The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘Come now,’ she murmured. ‘Once, surely?’

  ‘Once?’

  ‘Your name. Since your motive was vengeance, and since vengeance, if my experience is anything to go by, inevitably necessitates some form of subterfuge, I’ll lay ten to one it isn’t Farrar.’

  She was uncanny. I couldn’t help smiling at her.

  ‘Bravo, Miss Mount. No, it isn’t Farrar.’

  ‘May we know what it is?’

  ‘I want you to know what it is. Otherwise what I’ve done would become meaningless.’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘My name is Murgatroyd. Roger Murgatroyd.’

  Mary ffolkes gazed at me in astonishment.

  ‘Roger? Why, Roger’s the same name as … as Roger …’

  ‘I was named after him. Your husband was – I mean, he is – my godfather.’

  ‘You were named after him? And yet you …’

  She buried her face in her hands and burst into convulsive sobs. For her it seemed it was my attempt to kill someone whose name I shared that was the truly heinous crime. And because I was starting to feel sincerely sorry for her I didn’t care to remind her that, even though he may have treated me like a son, it had never occurred to the Colonel to address me other than by my – pseudonymous – surname. Or show the slightest interest in my family or my background, which of course suited me fine as his future murderer – or would-be murderer – yet, I can’t deny, obscurely offended me as a human being.

  ‘No,’ I continued, ‘my name isn’t Farrar. But then, your husband’s name isn’t ffolkes and he’s as much a Colonel as the Vicar was an Army padre.’

  Trubshawe was now clearly feeling it ever more incumbent on himself to reclaim the authority that was rightly his in a criminal matter.

  ‘Look here, Murgatroyd,’ he said to me in what he must have hoped was the ineffably reasonable voice of British officialdom, ‘we can surely talk this over without the gun – which is, I assume, the murder weapon. You’re not going anywhere with it, are you, so you may as well put it down.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘Not for the moment. Not until I’ve decided what to do next.’

  ‘Now listen,’ he went on, ‘I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending you’re not up for the chop. I know it and you know it. But from the way you’ve been talking, you don’t strike me as – well, as a natural-born killer. So what’s the use of behaving as though you were? Eh? Aren’t I right?’

  I looked down at the loaded gun.

  ‘You know why I’m not going to put down this revolver?’ I said after a while. ‘Because it guarantees me an uninterrupted hearing. It acts like a microphone. Except that, instead of magnifying my voice, it forces you to lower yours.

  ‘So, just for now, I’ll go on speaking through it and I suggest you all go on sitting where you are and not moving more than you have to.’

  ‘I was right!’ cried Evadne Mount. ‘“To speak through a revolver” – you do have a pretty turn of phrase. Young man, you could have been a writer.’

  ‘Thanks. Matter of fact, I am a writer. Or let’s say I was a writer.’

  ‘Who are you, Roger Murgatroyd?’

  It was Mary ffolkes who shot the question at me, without warning but now also without a trace of agitation in her voice.

  ‘Let me give you a clue, Mrs ffolkes,’ I answered. ‘My father was Miles Murgatroyd. That name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Why, no,’ she said, confused once more. ‘I’m – I’m afraid I never heard it before. It’s a very unusual, very distinctive name. I’m sure I would have remembered it if I had.’

  I found myself believing her.

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me. What I have to tell you happened a long, long time ago. You’d never even met the self-styled Colonel.’

  ‘The self-styled …’ she began. Then her voice trailed off into nothingness and she fell tremulously silent again.

  ‘There’s no polite way of putting this, Mrs ffolkes. You’ve got to know that, in his younger days, your husband was what they call a confidence man.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ screamed Selina.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Selina,’ I said as gently as I could, for I’d always had a soft spot for her. ‘But it’s God’s truth, I swear. Your father’s real name wasn’t Roger ffolkes, it was Roger Kydd. He started his career, if that’s the word I’m looking for, playing dominoes for cash on the London-to-Brighton train line. Then he graduated to the three-shell scam on Bournemouth Pier and, when my father met him, he’d just done a two-year prison stretch for forging cheques – a stretch in Dartmoor, ironically enough – and he was eking out a miserable living trying to pick the pockets of toffs waiting for cabs in front of the Ritz. My father had stopped in Piccadilly to light his Woodbine, he put his hand in his pocket for a match and he found Kydd’s hand already in there. Instead of turning him in, though, my father, who I think was something of a soft touch, decided to take him under his wing.

