Inside the library Evadne Mount faced the assembled company while everyone, even Trubshawe, still sucking on that long since extinct pipe of his, waited for her to start presenting her evidence. But when she finally did speak, what she had to say wasn’t at all what anyone had expected to hear.
She turned to the Doctor’s wife, who was unwrapping a new packet of Player’s, and asked, ‘Can I cadge, Madge?’
Madge Rolfe stared at her.
‘What?’
‘Can I cadge one of your nicotine lollies?’
‘One of my …?’
‘Your ciggies, dear, your ciggies.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I don’t,’ answered the novelist.
She opened the packet which had been tossed into her lap and drew out a cigarette. Then, lighting up and taking what looked very much like a beginner’s puff, she began.
‘You must forgive me if I start off on a personal note,’ she said with the complacent tone of someone who doesn’t care a jot whether she’s forgiven or not. ‘But if there’s one thing in this world I flatter myself I know how to do well, it’s tell a story, and, assuming none of you minds, I’d like to tell this remarkable story of ours in my own words, at my own pace and without omitting any of my own – rare – misjudgments.
‘It really has been the weirdest experience in my life, an experience that, had it not involved two brutal crimes, one of them committed against a close friend, I might even have enjoyed. Just think! Here we are, a group of suspects gathered together in the library to hear how and why a murder was perpetrated! It’s a scene I’ve written so many times in my novels. Yet if any of you had told me that one day I myself wouldn’t just be present at such a scene but would actually be playing the role of presiding sleuth, I’d have said you wanted your head examined!
‘Of course,’ she went on, directing her gaze on each of her listeners in turn to ensure that not one of them was paying her less than the attention she believed she deserved, ‘like my own fictional detective, Alexis Baddeley, I’m no more than an amateur. And, as I don’t have to remind you, I’ve never once had Alexis solve a locked-room crime. I like my whodunits to keep at least one foot on terra firma.
‘I’ve never had any truck with murder methods involving ropes and ladders and pulleys and doorkeys yanked through keyholes on strings which somehow succeed in combusting of their own accord and murder victims found stabbed in the middle of the desert with nary a footprint in the sand, coming or going, or else hanging from a beam in a padlocked garret with no sign of a chair or a table or any item of furniture they could have climbed up on and not even a damp patch on the floorboards to suggest the murderer had used a block of ice which had since melted. I can’t be doing with such contrivances. For me they’re too darned fangled, to borrow the Colonel’s delightful coinage.
‘Anyway, John Dickson Carr has cornered that particular market and what I say is, if somebody’s unbeatable, why bother trying to beat him?
‘Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away here, and I know you all think I’m a ghoulish old pussy, but I am coming to the point. And that point is that we were all so hypnotised by the method of Raymond’s murder – a method none of us dreamt could ever exist outside a book – we just couldn’t see the larger picture.
‘Locked-room murders, you know, aren’t unlike chess end-games. What I mean by that is that they bear about as much relation to real murders, murders committed by real people in the real world, as those end-games in the illustrated magazines – you know, a Knight and Pawn versus an unprotected Bishop to mate in five moves – well, as much as those end-games bear to the real strategies and configurations of a real game of chess. It’s something my dear friend Gilbert has always understood, which is why he’s the nonpareil genius he is.’
From the blank expressions that flitted from one face to another like a contagious yawn, it was clear nobody knew which Gilbert she was referring to. And since it was equally clear nobody liked to say so, she explained:
‘Gilbert Chesterton. What makes his Father Brown stories so unique is precisely that they are end-games and they don’t pretend to be anything but. By confining his clever little narratives to a dozen pages, he avoids having to articulate all that laborious plotline padding that a novelist like me needs to justify the dénouement. And his readers have the satisfying impression of being whisked straight to the climax of a full-length whodunit – the only part of it, to be honest, that really interests them – without having had to plough through the tedious exposition.
‘The point, Miss Mount,’ said Trubshawe, ‘the point!’
