The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

by Gilbert Adair

  Now the whole library erupted.

  ‘Oh, that’s silly!’

  ‘Well, but really! When the crime was so meticulously worked out!’

  ‘This time, Evie, you’ve gone too far!’

  ‘I said all along it was absurd to –’

  ‘Oh, just hear me out, won’t you!’ she cried, silencing them with a single bark, like an infant blowing out all the candles on a birthday cake with a single puff.

  ‘Look, all of you. Just suppose, for the sake of the argument, that it was the intention of somebody in this house to murder Raymond Gentry. Well, he pulled it off, didn’t he? He got clean away with it. Raymond was murdered, and none of us, not excluding the Chief-Inspector here, had the slightest notion by whom. The criminal – I think, from now on, I’m going to call him, or of course her, X – the criminal, X, had achieved what he’d presumably set out to achieve.

  ‘Why, then, did he or she next try to murder the Colonel? It doesn’t add up. Especially as you all agree, don’t you, that at no time did Roger drop any remark that might have made X decide he would have to die too. True, it was the Colonel who discovered Raymond’s body. But Don was there, too, and no one has attempted to murder him.

  ‘As for the idea that the two crimes might not be connected at all, well, I don’t suppose any of us ever took that seriously. I know coincidences exist – if they didn’t, we wouldn’t need a word for them – but it’s really too much to ask of the Law of Probability that the two men were both shot, within a mile or so of each other, within a few hours of each other, by two different murderers with two totally different motives!

  ‘So why was the Colonel shot at? The more I mulled over the mystery, the harder it was for me to conceive of any logical reason why Raymond’s murderer should afterwards want to kill Roger. At the same time, I gradually did begin to see at least one reason why Roger’s murderer might have found himself tempted in advance to kill Raymond. I began to wonder, in short, whether it was Roger, not Raymond, who had always been X’s destined victim.’

  She gave her disturbing new twist to the plot a few seconds to sink in.

  ‘And this suspicion of mine was actually strengthened by the page of notes that the Chief-Inspector found in the pocket of Gentry’s bathrobe, notes, remember, which had been typed out on the Colonel’s own typewriter.

  ‘What everybody assumed was that these notes demonstrated beyond doubt that we were up against a blackmailer. As an author of whodunits, though, I was unimpressed from the outset by a clue left so nonchalantly for the police to put their hands on. If Raymond really had planned to blackmail us all, would he have sashayed about the house with the evidence of his villainy so handily poking out of his bathrobe pocket? And was it really necessary to compose such skimpy little notes on a typewriter? On Roger’s typewriter to boot? Surely it would have been both simpler and safer to jot them down by hand? Unless, of course, and this was the crucial point, unless you were concerned that your handwriting might be identified. I wondered about all of that the moment those notes first turned up.

  ‘Then Trubshawe let us all take a look at them.

  ‘You may remember that, when I read them over a couple of times, something nagged at me for a good while afterwards that all was not as it should have been.

  ‘Well, suddenly – thanks to Don here – I got it. I realised that I had seen something in the notes which confirmed what I was coming more and more to suspect – that it wasn’t in fact Gentry who had typed them.’

  ‘What did you see?’ asked Trubshawe.

  ‘What did I see? To be absolutely literal, it’s what I didn’t see which put me on the qui vive.’

  ‘Oh, all right, Miss Mount,’ said the policeman with the weary sigh of a parent agreeing to humour a child for the very last time. ‘I’ll play along with you. What didn’t you see?’

  ‘I didn’t see you,’ said Evadne Mount.

  The Chief-Inspector gaped at her.

  ‘Just what do you mean by that grotesque statement?’ he growled.

  ‘Pardon me,’ answered the novelist, ‘that was my whimsical side peeping out. I’ll try to keep it under control. What I meant,’ she said more soberly, ‘was that I didn’t see u. The letter u?’

  Everyone looked at her in mystification.

  ‘You all remember those notes. They weren’t in shorthand, but in a kind of journalistic telegraphese. I recognised the style because I’ve been interviewed many, many times in my life and once or twice I’ve taken a peek at my interviewer’s notepad.