  ‘Remember,’ I said to the Chief-Inspector, ‘when you and the Colonel had your private little chat in this very room, he mentioned that there was a Priest’s Hole in the house. Well, I had actually concealed myself inside that Priest’s Hole, and when I heard him go on to talk about what he’d gotten up to in his youth and I realised he was on the point of revealing his true name, I immediately ran out of the secret passage into the corridor and interrupted him by knocking at the door. Fortunately, I was already dressed, like the rest of the staff, so I hadn’t had to go to my bedroom to change.

  ‘I wanted to silence him temporarily before I got the chance to silence him once and for all. If Scotland Yard ever learned who he really was, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for them to trace his connection to Miles Murgatroyd, which I naturally couldn’t let happen.

  ‘You see,’ I went on, ‘after the two of them had managed to patch over the awkward business of Roger Kydd trying to pick his pocket, my father decided to throw in his lot with him and they left Britain together to make their fortune in the States. For five years they prospected the Alaskan gold fields, five long, hard years when they lived on bacon and baked beans and became the closest of pals. Naturally, when my father got married, Kydd was his best man. And naturally, when I was born, he became my godfather.

  ‘Then, just when everything seemed to be going right at last, it actually all started to go wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Trubshawe asked.

  ‘I mean that my father and “the Colonel” – I guess it would be simpler if I just went on calling him that – my father and the Colonel finally hit pay-dirt. A deep seam of riverbed gold in a valley in north-west Alaska. I have this memory of my mother clutching a telegraph in her hands and shouting at me that we were going to be rich!

  ‘Except that we hadn’t reckoned on the Colonel’s chicanery and greed. I am sorry, so very sorry, Mrs ffolkes – Miss Selina – but I swear on my blessed mother’s grave I’m telling you exactly how it was. Just forty-eight hours after that first telegraph arrived we received a second one. It turned out that my father had plunged headlong into a ravine and broken his back.

  ‘Maybe it was an accident and maybe it wasn’t. To this day I don’t know and I’m not accusing anyone. What I do know is that, while Miles Murgatroyd was being transported to a filthy, vermin-infested hospital tent near Nome, Roger Kydd had already filed a claim to the gold-mine in his name alone. He then sold that claim on to some big mining outfit, pocketed the proceeds and vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘What did your father do then?’ asked Selina.

  I paused for a few moments before speaking again.

  ‘What did he do then? He died. He died not because his back was broken but because his spirit was broken. Oh, he was no spring chicken. He’d been globe-trotting for nigh on quarter of a century and he knew the kind of place the world was and the kind of people who lived in it. But he and the Colonel had become inseparable. That’s what killed
him.’

  ‘And then …?’ said Evadne Mount.

  ‘My mother did what she could to claw back her rights – our rights. But she discovered that, in the US of A, if you don’t have money you also don’t have rights. Over there, rights are something you buy, and they don’t come cheap.

  ‘So, since she’d married “beneath her”, in the horrible expression, and she’d been disinherited by her bigoted Baptist pastor of a father, she had to bring me up on her own. She embroidered smocks in a Frisco sweatshop till her eyeballs were as raw as sandpaper. Then, when she couldn’t do that any more, she took in other people’s laundry. Then, when she couldn’t do that either, we ended up in the poorhouse. And you have to know that, in the California of those days, the poorhouse wasn’t just a metaphor. It’s where the two of us really lived for three years. Till she died.

  ‘I was dumped in an orphanage, I lit out, I was caught, I was brought back, I lit out a second time and that time nobody bothered to try and catch me. So I mooched my way across the country. I worked as a carpenter in an Omaha saw-mill, I signed up for a stint aboard an oil tanker off the Gulf of Mexico, I served hash in a Fort Worth hash-house, I was a professional card-sharp on a Mississippi riverboat. You name it, I did it.

