A Mysterious Affair of Style (3 page)

This was too much for her. Without addressing another word to her companion, she leapt to her feet, hurriedly climbed the half-dozen steps leading up to the performing area and, in front of the entire cast, the petrified audience and a Trubshawe who for the moment was too discombobulated to think of taking any rational action, bounded onto the stage.

Like Cora Rutherford before her, she bent over the body. Bracing herself, she gently turned the young actor’s face upward. The audience gasped again – except that this was a different type of gasp, the gasp no longer of spectators at a theatrical show but of bystanders at a car crash. Blood was now sweating freely through the snow-white dickey of the actor’s tuxedo, forming an ever-expanding circular stain that resembled nothing so much as the Japanese national flag.

Evadne Mount looked up grimly, straight at the audience instead of at the members of the cast.

‘Oh my God, ladies and gentlemen, this is real blood. The bullet – the bullet wasn’t a blank!’

Hearing these words, one of the actors, a sixtyish, silver-templed gentleman who had been cast as a retired military officer – so at least intimated the lavishly beribboned and bemedalled lapels of his dinner jacket, the pronounced limp with which he had walked onto the stage and, not least, the monocle which dangled from a red ribbon about his neck – at once stepped forward (now minus the limp) and, prompting yet another gasp, held up what Trubshawe recognised as a German army pistol, a Luger.

‘I – I got it from props,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t even take a look inside it. Why should I? I naturally assumed everything was …’

Even before he had completed his piece, his fellow cast members could all be seen gradually distancing themselves from him and gathering in a nervous huddle at the opposite end of the stage.

‘Oh, come now. You can’t possibly suspect me of … Look here, I had no earthly reason to murder Emlyn. Not like this. Not in full view of everybody. No, no, no, that’s not what I meant to say. I had no reason to murder him anyway – at all! But if I’d
had
a reason – I mean, just for the sake of the argument – if I had
had
a reason – which, I repeat, I didn’t have – I certainly wouldn’t …’

His voice trailed off in a series of inaudible ramblings. The audience sat as though collectively turned to stone. They were so mesmerised by the extraordinary events which had taken place on stage, it hadn’t occurred to any of them to propose that the police, the real police, be instantly summoned.

Except that there was a real policeman, a real ex-policeman, in the house. Trubshawe had finally come to his senses. Realising that he alone of all those present in the Theatre Royal was qualified to ensure that the appropriate protocols would be implemented from that point on, he rose up from his seat.

And he was just about to follow Evadne Mount onto the stage by the same half-dozen steps when she herself stared back at him from the supine body over which she was still crouching and, to his stupefaction,
she winked at him!

Winked at him?
Winked at him
??? Could it be …? Surely not? Surely everything that had happened wasn’t just …?

Then, for Trubshawe as for the rest of the audience, the penny dropped.

Already, centre-stage, the novelist Evadne Mount and her most celebrated character, Alexis Baddeley, the former played by herself, as it were, the latter played by the actress known to be her oldest friend, were squabbling (exactly as he recalled them squabbling at ffolkes Manor) as to who had priority in investigating the murder of the juvenile lead. Every gibe, every aside, every taunt and twit, was greeted
with gales of laughter as, in their turn, the other members of the cast, all of them famous, though not to Trubshawe, also started insulting each other with coded comments about private lives and loves, professional successes and, even more gleefully, professional failures.

‘I never smoke. I never drink. I never take drugs,’ was the high-minded claim of one cast member who, in real life, had become notorious for trumpeting each of these abstemious virtues of his in the illustrated magazines.

‘Blimey O’Reilly,’ riposted Evadne Mount, who had naturally given herself the best of her own lines, ‘how do you find the time to do all these things you never do?’

Or when, a few minutes later, Cora Rutherford, half-Alexis Baddeley, half-herself, was asked her opinion of the ingenue, a simpering redhead with insufferable freckles, she cattishly replied, ‘My dear, I rather fancy that tonight will turn out to be her farewell debut.’

The audience, needless to say, adored all the rudery and ribaldry, all the banter and bitching and back-stabbing. So too did Trubshawe, once he had quietly decided to forget that so irresponsible a stunt, played out in a packed theatre, really ought not to be condoned by laughter or crowned by applause.

