old friends, Terry Guyatt, who first told me the story of the man with two girlfriends and gave me some early advice and encouragement, and John Kirby, for checking in regularly.

I thank my pal Chris Tuohy, who alerted me to the joke I used in ‘The annoying computer password’ mystery, and my new friend David Johnson, for sitting me down in the sunshine at the Yacht Club and listening to my early ideas. Cheers also to another new friend, Patricia Hammond, for sending me the most lovely and unexpected fan letter I’ve ever received.

I’m indebted to two excellent pub landlords, Richard at The Old Star and Mark at The Royal Sovereign, for providing me with old-fashioned liquid cheer when I was at low tide. I compliment Rob Sr and Rob Jr, Frank and Matt, and Richard, on their hard work, and I especially thank Arthur, for his zest, good humour, craftsmanship and strange unearthly whistling. His ‘Greensleeves’ is like something out of The Twilight Zone.

I’m grateful to the experts in the Magic Circle library, and at West Sussex Libraries, for providing, in the first case, information, and, in the second, refuge when the six people in the previous paragraph were making too much noise.

This book would have been a shadow of itself without the inspiring work of the towering Martin Gardner: mathematician, magician, sceptic, wit, puzzle collector and abundant author. I commend Michael Howell and Peter Ford for their superb 1985 page-turner, The Ghost Disease and Twelve Other Stories of Detective Work in the Medical Field, which filled me in on the Epping Jaundice, the Euston Road poisonings and the mysterious ailment that felled Clare Boothe Luce. I bow down also to Paul Sloane and Des MacHale, whose years of painstaking collecting and publishing of lateral thinking puzzles helped me track down some of the quirkiest, and I propose a resounding three cheers to those anonymous geniuses who came up with them all in the first place.

Finally, I thank Marianne, as usual, for everything.

FOREWORD

When people talk of the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction they’re usually referring to the 1920s and 30s, but some authorities believe that we are currently going through another ‘Golden Age’. The range, profile and quality of contemporary crime fiction are probably as high as they have ever been.

But one thing the current Golden Age lacks – which was very much present in the previous one – is a sense of fun.

As embittered middle-aged Inspectors with drink and relationship problems try to identify serial killers, as forensic pathologists sift through decomposing organs, and as dour Scandinavian detectives confront the unalterable bleakness of human existence, crime fiction has lost its traditional link with high spirits. Noir is the new black, and that’s just something readers have to take on board.

I’m sure, at universities all over the world, doctorates are even now being written about the reasons for this change. Whodunits in which the puzzle was paramount came to a natural end because there were no more puzzles left that hadn’t already been done. The country houses, perfectly designed for weekend house parties for guests with ‘dark secrets in their past’ and offering a wonderful range of domestics to act as witnesses, informants and suspects, did not survive the Second World War. No longer could their owners ‘get the staff’, and many were converted into hotels, boys’ prep schools and secret military training centres.

The great carnage of the war also made the Golden Age tradition of treating death as a kind of parlour game seem a little tasteless. Publications like The Baffle Book, a collection of murder puzzles very popular in the 1930s, appeared to be offensively trivial.

Another development, the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, meant crime novels were left with a lot more loose ends to be unravelled. No longer could the pointing finger of Hercule Poirot at the perpetrator in the library signal the permanent end of a case, with the hangman’s noose tying everything up in a neat bow. What had been black and white moved on to a colour-chart of greys.

So it was no surprise that crime fiction grew darker.

I’m sure I’m not alone in slightly regretting that change. ‘Murder as parlour game’ still holds a strong attraction, and it is no surprise how many books from the original Golden Age are now being successfully reprinted. Murder Mystery Dinners are a hugely popular form of entertainment, and new generations of young people are introduced every day to the fun of Cluedo.

It is firmly within that tradition of having fun with crime that this book by Tom Cutler fits. He has taken the original idea of selecting lateral thinking challenges and writing them up as mini detective stories, then asking the reader to work out the solution. The Crime Puzzle Book, thought to be dead after 1939, has been reborn in a new form for the 21st century.

I’m sure a great many readers will relish the challenges that it presents to them.

Simon Brett

Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger award-winner

and President of the Detection Club

INTRODUCTION

Two men are playing tennis together. After an exhausting three-set match, both of them win. How can this be? All will be explained in a moment.

The reason lateral thinking problems are so tricky, and such fun to solve, is that we tend to think in a routine way. Our ingrained habits, inhibitions and false assumptions hinder us in winkling out the less apparent possibilities tucked away inside the lateral thinking shell. But if we can look at the problem from another perspective, the answer often pops out. As Sherlock Holmes tells Dr Watson, ‘When once your point of view is changed the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.’

It’s like the joke about the man who dies and goes to hell. He sees an ugly old villain making love to a beautiful young blonde. When he objects that this is hardly a harsh enough fate, the Devil replies, ‘Who are you to question that woman’s punishment?’

The term ‘lateral thinking’ was coined in 1967 by a man who liked to use an overhead projector named Edward de Bono (the man is named Edward de Bono, not the projector). Edward de Bono has said that the mind can see only what it is prepared to see, but that we can solve some otherwise tricky problems if we look at things from the side – which is what ‘lateral’ means.

For example, if we hear that Dr Alex Bernard is a vicar we will probably make several unconscious assumptions about him. But, as Sherlock Holmes also said, ‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,’ for Dr Alex Bernard is a woman. Thinking that a vicar named Alex is a man is not sexism, as some people would insist, but just a forgivable mistake, because if we didn’t make assumptions based on our experience of the way the world normally works we would be so abstract that we wouldn’t be able to laugh at jokes or get on with people at parties.

In this book I’ve decided to make the most of the combination of riddle and story that most lateral thinking problems embody. Solving these mysteries won’t require unusual intelligence or imagination, and all the information you need is there in the tale – though the solution may be hidden in plain sight by the way in which the puzzle has been framed. There is no cheating, but there is, of course, a fair sprinkling of red herrings.

The first section of the book contains celebrated standards from the lateral thinking hall of fame. There’s everything from the immortal ‘Man in the lift’ to the baffling ‘Murder in the snow’, along with some less familiar, and a few entirely original, problems.

It is a feature of lateral thinking mysteries that they involve lots of death and destruction, with a fair number of hangings, shootings and suicides. What is so alluring about all this violence I can’t say, but I’ve kept it all in, along with a few laughs, I hope.

Besides the classics, I’ve included a section featuring some of the finest ‘locked-room’ mysteries and ‘impossible’ crimes from detective fiction, adapted to the lateral thinking format. Some of the very best head-scratchers from masters such as Lord Dunsany and Arthur Conan Doyle are included.