  ‘Well, consider what was written about Madge here. If you remember, it read “MR” – obviously Madge Rolfe – then a dash – then the words (I’ll omit the scurrilous adjective, which isn’t relevant to my point) – then the words “misbehavior in MC” – “MC” standing naturally for Monte Carlo. Well, what finally dawned on me was that the word “misbehavior” was spelt without the letter u. That’s what I meant when I said it wasn’t what I saw in Raymond’s notes that made me suspect the truth, it’s what I didn’t see. I didn’t see u.’

  Now she was almost grinning at her own artfulness.

  ‘It’s a very common misconception that having a blind spot necessarily consists of not seeing something that’s in front of you. Sometimes, you know, it consists of seeing something that’s not in front of you. We all saw that letter u because we all expected to see it, and it was only when Selina took so long to reappear from her bedroom and I heard Don say to her, “We’ve all been missing you” – missing you – the missing u? – that I finally understood what it was that had troubled me.

  ‘Once I did understand it, however, I instantly realised what it meant. That’s how “behaviour” is spelt by the Americans, without a u. Rotter that he was, Ray Gentry was also a journalist, and words were the tools of his trade. To me it was unthinkable he would ever have spelt the word that way.

  ‘Those of you who’ve seen my play The Wrong Voice will know how significant language and its misuse can be in a whodunit. If you recall, the murder victim is a school-teacher whose dying words, after he swallows a whisky-and-soda laced with arsenic, are “But it was the wrong voice …” Now everybody assumes, naturally, that what startled him was the identity of the speaker whose voice he’d just heard. Only Alexis Baddeley realises that, as an English master, he is in reality alluding to his grammar.

  ‘While cradling the victim in his arms, that speaker had cried out, “My God, he has been taking ill!” Where a genuine Englishman would have used the passive voice – “he has been taken ill” – he used the active voice, thereby revealing that he wasn’t a genuine Englishman, which was what he was pretending to be, and that he was ultimately the murderer.’

  There ensued a momentary silence. Then, of all people, Don spoke – Don, who hadn’t yet uttered a syllable, even when Evadne Mount had reminded everyone of his threat to kill Raymond Gentry. Which is why, when he now did choose to speak up, his voice, almost unrecognisably raspy with resentment, shattered the silence like a gunshot.

  ‘Yeah, the murderer. Like me, you mean?’

  The novelist stared at him. A web had formed on his forehead of tiny patches of nervous dampness.

  ‘What’s that you say, Don?’

  ‘Oh come on, ma’am, you know what –’

  ‘Evadne,’ said the novelist softly, ‘Evadne.’

  ‘Evadne …’

  Not himself for the moment, he pronounced her name as awkwardly as though it were a tongue-twister.

  ‘You don’t have to deny what you’re thinking, what you’re all thinking. Only an American could have written those notes and I’m the only American here.’

  ‘Don darling, nobody thinks you wrote them!’ cried Selina, giving his thigh an affectionate squeeze. ‘Tell him, Evadne. Tell Don you don’t suspect him.’

  ‘Oh yes she does,’ he said sullenly. ‘You all do. I can see it in your faces.’

  ‘Don?’ said Evadne Mount.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Are
you a reader of whodunits?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you a reader of whodunits?’

  ‘Heck, no,’ he answered after a few seconds. ‘Frankly, I can’t stand ’em. I mean, who cares who killed –’

  ‘All right, all right,’ the novelist testily cut him off. ‘You’ve made your point.’

  ‘Sorry, but you did ask,’ said Don. Then, perhaps emboldened by the realisation that he had found a chink in her hitherto impregnable armour, he added, ‘Say, why did you ask? What’s your point?’

  ‘My point is this. If you were a reader of whodunits, you’d know enough to give the matter a little more thought before accusing me of accusing you. And if you had given the matter a little more thought, you would soon have realised you aren’t the only suspect just because you’re the only American.’

  ‘I don’t get you. How come?’

  ‘Well, Cora, for instance –’

  ‘You know, Evie darling,’ drawled the actress, ‘it would be terribly, terribly sweet if, just once, I wasn’t the first “for instance” to pop into your head.’

