The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

Chapter Eleven

‘Depends. Depends.’

Trubshawe was speaking. He stood with his broad, bull-necked back to the fireplace, but at an oblique angle to it, concerned as he was to avoid blocking its warmth from the drawing-room’s other occupants. In contrast to the glowing fire, the pipe that permanently dangled from his lips was also, so far as anyone could recall, permanently unlit, to the point where you began to wonder if you’d ever actually seen it emitting smoke. Like many a man of his age, he wore that pipe rather than smoked it, and it had become as indispensable an accessory to his self-presentation as the Vicar’s dog-collar or Cora Rutherford’s tonitruous tangle of bangles.

Who knows what comment, or whose, prompted so typically cautious a response from him? ‘Depends. Depends.’ It could have been his motto, his ‘legend’, as the French affect to call it.

He had spent his whole career being dependable. It was obvious, even to those who had only fleetingly crossed his path in the line of duty, that he’d never been one of the Force’s star detectives, that no tabloid reporter had ever dubbed him ‘Trubshawe of the Yard’. But he was what the Great British Police Establishment is most comfortable with – the type of investigator who arrives at the solution to a problem (he himself would instinctively have avoided the word ‘mystery’) not through some ostentatious lightning-flash of inspiration or even imagination but by simply, doggedly depending on others to point him, often without their actually realising they were doing so, in the right direction.

He would pose a question, listen politely and patiently to the answer, then listen a little more, then still a little more – oh, he had all the time in the world! – until the hapless suspect, intimidated by the prolonged silence, even feeling obscurely responsible for it, proceeded to blurt out all sorts of things he never intended to reveal. And it’s then, one imagines, that this temperamentally slow and, yes, plodding man would pounce – in his fashion. He would move in for the kill, just as patiently and politely as, earlier, he had laid the ground and set the trap.

Sherlock Holmes he therefore was not. Yet in his stolid, even boring way, he had probably nabbed many more criminals than any number of glittering practitioners of the venerable craft of detection.

As for the ffolkeses’ guests, having spent the last forty-five minutes or so resting in their rooms, they were now seated comfortably at the fireplace again, increasingly engrossed, from the sound of it, in their own humdrum affairs.

‘Oh, there you are, Farrar. Everything quite satisfactory downstairs?’

‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes. The servants seem to be bearing up rather well considering.’

‘Considering?’

‘Considering the state they were in when the body was first discovered.’

‘Oh. Oh yes. Yes, of course. They were in a state, weren’t they?’

There was something not altogether natural about Mary ffolkes’s voice. Resembling nothing so much as an elderly butterfly, if such a creature can be said to exist, she had always been a fussy, fluttery woman, ever terrified of the Colonel’s ‘moods’, those vocal and too often public exhalations of his famous fiery temper. If there was one thing she dreaded in life, it was a ‘scene’, though in her case such a ‘scene’ might amount to no more than a couple of raised voices at the dinner-table. But now, when she spoke, a hoarseness of articulation combined with an unusually hesitant delivery suggested she was labouring under some more extreme strain.

She stood near the tall french window, noticeably apart from her friends, and even from the far end of the room she could be observed agitatedly toying with one of the knotted tassels with which the heavy drawn curtains were fringed. Every so often, too, when she thought no one was looking in her direction, she would tweak the curtains apart and steal a swift glance out on to the moors. Then she would just as swiftly draw them to again and, sporting a brave smile, turn cheerfully – just a tiny bit too cheerfully – to face the company.

After a moment she spoke again:

‘Sorry, Farrar, but would you happen to …?’ she started to ask.

‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes?’

‘Would you happen to know if my husband has returned?’

‘Uh, no.’

‘Ah. Well, thank you anyway.’

Then, pretending she’d had a belated afterthought, she added, ‘Oh, and Farrar …’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you mean – sorry – but did you mean he hasn’t returned or did you mean you don’t happen to know if he has?’

‘Well, he may be changing, of course, but it’s not likely he could have come in without anyone hearing him. His being with Tobermory and all. And, you know, the way – well, the way he has of always slamming the door.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. You’re right, of course. Just my foolishness.’

And yet she couldn’t prevent herself, not nearly as furtively this time, once more tweaking the curtains open and staring blankly at the empty, desolate landscape which stretched away from the house.

