The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

Chapter Twelve

The landscape appeared even less inviting than when the Colonel had set out on his constitutional. In fact, it looked as though God had taken a giant eraser to the horizon and simply rubbed it out like a blackboard – or whiteboard. It was now snowing heavily again, and the only sound to be heard, except for the whine of the ebbing wind, was a powdery creaking underfoot. Nothing, however, could have left a less Christmassy impression than the eerily virginal moorland that afternoon. Its whiteness was the whiteness of death, its pallor the hideous pallor of a cadaver.

Even the torchlights which cast their yellow haloes at everyone’s feet illuminated only the stark fact that there was nothing to illuminate. You half-expected the startled eyes of some feral creature to be trapped blinking in their beams – but no. Nothing. There was no such creature to be seen.

Nor – and this was a thought which had no doubt already crossed the mind of everyone in the search party, though no one had shown any readiness to put it into words – nor was the Colonel to be seen. Trubshawe’s parting reassurance to Mary ffolkes, that he might well encounter her husband walking back up the driveway of ffolkes Manor on his way home, had proved, after no more than a few minutes, to have been hopelessly optimistic. Only under the shelter of the monkey-puzzle tree were Roger ffolkes’s unobliterated footprints, preceding Tobermory’s by a couple of yards, visible to the naked eye. But there was only one set of his prints and they were headed in only one direction – away from the house.

It was the Chief-Inspector who eventually broke the silence.

‘The cold getting to you, Miss Mount?’

The authoress was attired in a ratty, moth-eaten tweed coat, one that had seen many better days, a thick woollen scarf wound several times about her neck and the matelot’s tricorne hat which had become her trademark in London’s literary world. This outré ensemble assuredly kept the freezing temperature at bay, but it also gave her a troubling resemblance to one of those madwomen who can be found peddling boxes of matches on the forecourt of Charing Cross Station. Not that she gave a fig about that.

‘Not at all, not at all!’ she protested in a muffled voice still loud enough to echo over the moors. ‘I like the cold.’

‘You like the cold?’

‘You heard me. And please don’t give me one of those condescendingly incredulous looks of yours that we’ve all had to get used to. I know I’m an author and therefore, for someone like you, an eccentric. But there are lots of us who simply hate the sun, who hate being drenched in sweat. Yes, sweat. I call it sweat because that’s what it is. I can’t speak for you, Chief-Inspector, but I sweat. I don’t perspire.’

‘Well, well, well. So it’s true what they always say. There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

Don, enveloped in the racoon coat which had caused a minor sensation when he first arrived at ffolkes Manor, turned, mystified, to the Chief-Inspector.

‘Sorry, I didn’t get that – what you just said.’

‘What I just said? Ah, yes, of course. Well, I don’t wonder you didn’t get it. It’s an old English expression. You can bet your bottom dollar it dates back to Chaucer, just as all those old expressions seem to do, even the smutty ones. “Nowt so queer as folk” – it means there’s nothing in the world as strange as people themselves.’

‘Oh, I see. You mean, like Miss Mount preferring cold to heat?’

‘That’s right. I love the sun myself. With the missus – God rest her soul – I used to go caravanning every August in Torbay. I’d just soak it up. How about you?’

‘Oh yeah, me too. But then, you see, I’m from California.’

‘California? Is that so?’

‘Yeah. Los Angeles. Nice little town. Full of orange groves and movie studios. Ever been there?’

‘Furthest I’ve been is Dieppe. Day trip. Couldn’t see what all the hubbub was about.’

‘You, Miss Mount?’ asked Don.

‘Evadne, dear. Please call me Evadne.’

‘Evadne.’

‘That wasn’t too difficult, was it?’ she said sweetly. ‘Now, what is it you’d like to know?’

‘Los Angeles. Have you ever visited it?’

‘No, I never have. Though, as it happens, I did set one of my whodunits there. I genned up on the place by reading Dashiell Hammett. You familiar with his stories? Not my cup of tea, as you might expect, but he knows his stuff all right.’

The pause that followed was motivated less by any reluctance on Don’s part to enquire about the plot of the whodunit in question than by his expectation that a précis of that plot was going to be volunteered anyway, whether he solicited it or not.

For once, though, the précis was unforthcoming, so he finally said:

‘I’d be interested to hear what it’s about. Your whodunit, I mean.’

‘We-ell, I don’t know,’ answered Evadne Mount, glancing at the Chief-Inspector. ‘I have the distinct impression our friend from Scotland Yard finds me a bit too style-cramping whenever I talk about my work.’

‘Oh, please. Don’t mind me,’ said Trubshawe, batting his two gloved hands together while striding onwards over the snow. ‘You never have before. Besides, it’ll help to pass the time.’

