The Chain of the Impaler [Solved]

[Blackrune]

I meant the gap that exists if you try to close the door far enough to be able to set the chain.
Hope that’s not too confusing, not really meant to be.

As for your theory…

The chain can’t be taken apart. No parts of the chain can be removed without just straight up breaking it.

This was very much meant to include any part of the lock attached to the door. (yeah, yeah, wouldn’t be broken in the traditional sense, but in the abstract sense of no longer performing the intended function)

And let’s upgrade my red truth about the hand I guess.
The chain was only ever set or unset by a human hand directly handling it and without any other tools influencing it.

[Xak]

Hmm… I believe it’s been confirmed in red that the maid would have noticed if the butler tried to lock any windows or touch anything after they broke in, but I don’t believe it’s quite been confirmed that the reverse is true. So, I’d like to confirm:

Right before the pair entered the room, every window in the waiting area was already locked.

This doesn’t necessarily include the study, literally just the waiting area. I want to confirm that we’re not missing something like the maid being free to stealthily lock the window closest to the door. Because, if this is the case, I’d say:

The maid is the culprit, and she set the chain through the open window on the east wall of the house. Then, she closed the window without locking it, and later locked it without the butler noticing when they broke into the room.

…and if planting the key is a problem:

She tossed the key in through the gap in the door when the butler went to go get a tool to break the chain. This would be after he broke the door, so the door should open a crack.

[Blackrune]

Now, now, I wouldn’t pull something like making that whole window check entirely meaningless due to arbitrary stealth.

Right before the pair entered the room, every window in the waiting area was already locked.

[Blackrune]

(Non-)Hint time. Now kill me.

Part 2: The darkest hour

God… damn it

It was midnight. Everyone had gone home.
Except me, of course, refusing to leave this place until I’d found an explanation.

One of my worse ideas.

The victim’s body had been replaced with the usual white outline.
They’d taken him together with the spear sticking through him, both because the murder weapon needed to be analyzed anyway and because… well, it turned out difficult to remove.

Not as difficult as figuring out how this locked room made any sense, of course.

I’d checked all the windows, but no dice. Sure, I’d confirmed that you could indeed leave through the study windows, but so what?
Everyone told me - those windows were locked when they stepped into the study.
Not that I would doubt any of them, although in my desperation I’d even had a sliver of suspicion that Hertway hadn’t been entirely straight with me.

The other windows… I’d thought they might just be big enough at first. As I said, the view was probably great during the day, but I noticed why I couldn’t count on them once I actually opened them.

As I opened them, they came to a sudden stop, leaving only a moderate gap. I tried sticking my arms through… sure, fair enough.
My head and shoulders… getting tricky.
The rest of my chest… no. I tried several times, but it wouldn’t open any further, only making some creaking sounds.

I’m glad nobody was there to see me as I tried to pull myself back out.
I didn’t bother to try this with any other window. Why were there so many damn windows in the first place?

The chain. I knew it would spell trouble, but this was more than expected.
I had glued it back together to do some testing. (it was pretty easy to tell, unlikely the culprit would have managed to fool anyone like that.)
The first thing of note is that the cut looked authentic - those pieces really went together and no part of the chain was missing.
There were no - absolutely zero - traces of tampering. But even if there were- if you just removed the entire lock somehow you’d still have faced the problem of somehow reattaching it from the outside.

I tried setting it through the gap in the door. No dice. My fingers got through the gap, but the base of my palm was too think.
I couldn’t think of anything else that could have been done through the door.

Which left me with really setting the chain proper. So I did.
Alright, what was the next step? Leaving through the door was out.
Leaving through the study windows? But I could not think of a way to close them from the other side.

There’s one other way I’d considered. I tried locking the chain through the window nearest to it. It worked.
I got thrilled for a moment, but… this window had been found locked, just like the rest.

Of course it’s not that simple…

Those were the only ways I could think of to lock it properly. Of course, either would have forced the culprit to leave a window open which was definitely found locked.

Maybe some kind of contraption closed them? I tried letting the spear fall on the latch (desperate, I’ll admit), but the latches required more force than that to be moved.
Again, I couldn’t think of anything except locking it properly with a hand. Some detective I was…

Was there another angle to approach this from? Determining who the killer is and working from there?

The crime resembled those of the serial killer ‘Vlad’. It must have been him, right?

…both the butler and the maid had been working here for several years. The butler in particular had pretty much worked here his entire life.
If he was secretly a serial killer… would it really make sense for him to go for someone that close to him? That was guaranteed to get him on the list of suspects.
Unless he was that confident in his crime or liked to live dangerously, of course. Or maybe the other victims were just a distraction and this was the only real target in the first place.
…No, there were too many victims. Nobody… surely nobody would go to such lengths just to…

The same was true for the maid, Vanessa. She’d only been working here for two years. Vlad’s activity began roughly one year and a half ago.
Could this have been a longterm plan? Her name started with V… I had to stop my thoughts there. If that was enough to put someone on the list of suspects, it would be quite long indeed.
Still, she was the one who supposedly found the key. I had considered she’d just pretended to find it… but if she was the killer, wouldn’t it have been smarter to just… drop it and let others find it?
Instead of drawing attention to yourself? A double bluff? My thoughts were beginning to spin in circles. With a twisted and elusive individual like Vlad, it was just impossible to know their thought process.

