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 inside? 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?’