A Mysterious Affair of Style (2 page)

‘Nor mine either. Anyhow, as I was saying, I’ve read enough of them now to know that, in the best ones, the only really effective ones, you don’t have to read the sentence or the paragraph or even the whole page twice to understand what the author’s getting at, as you might have to do with, you know, the classics. That’s not to denigrate whodunits, yours or anybody else’s. All I’m saying is that, when the revelations come tumbling out one after the other, their impact on the reader has got to be instantaneous. They’ve got to hit you – practically smack you – in the face.

‘It’s like a joke. If you don’t laugh at a joke at once, you’re never going to laugh at it. And now I come to think about it, isn’t that what’s really meant by the Perfect Crime, in whodunits
at least? Not a crime whose perpetrator goes undetected – I mean, whose murderer goes undetected, for nowadays people are so bloodthirsty I don’t suppose anything short of murder will do – not a crime where, as I say, the murderer goes undetected – no, you couldn’t have such a book, the reader would ask for his money back – but a crime in which everything fits together perfectly, in which there’s neither too much nor too little evidence to digest and in which the revelation of the murderer’s identity turns out to be as inevitable as it’s unforeseeable. It
couldn’t
be him, you say to yourself, yet it
couldn’t
be anybody else. That, surely, is the Perfect Crime.’

Trubshawe ended his discourse almost apologetically, as though conscious of his effrontery. Lecturing on whodunits, and at such length, to the Dowager Duchess of Crime herself! As he finally lit up his pipe, after knocking the dottle into a glass ashtray that was at once whisked away from their table by a hitherto unnoticed waitress and replaced by an identical but pristine one, he gave the novelist a wary sidelong glance.

For a moment, she seemed dumbfounded. Then, to his astonishment, she let rip with an explosive laugh.

The detective cocked his head enquiringly.

‘Did I say something funny?’

‘No,’ was her answer, once she had sufficiently calmed down to speak. ‘You didn’t say something funny, you said something honest. That’s what made me laugh – laugh so much I think I’ve got a run in my stocking!

‘I’ve become such a success, you see, such a star, nobody else dares to be honest to me. My publishers, my readers, my critics – well, most of them,’ she qualified, not quite suppressing an embryonic snarl – ‘they all tell me that my latest book, whichever it happens to be, is wonderful, is terrific, is the finest so far, though we all know it’s a dud. And even if the reviews are a teensy bit less ecstatic than I’m used to, that’s not going to stop the publishing house, when it’s reissued, from describing it on the cover as “much-acclaimed”. I tell you, Trubshawe, there’s never been a book published in this country that wasn’t “much-acclaimed”. Before too long, you’ll see, they’ll be advertising “the much-acclaimed Bible” and “the much-acclaimed telephone directory”, ha ha ha!

‘Not,’ she went on, switching to her ‘serious’ voice, ‘not that I’m suggesting
Death: A User’s Manual
is a dud, you understand. It isn’t one of my few, one of my very few, outright misfires. But you’re right, it’s too clever for its own good. It’s what you might call clever-clever, which sounds twice as clever as clever itself but is actually only half.

‘So thank you, Trubshawe,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘What are you thanking me for?’

‘For being so candid. Candid – and interesting. You may be a relative newcomer to whodunits, but you’re already quite the theorist.’

‘Well, you know, Miss Mount, I wouldn’t like you to
think I didn’t enjoy it. I did, really, only not so much as your earlier ones.’

‘Very nice of you to say so. And you really must call me Evadne. Old pals and allies as we are. Better still, call me Evie. Cut out the middle-woman, what? You will eventually, so why not start now?’

‘Evie,’ said Trubshawe unconvincingly.

‘And may I call you – well, whatever it is your friends call you?’

The detective drew on his pipe.

‘Don’t have too many of those left, I’m afraid. But if you mean, what’s my first name, well, it’s Eustace.’

‘Eustace? Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I don’t see you as a Eustace at all.’

‘Nor do I,’ grunted Trubshawe. ‘But there you are. It’s the name I was given, it’s the name on my birth certificate and it’s the name that makes me turn my head in the street if ever I hear it called out. Which nowadays, frankly, is never.’

Evadne Mount took a moment to contemplate him.

‘I say, Eustace,’ she said, consulting her wrist-watch, ‘do you have anything special on this evening?’

‘Me?’ he answered dejectedly. ‘I’ve nothing special on most evenings.’

‘I take it that means you aren’t in Town for some specific reason?’

‘I live in London now. Bought myself a semi-detached in Golders Green.’

‘Really? You don’t any longer have that cottage on Dartmoor?’

