What Dread Hand? (26 page)

‘He didn’t tell you the identity of A.N.Other?’

‘No, he didn’t,’ said Giles.

‘Well, never mind; that we can easily enough deduce. And so—?’

‘And so at half past three I came away and he was safe and sound then. And don’t say he wasn’t,’ said Giles, ‘because he was. He rang up Rupert after I’d left—and it wasn’t till four o’clock that he rang the police.’

‘Yes. Well?’

‘Well, I drove home. I parked the car and just as I came round the corner to the front door of the flats, I saw Rupert come running down the steps, hatless and carrying his mac. in spite of the rain, as though he’d just snatched it up all anyhow—and he scrambled into his car and went shooting off.’

‘Why in such a hurry? His appointment wasn’t till four?’

‘Because, so he says, Uncle Gem had just rung him up—’

‘The exact words, please.’

‘Well,’ he said first, “haven’t you started?” and Rupert said “I was just leaving; isn’t Giles still with you?” and Uncle Gem said, “No, he went at half past,” and he was just saying something about “a very good talk” or something like that when he suddenly broke off and said, “There it is again. I don’t like it, Rupert. There seems to be something funny happening outside the window.”’

‘Fifty feet up?’

‘Well, that’s what he said; and then he said, “Do come quickly, Rupert, there’s something wrong.” So naturally Rupert whizzed off not even taking time to put on his mac.’

‘Or to ring the police station first?—just across the road from your uncle.’

‘Well, I don’t think one would, do you?’ said Giles. ‘He says it just never entered his head.’

The old man thought it over. He said dryly: ‘All very convenient for
you,
dear boy? Because if you were seeing Rupert outside your flats, you weren’t back at the office, fifteen minutes’ drive away, murdering your uncle—were you?’

‘If
I was seeing Rupert,’ said Giles. ‘The police thought of that one, too—don’t worry! They thought I might have noted earlier where his car was parked, deduced that he’d have run out—he always does everything at the double. Faked up the alibi, in fact. But there was the macintosh.’

‘You could hardly have guessed that on such a day he wouldn’t be wearing it. I think it does let you out.’

‘And Rupert. Because if I saw him outside the flats, he couldn’t have been back at the office a couple of miles away, murdering Uncle Gem, either.’

‘Your uncle didn’t die until after Rupert could have had time to arrive there.’

‘Yes, but things had already started. He said so to Rupert.’

‘We have only Rupert’s word for that,’ said the old man. He changed his tack. ‘And meanwhile—Helen?’

‘Helen was out of it,’ said Giles quickly. ‘She was up on the heath, walking—and the heath’s fifteen miles away.’

‘What, the whole afternoon? On a wet, blustery day?’

‘She does it to keep fit. She does film work—stunt stuff, really, in a mild sort of way: the stand-ins, riding and diving and skiing and shooting, all that lot. I told you we boys brought her up tough.’

‘Lots of people saw her on the heath, I dare say?’

‘You said it yourself—who else would be up there on such a day?’

‘Then who says she was there?’

‘I say so. I’d arranged to meet her there.’

‘And did you?’

‘No,’ said Giles. ‘But that was my fault. I mucked up the arrangements. The heath’s a huge place. I said to go on and I’d meet her—well, after I’d left Uncle Gem, but I couldn’t tell her that, she didn’t know I was seeing him. I just said about half past four by the Bell, which is a pub. But she thought I said at the Dell, which is a place where we sometimes picnic. They do sound the same if you mumble.’

‘And did you mumble?’

‘Yes, because I didn’t want Rupert to hear. The fact is, I thought I’d get in first, after seeing Uncle Gem. All’s fair?’ said Giles with a faintly self-deprecatory air.

‘All right. A quarter to four. Helen’s up on the heath, without an alibi; you and Rupert alibi one another outside your flats. What’s your story next?’

‘My story, as you so flatteringly call it, is that I went in, made myself a cup of char—as I hadn’t said I’d meet her till half past; and I’d left Uncle Gem a bit early—and then drove up to the Bell. And Rupert’s story is that he couldn’t get into Uncle Gem’s office and was hammering at the door when the police arrived and broke it open. He went in with them and then he saw this note on the desk and he was so shaken by the murder and this on top of it that he never stopped to think but just rushed off to look for Helen. She wasn’t at home, he rang round frantically to a few friends, nothing doing there; so he got into the car again and drove about just stupidly searching in places where he thought she might be—’

‘Did the places where he thought she might be happen to take him near the scene of the policeman’s murder?’

‘It’s all within a smallish area,’ said Giles, briefly. ‘A couple of miles or so. Except of course for the heath and that’s where she was, half an hour’s drive away from any of it. Rupert went out there eventually, knowing she often walked there at the week-end. But as I say it’s a huge place and in the end we all missed one another.’

‘So at the time of the policeman’s killing—about five you said?—Helen and Rupert have in fact no alibis? And you?’

‘I’m afraid you will find this very convenient too,’ said Giles. ‘But yes, I have one for this time also. I waited for Helen for about twenty minutes and then I thought she might have decided not to come, it being such a filthy day; so I rang up the house to ask. The housekeeper will tell you so.’

