‘No,’ cried Selina, her eyes suddenly ablaze, ‘no, maybe he wasn’t! But he was alive, don’t you see, he was clever and he was fun and he widened my horizons! Oh, I realise how silly and childish it must sound to you but, compared to Ray’s world, everything in my own life seemed so shrivelled and dried up! Before I met him, all I’d ever known was this house and the village and the countryside around it. Well, I wanted something better out of life! I told myself I was free, white and twenty-one and I wanted everything that was going in this crazy world – furs and fine wines and wild, extravagant parties! And I didn’t want it some day – I wanted it now! Was that so very wrong of me?’
Her voice dropped an octave.
‘No, don’t answer, anybody,’ she said contritely. ‘It was wrong, I know. Now I know.’
‘How,’ enquired Trubshawe softly, ‘do you know?’
Selina stubbed out her cigarette, on which she had taken no more than a couple of jerky puffs.
‘Mr Trubshawe, if you’ve been questioning my family and their friends, then you must already have been told how intolerably rude and disrespectful Ray was to all of them from the moment we arrived. I watched him with mounting horror – watched how he couldn’t resist needling them and making them squirm. It was as though it was in his blood. What I had remembered as so gay and amusing and penetrating in the Kafka Klub now struck me as just stupidly arrogant and cruel.
‘That was one of his pet words, you know, “penetrating”. I used to think it was priceless the way he used it about everything. Down here, though, I realised for the first time what a hollow, shallow, meaningless word it was, the sort of word only a know-all like Ray would ever dream of using, a word whose sole purpose was to make other people feel small. Every time I heard him – here, here in this house, in my home, in front of my parents and their friends, my friends, my true friends – every time I heard him describe somebody or something as penetrating I wanted to scream!
‘I was seeing him as he really was and I couldn’t wait for Christmas to be all over so he’d drive back to Town, alone this time, and I’d never have to set eyes – or ears – on him again!’
She turned towards her parents, who had been listening avidly to her.
‘It’s true – Mummy – Daddy. I am so terribly, terribly sorry for what I’ve put you through, but I swear that even before – before what happened to him, I’d made up my mind to break things off. Before it went further … before it went too far …’
‘Oh, Selina, my darling,’ cried Mary ffolkes, giving her a smothering hug, ‘I just knew you’d eventually see what an awful person he was!’
‘I did. But it was Don who really showed me what Ray was worth.’
‘Don?’ echoed the Chief-Inspector. ‘What did he have to do with it?’
‘Well, as I told you, Don was unhappy from the very beginning, from the drive down here, with Raymond taking over all the arrangements as he did, and I could see him silently suffering Ray’s presence and just dying to give him what-for. Then when Ray, who got disgustingly drunk – that’s another side of him I used to find charming, if you can believe it – when Ray began needling even me, about my piano-playing, Don leapt up and actually threatened –’
Intuitively divining Trubshawe’s reaction to that last word, Selina abruptly clammed up.
‘I – I don’t mean –’ she finally began to stammer. ‘It’s just that, compared to Ray, Don was – you know – he was so – so virile – so …’
The Chief-Inspector doggedly pursued his advantage.
‘What did Don threaten to do to Raymond Gentry?’ he almost barked at her.
‘What?’
‘What was it Don threatened to do?’
‘I threatened to kill him.’
Trubshawe wheeled about to confront the young American who had just spoken.
‘What did you say?’
‘You heard what I said. I threatened to kill him.’
‘Oh, Don,’ said Selina in a whisper, ‘I oughtn’t to have spoken. I really didn’t mean to –’
‘Aw, shoot. He’d have found out on his own.’
‘So you threatened to kill him, did you?’ said Trubshawe. ‘Now that is interesting. Interesting for a reason that should be obvious to us all, but also interesting because it’s something Miss Mount omitted to include in her account of last night’s events.’
‘Yeah,’ said Don, glancing at the novelist, ‘I noticed that too.’