A Real Life section features mysterious true events such as the curious case of the Mary Celeste, the dihydrogen monoxide affair and the riddle of the Epping Jaundice.

Finally, there is a part featuring bar betchas and gotchas, with lateral thinking matchstick puzzles, counter-intuitive gags and unlosable bets.

The Pilot Who Wore a Dress makes great solo reading but you can also use it to challenge a roomful of players. You can even pass the book round and take turns reading out the stories. Apart from the monkey business behind the betchas, which is included with the bet, you will discover the fun and quirky solutions to the mysteries in their own section at the back of the book. They are as compelling as the enigmas they explain.

I hope you find these lateral thinking mysteries as much fun to solve as I did to write. Good luck.

Oh, by the way, if you’re still wondering about those two tennis players, the answer is that they are partners playing a doubles match. Of course!

LATERAL THINKING CLASSICS

‘These little grey cells. It is up to them.’

Agatha Christie

The sailor who ate the cream tea

The mystery

On the western outskirts of Plymouth lies the little seaside town of St Havet. It has a striped lighthouse, a rocky foreshore and a few red cliffs, which fossil-hunters say are a goldmine of echinoids and ammonites.

The town’s pretty high street has the tang of salt in its nostrils, and several old-fashioned shops line the cobbled roadway: a haberdashery, a fishmonger’s where the gulls circle, and a greengrocer’s. There is a friendly pub, The Lion and Lobster, and a charming tearoom – Marianne’s – famous for its homemade clotted cream and giant scones. The tearoom boasts lace tablecloths, an excitement of doilies, and those things that look like three flying saucers on a stick, which they put cakes on at teatime. On the walls hang faded photographs of the skiffs of Worlock’s Hole.

One afternoon, not long ago, the bell on the door of Marianne’s tearoom tinkled brightly. A young man walked in and sat down in the sunshine by the window. He was the only customer. Daisy, the waitress, daughter of the late Marianne, and now sole owner of the establishment, greeted him with a warm smile.

After consulting the dainty menu for a minute the man caught her eye again. She approached the table and asked him what he would like. ‘One of your famous cream teas, please,’ he said.

Daisy wrote this down carefully in her notebook and bustled off to the kitchen, emerging in due course with a steaming brown teapot, and a blue cup and saucer from a different tea service. She handed her customer his pot of tea and retired again to the kitchen. After a minute she was back, staggering under a tray laden with two scones the size of half-bricks, half a pint of strawberry jam in a pretty bowl with a silver spoon, and a saucer piled high with yellow clotted cream.

With an air of great deliberation, the man removed the scones from the plate and, using the spoon, distributed exactly twelve dollops of cream around the circumference of the plate. He carefully placed a dollop of jam between each blob of cream. In the centre of the plate he placed a scone, which he carefully cut into four pieces, before slicing the second scone in half and putting it on the plate. He poured himself a cup of tea and painstakingly dunked the small pieces of quartered scone in the tea before eating them, one after the other. He dipped the two halves of the remaining scone in the jam, and then in the cream, going around the plate like a clock face, but he took care not to dunk them in his tea.

Daisy had been watching the man carefully and she approached the table. ‘So, Sir,’ she said, ‘I see you are a sailor.’

The problem

How did Daisy know that her customer with the curious eating habits was a sailor?

Tap here for the solution.

The Wishing Cup of Keriput

The mystery

Sir Humphrey Bumfreigh (1873–1979) was an Egyptologist and explorer who became famous around the world for his discovery in 1922 of the desert tomb of King Orang Tua Keriput.

His adventure began in 1913, when the wealthy aristocrat Lord Elpus employed Bumfreigh to supervise his ambitious efforts to find the Keriput tomb, whose whereabouts had until that time eluded archaeologists. They began excavations in the Valley of the Wasps on the east bank of the Nile, near Thebes (modern-day Luxor). But in January 1921, after eight expensive years of finding nothing but quite a lot of sand, Bumfreigh was told by Lord Elpus that he had one last chance to discover the lost tomb before he turned off the money tap at the end of the year.

It looked hopeless, but on 6 December 1921 Humphrey Bumfreigh made the find of his life. While scraping dispiritedly around the bottom of an old wall, he uncovered four large stone steps. Some hieroglyphs on the steps suggested to him that this was the top of a staircase leading down to King Keriput’s tomb.

Bumfreigh immediately sent Lord Elpus an excited wire begging him to come, and on 11 January 1922, with Elpus at his elbow, and using a knife that his grandmother had given him for his sixteenth birthday, Bumfreigh made ‘a bit of a hole up near the top of this old door’, and was able to peek into the room behind. By the light of a flickering candle he could see gold and ebony artefacts which had been placed there before the time of Jesus, and which he was the first man to see for more than 2,000 years.

The tomb proved to be more spectacular even than King Tut’s, and over the next few years thousands of objects were cleared and many were sold off to collectors and museums. The Egyptian locals warned of ‘the curse of the pharaohs’, which would, they claimed, be visited at once upon violators of the tomb. But Humphrey Bumfreigh’s death in 1979, from a seizure brought on by kissing one of his team of nurses at the age of 106, seemed not to bear this out.

Perhaps the most mysterious of the Keriput finds was discovered in the sand in front of the steps to the tomb. More modern than the ancient relics, it was a plain ceramic pot, which the press dubbed the Wishing Cup of Keriput. Around its rim it bore a mysterious Latin-looking inscription that read: ITI SAPIS SPOTANDA BIGO NÉ. Neither Sir Humphrey Bumfreigh, Lord Elpus, nor anybody else could make anything of it, and the great explorer went to his death not knowing what it meant.

The problem

Can you decipher the mysterious inscription around the top of the Wishing Cup of Keriput?

Tap here for the solution.

Murder in the snow

The mystery

Known as the ‘Big Freeze’, the winter of 1962/63 was one of the coldest and longest British winters ever documented. December had started foggy and London was in the middle of what would turn out to be its last pea-souper. Halfway through the month a cold snap brought snow, causing people to ready themselves for a white Christmas. They began in earnest to shop for presents.

It continued bitterly cold for the rest of Advent and over the Christmas holiday. Persistently heavy snow fell on Boxing Day and into the following day, as delighted children threw snowballs at their guffawing uncles.

By the end of the month a savage blizzard was sweeping across the country. Freezing gales sculpted the snow into twenty-foot drifts, blocking roads and burying steam trains up to their shoulders.

