The Act of Roger Murgatroyd Read online

  With an unwavering gaze, he looked at each of the occupants of the drawing-room in turn until, slowly doubling back, his eyes settled at last on Cora Rutherford.

  ‘Perhaps, Miss Rutherford,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t mind going next?’

  ‘Delighted,’ said the actress.

  Now, it should be said that, whether she really was the coyly generic age she claimed for herself – ‘Not quite the Bright Young Thing I used to be, darling!’ – Cora Rutherford was by no stretch of the imagination a leathery old filly. She still had a trim figure, possibly too trim to have survived the years more or less intact without artificial enhancement, and though it wasn’t easy to tell beneath the waxy make-up which fossilised her face in a permanent moue of pinched hoity-toitiness, that face did seem to be genuinely unwrinkled.

  ‘I swear,’ she announced, ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then some!’ she huskily added with a flamboyant flourish of her cigarette-holder.

  ‘Very well,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Then can I please hear your own first-person account of the run-in you had last night with Raymond Gentry?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she answered, a tiny smoke-ring drifting over her head like a halo in search of a saint. ‘As you’re doubtless sick to the back-teeth of hearing, Gentry took the absolute pip. He was a beast, a rotter of the first water, a self-infatuated, sallow-complexioned little climber, with his artistic hair and his scarlet lips and his T. S. this and his D. H. that and his eternal boasting and bragging about his acquaintance with the Maharani of Rajasthan or the Oom of Oompapah or some other equally improbable pasha or pashette.

  ‘But there was one particular story he told of which it so happened that I had heard a distinctively different version from the horse’s mouth. As ever, he was bending our ears back with tales of all the famous people he had met and he mentioned that he’d once had a cocktail at Claridge’s with Molnar – the Hungarian playwright, you know, entrancing man, as witty as a barrel of monkeys. Well, it turns out that I know Ferenc – Ferenc Molnar, that is – I know him really rather well – I starred in his play Olympia, you recall, Evie? – and long before I ever had the ill-fortune to encounter Gentry, he himself had told me what actually occurred.

  ‘One evening Gentry had accosted him in the bar at Claridge’s and asked if he’d consent to be interviewed for that filthy rag of his. Ferenc naturally refused – he could smell a slice of phoney-baloney a mile off – and when Gentry continued to badger him, he simply turned on his heels and stalked out. As he was leaving the bar, though, he chanced to look back and what do you suppose he saw? The preposterous Gentry was furtively finishing off his – I mean Ferenc’s – cocktail!

  ‘So when I heard him talk about “having a cocktail with Molnar”, I just laughed in his face. In fact, I haven’t laughed so much since Minnie Battenberg got her knickers in a twist – literally her knickers and literally in a twist – on the opening night of Up in Mabel’s Room!

  ‘I can’t stand male gossips anyway,’ she continued. ‘In my experience, and I’ve had plenty, they’re all nancy boys. Frankly, when Gentry first sashayed into the drawing-room, I immediately pegged him for a pansy and I wondered what in heaven’s name poor Selina could be getting out of it. You know who he reminded me of, Evie?’

  ‘No, who?’

  ‘The villain in that story of yours that was so naughty you had to have it published in France.’

  ‘The Case of the Family Jewels?’

  ‘That’s the one. Such a scream! But, of course, it wasn’t a book Evie could ever have hoped to bring out in stuffy old Blighty. It all took place in Portofino, as I recall.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the novelist. ‘I set the scene among a –’

  ‘I fancy it’s my turn, ducks,’ said Cora Rutherford waspishly, loath to let herself be upstaged even by the author of the book in question. ‘It revolved around a group of British aristos partying at a beach-side villa and what was so awfully ingenious was that the crime was solved before any of them actually realised it had been committed. Old Lady – Lady – Lady Beltham, was it, who’s hosting the party has left this priceless heirloom lying about her boudoir just itching to be pinched, a heavy, multi-stringed pearl choker – you know, the kind of thing Queen Mary always wears. She’s also procured for herself a brand-new hombre young enough to be her son – or even grandson – in the book he’s named just Boy – and it’s obvious to everybody but la Beltham herself that he’s the worst type of leech. All the more so because there’s no doubt whatever from his manners and mannerisms that he’s, you know, iffy? Of the Uranian persuasion, as the Oscar Wilde set used to call it, and camp as all-get-out. So, of course, everyone suspects the only reason he’s canoodling with the besotted old crone is that he can’t wait to get his greedy, grubby little paws on the pearl choker.

