Mrs. Hudson-kan Zaiten-kan

The Mrs. Hudson is Milo Motion’s narrowboat, an inhabited canal vessel whose familiar domestic details become inseparable from the book’s locked-room murder. A gleaming red boat lined with potted plants, it serves as Motion’s home and a meeting place for the Bloodhounds; when Sid Towers is found dead inside, the boat’s heavy lock and limited points of entry turn that domestic space into the central physical puzzle of the case.

Identity and Home

Motion lives alone aboard the Mrs. Hudson, a narrowboat he names after Holmes’s housekeeper. The vessel is presented as more than a means of travel: it is his home, furnished and occupied as one. Its roof carries a television aerial, and around twenty potted conifers make the boat conspicuous among the winter moorings. In an earlier description it is called beautiful and gleaming, almost entirely covered in pot plants, a carefully tended appearance that contrasts with its later role as a crime scene.

The boat also has a social life. Motion hosts Bloodhounds meetings aboard, including the group’s last Christmas party. Its capacity to function as both a private dwelling and a gathering place helps explain why the murder disrupts more than a mooring: the boat is a familiar setting for the club. Conversation about Motion’s living arrangements also treats the narrowboat as suitable for winter, with an occupant recalling that it could be snug in cold weather. The vessel is therefore not a temporary summer excursion but Motion’s year-round home.

The Winter Mooring

The Mrs. Hudson lies at Dundas Boatyard, beside a stretch of the old Somerset Coal Canal used for mooring. Approaching the boatyard at night, Peter Diamond first encounters its offices, a small iron bridge, and a line of boats; the towpath reveals that the moorings extend much farther than they initially appear, along both banks. An estimated fifty or sixty boats are tied up there. Many are shut for winter, with curtains drawn and portable belongings removed from their decks, so the Mrs. Hudson is one vessel among a larger, quiet community of boats.

Against that row, its details are unusually legible: a red hull, potted conifers along the roof, and an aerial above the closed Venetian blinds. The cabin is lit, but the blinds prevent anyone outside from seeing in. The boat thus presents two opposing impressions at once: its plants and domestic fittings announce an occupied home, while the shut windows and secured entrance keep its interior inaccessible. That contrast shapes the first encounter with the body, which is inside a space that the investigators cannot simply inspect from outside.

Security and Access

The stern entrance is secured by a substantial steel padlock. It is described as German-made and expensive, obtained from a locksmith in George Street. When locked, the door’s iron staple fits into a hinged metal strap attached to the sliding hatch at the back of the roof. Diamond examines the arrangement with his torch and judges it secure, but leaves it untouched until the Scene of Crime Officers arrive. The lock is not merely a sign of Motion’s caution: its visible position and operation become evidence in the question of how anyone could have entered the cabin.

Motion explains that he uses the padlock except when aboard. Inside, he can close everything and bolt the boat from within; he says that he always takes the trouble to do so because he wants his home secure. The other possible routes appear restricted. Diamond counts five windows along the side, but their narrow upper vents are too small for someone to climb through. Motion says that an engine hatch exists, though it does not open into the cabin. The boat’s physical design consequently narrows the apparent possibilities of entry to a small set of doors, windows, and hatches, each examined against the claim that the cabin was inaccessible.

The Locked-Boat Murder

After questioning Motion about the Penny Black, John Wigfull accompanies him to the boatyard to check his account. Motion had locked the Mrs. Hudson at a quarter to seven to attend a meeting in Bath. When he returned at about one in the morning with Wigfull, the padlock was still in place. Motion opened the boat, and they found Sid Towers’s body lying on the lounge floor. Towers, a forty-six-year-old night watchman, had last been seen alive in central Bath at 8:45 the previous evening; he had been struck on the head with a heavy object, possibly a spanner, which had not been found.

The discovery converts the boat’s ordinary security features into the terms of a locked-room puzzle. Wigfull explicitly frames the question as how the body entered while the boat was locked; the coincidence that the missing stamp had been found in a chapter titled The Locked-Room Lecture further sharpens the literary echo. Yet Diamond insists on attending first to the body rather than treating the scene as a puzzle for its own sake. The Mrs. Hudson’s significance lies in that tension: its secure door and confined cabin invite an ingenious explanation, while the dead man inside insists that the investigation concerns a real killing, not merely a clever arrangement of locks.