The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

Chapter Thirteen

It seems that Mary ffolkes had chosen to ignore Dr Rolfe’s recommendation that she remain in a reclining position until the search party’s arrival home. Or else, more likely, knowing her, she had at the very last minute been alarmed by a cry from Selina – who at her mother’s request had stationed herself at the french window in order to catch the earliest possible glimpse of the Colonel’s return – and then leapt up to discover what had occasioned it. Whichever it was, the poor woman must have witnessed the funereal spectacle of her husband being borne across the moors on an improvised stretcher and, having assumed the worst, as loved ones inevitably do, simply fainted away. For, when the Colonel was finally transported into the drawing-room and his comatose body eased on to the sofa, Rolfe was already in the process of administering the smelling-salts.

Realising that nothing could more quickly and effectively snap her out of her fit than to be told that her husband’s condition wasn’t as terminal as she believed, Trubshawe all but elbowed Rolfe aside to give her the glad news.

‘Mrs ffolkes, can you hear me? I say, can you hear me, Mrs ffolkes?’

Half-raising her eyelids, baring eyes that were filmy with shock and grief, Mary ffolkes peered into his rough and ready features.

‘Roger? Is he …?’

‘No, Mrs ffolkes. He isn’t dead, if that’s what you were going to ask me. I won’t keep it from you. He’s in pretty bad shape. But he isn’t dead and he isn’t about to die.’

The effect was instantaneous. Her eyes appeared suddenly alive again, as though re-energised by a surge of electricity, and she even tried to sit up, though she was gently prevented in that by the policeman.

‘So he’s going to be all right?’ she murmured.

‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes, he’s going to be all right,’ said Trubshawe, lighting his pipe for the first time in anybody’s memory as he bent over her. He took a deep puff and exhaled the smoke with a pleasure all the purer for having been so long delayed. ‘That’s why I want to make sure you’ll be all right too – for his sake. He’s going to need you now more than he’s ever needed you.’

‘But I don’t understand. You tell me he’s in a bad way. What’s happened to him? What happened out there?’

The apprehension etched on Trubshawe’s face no doubt reflected the internal dialogue he was now conducting with himself. Should he tell her or not? Did this good, simple, God-fearing woman have the physical and mental stamina to learn about the cause of the Colonel’s condition? Or would it be better for her state of mind if he concealed from her (but for how long?) the fact that some as yet unknown individual’s desire to be forever rid of her husband had actually prompted him or her to commit the very worst of crimes?

He took the plunge.

‘Well, Mrs ffolkes, it’s also my regretful duty to inform you – but, if I do, it’s because I’ve a shrewd hunch you’re a strong enough woman to hear this – that someone tried to murder the Colonel.’

Mary ffolkes sat up with a start. So much so, she had to be held back by Cynthia Wattis, who had been dabbing at her friend’s fevered brow with a handkerchief.

‘What? Someone murder Roger? Oh no, no, no! It can’t be! You must be mistaken!’

‘I’m afraid not. It was no accident. He was shot at.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘Fortunately, his assailant wasn’t the shot he imagined he was. Or the distance was just too great. Or p’raps there was too much doom and gloom out there on the moors for him to take proper aim at his target. In any event, the bullet passed through your husband’s shoulder and, thank God, there’s no obvious sign that any lasting damage has been done.’

‘But we’ve got to get him to a doctor! Immediately!’

‘You’re forgetting, Mrs ffolkes. We have a doctor among us. Dr Rolfe here. He’s with your husband as we speak, and I’m sure he’ll know what has to be done.’

Throughout their exchange the Doctor had indeed been examining the still-unconscious Roger ffolkes, placing an ear to his heart, as Trubshawe had already done, while simultaneously taking his pulse. And once his diagnosis was complete, he came across the room and stood at the Chief-Inspector’s side.

‘Well?’ said Trubshawe.

‘Well,’ replied Rolfe, ‘even if none of the important organs was touched, he’s had a terrific shock to his system. A man of his age, you know … But, Mary, do let me assure you. Roger had the – I mean, has – Roger has the constitution of an ox and – well, as you know, I ruined my life on account of one stupid, tragic blunder, but I can promise you now, I can absolutely promise you, he’s going to pull through.’

‘Thank heaven for that! And thank you, Chief-Inspector, and you other men too, Don, Farrar, Evie, for having brought him back to me safe and sound. Well, anyway’ – and if for no more than an instant, her distress was tempered by one of those half-apologetic half-smiles of hers, the only ones she ever half-permitted herself – ‘if not as sound as he might be, then at least safe. I shall be eternally grateful.’

