The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (6 page)

The first of his victims was Clem Wattis. He had been regaling us with his theories on the far-reaching consequences of the Treaty of Versailles when Raymond, tapping his lips in a feigned yawn, drawled across the table, ‘Oh dear, Vicar, I’m afraid your Great War is in danger of becoming a Great Bore!’

Clem – as befits his calling – is someone utterly incapable of losing his temper. Indeed, according to Cynthia, he’s so absent-minded his temper is just about the only thing he never does manage to lose. So it was, I suspect, more in sorrow than in anger that he replied to Gentry, ‘I suppose, young man, you think you’re awfully clever.’

‘Not at all,’ came the riposte, cool as the proverbial cucumber. ‘It’s only because I’m talking to you that I
appear
clever. Almost anyone would.’

Now even the Vicar’s dander was up.

‘Have you forgotten, you insolent young pup,’ he
barked, ‘it was to make the world safe for the likes of you that we fought the Great War in the first place? And this is the gratitude we get!’

Whereupon Gentry, he – well, he – what can I say? – he started to cast aspersions on – on the, well, on the exact extent and degree of the Vicar’s wartime duties.

By then it was evident that nothing and nobody could stem the tide of his bile. He’d somehow got wind of the sordid secrets in each of our lives – every life, as you know, Trubshawe, even the most outwardly blameless, harbours its secrets, for there’s the public life and the private life and then there exists the
secret
life – and each of us in turn came to feel what I can only call the lash of his vitriol.

And that’s how it was that, thanks to a single gate-crashing guest, our merry little Christmas house-party was to become nothing less than a living nightmare.

You’ll excuse me, I trust, if I decline to go into greater detail about the painful things we all had to hear about each other. All I’m prepared to say is that, when we turned in that night, there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have rejoiced if Raymond Gentry had been struck down by a thunderbolt.

Or, for that matter (she concluded), by a bullet.

‘
H’m, I get the picture
…’

Having digested the information that she had just been feeding to him, the Chief-Inspector then congratulated the novelist.

‘Thank you for that, Miss Mount. Very pithily put, if I may say so. To be honest, I’m not much of a one for detective stories. They’re too airy-fairy in my opinion, with not nearly enough of the hard slog, the sheer dogged legwork, that goes into bringing your typical murderer to book. But you do have a knack for boiling a complicated situation down to its essentials.’

‘Well, thank
you
, Chief-Inspector,’ she said beaming, ‘it’s really most magnanimous of you. More magnanimous, I fear, than I tend to be in my whodunits where you and your colleagues are concerned.’

‘Oh, it’s all good clean fun,’ Trubshawe answered heartily. ‘I hope we’re big enough at the Yard to take your ragging of us in the spirit in which I’m certain it’s intended.
But enough of these pleasant futilities. We’ve now got to decide what’s to be done next.’

‘I really don’t see what there is we can do, Trubshawe,’ said the Colonel. ‘We’re snowed in, as you’re aware, and until the weather lifts, and the telephone wires are reconnected, we can’t even inform any kind of official authority what’s happened.’

‘In that case, may I enquire why I’m here?’

This question appeared to leave the Colonel at a loss for words.

‘Why you’re here …? Ah well, it just seemed like the only – well, when you put it like that, I’m not – it was just that Chitty suggested …’

‘Chitty?’

‘Yes, he reminded me that you’d settled down in the area and proposed that – dash it all, man, I do have a dead body in my house! If I have a leaky pipe I send for the plumber and if I have a – a leaky corpse, well, naturally, I send for the police!’

‘Probably what the Colonel means is that we all felt, at least until the local constabulary were able to reach us, that it would only be right and proper for a member of the police force to be in attendance, even if a retired member.’

‘Thank you, Farrar,’ said the Colonel gruffly. ‘That
is
exactly what, in my clod-hopping manner, I was trying to say. Fact is, Trubshawe, once we’d taken the decision to
have Rolfe and Don fetch you over, I don’t suppose any of us really asked ourselves what precisely it was we were fetching you for. I hope you don’t mind – I apologise again – it being Boxing Day …’

‘No, no, no,’ said Trubshawe, ‘you did the right thing, and I would have been remiss in my duty – and, retired I may be, I still see it as my duty – if I’d declined to come.’

‘Why, that’s just what
I
said!’ exclaimed the Colonel. ‘Didn’t I say a policeman never retires? Not even for the night.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that, but let it pass. The question is, am I here merely to lend a seal, or the semblance of a seal, of officialdom, or again, as you rightly say, of semi-officialdom, to the hours and p’raps even days that lie ahead of you all before you’re able to re-establish communication with the outside world? Or do I myself do something about the situation in the meantime?’