‘Right you are,’ she said, needing no further encouragement. ‘Well, the book was called Murder Murder on the Wall and its central character was an aged, loony silent film actress loosely based on Theda Bara – you remember, the star of A Fool There Was? – well, you won’t remember, Don, you’re not nearly old enough, but she’ll certainly have set off a palpitation or two in the Inspector’s manly young breast.’

‘Couldn’t have been easy for you to create a silent character,’ Trubshawe, not missing a beat, slyly interposed.

‘This film star,’ she continued, declining to rise to his bait, ‘lives a reclusive existence inside a deliriously creaky Bel Air mansion with only her incontinent Pekinese dog for company. Because she can no longer bear to contemplate the ravages of her own physical decline, she’s had all the mirrors in the house turned to the wall and even has a cleaning lady, what we in England call a char, come in every day to dust the furniture – though not the way you think. In fact, the cleaner’s job is to coat with extra dust any shiny surface in which there’s still a chance of her mistress’s appearance being reflected.

‘The thing is that, even though she’s on her uppers, and has been for as long as anyone can remember, it’s common knowledge on the Hollywood grapevine that there’s one valuable she’s never pawned, a fabulous ruby offered her many years before by the Maharajah of Udaipur.

‘Then, one morning, her brutally murdered body is discovered by the cleaner. She duly rings up the police, who can find no trace of the ruby, and the sole clue to the killer’s identity are the letters LAPD which the actress was able to scrawl on her bedroom wall, in her own blood, before she expired.

‘Naturally, suspicion arises that she must have been trying to “point the finger”, as Hammett would put it, at some member of the LAPD itself – you know, the Los Angeles Police Department. That is, until Alexis Baddeley happens to come along. Nosing around in her usual incorrigible fashion, she interprets those four letters as being, instead, the dying woman’s abortive attempt to spell out the word “lapdog” and eventually finds the ruby concealed inside a cheap cameo brooch attached to the Peke’s collar.’

‘Oh gee, wow, that’s really clever,’ said Don. ‘I’d really like to read that.’

Trubshawe cupped his hands and blew into them.

‘Dashed if I can see the point any longer,’ he said. ‘Now that you’ve been served the whole plot up on a plate.’

‘Not so fast, Chief-Inspector, not so fast,’ Evadne Mount sniffily expostulated. ‘You’ll note that I didn’t give away the identity of the real murderer.’

‘Pooh, that’s no brain-teaser. It was obviously the char.’

The novelist let out a cry of triumph.

‘Hah! That’s just what I was counting on the reader to think! Actually, the murderer turns out to be a police officer after all, a “crooked cop”, as the Yanks call them. It’s a double twist, you see. Those letters LAPD meant exactly what everybody originally assumed they meant and had nothing to do with the Peke. In her death throes the film star was genuinely trying to communicate who the killer was. So that, even when Alexis Baddeley gets it wrong, she still gets it right! Eh, Trubshawe, what have you to say to that? Trubshawe? Are you listening?’

Surprised at not receiving any response, she suddenly noticed that the Chief-Inspector had fallen several paces behind her before coming to a complete halt. Arching his hand over his brow, in unnervingly the same gesture as the Colonel’s just an hour before, he was trying to make out something or somebody in the distance ahead of him.

An ominous silence descended on the party. Everyone strained to see for themselves what could have attracted the Chief-Inspector’s attention. At first there was nothing. Then, amid the restless play of shadows, a dark and amorphous form, like a mound of cast-off clothes unceremoniously dumped on the horizon, rose out of the snow. And no sooner had one’s eyes encompassed its contours, they were irresistibly drawn to a second, smaller mound a few feet away.

‘What the –?’ said Trubshawe, doffing his tartan cloth cap and scratching his scalp.

‘Why,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘I – I – I’m positive –’

Swallowing the rest of her sentence with a gulp, she exclaimed, ‘Great Scott-Moncrieff!’

‘What? What is it?’ cried the policeman. ‘My eyesight isn’t what it used to be – one of these days I’m going to have to fork out for a pair of specs – and this torchlight is dazzling my eyes.’

For a few agonising seconds Evadne Mount chose not to speak. Then:

‘Trubshawe,’ she finally said, ‘I can’t yet see what the larger of the two mounds is, though,’ she added grimly, ‘I can guess. But I’m afraid, I’m very much afraid, the smaller one is – is Tobermory.’

With lips set so tight around his pipe that he came close to biting its stem in half, Trubshawe made his way, half-walking, half-running, towards the two matchingly sinister shadows.

Tobermory’s was the first of the bodies to be bathed in the harsh yellow beam of his torchlight. The dog was lying on his side and, if it hadn’t been for his foam-flecked mouth, his smashed-up rib-cage and the blood which polka-dotted the blankness of the snow, he could almost have been asleep. He wasn’t asleep, though, he was dead. Yet the breath of life had quit his body so recently, and with such haste, that his nostrils, if no longer quivering, were still moist.