‘Oh, Mary,’ cried Cynthia Wattis, ‘how very courageous you are, refusing to crack! But then, that’s the sort of person you’ve always been.’

‘Don’t delude yourself, Cyn,’ answered the Colonel’s wife. ‘I’m anything but courageous. To tell the truth, I’m actually shedding buckets of tears. If you can’t see them, it’s because, a long, long time ago, I learned how to channel those tears down the inside of my cheeks. It’s an art we women have to master.’

‘My dear,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘in my book, crying on the inside is the very definition of courage!’

Whereupon the novelist turned to the Chief-Inspector and, like a quick-change artiste, abruptly switched both style and subject-matter.

‘I say, Trubshawe,’ she boomed, ‘since I’m not needed here, you wouldn’t have any objection to my popping up to my bedroom to change? I’ll catch my death if I don’t get into some warm indoor clothes.’

‘No, no – go, do. Take your time,’ the Chief-Inspector carelessly replied, not a little relieved to be delivered, even temporarily, from the inhibitive presence of his brilliant but provoking rival.

‘Tell me, Doctor,’ he then asked, ‘what’s to be done with the Colonel? Dare we move him into his own bed? I mean, until the weather lets up and we can get him to a hospital.’

‘I’d certainly prefer to see him in a proper bed if possible. Mary,’ said Rolfe to the Colonel’s wife, ‘I presume you’ve got a fire going in your bedroom?’

‘Oh yes. By now it ought to be quite toasty warm.’

‘Then I propose we carry him up, undress him and put him to bed. After I patch him up, I’ll give him a shot which should knock him out. What he needs now is calm and lots of undisturbed sleep.’

Trubshawe gave the Doctor a meaningful look.

‘A shot, you say, Rolfe?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Precisely what sort of a shot?’

‘Oh, a small dose of morphine. I always have some on me. It’s perfectly harmless. Just enough to –’

But before Rolfe could say another word, the Chief-Inspector had turned his unfinished sentence into an unfinished question. The change was one of intonation only, but the implication was radically different.

‘Just enough to …?’

Rolfe visibly bristled.

‘Just enough to put him to sleep for several hours, was what I was going to say. But, look here, Trubshawe, why are you asking me these questions? What is it you’re insinuating?’

‘Am I insinuating something?’

‘I would say you are. I would say you’re insinuating that I’m not competent to tend to Roger.’

‘Not at all. I have as much faith as anyone in your medical skills.’

‘Then what is the meaning of this unwarranted questioning of my methods and – and, specifically, of the medication I wish to prescribe?’

For the first time since arriving at ffolkes Manor, the man from Scotland Yard seemed to be caught short for a suitable riposte. He puffed two or three times on his pipe before answering his interlocutor.

‘Rolfe,’ he said in a guarded tone, ‘I’m here, as you know, in an unofficial capacity. I’m here, basically, because you all requested me to be here. You yourself, moreover, were the person who came to fetch me. Informal as my investigation has necessarily had to be, I did insist from the beginning that, if it was to be conducted at all, it would have to be conducted in accordance with the – well, with what I like to think of as the immemorial practices in application at the Yard.

‘Now, it’s a fact – a fact you’ve all had to come to terms with – that almost all of you are potential suspects in the murder of Raymond Gentry. In the light of what’s just occurred, however, the case has taken on a whole new dimension, one whose significance none of you seems so far to have grasped.’

‘A new dimension?’ said Cora Rutherford.

‘Well, Miss, just think about it. Since, as far as I can surmise, the attempt on the Colonel’s life took place when all of you were in your rooms – and, yes, you don’t have to remind me, I know quite well that, for what it’s worth, you married couples all can and doubtless all will vouch for each other’s presence during that period – but since, as I say, it took place when you were all out of sight, then almost all of you must equally be considered suspects in the attempted murder of Roger ffolkes.’

‘But that’s preposterous, quite preposterous!’ exploded Rolfe. ‘What is it you’re suggesting? That one of us toddled up to our bedroom then at once slipped out of the house again in the howling snowstorm and took a potshot at the Colonel?’

‘Somebody, Doctor, somebody took a potshot at the Colonel. Surely you would agree it could hardly have been other than the same somebody, the same fiendishly clever somebody, who took a potshot at Raymond Gentry inside a locked attic room?’

