The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (17 page)

‘Yes, of course I do, Henry. Please give Roger your full attention.’

While Madge Rolfe discreetly squeezed her wrist in thanks, the Colonel’s wife now spoke to Trubshawe.

‘Chief-Inspector, I do understand your caution – indeed,
I’m grateful for it – but I’ve known Henry Rolfe for many years both as a doctor and as a friend and I have no hesitation in entrusting my husband to his care. You will please allow him to go ahead.’

The policeman knew when he was beaten.

‘Very well, Mrs ffolkes, I bow to you in this instance. It goes against all my professional instincts, but so be it. Your husband’s health must come first.

‘So,’ he then said to Rolfe, ‘now that that’s settled, what’s to be done?’

‘First thing,’ said Rolfe, ‘is for one of you women to boil water – and plenty of it!’

‘Boil water?’ exclaimed Cora Rutherford. ‘You know, Henry, I’ve often wondered why, whatever the ailment, you doctors always insist on having water boiled. What on earth do you get up to with the stuff?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ cried an exasperated Rolfe. ‘Can’t you just do what you’re told to do and stop asking imbecilic questions!’

He turned to his wife.

‘Madge? You I can rely on, can’t I? Well, hot water – at once.’

Then to Trubshawe:

‘We men, meanwhile, have to get Roger into his bed. Perhaps you and Don could help me carry him up to the bedroom?’

‘Right. Let’s get started, Don.’

Mary ffolkes endeavoured to raise herself to her feet.

‘No, no,’ said Trubshawe, wagging a finger at her, ‘this time, Mrs ffolkes, you’re following my orders. You’ve had a shock, you know, and you need as much rest as the Colonel does. And – and, well, I may as well tell you this now – there’s something else I’m going to have to insist on.’

‘You frighten me, Mr Trubshawe,’ said Mary ffolkes feebly.

‘There’s no cause for that. All I was going to say was that, once your husband is comfortably settled, once he’s had the, er, the knock-out potion, which should put him out for – for how long, Rolfe?’

‘Oh, a good five or six hours.’

‘Once he’s out, I shall have to insist on locking the bedroom door.’

‘I say, Inspector,’ said the Vicar, ‘that seems rather a drastic measure. Is it really necessary?’

‘I think it is,’ replied Trubshawe. ‘After all, everybody’s still a suspect and somebody has tried to kill the Colonel once already and I just don’t believe his room should be left open to all comers.’

‘But,’ cried Mary ffolkes, ‘locking poor Roger in! How awful! What if he should wake up and find he can’t open the door?’

‘Any chance of his prematurely coming to, Rolfe?’

‘None at all.’

The Doctor took Mary’s hand in his.

‘You’ll have to trust me in this too, Mary dear. I can
guarantee that Roger will sleep soundly for several hours. But if you’re really worried, Trubshawe and I will look in on him every half-hour or so to make sure nothing’s amiss. To be honest, it’s a needless precaution but, if it reassures you, we’ll be glad to take it. Now, Trubshawe, Don, let’s get him into his bedroom.’

‘Doctor?’

‘Yes?’

‘Anything else you need done?’

‘If you’d really like to make yourself useful, Farrar, what you could do is go down to the kitchen and have Mrs Varley prepare some consommé for Mary.’

‘Consommé?’

‘Yes. Very thin and very hot.’

‘Right.’

‘Farrar?’

‘Yes, Chief-Inspector?’

‘I don’t think it would be helpful for the servants to know what’s just happened. With this second crime following so close on the first, there’s a risk of them really getting the wind up. The last thing we need is a gaggle of sniffling, snivelling, moronic maids threatening to give notice.’

‘Understood, sir. No mention of anything they shouldn’t know about.’

‘Good. Well, boys, let’s get going. And again – right, Rolfe? – the word is
gently
.’

Half-an-hour later, after the Colonel’s wound had been attended to, after he had been given his shot and lapsed into a peaceful slumber, Evadne Mount, who had now come back downstairs from her bedroom, took the opportunity of a moment’s pregnant silence to arrest everyone’s attention with just three words. Three Latin words.

‘
Lux
facta est
.’

‘And what in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean?’ enquired Cora Rutherford.

‘“
Lux facta
est
”? Your Latin not up to scratch, Cora?’

‘Never mind my Latin. Just answer the question.’

