The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (21 page)

‘I was dumped in an orphanage, I lit out, I was caught, I was brought back, I lit out a second time and that time nobody bothered to try and catch me. So I mooched my way across the country. I worked as a carpenter in an Omaha saw-mill, I signed up for a stint aboard an oil tanker off the Gulf of Mexico, I served hash in a Fort Worth hash-house, I was a professional card-sharp on a Mississippi riverboat. You name it, I did it.

‘I finally got myself a job as an actor, touring in barnstorming mellers – that’s melodramas to you. Because of my father’s nationality I could do a snooty British accent and I’d get typecast as a Brit.

‘Then we were left stranded when the company manager ran off with the female juve – along with the box-office takings – and I was out of work again. So I started riding the
freight trains. And during those hot nights under the stars I’d tell the other hobos the gold-rush stories my father had told me and they ate them up and said I should write them down.

‘I did write one down and sold it to a pulp magazine –
The Argosy
, its name was. I got twenty dollars for it and that twenty-dollar bill made me a writer. I’d have kept it and framed it, except that I needed it to feed me while I wrote the next one.

‘Eventually I’d scraped the bottom of my father’s kitty of stories and I had to make up my own and I discovered I was good at that too. Good at the kind of detective stories that were all the rage, stories about grifters, gamblers, blackmailers, showgirls and those single-minded, double-crossing bitches who are as hard as the nails they never stop polishing. Way too hard-boiled for you,’ I added, referring to Evadne Mount.

‘H’m, yes,’ she replied, ‘I belong to what I daresay your lot would regard as the runny soft-boiled school. But, you know, Mr … Mr Murgatroyd, when I think about how you murdered Raymond, I find it hard to credit you never tried your hand at a locked-room whodunit.’

‘It’s funny you should say that. I could imitate just about any style, and I actually did once have this idea for a locked-room story with all the traditional trimmings. But none of the pulp rags would buy it. Thought it was too prissy, too Limey. What they were looking for was the rough, tough stuff taken straight from the headlines and
breadlines. And by that time I’d become a pro. Whatever they wanted, I gave them.

‘Then, when I was finally beginning to pull in some real dough, I hired a private detective, a Pinkerton agent, to find out what had happened to Roger Kydd. I suspected he’d returned to England with all the loot he’d stashed away, and I hadn’t a hope of tracking him down myself.

‘For a while there I thought it was money wasted, just flushed down the drain. In the end, though, my man did come up trumps. He reported back to me that Kydd had bought this – this “pile”, I think you say, on Dartmoor and set himself up as Colonel ffolkes. With two small
f
s, if you please.

‘If he’d still been based in the States, I guess I’d have taken my revenge the American way. I’d have gunned him down in some back alley and been done with it. But when I realised he’d transformed himself into an English gentleman, well, I decided to show you Brits that we Yanks could also commit – what did you call it, Miss Mount? A Mayhem Parva murder? I decided to test my locked-room plot in the real world. I liked the irony of it, his trying so hard to be English all over again.

‘I came over on the
Aquitania
and booked myself a room at The Heavenly Hound in Postbridge. Most evenings the Colonel would have a tankard or three in the bar and I had no trouble getting him chatting, especially when he learned we had a mutual passion for philately. He brought me back
here a couple of times to show off his stamp collection, and the rest was a breeze. He was looking for someone to run the estate and I told him I was looking for a job, so he offered me the post of manager. That was nearly four years ago.’

‘Why did you wait so long before taking your revenge?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘Those four years were to be my alibi.’

‘Your alibi?’

‘I knew that, once I’d murdered the Colonel in the attic, I’d have no real alibi and so I’d be a prime suspect. And I thought that, if Mrs ffolkes could inform the police that I’d been in her husband’s employ for as long as four years, that would help to avert suspicion from me.

‘Also, I realised I’d need time to repair the armchair. So, before I made my move, I waited as patiently as I knew how for a really severe winter – the kind of winter the ffolkeses had told me about, the kind of winter that meant the house would be so isolated the police wouldn’t be able to come snooping around for three or four days, which would give me the time I needed to do such a good repair job on the chair no one would ever know it had been tampered with. But, of course, I hadn’t counted on a retired Scotland Yard Inspector living just a few miles away.’

Then I added – ‘ruefully’ is the adverb I suppose I would have used if this had been one of my own stories – ‘I also hadn’t counted on Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Crime being of the party.’

I made a little mock-bow – rueful again – in Evadne Mount’s direction.

‘Thank you, young man,’ she said, returning the bow. ‘So my exposé of how and why you committed the two crimes was accurate?’

‘Ha! Accurate isn’t the word,’ I replied with a mirthless laugh. ‘For me it was almost creepy having to listen to you tell the story, my story, listen to you tell it as though you’d written it yourself and I was just a character in one of your books. I couldn’t even help admiring the way you picked up on that missing
u
in “behaviour”. Now that was a dumb mistake.’

