The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (18 page)

She beadily scanned her audience.

‘To be sure, given the uncanny similarity between Raymond’s murder and the kinds of murders that are routinely committed in whodunits, the very fact that Selina and Mary ffolkes were the least likely suspects may have caused some of you to wonder privately if perhaps one of them did it after all. Not me. As far as I was concerned, they really were the least likely suspects. They do exist.

‘Donald, now. A different case, Donald. True, as far as any of us are aware, no skeletons lie lurking in the cupboard of his young life. Here, though, a more traditional motive raised its head. Jealousy. Don was in love with Selina –
is
in love with Selina – and he was visibly jealous of his rival. We all remember how they almost came to blows.

‘Nor have we forgotten that Don actually threatened to kill Gentry. “I’ll murder you, you swine, I swear I’ll murder you!” We all heard him shout these words. Even if we sympathised with him and told ourselves that that’s all they were, just words, the fact remains that, as the Chief-Inspector reminded us all, he swore to end the life of somebody who was indeed subsequently shot through the heart.

‘Then poor Roger himself was shot and all of these
splendid theories of mine were thrown into confusion. For there seemed to be no motive at all for murdering him.’

She settled herself more comfily in her chair.

‘In a whodunit, of course, there would have been at least one obvious motive – that Roger had discovered some crucial clue to the identity of Raymond’s murderer and had to be put to death himself before he had a chance to share his knowledge with the authorities. But the circumstances of this case were so very special. Because Henry suggested we all be present throughout the Chief-Inspector’s interrogation, everything said about the events leading up to Gentry’s death was said in everybody’s presence. I cannot recall a single occasion, prior to his taking his constitutional, when the Colonel was alone with one of us and might unknowingly have let slip some idle remark that put the murderer on his mettle.

‘Yes, there were those twenty minutes or so which he spent with Mary, when we all retired to our bedrooms to dress and freshen up. But really, I don’t think we need entertain for a second the notion that it was to his own wife that he passed on some damning item of evidence and that it was his own wife who later felt compelled to do away with him.’

Horrified that such a grisly conjecture had even momentarily crossed her friend’s mind, Mary ffolkes looked up in reproachful surprise.

‘Why, Evie,’ she cried, ‘how could you think such a thing!’

‘Now, now, Mary love,’ replied the novelist soothingly, ‘I said exactly the opposite. I said I
didn’t
think such a thing. You’ve already been told I don’t suspect you. All I’m doing is hypothesising, ticking off one possibility after another, no matter how improbable.’

With a grimace of distaste, she stubbed her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray as though squeezing the life out of an insect, muttered, ‘Don’t know what you see in ’em,’ to Madge Rolfe and once more picked up the threads of her thesis.

‘Well then, since the first murder had too many motives and the second no apparent motive at all, I was flummoxed. And that was when I decided instead to apply my “little grey cells” – if I may filch a conceit from one of my so-called rivals – to apply my “little grey cells” to the respective
methods
employed, in the hope that they might tell me something about the murderer’s psychology.

‘Concerning the first of these methods, the locked room, we all tended to make the same assumption, and who could blame us? We all took it for granted that Raymond’s murder had been premeditated to the least detail. Which was, considering how fantastical it seemed, a fair assumption on our part.

‘But there was one detail of that murder which, it suddenly occurred to me, could have been altered at any minute, even right up to the very last minute, without in any way compromising the whole diabolical scheme.
The identity of the victim
.’

Having talked non-stop, she needed to take another deep breath and, as she did, Trubshawe could be heard musing, ‘H’m, yes, I think I begin to see what you’re getting at.’

At this late stage of the proceedings, though, Evadne Mount was in no mood to share even a scintilla of limelight with anyone else. She continued more vigorously than ever:

‘The other assumption that all of us made was that the second crime, so crude and clumsy in its execution, was in the nature of an afterthought, or at the very least something the murderer hadn’t originally planned on. We all assumed, in other words, that the Colonel’s shooting on the moors was an unforeseen consequence of Gentry’s shooting in the attic.

