The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (19 page)

‘Where these crimes are concerned, Cora, we’ve all had to get used to being “for instances”. Anyway, as I was about to say, after taking London by storm in the stage version of
The Mystery of the Green Penguin
, Cora was snapped up – I believe that’s the expression – was snapped up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and lived for the next two years in Hollywood. Unfortunately, as Raymond reminded us with his usual gallantry, she didn’t quite rise to the occasion’ – now she held up her right hand like a traffic policeman to prevent her friend from interrupting again, as was all too visibly her intention.

‘But even if things failed to work out for her altogether satisfactorily,’ she went on, ‘during those two years it may well have become second nature to her to spell as the Yanks do.

‘Then there are the Rolfes, who lived for several months in Canada before Henry’s misadventure in the operating-theatre brought him and Madge back, via the Riviera, to dear old England. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always understood that the Canadians spell the American way, not the British.

‘Nor,’ she said, ‘if we’re going to be absolutely logical, can we even rule out Clem.’

‘Me?’ cried the Vicar. ‘Why, I – I’ve never been to America in my life!’

‘No, Clem, but you did admit that you couldn’t spell for toffee. Well, it’s not impossible, I’m sure you’ll agree, that the word “misbehaviour” was misspelt for no other reason than that it was typed by someone who simply didn’t know how to spell.

‘So you see, Don, dear – that missing
u
doesn’t significantly reduce the number of suspects.’

‘Now just a godd**n minute, Evie!’ Cora Rutherford suddenly shouted at her. ‘I wish you’d stop treating us all as though we were in one of your cheap novelettes. I did very, very well in Hollywood, very respectably – what am I saying, more than respectably, much more than respectably! I was in
Our Dancing Daughters
with Joan Crawford and
The Last of Mrs Cheyney
with lovely, lovely Norma Shearer.’

‘Yes, Cora, I know you were. All I meant was –’

‘Anyway, who’s to say you didn’t write those notes yourself? Who’s to say you didn’t deliberately spell “misbehaviour” without the
u
, just to throw the rest of us off the scent? Your cardboard characters get up to that sort of fakery-pokery all the time!’

‘Bravo, Cora!’ cried the novelist, clapping her hands. ‘Congratulations!’

‘Congratulations?’ the actress warily echoed the word. ‘Why do I always get a teensy bit suspicious when somebody like you congratulates somebody like me?’

‘You shouldn’t. I intended it sincerely. For you’re spot on. I might well have done just that. I didn’t, of course, I didn’t do any such thing. But, yes, the possibility that I might have done it keeps me up there as one of the suspects.’

‘All right, ladies,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Now that both of you have had your say, could we please return to the matter at hand?’

‘Certainly, Chief-Inspector, certainly,’ Evadne Mount acquiesced with a grace that might have been mock but might also have been authentic.

‘Where was I? Oh yes. The planting of those bogus notes in Raymond’s pocket not only confirmed for me that there was something extremely fishy about the whole business but reinforced my growing conviction that X’s true objective was the Colonel’s death.

‘Then, finally, it came to me.

‘It had, I believed, been X’s plan all along to kill the Colonel by luring him into the attic and shooting him there. And he would have carried out that plan to the letter if Selina hadn’t, at the eleventh hour, invited home a piece of human slime – forgive me, my dear,’ she put it gently to Selina ffolkes, ‘but I think you know he was – a piece of human slime who, on that unforgettably horrid Christmas Night of ours, managed in just a few hours to turn everybody in the house against him.

‘We all felt like murdering Raymond – I know I did – but, at some stage in the evening, X must have realised that
he alone had not one but
two
reasons for murdering him. Don’t forget – if I’m right, he had already plotted the Colonel’s murder to the last detail. But what, I imagine him saying to himself,
what if I were to switch victims?
What if I were to murder Raymond
instead of
the Colonel? Or rather, what if I were to murder Raymond
and then
the Colonel?

‘Not only would the police assume that the first of these two murders, Raymond’s, was also the first in a more profound sense, the more significant murder, the really relevant one, the one on which all the ensuing investigations would focus. But, and this must have been for our killer the “clincher”, as they say, Raymond’s murder would also generate
a whole new set of potential suspects
– suspects
and
motives – unlike the Colonel’s murder, for which there was likely to be only one suspect and one motive.’