But then… what if it HADN’T been Vlad? What if this was a copycat crime? One to distract from the real culprit?
Still, anyone should know better than to think we’d rule them out just because the crime looked like that of an established serial killer.
Well, I say ‘anyone’, but human thought processes are all very different.
Was there some other reason to make the crime look like this, perhaps? Making the crime scene look as disturbing as possible to make sure the witnesses don’t stay there too long?
I’d considered it, but they ended up unexpectedly going in deeper, to the bathroom. No culprit could have predicted this, so either it ended up not interfering with their plan, or… that just wasn’t it.
Besides, the only reason I could think of to do that was to hide somewhere and leave after the disturbed witnesses… but there were just no hiding places in that waiting room.
The only thing large enough to hide in was the couch, but it was pressed firmly against the wall and impossible to move on your own.
It was also undamaged, so no chance of hiding inside it somehow.

And if they’d hidden in any other room, well, the maid would have seen them leave from the study, and the butler would have seen them in the bathroom.
Heck, the bathroom wasn’t big enough for more than one person to be inside in the first place.

Which meant there… was no reason to just pretend to be Vlad, right?

What’s worse was that I really couldn’t picture the maid or the old butler being strong enough to just… thrust a spear through someone like that.
But again… when humans get serious there’s often more strength in them than we assume.

The visitor… well, it could have been anyone judging by the description of their disguise.
By now I’d figured that if they were the murderer they probably didn’t do it then because they weren’t ready or didn’t want to be looked into too much.
It’s possible they had to scout out the place first.
Besides, it’s not exactly possible to smuggle in a long weapon like that without the butler noticing, so chances are they didn’t have the spear with them yet.
And if the victim was expecting them… well, probably hard to catch him unaware from behind, anyway.
If it was the butler himself, that becomes a moot point, of course.

I got desperate. What if Hertway was in on it?
Could he have fudged some detail during the investigation? He’d acted a little strange earlier, I think.

No… no… that was just the stress getting to him.

Besides, while he may have been the one in command, there should have always been other officers nearby.
It’s not like he could have made an excuse like checking the study all by himself and then locking the window.

And it was impossible for him to be Vlad, anyway. The two of us had been on that killer’s trail since the very beginning.
The serial killer himself conveniently getting assigned to his own case? Yeah right… not happening outside of movies.
…
I couldn’t believe I’d go that far in my suspicions. Clearly I needed sleep or a drink.

…
…
…

It must have been three hours later.

It was still engaged in desperate attempts to explain the events.
In my desperation, I’d started considering things that seemed utterly pointless at first glance, even.

No, that doesn’t work.

If this happened, you’d still be left with the problem of…

No, doesn’t change anything

…

The sun was going up in the distance.
That’s when I hit on it.

“N-No way, if they…”

Pointless, but if I expand the context…

…I knew I’d finally found the explanation for it.
In a way, I had been both right and wrong about it being the hardest part to explain.

I’d figured it out.

The chain.

The answer.

[DWaM]

The killer can still be the butler. After killing the victim, dropping the key and setting the chain, he left through the window in the study. The window was locked by a monkey. Monkies have human-like hands, hence ‘human hand’ did indeed lock the window. The monkey then hid in the bathroom. Butler goes into the bathroom, lets the monkey out through the bathroom window (it can fit through, since it is neither a human and it is quite smaller). The butler then locks the window behind the monkey. The motive was the butler trying to save the monkey from the doctor’s cancer research and some arbitrary reason.

[Blackrune]

A classic.

Outside of humans, no animals play any relevant part in this story.

[Xak]

I think I’m bested at this point, can’t really come up with any more chain tricks! Have mercy and PM me the solution

[Blackrune]

Don’t make your life complicated with chain tricks

Hm, I’m not really one to leak solutions just like that. Sorry, but I guess the pain of not knowing for a while will be part of your ‘punishment’ then.

[Xak]

Well I don’t mean a trick like with string or something, at this point it seems pretty clear it’s a loophole in the narrative that doesn’t contradict the clear and simple rules for how the chain can be set. There’s so many reds at this point that I keep coming back to theories that were already denied at some point, making it even harder.

EDIT: Something I just thought of: the chain lock one of those variants where the top has a key slot. You can use that to unlock the chain as well. The culprit could have set the chain, but unlocked it like that, left through the open door, then locked it again, since you’d be able to do so by only sticking your fingers through the gap.

Something like this:

[Blackrune]

Well, when I said it’s impossible to set it through the gap, that does include any and all manners in which it could be set.

I assure you, the exact variant of the chain lock is, perhaps surprisingly, completely irrelevant.