Wythenshawe in Cheshire was particularly badly hit, and it was here, on 20 January, that the papers reported a disturbing occurrence that had diverted the authorities from their road-clearing, burst-pipe-repairing and train-excavating duties.

Imagine the scene: the body of a man, dressed in a heavy coat over layers of clothing, has been spotted in the middle of a snow-covered field by some children coming home from school for their lunch. One of them, Charlie Shaver, braver perhaps than the rest, crosses the field to look at the body. The man’s face has been blasted away by something like a sawn-off shotgun, a weapon typical in country post office robberies around these parts. He is on his back in the snow, which is stained pink with his blood. There is no sign of a weapon.

Charlie races to the other side of the field and knocks on the door of his auntie, Ada Ferribridge. Ada, who had heard a single gunshot ring out about twenty minutes earlier, at once calls the police, who, keen to get away from shovelling their station forecourt, arrive at the scene with a good deal of important fuss.

They immediately recognise the body as that of local charmer and ladies’ man Raymond Trethewey. His manicured nails and fancy tattoo are known to all the regulars in the pub. Photographs are taken and the body is removed.

The autopsy report describes a short, very slight young fellow, in good nick but minus his appendix. He has died from a shotgun blast fired from below his chin, which has removed his previously handsome face.

Trethewey, it seems, had been on his way to the Cross In Hand pub in the high street, where he always goes for a lunchtime glass of beer with his next-door-neighbour and friend, the blacksmith Jack Ferrario. But today he hadn’t turned up.

Apart from young Charlie’s footprints going towards and away from the body, there is only one other set of marks, quickly identified as footprints made by the wellington boots habitually worn by Trethewey. These are expensive, specially commissioned boots. Though they look like normal wellingtons they have on their sole a handmade tread incorporating the victim’s initials, RWT.

Trethewy’s distinctive boot prints start at his front door and continue unbroken to the middle of the field, where his body lay. They are easy to track because of the monogram, which, up to the position of the dead body, has been very heavily trodden into the deep snow.

But none of this makes sense, because Trethewy is not wearing his famous boots. He has on instead a pair of totally unsuitable moccasins. Furthermore, the boot prints continue from the body in an unbroken line into a copse of trees between the field and the village high street, where they disappear, the snow having not penetrated the overgrown wood. Even odder, the prints beyond the body appear somewhat lighter and less deep, though still heavy enough.

The local police are quick to spot the problems. How can a man in light shoes walk into the middle of a field, leaving boot tracks, shoot himself in the face, and then continue on his merry way, taking his weapon with him?

Stirring a mug of Ada Ferribridge’s steaming tea, Sergeant Swainston remarks that the prints might actually be those of the murderer, who stealthily approached Trethewey, his feet muffled by the snow, shot him, and then continued into the wood, there disposing of the firearm. ‘So where are the victim’s footprints, then?’ asks a young constable, passing round some of Ada’s biscuits. To this Swainston has no answer so he strolls over to the pub to relieve himself of the several teas he has had that afternoon.

As he is emerging from the gents an old man in a cap motions him across. He tells Swainston that the previous day, as today, Trethewey was wearing nothing more than very wet moccasins on his feet, despite the deep snow. He says he had claimed that his boots had been stolen from outside his front door. But he has more …

Two days previously Jack Ferrario had blown his top in the pub, apparently furious that his next-door-neighbour Trethewey had been hopping over their party wall and romancing Ferrario’s wife while he was shoeing horses at the smithy. Ferrario promised that he was going to damage Trethewey’s good looks in a way he wouldn’t be able to fix.

The old chap says that though Ferrario has small feet he is a huge ox of a man and that if he decided to pick up the slight Trethewey, carry him round the pub, and then fling him through the etched-glass window, he’d be able to do it without any trouble.

A light springs up in Swainston’s eye.

The problem

Who has killed Trethewey and where is the weapon? Is blacksmith Ferrario the murderer? If so how did he shoot the victim in the middle of a snow-covered field without leaving any footprints? Where are Trethewey’s boots, why was he wearing moccasins, and why are there no moccasin prints in the field? Finally, why has such a slight man made such heavy impressions with his monogrammed wellies?

Tap here for the solution.

The Yorkshire factory

The mystery

It is a September day in 1925, on the outskirts of a small Yorkshire town tucked into a quiet nook in the Dales. It is lunchtime and the bells from the moorland church are chiming the quarter. Coming over the bridge is a solitary walker dressed in hiking tweeds, his cap pulled down over his eyes against the rain, which is now coming on hard. Across the high street he spies a cosy pub where he decides to shelter and have a bite to eat.

Inside the pub, our walker, whose name is Gerald, shakes the rain from his cap and hangs it on a peg beside the fire. He orders a pint of beer and a piece of cheese from the rosy-faced landlady and looking around the low ceilinged room he spots in the corner an old man in a straw hat, nursing a drink in a china mug.

Gerald leans his stick against the chimney corner and goes over to sit beside the old man. ‘Good afternoon,’ he says.

‘Aye’, replies the man, taking a pull at his ale and drawing a rough sleeve across his muttonchop whiskers.

Through the window Gerald can see, on the other side of a dry-stone wall, a huge Victorian factory building and its handsome reflection in the millstream. A plume of smoke rises from the chimney, and the factory name, S. GARTONS, is reflected in gigantic back-to-front capitals in the water. The old man removes the long clay pipe from his lips and says, ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

‘No,’ replies Gerald.

The man pauses. ‘I’ll tell you what, lad,’ he says. ‘If you can tell me in one guess what it is they make in that factory I’ll buy you as much beer as you can drink. If you fail, you’ll do the same for me. One guess only.’ Gerald muses for a minute, staring into the shimmering water of the millstream opposite.

‘Well, I’ve no idea,’ he says. Then he takes a longer look at the name reflected in the water. ‘All right,’ he says suddenly, ‘I’ll tell you.’

The old man grins. ‘What is it then?’

‘Handkerchiefs!’ exclaims Gerald.

‘You cheated! You knew already,’ gasps the man.

‘No I didn’t,’ says Gerald. ‘It was easy.’

The problem

How did Gerald know what was made in the factory?

Tap here for the solution.

The riddle of the Burns supper

The mystery

John and Joan Jones live in a charming 18th-century cottage near Matlock in Derbyshire, on the south-eastern cusp of the Peak District. From their bedroom windows their two children Julie and Jeremy often look out across the craggy sheep-sprinkled vista, which stretches from the low screen of evergreen trees at the bottom of their back garden out as far as the eye can see.

