‘Remember,’ I said to the Chief-Inspector, ‘when you and the Colonel had your private little chat in this very room, he mentioned that there was a Priest’s Hole in the house. Well, I had actually concealed myself inside that Priest’s Hole, and when I heard him go on to talk about what he’d gotten up to in his youth and I realised he was on the point of revealing his true name, I immediately ran out of the secret passage into the corridor and interrupted him by knocking at the door. Fortunately, I was already dressed, like the rest of the staff, so I hadn’t had to go to my bedroom to change.
‘I wanted to silence him temporarily before I got the chance to silence him once and for all. If Scotland Yard ever learned who he really was, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for them to trace his connection to Miles Murgatroyd, which I naturally couldn’t let happen.
‘You see,’ I went on, ‘after the two of them had managed to patch over the awkward business of Roger Kydd trying to pick his pocket, my father decided to throw in his lot with him and they left Britain together to make their fortune in the States. For five years they prospected the Alaskan gold fields, five long, hard years when they lived on bacon and baked beans and became the closest of pals. Naturally, when my father got married, Kydd was his best man. And naturally, when I was born, he became my godfather.
‘Then, just when everything seemed to be going right at last, it actually all started to go wrong.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Trubshawe asked.
‘I mean that my father and “the Colonel” – I guess it would be simpler if I just went on calling him that – my father and the Colonel finally hit pay-dirt. A deep seam of riverbed gold in a valley in north-west Alaska. I have this memory of my mother clutching a telegraph in her hands and shouting at me that we were going to be rich!
‘Except that we hadn’t reckoned on the Colonel’s chicanery and greed. I am sorry, so very sorry, Mrs ffolkes – Miss Selina – but I swear on my blessed mother’s grave I’m telling you exactly how it was. Just forty-eight hours after that first telegraph arrived we received a second one. It turned out that my father had plunged headlong into a ravine and broken his back.
‘Maybe it was an accident and maybe it wasn’t. To this day I don’t know and I’m not accusing anyone. What I do know is that, while Miles Murgatroyd was being transported to a filthy, vermin-infested hospital tent near Nome, Roger Kydd had already filed a claim to the gold-mine in his name alone. He then sold that claim on to some big mining outfit, pocketed the proceeds and vanished off the face of the earth.’
‘What did your father do then?’ asked Selina.
I paused for a few moments before speaking again.
‘What did he do then? He died. He died not because his back was broken but because his spirit was broken. Oh, he was no spring chicken. He’d been globe-trotting for nigh on quarter of a century and he knew the kind of place the world was and the kind of people who lived in it. But he and the Colonel had become inseparable. That’s what killed him.’
‘And then …?’ said Evadne Mount.
‘My mother did what she could to claw back her rights – our rights. But she discovered that, in the US of A, if you don’t have money you also don’t have rights. Over there, rights are something you buy, and they don’t come cheap.
‘So, since she’d married “beneath her”, in the horrible expression, and she’d been disinherited by her bigoted Baptist pastor of a father, she had to bring me up on her own. She embroidered smocks in a Frisco sweatshop till her eyeballs were as raw as sandpaper. Then, when she couldn’t do that any more, she took in other people’s laundry. Then, when she couldn’t do that either, we ended up in the poorhouse. And you have to know that, in the California of those days, the poorhouse wasn’t just a metaphor. It’s where the two of us really lived for three years. Till she died.
‘I was dumped in an orphanage, I lit out, I was caught, I was brought back, I lit out a second time and that time nobody bothered to try and catch me. So I mooched my way across the country. I worked as a carpenter in an Omaha saw-mill, I signed up for a stint aboard an oil tanker off the Gulf of Mexico, I served hash in a Fort Worth hash-house, I was a professional card-sharp on a Mississippi riverboat. You name it, I did it.
‘I finally got myself a job as an actor, touring in barnstorming mellers – that’s melodramas to you. Because of my father’s nationality I could do a snooty British accent and I’d get typecast as a Brit.
‘Then we were left stranded when the company manager ran off with the female juve – along with the box-office takings – and I was out of work again. So I started riding the freight trains. And during those hot nights under the stars I’d tell the other hobos the gold-rush stories my father had told me and they ate them up and said I should write them down.
‘I did write one down and sold it to a pulp magazine – The Argosy, its name was. I got twenty dollars for it and that twenty-dollar bill made me a writer. I’d have kept it and framed it, except that I needed it to feed me while I wrote the next one.
‘Eventually I’d scraped the bottom of my father’s kitty of stories and I had to make up my own and I discovered I was good at that too. Good at the kind of detective stories that were all the rage, stories about grifters, gamblers, blackmailers, showgirls and those single-minded, double-crossing bitches who are as hard as the nails they never stop polishing. Way too hard-boiled for you,’ I added, referring to Evadne Mount.
‘H’m, yes,’ she replied, ‘I belong to what I daresay your lot would regard as the runny soft-boiled school. But, you know, Mr … Mr Murgatroyd, when I think about how you murdered Raymond, I find it hard to credit you never tried your hand at a locked-room whodunit.’
‘It’s funny you should say that. I could imitate just about any style, and I actually did once have this idea for a locked-room story with all the traditional trimmings. But none of the pulp rags would buy it. Thought it was too prissy, too Limey. What they were looking for was the rough, tough stuff taken straight from the headlines and breadlines. And by that time I’d become a pro. Whatever they wanted, I gave them.
‘Then, when I was finally beginning to pull in some real dough, I hired a private detective, a Pinkerton agent, to find out what had happened to Roger Kydd. I suspected he’d returned to England with all the loot he’d stashed away, and I hadn’t a hope of tracking him down myself.
‘For a while there I thought it was money wasted, just flushed down the drain. In the end, though, my man did come up trumps. He reported back to me that Kydd had bought this – this “pile”, I think you say, on Dartmoor and set himself up as Colonel ffolkes. With two small fs, if you please.
‘If he’d still been based in the States, I guess I’d have taken my revenge the American way. I’d have gunned him down in some back alley and been done with it. But when I realised he’d transformed himself into an English gentleman, well, I decided to show you Brits that we Yanks could also commit – what did you call it, Miss Mount? A Mayhem Parva murder? I decided to test my locked-room plot in the real world. I liked the irony of it, his trying so hard to be English all over again.
‘I came over on the Aquitania and booked myself a room at The Heavenly Hound in Postbridge. Most evenings the Colonel would have a tankard or three in the bar and I had no trouble getting him chatting, especially when he learned we had a mutual passion for philately. He brought me back here a couple of times to show off his stamp collection, and the rest was a breeze. He was looking for someone to run the estate and I told him I was looking for a job, so he offered me the post of manager. That was nearly four years ago.’