The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

Chapter Five

In ones and twos, confidently and timidly, the ffolkeses’ guests trooped into the library, its walls lined ceiling-high with identically bound volumes which, as most of them were not merely unread but unopened, made the shelving appear as though it were supporting row after row of cigar-boxes.

Only Selina, still too distressed to make a re-appearance, was missing. But, in the twenty minutes which had elapsed since the others had retired to their rooms, they had all made themselves as presentable as they could for the trial they knew lay ahead of them.

Clem Wattis, to be sure, still looked very much the English Vicar incarnate, with his dog-eared dog-collar and raggedy ill-fitting cardigan, its leather elbow-patches so threadbare they themselves seemed in urgent need of patching. The Doctor, for his part, had gone for a prudently countrified look – checked sports jacket, impeccably creased corduroy trousers and tan suede shoes. As for Don, his canary-yellow V-necked jumper and tartan bow-tie instantly identified him as your typically modern American college student.

Evadne Mount, meanwhile, was wearing one of her yolk-of-egg tweed outfits, along with a pair of singularly unbecoming suet-coloured stockings and shoes so sensible, as they say, you felt like consulting them on whether you should cash in your shares in Amalgamated Copper. From her wardrobe Mary ffolkes had selected a flower-patterned taffeta dress that was unabashedly unfashionable but probably pricier than it looked. Madge Rolfe sported a stylishly plain frock of pale red crushed-velvet, a frock that, even if one had never set eyes on it before, one might have guessed had been worn more than once too often. And the Vicar’s wife had on a shabby brown cotton skirt with, over its matching blouse, a woollen cardigan nearly as shapeless as her husband’s.

Then there was Cora Rutherford. Like all of her thespian ilk, she was always ‘on’, even in deepest Dartmoor. She had decked herself out in a tailored suit in pleated grey tweed and a high-collared silk shirt, around which she’d negligently flung a chic fox-fur throw. Though her eyes were lavish with mascara, and her lips with cyclamen, her only jewellery was a pair of virtually invisible pearl earrings. The actress herself – the message came across loud and clear – was the jewel.

They were all requested to take seats around the Chief-Inspector, who stood in the centre of the room in front of a massive mahogany desk on top of which sat two of Roger ffolkes’s embossed stamp albums, an extra-large magnifying-glass, the typewriter on which Gentry’s notes had been typed out and, of all unlikely, unlovely artefacts, one of those ‘humorous’ ashtrays on whose rim a diminutive top-hatted toper unsteadily supports himself against a lamppost.

When everybody was settled, the Colonel mutely signalled to the detective to assume command.

‘Well now,’ said the Chief-Inspector, ‘I’d first like to thank you all for being so prompt. Each of you knows why you’re here, so the only thing that remains is for me to decide the order in which you’re questioned.’

He reflectively scanned the party as though he hadn’t already made up his mind who his first victim would be.

‘Perhaps I might call on you, Vicar,’ he said at last, ‘to open the batting?’

The Vicar almost leapt out of his chair.

‘Me!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why … why me?’

‘Well, somebody has to go first, you know,’ said Trubshawe with an only just perceptible twinkle in his eye.

‘Yes, but I …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it does seem unfair to pick on … to …’

‘Of course, if you’d rather not, perhaps you yourself would nominate one of your friends to take your place?’

‘Oh, but that’s also unfair! Oh, calamity!’ groaned the Vicar, who looked as though he were about to burst into tears.

‘Come now, Mr Wattis,’ said his tormentor gently but firmly, ‘aren’t you being a little childish? I promise I’ll do my utmost to make it all as painless as possible.’

Aware not only from the Chief-Inspector’s rebuke but also from the way his friends were staring at him that he had let himself be shown in a rather unattractive light, the Vicar now hastened to retrieve his composure.

‘Oh well … in that case, Mr Trub – I mean, Inspector Trub – that’s to say, Chief-Inspector Trub. Trubshawe! I suppose if you really think …’

‘Yes, Vicar, I do. I really do,’ the policeman nimbly cut in. ‘However –’ he began to add.

