The Act of Roger Murgatroyd Read online

  ‘Oh dear, I – I just don’t know whether –’

  ‘Questions,’ pursued Trubshawe, who was no longer prepared to be put off his stride by the clergyman’s interjections, ‘that, had I been assigned to this case in an official capacity, I would be asking you teat-a-teat, as the Frogs say, in the privacy of your own home or in a police station. But since everyone, you again included, fell in with the Doctor’s proposal that my interrogation, which, I repeat, is wholly informal –’

  Now it was Cora Rutherford’s turn to interrupt.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Trubshawe, we know all that!’ she snapped. ‘Do stop blethering, will you!’

  ‘Patience, dear lady, patience,’ Trubshawe calmly retorted. ‘When it comes, as it will, to your own turn, you may not be quite so desirous to have things rushed. The fact is that my presence is extremely irregular, and I wish to make sure you all understand that no one is actually, legally, obliged to undergo questioning here and now.’

  ‘But, I tell you, we do understand!’

  ‘Also,’ he went on unperturbed, ‘that, if you do agree to be questioned, then, notwithstanding the fact that you aren’t under oath, there’s simply no point to the exercise if you end by telling me less than the unvarnished truth – or at least what you sincerely believe to be the unvarnished truth. Aren’t I right? You do see what I’m driving at, Vicar?’

  Clem Wattis bristled at what he clearly felt was a slander on his character.

  ‘Well, really! I must protest – I really must lodge a protest, Chief-Inspector. You appear to be singling me out in an offensively gratuitous fashion!’

  ‘Please, please, Mr Wattis, let me assure you. No offence was intended. If I put it to you in particular, it’s only because you’re the one who’s going to set the ball rolling.’

  The Vicar was now so flustered that beads of sweat glistened atop his bald head and his owlish horn-rimmed glasses were starting to cloud over.

  ‘Oh well, if you – if you insist. After all, as a man of the cloth, I’m bound to tell the truth anyway. I mean, I’m bound by a higher authority than yours.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, I quite understand. So shall we …?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ said the Vicar unhappily.

  ‘Good,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘Now – I’d like to start by inviting you to relate your own experience of the Christmas dinner party. The way Miss Mount described it – that, for you, was substantially accurate, was it?’

  Clem Wattis shot a quick, helpless glance at his wife. She said nothing, but, with nervously rocking little nods of her head, appeared to be encouraging him to speak up. It couldn’t have been easy for her, however, knowing as she did what was in store for him, and her lips were pursed so tight you felt that, if she were to relax them, her whole face would unravel.

  ‘Well, Inspector – oh dear, I keep getting it wrong, don’t I? – I mean, Chief-Inspector –’

  ‘That’s quite all right, Reverend. As I say, I’m retired, so my rank is only a courtesy. Please go on.’

  ‘Well, Evadne certainly – she certainly “caught” Raymond Gentry. I mean, I know one should never speak ill of the dead – indeed, a man of my vocation shouldn’t speak ill even of the living – but I am only human, after all, I don’t pretend to be saintlier than any of my flock, and I cannot deny I took an instant dislike to that young man. There, I’ve said it!’

  ‘An instant dislike, eh? Mostly, I suppose, for the same reasons as Miss Mount?’

  ‘Absolutely. So sad, too. Our little gathering was just getting going when he turned up with Selina. Then the atmosphere became quite inspissated.’

  Trubshawe blinked.

  ‘Did it now? Can you give me a “for instance”?’

  ‘I can give you many “for instances”. Right from the start Gentry insisted on letting us know that he was among us only because poor, benighted Selina wanted him to meet her people.

  ‘Now, no one could be fonder than I am of Selina ffolkes, but she has, I fear – and I’ve had occasion to say so to her face, so I’m not telling tales out of school – she has never been too fastidious in her choice of male companions.’

  Then, realising that Don was glaring at him, he added a hurriedly improvised postscript:

  ‘Er … that’s to say, not until now.’

  Mopping his brow with a handkerchief which had been discreetly handed to him by his ever-watchful wife, he sought to get back on track.