  ‘Where these crimes are concerned, Cora, we’ve all had to get used to being “for instances”. Anyway, as I was about to say, after taking London by storm in the stage version of The Mystery of the Green Penguin, Cora was snapped up – I believe that’s the expression – was snapped up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and lived for the next two years in Hollywood. Unfortunately, as Raymond reminded us with his usual gallantry, she didn’t quite rise to the occasion’ – now she held up her right hand like a traffic policeman to prevent her friend from interrupting again, as was all too visibly her intention.

  ‘But even if things failed to work out for her altogether satisfactorily,’ she went on, ‘during those two years it may well have become second nature to her to spell as the Yanks do.

  ‘Then there are the Rolfes, who lived for several months in Canada before Henry’s misadventure in the operating-theatre brought him and Madge back, via the Riviera, to dear old England. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always understood that the Canadians spell the American way, not the British.

  ‘Nor,’ she said, ‘if we’re going to be absolutely logical, can we even rule out Clem.’

  ‘Me?’ cried the Vicar. ‘Why, I – I’ve never been to America in my life!’

  ‘No, Clem, but you did admit that you couldn’t spell for toffee. Well, it’s not impossible, I’m sure you’ll agree, that the word “misbehaviour” was misspelt for no other reason than that it was typed by someone who simply didn’t know how to spell.

  ‘So you see, Don, dear – that missing u doesn’t significantly reduce the number of suspects.’

  ‘Now just a godd**n minute, Evie!’ Cora Rutherford suddenly shouted at her. ‘I wish you’d stop treating us all as though we were in one of your cheap novelettes. I did very, very well in Hollywood, very respectably – what am I saying, more than respectably, much more than respectably! I was in Our Dancing Daughters with Joan Crawford and The Last of Mrs Cheyney with lovely, lovely Norma Shearer.’

  ‘Yes, Cora, I know you were. All I meant was –’

  ‘Anyway, who’s to say you didn’t write those notes yourself? Who’s to say you didn’t deliberately spell “misbehaviour” without the u, just to throw the rest of us off the scent? Your cardboard characters get up to that sort of fakery-pokery all the time!’

  ‘Bravo, Cora!’ cried the novelist, clapping her hands. ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘Congratulations?’ the actress warily echoed the word. ‘Why do I always get a teensy bit suspicious when somebody like you congratulates somebody like me?’

  ‘You shouldn’t. I intended it sincerely. For you’re spot on. I might well have done just that. I didn’t, of course, I didn’t do any such thing. But, yes, the possibility that I might have done it keeps me up there as one of the suspects.’

  ‘All right, ladies,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Now that both of you have had your say, could we please return to the matter at hand?’

  ‘Certainly, Chief-Inspector, certainly,’ Evadne Mount acquiesced with a grace that might have been mock but might also have been authentic.

  ‘Where was I? Oh yes. The planting of those bogus notes in Raymond’s pocket not only confirmed for me that there was something extremely fishy about the whole business but reinforced my growing conviction that X’s true objective was the Colonel’s death.

  ‘Then, finally, it came to me.

  ‘It had, I believed, been X’s plan all along to kill the Colonel by luring him into the attic and shooting him there. And he would have carried out that plan to the letter if Selina hadn’t, at the eleventh hour, invited home a piece of human slime – forgive me, my dear,’ she put it gently to Selina ffolkes, ‘but I think you know he was – a piece of human slime who, on that unforgettably horrid Christmas Night of ours, managed in just a few hours to turn everybody in the house against him.

  ‘We all felt like murdering Raymond – I know I did – but, at some stage in the evening, X must have realised that he alone had not one but two reasons for murdering him. Don’t forget – if I’m right, he had already plotted the Colonel’s murder to the last detail. But what, I imagine him saying to himself, what if I were to switch victims? What if I were to murder Raymond instead of the Colonel? Or rather, what if I were to murder Raymond and then the Colonel?

  ‘Not only would the police assume that the first of these two murders, Raymond’s, was also the first in a more profound sense, the more significant murder, the really relevant one, the one on which all the ensuing investigations would focus. But, and this must have been for our killer the “clincher”, as they say, Raymond’s murder would also generate a whole new set of potential suspects – suspects and motives – unlike the Colonel’s murder, for which there was likely to be only one suspect and one motive.’

