The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (3 page)

While Don was complementing the Colonel’s story, the Chief-Inspector bent down to study the door more closely. Now he stood up and said:

‘I note, too, that the door is locked from the inside and the key is still in the lock. Is that also how you found it?’

‘Absolutely!’ exclaimed the Colonel. ‘That’s what’s so dashed extraordinary about this business. Window barred, door locked from the inside, key still dangling in the lock! I never heard of such a thing, as the Scotchman said of the Crucifixion.’

‘And the attic was empty when you entered it?’

‘Completely empty – except, of course, for Gentry here. I’m blamed if I know how he did it – the murderer, I mean – and assuming it’s a he. As I was saying downstairs a couple of hours ago, it’s the kind of murder you can only imagine being committed in a book. Ironic, really, when you think that one of our guests is Evadne Mount. The thriller writer, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Trubshawe, ‘Mr Duckworth already told me she was here. I was quite impressed.’

‘A fan of her work, then, are you?’ asked the Colonel.

‘We-ell,’ answered Trubshawe evasively, ‘I don’t know as I’d call myself a fan. She’s never been known to be a fan of Scotland Yard. Inspector Plodder – that’s the moniker I’d be saddled with if I was unlucky enough to turn up in one of her books. I’d be the chump who does all the spade-work, who takes all the pains. Then along saunters some smart-alec of an amateur ’tec and –’

A stentorian voice rang out behind him.

‘If it’s
my
amateur ’tec you’re talking about, Chief-Inspector, do at least get the sex right. Smart-alexis, if you please, not smart-alec.’

On the threshold, wrapped in her dressing-gown, the quintessence of one of those dotty, indomitable Home Counties matrons who are as irreplaceable a feature of the soft and undulating English landscape as Bedouin tribeswomen are of the no less soft and undulating Sahara Desert, stood Evadne Mount.

‘Smart-alexis?’ repeated the Chief-Inspector, too taken aback for the moment to issue the stern rebuke he doubtless felt she deserved for having followed him uninvited into the attic.

‘If, as you seem to imply, you’ve read my books,’ she said, jabbing a pudgy finger at him, ‘and whether or not you feel you can count yourself among my many fans, you really should know my detective’s name.’

‘Which is?’

‘Baddeley. Alexis Baddeley.’

‘Why, yes, yes, of course it is!’ said Trubshawe. ‘It all comes back to me. Alexis Baddeley. Single lady – formidable intellect – of, as they say, a certain age. It was she who solved the identical-twin fratricide in
Faber or Faber
, am I right?’

‘You are indeed. It’s funny. I’d always been wary of that whiskery old device of identical twins. So when I finally did employ it, I decided, in my trademark fashion, to stretch the conceit as far as it would go without snapping.

‘You see,’ she rattled on, now extending her discourse to include Don and the Colonel, ‘the novel’s main characters are a pair of identical twins, the Faber brothers, Kenneth and George. Not only do they look exactly alike, they dress exactly alike. They even communicate in a strange coded language that nobody else understands and play endless practical jokes, vicious, mean-spirited pranks, on their neighbours, who of course have never been able to tell them apart.’

‘But I –’

‘Strangest of all,’ continued the novelist, paying no heed to Trubshawe’s attempt to interrupt her, ‘is that they themselves are always quarrelling – the reader soon learns that they actually despise each other – so that, when one of them is murdered, it stands to reason the other must have done it. But since the survivor of the two maintains a stubborn silence as to his identity, the dilemma facing Alexis Baddeley is: which is which? She has to exert all her formidable intellect, as you so kindly put it, Chief-Inspector, to discover whether it was Kenneth who murdered George or George who murdered Kenneth.’

‘And which was it?’ asked Trubshawe, his head literally spinning.

‘You say you read the book,’ Evadne Mount drily countered. ‘You tell me.’

He stared at her, almost if not quite rudely, before remembering that now was not the time for literary reminiscences.

‘Miss Mount, we haven’t been introduced so I’ll do the honours myself. My name is Trubshawe, Chief-Inspector Trubshawe. Or, I should say,
ex
-Chief-Inspector Trubshawe.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ returned the novelist.

‘And I you. Honoured, in fact. However, I really must insist that you go back downstairs at once and rejoin your fellow guests. This is no place for a lady.’