No one dared to speculate on Trubshawe’s feelings as he contemplated his dead companion. At last, though, he turned his torch on the larger of the two shapeless masses. There was, of course, no suspense whatever as to its identity. It was, as everyone knew it could only be, the Colonel.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ said Don in a whisper.

‘This is truly vile!’ gasped Evadne Mount. ‘Ray Gentry was vermin – but Roger? Why would anyone want to murder Roger?’

The Chief-Inspector wasted no time venting either grief or fury. He bent over the body like a terrier poised at a rathole and laid his head sideways on the Colonel’s chest. Then, gazing up at the cluster of faces circled about his own, he cried out:

‘He’s alive! He’s still alive!’

At first sight the Colonel had seemed just as dead as Tobermory. But when a light was trained directly on to his face, both his eyelids began to twitch – independently of one another, a strange and rather horrible sight – and, every five seconds or so, a convulsively jerky little quaver would shake each of his shoulders in turn.

‘What’s happening to him?’

‘I think he may be in some sort of a coma, Farrar – possibly he’s had an internal haemorrhage – not impossible he’s even had a stroke. Rolfe will be able to make a proper diagnosis. But he’s definitely alive. Look here.’ The policeman directed his index finger at a bloodied rip in the Colonel’s overcoat. ‘The murderer was obviously aiming at the heart, but, see, the bullet went in much too high, through the shoulder and out again.’

Quickly taking in the surrounding waste-land, he muttered, ‘No point in looking for the bullet in this weather. Or for footprints. They’ll all have long since been buried under the snow.’

Once more he looked down at the unconscious man.

‘I’m no doctor,’ he said, ‘but in my time I’ve had to deal with a good number of men who’ve just been shot and I’m convinced he can be saved.’

‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Don. ‘Don’t they always say you should never move a wounded body?’

‘Yes, I daresay they do, but I’m less worried about the wound, which seems to be a relatively superficial one, than about a possible psychological reaction setting in. No, I certainly don’t recommend leaving the old boy here on the ground while one of us runs back to the house to fetch Rolfe. In this case, we don’t have a choice. We’ve got to carry him back ourselves.’

‘Yeah, you’re right, of course.’

Don at once peeled off his racoon coat and said to Trubshawe:

‘Here. We can use this to support him. You know, like on a stretcher?’

‘We-ell, but that’s a pretty flimsy jumper you have on. Aren’t you afraid you’ll freeze out here?’

‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay.’

‘Good lad,’ said Trubshawe approvingly. ‘You’ve got what it takes.’

Then Evadne Mount spoke up.

‘And Tobermory?’

‘I know, I know … For the moment, though, the only thing that matters is to get the Colonel home. Don’t think I’ve forgotten old Tober. I haven’t and I never shall. But we’re going to have to abandon him for now. I’ll come out here later and – well, I’ll make sure he’s given a decent burial. Thank you, anyway, for asking.’

‘Why gun down a poor old blind animal?’ said Don. ‘It’s just crazy.’

Again Trubshawe gazed at the lifeless creature who had once been his most faithful and, at the end, his best friend, and for a few seconds his natural unflappability was tempered by a very real and visible emotion.

‘No, son, whatever it was, it wasn’t crazy,’ he quietly replied. ‘Tober may have been blind, but they do say a blind man’s surviving senses – specially his sense of smell – are sharpened by the loss of his sight and I imagine that’s just as true of a dog. P’raps truer. Tobermory was a witness, a dumb witness, so he had to be silenced. Dogs, even blind dogs, know right from wrong, and they remember, too, who did right and who did wrong. He would have snarled and growled at the murderer for ever afterwards.’

‘Inspector, I couldn’t be sorrier.’

‘Thanks, but this is no time for sentiment. Now, men,’ he said, gauging the strength of each one, ‘if we follow Don’s suggestion and use his coat as a stretcher, I think we can get the Colonel back home without worsening his condition. Farrar, help me roll him over – softly, softly does it – softly, I say. Don, you look as though you’re the strongest of the three of us, so why don’t you pick up your coat from the other end? That’s right – good, good – but take care you keep it from swinging too much. It’s not a hammock. Farrar, you and I will take him from this end.’

‘What about me?’ asked Evadne Mount. ‘What can I do?’

‘You? You’re going to be our guide. We’ll really need a guide, so keep your mind and your eyes focused on the way ahead. Here – take my torchlight as well as your own and direct them both at your feet. If you observe any hump, any bump, any ridge, any kind of concavity, anything at all we should look out for, make whatever detour you have to and we’ll follow suit. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

‘Now. Everyone knows what he’s got to do? Okay. One – two – three – all together!’

Then, with a wave of his hand, like the boss of a wagon train, he cried out:

‘Lead on, Evadne Mount!’

So it was that our dolorous little procession forged its slow and solemn path across the snow-mantled moors.