The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (15 page)

Together, propping her up, they began to walk across the room. Already half-way, however, the Colonel’s wife had not only steadied herself but was attempting to tidy up the
strands of hair that were flopping over her forehead, a nervous tic familiar to everybody who knew her well.

‘Thank you, but I’m really all right,’ she mumbled almost inaudibly. ‘Do please forgive me, I’m being such a silly-billy.’

When they reached the sofa, Selina hurriedly plumped up a cushion and rested her mother’s head against it, while Rolfe, stretching her two legs out lengthwise, removed her shoes.

‘Feeling better now?’ asked Selina, anxiously scrutinising the reddened, tear-streaked features.

‘Much better, thank you. I’m going to be fine. Just let me catch my breath.’

While he almost surreptitiously pressed his thumb on his patient’s wrist to take her pulse, Rolfe said, ‘Now, Mary dear, may I ask if something – I mean to say, something specific – brought on this little attack?’

‘It’s – well, to tell the truth, it’s Roger. I’m so worried.’

‘Worried, Mummy?’ asked Selina, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

In Mary ffolkes’s reply there could be detected an uncharacteristic trace of bitterness.

‘You see – you
haven’t
noticed. You’ve all become so preoccupied again with your own affairs. And why not? I can’t blame you for that. But not one of you seems to have noticed that Roger has been outside for a long time – really a lot longer than is good for him, particularly in weather
like this. It’s started snowing again, quite heavily. I’m a born worrier, I know, but … Oh, forgive me for being so foolish!’

Trubshawe immediately trained his gimlet eye on the grandfather clock. It was one-forty.

‘At exactly what time did he leave?’ he asked Mary ffolkes.

‘But that’s just it,’ she mumbled, wiping away her tears with a lacy handkerchief which she drew from the sleeve of her cardigan – her cardie, as she invariably called it. ‘That’s what’s so frustrating. I don’t know. I just don’t know. It was just Roger off on one of his constitutionals. He’s taken a walk at least once every day of his life. Except – except it seems to me this time he’s been out much longer than usual. I’m sure I’m getting into a dither for nothing, but we women do have our instincts, you know …’

‘Anyone else note what time the Colonel left?’

‘Well, sir –’

‘Yes, Farrar?’

‘You recall, he wanted someone to pop down to the kitchen to check up on the servants?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, one of the kitchen walls has a large bay window and, if you stand beside it listening to all the below-stairs gabbing –’

‘Yes, yes, get on.’

‘Well, it enables you to see anybody leaving the house.
And after about fifteen minutes the Colonel did walk past the window, just by the monkey-puzzle tree, with your dog Tobermory trotting along behind him – and it was exactly twelve-twenty by the kitchen clock.’

‘Twelve-twenty, eh?’ Trubshawe paused for a moment of reflection. ‘That would mean he’s been on the moors for quite a bit above an hour.’

He turned again to Mary ffolkes.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs ffolkes, but you understand I’m not what you would call conversant with your husband’s ambulatory habits. Is that a normal length of time for his walk? Or too long? Or what?’

‘Oh dear, Inspector, I really couldn’t say. Obviously, it’s never occurred to me to time one of Roger’s walks. What can I tell you? I just feel in my bones he’s been away too long.’

‘Now, Mary,’ Evadne Mount said to her cheerfully, ‘you really are worrying about nothing at all, you know. I’m certain Roger’s out there taking a long, vigorous walk to clear his head and, what’s more, enjoying every blessed minute of it. I also believe he’ll literally laugh his head off when he learns how alarmed you were. I can almost hear that laugh of his now.’

‘For once I’m in agreement with Miss Mount,’ Trubshawe nodded sagely. ‘It’s perfectly understandable you should be prey to all sorts of anxieties, what with everything that’s taken place here in the last couple of days. And you probably
think your husband’s been absent longer than usual for no better reason than that you yourself have been looking out for him. Aren’t you forgetting the proverbial kettle?’

Mary ffolkes blinked.

‘The proverbial kettle?’

‘I mean, about watching it boil,’ Trubshawe explained.

‘Oh yes. Of course. When you put it like that …’ she added doubtfully.

‘But that said and done,’ he went on, ‘I would like to see you have your mind put to rest. So this is what I propose. A small group of us men – you, Don, if you would, Farrar and me – Rolfe here will stay behind in case you have any further need of him, Mrs ffolkes – we’ll collect some torchlights and go out looking for the Colonel. Farrar ought to have some idea of the direction in which he tends to take his walks, so I’m pretty confident we’ll meet him on his way back, possibly even strolling up the driveway as we open the front door. Whatever – at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he’s no longer out there on his own. Now how does that sound?’

