The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘I did know that,’ she calmly replied, ‘and I apologise. Notwithstanding my public legend as the Dowager Duchess of Crime, I’m an extremely timorous soul when it comes to breaking the law.

  ‘My fear, however, was that before the police turned up – and what with the snow-storm and all, none of us had any idea how long that was going to be – the attic could very easily be tampered with. Remember, I was convinced the murderer was among us. What was to stop him or her taking advantage of some lull in the proceedings, just as I did, and slipping upstairs to remove a piece of hitherto unnoticed evidence?’

  ‘What! Well, I …’ Trubshawe fulminated. ‘So you admit that’s what you did do?’

  ‘I admit nothing of the kind. I did not remove a single object from the room. All I meant was that the ease with which I – an innocent party, I do assure you – the ease with which I got in and out of it could also have been exploited by the murderer himself.’

  ‘I give up!’ said the Chief-Inspector helplessly. ‘At least can I assume you didn’t touch anything?’

  ‘No-o-o,’ said the novelist. Then she added coyly, ‘Not much.’

  ‘Not much!’

  ‘Oh, hold on to your corset, Trubshawe. When you learn what I found out, you’ll agree it was well worth it.’

  She turned to address the entire company.

  ‘Now the one thing everybody said about that attic room was that it was empty. An empty room, that’s what the Colonel said, what Don said, what everybody said. But it wasn’t empty at all, it was by no means bare. There was a wooden table with two drawers, a rickety upright chair – the plain cane-bottomed type that always makes me think of Van Gogh – and a ragged old armchair. It also had a window and a door and bars on the window and a key in the keyhole of the door. So though it was pretty austere – and made even more sinister, I can tell you, by the presence of Gentry’s dead body – there was still some scrawny meat for me to gnaw on.

  ‘And I really worried at that room! I examined absolutely everything in it, even things I suspected weren’t worth examining.

  ‘First, I examined the floor more thoroughly than I’d been able to do this morning, and I noted once more how dust-free it was for a room which had supposedly been unused for months. Remember, Trubshawe, that was the minor oddity I tried to direct your attention to?

  ‘Then I examined the door itself to see whether it could have been removed from its hinges and, after the murder, hinged back on again. But that, I soon realised, was ridiculously impractical. Even if the door was hanging half off those hinges, thanks to the combined strength of Don and the Colonel, it was obvious it had never, ever been removed.

  ‘Then I examined the bars on the window to see whether maybe they could have been removed. Quite out of the question. They were caked with rust, both of them. I seriously doubt they’ve been tampered with since they were originally installed.

  ‘Then I examined the table. Not a sausage. Nothing in either drawer. No hidden partitions. It was just an ordinary wooden table, scratched and chipped, like a thousand others in a thousand other lumber rooms.

  ‘Then, when I was about to pack it in, I sat down in the armchair to take the weight off my feet – and that’s when it hit me, when it literally hit me!’ she boomed out, startling everybody with one of those deafening guffaws of hers.

  ‘Are you telling us,’ said the Chief-Inspector, ‘you know how the crime was committed?’

  ‘Not only how it was committed but who committed it. In this case, if you know how, you know who.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake, will you let the rest of us in on it!’ Madge Rolfe all but screamed at her. ‘Why must you leave us dangling like this? It’s really intolerable!’

  ‘Sorry, Madge,’ replied the novelist. ‘I’ve grown so accustomed, as a writer of mystery fiction, to spinning out the suspense that here I am doing it for real. You see, we’ve arrived at the first of those pages of a whodunit when the reader, who, I hope, will already be keyed-up, starts to get downright edgy. After all, he has invested a good deal of time and energy in the plot and he just can’t bear the thought that the ending might be a let-down, either because it’s not clever enough or else it’s too clever by half. At the same time, he has to remind himself not to let his eye stray too far ahead for fear of inadvertently catching sight of the murderer’s name before he reaches the sentence in which it’s revealed by the detective.