‘As I’ve said many times before in this very house,’ she went on, conspicuously ignoring his interruption, ‘if you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.’
‘That’s all very enlightening, I’m sure,’ Trubshawe interrupted her again in a voice that was both suave and gruff. ‘But when we agreed to join you in the library, it wasn’t to hear your opinions on the difference between factual and fictional murders – opinions which, as you yourself have admitted, you’ve already voiced many times. Just where is this leading to?’
Evadne Mount frowned.
‘Do learn to be patient with me, Chief-Inspector,’ she replied gravely. ‘I shall get there. I invariably do.’
She took another, more confident puff on her cigarette.
‘So there we were – there I was – confronted with two murders, each of which was very different from the other in its method. One was, as the Chief-Inspector would put it, a “fictional” murder, patently committed by somebody who’d read a lot of whodunits – though not, I repeat, any of mine. And the other was a “real” murder, an attempt at a real murder, the kind of murder which is committed every day in the real world.
‘For the first murder, Raymond Gentry’s, there were almost too many motives. Apart from Selina here, everybody in our little party was secretly, and in some instances not in the least secretly, relieved to see him put out of commission once and for all.
‘And the initial mistake I made was to persuade myself that even among such a wide and motley range of suspects there were distinctions to be drawn. Nearly all of us had been the object of Gentry’s malicious little smears. (There were exceptions and I’ll come to these in a minute.) Which implied that, theoretically, nearly all of us had a good reason for wishing him dead. Nevertheless, what struck me initially, I repeat, was the existence, as I saw it, of two separate categories of suspects.
‘There were those, on the one hand, for whom Raymond’s revelations would have been utterly catastrophic were they to have turned up in The Trombone. Cora, for instance. As she herself was honest enough to point out to us, her career would be ruined if word, instead of mere rumour, began to circulate about her dependency on … on, shall we say, certain substances.
‘Now, now, Cora, you don’t have to look daggers at me, I fancy I know what you’re itching to reply. Yes, it’s perfectly so, there was one other such suspect, and that was me. My books, I unblushingly confess, have a vast readership, and even though they’re all about murder and greed and hatred and revenge they’re really rather genteel fictions read mostly by rather genteel people. If these genteel readers of mine were suddenly to find out that – well, I’d prefer to pass over in silence something you already all know about me – but, yes, I can imagine what effect that would have on my sales.’
Having manfully grasped the nettle of her own past sins, she was ready to launch herself back into the fray.
‘There were also those, however, who, distressing as it must have been to hear once private squalors publicly aired, had nothing to fear from The Trombone. You, Clem, for one.
‘It’s true, unfortunately, that you played fast-and-loose with the facts of your wartime experience, and this has unquestionably been a Christmas you’ll want to forget, and want all of us likewise to forget. Yet you yourself, if I remember aright, actually acknowledged that, whatever warped amusement Raymond Gentry took in distilling his poison, the yellow press was never going to give a tinker’s curse for the white – or off-white – lies of a clergyman in an extremely modest living on Dartmoor.
‘Then we come to our friends the Rolfes. It can’t have been pleasant for either of you to see years and years of pretending to shrug off all those whispers as to what precisely transpired between Madge and some swarthy gigolo in Monte Carlo or how Henry botched what ought to have been a routine operation, curtailing not only a baby’s life but his own career along with it. It can’t have been pleasant, I say, to have all your face-saving efforts brought to naught in one fell swoop by Gentry’s hateful muckspreading. But, again, like the Wattises, you were never prominent enough, and you’re not prominent enough now, to interest the type of individual who’d read a piece of toilet paper like The Trombone.’
If, so far, all those present had listened more or less uncomplainingly to Evadne Mount argue her case, it wasn’t that they were now serenely at ease with the notion that the most ignominious facts of their lives had become public knowledge. Each time she mentioned one of their names, there was a start, an audible gasp, even, on Mrs Wattis’s part, a stifled tear. But the argument was so lucidly presented that, despite the renewed humiliations it brought in its wake, it felt like not only a duty but almost a pleasure to hear it out. What’s more, the tension that had been screwed up so tight over the preceding thirty-six hours had had to find a release, and release of a kind was what she was slowly but surely giving her fellow guests.