  ‘Gentry simply couldn’t resist driving home to us how much more amusing – no, no, no, not amusing, penetrating – that was the word – Evadne hit it on the nose, he used that word “penetrating” so often it, well, it penetrated right into my brain, giving me quite a migraine, something I –’

  ‘Vicar,’ said Trubshawe, ‘if you would …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘… stick to the point?’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, Inspector,’ said the Vicar querulously, ‘but, as you’ll see, this is the point. If his prattle hadn’t given me one of my splitting headaches, along the whole right side of my face, I might have been able to adopt a more benevolent, more truly Christian, attitude towards him. I might have tried harder to feign interest in his addle-pated talk about the “crowd” he moved in, all those vegetarians, Egyptologists, fakirs, Cubists, Russian dancers, Christian Scientists, amateur photographers, Theosophists and goodness knows what else! Now there’s a “for instance” for you.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Theosophists. Evie omitted to mention how much Gentry went on about conducting séances at the Planchette, making contact with Those Who Have Passed Over, you know, all that silly spiritualistic hanky-panky. In his foetid little mind he realised that, as an Anglican clergyman, I couldn’t possibly approve of such pagan foofaraw, so he taunted me and taunted me and I could see him, with a sly, lethal glint in his eye, simply waiting for me to rise to the bait.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Inspector, I must tell you that even in this agreeable little backwater of ours I’ve been buttonholed by potty-mouthed disbelievers before, and I find that the only way to handle them is to refuse to descend to their level. So I said to him, “I know what you’re up to, young man. I can put two and two together.”’

  ‘What was his answer to that?’

  ‘Oh, he was awfully clever – as usual. “Yes,” he said, in that nasal whinny of his which drove us all to distraction, “you can put two and two together – and come up with something too, too ridiculous!”’

  ‘I see …’ said the Chief-Inspector, suppressing a smile. ‘So you think he was being deliberately rude to you?’

  ‘I don’t think, I know. He never let a chance go by to mock my most deeply held beliefs. When the Colonel passed some blameless remark about the Great War – you remember, Roger – about how we’d stemmed the tide against the Hun, I observed that being born British meant that one had drawn first prize in the Lottery of Life. Gentry being incapable of offering any plausible argument against that, he simply scoffed. And I mean scoffed!

  ‘You know, Inspector, until I met him I never really knew the meaning of that word. I mean to say, I know what it looks like, what it physically looks like, when somebody sneers, for example, or frowns or scowls. But scoffs? Well, Raymond Gentry truly, physically, did scoff. He made an extremely indecent noise by blowing saliva through his lips. Obscene little bubbles were actually visible between his front teeth. Ah, I see you don’t believe me, but – Evie? Aren’t I speaking the truth?’

  ‘Why, yes, Clem, I never thought of it like that,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Yet you’re right. Gentry really did give a new meaning to the word “scoff”. I assure you, Trubshawe, Clem’s made quite an insightful remark there.’

  ‘Why, thank you, Evie,’ said the Vicar, unaccustomed to compliments from somebody generally so parsimonious with them.

  ‘And it’s a remark, if I’m not mistaken,’ said Trubshawe, ‘that brings us to the very crux of the matter.’

  ‘Th
e crux, you say?’

  ‘I mean the War. You just referred to the Great War.’

  The Vicar blanched. Here it was. Here and now was what he dreaded most. If ever a face was an open book, it was his at that instant.

  ‘You’ll recall, Vicar,’ the policeman continued, ‘that the first line of Gentry’s notes read: REV – WAR. And, later, Miss Mount made mention of what she called aspersions, aspersions that Gentry cast on your war record. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Er … yes,’ said the Vicar, ‘that – that is correct.’

  A few seconds elapsed during which neither he nor Trubshawe nor anybody else spoke. Like a group of miscreant schoolboys who, waiting in a morose huddle to be punished by their headmaster, anxiously scrutinise the features of the first boy to emerge from his study for any external clues as to the nature of that punishment, the ffolkeses and their guests were probably thinking as much of their own future plight as of the Vicar’s present one.

  ‘Would you care to elucidate?’ Trubshawe finally asked.

  ‘Well, I – I – I don’t really see how …’

  ‘Come now, sir, we did all agree, did we not? The unvarnished truth? So shall we have it?’