There was no question, and she knew it, that Evadne Mount had her circle of listeners where she wanted them. They were literally hanging on her every word, held under the spell of her personality, and she would have been something less than human if she hadn’t gloated just a little.

‘Think of it,’ she said with an impudently undisguised air of self-congratulation. ‘X, whose ultimate intention it is to kill the Colonel, decides to commit another murder first, a murder designed to cast the shadow of suspicion away from himself and on to a half-dozen entirely new suspects, virtually all of whom had a motive for doing
away with Raymond Gentry. Suspects, I might add, so classic, so traditional, they could all have come straight out of, or indeed gone straight into, a typical Mayhem Parva whodunit.

‘Just try to imagine X’s glee at finding himself presented with such a perfect collection of red herrings. The Author. The Actress. The Doctor. The Doctor’s Wife, who naturally has a Past. The Vicar, who also has a Past. Or rather, unfortunately for him, who
doesn’t
have a Past. The Colonel. The Colonel’s Wife. And finally, bringing up the rear, the Romantic Young Beau, who, like all Romantic Young Beaux, is head-over-heels in love with the Colonel’s Daughter.

‘And, yes, I say red herrings and I mean red herrings. For that, I’m afraid, is exactly what we all were – pure flimflam, as irrelevant to what was really afoot as one of those utterly pointless ground-plans which some of my rivals insist on having at the beginning of their whodunits and which only the most naïve of readers would ever think of consulting.’

Evadne Mount stopped, for a fraction of a second, to catch her breath again.

‘However,’ she continued, ‘convinced as I was that I’d hit upon the truth, I knew that my hunch could not hope to be more than that, a mere hunch, unless and until I was able to corroborate it with real factual evidence. So I decided at last to re-direct those perhaps not-so-little grey cells of mine to the problem that had baffled us all from the start –
the question of exactly how Gentry’s murder was done the way it was done.

‘In
The Hollow Man
John Dickson Carr actually interrupts the narrative of his novel to lecture his readers on all the principal categories of locked-room murders. Since I couldn’t call to mind off-hand what these were, I came looking for the book in this very library. Roger, alas, has never been an aficionado of detective fiction and, apart from a complete collection of my own efforts, all gifts from me, all unread, I’m certain, there was nothing. No Dickson Carr, no Chesterton, no Dorothy Sayers, no Tony Berkeley, no Ronnie Knox, no Margery Allingham, no Ngaio Marsh, not even Conan Doyle! Quite, quite scandalous!

‘I racked my brains and racked my brains, but the only two locked-room stories whose solutions I myself remembered, Israel Zangwill’s
The Big Bow Mystery
and Gaston Leroux’s
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
, had recourse to the selfsame trick, which was to have the murderer barge into a locked room – and then,
and only then
, before anybody else has arrived, have him stab the victim, who was alive up to that very instant.

‘Well, that was no help at all. Roger did indeed barge into the attic, but Don was at his side. Each saw what the other saw and unless, most implausibly, they were in cahoots – what, by the way,
is
a cahoot? – neither could have killed Gentry on the spot.

‘I was resolved, though, not to let myself be led astray by
the outlandish circumstances of the crime. A man lay dead inside a locked room. There was no magic, no voodoo, no hocus-pocus about it. The thing had been done and hence it could be undone. And the only way left for me to undo it, I realised, was to indulge in a little personal sleuthing at the scene of the crime.

‘So earlier, you recall, when I asked the Chief-Inspector if I might have leave to go to my bedroom and change out of my wet clothes, what I actually did first was sneak up to the attic.’

The instant she made this brazen admission, nobody could resist stealing a glance at Trubshawe, who was plainly torn between admiration for his rival’s deductive powers and aggravation at her self-confessed indifference to one of the most widely publicised ground-rules governing any criminal investigation.

‘Miss Mount,’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief, ‘I really am rather disturbed to hear you make such a statement. You knew very well that, till the local police arrived and a proper forensic examination had been carried out, nobody, not even the bestselling author of I don’t know and I don’t care how many whodunits, had permission to enter that attic room.’

‘I did know that,’ she calmly replied, ‘and I apologise. Notwithstanding my public legend as the Dowager Duchess of Crime, I’m an extremely timorous soul when it comes to breaking the law.

