The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (13 page)

‘What?’

‘What was it Don threatened to do?’

‘
I threatened to kill him
.’

Trubshawe wheeled about to confront the young American who had just spoken.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard what I said. I threatened to kill him.’

‘Oh, Don,’ said Selina in a whisper, ‘I oughtn’t to have spoken. I really didn’t mean to –’

‘Aw, shoot. He’d have found out on his own.’

‘So you threatened to kill him, did you?’ said Trubshawe.
‘Now that
is
interesting. Interesting for a reason that should be obvious to us all, but also interesting because it’s something Miss Mount omitted to include in her account of last night’s events.’

‘Yeah,’ said Don, glancing at the novelist, ‘I noticed that too.’

‘Heavens!’ protested Evadne Mount. ‘It ought to be perfectly plain why I didn’t mention it. People never stop threatening to kill other people – why, I’ve heard four-year-olds threaten to kill their parents – and in pretty much every case, in 99.9 per cent of cases, I’ll wager, it doesn’t mean a thing. But the police, naturally, would have pounced on such a threat and, don’t forget, Trubshawe, I hadn’t seen you in action yet. You might have been just the kind of copper who’s always willing to jump to the first and most obvious conclusion.’

‘Yes,’ Trubshawe had to agree, ‘I might at that,’ and he added, ‘especially as this particular threat happens to belong to the remaining 0.1 per cent where the threatened individual
does
actually end by getting himself killed.’

‘I grant you that,’ the novelist grudgingly conceded. ‘But anybody can see that Don didn’t kill Gentry.’

‘He might not have done in one of your whodunits, but we’re in the real world here.’

He turned back to Don.

‘Am I to take it you really meant to kill Gentry?’

‘It’s what I
felt
like doing,’ replied Don cagily. ‘But I didn’t.’

‘Then why did you threaten him?’

‘Listen, Mr Trubshawe, you never knew the creep. He was a complete … well, in mixed company I can’t say what he was a complete … but you’ve heard everyone else tell you what
they
thought of him.

‘With me it began earlier – when Selina telephoned to say he’d be joining us for Christmas. Everything had been hunky-dory up to then between Selina and me and I was beginning to think – to hope … Then there I was, squashed into the rumble seat of his Hispano-Suiza watching Selina give him “my hero” looks. I was one pretty browned-off guy, I can tell you.

‘And when we eventually got down here, the three of us, and straight away Gentry started driving everyone nuts, I found it tough work just holding myself back.’

‘But, at least to begin with, you did? Hold yourself back, I mean.’

‘I reckoned it was none of my beeswax.’

Trubshawe frowned perplexedly.

‘None of your what?’

‘My business. It was when he got fresh with Selina herself I just couldn’t see straight.’

‘And what exactly did you do about it?’

‘I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and ordered him to lay off.’

‘H’m. Stirring stuff all right, if not quite the death threat you admitted to, was it?’

‘No … but that wasn’t all.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yeah. He began making remarks about my parents – I’m an orphan, you see, I never knew my real mom and dad, and Gentry began to say – well, you won’t get me in a thousand years to repeat what he said but I warned him if he ever told any of his filthy lies again – or ever harmed a hair on Selina’s head – I’d kill him.’

‘And you meant it?’

‘Sure I meant it! And I’d have done it too. But what can I say? I’m in the same boat as everyone else in this room. Some lucky stiff got there first. I don’t know who he was and, even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you because, by bumping off a louse like Raymond Gentry, he did me – me and the world both – a favour!’

As Selina now treated Don to exactly the same ‘my hero’ look he’d just been alluding to, the Chief-Inspector shifted to another tack.

‘Miss Selina, while you were resting upstairs in your room, I was listening to your parents’ guests talk about the way Raymond Gentry taunted them by dropping all kinds of evil hints about certain regrettable incidents in their respective pasts. But even though he was a professional gossip, as I understand, he couldn’t have been made privy from his usual sources to the more, shall we say,
local
of these secrets, and we’ve all been rather wondering who could have passed them on to him.’

