‘Thank you, Farrar,’ said the Colonel gruffly. ‘That is exactly what, in my clod-hopping manner, I was trying to say. Fact is, Trubshawe, once we’d taken the decision to have Rolfe and Don fetch you over, I don’t suppose any of us really asked ourselves what precisely it was we were fetching you for. I hope you don’t mind – I apologise again – it being Boxing Day …’
‘No, no, no,’ said Trubshawe, ‘you did the right thing, and I would have been remiss in my duty – and, retired I may be, I still see it as my duty – if I’d declined to come.’
‘Why, that’s just what I said!’ exclaimed the Colonel. ‘Didn’t I say a policeman never retires? Not even for the night.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that, but let it pass. The question is, am I here merely to lend a seal, or the semblance of a seal, of officialdom, or again, as you rightly say, of semi-officialdom, to the hours and p’raps even days that lie ahead of you all before you’re able to re-establish communication with the outside world? Or do I myself do something about the situation in the meantime?’
The Colonel drew a doubtful finger along his unshaven chin.
‘Do something?’ he said. ‘I don’t get you. Do what?’
‘You aren’t going to arrest us all, are you?’ squealed the Vicar’s wife in a fluttery falsetto.
‘Dear lady,’ the Scotland Yard man smoothly replied, ‘even if I wished to arrest you – which I assure you I don’t – I couldn’t. Remember, I’m retired. I no longer have any official position, which means, logically, I no longer have any official power. However …’
His voice trailed off in a trio of tantalising suspension points.
‘However …?’ echoed the Colonel.
Trubshawe noisily cleared his throat.
‘Look, I realise what a dreadful ordeal this has been for all of you – and, between you and me, things are liable to get a good deal worse before they get any better. But it does strike me that a chance has presented itself which might allow us to clarify matters in the meantime.
‘It was Don here who told me, in Dr Rolfe’s motor, of the conversation you’d had in this very room a mere half-an-hour after he and the Colonel had discovered Raymond Gentry’s body. He told me, in particular, of Miss Mount’s insistence that you just couldn’t afford to sit around the house for hours, conceivably even days, with a corpse in the attic and an atmosphere of festering suspicion in the drawing-room. For he also apprised me of her theory – that one of you must logically be the murderer – a theory which, ladies and gentlemen, I’m obliged to endorse.’
This last statement of his provoked a collective gasp, almost as though a new and unexpected accusation had been levelled at the party, even though all the Chief-Inspector had done was, of course, reiterate what Evadne Mount had said earlier. It was possibly because, on this occasion, the charge was being made not by a novelist famed for her morbid imagination, the kind of imagination you look for and long for when you settle down at the fireside with a whodunit, but by an individual whose diagnosis of the situation couldn’t help but carry, even into his retirement, the ring of authority.
‘Yes,’ Trubshawe continued after a moment, ‘I fear you’ll have to forget any convenient notion that this murder might have been an outside job. I’ve seen Raymond Gentry’s body. And I’ve seen the room in which he was done to death.
‘And there’s another thing. I also found, inside the pocket of his bathrobe, a piece of paper that clearly implicates him as a blackmailer – whether amateur or professional
I couldn’t yet say. I’d like you all to take a look at that paper.’
Whereupon he drew it out, flattened it with his fingers and spread it on to the table so that everybody could read it.
No matter how enigmatic these words and symbols would have been to anybody else, they certainly seemed to make a meaningful impact on the various members of the ffolkeses’ house-party who, one after the other, the colour draining from their features, could all be seen recoiling from a hasty perusal of the damning text.
Only Evadne Mount, either because she was of a more robust temperament than her fellow guests, or simply because of her congenital propensity to pry, continued to pore over the crumpled paper.
When she raised her head at last, Trubshawe noticed at once that she wore an expression of frowning perplexity.
‘What is it, Miss Mount?’ he quickly asked her.
‘Well, I don’t really know,’ she mumbled almost plaintively.
‘You don’t know?’
‘No, I don’t. It’s just that – well, I just can’t help feeling that there’s … there’s, you know, something wrong with that piece of paper. But what?’
‘I beg you to share with us whatever it is you have to say. You never know what could turn out to be important.’
She looked back down at the page of notes and studied it again for a few moments. Then she shook her head.
‘No, sorry, Trubshawe, I don’t know what it is that’s troubling me, really I don’t. It may come to me if I stop thinking about it.’
At first the Chief-Inspector seemed undecided whether or not to pursue the matter, then he asked Roger ffolkes:
‘Colonel, do you by any chance recognise the typing?’
‘Recognise the typing? How could I possibly recognise the typing? It’s not as though it’s handwriting.’
‘Actually,’ Trubshawe said patiently, ‘it is in a way. No two typewriters, you see, ever produce an exactly identical typeface. What I mean is, do you happen to know on whose machine this was typed out?’
He handed the sheet of paper over to the Colonel, who gave it no more than a perfunctory inspection.
‘Haven’t a clue. Don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for. Here, Farrar, you take a gander at it, will you? Perhaps you can see what the Inspector’s on about.’
‘Why, yes, Colonel.’
‘What? You mean you can?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s – well, it was typed on your typewriter.’
‘Mine?!’
‘Definitely, sir. The one in the library. You see here – Chief-Inspector – this letter C? And this one again? The arc is broken – look, it has like a tiny space in the middle. Both of them. It’s your typewriter all right, Colonel.’
‘Well, I’m jiggered!’
‘So,’ ruminated the Chief-Inspector. ‘That means these notes were typed inside this very house, probably at some time in the last thirty-six hours. Colonel, would Gentry have had access to your library?’
‘Why, naturally he would. I don’t keep parts of my house out of bounds to my guests, even the uninvited ones. Anyone in search of a book to read, or if he just fancied being on his own for a while, was free to wander into the library.’
Trubshawe folded the paper up again and stuffed it back in his pocket.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘since it’s clear there was no love lost between any of you and the victim, and since this’ – he patted his jacket pocket – ‘is a significant part of what makes it clear, it’s my belief that it would be a waste of time looking elsewhere for possible motives for his murder, at least before I’ve investigated those closer to home. By that I mean, here in ffolkes Manor.’
‘Before you’ve investigated …’ said Dr Rolfe. ‘Are we to understand that you’re suggesting you yourself conduct an investigation?’
‘Yes, that is what I’m suggesting.’
‘Here and now?’
‘Yes, again.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said the Colonel. ‘You’re proposing to – what? – question each of us in turn?’
‘That’s right. That is just how I was thinking of going about it.’