The Colonel drew a doubtful finger along his unshaven chin.

‘Do something?’ he said. ‘I don’t get you. Do what?’

‘You aren’t going to arrest us all, are you?’ squealed the Vicar’s wife in a fluttery falsetto.

‘Dear lady,’ the Scotland Yard man smoothly replied, ‘even if I wished to arrest you – which I assure you I don’t – I couldn’t. Remember, I’m retired. I no longer have any official position, which means, logically, I no longer have any official power. However …’

His voice trailed off in a trio of tantalising suspension points.

‘However …?’ echoed the Colonel.

Trubshawe noisily cleared his throat.

‘Look, I realise what a dreadful ordeal this has been for all of you – and, between you and me, things are liable to get a good deal worse before they get any better. But it does strike me that a chance has presented itself which might allow us to clarify matters in the meantime.

‘It was Don here who told me, in Dr Rolfe’s motor, of the conversation you’d had in this very room a mere half-an-hour after he and the Colonel had discovered Raymond Gentry’s body. He told me, in particular, of Miss Mount’s insistence that you just couldn’t afford to sit around the house for hours, conceivably even days, with a corpse in the attic and an atmosphere of festering suspicion in the drawing-room. For he also apprised me of her theory – that one of you must logically be the murderer – a theory which, ladies and gentlemen, I’m obliged to endorse.’

This last statement of his provoked a collective gasp, almost as though a new and unexpected accusation had been levelled at the party, even though all the Chief-Inspector had done was, of course, reiterate what Evadne Mount had said earlier. It was possibly because, on this occasion, the charge was being made not by a novelist famed for her morbid imagination, the kind of imagination you look for and long for when you settle down at the fireside with a
whodunit, but by an individual whose diagnosis of the situation couldn’t help but carry, even into his retirement, the ring of authority.

‘Yes,’ Trubshawe continued after a moment, ‘I fear you’ll have to forget any convenient notion that this murder might have been an outside job. I’ve seen Raymond Gentry’s body. And I’ve seen the room in which he was done to death.

‘And there’s another thing. I also found, inside the pocket of his bathrobe, a piece of paper that clearly implicates him as a blackmailer – whether amateur or professional

I couldn’t yet say. I’d like you all to take a look at that paper.’

Whereupon he drew it out, flattened it with his fingers and spread it on to the table so that everybody could read it.

No matter how enigmatic these words and symbols would have been to anybody else, they certainly seemed to make a meaningful impact on the various members of the ffolkeses’ house-party who, one after the other, the colour draining from their features, could all be seen recoiling from a hasty perusal of the damning text.

Only Evadne Mount, either because she was of a more robust temperament than her fellow guests, or simply because of her congenital propensity to pry, continued to pore over the crumpled paper.

When she raised her head at last, Trubshawe noticed at once that she wore an expression of frowning perplexity.

‘What is it, Miss Mount?’ he quickly asked her.

‘Well, I don’t really know,’ she mumbled almost plaintively.

‘You don’t know?’

‘No, I don’t. It’s just that – well, I just can’t help feeling that there’s … there’s, you know, something wrong with that piece of paper. But what?’

‘I beg you to share with us whatever it is you have to say. You never know what could turn out to be important.’

She looked back down at the page of notes and studied it again for a few moments. Then she shook her head.

‘No, sorry, Trubshawe, I don’t know what it is that’s troubling me, really I don’t. It may come to me if I stop thinking about it.’

At first the Chief-Inspector seemed undecided whether or not to pursue the matter, then he asked Roger ffolkes:

‘Colonel, do you by any chance recognise the typing?’

‘Recognise the typing? How could I possibly recognise the typing? It’s not as though it’s handwriting.’

‘Actually,’ Trubshawe said patiently, ‘it is in a way. No two typewriters, you see, ever produce an exactly identical
typeface. What I mean is, do you happen to know on whose machine this was typed out?’

He handed the sheet of paper over to the Colonel, who gave it no more than a perfunctory inspection.

‘Haven’t a clue. Don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for. Here, Farrar, you take a gander at it, will you? Perhaps you can see what the Inspector’s on about.’

‘Why, yes, Colonel.’

‘What? You mean you can?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s – well, it was typed on your typewriter.’

‘Mine?!’