‘Oh thank you, Inspector,’ said Mary ffolkes, smiling palely. ‘I know I’m being needlessly alarmist, but – yes, I would be awfully grateful.’

‘Good, good,’ replied Trubshawe. ‘Then shall we get going, men – Don, Farrar?’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Evadne Mount declared.

The Chief-Inspector instantly negatived this suggestion.

‘I won’t hear of it, Miss Mount. This is a man’s job, and your place is here with the other ladies.’

‘There you go again! And it’s all pish-posh. I’m as much a man as you are, Trubshawe. Besides, there’s nothing for me to do here – Cora could tell her stories to the back of the Clapham omnibus and never know the difference. No, no, no, you can like it or you can lump it, but I’m coming with you.’

And she did.

The landscape appeared even less inviting than when the Colonel had set out on his constitutional. In fact, it looked as though God had taken a giant eraser to the horizon and simply rubbed it out like a blackboard – or whiteboard. It was now snowing heavily again, and the only sound to be heard, except for the whine of the ebbing wind, was a powdery creaking underfoot. Nothing, however, could have left a less Christmassy impression than the eerily virginal moorland that afternoon. Its whiteness was the whiteness of death, its pallor the hideous pallor of a cadaver.

Even the torchlights which cast their yellow haloes at everyone’s feet illuminated only the stark fact that there
was
nothing to illuminate. You half-expected the startled eyes of some feral creature to be trapped blinking in their beams – but no. Nothing. There was no such creature to be seen.

Nor – and this was a thought which had no doubt already crossed the mind of everyone in the search party,
though no one had shown any readiness to put it into words – nor was the Colonel to be seen. Trubshawe’s parting reassurance to Mary ffolkes, that he might well encounter her husband walking back up the driveway of ffolkes Manor on his way home, had proved, after no more than a few minutes, to have been hopelessly optimistic. Only under the shelter of the monkey-puzzle tree were Roger ffolkes’s unobliterated footprints, preceding Tobermory’s by a couple of yards, visible to the naked eye. But there was only one set of his prints and they were headed in only one direction – away from the house.

It was the Chief-Inspector who eventually broke the silence.

‘The cold getting to you, Miss Mount?’

The authoress was attired in a ratty, moth-eaten tweed coat, one that had seen many better days, a thick woollen scarf wound several times about her neck and the matelot’s tricorne hat which had become her trademark in London’s literary world. This outré ensemble assuredly kept the freezing temperature at bay, but it also gave her a troubling resemblance to one of those madwomen who can be found peddling boxes of matches on the forecourt of Charing Cross Station. Not that she gave a fig about that.

‘Not at all, not at all!’ she protested in a muffled voice still loud enough to echo over the moors. ‘I like the cold.’

‘You
like
the cold?’

‘You heard me. And please don’t give me one of those
condescendingly incredulous looks of yours that we’ve all had to get used to. I know I’m an author and therefore, for someone like you, an eccentric. But there are lots of us who simply hate the sun, who hate being drenched in sweat. Yes, sweat. I call it sweat because that’s what it is. I can’t speak for you, Chief-Inspector, but
I
sweat. I don’t perspire.’

‘Well, well, well. So it’s true what they always say. There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

Don, enveloped in the racoon coat which had caused a minor sensation when he first arrived at ffolkes Manor, turned, mystified, to the Chief-Inspector.

‘Sorry, I didn’t get that – what you just said.’

‘What I just said? Ah, yes, of course. Well, I don’t wonder you didn’t get it. It’s an old English expression. You can bet your bottom dollar it dates back to Chaucer, just as all those old expressions seem to do, even the smutty ones. “Nowt so queer as folk” – it means there’s nothing in the world as strange as people themselves.’

‘Oh, I see. You mean, like Miss Mount preferring cold to heat?’

‘That’s right. I love the sun myself. With the missus – God rest her soul – I used to go caravanning every August in Torbay. I’d just soak it up. How about you?’

‘Oh yeah, me too. But then, you see, I’m from California.’

‘California? Is that so?’

‘Yeah. Los Angeles. Nice little town. Full of orange groves and movie studios. Ever been there?’

‘Furthest I’ve been is Dieppe. Day trip. Couldn’t see what all the hubbub was about.’

‘You, Miss Mount?’ asked Don.

‘Evadne, dear. Please call me Evadne.’

‘Evadne.’

‘That wasn’t too difficult, was it?’ she said sweetly. ‘Now, what is it you’d like to know?’

‘Los Angeles. Have you ever visited it?’

‘No, I never have. Though, as it happens, I did set one of my whodunits there. I genned up on the place by reading Dashiell Hammett. You familiar with his stories? Not my cup of tea, as you might expect, but he knows his stuff all right.’

