A Mysterious Affair of Style

Chapter Eleven

In deference to Benjamin Levey’s concern that the film’s leading man and lady not be imposed upon more than was absolutely necessary, Calvert decided that the very next person to be grilled would be Gareth Knight, followed immediately by Leolia Drake. As before, it was Sergeant Whistler who escorted Knight into Hanway’s office and silently steered him to the interviewees’ chair. With a first vague nod at both Evadne Mount and Trubshawe, the actor turned to face Tom Calvert. Then, removing his cigarette-case from the inside breast-pocket of his impeccably cut sports jacket, he was about to ask whether he might be permitted to smoke when, the two men taking stock of one another, an unexpected thing occurred.

Though probably nothing untoward would have struck the untrained eye, for Trubshawe there was no doubt at all. It wasn’t that he merely fancied he saw – no, he definitely did see – the actor momentarily flush with apprehension. Clearly, Knight recognised Calvert, and it was that recognition which had caused him to – in Cora’s word – start.

Did Calvert, though, recognise Knight? That was less obvious, as the young officer opened the session with a politely neutral, almost sycophantic approach.

‘I want very much to thank you, Mr Knight, for agreeing to appear before us and also to assure you that I mean to take up as little of your valuable time as I humanly can. I’d just like to ask you, if I may, some questions about the terrible thing that happened here yesterday afternoon. You don’t mind, do you?’

Shifting uneasily in his chair, the suddenly rather waxy-complexioned Knight seemed to have more of a problem lighting his cigarette than one might have expected of so urbane an idol of the silver screen.

‘Not at all, not at all. I – I’m entirely at your disposal.’

‘Good. Now then, I really don’t have to ask who you are and all that. Somebody as well-known as you needs, as they say, no introduction. So we’ll proceed directly to –’

He didn’t complete the sentence.

‘I say, sir, haven’t we met, you and I? I know I ought to remember, but …’

Knight bit into his lower lip, but so furtively that the gesture was noticed, again, only by Trubshawe, whom years of experience had taught to be eternally on the watch for all such, to others, imperceptible symptoms of disquiet.

The actor decided at once, however, that it would be both pointless and counterproductive to conceal the truth, and replied in a clipped tone:

‘Yes, Inspector, you’re quite right. We have met before.’

‘It was when I was on duty, was it not?’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘It’s coming back to me now. The reason I didn’t at first remember where and when we met is that, at the time, you weren’t using the same name. Am I right?’

‘You are.’

‘Would you mind telling me what name you were arrested under?’

As Hanway had before him, Knight edgily glanced back at the novelist and the Chief-Inspector.

‘No need for alarm, sir,’ said Calvert. ‘Everything we hear will remain between these four walls. Mum’s the word – unless, of course, it should turn out to have a bearing on the case we’re investigating.’

‘Very well,’ said Knight, struggling to control his nerves. ‘It happened about eighteen months ago. On V.E. Day. Or V.D. Day, as I believe some wag jocularly called it. I was arrested by two constables in Leicester Square for …’ – he hesitated again – ‘for soliciting in a Public Convenience. The – the young gentleman with whom I imagined I was having a pleasant and, uh, promising conversation turned out to be – as you know, Inspector – a plain-clothes policeman. I must say that did seem to me to take policing a little bit too far, especially on such a joyous and festive occasion.’

‘Well, of course, I’m sorry you feel that way, sir, but for me it was an assignment like any other. Our job, after all, is to protect the public from the likes of –’ said Calvert. ‘Anyway, do go on.’

‘As I say, I was arrested in Leicester Square and taken to Bow Street Police Station. Fortunately the sergeant there failed to recognise me and I was able to give another name –’

Calvert interrupted him.

‘I’m amazed to hear you brazenly admit that, Mr Knight. That was a most serious offence you committed.’

‘You don’t understand, Inspector. Gareth Knight is my professional name. For an obvious reason – which is to say, my career would have been killed stone dead if the press had got wind of the arrest – I gave my real one.’

‘Which is?’

His cheeks tensing, Knight seemed even more reluctant to confess to his real name than to the offence he had committed.

‘Colleano. Luigi Colleano.’

‘I see,’ said Calvert. ‘Luigi Colleano? Doesn’t quite have the same ring as Gareth Knight, does it? So you’re Italian?’

‘As a matter of fact, I was born in Bournemouth. My father, who emigrated just before the First War, earned his living by selling ice-cream cones and wafers on the pier.’

‘Uh huh. All very respectable, I dare say. But, well, didn’t you also look different?’

‘I had shaved off my moustache for the occasion. And wore spectacles.’

Observing Calvert’s expression of mild reproof, he added:

‘No crime in that, I believe?’

‘Never said there was, sir, never said there was. If I’m not mistaken, you were sent to Wormwood Scrubs, right?’

