The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (10 page)

Everyone smiled at this
mot
, but smiled at it as much for its having relaxed the tension as for its own moot quality as wit.

‘Well,’ he bravely went on, ‘the titters started gradually shading into outright guffaws, and, as for Mrs de Cazalis, the gloating expression on her flushed fat face left me in no doubt that she regarded it as game, set and match to her. It was the worst moment of my life.

‘Nor did it end there. For months afterwards in the village I was the target of all sorts of derisive little digs and
doubles entendres
, and the greengrocer’s barrow-boy would careen past me on his bike yelling not “Yippee!” but
“Ypree!” It was touch and go whether we’d simply pack our things and slip away in the night. But Cynthia, bless her, urged me to stand fast.

‘And, you know, she was right. For even though I genuinely believed I could never live down such a humiliation this side of Kingdom Come, time after all does pass. It does heal wounds, precisely as they say it does.

‘Oh, once in a while I’d overhear some remark I felt I’d eavesdropped on – eavesdropped even though it was addressed to me. Somebody might say that when we’re burdened with troubles we just have to “soldier on”, you know, the sort of thing people come out with when they’ve nothing better to say, and I’d blush inwardly – and sometimes outwardly – at what I took to be an allusion to me. Again, though, Cynthia would persuade me I was being overly sensitive, and most likely she was right.’

‘How long did this period last?’

‘How long? Several months, I suppose. And then, I repeat, it all began to die down. Even though I never ceased to suffer in private, publicly it came to be so much water under the bridge, and my wife and I lived on for many years in the village as contentedly as we were able.

‘That is,’ he added after a lengthy pause, ‘until Raymond Gentry entered our lives.’

‘Tell me,’ asked Trubshawe, ‘what exactly was it he said?’

‘It wasn’t what he said,’ answered the Vicar. ‘It was what he implied with all his feline, sibilant little insinuations
about the War. I realise he’s lying dead upstairs, a bullet through his heart, but, as Evie rightly said, there was something un-English about him. Not foreign exactly, but, you know, oily and underhand, like many of his unfortunate race. No one who wasn’t already aware of the background to my story would have grasped what he was getting at, but I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, and this loathsome complicity between us, with everyone else looking on and listening on, became quite intolerable.’

‘How do you imagine he found out?’

‘Ah well, now there you do raise an interesting question, Inspector,’ said the Vicar. ‘As a professional snitch, Gentry could of course be expected to know the – the, eh, dirt about the private lives of the ffolkeses’ starrier acquaintances, like Evie here and Cora. But the local Vicar? The local Doctor? Now who could have passed on to him that kind of information? I hate to be hurtful to Roger and Mary, dear, dear friends who invite Cynthia and me down here for Christmas every year when I doubt anybody else in the locality would, but I fear the prime suspect has to be Selina.’

‘When Miss ffolkes is ready to join us,’ Trubshawe intervened judiciously, ‘you may be sure I’ll ask her whatever questions I consider to be relevant to her relationship with the deceased. But for now, Vicar, I have to ask you the hardest one of all.’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you kill Raymond Gentry?’

The Vicar almost choked with incredulity.

‘What! Is that a joke question?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You’re asking me
seriously
if I …?’

‘Now look,’ replied the Chief-Inspector soberly. ‘Why do you think I’ve been putting you through all this unpleasantness, if not because you are, along with everybody else present, a suspect? I thought that was a given.’

‘Well, yes, of course I understand that to be the case, but do be serious, man. Can you really be asking me if I’m the kind of person who kills just anybody and everybody who happens to do me wrong? Do I look like a murderer?’

‘Ah, Vicar, if murderers looked like murderers, if every burglar went around wearing a domino mask and a striped jumper and toting a bulging sack over his shoulder with the word “Swag” stencilled on it that he’d purchased from some burglars’ emporium, how easy our job would be!’

‘Oh, very well, yes, I do see what you mean,’ said Wattis resignedly. ‘Point taken.’

‘And so – the answer to my question?’