It was hard to credit that no one else had noticed the gradual alteration in her demeanour, that no one else had sensed the hysteria locked up inside her like a genie trapped in a bottle. But then, even at the height of a crisis, normally constituted human beings appear to require next to no excuse to revert to their natural state of self-absorption, as witness the fragments of chit-chat which were drifting round the drawing-room and from which it could be gathered that, in the absence of anything to be urgently debated, any collective decision to be taken, the ffolkeses’ house-party had all gratefully subsided into the pre-murder routine of their various quotidian rounds.

The Vicar and his wife, for example, were huddled together in a private confab. For all one knew, they were discussing how they were ever going to confront the future under the cloud which the events of the last twenty-four hours had cast over their reputations. Or they could just as well have been sticking mental pins into a mental effigy of the terrible Mrs de Cazalis.

Those two wicked witches of the West End, Cora Rutherford and Evadne Mount, were having a high old time puncturing the pretensions of mutual acquaintances in the interconnected worlds of plays and books. From time to time a mot from one or the other would make itself piercingly heard above the general babble – ‘Yes, he was short, the little runt, but not as short as the shrift I gave him!’ (that was the novelist) – ‘Her own hair? Not bl**dy likely! By the look of it, it wasn’t even her own wig!’ (that was the actress) – followed by a cascade of tinny tee-hees from Cora Rutherford and booming haw-haws from Evadne Mount.

Then there were the Rolfes. They were seated side by side on the sofa nearest the fire, next to a collection of carved wooden figurines, about a quarter life-size, all of them representing darkies in fezes and topees – postmen, stationmasters and other minor colonial dogsbodies – which the Colonel had brought back home from one of his African trips. When he was not distractedly fingering one or other of these peculiar statues as though greeting a deputation of pygmies, Henry Rolfe would squeeze his wife’s hand tight in his own, while she could be seen raising a finger to her eye – was she actually brushing away a tear?

So their apparent reconciliation meant that the tragedy of ffolkes Manor was to have at least one positive consequence. It had paradoxically saved a marriage that might have died had Raymond Gentry not. For the Rolfes, the word ‘tender’ for too many years had meant something akin to ‘raw’ and ‘bruised’. Now it really looked as though there was a chance it could once again come to mean ‘soft’ and ‘romantic’.

One positive consequence – or two? For, last but not least, we arrive at our pair of young lovers. Selina and Don were snuggled up on the smaller of the two sofas. And though they were whispering, or imagined they were whispering, communicating in a language too intimate to be spoken aloud, the fact that virtually everybody else was conversing in low voices made it impossible to avoid overhearing what they were saying.

‘Oh, Don darling,’ said Selina, peering with such undivided attention into the depths of the young American’s eyes you’d have thought he would either have to close them or turn aside from her field of vision, ‘was I awfully cruel to you? I didn’t mean to be, really I didn’t. It’s just that – I suppose I let myself get carried away.’

Even if Don had been listening to every word she had uttered, it was obvious from what he himself said next that only one of those words had truly registered.

‘Selina,’ he whispered, ‘you called me –’

‘“Darling”? Yes, I did. Do you mind?’

‘Mind? You’re asking me if I mind? Darling, darling, darling Selina, I’ll mind only if you don’t call me darling! From now on, I’ll expect every sentence you say to me, every single question you ask me, to end in darling! I won’t ever be content with just Don. Matter of fact, I never, ever want to hear you pronounce my name again. From now on, for you, I’ve only got one name – darling.’

Selina laughed, a high, bright, tinkly laugh, like someone grinning aloud. It was the first time she’d laughed since the body had been discovered. Maybe even the first time since her arrival at the house.

‘Why, Don – I mean, darling! darling! – how eloquent you’ve become.’

‘Now you’re making fun of me.’

‘No, no, really I’m not. I thought that was a very poetic little speech.’

‘Oh, if you take me at all, Selina, you’ll have to take me as I am. I don’t kid myself I’m any kinda poet.’

‘Darling, please stop running yourself down. My – well, my infatuation, I suppose I have to call it, with Ray – it wasn’t really him, you know – to be honest, I’m no longer all that sure I ever actually liked him – it was the world he represented.’

She perused the semi-circle formed by her parents’ guests.

‘You see the sort of milieu I come from. I do adore every one of them. Most of all Mummy and Daddy, naturally, but also Evie and Cora and the Vicar and Cynthia and … Goshsakes, they’re all frightfully sweet and everything, but they’re so much older, so much more settled, than I am. I was beginning to feel I was a prisoner in this house. I craved life and experience and adventure, and Ray opened doors for me, doors into worlds whose existence I knew about only from books and mags and films.’

