The Act of Roger Murgatroyd by Gilbert Adair

wounds, precisely as they say it does.
    ‘Oh, once in a while I’d overhear some remark I felt I’d eavesdropped on – eavesdropped even though it was addressed to me. Somebody might say that when we’re burdened with troubles we just have to “soldier on”, you know, the sort of thing people come out with when they’ve nothing better to say, and I’d blush inwardly – and sometimes outwardly – at what I took to be an allusion to me. Again, though, Cynthia would persuade me I was being overly sensitive, and most likely she was right.’
    ‘How long did this period last?’
    ‘How long? Several months, I suppose. And then, I repeat, it all began to die down. Even though I never ceased to suffer in private, publicly it came to be so much water under the bridge, and my wife and I lived on for many years in the village as contentedly as we were able.
    ‘That is,’ he added after a lengthy pause, ‘until Raymond Gentry entered our lives.’
    ‘Tell me,’ asked Trubshawe, ‘what exactly was it he said?’
    ‘It wasn’t what he said,’ answered the Vicar. ‘It was what he implied with all his feline, sibilant little insinuationsabout the War. I realise he’s lying dead upstairs, a bullet through his heart, but, as Evie rightly said, there was something un-English about him. Not foreign exactly, but, you know, oily and underhand, like many of his unfortunate race. No one who wasn’t already aware of the background to my story would have grasped what he was getting at, but I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, and this loathsome complicity between us, with everyone else looking on and listening on, became quite intolerable.’
    ‘How do you imagine he found out?’
    ‘Ah well, now there you do raise an interesting question, Inspector,’ said the Vicar. ‘As a professional snitch, Gentry could of course be expected to know the – the, eh, dirt about the private lives of the ffolkeses’ starrier acquaintances, like Evie here and Cora. But the local Vicar? The local Doctor? Now who could have passed on to him that kind of information? I hate to be hurtful to Roger and Mary, dear, dear friends who invite Cynthia and me down here for Christmas every year when I doubt anybody else in the locality would, but I fear the prime suspect has to be Selina.’
    ‘When Miss ffolkes is ready to join us,’ Trubshawe intervened judiciously, ‘you may be sure I’ll ask her whatever questions I consider to be relevant to her relationship with the deceased. But for now, Vicar, I have to ask you the hardest one of all.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Did you kill Raymond Gentry?’
    The Vicar almost choked with incredulity.
    ‘What! Is that a joke question?’
    ‘Not at all.’
    ‘You’re asking me
seriously
if I …?’
    ‘Now look,’ replied the Chief-Inspector soberly. ‘Why do you think I’ve been putting you through all this unpleasantness, if not because you are, along with everybody else present, a suspect? I thought that was a given.’
    ‘Well, yes, of course I understand that to be the case, but do be serious, man. Can you really be asking me if I’m the kind of person who kills just anybody and everybody who happens to do me wrong? Do I look like a murderer?’
    ‘Ah, Vicar, if murderers looked like murderers, if every burglar went around wearing a domino mask and a striped jumper and toting a bulging sack over his shoulder with the word “Swag” stencilled on it that he’d purchased from some burglars’ emporium, how easy our job would be!’
    ‘Oh, very well, yes, I do see what you mean,’ said Wattis resignedly. ‘Point taken.’
    ‘And so – the answer to my question?’
    ‘The answer to your question, Inspector, is no. No, I did not kill Raymond Gentry. I may have felt like it – I know everybody else did and, as I say, I’ve never made any claim to be better than my fellow men. But I certainly did not act on whatever evil impulse he might have provoked in me.Actually,’ he