A Mysterious Affair of Style (13 page)

‘Now, before it happened, was there anything at all, anything you observed, that struck you as, well, queer – unusual – out-of-the-ordinary? Think hard, please.’

‘Inspector, I have not the need to think. I observe nothing of the kind you say. I am here to watch the shoot. I place myself in a corner and I take the notes.’

‘For your book on Farjeon, no?’ (The French style, Calvert ruefully realised, risked becoming contagious.)

‘Yes. The last chapter is going to be about
If Ever They Find Me Dead.
It will be a very curious chapter – not at all in the style of the rest of my book …’

As his answer died away rather inconclusively, Evadne seized the opportunity to put one of her own questions.

‘Monsieur Françaix,’ she began, ‘you will remember, I’m sure, that yesterday we lunched together in the commissary.’

‘
Mais
naturellement.
I remember it very well.’

‘It was during lunch, was it not, that you told us about the interviews you’d been conducting with Farjeon for your book?’

‘Yes.’

‘And, above all, about your admiration for his work, an admiration which you’ve just reiterated?’

‘That is so.’

‘But you also told us, practically as an afterthought, that you considered him to be a despicable human being. If I may quote you, “a pig of a man”. Am I right?’

‘Yes, you – you are right,’ he replied, his eyes indecipherable behind his thick dark glasses.

‘Well, my question to you is this. Why? Why was he a pig of a man?’

‘But everybody knows why. It is
dans le domaine public
. It is public knowledge – his reputation – I repeat, it is a known thing about him.’

‘That’s quite true,’ Evadne continued. ‘Yet I had a feeling, a very distinct feeling, that when you spoke about him, the violence of your condemnation was based not just on public knowledge but on private experience, personal experience.’

Françaix pondered this for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

‘Qu’est-ce que ça peut me faire enfin?
’ His dark glasses looked the novelist directly in the eyes. ‘Yes, Miss Mount, it was based on personal experience. A very unpleasant experience.’

‘Will you share it with us?’

‘Why not? You see, I devote my life to Alastair Farjeon. I study his films, I watch them many, many times, and each time brings new discoveries, new and fascinating details I never notice before, the films are all so rich and strange. Then, at last, I take the courage in my two hands to write to the man himself, here at Elstree, and I propose something completely
inédit
– how you say? – untried? A book about him, but not a monograph, no, no, a book of interviews. To my surprise, he agrees. I at once catch the boat-train to Victoria and we sit down together, not here but at his splendid villa in Cookham, now alas no more – and he talks and I listen. He talks and he talks while I listen and I take notes. It is
extraordinaire
, what he says, it is
tout-à-fait époustouflant!
I am so very happy. I begin to think I will publish the greatest book about the cinema that there has ever been.’

His baldness was glistening with minute beads of sweat.

‘But there is something else. Inside every film critic is a film-maker who cries to get out, you comprehend? And I am no different. I am so
impregné
with Farjeon’s work I myself start to write a scenario – with his style in my mind. I work on it for many months till I feel it is ready for him to read. Then I send it to him with a nice, timid letter in accompaniment. And I wait. I wait and I wait and I wait. But I hear nothing, nothing at all. I cannot understand. I think maybe I must telephone to ask if he receives it. Then I read in the newspaper that he prepares a new film. Its title is
If Ever They Find Me Dead
. And I do understand –
enfin
.’

‘What do you understand?’ asked Evadne Mount quietly.

There was a brief pause. Then:

‘My scenario, it is called
The Man in Row D
. It tells about two women who go to the theatre and one of them points out a man who is seated in front of them and she says to her companion –’

At which point of his narrative he and Evadne chimed in together:

‘“If ever they find me dead, that’s the man who did it …”’

‘“If ever they find me dead, that’s the man who did it …”’

‘Snap,’ said Evadne gravely. Then she added, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘He stole your script.’

‘He stole my script, yes. That is why I say he is a genius but he is also a peeg.’

‘Curious …’

‘What is curious?’

‘The way Cora described the plot to us, the man was sitting in row C.’

Françaix allowed himself a mirthless laugh.

‘So there is at least one thing he changed.’

‘That, and the title.’

‘And the title, yes.’

‘Was there nothing you could do about it?’ asked Calvert.

‘Nothing. I had no proof. No copyright. Nothing. I was so avid that Farjeon is the first to read it, this scenario I write for him, that I do not show it to my friends or my colleagues or speak about it to anybody. And all that, see you, I write in the nice, timid little letter I insert inside the manuscript. I was – how you say? – the perfect sap.’

‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Evadne Mount maintained. ‘After all, how were you to know he would be so unscrupulous?’

‘But yes, I was to know!’ Françaix exclaimed, slamming his fist down hard on the desk.

‘But how?’

‘It is all there – in his films! I see it again and again, but I do not comprehend what I see!’

‘You know,’ said Evadne pensively, ‘I really must try to catch up with a few of those pictures myself.’

‘Ah yes? You are curious to discover Alastair Farjeon’s work?’

‘Well, of course I am.’

‘Then you must permit me to escort you. Tonight, if you are free. It will be a great honour.’

‘Escort me? Tonight? Heavens, where?’

‘To your Academy cinema. At midnight there is an all-night show of his films. An
hommage
. You did not know?’

‘No, I didn’t. Well, I hardly dare recall how long ago it was I stayed up all night, but this
hommage
is too important for me to miss. Monsieur Françaix, you have a date.’

The last of the sessions, that with Lettice Morley, was equally the briefest, in part because she had so impressively presented the case against herself in the commissary the day before and in part because she struck them all as far the least likely of the five suspects. Calvert’s questions, then, were mostly routine, her answers no less so. She had seen what everybody else had seen and had reacted much as everybody else had reacted. It was, in fact, only when the proceedings were drawing to a slightly anti-climactic close that she added anything of value to her questioners’ store of knowledge.

Just prior to that, however, there had taken place an odd little diversion. So monotonously repetitive had Evadne Mount begun to find the alternating sequence of questions and answers, she’d actually nodded off. “Nod” was indeed the word as, to Trubshawe’s amusement, when doziness eventually shaded into unequivocal slumber, the novelist’s
head would tip over to left or right before at once jerkily righting itself. Then, a few minutes later, even as she was attempting almost manually to prop up her eyelids, it would happen all over again. And then again.

The fourth time it happened, she did somehow contrive to prise her eyes open before actually sitting upright. And what she saw at that instant, what proved to be directly in her line of vision, was a small wastepaper basket tucked away out of sight under Rex Hanway’s desk. It was stuffed to the brim with assorted papers – presumably old letters, obsolete contracts, pages from rejected scripts and suchlike. On top of them all, though, poking out of the basket, was an oblong strip of paper, badly singed on both sides, which had clearly been ripped from a much wider sheet. Her sleuthial instincts stimulated by the sight of one of those trifling but, as invariably turned out to be the case, vital scraps of paper, discarded if not quite destroyed, which had so often figured in her own whodunits, she shot out an arm as deftly as an ant-eater its tongue, clasped the paper between her fingers and took a few moments to peruse it before sticking it unobserved (so she imagined) inside her handbag. Then she drew herself up erect on her chair and endeavoured to give her full attention to Calvert’s interrogation.

‘Come now, Miss,’ she heard him saying, ‘you must have been sickened, to put it mildly. A famous film director invites you down to his villa to discuss plans for his latest picture and then, without warning, attempts to – well, to ravish
you. What respectable woman would not be sickened by such reprehensible behaviour?’

‘At least in the film business, Inspector,’ Lettice answered, ‘only a very foolish woman would be sickened by it. A real namby-pamby. Oh, I see how shocked you are and, I assure you, it’s not because I treat rape lightly. Yes, I repeat, rape. What Farjeon tried to do was rape – not, as you coyly put it, “ravish” – me. He tried to rape me, just as I’m certain he tried to rape Patsy Sloots. Unlike poor Patsy, though, I know how to handle men, especially when, considering Farje’s reputation, I suppose I’d half-expected it to happen in the first place.’

‘How
did
you handle him?’

‘I tore myself away from his clutches – and, incidentally, tore a new and rather pricey Hartnell frock in the process – I ran from the villa, found a half-decent B & B in Cookham, where I spent the night licking my wounds, and caught the first train back to Town next morning. More or less in one piece.

‘Naturally, after my rejection of him, I was convinced I was off the film – I had been Rex Hanway’s assistant – and that I’d better start looking around for another position. Then I read, first, about the fire at Farjeon’s villa and, three or four weeks after that, about Rex himself being assigned to direct
If Ever They Find Me Dead
. I rang him up and – not surprisingly, considering how long and how well we’d worked together – he offered me his own old job.

‘So no, Inspector, to answer your original question, I was not at all devastated, as you put it, by Alastair Farjeon’s death, for the reasons I’ve just given you.’

Sitting back in his chair, Calvert almost fondly contemplated her.

