‘Donald, now. A different case, Donald. True, as far as any of us are aware, no skeletons lie lurking in the cupboard of his young life. Here, though, a more traditional motive raised its head. Jealousy. Don was in love with Selina – is in love with Selina – and he was visibly jealous of his rival. We all remember how they almost came to blows.
‘Nor have we forgotten that Don actually threatened to kill Gentry. “I’ll murder you, you swine, I swear I’ll murder you!” We all heard him shout these words. Even if we sympathised with him and told ourselves that that’s all they were, just words, the fact remains that, as the Chief-Inspector reminded us all, he swore to end the life of somebody who was indeed subsequently shot through the heart.
‘Then poor Roger himself was shot and all of these splendid theories of mine were thrown into confusion. For there seemed to be no motive at all for murdering him.’
She settled herself more comfily in her chair.
‘In a whodunit, of course, there would have been at least one obvious motive – that Roger had discovered some crucial clue to the identity of Raymond’s murderer and had to be put to death himself before he had a chance to share his knowledge with the authorities. But the circumstances of this case were so very special. Because Henry suggested we all be present throughout the Chief-Inspector’s interrogation, everything said about the events leading up to Gentry’s death was said in everybody’s presence. I cannot recall a single occasion, prior to his taking his constitutional, when the Colonel was alone with one of us and might unknowingly have let slip some idle remark that put the murderer on his mettle.
‘Yes, there were those twenty minutes or so which he spent with Mary, when we all retired to our bedrooms to dress and freshen up. But really, I don’t think we need entertain for a second the notion that it was to his own wife that he passed on some damning item of evidence and that it was his own wife who later felt compelled to do away with him.’
Horrified that such a grisly conjecture had even momentarily crossed her friend’s mind, Mary ffolkes looked up in reproachful surprise.
‘Why, Evie,’ she cried, ‘how could you think such a thing!’
‘Now, now, Mary love,’ replied the novelist soothingly, ‘I said exactly the opposite. I said I didn’t think such a thing. You’ve already been told I don’t suspect you. All I’m doing is hypothesising, ticking off one possibility after another, no matter how improbable.’
With a grimace of distaste, she stubbed her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray as though squeezing the life out of an insect, muttered, ‘Don’t know what you see in ’em,’ to Madge Rolfe and once more picked up the threads of her thesis.
‘Well then, since the first murder had too many motives and the second no apparent motive at all, I was flummoxed. And that was when I decided instead to apply my “little grey cells” – if I may filch a conceit from one of my so-called rivals – to apply my “little grey cells” to the respective methods employed, in the hope that they might tell me something about the murderer’s psychology.
‘Concerning the first of these methods, the locked room, we all tended to make the same assumption, and who could blame us? We all took it for granted that Raymond’s murder had been premeditated to the least detail. Which was, considering how fantastical it seemed, a fair assumption on our part.
‘But there was one detail of that murder which, it suddenly occurred to me, could have been altered at any minute, even right up to the very last minute, without in any way compromising the whole diabolical scheme. The identity of the victim.’
Having talked non-stop, she needed to take another deep breath and, as she did, Trubshawe could be heard musing, ‘H’m, yes, I think I begin to see what you’re getting at.’
At this late stage of the proceedings, though, Evadne Mount was in no mood to share even a scintilla of limelight with anyone else. She continued more vigorously than ever:
‘The other assumption that all of us made was that the second crime, so crude and clumsy in its execution, was in the nature of an afterthought, or at the very least something the murderer hadn’t originally planned on. We all assumed, in other words, that the Colonel’s shooting on the moors was an unforeseen consequence of Gentry’s shooting in the attic.
‘Then I had quite the brain-wave. What, I found myself thinking, what if Gentry’s murder, not the Colonel’s, had been the afterthought?’
Now the whole library erupted.
‘Oh, that’s silly!’
‘Well, but really! When the crime was so meticulously worked out!’
‘This time, Evie, you’ve gone too far!’
‘I said all along it was absurd to –’
‘Oh, just hear me out, won’t you!’ she cried, silencing them with a single bark, like an infant blowing out all the candles on a birthday cake with a single puff.
‘Look, all of you. Just suppose, for the sake of the argument, that it was the intention of somebody in this house to murder Raymond Gentry. Well, he pulled it off, didn’t he? He got clean away with it. Raymond was murdered, and none of us, not excluding the Chief-Inspector here, had the slightest notion by whom. The criminal – I think, from now on, I’m going to call him, or of course her, X – the criminal, X, had achieved what he’d presumably set out to achieve.
‘Why, then, did he or she next try to murder the Colonel? It doesn’t add up. Especially as you all agree, don’t you, that at no time did Roger drop any remark that might have made X decide he would have to die too. True, it was the Colonel who discovered Raymond’s body. But Don was there, too, and no one has attempted to murder him.
‘As for the idea that the two crimes might not be connected at all, well, I don’t suppose any of us ever took that seriously. I know coincidences exist – if they didn’t, we wouldn’t need a word for them – but it’s really too much to ask of the Law of Probability that the two men were both shot, within a mile or so of each other, within a few hours of each other, by two different murderers with two totally different motives!
‘So why was the Colonel shot at? The more I mulled over the mystery, the harder it was for me to conceive of any logical reason why Raymond’s murderer should afterwards want to kill Roger. At the same time, I gradually did begin to see at least one reason why Roger’s murderer might have found himself tempted in advance to kill Raymond. I began to wonder, in short, whether it was Roger, not Raymond, who had always been X’s destined victim.’
She gave her disturbing new twist to the plot a few seconds to sink in.
‘And this suspicion of mine was actually strengthened by the page of notes that the Chief-Inspector found in the pocket of Gentry’s bathrobe, notes, remember, which had been typed out on the Colonel’s own typewriter.
‘What everybody assumed was that these notes demonstrated beyond doubt that we were up against a blackmailer. As an author of whodunits, though, I was unimpressed from the outset by a clue left so nonchalantly for the police to put their hands on. If Raymond really had planned to blackmail us all, would he have sashayed about the house with the evidence of his villainy so handily poking out of his bathrobe pocket? And was it really necessary to compose such skimpy little notes on a typewriter? On Roger’s typewriter to boot? Surely it would have been both simpler and safer to jot them down by hand? Unless, of course, and this was the crucial point, unless you were concerned that your handwriting might be identified. I wondered about all of that the moment those notes first turned up.