‘And while we’re about it, darling,’ Cora Rutherford muttered under her breath, ‘did you never stop to think that his verse was free because he couldn’t find anyone to pay for it?’
Now Selina seemed so close to tears the actress at once took pity on her.
‘Sorry to be such a cat, my sweet,’ she said. ‘Just couldn’t help myself.’
‘Look, Miss,’ Trubshawe said, ‘I fancy what Miss Rutherford here and I were trying to do in our clumsy ways was demonstrate that Raymond Gentry wasn’t really worthy of somebody like you. Not a very nice person, now, was he?’
‘No,’ cried Selina, her eyes suddenly ablaze, ‘no, maybe he wasn’t! But he was alive, don’t you see, he was clever and he was fun and he widened my horizons! Oh, I realise how silly and childish it must sound to you but, compared to Ray’s world, everything in my own life seemed so shrivelled and dried up! Before I met him, all I’d ever known was this house and the village and the countryside around it. Well, I wanted something better out of life! I told myself I was free, white and twenty-one and I wanted everything that was going in this crazy world – furs and fine wines and wild, extravagant parties! And I didn’t want it some day – I wanted it now! Was that so very wrong of me?’
Her voice dropped an octave.
‘No, don’t answer, anybody,’ she said contritely. ‘It was wrong, I know. Now I know.’
‘How,’ enquired Trubshawe softly, ‘do you know?’
Selina stubbed out her cigarette, on which she had taken no more than a couple of jerky puffs.
‘Mr Trubshawe, if you’ve been questioning my family and their friends, then you must already have been told how intolerably rude and disrespectful Ray was to all of them from the moment we arrived. I watched him with mounting horror – watched how he couldn’t resist needling them and making them squirm. It was as though it was in his blood. What I had remembered as so gay and amusing and penetrating in the Kafka Klub now struck me as just stupidly arrogant and cruel.
‘That was one of his pet words, you know, “penetrating”. I used to think it was priceless the way he used it about everything. Down here, though, I realised for the first time what a hollow, shallow, meaningless word it was, the sort of word only a know-all like Ray would ever dream of using, a word whose sole purpose was to make other people feel small. Every time I heard him – here, here in this house, in my home, in front of my parents and their friends, my friends, my true friends – every time I heard him describe somebody or something as penetrating I wanted to scream!
‘I was seeing him as he really was and I couldn’t wait for Christmas to be all over so he’d drive back to Town, alone this time, and I’d never have to set eyes – or ears – on him again!’
She turned towards her parents, who had been listening avidly to her.
‘It’s true – Mummy – Daddy. I am so terribly, terribly sorry for what I’ve put you through, but I swear that even before – before what happened to him, I’d made up my mind to break things off. Before it went further … before it went too far …’
‘Oh, Selina, my darling,’ cried Mary ffolkes, giving her a smothering hug, ‘I just knew you’d eventually see what an awful person he was!’
‘I did. But it was Don who really showed me what Ray was worth.’
‘Don?’ echoed the Chief-Inspector. ‘What did he have to do with it?’
‘Well, as I told you, Don was unhappy from the very beginning, from the drive down here, with Raymond taking over all the arrangements as he did, and I could see him silently suffering Ray’s presence and just dying to give him what-for. Then when Ray, who got disgustingly drunk – that’s another side of him I used to find charming, if you can believe it – when Ray began needling even me, about my piano-playing, Don leapt up and actually threatened –’
Intuitively divining Trubshawe’s reaction to that last word, Selina abruptly clammed up.
‘I – I don’t mean –’ she finally began to stammer. ‘It’s just that, compared to Ray, Don was – you know – he was so – so virile – so …’
The Chief-Inspector doggedly pursued his advantage.
‘What did Don threaten to do to Raymond Gentry?’ he almost barked at her.
‘What?’
‘What was it Don threatened to do?’
‘I threatened to kill him.’
Trubshawe wheeled about to confront the young American who had just spoken.
‘What did you say?’
‘You heard what I said. I threatened to kill him.’
‘Oh, Don,’ said Selina in a whisper, ‘I oughtn’t to have spoken. I really didn’t mean to –’
‘Aw, shoot. He’d have found out on his own.’
‘So you threatened to kill him, did you?’ said Trubshawe. ‘Now that is interesting. Interesting for a reason that should be obvious to us all, but also interesting because it’s something Miss Mount omitted to include in her account of last night’s events.’
‘Yeah,’ said Don, glancing at the novelist, ‘I noticed that too.’
‘Heavens!’ protested Evadne Mount. ‘It ought to be perfectly plain why I didn’t mention it. People never stop threatening to kill other people – why, I’ve heard four-year-olds threaten to kill their parents – and in pretty much every case, in 99.9 per cent of cases, I’ll wager, it doesn’t mean a thing. But the police, naturally, would have pounced on such a threat and, don’t forget, Trubshawe, I hadn’t seen you in action yet. You might have been just the kind of copper who’s always willing to jump to the first and most obvious conclusion.’
‘Yes,’ Trubshawe had to agree, ‘I might at that,’ and he added, ‘especially as this particular threat happens to belong to the remaining 0.1 per cent where the threatened individual does actually end by getting himself killed.’
‘I grant you that,’ the novelist grudgingly conceded. ‘But anybody can see that Don didn’t kill Gentry.’
‘He might not have done in one of your whodunits, but we’re in the real world here.’
He turned back to Don.
‘Am I to take it you really meant to kill Gentry?’
‘It’s what I felt like doing,’ replied Don cagily. ‘But I didn’t.’
‘Then why did you threaten him?’
‘Listen, Mr Trubshawe, you never knew the creep. He was a complete … well, in mixed company I can’t say what he was a complete … but you’ve heard everyone else tell you what they thought of him.
‘With me it began earlier – when Selina telephoned to say he’d be joining us for Christmas. Everything had been hunky-dory up to then between Selina and me and I was beginning to think – to hope … Then there I was, squashed into the rumble seat of his Hispano-Suiza watching Selina give him “my hero” looks. I was one pretty browned-off guy, I can tell you.
‘And when we eventually got down here, the three of us, and straight away Gentry started driving everyone nuts, I found it tough work just holding myself back.’
‘But, at least to begin with, you did? Hold yourself back, I mean.’
‘I reckoned it was none of my beeswax.’
Trubshawe frowned perplexedly.
‘None of your what?’
‘My business. It was when he got fresh with Selina herself I just couldn’t see straight.’
‘And what exactly did you do about it?’
‘I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and ordered him to lay off.’
‘H’m. Stirring stuff all right, if not quite the death threat you admitted to, was it?’
‘No … but that wasn’t all.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yeah. He began making remarks about my parents – I’m an orphan, you see, I never knew my real mom and dad, and Gentry began to say – well, you won’t get me in a thousand years to repeat what he said but I warned him if he ever told any of his filthy lies again – or ever harmed a hair on Selina’s head – I’d kill him.’