‘Heavens!’ protested Evadne Mount. ‘It ought to be perfectly plain why I didn’t mention it. People never stop threatening to kill other people – why, I’ve heard four-year-olds threaten to kill their parents – and in pretty much every case, in 99.9 per cent of cases, I’ll wager, it doesn’t mean a thing. But the police, naturally, would have pounced on such a threat and, don’t forget, Trubshawe, I hadn’t seen you in action yet. You might have been just the kind of copper who’s always willing to jump to the first and most obvious conclusion.’
‘Yes,’ Trubshawe had to agree, ‘I might at that,’ and he added, ‘especially as this particular threat happens to belong to the remaining 0.1 per cent where the threatened individual does actually end by getting himself killed.’
‘I grant you that,’ the novelist grudgingly conceded. ‘But anybody can see that Don didn’t kill Gentry.’
‘He might not have done in one of your whodunits, but we’re in the real world here.’
He turned back to Don.
‘Am I to take it you really meant to kill Gentry?’
‘It’s what I felt like doing,’ replied Don cagily. ‘But I didn’t.’
‘Then why did you threaten him?’
‘Listen, Mr Trubshawe, you never knew the creep. He was a complete … well, in mixed company I can’t say what he was a complete … but you’ve heard everyone else tell you what they thought of him.
‘With me it began earlier – when Selina telephoned to say he’d be joining us for Christmas. Everything had been hunky-dory up to then between Selina and me and I was beginning to think – to hope … Then there I was, squashed into the rumble seat of his Hispano-Suiza watching Selina give him “my hero” looks. I was one pretty browned-off guy, I can tell you.
‘And when we eventually got down here, the three of us, and straight away Gentry started driving everyone nuts, I found it tough work just holding myself back.’
‘But, at least to begin with, you did? Hold yourself back, I mean.’
‘I reckoned it was none of my beeswax.’
Trubshawe frowned perplexedly.
‘None of your what?’
‘My business. It was when he got fresh with Selina herself I just couldn’t see straight.’
‘And what exactly did you do about it?’
‘I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and ordered him to lay off.’
‘H’m. Stirring stuff all right, if not quite the death threat you admitted to, was it?’
‘No … but that wasn’t all.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yeah. He began making remarks about my parents – I’m an orphan, you see, I never knew my real mom and dad, and Gentry began to say – well, you won’t get me in a thousand years to repeat what he said but I warned him if he ever told any of his filthy lies again – or ever harmed a hair on Selina’s head – I’d kill him.’
‘And you meant it?’
‘Sure I meant it! And I’d have done it too. But what can I say? I’m in the same boat as everyone else in this room. Some lucky stiff got there first. I don’t know who he was and, even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you because, by bumping off a louse like Raymond Gentry, he did me – me and the world both – a favour!’
As Selina now treated Don to exactly the same ‘my hero’ look he’d just been alluding to, the Chief-Inspector shifted to another tack.
‘Miss Selina, while you were resting upstairs in your room, I was listening to your parents’ guests talk about the way Raymond Gentry taunted them by dropping all kinds of
evil hints about certain regrettable incidents in their respective pasts. But even though he was a professional gossip, as I understand, he couldn’t have been made privy from his usual sources to the more, shall we say, local of these secrets, and we’ve all been rather wondering who could have passed them on to him.’
‘Yes …?’ she said, a faint tremor detectable in her voice.
‘Well?’ he queried her.
‘Well what, Inspector?’
‘I think you know what, Miss. It was you, wasn’t it? It was from you he got that information?’
There was a lengthy pause while Selina gazed helplessly into the faces of her parents’ guests.
‘Come now, Miss. You’d be better off telling me the truth. Everyone else has.’
‘Well, you see,’ she said, so faintly you had to strain to hear her, ‘when it was agreed that Ray would drive us down, he asked me what kind of a crowd he’d be mixing with. You understand, he hated anybody who wasn’t, in his eyes, “amusing”, he got bored so awfully easy, so I just couldn’t say, you know, there’d be the local Vicar and his wife, the local Doctor and his wife. They just wouldn’t have sounded amusing enough for him. So I – well, I found myself trying to make them more – more interesting to him and I suppose I did let slip some of the local gossip. I didn’t mean any harm and, if I’d known what he intended to do with it, I swear I wouldn’t have breathed a word.