They watch the ravens circling and cawing overhead, tearing worms from the damp earth, or dropping snails from a height onto the limestone outcrops as if cracking nuts. At night a low wind is often to be heard moaning under the eaves and rattling the handle of the Joneses’ garden shed.

The Joneses are a happy family. John Jones is a Scotsman who teaches business studies at Buxton’s Espurio University. Joan Jones is a full-time mother. Their cheerful children catch the bus to school every day and are both doing well. Jeremy is good at drawing and Julie likes maths. They help their mother around the house but from time to time Jeremy is mischievous, blowing raspberries at the dustmen through a hole in the hedge or letting his beagle Tinker off the lead when he goes into town.

One Sunday morning Mr and Mrs Jones return home in the early hours after a roisterous Burns Night supper in town. Letting themselves into the house in the pitch black, they relieve the babysitter and push straight off to bed.

Mrs Jones wakes later than usual the next morning. She had rather more sparkling wine than she’d meant to the previous night and John polished off a bottle of malt whisky with a couple of friends. Today her head is throbbing and he is snoring for Scotland.

Mrs Jones gingerly opens the bedroom curtains to take a look at the morning. The sun is streaming onto the front lawn and it is a good deal warmer than it has been over the past week, which is nice.

But Joan notices something unusual. Lying on the wet lawn are some objects that she cannot identify. Pulling on her dressing gown, she goes downstairs and turns on the kettle in the kitchen before padding over to the front door. She opens it a crack to have a better look at the things on the grass.

In the middle of the lawn are eleven pieces of coal, each very roughly the size of a walnut. They are not far apart and appear to have been placed together deliberately. Lying nearby all on its own is a large carrot, which a raven is eyeing from the wall. Somebody, presumably the person who placed the other objects on the lawn, has left his or her scarf on the grass, and it is now soaking wet. The scarf is of a very common design and looks rather moth-eaten. It certainly isn’t one Mrs Jones would allow John or Jeremy to wear in a similar state.

Behind her, Joan Jones hears the tread of Jeremy on the stairs. His hair is up on end and he is holding a jam jar with a snail in it. ‘Malcolm wants some lettuce,’ says Jeremy.

‘Good morning to you too,’ says his mother, shutting the door. ‘I hope you were good last night.’

‘Suzanne let us watch The Exorcist,’ says Jeremy. Joan makes a mental note to think twice about the suitability of Suzanne as a babysitter next time.

‘What do you know about those things on the lawn?’ says Mrs Jones suspiciously, swallowing a couple of aspirin and pouring boiling water into two mugs. ‘Did you put them on the lawn?’ Jeremy smiles and shakes his head. He pours some sugar-coated breakfast cereal into a bowl and adds nearly a pint of milk and a good deal more sugar. ‘What about Julie?’ asks his mum.

‘No,’ replies Jeremy with his mouth full, ‘she didn’t put them on the lawn either. Nobody did.’

Mrs Jones is bemused but doesn’t fancy an argument. She also decides against breakfast. ‘Not too much noise this morning, darling,’ she tells her son. ‘Your father had a busy day yesterday.’ She carries the coffee cups upstairs, trying, between hiccups, to solve the mystery of the strange objects arranged on her lawn.

The problem

Jeremy was telling the truth. Nobody put the strange assortment of objects on the Joneses’ lawn. But there is a very straightforward reason why they are there. What is it?

Tap here for the solution.

The annoying computer password

The mystery

Children these days seem to have little trouble remembering twenty computer passwords, yet they still cannot remember the kings and queens of England. Why should they, when they can look them up on their iPhone?

Older people often have trouble remembering where they live and their own names, let alone recalling their PIN number, mobile number, telephone banking security questions and all that stuff.

I don’t know who is responsible for the following joke about computers – I wish I did – but it kind of sums up the situation.

COMPUTER: Please enter your new password.

USER: cabbage

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password must be more than 8 characters.

USER: boiled cabbage

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password must contain 1 numerical character.

USER: 1 boiled cabbage

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password cannot have blank spaces.

USER: 50fuckingboiledcabbages

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password must contain at least one upper-case character.

USER: 50FUCKINGboiledcabbages

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password cannot use more than one upper-case character consecutively.

USER: 50FuckingBoiledCabbagesShovedUpYourArseIfYouDon’tGiveMeAccessNow!

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password cannot contain punctuation.

USER: ReallyPissedOff50FuckingBoiledCabbagesShovedUpYourArseIfYouDontGiveMeAccessNow

COMPUTER: Sorry, that password is already in use.

Anyway, the point is to tell you about a man named Bill, who could never remember how to spell his password. He was alert, sane, and happy with computers, but spelling had always been a bit tricky for him. It wasn’t just unusual words like ‘acquit’ and ‘minuscule’ that gave him trouble, it was ordinary words with double letters, like ‘misspell’ – somewhat ironically.

The most annoying of the lot was his password, which he never could spell correctly, so that he spent many wasted hours trying to log on to his computer.

The problem

How did Bill spell his password?

Tap here for the solution.

Terry’s girlfriends

The mystery

Terry is a young man with two girlfriends: Emma, who lives to his east, and Wendy, who lives to his west. Emma East is a petite and sultry redhead; Wendy West is a blonde volcano – cool on the outside but bubbling hot below the surface ice. Terry likes both girls equally and enjoys the company of one just as much as the other.

Terry’s local railway station has only one platform. It is one of those ‘island’ platforms of the sort where trains on one side always go one way and trains on the other side always go the opposite way. There is an unfailingly reliable hourly service in each direction, east and west, the trains always run on time, there are the same number both ways, and no train is ever cancelled. (You’ll have noticed that this is very unlike the real world.)

Unfortunately, Terry is completely disorganised, with no idea of the actual times of either service. In one respect this doesn’t matter, because Terry’s girlfriends never go out. They are so devoted to him that they’re always at home in their respective houses, looking out of their front window, waiting for him to visit.

Every time Terry fancies some female company he leaves home without consulting a watch or clock, goes straight to the station, buys a ticket valid to either station, runs up the steps to the middle of the island platform, and boards the first train that comes in, whether eastbound or westbound. There’s one of each every hour and they are perfectly normal trains in every way. He catches his trains at random times and on random days. Sometimes he gets there late in the evening. Sometimes it’s early morning. Sometimes it’s lunchtime, sometimes teatime. He arrives on any and every day of the week in no particular order and he goes either east or west according to which train arrives first.

The westbound train, going to Wendy, leaves at exactly the same time past each hour. The eastbound ‘Emma’ train does the same but leaves at a different time from the westbound ‘Wendy’ train, so Terry is never torn between the two.