  ‘I finally got myself a job as an actor, touring in barnstorming mellers – that’s melodramas to you. Because of my father’s nationality I could do a snooty British accent and I’d get typecast as a Brit.

  ‘Then we were left stranded when the company manager ran off with the female juve – along with the box-office takings – and I was out of work again. So I started riding the freight trains. And during those hot nights under the stars I’d tell the other hobos the gold-rush stories my father had told me and they ate them up and said I should write them down.

  ‘I did write one down and sold it to a pulp magazine – The Argosy, its name was. I got twenty dollars for it and that twenty-dollar bill made me a writer. I’d have kept it and framed it, except that I needed it to feed me while I wrote the next one.

  ‘Eventually I’d scraped the bottom of my father’s kitty of stories and I had to make up my own and I discovered I was good at that too. Good at the kind of detective stories that were all the rage, stories about grifters, gamblers, blackmailers, showgirls and those single-minded, double-crossing bitches who are as hard as the nails they never stop polishing. Way too hard-boiled for you,’ I added, referring to Evadne Mount.

  ‘H’m, yes,’ she replied, ‘I belong to what I daresay your lot would regard as the runny soft-boiled school. But, you know, Mr … Mr Murgatroyd, when I think about how you murdered Raymond, I find it hard to credit you never tried your hand at a locked-room whodunit.’

  ‘It’s funny you should say that. I could imitate just about any style, and I actually did once have this idea for a locked-room story with all the traditional trimmings. But none of the pulp rags would buy it. Thought it was too prissy, too Limey. What they were looking for was the rough, tough stuff taken straight from the headlines and breadlines. And by that time I’d become a pro. Whatever they wanted, I gave them.

  ‘Then, when I was finally beginning to pull in some real dough, I hired a private detective, a Pinkerton agent, to find out what had happened to Roger Kydd. I suspected he’d returned to England with all the loot he’d stashed away, and I hadn’t a hope of tracking him down myself.

  ‘For a while there I thought it was money wasted, just flushed down the drain. In the end, though, my man did come up trumps. He reported back to me that Kydd had bought this – this “pile”, I think you say, on Dartmoor and set himself up as Colonel ffolkes. With two small fs, if you please.

  ‘If he’d still been based in the States, I guess I’d have taken my revenge the American way. I’d have gunned him down in some back alley and been done with it. But when I realised he’d transformed himself into an English gentleman, well, I decided to show you Brits that we Yanks could also commit – what did you call it, Miss Mount? A Mayhem Parva murder? I decided to test my locked-room plot in the real world. I liked the irony of it, his trying so hard to be English all over again.

  ‘I came over on the Aquitania and booked myself a room at The Heavenly Hound in Postbridge. Most evenings the Colonel would have a tankard or three in the bar and I had no trouble getting him chatting, especially when he learned we had a mutual passion for philately. He brought me back here a couple of times to show off his stamp collection, and the rest was a breeze. He was looking for someone to run the estate and I told him I was looking for a job, so he offered me the post of manager. That was nearly four years ago.’

  ‘Why did you wait so long before taking your revenge?’ asked Trubshawe.

  ‘Those four years were to be my alibi.’

  ‘Your alibi?’

  ‘I knew that, once I’d murdered the Colonel in the attic, I’d have no real alibi and so I’d be a prime suspect. And I thought that, if Mrs ffolkes could inform the police that I’d been in her husband’s employ for as long as four years, that would help to avert suspicion from me.

  ‘Also, I realised I’d need time to repair the armchair. So, before I made my move, I waited as patiently as I knew how for a really severe winter – the kind of winter the ffolkeses had told me about, the kind of winter that meant the house would be so isolated the police wouldn’t be able to come snooping around for three or four days, which would give me the time I needed to do such a good repair job on the chair no one would ever know it had been tampered with. But, of course, I hadn’t counted on a retired Scotland Yard Inspector living just a few miles away.’

  Then I added – ‘ruefully’ is the adverb I suppose I would have used if this had been one of my own stories – ‘I also hadn’t counted on Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Crime being of the party.’