‘The answer to your question, Inspector, is no. No, I did not kill Raymond Gentry. I may have felt like it – I know everybody else did and, as I say, I’ve never made any claim to be better than my fellow men. But I certainly did not act on whatever evil impulse he might have provoked in me.
Actually,’ he added, ‘in some respects I have reason to be grateful to him.’

‘Grateful?’ exclaimed the Colonel. ‘Good Lord, Clem, how on earth can you be grateful to such a swine for causing you the pain he did?’

‘Yes, Roger, it’s true, he did cause me pain – but, oddly, he also brought me relief from that pain. I’ve finally got the thing off my chest. I’ve finally been compelled to yank it, kicking and screaming, into the open air and, honestly, I think I feel the better for it. I feel as though I’ve been purged. I may have been a liar, and God is my witness that I’ve paid for my lie many times over. But I never was, as God also knows, a coward. It’s true, I didn’t see any action in the War, like my glorious predecessor, but neither did thousands of others like me with flat feet and short sight and fallen arches, and it wasn’t their fault just as it wasn’t mine. When all is said and done, I had a perfectly respectable War and have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. “They also serve …”, you know.’

‘Hear hear!’ cried the Colonel.

‘Good for you, Vicar,’ the Chief-Inspector nodded in agreement. ‘And thank you for being so co-operative. Now let me put one last question to you and then you’re free.’

‘Please.’

‘Did you leave your bedroom at all during the night?’

‘Yes, I did,’ was the surprising answer. ‘Several times, in fact.’

‘Several times!? Why?’

The Vicar threw back his head and laughed – he actually laughed aloud.

‘Well,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I may be getting dim, but I fail to understand what’s suddenly so funny.’

‘Oh, Inspector, now that I’ve crashed through the barrier of embarrassment, I’m willing – as only half-an-hour ago it would have been unthinkable for me – I’m willing to give you a brutally straight answer to that question. If I left my bedroom several times during the night, it was because I had to reply to several Calls of Nature. When you reach my age, Nature can become quite … quite pressing. Especially after the sort of blowout we had at dinner.’

‘I see. And roughly when, may I ask, was the last time?’

‘Actually, I can answer that one not roughly but precisely. Nature, at least in my current experience, tends to be a creature of routine. It was five-thirty.’

‘And did you see anything suspicious? Or even just untoward?’

‘No, nothing at all. I woke up, got up – yet again – trotted along the corridor and …’

Whereupon, abruptly falling silent, he started to frown in an effort of remembrance.

‘So you
did
see something?’

‘N-o-o-o,’ murmured the Vicar when he answered at last. ‘No, I didn’t
see
anything.’

‘But you stopped as though –’

‘It wasn’t what I saw, it was what I
heard
. How very odd. With everything that’s happened since, it completely slipped my mind.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘As I was returning from – from my last Call of Nature, I heard voices raised in anger, an argument, a real argy-bargy, between a man and a woman, quite a violent one too. I couldn’t distinguish what was being said, all of it taking place behind closed doors, you understand, but it certainly sounded as though it must have been alarmingly loud inside the room itself.’

‘Inside which room?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘Oh, as to that,’ replied the Vicar, ‘there can be no doubt at all. It came from the attic. Yes, it most definitely came from the attic.’

‘An argument inside the attic at five-thirty in the morning, eh?’ grunted the Chief-Inspector. ‘Between a man and a woman? The plot thickens …’ he added satirically.

Tugging at one of his moustache’s nicotine-stained fringes, he then asked the Vicar:

‘You didn’t recognise either voice, I suppose?’

‘I’m afraid not. I say again, Mr Trubshawe, I didn’t actually hear the argument itself – who was arguing and what it was about. I heard only that there
was
an argument.’

‘And naturally you didn’t get any sense of how old they were?’

‘How old who were?’

‘The man and woman you heard arguing?’

‘No, no, no. I
was
half-asleep, you know, which is why I’ve only just remembered that I heard it at all.’

‘I see. Well, thanks for that, Vicar,’ said the policeman. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful.’

He turned his attention to the five women present.