‘Yes? You say however?’ the Vicar once more interrupted him, and this time his already squeaky voice came perilously close to cracking.

‘However, I say – in the light of Miss Mount’s account of last night’s events, an account with which, I noted, not one of you present – you yourself included, Vicar – chose to take issue, I feel duty-bound to advise you that the phrase “as painless as possible” shouldn’t be construed to mean that our conversation will be totally, ah, pain-free. You do realise I’m going to have to ask you some very probing – indeed, some very personal – questions?’

‘Oh dear, I – I just don’t know whether –’

‘Questions,’ pursued Trubshawe, who was no longer prepared to be put off his stride by the clergyman’s interjections, ‘that, had I been assigned to this case in an official capacity, I would be asking you teat-a-teat, as the Frogs say, in the privacy of your own home or in a police station. But since everyone, you again included, fell in with the Doctor’s proposal that my interrogation, which, I repeat, is wholly informal –’

Now it was Cora Rutherford’s turn to interrupt.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Trubshawe, we know all that!’ she snapped. ‘Do stop blethering, will you!’

‘Patience, dear lady, patience,’ Trubshawe calmly retorted. ‘When it comes, as it will, to your own turn, you may not be quite so desirous to have things rushed. The fact is that my presence is extremely irregular, and I wish to make sure you all understand that no one is actually, legally, obliged to undergo questioning here and now.’

‘But, I tell you, we do understand!’

‘Also,’ he went on unperturbed, ‘that, if you do agree to be questioned, then, notwithstanding the fact that you aren’t under oath, there’s simply no point to the exercise if you end by telling me less than the unvarnished truth – or at least what you sincerely believe to be the unvarnished truth. Aren’t I right? You do see what I’m driving at, Vicar?’

Clem Wattis bristled at what he clearly felt was a slander on his character.

‘Well, really! I must protest – I really must lodge a protest, Chief-Inspector. You appear to be singling me out in an offensively gratuitous fashion!’

‘Please, please, Mr Wattis, let me assure you. No offence was intended. If I put it to you in particular, it’s only because you’re the one who’s going to set the ball rolling.’

The Vicar was now so flustered that beads of sweat glistened atop his bald head and his owlish horn-rimmed glasses were starting to cloud over.

‘Oh well, if you – if you insist. After all, as a man of the cloth, I’m bound to tell the truth anyway. I mean, I’m bound by a higher authority than yours.’

‘Yes, yes, of course, I quite understand. So shall we …?’

‘Uh huh,’ said the Vicar unhappily.

‘Good,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘Now – I’d like to start by inviting you to relate your own experience of the Christmas dinner party. The way Miss Mount described it – that, for you, was substantially accurate, was it?’

Clem Wattis shot a quick, helpless glance at his wife. She said nothing, but, with nervously rocking little nods of her head, appeared to be encouraging him to speak up. It couldn’t have been easy for her, however, knowing as she did what was in store for him, and her lips were pursed so tight you felt that, if she were to relax them, her whole face would unravel.

‘Well, Inspector – oh dear, I keep getting it wrong, don’t I? – I mean, Chief-Inspector –’

‘That’s quite all right, Reverend. As I say, I’m retired, so my rank is only a courtesy. Please go on.’

‘Well, Evadne certainly – she certainly “caught” Raymond Gentry. I mean, I know one should never speak ill of the dead – indeed, a man of my vocation shouldn’t speak ill even of the living – but I am only human, after all, I don’t pretend to be saintlier than any of my flock, and I cannot deny I took an instant dislike to that young man. There, I’ve said it!’

‘An instant dislike, eh? Mostly, I suppose, for the same reasons as Miss Mount?’

‘Absolutely. So sad, too. Our little gathering was just getting going when he turned up with Selina. Then the atmosphere became quite inspissated.’

Trubshawe blinked.

‘Did it now? Can you give me a “for instance”?’

‘I can give you many “for instances”. Right from the start Gentry insisted on letting us know that he was among us only because poor, benighted Selina wanted him to meet her people.