Since nobody seemed to have any plausible counter-argument to offer, he took their silence as meaning that they did all agree and continued:

‘Now – to come back to what’s to be done about the Colonel’s present condition. Here we have you, Rolfe, one of the potential suspects – no more, I grant you, but also no less than anybody else in this room – here we have you telling me, cool as you please, that you’d like to have him carried up to his bedroom, where you would then give him an injection. That of course sounds all very right and proper, except that, as you must see, it would scarcely be advisable for me, even under circumstances as extraordinary as these, to let one of the suspects in a murder case inject some unknown fluid into the body of one of the murderer’s victims. Especially as the very first question I shall naturally want to put to the Colonel when he regains consciousness is whether he saw and, more to the point, recognised his assailant.

‘Answer me, Doctor,’ he said imperiously. ‘In your opinion as a professional man, just as I am in my own field, am I being unreasonable?’

Rolfe appeared initially to be on the point of making a protest. But when he did reply, it was in his usual cold, calm voice.

‘No, Trubshawe, you aren’t being unreasonable, save in a single respect.’

‘And what is that?’

‘You yourself have just described the person who murdered Gentry and – we must assume – also tried to murder the Colonel as a fiendishly clever fellow. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘Now, I ask you, how clever would it be of me to announce to all of you here – including a retired Scotland Yard detective – that I was going to give Roger a harmless injection then actually proceed to give him a lethal one? If anything were then to happen to the Colonel, as surely you can see, instead of a nice, juicy array of suspects, there’d be only one – yours truly.’

‘Quite so,’ said Trubshawe, ‘quite so. That’s exactly what I expected you to say. And it’s a line of argumentation I have just one problem with.

‘Not being a medical man myself, I would never be able to prove – to prove, Dr Rolfe, for where the law is concerned suspicion is nothing without proof – that such an injection was in fact responsible for inducing the – well, let’s say the seeming heart attack to which the Colonel might later succumb.

‘If a fatal heart attack were the outcome, it would of course look very bad for you. But, I repeat, I myself don’t know enough about these matters to be sure that such an effect could positively and conclusively be traced back to such a cause. And, frankly, I don’t fancy finding myself in that position, even though I’m here in an informal capacity. My duty hasn’t changed, and I’d be derelict in that duty if I simply said to you, yes, go ahead, give him the shot, do as you think best. I’m sorry, but you must see the position I find myself in.’

Rolfe pondered this for a few minutes, glanced over at the Colonel lying stretched out on the couch, insensible to the argument which was raging about him, then once more addressed the Chief-Inspector.

‘Yes, that all makes sense. But I too find myself in an awkward position. Whatever may be your doubts and misgivings, Trubshawe, I know what’s right for my patient, and Roger is, and has been for many years, my patient, not yours. He must – I repeat, he must – be given morphine at once. If not, I cannot answer for the consequences. There might at the very least be a dangerously prolonged reaction to the physiological and psychological shock he’s already suffered.’

He turned to Mary ffolkes, who had been intently following the debate.

‘Mary, my dear,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have to leave the decision in your hands.’

‘My hands?’

‘The question is – do you trust me?’

‘Trust you? Well, I … well, of course … Of course I trust you, Henry. You know I do.’

‘No,’ said Rolfe unexpectedly.

‘No? But I just said yes.’

‘No, Mary, I’m afraid that, in this case, that kind of hesitantly polite nod of approval isn’t enough.’

‘Oh dear, why must everything be so complicated?’

‘Answer me yes or no, Mary,’ said Rolfe. ‘Do you trust me to give Roger the injection I’m convinced he needs if we hope to prevent an adverse metabolic reaction?’

Even though the look Mary ffolkes afforded him, one born of a long friendship, had already soundlessly answered his question, she also said in a voice designed to dispel any further doubt:

‘Yes, of course I do, Henry. Please give Roger your full attention.’

While Madge Rolfe discreetly squeezed her wrist in thanks, the Colonel’s wife now spoke to Trubshawe.

‘Chief-Inspector, I do understand your caution – indeed, I’m grateful for it – but I’ve known Henry Rolfe for many years both as a doctor and as a friend and I have no hesitation in entrusting my husband to his care. You will please allow him to go ahead.’

The policeman knew when he was beaten.

‘Very well, Mrs ffolkes, I bow to you in this instance. It goes against all my professional instincts, but so be it. Your husband’s health must come first.

‘So,’ he then said to Rolfe, ‘now that that’s settled, what’s to be done?’

