Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (15 page)

—and screamed at her to drink it!—
drink
it! Would Frederick now come hurrying forward with little damaging, dangerous recollections like these? The cotton-wool was closing down upon her once more, stifling her brain with its clouds of unreason, inability to co-ordinate. She clawed her way through it feebly, up to the surface. ‘And may I ask—when did I alter the book?’

‘Any time,’ he said. ‘Then or later. I don’t think that matters. You’d given her the coffee: and in the words of the poet there was “poison i’ the cup”.’

She rallied her whole fighting spirit. ‘A literary policeman—how engaging!’

He gave her a small, sardonic bow. Let the poor mouse take what cheap comfort it may, the bow seemed to say, before the cat gobbles it up.

And yet, after all… What can he prove? she thought. He’s just trying to bluff me. He knows, yes: but if I admit nothing, his knowledge is of no use to him, none at all. All right, so I could have taken the morphia, I could have altered the book; but when could I have administered the dose? Not when I was alone with the girl, or she’d have said so—when she said, for example, that I’d probably put arsenic in the next hot drink I gave her. And for the rest of the time, I was never alone with her, or anyway not till after she’d begun showing symptoms. There’s only the cup of coffee: and he may guess about that but he can’t know—the cup is safe. All I have to do is stand firm and not let myself be drawn….And in the blessed relief of it, she asked, taunting him, the mouse growing suddenly large and mocking, insolently menacing, not a mouse any longer but a rat with bared white fangs, match for any stupid great cat: ‘And do let me ask you, Inspector—did you, “in the words of the poet”—
find
any poison in the cup?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You’d been careful to rinse that out.’

‘But it still had dregs in it.’

‘From the dregs in the coffee pot, no doubt.’

‘Goodness,’ she said, all sarcasm. ‘How neat!’

‘Yes, it was,’ he said. ‘Very neat. Nobody else, by the way, could have handled the cup? Your own story does confirm that?’

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid of the cup, not in the least. I take full responsibility—nobody went into the kitchen after I left the cup there, on the draining board. With some dregs of coffee in it and nothing else—you said so yourself, Inspector, you dipped your finger in and sucked it and you said—’

‘I said there was nothing there but black coffee,’ he said. ‘And that was true.’ And his fingers on her wrist grew suddenly from a light, restraining touch to a ring of steel. ‘You’d forgotten to put any sugar in the dregs,’ he said.

T
HE OLD MAN WAS SIMPLY
delighted to make his acquaintance. ‘You’re most welcome, my dear boy; not often I see a fresh face, these days, not one that I like, anyway—and you remind me a bit of myself when
I
was a lad. You’re staying, I hope?’ All about them stretched wide lawns, velvety green in the bright spring sunshine; over the shining flower-beds, men were working with spud and hoe. ‘What brings you here?’

‘The Gemminy case,’ said Giles.

‘Yes, well you know, I’m pretty hot on a murder puzzle; I’ve heard a lot of confessions in my time.’ He thought about it. ‘Gemminy. The solicitor? The name’s familiar but my memory’s all to pieces, these days. A good chap, I seem to recall?’ His old mind searched back over recent months. ‘I do remember something in the papers, that brought the name back. Sealed Room Mystery, didn’t they call it?’

‘He was in his office, bolts drawn inside the door, window broken—glass still vibrating: but four storeys up. He’d been strangled and then tied to his chair and then stabbed. The wound so fresh that it was still bleeding when the police broke in. But nobody in the room.’

‘Well, my goodness!’ He hooked his heavy, veined old hand into the young man’s arm. ‘Give us a haul up this slope and we’ll sit on a bench under the mulberry tree—not many gardens nowadays can boast a mulberry, can they?—and you can tell me all about it. I’ve forgotten, I forget everything nowadays, so you can start from scratch.’ And his bright eyes shone. ‘Test me! We’ll play a sort of game of Hunt the Thimble—Hunt the Murderer, if you like. Tell me the outlines, tell it to me as the police will have got it, clues, bits of evidence—not necessarily the truth, you know, but as it came to them. Let me work it out and see if I can beat them to it….’

Now that it had come, a sort of horror grew in Giles’ mind, a sort of sickness at the thought of going over it all yet again, of dragging Helen’s name again through the blood and the terror and the doubt. But they had said to talk about it as much as he could, to get it out of his system, to try to forget. Try to forget me, Helen had said, try to forget….And so….