‘Yes …?’ she said, a faint tremor detectable in her voice.

‘Well?’ he queried her.

‘Well what, Inspector?’

‘I think you know what, Miss. It
was
you, wasn’t it? It was from you he got that information?’

There was a lengthy pause while Selina gazed helplessly into the faces of her parents’ guests.

‘Come now, Miss. You’d be better off telling me the truth. Everyone else has.’

‘Well, you see,’ she said, so faintly you had to strain to hear her, ‘when it was agreed that Ray would drive us down, he asked me what kind of a crowd he’d be mixing with. You understand, he hated anybody who wasn’t, in his eyes, “amusing”, he got bored so awfully easy, so I just couldn’t say, you know, there’d be the local Vicar and his wife, the local Doctor and his wife. They just wouldn’t have sounded amusing enough for him. So I – well, I found myself trying to make them more – more interesting to him and I suppose I did let slip some of the local gossip. I didn’t mean any harm and, if I’d known what he intended to do with it, I swear I wouldn’t have breathed a word.

‘Oh, will you ever find it in yourselves to forgive me?’ she cried disconsolately to everyone present.

‘Yes, I can see how you might be feeling pretty rotten about your indiscretions now,’ said the Chief-Inspector before anyone had a chance to reply. ‘But the idea that, after you’d known him only a few weeks, this man had become so important to you,
you were prepared to divulge your friends’ most intimate secrets to him? I must say, that does surprise me.’

‘But they weren’t secret! It was wrong of me, I know, but most of what I told Ray – Dr Rolfe’s operation in Canada, the Vicar and the War – it was common knowledge in Postbridge village. If you really want to know everything about everybody around here, all you have to do is pass the time of day with the postmistress or the librarian.

‘As for Evie, you’ve only got to look at her to guess what the skeleton in her closet must be.’

‘Well, thank you for that, my dear,’ the novelist acidly cut in. ‘I think I’m speaking for all of us when I express my gratitude to you for being so bracingly outspoken!’

‘Oh, I’m getting all muddled!’ said Selina, who was indeed beginning to sound as fluttery as her mother tended to do in a crisis. ‘I love you all dearly, I do, I do. But what I’m trying to get the Chief-Inspector to understand is that I didn’t tell Ray anything he couldn’t have found out for himself after spending an hour or two in the village.’

‘Miss Selina,’ Trubshawe then demanded questioningly, ‘did you have a rendezvous with Raymond Gentry last night – or rather, early this morning – in the attic?’

Selina gasped. This was one question she hadn’t been expecting.

‘Why … how did you know that?’

‘You were heard,’ replied Trubshawe bluntly. ‘It seems you and he had a violent altercation. At about five-thirty.’

It took her a few moments before she was able to answer.

‘Yes, it’s true. I did meet him in the attic.’

‘Why don’t you describe what happened?’

‘I simply couldn’t sleep last night. I couldn’t stop brooding about what a complete stinker Ray had been, I just couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to bring everything to an end between him and me but I didn’t want to leave the unpleasant business of breaking up till next morning – this morning – when the whole household would be up and about.

‘So, at around five, I slipped on a dressing-gown and tiptoed along to his bedroom. I tapped on his door again and again – I didn’t dare knock too loudly for fear of waking the others – and he eventually opened it. He was in a beastly temper – hungover, I guess – and he started remonstrating with me for getting him up at such a godawful hour, as he put it. I told him we had to talk and suggested we go to the attic, which was never used and where we wouldn’t be overheard. After lots of mumbling and grumbling and fumbling about, he agreed.’

‘So then you did both go upstairs to the attic?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘Yes.’

‘Which you found unlocked?’

‘Oh yes. It’s never locked.’

‘I see. Go on.’

‘Inside the attic I let him know what I thought of him and how he’d only shown himself up by being so horrid to
my friends. Then I insisted he drive back to Town the very next morning. I mean, today.’