  ‘Actually,’ she dreamily elaborated on her favourite theme, unmindful of the agonised impatience of her listeners, ‘to turn the screw even tighter, I used to reorganise my pagination with the printers. It drove my publishers crazy, but I’d add a couple of paragraphs here or else delete a couple of lines there, just so that the detective’s declaration “And the murderer is …” would sit at the very foot of a page and the reader would have to turn that page before he was able to discover, at the top of the next one, who the murderer actually was.

  ‘But then, you know, new editions are brought out – my books generally run into many editions – the original layout goes to pot – and all my time and trouble –’

  ‘I swear,’ Cora Rutherford hissed at her, ‘I swear on my dear old mum’s eternal soul that if you don’t get back on track, Evadne Mount, there’ll be a second murder inside this house! And, as I’m certain Trubshawe here will back me up, no jury would ever convict me!’

  ‘Very well, but I do insist you let me go on in my own inimitable fashion.

  ‘Take your minds back to early this morning. On some pretext or other, probably by dangling a choice morsel of gossip before him, X entices Raymond Gentry into the attic and shoots him at point-blank range through the heart. The Colonel, who’s running his bath, hears the shot, as we all do, followed by a blood-curdling scream. On his way up to investigate, he runs into Don, whose bedroom is situated nearest the stairs. Because the room is locked – bizarrely, from the inside – they stand in front of it for a little while uncertain what to do. And it’s then the Colonel notices a trickle of blood oozing out of the attic on to the landing. So they realise they’ve just got to get in.

  ‘Putting their shoulders to the door, they eventually succeed in opening it – and the first thing they see is Raymond’s dead body. Yet, horror-stricken as they are at the sight of the corpse, they do have the presence of mind to give the whole room a good examination. Nothing. Or rather, nobody. It’s a very small room containing next to no furniture and both of them swear it was unoccupied. Am I right, Don?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s how it was.’

  ‘So what do they do next? Because they can already hear the household starting to stir, and because they’re both determined to prevent Selina from even so much as glimpsing Raymond’s body, they rush back down into the hallway, where we’re all shambling about in our dressing-gowns wondering what in heaven’s name is going on. Which is when the Colonel, as you all remember, broke the terrible news to Selina as humanely as he knew how.

  ‘That, you agree, is what was happening in the hallway. What meanwhile was happening inside the attic?

  ‘For the very last time I invite you to review the scene. The Colonel and Don have both retreated downstairs. The attic door is hanging half off its hinges. Raymond’s body is still shoved up tight against the door, still oozing blood. The only other objects in the room are the table, the upright chair and the armchair.’

  Her voice dropped to a husky whisper.

  ‘What I venture to suggest happened next is that – if I can phrase it this way – the armchair suddenly stood up on its hind legs.’

  Everybody in the library gasped in unison. It was almost as though she had spoken in italics, almost as though they could feel the hairs stand up on the napes of their necks, almost as though those hairs, too, were in italics.

  As for Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, he was scrutinising the novelist with a queer expression on his face, an expression intimating that his irritation at her unorthodox methods, as also at the torrential verbosity with which she had
been exposing them, had now capitulated to unconditional admiration for the results they had produced.

  ‘You don’t mean …?’ he said.

  ‘I do mean,’ she replied calmly. ‘The murderer had concealed himself or herself inside the armchair. That’s undoubtedly why Gentry’s body had been pushed up against the door – to make it even harder for anyone to break in and so gain for X a few more valuable seconds in which to conceal himself.

  ‘Hunched inside that armchair, having already committed the murder, it was X, don’t you see, not Raymond, who was responsible for the blood-curdling scream we all heard. For his plan to work, it was essential to call our immediate attention to the crime.

  ‘Then, as soon as the coast was clear, Roger and Don having quit the attic to let us know what they’d discovered, he – or, I repeat yet again, she – quickly and quietly clambered out of the chair, patted everything back into place, stepped over Gentry’s body and nipped down to the hallway.

