The Act of Roger Murgatroyd Read online

  ‘You must forgive me if I start off on a personal note,’ she said with the complacent tone of someone who doesn’t care a jot whether she’s forgiven or not. ‘But if there’s one thing in this world I flatter myself I know how to do well, it’s tell a story, and, assuming none of you minds, I’d like to tell this remarkable story of ours in my own words, at my own pace and without omitting any of my own – rare – misjudgments.

  ‘It really has been the weirdest experience in my life, an experience that, had it not involved two brutal crimes, one of them committed against a close friend, I might even have enjoyed. Just think! Here we are, a group of suspects gathered together in the library to hear how and why a murder was perpetrated! It’s a scene I’ve written so many times in my novels. Yet if any of you had told me that one day I myself wouldn’t just be present at such a scene but would actually be playing the role of presiding sleuth, I’d have said you wanted your head examined!

  ‘Of course,’ she went on, directing her gaze on each of her listeners in turn to ensure that not one of them was paying her less than the attention she believed she deserved, ‘like my own fictional detective, Alexis Baddeley, I’m no more than an amateur. And, as I don’t have to remind you, I’ve never once had Alexis solve a locked-room crime. I like my whodunits to keep at least one foot on terra firma.

  ‘I’ve never had any truck with murder methods involving ropes and ladders and pulleys and doorkeys yanked through keyholes on strings which somehow succeed in combusting of their own accord and murder victims found stabbed in the middle of the desert with nary a footprint in the sand, coming or going, or else hanging from a beam in a padlocked garret with no sign of a chair or a table or any item of furniture they could have climbed up on and not even a damp patch on the floorboards to suggest the murderer had used a block of ice which had since melted. I can’t be doing with such contrivances. For me they’re too darned fangled, to borrow the Colonel’s delightful coinage.

  ‘Anyway, John Dickson Carr has cornered that particular market and what I say is, if somebody’s unbeatable, why bother trying to beat him?

  ‘Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away here, and I know you all think I’m a ghoulish old pussy, but I am coming to the point. And that point is that we were all so hypnotised by the method of Raymond’s murder – a method none of us dreamt could ever exist outside a book – we just couldn’t see the larger picture.

  ‘Locked-room murders, you know, aren’t unlike chess end-games. What I mean by that is that they bear about as much relation to real murders, murders committed by real people in the real world, as those end-games in the illustrated magazines – you know, a Knight and Pawn versus an unprotected Bishop to mate in five moves – well, as much as those end-games bear to the real strategies and configurations of a real game of chess. It’s something my dear friend Gilbert has always understood, which is why he’s the nonpareil genius he is.’

  From the blank expressions that flitted from one face to another like a contagious yawn, it was clear nobody knew which Gilbert she was referring to. And since it was equally clear nobody liked to say so, she explained:

  ‘Gilbert Chesterton. What makes his Father Brown stories so unique is precisely that they are end-games and they don’t pretend to be anything but. By confining his clever little narratives to a dozen pages, he avoids having to articulate all that laborious plotline padding that a novelist like me needs to justify the dénouement. And his readers have the satisfying impression of being whisked straight to the climax of a full-length whodunit – the only part of it, to be honest, that really interests them – without having had to plough through the tedious exposition.

  ‘The point, Miss Mount,’ said Trubshawe, ‘the point!’

  ‘As I’ve said many times before in this very house,’ she went on, conspicuously ignoring his interruption, ‘if you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.’

  ‘That’s all very enlightening, I’m sure,’ Trubshawe interrupted her again in a voice that was both suave and gruff. ‘But when we agreed to join you in the library, it wasn’t to hear your opinions on the difference between factual and fictional murders – opinions which, as you yourself have admitted, you’ve already voiced many times. Just where is this leading to?’

  Evadne Mount frowned.

  ‘Do learn to be patient with me, Chief-Inspector,’ she replied gravely. ‘I shall get there. I invariably do.’

  She took another, more confident puff on her cigarette.

  ‘So there we were – there I was – confronted with two murders, each of which was very different from the other in its method. One was, as the Chief-Inspector would put it, a “fictional” murder, patently committed by somebody who’d read a lot of whodunits – though not, I repeat, any of mine. And the other was a “real” murder, an attempt at a real murder, the kind of murder which is committed every day in the real world.

  ‘For the first murder, Raymond Gentry’s, there were almost too many motives. Apart from Selina here, everybody in our little party was secretly, and in some instances not in the least secretly, relieved to see him put out of commission once and for all.

  ‘And the initial mistake I made was to persuade myself that even among such a wide and motley range of suspects there were distinctions to be drawn. Nearly all of us had been the object of Gentry’s malicious little smears. (There were exceptions and I’ll come to these in a minute.) Which implied that, theoretically, nearly all of us had a good reason for wishing him dead. Nevertheless, what struck me initially, I repeat, was the existence, as I saw it, of two separate categories of suspects.

  ‘There were those, on the one hand, for whom Raymond’s revelations would have been utterly catastrophic were they to have turned up in The Trombone. Cora, for instance. As she herself was honest enough to point out to us, her career would be ruined if word, instead of mere rumour, began to circulate about her dependency on … on, shall we say, certain substances.

  ‘Now, now, Cora, you don’t have to look daggers at me, I fancy I know what you’re itching to reply. Yes, it’s perfectly so, there was one other such suspect, and that was me. My books, I unblushingly confess, have a vast readership, and even though they’re all about murder and greed and hatred and revenge they’re really rather genteel fictions read mostly by rather genteel people. If these genteel readers of mine were suddenly to find out that – well, I’d prefer to pass over in silence something you already all know about me – but, yes, I can imagine what effect that would have on my sales.’