‘It means “Light is shed”. From
Oedipus Rex
. Sophocles, you know.’

‘Thank you, dearie. But, yes, I do know who wrote
Oedipus Rex
.’

‘Ah, but have you forgotten I rewrote it? With calamitous results! It was my very first play,
Oedipus vs. Rex
, and what I tried to do was retell the myth as a conventional courtroom drama. The defending counsel was Tiresias, the sightless seer – I was thinking of Max Carrados, you know, Ernest Bramah’s blind detective? No? Anyway, it was he who proved, solely by his powers of deduction, that “the Oedipus case”, as it was referred to throughout the play, was in reality a travesty of justice.

‘The climactic twist, you see, was that Oedipus had been framed by his political enemies, who hadn’t just spread the rumour that Jocasta was his mother but had themselves killed Laius, his alleged father. Then they substituted some hapless double to be murdered by Oedipus when they met each other at the crossroads of Daulis and Delphi.

‘Well, what a dud, what a stinkeroony, what a pile of horse manure! The whole thing was done in masks and, if I’d had any sense, I’d have worn a mask myself! Poor “Boo” Laye – Evelyn Laye, you know, heavenly in intimate revue but, typically, fancied herself as a great dramatic actress – why won’t they stick to the one talent they do have? – well, “Boo” Laye played Jocasta – rhymes with “disaster”, I used to quip! – and when the audience began to boo us all at the curtain call, the poor, addlepated darling believed they wanted her to take a separate bow. I thought I’d die!’

‘But why,’ the actress persisted, ‘has light been shed, as you so gnomically put it?’

The novelist fell suddenly serious.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you why. Thanks to a chance remark made in this very room not upward of two hours ago, a bulb flashed on in my rapidly dimming old brain and I saw – I saw as though it had been illuminated by a bolt of lightning – exactly what has been happening here these past thirty-six hours.’

There was a silence while everyone absorbed this startling claim.

Then the Chief-Inspector, who had reverted to sucking on the stem of his unlit pipe, said:

‘Let me get this straight. Just so there’s no chance we’re talking at cross-purposes, do I take it you’re referring to Gentry’s murder?’

‘I am.’

‘As well as the Colonel’s attempted murder?’

‘That too. Actually, it was the attempt on Roger’s life which provided me with the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. A giant piece. Now I know the whole plot.’

‘The whole plot, you say?’

‘Even its twist. For, unless I’m mistaken, just like my Oedipus plot, this one does indeed have a climactic twist. I’ve been doing quite a bit of sniffing about, more than any of you realise, and, as I say, I now believe I’m in a position to lay the entire case out in front of you all.’

‘Look here, Miss Mount,’ grunted Trubshawe, ‘if you do indeed possess certain facts – or theories – about this business, facts or theories of which we all ought to be apprised, me in particular, then let’s have them. No more monkeying about, please. In your opinion – I repeat, in your
opinion
, for it is only an opinion – and I repeat yet again, with a different but no less relevant emphasis, in
your
opinion, for it is only yours – who killed Raymond Gentry and who tried to kill the Colonel?’

‘Forgive me, Trubshawe, but I’m not ready to tell you yet.’

‘What!’

‘Oh, just let me explain. I’m not simply being a tease, you know. It all has to do with the difference between what you might call proposing and exposing. Don’t you see, if I were baldly to announce who I believe did it, it would be like a maths teacher
proposing
a problem to his students, then instantly giving them the solution without in the meantime
exposing
any of the connective tissue which enabled him to arrive at that solution, connective tissue which would also enable those students of his to understand why it was the only solution possible.

‘I want you all to understand why the person who I believe killed Gentry and tried to kill Roger could only be that person
and no other
– and to do that I’ve got to let the whole story unfold as I myself gradually came to understand it.’

‘Well – well, all right,’ replied Trubshawe with surprisingly good grace, ‘I suppose that’s fair enough. But just when
do
you intend to tell us?’

‘Oh, now. At once. Immediately. But what I’d like is for all of us to gather again in the library. A criminal, so they say, always returns to the scene of the crime. So why shouldn’t a detective – if I may flatter myself by appropriating such a label – not return to the scene of the investigation?’

