The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (14 page)

‘You mean they put ’im inside the trouser-press, suit an’ all?!’ cried Iris.

‘No, ’is suit. Like in one o’ them big ’otels. Not just a room but a suit.’

‘Gerraway! What you mean is a
sweet
!’

‘No, I don’t. I do so mean a suit. Anyway, all the time you’re readin’ the book, you remember the murder bein’ done in the first chapter an’ you know who done it an’ you can’t work out ’ow the detective – that’s a woman called Alexis Baddeley – you can’t work out ’ow she’s goin’ to save the man who’s been arrested for it – he’s an ’andsome, clean-cut young Yank, Mike somethin’ – I don’t remember ’is second name – no, no, no, call me a liar, I do so remember, it was Mike Rittenhouse, that’s right, ’e was the Napoleon’s penniless nephew – an’ you can’t work out ’ow she’ll save ’im from bein’ ’ung, seein’ as ‘ow he definitely done it cos you read about ’im doin’ it before you read anythin’ else.’

Having been talking, uninterrupted, for probably longer than ever before in her young life, Addie stopped to take a deep breath.

‘Well, don’t leave us all on tintacks, Addie,’ said Mrs Varley. ‘Did he do it or didn’t he?’

‘No, ’e didn’t!’ cried Addie, beaming triumphantly at everybody in turn. ‘That was what was so clever about it. It’s only at the very end you discover that in the first chapter ’e was at the pictures – which ’e told the police again an’ again ’e was – an’ what you read in that chapter is not ’im 
killin’ ’is uncle as ’e’s supposed to ’ave done but a similar-like murder ’e saw in the picture show that – what’s the word? –
inspirated!
– that inspirated the real murderer. But cos it’s the first thing you read, an’ cos, after ’e comes out of the picture show, ’e walks along Bond Street worryin’ about this terrible thing ’e’s done an’ you think it’s the murder ’e’s worryin’ about – but it’s atcherly cos he spent all ’is money on this loose woman ’e met at a Lyons Corner ’Ouse – an’ cos you’ve got it in your ’ead for the rest of the book that ’e’s the one that done it, it comes as ever such a surprise that it wasn’t ’im as killed ’is uncle after all!’

Flushed with what she imagined had been the unqualified success of her storytelling, she’d failed to notice that an opaque expression had started to glaze her listeners’ eyes.

‘Blessed if I can understand it,’ said Mrs Varley.

‘No more can I,’ said Dolly, shaking her head.

‘You got the wrong end of the stick as usual, Addie, my dear,’ said Chitty in what he doubtless intended to be a kindly voice.

The kitchen-maid was now close to tears.

‘No, I didn’t. It’s a really clever idea when you think about it.’

‘I don’t hold with ideas,’ said Mrs Varley. ‘Cause of half the problems in the world, ideas are.’

‘But this young Yank, this Mike, you see, everyone says ’e –’

‘Now don’t start all over again,’ said Tomelty. ‘We couldn’t
make ’ead or tail of it the first time and, knowing you, you’ll only make things worse. Why’d you have to tell us all that anyway, I’d like to know?’

Her lower lip trembling beneath her protruding teeth like that of a child who’s been scolded, Addie said, ‘I just wanted to say you shouldn’t touch a dead body in a murder case before the doctor tells you it really is dead. It said so in the book, so it must be true.’

‘Well, that’s cleared up,’ said Tomelty. ‘Now what’s the view around the table? Who done it?’

‘Are my ears deceiving me, Tomelty,’ cried an aghast Mrs Varley, ‘or are you asking us who
we
think murdered Gentry?’

‘An’ why not? They seem to be makin’ a right ’ash of it upstairs.’

Mrs Varley’s eyes narrowed.

‘Would there be a reward, do you suppose?’

‘Reward? Nah! If the ’ole ’ouse was burnin’ down an’ they was all a-screamin’ an’ a-shriekin’ an’ you burst in to try an’ rescue them, they’d make you wipe yer feet ’fore you got ’alf-way through the bleedin’ flames!’

He turned to Dolly.

