Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (17 page)

‘If it was,’ said the old man, ‘who more interested than herself?’ He brushed aside interruptions. ‘Thomas Gemminy was discussing the marriage of this precious ewe lamb of his. He knew all the past histories, the heredities—he could tell what might for ever put an end to any idea of marriage between Helen and—somebody. So—somebody silenced him. Somebody set fire to the desk where dangerous documents might be kept; and silenced him.’

‘All right—so you say. But I say—how?’

The old man was silent, sitting deep in thought, the sunshine beating down through the leafless branches of the mulberry tree, dappling his big bald head with light and shadow. Giles prompted at last, trailing a red herring across that other name: ‘Take Rupert—’

He seemed to come awake. ‘All right, very well: take Rupert! Rupert pretends a telephone call to give him an excuse to hurry off and get there early; or perhaps even actually gets one, telling him simply that you’ve left and he may as well come along now—but either way is sure that you are out of the way. He strangles the old man, ties him to the chair, conceals the knife about himself somewhere and comes out, locking the door behind him. When the police arrive, he’s pounding on it. He suggests that it’s bolted on the inside and when the panel’s broken, is the first to thrust through his arm and pretend to draw back the bolts: which in fact, of course, never were shot at all. The lock gives way, they all tumble in and he goes with them. Chucks the key into the fire raging round the desk; and that’s all there is to it.’ He asked as a child asks, playing Hunt the Thimble: ‘Am I getting warm?’

‘Not frightfully,’ said Giles. ‘What about the stabbing, for example?’

‘The oldest trick in the crime thrillers, boy. Bends over the body pretending to be frantic with anxiety, jabs in the knife. So recently dead, there’d still be a little ooze of blood.’

‘All this in front of half a dozen policemen?’

‘In a crowded room filled with smoke; everyone excited and milling about….’

Giles clutched at a straw. ‘But the window! They heard the glass being shattered just as they were actually breaking in.’

‘They heard glass being shattered,’ said the old man. ‘Which is rather a different thing.’

‘The broken pane was still quivering.’

He shrugged again. ‘Something thrown while Rupert’s hand was through the panel—a piece of the panel itself, perhaps; it would be burnt up afterwards in the fire. Or the window broken in advance and a piece of the glass kept back for just this purpose—there was a little inside the window-sill, wasn’t there? Threw it while his hand was through the broken panel, out of sight; and a lucky shot hit the broken pane and started it vibrating again. But all that was needed was the sound.’

‘Good God!’ said Giles. He could not help a grudging admiration. ‘You certainly have it all worked out.’

‘You said it couldn’t be done. I’m only telling you one of half a dozen ways in which it could. This is the way it could have been done by Rupert.’

‘Well, all right then—Rupert. What about the note?’

‘No note, of course. An excuse to get himself out of the room.’

‘Why?’ said Giles.

‘Ah, why? To deal with the policeman? The policeman, on his beat, had seen something, perhaps?’

Giles’ scepticism began to revive a little. ‘Seen what? There was nothing to be seen. Rupert got there a bit early—so what? He makes no secret of it, he’s accounted for it anyway by saying that Uncle Gem ’phoned him. He had no reason to kill the policeman.’

‘I agree,’ said the old man, calmly. ‘And if he didn’t then no doubt he also didn’t kill Mr. Gemminy.’

‘You don’t believe this about Rupert at all?’

‘I told you—this is one way it could have been done—by Rupert.’

‘But then if he’s out—well, there really
was
a note saying that Helen was in danger.’

‘I dare say there was,’ said the old man.

‘But Helen wasn’t in danger.’

‘I dare say she wasn’t,’ said the old man.

‘Then—who put the note there about Helen?’

‘Helen put it there,’ said the old man.

A tough girl. A girl trained to ride and climb, to shoot straight, to throw straight—a girl beating boys at their own games. A girl in love, whose guardian disapproved of her romance and had the power to end it for ever—he who knew the secrets of so many pasts. A girl with half an hour to work in, between one interview and the next….‘Am I getting warm?’

That cold shudder again, that sickness at the heart, when Helen’s name was dragged forward into the ugly light. ‘Of course not,’ said Giles. ‘It’s all nonsense. How could she have done it? She was nowhere near when the door was broken down. And in that case the bolts really were drawn, inside.’

‘Oh, well—bits of string passed under the door, you know—all that lark. The door was destroyed by fire and the bits of string with it. One good reason why the fire was ever started at all.’

‘But the knife wound! The broken glass!’