‘What was his reaction?’

‘He laughed at me.’

‘Laughed at you?’

‘Yes – a horrible kind of devilish laugh it was. In fact, as I realise now, it was just the same wicked laugh he’d always had – you know, wicked in the witty sense of the word, or so I used to kid myself. But now that it was directed against me, it brought home for the first time how it must have felt to his victims.

‘Well, he just went on ridiculing me and Mummy and Daddy and their friends and their values and their traditions and he even began sneering at how pathetically dreary and boring life in the English countryside was. He said it was all warm beer and dog lovers and old maids cycling to Communion through the early morning mist …’

‘And what was your answer to that?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘I shouted back at him and it all got louder and louder until I thought if I stayed in that room another instant my head would explode. It wasn’t only the sound of Ray’s voice I couldn’t bear any longer, it was the sound of my own. So I turned on my heels and ran back to my room.’

‘And then?’

‘Ten minutes later I heard Raymond walk along the corridor. He was whistling, he was actually whistling, as though … It was “The Sheik of Araby”, I remember.’

‘Oh, the swine!’ said Don through gritted teeth.

‘And there I stayed, inside my bedroom, crying myself to sleep, until I was woken up by …’

She faltered, unable to go on.

‘By the discovery of the body … I know,’ murmured Trubshawe. ‘Tell me, what were your feelings about that?’

‘Oh, terrible, terrible! I actually felt guilty! It was almost as though I were in some way the cause of his death. Ray
had
been a close friend, after all, and however badly he’d behaved he surely didn’t deserve that … Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying any longer … I’m so – so dreadfully confused …’

‘You may be confused, Miss,’ said the Chief-Inspector after giving her a few seconds to pull herself together, ‘but above all you’ve been brave, very, very brave. And I’d like to thank you for that. Not,’ he added, shaking his head, ‘that what you’ve had to say has brought us much closer to a solution, but that would appear to be the nature of the beast. The nature of the case, I mean,’ he explained, lest anyone were mystified by his metaphor. ‘Thank you again. For you the ordeal’s over.’

Then, as Mary ffolkes started to fuss around her daughter again, the Chief-Inspector, who was clearly a man who didn’t believe in wasting time, immediately turned to her husband.

‘Colonel?’

‘Yes, Trubshawe?’

‘Now that Miss Selina has told me everything she knows, I believe it’s your turn to walk over the hot coals.’

‘My turn to … Oh yes, of course, of course,’ Roger ffolkes quickly replied.

For a few seconds, though, he fiddled uneasily with his cigar’s cellophane wrapper, before finally saying:

‘There’s just one thing, Trubshawe. We do seem to have been at this for hours already. I wonder if the others think the way I do, that maybe we might take a short break. It’s very draining on us all, you know, being interrogated in this way, and I’m sure my guests would like to have a bit of a lie-down in their bedrooms. As for me, I haven’t had my constitutional today and I really need to stretch my legs.’

‘In
this
weather, Colonel?’

‘In all weathers, sir, in all weathers. Isn’t that so, Mary?’

‘Oh yes, that’s quite right, Inspector. Roger won’t let a day go by without his constitutional.’

‘We-ell,’ said Trubshawe uncertainly, ‘p’raps a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea at that. Though a short one, mind.’

On hearing the Chief-Inspector’s acquiescence – which for him, of course, implied a stay of execution, however short-lived – the Colonel instantly became his breezy self once again.

‘Oh, absolutely!’ he genially replied. ‘Absolutely! All I want is a lungful of good fresh wintry air. Half an hour, no more, there and back, I promise.’

‘Actually, Colonel,’ added Trubshawe, ‘if you
do
intend going for a walk, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind taking Tober along with you. The poor old boy needs his constitutional too.’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ said the Colonel. ‘But will he follow me?’