‘So, Dolly, tell us who you think murdered Raymond Gentry.’

Dolly stuck her forefinger in the dead centre of her brow as though to indicate, for everyone’s benefit, the exact location of her hunch.

‘Well, I was wonderin’,’ she said, ‘seein’ as ’ow angry ’e made ’em all with ’is insinuendoes – I mean, couldn’t it be, you know, all of ’em at once?’

‘All of ’em? At once?’

‘You know, all of ’em in it together? Like in a jury?’

Tomelty made short work of that argument.

‘There’s twelve to a jury, so that won’t do. Iris?’

‘Well, since you ask, Tomelty,’ the upstairs-maid said primly, ‘I do ’ave a theory.’

‘A theory, is it? All right, Miss Alberta Einstein, let’s ’ave it.’

Pointedly tossing her permed curls at the chauffeur to let him know just what he could do with his vulgar shanty-Irish sarcasm, she proceeded:

‘You remember ’ow in books it’s always the person you don’t expect?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well then, it’s obvious, ain’t it? The murderer must be what’s ’is name – Trubshawe – the copper.’

‘You’re potty, you are!’ cried Mrs Varley, who, in spite of her misgivings at the direction the conversation had taken, was finding it impossible to resist joining in. ‘Trubshawe wasn’t even in the house when it happened.’

‘That never stops ’em in books. For all we know, ’e might ’ave sneaked over in the middle of the –’

‘Tommyrot!’ said Tomelty.

‘You seem to know it all, Tomelty,’ said Chitty. ‘What’s
your
theory?’

‘Well, we’re lookin’ for the obvious suspect, am I right?’

‘Right.’

‘Then, like they always say, it must ’ave been the butler what done it.’

‘Here, here, what’s that? You accusing
me
of murder?’

‘Nah, course not, Mr Chitty. Not you. I was makin’ a joke, that’s all. Just a joke.’

There was a pause. And then, impeccably on cue:

‘I don’t hold with jokes,’ said Mrs Varley.

It was a dark and stormy afternoon. Howling like a demented banshee, shaking the bony, leafless trees on either side of the drive so violently you’d swear it was their skeletons you heard rattling, an icy wind surged around the four walls of ffolkes Manor. The temperature must have been close to zero.

Stepping out of the house with Tobermory plodding ponderously in his wake, the dog’s leash trailing the snow-blanketed gravel path behind him, the Colonel stopped dead on the doorstep even before he closed the front door. The sheer force of the wind had visibly taken him by surprise and he glanced up at the heavens as though wondering apprehensively whether this was such a good idea after all. Then, manfully, he buttoned his overcoat’s top button and pushed its collar up till it shielded his neck both front and back.

For the moment at least, the snow had stopped falling
and now lay deep and even as far as the eye could see, in so far as, under the lowering firmament, the eye could see very much of anything at all. But what lay ahead couldn’t have been further from the quaint and powdery snow of Christmas cards – the snow as nature’s tinsel. There was a desert of snow stretching away in every direction, without the oasis, either near or far, of a smattering of house-lights, which would have intimated the existence of some living community, a village at the very least, to reassure you that you weren’t the sole survivor of a dead world.

How often, though, had the Colonel insisted that he preferred his seasons to be properly
seasonal
. ‘The four seasons,’ he never tired of saying, ‘are like the four courses of a meal. A diet of perpetual sunshine is like being served a meal of four puddings.’ And even now, on a day so god-forsaken he might have been forgiven for having had second thoughts about the wisdom of his walk, you could still make out on his face the masochistic satisfaction a real Englishman takes in a real English winter, the sort of winter which feels like it truly is winter, the sort of winter Dickens wrote about.

His coat buttoned right to the neck, his hairy woollen scarf wound tight around its collar, he slammed the front door of ffolkes Manor. That was another of the Colonel’s idiosyncrasies. You could always tell when it was he who had come in or gone out, since he was incapable of closing a door, any door, without slamming it. He even, nobody
quite knew how, contrived to slam doors
open
. No matter how regularly Mary ffolkes would remind him that there wasn’t a single door in the house that couldn’t be pulled-to quietly, he never did remember not to slam it.