‘Now, no one could be fonder than I am of Selina ffolkes, but she has, I fear – and I’ve had occasion to say so to her face, so I’m not telling tales out of school – she has never been too fastidious in her choice of male companions.’

Then, realising that Don was glaring at him, he added a hurriedly improvised postscript:

‘Er … that’s to say, not until now.’

Mopping his brow with a handkerchief which had been discreetly handed to him by his ever-watchful wife, he sought to get back on track.

‘Gentry simply couldn’t resist driving home to us how much more amusing – no, no, no, not amusing, penetrating – that was the word – Evadne hit it on the nose, he used that word “penetrating” so often it, well, it penetrated right into my brain, giving me quite a migraine, something I –’

‘Vicar,’ said Trubshawe, ‘if you would …’

‘What?’

‘… stick to the point?’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Inspector,’ said the Vicar querulously, ‘but, as you’ll see, this is the point. If his prattle hadn’t given me one of my splitting headaches, along the whole right side of my face, I might have been able to adopt a more benevolent, more truly Christian, attitude towards him. I might have tried harder to feign interest in his addle-pated talk about the “crowd” he moved in, all those vegetarians, Egyptologists, fakirs, Cubists, Russian dancers, Christian Scientists, amateur photographers, Theosophists and goodness knows what else! Now there’s a “for instance” for you.’

‘What is?’

‘Theosophists. Evie omitted to mention how much Gentry went on about conducting séances at the Planchette, making contact with Those Who Have Passed Over, you know, all that silly spiritualistic hanky-panky. In his foetid little mind he realised that, as an Anglican clergyman, I couldn’t possibly approve of such pagan foofaraw, so he taunted me and taunted me and I could see him, with a sly, lethal glint in his eye, simply waiting for me to rise to the bait.’

‘And did you?’

‘Inspector, I must tell you that even in this agreeable little backwater of ours I’ve been buttonholed by potty-mouthed disbelievers before, and I find that the only way to handle them is to refuse to descend to their level. So I said to him, “I know what you’re up to, young man. I can put two and two together.”’

‘What was his answer to that?’

‘Oh, he was awfully clever – as usual. “Yes,” he said, in that nasal whinny of his which drove us all to distraction, “you can put two and two together – and come up with something too, too ridiculous!”’

‘I see …’ said the Chief-Inspector, suppressing a smile. ‘So you think he was being deliberately rude to you?’

‘I don’t think, I know. He never let a chance go by to mock my most deeply held beliefs. When the Colonel passed some blameless remark about the Great War – you remember, Roger – about how we’d stemmed the tide against the Hun, I observed that being born British meant that one had drawn first prize in the Lottery of Life. Gentry being incapable of offering any plausible argument against that, he simply scoffed. And I mean scoffed!

‘You know, Inspector, until I met him I never really knew the meaning of that word. I mean to say, I know what it looks like, what it physically looks like, when somebody sneers, for example, or frowns or scowls. But scoffs? Well, Raymond Gentry truly, physically, did scoff. He made an extremely indecent noise by blowing saliva through his lips. Obscene little bubbles were actually visible between his front teeth. Ah, I see you don’t believe me, but – Evie? Aren’t I speaking the truth?’

‘Why, yes, Clem, I never thought of it like that,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Yet you’re right. Gentry really did give a new meaning to the word “scoff”. I assure you, Trubshawe, Clem’s made quite an insightful remark there.’

‘Why, thank you, Evie,’ said the Vicar, unaccustomed to compliments from somebody generally so parsimonious with them.

‘And it’s a remark, if I’m not mistaken,’ said Trubshawe, ‘that brings us to the very crux of the matter.’

‘The crux, you say?’

‘I mean the War. You just referred to the Great War.’

The Vicar blanched. Here it was. Here and now was what he dreaded most. If ever a face was an open book, it was his at that instant.

‘You’ll recall, Vicar,’ the policeman continued, ‘that the first line of Gentry’s notes read: REV – WAR. And, later, Miss Mount made mention of what she called aspersions, aspersions that Gentry cast on your war record. Isn’t that so?’

‘Er … yes,’ said the Vicar, ‘that – that is correct.’