‘Oh, will you ever find it in yourselves to forgive me?’ she cried disconsolately to everyone present.
‘Yes, I can see how you might be feeling pretty rotten about your indiscretions now,’ said the Chief-Inspector before anyone had a chance to reply. ‘But the idea that, after you’d known him only a few weeks, this man had become so important to you, you were prepared to divulge your friends’ most intimate secrets to him? I must say, that does surprise me.’
‘But they weren’t secret! It was wrong of me, I know, but most of what I told Ray – Dr Rolfe’s operation in Canada, the Vicar and the War – it was common knowledge in Postbridge village. If you really want to know everything about everybody around here, all you have to do is pass the time of day with the postmistress or the librarian.
‘As for Evie, you’ve only got to look at her to guess what the skeleton in her closet must be.’
‘Well, thank you for that, my dear,’ the novelist acidly cut in. ‘I think I’m speaking for all of us when I express my gratitude to you for being so bracingly outspoken!’
‘Oh, I’m getting all muddled!’ said Selina, who was indeed beginning to sound as fluttery as her mother tended to do in a crisis. ‘I love you all dearly, I do, I do. But what I’m trying to get the Chief-Inspector to understand is that I didn’t tell Ray anything he couldn’t have found out for himself after spending an hour or two in the village.’
‘Miss Selina,’ Trubshawe then demanded questioningly, ‘did you have a rendezvous with Raymond Gentry last night – or rather, early this morning – in the attic?’
Selina gasped. This was one question she hadn’t been expecting.
‘Why … how did you know that?’
‘You were heard,’ replied Trubshawe bluntly. ‘It seems you and he had a violent altercation. At about five-thirty.’
It took her a few moments before she was able to answer.
‘Yes, it’s true. I did meet him in the attic.’
‘Why don’t you describe what happened?’
‘I simply couldn’t sleep last night. I couldn’t stop brooding about what a complete stinker Ray had been, I just couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to bring everything to an end between him and me but I didn’t want to leave the unpleasant business of breaking up till next morning – this morning – when the whole household would be up and about.
‘So, at around five, I slipped on a dressing-gown and tiptoed along to his bedroom. I tapped on his door again and again – I didn’t dare knock too loudly for fear of waking the others – and he eventually opened it. He was in a beastly temper – hungover, I guess – and he started remonstrating with me for getting him up at such a godawful hour, as he put it. I told him we had to talk and suggested we go to the attic, which was never used and where we wouldn’t be overheard. After lots of mumbling and grumbling and fumbling about, he agreed.’
‘So then you did both go upstairs to the attic?’ asked Trubshawe.
‘Yes.’
‘Which you found unlocked?’
‘Oh yes. It’s never locked.’
‘I see. Go on.’
‘Inside the attic I let him know what I thought of him and how he’d only shown himself up by being so horrid to my friends. Then I insisted he drive back to Town the very next morning. I mean, today.’
‘What was his reaction?’
‘He laughed at me.’
‘Laughed at you?’
‘Yes – a horrible kind of devilish laugh it was. In fact, as I realise now, it was just the same wicked laugh he’d always had – you know, wicked in the witty sense of the word, or so I used to kid myself. But now that it was directed against me, it brought home for the first time how it must have felt to his victims.
‘Well, he just went on ridiculing me and Mummy and Daddy and their friends and their values and their traditions and he even began sneering at how pathetically dreary and boring life in the English countryside was. He said it was all warm beer and dog lovers and old maids cycling to Communion through the early morning mist …’
‘And what was your answer to that?’ asked Trubshawe.
‘I shouted back at him and it all got louder and louder until I thought if I stayed in that room another instant my head would explode. It wasn’t only the sound of Ray’s voice I couldn’t bear any longer, it was the sound of my own. So I turned on my heels and ran back to my room.’
