‘All right. Well….’ The old man considered it, forming the picture in his mind’s eye. ‘The general scene? The buildings opposite?’
Giles Carberry drew angles on the gravelled path. ‘This is the office block; big old house, actually—we took up the whole top floor of it. Stairs, no lift. No one else working there of course on a Saturday afternoon—and the day of the World Cup Final, what’s more. Street here. These are Rupert’s rooms and mine, looking across the street to the police station opposite. Uncle Gem’s the end room, the corner room; only one window and that overlooked the warehouse yard, at right angles to the street.’
‘Narrow yard?’
‘Yes, but don’t start on rope bridges and pulleys and things from the opposite roof; or ledges or painters’ cradles and the rest of the gimmicks. They’ve all been considered and counted out.’
‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ said the old man like a child playing a game.
‘Well, but these are facts, not evidence which might or might not be true. And the fact is that no one could have got out of the jagged hole in that window, fifty feet up.’
‘All right. Well?’ He twiddled his gnarled old thumbs. ‘This Rupert Chester? Another of old Gemminy’s wards, you say?’
‘Wards, adopted children, whatever you like to call us. His “Crickets”. Rupert and me and Helen; and lots more of us, of course….’
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?’