As he strode away down the drive, the Colonel turned a judgmental eye on his wife’s monkey-puzzle tree, which stood directly in front of the big bay kitchen window. It was a frippery which he gruffly pretended not to approve of but which he nevertheless couldn’t help interfering with and advising on and generally sticking his nose into as he would into everything else that happened in and around his own house. But the engulfing gloom was such that it must have been impossible for him to see how well it was holding its own against the ferocity of a West Country winter. So, with an almost audible sigh, he grasped his gnarled wooden stick, a genuine shepherd’s crook which he’d brought back with him from his American sojourn, whistled to Tobermory, who ambled up out of nowhere to join him, and set out on his constitutional across the moor.

Walking briskly to keep himself as warm as was humanly possible, if not so briskly as to risk leaving Tobermory behind – walking, so one imagined, his own memories along with the dog and maybe even using the dog as an excuse to permit him to walk those memories undetected – he cut an oddly vulnerable figure silhouetted against the white shadows of the desolate lunar landscape.

Every so often, coming to a brief standstill, he’d test the
ground ahead of him with his stick to make sure he wasn’t unwittingly about to insert his foot into one of the tiny but treacherous gullies, now deceptively ironed out by the snow, with which, as he knew, the moors were pock-marked, for he was as familiar with them as with the back of his own hand. And every step he took was accompanied, mechanically, almost automatically, almost as though he himself were unaware of what he was doing, like a labourer whistling while he worked, by an affectionate halloo to Tobermory.

‘Come on, Tober!’ he’d cry out, without even troubling to turn his head, and ‘Here, boy!’ and ‘That’s it, try to keep up with me!’ and ‘Yes, yes, you’re a plucky old mutt, that you are!’ And because, apparently, not another denizen of Dartmoor, neither human nor animal, had ventured outdoors on such a forbidding Boxing Day, the distinctively squiggly pattern of his footprints stood out so vividly on the otherwise pristine terrain you could, in an absolutely literal sense, follow in his footsteps.

It was, after fifteen minutes or thereabouts at a steady pace, when he had left ffolkes Manor pretty far behind – the house-lights were still visible but they had become far too small, anonymous and untwinkly to be any longer describable as ‘warm’ – it was then that Tobermory started to appear vaguely restless.

Not that he failed to continue trudging along after the nice man who, he seemed to comprehend, was understudying
his real master. From time to time, though, painfully cranking up his fossilised neck muscles, he would turn his head to sneak a look back over the terrain which they’d already covered. Yet he never once barked or even growled, and the Colonel, his breath as visible as cigar smoke, never once took notice of the creature’s growing unease.

Then, as unexpected as it was brief, a sickly mist-enhaloed sun appeared from behind a low-lying bank of clouds and the entire landscape momentarily softened. Just at that moment Tober turned again – and this time he did bark. His barking sounded, from a distance, like nothing so much as the phlegmy wheezing of an asthmatic old codger, but it was enough to stop the Colonel in his tracks.

Shielding his features from the wind, he looked back at the dog, whose vocal exertions were causing not only his tail but his whole ramshackle frame to wag.

‘What is it, Tober? You smell something, boy? A rabbit? A goat? Surely not?’

Cupping a palm over his brow, the Colonel peered back in the direction in which the dog was still barking.

‘But you’re right, there
is
something – or somebody. Good boy, Tober, good boy! You may be at death’s door, but you’ve still got some of your wits about you.’

For a few seconds he said nothing. Instead, he stared straight ahead of him, alert, certainly, though less anxious than just plain curious.

Then, gradually, what had at first been uncaptioned curiosity did begin to turn into a nagging anxiety after all.

He called out, ‘Hello there!’

Then, after a lengthy pause:

‘Hello!! Why don’t you answer?’

And then, after a much shorter pause:

‘Who
is
that? Come closer where I can see you!’

The instant the shot rang out, he fell like a stone.

‘Depends. Depends.’