The problem

Last year Terry saw Emma East a lot, and many more times than he saw Wendy West. In fact, he hardly saw Wendy West at all. Why?

Tap here for the solution.

The lorry driver slaying

The mystery

The Sting is a 1973 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It covers the ups and downs of two confidence tricksters as they try their hand at everything from racing scams to cheating at cards. There are several other successful films on the same subject, which makes you wonder what it is about conmen and card-sharps that provides this mysterious allure.

The most polished card cheats are very skilled and slick. You’ve got the ‘mechanics’, who use sleight of hand such as second dealing, whereby the top card is retained on the pack by the thumb while the second card is invisibly slipped out under it in the process of the deal. Then there are the ‘stackers’, who can arrange the cards in a useful order while shuffling. There are the ‘paper players’, who use marked cards, and there are ‘hand muckers’, who cleverly conceal cards in their palms and switch them for other less useful cards during play.

Most amateur cheats keep things simple, using less complicated methods such as ‘shorting the pot’ (quietly putting in less money for their bet than they say) or peeking at other players’ cards. The benefit of the simple approach is deniability.

A fine example of suspected cheating of the sophisticated sort came one chilly December day in 2011 at a roadside café near Newcastle, where a group of lorry drivers had finished their egg and chips and were playing a game of poker.

The game had been going some time and the pot was huge. The card players were all experienced, and very good at what they were doing. There was no chat and the focus was on the game. Cards were held close to chests and mugs of tea were going cold. Glances passed back and forth, but the stony poker faces gave nothing away.

Several players clearly thought they had good hands, and betting was serious. A great wad of money had built up in the centre of the table. Then came the moment. The dealer laid down, in dramatic fashion, one card at a time, a perfect royal flush in Spades: Ten, Jack, Queen, King and Ace, the strongest possible poker hand, and an unlikely one.

For a moment a hush fell upon the group. The dealer’s face showed no emotion. Outside, the engines of arriving vehicles appeared to fall silent. Then one of the men, large and broad-shouldered, stood up, knocking his metal chair onto the tile floor. ‘You’re a cheat!’ he announced determinedly, aiming a stout forefinger at the dealer. ‘And I can prove it.’ The dealer didn’t speak but instead, in front of a whole table of witnesses, silently drew a long knife and stabbed the man through the chest, killing him on the spot.

The café owner locked himself into his room and immediately called the police, who arrived quickly. As a trickle of blood continued to run from the table into the spreading red pool on the floor they interviewed all the lorry drivers and also the café owner. All the men agreed on the dealer’s guilt and even the dealer admitted the stabbing, though not the cheating.

But, after hours of questioning, a confession, and clear evidence that the dealer was guilty of the murder of an innocent card player, not a single man was arrested – not even for illegal gambling – and every one of them was allowed to walk free and drive his lorry home.

The problem

Why, when the police had the dealer’s confession and the agreement of everyone around the table on the dealer’s guilt, did the police let every single man off scot-free?

Tap here for the solution.

The magic bucket

The mystery

Stuart O’Brien is a successful businessman, with silvering hair, a flash car and an imposingly ugly mansion in the Surrey countryside.

Stuart left school without taking any exams but used his persuasive skills to land himself a job in the sales team of Polyplastika, a plastics manufacturer. The company turns out drainpipes, washing-up bowls, industrial pallets and buckets by the thousand.

Stuart was always a fantastic salesman and rose through the company ranks very fast. His friends call him ‘Irish Stu’, and say that he hasn’t so much kissed the Blarney Stone as stuck his tongue down its throat. By the time he was twenty Stu was heading the firm’s sales team and was beginning to earn serious money.

Stu is now strengthening the firm’s toehold in China, he’s on the company board and is being tipped as the firm’s next CEO. He plays golf to a handicap of four, buys the most expensive foreign colognes and has just treated himself to a pair of enormous Tudor garage doors. Life is good.

Stu is married to Laverne, a tall blonde with an expensive taste in handbags and holidays. She has a mouth full of uncannily white teeth, which flash like urinals in a cave.

Apart from looking good on Stu’s arm at company dos and trips to the Far East, Laverne is a great party-giver. At their annual summer barbecue, held at the O’Briens’ vast Surrey home, Laverne circulates in the garden in unlikely heels, topping people up by the pool, putting little umbrellas in their glasses, and doling out to each of them at least eleven seconds of her white-urinal smile. And it’s at the barbie that Stu always does his party piece.

Someone hands him one of the company’s famous plastic buckets – he prefers to use a red one. He then hands back the lid, which he doesn’t need, and fills the bucket to the very brim with warmish water. He now asks for silence while he slowly turns the bucket upside down. It remains full. Not a drop spills out. He doesn’t swing it round his head, add anything to it, or put anything on the top – it’s an open bucket full of nothing but water. To prove the point, he puts his hand into the upside-down bucket and brings it out wet, shaking and flicking a few drops at his friends.

After a couple of seconds, or longer if people ask, he turns the bucket right-way up again. It contains just as much water as it did at the start. He hands it to Laverne, who can barely hold it because it’s still full to the brim.

Stu’s audience are so astonished by his performance that many laugh in sheer disbelief, and, if they didn’t know it before, realise that Irish Stu is one of the best showmen going.

Finally, with the help of someone else, because it’s heavy, Laverne empties the water out of the bucket onto Stu’s head, producing a round of applause and shouts of glee. Stu then dries himself off and goes in to change.

If people want, they can examine the bucket at any time (Stu has been known to sell a couple during this procedure).

The problem

How on earth can Irish Stu turn a full, lidless bucket of water upside-down in his back garden without the water pouring out?

Tap here for the solution.

The impossible brothers

The mystery

Bob and Jim are brothers. Bob was born in Hastane Maternity Hospital, near Drumroos in Scotland, at 8.15 a.m. on April Fools’ Day 1976. Jim was born in the same place, just seven minutes later.

Their mum remembers the day not only because of the happy occasion of their births but because of the Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect that astronomer Patrick Moore reported would happen that day.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, with a mass of about two and a half times that of all the other planets glued together. Pluto on the other hand is so small that in 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Moore told listeners to BBC radio that as Pluto passed behind Jupiter at 9.47 that morning, a powerful combination of the two planets’ gravitation would decrease the gravity on Earth. People were told that if they jumped in the air at exactly the right time they would stay up longer than normal and briefly feel as if they were floating.

