The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (4 page)

‘You know, Trubshawe …’

Once more it was Evadne Mount who had cut in.

‘Yes?’

‘Major discoveries are all very well,’ she cavalierly remarked, ‘but sometimes they turn out to be of less significance than minor oddities.’

‘Minor oddities?’

Drawing the tip of her index finger along one of the attic’s floorboards, she held it up for his inspection.

‘Why,’ he said, peering at her fingertip, ‘I see nothing there.’

‘That,’ she said, ‘is the minor oddity.’

Downstairs in the drawing-room the ffolkeses’ house-guests were looking more dishevelled than ever. Stale cigarette smoke hung in the air, two of the womenfolk, Mary ffolkes and Cynthia Wattis, the Vicar’s wife, had nodded off, faded fashion magazines lying half-browsed on their laps, and even Chitty, who prided himself that his employers had never once had occasion to see him other than unbowed and upright, was starting to flag.

When the Colonel entered, however, followed by the rest of the small investigative party, they all wearily roused themselves, the women adjusting their hair, the men re-knotting the cords of their dressing-gowns, and waited expectantly to hear what the man from Scotland Yard had to say.

It was, however, Roger ffolkes who spoke first. Turning to the Chief-Inspector, he asked:

‘Perhaps now you’d like me to introduce my guests?’

‘Certainly,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Be my guest. Or rather, be my host, what?’

‘Ha, very neat, yes,’ said the Colonel with a half-hearted smile. ‘Oh, and I trust you’ll excuse our varying states of undress. We’ve all been caught a bit off-guard, you know.’

‘Please, please … In my profession, ladies, gentlemen, I’m quite used to it. I remember once arresting a villain while he was taking his bath. Can you believe it, even though I’d begun to read him his rights – “You aren’t obliged to say anything, but anything you do say, etc., etc.” – he continued to sit there calmly soaping himself!

‘When I protested, you know what his answer was, the cheeky blighter? “You do want me to come clean, don’t you, Mr Trubshawe?”’

There was more mild laughter at this witticism. But since no one was really in the mood for jocular wordplay, the Colonel at once proceeded to the round of presentations.

‘Well now, Trubshawe – cigarettes on the table beside you, by the way, so please do help yourself.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll stick to this if you don’t mind,’ answered the Chief-Inspector, waving his still-unlit pipe in the air.

‘As you wish,’ said the Colonel. ‘Now, let’s see. On the sofa near the fireplace, over there, that’s Clem Wattis, our Vicar, and his wife, Cynthia. Next to Cynthia is Cora Rutherford, the well-known actress, who I’m sure needs no introduction, as they say. Then there’s Madge Rolfe, the wife of Dr Rolfe, who’s the gentleman standing to her left.’

‘Colonel,’ interrupted Trubshawe, ‘Rolfe and I
have
met. You forget, it was he who drove over to my cottage with young Duckworth.’

‘Ah, yes, yes, yes, course it was. Foolish of me. Frightful thing, old age. Now who else haven’t you been introduced to yet? Oh yes, my wife Mary.’

‘How d’you do, Mrs ffolkes?’

‘How d’you do, Inspector Trubshawe?’

‘Snap!’ said the policeman, and they both smiled, as one does.

‘And, of course, Chitty, my butler.’

‘Chitty.’

‘Sir.’

‘As for my daughter Selina,’ the Colonel went on, ‘I’m afraid …’

‘Yes?’

‘She really was awfully attached to Gentry, so his murder has come as a tremendous shock to her. She’s gone up to her room to rest. Naturally, if you insist on her being here, I can always –’

‘That won’t be necessary for the moment. Later – when she’s better able to tell me what she knows. I think, too, it might be wise if your butler is excused.’

On hearing these words, Chitty gave the policeman a respectful nod and may even have said something equally respectful, except that, if he did, he said it so butlerishly
sotto voce
the Chief-Inspector was unlikely to have heard
what it was. Then, without waiting to be requested to do so by the Colonel, he left the room.

After watching him go, Trubshawe turned to face the whole company.