‘You could have done that from anywhere.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I did it from the call box outside the Bell. And I can prove it because I could see the people inside all crowded round the television—the pub was closed, but we know the people, we often go there; and I knocked on the window and made signs asking the score and they signalled back that extra time was being played, so I knew it was all square; and we all made praying signals through the glass…’

‘Well, I must say that sounds pretty conclusive.’

‘The police thought so too,’ said Giles; dry in his turn.

‘So that leaves Rupert and Helen.’

‘And your dear friend A.N.Other. And perhaps you’ll explain to me,’ said Giles, ‘not so much which of them killed Uncle Gemminy as how any of them
could
have. The door locked—the key was in the debris of the burnt-out desk, by the way—and bolted from the inside. The window was fifty feet up and a child couldn’t have got through the hole in the glass. Yet it had just that moment been broken and Uncle Gem had that minute been stabbed. So before we have accusations—I think there should be explanations.’

The old man shrugged huge shoulders up to the thick lobes of his ears. ‘Oh, well, as to that there are probably half a dozen. I can think of three, straight off—one for each of them: One for Rupert, one for Helen, one for my dear friend, as you call him, A.N.Other…’

Giles reacted immediately. ‘Why should Helen do such a thing? You agree that this crime was committed because of her.’

‘If it was,’ said the old man, ‘who more interested than herself?’ He brushed aside interruptions. ‘Thomas Gemminy was discussing the marriage of this precious ewe lamb of his. He knew all the past histories, the heredities—he could tell what might for ever put an end to any idea of marriage between Helen and—somebody. So—somebody silenced him. Somebody set fire to the desk where dangerous documents might be kept; and silenced him.’

‘All right—so you say. But I say—how?’

The old man was silent, sitting deep in thought, the sunshine beating down through the leafless branches of the mulberry tree, dappling his big bald head with light and shadow. Giles prompted at last, trailing a red herring across that other name: ‘Take Rupert—’

He seemed to come awake. ‘All right, very well: take Rupert! Rupert pretends a telephone call to give him an excuse to hurry off and get there early; or perhaps even actually gets one, telling him simply that you’ve left and he may as well come along now—but either way is sure that you are out of the way. He strangles the old man, ties him to the chair, conceals the knife about himself somewhere and comes out, locking the door behind him. When the police arrive, he’s pounding on it. He suggests that it’s bolted on the inside and when the panel’s broken, is the first to thrust through his arm and pretend to draw back the bolts: which in fact, of course, never were shot at all. The lock gives way, they all tumble in and he goes with them. Chucks the key into the fire raging round the desk; and that’s all there is to it.’ He asked as a child asks, playing Hunt the Thimble: ‘Am I getting warm?’

‘Not frightfully,’ said Giles. ‘What about the stabbing, for example?’

‘The oldest trick in the crime thrillers, boy. Bends over the body pretending to be frantic with anxiety, jabs in the knife. So recently dead, there’d still be a little ooze of blood.’

‘All this in front of half a dozen policemen?’

‘In a crowded room filled with smoke; everyone excited and milling about…’

Giles clutched at a straw. ‘But the window! They heard the glass being shattered just as they were actually breaking in.’

‘They heard glass being shattered,’ said the old man. ‘Which is rather a different thing.’

‘The broken pane was still quivering.’

He shrugged again. ‘Something thrown while Rupert’s hand was through the panel—a piece of the panel itself, perhaps; it would be burnt up afterwards in the fire. Or the window broken in advance and a piece of the glass kept back for just this purpose—there was a little inside the window-sill, wasn’t there? Threw it while his hand was through the broken panel, out of sight; and a lucky shot hit the broken pane and started it vibrating again. But all that was needed was the sound.’

‘Good God!’ said Giles. He could not help a grudging admiration. ‘You certainly have it all worked out.’

‘You said it couldn’t be done. I’m only telling you one of half a dozen ways in which it could. This is the way it could have been done by Rupert.’

‘Well, all right then—Rupert. What about the note?’

‘No note, of course. An excuse to get himself out of the room.’

‘Why?’ said Giles.

‘Ah, why? To deal with the policeman? The policeman, on his beat, had seen something, perhaps?’

Giles’ scepticism began to revive a little. ‘Seen what? There was nothing to be seen. Rupert got there a bit early—so what? He makes no secret of it, he’s accounted for it anyway by saying that Uncle Gem ’phoned him. He had no reason to kill the policeman.’

‘I agree,’ said the old man, calmly. ‘And if he didn’t then no doubt he also didn’t kill Mr. Gemminy.’

‘You don’t believe this about Rupert at all?’

‘I told you—this is one way it could have been done—by Rupert.’

‘But then if he’s out—well, there really
was
a note saying that Helen was in danger.’

‘I dare say there was,’ said the old man.

‘But Helen wasn’t in danger.’

‘I dare say she wasn’t,’ said the old man.

‘Then—who put the note there about Helen?’

‘Helen put it there,’ said the old man.

A tough girl. A girl trained to ride and climb, to shoot straight, to throw straight—a girl beating boys at their own games. A girl in love, whose guardian disapproved of her romance and had the power to end it for ever—he who knew the secrets of so many pasts. A girl with half an hour to work in, between one interview and the next… ‘Am I getting warm?’

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 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.’