‘But,’ she went on, pausing for a second or two, clearly holding back so that her next statement would have the greatest possible effect on her listeners, ‘I do know who did it.’
And, indeed, the effect was devastating. The drawing-room went deathly quiet. A few seconds elapsed when time seemed suspended. The servants stopped their nervous shuffling. Cora Rutherford’s immaculately manicured fingers stopped dancing a pirouette on the transparent rim of her glass ashtray. Even the grandfather clock stopped ticking – or else tick-tocked on tiptoe.
The silence was finally, bathetically, brought to an end by an eruption of nasal wailing from the butter-fingered kitchen-maid Adelaide, adenoidal Addie, the other maids called her, who would burst into tears at the drop of a hat – or at least of a china teacup. With a loud ‘Wheeesht, girl!’, however, Mrs Varley, the cook, put an end to that, and everybody turned again to face Evadne Mount.
It was the Colonel who posed the inevitable question.
‘Oh, you do, do you? So tell us. Who did it?’
‘One of us.’
Strangely, none of the indignant protestations she might have assumed would follow such a dramatic assertion were forthcoming. On the contrary, it was as though its logic had impressed everybody, instantly and simultaneously, as irrefutable.
‘I know that this house is situated right on the edge of Dartmoor,’ she continued, ‘and probably fantasies of escaped convicts have been flitting through all of your brains. And, yes, it’s true that, with the ’phone lines down, we can’t know for sure that some escaped convict isn’t roaming about the countryside. As far as I’m concerned, though, it’s not on. Like the White Queen, I’m capable of believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast – well, let’s say after breakfast,’ she corrected herself, ‘I’m nothing till I’ve had my coffee. And, as an avid reader of my dear friend John Dickson Carr’s whodunits, I’m also capable of believing that somebody managed to materialise then dematerialise inside that locked attic room, killing Raymond Gentry in the meantime, and all without supernatural intervention. Great Gods, I have to believe it, since it happened!
‘But nobody will ever make me believe that a convict escaped from his cell in Dartmoor, escaped from the most escape-proof prison in the country, made his away across the moors in a howling snowstorm, broke into this house without any of us hearing him, lured the wretched Gentry into the attic, did away with him, got out again leaving the door and window intact, and sneaked back into the storm! No – there, in life and in fiction, I draw the line. Whichever way you look at it, the murder has to be what the police call an inside job.’
Again there was silence, while again her words insidiously sank in. Even Selina lifted her tear-stained face from her hands to watch how everybody else was reacting. And again it was the Colonel, standing with his legs akimbo in front of the huge blazing fire, in a pose uncannily reminiscent of the actor Charles Laughton as Henry VIII, who spoke.
‘Well, Evadne, that’s a red-hot potato you’ve tossed into our laps, I must say.’
‘I had to be blunt,’ she answered unapologetically. ‘It was you yourself who told us we must face the facts.’
‘What you’ve just offered us is a theory, not a fact.’
‘Maybe so. But if anybody else’ – her eyes scanned the room – ‘if anybody else can draw a more plausible conclusion from the evidence before us, I’d be glad to hear it.’
Mary ffolkes, who hadn’t said a word until then, suddenly turned to her and cried, ‘Oh, Evie, you’ve got to be mistaken, you’ve just got to be! If it were true, it – it would be too gruesome to contemplate!’
‘I’m sorry, old girl, but it’s precisely because it’s gruesome that we have to contemplate it. That’s why I said we can’t afford to hang around till the storm breaks. The very idea of us all sitting here wondering which of us … Good heavens, I don’t have to spell it out, do I? I know what havoc this kind of mutual suspicion can cause.
‘It was the theme of my first novel, The Mystery of the Green Penguin, you remember, in which a woman becomes so obsessed with the idea that her next-door neighbour is slowly poisoning her crippled husband that her own husband, driven to distraction by her compulsive spying and snooping and sleuthing, eventually runs amok and splits her head open with a piece of antique Benares brassware. And, of course, the neighbour turns out to be totally innocent.
‘Now, I’m not suggesting anything like that is liable to happen here. But something’s got to be done. And fast.’
From the other end of the drawing-room, where he stood stiffly alongside his fellow staff members, Chitty, the Colonel’s butler, a man who even at such an ungodly hour contrived to uphold a butlerish gravitas, took one step forward, clenched his fist, raised it to his lips and gave a self-consciously theatrical cough. It was the sort of sound that, in their stage directions, playwrights tend to convey as ‘ahem’ and you could actually hear the two syllables ‘a’ and ‘hem’ in Chitty’s cough.
‘Yes, Chitty,’ said the Colonel, ‘what is it?’
‘If I may be so bold, sir,’ said Chitty ponderously, ‘it did occur to me that – well, that –’
‘Yes, yes, speak up, man!’
‘Well, sir. Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, sir.’
The Colonel’s face brightened up at once.
‘Why, I do believe you’ve got something there! Trubshawe, of course!’
‘Trubshawe? I know that name,’ said Henry Rolfe, the local GP. ‘Isn’t he the retired Scotland Yard man? Moved down here two or three months ago?’
‘That’s right. A widower. Bit of a recluse. I invited him to join the party – you know, just to be neighbourly. Said he preferred to spend Christmas alone. But he’s an affable enough cove once you get talking to him, and he was one of the top chaps at the Yard. Good thinking, Chitty.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ murmured Chitty with evident satisfaction, before noiselessly resuming his place.
‘The thing is,’ the Colonel went on, ‘Trubshawe’s cottage is six or seven miles along the Postbridge Road. Next to the level-crossing. Even in this storm, it might be feasible for somebody to drive there and bring him back.’
‘Colonel?’
‘Yes, Farrar?’
‘Won’t that be an imposition? At this hour. And at Christmas, too. He is retired, after all.’
‘A policeman never really retires, not even for the night,’ demurred the Colonel. ‘For all I know, he might welcome some excitement. Must be bored rigid with no one but a blind old Labrador to talk to all day long.’
He at once started from his immobility and turned to each of the men who were standing, sitting or slouching in the room.
‘Any of you ready to give it a go?’
‘I will,’ said the Doctor before the others had a chance to speak. ‘My old crock can stand up to the worst weather. Fact is, she’s used to it.’
‘Let me come with you,’ Don just as quickly seconded him.
‘Thanks. I’ll need some muscular assistance if she stalls.’
‘If it’s muscles you want, Doctor,’ said Don, stealing a hopeful glance at Selina as he only half-jokily pumped up his biceps, ‘then I’m your man!’
‘Good, good. Well, let’s get going if we’re going.’
Henry Rolfe then leaned over the armchair in which his wife Madge sat, her unstockinged legs folded underneath her like those of a cat, and kissed her demurely on the forehead.
‘Now, darling,’ he said, ‘I don’t want you to be anxious about me. I’ll be fine.’