  ‘Given the pandaemonium reigning in that hallway, it would have been child’s play for him or her to mingle unobserved with the rest of us. Et voilà!’

  There was the briefest of pauses. Then Trubshawe spoke again.

  ‘May we know,’ he asked, ‘how you arrived at that – I do have to say – very persuasive conclusion?’

  ‘Easy,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘I told you that I sat down on the armchair. I also told you that that was when it hit me. I even added, to be extra-helpful, the word “literally”.

  ‘The fact is, when I did sit down, the bottom of the chair instantly gave way under me – so much so that my own rear end hit the floor with an embarrassingly hefty thud. But even as I was feeling a very foolish old biddy indeed, my two stockinged legs slicing the air like a pair of scissors, I knew I’d found the solution. And once I’d managed to extricate myself, I set to examining the insides of that chair. As I expected, the whole thing had been hollowed out so that, like some monstrous glove puppet, it could actually accommodate a crouching human body. And that, I realised, was how and where the murderer was concealed.’

  ‘Very neat,’ murmured the Chief-Inspector. ‘Very, very neat.’

  ‘Do you mean X for having devised such a method,’ enquired Evadne Mount, ‘or me for having discovered it?’

  Trubshawe smiled.

  ‘Both, I guess. But hold on,’ he added, a new idea occurring to him. ‘You said that the instant you knew how it was done, you also knew who’d done it. What did you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh, Inspector, now there you do disappoint me. I really believed you at least would understand the most significant implication of my discovery.’

  ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I must be stupid – I am retired, you know – but I don’t.’

  In the ensuing silence a clear young voice rang out.

  ‘I think I do,’ said Selina.

  ‘Then why don’t you share your thoughts with us, my dear?’ the novelist said benignly.

  ‘We-ell … it strikes me this way. We – I mean, Mummy and Daddy’s house-party – we all got here only two days ago, Ray, Don and I last of all. If what you say is correct, then none of us could have been the murderer because none of us would have had either the time or the opportunity to scoop out that armchair or whatever it was the murderer did to it.’

  Evadne Mount beamed at her with the gratified air of a school-mistress congratulating an especially smart pupil.

  ‘Right first time, Selina!’ she cried. ‘Yes, it’s absolutely true. Once I realised how incredibly well prepared Gentry’s murder must have been, how far in advance it had to be set up, I knew that not one of you – I should say, not one of us – could have committed the crime.

  ‘No, the only person who could have done it was somebody who was here already. Somebody who saw and heard everything yet said nothing or next to nothing. Somebody who is among us now yet not among us. Somebody who is present yet almost transparent.’

  Her eyes narrowed behind the glinting pince-nez. Then, in what can only be described as an eerily silent voice, she said:

  ‘You know who you are. Why don’t you speak up for yourself?’

  On hearing that question, I decided, without an instant’s hesitation, to do what she asked. For I understood – indeed I think I’d understood ever since I’d failed to kill the Colonel – that it was all over for me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Farrar!?’ Mary ffolkes half-whispered, half-shrieked.

  It’s amazing how foolish you feel, standing in front of a group of people, people you’re personally acquainted with, clenching a revolver in your fist and forcing yourself to cry ‘Hands up!’ or some-such corny line as though you were in a third-rate play or picture-show. From the moment I rose from my chair in the library it was as much as I could do to keep from giggling.

  Mary ffolkes continued to stare at me in disbelief, her hands twitching, her eyelids flickering nervously.

  ‘You, Farrar? You tried to kill Roger?’

  I no longer had any reason to hold back. It came as an immense relief to be able to open up at last. It felt good to speak in the first person again. If I’d said so little during the past twelve hours, it wasn’t that I’m the taciturn type by nature, just that I’d had to be exceptionally careful not to give myself away.

  ‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes,’ I replied, ‘I tried to kill Roger.’