‘Well, I think that’s all I wanted to know. I’d like to thank you once more for coming in, Miss Morley. If I may say so, you’ve made a remarkable impression on us all. Almost unnerving. I only wish all the witnesses I’m obliged to question were as lucid and level-headed as you.’

‘Well, thank you too, Inspector.’

She stood up and unaffectedly smoothed out her skirt.

‘Goodbye, Miss Mount. Mr Trubshawe. It’s been an interesting experience meeting you both. I do mean that.’

As soon as she had closed the door behind her, Trubshawe said:

‘There’s one young woman who’s got her head screwed on tight.’

‘She certainly has,’ agreed Calvert. ‘I’ve come rather to admire her. What say you, Miss Mount?’

‘What say I? I say I need a drink. Especially if I’m going to spend the whole night watching pictures at the Academy Cinema.’

‘Then, my dear Evie,’ said Trubshawe, ‘let me offer you, in the first instance, a lift back to Town,
mais naturellement,
and, in the second, a brace of double pink gins in the Ritz Bar.’

‘Both offers, my dear Eustace, gratefully accepted.’

‘Good, good. How are you fixed, Tom? You won’t be needing a lift, I suppose?’

‘No thanks, I’ve got my own car. But just let me say how grateful I am to you and Miss Mount for agreeing to participate in this little experiment of mine. Also for putting some very germane and’ – he couldn’t resist stealing a mischievous glance at Evadne – ‘trenchant questions. What I would ask you to do now is let your minds dwell on everything we’ve heard this afternoon and, if and when you have any new ideas you feel you ought to communicate to me, please don’t hesitate to ring me up. I meanwhile will let you know how things go at the inquest.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Trubshawe with an enigmatic half-smile, ‘I fancy I already have an intriguing new slant on the whole case. If you’ve no objection, though, I’d like to let it simmer awhile before running it past you …’

To begin with, on the journey back from Elstree in the Chief-Inspector’s Rover, neither he nor Evadne appeared to have much to say to one another. Yet, notwithstanding the policeman’s phlegmatic temperament, coupled with his aversion ever to declaring his hand prematurely, doubtless a product of his years of service at the Yard, she couldn’t help observing in his demeanour a barely repressed excitement that was most unlike the Trubshawe she already felt she knew of old.

‘Eustace, dear?’ she finally asked after having been driven by him in silence for about twenty minutes.

‘H’m?’

‘You’re awfully quiet. There isn’t something you’re concealing from me, is there?’

‘Yes,’ he was forced to avow, ‘there is. I swear to you, though, “conceal” isn’t really the right word. All will be revealed when we get to the Ritz. I’d rather not talk about it and drive at the same time.’ Then he added, ‘But, Evie, what about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Only that I have reason to believe you’re concealing something too.’

‘Am I?’

‘I think you are. Out with it.’

‘Out with what, pray?’

‘You know what. Thought nobody noticed, did you?’

‘Eustace, will you please stop speaking in riddles. If you have something to say, then for goodness’ sake say it.’

‘That scrap of paper you snatched from Hanway’s waste-basket. Oh, you were very nimble, very sly. Quite catlike, in fact. But you didn’t fool old Inspector Plodder. We’re partners, aren’t we? Is there any point in not letting me in on the secret?’

‘No point at all,’ she replied. ‘Unlike you, I don’t play Hide-And-Seek.’

Whereupon she opened her handbag, extracted the crumpled-up piece of paper and flattened it over her knees.

‘Shall I read it out to you?’

‘If you will.’

‘All it says – and all of it, mark you, in block capitals – is: “SS ON THE RIGHT”.’

The ex-policeman mulled this over.

‘SS ON THE RIGHT, eh? SS ON THE RIGHT … It mean something to you?’

‘Not yet,’ Evadne prudently replied.

‘Could be anything, anything at all. Could even be some sort of a code.’

‘A code? Lawks Almighty, Eustace, I never thought I’d be
the one to make such a remark, but you’ve been reading too many detective stories!’

‘A fine thing for you to say. If this were one of your whodunits, that piece of paper would automatically – I repeat, automatically – constitute a crucial piece of evidence. I can just see it. SS ON THE RIGHT? Why, of course. Benjamin Levey! Since Levey only just managed to escape from Nazi Germany, obviously the SS, the Gestapo – what’s left of it – is hotfoot on his trail.’

She took a moment or two to boggle at the absurdity. Then:

‘Eustace?’

‘Yes?’

‘Keep your mind on the road ahead, there’s a love.’