‘You do realise, my darling,’ said Don, comically solemn in his youthful ardour, ‘that I can’t open those doors for you. They’re just as closed to me as they were to you. And seeing what effect they had on you – like your using the word “milieu”, that’s such a Raymondish word! – I mean to keep them closed.’

‘I do realise it. And it’s because of that I love you, not in spite of it. That’s what you’ve got to understand.’

‘Oh, I know I’m a colourless character, a bit of a cookie cut-out figure.’

‘What are you talking about? You have absolute oodles of It.’

‘It? What’s It?’

‘Haven’t you read your Elinor Glyn?’

‘Why, no, I –’

‘What? You never read It? It’s a modern classic.’

‘I’m not really the bookish type, you know, Selina.’

‘It means sex appeal, you egregious darling!’

Don’s eyes opened wide enough to swallow up the whole visible world.

‘Hot dog! You – you think I’ve got sex appeal?’

‘I’m telling you, oodles of it, you clod, you mad, wonderful clod!’

It was all too much for him.

‘Oh gee – oh gee!’ he stuttered, overwhelmed by the speed at which his luck seemed to have turned. ‘And I always thought I was just, you know, tall, dark and one-dimensional. My only excuse was that that’s how I was made by my Creator.’

‘And He did a wonderful job. He,’ she repeated, before adding archly, ‘or She.’

‘She?’ Don jovially echoed her. ‘A female God, eh? Should I take that to mean you’ve become a – a – whaddya call ’em?’

‘What do you call what?’

‘You know, those harpies who chain themselves to the Parliament gates and wave their umbrellas in the air and proclaim emancipation for women?’

‘Feminists?’

‘Feminists, yeah! So you’re a feminist now, are you?’

‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ said Selina, a roguish smile playing on her lips.

‘Well, don’t worry, I’ll soon cure you of that nonsense. There’s only one person who’s gonna be allowed to wear the pants in our marriage and I promise you it ain’t going to be the little wifey!’

‘But, Don, women already have the vote.’

‘Not in my home they don’t! Besides, you’re too beautiful to be a feminist.’

‘Oh, you dope, you darling, you sweet, sweet peachereno!’ giggled Selina. ‘I never realised you could be so masterful!’

‘Hot dog!’ Don cried again.

This time, however, he truly did cry out, causing everybody in the room to interrupt their own conversations and stare at him in amusement.

He blushed to the roots of his hair.

‘Sorry, I –’ he began to say in an embarrassed voice.

But he never did manage to complete his apology. Suddenly, at the french window, Mary ffolkes buried her face in her hands and burst into loud, heaving sobs.

Everybody looked at one another – which is another way of saying that nobody knew where to look.

Selina was the first to respond. Followed close behind by Dr Rolfe, she rushed over to the window.

‘Why, Mummy, what is it?’ she cried out. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

As Selina cradled her, Mary ffolkes tried to speak, but hiccoughing sobs were shaking her whole frame.

‘Now, now, Mary, my dear,’ murmured Rolfe in his dulcet bedside voice, deftly unpinning the Cairngorm brooch which held the collar of her taffeta dress in a secure clasp, ‘you must try to remain calm.’

Sliding a protective arm around her shoulders, he whispered softly to Selina:

‘Let’s get her over to the sofa. She needs to lie down for a few minutes. I’m afraid what’s happened has been just too much for her. I might have known the strain would tell. She’s not as young as she used to be. Her heart, you know …’

Together, propping her up, they began to walk across the room. Already half-way, however, the Colonel’s wife had not only steadied herself but was attempting to tidy up the strands of hair that were flopping over her forehead, a nervous tic familiar to everybody who knew her well.

‘Thank you, but I’m really all right,’ she mumbled almost inaudibly. ‘Do please forgive me, I’m being such a silly-billy.’

When they reached the sofa, Selina hurriedly plumped up a cushion and rested her mother’s head against it, while Rolfe, stretching her two legs out lengthwise, removed her shoes.

‘Feeling better now?’ asked Selina, anxiously scrutinising the reddened, tear-streaked features.

‘Much better, thank you. I’m going to be fine. Just let me catch my breath.’

While he almost surreptitiously pressed his thumb on his patient’s wrist to take her pulse, Rolfe said, ‘Now, Mary dear, may I ask if something – I mean to say, something specific – brought on this little attack?’