[Xak]

Alright, guess I’ll try for some decisive reds then. Repetition requests:

From the moment the chain was cut, through the police’s investigation, no window was unlocked, locked, opened, or closed.

All of the windows would have behaved the way the POV character describes, if he had tested them. That is, they would not open past a certain height.

It is impossible to set the chain from outside the waiting area, unless you do it from the other side of the window on the right. (This one is pretty much a given at this point, but just as a sanity check.)

The victim was definitely dead before the chain was cut.

Or, you can cut down this theory directly:
The butler killed the victim, and then left every single window on the east wall of the area open and unlocked. They left through the front door, and then set the chain via the close window on the right. They then closed that window, then locked it by sticking their hand in from the next closest window. They continued to do this all the way up to the bathroom window, which is the only window that remained unlocked. The butler then locked this window when they were alone in the bathroom.
This would be the impaler’s chain - a chain of windows creating a devious closed room!!

[Blackrune]

H-Huh…
…
Close enough.
Looks like the jig is up.
Congratulations.

You found the true chain of the impaler.

And yes, the fact I didn’t initially have the windows on it was that I was worried it’d be too easy otherwise, although it looks like it wasn’t that obvious regardless. You can call me out for that if you want, but the main idea was always that the sheer amount of windows mentioned or me never confirming that the bathroom window was locked when the butler was inside would tip you off.
As you can see I had four windows in the hallway, placing one closer to the corner at the waiting room, but well, at the point you presented your version I couldn’t exactly say that without giving away how important that was. ^^; Besides, your window placement still mostly checks out, given the reasonable assumption the doors has roughly one arm’s length of width.
The actual killer, though, was Hertway.
The victim was indeed performing experiments, mainly trying to see if certain ‘poison’ could combat cancer.
Somebody close to Hertway got caught up in this, and the sergeant decided to get revenge.
He was the mysterious visitor, pretending to volunteer. His purpose, at that point, was to mainly scout out the place. He noticed the windows on the east wall were all identical and all had their latches on the left side of their frame, and adjusted his plan from there. During his visit in the study, he walked over to the study window and commented on the great view, but unlocked one of the windows there for later.
After that, he simply said he had to think about it some more and left. Later, he came back armed with a spear, and entered through the window he’d left open.
The victim was in the waiting area at that point.
Hertway charged at him from the hallway and stabbed him in the back.
After that he set up the scene to look like one from the serial killer.
The first reason for this was simple - he intended to lock one window during the investigation, but how does he even guarantee he’ll be on the scene? Simple, if it was obviously reported as a crime by ‘Vlad’, he was pretty much guaranteed to be dispatched seeing how he/his division was assigned to that case.
The second reason was indeed that with it looking that disturbing, the witnesses would not bother to check the windows. Alas, they almost found it anyway, but the butler was too occupied to check whether the smaller window in the bathroom was also locked.
Anyway, the main trick was then put into action: Open all the windows, lock the door from outside, set the chain through the window, then lock each window from the next all the way to the bathroom.
Whenever he was done locking all windows in a room, he also closed the door from the window.
The key was thrown into the room while the windows were still open.
After that, he simply left and waited for the crime to be discovered.
The witnesses had their discovery, and he was called to the scene as planned.
During his investigation, he was the first to enter the bathroom and simply locked the window then.
As was said, the bathroom was too small for more than one person to really fit in comfortably at a time, so he had the perfect excuse to look inside by himself first.

Until next time, when I’ll claim something is difficult but you solve it super-fast or something.

[Xak]

Ah, I was a bit unsure on the true culprit, since according to the POV character, someone had actually been sick in the bathroom, which suggested that maybe it wasn’t the butler after all. However, I figured the butler could’ve been particularly… thorough, and forced himself to throw up to not draw suspicion. It also lined up nicely with the clues that killing someone with a spear in that manner would require a great deal of strength, which the butler mysteriously had when he slammed the door open later on. But I suppose it wasn’t really about the culprit’s identity, as mentioned at the beginning. I think it would’ve been a bit more manageable with your own window layout - I was still doubting myself a bit due to the layout I proposed, where you’d have to reach a fair distance around a corner once it got to the hallway.

All in all, a fun locked room. Thanks for sharing!

[DWaM]

Yeah the diagram is really my only issue here. I love the trick, but I dismissed it a while ago because it didn’t look like it works with the window distance proposed in the diagram - especially with the aforementioned corner.
Hell, I can even show it can’t be done with the diagram thanks to meth.
I mean math.
If we assume the average door is roughly 80 cms in width, and we assume that same distance roughly equals from the start of the wall to the middle of the window across, we can say from the diagram that’s roughly 40 cms from the window to the doorway. Looking at the diagram, it also seems like there’s another 40 from the doorway to the waiting room window on its right. Leaving you about a hand that needs to extend for roughly 80 cms + distance needed to get to the latch on the window + additional length because it’d be bending around the corner.

Probs should’ve edited that diagram when you had the chance.

Still, was fun. GG.