‘The man was strangled,’ said Giles, white-lipped.
‘Are they sure which happened first?—after the immersion in the tank, I dare say it wasn’t easy to be certain. Anyone can stab a man in the back; and once he was weakened by the knife wound, it wouldn’t be too hard for a strong young woman to finish him off. And that might explain how she got him to the final hiding place—dragged him along, still alive but stupefied by pain and weakness, tied him up when she got him there and once he was totally helpless—’
‘Dear God!’ said Giles. He fought against it, the very thought was revolting. ‘The telephone call—’
‘At the knife point? Perhaps he’d told her how he’d tricked the police with the faked call from Gemminy’s office, perhaps he’d confessed it all—freely or at the knife point, as I say. So she forced him to do the thing again, use the same phrases, carry on the mystery, the strangeness, the hint of some horrible magic that he’d already begun when he’d impersonated Mr. Gemminy.’ He looked suddenly, keenly, into the white sick face. ‘My dear boy—it’s still only a game, isn’t it? Or if it’s the truth, you surely can’t go on caring for such a girl? Yet you can’t even bear to have her name mentioned in such, a connection.’
‘You could hardly expect it,’ said Giles. ‘I’ve been in love with her all my life. To ask me to accept…’ His mind was sick, swooning with the horror of the thought of it. ‘That even for revenge, even in a red hot rage she could do such a thing—’
‘Better, all the same than doing it dispassionately; not in grief or anger but deliberately, in cold blood?’ And he asked: ‘What, after all, did you know about this girl? What if it was really a case, not of what Mr. Gemminy could tell Helen about her lover, but what he could tell the lover about her?’
The sun was going down, it was growing a little chilly. ‘Let’s walk up and down just one more turn and then we’ll go in and have tea.’ And he got up, seized Giles by the arm and walked with him again along the sanded path. ‘This young policeman—his past can’t after all have been so very bad? He’d been brought back to this country, encouraged by your uncle to join the police force; or only permitted, but at any rate your uncle knew all about it. Would the old man have been so rigidly, so positively against the marriage if there hadn’t been something on the other side also? Or perhaps it was only on Helen’s side that the bad heredity lay? Perhaps he knew that she should not marry at all?’
‘She’s as good as gold,’ said Giles. ‘As good as gold.’
‘But we’re speaking not of her sins but of the sins of her forefathers.’ Giles jerked away his arm but the old man caught at it again, and held him fast. ‘Supposing Helen was not in love with the policeman at all? Supposing it was one of you two, yourself or Rupert?—she was just teasing you, making you both jealous, playing hard to get. But Mr. Gemminy doesn’t know that. He sees the young man below the window, watching, wondering what’s being said up there about him—and Helen. He calls him up—and tells him for his own sake as well as for Helen’s, that two such heredities shouldn’t mix. So the young man—predisposed, you see, by his own bad heredity—kills him. And coming to her with the blood of her beloved guardian still fresh on his hands, reveals that he now knows secrets of her own past—and if she will not “consent unto him” as the Bible says, may he not well reveal these secrets to prevent her marrying anyone else? Would you have married her under these circumstances? Would Rupert? Would you not always have been looking over your shoulders, asking yourselves what your children would become…?’ He was silent again. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that this perhaps was not an execution, though that may have been the excuse that the killer gave, even to herself. I think it was like the setting fire to the desk—a safety measure.’ And his bright old eye swivelled again to the set face. ‘Am I not getting very hot?’
‘You are getting as cold as ice,’ said Giles; very cold himself. ‘You were burning your fingers but now you have taken your hand away from the truth, and you’re cold again.’ And he pointed out: ‘The whole object of the exercise was that Uncle Gem wanted to “keep it in the family”—he wanted her to marry either Rupert or me. And he’d hardly have done that if her heredity had been so bad that she would commit murder to keep it a secret.’