Trubshawe was speaking. He stood with his broad, bull-necked back to the fireplace, but at an oblique angle to it, concerned as he was to avoid blocking its warmth from the drawing-room’s other occupants. In contrast to the glowing fire, the pipe that permanently dangled from his lips was also, so far as anyone could recall, permanently unlit, to the point where you began to wonder if you’d ever actually seen it emitting smoke. Like many a man of his age, he
wore
that pipe rather than smoked it, and it had become as indispensable an accessory to his self-presentation as the Vicar’s dog-collar or Cora Rutherford’s tonitruous tangle of bangles.

Who knows what comment, or whose, prompted so typically cautious a response from him? ‘Depends. Depends.’ It could have been his motto, his ‘legend’, as the French affect to call it.

He had spent his whole career being dependable. It was
obvious, even to those who had only fleetingly crossed his path in the line of duty, that he’d never been one of the Force’s star detectives, that no tabloid reporter had ever dubbed him ‘Trubshawe of the Yard’. But he was what the Great British Police Establishment is most comfortable with – the type of investigator who arrives at the solution to a problem (he himself would instinctively have avoided the word ‘mystery’) not through some ostentatious lightning-flash of inspiration or even imagination but by simply, doggedly depending on others to point him, often without their actually realising they were doing so, in the right direction.

He would pose a question, listen politely and patiently to the answer, then listen a little more, then still a little more – oh, he had all the time in the world! – until the hapless suspect, intimidated by the prolonged silence, even feeling obscurely responsible for it, proceeded to blurt out all sorts of things he never intended to reveal. And it’s then, one imagines, that this temperamentally slow and, yes, plodding man would pounce – in his fashion. He would move in for the kill, just as patiently and politely as, earlier, he had laid the ground and set the trap.

Sherlock Holmes he therefore was not. Yet in his stolid, even boring way, he had probably nabbed many more criminals than any number of glittering practitioners of the venerable craft of detection.

As for the ffolkeses’ guests, having spent the last forty-five minutes or so resting in their rooms, they were now
seated comfortably at the fireplace again, increasingly engrossed, from the sound of it, in their own humdrum affairs.

‘Oh, there you are, Farrar. Everything quite satisfactory downstairs?’

‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes. The servants seem to be bearing up rather well considering.’

‘Considering?’

‘Considering the state they were in when the body was first discovered.’

‘Oh. Oh yes. Yes, of course. They
were
in a state, weren’t they?’

There was something not altogether natural about Mary ffolkes’s voice. Resembling nothing so much as an elderly butterfly, if such a creature can be said to exist, she had always been a fussy, fluttery woman, ever terrified of the Colonel’s ‘moods’, those vocal and too often public exhalations of his famous fiery temper. If there was one thing she dreaded in life, it was a ‘scene’, though in her case such a ‘scene’ might amount to no more than a couple of raised voices at the dinner-table. But now, when she spoke, a hoarseness of articulation combined with an unusually hesitant delivery suggested she was labouring under some more extreme strain.

She stood near the tall french window, noticeably apart from her friends, and even from the far end of the room she could be observed agitatedly toying with one of the knotted
tassels with which the heavy drawn curtains were fringed. Every so often, too, when she thought no one was looking in her direction, she would tweak the curtains apart and steal a swift glance out on to the moors. Then she would just as swiftly draw them to again and, sporting a brave smile, turn cheerfully – just a tiny bit too cheerfully – to face the company.

After a moment she spoke again:

‘Sorry, Farrar, but would you happen to …?’ she started to ask.

‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes?’

‘Would you happen to know if my husband has returned?’

‘Uh, no.’

‘Ah. Well, thank you anyway.’

Then, pretending she’d had a belated afterthought, she added, ‘Oh, and Farrar …’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you mean – sorry – but did you mean he
hasn’t
returned or did you mean you don’t happen to
know
if he has?’

‘Well, he may be changing, of course, but it’s not likely he could have come in without anyone hearing him. His being with Tobermory and all. And, you know, the way – well, the way he has of always slamming the door.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. You’re right, of course. Just my foolishness.’

And yet she couldn’t prevent herself, not nearly as furtively this time, once more tweaking the curtains open and staring blankly at the empty, desolate landscape which stretched away from the house.