‘Oh yes. Follow anybody for a walk, Tober will. Even a villain, ha ha! Hey, Tober, won’t you, though? Walkies! Walkies!’

No sooner had the Chief-Inspector pronounced the magic word than the Labrador, who had been lying slumped at his master’s feet, dragged himself up to his own feet with such surprising energy you might have thought his furiously wagging tail was acting as a kind of hydraulic lever.

‘There’s a good boy,’ said the Colonel, tickling the dog’s sticky-wet muzzle and starting to lead him out of the library. ‘Going for walkies, are we, you and me? Eh? Eh, Tobermory?’

Just as he reached the doorway, however, he turned round.

‘Farrar?’

‘Yes, Colonel?’

‘Whilst I’m out, you might pop down to the kitchen for a while. Make sure the servants are all right.’

‘Yes, of course, sir.’

‘And Farrar?’

‘Yes?’

‘Have Iris serve tea in the drawing-room. I imagine everybody’s dying for a quick cuppa before they go up to their rooms.’

‘Will do.’

‘Cracking piece of bacon, is this, Mrs Varley.’

‘Well, thank
you
, Mr Chitty. Your appreciation is much appreciated, I’m sure. Can I tempt you to some more cold turkey?’

‘Don’t mind if I do, Mrs Varley.’

‘Addie!’ cried Mrs Varley.

There was no response.

‘Addie!!!’

Little Addie, little adenoidal Addie, wiping her two grimy little hands on her apron, came running in from the coal-house.

‘Did you call me, mum?’

Mrs Varley spluttered in disbelief.

‘Did I call you? she says! Who else was I calling? Stop yer twittering and cut Mr Chitty another slice of turkey. And make sure it’s nice and thick.’

‘Yes, mum. Right away, mum.’

‘Oh no, my lass, not right away. You’ll wash yer hands
first. And proper, mind. They’re positive caked with muck.’

‘Yes, mum.’

As Addie hurried over to the sink, Tomelty, the ffolkeses’ Irish gardener and general handyman, lit up a Senior Service, gave his scarlet braces a devil-may-care snap and ran his fingers through his wavy, dreamy, Brylcreemy, jet-black hair. Something of a self-fancying Don Juan, the terror of the village girls, with his gleaming white teeth and smouldering five o’clock shadow, he was slouching at the far end of the kitchen table from Chitty, his Senior Service in one corner of his mouth, his trademark sneer in the other.

Watching the butler sup his steaming tea, he commented amiably, ‘Well, Mr Chitty, this ’ere murder business don’t appear to ’ave done your appetite no ’arm.’

‘Ah, Tomelty,’ replied Chitty, extracting with repulsive gentility a sliver of bacon which had got lodged between two of his front teeth, ‘must keep our peckers up, you know.’

There was a pause.

‘You’re very quiet, Mr Farrar,’ someone said.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘What do
you
think?’

‘About what?’

‘Who’s going to be the murderer’s next victim?’

‘Tomelty!’ Chitty snapped at him. ‘Just you watch that tongue of yours! I won’t have you scaring the womenfolk with sly talk of murder. Not whilst I’m master in this kitchen.’

Chitty had been a boxing referee for some years before entering domestic service and seldom let his inferiors forget it.

‘No talk o’ murder? Fat chance!’ exclaimed the chauffeur. ‘Nothin’ this int’r’stin’ ’as ’appened at ffolkes Manor since I began workin’ ’ere. And you think you can stop us talkin’ about it? You’ve gone funny in the ’ead, you ’ave. Aren’t I right, Mr Farrar?’

‘Ye-es. Whatever else can be said about it, Gentry’s murder is certainly interesting.’

‘I’m surprised at you, Mr Farrar, you so well educated!’ said Mrs Varley. ‘Interesting? What word is that to use about a guest found with a bullet in his brains?’

‘Heart, surely?’

‘Heart – brains – what’s the difference? A man’s been shot dead. I can think of a lot of words for that, but interesting wouldn’t come top of the list.’