  ‘Really, Miss Ruther –’ the Chief-Inspector began to say in an endeavour to stem the flow.

  ‘Which is when her nephew – Lady Beltham’s nephew and the heir to the heirloom – engages a private detective and introduces him to his aunt as a former school pal so he can fit in with the house-party. I say “him” because, for once, this detective isn’t Alexis Baddeley but a fey young laddie – Elias Lindstrom, I think his name was – who, we are led to understand, is also a Uranian.

  ‘Well, one morning everyone’s lounging on the beach when Boy emerges from the villa, disrobes and, watched by his clucking sugar-mummy, wades into the ocean in a pair of resplendent figure-hugging bathing-trunks. And it’s at that moment that Lindstrom realises he’s just stolen the choker.

  The twist is that he himself – Lindstrom, I mean – has already indulged in a little bout of bedroom hanky-panky with Boy, just in the line of business, you understand, and when he catches sight of the really rather impressive bulge in his trunks, a bulge that bears no relation to what he …. Well, I don’t have to draw a picture, do I? He knows there has to be something else in there besides the family jewels. So when Boy wades back out of the ocean, the detective, without so much as a by-your-leave, yanks his trunks down to his ankles – and out pops the pearl choker!

  ‘Anyway, to return to last night – yes, yes, Trubshawe, I am getting there – to return to last night, Gentry reminded me of that sleazy young bounder and, to repeat, I simply couldn’t fathom what lay behind his interest in Selina, not to mention hers in him. But when I showed him up over the bogus Molnar business, I realised at once I’d made an enemy for life.

  ‘What I didn’t realise, though, was how quickly he’d go on the offensive. For some people, you know, an enemy’s blood is like a fine vintage wine. It has to be savoured, swilled about the palate, all that wine-bore guff and stuff. Not Gentry. He immediately went for the jugular.’

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Trubshawe.

  ‘The first thing he said – I mean, insinuated – the first thing he insinuated was that, professionally, I was on the skids because – because –’

  At this point, just as the Chief-Inspector had predicted, the actress seemed to find herself suddenly as tongue-tied as the Vicar before her. For all her brazen self-possession, airing in public what was, even for her, an unpalatable home truth was patently turning out to be not as easy as she had expected.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she finally sighed, ‘here goes nothing. He insinuated that I was on the skids because of my increasing and, so he implied, incapacitating dependency on certain – on certain substances.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Cocaine, if you must know.’

  The horrified silence with which this last statement was met derived less from the revelation that Cora Rutherford was a dope fiend – as Evadne Mount had already hinted, such a rumour had been circulating for years – than from the cool defiance with which she acknowledged it as a fact of her life.

  ‘And was what he insinuated true?’

  ‘To that, Chief-Inspector, my answer would be yes, no and certainly not.’

  ‘Explain, dear lady.’


  ‘Yes, I do take cocaine. No, I am not incapacitated. And certainly not, as far as my career being on the skids is concerned. I’ve just ended a ten-week run at the Haymarket, playing Ginevra in The Jest by Sem Benelli, a dramatist whose plays, it goes without saying, will be staged as long as theatres exist to stage them in. I’m currently in talks with Hitch – Hitch? Alfred Hitchcock? The famous film director? No? You’ve really never heard of him?? None of you??? Lawks almighty! Well, anyhow, I’m in talks with Hitch about playing Alexis Baddeley in a forthcoming picture version of Evadne’s Death Be My Deadline. A character role for me, of course. I’m going to need lashings of slap’.

  ‘Miss Rutherford, did Raymond Gentry actually threaten to expose your – your –’

  ‘My addiction?’

  ‘Yes, your addiction. Did he threaten to write it up in The Trombone?’