  There was no question, and she knew it, that Evadne Mount had her circle of listeners where she wanted them. They were literally hanging on her every word, held under the spell of her personality, and she would have been something less than human if she hadn’t gloated just a little.

  ‘Think of it,’ she said with an impudently undisguised air of self-congratulation. ‘X, whose ultimate intention it is to kill the Colonel, decides to commit another murder first, a murder designed to cast the shadow of suspicion away from himself and on to a half-dozen entirely new suspects, virtually all of whom had a motive for doing away with Raymond Gentry. Suspects, I might add, so classic, so traditional, they could all have come straight out of, or indeed gone straight into, a typical Mayhem Parva whodunit.

  ‘Just try to imagine X’s glee at finding himself presented with such a perfect collection of red herrings. The Author. The Actress. The Doctor. The Doctor’s Wife, who naturally has a Past. The Vicar, who also has a Past. Or rather, unfortunately for him, who doesn’t have a Past. The Colonel. The Colonel’s Wife. And finally, bringing up the rear, the Romantic Young Beau, who, like all Romantic Young Beaux, is head-over-heels in love with the Colonel’s Daughter.

  ‘And, yes, I say red herrings and I mean red herrings. For that, I’m afraid, is exactly what we all were – pure flimflam, as irrelevant to what was really afoot as one of those utterly pointless ground-plans which some of my rivals insist on having at the beginning of their whodunits and which only the most naïve of readers would ever think of consulting.’

  Evadne Mount stopped, for a fraction of a second, to catch her breath again.

  ‘However,’ she continued, ‘convinced as I was that I’d hit upon the truth, I knew that my hunch could not hope to be more than that, a mere hunch, unless and until I was able to corroborate it with real factual evidence. So I decided at last to re-direct those perhaps not-so-little grey cells of mine to the problem that had baffled us all from the start – the question of exactly how Gentry’s murder was done the way it was done.

  ‘In The Hollow Man John Dickson Carr actually interrupts the narrative of his novel to lecture his
readers on all the principal categories of locked-room murders. Since I couldn’t call to mind off-hand what these were, I came looking for the book in this very library. Roger, alas, has never been an aficionado of detective fiction and, apart from a complete collection of my own efforts, all gifts from me, all unread, I’m certain, there was nothing. No Dickson Carr, no Chesterton, no Dorothy Sayers, no Tony Berkeley, no Ronnie Knox, no Margery Allingham, no Ngaio Marsh, not even Conan Doyle! Quite, quite scandalous!

  ‘I racked my brains and racked my brains, but the only two locked-room stories whose solutions I myself remembered, Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery and Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, had recourse to the selfsame trick, which was to have the murderer barge into a locked room – and then, and only then, before anybody else has arrived, have him stab the victim, who was alive up to that very instant.

  ‘Well, that was no help at all. Roger did indeed barge into the attic, but Don was at his side. Each saw what the other saw and unless, most implausibly, they were in cahoots – what, by the way, is a cahoot? – neither could have killed Gentry on the spot.

  ‘I was resolved, though, not to let myself be led astray by the outlandish circumstances of the crime. A man lay dead inside a locked room. There was no magic, no voodoo, no hocus-pocus about it. The thing had been done and hence it could be undone. And the only way left for me to undo it, I realised, was to indulge in a little personal sleuthing at the scene of the crime.

  ‘So earlier, you recall, when I asked the Chief-Inspector if I might have leave to go to my bedroom and change out of my wet clothes, what I actually did first was sneak up to the attic.’

  The instant she made this brazen admission, nobody could resist stealing a glance at Trubshawe, who was plainly torn between admiration for his rival’s deductive powers and aggravation at her self-confessed indifference to one of the most widely publicised ground-rules governing any criminal investigation.

  ‘Miss Mount,’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief, ‘I really am rather disturbed to hear you make such a statement. You knew very well that, till the local police arrived and a proper forensic examination had been carried out, nobody, not even the bestselling author of I don’t know and I don’t care how many whodunits, had permission to enter that attic room.’