‘First thing,’ said Rolfe, ‘is for one of you women to boil water – and plenty of it!’

‘Boil water?’ exclaimed Cora Rutherford. ‘You know, Henry, I’ve often wondered why, whatever the ailment, you doctors always insist on having water boiled. What on earth do you get up to with the stuff?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ cried an exasperated Rolfe. ‘Can’t you just do what you’re told to do and stop asking imbecilic questions!’

He turned to his wife.

‘Madge? You I can rely on, can’t I? Well, hot water – at once.’

Then to Trubshawe:

‘We men, meanwhile, have to get Roger into his bed. Perhaps you and Don could help me carry him up to the bedroom?’

‘Right. Let’s get started, Don.’

Mary ffolkes endeavoured to raise herself to her feet.

‘No, no,’ said Trubshawe, wagging a finger at her, ‘this time, Mrs ffolkes, you’re following my orders. You’ve had a shock, you know, and you need as much rest as the Colonel does. And – and, well, I may as well tell you this now – there’s something else I’m going to have to insist on.’

‘You frighten me, Mr Trubshawe,’ said Mary ffolkes feebly.

‘There’s no cause for that. All I was going to say was that, once your husband is comfortably settled, once he’s had the, er, the knock-out potion, which should put him out for – for how long, Rolfe?’

‘Oh, a good five or six hours.’

‘Once he’s out, I shall have to insist on locking the bedroom door.’

‘I say, Inspector,’ said the Vicar, ‘that seems rather a drastic measure. Is it really necessary?’

‘I think it is,’ replied Trubshawe. ‘After all, everybody’s still a suspect and somebody has tried to kill the Colonel once already and I just don’t believe his room should be left open to all comers.’

‘But,’ cried Mary ffolkes, ‘locking poor Roger in! How awful! What if he should wake up and find he can’t open the door?’

‘Any chance of his prematurely coming to, Rolfe?’

‘None at all.’

The Doctor took Mary’s hand in his.

‘You’ll have to trust me in this too, Mary dear. I can guarantee that Roger will sleep soundly for several hours. But if you’re really worried, Trubshawe and I will look in on him every half-hour or so to make sure nothing’s amiss. To be honest, it’s a needless precaution but, if it reassures you, we’ll be glad to take it. Now, Trubshawe, Don, let’s get him into his bedroom.’

‘Doctor?’

‘Yes?’

‘Anything else you need done?’

‘If you’d really like to make yourself useful, Farrar, what you could do is go down to the kitchen and have Mrs Varley prepare some consommé for Mary.’

‘Consommé?’

‘Yes. Very thin and very hot.’

‘Right.’

‘Farrar?’

‘Yes, Chief-Inspector?’

‘I don’t think it would be helpful for the servants to know what’s just happened. With this second crime following so close on the first, there’s a risk of them really getting the wind up. The last thing we need is a gaggle of sniffling, snivelling, moronic maids threatening to give notice.’

‘Understood, sir. No mention of anything they shouldn’t know about.’

‘Good. Well, boys, let’s get going. And again – right, Rolfe? – the word is gently.’

Half-an-hour later, after the Colonel’s wound had been attended to, after he had been given his shot and lapsed into a peaceful slumber, Evadne Mount, who had now come back downstairs from her bedroom, took the opportunity of a moment’s pregnant silence to arrest everyone’s attention with just three words. Three Latin words.

‘Lux facta est.’

‘And what in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean?’ enquired Cora Rutherford.

‘“Lux facta est”? Your Latin not up to scratch, Cora?’

‘Never mind my Latin. Just answer the question.’

‘It means “Light is shed”. From Oedipus Rex. Sophocles, you know.’

‘Thank you, dearie. But, yes, I do know who wrote Oedipus Rex.’

‘Ah, but have you forgotten I rewrote it? With calamitous results! It was my very first play, Oedipus vs. Rex, and what I tried to do was retell the myth as a conventional courtroom drama. The defending counsel was Tiresias, the sightless seer – I was thinking of Max Carrados, you know, Ernest Bramah’s blind detective? No? Anyway, it was he who proved, solely by his powers of deduction, that “the Oedipus case”, as it was referred to throughout the play, was in reality a travesty of justice.

‘The climactic twist, you see, was that Oedipus had been framed by his political enemies, who hadn’t just spread the rumour that Jocasta was his mother but had themselves killed Laius, his alleged father. Then they substituted some hapless double to be murdered by Oedipus when they met each other at the crossroads of Daulis and Delphi.

