The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (20 page)

‘But then, you know, new editions are brought out – my books generally run into many editions – the original layout goes to pot – and all my time and trouble –’

‘I swear,’ Cora Rutherford hissed at her, ‘I swear on my dear old mum’s eternal soul that if you don’t get back on track, Evadne Mount, there’ll be a second murder inside this house! And, as I’m certain Trubshawe here will back me up, no jury would ever convict me!’

‘Very well, but I do insist you let me go on in my own inimitable fashion.

‘Take your minds back to early this morning. On some pretext or other, probably by dangling a choice morsel of gossip before him, X entices Raymond Gentry into the attic and shoots him at point-blank range through the heart. The Colonel, who’s running his bath, hears the shot, as we all do, followed by a blood-curdling scream. On his way up to investigate, he runs into Don, whose bedroom is situated nearest the stairs. Because the room is locked – bizarrely, from the inside – they stand in front of it for a little while
uncertain what to do. And it’s then the Colonel notices a trickle of blood oozing out of the attic on to the landing. So they realise they’ve just got to get in.

‘Putting their shoulders to the door, they eventually succeed in opening it – and the first thing they see is Raymond’s dead body. Yet, horror-stricken as they are at the sight of the corpse, they do have the presence of mind to give the whole room a good examination. Nothing. Or rather, nobody. It’s a very small room containing next to no furniture and both of them swear it was unoccupied. Am I right, Don?’

‘Yeah, that’s how it was.’

‘So what do they do next? Because they can already hear the household starting to stir, and because they’re both determined to prevent Selina from even so much as glimpsing Raymond’s body, they rush back down into the hallway, where we’re all shambling about in our dressing-gowns wondering what in heaven’s name is going on. Which is when the Colonel, as you all remember, broke the terrible news to Selina as humanely as he knew how.

‘That, you agree, is what was happening in the hallway. What meanwhile was happening inside the attic?

‘For the very last time I invite you to review the scene. The Colonel and Don have both retreated downstairs. The attic door is hanging half off its hinges. Raymond’s body is still shoved up tight against the door, still oozing blood. The only other objects in the room are the table, the upright chair and the armchair.’

Her voice dropped to a husky whisper.

‘What I venture to suggest happened next is that – if I can phrase it this way –
the armchair suddenly stood up on its hind legs
.’

Everybody in the library gasped in unison. It was almost as though she had
spoken
in italics, almost as though they could feel the hairs stand up on the napes of their necks, almost as though those hairs, too, were in italics.

As for Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, he was scrutinising the novelist with a queer expression on his face, an expression intimating that his irritation at her unorthodox methods, as also at the torrential verbosity with which she had been exposing them, had now capitulated to unconditional admiration for the results they had produced.

‘You don’t mean …?’ he said.

‘I do mean,’ she replied calmly. ‘The murderer had concealed himself or herself
inside
the armchair. That’s undoubtedly why Gentry’s body had been pushed up against the door – to make it even harder for anyone to break in and so gain for X a few more valuable seconds in which to conceal himself.

‘Hunched inside that armchair, having already committed the murder, it was X, don’t you see, not Raymond, who was responsible for the blood-curdling scream we all heard. For his plan to work, it was essential to call our immediate attention to the crime.

‘Then, as soon as the coast was clear, Roger and Don having
quit the attic to let us know what they’d discovered, he – or, I repeat yet again, she – quickly and quietly clambered out of the chair, patted everything back into place, stepped over Gentry’s body and nipped down to the hallway.

‘Given the pandaemonium reigning in that hallway, it would have been child’s play for him or her to mingle unobserved with the rest of us.
Et voilà
!’

There was the briefest of pauses. Then Trubshawe spoke again.

‘May we know,’ he asked, ‘how you arrived at that – I do have to say – very persuasive conclusion?’

‘Easy,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘I told you that I sat down on the armchair. I also told you that that was when it hit me. I even added, to be extra-helpful, the word “literally”.

‘The fact is, when I did sit down, the bottom of the chair instantly gave way under me – so much so that my own rear end hit the floor with an embarrassingly hefty thud. But even as I was feeling a very foolish old biddy indeed, my two stockinged legs slicing the air like a pair of scissors, I knew I’d found the solution. And once I’d managed to extricate myself, I set to examining the insides of that chair. As I expected, the whole thing had been hollowed out so that, like some monstrous glove puppet, it could actually accommodate a crouching human body. And that, I realised, was how and where the murderer was concealed.’

‘Very neat,’ murmured the Chief-Inspector. ‘Very, very neat.’

‘Do you mean X for having devised such a method,’ enquired Evadne Mount, ‘or me for having discovered it?’

Trubshawe smiled.

