‘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, set 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….’