  I strained to keep my voice as matter-of-fact as possible.

  ‘You see,’ I explained, ‘the advantage of my position in your household was that, if I wasn’t upstairs, everyone assumed I must be downstairs, and vice versa. So no one ever really missed me. When your husband sent me down to find out what was happening in the kitchen, I hung about for ten minutes or so, standing at the big bay window and pretending to listen to the servants’ chatter. Then I saw the Colonel walk past the monkey-puzzle tree. I slipped out of the house, caught up with him, shot him and returned before anyone, upstairs or downstairs, had time to notice I’d been gone.’

  I now addressed Trubshawe.

  ‘I’m truly sorry, old man, about Tobermory, but you yourself realised I couldn’t allow him to live. When the Colonel fell, he set up such a howling …’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Mary ffolkes. ‘I don’t understand.’

  The poor uncomprehending woman looked at Selina, at Evadne Mount, at the Rolfes, at seemingly everyone but me, as though the solution to the mystery might be reflected on their faces instead of mine. She reminded me of the one guest at a dinner party who hasn’t ‘got’ an off-colour joke which has everyone else splitting their sides and is hoping that, if she peers into their eyes for long enough, it’s bound to dawn on her at last.

  ‘Roger and I were always so kind to you. We never, ever treated you as one of the servants. You were almost like the son we never had.’

  This was the scene I’d feared. The Colonel had deserved to die, in that I’d never wavered, but his wife didn’t really deserve to find out why.

  ‘It’s strange,’ I replied almost wistfully, though still clutching my revolver. ‘They say vengeance is a dish best eaten cold. I’m not so sure. I’ve been so hungry for vengeance all my adult life, year after year of it, that there were times my mouth would literally water at the prospect of exacting it. Yet now, all these years later, when I have exacted it, more or less, I can’t claim that – that I’ve gorged on it as I expected I would. And I don’t just mean because I didn’t succeed in killing the Colonel.

  ‘Mrs ffolkes, the longer I stayed in your husband’s service, the fonder I got to be of the old guy and the more I had to remind myself he was the man who did me wrong so many years ago. I’m even finding it hard to regret I didn’t kill him. And if you find that just as hard to believe, don’t forget I’ve got a set of duplicate keys to every door in the house. I could easily have snuck into his bedroom and finished him off before he’d a chance to give Trubshawe a few interesting facts about his life in America, facts that would have led the police directly to me. Yet
I chose not to.

  ‘As for Raymond Gentry,’ I added, ‘well, that’s a different story. No one will convince me I didn’t do the world a service by removing him from it.’

  I could see that the Chief-Inspector was champing at the bit to give me the usual party piece about my being under no obligation to make a statement but anything I did say – well, you know the rest. But I was set on having my own say first. I meant to be heard. I’d kept silent for too long.

  As it happens, we were both of us pipped at the post by Evadne Mount.

  ‘So you do have a voice, young man,’ she said, ‘as well as a pretty turn of phrase. You know, I’ve had my eye on you for some time. Not that I realised right from the beginning you’d done it or anything like that. It was just that I found you – well, really rather fascinating.’

  ‘Me? Fascinating?’ I won’t deny I was flattered. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re something I never thought to encounter. The perfect factotum. You were always there when you were needed and never when you weren’t. Everywhere yet nowhere, present yet anonymous, omniscient yet invisible. Attentive to everything that was going on, everything that was said and done, as though you were recording it, taking it all down, mentally taking it all in. Your eyes never met any of ours and you almost never spoke – and even when you did, not once, unless I’m very much mistaken, in the first person. You missed nothing and you contributed nothing. You practically never intervened and you absolutely never interfered. As for your – with respect – your utterly nondescript features, and your even more nondescript clothes, well, they made you, as I say, almost transparent. If I weren’t afraid of outraging the Vicar, I’d be tempted to compare you to God.’

  ‘Like God I never lied,’ I said.