The pause that followed was motivated less by any reluctance on Don’s part to enquire about the plot of the whodunit in question than by his expectation that a précis of that plot was going to be volunteered anyway, whether he solicited it or not.

For once, though, the précis was unforthcoming, so he finally said:

‘I’d be interested to hear what it’s about. Your whodunit, I mean.’

‘We-ell, I don’t know,’ answered Evadne Mount, glancing at the Chief-Inspector. ‘I have the distinct impression our friend from Scotland Yard finds me a bit too style-cramping whenever I talk about my work.’

‘Oh, please. Don’t mind me,’ said Trubshawe, batting his two gloved hands together while striding onwards over the snow. ‘You never have before. Besides, it’ll help to pass the time.’

‘Right you are,’ she said, needing no further encouragement. ‘Well, the book was called
Murder Murder on the Wall
and its central character was an aged, loony silent film actress loosely based on Theda Bara – you remember, the star of
A Fool There Was
? – well,
you
won’t remember, Don, you’re not nearly old enough, but she’ll certainly have set off a palpitation or two in the Inspector’s manly young breast.’

‘Couldn’t have been easy for you to create a
silent
character,’ Trubshawe, not missing a beat, slyly interposed.

‘This film star,’ she continued, declining to rise to his bait, ‘lives a reclusive existence inside a deliriously creaky Bel Air mansion with only her incontinent Pekinese dog for company. Because she can no longer bear to contemplate the ravages of her own physical decline, she’s had all the mirrors in the house turned to the wall and even has a cleaning lady, what we in England call a char, come in every day to dust the furniture – though not the way you think. In fact, the cleaner’s job is to coat with
extra dust
any shiny surface in which there’s still a chance of her mistress’s appearance being reflected.

‘The thing is that, even though she’s on her uppers, and has been for as long as anyone can remember, it’s common
knowledge on the Hollywood grapevine that there’s one valuable she’s never pawned, a fabulous ruby offered her many years before by the Maharajah of Udaipur.

‘Then, one morning, her brutally murdered body is discovered by the cleaner. She duly rings up the police, who can find no trace of the ruby, and the sole clue to the killer’s identity are the letters LAPD which the actress was able to scrawl on her bedroom wall, in her own blood, before she expired.

‘Naturally, suspicion arises that she must have been trying to “point the finger”, as Hammett would put it, at some member of the LAPD itself – you know, the Los Angeles Police Department. That is, until Alexis Baddeley happens to come along. Nosing around in her usual incorrigible fashion, she interprets those four letters as being, instead, the dying woman’s abortive attempt to spell out the word “lapdog” and eventually finds the ruby concealed inside a cheap cameo brooch attached to the Peke’s collar.’

‘Oh gee, wow, that’s really clever,’ said Don. ‘I’d really like to read that.’

Trubshawe cupped his hands and blew into them.

‘Dashed if I can see the point any longer,’ he said. ‘Now that you’ve been served the whole plot up on a plate.’

‘Not so fast, Chief-Inspector, not so fast,’ Evadne Mount sniffily expostulated. ‘You’ll note that I didn’t give away the identity of the real murderer.’

‘Pooh, that’s no brain-teaser. It was obviously the char.’

The novelist let out a cry of triumph.

‘Hah! That’s just what I was counting on the reader to think! Actually, the murderer turns out to be a police officer after all, a “crooked cop”, as the Yanks call them. It’s a double twist, you see. Those letters LAPD meant exactly what everybody originally assumed they meant and had nothing to do with the Peke. In her death throes the film star was genuinely trying to communicate who the killer was. So that, even when Alexis Baddeley gets it wrong, she still gets it right! Eh, Trubshawe, what have you to say to that? Trubshawe? Are you listening?’

Surprised at not receiving any response, she suddenly noticed that the Chief-Inspector had fallen several paces behind her before coming to a complete halt. Arching his hand over his brow, in unnervingly the same gesture as the Colonel’s just an hour before, he was trying to make out something or somebody in the distance ahead of him.

An ominous silence descended on the party. Everyone strained to see for themselves what could have attracted the Chief-Inspector’s attention. At first there was nothing. Then, amid the restless play of shadows, a dark and amorphous form, like a mound of cast-off clothes unceremoniously dumped on the horizon, rose out of the snow. And no sooner had one’s eyes encompassed its contours, they were irresistibly drawn to a second, smaller mound a few feet away.

‘What the –?’ said Trubshawe, doffing his tartan cloth cap and scratching his scalp.

‘Why,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘I – I – I’m positive –’

Swallowing the rest of her sentence with a gulp, she exclaimed, ‘Great Scott-Moncrieff!’

