The Act of Roger Murgatroyd Read online

  Even if Don had been listening to every word she had uttered, it was obvious from what he himself said next that only one of those words had truly registered.

  ‘Selina,’ he whispered, ‘you called me –’

  ‘“Darling”? Yes, I did. Do you mind?’

  ‘Mind? You’re asking me if I mind? Darling, darling, darling Selina, I’ll mind only if you don’t call me darling! From now on, I’ll expect every sentence you say to me, every single question you ask me, to end in darling! I won’t ever be content with just Don. Matter of fact, I never, ever want to hear you pronounce my name again. From now on, for you, I’ve only got one name – darling.’

  Selina laughed, a high, bright, tinkly laugh, like someone grinning aloud. It was the first time she’d laughed since the body had been discovered. Maybe even the first time since her arrival at the house.

  ‘Why, Don – I mean, darling! darling! – how eloquent you’ve become.’

  ‘Now you’re making fun of me.’

  ‘No, no, really I’m not. I thought that was a very poetic little speech.’

  ‘Oh, if you take me at all, Selina, you’ll have to take me as I am. I don’t kid myself I’m any kinda poet.’

  ‘Darling, please stop running yourself down. My – well, my infatuation, I suppose I have to call it, with Ray – it wasn’t really him, you know – to be honest, I’m no longer all that sure I ever actually liked him – it was the world he represented.’

  She perused the semi-circle formed by her parents’ guests.

  ‘You see the sort of milieu I come from. I do adore every one of them. Most of all Mummy and Daddy, naturally, but also Evie and Cora and the Vicar and Cynthia and … Goshsakes, they’re all frightfully sweet and everything, but they’re so much older, so much more settled, than I am. I was beginning to feel I was a prisoner in this house. I craved life and experience and adventure, and Ray opened doors for me, doors into worlds whose existence I knew about only from books and mags and films.’

  ‘You do realise, my darling,’ said Don, comically solemn in his youthful ardour, ‘that I can’t open those doors for you. They’re just as closed to me as they were to you. And seeing what effect they had on you – like your using the word “milieu”, that’s such a Raymondish word! – I mean to keep them closed.’

  ‘I do realise it. And it’s because of that I love you, not in spite of it. That’s what you’ve got to understand.’

  ‘Oh, I know I’m a colourless character, a bit of a cookie cut-out figure.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You have absolute oodles of It.’

  ‘It? What’s It?’

  ‘Haven’t you read your Elinor Glyn?’

  ‘Why, no, I –’

  ‘What? You never read It? It’s a modern classic.’

  ‘I’m not really the bookish type, you know, Selina.’

  ‘It means sex appeal, you egregious darling!’

  Don’s eyes opened wide enough to swallow up the whole visible world.

  ‘Hot dog! You – you think I’ve got sex appeal?’

  ‘I’m telling you, oodles of it, you clod, you mad, wonderful clod!’

  It was all too much for him.

  ‘Oh gee – oh gee!’ he stuttered, overwhelmed by the speed at which his luck seemed to have turned. ‘And I always thought I was just, you know, tall, dark and one-dimensional. My only excuse was that that’s how I was made by my Creator.’

  ‘And He did a wonderful job. He,’ she repeated, before adding archly, ‘or She.’

  ‘She?’ Don jovially echoed her. ‘A female God, eh? Should I take that to mean you’ve become a – a – whaddya call ’em?’

  ‘What do you call what?’

  ‘You know, those harpies who chain themselves to the Parliament gates and wave their umbrellas in the air and proclaim emancipation for women?’

  ‘Feminists?’

  ‘Feminists, yeah! So you’re a feminist now, are you?’

  ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ said Selina, a roguish smile playing on her lips.

  ‘Well, don’t worry, I’ll soon cure you of that nonsense. There’s only one person who’s gonna be allowed to wear the pants in our marriage and I promise you it ain’t going to be the little wifey!’

  ‘But, Don, women already have the vote.’

  ‘Not in my home they don’t! Besides, you’re too beautiful to be a feminist.’

  ‘Oh, you dope, you darling, you sweet, sweet peachereno!’ giggled Selina. ‘I never realised you could be so masterful!’