  ‘No, not in so many words. Just as the article itself, had he had the time and opportunity to write it, wouldn’t have been in so many words, if you follow me. But it was all too obvious what he intended to do. By debunking his Molnar story, I’d made him look an ass in front of Selina and he was determined to take his revenge.

  ‘Oh, he wouldn’t have dared to use the word “cocaine” in print – that would have been positively actionable, since he couldn’t have proved a thing – but his readers all understand the Trombone code and he would have left no doubt in their minds what he was talking about.’

  ‘Yet,’ said the Chief-Inspector, ‘if rumours of your dependency had been circulating for years, as we heard from Miss Mount, surely it wouldn’t have made too much of a difference if some what-you-call coded piece were to be published in The Trombone?’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? These things, though, never work like that. So long as rumours just “circulate”, as you put it, they can’t do too much harm, because so many stories circulate, true and false alike. It’s when they get into print, even as rumours, and they become news – that’s when they become dangerous.’

  ‘Yes, I believe I get what you’re saying.’

  ‘And it wasn’t only the drugs. There was also –’

  At that point she fell silent again.

  Trubshawe waited a few seconds before pressing her.

  ‘There was also what?’

  ‘I – well, it’s really not for me to bring up the – the other thing.’

  ‘Please, Miss Rutherford, as far as I’m aware you’ve dealt an honest hand so far. I insist you let me know everything that could be relevant to the situation you’re all in.’

  The actress continued to remain mute.

  ‘Could your reluctance to go on,’ he then asked her, ‘have something to do with’ – he once more pulled Gentry’s page of notes out of his pocket and read aloud what he suspected must be the operative line: ‘“CR + EM = COCA + LES”?’

  ‘Ye-es – yes, it could,’ answered Cora Rutherford after a moment of hesitation. ‘The problem, Trubshawe, is that another person’s privacy is involved. I feel it would be –’

  ‘Oh, Cora, just tell the man,’ Evadne Mount brusquely interrupted her. ‘It’s bound to come out. Eventually.’

  ‘You really mean that, Evie?’ said the actress. ‘After all, can we be certain he was referring to – you know what?’

  ‘Course he was, the obnoxious little toad. What else could it have been? But if we have Trubshawe’s word that none of this will leak beyond these four walls, then I’m willing to be as outspoken as you were.’

  ‘I’ve already given you that word.’

  Now the moment had come for the novelist to take up the story.

  ‘Well, you see, Chief-Inspector, Cora and I – we’ve been best friends since the year dot. When we were both still in our twenties, she was a struggling young actress and I an aspiring young writer. For a couple of years we actually shared a flat in Bloomsbury, quite the weeest flat you ever saw.’

  ‘Wee!’ said the actress. ‘Wee wasn’t the word! You literally couldn’t have swung a cat.’

  ‘A cat?’ said the novelist. ‘You couldn’t have swung a mouse!’

  Suddenly assailed by memories of a dim, unknowable past to which they alone were privy, both women fell to giggling like the two gawky, galumphing young gals they probably once were. There was something almost poignant about the spectacle.

  ‘Anyway,’ Evadne Mount continued, wiping a nostalgic tear from her eye, ‘I was writing my very first book and –’

  ‘Ah no!’ the Chief-Inspector shouted her down. ‘Here I really must insist! Now is not – I repeat, not – the time or place for another one of your hyper-ingenious plots.’

  ‘Oh, don’t get yourself into such a tizz! This is one novel whose plot I wouldn’t dare to relate in detail. At least, not in front of the Vicar.’

  ‘Eh? What’s that you say?’ interjected the policeman, now clearly intrigued in spite of himself. ‘So, eh, so tell me, exactly what kind of a novel was it?’

  ‘That’s just it. It wasn’t a whodunit. In those days my ambition was to be a great literary genius. The model for the book was The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall, you know. Its title – I blush to think of it now – but its title was The Urinal of Futility and it was all about a virginal young woman who has just graduated from Somerville, about her painful reconciliation with her own’ – here the novelist’s voice dropped to a whisper – ‘her own h-o-m-o-s-e-x-a-l – no, wait, there’s something wrong there, h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l-i-t-y’ – then, having at last managed to spell out the offending word, she at once raised her voice again to its natural booming resonance, just as though she’d turned up the volume switch on a wireless – ‘and her intimate relationship with a – with a – well, let’s just say it was autobiographical and be done with it.