‘Sold up and moved on six-seven years ago. It became too lonely for me, you know, after the death of poor old Tobermory. You remember, that blind Labrador of mine that was shot on the moors?’

‘Of course, of course I do. So there’s nowhere you have to be tonight?’

‘Nowhere at all.’

‘Then why don’t you join me? Eh? For old times’ sake?’

‘Join you?’ he echoed her. ‘I don’t think I understand.’

Evadne Mount ground her ample frame into the defenceless little chair.

‘As it so happens, this is a very special evening for me. At the Haymarket tonight – the Theatre Royal, Haymarket – they’re giving a Grand Charity Benefit Show in aid of East End Orphans. Everybody in London will be there,’ she said, deliberately courting the cliché. ‘Bobbie Howes, Jack and Cicely, the Western Brothers, Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea and I don’t know who else, all doing their bit for nothing. It’s in the best of causes, after all.

‘I’m one of the writers – I cooked up a short curtain-raiser, a mini-whodunit – and you’ll never guess who’s playing Alexis Baddeley.’

‘Who?’

‘Another of your former acquaintances. Cora.’

‘Cora?’ repeated a mystified Trubshawe.

‘Cora Rutherford. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten her?’

For a few seconds more he racked his brains. Then, in a rush, it all came back to him.

‘Cora Rutherford! Well, of course, I’m with you now. She was also one of the guests at ffolkes Manor, was she not?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So you too are as inseparable as ever?’

‘Well, no … To be honest, I’d rather lost touch with Cora until this show brought us together again. Oh, we’ve had the odd natter on the blower, but we never quite manage to synchronise our watches. When I’m free, she’s busy; when she’s free, I’m busy. You know what they say, though. Our best friends aren’t those we see the most but those we’ve known the longest. Where it really counts, she and I are still bosom pals.’

‘Ye-es,’ muttered Trubshawe, for whose taste the novelist’s choice of words had proved a touch too vividly fleshy. He pronounced the name thoughtfully.

‘Cora Rutherford … It’s true enough,’ he went on, ‘I was never a great fan of the Pictures, even when Annie was alive. We’d go together because she liked them even if I didn’t. Still, I can’t say I’ve heard much about her of late. Cora Rutherford, I mean. She hasn’t retired, has she?’

‘Oh no,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Cora’s still gamely hanging in there. Actually, she rang me up just the other day to tell me that she’d landed a part in a brand-new film production. Confidentially, though, she fancies herself as a bit of a
recluse, occasionally sighted flitting along Bond Street like a rare specimen of some exotic avian species – the seldom-spotted film star!’

The novelist laughed indulgently at her friend’s eccentricity.

‘It’s all rather preposterous, you know, because, from what I hear, she’s as much the woman-about-town as she ever was. But if it helps Cora to grow old painlessly by thinking of herself as the British Garbo, well, who am I to spoil her fun?’

‘And you say she’s appearing in the show?’

‘She plays Alexis Baddeley in the opening sketch, the one by yours truly. After which, there’ll be some singing, some dancing, a few laughs, a few tears, and a spectacular grand finale. So why don’t you come along as my guest?’

Trubshawe was tempted. It was obvious that, of late, not much singing, dancing, laughter or tears had enlivened his existence. Yet he was as cautious a private individual as he had been an officer of the law and he needed to tot up the pros and cons of any revision to his plans, particularly his immediate plans, before saying yes or no. In short, he definitely wanted to go to the show, but he was also determined to ascertain in advance whether there was any likelihood of his subsequently regretting having done so.

‘The question is,’ he finally said, scratching his chin, which wasn’t even itching, ‘will there be tickets left? You’ve made it sound such a prestigious event.’

‘There isn’t a single ticket to be had for love or money. The show was sold out weeks ago, even at the prices they’re asking. Five guineas for a seat in the stalls, can you imagine? Not to worry, though. I’ve been given a couple of comps, so that’s all taken care of.’

Trubshawe now cast a downward glance at his suit and tie. It was a perfectly respectable suit and tie, the suit grey worsted, the tie belonging to one of London’s less well-frequented gentlemen’s clubs. But even he, no habitué of Theatreland, was aware that not one of his fellow-members of what promised to be an exceptionally glamorous audience was likely to beg him for the name of his tailor.

A small grey cloud drifted across his stolid features.

‘You’re fine, absolutely fine!’ she said loudly and encouragingly. ‘Besides, just take a look at me, will you, and then tell me you’re going to feel out of place!’

