‘Miss Mount,’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief, ‘I really am rather disturbed to hear you make such a statement. You knew very well that, till the local police arrived and a proper forensic examination had been carried out, nobody, not even the bestselling author of I don’t know and I don’t care how many whodunits, had permission to enter that attic room.’
‘I did know that,’ she calmly replied, ‘and I apologise. Notwithstanding my public legend as the Dowager Duchess of Crime, I’m an extremely timorous soul when it comes to breaking the law.
‘My fear, however, was that before the police turned up – and what with the snow-storm and all, none of us had any idea how long that was going to be – the attic could very easily be tampered with. Remember, I was convinced the murderer was among us. What was to stop him or her taking advantage of some lull in the proceedings, just as I did, and slipping upstairs to remove a piece of hitherto unnoticed evidence?’
‘What! Well, I …’ Trubshawe fulminated. ‘So you admit that’s what you did do?’
‘I admit nothing of the kind. I did not remove a single object from the room. All I meant was that the ease with which I – an innocent party, I do assure you – the ease with which I got in and out of it could also have been exploited by the murderer himself.’
‘I give up!’ said the Chief-Inspector helplessly. ‘At least can I assume you didn’t touch anything?’
‘No-o-o,’ said the novelist. Then she added coyly, ‘Not much.’
‘Not much!’
‘Oh, hold on to your corset, Trubshawe. When you learn what I found out, you’ll agree it was well worth it.’
She turned to address the entire company.
‘Now the one thing everybody said about that attic room was that it was empty. An empty room, that’s what the Colonel said, what Don said, what everybody said. But it wasn’t empty at all, it was by no means bare. There was a wooden table with two drawers, a rickety upright chair – the plain cane-bottomed type that always makes me think of Van Gogh – and a ragged old armchair. It also had a window and a door and bars on the window and a key in the keyhole of the door. So though it was pretty austere – and made even more sinister, I can tell you, by the presence of Gentry’s dead body – there was still some scrawny meat for me to gnaw on.
‘And I really worried at that room! I examined absolutely everything in it, even things I suspected weren’t worth examining.
‘First, I examined the floor more thoroughly than I’d been able to do this morning, and I noted once more how dust-free it was for a room which had supposedly been unused for months. Remember, Trubshawe, that was the minor oddity I tried to direct your attention to?
‘Then I examined the door itself to see whether it could have been removed from its hinges and, after the murder, hinged back on again. But that, I soon realised, was ridiculously impractical. Even if the door was hanging half off those hinges, thanks to the combined strength of Don and the Colonel, it was obvious it had never, ever been removed.
‘Then I examined the bars on the window to see whether maybe they could have been removed. Quite out of the question. They were caked with rust, both of them. I seriously doubt they’ve been tampered with since they were originally installed.
‘Then I examined the table. Not a sausage. Nothing in either drawer. No hidden partitions. It was just an ordinary wooden table, scratched and chipped, like a thousand others in a thousand other lumber rooms.
‘Then, when I was about to pack it in, I sat down in the armchair to take the weight off my feet – and that’s when it hit me, when it literally hit me!’ she boomed out, startling everybody with one of those deafening guffaws of hers.
‘Are you telling us,’ said the Chief-Inspector, ‘you know how the crime was committed?’
‘Not only how it was committed but who committed it. In this case, if you know how, you know who.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, will you let the rest of us in on it!’ Madge Rolfe all but screamed at her. ‘Why must you leave us dangling like this? It’s really intolerable!’
‘Sorry, Madge,’ replied the novelist. ‘I’ve grown so accustomed, as a writer of mystery fiction, to spinning out the suspense that here I am doing it for real. You see, we’ve arrived at the first of those pages of a whodunit when the reader, who, I hope, will already be keyed-up, starts to get downright edgy. After all, he has invested a good deal of time and energy in the plot and he just can’t bear the thought that the ending might be a let-down, either because it’s not clever enough or else it’s too clever by half. At the same time, he has to remind himself not to let his eye stray too far ahead for fear of inadvertently catching sight of the murderer’s name before he reaches the sentence in which it’s revealed by the detective.
‘Actually,’ she dreamily elaborated on her favourite theme, unmindful of the agonised impatience of her listeners, ‘to turn the screw even tighter, I used to reorganise my pagination with the printers. It drove my publishers crazy, but I’d add a couple of paragraphs here or else delete a couple of lines there, just so that the detective’s declaration “And the murderer is …” would sit at the very foot of a page and the reader would have to turn that page before he was able to discover, at the top of the next one, who the murderer actually was.
‘But then, you know, new editions are brought out – my books generally run into many editions – the original layout goes to pot – and all my time and trouble –’
‘I swear,’ Cora Rutherford hissed at her, ‘I swear on my dear old mum’s eternal soul that if you don’t get back on track, Evadne Mount, there’ll be a second murder inside this house! And, as I’m certain Trubshawe here will back me up, no jury would ever convict me!’
‘Very well, but I do insist you let me go on in my own inimitable fashion.
‘Take your minds back to early this morning. On some pretext or other, probably by dangling a choice morsel of gossip before him, X entices Raymond Gentry into the attic and shoots him at point-blank range through the heart. The Colonel, who’s running his bath, hears the shot, as we all do, followed by a blood-curdling scream. On his way up to investigate, he runs into Don, whose bedroom is situated nearest the stairs. Because the room is locked – bizarrely, from the inside – they stand in front of it for a little while uncertain what to do. And it’s then the Colonel notices a trickle of blood oozing out of the attic on to the landing. So they realise they’ve just got to get in.
‘Putting their shoulders to the door, they eventually succeed in opening it – and the first thing they see is Raymond’s dead body. Yet, horror-stricken as they are at the sight of the corpse, they do have the presence of mind to give the whole room a good examination. Nothing. Or rather, nobody. It’s a very small room containing next to no furniture and both of them swear it was unoccupied. Am I right, Don?’
‘Yeah, that’s how it was.’
‘So what do they do next? Because they can already hear the household starting to stir, and because they’re both determined to prevent Selina from even so much as glimpsing Raymond’s body, they rush back down into the hallway, where we’re all shambling about in our dressing-gowns wondering what in heaven’s name is going on. Which is when the Colonel, as you all remember, broke the terrible news to Selina as humanely as he knew how.
‘That, you agree, is what was happening in the hallway. What meanwhile was happening inside the attic?
‘For the very last time I invite you to review the scene. The Colonel and Don have both retreated downstairs. The attic door is hanging half off its hinges. Raymond’s body is still shoved up tight against the door, still oozing blood. The only other objects in the room are the table, the upright chair and the armchair.’