  Having manfully grasped the nettle of her own past sins, she was ready to launch herself back into the fray.

  ‘There were also those, however, who, distressing as it must have been to hear once private squalors publicly aired, had nothing to fear from The Trombone. You, Clem, for one.

  ‘It’s true, unfortunately, that you played fast-and-loose with the facts of your wartime experience, and this has unquestionably been a Christmas you’ll want to forget, and want all of us likewise to forget. Yet you yourself, if I remember aright, actually acknowledged that, whatever warped amusement Raymond Gentry took in distilling his poison, the yellow press was never going to give a tinker’s curse for the white – or off-white – lies of a clergyman in an extremely modest living on Dartmoor.

  ‘Then we come to our friends the Rolfes. It can’t have been pleasant for either of you to see years and years of pretending to shrug off all those whispers as to what precisely transpired between Madge and some swarthy gigolo in Monte Carlo or ho
w Henry botched what ought to have been a routine operation, curtailing not only a baby’s life but his own career along with it. It can’t have been pleasant, I say, to have all your face-saving efforts brought to naught in one fell swoop by Gentry’s hateful muckspreading. But, again, like the Wattises, you were never prominent enough, and you’re not prominent enough now, to interest the type of individual who’d read a piece of toilet paper like The Trombone.’

  If, so far, all those present had listened more or less uncomplainingly to Evadne Mount argue her case, it wasn’t that they were now serenely at ease with the notion that the most ignominious facts of their lives had become public knowledge. Each time she mentioned one of their names, there was a start, an audible gasp, even, on Mrs Wattis’s part, a stifled tear. But the argument was so lucidly presented that, despite the renewed humiliations it brought in its wake, it felt like not only a duty but almost a pleasure to hear it out. What’s more, the tension that had been screwed up so tight over the preceding thirty-six hours had had to find a release, and release of a kind was what she was slowly but surely giving her fellow guests.

  ‘So you might have supposed, as I did at first,’ she went on, ‘that the only two legitimate suspects were Cora and myself. Who, after all, would commit a murder just because some dog-eared old dirt was going to be dished up in a village of a hundred or so inhabitants?

  ‘Well, my answer to that would be – just about anybody! Oh, I saw the horror in your faces when Gentry started firing his lethal little darts, not just horror but homicidal loathing! And I soon realised how wrong I’d been in assuming that the craving for vengeance had to be commensurate with the degree of exposure.

  ‘Frankly, it was a mistake I of all people should never have made. If I’ve set several of my books in a Home Counties village, it’s because it offers the writer of whodunits a more fertile breeding-ground for murder than the most insalubrious back alley in Limehouse! You want to know what a sink of iniquity really looks like? I’ll tell you. It has picturesque thatched cottages and Ye Olde Tea Shoppes and Women’s Institutes and Conservative Associations and Bring-and-Buy Sales and Morris Dancing on the village green and Charity Fêtes in the Vicarage garden –’

  ‘Oh come, Evadne,’ the Vicar pooh-poohed mutinously, ‘there you do exaggerate …’

  ‘Sorry again, old bean, but I’m afraid that’s bilge. You’ll find this hard to credit, but I’ve actually had a bad review or two – there was one in the Daily Clarion I won’t forget in a hurry,’ she snarled, baring her fangish false teeth, ‘yet not once has a reviewer criticised one of my novels for painting too dark and malignant a picture of rural life.

  ‘Then there’s my fan mail. Most of it’s not from paying customers, who evidently believe that, having forked out seven-and-six for a book, they have no further obligation to its author, but from readers in villages who obtain my whodunits from their local circulating-library. I should let you read that fan mail. I recall one letter. It was from a little old lady in some idyllic hamlet in the Cotswolds telling me how she suspected the district nurse of slowly poisoning her crippled husband, and the sole basis of her accusation was that she’d chanced to catch the poor woman borrowing a copy of The Proof of the Pudding, which has exactly the same premise. And there was another, from somebody who’d read The Timing of the Stew and who was persuaded the stationmaster had read it as well, since his wife had vanished, supposedly run off with the coalman, but she, my fan, she knew better, she knew he’d buried both of them under the station’s ornamental rockery.

  ‘In the Detection Club we once coined a name for this sort of macabre village – Mayhem Parva. Well, I seriously doubt there’s a single village in England’s green and pleasant land that isn’t a potential Mayhem Parva!

  ‘So, Vicar, no, I don’t exaggerate. I’m taking your case only as a general example, you understand, but it’s my belief that a mild-mannered man of the cloth, as I know you to be, would be just as likely to commit murder to prevent his name from being besmirched at the local British Legion dinner-dance as a film star would be to prevent his or hers from being splashed across the front page of some nationally distributed scandal mag.

  ‘And what that meant, of course, was that I immediately found myself right back where I started. I was obliged to regard nearly everybody present as equally suspect.

  ‘Now for the exceptions. There was Selina, first of all, the only one of us to mourn Raymond’s passing. She may have seen the light now – let’s not forget the row they had in the attic – but I don’t think any of us would have questioned the feelings she formerly had for the man. I ruled her out at once. She, it seemed to me, couldn’t conceivably have killed him.

  ‘Nor, I state without fear of contradiction, could her mother. I say that not only because she’s one of my oldest and dearest and truest friends but because I know she’s incapable of harming a fly. She’s certainly incapable of harming a fly by trapping it in a locked room, swatting it to death, then managing to get out of said locked room again without opening either its door or its window!’

  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?’