‘Both, I guess. But hold on,’ he added, a new idea occurring to him. ‘You said that the instant you knew how it was done, you also knew who’d done it. What did you mean by that?’

‘Oh, Inspector, now there you do disappoint me. I really believed you at least would understand the most significant implication of my discovery.’

‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I must be stupid – I
am
retired, you know – but I don’t.’

In the ensuing silence a clear young voice rang out.

‘I think I do,’ said Selina.

‘Then why don’t you share your thoughts with us, my dear?’ the novelist said benignly.

‘We-ell … it strikes me this way. We – I mean, Mummy and Daddy’s house-party – we all got here only two days ago, Ray, Don and I last of all. If what you say is correct, then none of us could have been the murderer because none of us would have had either the time or the opportunity to scoop out that armchair or whatever it was the murderer did to it.’

Evadne Mount beamed at her with the gratified air of a school-mistress congratulating an especially smart pupil.

‘Right first time, Selina!’ she cried. ‘Yes, it’s absolutely true. Once I realised how incredibly well prepared Gentry’s
murder must have been, how far in advance it had to be set up, I knew that not one of you – I should say, not one of
us
– could have committed the crime.

‘No, the only person who could have done it was somebody who was here already. Somebody who saw and heard everything yet said nothing or next to nothing. Somebody who is among us now yet not among us. Somebody who is present yet almost transparent.’

Her eyes narrowed behind the glinting pince-nez. Then, in what can only be described as an eerily
silent
voice, she said:

‘You know who you are. Why don’t you speak up for yourself?’

On hearing that question, I decided, without an instant’s hesitation, to do what she asked. For I understood – indeed I think I’d understood ever since I’d failed to kill the Colonel – that it was all over for me.

‘Farrar!?’ Mary ffolkes half-whispered, half-shrieked.

It’s amazing how foolish you feel, standing in front of a group of people, people you’re personally acquainted with, clenching a revolver in your fist and forcing yourself to cry ‘Hands up!’ or some-such corny line as though you were in a third-rate play or picture-show. From the moment I rose from my chair in the library it was as much as I could do to keep from giggling.

Mary ffolkes continued to stare at me in disbelief, her hands twitching, her eyelids flickering nervously.

‘You, Farrar? You tried to kill Roger?’

I no longer had any reason to hold back. It came as an immense relief to be able to open up at last. It felt good to speak in the first person again. If I’d said so little during the past twelve hours, it wasn’t that I’m the taciturn type by nature, just that I’d had to be exceptionally careful not to give myself away.

‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes,’ I replied, ‘I tried to kill Roger.’

I strained to keep my voice as matter-of-fact as possible.

‘You see,’ I explained, ‘the advantage of my position in your household was that, if I wasn’t upstairs, everyone assumed I must be downstairs, and vice versa. So no one ever really missed me. When your husband sent me down to find out what was happening in the kitchen, I hung about for ten minutes or so, standing at the big bay window and pretending to listen to the servants’ chatter. Then I saw the Colonel walk past the monkey-puzzle tree. I slipped out of the house, caught up with him, shot him and returned before anyone, upstairs or downstairs, had time to notice I’d been gone.’

I now addressed Trubshawe.

‘I’m truly sorry, old man, about Tobermory, but you yourself realised I couldn’t allow him to live. When the Colonel fell, he set up such a howling …’

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Mary ffolkes. ‘I don’t understand.’

The poor uncomprehending woman looked at Selina, at Evadne Mount, at the Rolfes, at seemingly everyone but me, as though the solution to the mystery might be reflected on their faces instead of mine. She reminded me of the one guest at a dinner party who hasn’t ‘got’ an off-colour joke which has everyone else splitting their sides and is hoping that, if she peers into their eyes for long enough, it’s bound to dawn on her at last.

‘Roger and I were always so kind to you. We never, ever
treated you as one of the servants. You were almost like the son we never had.’

This was the scene I’d feared. The Colonel had deserved to die, in that I’d never wavered, but his wife didn’t really deserve to find out why.

‘It’s strange,’ I replied almost wistfully, though still clutching my revolver. ‘They say vengeance is a dish best eaten cold. I’m not so sure. I’ve been so hungry for vengeance all my adult life, year after year of it, that there were times my mouth would literally water at the prospect of exacting it. Yet now, all these years later, when I have exacted it, more or less, I can’t claim that – that I’ve
gorged
on it as I expected I would. And I don’t just mean because I didn’t succeed in killing the Colonel.

‘Mrs ffolkes, the longer I stayed in your husband’s service, the fonder I got to be of the old guy and the more I had to remind myself he was the man who did me wrong so many years ago. I’m even finding it hard to regret I didn’t kill him. And if you find that just as hard to believe, don’t forget I’ve got a set of duplicate keys to every door in the house. I could easily have snuck into his bedroom and finished him off before he’d a chance to give Trubshawe a few interesting facts about his life in America, facts that would have led the police directly to me. Yet I chose not to.