A few seconds elapsed during which neither he nor Trubshawe nor anybody else spoke. Like a group of miscreant schoolboys who, waiting in a morose huddle to be punished by their headmaster, anxiously scrutinise the features of the first boy to emerge from his study for any external clues as to the nature of that punishment, the ffolkeses and their guests were probably thinking as much of their own future plight as of the Vicar’s present one.

‘Would you care to elucidate?’ Trubshawe finally asked.

‘Well, I – I – I don’t really see how …’

‘Come now, sir, we did all agree, did we not? The unvarnished truth? So shall we have it?’

The wretched clergyman, at whom seemingly not even his wife could for the moment bear to look, realised there was no longer any escape.

‘Farrar?’

‘Yes, Vicar?’

‘I wonder if – if I might have a glass of water? My throat seems a little tight. Constricted, somehow.’

‘Why, certainly, Vicar.’

‘Thank you.’

A moment later, having taken a few modest sips, he was ready to continue – or as ready as he’d ever be.

‘Well, you know, I – I took up my post here in 1919 – in January, was it? Or February – oh well, I don’t suppose it really matters.’

‘No, it really doesn’t,’ said the Chief-Inspector drily. ‘Just go on.’

‘Anyway, it was in one or other of the early months of 1919, so not too long after the end of the War, and my predecessor in the parish had been a young man, relatively young, but nevertheless much liked, I might almost say much loved, by his parishioners. All the more so because he’d been killed in action – during one of the last Big Pushes. I ought to explain, too, that he’d been so keen to do his bit for King and Country he’d actually concealed the fact that he was a clergyman and enlisted as a common soldier. Then he was posted to the front, where he died quite the hero’s death. He was mentioned in dispatches, you know, and there was vague talk of a posthumous George Cross.

‘In any event, when I arrived here to take up my living in 1919, I found that his presence, if I may put it that way, was still very, very powerful. Not that there was any resentment against me, I hasten to add – well, not to start with – it was just that the locals hadn’t forgotten the shining example of his courage. I fear I must have struck them as something of a letdown by comparison.

‘That would certainly explain why, when Cynthia and I moved in, the parish was at first a trifle standoffish, a trifle “sniffy”. There was, in particular, a Mrs de Cazalis. She’s our local grande dame and she’d evidently been very “in” with my predecessor. Harker, the village’s odd-job man, had a nickname for her – Vicar’s Pet. You know, like the kind of schoolchild who gets ragged for being Teacher’s Pet?

‘Well, it soon became clear that she expected things to go on just as they had before. My predecessor had been a bachelor, you see, and whilst you might expect that to have counted as a point against him, it had in reality turned out to be the reverse. All the local ladies – now, Inspector, I wouldn’t like to suggest that they were all busybodies – but all the local ladies who participated, don’t you know, who organised our Charity Sales and Mystery Tours and Charabanc Outings for the Old Folk, well, they were absolutely in seventh heaven that there was no interfering vicar’s wife to run these things, which is traditionally the case.

‘Hence it was, at least in the first few months, a rather lonely life for us. It’s a lonely part of the country, anyway, and we had problems making new friends, as we tend to do. So, without thinking of the possible consequences, Cynthia eventually elected to busy herself with all the usual chores of a vicar’s wife and, I’m afraid, only succeeded in putting a few noses out of joint. There was even, at last, a sort of showdown – is that what it’s called? – a showdown in the Vicarage.

‘I can still see them all sitting in our little front room, rattling their teacups in their laps, and after some pointed comments on the very exceptional calibre of my predecessor, on his heroism, all of that, Mrs de Cazalis turned to me and enquired, bold as brass, “And what did you do in the Great War, Vicar?” The italics, needless to say, were hers.’

There was a pregnant pause, and it was the Chief-Inspector, the only one of the Vicar’s listeners not to know his story’s dénouement, who nudged him into continuing.

‘You understand, Inspector,’ said the Vicar, ‘I really didn’t mean to tell a lie. I didn’t. It was almost as though – well, as though I wasn’t stealing the truth – which is what I always think a lie is, you know, a stolen truth – but, as it were, embezzling it.’