‘And I can think of a lot o’ words for Raymond Gentry,’ said Tomelty, ‘and int’r’stin’ wouldn’t come top o’ that list neither.’

‘We-ell, that’s true enough,’ said Mrs Varley, recalling just how recently it was she had been furious with the late gossip columnist. ‘Slimy is more like it.’

‘Now, now, Mrs Varley,’ said Chitty. ‘As you yourself just said, the poor man’s lying dead upstairs. A little Christian charity is called for.’

‘Poor man!’ said Mrs Varley, warming to her theme. ‘The gall, the unmitigated gall, asking for bacon and eggs at
eleven in the morning! Where did he think he was? The bleedin’ Savoy hotel! He had a right bleedin’ nerve, if I may say so. Pardon my French, Mr Chitty.’

Chitty, who clearly shared the sentiment – for he too had found himself at the receiving end of more than one of Gentry’s sallies – felt nevertheless that it had been ill-expressed.

‘Language, Mrs Varley, language …’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Chitty, but you’re not above denying, I’m sure, he was an all-round bad lot who deserved everything that was coming to him.’

‘Oh, I don’t know as how I’d go that far …’

Addie, meanwhile, whose squashed little features could just conceivably have been appealing had she known how to make herself up and pinned back her hair so that it wasn’t always dripping into her eyes, came over to the table with an extra-thick slice of turkey and prodded it on to Chitty’s empty plate with the blunt edge of a large bread knife.

‘Coo!’ she said to nobody in particular. ‘I wouldn’t ’alf like to foxtrot to one o’ them Savoy bands like you ’ear on the wireless. Better than the Christy Minstrels you get on Southend pier.’

‘Well, you never will, so forget it,’ replied Mrs Varley. ‘Go and bring the rest of the coal in.’

‘Yes, mum.’

She skittered off, nearly colliding with Iris, the upstairs maid and one of flame-haired twin sisters who had entered
the ffolkeses’ service on the same day. The other’s name was Dolly and, identically pert in their identical maids’ outfits, they were next to impossible to tell apart.

‘Oh, me poor feet!’ Iris groaned. ‘They’re fair killin’ me!’

She collapsed on to the chair next to Tomelty’s.

‘’Ello, beautiful,’ he greeted her with the uncouth coquetry he had long since patented. His was a line as subtle as semaphore and you couldn’t help wondering how it ever worked. Yet it did, again and again.

‘Want me to give you a massage?’ he hopefully proposed.

‘Cheeky monkey! Oooooh!’ she sighed ecstatically as she tipped off her shoes under the table – the heel of the left with the toe of the right, the heel of the right with the toe of the left. She started vigorously rubbing the soles of her feet. ‘I’ve been dyin’ to do that for the past hour. They’re red raw!’

She let out a sigh of pleasurable anticipation.

‘Tomorrow’s me mornin’ off and I’m goin’ to set the alarm clock to six o’clock – just to remind meself I can go straight back to sleep. Bliss!’

‘So what’s happening up there?’ asked Mrs Varley, who was shovelling the third of four spoonfuls of sugar into her tea. ‘Still all in a state, are they?’

‘Not ’alf. S’why they’re keepin’ us downstairs – cos of all the dirt that’s bein’ spilt. As I was leavin’ the drawin’-room with the tea-tray, that actress, Cora what’s-’er-face, was callin’ Gentry a lyin’ ’ound – “a lyin’ ’ound” – them were
’er actual words an’ she fair spat ’em out! I wouldn’t like to meet ’er on a dark night.’

‘Well, you never will, so forget it,’ said Mrs Varley, who couldn’t have got through the day without plentiful dippings into her kitty of stock phrases.

‘It’s a turn o’ speech, Mrs Varley. What they call an allergy.’

‘I don’t hold with allergies. Plain English should be good enough for anyone.’

She thoughtfully sipped her tea, pinkie upraised in the refined manner.

