The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2 page)

‘Thanks. I’ll need some muscular assistance if she stalls.’

‘If it’s muscles you want, Doctor,’ said Don, stealing a hopeful glance at Selina as he only half-jokily pumped up his biceps, ‘then I’m your man!’

‘Good, good. Well, let’s get going if we’re going.’

Henry Rolfe then leaned over the armchair in which his wife Madge sat, her unstockinged legs folded underneath her like those of a cat, and kissed her demurely on the forehead.

‘Now, darling,’ he said, ‘I don’t want you to be anxious about me. I’ll be fine.’

Bearing up with fetching fortitude, Madge Rolfe, who always looked as though the major anxiety of her life was how long she might have to wait for some lovelorn lounge lizard to light her next cigarette, offered him no more than a wan smile in return for his kiss.

As he strode out of the room followed by Don, everybody wished them godspeed. Then, clapping his hands in quite the Oriental manner, mustering as much grim joviality as could be regarded as decent under the circumstances, the Colonel asked, ‘Would anybody care to join me in a spot of breakfast?’

It was a few minutes short of nine o’clock that same morning when a motor-car was heard pulling up in the forecourt outside the french window and a swift peek between the drawing-room’s heavy velveteen curtains confirmed it to be Dr Rolfe’s. It transpired (as the house-party was to hear it described to them) that the outward journey in particular had been a nightmarish experience. By the Doctor’s account, his Rover had lurched perilously out of one deep snowdrift into another and poor Don seems to have spent more of the trip pushing the car than being driven in it. They had, though, finally made it to Trubshawe’s cottage. Luckily, he was already up, nursing a mug of hot chocolate by the fire – perhaps also nursing a lonely memory or two – while Tobermory, his ancient Labrador, dozed at his slippered feet.

The Chief-Inspector first had to get over his natural surprise at finding a pair of strangers on his doorstep not merely on an icy December morn but on Boxing Day to boot.
Having digested that, he was to be surprised all over again when informed of the reason for their call. Once a policeman, however, always a policeman: he accepted without hesitation to return with them to ffolkes Manor. In fact, the Colonel may have been right when he predicted that Trubshawe would actually welcome an injection of excitement in what must have become a somewhat anti-climactic existence after four decades of sterling service at the Yard. Don reported having observed an exhilarated glint in his eyes as well as a coiled and almost cat-like alacrity in his gestures when he and Rolfe gave him a brief rundown of the morning’s bizarre events.

Inside the gloomy hallway the three of them proceeded to divest themselves of their overcoats, scarves and gloves. Then, as the Chief-Inspector briskly dusted the snow from his walrus moustache, Tobermory, who couldn’t be left behind on his own, since at this stage nobody knew for certain just how long it might be before his master got home again, treated his bulgy old frame to an unexpectedly vigorous shake before trotting into the drawing-room and, giving its occupants an incurious once-over, collapsed in front of the fireplace and promptly closed his rheumy eyes.

The company, it has to be said, had become more than a little fretful in the intervening couple of hours. Selina ffolkes had taken to her bed, or at least to her bedroom, minutes after the Doctor’s departure and, with the exception 
of Chitty, whose idea it had been to fetch the Chief-Inspector and whom it would have been churlish to deprive of the spectacle of his arrival, the servants – the cook, the two housemaids, the kitchen-maid and the gardener-cum-chauffeur-cum-handyman – had all been sent back down to the kitchen, since the only contribution the three maids especially had had to make to the crisis was a nervous twittering that looked unlikely to let up in the short term.

As for the ffolkeses’ house-guests, not knowing whether they ought to go up to their rooms or wait on in the drawing-room, they had all chosen – all but Selina, that is – to stay put.

Maybe ‘chosen’ isn’t the correct word. Though nobody, not even the Colonel, presumed to give an order as such, there was an unspoken feeling among the whole party that, mortifying as it was to have to sit about in their dressing-gowns, hair unkempt and make-up unapplied, it might be wiser if they all remained within reassuring sight of each other until this Trubshawe person turned up, assuming he ever did. Naturally, they all implicitly trusted their fellow guests and hosts, all of them old, dear, close friends. Still, you could almost hear them thinking, if Evie
is
right …

Time passing as slowly as it invariably does, though, when you’re eager for it to fly, Madge Rolfe had proposed a rubber of bridge to while away what, for all anyone knew, could be several hours before her husband’s return. And since Mary ffolkes had long since given up playing
with her own choleric spouse, it was Madge herself who ended up partnering the Colonel, and Evadne Mount the Vicar.