‘Then I had quite the brain-wave. What, I found myself thinking,
what if Gentry’s murder, not the Colonel’s, had been the afterthought?
’

Now the whole library erupted.

‘Oh, that’s silly!’

‘Well, but really! When the crime was so meticulously worked out!’

‘This time, Evie, you’ve gone too far!’

‘I said all along it was absurd to –’

‘Oh, just hear me out, won’t you!’ she cried, silencing them with a single bark, like an infant blowing out all the candles on a birthday cake with a single puff.

‘Look, all of you. Just suppose, for the sake of the argument, that it was the intention of somebody in this house
to murder Raymond Gentry. Well, he pulled it off, didn’t he? He got clean away with it. Raymond
was
murdered, and none of us, not excluding the Chief-Inspector here, had the slightest notion by whom. The criminal – I think, from now on, I’m going to call him, or of course her, X – the criminal, X, had achieved what he’d presumably set out to achieve.

‘Why, then, did he or she next try to murder the Colonel? It doesn’t add up. Especially as you all agree, don’t you, that at no time did Roger drop any remark that might have made X decide he would have to die too. True, it was the Colonel who discovered Raymond’s body. But Don was there, too, and no one has attempted to murder him.

‘As for the idea that the two crimes might not be connected at all, well, I don’t suppose any of us ever took that seriously. I know coincidences exist – if they didn’t, we wouldn’t need a word for them – but it’s really too much to ask of the Law of Probability that the two men were both shot, within a mile or so of each other, within a few hours of each other, by two different murderers with two totally different motives!

‘So why was the Colonel shot at? The more I mulled over the mystery, the harder it was for me to conceive of any logical reason why Raymond’s murderer should
afterwards
want to kill Roger. At the same time, I gradually did begin to see at least one reason why Roger’s murderer might have
found himself tempted
in advance
to kill Raymond. I began to wonder, in short, whether it was Roger, not Raymond, who had always been X’s destined victim.’

She gave her disturbing new twist to the plot a few seconds to sink in.

‘And this suspicion of mine was actually strengthened by the page of notes that the Chief-Inspector found in the pocket of Gentry’s bathrobe, notes, remember, which had been typed out on the Colonel’s own typewriter.

‘What everybody assumed was that these notes demonstrated beyond doubt that we were up against a blackmailer. As an author of whodunits, though, I was unimpressed from the outset by a clue left so nonchalantly for the police to put their hands on. If Raymond really had planned to blackmail us all, would he have sashayed about the house with the evidence of his villainy so handily poking out of his bathrobe pocket? And was it really necessary to compose such skimpy little notes on a typewriter? On Roger’s typewriter to boot? Surely it would have been both simpler and safer to jot them down by hand? Unless, of course, and this was the crucial point, unless you were concerned
that your handwriting might be identified
. I wondered about all of that the moment those notes first turned up.

‘Then Trubshawe let us all take a look at them.

‘You may remember that, when I read them over a couple of times, something nagged at me for a good while afterwards that all was not as it should have been.

‘Well, suddenly – thanks to Don here – I got it. I realised that I had seen something in the notes which confirmed what I was coming more and more to suspect – that it wasn’t in fact Gentry who had typed them.’

‘What did you see?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘What did I see? To be absolutely literal, it’s what I didn’t see which put me on the
qui vive
.’

‘Oh, all right, Miss Mount,’ said the policeman with the weary sigh of a parent agreeing to humour a child for the very last time. ‘I’ll play along with you. What
didn’t
you see?’

‘
I didn’t see you
,’ said Evadne Mount.

The Chief-Inspector gaped at her.

‘Just what do you mean by that grotesque statement?’ he growled.

‘Pardon me,’ answered the novelist, ‘that was my whimsical side peeping out. I’ll try to keep it under control. What I meant,’ she said more soberly, ‘was that I didn’t see
u
. The letter
u
?’

Everyone looked at her in mystification.

‘You all remember those notes. They weren’t in shorthand, but in a kind of journalistic telegraphese. I recognised the style because I’ve been interviewed many, many times in my life and once or twice I’ve taken a peek at my interviewer’s notepad.

