‘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—’