But it had been a spineless sort of game, with a dispiriting absence of the squabbling they all secretly enjoyed. It was clear they felt it would have been both tactless and tasteless to indulge themselves in one of their ripsnorting, corset-cracking rows. So that, when the search-party turned up at last with the Chief-Inspector in tow, it was with unanimous and undisguised relief that they all downed their cards.

Flanked by Don and Rolfe, the burly ex-Scotland Yard policeman stepped into the spacious drawing-room, whose light and warmth, following directly on from the gloom of the narrow hallway, caused him momentarily to blink.

The Colonel walked a few paces forward to greet him.

‘Ah, Trubshawe, so they got you here in one piece? Look, I’m really sorry, old chap, to have to drag you away from hearth and home on Boxing Day – and what a stinker of a Boxing Day it is, eh, what? But we’ve been at our wits’ end – we just didn’t know what …’

The Chief-Inspector took a grip of the Colonel’s hand and gave it such a forceful shake the latter couldn’t prevent himself from flinching. Then he scrutinised the half-dozen guests seated around the fireside – their tired, obscurely frightened eyes lent a semblance of animation by its glow – without letting his own shrewd eyes alight for more than a couple of seconds on any one of them.

‘You needn’t apologise,’ he said, absent-mindedly tweaking one of his bushy eyebrows. ‘I quite see how you had to turn wherever you could for help. Sounds like a dreadful business.’

‘It is, it is. But do come right in, right up to the fire. Warm your hands.’

‘Thanks. I will,’ he answered, marching over to the fireside with a series of generic nods to the attendant womenfolk.

‘Ladies,’ he said lightly, all but dipping his fingertips into the flames.

Then, turning back to the Colonel, he added, ‘I think, though, I ought to be taken at once to the scene of the crime.’

‘You wouldn’t prefer to be introduced first?’

‘Well – no.’

He addressed the others.

‘I don’t wish to appear rude, ladies – gentlemen,’ he nodded again, this time to both genders, ‘but, in view of the extreme gravity of the case, first things first. The body, I think.’

‘Yes, naturally you’ll want to see the body,’ said the Colonel. ‘Yes, yes, if you’ll just come with me. But, you know, it does feel a bit odd you haven’t yet met –’

‘The body first,’ the Chief-Inspector insisted.

‘As you say, then. It – I mean the body – it’s still in the attic. We haven’t touched anything, you’ll see. We left it – we left him – exactly as we found him. If you’d just like to follow me.’

‘Thank you. And perhaps you, Mr Duckworth, would join us? Since you were with the Colonel when he broke into the attic.’

‘Oh yeah, sure thing,’ averred Don. ‘In the car I told you everything I know, but, sure, anything you say.’

‘It might be helpful if Farrar also came with us,’ the Colonel interjected. ‘Take notes. What say you, Chief-Inspector? He’s my secretary and general manager. Good chap to have around.’

‘I don’t have a problem with that. Though I tend to make my own notes’ – he tapped his forehead – ‘inside my head, don’t you know. But yes, why not.’

The small party was then led off into the main hall, a draughty, well-proportioned, high-ceilinged space, though one that some already found lugubrious even without the baleful influence of the present tragedy. On its walls the Colonel had mounted the stuffed heads of every imaginable wild beast, from a magnificently antlered Highland stag and an enormous grey elephant from the Indian hill country to a hybrid flock of smaller and friskier creatures, all of them mementoes of his travels in happier times. At the top of the broad central staircase, which arched out in both directions to two banistered galleries, an Egyptian mummy stood erect in its garish gilt coffin and, when the Colonel escorted Trubshawe past it, and noticed the bemused interest the policeman momentarily took in it, he remarked:

‘My wife’s. Given her by some archaeologist cousin of
hers. He – how shall I put this? – he, um, salvaged it from a dig he was directing in Luxor in – let me see – must have been in ’31.’

He then made one of his typically lame efforts to lighten an awkward situation.

‘As I say, it’s my wife’s mummy. What you might call my mummy-in-law. Ha ha ha!’

‘Most amusing,’ said Trubshawe politely.

(To be honest, it was a joke which Roger ffolkes had made to absolutely every stranger who had ever crossed the threshold of his house and by now it was as old and creaky as the mummy itself.)

The Colonel turned into the right-hand gallery past two guest bedrooms connected by a shared, in-between bathroom, then went right again into a narrow corridor at the end of which a spiral staircase led up to the spartan stone corridor along which the servants were variously quartered. It was there that, like a skein of ribbon whose festive curlicues had been neatly ironed out, the spiral staircase straightened itself into a short flight of steps at the very top of which, opposite the last step, loomed the attic door.