‘Well, consider what was written about Madge here. If you remember, it read “MR” – obviously Madge Rolfe –
then a dash – then the words (I’ll omit the scurrilous adjective, which isn’t relevant to my point) – then the words “misbehavior in MC” – “MC” standing naturally for Monte Carlo. Well, what finally dawned on me was that the word “misbehavior” was spelt without the letter
u
. That’s what I meant when I said it wasn’t what I saw in Raymond’s notes that made me suspect the truth, it’s what I didn’t see. I didn’t see
u
.’

Now she was almost grinning at her own artfulness.

‘It’s a very common misconception that having a blind spot necessarily consists of
not
seeing something that’s in front of you. Sometimes, you know, it consists of seeing something that’s
not
in front of you. We all saw that letter
u
because we all expected to see it, and it was only when Selina took so long to reappear from her bedroom and I heard Don say to her, “We’ve all been missing you” –
missing you
– the missing
u
? – that I finally understood what it was that had troubled me.

‘Once I did understand it, however, I instantly realised what it meant. That’s how “behaviour” is spelt by the Americans, without a
u
. Rotter that he was, Ray Gentry was also a journalist, and words were the tools of his trade. To me it was unthinkable he would ever have spelt the word that way.

‘Those of you who’ve seen my play
The Wrong Voice
will know how significant language and its misuse can be in a whodunit. If you recall, the murder victim is a school-teacher
whose dying words, after he swallows a whisky-and-soda laced with arsenic, are “But it was the wrong voice …” Now everybody assumes, naturally, that what startled him was the
identity
of the speaker whose voice he’d just heard. Only Alexis Baddeley realises that, as an English master, he is in reality alluding to his
grammar
.

‘While cradling the victim in his arms, that speaker had cried out, “My God, he has been taking ill!” Where a genuine Englishman would have used the passive voice – “he has been
taken
ill” – he used the active voice, thereby revealing that he wasn’t a genuine Englishman, which was what he was pretending to be, and that he was ultimately the murderer.’

There ensued a momentary silence. Then, of all people, Don spoke – Don, who hadn’t yet uttered a syllable, even when Evadne Mount had reminded everyone of his threat to kill Raymond Gentry. Which is why, when he now did choose to speak up, his voice, almost unrecognisably raspy with resentment, shattered the silence like a gunshot.

‘Yeah, the murderer. Like me, you mean?’

The novelist stared at him. A web had formed on his forehead of tiny patches of nervous dampness.

‘What’s that you say, Don?’

‘Oh come on, ma’am, you know what –’

‘Evadne,’ said the novelist softly, ‘Evadne.’

‘Evadne …’

Not himself for the moment, he pronounced her name as awkwardly as though it were a tongue-twister.

‘You don’t have to deny what you’re thinking, what you’re all thinking. Only an American could have written those notes and I’m the only American here.’

‘Don darling, nobody thinks you wrote them!’ cried Selina, giving his thigh an affectionate squeeze. ‘Tell him, Evadne. Tell Don you don’t suspect him.’

‘Oh yes she does,’ he said sullenly. ‘You all do. I can see it in your faces.’

‘Don?’ said Evadne Mount.

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you a reader of whodunits?’

‘What?’

‘Are you a reader of whodunits?’

‘Heck, no,’ he answered after a few seconds. ‘Frankly, I can’t stand ’em. I mean, who cares who killed –’

‘All right, all right,’ the novelist testily cut him off. ‘You’ve made your point.’

‘Sorry, but you did ask,’ said Don. Then, perhaps emboldened by the realisation that he had found a chink in her hitherto impregnable armour, he added, ‘Say, why
did
you ask? What’s
your
point?’

‘My point is this. If you
were
a reader of whodunits, you’d know enough to give the matter a little more thought before accusing me of accusing you. And if you
had
given the matter a little more thought, you would soon have realised you aren’t the only suspect just because you’re the only American.’

‘I don’t get you. How come?’

‘Well, Cora, for instance –’

‘You know, Evie darling,’ drawled the actress, ‘it would be terribly, terribly sweet if, just once, I wasn’t the first “for instance” to pop into your head.’