The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

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‘Sort of thing you can’t imagine happening outside of a book!’

With a shaking hand the Colonel lit his cigar, then added, ‘D**n it all, Evadne, it could be one of yours!’

‘Hah!’ snorted the lady in question, straightening her pince-nez, which were sitting askew on the bridge of her nose. ‘That only proves what I suspected all along.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘That you were fibbing when you told me how much you enjoyed my stuff.’

‘Fibbing? Well, of all the –’

‘If you’d actually read my novels, Roger ffolkes, instead of just pretending to have read them, you’d know I never touch locked rooms. I leave them to John Dickson Carr.’

The Colonel was patently calculating how best to bluster his way out of the fix he’d got himself into when his daughter Selina, who until that instant had been seated beside her mother on the sofa, her face buried in her hands, suddenly startled both of them by shouting, ‘Oh, for God’s sake stop it, you two! You’re being absolutely horrid, behaving just as though we were playing a game of Murder! Ray is lying dead’ – she made a histrionic gesture in the vague direction of the attic – ‘shot through the heart! Don’t you even care!’

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