Shortly after the appointed time hundreds of listeners telephoned the BBC to report that they had indeed felt the effect. One woman said that she and some friends had been ‘wafted’ from their chairs and ‘orbited gently around the room’. Not that you can orbit around a room when you’re inside it, but never mind. (These people actually vote.)

Of course, the whole thing was an April Fools’ hoax by the mischievous Patrick Moore. Although Jupiter is very massive, it is also a very long long way away. At its closest to Earth the planet has a gravitational pull only about the same as that of a Renault Twizy on an old man standing a couple of feet away. The gravitational attraction of Pluto is even less. It’s about the same as a marble 100 yards away from you. Which means that even the combined gravity of the two distant planets is far too small to cause a person to become lighter or float while jumping. It’s a good job that gravity is such a weak force, or the gravitational pull of Bob and Jim’s obstetrician would have caused the tide to go out in their mum’s cup of tea.

The problem

Jim and Bob were born at the same place in the same hour of the same day of the same month of the same year, and to the same mother. Yet they are not twins. How can this be?

Tap here for the solution.

Arms and the child

The mystery

Jenny Brown and Margaret Green are lifelong friends. They grew up together, they went to the same school together, and they graduated from teacher-training college together. Both of them applied for a teaching post at their local village primary and they were appointed at the same time, in the same September of the same year.

Jenny and Margaret now teach in that school, in adjacent classrooms. The school is a charming Victorian building with a steep tiled roof, and roses round the door. It smells, as many schools do, of shepherd’s pie and pine disinfectant. It has about 120 children each year and at the end of their four years most of them feed into the large secondary school in the town.

Jenny and Margaret’s school is a happy place, with a good head, good staff, generous playgrounds, a large sports field and plenty of trees. Not so long ago a local supermarket offered a great deal of money to buy the bottom end of the cricket pitch, but the headmistress, Miss Jean Piaget, had other ideas. The parents carried her in triumph on the day the supermarket abandoned its scheme (they carried her metaphorically, that is).

One day the two young teachers were sipping tea in the staffroom and discussing mathematics. They decided to teach their pupils that maths is not just for passing exams but is a useful and fascinating subject in the real world. They devised a lesson plan in which the children in their classes would measure the length of every child’s arms and deal with the numbers in different ways, to arrive at the three different sorts of average: the mean (got by adding up all the different lengths of the children’s arms and dividing this figure by the number of children in the class), the median (arrived at by listing in order the different lengths of the children’s arms and finding which arm length falls in the middle of the list) and the mode (found by seeing which arm length occurs most often).

On Monday morning Jenny and Margaret called their respective registers. There were 28 children present in each class, with no absences.

They then explained the task to their classes and allowed them to decide who would be in charge of the tape measure, who would take down all the measurements and who would check the figures before handing in the final calculations. The children got to work, and by lunchtime the numbers were all written down.

In the staffroom Jenny and Margaret compared lists and checked the maths. Miss Tijdelijk, a temporary supply teacher, was passing through with a sandwich and asked Margaret and Jenny what they were doing. They showed her the numbers and to her utter astonishment she discovered that, although everything had been done in exactly the same way in both classrooms, and although all the measurements were correct and all the mathematics properly done, the average (mean) arm length of the children in Jenny’s class was three inches greater than the mean arm length of the children in Margaret’s class.

The problem

The children in both classes are all physically normal, and nobody in either class has extraordinarily short or long arms. The arithmetic is correct and, in fact, accurately reflects the actual arm lengths of the children.

How is it that the children in Jenny’s class appear to have significantly longer arms than the children in Margaret’s class?

Tap here for the solution.

The window cleaner in the sky

The mystery

Tall buildings are nothing new. Blocks of high-rise flats were all the rage in Ancient Rome, where they rose to a height of ten or more storeys. Some Roman emperors took against them, though, getting their togas in a right tangle trying to set a height limit on the pesky things, but without much luck. If an emperor can’t get something like that done it makes you wonder about your own planning department down at the town hall.

It wasn’t just Rome, either. Twelfth-century Bologna had many high-rise apartment blocks too, something like 180 of them. It looked like an ancient New York. The tallest of these buildings – which hasn’t fallen down over the centuries – is the Asinelli Tower, one of the so-called Duo Torri (Two Towers) that together resemble the old World Trade Center. The Asinelli Tower is 319 feet high, and I can imagine the 12th-century Bolognese sitting down to eat their spaghetti at sunset, grumpily looking out over the red roofs of the city and writing endless letters to the council to complain about being overlooked.

But neither the Roman nor the Bolognese towers were really skyscrapers. This term was first used in the late 19th century to describe steel-frame buildings of ten storeys or more. Nowadays it can refer to any very tall multi-storey building, most often one covered in big windows.

The oldest iron-frame building in the world, and the grandfather of the skyscraper, is the Maltings in Shrewsbury, which went up in 1797. However, as with the Roman tower blocks, there were complaints. And it was the same in 19th-century London, when a British empress took a leaf out of the Roman emperors’ book.

Queen Victoria, Empress of India, had a really good moan about tall buildings going up near Buckingham Palace, and to mollify the monarch height limits were introduced, which continued to be enforced until the 1950s. Prince Charles carries on the good fight today in an effort to prevent the building of ugly high-rise buildings in London, and pushing to have The Gherkin thatched. I’ve noticed that, rather like the Romans, he’s not having much luck.

Many office employees today work in skyscrapers, and one of the benefits is the fun of watching the guys who clean the windows from special cradles trying to cope with the high winds, and being stared at.

It was in 2012 that Horace Morris, an experienced 60-year-old window cleaner who was working on a window on the 40th floor of the 94-storey Alto Tower, near London Bridge, had a spot of trouble. Horace was smoking a cigarette and whistling along to the radio. He had cleaned the windows many times before and was not really paying proper attention to what he was doing.

As he was reaching across to get to a particularly dirty patch in a tricky corner, Horace slipped off his support and fell.

The problem

Horace was not wearing any kind of safety harness or other device, just his workwear. His clothes were not padded, he had no safety hat – or any hat – and there was nothing to slow his fall. Yet when he hit the ground Horace merely shook his head, rubbed his sore hands together, and stood up. He had broken no bones, and had only a slight scratch to his palm, a sore knuckle, a bent thumb and two very achy knees. How come?

Tap here for the solution.

The troublesome signpost

The mystery

Everybody who is old enough to remember the event recalls where he or she was when President Kennedy was shot, or when the World Trade Center was attacked. For those who witnessed its aftermath, the Great Storm of 1987 is another of those memorable events.

