What Dread Hand?

by Christianna Brand

  ‘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 clientèle. 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.’

  And he was gone. ‘Shall I go after him?’ yelled one of the men, but, ‘No, no,’ the sergeant yelled back, ‘leave him, get on with the job.’ There was too much to do, no one could be spared; and after all, Rupert Chester was known to them, it wasn’t like a suspect disappearing, unidentifiable. And besides—there he’d been outside the locked and bolted door, trying to get in. And the smoke was getting thicker, a man was calling out that the body was beginning to scorch, a voice cried, ‘For God’s sake, aren’t there any extinguishers?’, a voice cried, ‘I’ll go for the fire brigade…’ What was one to do?—move the body with all its tell-tale clues or risk the whole lot being consumed by the fire? He fought his way over to the flaming desk, looked briefly at the old man’s body, trying to take in the whole scene and impress it on his memory; ordered, ‘Yes, move him, chair and all, carry him outside.’ No time to worry about Rupert Chester now; and if there really were some danger to Helen Crane, at least someone was coping with it. And anyway, thank God!—here was the fire brigade.

  ‘Was the room badly burnt?’

  ‘Most of the woodwork,’ said Giles. ‘The furniture and the door itself and so on; and papers, of course, there was masses of paper in the room. Not much left in the way of clues, once the hoses had soused it all. And of course no sign of the note.’

  ‘What note?’

  ‘The note that had made Rupert shoot off to look for Helen. He said it was on a scribbling pad; huge letters, scrawled—HELEN—DANGER—some such thing.’

  ‘Did anyone else see it?’

  ‘He said he’d shown it to one of the men; but they all deny having seen it.’

  ‘That was predictable,’ said the old man dryly.

  Giles did a double take. ‘You mean you’re there?’

  ‘What’s “there”? I’m in a dozen places. If you mean do I see how it could have been done—’

  ‘You haven’t heard yet about the dead policeman.’

  ‘I don’t see how he complicates things. We now have all our suspects—all of them,’ said the old man with a significant wink, ‘outside the locked room and free to be running around murdering policemen or doing anything else. Still, tell me about him.’

  ‘He was killed about five o’clock. Uncle Gem’s call came through to the station at near enough three minutes to four; at five the policeman rang up. And saying almost the same words, that’s what made it so uncanny—about the long arms and something vanishing into thin air. First he said “George?”—that was the chap on the switchboard—“this is Dinkum.” Dinkum was his nickname at the station—and he gave his number and was just saying where he was calling from when he seemed to be disturbed and there came this frightful shouting, again about somebody strangling him, just like Uncle Gem, and the word “window” and “vanished into thin air”—and then a sort of gurgling scream and the operator could just make out the words “the long arms…” And as I told you, they finally found a call box with a broken window pane and they searched around there and the body was in a half-demolished factory, a hundred yards away.’

  They came to the end of the gravelled path and turned back. ‘The murderer seems to have been very fortunate in the privacy of his arrangements.’

  ‘Well, but they were arrangements, weren’t they? And what arrangements! Saturday afternoon and the final of the World Cup: every soul in the place glued to the telly—and for good measure a wet, blustery day: gorgeous weather over most of the country, but with us a wet, blustery day.’
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  They came to the bench and sat down again; the old man tired easily. From below came the whirr of a motor-mower, the lawn was striped in paler and darker green as the grass bent beneath the cropping blades. But the old man’s mind was in a sealed room, locked and bolted, where glass broke, a dying man was stabbed—and yet where no living man could have been; in a ‘phone box where a country-town policeman choked and yammered and presumably within a few moments, also died. ‘Any actual tie between the two deaths?’

  ‘The same words spoken—“into thin air” and this terrifying thing about “the long arms”. And it was the knife from Uncle Gem’s office; and traces of his blood group were mingled with the man’s own. It was all a good bit diluted with the water—he’d been heaved into this sort of half-destroyed tipped-up water tank. Tied up with some wire rope which had been lying about there.’

  ‘I see. All right. Well, those are the facts,’ said the old man, rubbing his hands. ‘So then, let’s have the alibis.’

  ‘Rupert’s and Helen’s and mine—?’

  ‘And A.N.Other’s. We mustn’t forget Helen’s third suitor. I am assuming,’ said the old man, ‘that if money was out of it, the motive was something to do with Helen?’

  And they were back to Helen. But he had to go through with it now. ‘That was the conclusion the police came to at this stage,’ said Giles.

  ‘Yes, well we want to play it from the police angle. But first—what authority had Mr. Gemminy over Helen? With regard to her marrying, I mean. Could he prevent it?’

  ‘Not legally, probably, if that’s what you mean. But he could advise; and his advice was based upon knowledge of the past. He could prevent it by—well, warnings; to her, to us, to other people. He knew our life histories, our heredities…’

  ‘Sufficient motive certainly, for silencing him. More potent, in fact, than actual authority.’

  ‘Somebody thought so,’ said Giles, grimly assenting.

  ‘Very well. Let’s move on now to what actually happened, the order of events.’ Like a child, excited and eager, he wriggled himself heavily into a more comfortable sitting position on the bench. ‘True or false—as the police got them. Leave me to do the sorting out. They had to.’

  In a way, the ball had started with P.C. Cross: finishing his dinner in the canteen, pedalling off to his beat, not remarked again until the telephone call at five o’clock; his body found an hour or so later in the disused factory.

  ‘The next exact time we know is when I went to the office to see Uncle Gemminy…’

  Mr. Gemminy had stayed on there because he wanted to talk to them—to Giles and Rupert: but separately. ‘I was to go at half past two, Rupert at four. He didn’t want to talk at home because Helen might be there—she still lived with him. Rupert and I shared a flat in a block about fifteen minutes’ drive from the office. Anyway, the thing was that this third party had turned up and the old man didn’t like it. Who the chap was we didn’t then know but I think he knew, or he’d guessed, and he wasn’t too pleased. He thought she’d had her head turned, he thought she didn’t know her own mind; and anyway he would secretly have liked it to be Rupert or me, he wanted to keep it in the family. Anyway, his idea was to sort it out first with us two and find out how each felt about her before he did any more. But nothing terrific you know—just a family discussion.’

  ‘All right. So at half past two you went along?’

  ‘M’m. Leaving Rupert at the flat. We had a very affable chat, the old man and I, I told him my side of the thing—’

  ‘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 th
e 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…’