The Act of Roger Murgatroyd Page 8

  ‘Mr Wattis,’ the Chief-Inspector nipped in quickly, ‘sorry, but where exactly is this business of the Fête going? And what has it to do with Raymond Gentry?’

  There was a snort from the Colonel.

  ‘Really, Trubshawe!’ he cried. ‘Why must you badger the poor fellow so! You asked him for his story and that’s just what he’s giving you. It’s a deuced uncomfortable spot you’ve put him on, you know, but he’s doing his level best. Go on, Clem, and take your own time. Whatever courage you did or did not show in the War, you’re certainly making up for it now. You’re an example to us all.’

  ‘Very kind of you to put it that way, Roger,’ said the Vicar, visibly touched by his friend’s unsolicited words of support. In fact, with the relief of having got over the worst, there had now come a new confidence in his voice.

  ‘The thing is, Inspector,’ he went on, ‘I was expected, as Vicar, to contribute some little thing of my own to the show. And, as I couldn’t sing, or juggle, or do bird-call impressions, or anything of the kind, it was finally proposed – by the perfidious Mrs de Cazalis, surprise surprise – that I deliver a public talk about my wartime experiences.’

  ‘H’m. Quite a can of worms you’d opened up.’

  ‘I simply couldn’t say no, particularly as it was to benefit the church, and the other ladies of the committee excitedly backed her up, and I felt well and truly trapped. Cynthia will confirm how I agonised long and hard over how I might extricate myself. I tell you, Inspector – all of you – it got to the point where I even contemplated resigning from my living as the only decent thing to do, but – well, that would undoubtedly also have meant quitting the Church, which would have been a frightful cross to bear for the rest of my life. As well as something I could ill-afford.

  ‘Anyway, the upshot was, I agreed to give the talk.

  ‘There was absolutely no question, as I already said, of inventing stories of my own so-called courage, but I realised I would have to offer a detailed summary of conditions at the front. So I read every single book on the war I could lay my hands on, until I became quite an expert on the subject – history manuals, personal memoirs, whatever there was, I read it and made copious notes. And, you understand, I couldn’t even borrow these books from the circulating library, as I suspected it would soon dawn on the snooping Mrs de Cazalis what I was up to. So I had to buy them, putting a real strain on our purse-strings, given that Cynthia and I are as poor as a pair of church-mice.

  ‘But even if what I had to say wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, my truth, I wanted it to be, at some level, the truth. You do understand? That was very important to me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  The Vicar seemed briefly in danger of once more losing his composure, but he swiftly rallied.

  ‘It was a fiasco!’

  ‘Really? But why? If, as you say, you’d done your homework?’

  ‘The fact is, I’m simply no good at lying. I was convincing, more or less, when I gave my audience a general outline of the situation in Flanders. But when I started to talk in the first person – about my visiting the trenches, my consoling the walking wounded, my holding a service in a half-ruined village chapel with the distant rumble of Big Bertha shaking the rafters – well, Inspector, I quite went to pieces. I stumbled over my words, I was hazy on details, I got my dates all mixed up, I lost the place in the notes I’d made, I hemmed and hawed and then hemmed all over again. I was clueless, clueless!’

  ‘I’m truly sorry, Reverend. You didn’t deserve that for one minor lapse.’

  ‘Oh, it all happened a very long time ago. Yet, you know, I still wake up in a sweat at the memory of it. No, no, no, why should I pretend any longer? Not in a sweat. I wake up screaming. Do you hear? I, the sweet old Vicar, dear old Clem Wattis who wouldn’t harm a fly – I wake up screaming in the middle of the night! Oh, my poor Cynthia, what I’ve forced you to put up with!’

  His wife’s eyes looked into his with infinite love and compassion.

  ‘Where was I?’ he finally asked himself. ‘Oh yes. Well, I could already hear a smattering of titters from the audience and I could see, in the very front row, Mrs de Cazalis savouring every minute of her triumph.

  ‘And then I came in my notes to the word “Ypres”.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘What word?’