For a few moments nobody said anything. Some of those present plainly thought the novelist had finally taken leave of the little that was still left of her senses. As for the others, though they would never willingly have owned up to it,
even to themselves, they were perhaps obscurely tempted by the prospect of participating in a real-life rehearsal of the last – more accurately, last-but-one – chapter of a classic whodunit.

Then, finally, the Chief-Inspector gave his response to the proposal.

‘There’s one thing you seem to have forgotten,’ he said. ‘I haven’t yet finished my own investigation.’

‘Yes, you have,’ retorted Evadne Mount. ‘You’ve questioned all of us. All of us, that is, except Mary here, but I can’t imagine you suspect her of trying to kill her own husband.’

‘No, you’re wrong.’

‘What!’ cried a horrified Mary ffolkes.

‘Please, please, Mrs ffolkes, you misunderstand me. All I meant was that I haven’t interviewed any of the servants.’

The novelist snorted.

‘Speaking as someone who has just solved the mystery,’ she said airily, ‘I can unhesitatingly assure you that there wouldn’t be the slightest use in your questioning them now.’

‘We-ell,’ said Trubshawe, still doubtful, ‘if you really do believe you’re in possession of all the facts …?’

‘Actually, I don’t believe it,’ came the confident reply. ‘I know it.’

Inside the library Evadne Mount faced the assembled company while everyone, even Trubshawe, still sucking on that long since extinct pipe of his, waited for her to start presenting her evidence. But when she finally did speak, what she had to say wasn’t at all what anyone had expected to hear.

She turned to the Doctor’s wife, who was unwrapping a new packet of Player’s, and asked, ‘Can I cadge, Madge?’

Madge Rolfe stared at her.

‘What?’

‘Can I cadge one of your nicotine lollies?’

‘One of my …?’

‘Your ciggies, dear, your ciggies.’

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘I don’t,’ answered the novelist.

She opened the packet which had been tossed into her lap and drew out a cigarette. Then, lighting up and taking what looked very much like a beginner’s puff, she began.

‘You must forgive me if I start off on a personal note,’ she said with the complacent tone of someone who doesn’t care a jot whether she’s forgiven or not. ‘But if there’s one thing in this world I flatter myself I know how to do well, it’s tell a story, and, assuming none of you minds, I’d like to tell this remarkable story of ours in my own words, at my own pace and without omitting any of my own – rare – misjudgments.

‘It really has been the weirdest experience in my life, an experience that, had it not involved two brutal crimes, one of them committed against a close friend, I might even have enjoyed. Just think! Here we are, a group of suspects gathered together in the library to hear how and why a murder was perpetrated! It’s a scene I’ve written so many times in my novels. Yet if any of you had told me that one day I myself wouldn’t just be present at such a scene but would actually be playing the role of presiding sleuth, I’d have said you wanted your head examined!

‘Of course,’ she went on, directing her gaze on each of her listeners in turn to ensure that not one of them was paying her less than the attention she believed she deserved, ‘like my own fictional detective, Alexis Baddeley, I’m no more than an amateur. And, as I don’t have to remind you, I’ve never once had Alexis solve a locked-room crime. I like my whodunits to keep at least one foot on
terra firma
.

‘I’ve never had any truck with murder methods involving ropes and ladders and pulleys and doorkeys yanked through
keyholes on strings which somehow succeed in combusting of their own accord and murder victims found stabbed in the middle of the desert with nary a footprint in the sand, coming or going, or else hanging from a beam in a padlocked garret with no sign of a chair or a table or any item of furniture they could have climbed up on and not even a damp patch on the floorboards to suggest the murderer had used a block of ice which had since melted. I can’t be doing with such contrivances. For me they’re too darned
fangled
, to borrow the Colonel’s delightful coinage.

‘Anyway, John Dickson Carr has cornered that particular market and what I say is, if somebody’s unbeatable, why bother trying to beat him?

‘Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away here, and I know you all think I’m a ghoulish old pussy, but I am coming to the point. And that point is that we were all so hypnotised by the
method
of Raymond’s murder – a method none of us dreamt could ever exist outside a book – we just couldn’t see the larger picture.

‘Locked-room murders, you know, aren’t unlike chess end-games. What I mean by that is that they bear about as much relation to real murders, murders committed by real people in the real world, as those end-games in the illustrated magazines – you know, a Knight and Pawn versus an unprotected Bishop to mate in five moves – well, as much as those end-games bear to the real strategies and configurations of a real game of chess. It’s something my dear
friend Gilbert has always understood, which is why he’s the nonpareil genius he is.’