Even before the Chief-Inspector had reached that last step, he could see that a heinous crime had been committed inside the room. Not only had the door been forced to give way but it was still jammed against some large, inert object which prevented it from being opened more than a crack, an object which was all too obviously a human body, lying
on the floor in a pose as random as a throw of dice. And from under the door a trickle of congealing blood had formed a blot of incongruously vibrant colour against the landing’s drab flagstones.

Trubshawe wasted no time on that blood. Gingerly, so as not to disturb the corpse more than he had to, but aggressively nevertheless, because he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get into the room at all, he shouldered the door open as far as it would go, stepped over the now visible remains of Raymond Gentry and entered the room.

The attic was of a stark, cell-like austerity, higher than it was long except where its ceiling sloped down to the half-way mark of the wall furthest away from where the Chief-Inspector was now standing. And it was sparely equipped, its furniture consisting, for all in all, of a badly chipped wooden table with its own rickety cane-bottomed chair and, in a corner, one sad and solitary armchair. The latter’s fabric, which would once have been described as chintzy, had suffered so much wear and tear that yellowy-white stuffing protruded unappetisingly from all over its faded surface and the chintz itself had become so worn it was next to impossible to figure out what might have been its original pattern.

There was also, above and behind the armchair, the attic’s one and only window, which was oblong and glassless and traversed vertically by a pair of parallel iron bars.

It was, though, the sight of the dead Raymond Gentry
which transfixed everyone’s attention. Wearing the arresting combination of jet-black silk pyjamas and a bathrobe of a fluffy white towelling fabric, he lay stretched across the floor, his sickly, effeminate features warped out of shape by a grimace of indescribable horror. Seeping through his two hands, as they desperately clutched his own neck, rivulets of blood snaked about his long, tapering fingers like so many exotic ruby rings.

Hunkering down to inspect the body, Trubshawe carefully unbuttoned Gentry’s ripped and seared pyjama jacket to examine the bullet wound, an act that made Don shrink back in revulsion.

Then he got to his feet, took a gnarled old pipe out of his pocket, shoved it unlit into his mouth and turned to the Colonel.

‘I presume this,’ he said gravely, ‘is exactly how you found him?’

‘Indeed it is. Nothing’s been moved or even touched. Am I right, Don?’

‘Say what?’ mumbled the young American, still shaken by his brusque exposure to the grisly details of Gentry’s wound.

‘I said, this is exactly how we found him?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Just as he is now. Pushed up against the door.’

‘And already dead?’ asked the Chief-Inspector.

‘Oh yes,’ said the Colonel. ‘No doubt about that at all.
We did ask the Doctor to take a look at him, but he was well past saving. From what Rolfe told us, though, he’d only just been killed. Which makes sense, because of course I had heard the shot myself.’

‘I see,’ said Trubshawe thoughtfully. ‘Now, on our drive back, Mr Duckworth gave me his version of how you two made the discovery. I’d like to run it past you, Colonel, if I may, to assure myself there’s no discrepancy in your accounts.’

‘Yes, of course. Go ahead.’

‘Well, what I gathered from Mr Duckworth was that you were drawing a bath when you heard the firing of a shot.’

‘A shot followed by a scream. A scream, Chief-Inspector, that positively froze my marrow, and I’m no stranger to screams.’

‘A shot and a scream that you immediately knew could only have come from the attic. Have I got that right?’

‘Yes, I heard them both overhead. That’s how I realised they couldn’t have come from the servants’ quarters, you see, because they all sleep in adjacent rooms further along the corridor. The attic is the only room in the house located directly above our bedroom.’

‘So you instantly rushed out of your bedroom –’

‘Well, not quite instantly. I did have to slip on a few more clothes than I happened to be wearing at the time.’

‘Slipping on some extra clothes, you rushed out of your bedroom into the gallery, then up these steps we’ve just climbed and –’

‘If I may interrupt you again, Chief-Inspector?’

‘Yes, Colonel?’

‘So that we’re all in agreement about everything, I think you should know it was as I was starting to climb the steps that I collided with Don, whose bedroom happens to be the closest to them.’

‘Quite so. That chimes exactly with what Mr Duckworth told me. Then, if I understand aright, you both observed blood seeping under the doorway and decided you had to break into the room at once?’

‘You got it,’ said Don. ‘The first, I dunno, three or four times we put our shoulders to the door, it just wouldn’t budge. But, you can see for yourself, the wood’s really old and damp, some parts of it are rotten through – here, look, if you pick at it with your finger it just flakes away – so, anyway, we did eventually manage to get it open. Even then, we could only squeeze into the room by clambering over Gentry’s body.’