‘Then Trubshawe let us all take a look at them.
‘You may remember that, when I read them over a couple of times, something nagged at me for a good while afterwards that all was not as it should have been.
‘Well, suddenly – thanks to Don here – I got it. I realised that I had seen something in the notes which confirmed what I was coming more and more to suspect – that it wasn’t in fact Gentry who had typed them.’
‘What did you see?’ asked Trubshawe.
‘What did I see? To be absolutely literal, it’s what I didn’t see which put me on the qui vive.’
‘Oh, all right, Miss Mount,’ said the policeman with the weary sigh of a parent agreeing to humour a child for the very last time. ‘I’ll play along with you. What didn’t you see?’
‘I didn’t see you,’ said Evadne Mount.
The Chief-Inspector gaped at her.
‘Just what do you mean by that grotesque statement?’ he growled.
‘Pardon me,’ answered the novelist, ‘that was my whimsical side peeping out. I’ll try to keep it under control. What I meant,’ she said more soberly, ‘was that I didn’t see u. The letter u?’
Everyone looked at her in mystification.
‘You all remember those notes. They weren’t in shorthand, but in a kind of journalistic telegraphese. I recognised the style because I’ve been interviewed many, many times in my life and once or twice I’ve taken a peek at my interviewer’s notepad.
‘Well, consider what was written about Madge here. If you remember, it read “MR” – obviously Madge Rolfe – then a dash – then the words (I’ll omit the scurrilous adjective, which isn’t relevant to my point) – then the words “misbehavior in MC” – “MC” standing naturally for Monte Carlo. Well, what finally dawned on me was that the word “misbehavior” was spelt without the letter u. That’s what I meant when I said it wasn’t what I saw in Raymond’s notes that made me suspect the truth, it’s what I didn’t see. I didn’t see u.’
Now she was almost grinning at her own artfulness.
‘It’s a very common misconception that having a blind spot necessarily consists of not seeing something that’s in front of you. Sometimes, you know, it consists of seeing something that’s not in front of you. We all saw that letter u because we all expected to see it, and it was only when Selina took so long to reappear from her bedroom and I heard Don say to her, “We’ve all been missing you” – missing you – the missing u? – that I finally understood what it was that had troubled me.
‘Once I did understand it, however, I instantly realised what it meant. That’s how “behaviour” is spelt by the Americans, without a u. Rotter that he was, Ray Gentry was also a journalist, and words were the tools of his trade. To me it was unthinkable he would ever have spelt the word that way.
‘Those of you who’ve seen my play The Wrong Voice will know how significant language and its misuse can be in a whodunit. If you recall, the murder victim is a school-teacher whose dying words, after he swallows a whisky-and-soda laced with arsenic, are “But it was the wrong voice …” Now everybody assumes, naturally, that what startled him was the identity of the speaker whose voice he’d just heard. Only Alexis Baddeley realises that, as an English master, he is in reality alluding to his grammar.
‘While cradling the victim in his arms, that speaker had cried out, “My God, he has been taking ill!” Where a genuine Englishman would have used the passive voice – “he has been taken ill” – he used the active voice, thereby revealing that he wasn’t a genuine Englishman, which was what he was pretending to be, and that he was ultimately the murderer.’
There ensued a momentary silence. Then, of all people, Don spoke – Don, who hadn’t yet uttered a syllable, even when Evadne Mount had reminded everyone of his threat to kill Raymond Gentry. Which is why, when he now did choose to speak up, his voice, almost unrecognisably raspy with resentment, shattered the silence like a gunshot.
‘Yeah, the murderer. Like me, you mean?’
The novelist stared at him. A web had formed on his forehead of tiny patches of nervous dampness.
‘What’s that you say, Don?’
‘Oh come on, ma’am, you know what –’
‘Evadne,’ said the novelist softly, ‘Evadne.’
‘Evadne …’
Not himself for the moment, he pronounced her name as awkwardly as though it were a tongue-twister.
‘You don’t have to deny what you’re thinking, what you’re all thinking. Only an American could have written those notes and I’m the only American here.’
‘Don darling, nobody thinks you wrote them!’ cried Selina, giving his thigh an affectionate squeeze. ‘Tell him, Evadne. Tell Don you don’t suspect him.’
‘Oh yes she does,’ he said sullenly. ‘You all do. I can see it in your faces.’
‘Don?’ said Evadne Mount.
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you a reader of whodunits?’
‘What?’
‘Are you a reader of whodunits?’
‘Heck, no,’ he answered after a few seconds. ‘Frankly, I can’t stand ’em. I mean, who cares who killed –’
‘All right, all right,’ the novelist testily cut him off. ‘You’ve made your point.’
‘Sorry, but you did ask,’ said Don. Then, perhaps emboldened by the realisation that he had found a chink in her hitherto impregnable armour, he added, ‘Say, why did you ask? What’s your point?’
‘My point is this. If you were a reader of whodunits, you’d know enough to give the matter a little more thought before accusing me of accusing you. And if you had given the matter a little more thought, you would soon have realised you aren’t the only suspect just because you’re the only American.’
‘I don’t get you. How come?’
‘Well, Cora, for instance –’
‘You know, Evie darling,’ drawled the actress, ‘it would be terribly, terribly sweet if, just once, I wasn’t the first “for instance” to pop into your head.’
‘Where these crimes are concerned, Cora, we’ve all had to get used to being “for instances”. Anyway, as I was about to say, after taking London by storm in the stage version of The Mystery of the Green Penguin, Cora was snapped up – I believe that’s the expression – was snapped up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and lived for the next two years in Hollywood. Unfortunately, as Raymond reminded us with his usual gallantry, she didn’t quite rise to the occasion’ – now she held up her right hand like a traffic policeman to prevent her friend from interrupting again, as was all too visibly her intention.
‘But even if things failed to work out for her altogether satisfactorily,’ she went on, ‘during those two years it may well have become second nature to her to spell as the Yanks do.
‘Then there are the Rolfes, who lived for several months in Canada before Henry’s misadventure in the operating-theatre brought him and Madge back, via the Riviera, to dear old England. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always understood that the Canadians spell the American way, not the British.
‘Nor,’ she said, ‘if we’re going to be absolutely logical, can we even rule out Clem.’
‘Me?’ cried the Vicar. ‘Why, I – I’ve never been to America in my life!’
‘No, Clem, but you did admit that you couldn’t spell for toffee. Well, it’s not impossible, I’m sure you’ll agree, that the word “misbehaviour” was misspelt for no other reason than that it was typed by someone who simply didn’t know how to spell.