This original concept clearly intrigued the policeman.

‘Embezzling the truth? I confess I …’

‘As though I’d temporarily stolen somebody else’s truth to get myself out of a hole, but fully intended to replace it once the crisis was over.

‘Alas,’ he sighed, ‘like so many embezzlers before me, I was to discover that there never does arrive that convenient moment when you’re able to return what you’ve stolen. Before you could say Jack Robinson, I’d gone on stealing other truths that didn’t belong to me, until I found myself – oh dear God forgive me! – I found myself living a permanent lie.’

The poor man now really was on the verge of tears, and his wife would have attempted to offer him comfort, except that she must have realised that at such a point any display of affectionate solidarity on her part would have done for him.

‘Mr Wattis,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I know how difficult this is for you, but I have to ask. What was this “truth” which you – you embezzled? That you too had been a war hero, p’raps?’

The Vicar was aghast at such a calumny.

‘No, no, no, no, no! The very idea, Inspector! I would never, never have presumed … By lying as I did, it wasn’t at all my intention to puff myself up. I simply hoped to take those prying old – I mean, the ladies of the Church Committee, down a peg or two.

‘I recall a schoolmaster friend of ours – I’m thinking of Grenfell, dear,’ he said to his wife, ‘who once admitted to me that he, the very gentlest of souls, would be a regular martinet with his charges at the start of every new term, actually going so far as caning them for the most piffling of offences, even as it went against the grain, because he believed that, if he gave them so excessive a demonstration of his authority straight off, he’d never have to use his cane again. Well, that in a sense was what I was also trying to do. I allowed myself to tell one little untruth right at the beginning – merely to impose my authority, so to speak – and I trusted I’d never have to tell another.’

‘Yes – yes,’ replied Trubshawe, ‘I can see how that might have worked. But I have to put it to you again – what was the lie?’

‘The lie?’ said the Vicar sadly. ‘The lie was that, throughout the War, I’d been an Army padre in Flanders. Nothing grand, you understand, no heroics, no mention in dispatches. I just left my parishioners with the impression – not much more than an impression, I assure you – that I’d, well …’

‘I get you. You claimed you’d seen action in Europe. Instead of which …?’

The Vicar almost literally hung his head.

‘Instead of which, I’d been a company clerk in Aldershot. I hadn’t yet been ordained and, in addition, I was declared unfit for active service. My feet, you know.’

‘Your feet?’ said the Chief-Inspector.

‘They’re flat, I’m afraid. I was born with flat feet.’

‘Aha. I see. Well, Vicar,’ said Trubshawe benignly, ‘I have to say it strikes me as a pretty forgivable fib. Not much there for anybody to make a song-and-dance about, surely?’

‘No,’ said the Vicar, ‘perhaps not. If that had been all there was to it.’

‘There was more to it, then?’

‘Well, I fear it all rather got out of control. You’re familiar, I’m certain, with the old rhyme “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive”? Once I’d told the original lie, there I was, caught in my own web. Even though I played down any notion that I might have been a hero, I daresay I sinned by omission when I let the inference stand.

‘The consequence was that these ladies of the parish took it for granted that I was being disarmingly modest about my experience and started pestering me about everything I’d seen and done at the front. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I feel sure their curiosity in this regard was utterly irreproachable, except – except in the case of Mrs de Cazalis herself, whom I confess I did come to suspect – it was most un-Christian of me, I know – but I did come to suspect her of harbouring, alas, all too well-founded doubts about the probity of my character and even of hoping to trip me up. Then it all came to a head with the matter of the organ.’

‘The organ?’

‘The church organ. When I arrived in the parish, it was in dire need of repair, as many church organs were in the aftermath of the War, and as always there was simply no money to pay for it. So, following innumerable committee meetings, with all the internecine bickerings which would appear to be part and parcel of these meetings, and whose endless ramifications and recriminations I’ll spare you, we decided to hold a Grand Charity Fête.