  The wretched clergyman, at whom seemingly not even his wife could for the moment bear to look, realised there was no longer any escape.

  ‘Farrar?’

  ‘Yes, Vicar?’

  ‘I wonder if – if I might have a glass of water? My throat seems a little tight. Constricted, somehow.’

  ‘Why, certainly, Vicar.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  A moment later, having taken a few modest sips, he was ready to continue – or as ready as he’d ever be.

  ‘Well, you know, I – I took up my post here in 1919 – in January, was it? Or February – oh well, I don’t suppose it really matters.’

  ‘No, it really doesn’t,’ said the Chief-Inspector drily. ‘Just go on.’

  ‘Anyway, it was in one or other of the early months of 1919, so not too long after the end of the War, and my predecessor in the parish had been a young man, relatively young, but nevertheless much liked, I might almost say much loved, by his parishioners. All the more so because he’d been killed in action – during one of the last Big Pushes. I ought to explain, too, that he’d been so keen to do his bit for King and Country he’d actually concealed the fact that he was a clergyman and enlisted as a common soldier. Then he was posted to the front, where he died quite the hero’s death. He was mentioned in dispatches, you know, and there was vague talk of a posthumous George Cross.

  ‘In any event, when I arrived here to take up my living in 1919, I found that his presence, if I may put it that way, was still very, very powerful. Not that there was any resentment against me, I hasten to add – well, not to start with – it was just that the locals hadn’t forgotten the shining example of his courage. I fear I must have struck them as something of a letdown by comparison.

  ‘That would certainly explain why, when Cynthia and I moved in, the parish was at first a trifle standoffish, a trifle “sniffy”. There was, in particular, a Mrs de Cazalis. She’s our local grande dame and she’d evidently been very “in” with my predecessor. Harker, the village’s odd-job man, had a nickname for her – Vicar’s Pet. You know, like the kind of schoolchild who gets ragged for being Teacher’s Pet?

  ‘Well, it soon became clear that she expected things to go on just as they had before. My predecessor had been a bachelor, you see, and whilst you might expect that to have counted as a point against him, it had in reality turned out to be the reverse. All the local ladies – now, Inspector, I wouldn’t like to suggest that they were all busybodies – but all the local ladies who participated, don’t you know, who organised our Charity Sales and Mystery Tours and Charabanc Outings for the Old Folk, well, they were absolutely in seventh heaven that there was no interfering vicar’s wife to run these things, which is traditionally the case.

  ‘Hence it was, at least in the first few months, a rather lonely life for us. It’s a lonely part of the country, anyway, and we had problems making new friends, as we tend to do. So, without thinking of the possible consequences, Cynthia eventually elected to busy herself with all the usual chores of a vicar’s wife and, I’m afraid, only succeeded in putting a few noses out of joint. There was even, at last, a sort of showdown – is that what it’s called? – a showdown in the Vicarage.

  ‘I can still see them all sitting in our little front room, rattling their teacups in their laps, and after some pointed comments on the very exceptional calibre of my predecessor, on his heroism, all of that, Mrs de Cazalis turned to me and enquired, bold as brass, “And what did you do in the Great War, Vicar?” The italics, needless to say, were hers.’

  There was a pregnant pause, and it was the Chief-Inspector, the only one of the Vicar’s listeners not to know his story’s dénouement, who nudged him into continuing.

  ‘You understand, Inspector,’ said the Vicar, ‘I really didn’t mean to tell a lie. I didn’t. It was almost as though – well, as though I wasn’t stealing the truth – which is what I always think a lie is, you know, a stolen truth – but, as it were, embezzling it.’

  This original concept clearly intrigued the policeman.

  ‘Embezzling the truth? I confess I …’

  ‘As though I’d temporarily stolen somebody else’s truth to get myself out of a hole, but fully intended to replace it once the crisis was over.

  ‘Alas,’ he sighed, ‘like so many embezzlers before me, I was to discover that there never does arrive that convenient moment when you’re able to return what you’ve stolen. Before you could say Jack Robinson, I’d gone on stealing other truths that didn’t belong to me, until I found myself – oh dear God forgive me! – I found myself living a permanent lie.’

  The poor man now really was on the verge of tears, and his wife would have attempted to offer him comfort, except that she must have realised that at such a point any display of affectionate solidarity on her part would have done for him.