What a strange business, he thought, the show business is. The theatre, for example. If people go to a play, it’s surely because they take pleasure in being caught up in all the illusions the theatre can offer. Yet, if there’s one thing in which
they take pleasure even more than these illusions, it’s to have them unexpectedly shattered.

It always seems as though the warmest round of applause is reserved for the actor who understudies a role at the last minute and has to go on-stage with script in hand or the actress so decrepit she can hardly remember her lines or the matinée idol known to have served a prison sentence for buying petrol on the black market or the chorus girl whose husband has dragged both her and her swarthy masseur-cum-lover through the divorce courts. As Trubshawe had good cause to know, considering how often she had told him during their former acquaintance, Evadne Mount’s plays had all enjoyed lengthy runs in the West End. Yet he would have wagered his last ten-shilling note that not one of them had been so rapturously received as this trivial squib, the whole point of which was to mock the whiskery props and devices by which the same audience would have been enthralled when watching one of her more serious efforts.

And it fleeted across his mind that if the audience knew what he knew – that, the moment the curtain came down, the leading lady was fated to receive some as yet unspecified piece of bad news – they would have adored it even more.

In any case, after a running time that was neither too long nor too short but, like the baby bear’s bowl of porridge, just right, the sketch reached its triumphant climax. The ‘victim’ abruptly sprang to his feet and, turning to face the audience,
let his blood-stained dickey roll up his chest like a circus clown’s. Beneath it, on his undervest, three words had been scribbled: APRIL THE FIRST.

‘Anywhere,’ declared Cora, ‘but the Ivy.’

It was just after ten-thirty when the three companions stood on the steps of the Theatre Royal and wondered where to have supper together.

‘But, Cora,’ protested Evadne, ‘you adore the Ivy.’

‘Used to, darling, used to,’ Cora drawled, bundling her pale furs about her neck. ‘You seem to forget, I’ve withdrawn from that frivolous world. No more hugging and mugging and table-hopping for poor lonely little Cora.’

‘But I saw you there only last week.’

‘Ah yes,’ replied the actress defensively, ‘but then I was dining with Noël. I mean to say, Noël …’

‘Oh, very well, have it your own foolish way. The thing is, it’s cold and it’s late. Do we eat or do we don’t? And, if we do, then where?’

‘What about the Kit-Kat?’

Cora turned to Trubshawe who, because he suspected that no proposal he might make would cut much ice with his two redoubtable dining companions, had so far refrained from taking part in the conversation.

‘You know it?’ she queried. ‘It’s in Chelsea – the King’s
Road. First it was the Kafka Klub. Then it was the Kandinsky Klub. Then the Kokoschka Klub. Now it’s the Kit-Kat Klub. It’s one of those places that are renamed a hundred times but never go out of fashion.’

Evadne Mount’s answer was pat and to the point.

‘I absolutely refuse to go to the Kit-Kat,’ she said. ‘The food costs the earth – and tastes like it too. But I say,’ she changed tack, ‘if what you’re hankering after is something off the beaten track, I know a simply marvellous Chinese restaurant in Limehouse. There may be table-smashing but I can assure you there won’t be any table-hopping. What say you, Eustace?’

The Chief-Inspector looked slightly ill-at-ease.

‘What’s the matter? You aren’t afraid, as an ex-copper, of being caught in such a den of iniquity? You really needn’t worry. Frankly, it couldn’t be more respectable.’

‘No, no, it isn’t that at all.’

‘What, then?’

‘Well, you see,’ he explained, ‘I ate Chinese food once. When my wife and I took a weekend break in Dieppe. I just couldn’t get a grip on those – those whatyamacallums.’

‘You mean chopsticks?’

‘That’s the word. Chopsticks. I couldn’t handle them at all. It felt as though I was eating on stilts, don’t you know.’

‘Well, of course Trubbers doesn’t want to have some foul Chinee muck in the East End!’ said Cora Rutherford.

With a plaintive sigh she faded further into her furs.

‘I can see it’s up to me as usual to make the sacrifice. Oh well, if it must be the Ivy, then the Ivy it is.
Allons-y, les enfants.’

‘I’m simply gasping for a ciggie!’

