‘So you see, Don, dear – that missing u doesn’t significantly reduce the number of suspects.’
‘Now just a godd**n minute, Evie!’ Cora Rutherford suddenly shouted at her. ‘I wish you’d stop treating us all as though we were in one of your cheap novelettes. I did very, very well in Hollywood, very respectably – what am I saying, more than respectably, much more than respectably! I was in Our Dancing Daughters with Joan Crawford and The Last of Mrs Cheyney with lovely, lovely Norma Shearer.’
‘Yes, Cora, I know you were. All I meant was –’
‘Anyway, who’s to say you didn’t write those notes yourself? Who’s to say you didn’t deliberately spell “misbehaviour” without the u, just to throw the rest of us off the scent? Your cardboard characters get up to that sort of fakery-pokery all the time!’
‘Bravo, Cora!’ cried the novelist, clapping her hands. ‘Congratulations!’
‘Congratulations?’ the actress warily echoed the word. ‘Why do I always get a teensy bit suspicious when somebody like you congratulates somebody like me?’
‘You shouldn’t. I intended it sincerely. For you’re spot on. I might well have done just that. I didn’t, of course, I didn’t do any such thing. But, yes, the possibility that I might have done it keeps me up there as one of the suspects.’
‘All right, ladies,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Now that both of you have had your say, could we please return to the matter at hand?’
‘Certainly, Chief-Inspector, certainly,’ Evadne Mount acquiesced with a grace that might have been mock but might also have been authentic.
‘Where was I? Oh yes. The planting of those bogus notes in Raymond’s pocket not only confirmed for me that there was something extremely fishy about the whole business but reinforced my growing conviction that X’s true objective was the Colonel’s death.
‘Then, finally, it came to me.
‘It had, I believed, been X’s plan all along to kill the Colonel by luring him into the attic and shooting him there. And he would have carried out that plan to the letter if Selina hadn’t, at the eleventh hour, invited home a piece of human slime – forgive me, my dear,’ she put it gently to Selina ffolkes, ‘but I think you know he was – a piece of human slime who, on that unforgettably horrid Christmas Night of ours, managed in just a few hours to turn everybody in the house against him.
‘We all felt like murdering Raymond – I know I did – but, at some stage in the evening, X must have realised that he alone had not one but two reasons for murdering him. Don’t forget – if I’m right, he had already plotted the Colonel’s murder to the last detail. But what, I imagine him saying to himself, what if I were to switch victims? What if I were to murder Raymond instead of the Colonel? Or rather, what if I were to murder Raymond and then the Colonel?
‘Not only would the police assume that the first of these two murders, Raymond’s, was also the first in a more profound sense, the more significant murder, the really relevant one, the one on which all the ensuing investigations would focus. But, and this must have been for our killer the “clincher”, as they say, Raymond’s murder would also generate a whole new set of potential suspects – suspects and motives – unlike the Colonel’s murder, for which there was likely to be only one suspect and one motive.’
There was no question, and she knew it, that Evadne Mount had her circle of listeners where she wanted them. They were literally hanging on her every word, held under the spell of her personality, and she would have been something less than human if she hadn’t gloated just a little.
‘Think of it,’ she said with an impudently undisguised air of self-congratulation. ‘X, whose ultimate intention it is to kill the Colonel, decides to commit another murder first, a murder designed to cast the shadow of suspicion away from himself and on to a half-dozen entirely new suspects, virtually all of whom had a motive for doing away with Raymond Gentry. Suspects, I might add, so classic, so traditional, they could all have come straight out of, or indeed gone straight into, a typical Mayhem Parva whodunit.
‘Just try to imagine X’s glee at finding himself presented with such a perfect collection of red herrings. The Author. The Actress. The Doctor. The Doctor’s Wife, who naturally has a Past. The Vicar, who also has a Past. Or rather, unfortunately for him, who doesn’t have a Past. The Colonel. The Colonel’s Wife. And finally, bringing up the rear, the Romantic Young Beau, who, like all Romantic Young Beaux, is head-over-heels in love with the Colonel’s Daughter.
‘And, yes, I say red herrings and I mean red herrings. For that, I’m afraid, is exactly what we all were – pure flimflam, as irrelevant to what was really afoot as one of those utterly pointless ground-plans which some of my rivals insist on having at the beginning of their whodunits and which only the most naïve of readers would ever think of consulting.’
Evadne Mount stopped, for a fraction of a second, to catch her breath again.
‘However,’ she continued, ‘convinced as I was that I’d hit upon the truth, I knew that my hunch could not hope to be more than that, a mere hunch, unless and until I was able to corroborate it with real factual evidence. So I decided at last to re-direct those perhaps not-so-little grey cells of mine to the problem that had baffled us all from the start – the question of exactly how Gentry’s murder was done the way it was done.
‘In The Hollow Man John Dickson Carr actually interrupts the narrative of his novel to lecture his readers on all the principal categories of locked-room murders. Since I couldn’t call to mind off-hand what these were, I came looking for the book in this very library. Roger, alas, has never been an aficionado of detective fiction and, apart from a complete collection of my own efforts, all gifts from me, all unread, I’m certain, there was nothing. No Dickson Carr, no Chesterton, no Dorothy Sayers, no Tony Berkeley, no Ronnie Knox, no Margery Allingham, no Ngaio Marsh, not even Conan Doyle! Quite, quite scandalous!
‘I racked my brains and racked my brains, but the only two locked-room stories whose solutions I myself remembered, Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery and Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, had recourse to the selfsame trick, which was to have the murderer barge into a locked room – and then, and only then, before anybody else has arrived, have him stab the victim, who was alive up to that very instant.
‘Well, that was no help at all. Roger did indeed barge into the attic, but Don was at his side. Each saw what the other saw and unless, most implausibly, they were in cahoots – what, by the way, is a cahoot? – neither could have killed Gentry on the spot.
‘I was resolved, though, not to let myself be led astray by the outlandish circumstances of the crime. A man lay dead inside a locked room. There was no magic, no voodoo, no hocus-pocus about it. The thing had been done and hence it could be undone. And the only way left for me to undo it, I realised, was to indulge in a little personal sleuthing at the scene of the crime.
‘So earlier, you recall, when I asked the Chief-Inspector if I might have leave to go to my bedroom and change out of my wet clothes, what I actually did first was sneak up to the attic.’
The instant she made this brazen admission, nobody could resist stealing a glance at Trubshawe, who was plainly torn between admiration for his rival’s deductive powers and aggravation at her self-confessed indifference to one of the most widely publicised ground-rules governing any criminal investigation.