  ‘Mr Wattis,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I know how difficult this is for you, but I have to ask. What was this “truth” which you – you embezzled? That you too had been a war hero, p’raps?’

  The Vicar was aghast at such a calumny.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no! The very idea, Inspector! I would never, never have presumed … By lying as I did, it wasn’t at all my intention to puff myself up. I simply hoped to take those prying old – I mean, the ladies of the Church Committee, down a peg or two.

  ‘I recall a schoolmaster friend of ours – I’m thinking of Grenfell, dear,’ he said to his wife, ‘who once admitted to me that he, the very gentlest of souls, would be a regular martinet with his charges at the start of every new term, actually going so far as caning them for the most piffling of offences, even as it went against the grain, because he believed that, if he gave them so excessive a demonstration of his authority straight off, he’d never have to use his cane again. Well, that in a sense was what I was also trying to do. I allowed myself to tell one little untruth right at the beginning – merely to impose my authority, so to speak – and I trusted I’d never have to tell another.’

  ‘Yes – yes,’ replied Trubshawe, ‘I can see how that might have worked. But I have to put it to you again – what was the lie?’

  ‘The lie?’ said the Vicar sadly. ‘The lie was that, throughout the War, I’d been an Army padre in Flanders. Nothing grand, you understand, no heroics, no mention in dispatches. I just left my parishioners with the impression – not much more than an impression, I assure you – that I’d, well …’

  ‘I get you. You claimed you’d seen action in Europe. Instead of which …?’

  The Vicar almost literally hung his head.

  ‘Instead of which, I’d been a company clerk in Aldershot. I hadn’t yet been ordained and, in addition, I was declared unfit for active service. My feet, you know.’

  ‘Your feet?’ said the Chief-Inspector.

 
‘They’re flat, I’m afraid. I was born with flat feet.’

  ‘Aha. I see. Well, Vicar,’ said Trubshawe benignly, ‘I have to say it strikes me as a pretty forgivable fib. Not much there for anybody to make a song-and-dance about, surely?’

  ‘No,’ said the Vicar, ‘perhaps not. If that had been all there was to it.’

  ‘There was more to it, then?’

  ‘Well, I fear it all rather got out of control. You’re familiar, I’m certain, with the old rhyme “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive”? Once I’d told the original lie, there I was, caught in my own web. Even though I played down any notion that I might have been a hero, I daresay I sinned by omission when I let the inference stand.

  ‘The consequence was that these ladies of the parish took it for granted that I was being disarmingly modest about my experience and started pestering me about everything I’d seen and done at the front. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I feel sure their curiosity in this regard was utterly irreproachable, except – except in the case of Mrs de Cazalis herself, whom I confess I did come to suspect – it was most un-Christian of me, I know – but I did come to suspect her of harbouring, alas, all too well-founded doubts about the probity of my character and even of hoping to trip me up. Then it all came to a head with the matter of the organ.’

  ‘The organ?’

  ‘The church organ. When I arrived in the parish, it was in dire need of repair, as many church organs were in the aftermath of the War, and as always there was simply no money to pay for it. So, following innumerable committee meetings, with all the internecine bickerings which would appear to be part and parcel of these meetings, and whose endless ramifications and recriminations I’ll spare you, we decided to hold a Grand Charity Fête.

  ‘It had Tombola, Morris Dancing around the Maypole, a Punch-and-Judy show for the tots, a Pin-the-Nail-on-the-Donkey’s-Tail stall for the older children and an entertainment which we, the members of the Church Committee, got up ourselves. We invited some jolly Pierrots and Harlequins over from the Postbridge concert-party, the Fol-de-Rols. The girls of St Cecilia’s performed a series of tasteful Tableaux Vivants. Mr Hawkins from the Post Office charmed us all with his famous bird-call impressions. And his eldest son Georgie – well, Georgie, as I recall, did some sort of an act with gaily coloured hoops. I never did know quite what was supposed to happen to those hoops, as we had next to no time for rehearsals, but Georgie surely didn’t mean for them all to bound off the stage in every direction at once. Anyway, it got the biggest laugh of the day, which I suppose was the main thing.’