And so they came to the bench; Giles Carberry sat with the old man there and told him the story of the Gemminy case.

Old Gemminy’s office: a bare, square room, not very large. Strong, heavy door. Opposite the door, the single window—one large pane of glass, the glass broken to form a jagged hole, perhaps two feet in diameter. A little broken glass on the floor beneath the sill; much more in the deserted warehouse yard below. As Giles had said, the window four storeys up.

And at the desk, between window and door, Thomas Gemminy, solicitor dealing largely in criminal matters; seventy years old. Tied to the chair with a length of cord torn from the blind, tipped sideways, half asprawl across the paper-strewn desk, staring with empurpled face towards the door; his own silk handkerchief twisted about his neck and, for good measure, a knife thrust between the shoulder-blades; only a little blood, but the wound still oozing. The paper knife, which had always lain on his desk, not there.

And at the door, as the police came pounding up the stairs, Rupert Chester hammering, double-fisted, shouting out that there was smoke coming from under the door, that Uncle Gem wouldn’t answer….

‘Rupert Chester?’

‘Rupert was one of his wards. We were all his wards—he constituted himself guardian to all sorts of children he came across with—well, with unhappy backgrounds. You must remember that? Anyway, I’ll tell you later. But Rupert was one of them.’

‘All right. Well….’ The old man considered it, forming the picture in his mind’s eye. ‘The general scene? The buildings opposite?’

Giles Carberry drew angles on the gravelled path. ‘This is the office block; big old house, actually—we took up the whole top floor of it. Stairs, no lift. No one else working there of course on a Saturday afternoon—and the day of the World Cup Final, what’s more. Street here. These are Rupert’s rooms and mine, looking across the street to the police station opposite. Uncle Gem’s the end room, the corner room; only one window and that overlooked the warehouse yard, at right angles to the street.’

‘Narrow yard?’

‘Yes, but don’t start on rope bridges and pulleys and things from the opposite roof; or ledges or painters’ cradles and the rest of the gimmicks. They’ve all been considered and counted out.’

‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ said the old man like a child playing a game.

‘Well, but these are facts, not evidence which might or might not be true. And the fact is that no one could have got out of the jagged hole in that window, fifty feet up.’

‘All right. Well?’ He twiddled his gnarled old thumbs. ‘This Rupert Chester? Another of old Gemminy’s wards, you say?’

‘Wards, adopted children, whatever you like to call us. His “Crickets”. Rupert and me and Helen; and lots more of us, of course….’

A
good
chap, the old man had said; and so indeed he had been, Thomas Gemminy—good, kind and compassionate. Thrown by his work a great deal among criminals, his heart had bled for innocent families, left to the mercy of an undiscriminating world. Financial help, help in finding new jobs, new homes, often even new lives far away from England where the past would not catch up on you…‘We used to think that the ones he encouraged to emigrate were the ones with really dangerous pasts,’ said Giles. ‘But of course we never knew; none of us ever knew about the others, he said it would not have been fair.’ While his wife had lived, his own home, even, had been open to pitiful children, often too young to know, themselves, what their parentage had been. The Gemminy Crickets, he called them: one of his foolish, gentle jokes. There was a Gemminy Crickets Trust, to which all those who had passed through his hands might turn for help in time of need; his will left everything to the trust. (‘So no clues there; you can leave money out of it.’) He had been to great lengths to cover their tracks, even from themselves; (not with Giles, however—Giles had been old enough to remember that night, the night his mother and father had been hacked to death by the madman with an axe—it was not only the children of criminals Thomas Gemminy befriended: there had been the victims too.)

Of them all, in his old age three had been most close to him—Giles, Rupert, Helen: Giles and Rupert because they had qualified and gone into partnership with him, and Helen, his pet, his darling, last to be adopted in his own home before his wife had died: Helen with her great eyes looking out so bravely from beneath the cloud of her soft, dark hair….

‘His Talking Orchid he used to call her,’ said Giles. ‘But she’s very tough, really. Spent all her life with us boys doing everything we did, and most things better….’ The smile died out of his eyes. ‘All that emerged at the trial.’

‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ said the old man again. ‘Let me guess.’ He eyed the young man shrewdly. ‘You were in love with her?’

There came upon him the sickness, the stab of sickness and pain that came whenever he thought too closely about Helen; but he said, keeping his tone light: ‘What do you think?’