During the night of 15 October violent hurricane-force winds tore roofs off houses in London, demolished the seven oaks in Sevenoaks, and blew beach huts half a mile across the sea road in Hove. Roads and railways blocked by downed trees kept commuters at home, and fallen electricity lines left many without power. London, East Anglia and the Home Counties were particularly badly hit, being buffeted by winds the like of which will probably not be felt again for another 200 years. Gorleston in Norfolk chalked up a gust of 122 mph.

I remember this all as if it was yesterday. I was living in Muswell Hill, in North London. As I walked through the woods to the Tube station the next morning – I was meant to travel to Sussex – I had to step over branches and jump over whole trees. No trains were moving so I postponed my visit until the following week. When Monday arrived I set off on my journey.

I enjoy the countryside so I decided that I would walk the few miles from Brookbridge station to the home of my great friend Arthur Van Houghton, the famous opera tenor and popular siffleur, who I was going to see. I had never been to the area before but he’d told me it was a pleasant stroll from the station to Rotherborough High Street, where we were to meet.

This was in the days long before smartphones and digital maps, and Arthur had told me to get out at the station and walk past the Wheatsheaf pub and then along the bridleway that travels straight as an arrow through the pretty fields and woods towards Martinsbrook. I was to go as far as the fingerpost at the crossroads in the little village of Brookstead Heath. The signpost, he said, would point me in the direction of Rotherborough, once the hometown of the celebrated aviatrix Betty la Roche. Arthur was to meet me at the top of the high street, under the bronze sculpture of the famous airwoman.

The train journey was uneventful and I got out at the station, and set off as instructed. There were many indications of hurricane damage in the dappled autumn sunshine, but much of the fallen wood and bits of demolished fence had been tidied into piles.

It was indeed a lovely walk and I finally reached the crossroads where the signpost was. And that’s where the trouble started.

The sign was a charming black and white fingerpost of the old style, with four ‘fingers’ pointing from its central pillar. The problem was that the hurricane had blown the sign down and it was lying flat on the grass. I looked at it lying there uselessly for a moment, wondering what to do.

One of the signpost’s fingers pointed to Martinsbrook and Coppesfield, a second, at right angles to that one and stuck in the mud, pointed to High Woodhurst and Rotherborough (my destination), a third, pointing in the opposite direction to the one to Coppesfield, pointed to Brookbridge, and a fourth, opposite the Rotherborough one, pointed to Buxfield Cross, a place I’d never heard of.

And then a thought struck me. I realised that I could easily discover which way I needed to go by using the sign, even as it lay there on the ground.

The problem

How did I discover from the blown-down signpost the proper direction to take in order to reach my destination?

Tap here for the solution.

The Knightsbridge barber

The mystery

Nowadays, Knightsbridge is an exclusive shopping district in London, but it began as a little hamlet that extended into the parishes of Kensington and Chelsea. Its ancient name comes from the Knight’s Bridge that once crossed over the River Westbourne, which still flows through the city, but now underground.

One of Knightsbridge’s most celebrated residents was Raymond Bessone, Britain’s first celebrity hairdresser. Born in Soho in 1911, Bessone anglicised his name to the more palatable Peter Raymond, but was known to everybody as Mr Teasy-Weasy.

Mr Teasy-Weasy was always impeccably coiffed and turned out, swooshing around Mayfair in bow ties, buttonholes and an expensive overcoat, which he wore without putting his arms in the sleeves. His Italianate looks were enhanced by his pencil moustache, but undermined by his entirely fake French accent.

Building his business and developing an exclusive clientele over the years was second nature to Mr Teasy-Weasy. Mixing as he did with the most fashionable people, he was always popping up in the news. Once, in 1956, the blonde bombshell Diana Dors flew him to the States to shampoo her hair. This reportedly cost £2,500, about £59,000 in today’s money.

Mr Teasy-Weasy was never short of an opinion. He claimed that women over the age of twenty should avoid wearing long hair because it was ageing. If he was interrupted while doing nothing he would announce, ‘Madam! Can you not see that I am meditating?’

One of Mr Teasy-Weasy’s most famous reported remarks concerned the backgrounds of those whose hair he was styling. He said, ‘I would rather cut the hair of three Cockney women than that of one Yorkshirewoman.’ This, as you might imagine, caused quite a stir among his northern clientele, of whom, admittedly, there weren’t hundreds.

The problem

Why did Mr Teasy-Weasy say that he would rather cut the hair of three Cockney women than one Yorkshirewoman?

Tap here for the solution.

The fastest beard in the world

The mystery

In 1963 Sean Horn was seventeen and living at home with his parents in the USA. He was a precocious child and had a particular knack for the church organ, which he had learned from his father, a sober black-suited minister, who was himself proficient on the instrument.

Sean was also precocious in the matter of facial hair. His beard had begun growing at the age of sixteen and would by now have been long and bushy if his parents had not insisted on him shaving it off. They refused to allow men with long hair or beards to enter the house, on old-fashioned ‘moral’ grounds that were a mystery to Sean’s normal, Beatles-loving friends. ‘When you are eighteen, My Son, and have come of age,’ said his mother one day, ‘only then may you grow a beard. If you must.’ Sean was an obedient boy so he shaved his face every day without fail.

Sean’s friend Olivia Carlson had invited him to her all-night Christmas party on 18 December, in the centre of the city, so he asked his parents’ permission. They were already trying their best to accommodate themselves to the galloping changes taking place in the USA at that time. Boys with long hair, girlfriends staying over, jeans, drugs, swearing and pop music all seemed so alien to their world. But, though old-fashioned and strict, they realised that their son was nearly a man so they agreed that he could go to the party if he was back before sunrise. He promised he would be. ‘Make sure to shave before you go, Son, and don’t forget to take along a posy of flowers,’ said his mother.

On the night of the party, Sean put on his best clothes and had a close shave. His parents approved. He waved them goodbye as he jumped on the evening bus into town.

When he returned home just before the following sunrise his parents were astonished to see that he had a bushy black beard. They pulled it in disbelief but it didn’t come off. It was a real beard.

The problem

Sean’s hair grows at a normal rate. His beard is his own real hair, and there’s nothing wrong with him. So how did he manage to grow a proper bushy black beard before sunrise?

Tap here for the solution.

The high window

The mystery

The sloping walls at the foot of the newish-looking Leeds Combined Court Centre are no doubt designed to prevent people from standing around smoking or relieving themselves against the building. They add an extra element of charmlessness to an edifice that, in its orange-brick brutalism, is already a bit short on good looks.

Not so long ago this was the scene of an interesting dispute, which sprang up during the trial of Mr Joe Slepkava, who was being tried for the crime of murder.