‘So you might have supposed, as I did at first,’ she went on, ‘that the only two legitimate suspects were Cora and myself. Who, after all, would commit a murder just because some dog-eared old dirt was going to be dished up in a village of a hundred or so inhabitants?
‘Well, my answer to that would be – just about anybody! Oh, I saw the horror in your faces when Gentry started firing his lethal little darts, not just horror but homicidal loathing! And I soon realised how wrong I’d been in assuming that the craving for vengeance had to be commensurate with the degree of exposure.
‘Frankly, it was a mistake I of all people should never have made. If I’ve set several of my books in a Home Counties village, it’s because it offers the writer of whodunits a more fertile breeding-ground for murder than the most insalubrious back alley in Limehouse! You want to know what a sink of iniquity really looks like? I’ll tell you. It has picturesque thatched cottages and Ye Olde Tea Shoppes and Women’s Institutes and Conservative Associations and Bring-and-Buy Sales and Morris Dancing on the village green and Charity Fêtes in the Vicarage garden –’
‘Oh come, Evadne,’ the Vicar pooh-poohed mutinously, ‘there you do exaggerate …’
‘Sorry again, old bean, but I’m afraid that’s bilge. You’ll find this hard to credit, but I’ve actually had a bad review or two – there was one in the Daily Clarion I won’t forget in a hurry,’ she snarled, baring her fangish false teeth, ‘yet not once has a reviewer criticised one of my novels for painting too dark and malignant a picture of rural life.
‘Then there’s my fan mail. Most of it’s not from paying customers, who evidently believe that, having forked out seven-and-six for a book, they have no further obligation to its author, but from readers in villages who obtain my whodunits from their local circulating-library. I should let you read that fan mail. I recall one letter. It was from a little old lady in some idyllic hamlet in the Cotswolds telling me how she suspected the district nurse of slowly poisoning her crippled husband, and the sole basis of her accusation was that she’d chanced to catch the poor woman borrowing a copy of The Proof of the Pudding, which has exactly the same premise. And there was another, from somebody who’d read The Timing of the Stew and who was persuaded the stationmaster had read it as well, since his wife had vanished, supposedly run off with the coalman, but she, my fan, she knew better, she knew he’d buried both of them under the station’s ornamental rockery.
‘In the Detection Club we once coined a name for this sort of macabre village – Mayhem Parva. Well, I seriously doubt there’s a single village in England’s green and pleasant land that isn’t a potential Mayhem Parva!
‘So, Vicar, no, I don’t exaggerate. I’m taking your case only as a general example, you understand, but it’s my belief that a mild-mannered man of the cloth, as I know you to be, would be just as likely to commit murder to prevent his name from being besmirched at the local British Legion dinner-dance as a film star would be to prevent his or hers from being splashed across the front page of some nationally distributed scandal mag.
‘And what that meant, of course, was that I immediately found myself right back where I started. I was obliged to regard nearly everybody present as equally suspect.
‘Now for the exceptions. There was Selina, first of all, the only one of us to mourn Raymond’s passing. She may have seen the light now – let’s not forget the row they had in the attic – but I don’t think any of us would have questioned the feelings she formerly had for the man. I ruled her out at once. She, it seemed to me, couldn’t conceivably have killed him.
‘Nor, I state without fear of contradiction, could her mother. I say that not only because she’s one of my oldest and dearest and truest friends but because I know she’s incapable of harming a fly. She’s certainly incapable of harming a fly by trapping it in a locked room, swatting it to death, then managing to get out of said locked room again without opening either its door or its window!’
She beadily scanned her audience.
‘To be sure, given the uncanny similarity between Raymond’s murder and the kinds of murders that are routinely committed in whodunits, the very fact that Selina and Mary ffolkes were the least likely suspects may have caused some of you to wonder privately if perhaps one of them did it after all. Not me. As far as I was concerned, they really were the least likely suspects. They do exist.
