‘There were those, on the one hand, for whom Raymond’s revelations would have been utterly catastrophic were they to have turned up in The Trombone. Cora, for instance. As she herself was honest enough to point out to us, her career would be ruined if word, instead of mere rumour, began to circulate about her dependency on … on, shall we say, certain substances.
‘Now, now, Cora, you don’t have to look daggers at me, I fancy I know what you’re itching to reply. Yes, it’s perfectly so, there was one other such suspect, and that was me. My books, I unblushingly confess, have a vast readership, and even though they’re all about murder and greed and hatred and revenge they’re really rather genteel fictions read mostly by rather genteel people. If these genteel readers of mine were suddenly to find out that – well, I’d prefer to pass over in silence something you already all know about me – but, yes, I can imagine what effect that would have on my sales.’
Having manfully grasped the nettle of her own past sins, she was ready to launch herself back into the fray.
‘There were also those, however, who, distressing as it must have been to hear once private squalors publicly aired, had nothing to fear from The Trombone. You, Clem, for one.
‘It’s true, unfortunately, that you played fast-and-loose with the facts of your wartime experience, and this has unquestionably been a Christmas you’ll want to forget, and want all of us likewise to forget. Yet you yourself, if I remember aright, actually acknowledged that, whatever warped amusement Raymond Gentry took in distilling his poison, the yellow press was never going to give a tinker’s curse for the white – or off-white – lies of a clergyman in an extremely modest living on Dartmoor.
‘Then we come to our friends the Rolfes. It can’t have been pleasant for either of you to see years and years of pretending to shrug off all those whispers as to what precisely transpired between Madge and some swarthy gigolo in Monte Carlo or how Henry botched what ought to have been a routine operation, curtailing not only a baby’s life but his own career along with it. It can’t have been pleasant, I say, to have all your face-saving efforts brought to naught in one fell swoop by Gentry’s hateful muckspreading. But, again, like the Wattises, you were never prominent enough, and you’re not prominent enough now, to interest the type of individual who’d read a piece of toilet paper like The Trombone.’
If, so far, all those present had listened more or less uncomplainingly to Evadne Mount argue her case, it wasn’t that they were now serenely at ease with the notion that the most ignominious facts of their lives had become public knowledge. Each time she mentioned one of their names, there was a start, an audible gasp, even, on Mrs Wattis’s part, a stifled tear. But the argument was so lucidly presented that, despite the renewed humiliations it brought in its wake, it felt like not only a duty but almost a pleasure to hear it out. What’s more, the tension that had been screwed up so tight over the preceding thirty-six hours had had to find a release, and release of a kind was what she was slowly but surely giving her fellow guests.
‘So you might have supposed, as I did at first,’ she went on, ‘that the only two legitimate suspects were Cora and myself. Who, after all, would commit a murder just because some dog-eared old dirt was going to be dished up in a village of a hundred or so inhabitants?
‘Well, my answer to that would be – just about anybody! Oh, I saw the horror in your faces when Gentry started firing his lethal little darts, not just horror but homicidal loathing! And I soon realised how wrong I’d been in assuming that the craving for vengeance had to be commensurate with the degree of exposure.
‘Frankly, it was a mistake I of all people should never have made. If I’ve set several of my books in a Home Counties village, it’s because it offers the writer of whodunits a more fertile breeding-ground for murder than the most insalubrious back alley in Limehouse! You want to know what a sink of iniquity really looks like? I’ll tell you. It has picturesque thatched cottages and Ye Olde Tea Shoppes and Women’s Institutes and Conservative Associations and Bring-and-Buy Sales and Morris Dancing on the village green and Charity Fêtes in the Vicarage garden –’
‘Oh come, Evadne,’ the Vicar pooh-poohed mutinously, ‘there you do exaggerate …’
‘Sorry again, old bean, but I’m afraid that’s bilge. You’ll find this hard to credit, but I’ve actually had a bad review or two – there was one in the Daily Clarion I won’t forget in a hurry,’ she snarled, baring her fangish false teeth, ‘yet not once has a reviewer criticised one of my novels for painting too dark and malignant a picture of rural life.
‘Then there’s my fan mail. Most of it’s not from paying customers, who evidently believe that, having forked out seven-and-six for a book, they have no further obligation to its author, but from readers in villages who obtain my whodunits from their local circulating-library. I should let you read that fan mail. I recall one letter. It was from a little old lady in some idyllic hamlet in the Cotswolds telling me how she suspected the district nurse of slowly poisoning her crippled husband, and the sole basis of her accusation was that she’d chanced to catch the poor woman borrowing a copy of The Proof of the Pudding, which has exactly the same premise. And there was another, from somebody who’d read The Timing of the Stew and who was persuaded the stationmaster had read it as well, since his wife had vanished, supposedly run off with the coalman, but she, my fan, she knew better, she knew he’d buried both of them under the station’s ornamental rockery.
‘In the Detection Club we once coined a name for this sort of macabre village – Mayhem Parva. Well, I seriously doubt there’s a single village in England’s green and pleasant land that isn’t a potential Mayhem Parva!
‘So, Vicar, no, I don’t exaggerate. I’m taking your case only as a general example, you understand, but it’s my belief that a mild-mannered man of the cloth, as I know you to be, would be just as likely to commit murder to prevent his name from being besmirched at the local British Legion dinner-dance as a film star would be to prevent his or hers from being splashed across the front page of some nationally distributed scandal mag.
‘And what that meant, of course, was that I immediately found myself right back where I started. I was obliged to regard nearly everybody present as equally suspect.
‘Now for the exceptions. There was Selina, first of all, the only one of us to mourn Raymond’s passing. She may have seen the light now – let’s not forget the row they had in the attic – but I don’t think any of us would have questioned the feelings she formerly had for the man. I ruled her out at once. She, it seemed to me, couldn’t conceivably have killed him.
‘Nor, I state without fear of contradiction, could her mother. I say that not only because she’s one of my oldest and dearest and truest friends but because I know she’s incapable of harming a fly. She’s certainly incapable of harming a fly by trapping it in a locked room, swatting it to death, then managing to get out of said locked room again without opening either its door or its window!’
She beadily scanned her audience.
‘To be sure, given the uncanny similarity between Raymond’s murder and the kinds of murders that are routinely committed in whodunits, the very fact that Selina and Mary ffolkes were the least likely suspects may have caused some of you to wonder privately if perhaps one of them did it after all. Not me. As far as I was concerned, they really were the least likely suspects. They do exist.