A short taxi ride later, they were comfortably installed at one of the most enviable of the Ivy’s tables. The two women had ordered a couple of exotic cocktails, Trubshawe was hospitably aquainting himself with a whisky-and-soda, and the incipient conversation awaited only the lighting of Cora’s first cigarette.

It was a real performance. For the actress, a cigarette represented a sixth finger. Once, indeed, she had languorously informed an impressionable lady columnist from the
Sunday Sundial
that she was incapable of contemplating Michelangelo’s image of God breathing life into Adam without transforming it in her mind into an allegory – an allegory, darling! – of the immemorial gesture of one smoker offering a light to another. The columnist was suitably thrilled. So too, presumably, were her readers.

Now, the cigarette extracted from its platinum case, inserted into a jet-black ebony holder, lit up and luxuriously
inhaled, she was ready to rejoin the living.

She turned to face Trubshawe.

‘This
is
nice, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘After all those years! So much more
gemütlich
than last time around. I think we all prefer a spoof murder to a genuine one – except for Evie, of course. Now this is a question I really don’t have to put to you, because I could plainly see you sitting there large as life in the front row, but I’ll put it to you anyway. How did you enjoy the show?’

‘The show?’ replied Trubshawe. ‘I haven’t laughed so much since – I don’t know when I last laughed so much. And watching you two bicker on the stage certainly brought back a few memories. If I still had my hat on, I’d take it off to both of you.’

He hesitated before pursuing his train of thought.

‘Even if …’

‘Even if what?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘even if it did seem to me you were sailing a wee bit close to the wind. Pulling a stunt like that inside a crowded theatre, you know, it’s tantamount to crying “Fire!”. Had the worst come to the worst, you could have provoked a stampede. It was all so very believable, at least for the first few minutes, I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the more gullible members of the audience had assumed there really was a murderer skulking about backstage. I don’t suppose you bothered to apply for authorisation, now did you?’

‘Well, naturally we didn’t,’ snorted the novelist. ‘Imagine how much red tape we would have had spewed out at us. It was in a Good Cause, don’t forget. Besides, that was an exceptionally sophisticated audience out front. Did they look to you about to stampede?’

‘No-o-o,’ said Trubshawe. ‘But then, of course, I was sitting in the very first row. I couldn’t really see how they were taking it.

‘Anyway,’ he added in a conciliatory tone, ‘no harm done. It
was
hilariously funny. And, as you say, it
was
in a Good Cause. And, after all, I
am
only an ex-policeman. I couldn’t have taken official action even if I’d wanted to.’

The next several minutes saw them occupied perusing the menu. When their choices had been made and their orders taken, the subject turned at last to the bad news of which Evadne Mount had already advised the Chief-Inspector.

‘I say, Cora …’ she began hesitantly.

Cora was instantly aware of the change in her friend’s voice.

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘Well … I heard some news – bad news, seriously bad news – just five minutes or so before curtain-up. You’ll forgive me, I know, but I felt I had to hold it back until after you’d done your turn.’

‘All right,’ said Cora bluntly, ‘I’ve done my turn. Out with it.’

‘It’s Farjeon.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m afraid he –’ she sought to cushion the blow – ‘I’m afraid he’s joined the Great Majority.’

‘What!’ cried Cora. ‘You mean he’s gone to Hollywood?’

Evadne wriggled in a paroxysm of embarrassment.

‘No, no, dear. Do try to concentrate. What I mean,’ she frowned gravely, ‘what I mean is that he’s dead.’

‘Dead?! Alastair Farjeon?’

‘Yes, I fear so. The stage manager heard the news on the wireless and told me, as I say, just five minutes before you were due to make your entrance.’

It came again, like a belated echo:

‘Dead!’

Horror and incredulity battled it out for supremacy on Cora’s features.

‘Good God! Farjeon dead! A heart attack, I suppose?’

‘No. I understand why you might think so. As a matter of fact, though, it wasn’t a heart attack. It was something much, much worse.’

There was a momentary pause during which neither spoke.

‘Well?’ Cora eventually said.

‘Well …’

‘Oh, do get on, Evie, for Christ’s sake! By dragging it out like this, you’re only making it a thousand times worse.’