‘It had Tombola, Morris Dancing around the Maypole, a Punch-and-Judy show for the tots, a Pin-the-Nail-on-the-Donkey’s-Tail stall for the older children and an entertainment which we, the members of the Church Committee, got up ourselves. We invited some jolly Pierrots and Harlequins over from the Postbridge concert-party, the Fol-de-Rols. The girls of St Cecilia’s performed a series of tasteful Tableaux Vivants. Mr Hawkins from the Post Office charmed us all with his famous bird-call impressions. And his eldest son Georgie – well, Georgie, as I recall, did some sort of an act with gaily coloured hoops. I never did know quite what was supposed to happen to those hoops, as we had next to no time for rehearsals, but Georgie surely didn’t mean for them all to bound off the stage in every direction at once. Anyway, it got the biggest laugh of the day, which I suppose was the main thing.’

‘Mr Wattis,’ the Chief-Inspector nipped in quickly, ‘sorry, but where exactly is this business of the Fête going? And what has it to do with Raymond Gentry?’

There was a snort from the Colonel.

‘Really, Trubshawe!’ he cried. ‘Why must you badger the poor fellow so! You asked him for his story and that’s just what he’s giving you. It’s a deuced uncomfortable spot you’ve put him on, you know, but he’s doing his level best. Go on, Clem, and take your own time. Whatever courage you did or did not show in the War, you’re certainly making up for it now. You’re an example to us all.’

‘Very kind of you to put it that way, Roger,’ said the Vicar, visibly touched by his friend’s unsolicited words of support. In fact, with the relief of having got over the worst, there had now come a new confidence in his voice.

‘The thing is, Inspector,’ he went on, ‘I was expected, as Vicar, to contribute some little thing of my own to the show. And, as I couldn’t sing, or juggle, or do bird-call impressions, or anything of the kind, it was finally proposed – by the perfidious Mrs de Cazalis, surprise surprise – that I deliver a public talk about my wartime experiences.’

‘H’m. Quite a can of worms you’d opened up.’

‘I simply couldn’t say no, particularly as it was to benefit the church, and the other ladies of the committee excitedly backed her up, and I felt well and truly trapped. Cynthia will confirm how I agonised long and hard over how I might extricate myself. I tell you, Inspector – all of you – it got to the point where I even contemplated resigning from my living as the only decent thing to do, but – well, that would undoubtedly also have meant quitting the Church, which would have been a frightful cross to bear for the rest of my life. As well as something I could ill-afford.

‘Anyway, the upshot was, I agreed to give the talk.

‘There was absolutely no question, as I already said, of inventing stories of my own so-called courage, but I realised I would have to offer a detailed summary of conditions at the front. So I read every single book on the war I could lay my hands on, until I became quite an expert on the subject – history manuals, personal memoirs, whatever there was, I read it and made copious notes. And, you understand, I couldn’t even borrow these books from the circulating library, as I suspected it would soon dawn on the snooping Mrs de Cazalis what I was up to. So I had to buy them, putting a real strain on our purse-strings, given that Cynthia and I are as poor as a pair of church-mice.

‘But even if what I had to say wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, my truth, I wanted it to be, at some level, the truth. You do understand? That was very important to me.’

‘What happened?’

The Vicar seemed briefly in danger of once more losing his composure, but he swiftly rallied.

‘It was a fiasco!’

‘Really? But why? If, as you say, you’d done your homework?’

‘The fact is, I’m simply no good at lying. I was convincing, more or less, when I gave my audience a general outline of the situation in Flanders. But when I started to talk in the first person – about my visiting the trenches, my consoling the walking wounded, my holding a service in a half-ruined village chapel with the distant rumble of Big Bertha shaking the rafters – well, Inspector, I quite went to pieces. I stumbled over my words, I was hazy on details, I got my dates all mixed up, I lost the place in the notes I’d made, I hemmed and hawed and then hemmed all over again. I was clueless, clueless!’

‘I’m truly sorry, Reverend. You didn’t deserve that for one minor lapse.’

‘Oh, it all happened a very long time ago. Yet, you know, I still wake up in a sweat at the memory of it. No, no, no, why should I pretend any longer? Not in a sweat. I wake up screaming. Do you hear? I, the sweet old Vicar, dear old Clem Wattis who wouldn’t harm a fly – I wake up screaming in the middle of the night! Oh, my poor Cynthia, what I’ve forced you to put up with!’