  ‘Hot dog!’ Don cried again.

  This time, however, he truly did cry out, causing everybody in the room to interrupt their own conversations and stare at him in amusement.

  He blushed to the roots of his hair.

  ‘Sorry, I –’ he began to say in an embarrassed voice.

  But he never did manage to complete his apology. Suddenly, at the french window, Mary ffolkes buried her face in her hands and burst into loud, heaving sobs.

  Everybody looked at one another – which is another way of saying that nobody knew where to look.

  Selina was the first to respond. Followed close behind by Dr Rolfe, she rushed over to the window.

  ‘Why, Mummy, what is it?’ she cried out. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  As Selina cradled her, Mary ffolkes tried to speak, but hiccoughing sobs were shaking her whole frame.

  ‘Now, now, Mary, my dear,’ murmured Rolfe in his dulcet bedside voice, deftly unpinning the Cairngorm brooch which held the collar of her taffeta dress in a secure clasp, ‘you must try to remain calm.’

  Sliding a protective arm around her shoulders, he whispered softly to Selina:

  ‘Let’s get her over to the sofa. She needs to lie down for a few minutes. I’m afraid what’s happened has been just too much for her. I might have known the strain would tell. She’s not as young as she used to be. Her heart, you know …’

  Together, propping her up, they began to walk across the room. Already half-way, however, the Colonel’s wife had not only steadied herself but was attempting to tidy up the strands of hair that were flopping over her forehead, a nervous tic familiar to everybody who knew her well.

  ‘Thank you, but I’m really all right,’ she mumbled almost inaudibly. ‘Do please forgive me, I’m being such a silly-billy.’

  When they reached the sofa, Selina hurriedly plumped up a cushion and rested her mother’s head against it, while Rolfe, stretching her two legs out lengthwise, removed her shoes.

  ‘Feeling better now?’ asked Selina, anxiously scrutinising the reddened, tear-streaked features.

  ‘Much better, thank you. I’m going to be fine. Just let me catch my breath.’

  While he almost surreptitiously pressed his thumb on his patient’s wrist to take her pulse, Rolfe said, ‘Now, Mary dear, may I ask if something – I mean to say, something specific – brought on this little attack?’

  ‘It’s – well, to tell the truth, it’s Roger. I’m so worried.’

  ‘Worried, Mummy?’ asked Selina, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  In Mary ffolkes’s reply there could be detected an uncharacteristic trace of bitterness.

  ‘You see – you haven’t noticed. You’ve all become so preoccupied again with your own affairs. And why not? I can’t blame you for that. But not one of you seems to have noticed that Roger has been outside for a long time – really a lot longer than is good for him, particularly in weather like this. It’s started snowing again, quite heavily. I’m a born worrier, I know, but … Oh, forgive me for being so foolish!’

  Trubshawe immediately trained his gimlet eye on the grandfather clock. It was one-forty.

  ‘At exactly what time did he leave?’ he asked Mary ffolkes.

  ‘But that’s just it,’ she mumbled, wiping away her tears with a lacy handkerchief which she drew from the sleeve of her cardigan – her cardie, as she invariably called it. ‘That’s what’s so frustrating. I don’t kn
ow. I just don’t know. It was just Roger off on one of his constitutionals. He’s taken a walk at least once every day of his life. Except – except it seems to me this time he’s been out much longer than usual. I’m sure I’m getting into a dither for nothing, but we women do have our instincts, you know …’

  ‘Anyone else note what time the Colonel left?’

  ‘Well, sir –’

  ‘Yes, Farrar?’

  ‘You recall, he wanted someone to pop down to the kitchen to check up on the servants?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, one of the kitchen walls has a large bay window and, if you stand beside it listening to all the below-stairs gabbing –’

  ‘Yes, yes, get on.’

  ‘Well, it enables you to see anybody leaving the house. And after about fifteen minutes the Colonel did walk past the window, just by the monkey-puzzle tree, with your dog Tobermory trotting along behind him – and it was exactly twelve-twenty by the kitchen clock.’

  ‘Twelve-twenty, eh?’ Trubshawe paused for a moment of reflection. ‘That would mean he’s been on the moors for quite a bit above an hour.’