‘Definitely, sir. The one in the library. You see here – Chief-Inspector – this letter
C
? And this one again? The arc is broken – look, it has like a tiny space in the middle. Both of them. It’s your typewriter all right, Colonel.’

‘Well, I’m jiggered!’

‘So,’ ruminated the Chief-Inspector. ‘That means these notes were typed inside this very house, probably at some time in the last thirty-six hours. Colonel, would Gentry have had access to your library?’

‘Why, naturally he would. I don’t keep parts of my house out of bounds to my guests, even the uninvited ones. Anyone in search of a book to read, or if he just fancied being on his own for a while, was free to wander into the library.’

Trubshawe folded the paper up again and stuffed it back in his pocket.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘since it’s clear there was no love lost
between any of you and the victim, and since this’ – he patted his jacket pocket – ‘is a significant part of what makes it clear, it’s my belief that it would be a waste of time looking elsewhere for possible motives for his murder, at least before I’ve investigated those closer to home. By that I mean, here in ffolkes Manor.’

‘Before you’ve investigated …’ said Dr Rolfe. ‘Are we to understand that you’re suggesting you yourself conduct an investigation?’

‘Yes, that is what I’m suggesting.’

‘Here and now?’

‘Yes, again.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ said the Colonel. ‘You’re proposing to – what? – question each of us in turn?’

‘That’s right. That
is
just how I was thinking of going about it.’

‘Even though you’re retired and have no authority to do so?’

‘Look,’ said Trubshawe. ‘You do realise that, when the police eventually get here, you’re all going to be subjected to some tough questioning. What I propose could almost be like a dress rehearsal. It’s true, I’d have to be fairly tough myself. There wouldn’t be much point to the exercise if I weren’t. But because I wouldn’t be interrogating you in an official capacity, and also, of course, because none of you would be on oath, well, if you began to think you really ought to have a lawyer present or else you simply found
yourself getting a little hot under the collar, then there’s nothing I could do or say to prevent you from refusing to answer.

‘And if, by chance, though I must confess this strikes me as a very long shot indeed, if I arrive at the solution before the police arrive at the house, if I actually succeed in identifying Gentry’s murderer, then the whole distasteful process will have taken place away from the prying eyes of the yellow press.

‘For don’t delude yourselves, you’re in for some extremely unsavoury publicity. As I understand it, Gentry was a gossip columnist on a nationally syndicated scandal rag. Well, I can promise you, the public will juicily eat that up and come back asking for lots more of the same. By having the interrogation now, you may actually be sparing yourselves the worst.

‘As for the alternative, you all know what that means. Sitting here, hour after hour, wondering which of you did it and when he – or she – is going to strike again.’

‘Well,’ muttered the Colonel, ‘that does put a new complexion on things.’

He turned to face his guests.

‘All right. I think it’s only fair we be democratic about this. So let’s hear what you all think of the Chief-Inspector’s idea.’

For a while it seemed as though everyone was waiting for someone else to speak first, exactly as happens at many a
public lecture, whose listeners, visibly aching to interrupt the lecturer with their own opinions, opinions just as passionately held as his, suddenly seem to be struck dumb when questions are thrown open to members of the audience.

It was, as ever, Evadne Mount who broke the silence.

‘Since you lot seem too timid to speak up, I will. I’m all for it. Matter of fact, Trubshawe, I might even give you a helping hand. Only if you wanted me to, of course. But we whodunit writers have a few aces up our sleeves, you know, just as you coppers have.’

‘No comment,’ replied the Chief-Inspector in an amiably dismissive aside. ‘But thank you anyway, Miss Mount, for taking the initiative. That’s one in favour. Any other takers? Rolfe?’

‘It
is
irregular, of course,’ said the Doctor, ‘but it certainly does seem to me preferable to doing nothing at all. I’m with you.’

‘Good. That makes two.’

‘However,’ Rolfe continued, ‘I would like to remind the undecideds’ – he gave his friends a steady appraising glance – ‘that the presence in this house of Raymond Gentry has reopened a number of wounds that many of you, many of
us
, believed and hoped had been closed for good. I fear the Chief-Inspector’s questions are going to open up those wounds even wider. We’ve all got to be prepared for that, am I not right, Trubshawe?’

‘Yes, Doctor, you are, and that was well put. As I said
before, I’m not in a position to oblige any of you to answer my questions. You won’t be required to take any kind of oath, as you would in a courtroom. And if you should opt to lie to me, no action could be taken against you, which would not be the case during a proper police interrogation, where lying is a very serious offence indeed.