‘Well, as you know – as I’m sure you know – Farjeon owned a villa near Cookham – you did know that, didn’t you? – I’ve heard it was the last word in gracious living – he
used to host lots of weekend parties there – were you ever invited?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Cora nodded impatiently.

‘Well, it seems there was the most ghastly fire in that villa of his and he himself was burnt to death.’

‘Oh my Lord, how perfectly awful! Was he alone, do you know?’

‘Absolutely no idea. All I know are the basic facts. None of the details. It happened this afternoon – late this afternoon.’

Trubshawe intervened for the first time.

‘Apologies for butting in. This has obviously been a terrific blow to both of you. But would you mind if I asked who exactly you’re talking about?’

Cora stared at him.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know who Alastair Farjeon is?’

‘Well, no, I can’t say I do.’

‘Cora, love,’ the novelist gently broke in before her friend could air her astonishment at the policeman’s ignorance. ‘You forget. Not everybody’s horizons are bounded by Wardour Street at one end and Shaftesbury Avenue at the other. You lot who work in the show business often forget how very distant that world is from most people’s ordinary day-to-day preoccupations.’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Right as usual, darling,’ Cora replied contritely.

She turned again to Trubshawe.

‘
Mea culpa
, my dear. I was just so surprised that you’d
never heard of Farje – I mean, Farjeon. I quite took it for granted that everyone knew the name, because he’s simply – he
was
simply,’ she corrected herself – ‘the most brilliantly creative artist we’ve ever had in the British film industry.’

‘I don’t get to the Pictures too often,’ the Chief-Inspector apologised. ‘This Farjeon, he was what you call a film producer, is that it?’

‘No, he was a film
director
, and please’ – here she raised the palm of her right hand in front of his face to prevent him from posing what she knew would be his next question (it was a ploy he recalled having seen before but, since on that occasion the hand had been Evadne Mount’s, the actress must have picked it up from the novelist or possibly vice-versa) – ‘
please
don’t ask me what the difference is between a producer and a director. If I had a silver guinea for the number of times I’ve had that question put to me, I could retire on the spot. Just take my word for it, dearie, there is one.’

‘And now he’s dead. Such a tragic death, too,’ said Trubshawe. ‘I’m truly sorry. He was a close friend of yours, I gather?’

‘Close friend?’ Cora ejaculated. ‘Close friend?? That’s a good one.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘I couldn’t
stand
Alastair Farjeon. No one could.’

The Chief-Inspector was utterly befuddled. He knew the immemorial reputation of theatricals for being fickle, flighty creatures, capricious to a fault, but this was ridiculous.

‘Then there really must be something I’m not getting here,’ he said. ‘I had the impression you were devastated by his death.’

‘Oh, I am. But for purely professional reasons, you understand. The man himself I abominated. He was a verminous, arachnoid pig, if I may be permitted to mix my animal metaphors, a pompous, puffed-up little swine, a toad to his inferiors and a toady to his superiors. He also had, if you can believe this, the unmitigated brass to flatter himself that he was God’s gift to womanhood,’ she added, unexpectedly assuming a maidenly archness that would have been comical if the circumstances were other.

‘A good-looking man, was he?’

‘Good-looking? Farje?!’

Cora gave a harsh, mirthless laugh.

‘Farje, you must know, was
fat
. Not ordinarily, forgivably, lovably fat. He was outlandishly fat, monstrously so. Which is why, when Evadne announced the news of his death, I at once assumed it must have been from a heart attack, for he’d had more than one already.

‘He was also the vainest, most egocentric man I ever met. A complete narcissist.’

‘A fat narcissist?’ said Trubshawe. ‘H’m, that couldn’t have been easy.’

Cora was now talking compulsively, almost convulsively.

‘I’ve always believed it was out of narcissism that he became a film director in the first place. He had this very
special trick – a unique trick, you might say. In every one of his films, right at the start, before the plot had got underway, he would have a double, some extra who looked exactly like him, make a brief appearance in the corner of the screen. It became in a way his trademark, like the Guinness pelican, you know, or the golliwog on the marmalade jar.’

‘I see …’ said Trubshawe, though, in truth, he didn’t quite.

