A Mysterious Affair of Style

Chapter Thirteen

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:

POSSIBLE SUSPECTS IN THE MURDER OF

ALASTAIR FARJEON

AND THEIR POTENTIAL MOTIVES

Rex Hanway. Farjeon’s death meant that he was free at last to make a picture on his own, an ambition he himself admitted he had waited many years to satisfy.

Philippe Françaix. Farjeon plagiarised his script of If Ever They Find Me Dead.

Lettice Morley. Farjeon attempted to ravish her in his Cookham villa.

Gareth Knight. Farjeon threatened to peach on him about his having served a sentence in the Scrubs for making indecent overtures to a young policeman in a public lavatory.

Leolia Drake. She knew that only if Farjeon were out of the way would she have a chance of playing the leading role in If Ever They Find Me Dead. (Or could she have been merely Hanway’s accomplice?)

Evadne laid the sheet of paper down on the table between them and was about to speak, except that Trubshawe, who would have been less than human if he hadn’t experienced a certain smug satisfaction in having managed to give her a taste of her own medicine, got in first by raising his hand to silence her.

‘Before you answer,’ he said, ‘let me just add one crucial point. If, as I believe, Alastair Farjeon was murdered, then it finally gives us something which we have all been seeking in vain from the very beginning of this case.’

‘What?’

‘A motive for murdering Cora.’

They both spoke at the same time.

‘Because Cora had found out who murdered Farjeon!’

‘Because Cora had found out who murdered Farjeon!’

‘Snap!’

‘Snap!’

‘Now,’ said Trubshawe, taking triumphant note of what he imagined was the novelist’s belated conversion to the cause, ‘it’s time for you to tell me what you think.’

He sat comfortably back in his chair, his glass of whisky in his hand, waiting for the inevitable accolade.

But Evadne’s voice, when she spoke again, was not as encouraging as he had expected.

‘We-ll …’

‘Yes?’

‘…?’

‘What? What is it you’re trying to say?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all. That is, I …’

‘Out with it, Evie.’

‘Well, Eustace, frankly I don’t know.’

‘What in Heaven’s name is the problem?’

‘The problem,’ she said, ‘is that my bottom itches.’

Trubshawe gaped at her in disbelief.

‘Your bottom itches!’ he cried out so loudly that not a few of those customers who were seated at nearby tables turned their heads to stare at them both.

‘Yes,’ she repeated in a half-whisper, ‘my bottom itches. And I have to tell you, Eustace, my bottom has never let me down.’

‘What the –’ he spluttered incontinently. Then:

‘Even from you, Evie,’ he said in a low hiss, ‘this is going too far.’

‘No, no, let me explain,’ she replied with dignity. ‘Whenever I read a whodunit by one of my rivals, my so-called rivals, and I encounter some device – I don’t know, a motive, a clue, an alibi, whatever – a device I simply don’t trust, even if I can’t immediately articulate to myself why I don’t trust it, I long ago noticed that my bottom started to itch. I repeat, it’s infallible. If my bottom ever once steered me wrong, why, the universe would be meaningless.’

‘How is it you never mentioned this at ffolkes Manor?’

‘Really, Eustace, my bottom is scarcely something I care to bring up in mixed company. Besides, we had only just met.’

‘So you’re telling me, are you, that you’d put your trust in your – in your bottom before you’d ever put it in me, and I’m not just a friend, a close friend, I hope, but also a police officer who spent his professional life investigating crimes of this nature?’

‘Yes, Eustace, I know how odd it must sound. Yet, close friend as you assuredly are, I’m closer still to my own bottom, after all, and I’ve known it far longer than I’ve known you.

‘It works even when I’m writing my own books. It’ll sometimes happen that I’m dog-tired, I desperately want to finish a chapter and I botch it by lazily employing some whiskery, second-hand plot device. Then, sure as Fate, my bottom starts itching and I realise that I’ve just got to go back to the drawing-board and replace it with something cleverer and more original. Which, I may say, I invariably do.’

‘You could have fooled me,’ muttered a sullen Trubshawe.

‘I find I usually do,’ she countered airily.

His face crimsoned.

‘I see. Now you’re being nasty – nasty and gratuitous. Have a care, Evie, have a care. Two can play at that game.’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I readily admit that your theory is attractive, really very attractive, and for the moment I can’t quite explain – except, of course, for the itch in my bottom – why I’m ill-at-ease with it.’

‘You certainly seemed to share my excitement when I proposed that it at least provided us with a clue as to why Cora had been murdered.’

‘True enough. Even now, that strikes me as by far the best argument that can be made for it. It’s just that, where those five suspects are concerned, well …’

‘What?’

‘Yes, they do all appear to have had motives for wanting to murder Farjeon, I grant you that. I just can’t help feeling that some of those motives are a little – let’s say – weak.’

‘Oh. Which ones?’