  I made a little mock-bow – rueful again – in Evadne Mount’s direction.

  ‘Thank you, young man,’ she said, returning the bow. ‘So my exposé of how and why you committed the two crimes was accurate?’

  ‘Ha! Accurate isn’t the word,’ I replied with a mirthless laugh. ‘For me it was almost creepy having to listen to you tell the story, my story, listen to you tell it as though you’d written it yourself and I was just a character in one of your books. I couldn’t even help admiring the way you picked up on that missing u in “behaviour”. Now that was a dumb mistake.’

  ‘It was indeed,’ she agreed. ‘But, you know, I always say it’s the cleverest crooks who make the dumbest mistakes. I might even borrow yours for my next whodunit. The few readers capable of picking up on it, as you put it, will most likely assume it’s a printer’s literal. God knows, there are enough of those about nowadays.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘it is gratifying to realise that, in the midst of tragedy, my instincts remained intact.’

  ‘Well – maybe less than you think,’ I said.

  ‘Oh? What makes you say that?’

  ‘Only that the one thing you don’t seem to have cottoned on to is your responsibility in the murder of Raymond Gentry.’

  ‘My responsibility! My responsibility! Why, I – I never heard of such a –’

  ‘Yes, your responsibility. You were absolutely right when you suggested that the Colonel had been the victim I originally singled out for my locked-room murder. And you guessed right, too, when you said that, after Miss Selina arrived at the last minute with Gentry, I chose to murder him instead – promising to give him some piece of bogus dirt about the Colonel and persuading him to meet me in the attic before the rest of the house was up and about. And you were also right about why I changed my plans – so there’d be a whole new set of suspects and motives.’

  I turned to Trubshawe.

  ‘You were puzzled, remember, at not finding the murder weapon inside the attic? What you didn’t understand was that I’d deliberately taken the gun away with me – for the simple reason that I didn’t want Gentry’s death to be thought of as a suicide. For my plan to work, it had to be seen for wh
at it was: a murder. Only not one committed by me.

  ‘And what you didn’t understand’ – I turned once more to Evadne Mount – ‘is that, if I decided to switch victims, it was partly because I’d heard you holding forth again and again about how much safer and more effective it was to murder someone by just shooting him or knifing him and then burying the knife or the gun. What was it you said? Eschew the fancy stuff? Well, you’re the expert. So that’s what I did. I decided to eschew the fancy stuff and just gun the Colonel down while he was out walking Tobermory, poor old Tobermory, on the moors.’

  Shaken by the turn of events, Evadne Mount was, for once, speechless. It was Selina ffolkes who spoke up instead.

  ‘But don’t you see, Evie,’ she said, ‘it means you saved Daddy’s life!’

  ‘Eh? What’s that you –?’

  I cut her short.

  ‘Miss Selina’s speaking the plain truth,’ I said. ‘If I’d stuck to my original plan, I’d surely have succeeded in killing the Colonel in the attic, just as I succeeded in killing Gentry there. But your theories were responsible for making me change that plan and, as it turned out, it was because of those theories that I botched the Colonel’s murder. For you know, my dear Miss Mount, those theories of yours, all those fine theories of the Dowager Duchess of Crime? Frankly, they stink. You just have a go yourself and you’ll discover as I did it’s not so easy committing a murder that’s simple, boring and perfect.’

  The novelist instantly cheered up.

  ‘Well, thank God for that!’ she exclaimed. ‘So it seems that, just like Alexis Baddeley, I’m right even when I’m wrong! I trust, Trubshawe, you won’t forget that, if ever we should combine forces on another case.’

  Silently, though quite visibly, mouthing, ‘Heaven forfend!’, the Chief-Inspector then leaned forward and spoke to me in his soberest voice.

  ‘Murgatroyd, you do know that by killing Gentry, however worthless an individual he was, you were causing the shadow of suspicion to be cast on a number of wholly innocent people?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘but the fact that just about everyone had a motive meant it was very unlikely any one suspect would be arrested. My grievance was with the Colonel. I didn’t want to see anyone else hurt.’