‘And then?’
‘Ten minutes later I heard Raymond walk along the corridor. He was whistling, he was actually whistling, as though … It was “The Sheik of Araby”, I remember.’
‘Oh, the swine!’ said Don through gritted teeth.
‘And there I stayed, inside my bedroom, crying myself to sleep, until I was woken up by …’
She faltered, unable to go on.
‘By the discovery of the body … I know,’ murmured Trubshawe. ‘Tell me, what were your feelings about that?’
‘Oh, terrible, terrible! I actually felt guilty! It was almost as though I were in some way the cause of his death. Ray had been a close friend, after all, and however badly he’d behaved he surely didn’t deserve that … Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying any longer … I’m so – so dreadfully confused …’
‘You may be confused, Miss,’ said the Chief-Inspector after giving her a few seconds to pull herself together, ‘but above all you’ve been brave, very, very brave. And I’d like to thank you for that. Not,’ he added, shaking his head, ‘that what you’ve had to say has brought us much closer to a solution, but that would appear to be the nature of the beast. The nature of the case, I mean,’ he explained, lest anyone were mystified by his metaphor. ‘Thank you again. For you the ordeal’s over.’
Then, as Mary ffolkes started to fuss around her daughter again, the Chief-Inspector, who was clearly a man who didn’t believe in wasting time, immediately turned to her husband.
‘Colonel?’
‘Yes, Trubshawe?’
‘Now that Miss Selina has told me everything she knows, I believe it’s your turn to walk over the hot coals.’
‘My turn to … Oh yes, of course, of course,’ Roger ffolkes quickly replied.
For a few seconds, though, he fiddled uneasily with his cigar’s cellophane wrapper, before finally saying:
‘There’s just one thing, Trubshawe. We do seem to have been at this for hours already. I wonder if the others think the way I do, that maybe we might take a short break. It’s very draining on us all, you know, being interrogated in this way, and I’m sure my guests would like to have a bit of a lie-down in their bedrooms. As for me, I ha
ven’t had my constitutional today and I really need to stretch my legs.’
‘In this weather, Colonel?’
‘In all weathers, sir, in all weathers. Isn’t that so, Mary?’
‘Oh yes, that’s quite right, Inspector. Roger won’t let a day go by without his constitutional.’
‘We-ell,’ said Trubshawe uncertainly, ‘p’raps a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea at that. Though a short one, mind.’
On hearing the Chief-Inspector’s acquiescence – which for him, of course, implied a stay of execution, however short-lived – the Colonel instantly became his breezy self once again.
‘Oh, absolutely!’ he genially replied. ‘Absolutely! All I want is a lungful of good fresh wintry air. Half an hour, no more, there and back, I promise.’
‘Actually, Colonel,’ added Trubshawe, ‘if you do intend going for a walk, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind taking Tober along with you. The poor old boy needs his constitutional too.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said the Colonel. ‘But will he follow me?’
‘Oh yes. Follow anybody for a walk, Tober will. Even a villain, ha ha! Hey, Tober, won’t you, though? Walkies! Walkies!’
No sooner had the Chief-Inspector pronounced the magic word than the Labrador, who had been lying slumped at his master’s feet, dragged himself up to his own feet with such surprising energy you might have thought his furiously wagging tail was acting as a kind of hydraulic lever.
‘There’s a good boy,’ said the Colonel, tickling the dog’s sticky-wet muzzle and starting to lead him out of the library. ‘Going for walkies, are we, you and me? Eh? Eh, Tobermory?’
Just as he reached the doorway, however, he turned round.
‘Farrar?’
‘Yes, Colonel?’
‘Whilst I’m out, you might pop down to the kitchen for a while. Make sure the servants are all right.’
‘Yes, of course, sir.’
‘And Farrar?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have Iris serve tea in the drawing-room. I imagine everybody’s dying for a quick cuppa before they go up to their rooms.’
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd Page 12