‘It’s – well, to tell the truth, it’s Roger. I’m so worried.’

‘Worried, Mummy?’ asked Selina, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

In Mary ffolkes’s reply there could be detected an uncharacteristic trace of bitterness.

‘You see – you haven’t noticed. You’ve all become so preoccupied again with your own affairs. And why not? I can’t blame you for that. But not one of you seems to have noticed that Roger has been outside for a long time – really a lot longer than is good for him, particularly in weather like this. It’s started snowing again, quite heavily. I’m a born worrier, I know, but … Oh, forgive me for being so foolish!’

Trubshawe immediately trained his gimlet eye on the grandfather clock. It was one-forty.

‘At exactly what time did he leave?’ he asked Mary ffolkes.

‘But that’s just it,’ she mumbled, wiping away her tears with a lacy handkerchief which she drew from the sleeve of her cardigan – her cardie, as she invariably called it. ‘That’s what’s so frustrating. I don’t know. I just don’t know. It was just Roger off on one of his constitutionals. He’s taken a walk at least once every day of his life. Except – except it seems to me this time he’s been out much longer than usual. I’m sure I’m getting into a dither for nothing, but we women do have our instincts, you know …’

‘Anyone else note what time the Colonel left?’

‘Well, sir –’

‘Yes, Farrar?’

‘You recall, he wanted someone to pop down to the kitchen to check up on the servants?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, one of the kitchen walls has a large bay window and, if you stand beside it listening to all the below-stairs gabbing –’

‘Yes, yes, get on.’

‘Well, it enables you to see anybody leaving the house. And after about fifteen minutes the Colonel did walk past the window, just by the monkey-puzzle tree, with your dog Tobermory trotting along behind him – and it was exactly twelve-twenty by the kitchen clock.’

‘Twelve-twenty, eh?’ Trubshawe paused for a moment of reflection. ‘That would mean he’s been on the moors for quite a bit above an hour.’

He turned again to Mary ffolkes.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs ffolkes, but you understand I’m not what you would call conversant with your husband’s ambulatory habits. Is that a normal length of time for his walk? Or too long? Or what?’

‘Oh dear, Inspector, I really couldn’t say. Obviously, it’s never occurred to me to time one of Roger’s walks. What can I tell you? I just feel in my bones he’s been away too long.’

‘Now, Mary,’ Evadne Mount said to her cheerfully, ‘you really are worrying about nothing at all, you know. I’m certain Roger’s out there taking a long, vigorous walk to clear his head and, what’s more, enjoying every blessed minute of it. I also believe he’ll literally laugh his head off when he learns how alarmed you were. I can almost hear that laugh of his now.’

‘For once I’m in agreement with Miss Mount,’ Trubshawe nodded sagely. ‘It’s perfectly understandable you should be prey to all sorts of anxieties, what with everything that’s taken place here in the last couple of days. And you probably think your husband’s been absent longer than usual for no better reason than that you yourself have been looking out for him. Aren’t you forgetting the proverbial kettle?’

Mary ffolkes blinked.

‘The proverbial kettle?’

‘I mean, about watching it boil,’ Trubshawe explained.

‘Oh yes. Of course. When you put it like that …’ she added doubtfully.

‘But that said and done,’ he went on, ‘I would like to see you have your mind put to rest. So this is what I propose. A small group of us men – you, Don, if you would, Farrar and me – Rolfe here will stay behind in case you have any further need of him, Mrs ffolkes – we’ll collect some torchlights and go out looking for the Colonel. Farrar ought to have some idea of the direction in which he tends to take his walks, so I’m pretty confident we’ll meet him on his way back, possibly even strolling up the driveway as we open the front door. Whatever – at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he’s no longer out there on his own. Now how does that sound?’

‘Oh thank you, Inspector,’ said Mary ffolkes, smiling palely. ‘I know I’m being needlessly alarmist, but – yes, I would be awfully grateful.’

‘Good, good,’ replied Trubshawe. ‘Then shall we get going, men – Don, Farrar?’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Evadne Mount declared.

The Chief-Inspector instantly negatived this suggestion.

‘I won’t hear of it, Miss Mount. This is a man’s job, and your place is here with the other ladies.’

‘There you go again! And it’s all pish-posh. I’m as much a man as you are, Trubshawe. Besides, there’s nothing for me to do here – Cora could tell her stories to the back of the Clapham omnibus and never know the difference. No, no, no, you can like it or you can lump it, but I’m coming with you.’

And she did.