‘Well, what a dud, what a stinkeroony, what a pile of horse manure! The whole thing was done in masks and, if I’d had any sense, I’d have worn a mask myself! Poor “Boo” Laye – Evelyn Laye, you know, heavenly in intimate revue but, typically, fancied herself as a great dramatic actress – why won’t they stick to the one talent they do have? – well, “Boo” Laye played Jocasta – rhymes with “disaster”, I used to quip! – and when the audience began to boo us all at the curtain call, the poor, addlepated darling believed they wanted her to take a separate bow. I thought I’d die!’

‘But why,’ the actress persisted, ‘has light been shed, as you so gnomically put it?’

The novelist fell suddenly serious.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you why. Thanks to a chance remark made in this very room not upward of two hours ago, a bulb flashed on in my rapidly dimming old brain and I saw – I saw as though it had been illuminated by a bolt of lightning – exactly what has been happening here these past thirty-six hours.’

There was a silence while everyone absorbed this startling claim.

Then the Chief-Inspector, who had reverted to sucking on the stem of his unlit pipe, said:

‘Let me get this straight. Just so there’s no chance we’re talking at cross-purposes, do I take it you’re referring to Gentry’s murder?’

‘I am.’

‘As well as the Colonel’s attempted murder?’

‘That too. Actually, it was the attempt on Roger’s life which provided me with the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. A giant piece. Now I know the whole plot.’

‘The whole plot, you say?’

‘Even its twist. For, unless I’m mistaken, just like my Oedipus plot, this one does indeed have a climactic twist. I’ve been doing quite a bit of sniffing about, more than any of you realise, and, as I say, I now believe I’m in a position to lay the entire case out in front of you all.’

‘Look here, Miss Mount,’ grunted Trubshawe, ‘if you do indeed possess certain facts – or theories – about this business, facts or theories of which we all ought to be apprised, me in particular, then let’s have them. No more monkeying about, please. In your opinion – I repeat, in your opinion, for it is only an opinion – and I repeat yet again, with a different but no less relevant emphasis, in your opinion, for it is only yours – who killed Raymond Gentry and who tried to kill the Colonel?’

‘Forgive me, Trubshawe, but I’m not ready to tell you yet.’

‘What!’

‘Oh, just let me explain. I’m not simply being a tease, you know. It all has to do with the difference between what you might call proposing and exposing. Don’t you see, if I were baldly to announce who I believe did it, it would be like a maths teacher proposing a problem to his students, then instantly giving them the solution without in the meantime exposing any of the connective tissue which enabled him to arrive at that solution, connective tissue which would also enable those students of his to understand why it was the only solution possible.

‘I want you all to understand why the person who I believe killed Gentry and tried to kill Roger could only be that person and no other – and to do that I’ve got to let the whole story unfold as I myself gradually came to understand it.’

‘Well – well, all right,’ replied Trubshawe with surprisingly good grace, ‘I suppose that’s fair enough. But just when do you intend to tell us?’

‘Oh, now. At once. Immediately. But what I’d like is for all of us to gather again in the library. A criminal, so they say, always returns to the scene of the crime. So why shouldn’t a detective – if I may flatter myself by appropriating such a label – not return to the scene of the investigation?’

For a few moments nobody said anything. Some of those present plainly thought the novelist had finally taken leave of the little that was still left of her senses. As for the others, though they would never willingly have owned up to it, even to themselves, they were perhaps obscurely tempted by the prospect of participating in a real-life rehearsal of the last – more accurately, last-but-one – chapter of a classic whodunit.

Then, finally, the Chief-Inspector gave his response to the proposal.

‘There’s one thing you seem to have forgotten,’ he said. ‘I haven’t yet finished my own investigation.’

‘Yes, you have,’ retorted Evadne Mount. ‘You’ve questioned all of us. All of us, that is, except Mary here, but I can’t imagine you suspect her of trying to kill her own husband.’

‘No, you’re wrong.’

‘What!’ cried a horrified Mary ffolkes.

‘Please, please, Mrs ffolkes, you misunderstand me. All I meant was that I haven’t interviewed any of the servants.’

The novelist snorted.

‘Speaking as someone who has just solved the mystery,’ she said airily, ‘I can unhesitatingly assure you that there wouldn’t be the slightest use in your questioning them now.’

‘We-ell,’ said Trubshawe, still doubtful, ‘if you really do believe you’re in possession of all the facts …?’

‘Actually, I don’t believe it,’ came the confident reply. ‘I know it.’