  ‘Ypres. The Belgian town, you know. I had blithely jotted down the name without thinking I’d actually have to pronounce it when I gave my talk, and I got so tangled in my pronunciation it emerged from my mouth like a – forgive the vulgarity, but I’m afraid there is no other word – like a belch.

  ‘I’d also misspelled it, which didn’t help. It’s an old failing of mine, spelling. I can’t spell for toffee. Matter of fact,’ he added with an unexpected dash of self-deprecating humour, ‘I can’t even spell “toffee”.’

  Everyone smiled at this mot, but smiled at it as much for its having relaxed the tension as for its own moot quality as wit.

  ‘Well,’ he bravely went on, ‘the titters started gradually shading into outright guffaws, and, as for Mrs de Cazalis, the gloating expression on her flushed fat face left me in no doubt that she regarded it as game, set and match to her. It was the worst moment of my life.

  ‘Nor did it end there. For months afterwards in the village I was the target of all sorts of derisive little digs and doubles entendres, and the greengrocer’s barrow-boy would careen past me on his bike yelling not “Yippee!” but “Ypree!” It was touch and go whether we’d simply pack our things and slip away in the night. But Cynthia, bless her, urged me to stand fast.

  ‘And, you know, she was right. For even though I genuinely believed I could never live down such a humiliation this side of Kingdom Come, time after all does pass. It does heal wounds, precisely as they say it does.

  ‘Oh, once in a while I’d overhear some remark I felt I’d eavesdropped on – eavesdropped even though it was addressed to me. Somebody might say that when we’re burdened with troubles we just have to “soldier on”, you know, the sort of thing people come out with when they’ve nothing better to say, and I’d blush inwardly – and sometimes outwardly – at what I took to be an allusion to me. Again, though, Cynthia would persuade me I was being overly sensitive, and most likely she was right.’

  ‘How long did this period last?’

  ‘How long? Several months, I suppose. And then, I repeat, it all began to die down. Even though I never ceased to suffer in private, publicly it came to be so much water under the bridge, and my wife and I lived on for many years in the village as contentedly as we were able.

  ‘That is,’ he added after a lengthy pause, ‘until Raymond Gentry entered our lives.’

  ‘Tell me,’ asked Trubshawe, ‘what exactly was it he said?’

  ‘It wasn’t what he said,’ answered the Vicar. ‘It was what he implied with all his feline, sibilant little insinuations about the War. I realise he’s lying dead upstairs, a bullet through his heart, but, as Evie rightly said, there was something un-English about him. Not foreign exactly, but, you know, oily and underhand, like many of his unfortunate race. No one who wasn’t already aware of the background to my story would have grasped what he was getting at, but I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, and this loathsome complicity between us, with everyone else looking on and listening on, became quite intolerable.’

  ‘How do you imagine he found out?’

  ‘Ah well, now there you do raise an interesting question, Inspector,’ said the Vicar. ‘As a professional snitch, Gentry could of course be expected to know the – the, eh, dirt about the private lives of the ffolkeses’ starrier acquaintances, like Evie here and Cora. But the local Vicar? The local Doctor? Now who could have passed on to him that kind of information? I hate to be hurtful to Roger and Mary, dear, dear friends who invite Cynthia and me down here for Christmas every year when I doubt anybody else in the locality would, but I fear the prime suspect has to be Selina.’
/>
  ‘When Miss ffolkes is ready to join us,’ Trubshawe intervened judiciously, ‘you may be sure I’ll ask her whatever questions I consider to be relevant to her relationship with the deceased. But for now, Vicar, I have to ask you the hardest one of all.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you kill Raymond Gentry?’

  The Vicar almost choked with incredulity.

  ‘What! Is that a joke question?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You’re asking me seriously if I …?’

  ‘Now look,’ replied the Chief-Inspector soberly. ‘Why do you think I’ve been putting you through all this unpleasantness, if not because you are, along with everybody else present, a suspect? I thought that was a given.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course I understand that to be the case, but do be serious, man. Can you really be asking me if I’m the kind of person who kills just anybody and everybody who happens to do me wrong? Do I look like a murderer?’