‘It was indeed,’ she agreed. ‘But, you know, I always say it’s the cleverest crooks who make the dumbest mistakes. I might even borrow yours for my next whodunit. The few readers capable of picking up on it, as you put it, will most likely assume it’s a printer’s literal. God knows, there are enough of those about nowadays.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘it
is
gratifying to realise that, in the midst of tragedy, my instincts remained intact.’

‘Well – maybe less than you think,’ I said.

‘Oh? What makes you say that?’

‘Only that the one thing you don’t seem to have cottoned on to is
your
responsibility in the murder of Raymond Gentry.’

‘My responsibility!
My
responsibility! Why, I – I never heard of such a –’

‘Yes, your responsibility. You were absolutely right when you suggested that the Colonel had been the victim I originally
singled out for my locked-room murder. And you guessed right, too, when you said that, after Miss Selina arrived at the last minute with Gentry, I chose to murder him instead – promising to give him some piece of bogus dirt about the Colonel and persuading him to meet me in the attic before the rest of the house was up and about. And you were also right about why I changed my plans – so there’d be a whole new set of suspects and motives.’

I turned to Trubshawe.

‘You were puzzled, remember, at not finding the murder weapon inside the attic? What you didn’t understand was that I’d deliberately taken the gun away with me – for the simple reason that I didn’t want Gentry’s death to be thought of as a suicide. For my plan to work, it had to be seen for what it was: a murder. Only not one committed by me.

‘And what
you
didn’t understand’ – I turned once more to Evadne Mount – ‘is that, if I decided to switch victims, it was partly because I’d heard you holding forth again and again about how much safer and more effective it was to murder someone by just shooting him or knifing him and then burying the knife or the gun. What was it you said? Eschew the fancy stuff? Well, you’re the expert. So that’s what I did. I decided to eschew the fancy stuff and just gun the Colonel down while he was out walking Tobermory, poor old Tobermory, on the moors.’

Shaken by the turn of events, Evadne Mount was, for once, speechless. It was Selina ffolkes who spoke up instead.

‘But don’t you see, Evie,’ she said, ‘it means you saved Daddy’s life!’

‘Eh? What’s that you –?’

I cut her short.

‘Miss Selina’s speaking the plain truth,’ I said. ‘If I’d stuck to my original plan, I’d surely have succeeded in killing the Colonel in the attic, just as I succeeded in killing Gentry there. But your theories were responsible for making me change that plan and, as it turned out, it was because of those theories that I botched the Colonel’s murder. For you know, my dear Miss Mount, those theories of yours, all those fine theories of the Dowager Duchess of Crime? Frankly, they stink. You just have a go yourself and you’ll discover as I did it’s not so easy committing a murder that’s simple, boring and perfect.’

The novelist instantly cheered up.

‘Well, thank God for that!’ she exclaimed. ‘So it seems that, just like Alexis Baddeley, I’m right even when I’m wrong! I trust, Trubshawe, you won’t forget that, if ever we should combine forces on another case.’

Silently, though quite visibly, mouthing, ‘Heaven forfend!’, the Chief-Inspector then leaned forward and spoke to me in his soberest voice.

‘Murgatroyd, you do know that by killing Gentry, however worthless an individual he was, you were causing the shadow of suspicion to be cast on a number of wholly innocent people?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘but the fact that just about everyone had a motive meant it was very unlikely any one suspect would be arrested. My grievance was with the Colonel. I didn’t want to see anyone else hurt.’

‘But have you thought about this? That if things
had
turned out the way you wanted, if you
had
got away with it,
no one would ever have known
. I mean, no one would ever have known which of the ffolkeses’ guests the real murderer was. That shadow would have remained over all of them alike.
For ever
…’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘People forget – sooner than you expect. And I was prepared to place my trust in English law. As I understand it, in your legal system there’s no such thing as a miscarriage of justice.’

‘You’re right there,’ agreed Trubshawe. ‘But what about Gentry? What had he ever done to you?’

‘Gentry? He had it coming. I have no regrets.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but in this country we don’t hold with people taking the law into their own hands. You killed one man and you tried to kill another. You’ll have to pay for that.’

‘I don’t think so. Aren’t you forgetting I’m armed and you’re not?’

‘Listen to me, man. You’re obviously no fool. You must know you’re done for. You can’t murder us all and it would be senseless to try to escape across the moors in this weather.’

There was a pause when neither of us spoke. Then:

‘I
am
going to escape,’ I countered in a voice that sounded alien even to me. ‘Though not across the moors.’

I tightened my grip on the revolver.

As I did, I heard Evadne Mount shout, ‘Stop him! Stop him! He’s going to kill himself!’

What a woman. She was right again.

Gilbert Adair published novels, essays, translations, children’s books and poetry. He also wrote screenplays, including
The Dreamers
from his own novel for Bernardo Bertolucci. He died in 2011.