‘Leolia Drake’s, for example. She’s a putrid little minx, to be sure, but do you really believe she’d be ready to murder Farjeon – and not only Farjeon, remember, but poor Patsy Sloots along with him – just because, in the first place, she knew, or merely expected, that Hanway would consequently be assigned to direct If Ever They Find Me Dead and, in the second place, because she had total confidence in his authority to cast her in the leading role? I have to say I do find that a strain on my credulity.’

‘We-ell,’ the Chief-Inspector defensively replied, aware as he was that, with this particular suspect, he was on shaky ground, ‘I did add a rider to the effect that she might merely have acted as Hanway’s accomplice.’

‘Even so, Eustace, even so. And Lettice. Now, I agree, she is, as the Yanks say, a tough little cookie. But, after all, Farjeon didn’t actually succeed in having his evil way with her.’

‘I can’t see as that makes a ha’p’orth of difference. Don’t forget that, if it was Lettice, she may not actually have meant to kill Farjeon. It may just have been her intention to give him the fright of his life. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we were talking of manslaughter here.’

‘And Philippe? A French film critic committing murder? I mean, literally. Difficult to swallow.’

‘Oh, please, let’s have no truck with such tired old generalisations. Put yourself in his position. All his adult life he had lived and breathed Alastair Farjeon. Farjeon was his life, the only life, in a sense, he’d ever known. And now here he was, instead of having to worship him from afar, finally at his side, not just as an admirer but, so he hoped, as a colleague. He had written a script he believed would be ideal for his favourite film director. And it was ideal – if it hadn’t been, Farjeon would never have stolen it in the first place. He does steal it, though, and all of Françaix’s dreams crumble to dust. Can’t you imagine how he must have felt when it dawned on him that he had wasted his whole life on someone totally unworthy of his admiration. People have killed for less, much less, in my experience.’

‘Possibly so … Yet, you know, Eustace, as you yourself pointed out, they tended to speak quite freely and openly of their loathing of Farjeon. Why would they have done that if they suspected that they themselves were, well, suspected of having murdered him?’

‘But that’s just it!’ Trubshawe practically shouted at her. ‘They didn’t suspect! Nor were they suspected! It was Cora’s murder we were investigating. Not for a second did they have any cause to wonder whether it might be advisable for them to hold their tongues about their relationship with Farjeon. Anyway, as you of all people, the Dowager Duchess of Crime, must know, the subtlest way of insinuating that you didn’t kill somebody is to claim that you wished you had.’

Evadne Mount reflected on this for a moment, then said simply:

‘I’m not sure, Eustace, I’m not sure.’

‘Why not? Mine is the only theory which even begins to explain why one of the five might have poisoned Cora. We have nothing else to go on.’

‘Not quite nothing. What about my scrap of paper?’

‘Oh yes? One of those obliging scraps of paper that your whodunits are littered with? Let’s be serious, Evie. It hardly stands up against what I have to offer. You recall what Sherlock Holmes said? “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”’

At this she released a sharp ejaculation.

‘Pshaw, Trubshawe, pshaw! Devotee as I am of Conan Doyle, I’ve always thought that particular apothegm to be complete drivel. There exist lots of things in the world that are theoretically not impossible but extremely unlikely ever to be “the truth”. Playing a perfect round of golf, for instance, by scoring eighteen successive holes-in-one. The fact that yours is, there’s no denying it, the only theory so far – so far, Eustace – which adequately accounts for Cora’s murder doesn’t mean it’s true.

‘Actually,’ she added, ‘the more I think about it, the more offensive I find it. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. If you ever do actually get round to smoking that filthy old pipe of yours.’

Trubshawe ignored this unwarranted calumny on his beloved meerschaum.

‘Offensive?’ he queried. ‘You find it offensive? Now there, Evie, you’ve lost me.’

‘Well, just consider. What you appear to be implying is not only that one of the five suspects murdered Farjeon but that Cora subsequently discovered the identity of that murderer and threatened him or her with the prospect of taking what she knew to the police. In other words, she set about blackmailing the murderer and got murdered herself for her sins.’

‘No, no, no! Now you’re extrapolating, wildly extrapolating. All I said was that Cora had acquired what would turn out to be a very dangerous piece of knowledge. Just knowing that she knew may have been enough for the murderer. I never once suggested that she sought to exploit the secret.’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘Remember how gleeful she was when she announced to us that she’d somehow contrived to have her part “bumped up”? Remember how cagey she then became when you asked her how she’d pulled it off?’

‘There you are!’ cried the novelist, who visibly did remember her friend’s crowing complacency. ‘What is it you’re implying if not blackmail? Well, I won’t have it, Eustace. I won’t hear a word against poor dear dead Cora. I insist that you retract these scurrilous insinuations of yours.’

‘I say, dash it all, Evie, we aren’t going to fight, are we?’