It was hard to credit that no one else had noticed the gradual alteration in her demeanour, that no one else had sensed the hysteria locked up inside her like a genie trapped in a bottle. But then, even at the height of a crisis, normally constituted human beings appear to require next to no excuse to revert to their natural state of self-absorption, as witness the fragments of chit-chat which were drifting round the drawing-room and from which it could be gathered that, in the absence of anything to be urgently debated, any collective decision to be taken, the ffolkeses’ house-party had all gratefully subsided into the pre-murder routine of their various quotidian rounds.

The Vicar and his wife, for example, were huddled together in a private confab. For all one knew, they were discussing how they were ever going to confront the future under the cloud which the events of the last twenty-four hours had cast over their reputations. Or they could just as well have been sticking mental pins into a mental effigy of the terrible Mrs de Cazalis.

Those two wicked witches of the West End, Cora Rutherford and Evadne Mount, were having a high old time puncturing the pretensions of mutual acquaintances in the interconnected worlds of plays and books. From time
to time a
mot
from one or the other would make itself piercingly heard above the general babble – ‘Yes, he was short, the little runt, but not as short as the shrift I gave him!’ (that was the novelist) – ‘Her own hair? Not bl**dy likely! By the look of it, it wasn’t even her own wig!’ (that was the actress) – followed by a cascade of tinny tee-hees from Cora Rutherford and booming haw-haws from Evadne Mount.

Then there were the Rolfes. They were seated side by side on the sofa nearest the fire, next to a collection of carved wooden figurines, about a quarter life-size, all of them representing darkies in fezes and topees – postmen, stationmasters and other minor colonial dogsbodies – which the Colonel had brought back home from one of his African trips. When he was not distractedly fingering one or other of these peculiar statues as though greeting a deputation of pygmies, Henry Rolfe would squeeze his wife’s hand tight in his own, while she could be seen raising a finger to her eye – was she actually brushing away a tear?

So their apparent reconciliation meant that the tragedy of ffolkes Manor was to have at least one positive consequence. It had paradoxically saved a marriage that might have died had Raymond Gentry not. For the Rolfes, the word ‘tender’ for too many years had meant something akin to ‘raw’ and ‘bruised’. Now it really looked as though there was a chance it could once again come to mean ‘soft’ and ‘romantic’.

One positive consequence – or two? For, last but not least, we arrive at our pair of young lovers. Selina and Don were snuggled up on the smaller of the two sofas. And though they were whispering, or imagined they were whispering, communicating in a language too intimate to be spoken aloud, the fact that virtually everybody else was conversing in low voices made it impossible to avoid overhearing what they were saying.

‘Oh, Don darling,’ said Selina, peering with such undivided attention into the depths of the young American’s eyes you’d have thought he would either have to close them or turn aside from her field of vision, ‘was I awfully cruel to you? I didn’t mean to be, really I didn’t. It’s just that – I suppose I let myself get carried away.’

Even if Don had been listening to every word she had uttered, it was obvious from what he himself said next that only one of those words had truly registered.

‘Selina,’ he whispered, ‘you called me –’

‘“Darling”? Yes, I did. Do you mind?’

‘Mind? You’re asking me if I
mind
? Darling, darling, darling Selina, I’ll mind only if you
don’t
call me darling! From now on, I’ll expect every sentence you say to me, every single question you ask me, to end in darling! I won’t ever be content with just Don. Matter of fact, I never,
ever
want to hear you pronounce my name again. From now on, for you, I’ve only got one name – darling.’

Selina laughed, a high, bright, tinkly laugh, like someone
grinning aloud. It was the first time she’d laughed since the body had been discovered. Maybe even the first time since her arrival at the house.

‘Why, Don – I mean, darling! darling! – how eloquent you’ve become.’

‘Now you’re making fun of me.’

‘No, no, really I’m not. I thought that was a very poetic little speech.’

‘Oh, if you take me at all, Selina, you’ll have to take me as I am. I don’t kid myself I’m any kinda poet.’