It was just after five o’clock when they entered the Ritz Bar. He escorted her to a secluded table, ordered, together with his own whisky-and-soda, the double pink gin he assumed she would have ordered for herself, in which assumption he was entirely correct, drew out his pipe and posed it on the table’s ashtray, along one of whose four narrow grooves it lay, unlit, like a tiny black odalisque.

Then, once they had been served, once her glass had been clinked against his and each had echoed the other’s ‘Chin chin!’, she turned to him and said:

‘Well now, here we are. Time to tell me what’s afoot.’

‘Evie,’ he said, leaning towards her as though resolved to thwart any passing waiter from even fleetingly eavesdropping on him, ‘I believe I’ve got it.’

‘Got what?’

‘This afternoon, as I was listening to our suspects, I was also running over the case in my mind, tabulating all the salient points in what they had to say, and I had a sudden insight, one, I fancy, that stands a jolly good chance of bringing everything to a swifter conclusion than we ever dreamt possible.’

‘Aha! Been thinking behind my back, I see.’

‘Oh well, if you’re going to be like that …’

‘Forgive me, just my little jest. From what I gather, then, you’ve uncovered some kind of a major clue?’

‘I have at that,’ said Trubshawe, who found it hard to conceal the sense of gratifying trepidation peculiar to anyone gearing up to astound his interlocutor with a startling piece of news. ‘A clue that, as they say in the films, is liable to crack this case wide open. At the very least, it will show Calvert that we old’uns still have an ace or two up our sleeves.’

‘All right,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘My ears are all ears. Let’s hear what it is you’ve got for them.’

‘Well,’ Trubshawe began, ‘you would agree that, logically, only five people could have laced Cora’s champagne glass with cyanide?’

‘Aren’t we forgetting ourselves?’

‘What do you mean, forgetting ourselves?’

‘You and I were also supposed to be suspects, were we not?’

‘Evie,’ he asked, assuming a mock-solemn expression, ‘did you kill Cora?’

‘No, of course I didn’t.’

‘Neither did I. I repeat, then, only five people are known to us to have been aware of the change that Hanway made to the script. Only five people therefore could also have known of the moment of opportunity during which it would have been possible, unobserved, to murder Cora. And given that no one else was about to drink out of that glass, there can’t be any ambiguity whatever as to the identity of the murderer’s predestined victim. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘I repeat yet again, only five people could have murdered Cora – and yet, as we discovered when we questioned them, not one of them had a conceivable motive.’

‘Hold it there, Eustace,’ Evadne pointed out. ‘One of them – indeed, several of them – might have had a
secret
motive. A motive of which we’re still unaware and which they were naturally averse to revealing to us.’

‘Yes, I thought of that,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Yet my own personal conviction is that they were all telling us the truth – the truth, at least, about their relationship, or lack of it, past or present, with Cora. Nearly all of them, you remember, insisted that they’d never even met her before she turned up at the studio to start shooting the picture. Only Gareth
Knight knew her from the old days, when they’d trodden the boards together, and of all of them he was ostensibly the best-disposed towards her. I say ostensibly, because of course he could have been lying – but again, don’t ask me why, I believed him.

‘If that were not enough, they all had a very powerful professional motive for, so to speak,
not killing her
– for, as Hanway himself put it, keeping her alive. Farjeon’s death had already dealt a near-fatal blow to
If Ever They Find Me Dead
and Cora’s death will probably be the
coup de grâce
. Since the future of each and every one of those suspects was tied up in that picture, the last thing any of them would have wanted was to have a second, even darker cloud hanging over it.’

‘Eustace dear, it gives me no pleasure to say this, sincerely it doesn’t, but you haven’t told me anything yet I didn’t already know.’

‘Be patient with me, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, making a superhuman effort not to lose his own patience. ‘I long ago had to learn how with you.’

‘Sorry, sorry. Go on.’

‘The fact is that all the evidence we heard either took us round in circles or else led us nowhere. Yet, despite the irrelevance of most of what they had to tell us, there was something I felt for the longest time without being able to pin it down, some underlying coherence or consistency, some mysterious thread running through the testimonies of everyone we questioned.’

‘Then at last – it was when Françaix told us of the theft of his script – it struck me what that consistency was. At that instant I saw, as though in a flash of lightning, what I’d been groping towards.’

‘Yes? What is it you saw?’ she asked, by now almost as wound up as he himself was.