  ‘Ah, Vicar, if murderers looked like murderers, if every burglar went around wearing a domino mask and a striped jumper and toting a bulging sack over his shoulder with the word “Swag” stencilled on it that he’d purchased from some burglars’ emporium, how easy our job would be!’

  ‘Oh, very well, yes, I do see what you mean,’ said Wattis resignedly. ‘Point taken.’

  ‘And so – the answer to my question?’

  ‘The answer to your question, Inspector, is no. No, I did not kill Raymond Gentry. I may have felt like it – I know everybody else did and, as I say, I’ve never made any claim to be better than my fellow men. But I certainly did not act on whatever evil impulse he might have provoked in me. Actually,’ he added, ‘in some respects I have reason to be grateful to him.’

  ‘Grateful?’ exclaimed the Colonel. ‘Good Lord, Clem, how on earth can you be grateful to such a swine for causing you the pain he did?’

  ‘Yes, Roger, it’s true, he did cause me pain – but, oddly, he also brought me relief from that pain. I’ve finally got the thing off my chest. I’ve finally been compelled to yank it, kicking and screaming, into the open air and, honestly, I think I feel the better for it. I feel as though I’ve been purged. I may have been a liar, and God is my witness that I’ve paid for my lie many times over. But I never was, as God also knows, a coward. It’s true, I didn’t see any action in the War, like my glorious predecessor, but neither did thousands of others like me with flat feet and short sight and fallen arches, and it wasn’t their fault just as it wasn’t mine. When all is said and done, I had a perfectly respectable War and have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. “They also serve …”, you know.’

  ‘Hear hear!’ cried the Colonel.

  ‘Good for you, Vicar,’ the Chief-Inspector nodded in agreement. ‘And thank you for being so co-operative. Now let me put one last question to you and then you’re free.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Did you leave your bedroom at all during the night?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ was the surprising answer. ‘Several times, in fact.’

  ‘Several times!? Why?’

  The Vicar threw back his head and laughed – he actually laughed aloud.

  ‘Well,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I may be getting dim, but I fail to understand what’s suddenly so funny.’

  ‘Oh, Inspector, now that I’ve crashed through the barrier of embarrassment, I’m willing – as only half-an-hour ago it would have been unthinkable for me – I’m willing to give you a brutally straight answer to that question. If I left my bedroom several times during the night, it was because I had to reply to several Calls of Nature. When you reach my age, Nature can become quite … quite pressing. Especially after the sort of blowout we had at dinner.’

  ‘I see. And roughly when, may I ask, was the last time?’

  ‘Actually, I can answer that one not roughly but precisely. Nature, at least in my current experience, tends to be a creature of routine. It was five-thirty.’

  ‘And did you see anything suspicious? Or even just untoward?’

  ‘No, nothing at all. I woke up, got up – yet again – trotted along the corridor and …’

  Whereupon, abruptly falling silent, he started to frown in an effort of remembrance.

  ‘So you did see something?’

  ‘N-o-o-o,’ murmured the Vicar when he answered at last. ‘No, I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘But you stopped as though –’

  ‘It wasn’t what I saw, it was what I heard. How very odd. With everything that’s happened since, it completely slipped my mind.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘As I was returning from – from my last Call of Nature, I heard voices raised in anger, an argument, a real argy-bargy, between a man and a woman, quite a violent one too. I couldn’t distinguish what was being said, all of it taking place behind closed doors, you understand, but it certainly sounded as though it must have been alarmingly loud inside the room itself.’

  ‘Inside which room?’ asked Trubshawe.

  ‘Oh, as to that,’ replied the Vicar, ‘there can be no doubt at all. It came from the attic. Yes, it most definitely came from the attic.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘An argument inside the attic at five-thirty in the morning, eh?’ grunted the Chief-Inspector. ‘Between a man and a woman? The plot thickens …’ he added satirically.