‘Donald, now. A different case, Donald. True, as far as any of us are aware, no skeletons lie lurking in the cupboard of his young life. Here, though, a more traditional motive raised its head. Jealousy. Don was in love with Selina – is in love with Selina – and he was visibly jealous of his rival. We all remember how they almost came to blows.
‘Nor have we forgotten that Don actually threatened to kill Gentry. “I’ll murder you, you swine, I swear I’ll murder you!” We all heard him shout these words. Even if we sympathised with him and told ourselves that that’s all they were, just words, the fact remains that, as the Chief-Inspector reminded us all, he swore to end the life of somebody who was indeed subsequently shot through the heart.
‘Then poor Roger himself was shot and all of these splendid theories of mine were thrown into confusion. For there seemed to be no motive at all for murdering him.’
She settled herself more comfily in her chair.
‘In a whodunit, of course, there would have been at least one obvious motive – that Roger had discovered some crucial clue to the identity of Raymond’s murderer and had to be put to death himself before he had a chance to share his knowledge with the authorities. But the circumstances of this case were so very special. Because Henry suggested we all be present throughout the Chief-Inspector’s interrogation, everything said about the events leading up to Gentry’s death was said in everybody’s presence. I cannot recall a single occasion, prior to his taking his constitutional, when the Colonel was alone with one of us and might unknowingly have let slip some idle remark that put the murderer on his mettle.
‘Yes, there were those twenty minutes or so which he spent with Mary, when we all retired to our bedrooms to dress and freshen up. But really, I don’t think we need entertain for a second the notion that it was to his own wife that he passed on some damning item of evidence and that it was his own wife who later felt compelled to do away with him.’
Horrified that such a grisly conjecture had even momentarily crossed her friend’s mind, Mary ffolkes looked up in reproachful surprise.
‘Why, Evie,’ she cried, ‘how could you think such a thing!’
‘Now, now, Mary love,’ replied the novelist soothingly, ‘I said exactly the opposite. I said I didn’t think such a thing. You’ve already been told I don’t suspect you. All I’m doing is hypothesising, ticking off one possibility after another, no matter how improbable.’
With a grimace of distaste, she stubbed her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray as though squeezing the life out of an insect, muttered, ‘Don’t know what you see in ’em,’ to Madge Rolfe and once more picked up the threads of her thesis.
‘Well then, since the first murder had too many motives and the second no apparent motive at all, I was flummoxed. And that was when I decided instead to apply my “little grey cells” – if I may filch a conceit from one of my so-called rivals – to apply my “little grey cells” to the respective methods employed, in the hope that they might tell me something about the murderer’s psychology.
‘Concerning the first of these methods, the locked room, we all tended to make the same assumption, and who could blame us? We all took it for granted that Raymond’s murder had been premeditated to the least detail. Which was, considering how fantastical it seemed, a fair assumption on our part.
‘But there was one detail of that murder which, it suddenly occurred to me, could have been altered at any minute, even right up to the very last minute, without in any way compromising the whole diabolical scheme. The identity of the victim.’
Having talked non-stop, she needed to take another deep breath and, as she did, Trubshawe could be heard musing, ‘H’m, yes, I think I begin to see what you’re getting at.’
At this late stage of the proceedings, though, Evadne Mount was in no mood to share even a scintilla of limelight with anyone else. She continued more vigorously than ever:
‘The other assumption that all of us made was that the second crime, so crude and clumsy in its execution, was in the nature of an afterthought, or at the very least something the murderer hadn’t originally planned on. We all assumed, in other words, that the Colonel’s shooting on the moors was an unforeseen consequence of Gentry’s shooting in the attic.
‘Then I had quite the brain-wave. What, I found myself thinking, what if Gentry’s murder, not the Colonel’s, had been the afterthought?’
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.’
‘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.’
‘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.