1.32. A man is killed on a train. He is found to have
written “elf” on the floor in his own blood. (MB, from “The Problem of the
Locked Caboose,” by Edward D. Hoch)
1.32 answer: Attached to the train was a caboose with a safe carrying a
shipment of jewels. The victim, Schmidt, was the conductor guarding the
shipment; he had robbed the safe himself, and had an accomplice traveling on
the train under a false name to remove the loot. The accomplice killed
Schmidt to keep his share. Schmidt didn’t know the accomplice’s false name,
so he wrote the killer’s berth number, 11. For greater clarity he spelled
out the number as a word — in his native German. (In the original story he
didn’t want “11” to be misread as two parallel lines, but Germans don’t
write “1” as a straight line.) This arguably belongs in section 2 for double
meaning, but the double-meaninged word here is explicitly called out, so I’m
going to leave it in section 1 for now.