Authors: Christianna Brand
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, sets 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!’
‘To a telephone booth where he binds and gags himself, rings up the police with a message almost identical with the earlier one and then moves on to a convenient hiding place and there quietly murders himself?’
‘Murder?’ said the old man. ‘Would you call it murder?’ And he turned his big frame so that he stared directly into the tense, white face. ‘I thought you would be more likely to regard it as—an execution.’
Giles sat up very straight. ‘Are you suggesting that
I
—?’
‘You were up on the heath, dear boy; you have your alibi and there’s no breaking that, if people actually confirm having seen you there.’
‘Rupert then—?’
‘But could Rupert have known who had murdered your guardian?’
‘Nobody could have known at that stage,’ said Giles. ‘No one even knew that Uncle Gem had been killed, except for the police—and of course the murderer. How could somebody kill the murderer, by way of revenge, when nobody else knew there had even been a murder?’
‘Perhaps the murderer himself told somebody?’
‘Told who? He’d hardly have come to Rupert or me—’
‘No,’ said the old man. ‘So who
would
he have gone to?’
‘Dear God!—you mean he told Helen?’
‘Need he actually have told her? But… You see, may he not well have had an assignation with Helen for that afternoon—that important afternoon when their joint future was being discussed. She has a date with you, but she’ll ditch that, pretend she confused the meeting place. And… Well, she is waiting for him somewhere near that telephone booth. Something shows in his face perhaps; or in his manner; and we know there was blood on his uniform—traces were found despite his having been in the water.’
‘The blood was from the knife. Why should he have brought away the knife?’
‘To defend himself, perhaps? Maybe Rupert had a lucky escape not actually meeting him on the stairs. Or maybe he was frightened of leaving finger-prints—we know he was hurried, he had less time than he’d bargained for—Mr. Gemminy would have warned him, very likely, that Rupert was on his way. The old man wouldn’t die quick enough, perhaps, so he snatched up the knife—that would explain why two methods were used. But then—had he been careful enough about prints? if they’re found on the knife, that’s the end of him. So he plucks it out of the wound, wraps it round with something, conceals it under his uniform jacket…’
‘And Helen?’
‘Helen goes close up to him to embrace him—feels the hard ridge of the knife against his chest… Or he drops it, perhaps—he’ll have been pretty nervous, no doubt. At any rate she deduces what has happened—gets it away from him and in her rage and agony about her uncle, strikes out at him—’
‘The man was strangled,’ said Giles, white-lipped.
‘Are they sure which happened first?—after the immersion in the tank, I dare say it wasn’t easy to be certain. Anyone can stab a man in the back; and once he was weakened by the knife wound, it wouldn’t be too hard for a strong young woman to finish him off. And that might explain how she got him to the final hiding place—dragged him along, still alive but stupefied by pain and weakness, tied him up when she got him there and once he was totally helpless—’
‘Dear God!’ said Giles. He fought against it, the very thought was revolting. ‘The telephone call—’
‘At the knife point? Perhaps he’d told her how he’d tricked the police with the faked call from Gemminy’s office, perhaps he’d confessed it all—freely or at the knife point, as I say. So she forced him to do the thing again, use the same phrases, carry on the mystery, the strangeness, the hint of some horrible magic that he’d already begun when he’d impersonated Mr. Gemminy.’ He looked suddenly, keenly, into the white sick face. ‘My dear boy—it’s still only a game, isn’t it? Or if it’s the truth, you surely can’t go on caring for such a girl? Yet you can’t even bear to have her name mentioned in such a connection.’
‘You could hardly expect it,’ said Giles. ‘I’ve been in love with her all my life. To ask me to accept…’ His mind was sick, swooning with the horror of the thought of it. ‘That even for revenge, even in a red hot rage she could do such a thing—’
‘Better, all the same than doing it dispassionately; not in grief or anger but deliberately, in cold blood?’ And he asked: ‘What, after all, did you know about this girl? What if it was really a case, not of what Mr. Gemminy could tell Helen about her lover, but what he could tell the lover about her?’
The sun was going down, it was growing a little chilly. ‘Let’s walk up and down just one more turn and then we’ll go in and have tea.’ And he got up, seized Giles by the arm and walked with him again along the sanded path. ‘This young policeman—his past can’t after all have been so very bad? He’d been brought back to this country, encouraged by your uncle to join the police force; or only permitted, but at any rate your uncle knew all about it. Would the old man have been so rigidly, so positively against the marriage, if there hadn’t been something on the other side also? Or perhaps it was
only
on Helen’s side that the bad heredity lay? Perhaps he knew that she should not marry at all?’
‘She’s as good as gold,’ said Giles. ‘As good as gold.’
‘But we’re speaking not of
her
sins but of the sins of her forefathers.’ Giles jerked away his arm but the old man caught at it again, and held him fast. ‘Supposing Helen was not in love with the policeman at all? Supposing it was one of you two, yourself or Rupert?—she was just teasing you, making you both jealous, playing hard to get. But Mr. Gemminy doesn’t know that. He sees the young man below the window, watching, wondering what’s being said up there about him—and Helen. He calls him up—and tells him for his own sake as well as for Helen’s, that two such heredities shouldn’t mix. So the young man—predisposed, you see, by his own bad heredity—kills him. And coming to her with the blood of her beloved guardian still fresh on his hands, reveals that he now knows secrets of her own past—and if she will not “consent unto him” as the Bible says, may he not well reveal these secrets to prevent her marrying anyone else? Would you have married her under these circumstances? Would Rupert? Would you not always have been looking over your shoulders, asking yourselves what your children would become…?’ He was silent again. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that this perhaps was not an execution, though that may have been the excuse that the killer gave, even to herself. I think it was like the setting fire to the desk—a safety measure.’ And his bright old eye swivelled again to the set face. ‘Am I not getting very hot?’