Evadne Mount glanced dispassionately at the recumbent form of Raymond Gentry.

‘Fiddlesticks. I can’t speak for my fellow ladies, but I’m quite capable of outstaring a dead body without swooning away like some helpless ninny. And it could be useful to me, as an author of whodunits, to observe the proper – what’s Scotland Yard parlance for it? – process? – no, no, no, procedure, isn’t it?

‘Besides which, as Roger just remarked, this is the sort of crime which is supposed to happen only in books and it’s by way of being a theory of mine that, even in life, there exist murder mysteries we writers are better qualified to solve than you policemen. Naturally I don’t expect you to share that view, but you would agree, surely, that the more the merrier?’

‘The more the merrier, you say?’ mused the Chief-Inspector. ‘Isn’t that rather an unfortunate turn of phrase to use while standing a few feet away from a corpse? And now we’re on the subject, Colonel, I have to tell you this. Though, on the one hand, I’ve certainly sensed the shock and horror any group of respectable citizens would experience on discovering that a brutal murder has been committed in their midst, it hasn’t escaped my notice, on the other hand, that none of you is what might be called prostrate with grief at the death of this young man.’

To Trubshawe’s observation the Colonel seemed at first to have no adequate response.

‘Ah, well …’ he mumbled. ‘It’s just … just … Well, frankly, I’m at a loss to know what to say.’

‘After all, the poor chap was a guest of yours.’

‘That’s just it. He wasn’t.’

‘He wasn’t?’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said the Colonel.

‘Then what was he doing here?’

‘The fact is, Trubshawe, I never met Raymond Gentry in my life before. Not till he arrived on Christmas Eve. He came down with my daughter Selina – and Don here. He was Selina’s guest, not mine or my wife’s. It was one of those last-minute changes of plan young people find so appealing, I suppose because it makes them feel they’re being all very Bohemian and free-spirited.

‘I worship my daughter, you understand, but she’s like all her crowd these days. She means no harm, but at the same time she has no consideration of how inconvenient some “amusingly” spontaneous act of hers might turn out to be for the rest of us. When I was her age, I’d never have dreamt of foisting a stranger on my people at Christmas-time, some young man who hadn’t been invited and whom none of us knew from Adam.

‘But there you are, that’s the younger generation for you. The Chelsea set and all that. They’re a law unto themselves, are they not, just as stuck in their ways as we are in ours. And if you even so much as hint that it might have been nice if they’d thought to ask you first, they write
you off as some kind of hopelessly hidebound old fusspot.’

‘She gave you no prior warning?’

‘None at all.’

‘And this Raymond Gentry, didn’t he feel discomfort at finding himself among people who were unable or unwilling to conceal their resentment at his presence?’

The Colonel snorted.

‘Gentry? Huh! I tell you, Trubshawe, I shouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the whole idea of his coming down here hadn’t been mooted by Gentry himself.’

‘Aha. I gather you don’t – didn’t – care overmuch for the young man?’

‘Didn’t care overmuch for him?’ spluttered the Colonel. ‘Gentry was as nasty a bit of goods as I’ve ever had the ill-fortune to encounter. Know what he did for a so-called living? He was, wait for it, a professional gossip columnist for that despicable rag,
The Trombone
. Now you can’t sink much lower than that!

‘Yes, yes, I realise the man is lying dead at our feet, but there were times I had half a mind to horsewhip him out of the house and frogmarch him down the front drive! And, when you think of it, if I’d had a whole mind to do it, the young whipper-snapper would be alive today!’

‘Why, then, didn’t you?’ asked Trubshawe quietly.

‘Why didn’t I what?’

‘Horsewhip him? Frogmarch him?’

‘In a word, Selina. As I said, it was she who invited him
down and she did seem to have a pash on the fellow. Don’t ask me why. Selina’s always been something of a handful, and more so of late, but she’s our only child and Mary and I dote on her. So I decided I’d just have to grin and bear it –
try
to grin and
try
to bear it. Bite the bullet instead of firing it, ha ha ha!

‘That, incidentally, Chief-Inspector, in case you hadn’t understood, was my way of telling you that, sorely tempted as I often have been these past twenty-four hours, I did not kill Raymond Gentry.’

On this declaration of innocence his interlocutor, whose crafty old eyes were already taking in the dingily sinister little room, made no comment.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he said instead, ‘there’s any point in my asking you if there was a murder weapon left lying about?’