  Tugging at one of his moustache’s nicotine-stained fringes, he then asked the Vicar:

  ‘You didn’t recognise either voice, I suppose?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I say again, Mr Trubshawe, I didn’t actually hear the argument itself – who was arguing and what it was about. I heard only that there was an argument.’

  ‘And naturally you didn’t get any sense of how old they were?’

  ‘How old who were?’

  ‘The man and woman you heard arguing?’

  ‘No, no, no. I was half-asleep, you know, which is why I’ve only just remembered that I heard it at all.’

  ‘I see. Well, thanks for that, Vicar,’ said the policeman. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful.’

  He turned his attention to the five women present.

  ‘Now, ladies,’ he said, ‘you’ve just heard what the Vicar has had to say. So may I enquire if any of you went to the attic, for whatever reason, you understand – for, even though it’s highly improbable, it’s nevertheless not impossible that the argument overheard by the Vicar and the subsequent murder of Gentry are unconnected. I repeat, did any of you, for whatever reason, go up into the attic at approximately five-thirty this morning?’

  It was, unexpectedly, the Vicar himself who answered first.

  ‘Not,’ he said without any too apparent asperity in his voice, ‘that my word, my word of honour, is likely to carry as much weight with you as it might previously have done, Inspector, given what I’ve just confessed to, but I would like to vouch for Mrs Wattis. She was sound asleep when I crawled out of bed at five-thirty and she was sound asleep when I climbed back into it no more than seven or eight minutes later. You may believe me or not as you will.’

  ‘My dear Vicar,’ Trubshawe diplomatically replied, ‘I’m not here either to believe or disbelieve you. You or anybody else, for that matter. I’m here to listen to what you all have to tell me in the hope of uncovering some clue as to how and why and by whom the crime was committed. As I’ve already had cause to remind you, I did not volunteer to come to ffolkes Manor.’

  ‘Please be patient with us, Trubshawe,’ said the Colonel. ‘We’re all of us still on edge. Evadne may find it hard to conceal her glee at being directly implicated in the kind of whodunit she’s only ever lived by proxy – don’t deny it, Evie dear, it’s written all over your face – but I can assure you that, for the rest of us, knowing we’re suspects in a real-life murder mystery is no laughing matter.

  ‘As for vouching for our better halves, as Clem has just done, well, I fear I for one cannot oblige. As per usual, I was snoring my head off at five-thirty and Mary
could have danced the hoochie-koochie in front of the wardrobe mirror for all I’d have been aware of it.

  ‘She and I, though, have been man and wife for nigh on twenty-six years, twenty-six cloudless years, and it’s on that evidence that I’m prepared to vouch for her. It probably won’t be enough for a police officer like you, but it’s more than enough for me.’

  He laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and let her clasp it in her own.

  An unmoved Trubshawe, meanwhile, addressed the Doctor.

  ‘Rolfe? Sound asleep at five-thirty, I suppose?’

  ‘Afraid so. Both of us – I mean, both Madge and I – we tend to sleep through the night. It’s just one of those quirky habits we’ve fallen into. Pity, really. If I’d known what was about to happen, I’d have struggled to stay awake. But, there you are, no one gave us any advance warning.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, Doctor,’ said the Chief-Inspector with a sigh, ‘we can all live without the heavy sarcasm. These questions have to be asked. Miss Mount, you will vouch for yourself, I suppose?’

  ‘If you mean by that, was I in bed, was I in bed by myself, and was I sound asleep at five-thirty in the morning, the answer is yes on all counts.’

  The Chief-Inspector sighed again.

  ‘And you, Miss Rutherford?’

  ‘Me? I’ve never even heard of five-thirty in the morning!’

  ‘H’m,’ said Trubshawe, ‘that leaves just Miss Selina. Naturally, I’ll wait till she’s sufficiently recovered before putting any questions to her. And please don’t look so anxious, Mrs ffolkes, I’ll be diplomacy itself. I know how to handle these tricky situations. Heaven knows I’ve had enough practice.’