The story was that a man had been stabbed outside a pub overlooking the River Aire, which flows through Leeds city centre. Along the river’s banks stand many renovated industrial buildings. Some are businesses, others hotels, and some are tall private dwellings. It was from a high window in one of these skinny 19th-century conversions that the witness for the prosecution, structural engineer Marmaduke Snarbes, claimed to have seen Slepkava arguing with the victim before stabbing him and heaving him over the side into the water. Here is an extract from the trial records.

MR CUMMING (PROSECUTION): ‘Just tell us, Mr Snarbes, what it was you saw from the house in Chandler’s Walk.’

MR SNARBES (PROSECUTION WITNESS): ‘Well, I was in this small room at the top of number 69, inspecting it for my client. The main beam, which functions as a drag strut in the lateral-load-resisting system, seemed to have a problem with its acquired axial loading.’

CUMMING: ‘Just tell us what you saw, thank you, Mr Snarbes.’

SNARBES: ‘Oh yes, well it’s an unused room on the third floor. Dark and dusty. Unfurnished …’

CUMMING: ‘Was it locked?’

SNARBES: ‘No. It was jammed closed from outside with an old chair, under the handle. The wind whistles through any open doors up there. There is one very small square window in the room. It’s got bars on it. No furniture, no chimney or anything in the room. Nothing – it’s completely bare. Peeling wallpaper, bare floorboards, very dirty. Now, in the course of taking notes I heard raised voices, so I looked out of the window and I noticed a big fat man down beside the river. He had a spider web tattoo on his face. I saw him stab this other man in the chest and lift the body over the side, into the water. He threw the knife in afterwards.’

CUMMING: ‘You say you got a good look at this man. If you see him in court today would you please point him out to the jury? Thank you. For the record, the witness has pointed at Mr Slepkava.’

HIS HONOUR JUDGE QUATERMASS: ‘You are certain, are you, that this is the man you saw?’

SNARBES: ‘Yes Sir. The missing ear and the facial tattoo are distinctive.’

JUDGE QUATERMASS: ‘Thank you.’

CUMMING: ‘No more questions, Your Honour.’

JUDGE QUATERMASS: ‘Ms Scrunt?’

MS SCRUNT (DEFENCE): ‘Thank you, Your Honour. Mr Snarbes, you told the police when they took your statement that – now this is important – that you had seen this event by looking out of the window.’

SNARBES: ‘That’s right. I looked out of the window and saw that man stab the other one and push him in the river. I told the police that.’

SCRUNT: ‘Mr Snarbes, you are a professional surveyor, a man used to dealing in numbers and space. How high is the window that you claim to have looked through?’

SNARBES: ‘I didn’t measure it.’

SCRUNT: ‘Well, roughly – as well as you can remember.’

SNARBES: ‘I should say, about … I suppose about eight feet off the floor. It’s a tall room and it’s a small square window.’

SCRUNT: ‘Eight feet? That is indeed a high window. It’s about the height of a single-decker bus, isn’t it? How tall are you, Mr Snarbes? In feet and inches if you prefer.’

SNARBES: ‘I’m five feet ten.’

SCRUNT: ‘Could you look over the top of a bus?’

SNARBES: ‘No.’

SCRUNT: ‘Yet you claim that you looked through a tiny, dirty window obstructed by bars, eight feet off the floor.’

SNARBES: ‘Yes.’

SCRUNT: ‘It’s a smooth wall, isn’t it? Or is there a projecting window sill or anything to grab hold of?’

SNARBES: ‘Nothing to get hold of, no.’

SCRUNT: ‘You didn’t use rope of any sort?’

SNARBES: ‘Rope? No, I didn’t use rope or anything like that.’

SCRUNT: ‘Mr Snarbes, we took pains to visit this room. It’s exactly as you describe it, entirely empty and the window is almost eight feet off the floor. We took Mr Niblet, our solicitor, with us. Mr Niblet is six feet tall and plays basketball, and he couldn’t see out of the window, even when he jumped up. And yet you say that you saw our client through this tiny aperture when you are only of modest height.’

SNARBES: ‘Yes. Though I disagree that five feet ten is “modest”.’

JUDGE QUATERMASS: ‘Ms Scrunt, this is easily settled. We will adjourn, and you and Mr Cumming will take a couple of police officers and you will visit the room in question. Take Mr Snarbes too, please, and find out whether he, or anybody, can see through this high window in this completely empty room. You may report back after the adjournment.’

MS SCRUNT: ‘Thank you, Your Honour.’

After the adjournment the court reconvened.

JUDGE QUATERMASS: ‘Now Ms Scrunt, perhaps you can tell us: could you or the police officers, or anyone, see through the window in question?’

MS SCRUNT: ‘Yes, we all did, thank you, Your Honour. I’d like now to move on to the badly blurred pictures from the CCTV camera on top of the Hungry Pussy nightclub …’

The problem

How is it that Mr Snarbes, a man of normal height, was able to see easily through a small window eight feet off the floor in an entirely bare room? Even Ms Scrunt was able to see through the window when she tried for a second time. Mr Snarbes didn’t use rope, wire, mirrors, a camera or any unusual aid. How is this possible?

Tap here for the solution.

The confusing coach trip

The mystery

During the early part of the 20th century, when people had less money to throw around than they do now, manufacturing firms, especially in the industrial north of England, used to organise works outings for their employees. They would send their grateful staff to seaside resorts or other out-of-town destinations to blow the cotton fluff out of their hair and the coal dust out of their lungs.

In the earliest days workers were ferried to Blackpool and other exotic destinations in charabancs. The strange name of these vehicles comes from the French char-à-bancs, meaning, ‘carriage with seats’, and your typical charabanc was an open-topped horse-drawn contraption that over time gave way to the modern motor coach, with two decks, toilets, tinted windows, air conditioning, entertainment facilities, vast luggage capacity and fat driver.

The first charabanc in Britain was presented to Queen Victoria by Louis Philippe of France and is today kept in the Royal Mews. Just the sort of present every queen needs. It is part of history now, and the word itself is seldom heard any more, though some older people still refer to modern coaches as ‘charabancs’.

Works outings are a thing of the past too. Nowadays, tradesmen such as plumbers and painters seem quite flush with the old wonga, unfurling great curled wads of the stuff in the pub on a Saturday night, or flying off to Crete, Cuba and Thailand for what are now called ‘breaks’. Many of them also seem to have second homes in Malaga or Florida, and zoom around town in flash cars and dark glasses, iPhones clapped to their ears. Am I straying into the land of caricature here?

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