‘No, you’re wrong.’
‘What!’ cried a horrified Mary ffolkes.
‘Please, please, Mrs ffolkes, you misunderstand me. All I meant was that I haven’t interviewed any of the servants.’
The novelist snorted.
‘Speaking as someone who has just solved the mystery,’ she said airily, ‘I can unhesitatingly assure you that there wouldn’t be the slightest use in your questioning them now.’
‘We-ell,’ said Trubshawe, still doubtful, ‘if you really do believe you’re in possession of all the facts …?’
‘Actually, I don’t believe it,’ came the confident reply. ‘I know it.’
Chapter Fourteen
Inside the library Evadne Mount faced the assembled company while everyone, even Trubshawe, still sucking on that long since extinct pipe of his, waited for her to start presenting her evidence. But when she finally did speak, what she had to say wasn’t at all what anyone had expected to hear.
She turned to the Doctor’s wife, who was unwrapping a new packet of Player’s, and asked, ‘Can I cadge, Madge?’
Madge Rolfe stared at her.
‘What?’
‘Can I cadge one of your nicotine lollies?’
‘One of my …?’
‘Your ciggies, dear, your ciggies.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I don’t,’ answered the novelist.
She opened the packet which had been tossed into her lap and drew out a cigarette. Then, lighting up and taking what looked very much like a beginner’s puff, she began.
‘You must forgive me if I start off on a personal note,’ she said with the complacent tone of someone who doesn’t care a jot whether she’s forgiven or not. ‘But if there’s one thing in this world I flatter myself I know how to do well, it’s tell a story, and, assuming none of you minds, I’d like to tell this remarkable story of ours in my own words, at my own pace and without omitting any of my own – rare – misjudgments.
‘It really has been the weirdest experience in my life, an experience that, had it not involved two brutal crimes, one of them committed against a close friend, I might even have enjoyed. Just think! Here we are, a group of suspects gathered together in the library to hear how and why a murder was perpetrated! It’s a scene I’ve written so many times in my novels. Yet if any of you had told me that one day I myself wouldn’t just be present at such a scene but would actually be playing the role of presiding sleuth, I’d have said you wanted your head examined!
‘Of course,’ she went on, directing her gaze on each of her listeners in turn to ensure that not one of them was paying her less than the attention she believed she deserved, ‘like my own fictional detective, Alexis Baddeley, I’m no more than an amateur. And, as I don’t have to remind you, I’ve never once had Alexis solve a locked-room crime. I like my whodunits to keep at least one foot on terra firma.
‘I’ve never had any truck with murder methods involving ropes and ladders and pulleys and doorkeys yanked through keyholes on strings which somehow succeed in combusting of their own accord and murder victims found stabbed in the middle of the desert with nary a footprint in the sand, coming or going, or else hanging from a beam in a padlocked garret with no sign of a chair or a table or any item of furniture they could have climbed up on and not even a damp patch on the floorboards to suggest the murderer had used a block of ice which had since melted. I can’t be doing with such contrivances. For me they’re too darned fangled, to borrow the Colonel’s delightful coinage.
‘Anyway, John Dickson Carr has cornered that particular market and what I say is, if somebody’s unbeatable, why bother trying to beat him?
‘Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away here, and I know you all think I’m a ghoulish old pussy, but I am coming to the point. And that point is that we were all so hypnotised by the method of Raymond’s murder – a method none of us dreamt could ever exist outside a book – we just couldn’t see the larger picture.
‘Locked-room murders, you know, aren’t unlike chess end-games. What I mean by that is that they bear about as much relation to real murders, murders committed by real people in the real world, as those end-games in the illustrated magazines – you know, a Knight and Pawn versus an unprotected Bishop to mate in five moves – well, as much as those end-games bear to the real strategies and configurations of a real game of chess. It’s something my dear friend Gilbert has always understood, which is why he’s the nonpareil genius he is.’
From the blank expressions that flitted from one face to another like a contagious yawn, it was clear nobody knew which Gilbert she was referring to. And since it was equally clear nobody liked to say so, she explained:
‘Gilbert Chesterton. What makes his Father Brown stories so unique is precisely that they are end-games and they don’t pretend to be anything but. By confining his clever little narratives to a dozen pages, he avoids having to articulate all that laborious plotline padding that a novelist like me needs to justify the dénouement. And his readers have the satisfying impression of being whisked straight to the climax of a full-length whodunit – the only part of it, to be honest, that really interests them – without having had to plough through the tedious exposition.
‘The point, Miss Mount,’ said Trubshawe, ‘the point!’
‘As I’ve said many times before in this very house,’ she went on, conspicuously ignoring his interruption, ‘if you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.’
‘That’s all very enlightening, I’m sure,’ Trubshawe interrupted her again in a voice that was both suave and gruff. ‘But when we agreed to join you in the library, it wasn’t to hear your opinions on the difference between factual and fictional murders – opinions which, as you yourself have admitted, you’ve already voiced many times. Just where is this leading to?’
Evadne Mount frowned.
‘Do learn to be patient with me, Chief-Inspector,’ she replied gravely. ‘I shall get there. I invariably do.’
She took another, more confident puff on her cigarette.
‘So there we were – there I was – confronted with two murders, each of which was very different from the other in its method. One was, as the Chief-Inspector would put it, a “fictional” murder, patently committed by somebody who’d read a lot of whodunits – though not, I repeat, any of mine. And the other was a “real” murder, an attempt at a real murder, the kind of murder which is committed every day in the real world.
‘For the first murder, Raymond Gentry’s, there were almost too many motives. Apart from Selina here, everybody in our little party was secretly, and in some instances not in the least secretly, relieved to see him put out of commission once and for all.
‘And the initial mistake I made was to persuade myself that even among such a wide and motley range of suspects there were distinctions to be drawn. Nearly all of us had been the object of Gentry’s malicious little smears. (There were exceptions and I’ll come to these in a minute.) Which implied that, theoretically, nearly all of us had a good reason for wishing him dead. Nevertheless, what struck me initially, I repeat, was the existence, as I saw it, of two separate categories of suspects.