‘Now, ladies,’ he said, ‘you’ve just heard what the Vicar has had to say. So may I enquire if any of you went to the attic, for whatever reason, you understand – for, even though it’s highly improbable, it’s nevertheless not impossible that the argument overheard by the Vicar and the subsequent murder of Gentry are unconnected. I repeat, did any of you, for whatever reason, go up into the attic at approximately five-thirty this morning?’

It was, unexpectedly, the Vicar himself who answered first.

‘Not,’ he said without any too apparent asperity in his voice, ‘that my word, my word of honour, is likely to carry as much weight with you as it might previously have done, Inspector, given what I’ve just confessed to, but I would like to vouch for Mrs Wattis. She was sound asleep when I crawled out of bed at five-thirty and she was sound asleep when I climbed back into it no more than seven or eight minutes later. You may believe me or not as you will.’

‘My dear Vicar,’ Trubshawe diplomatically replied, ‘I’m not here either to believe or disbelieve you. You or anybody else, for that matter. I’m here to listen to what you all have to tell me in the hope of uncovering some clue as to how and why and by whom the crime was committed. As I’ve already had cause to remind you, I did not volunteer to come to ffolkes Manor.’

‘Please be patient with us, Trubshawe,’ said the Colonel. ‘We’re all of us still on edge. Evadne may find it hard to
conceal her glee at being directly implicated in the kind of whodunit she’s only ever lived by proxy – don’t deny it, Evie dear, it’s written all over your face – but I can assure you that, for the rest of us, knowing we’re suspects in a real-life murder mystery is no laughing matter.

‘As for vouching for our better halves, as Clem has just done, well, I fear I for one cannot oblige. As per usual, I was snoring my head off at five-thirty and Mary could have danced the hoochie-koochie in front of the wardrobe mirror for all I’d have been aware of it.

‘She and I, though, have been man and wife for nigh on twenty-six years, twenty-six cloudless years, and it’s on
that
evidence that I’m prepared to vouch for her. It probably won’t be enough for a police officer like you, but it’s more than enough for me.’

He laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and let her clasp it in her own.

An unmoved Trubshawe, meanwhile, addressed the Doctor.

‘Rolfe? Sound asleep at five-thirty, I suppose?’

‘Afraid so. Both of us – I mean, both Madge and I – we tend to sleep through the night. It’s just one of those quirky habits we’ve fallen into. Pity, really. If I’d known what was about to happen, I’d have struggled to stay awake. But, there you are, no one gave us any advance warning.’

‘If you don’t mind, Doctor,’ said the Chief-Inspector with a sigh, ‘we can all live without the heavy sarcasm. These
questions have to be asked. Miss Mount, you will vouch for yourself, I suppose?’

‘If you mean by that, was I in bed, was I in bed by myself, and was I sound asleep at five-thirty in the morning, the answer is yes on all counts.’

The Chief-Inspector sighed again.

‘And you, Miss Rutherford?’

‘Me? I’ve never even heard of five-thirty in the morning!’

‘H’m,’ said Trubshawe, ‘that leaves just Miss Selina. Naturally, I’ll wait till she’s sufficiently recovered before putting any questions to her. And please don’t look so anxious, Mrs ffolkes, I’ll be diplomacy itself. I know how to handle these tricky situations. Heaven knows I’ve had enough practice.’

With an unwavering gaze, he looked at each of the occupants of the drawing-room in turn until, slowly doubling back, his eyes settled at last on Cora Rutherford.

‘Perhaps, Miss Rutherford,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t mind going next?’

‘Delighted,’ said the actress.

Now, it should be said that, whether she really was the coyly generic age she claimed for herself – ‘Not quite the Bright Young Thing I used to be, darling!’ – Cora Rutherford was by no stretch of the imagination a leathery old filly. She still had a trim figure, possibly too trim to have survived the years more or less intact without artificial enhancement, and though it wasn’t easy to tell beneath the
waxy make-up which fossilised her face in a permanent
moue
of pinched hoity-toitiness, that face did seem to be genuinely unwrinkled.