  He turned again to Mary ffolkes.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs ffolkes, but you understand I’m not what you would call conversant with your husband’s ambulatory habits. Is that a normal length of time for his walk? Or too long? Or what?’

  ‘Oh dear, Inspector, I really couldn’t say. Obviously, it’s never occurred to me to time one of Roger’s walks. What can I tell you? I just feel in my bones he’s been away too long.’

  ‘Now, Mary,’ Evadne Mount said to her cheerfully, ‘you really are worrying about nothing at all, you know. I’m certain Roger’s out there taking a long, vigorous walk to clear his head and, what’s more, enjoying every blessed minute of it. I also believe he’ll literally laugh his head off when he learns how alarmed you were. I can almost hear that laugh of his now.’

  ‘For once I’m in agreement with Miss Mount,’ Trubshawe nodded sagely. ‘It’s perfectly understandable you should be prey to all sorts of anxieties, what with everything that’s taken place here in the last couple of days. And you probably think your husband’s been absent longer than usual for no better reason than that you yourself have been looking out for him. Aren’t you forgetting the proverbial kettle?’

  Mary ffolkes blinked.

  ‘The proverbial kettle?’

  ‘I mean, about watching it boil,’ Trubshawe explained.

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. When you put it like that …’ she added doubtfully.

  ‘But that said and done,’ he went on, ‘I would like to see you have your mind put to rest. So this is what I propose. A small group of us men – you, Don, if you would, Farrar and me – Rolfe here will stay behind in case you have any further need of him, Mrs ffolkes – we’ll collect some torchlights and go out looking for the Colonel. Farrar ought to have some idea of the direction in which he tends to take his walks, so I’m pretty confident we’ll meet him on his way back, possibly even strolling up the driveway as we open the front door. Whatever – at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he’s no longer out there on his own. Now how does that sound?’

  ‘Oh thank you, Inspector,’ said Mary ffolkes, smiling palely. ‘I know I’m being needlessly alarmist, but – yes, I would be awfully grateful.’

  ‘Good, good,’ replied Trubshawe. ‘Then shall we get going, men – Don, Farrar?’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Evadne Mount declared.

  The Chief-Inspector instantly negatived this suggestion.

  ‘I won’t hear of it, Miss Mount. This is a man’s job, and your place is here with the other ladies.’

  ‘There you go again! And it’s all pish-posh. I’m as much a man as you are, Trubshawe. Besides, there’s nothing for me to do here – Cora could tell her stories to the back of the Clapham omnibus and never know the difference. No, no, no, you can like it or you can lump it, but I’m coming with you.’

  And she did.

  Chapter Twelve

  The landscape appeared even less inviting than when the Colonel had set out on his constitutional. In fact, it looked as though God had taken a giant eraser to the horizon and simply rubbed it out like a blackboard – or whiteboard. It was now snowing heavily again, and the only sound to be heard, except for the whine of the ebbing wind, was a powdery creaking underfoot. Nothing, however, could have left a less Christmassy impression than the eerily virginal moorland that afternoon. Its whiteness was the whiteness of death, its pallor the hideous pallor of a cadaver.

  Even the torchlights which cast their yellow haloes at everyone’s feet illuminated only the stark fact that there was nothing to illuminate. You half-expected the startled eyes of some feral creature to be trapped blinking in their beams – but no. Nothing. There was no such creature to be seen.

  Nor – and this was a thought which had no doubt already crossed the mind of everyone in the search party, though no one had shown any readiness to put it into words – nor was the Colonel to be seen. Trubshawe’s parting reassurance to Mary ffolkes, that he might well encounter her husband walking back up the driveway of ffolkes Manor on his way home, had proved, after no more than a few minutes, to have been hopelessly optimistic. Only under the shelter of the monkey-puzzle tree were Roger ffolkes’s unobliterated footprints, preceding Tobermory’s by a couple of yards, visible to the naked eye. But there was only one set of his prints and they were headed in only one direction – away from the house.

  It was the Chief-Inspector who eventually broke the silence.

  ‘The cold getting to you, Miss Mount?’