‘As for Raymond Gentry,’ I added, ‘well, that’s a different story. No one will convince me I didn’t do the world a service by removing him from it.’

I could see that the Chief-Inspector was champing at the bit to give me the usual party piece about my being under no obligation to make a statement but anything I did say – well, you know the rest. But I was set on having my own say first. I meant to be heard. I’d kept silent for too long.

As it happens, we were both of us pipped at the post by Evadne Mount.

‘So you do have a voice, young man,’ she said, ‘as well as a pretty turn of phrase. You know, I’ve had my eye on you for some time. Not that I realised right from the beginning you’d done it or anything like that. It was just that I found you – well, really rather fascinating.’

‘Me? Fascinating?’ I won’t deny I was flattered. ‘Why?’

‘You’re something I never thought to encounter. The perfect factotum. You were always there when you were needed and never when you weren’t. Everywhere yet nowhere, present yet anonymous, omniscient yet invisible. Attentive to everything that was going on, everything that was said and done, as though you were recording it, taking it all down, mentally taking it all in. Your eyes never met any of ours and you almost never spoke – and even when you did,
not once
, unless I’m very much mistaken, in the first person. You missed nothing and you contributed nothing. You practically never intervened and you absolutely never interfered. As for your – with respect – your utterly nondescript features, and your even more nondescript clothes, well, they made you, as I say, almost transparent. If I weren’t
afraid of outraging the Vicar, I’d be tempted to compare you to God.’

‘Like God I never lied,’ I said.

‘Come now,’ she murmured. ‘Once, surely?’

‘Once?’

‘Your name. Since your motive was vengeance, and since vengeance, if my experience is anything to go by, inevitably necessitates some form of subterfuge, I’ll lay ten to one it isn’t Farrar.’

She was uncanny. I couldn’t help smiling at her.

‘Bravo, Miss Mount. No, it isn’t Farrar.’

‘May we know what it is?’

‘I
want
you to know what it is. Otherwise what I’ve done would become meaningless.’

I took a deep breath.

‘My name is Murgatroyd. Roger Murgatroyd.’

Mary ffolkes gazed at me in astonishment.

‘Roger? Why, Roger’s the same name as … as Roger …’

‘I was named after him. Your husband was – I mean, he is – my godfather.’

‘You were named after him? And yet you …’

She buried her face in her hands and burst into convulsive sobs. For her it seemed it was my attempt to kill someone whose name I shared that was the truly heinous crime. And because I was starting to feel sincerely sorry for her I didn’t care to remind her that, even though he may have treated me like a son, it had never occurred to the Colonel
to address me other than by my – pseudonymous – surname. Or show the slightest interest in my family or my background, which of course suited me fine as his future murderer – or would-be murderer – yet, I can’t deny, obscurely offended me as a human being.

‘No,’ I continued, ‘my name isn’t Farrar. But then, your husband’s name isn’t ffolkes and he’s as much a Colonel as the Vicar was an Army padre.’

Trubshawe was now clearly feeling it ever more incumbent on himself to reclaim the authority that was rightly his in a criminal matter.

‘Look here, Murgatroyd,’ he said to me in what he must have hoped was the ineffably reasonable voice of British officialdom, ‘we can surely talk this over without the gun – which is, I assume, the murder weapon. You’re not going anywhere with it, are you, so you may as well put it down.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘Not for the moment. Not until I’ve decided what to do next.’

‘Now listen,’ he went on, ‘I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending you’re not up for the chop. I know it and you know it. But from the way you’ve been talking, you don’t strike me as – well, as a natural-born killer. So what’s the use of behaving as though you were? Eh? Aren’t I right?’

I looked down at the loaded gun.

‘You know why I’m not going to put down this revolver?’ I said after a while. ‘Because it guarantees me an
uninterrupted hearing. It acts like a microphone. Except that, instead of magnifying
my
voice, it forces you to lower
yours
.

‘So, just for now, I’ll go on speaking through it and I suggest you all go on sitting where you are and not moving more than you have to.’

‘I was right!’ cried Evadne Mount. ‘“To speak through a revolver” – you
do
have a pretty turn of phrase. Young man, you could have been a writer.’

‘Thanks. Matter of fact, I am a writer. Or let’s say I was a writer.’

‘
Who are you, Roger Murgatroyd?
’

It was Mary ffolkes who shot the question at me, without warning but now also without a trace of agitation in her voice.

‘Let me give you a clue, Mrs ffolkes,’ I answered. ‘My father was Miles Murgatroyd. That name mean anything to you?’

‘Why, no,’ she said, confused once more. ‘I’m – I’m afraid I never heard it before. It’s a very unusual, very distinctive name. I’m sure I would have remembered it if I had.’

I found myself believing her.

‘It doesn’t surprise me. What I have to tell you happened a long, long time ago. You’d never even met the self-styled Colonel.’

‘The self-styled …’ she began. Then her voice trailed off into nothingness and she fell tremulously silent again.

‘There’s no polite way of putting this, Mrs ffolkes. You’ve got to know that, in his younger days, your husband was what they call a confidence man.’

‘That’s a lie!’ screamed Selina.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Selina,’ I said as gently as I could, for I’d always had a soft spot for her. ‘But it’s God’s truth, I swear. Your father’s real name wasn’t Roger ffolkes, it was Roger Kydd. He started his career, if that’s the word I’m looking for, playing dominoes for cash on the London-to-Brighton train line. Then he graduated to the three-shell scam on Bournemouth Pier and, when my father met him, he’d just done a two-year prison stretch for forging cheques – a stretch in Dartmoor, ironically enough – and he was eking out a miserable living trying to pick the pockets of toffs waiting for cabs in front of the Ritz. My father had stopped in Piccadilly to light his Woodbine, he put his hand in his pocket for a match and he found Kydd’s hand already in there. Instead of turning him in, though, my father, who I think was something of a soft touch, decided to take him under his wing.

‘Remember,’ I said to the Chief-Inspector, ‘when you and the Colonel had your private little chat in this very room, he mentioned that there was a Priest’s Hole in the house. Well, I had actually concealed myself inside that Priest’s Hole, and when I heard him go on to talk about what he’d gotten up to in his youth and I realised he was on the point of revealing his true name, I immediately ran out of the
secret passage into the corridor and interrupted him by knocking at the door. Fortunately, I was already dressed, like the rest of the staff, so I hadn’t had to go to my bedroom to change.

‘I wanted to silence him temporarily before I got the chance to silence him once and for all. If Scotland Yard ever learned who he really was, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for them to trace his connection to Miles Murgatroyd, which I naturally couldn’t let happen.

‘You see,’ I went on, ‘after the two of them had managed to patch over the awkward business of Roger Kydd trying to pick his pocket, my father decided to throw in his lot with him and they left Britain together to make their fortune in the States. For five years they prospected the Alaskan gold fields, five long, hard years when they lived on bacon and baked beans and became the closest of pals. Naturally, when my father got married, Kydd was his best man. And naturally, when I was born, he became my godfather.

‘Then, just when everything seemed to be going right at last, it actually all started to go wrong.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Trubshawe asked.

‘I mean that my father and “the Colonel” – I guess it would be simpler if I just went on calling him that – my father and the Colonel finally hit pay-dirt. A deep seam of riverbed gold in a valley in north-west Alaska. I have this memory of my mother clutching a telegraph in her hands and shouting at me that we were going to be rich!

‘Except that we hadn’t reckoned on the Colonel’s chicanery and greed. I am sorry, so very sorry, Mrs ffolkes – Miss Selina – but I swear on my blessed mother’s grave I’m telling you exactly how it was. Just forty-eight hours after that first telegraph arrived we received a second one. It turned out that my father had plunged headlong into a ravine and broken his back.

‘Maybe it was an accident and maybe it wasn’t. To this day I don’t know and I’m not accusing anyone. What I do know is that, while Miles Murgatroyd was being transported to a filthy, vermin-infested hospital tent near Nome, Roger Kydd had already filed a claim to the gold-mine in his name alone. He then sold that claim on to some big mining outfit, pocketed the proceeds and vanished off the face of the earth.’

‘What did your father do then?’ asked Selina.

I paused for a few moments before speaking again.

‘What did he do then? He died. He died not because his back was broken but because his spirit was broken. Oh, he was no spring chicken. He’d been globe-trotting for nigh on quarter of a century and he knew the kind of place the world was and the kind of people who lived in it. But he and the Colonel had become inseparable. That’s what killed him.’

‘And then …?’ said Evadne Mount.

‘My mother did what she could to claw back her rights – our rights. But she discovered that, in the US of A, if you
don’t have money you also don’t have rights. Over there, rights are something you buy, and they don’t come cheap.

‘So, since she’d married “beneath her”, in the horrible expression, and she’d been disinherited by her bigoted Baptist pastor of a father, she had to bring me up on her own. She embroidered smocks in a Frisco sweatshop till her eyeballs were as raw as sandpaper. Then, when she couldn’t do that any more, she took in other people’s laundry. Then, when she couldn’t do that either, we ended up in the poorhouse. And you have to know that, in the California of those days, the poorhouse wasn’t just a metaphor. It’s where the two of us really lived for three years. Till she died.