‘I’m surprised, though, to hear you say she was spitting mad. She always struck me as so swelte and sophisticated.’

‘Swelte?’ said Iris derisively. ‘That stuck-up thing? Swelte, my –’

‘Iris!’ warned Chitty. ‘Language!’

‘Sorry. But I ’ad to laugh, you see, at somethin’ she let slip out.’

‘Who?’

‘The so-called Cora Rutherford.’

‘What do you mean “so-called”?’

‘Well, it was like this. They was all havin’ their tea, even the copper, and she – Cora Rutherford – she was tryin’, you know, to brighten up the mood with one of ’er antidotes. She’s got a ton o’ them antidotes.’

‘I don’t hold with antidotes.’

‘Oh, put a sock in it, Mrs Varley! Go on, Iris, what happened?’

The kitchen was all ears. Addie had come back from the coal-house and was standing as inconspicuously as possible at the garden door – she was an inconspicuous creature at the best of times – while Dolly, who had just returned from her duties upstairs, took a seat on the other side of Tomelty from Iris.

‘Well,’ said Iris in a stage whisper, ‘she was sittin’ close to the fire in that fur wrap of ’ers –’

‘Isn’t it somethin’, though!’ Dolly interrupted her with a sigh. ‘I’d just die – I’d
kill
– for a mink wrap like that!’

‘It’s not mink, it’s fox.’

‘It’s mink.’

‘Fox!’

‘Mink!’

‘Girls, girls, surely it doesn’t matter?’

‘How right you are, Mr Farrar. It’s most aggravatin’ to be interrupted in an antidote ’ardly before you’ve started,’ said Iris, glaring at her sister.

‘As I was sayin’ before I was so rudely interrupted,’ she continued, ‘she was tellin’ ’em all some story about ’er bein’ a little kid – it wasn’t about the theatre for once – it was about ’ow she’d been misbehavin’ with some local boy – no, no, not what you’re thinkin’, Tomelty, you Irish tink, you – you with your one-track mind! Seems ’er an’ this boy ’ad been splashin’ about in a mud pool together an’ when she got home ’er mum was blazin’ mad at the state of ’er clothes an’ ticked ’er off no end – an’ she,
Cora, she said this witty, rude thing back at ’er mum – which was atcherly the point o’ the antidote – but what made everyone laugh out loud was when she repeated what ’er mum said when she ’eard ’er say this witty thing’ – Iris switched to an uncannily convincing imitation of Cora Rutherford’s accent – ‘“So dear Mama turned to me and cried, ‘How dare you speak to your mother like that, Nelly!’” Nelly!’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Addie.

Iris burst into raucous, dirty, gravelly laughter.

‘Nelly! There she was, tellin’ ‘er antidote an’ bein’ so witty an’ all, an’ she got so carried away she clean forgot ‘er name was supposed to be Cora. She didn’t even finish the story. She clapped ’er ’ands over ’er mouth and that pasty face of ’ers – just like one of Mrs Varley’s soda scones, it is! – went quite
peuce
. I daresay ’er name isn’t Rutherford neither. Ramsbottom more like.’

‘Now, now, Iris,’ said Chitty, who realised he was fighting a losing battle in defence of the decencies, ‘we don’t want any of your lip in this kitchen.’

‘Little Nelly Ramsbottom,’ Iris went on unrepentantly, ‘the queen o’ the back-to-backs!’

Her chant – ‘Lit-tle-Ne-lly-Rams-bo-ttom!’ – was taken up by Dolly and even, though at first circumspectly, by Addie, the three of them beginning to dance a conga round the kitchen table.

‘Wheeesht, all of you!’ an indignant Mrs Varley shouted
at them. ‘What a way to behave when there’s a dead body in the house!’

‘Go on,’ said Tomelty, ‘you said yerself as ’ow Raymond Gentry was a bad lot. You’re not about sheddin’ tears over ’im now, are you?’