  The authoress was attired in a ratty, moth-eaten tweed coat, one that had seen many better days, a thick woollen scarf wound several times about her neck and the matelot’s tricorne hat which had become her trademark in London’s literary world. This outré ensemble assuredly kept the freezing temperature at bay, but it also gave her a troubling resemblance to one of those madwomen who can be found peddling boxes of matches on the forecourt of Charing Cross Station. Not that she gave a fig about that.

  ‘Not at all, not at all!’ she protested in a muffled voice still loud enough to echo over the moors. ‘I like the cold.’

  ‘You like the cold?’

  ‘You heard me. And please don’t give me one of those condescendingly incredulous looks of yours that we’ve all had to get used to. I know I’m an author and therefore, for someone like you, an eccentric. But there are lots of us who simply hate the sun, who hate being drenched in sweat. Yes, sweat. I call it sweat because that’s what it is. I can’t speak for you, Chief-Inspector, but I sweat. I don’t perspire.’

  ‘Well, well, well. So it’s true what they always say. There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

  Don, enveloped in the racoon coat which had caused a minor sensation when he first arrived at ffolkes Manor, turned, mystified, to the Chief-Inspector.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t get that – what you just said.’

  ‘What I just said? Ah, yes, of course. Well, I don’t wonder you didn’t get it. It’s an old English expression. You can bet your bottom dollar it dates back to Chaucer, just as all those old expressions seem to do, even the smutty ones. “Nowt so queer as folk” – it means there’s nothing in the world as strange as people themselves.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You mean, like Miss Mount preferring cold to heat?’

  ‘That’s right. I love the sun myself. With the missus – God rest her soul – I used to go caravanning every August in Torbay. I’d just soak it up. How about you?’

  ‘Oh yeah, me too. But then, you see, I’m from California.’

  ‘California? Is that so?’

  ‘Yeah. Los Angeles. Nice little town. Full of orange groves and movie studios. Ever been there?’

  ‘Furthest I’ve been is Dieppe. Day trip. Couldn’t see what all the hubbub was about.’

  ‘You, Miss Mount?’ asked Don.

  ‘Evadne, dear. Please call me Evadne.’

  �
�Evadne.’

  ‘That wasn’t too difficult, was it?’ she said sweetly. ‘Now, what is it you’d like to know?’

  ‘Los Angeles. Have you ever visited it?’

  ‘No, I never have. Though, as it happens, I did set one of my whodunits there. I genned up on the place by reading Dashiell Hammett. You familiar with his stories? Not my cup of tea, as you might expect, but he knows his stuff all right.’

  The pause that followed was motivated less by any reluctance on Don’s part to enquire about the plot of the whodunit in question than by his expectation that a précis of that plot was going to be volunteered anyway, whether he solicited it or not.

  For once, though, the précis was unforthcoming, so he finally said:

  ‘I’d be interested to hear what it’s about. Your whodunit, I mean.’

  ‘We-ell, I don’t know,’ answered Evadne Mount, glancing at the Chief-Inspector. ‘I have the distinct impression our friend from Scotland Yard finds me a bit too style-cramping whenever I talk about my work.’

  ‘Oh, please. Don’t mind me,’ said Trubshawe, batting his two gloved hands together while striding onwards over the snow. ‘You never have before. Besides, it’ll help to pass the time.’

  ‘Right you are,’ she said, needing no further encouragement. ‘Well, the book was called Murder Murder on the Wall and its central character was an aged, loony silent film actress loosely based on Theda Bara – you remember, the star of A Fool There Was? – well, you won’t remember, Don, you’re not nearly old enough, but she’ll certainly have set off a palpitation or two in the Inspector’s manly young breast.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been easy for you to create a silent character,’ Trubshawe, not missing a beat, slyly interposed.

  ‘This film star,’ she continued, declining to rise to his bait, ‘lives a reclusive existence inside a deliriously creaky Bel Air mansion with only her incontinent Pekinese dog for company. Because she can no longer bear to contemplate the ravages of her own physical decline, she’s had all the mirrors in the house turned to the wall and even has a cleaning lady, what we in England call a char, come in every day to dust the furniture – though not the way you think. In fact, the cleaner’s job is to coat with extra dust any shiny surface in which there’s still a chance of her mistress’s appearance being reflected.