‘I saw that the thread running through all their evidence was Alastair Farjeon. We were interrogating them about Cora and all they wanted to talk about was Farjeon. It was as though they weren’t actually that interested in Cora. As though they couldn’t understand the point of being asked about her. That’s why I say I believed them when they claimed they had no earthly reason to commit the crime. As we all did, I listened to their protestations of innocence but what I found myself increasingly listening
for
was, in every instance, the almost offhand way they made that claim.
Of course
– each of them told us –
of course
I didn’t kill Cora Rutherford. Meaning, she wasn’t an important enough figure in my life to be worth killing.

‘And did you notice,’ he went on, swept up in the tide of his own momentum, ‘did you notice how not one of them seemed to be nervous or shifty-eyed? Now, Evie, that just isn’t natural, even when the suspects you’re dealing with are innocent. You’ll always find a trace of what we used to call at the Yard the Plain-Clothes Syndrome. People are nervous when they’re being questioned by the police. Why? Because they’re guilty? Not necessarily. Then why? Because they’re
being questioned by the police, that’s why. For most people a police interrogation is such an ordeal, it’s enough to make anyone nervous, guilty or innocent. It’s exactly like blood pressure.’

‘Blood pressure?’

‘A doctor can never obtain an exact measurement of a patient’s blood pressure for one very elementary reason: blood pressure automatically rises when it’s being measured. Which is why, during interrogations at the Yard, we were always more suspicious of those who responded calmly to being questioned than those who were sweaty and jittery and never stopped shifting about in the hot seat.’

‘But, Eustace, you’re contradicting yourself. If, as you say, our five suspects all responded calmly, then logically that suggests we shouldn’t trust any of them.’

‘That’s exactly what I do say. We should and we shouldn’t.’

‘Explain.’

‘As far as Cora’s murder is concerned, we
should
trust them. It was, I repeat, as though the question – “Did you murder Cora Rutherford?” – a question, I grant you, we never did actually ask, but they all knew that it was implied in well-nigh every question we did ask – it was as though such a question was just too foolish to be dignified with a serious answer, as the saying goes, like asking them if they’d poisoned Hitler in his bunker. But we
shouldn’t
trust them further than that, for the very simple reason that, when they started talking freely about Alastair Farjeon, and none of
them could resist talking about him, they all revealed something about themselves that made me realise just what slippery customers they potentially were. One of them, at any rate.’

‘And what was it they revealed?’

The Chief-Inspector held himself back for a few seconds in order for his response to make the greatest possible impact on his listener.

‘That, if none of them had a motive for murdering Cora Rutherford, all of them did have a motive for murdering Alastair Farjeon.’

‘Alastair Farjeon?! But Farjeon wasn’t murdered.’

‘Oh, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, unable to resist a smile of condescension, ‘you disappoint me. Don’t you ever read your own books?’

‘No, of course I don’t. Why should I? I know who did it!’ she petulantly snapped back at him, slamming the statement shut with an audible exclamation mark.

‘Just let me remind you, though,’ she went on. ‘Your young protégé Tom Calvert – “the most promising newcomer to the Force I ever came across”, if I may quote your own assessment of his quality as a police officer – issued a statement to the press that categorically excluded any suspicion of foul play in the Cookham fire. And, by the way, what have my books got to do with the price of potatoes?’

‘Come now, Evie, you’re being unfair. Prior to Cora’s murder, young Tom had no reason to suppose that there might
have been foul play. And, as far as your books are concerned, I’d just like to remind you that, if this were one of your whodunits, the so-called accidental death of a character like Farjeon would certainly be regarded as suspicious by the reader. By Alexis Baddeley, too, if not, of course, by dependable, doddery old Inspector Plodder, Plodder of the Yard.’

‘Sorry, Eustace,’ said Evadne, ‘but this is not one of my books. It’s a case of real bloody murder, the murder, you seem to forget, of a very dear friend of mine. A human heart has ceased to beat, and I can’t help feeling it’s tasteless of you to compare Cora’s murder with the sort I write about in whodunits whose sole ambition is to entertain my readers.’

‘If you would just listen to me, instead of flying off in a rage,’ a flustered Trubshawe replied, ‘you’d realise that what I’m saying might actually help us apprehend Cora’s murderer.’

‘Oh, very well,’ said the novelist ungraciously, ‘continue with your exposition.’

‘What I deduced, then, is that all five suspects did indeed have a motive for murder, except that it was for the murder not of Cora but of Alastair Farjeon, a man few of them took the trouble to deny that they cordially detested. And, just before we left Elstree, I went off to the Gents and scribbled down a quick list so that you’d be able to see at one fell swoop what I was getting at.’

He pulled from his pocket a neatly folded sheet of lined writing-paper and handed it over to Evadne Mount.

This is what she read: