‘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 were 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 musn’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.