From the blank expressions that flitted from one face to another like a contagious yawn, it was clear nobody knew which Gilbert she was referring to. And since it was equally clear nobody liked to say so, she explained:

‘Gilbert Chesterton. What makes his Father Brown stories so unique is precisely that they
are
end-games and they don’t pretend to be anything but. By confining his clever little narratives to a dozen pages, he avoids having to articulate all that laborious plotline padding that a novelist like me needs to justify the dénouement. And his readers have the satisfying impression of being whisked straight to the climax of a full-length whodunit – the only part of it, to be honest, that really interests them – without having had to plough through the tedious exposition.

‘The point, Miss Mount,’ said Trubshawe, ‘the point!’

‘As I’ve said many times before in this very house,’ she went on, conspicuously ignoring his interruption, ‘if you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of
mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.’

‘That’s all very enlightening, I’m sure,’ Trubshawe interrupted her again in a voice that was both suave and gruff. ‘But when we agreed to join you in the library, it wasn’t to hear your opinions on the difference between factual and fictional murders – opinions which, as you yourself have admitted, you’ve already voiced many times. Just where is this leading to?’

Evadne Mount frowned.

‘Do learn to be patient with me, Chief-Inspector,’ she replied gravely. ‘I shall get there. I invariably do.’

She took another, more confident puff on her cigarette.

‘So there we were – there
I
was – confronted with two murders, each of which was very different from the other in its method. One was, as the Chief-Inspector would put it, a “fictional” murder, patently committed by somebody who’d read a lot of whodunits – though not, I repeat, any of mine. And the other was a “real” murder, an attempt at a real murder, the kind of murder which is committed every day in the real world.

‘For the first murder, Raymond Gentry’s, there were almost too many motives. Apart from Selina here, everybody in our little party was secretly, and in some instances not in the least secretly, relieved to see him put out of commission once and for all.

‘And the initial mistake I made was to persuade myself
that even among such a wide and motley range of suspects there were distinctions to be drawn. Nearly all of us had been the object of Gentry’s malicious little smears. (There were exceptions and I’ll come to these in a minute.) Which implied that, theoretically, nearly all of us had a good reason for wishing him dead. Nevertheless, what struck me initially, I repeat, was the existence, as I saw it, of two separate categories of suspects.

‘There were those, on the one hand, for whom Raymond’s revelations would have been utterly catastrophic were they to have turned up in
The Trombone
. Cora, for instance. As she herself was honest enough to point out to us, her career would be ruined if word, instead of mere rumour, began to circulate about her dependency on … on, shall we say, certain substances.

‘Now, now, Cora, you don’t have to look daggers at me, I fancy I know what you’re itching to reply. Yes, it’s perfectly so, there was one other such suspect, and that was me. My books, I unblushingly confess, have a vast readership, and even though they’re all about murder and greed and hatred and revenge they’re really rather genteel fictions read mostly by rather genteel people. If these genteel readers of mine were suddenly to find out that – well, I’d prefer to pass over in silence something you already all know about me – but, yes, I can imagine what effect that would have on my sales.’

Having manfully grasped the nettle of her own past sins, she was ready to launch herself back into the fray.

‘There were also those, however, who, distressing as it must have been to hear once private squalors publicly aired, had nothing to fear from
The Trombone
. You, Clem, for one.

‘It’s true, unfortunately, that you played fast-and-loose with the facts of your wartime experience, and this has unquestionably been a Christmas you’ll want to forget, and want all of us likewise to forget. Yet you yourself, if I remember aright, actually acknowledged that, whatever warped amusement Raymond Gentry took in distilling his poison, the yellow press was never going to give a tinker’s curse for the white – or off-white – lies of a clergyman in an extremely modest living on Dartmoor.

‘Then we come to our friends the Rolfes. It can’t have been pleasant for either of you to see years and years of pretending to shrug off all those whispers as to what precisely transpired between Madge and some swarthy gigolo in Monte Carlo or how Henry botched what ought to have been a routine operation, curtailing not only a baby’s life but his own career along with it. It can’t have been pleasant, I say, to have all your face-saving efforts brought to naught in one fell swoop by Gentry’s hateful muckspreading. But, again, like the Wattises, you were never prominent enough, and you’re not prominent enough now, to interest the type of individual who’d read a piece of toilet paper like
The Trombone
.’