‘Three months penal servitude. My war record was taken into account. I’d been an R.A.F. pilot in the Battle of Britain. Shot down four Messerschmitts and one Dornier. Awarded the D.S.O.’

‘Only three months, eh?’ said Calvert. ‘Well, Mr Knight, I really don’t think you have too much to complain of. Could have been two years, you know.’

‘There is that, I suppose,’ agreed Knight drily. ‘The essential is that there was no write-up in the papers and my reputation was saved.’

‘You yourself might want to put it that way. For us in the police, of course, the essential is that you were made to pay your debt to society. And, since you did, we’ll say no more about it.

‘Now to the matter at hand. As I understand, you were actually performing alongside Cora Rutherford just before she died?’

‘That’s right. We were playing our one big scene together.’

‘What was your reaction, your initial reaction, when she collapsed in front of you?’

‘My initial reaction? To be absolutely honest with you – it’s awful to have to say such a thing – but my initial reaction was that she was grandstanding.’

‘Grandstanding?’ said a puzzled Calvert. ‘I don’t think I know that word.’

‘It’s what the French call “pulling the covers over to your own side of the bed”,’ explained Evadne. ‘Isn’t that so, Mr Knight?’

Knight turned to face her.

‘Yes it is, Mrs …?’

‘Miss. Miss Evadne Mount.’

‘Miss Mount. Yes, I’d say that was rather a neat definition.’

Then, to Calvert again:

‘It means trying to upstage your co-performers. And, well, I blush to think of it now but, before I realised that something deadly serious had happened, that’s exactly what I thought Cora was up to.’

‘So you disliked her, did you?’ the novelist put to him.

‘Cora? Why, not at all,’ he replied, expressing surprise. ‘Oh, I won’t pretend she didn’t sometimes set my teeth on edge with all her tantrums and taradiddle, and especially her chronic lateness – I cannot abide unpunctuality – but, no, deep down I was really rather fond of Cora.’

This revelation arrested Evadne’s head.

‘Were you?’ she said, even more surprised by Knight’s answer than he had been by her question.

‘Yes, I was. I can’t say I knew her all that well, but over the years, you know, we’d run into one another at the Ivy and the Caprice.’

‘You had no previous professional connection with her, I assume,’ Calvert asked.

‘Yes, I did. Just the once. It must have been in 1930. Possibly ’31. She and I were in a stage production together.’

‘Really?’ remarked Evadne. ‘Cora never mentioned it to me.’

‘I can’t say I blame her. It wasn’t something either of us felt like boasting about. A play by Eugene O’Neill, but decidedly one of his feebler efforts. Orpheus Schmorpheus. Adapted from the French – Jean Cocteau, you know. It closed after five performances. Precisely five too many, in my opinion. O’Neill never had the light touch.’

‘But as to Cora,’ the novelist persisted, ‘you say you really liked her?’

‘Well, yes, I rather did. Certainly, when I first met her, about fifteen years ago, she was very special. Unforgettably gorgeous and possessed of an extraordinary presence. Not just on stage but in life. She was one of those actresses who didn’t need spot-lights or arc-lights. She didn’t absorb light, she herself seemed to emit it.’

‘Nicely put, young man.’

‘Well, thank you, Miss Mount. And, incidentally, thank you, too, for the “young man”. We were two of a kind, Cora and I. She was somewhat older than I, of course, but we both had what she’d have called a “past”. We both launched our careers in the theatre before eventually gravitating to the films. And we both knew we were getting on when we stopped lying about what we were going to do and started lying about what we’d already done.

‘The trouble with Cora, though, is that she never learned to adapt. Even when she was acting in front of a film camera, she continued to deliver her lines as though she had to pitch them to the very last row of the Upper Circle. And she continued to behave – to misbehave – as though she were a major star, which, these last few years, she was most definitely not. All the same, she had class, real class. She wasn’t like one of these fluffy little chits one finds oneself acting with nowadays who not only couldn’t play O’Neill but have never even heard of him. And for all her bitchiness – of which, I have to tell you, I was more than once the target – she could be a generous soul.’

‘I wholeheartedly agree with you,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘It’s what I was saying to my friend Eustace here. Cora was a good egg.’

‘Let’s say, rather, a curate’s egg,’ murmured the actor, adding chivalrously, ‘but by Fabergé.’

‘So,’ said Trubshawe, none too pleased to hear his deplorable Christian name afforded another reckless public airing, ‘you didn’t object to her being cast in the picture?’

‘Object? Certainly not. As a matter of fact, it was I who persuaded Farje that she’d be ideal for the role.’

‘Oh, you did, did you?’ Trubshawe said pensively. ‘Now that is interesting …’

‘Why so?’