It was true. She was dressed, as he recalled had been the case those ten years ago, in a shapeless tweed suit that protruded in the places in which she herself protruded but also contrived to protrude in a few places on its own initiative. Lying on the tablecloth, moreover, creased every conceivable way a hat can be creased, and then some, was the matelot’s navy-blue tricorne which had long been her trademark in London’s literary circles. No, Evadne Mount hadn’t changed.

‘Well, Eustace,’ she said, ‘shall we be off? The show starts at half-past seven, which really means quarter-to-eight, so we’ve just got twenty minutes to make it.’

Trubshawe nodded agreement. He also insisted on picking up the bill not merely for his own pot of tea but also for his companion’s order, which turned out to be not one but two double pink gins and pricier than he had bargained for.

Never mind, he thought to himself, as he cast a handful of silver onto the table and his companion, with a nonchalantly maladroit gesture, swept the stack of green Penguins all at once into her capacious handbag. Things happen around Evadne Mount. She had already teased him out of his sulks, cheered him out of his loneliness, half-cured him of what, in his rare introspective, even poetical moments, he would describe to himself as his ‘spiritual gout’, and here he was, wholly out of the blue, about to join the elite at a splendid theatrical gala. Well worth the twelve shillings and sixpence.

‘By the way,’ he said, escorting her from the Ritz, its door held open by a resplendently uniformed flunky, who bowed them into the street with the utmost correctitude, ‘what’s the name of this show we’re going to see?’

Pulling the tricorne hat down hard on her head, she gave its middle furrow a vicious bash.

‘Save the Last Valise for Me,
’ she answered. ‘Oh, I know, it’s a daft title, but then, I fear it’s going to be a pretty daft evening. Except,’ she added, ‘for my own little sketch. That, I do assure you, is deadly serious.’

And, with these enigmatic words, in the gathering shades of a Friday evening in early April, they wandered off together towards the nearest bus-stop.

The shiny red omnibus which had borne them the length of Piccadilly, and on whose open top floor they had perched as majestically as on a Maharajah’s elephant, deposited them fifteen minutes later at the far end of the Haymarket, just a few yards from the Theatre Royal itself.

The Haymarket, it must be said, was but the shadow of its prewar self. Its pedestrians were threadbare, its underaged, undernourished beggars hollow-eyed. Even the lacklustre street-lamps served only to intensify the prevailing gloom. Yet the theatre itself, whose colonnade of six white pillars was taller by far than the theatregoers who passed between them, retained most of its faded grandeur. Nor was it the theatre alone. As though in a concerted protest against the drab post-war ethos, the cream of the theatrical, cinematical, political, journalistic and social world had patently decided to demonstrate that, in the War’s embattled aftermath just as during the conflict itself, London Could Take It!

Furs had been retrieved from vaults, necklaces from security
boxes, evening gowns and dinner suits from mothballs, and all donned as defiantly as, not so long before, gas masks and camouflage kits. It’s true that not a few of the pearls had been born out of wedlock, so to speak, and most of the furs, evening gowns and dinner suits had grown old with their owners, but it was a magnificent spectacle nevertheless. For the crowd of onlookers who gawped at the Rolls-Royces and Bentleys gliding suavely down the Haymarket, the show was as dazzling in its way as that for which the toffs themselves had turned up.

Even Trubshawe, discreetly elbowing his way through
hoi polloi
as he and his companion entered the foyer, couldn’t help but feel slightly overawed.

Yes, he had been one of the top men at the Yard and, in his time and in his prime, he had had dealings with the most eminent and powerful figures in the land. Yet he had been born a fretworker’s son in Tooting and had clawed his way slowly up through the ranks, a fact which was all to his credit, more so than if he had been afforded entrée to the superior echelons of the Force through some august family connection. But it did mean that he had never quite succeeded in shedding the skin of his modest ancestry. He knew the ropes, in short, but he had never lost his fear of getting himself entangled in them. He had always had, and had always hated himself for it, a touch of deference in his encounters with the great and the good, even when, as had sometimes occurred, he had found himself obliged to caution them that
anything they said might be used in evidence against them. And here he was, hobnobbing with Dukes and Duchesses, Ministers and Diplomats, Actresses and Playwrights.

On the steps of the theatre he even caught sight of someone he knew. The man was a former Cabinet Minister, and Trubshawe was on the point of doffing his cap to him when he remembered in time that their acquaintance was founded on his having managed, back in the teens of the century, to recover from the hands of agents employed by a certain Central European power the only complete blueprint of the X-27 prototype, the exploitation of which, had that power ever come to possess it, would undoubtedly have prolonged the Great War by several months, if not years. Realising, then, that if the facts were looked square in the face, the Minister was more beholden to him than vice versa, he merely returned the other’s circumspect nod with one of his own and rejoined Evadne Mount.

‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, waving to this member of the audience and that, indiscriminately, it seemed, as Trubshawe noticed some of those waved-to staring back at her with a doubtful do-I-know-that-woman? expression on their faces.

‘Here’s your ticket. Why don’t you get yourself settled?’

‘Oh, but –’ replied Trubshawe in alarm, ‘where are you going?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be with you in a jiff. I just want to tell Cora to break a leg.’

‘You want to what?’

‘Theatre lingo, my dear,’ said the novelist. ‘I want to wish her well for the evening’s performance. So be a good chap and take your seat.’

Without letting him voice any further protest, clinging for dear life to her tricorne hat, she rushed off backstage. Meanwhile, stifling a sigh, Trubshawe was drawn forward by the garrulously whinnying mob of privileged humanity and immediately found himself inside the auditorium.

He walked down the aisle, kneading his tartan golf cap between his fingers. And it was only when he arrived at the very last – rather, the very first – row of the orchestra stalls and checked his ticket number that he realised with a start that he and Evadne Mount had been allocated seats just under the stage, seats from which they would be practically as visible to the rest of the audience as the actors themselves. Though he had never been a patron of the theatrical arts, he had certainly seen the odd play in his life, but to be seated in the very front row – this was a new experience for him.

He removed his overcoat, folded it neatly across his lap as he sat down, then opened the luxurious silver-embossed programme which had been handed him by an usherette on his entering the theatre. The first item on the bill, he saw at once, was
Eeny-Meeny-Murder-Mo
, starring Cora Rutherford as Alexis Baddeley and bearing the subtitle ‘A Lethal Squib by Evadne Mount’. Having scanned the names of the other cast members, none of whom were familiar to him, he
took a last lingering glance round the auditorium and waited for Evadne herself to take her seat.

It was just seconds before the curtain rose that she reappeared, racing down the aisle to general amusement after everybody else had been seated. As Trubshawe observed, she was again blowing kisses left and right to various acquaintances. In fact, she made such a dramatic entrance into the hushed, now near-silent auditorium it was almost as though she were deliberately trying to render her arrival as obtrusive as possible.

Finally, she plumped herself down beside Trubshawe.

‘I was beginning to think you’d abandoned me,’ he said.

‘Apologies, apologies. I’m afraid I was detained longer than I expected to be. I was just given some really rotten news. Rotten for Cora, that is.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ Trubshawe said under his breath. ‘And only a few minutes before she’s due to go on stage. That must be the actor’s worst nightmare.’

‘It is. But she hadn’t yet heard the news herself and I forbore to tell her. It can wait till after the show.’

‘Not a death in the family, I trust?’

‘No, it concerns Alastair Farjeon.’

‘Alastair Farjeon?’

‘The great film director. It seems –’

But before she had time to elaborate, the lights dimmed. For Trubshawe, too, the explanation would have to keep.

When, a second or two later, the curtain rose, he could
barely make out what was in front of his own eyes, the stage being nearly as dark as the auditorium. There was a hint – albeit not much more than a hint – of ceiling-high bookshelves, an enormous fireplace, two deep leather armchairs and, on the extreme left, a closed door under which a narrow blade of light provided the only source of illumination. Behind that door, apparently, some kind of a party was being held. Audible, inside the room supposedly adjacent to the dim, still unoccupied stage, were lots of gay, eupeptically high-pitched voices, the strains of syncopated Negro music and, every so often, the explosive plop of a champagne cork.

‘Scenery’s a bit underlit, isn’t it?’ the Chief-Inspector whispered to Evadne Mount. ‘Oughtn’t you to do something about it?’

‘Shhhh!’ she replied in a whisper three times as loud as his, her eyes glued to the stage.

At long last something happened. The closed door opened a sliver, causing the music’s already high decibel level to be turned up higher still, as brusquely as though on a gramophone. At the same time, a young man in evening dress stealthily tiptoed into the room, followed by an even younger woman in a white satin gown. Silently closing the door behind him, turning to face her, he put his index finger to his Ronald Colman moustache.

For a few moments they stood together on the unlit stage, neither of them saying a word, both of them listening
intently to the muffled din from the next room. When it became obvious that, for now, their absence had gone undetected, the young man switched on the light.

All at once, their facial features having suddenly become visible, a tremendous salvo of applause swept through the auditorium, running the gamut from the vigorously genteel (in the stalls) to the downright raucous (from the gallery). If the Chief-Inspector alone failed to recognise either of the two faces, let alone attach names to them, even he could see on those faces that both stars, as he assumed them to be, were positively aching to step out of character, face the audience of their peers and gratefully acknowledge their accolade.