‘Well now, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘as you don’t need to be told, this is a most terrible and mysterious crime you’ve got yourselves entangled in. I literally couldn’t believe my ears when I was first told what had happened but, having been up to the attic and seen for myself, I have to believe them now. In effect, the murderer contrived to get in, kill Raymond Gentry, then get out again, apparently without opening either a door or a window. I don’t mind admitting I’m dumbfounded.

‘What I require, though, is for one of you to fill me in on the events that led up to the murder itself. Coming over here in the car, Dr Rolfe and Mr Duckworth did give me a sketchy account, but, what with stopping and starting and getting out to push and getting back in again, well – you’ll excuse me, gents, I’m sure you understand what I’m saying – but what I need now is a more coherent version, one with a beginning, a middle and an end in that order. Would any of you,’ he said, glancing at everybody in turn, ‘care to volunteer? Just one, mind.’

There was a moment’s silence, then Mary ffolkes began to say:

‘Well, it does seem to me that …’

‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes?’

‘I was going to suggest Evie. She’s the writer Evadne Mount, you know. And, well, it
is
her job to tell stories – indeed, just this sort of a story. So I thought …’

‘Uh huh,’ murmured Trubshawe, his fingers drumming a restless tattoo on the mantelpiece. ‘Ye-es, I suppose she would be the obvious choice.’

You could see, however, that he was less than ecstatic at the prospect of even temporarily surrendering the reins to his redoubtable rival in matters of criminality.

Evadne Mount could see it too.

‘Now look, Trubshawe,’ she said pettishly, ‘I’ll be happy to oblige but, if you’d rather it weren’t me, then all you have to do is say so. I don’t easily take offence, you know,’ she added with less conviction.

‘Oh, but you’re wrong, Miss Mount,’ he tactfully replied. ‘I’d be pleased, very pleased, if you were to give me a rundown of what occurred here yesterday. All I’d say – but I’m sure I really don’t need to – is, well, just stick to the facts. Keep your imagination for your whodunits.’

‘Now that
is
a remark I might be offended by,’ said the novelist, ‘if I were so minded. But because it’s you, Trubshawe, and I’ve already taken a shine to you, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear it. So, yes, I’d be happy to give you an account of everything leading up to Gentry’s murder. When would you like it?’

‘No time like the present.’

Stepping away from the fireside, Trubshawe indicated
that place on the sofa next to where the Reverend Wattis was seated.

‘Mind if I park myself here? Beside you?’

‘Not at all,’ answered the Vicar, shifting sideways to make room for the detective’s generous frame.

‘Now,’ said the Chief-Inspector to Evadne Mount, ‘if you would …’

Our party (she began) got going under the most promising of auspices. We all arrived fairly early on Christmas Eve – less, of course, Selina, Don and Raymond, who, as you’ve already been informed, Chief-Inspector, turned up a few hours after the rest of us. The Rolfes and the Wattises are locals, so they motored over from the village, while Cora and I, who’ve been close chums and near-neighbours for absolute yonks, travelled down from Town together, catching the 1.25 from Paddington.

Now Roger and Mary are, I’ve got to tell you, quite the perfect hosts. The house, we discovered, was stocked with every delicacy appropriate to the season, from oyster soup to roast turkey, from succulent Brussels sprouts to the
pièce de résistance
, a gigantic Christmas pud steeped in the finest French brandy. Naturally, given the time of year, our rooms were a trifle nippy – like so many in this part of the country, ffolkes Manor is an impossible house to heat properly – but we all had lovely warming pans slipped between our bed-sheets an
hour or so before we retired. As for this very drawing-room, when we arrived – just in time for a glass of mulled claret or else, for those of us in need of a more powerful stimulant, a whisky-and-polly – it was glowing from a huge open fire that had already been regularly replenished during the day.

It’s true, the weather had deteriorated badly and what had amounted at first to not much more than a few feathery flurries of snow was already half-way to degenerating into a full-blown storm – except that my own feeling, Chief-Inspector, is that such a storm, however awkward it makes life for the poor traveller, can only
intensify
the snugness of a cosy little gathering like ours. The way, you know, a frosting of snow on a window-pane has the same magical appeal for us Britishers as the sound of rain pelting down on the roof of a lamplit bedroom. I do feel, don’t you, that freezing weather actually reinforces that sense of security, of comfort, of ‘indoorness’, that’s so indispensable to the spirit and success of an old-fashioned British Christmas.