‘Darling, please stop running yourself down. My – well, my infatuation, I suppose I have to call it, with Ray – it wasn’t really him, you know – to be honest, I’m no longer all that sure I ever actually liked him – it was the world he represented.’

She perused the semi-circle formed by her parents’ guests.

‘You see the sort of milieu I come from. I do adore every one of them. Most of all Mummy and Daddy, naturally, but also Evie and Cora and the Vicar and Cynthia and … Goshsakes, they’re all frightfully sweet and everything, but they’re so much older, so much more
settled
, than I am. I was beginning to feel I was a prisoner in this house. I craved life and experience and adventure, and Ray opened doors for me, doors into worlds whose existence I knew about only from books and mags and films.’

‘You do realise, my darling,’ said Don, comically solemn
in his youthful ardour, ‘that
I
can’t open those doors for you. They’re just as closed to me as they were to you. And seeing what effect they had on you – like your using the word “milieu”, that’s such a Raymondish word! – I mean to keep them closed.’

‘I do realise it. And it’s because of that I love you, not in spite of it. That’s what you’ve got to understand.’

‘Oh, I know I’m a colourless character, a bit of a cookie cut-out figure.’

‘What are you talking about? You have absolute oodles of It.’

‘It? What’s It?’

‘Haven’t you read your Elinor Glyn?’

‘Why, no, I –’

‘What? You never read
It
? It’s a modern classic.’

‘I’m not really the bookish type, you know, Selina.’

‘It means sex appeal, you egregious darling!’

Don’s eyes opened wide enough to swallow up the whole visible world.

‘Hot dog! You – you think I’ve got sex appeal?’

‘I’m telling you, oodles of it, you clod, you mad, wonderful clod!’

It was all too much for him.

‘Oh gee – oh gee!’ he stuttered, overwhelmed by the speed at which his luck seemed to have turned. ‘And I always thought I was just, you know, tall, dark and one-dimensional. My only excuse was that that’s how I was made by my Creator.’

‘And He did a wonderful job. He,’ she repeated, before adding archly, ‘or She.’

‘She?’ Don jovially echoed her. ‘A female God, eh? Should I take that to mean you’ve become a – a – whaddya call ’em?’

‘What do you call what?’

‘You know, those harpies who chain themselves to the Parliament gates and wave their umbrellas in the air and proclaim emancipation for women?’

‘Feminists?’

‘Feminists, yeah! So you’re a feminist now, are you?’

‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ said Selina, a roguish smile playing on her lips.

‘Well, don’t worry, I’ll soon cure you of that nonsense. There’s only one person who’s gonna be allowed to wear the pants in our marriage and I promise you it ain’t going to be the little wifey!’

‘But, Don, women already have the vote.’

‘Not in my home they don’t! Besides, you’re too beautiful to be a feminist.’

‘Oh, you dope, you darling, you sweet, sweet peachereno!’ giggled Selina. ‘I never realised you could be so masterful!’

‘Hot dog!’ Don cried again.

This time, however, he truly did cry out, causing everybody in the room to interrupt their own conversations and stare at him in amusement.

He blushed to the roots of his hair.

‘Sorry, I –’ he began to say in an embarrassed voice.

But he never did manage to complete his apology. Suddenly, at the french window, Mary ffolkes buried her face in her hands and burst into loud, heaving sobs.

Everybody looked at one another – which is another way of saying that nobody knew where to look.

Selina was the first to respond. Followed close behind by Dr Rolfe, she rushed over to the window.

‘Why, Mummy, what is it?’ she cried out. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

As Selina cradled her, Mary ffolkes tried to speak, but hiccoughing sobs were shaking her whole frame.

‘Now, now, Mary, my dear,’ murmured Rolfe in his dulcet bedside voice, deftly unpinning the Cairngorm brooch which held the collar of her taffeta dress in a secure clasp, ‘you must try to remain calm.’

Sliding a protective arm around her shoulders, he whispered softly to Selina:

‘Let’s get her over to the sofa. She needs to lie down for a few minutes. I’m afraid what’s happened has been just too much for her. I might have known the strain would tell. She’s not as young as she used to be. Her heart, you know …’