Locked rooms

The grin slipped for an instant before he retrieved it to buoy his protests, but I was not listening to his words. Instead, I was taken up with his face and the voice itself.

The burn that affected about half his facial skin had erased one eyebrow and part of the other, but had not gone deep enough to reach the muscles and tendons. Below the shiny scar tissue the movement was normal enough, albeit somewhat stiff on the left side.

And the voice—I knew that voice, slightly hoarse and with the flat Boston accent that my father had possessed in a much softer degree. The voice reached in and pulled out the hidden something, the room in my memory house that I had known was there, the key I had obediently set aside so thoroughly that I did not even see it.

“You said, ‘Don't be afraid, little girl,'” I told him. I had not meant to speak aloud, but the man blinked, so clearly I had.

“What?” he said.

“In the tent. When you came looking for my father and woke me up, you had no face, it was whiter than your face is now and even shinier, and I was frightened. You told me not to be afraid. But I should have been, shouldn't I?”

Greenfield looked at the men holding his arms and again tried to grin. “I was out doing rescue work and got burned, so I went to find your father and see how he was. He'd been a good friend of mine, before he married, and—”

“You were not doing rescue work; you were out robbing abandoned houses and stripping dead bodies.”

That silenced him.

“But that wasn't the only time,” I continued, speaking as much to myself, or to Holmes, as to Greenfield. “You were there when Father stopped for the tyre-change, weren't you? In Serra Beach. That's the thing I've been trying to remember the last few days, that I caught a glimpse of you behind the garage, slipping behind that big gum tree at the side. You'd been talking with my father, and when I finished lunch and went to find him and tell him we were ready to go, I saw the two of you, arguing. When my father turned and saw me, his face was red and his fists were clenched—I'd never seen him look like that. You ran off. And I asked him then who you were and he told me you were nobody, that it would upset Mother if I told her I'd seen you, that I should try to forget all about you.

“And so I did. God, did I ever. But you were there that day, and you cut the brake rod and you killed them all. Just like you killed Leah Ginzberg and Mah and Micah Long, four months later.”

At this last pair of names a murmur sprang up, as several of the older residents recognised the Anglicised versions of the murdered couple's names. I walked around the motor until I was standing directly in front of Greenfield, and I wanted to murder him. Then and there, I wanted to gut him and leave him bleeding his life out on the street, for what he had done to six good and loving people. I might even have done so—I was on the very brink of snatching the gun from my pocket or bending for the knife in my boot-top—when something touched my arm. It was the gentlest touch imaginable, the mere brush of a bird's wings in weight, but the faint weight of it settled onto the taut muscles of my forearm and stopped them from moving. I looked down at the delicate old fingers, then into the face of Dr Ming.

“You do not wish to do this,” he said.

I did want to do it, I could almost taste the glory of revenge. And then suddenly I did not. The murderous impulse left me, the hand fell away, and as if by a stage cue, the police arrived, bluff and uncomprehending and requiring a great deal of attention, from all of us, for a very long time.

Epilogue

Late, late that night Holmes and I crept back to our rooms at the St Francis. We had persuaded Officialdom to let Long go home, and even Hammett, but at the cost of remaining and explaining, again and again, what it all meant: why Rosa Greenfield's finger-prints had been found on the toilet-pull of my house; why a bullet from Greenfield's gun would match one to be found in a fence in Pacific Heights; why Greenfield's finger- prints were going to be found on coins in the tin boxes in our hotel's safe.

Had it not been for Holmes' name, the bewildered police would have thrown us all out and let us sort it out on the street.

But in the end, Robert and Rosa Greenfield were charged, and we were free to go.

As we walked towards the lift, shortly before midnight, the night man came out from behind his desk and gave Holmes a packet. His hand reached out automatically for it, and as we rode the lift upwards, my eyes idled across the address on the label as if its letters contained some arcane message. It was, I realised only when we were in the room and he ripped open the paper, the urgent reproductions of Flo's photograph that he had left to be copied—only that morning yet many, many hours before.

I went through the motions of hanging up my coat and divesting myself of shoes and the like, then plodded into the bath-room to wash my face.

When I came out, Holmes was sitting with a photograph in his hand—not that of the Greenfields; he held it out in my direction.

“What is that?” I asked wearily.

“Another photograph I left the other day for copying. I'd all but forgotten it.”

I sat down to save myself from falling and took the picture from his hand.

A tent city. A woman, a blonde child with a book, a man trudging up the hill, looking as exhausted as I felt.

My family.

I took off my glasses to study my father's face. Too tired for the nightmares to reach me, he had written in the document; I wondered if all his dreams had been of the fire.

“Do I look like him?” I asked.

“You do somewhat, without a hat and your hair as it is. To a guilty mind, the resemblance would be startling.”

I picked up a copy of the other picture as well, showing the Greenfields at the Lodge, unscarred and not yet embarked on murder. They were standing by the lake, looking over the shoulder of the photographer at the log house that the young and carefree Greenfield had helped his friend Charles build.

“The sun was red,” I murmured.

“Sorry?”

“During the fire. Everything was a peculiar colour from the smoke and ashes, and it was terrifying, with the sun a red glow in the sky and the earth shaking and the sound of explosions. But my father came back then and he explained it to me, told me that the booms were just the firemen removing houses so there wouldn't be anything for the fire to burn and it would go out. I understood what he was saying, and when he told me it would be all right, I believed him.”

“Your parents were good people,” he said. And then he added the most perfect thing anyone has ever said to me. “They would be proud of you.”

Not that I believed him, of course. Instead I gave voice to the remnants of my guilt. “If I'd told my mother about seeing Greenfield that day, if I'd said something, I might have saved them.”

“I think not. Greenfield was already set on his course. Had you told your mother that you had seen him, it might have caused an argument between your parents, and at most a resolution to confront Greenfield when they returned to the city, but it would not have interrupted the family's progress to the lake. Only Greenfield himself could have done that.”