‘I swear,’ she announced, ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then some!’ she huskily added with a flamboyant flourish of her cigarette-holder.

‘Very well,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Then can I please hear your own first-person account of the run-in you had last night with Raymond Gentry?’

‘Certainly,’ she answered, a tiny smoke-ring drifting over her head like a halo in search of a saint. ‘As you’re doubtless sick to the back-teeth of hearing, Gentry took the absolute pip. He was a beast, a rotter of the first water, a self-infatuated, sallow-complexioned little climber, with his artistic hair and his scarlet lips and his T. S. this and his D. H. that and his eternal boasting and bragging about his acquaintance with the Maharani of Rajasthan or the Oom of Oompapah or some other equally improbable pasha or pashette.

‘But there was one particular story he told of which it so happened that I had heard a distinctively different version from the horse’s mouth. As ever, he was bending our ears back with tales of all the famous people he had met and he mentioned that he’d once had a cocktail at Claridge’s with Molnar – the Hungarian playwright, you know, entrancing man, as witty as a barrel of monkeys. Well, it turns out that I know Ferenc – Ferenc Molnar, that is – I know him really
rather well – I starred in his play
Olympia
, you recall, Evie? – and long before I ever had the ill-fortune to encounter Gentry, he himself had told me what actually occurred.

‘One evening Gentry had accosted him in the bar at Claridge’s and asked if he’d consent to be interviewed for that filthy rag of his. Ferenc naturally refused – he could smell a slice of phoney-baloney a mile off – and when Gentry continued to badger him, he simply turned on his heels and stalked out. As he was leaving the bar, though, he chanced to look back and what do you suppose he saw? The preposterous Gentry was furtively finishing off his – I mean Ferenc’s – cocktail!

‘So when I heard him talk about “having a cocktail with Molnar”, I just laughed in his face. In fact, I haven’t laughed so much since Minnie Battenberg got her knickers in a twist – literally her knickers and literally in a twist – on the opening night of
Up in Mabel’s Room
!

‘I can’t stand male gossips anyway,’ she continued. ‘In my experience, and I’ve had plenty, they’re all nancy boys. Frankly, when Gentry first sashayed into the drawing-room, I immediately pegged him for a pansy and I wondered what in heaven’s name poor Selina could be getting out of it. You know who he reminded me of, Evie?’

‘No, who?’

‘The villain in that story of yours that was so naughty you had to have it published in France.’

‘
The Case of the Family Jewels
?’

‘That’s the one. Such a scream! But, of course, it wasn’t a book Evie could ever have hoped to bring out in stuffy old Blighty. It all took place in Portofino, as I recall.’

‘That’s right,’ said the novelist. ‘I set the scene among a –’

‘I fancy it’s my turn, ducks,’ said Cora Rutherford waspishly, loath to let herself be upstaged even by the author of the book in question. ‘It revolved around a group of British aristos partying at a beach-side villa and what was so awfully ingenious was that the crime was solved before any of them actually realised it had been committed. Old Lady – Lady – Lady Beltham, was it, who’s hosting the party has left this priceless heirloom lying about her boudoir just itching to be pinched, a heavy, multi-stringed pearl choker – you know, the kind of thing Queen Mary always wears. She’s also procured for herself a brand-new
hombre
young enough to be her son – or even grandson – in the book he’s named just Boy – and it’s obvious to everybody but
la
Beltham herself that he’s the worst type of leech. All the more so because there’s no doubt whatever from his manners and mannerisms that he’s, you know, iffy? Of the Uranian persuasion, as the Oscar Wilde set used to call it, and camp as all-get-out. So, of course, everyone suspects the only reason he’s canoodling with the besotted old crone is that he can’t wait to get his greedy, grubby little paws on the pearl choker.

‘Really, Miss Ruther –’ the Chief-Inspector began to say in an endeavour to stem the flow.

‘Which is when her nephew – Lady Beltham’s nephew and the heir to the heirloom – engages a private detective and introduces him to his aunt as a former school pal so he can fit in with the house-party. I say “him” because, for once, this detective isn’t Alexis Baddeley but a fey young laddie – Elias Lindstrom, I think his name was – who, we are led to understand, is also a Uranian.