If, so far, all those present had listened more or less uncomplainingly to Evadne Mount argue her case, it wasn’t
that they were now serenely at ease with the notion that the most ignominious facts of their lives had become public knowledge. Each time she mentioned one of their names, there was a start, an audible gasp, even, on Mrs Wattis’s part, a stifled tear. But the argument was so lucidly presented that, despite the renewed humiliations it brought in its wake, it felt like not only a duty but almost a pleasure to hear it out. What’s more, the tension that had been screwed up so tight over the preceding thirty-six hours had had to find a release, and release of a kind was what she was slowly but surely giving her fellow guests.

‘So you might have supposed, as I did at first,’ she went on, ‘that the only two legitimate suspects were Cora and myself. Who, after all, would commit a murder just because some dog-eared old dirt was going to be dished up in a village of a hundred or so inhabitants?

‘Well, my answer to that would be – just about anybody! Oh, I saw the horror in your faces when Gentry started firing his lethal little darts, not just horror but homicidal loathing! And I soon realised how wrong I’d been in assuming that the craving for vengeance had to be commensurate with the degree of exposure.

‘Frankly, it was a mistake I of all people should never have made. If I’ve set several of my books in a Home Counties village, it’s because it offers the writer of whodunits a more fertile breeding-ground for murder than the most insalubrious back alley in Limehouse! You want to know
what a sink of iniquity really looks like? I’ll tell you. It has picturesque thatched cottages and Ye Olde Tea Shoppes and Women’s Institutes and Conservative Associations and Bring-and-Buy Sales and Morris Dancing on the village green and Charity Fêtes in the Vicarage garden –’

‘Oh come, Evadne,’ the Vicar pooh-poohed mutinously, ‘there you do exaggerate …’

‘Sorry again, old bean, but I’m afraid that’s bilge. You’ll find this hard to credit, but I’ve actually had a bad review or two – there was one in the
Daily Clarion
I won’t forget in a hurry,’ she snarled, baring her fangish false teeth, ‘yet not once has a reviewer criticised one of my novels for painting too dark and malignant a picture of rural life.

‘Then there’s my fan mail. Most of it’s not from paying customers, who evidently believe that, having forked out seven-and-six for a book, they have no further obligation to its author, but from readers in villages who obtain my whodunits from their local circulating-library. I should let you read that fan mail. I recall one letter. It was from a little old lady in some idyllic hamlet in the Cotswolds telling me how she suspected the district nurse of slowly poisoning her crippled husband, and the sole basis of her accusation was that she’d chanced to catch the poor woman borrowing a copy of
The Proof of the Pudding
, which has exactly the same premise. And there was another, from somebody who’d read
The Timing of the Stew
and who was persuaded the stationmaster had read it as well, since his wife had
vanished, supposedly run off with the coalman, but she, my fan, she knew better, she knew he’d buried both of them under the station’s ornamental rockery.

‘In the Detection Club we once coined a name for this sort of macabre village – Mayhem Parva. Well, I seriously doubt there’s a single village in England’s green and pleasant land that isn’t a potential Mayhem Parva!

‘So, Vicar, no, I don’t exaggerate. I’m taking your case only as a general example, you understand, but it’s my belief that a mild-mannered man of the cloth, as I know you to be, would be just as likely to commit murder to prevent his name from being besmirched at the local British Legion dinner-dance as a film star would be to prevent his or hers from being splashed across the front page of some nationally distributed scandal mag.

‘And what that meant, of course, was that I immediately found myself right back where I started. I was obliged to regard nearly everybody present as equally suspect.

‘Now for the exceptions. There was Selina, first of all, the only one of us to mourn Raymond’s passing. She may have seen the light now – let’s not forget the row they had in the attic – but I don’t think any of us would have questioned the feelings she formerly had for the man. I ruled her out at once. She, it seemed to me, couldn’t conceivably have killed him.

‘Nor, I state without fear of contradiction, could her mother. I say that not only because she’s one of my oldest
and dearest and truest friends but because I know she’s incapable of harming a fly. She’s certainly incapable of harming a fly by trapping it in a locked room, swatting it to death, then managing to get out of said locked room again without opening either its door or its window!’