His wife’s eyes looked into his with infinite love and compassion.

‘Where was I?’ he finally asked himself. ‘Oh yes. Well, I could already hear a smattering of titters from the audience and I could see, in the very front row, Mrs de Cazalis savouring every minute of her triumph.

‘And then I came in my notes to the word “Ypres”.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘What word?’

‘Ypres. The Belgian town, you know. I had blithely jotted down the name without thinking I’d actually have to pronounce it when I gave my talk, and I got so tangled in my pronunciation it emerged from my mouth like a – forgive the vulgarity, but I’m afraid there is no other word – like a belch.

‘I’d also misspelled it, which didn’t help. It’s an old failing of mine, spelling. I can’t spell for toffee. Matter of fact,’ he added with an unexpected dash of self-deprecating humour, ‘I can’t even spell “toffee”.’

Everyone smiled at this mot, but smiled at it as much for its having relaxed the tension as for its own moot quality as wit.

‘Well,’ he bravely went on, ‘the titters started gradually shading into outright guffaws, and, as for Mrs de Cazalis, the gloating expression on her flushed fat face left me in no doubt that she regarded it as game, set and match to her. It was the worst moment of my life.

‘Nor did it end there. For months afterwards in the village I was the target of all sorts of derisive little digs and doubles entendres, and the greengrocer’s barrow-boy would careen past me on his bike yelling not “Yippee!” but “Ypree!” It was touch and go whether we’d simply pack our things and slip away in the night. But Cynthia, bless her, urged me to stand fast.

‘And, you know, she was right. For even though I genuinely believed I could never live down such a humiliation this side of Kingdom Come, time after all does pass. It does heal wounds, precisely as they say it does.

‘Oh, once in a while I’d overhear some remark I felt I’d eavesdropped on – eavesdropped even though it was addressed to me. Somebody might say that when we’re burdened with troubles we just have to “soldier on”, you know, the sort of thing people come out with when they’ve nothing better to say, and I’d blush inwardly – and sometimes outwardly – at what I took to be an allusion to me. Again, though, Cynthia would persuade me I was being overly sensitive, and most likely she was right.’

‘How long did this period last?’

‘How long? Several months, I suppose. And then, I repeat, it all began to die down. Even though I never ceased to suffer in private, publicly it came to be so much water under the bridge, and my wife and I lived on for many years in the village as contentedly as we were able.

‘That is,’ he added after a lengthy pause, ‘until Raymond Gentry entered our lives.’

‘Tell me,’ asked Trubshawe, ‘what exactly was it he said?’

‘It wasn’t what he said,’ answered the Vicar. ‘It was what he implied with all his feline, sibilant little insinuations about the War. I realise he’s lying dead upstairs, a bullet through his heart, but, as Evie rightly said, there was something un-English about him. Not foreign exactly, but, you know, oily and underhand, like many of his unfortunate race. No one who wasn’t already aware of the background to my story would have grasped what he was getting at, but I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, and this loathsome complicity between us, with everyone else looking on and listening on, became quite intolerable.’

‘How do you imagine he found out?’

‘Ah well, now there you do raise an interesting question, Inspector,’ said the Vicar. ‘As a professional snitch, Gentry could of course be expected to know the – the, eh, dirt about the private lives of the ffolkeses’ starrier acquaintances, like Evie here and Cora. But the local Vicar? The local Doctor? Now who could have passed on to him that kind of information? I hate to be hurtful to Roger and Mary, dear, dear friends who invite Cynthia and me down here for Christmas every year when I doubt anybody else in the locality would, but I fear the prime suspect has to be Selina.’

‘When Miss ffolkes is ready to join us,’ Trubshawe intervened judiciously, ‘you may be sure I’ll ask her whatever questions I consider to be relevant to her relationship with the deceased. But for now, Vicar, I have to ask you the hardest one of all.’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you kill Raymond Gentry?’

The Vicar almost choked with incredulity.