‘Well, don’t you see, sir. Somebody obviously had his reasons for wanting Miss Rutherford put out of commission. And one way of disposing of her would be to have her poisoned in the middle of a crowded film set. Now we learn that it was you who recommended that she be cast in the picture. Don’t you see what I’m getting at?’

Gareth Knight thought this over, then said:

‘Well, no, I can’t say I do. You seem to have forgotten that there was nothing in the original script about Cora drinking out of the champagne glass. It was an idea the director had on the set, at the very last minute, just as used to happen heaps of times with Farje. Can you actually be suggesting that I knew in advance, by some kind of intimate conviction, that Hanway was going to have that idea?’

‘That’s one in the eye for you, Eustace!’ Evadne Mount almost crowed.

‘Besides,’ Knight smoothly continued, ‘I repeat, I liked Cora. It’s absurd to imply that I might have had a reason to kill her. Not only did I not, I simply cannot imagine why anyone else would. There were times I would happily have throttled her – but not killed her, if you know what I mean.’

‘Just so,’ said Calvert. ‘But tell me, Mr Knight, during the ninety minutes or so between the moment when everybody broke for lunch and your own reappearance on the set, what exactly were your movements? Where did you go? And what did you do?’

‘I spent the entire hour-and-a-half in my dressing-room.’

‘You didn’t have lunch in the canteen?’

‘The commissary? No, never. My secretary prepares my lunch every day and brings it down to Elstree from my London flat.’

‘And this secretary? Was she with you any of the time in your dressing-room?’

‘He, Inspector.’

‘He?’

‘My secretary is male.’

‘Aha … I see. Well, was he with you any of the time?’

‘He was with me all of the time. In fact, he and I lunched together. Then he helped me run through the new scene. He played Cora. I mean, he read Cora’s lines. He will absolutely vouch for that.’

‘I’m sure he will, sir, I’m sure he will.’

Changing tack, Calvert now said, ‘This picture – If Ever They Find Me Dead – it does appear to be jinxed, doesn’t it? Miss Rutherford dying as she did, right there on the set, and of course Mr Farjeon also dying only a few weeks ago. His death must have come as a great shock to you.’

‘It was a shock, yes,’ said Knight. ‘A huge professional blow. I’ve acted in several of Farje’s films, you know. I was one of his repertory company, as it were.’

‘A professional blow, you say. Not a personal one?’

Knight fell silent. It was patent that he was debating with himself whether to speak out or not. Finally, he said:

‘Inspector, I yield to no one in my admiration for Alastair Farjeon as an artist. He was, I need hardly say, a true genius, one of the very few reasons it was still possible for us to take pride in this mostly lamentable British film industry of ours. As a man …’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘You weren’t close friends, I gather?’

‘But that’s just it, we were close friends,’ Hanway replied with a grimace. ‘That’s what I found so unforgivably cruel. You understand, I –’

‘Yes, Mr Knight?’

‘Oh well, in view of what I’ve already been obliged to confess, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be acquainted with the whole story. Now that he’s dead, it no longer matters. When I was arrested, it was Farje whom I asked to pay my bail and contact my lawyer and so forth. Naturally, that meant he had to be in on the whole sordid business. And, just as naturally, given his twisted personality, he at once realised the implications it held for my future career.’

‘He did, nevertheless, continue to cast you in his pictures.’

‘Yes, Miss Mount, I grant you, he did that. On the other hand – and, with a man like Farje, there always was another hand – he never once allowed me to forget what he knew. How with a single negligent word from him my reputation would be in ruins. How he’d always had a weakness for the strong stuff and how, when he’d been drinking too much, he had an unfortunate tendency to become a tiny bit talkative – hence it was in my interest to make sure he stayed safely on the wagon – and so on – and so forth. He taunted me and taunted me until I thought I was going to lose my mind. So, you see, it would be hypocritical of me to pretend that, when I heard of his death, I didn’t breathe an immense sigh of relief, even as I sincerely bemoaned his loss to the British cinema.

‘But to return to what you said a moment ago, Inspector, you may be right at that. There may well be a jinx on this film. I don’t want to sound ghoulish but I can’t help wondering …’

‘Wondering what, sir?’ Calvert prompted him.

‘Wondering who’s going to be next.’

*

Next, as it happened, but only in the sense that she was next up for questioning, was Leolia Drake.

She entered the room wearing a heavy, layered cashmere coat, clutching it to her body as tightly as though it were bitterly cold, which it wasn’t, or as though she were naked underneath, which she wasn’t. She accepted the chair opposite Calvert’s, pulled her skirt down over the top of her knees as showily as though they themselves were showing, which they weren’t, and waited for him to proceed with his interrogation.

Since Calvert’s preliminaries were much as they had been with both Hanway and Knight, they need no repetition here. The essential point was that the actress duly confirmed what Lettice Morley had already told him, that she had indeed been chatting with Gareth Knight when she’d heard about Hanway’s ‘super new idea’.