‘No, I am not,’ she replied. ‘But it’s not a pleasant thought – sharing the house with a murderer.’

‘You needn’t go botherin’ yer ’ead about that,’ he retorted with a snort. ‘This murder is strictly a toffs’ affair. It’s a fine art for the likes o’ them – a snooty sport, bit like fox-’untin’. We might feel like murderin’ one o’ them, but you can bet yer last farthin’ they’d never dirty their manicured fingers murderin’ one of us, for sure if we ain’t good enough to invite to cocktails we ain’t good enough to murder neither. If one o’ that bunch upstairs was to kill one of us, ’e’d be oystercised all right – but you know for why? Not cos ’e’d done a murder but cos ’e’d stepped out of ’is own class!’

For all his rough-diamond exterior Tomelty could be quite eloquent.

‘Can you see any o’ them takin’ the time or trouble to bump one of us off in the attic an’ leave it lookin’ like no one’s come in or gone out? Some ’ope! If ever we ’ave ours comin’, we’ll get it the good old workin’-class way, a quick bash on the back o’ the noggin outside the Dog an’ Duck. ’Ave no fear, Mrs Varley, your life – aye, an’ your virtue, too – is safe as ’ouses!’

‘Here, you!’ said Mrs Varley heatedly. ‘My virtue’s my business and don’t you forget it! If the late Mr Varley was alive to hear what you just said, he’d be spinning in his grave!’

‘Given how flippant you’ve all been talking about him,’ remarked Chitty, ‘I’d say that, if anyone’s spinning in his grave at this moment, it’s Raymond Gentry.’

‘’E’s not in ’is grave yet, silly,’ Iris pointed out, while powdering the tip of her nose from a pink powder-puff. ‘’E’s still in the attic just where they found ’im. Not decent, I call it, leavin’ a dead body without coverin’ it over or anythin’.’

‘Oh no, Iris!’ little Addie suddenly piped up. ‘That’s what the police tell you to do when there’s a murder.’

‘What?’

‘Nothin’.’

‘Nothin’? What you mean, nothin’?’

‘You’re not to do nothin’ at all. I read it in a book.’

Mrs Varley performed what in the films they call a double-take.

‘
You
read a book!?’

‘I’ve read
two
books, Mrs Varley,’ Addie answered gamely. ‘Jessie passed ’em on to me when she ’anded in ’er notice. You remember Jessie, mum? ’Er as up an’ married the ’aberdasher’s son an’ went to Great Yarmouth for ’er ’oneymoon.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Varley grimly, ‘I
do
remember Jessie. I
also remember we don’t talk about Jessie around here. Those banns were posted a mite too hastily for my liking. And to think the Vicar allowed her to get married in white! There’s such a thing as being too Christian!’

‘Anyway, mum, Jessie gave me these two books of ’ers. Quite ’ighbrow they was. One was
The Vamp of the Pampas
. Ooh, was that hot stuff!’

‘Language, Addie, language! This isn’t Paris, you know.’

‘Sorry, Mr Chitty.’

‘And what was the other, dear?’ he asked.

‘Well, that’s the funny thing. It was one o’ that Miss Mount’s that’s one o’ the Master’s guests.’

‘What one was it?’ Dolly asked.

‘Oh, Dolly, now you’re askin’,’ said Addie. ‘I think it was called
Murder
somethin’ …’

‘Well, that don’t get us much forrader,’ said Tomelty, his eyes swimming heavenward. ‘Just about every one of ’er books ’as “Murder” in the title.’

‘That’s it! That’s the one!’

‘What one?’

‘
No Murder in the Title
! It was called
No Murder in the Title
an’ it was really good! The murder takes place in the first chapter – an’ really gory it is, too! The victim – ’e’s some kind of big businessman, Hiram Rittenhouse – Hiram
B
. Rittenhouse the Third – a Napoleon of Finance, they call ’im – an’ ’e’s found squeezed inside a trouser-press in ’is suit at the Dorchester.’