‘My fear, however, was that before the police turned up
– and what with the snow-storm and all, none of us had any idea how long that was going to be – the attic could very easily be tampered with. Remember, I was convinced the murderer was among us. What was to stop him or her taking advantage of some lull in the proceedings, just as I did, and slipping upstairs to remove a piece of hitherto unnoticed evidence?’

‘What! Well, I …’ Trubshawe fulminated. ‘So you admit that’s what you did do?’

‘I admit nothing of the kind. I did not remove a single object from the room. All I meant was that the ease with which I – an innocent party, I do assure you – the ease with which I got in and out of it could also have been exploited by the murderer himself.’

‘I give up!’ said the Chief-Inspector helplessly. ‘At least can I assume you didn’t touch anything?’

‘No-o-o,’ said the novelist. Then she added coyly, ‘Not much.’

‘Not much!’

‘Oh, hold on to your corset, Trubshawe. When you learn what I found out, you’ll agree it was well worth it.’

She turned to address the entire company.

‘Now the one thing everybody said about that attic room was that it was empty. An empty room, that’s what the Colonel said, what Don said, what everybody said. But it wasn’t empty at all, it was by no means bare. There was a wooden table with two drawers, a rickety upright chair – the
plain cane-bottomed type that always makes me think of Van Gogh – and a ragged old armchair. It also had a window and a door and bars on the window and a key in the keyhole of the door. So though it was pretty austere – and made even more sinister, I can tell you, by the presence of Gentry’s dead body – there was still some scrawny meat for me to gnaw on.

‘And I really
worried
at that room! I examined absolutely everything in it, even things I suspected weren’t worth examining.

‘First, I examined the floor more thoroughly than I’d been able to do this morning, and I noted once more how dust-free it was for a room which had supposedly been unused for months. Remember, Trubshawe, that was the minor oddity I tried to direct your attention to?

‘Then I examined the door itself to see whether it could have been removed from its hinges and, after the murder, hinged back on again. But that, I soon realised, was ridiculously impractical. Even if the door was hanging half off those hinges, thanks to the combined strength of Don and the Colonel, it was obvious it had never, ever been removed.

‘Then I examined the bars on the window to see whether maybe
they
could have been removed. Quite out of the question. They were caked with rust, both of them. I seriously doubt they’ve been tampered with since they were originally installed.

‘Then I examined the table. Not a sausage. Nothing in either drawer. No hidden partitions. It was just an ordinary
wooden table, scratched and chipped, like a thousand others in a thousand other lumber rooms.

‘Then, when I was about to pack it in, I sat down in the armchair to take the weight off my feet – and that’s when it hit me, when it literally hit me!’ she boomed out, startling everybody with one of those deafening guffaws of hers.

‘Are you telling us,’ said the Chief-Inspector, ‘you know how the crime was committed?’

‘Not only how it was committed but who committed it. In this case, if you know how, you know who.’

‘Well, for God’s sake, will you let the rest of us in on it!’ Madge Rolfe all but screamed at her. ‘Why must you leave us dangling like this? It’s really intolerable!’

‘Sorry, Madge,’ replied the novelist. ‘I’ve grown so accustomed, as a writer of mystery fiction, to spinning out the suspense that here I am doing it for real. You see, we’ve arrived at the first of those pages of a whodunit when the reader, who, I hope, will already be keyed-up, starts to get downright edgy. After all, he has invested a good deal of time and energy in the plot and he just can’t bear the thought that the ending might be a let-down, either because it’s not clever enough or else it’s too clever by half. At the same time, he has to remind himself not to let his eye stray too far ahead for fear of inadvertently catching sight of the murderer’s name before he reaches the sentence in which it’s revealed by the detective.

‘Actually,’ she dreamily elaborated on her favourite theme, unmindful of the agonised impatience of her listeners,
‘to turn the screw even tighter, I used to reorganise my pagination with the printers. It drove my publishers crazy, but I’d add a couple of paragraphs here or else delete a couple of lines there, just so that the detective’s declaration “And the murderer is …” would sit at the very foot of a page and the reader would have to turn that page before he was able to discover, at the top of the next one, who the murderer actually was.