‘The glass was broken in advance, of course—a hole two feet in diameter. And the victim, dying or dead, tied to his chair—with his back to that hole in the glass. For the rest—a warehouse roof opposite: a narrow yard. She could throw straight, couldn’t she?—a knife no doubt, as well as anything else. As to the breaking glass—why assume that the glass was broken, at the time they heard it breaking, from the
in
side? After all, there was some as we’ve just seen, inside the sill. She’d be pretty handy with a catapult, I dare say? You boys will have seen to that.’

‘Why should she have done it? Why should she do such a thing? Why all this—mystification?’

‘To mystify. To make it all happen when she was supposed to be nowhere near.’ He looked into the young man’s white face curiously. ‘It’s only a game,’ he said. ‘We’re only playing a game. But you don’t like even to hear it said.’

‘I’ve heard it said several times already,’ said Giles, ‘when it was not a game. The police are not fools, you know, either. Only—not being fools—they asked themselves two further questions. Why leave the note—?’

‘To make Rupert do just what he did. Run out and leave himself without an alibi for the time the policeman was killed.’

‘—and so that brings us again to: why kill the policeman, anyway?’

‘The policeman came from the station just across the road from the office. As he pedalled off to his beat—may he not have glanced up and seen—a boy on the roof of the warehouse with a catapult…? But when the news of the murder broke—then he’d have to put two and two together, wouldn’t he? So she had to shut his mouth. She’d recognise him? Like the rest of you, she’d know all the chaps at the station, at any rate by sight?’

‘Yes, we all knew him. And by the same token,’ said Giles, ‘a strapping great chap he was. So how—?’

‘You told me she was a tough girl,’ said the old man.

‘Tough enough to drag him, dead or dying, to that place a hundred yards away from the call box, heave him into that tank…?’

‘That has to be accounted for,’ acknowledged the old man with an odd glance.

‘And the knife—if she’d thrown the knife, it would still have been in the wound when the police broke in. She wasn’t in the room, to take it away. You’ll hardly suggest, I suppose,’ said Giles, heavily sarcastic, ‘that she yanked it back with a piece of string? Or some sort of boomerang knife, perhaps…?’ He relaxed against the hard back of the bench with an absurd relief. ‘You old devil!—you never really believed she killed Uncle Gem.’

Bright eyes, alight with mockery: not very kindly mockery. ‘No. Not that.’

‘And so—we come to A.N.Other?’

‘And the boomerang?’

‘Boomerang—what boomerang? What I said just now—a boomerang knife? I was only joking.’

‘Not a boomerang knife, no. Just any old boomerang.’ He left it at that; sat for a long time, thinking. ‘We have at this stage, I take it, all the information the police had to work on. True or false. So… So I put myself in the position of the police; and I think what I do is to ask myself what are the most important questions. And I think I reply to myself as follows: First—why was the policeman killed? And secondly—why was he killed in the way he was?—why were both men killed in such a way?—strangled, tied up and then, dying or already dead, stabbed in the back. And thirdly, why did both ring up with this strange phrase about something vanishing into thin air?—and what was meant by the horrible screaming about the long arms? And fourthly—why, when Rupert says that he showed the note to somebody, does everybody deny having seen it? And fifthly and sixthly and seventhly and for ever ad infinitum, the most important question of all: in that room that afternoon—dead man locked in, wound still bleeding, window just broken, desk in flames and all the rest of it—why did someone call out that he was going for the fire brigade? And he asked again, like a child playing a drawing-room game: ‘Am I getting warm?’

‘Very warm now,’ said Giles. ‘Very warm.’

‘The call to the police station said that the room was on fire. Surely to goodness, while the men rushed across the street to the rescue, they could leave it to the remaining staff to follow the obvious routine and send for the fire brigade?’

‘Fire or no fire,’ said Giles, ‘if you get any hotter you’ll burn yourself.’

‘And P.C.Cross had not been seen since he’d left after his midday dinner and gone off to his beat?’

‘Scorching,’ said Giles.

‘Which brings us back to the boomerang, you see.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by this boomerang.’

‘Only that it’s an Australian word; and when you used it a moment ago, it made me think. Because ‘dinkum’ is an Australian word too, isn’t it? And that was the policeman’s nickname, wasn’t it? Dinkum Cross.’

We used to think that the ones he encouraged to emigrate were the ones with really dangerous pasts.

A child with a bad background, sent away for his own safety and peace of mind. Returning in manhood, under the wing of the kindly old guardian, joining the police force with his help and encouragement—a Gemminy Cricket like the rest of them, unacknowledged as such only lest the past should catch up on him still. Through his work coming in contact with his brother Crickets; getting to know Helen, his sister Cricket: falling in love. His heredity such that their guardian would never permit a marriage between them.

‘Helen, of course, would have told him all about the arrangements for that afternoon; she could hardly have been so incurious as you men all seemed so innocently to suppose, when it was her business you were going to discuss. From the corner of the warehouse yard, he watched you come and saw you leave. Mr. Gemminy observed him there, rang up Rupert and told him to hurry, there’d been something rather odd going on under the window—’

‘He could have rung across to the police.’

‘But he had this young man’s secrets still to respect.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Giles. ‘That would have been in character. So?’

‘So he rang Rupert. And in the middle of the conversation the murderer came into the office.’ He broke off. ‘Still hot?’

‘Very hot; but also very cold,’ said Giles.

‘Still, let’s go on through with it. He must work fast—our murderer—because he hasn’t as much time as he’d hoped, Rupert’s been warned, he’s on his way. He strangles the old man, stabs him for good measure, set the desk alight, smashes the hole in the window to create a draught and fan the flames. And it’s done: his secrets are burnt to ashes, the only one in the world who was aware that they even existed is dead. No one knows who he is, not even Helen will connect him with Thomas Gemminy, let alone with his murder. He closes the door and is starting to hurry off down the stairs when he hears—?’

‘He hears Rupert arriving, I suppose,’ said Giles. ‘It’s too late to escape that way; and there’s no other.’

‘What would he do?’ said the old man. He thought that one over too, unhurriedly. ‘I think he would dodge into the nearest room—would that be your office? Oh, Rupert’s, well it makes no difference—he’d dodge in there, meaning to wait until Rupert was inside the smoke-filled room trying to cope with what he found there—and then slip out and away down the stairs before he called the police. But—’

‘But?’

‘But he’d locked the door. An automatic gesture, a symbolical gesture, closing the door upon the terrible past and the terrible thing he’d done to conceal it. He’d locked the door of the murder room, simply not thinking: and Rupert couldn’t get in.’

‘And he was a few feet away in Rupert’s room—and couldn’t get out?’

‘Until—?’

‘Until a whole lot of men in blue uniform just like himself came pounding up the stairs and started banging at the locked door. Who was to notice in that confined space on the landing, with smoke already belching out from under the door, that they had been joined by another of themselves, all barging, heads down, one, two, three, all together now! against the door. And someone says something about bolts and he thinks very quickly; and stoves in the panel and thrusts in his arm and pretends to draw them back. But surely,’ said Giles, ‘he wouldn’t really have gone unrecognised?’

‘The room was on fire, filling with dense smoke; doubtless no one would notice if you kept a handkerchief up to your face—probably they all were doing it. Voices were choking and unrecognisable—voices saying something about fire extinguishers, something about going for the fire brigade….’

‘So as to get out of the room?’

‘There you have it, boy. And how clever after all! Not a suspect escaping, you see, but just one of themselves, shouting to the man at the top of the stairs that he’d been sent—and something about the fire brigade. He’d tried a better way; while he waited in the other room, he’d scrawled the note about Helen, hoping to be allowed to go after Rupert when Rupert, predictably, dashed off. But that one didn’t wash so he had to fall back on the fire brigade. For improvisation, it wasn’t too bad.’ He humphed and smiled. ‘Hot?’

‘In parts,’ said Giles. ‘One small point, however, strikes a little chill. What about Uncle Gem’s ’phone call to the police? What about these strange remarks—vanishing into thin air, the long arms….’

‘Your Uncle Gemminy’s—? But my dear fellow, good heavens! you haven’t got the point at all. You don’t suppose…?’ He broke off rubbing his thick hands together with a self-satisfied chuckle. ‘Just put yourself into the picture, boy! Rupert beating on the door. Murderer crouching in a room a few feet away: in Rupert’s own room. And very soon indeed, what is Rupert going to do? He’s going to stop panicking, dear boy, he’s going to use his loaf—he’s going to come to his own room and telephone to the station just across the way. Only one thing will prevent him—and that is the arrival of the police, before he calls them. So… From the window, the murderer can see down into the canteen—half a dozen chaps there who will, as he knows from his own experience, leap up and come dashing to the scene of an emergency call—if it’s urgent enough. So—the gasping and the choking—to disguise the voice—the mystification of a lot of nonsense about long arms and thin air. And duly—over they come; and in due course also, as we’ve seen—off he goes!’