‘Well, one morning everyone’s lounging on the beach when Boy emerges from the villa, disrobes and, watched by his clucking sugar-mummy, wades into the ocean in a pair of resplendent figure-hugging bathing-trunks. And it’s at that moment that Lindstrom realises he’s just stolen the choker.

The twist is that he himself – Lindstrom, I mean – has already indulged in a little bout of bedroom hanky-panky with Boy, just in the line of business, you understand, and when he catches sight of the really rather impressive bulge in his trunks, a bulge that bears no relation to what he …. Well, I don’t have to draw a picture, do I? He knows there has to be something else in there besides the family jewels. So when Boy wades back out of the ocean, the detective, without so much as a by-your-leave, yanks his trunks down to his ankles – and out pops the pearl choker!

‘Anyway, to return to last night – yes, yes, Trubshawe, I
am
getting there – to return to last night, Gentry reminded me of that sleazy young bounder and, to repeat, I simply couldn’t fathom what lay behind his interest in Selina, not
to mention hers in him. But when I showed him up over the bogus Molnar business, I realised at once I’d made an enemy for life.

‘What I didn’t realise, though, was how quickly he’d go on the offensive. For some people, you know, an enemy’s blood is like a fine vintage wine. It has to be savoured, swilled about the palate, all that wine-bore guff and stuff. Not Gentry. He immediately went for the jugular.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘The first thing he said – I mean, insinuated – the first thing he insinuated was that, professionally, I was on the skids because – because –’

At this point, just as the Chief-Inspector had predicted, the actress seemed to find herself suddenly as tongue-tied as the Vicar before her. For all her brazen self-possession, airing in public what was, even for her, an unpalatable home truth was patently turning out to be not as easy as she had expected.

‘Oh, well,’ she finally sighed, ‘here goes nothing. He insinuated that I was on the skids because of my increasing and, so he implied, incapacitating dependency on certain – on certain substances.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Cocaine, if you must know.’

The horrified silence with which this last statement was met derived less from the revelation that Cora Rutherford was a dope fiend – as Evadne Mount had already hinted,
such a rumour had been circulating for years – than from the cool defiance with which she acknowledged it as a fact of her life.

‘And was what he insinuated true?’

‘To that, Chief-Inspector, my answer would be yes, no and certainly not.’

‘Explain, dear lady.’

‘Yes, I do take cocaine. No, I am not incapacitated. And certainly not, as far as my career being on the skids is concerned. I’ve just ended a ten-week run at the Haymarket, playing Ginevra in
The Jest
by Sem Benelli, a dramatist whose plays, it goes without saying, will be staged as long as theatres exist to stage them in. I’m currently in talks with Hitch – Hitch? Alfred Hitchcock? The famous film director? No? You’ve really never heard of him?? None of you??? Lawks almighty! Well, anyhow, I’m in talks with Hitch about playing Alexis Baddeley in a forthcoming picture version of Evadne’s
Death Be My Deadline
. A character role for me, of course. I’m going to need lashings of slap’.

‘Miss Rutherford, did Raymond Gentry actually threaten to expose your – your –’

‘My addiction?’

‘Yes, your addiction. Did he threaten to write it up in
The Trombone
?’

‘No, not in so many words. Just as the article itself, had he had the time and opportunity to write it, wouldn’t have
been in so many words, if you follow me. But it was all too obvious what he intended to do. By debunking his Molnar story, I’d made him look an ass in front of Selina and he was determined to take his revenge.

‘Oh, he wouldn’t have dared to use the word “cocaine” in print – that would have been positively actionable, since he couldn’t have proved a thing – but his readers all understand the
Trombone
code and he would have left no doubt in their minds what he was talking about.’

‘Yet,’ said the Chief-Inspector, ‘if rumours of your dependency had been circulating for years, as we heard from Miss Mount, surely it wouldn’t have made too much of a difference if some what-you-call coded piece were to be published in
The Trombone
?’