‘What! Is that a joke question?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You’re asking me seriously if I …?’

‘Now look,’ replied the Chief-Inspector soberly. ‘Why do you think I’ve been putting you through all this unpleasantness, if not because you are, along with everybody else present, a suspect? I thought that was a given.’

‘Well, yes, of course I understand that to be the case, but do be serious, man. Can you really be asking me if I’m the kind of person who kills just anybody and everybody who happens to do me wrong? Do I look like a murderer?’

‘Ah, Vicar, if murderers looked like murderers, if every burglar went around wearing a domino mask and a striped jumper and toting a bulging sack over his shoulder with the word “Swag” stencilled on it that he’d purchased from some burglars’ emporium, how easy our job would be!’

‘Oh, very well, yes, I do see what you mean,’ said Wattis resignedly. ‘Point taken.’

‘And so – the answer to my question?’

‘The answer to your question, Inspector, is no. No, I did not kill Raymond Gentry. I may have felt like it – I know everybody else did and, as I say, I’ve never made any claim to be better than my fellow men. But I certainly did not act on whatever evil impulse he might have provoked in me. Actually,’ he added, ‘in some respects I have reason to be grateful to him.’

‘Grateful?’ exclaimed the Colonel. ‘Good Lord, Clem, how on earth can you be grateful to such a swine for causing you the pain he did?’

‘Yes, Roger, it’s true, he did cause me pain – but, oddly, he also brought me relief from that pain. I’ve finally got the thing off my chest. I’ve finally been compelled to yank it, kicking and screaming, into the open air and, honestly, I think I feel the better for it. I feel as though I’ve been purged. I may have been a liar, and God is my witness that I’ve paid for my lie many times over. But I never was, as God also knows, a coward. It’s true, I didn’t see any action in the War, like my glorious predecessor, but neither did thousands of others like me with flat feet and short sight and fallen arches, and it wasn’t their fault just as it wasn’t mine. When all is said and done, I had a perfectly respectable War and have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. “They also serve …”, you know.’

‘Hear hear!’ cried the Colonel.

‘Good for you, Vicar,’ the Chief-Inspector nodded in agreement. ‘And thank you for being so co-operative. Now let me put one last question to you and then you’re free.’

‘Please.’

‘Did you leave your bedroom at all during the night?’

‘Yes, I did,’ was the surprising answer. ‘Several times, in fact.’

‘Several times!? Why?’

The Vicar threw back his head and laughed – he actually laughed aloud.

‘Well,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I may be getting dim, but I fail to understand what’s suddenly so funny.’

‘Oh, Inspector, now that I’ve crashed through the barrier of embarrassment, I’m willing – as only half-an-hour ago it would have been unthinkable for me – I’m willing to give you a brutally straight answer to that question. If I left my bedroom several times during the night, it was because I had to reply to several Calls of Nature. When you reach my age, Nature can become quite … quite pressing. Especially after the sort of blowout we had at dinner.’

‘I see. And roughly when, may I ask, was the last time?’

‘Actually, I can answer that one not roughly but precisely. Nature, at least in my current experience, tends to be a creature of routine. It was five-thirty.’

‘And did you see anything suspicious? Or even just untoward?’

‘No, nothing at all. I woke up, got up – yet again – trotted along the corridor and …’

Whereupon, abruptly falling silent, he started to frown in an effort of remembrance.

‘So you did see something?’

‘N-o-o-o,’ murmured the Vicar when he answered at last. ‘No, I didn’t see anything.’

‘But you stopped as though –’

‘It wasn’t what I saw, it was what I heard. How very odd. With everything that’s happened since, it completely slipped my mind.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘As I was returning from – from my last Call of Nature, I heard voices raised in anger, an argument, a real argy-bargy, between a man and a woman, quite a violent one too. I couldn’t distinguish what was being said, all of it taking place behind closed doors, you understand, but it certainly sounded as though it must have been alarmingly loud inside the room itself.’

‘Inside which room?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘Oh, as to that,’ replied the Vicar, ‘there can be no doubt at all. It came from the attic. Yes, it most definitely came from the attic.’