Anyway, as I always say, the ideal complement to good food and wine is good company, and that, I think I can safely assert, we were. Oh, I suppose ‘the younger set’ would have found us a touch fusty, a touch out-of-touch, so to speak. But since we ourselves are all confirmed fogeys and fuddy-duddies, why should we give two hoots what they think?

After supper things settled down nicely. Cora, who is, you should know, a wonderful raconteur – or ought that to be raconteuse? – was delighting me with some appallingly
indiscreet anecdotes about the
unprintable
, as she wittily puts it, Suzanne Moiré, with whom she co-starred in Willie Maugham’s
Our Betters
. The Colonel was showing Clem Wattis the latest acquisitions to his stamp album. And the Rolfes were telling Cynthia Wattis all about their recent cruise around the Greek islands. In other words, it was the sort of evening that sounds deadly dull when you attempt to describe it afterwards, but really, while it was unfolding, it was all most congenial.

And because the ffolkeses don’t ‘believe in’ the wireless – Roger, in his eccentric English way, refuses to have a set in the house because he regards it as too ‘fangled’ – there was no deafening dance-band syncopation to drown out our inconsequential chatter. Instead, Mary, a gifted pianist, treated us to a medley of the type of tunes everybody really likes, even if they’re not always prepared to admit it: Rachmaninoff’s
Prelude
; a couple of Cyril Scott pieces,
Danse nègre
and
Lotus Land
, as she knows I have an unwholesome penchant for the more palatable modernists; a pot-pourri of waltzes and schottisches; and, for an encore, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Fearfully gay.

Well then, at about half-past ten, when we were just about to plunge into a game of Charades – Roger and I had decamped to the library to plot how best to do King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid – we heard a car pull up in the drive.

It was, as expected, Selina and Don – along with, though
in his case not at all as expected, Raymond Gentry. Don, I have to say, and I’m sure he won’t contradict me, was already looking extremely disgruntled at finding himself in a crowd of three. Selina, and she surely wouldn’t deny this either if she were here, was, I felt, rather callously oblivious of the all too flagrant fact that Don was in a huff. And Raymond – well, Raymond was Raymond.

As there exists no more satisfying sensation than being fair about someone you loathe, I’d love to be able to say lots of nice things about Raymond Gentry. Well, but I can’t.

From the minute he entered the house he set everybody’s teeth on edge. Roger and Mary were both conspicuously put out about his being here at all, neither having reckoned on being obliged to accommodate an extra last-minute guest – and a total stranger at that. But, well, they
are
parents, so they know better than any of us how easygoing young people can be about what, for our generation, are the most elementary courtesies and formalities. Even so, Raymond was special.

I remember, when the Colonel asked him to park his motor-car, a Hispano-Suiza, wouldn’t you know, inside the garage alongside the Rolfes’ and the Wattises’, he actually yawned – I mean, he actually, literally yawned in Roger’s face! – and said, with that unblushing effrontery of his that we came so to dread, ‘Sorry, old man, but it’s such a fag putting a car away at night. In the morning – if I can be bothered.’ If I can be bothered!

We all heard him say that and, half-fascinated, half-horrified,
we all watched him languidly drape himself over an armchair. Though she didn’t directly take him to task, Selina, who must surely have begun to regret inviting him in the first place, did have the grace not to hide her shame. As for Don, he was already so bristly with resentment as to be beyond surprise. We most definitely had the impression that the drive down in the Hispano-Suiza had been a tense one.

How to sum up Raymond? Well, Trubshawe, now that you’ve seen him, even if attired only in a bathrobe and pyjamas – and of course deceased – you may already have an inkling as to why not one of us was convinced by what he condescended to tell us of himself. When Mary enquired about his people, he alluded airily – understandably airily, in my opinion – to the so-called ‘Gentrys of Berkshire’. Then, when he was questioned about his education, he had the nerve to inform us that his extortionately expensive public school was so exclusive he was forbidden from naming it in public. Well, I mean to say! A public school that can’t be named in public! And all this accompanied by such a sarcastic smirk you really didn’t know if he was pulling your leg or not.