‘Poor Farje. He was famous for falling helplessly and hopelessly in love with his leading ladies. But because he invariably lusted after the sort of frosty blonde, cool and aloof on the outside, scalding hot on the inside, who couldn’t possibly have lusted after him, he found himself obliged to pay them vicarious – is that the word I’m looking for? – to pay them vicarious court via the various debonair young actors he tended to cast opposite them in his films. He was like Cyrano de Bergerac, except that it was Farje’s belly not his nose that was oversized.’

She allowed herself the ghost of a smile at her own wit.

‘Then, when he finally screwed up what little courage he possessed to make a pass at one of them and, inevitably, was repulsed, he’d take his revenge by tormenting, by practically torturing, her on the set.

‘He got himself into trouble with the odd husband or boyfriend, I can tell you. I seem to remember he was once seriously duffed up in the lobby of the Dorchester.’

‘So he was an unmarried man?’

‘Not at all. He’s been – I mean, he was – married to the same woman for Heaven knows how many years. Hattie. Everyone in the industry knows Hattie Farjeon. She’s one of those unthreatening little wifies insecure men attach themselves to by the proverbial ball-and-chain.

‘It’s curious. Whenever Farje wasn’t around, Hattie was Miss Bossy-Boots incarnate, a whinging fussbudget, a real besom, as my dear old mum used to say, a meddling, scheming know-it-all, physically unprepossessing, to put it mildly, very mildly, and given to stamping her two little flat feet if crossed. When they were together, though, it was obvious just how terrified she was of him.’

‘And you say,’ Trubshawe enquired, ‘that your reasons for regretting his death were purely professional?’

‘I had just signed up for a part in his new picture,’ she said bitterly.

‘Ah … I see. The leading role, I assume?’

‘Thank you, Trubbers, thank you for being so
galant
,’ replied the actress. ‘No, it wasn’t the leading role. Oh, small as it was, it was a showy part all right, with one big scene where I positively chew up the furniture, but the lead? No. In fact, I wouldn’t normally have accepted such a – well, such a petite role. If I did so in this case, it was only because it was Farje.’

‘Sorry,’ said Trubshawe, ‘but I still don’t follow. You claim you abominated the man. You also said that he was famous for tormenting his actresses. You even went so far as to use
the word “torture”. And you’ve just admitted that the part you signed up for wasn’t even the lead. Why were you so eager to play it?’

Even though the tragic gaze that Cora now trained on him had done stellar service, as the policeman was well aware, in a dozen West End melodramas, it was one in which, on this occasion, real pain was nevertheless detectable. There was the barnstorming actress on stage. Waiting in the wings, however, there was also the bruised human being.

‘Listen, my dear,’ she said, ‘in your long and doubtless varied career you must have had to deal with crooks who were as villainous as they come, except that you just couldn’t help grudgingly admiring their professional panache. Am I right or am I right?’

‘Yes – yes, you are,’ replied the detective. ‘Yes, I see what you’re getting at.’

‘That’s how we all felt about Farje. He may have been a rat, but he was also a genius, the nearest thing the British film industry has ever had to a Wyler or a Duvivier or a Lubitsch. For him the cinema was not just a job of work, it was a challenge, a perpetual challenge. Haven’t you seen any of his films?’

‘Ah well, there you have me, I’m afraid. I may well have done. The thing is, I used just to go to the Pictures, not to any one particular Picture. Most of the time, I didn’t actually know in advance what it was I was going to see. I didn’t go to
Casablanca
, I went to the Tivoli – and if
Casablanca
happened to be showing at the Tivoli that night, then
Casablanca
is what I’d end up watching. This whole complicated business of, you know, directors and producers and suchlike is something of a closed book to me.’

‘Well, I can only say that, if you’re unfamiliar with Farje’s work, you’ve been denying yourself a great deal of pleasure.’

‘There was that wonderful thriller of his,
Remains to be Seen
, about a party of English archaeologists working on a dig in Egypt. The “remains to be seen” are the ruins they’re excavating – already an awfully clever conceit, don’t you think? – but they’re also the remains of the victim, whose freshly murdered body is discovered inside an underground tomb which has lain undisturbed for three thousand years! And it all ends with a glorious shoot-out in and around the Sphinx.