‘Roger and I were always so kind to you. We never, ever treated you as one of the servants. You were almost like the son we never had.’
This was the scene I’d feared. The Colonel had deserved to die, in that I’d never wavered, but his wife didn’t really deserve to find out why.
‘It’s strange,’ I replied almost wistfully, though still clutching my revolver. ‘They say vengeance is a dish best eaten cold. I’m not so sure. I’ve been so hungry for vengeance all my adult life, year after year of it, that there were times my mouth would literally water at the prospect of exacting it. Yet now, all these years later, when I have exacted it, more or less, I can’t claim that – that I’ve gorged on it as I expected I would. And I don’t just mean because I didn’t succeed in killing the Colonel.
‘Mrs ffolkes, the longer I stayed in your husband’s service, the fonder I got to be of the old guy and the more I had to remind myself he was the man who did me wrong so many years ago. I’m even finding it hard to regret I didn’t kill him. And if you find that just as hard to believe, don’t forget I’ve got a set of duplicate keys to every door in the house. I could easily have snuck into his bedroom and finished him off before he’d a chance to give Trubshawe a few interesting facts about his life in America, facts that would have led the police directly to me. Yet I chose not to.
‘As for Raymond Gentry,’ I added, ‘well, that’s a different story. No one will convince me I didn’t do the world a service by removing him from it.’
I could see that the Chief-Inspector was champing at the bit to give me the usual party piece about my being under no obligation to make a statement but anything I did say – well, you know the rest. But I was set on having my own say first. I meant to be heard. I’d kept silent for too long.
As it happens, we were both of us pipped at the post by Evadne Mount.
‘So you do have a voice, young man,’ she said, ‘as well as a pretty turn of phrase. You know, I’ve had my eye on you for some time. Not that I realised right from the beginning you’d done it or anything like that. It was just that I found you – well, really rather fascinating.’
‘Me? Fascinating?’ I won’t deny I was flattered. ‘Why?’
‘You’re something I never thought to encounter. The perfect factotum. You were always there when you were needed and never when you weren’t. Everywhere yet nowhere, present yet anonymous, omniscient yet invisible. Attentive to everything that was going on, everything that was said and done, as though you were recording it, taking it all down, mentally taking it all in. Your eyes never met any of ours and you almost never spoke – and even when you did, not once, unless I’m very much mistaken, in the first person. You missed nothing and you contributed nothing. You practically never intervened and you absolutely never interfered. As for your – with respect – your utterly nondescript features, and your even more nondescript clothes, well, they made you, as I say, almost transparent. If I weren’t afraid of outraging the Vicar, I’d be tempted to compare you to God.’
‘Like God I never lied,’ I said.
‘Come now,’ she murmured. ‘Once, surely?’
‘Once?’
‘Your name. Since your motive was vengeance, and since vengeance, if my experience is anything to go by, inevitably necessitates some form of subterfuge, I’ll lay ten to one it isn’t Farrar.’
She was uncanny. I couldn’t help smiling at her.
‘Bravo, Miss Mount. No, it isn’t Farrar.’
‘May we know what it is?’
‘I want you to know what it is. Otherwise what I’ve done would become meaningless.’
I took a deep breath.
‘My name is Murgatroyd. Roger Murgatroyd.’
Mary ffolkes gazed at me in astonishment.
‘Roger? Why, Roger’s the same name as … as Roger …’
‘I was named after him. Your husband was – I mean, he is – my godfather.’
‘You were named after him? And yet you …’
She buried her face in her hands and burst into convulsive sobs. For her it seemed it was my attempt to kill someone whose name I shared that was the truly heinous crime. And because I was starting to feel sincerely sorry for her I didn’t care to remind her that, even though he may have treated me like a son, it had never occurred to the Colonel to address me other than by my – pseudonymous – surname. Or show the slightest interest in my family or my background, which of course suited me fine as his future murderer – or would-be murderer – yet, I can’t deny, obscurely offended me as a human being.
‘No,’ I continued, ‘my name isn’t Farrar. But then, your husband’s name isn’t ffolkes and he’s as much a Colonel as the Vicar was an Army padre.’
Trubshawe was now clearly feeling it ever more incumbent on himself to reclaim the authority that was rightly his in a criminal matter.
‘Look here, Murgatroyd,’ he said to me in what he must have hoped was the ineffably reasonable voice of British officialdom, ‘we can surely talk this over without the gun – which is, I assume, the murder weapon. You’re not going anywhere with it, are you, so you may as well put it down.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘Not for the moment. Not until I’ve decided what to do next.’
‘Now listen,’ he went on, ‘I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending you’re not up for the chop. I know it and you know it. But from the way you’ve been talking, you don’t strike me as – well, as a natural-born killer. So what’s the use of behaving as though you were? Eh? Aren’t I right?’
I looked down at the loaded gun.
‘You know why I’m not going to put down this revolver?’ I said after a while. ‘Because it guarantees me an uninterrupted hearing. It acts like a microphone. Except that, instead of magnifying my voice, it forces you to lower yours.
‘So, just for now, I’ll go on speaking through it and I suggest you all go on sitting where you are and not moving more than you have to.’
‘I was right!’ cried Evadne Mount. ‘“To speak through a revolver” – you do have a pretty turn of phrase. Young man, you could have been a writer.’
‘Thanks. Matter of fact, I am a writer. Or let’s say I was a writer.’
‘Who are you, Roger Murgatroyd?’
It was Mary ffolkes who shot the question at me, without warning but now also without a trace of agitation in her voice.
‘Let me give you a clue, Mrs ffolkes,’ I answered. ‘My father was Miles Murgatroyd. That name mean anything to you?’
‘Why, no,’ she said, confused once more. ‘I’m – I’m afraid I never heard it before. It’s a very unusual, very distinctive name. I’m sure I would have remembered it if I had.’
I found myself believing her.
‘It doesn’t surprise me. What I have to tell you happened a long, long time ago. You’d never even met the self-styled Colonel.’
‘The self-styled …’ she began. Then her voice trailed off into nothingness and she fell tremulously silent again.
‘There’s no polite way of putting this, Mrs ffolkes. You’ve got to know that, in his younger days, your husband was what they call a confidence man.’
‘That’s a lie!’ screamed Selina.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Selina,’ I said as gently as I could, for I’d always had a soft spot for her. ‘But it’s God’s truth, I swear. Your father’s real name wasn’t Roger ffolkes, it was Roger Kydd. He started his career, if that’s the word I’m looking for, playing dominoes for cash on the London-to-Brighton train line. Then he graduated to the three-shell scam on Bournemouth Pier and, when my father met him, he’d just done a two-year prison stretch for forging cheques – a stretch in Dartmoor, ironically enough – and he was eking out a miserable living trying to pick the pockets of toffs waiting for cabs in front of the Ritz. My father had stopped in Piccadilly to light his Woodbine, he put his hand in his pocket for a match and he found Kydd’s hand already in there. Instead of turning him in, though, my father, who I think was something of a soft touch, decided to take him under his wing.