  ‘Yes, Clem, you heard me. It was autobiographical. And, yes, I know how terribly delicate your susceptibilities are, but there’s no call for you to look so scandalised. I’m not the only one of us on whom life has played a sneaky, underhand trick. You have flat feet, after all.’

  ‘Evie, please!’ the Vicar tut-tutted. ‘I cannot concur with such an idea – that flat feet and what you suffered from – and I hope I may use the past tense – are to any degree comparable.’

  ‘This is all very interesting, Miss Mount,’ Trubshawe intervened, ‘but I must be getting dense again, for I simply cannot figure out what it has to do with Miss Rutherford.’

  ‘Judas to Judas, man,’ cried the novelist, ‘it’s positively shrieking at you!’

  ‘Is it? Yet I still –’

  ‘Look. Cora and I were both, as I say, in our early twenties and she was ravishing and, incredible as it may seem to you, I wasn’t actually too bad-looking myself – certainly not the tweedy panda you have in front of you now – and we were lonely and we shared a minuscule flat which had just one great big bed and – well, to quote Cora, would you like me to draw a picture?’

  ‘No!’ shuddered the Chief-Inspector. ‘I’m afraid you already have.’

  ‘In any event,’ was Evadne Mount’s brisk rejoinder, ‘nothing was ultimately to come of it for either of us. Indeed, as readers of Kine Weekly well know, Cora has had no fewer than three husbands. It is three, isn’t it, Cora darling?’

  ‘Four, darling, if you count the Count.’

  ‘I never count the Count.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ chuckled Cora.

  ‘As for me, I chose to channel my emotional energies into my books, by which I mean my whodunits. The Urinal of Futility was published – privately – but I’ve never let it be reprinted and I’ve always left it out of my entry in Who’s Who. Its author is not Who I am any longer nor Who I’ve been for many years. It was a road not taken, as they say. And thank God too, I say. My readers are all very nice people, I’m sure, but it’s my experience that, once you get beyond the pleasantries, the how-d’you-dos and lovely-to-see-yous, it’s these same very nice people who tend to spout the most horrendously bigoted opinions.’

  ‘
Yes, yes,’ said Trubshawe impatiently, ‘but could we get back to Gentry, please?’

  ‘Oh well, there’s not much more to say. Precisely the same thing happened to us as happened to poor Clem. Having somehow got wind of our mutual past, Cora’s and mine, Gentry started to taunt us both across the dinner-table. And all in so sly and subtle a fashion that, as Cora has told you, only she and I could have known what he was talking about.’

  ‘How did the subject come up?’

  ‘Really, it was so puerile I can barely remember.’

  ‘“Lady of Spain”, Evie?’ the actress prompted her. ‘You might mention that.’

  ‘“Lady of Spain”?’ repeated a bemused Trubshawe.

  The novelist winced at the memory.

  ‘Yes, it was that silly. Selina happened to be seated at the piano and she asked if any of us had a request. When Cynthia suggested “Lady of Spain” – you know, “Lady of Spain, I adore you, tra la la la, I implore you!” – Gentry instantly treated Cora and me to one of his sniggery stares and proposed that, for our benefit, the song be titled not “Lady of Spain” but “Ladies of Lisbon”.’

  Now Trubshawe looked downright baffled.

  ‘Ladies of Lisbon? I don’t understand. Lisbon’s in Portugal, not Spain.’

  Once again both actress and novelist burst into gales of uncontrollable laughter. Once again a glimpse, so fleeting as to be almost imperceptible, was afforded of two fun-loving young women who, eons before, had shared a small cold flat and a big warm bed in Bloomsbury. Then, as rapidly as they had emerged, the ghosts of their younger, gayer selves beat a discreet retreat into the past where they belonged, just as a matching pair of blushes lit up Trubshawe’s cheeks. It had taken a few seconds, but he had, finally, got it.

  ‘I see – yes, yes, I do see,’ he mumbled, audibly mortified.

  ‘Your word, mind?’ said Cora Rutherford. ‘You gave us your word?’