So, as I say, we were simply too intimidated to have the kind of gossipy chit-chat we might have expected to enjoy over dinner – which was our big mistake. For, you see, it left the floodgates open for Raymond himself. And that’s when we discovered just how evil – I weigh the word, Trubshawe, I weigh the word – just how evil he really could be.
It began, as I recall, with Cora here, who can be relied on, as I know too well, to give as good as she gets. She’d been telling us all, with the verve for which she’s become a byword, about playing the lead in Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, which was one of her biggest successes in the twenties. We were having a rollicking good laugh at her inexhaustible fund of anecdotes when Gentry, who’d seemed not to be paying attention at all, suddenly opined that The Green Hat was ‘remembered only for having been forgotten’, as he phrased it, and that Michael Arlen was ‘irredeemably passé, not so much green hat as old hat, a real has-been!’
Well, did Cora let him have it! She said something extremely funny, as a matter of fact, something that, for once, knocked the wind out of his sails. She said – you’ll forgive me, Cora, if I fail to do justice to your impeccable timing – she said, ‘A has-been!?’ – and I could see her gearing herself up for one of those epic cat-fights on which theatricals thrive. ‘Why, you putrid little twerp,’ she spat at him. ‘At least has-been means was! You – you weren’t, you aren’t, and you never will be!’
Well! Raymond plainly wasn’t used to being answered back, and his face was quite a picture. I think it true to say everybody in the room, maybe even Selina, exulted in his come-uppance.
Our exultation, unfortunately, turned out to be just a tiny bit premature. His eyes narrowing with malice, he at once turned on Cora and he said – he said – ah, well, you have to understand, Trubshawe, I – after all, Cora’s an old crony of mine and – and – all things considered, you really can’t expect me to repeat what he said. All you need to know is that he alluded to certain – to certain scurrilous rumours that have dogged her private life, rumours that have never been more than rumours, you understand, except that Gentry, who of course made his living out of scandal-mongering, proved to be unexpectedly well informed about how she obtained – no, no, I really can’t pursue this line further.
I did decide, however, that I couldn’t abandon my friend to her fate and I told Gentry in no uncertain terms that he must apologise for such an unwarranted slur on her character. And, to my very great surprise, he did. He actually did apologise forthwith, doubtless because he could see how distressed Selina was by his conduct. For the next hour or so, during most of dinner, he was as sullen as ever but at least he behaved himself, more or less.
It was while we were all tucking into Christmas pud that he started again with a vengeance – and, given the fool he’d been made to appear by Cora, I’m sure ‘vengeance’ is the right word. He couldn’t forgive any of us for having witnessed the spectacle.
The first of his victims was Clem Wattis. He had been regaling us with his theories on the far-reaching consequences of the Treaty of Versailles when Raymond, tapping his lips in a feigned yawn, drawled across the table, ‘Oh dear, Vicar, I’m afraid your Great War is in danger of becoming a Great Bore!’
Clem – as befits his calling – is someone utterly incapable of losing his temper. Indeed, according to Cynthia, he’s so absent-minded his temper is just about the only thing he never does manage to lose. So it was, I suspect, more in sorrow than in anger that he replied to Gentry, ‘I suppose, young man, you think you’re awfully clever.’
‘Not at all,’ came the riposte, cool as the proverbial cucumber. ‘It’s only because I’m talking to you that I appear clever. Almost anyone would.’
Now even the Vicar’s dander was up.
‘Have you forgotten, you insolent young pup,’ he barked, ‘it was to make the world safe for the likes of you that we fought the Great War in the first place? And this is the gratitude we get!’
Whereupon Gentry, he – well, he – what can I say? – he started to cast aspersions on – on the, well, on the exact extent and degree of the Vicar’s wartime duties.
By then it was evident that nothing and nobody could stem the tide of his bile. He’d somehow got wind of the sordid secrets in each of our lives – every life, as you know, Trubshawe, even the most outwardly blameless, harbours its secrets, for there’s the public life and the private life and then there exists the secret life – and each of us in turn came to feel what I can only call the lash of his vitriol.
And that’s how it was that, thanks to a single gate-crashing guest, our merry little Christmas house-party was to become nothing less than a living nightmare.
You’ll excuse me, I trust, if I decline to go into greater detail about the painful things we all had to hear about each other. All I’m prepared to say is that, when we turned in that night, there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have rejoiced if Raymond Gentry had been struck down by a thunderbolt.
Or, for that matter (she concluded), by a bullet.
Chapter Four
‘H’m, I get the picture …’
Having digested the information that she had just been feeding to him, the Chief-Inspector then congratulated the novelist.
‘Thank you for that, Miss Mount. Very pithily put, if I may say so. To be honest, I’m not much of a one for detective stories. They’re too airy-fairy in my opinion, with not nearly enough of the hard slog, the sheer dogged legwork, that goes into bringing your typical murderer to book. But you do have a knack for boiling a complicated situation down to its essentials.’
‘Well, thank you, Chief-Inspector,’ she said beaming, ‘it’s really most magnanimous of you. More magnanimous, I fear, than I tend to be in my whodunits where you and your colleagues are concerned.’
‘Oh, it’s all good clean fun,’ Trubshawe answered heartily. ‘I hope we’re big enough at the Yard to take your ragging of us in the spirit in which I’m certain it’s intended. But enough of these pleasant futilities. We’ve now got to decide what’s to be done next.’
‘I really don’t see what there is we can do, Trubshawe,’ said the Colonel. ‘We’re snowed in, as you’re aware, and until the weather lifts, and the telephone wires are reconnected, we can’t even inform any kind of official authority what’s happened.’
‘In that case, may I enquire why I’m here?’
This question appeared to leave the Colonel at a loss for words.
‘Why you’re here …? Ah well, it just seemed like the only – well, when you put it like that, I’m not – it was just that Chitty suggested …’
‘Chitty?’
‘Yes, he reminded me that you’d settled down in the area and proposed that – dash it all, man, I do have a dead body in my house! If I have a leaky pipe I send for the plumber and if I have a – a leaky corpse, well, naturally, I send for the police!’
‘Probably what the Colonel means is that we all felt, at least until the local constabulary were able to reach us, that it would only be right and proper for a member of the police force to be in attendance, even if a retired member.’