‘And Rupert?’

‘Rupert too.’

‘Which did she favour?’

Rupert, gay, sweet-tempered Rupert with his smiling blue eyes and his heavy, curling auburn hair, so ruthlessly brushed flat only to come curling up again….Himself, dark, slender, serious, who could yet be so full of jokes and laughter….‘One day it was one of us, one day the other; she just made hay with us. And then when this third party came along—’

‘Oh, there was a third party then? Not just between you three?—the murder I mean, of course. Suspects one, two, three and four: you and Rupert and Helen and—A.N.Other?’ The old man rose, hoisting himself forward with a jerk of his heavy arms and shoulders. ‘Let’s walk a little; it’s chilly sitting still. And wasn’t there something about a policeman murdered too? Old Gemminy rang up the police station with some message?—and later a policeman also rang up?’

Thomas Gemminy in his ‘sealed room’, dying—ringing up the police station across the street with that wild, mad, urgent summons—something about something or somebody ‘vanishing into thin air’, something about the window, and then on a note of sheer, squealing terror, something about ‘the long arms…’ And an hour later Police Constable Cross, supposed to be pounding his unsensational beat a couple of miles away, ringing up also, with crazy gabblings, ‘Got me by the throat….’ and something about the window and something about vanishing into thin air and something on a suddenly rising note of terror about ‘the long arms….’ A ’phone box had been traced at last with a pane of glass broken; and a hundred yards away, submerged in a tank of water in a half-demolished old factory, his body—bound and strangled; and stabbed in the back with the missing paper knife from Mr. Gemminy’s office….

‘He came from the same police station?’

The only police station in that small country town—just across the street from the office, where they had all been known so well: Thomas Gemminy and his two young men, in and out every other day pleading, arguing, deliberating, fighting, on behalf of their dubious clientele. There had been half a dozen of the lads getting their tea when the first message had come through—down in the basement canteen, from whose windows they could actually see the windows of Gemminy’s offices, five storeys above. They’d all dropped everything the minute the name of Gemminy was mentioned and, hardly waiting for permission let alone orders, caught up their helmets and gone dashing across the street. ‘So it couldn’t have been two minutes from the time he rang—’

‘What exactly did he say?’

‘I’ve told you. That he was dying. That someone or something, the operator couldn’t make sense out of it, had strangled him; that the desk was on fire, he must have help quick. And then this thing about “through the window” and then about “vanishing into thin air”. The operator kept trying to interrupt him, trying to get the name and address and at last he choked out the name Gemminy and then there was this dreadful scream about “the long arms”. As I say, within a couple of minutes a sergeant and at least five of the boys were trying to break down the door.’

But Rupert had been already there, beating at it with a closed fist, barging at it with a bruising shoulder, yelling ‘Uncle Gem! Uncle Gem!’ The sergeant had told off a man to stand at the head of the stairs and watch for anyone escaping and then with the rest had launched himself against the door. Rupert had yelled at last: ‘It must be bolted. There’s bolts top and bottom.’ And a panel was stove in and an arm thrust through and up and a panel kicked in and an arm thrust through and down; and as they stood back for one more concerted effort against the stout lock still holding—into the momentary silence there came from within the room, thin and clear and eerily tinkling, the sound of breaking glass.

And the door gave at last and burst inwards and suddenly the smoke-filled room was a flurry of blue-uniformed arms and legs; and there was nobody there, not a living soul.

Not a living soul. A dead man, only: strangled, staring at them across the burning desk, the wound in his back still oozing blood, and the jagged edges of the broken window pane behind him still vibrant, as though someone had that moment gone diving through.

But the hole was two feet in diameter and the window fifty feet up.

Rupert Chester and a couple of the men rushed over to the body, the sergeant with another made a dash for the window. Nothing moving, not a sign of life in the yard below—a warehouse yard, used for deliveries, swept clean, a shell, an empty space enclosed by blank walls and a high barricaded gate. ‘Watch,’ said the sergeant to the man, ‘don’t take your eyes off it.’ But he knew there would be nothing to see and already a sort of dread was forming in him, a dread and a confusion. In the centre of the room all was pandemonium as, coughing and choking in the smoke belched out from the burning desk, men beat at the flaming papers; and out of the confusion, Rupert Chester’s voice cried, sharp and high: ‘For God’s sake!—look at this! It’s Helen—she’s in danger. I must go.’