They resisted nevertheless and instead fell into one another’s arms.

Then, when she had finally unsealed her lips from her lover’s, the young woman cried out:

‘Oh, Harry! How perfectly frightful this evening’s been! I don’t think I can bear it a minute longer!’

‘I know, I know,’ he said.

He pummelled his right fist into the palm of his left hand.

‘He’s a brute, a swine! The way he kept taunting you in front of everybody. Oh, I wanted to kill him!’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to run away together.’

‘Run away?’ she repeated tremulously. ‘But – but when?’

‘Tonight. Now.’

‘Heavens! Where will we go?’

‘Anywhere. Anywhere we please. I’m a rich man, Debo, a very rich man. I can take you anywhere you could ever want to go. I can give you anything your heart could ever desire. A Mediterranean villa, a yacht, a stable of polo ponies …’

‘Now, Harry’ – the first hint of a half-smile playing on her lips – ‘what on earth would I do with a stable of polo ponies?’

‘Debo darling, how naïve you are! How exquisitely naïve! One doesn’t
do
anything with polo ponies. One just
has
them. That’s what being rich is all about.’

‘I don’t give a fig about being rich. All I want is to be with you, as far away as possible from that beast.’

Just then – but one had to be paying very close attention, so surreptitious, so nearly invisible, was the stage business – the door behind them re-opened. The five fingers of a male hand slithered, one by one, around the frame, started groping for the light-switch and, finding it, flicked off the light again. Before either of the two characters already on stage had time to react to this new development, a nerve-jangling shot rang out. The door was immediately slammed shut, the woman named Debo screamed, the audience gave out a loud collective gasp and the young man, or rather his dimly illuminated silhouette, collapsed in a heap on the carpet.

All Hell erupted. The off-stage Negro music came to an abrupt halt – one would almost swear to having heard the scratch of a needle as it was yanked off a record – the library
door opened once more, opened wide this time, the light was switched on again and, squeezed into the doorway, faces as white as shirt-fronts, cigarettes, cigars and cocktail glasses clutched in trembling hands, were a half-dozen horrified guests – one of them, as Trubshawe remarked, togged out in full kilted regalia.

Another, as he also remarked, was Cora Rutherford. The quintessence of pre-war chic in a long black evening gown and matching elbow-length gloves, she seemed scarcely altered from the woman he had encountered and indeed interrogated those many years before at ffolkes Manor. At once taking charge of the situation, she strode superbly across the stage, bent over the victim’s body exactly (in Trubshawe’s memory) as he himself had so often done in his career, put her ear to his chest – meanwhile shoving aside an exquisite tear-drop pearl earring as conspicuously as though she actually intended to raise a smile from the audience – felt his pulse, drew down both his eyelids, then looked back up at the others.

‘He’s dead.’

This announcement caused an even greater commotion. What was to be done? The police would have to be called in, of course; but in the meantime, there being no doubt whatever that the murder had been committed by one of those present, how were they to spend the time in the uneasy truce that would follow?

Now it must be said that even in those of Evadne Mount’s
whodunits he had found most satisfying it was the obligatory but, to his way of thinking, faintly tiresome connective tissue that Trubshawe had always least looked forward to; and here too, after such a suspenseful opening scene, his mind began to wander. So it was that he chanced temporarily to turn his attention away from the stage and towards the novelist who, from the very start of the sketch, had been utterly absorbed in the to-ings and fro-ings of her own creations.

As he watched her from the corner of his eye, however, he saw her features suddenly twitch with a spasm of disbelief, of shock, almost of horror.

A moment later, she caught his wrist in a painfully tight grip and, half-moaning, murmured:

‘Oh no … No …’

‘Why, what is it?’ whispered Trubshawe.

‘Look!’ she cried out, seemingly forgetting that she was in a theatre. ‘The blood! It’s wrong! It’s all wrong! There’s not supposed to be any blood!’

While some spectators immediately attempted to shoosh this blithering female who had had the nerve, so they imagined, to interrupt the show with her own dim-witted chatter, others who had recognised Evadne Mount as the author of the playlet and on whom the ominous implication of her words was already having its effect, began to wonder aloud if there really could be …

As for the performers on stage, they were visibly at a loss
to know what to do next. Should they continue to deliver the lines as they had been written? Or should they pay heed to this grotesque if, all the same, anxiety-inducing outburst from the woman who had written them?

Their minds were made up for them by the eventual realisation, on both sides of the footlights at once, that from the ‘dead body’ of the character who had just been ‘murdered’ a thin trickle of blood had indeed started to snake its way downstage and was even now dripping into the orchestra pit, right in front of the seat occupied by, precisely, Evadne Mount.