Authors: Christianna Brand
A
good
chap, the old man had said; and so indeed he had been, Thomas Gemminy—good, kind and compassionate. Thrown by his work a great deal among criminals, his heart had bled for innocent families, left to the mercy of an undiscriminating world. Financial help, help in finding new jobs, new homes, often even new lives far away from England where the past would not catch up on you… ‘We used to think that the ones he encouraged to emigrate were the ones with really dangerous pasts,’ said Giles. ‘But of course we never knew; none of us ever knew about the others, he said it would not have been fair.’ While his wife had lived, his own home, even, had been open to pitiful children, often too young to know, themselves, what their parentage had been. The Gemminy Crickets, he called them: one of his foolish, gentle jokes. There was a Gemminy Crickets Trust, to which all those who had passed through his hands might turn for help in time of need; his will left everything to the trust. (‘So no clues there; you can leave money out of it.’) He had been to great lengths to cover their tracks, even from themselves; (not with Giles, however—Giles had been old enough to remember that night, the night his mother and father had been hacked to death by the madman with an axe—it was not only the children of criminals, Thomas Gemminy befriended: there had been the victims too.)
Of them all, in his old age three had been most close to him—Giles, Rupert, Helen: Giles and Rupert because they had qualified and gone into partnership with him, and Helen, his pet, his darling, last to be adopted in his own home before his wife had died: Helen with her great eyes looking out so bravely from beneath the cloud of her soft, dark hair…
‘His Talking Orchid he used to call her,’ said Giles. ‘But she’s very tough, really. Spent all her life with us boys doing everything we did, and most things better…’ The smile died out of his eyes. ‘All that emerged at the trial.’
‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ said the old man again. ‘Let me guess.’ He eyed the young man shrewdly. ‘You were in love with her?’
There came upon him the sickness, the stab of sickness and pain that came whenever he thought too closely about Helen; but he said, keeping his tone light: ‘What do you think?’
‘And Rupert?’
‘Rupert too.’
‘Which did she favour?’
Rupert, gay, sweet-tempered Rupert with his smiling blue eyes and his heavy, curling auburn hair, so ruthlessly brushed flat only to come curling up again… Himself, dark, slender, serious, who could yet be so full of jokes and laughter… ‘One day it was one of us, one day the other; she just made hay with us. And then when this third party came along—’
‘Oh, there was a third party then? Not just between you three?—the murder I mean, of course. Suspects one, two, three and four: you and Rupert and Helen and—A.N.Other?’ The old man rose, hoisting himself forward with a jerk of his heavy arms and shoulders. ‘Let’s walk a little; it’s chilly sitting still. And wasn’t there something about a policeman murdered too? Old Gemminy rang up the police station with some message?—and later a policeman also rang up?’
Thomas Gemminy in his ‘sealed room’, dying—ringing up the police station across the street with that wild, mad, urgent summons—something about something or somebody ‘vanishing into thin air’, something about the window, and then on a note of sheer, squealing terror, something about ‘the long arms…’ And an hour later Police Constable Cross, supposed to be pounding his unsensational beat a couple of miles away, ringing up also, with crazy gabblings, ‘Got me by the throat…’ and something about the window and something about vanishing into thin air and something, on a suddenly rising note of terror about ‘the long arms…’ A ’phone box had been traced at last with a pane of glass broken; and a hundred yards away, submerged in a tank of water in a half-demolished old factory, his body—bound and strangled; and stabbed in the back with the missing paper-knife from Mr. Gemminy’s office…
‘He came from the same police station?’
The only police station in that small country town—just across the street from the office, where they had all been known so well: Thomas Gemminy and his two young men, in and out every other day pleading, arguing, deliberating, fighting, on behalf of their dubious clientèle. There had been half a dozen of the lads getting their tea when the first message had come through—down in the basement canteen, from whose windows they could actually see the windows of Gemminy’s offices, five storeys above. They’d all dropped everything the minute the name of Gemminy was mentioned and, hardly waiting for permission let alone orders, caught up their helmets and gone dashing across the street. ‘So it couldn’t have been two minutes from the time he rang—’
‘What exactly did he say?’
‘I’ve told you. That he was dying. That someone or something, the operator couldn’t make sense out of it, had strangled him; that the desk was on fire, he must have help quick. And then this thing about “through the window” and then about “vanishing into thin air”. The operator kept trying to interrupt him, trying to get the name and address and at last he choked out the name Gemminy and then there was this dreadful scream about “the long arms”. As I say, within a couple of minutes a sergeant and at least five of the boys were trying to break down the door.’
But Rupert had been already there, beating at it with a closed fist, barging at it with a bruising shoulder, yelling ‘Uncle Gem! Uncle Gem!’ The sergeant had told off a man to stand at the head of the stairs and watch for anyone escaping and then with the rest had launched himself against the door. Rupert had yelled at last: ‘It must be bolted. There’s bolts top and bottom.’ And a panel was stove in and an arm thrust through and up and a panel kicked in and an arm thrust through and down; and as they stood back for one more concerted effort against the stout lock still holding—into the momentary silence there came from within the room, thin and clear and eerily tinkling, the sound of breaking glass.
And the door gave at last and burst inwards and suddenly the smoke-filled room was a flurry of blue-uniformed arms and legs; and there was nobody there, not a living soul.
Not a living soul. A dead man, only: strangled, staring at them across the burning desk, the wound in his back still oozing blood, and the jagged edges of the broken window pane behind him still vibrant, as though someone had that moment gone diving through.
But the hole was two feet in diameter and the window fifty feet up.
Rupert Chester and a couple of the men rushed over to the body, the sergeant with another made a dash for the window. Nothing moving, not a sign of life in the yard below—a warehouse yard, used for deliveries, swept clean, a shell, an empty space enclosed by blank walls and a high barricaded gate. ‘Watch;’ said the sergeant to the man, ‘don’t take your eyes off it.’ But he knew there would be nothing to see and already a sort of dread was forming in him, a dread and a confusion. In the centre of the room all was pandemonium as, coughing and choking in the smoke belched out from the burning desk, men beat at the flaming papers; and out of the confusion, Rupert Chester’s voice cried, sharp and high: ‘For God’s sake!—look at this! It’s Helen—she’s in danger. I must go.’
And he was gone. ‘Shall I go after him?’ yelled one of the men, but, ‘No, no,’ the sergeant yelled back, ‘leave him, get on with the job.’ There was too much to do, no one could be spared; and after all, Rupert Chester was known to them, it wasn’t like a suspect disappearing, unidentifiable. And besides—there he’d been outside the locked and bolted door, trying to get
in.
And the smoke was getting thicker, a man was calling out that the body was beginning to scorch, a voice cried, ‘For God’s sake, aren’t there any extinguishers?’, a voice cried, ‘I’ll go for the fire brigade…’ What was one to do?—move the body with all its tell-tale clues or risk the whole lot being consumed by the fire? He fought his way over to the flaming desk, looked briefly at the old man’s body, trying to take in the whole scene and impress it on his memory; ordered, ‘Yes, move him, chair and all, carry him outside.’ No time to worry about Rupert Chester now; and if there really were some danger to Helen Crane, at least someone was coping with it. And anyway, thank God!—here was the fire brigade.
‘Was the room badly burnt?’
‘Most of the woodwork,’ said Giles. ‘The furniture and the door itself and so on; and papers, of course, there was masses of paper in the room. Not much left in the way of clues, once the hoses had soused it all. And of course no sign of the note.’
‘What note?’
‘The note that had made Rupert shoot off to look for Helen. He said it was on a scribbling pad; huge letters, scrawled
—HELEN—DANGER—
some such thing.’
‘Did anyone else see it?’
‘He said he’d shown it to one of the men; but they all deny having seen it.’
‘That was predictable,’ said the old man dryly.
Giles did a double take. ‘You mean you’re
there
?’
‘What’s “there”? I’m in a dozen places. If you mean do I see how it could have been done—’
‘You haven’t heard yet about the dead policeman.’
‘I don’t see how he complicates things. We now have all our suspects—all of them,’ said the old man with a significant wink, ‘outside the locked room and free to be running around murdering policemen or doing anything else. Still, tell me about him.’
‘He was killed about five o’clock. Uncle Gem’s call came through to the station at near enough three minutes to four; at five the policeman rang up. And saying almost the same words, that’s what made it so uncanny—about the long arms and something vanishing into thin air. First he said “George?”—that was the chap on the switchboard—“this is Dinkum.” Dinkum was his nickname at the station—and he gave his number and was just saying where he was calling from when he seemed to be disturbed and there came this frightful shouting, again about somebody strangling him, just like Uncle Gem, and the word “window” and “vanished into thin air”—and then a sort of gurgling scream and the operator could just make out the words “the long arms…” And as I told you, they finally found a call box with a broken window pane and they searched around there and the body was in a half-demolished factory, a hundred yards away.’
They came to the end of the gravelled path and turned back. ‘The murderer seems to have been very fortunate in the privacy of his arrangements.’
‘Well, but they
were
arrangements, weren’t they? And what arrangements! Saturday afternoon and the final of the World Cup: every soul in the place glued to the telly—and for good measure a wet, blustery day: gorgeous weather over most of the country, but with us a wet, blustery day.’
They came to the bench and sat down again; the old man tired easily. From below came the whirr of a motor-mower, the lawn was striped in paler and darker green as the grass bent beneath the cropping blades. But the old man’s mind was in a sealed room, locked and bolted, where glass broke, a dying man was stabbed—and yet where no living man could have been; in a ‘phone box where a country-town policeman choked and yammered and presumably within a few moments, also died. ‘Any actual tie between the two deaths?’
‘The same words spoken—“into thin air” and this terrifying thing about “the long arms”. And it was the knife from Uncle Gem’s office; and traces of his blood group were mingled with the man’s own. It was all a good bit diluted with the water—he’d been heaved into this sort of half-destroyed tipped-up water tank. Tied up with some wire rope which had been lying about there.’
‘I see. All right. Well, those are the facts,’ said the old man, rubbing his hands. ‘So then, let’s have the alibis.’
‘Rupert’s and Helen’s and mine—?’
‘And A.N.Other’s. We mustn’t forget Helen’s third suitor. I am assuming,’ said the old man, ‘that if money was out of it, the motive was something to do with Helen?’
And they were back to Helen. But he had to go through with it now. ‘That was the conclusion the police came to at this stage,’ said Giles.
‘Yes, well we want to play it from the police angle. But first—what authority had Mr. Gemminy over Helen? With regard to her marrying, I mean. Could he prevent it?’
‘Not legally, probably, if that’s what you mean. But he could advise; and his advice was based upon knowledge of the past. He could prevent it by—well, warnings; to her, to us, to other people. He knew our life histories, our heredities…’
‘Sufficient motive certainly, for silencing him. More potent, in fact, than actual authority.’
‘Somebody thought so,’ said Giles, grimly assenting.
‘Very well. Let’s move on now to what actually happened, the order of events.’ Like a child, excited and eager, he wriggled himself heavily into a more comfortable sitting position on the bench. ‘True or false—as the police got them. Leave me to do the sorting out.
They
had to.’
In a way, the ball had started with P.C. Cross: finishing his dinner in the canteen, pedalling off to his beat, not remarked again until the telephone call at five o’clock; his body found an hour or so later in the disused factory.
‘The next exact time we know is when I went to the office to see Uncle Gemminy…’
Mr. Gemminy had stayed on there because he wanted to talk to them—to Giles and Rupert: but separately. ‘I was to go at half past two, Rupert at four. He didn’t want to talk at home because Helen might be there—she still lived with him. Rupert and I shared a flat in a block about fifteen minutes’ drive from the office. Anyway, the thing was that this third party had turned up and the old man didn’t like it. Who the chap was we didn’t then know but I think
he
knew, or he’d guessed, and he wasn’t too pleased. He thought she’d had her head turned, he thought she didn’t know her own mind; and anyway he would secretly have liked it to be Rupert or me, he wanted to keep it in the family. Anyway, his idea was to sort it out first with us two and find out how each felt about her before he did any more. But nothing terrific you know—just a family discussion.’
‘All right. So at half past two you went along?’
‘M’m. Leaving Rupert at the flat. We had a very affable chat, the old man and I, I told him my side of the thing—’