‘Nothing either of us could see, no.’

Trubshawe stepped over to the table, pulled at its two drawers at once – he had to give one of them a violent jerk before it would consent to slide scratchily open – and found both to be empty.

‘Queer …’ he murmured.

‘What is?’

‘Oh, just that if the murderer had wanted the thing to look like a suicide, then all he had to do was leave his revolver in Gentry’s hand – and given the infernal trouble he must have gone to over the locked door, barred window and all, that surely would have been an obvious ploy to distract
us from the true nature of the crime. By removing the gun, he – or, of course, she – has actually succeeded in drawing our attention to the fact that it
was
murder.’

He crossed to the window and ran a finger aslant its scabby wooden frame. Then, with that powerful grip of his, he endeavoured to prise apart its two iron bars. Neither so much as wobbled.

Rubbing his now dust-covered palms together, he turned to the Colonel again.

‘Servants above suspicion, are they?’

‘Good heavens, yes. They’ve all been with us for years – or, in the case of the maids, months, which is about as much as you’ve any right to expect these days.’

He reflected a moment.

‘There is Tomelty, of course.’

‘Tomelty?’

‘He’s my chauffeur-cum-gardener-cum-general-thingumabob. Irish. Bit too Irish for my liking. Fancies himself as a real devil, Tomelty does. But, to be honest, if he is a danger, it’s only to the village girls. Mary and I suspect he’s already responsible for having popped a bun or two into some local ovens, but no one was able to prove anything – all the mums kept mum, so to say – and I’m not the type of employer who’ll sack a man on the basis of rumour and tittle-tattle. Especially as, for all his occasional Irish insolence, he’s d**ned good at his job. He’s certainly no murderer.’

‘And Farrar?’ Trubshawe then asked him. ‘Do forgive my bluntness, Mr Farrar, but it’s a question that’s eventually got to be put to your employer and I might as well put it now.’

The Colonel vehemently shook his head.

‘Nothing there for you to worry about. Farrar’s been with me – how long has it been? Three years? Four?’

‘Four, sir.’

‘Yes, four years managing the estate and never so much as a shadow of impropriety. In any event, Trubshawe, this whole line of questioning, if you don’t mind my saying so, is absurd. Not one of my employees could have had any motive for murdering Raymond Gentry, a man they barely met, let alone knew.’

‘Am I to assume, then,’ said the policeman, ‘you share Miss Mount’s view that the murderer must be a member of the house-party?’

‘Oh, and who told you I ever said such a thing?’ Evadne Mount brusquely asked.

‘Why, I think it must have been Mr Duckworth here. Yes, that’s who it was. He told me as Dr Rolfe was driving us back to the house.’

Don’s face creased with embarrassment.

‘It’s true,’ he said to the novelist. ‘I did tell the Chief-Inspector everything I’d heard said in the drawing-room. I thought he oughta know.’

‘Young man, you have nothing to apologise for,’ she
replied in a kindly tone. ‘I just like to keep tabs on who said what and to whom.’

Whereupon, tightening her robe about her with a shiver, she wandered off into the room and started cursorily to inspect its few wretched items of furniture.

For a moment or two Trubshawe observed her out of the corner of his eye before asking the Colonel:

‘Did you by any chance take a look’ – he pointed down at the body of Raymond Gentry – ‘inside the pockets of his robe?’

‘Certainly not. I already told you, Chief-Inspector, we touched nothing.’

Without further ado, Trubshawe bent down and inserted his hand first into the left, then the right pocket of Gentry’s blood-stained bathrobe.

From the left pocket he came up empty-handed. But, from the right, he pulled out a single sheet of crumpled paper. He bent back up and, without addressing a word to anybody, impassively unfolded it.

On one side of the paper four or five lines, mostly just strings of capital letters, had been typed out. These, he took a few seconds to peruse.

‘Nothing relevant to the case, I assume?’ said the Colonel, trying in vain to squint at the text.

‘On the contrary,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Something extremely relevant to the case. A major discovery, if I’m not mistaken.’

He folded the sheet up and slipped it into his own jacket pocket.

‘Tell me, Colonel, did all your guests share your distaste for Gentry?’

‘None of them could stand the horrible little tick. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I have my reasons,’ the Chief-Inspector replied noncommittally.