‘What? What is it?’ cried the policeman. ‘My eyesight isn’t what it used to be – one of these days I’m going to have to fork out for a pair of specs – and this torchlight is dazzling my eyes.’

For a few agonising seconds Evadne Mount chose not to speak. Then:

‘Trubshawe,’ she finally said, ‘I can’t yet see what the larger of the two mounds is, though,’ she added grimly, ‘I can guess. But I’m afraid, I’m very much afraid, the smaller one is – is Tobermory.’

With lips set so tight around his pipe that he came close to biting its stem in half, Trubshawe made his way, half-walking, half-running, towards the two matchingly sinister shadows.

Tobermory’s was the first of the bodies to be bathed in the harsh yellow beam of his torchlight. The dog was lying on his side and, if it hadn’t been for his foam-flecked mouth, his smashed-up rib-cage and the blood which polka-dotted the blankness of the snow, he could almost have been asleep. He wasn’t asleep, though, he was dead. Yet the breath of life had quit his body so recently, and with such haste, that his nostrils, if no longer quivering, were still moist.

No one dared to speculate on Trubshawe’s feelings as he contemplated his dead companion. At last, though, he turned his torch on the larger of the two shapeless masses. There was, of course, no suspense whatever as to its identity. It was, as everyone knew it could only be, the Colonel.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ said Don in a whisper.

‘This is truly vile!’ gasped Evadne Mount. ‘Ray Gentry was vermin – but Roger? Why would anyone want to murder Roger?’

The Chief-Inspector wasted no time venting either grief or fury. He bent over the body like a terrier poised at a rathole and laid his head sideways on the Colonel’s chest. Then, gazing up at the cluster of faces circled about his own, he cried out:

‘He’s alive! He’s still alive!’

At first sight the Colonel had seemed just as dead as Tobermory. But when a light was trained directly on to his face, both his eyelids began to twitch – independently of one another, a strange and rather horrible sight – and, every five seconds or so, a convulsively jerky little quaver would shake each of his shoulders in turn.

‘What’s happening to him?’

‘I think he may be in some sort of a coma, Farrar – possibly he’s had an internal haemorrhage – not impossible he’s even had a stroke. Rolfe will be able to make a proper diagnosis. But he’s definitely alive. Look here.’ The policeman directed his index finger at a bloodied rip in the
Colonel’s overcoat. ‘The murderer was obviously aiming at the heart, but, see, the bullet went in much too high, through the shoulder and out again.’

Quickly taking in the surrounding waste-land, he muttered, ‘No point in looking for the bullet in this weather. Or for footprints. They’ll all have long since been buried under the snow.’

Once more he looked down at the unconscious man.

‘I’m no doctor,’ he said, ‘but in my time I’ve had to deal with a good number of men who’ve just been shot and I’m convinced he can be saved.’

‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Don. ‘Don’t they always say you should never move a wounded body?’

‘Yes, I daresay they do, but I’m less worried about the wound, which seems to be a relatively superficial one, than about a possible psychological reaction setting in. No, I certainly don’t recommend leaving the old boy here on the ground while one of us runs back to the house to fetch Rolfe. In this case, we don’t have a choice. We’ve got to carry him back ourselves.’

‘Yeah, you’re right, of course.’

Don at once peeled off his racoon coat and said to Trubshawe:

‘Here. We can use this to support him. You know, like on a stretcher?’

‘We-ell, but that’s a pretty flimsy jumper you have on. Aren’t you afraid you’ll freeze out here?’

‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay.’

‘Good lad,’ said Trubshawe approvingly. ‘You’ve got what it takes.’

Then Evadne Mount spoke up.

‘And Tobermory?’

‘I know, I know … For the moment, though, the only thing that matters is to get the Colonel home. Don’t think I’ve forgotten old Tober. I haven’t and I never shall. But we’re going to have to abandon him for now. I’ll come out here later and – well, I’ll make sure he’s given a decent burial. Thank you, anyway, for asking.’

‘Why gun down a poor old blind animal?’ said Don. ‘It’s just crazy.’

Again Trubshawe gazed at the lifeless creature who had once been his most faithful and, at the end, his best friend, and for a few seconds his natural unflappability was tempered by a very real and visible emotion.

‘No, son, whatever it was, it wasn’t crazy,’ he quietly replied. ‘Tober may have been blind, but they do say a blind man’s surviving senses – specially his sense of smell – are sharpened by the loss of his sight and I imagine that’s just as true of a dog. P’raps truer. Tobermory was a witness, a dumb witness, so he had to be silenced. Dogs, even blind dogs, know right from wrong, and they remember, too, who did right and who did wrong. He would have snarled and growled at the murderer for ever afterwards.’