‘Then can you describe to me, Miss Drake,’ said Calvert, ‘at the moment when Miss Rutherford drank from the poisoned glass – poison has now been officially confirmed, by the way – where precisely were you? On the set itself, by any chance?’

‘Yes, I was. But nowhere near Cora, you know. I was standing behind the camera. I couldn’t possibly have –’

‘Why,’ Evadne Mount asked, ‘were you on the set at all if you weren’t playing in the scene?’

‘Oh, it’s just that Rex is so frightfully brilliant I couldn’t bear to tear myself away. I preferred to be there at his side, watching him be clever. It sent all sorts of funny little shivers up my spine.’

‘I can see you have a high opinion of him as a film director.’

‘Of course I have,’ she replied. ‘I mean to say, we are going out together.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth’ – she couldn’t resist a naughty-little-girlish giggle – ‘we’re staying in together, if you follow me.’

‘Is that why he gave you a part in the picture?’

‘What?’

‘I asked you if that was why he gave you a part in the picture?’

The actress was outraged by the question.

‘What a beastly thing to say!’ she finally cried. ‘It wasn’t my fault Patsy Sloots got hers in that fire. Inspector, I don’t know who this woman is, but I simply refuse to stay here and be insulted by her.’

‘Yes, Miss Mount,’ said Calvert, ‘I do have to agree with Miss Drake. I cannot accept there’s any call for you to be so systematically hostile to witnesses who, after all, are doing their best to be of assistance to us. If you don’t mind, I’ll take charge of the inquiry from now on.’

The novelist mutely declining to reply, he began to pursue his own line of questioning.

‘Miss Drake, what were your personal feelings towards Cora Rutherford?’

‘I really don’t know what to tell you.’

‘Just tell me what you thought of her. It’ll go no further than here.’

‘She’s not somebody I gave much thought to one way or the other. She was foisted on Rex, you know. He didn’t choose her for the film and, if he’d been, well, a free agent, I don’t suppose for a single second he would have.’

‘That may well be true. Yet, in this very room, just a little while ago, Mr Hanway himself voluntarily admitted to us that he had been wrong. That he’d been tremendously excited by the way her performance was turning out.’

‘Did Rex say that?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Oh well,’ she replied carelessly, ‘that was very handsome of him. But so like Rex. He’s such a generous person.’

‘You yourself were not impressed?’

‘I’d rather not speak ill of the dead, Inspector.’

‘You just did,’ Evadne Mount muttered under her breath.

There ensued a silence which, even though it lasted only a few seconds, began to seem awkwardly protracted to the young actress, who must eventually have felt it incumbent on her to bring it to an end.

‘Oh, Cora was all right in her way, if you like that kind of thing. But really, Inspector, let’s face it. I mean, she was a bit – well, quite a lot more than a bit – past it. So p’raps,’ she ended pleasantly, ‘p’raps what happened was, you know, all for the best.’

‘All for the best?!’ Evadne let out an indignant snort. ‘Do my ears deceive me, you – you – or are you actually suggesting that Cora ought to consider herself lucky to have been murdered?! Is that really what you’re saying?’

‘Oh no, no, no, that’s not at all what I meant! I think it’s most unfair of you, taking the words out of my mouth like that. And out of context too. Of course, it’s dreadful that Cora was killed, dreadful. All I meant was – well, she didn’t really have too much of a future, did she, so it’s not so bad – I mean, it’s not quite so bad – as it would be if somebody like – well, somebody younger and prettier – oh, now you’ve got me so mixed up I’ve quite lost track of what I do mean.’

‘That’s all right, Miss Drake,’ said Calvert diplomatically, ‘that’s all right. It’s been a trying situation for you.’

Sensing that it would be futile to prolong the interrogation, he offered his hand to her.

‘And thank you so much for coming in. You’ve been most helpful.’

‘I tried to be, Inspector, I really tried.’

‘I know you did. And you’re free to go. But – this is just a formality – please don’t make any travelling plans without first advising me.’

‘Oh, I do understand. In any case, now that this picture looks as though it’s up the spout, I hope quite soon to start rehearsing a play in the West End. The Philadelphia Story? It’s by Sir James Barrie, you know?’

‘Is it really?’ Calvert tactfully agreed. ‘Well, I do wish you better luck in your theatrical career than you’ve had so far in the films. Thank you again and goodbye.’

‘Goodbye to you, Inspector,’ she mumbled almost tearfully. Then, looking neither at Trubshawe, who had said nothing at all, nor at Evadne, who had said much too much, she once more gathered her coat about herself and hurried out of the room.

A moment later, Calvert turned to the novelist and wagged an emphatic index finger at her.

‘Really, Miss Mount, really …’