‘That’s entirely up to you. I simply won’t have you trampling over Cora’s memory with your flatfoot’s hob-nailed boots.’

Trubshawe, however, instead of beating a retreat, as he would once have done, elected to pursue what he saw as his advantage.

‘I’m sorry. I understand how sensitive you are about Cora’s death, but I wonder if you aren’t letting your friendship cloud your judgement. I, on the other hand, am free to speak my mind.’

‘That shouldn’t take long.’

‘Now listen, Evie,’ said Trubshawe with steely determination, ‘I know you well enough to know how you can’t tolerate being upstaged, to use Gareth Knight’s word. Obviously, it goes against the grain for you to acknowledge that somebody else might be right for once or simply have got there first. In your books, you make d**ned sure Alexis Baddeley always defeats poor old Inspector Plodder and you’ve deluded yourself that it must happen like that in life. If this were one of your whodunits –’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that,’ the novelist testily interjected. ‘It’s my line, not yours.’

‘I’m right. I’m right about the case and I’m right about you, too. I know it and I think you know it, except that you can’t bring yourself to admit it. And do you know why you can’t bring yourself to admit it? A classic case of sour grapes. You’re jealous, Evie. You’re jealous because, this time around, I’ve come up with the goods for a change instead of you. So all you can think to do is just sit there and be mulish.’

Now it was Evadne Mount’s turn to splutter.

‘What – what – what bally cheek! What a royal nerve you have!’

She trained a malevolent eye on Trubshawe.

‘Jealous? Of you? If I had a single jealous bone in my body, it’s certainly not you I’d be jealous of! But I don’t, you hear, not one.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘I think not, Evie. We both know that there’s at least one person in this world you’re jealous of. Her very existence has you positively a-twitter with jealousy.’

‘And who might that be?’ she asked with as much aplomb as she could muster at short notice.

‘Who might that be?’ he parroted her. ‘I rather think it might be Agatha –’

He got no further.

‘How dare you!’ she spat at him. ‘How dare you! As I’m a lady, I won’t descend to raising my voice, but I must tell you, Eustace Trubshawe, that is an atrocious calumny which I shall find hard, mighty hard, ever to forgive.’

Only when it was too late to retract what he’d said did the Chief-Inspector understand that he’d gone too far, far too far.

‘Look,’ he blundered on, ‘there’s no – I mean to say, there’s no shame in being jealous of the best? Am I right?’

Silence.

‘Evie?’

Silence.

‘Evie, please. I didn’t really – after all, I was just trying to …’

Realising that he was making no headway, he fell silent.

So it was that they sat there for a moment, neither of them speaking, neither of them drinking.

When the novelist eventually did answer back, her voice was calm, unnaturally calm. It was the calm that follows rather than precedes the storm.

‘Very well, Eustace. I can see that you have total confidence in your theory. Are you ready to put that confidence to the test?’

‘Certainly I am,’ answered Trubshawe, unsure where she was leading.

‘Good. Now I am not, by nature, a betting woman, but I’m willing to make a wager with you if you are willing to accept it.’

‘What kind of wager?’

‘I’m willing to bet you that I will solve this crime before you do.’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘Then I swear to you that the dedication of my very next whodunit will read: “To Agatha Christie, the undisputed Queen of Crime Fiction”. There – how you say? – voilà!’

Trubshawe drew in his breath.

‘You would do that?’

‘If I lose, yes. Except that I won’t. Well, do you accept the wager?’

‘I absolutely do,’ Trubshawe replied without hesitation, adding, ‘And what will I have to do if I lose? Except that I won’t.’

‘If you lose,’ she replied, ‘you must agree to marry me.’

‘Marry you!!??’

Once again the Chief-Inspector had spoken so loudly that two startled waiters, both of them bearing trays heaped high with empty glasses, only just averted a collision as their paths crossed in the middle of the bar. First an itching bottom, now a proposal of marriage. These two fossilised old dears – you could almost hear the whisper buzz around the room – perhaps weren’t as superannuated as they looked.

‘Have you lost your mind?’

‘Not at all.’

‘But why on earth would you want to marry me? This very afternoon we’ve done nothing but quarrel like – like –’

‘Like an old married couple?’ said Evadne Mount, deftly completing the phrase for him.

Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she took his hand and squeezed it in her own.

‘Come clean, Eustace. You’re lonely. You can come clean, you know, because you’ve already done so. More than once. Well, now it’s my turn. I’m lonely too. Terrifyingly lonely, if you really want to know. Why do you suppose I drop into this ridiculous hotel every day? Just in the hope of finding somebody to speak to – anybody, Eustace, anybody at all. And when, all those weeks ago, it was you I found to speak to, I can’t tell you how thrilled I was. So thrilled that, for days afterwards, I was hoping – hoping against hope – that you would drop in again. Really I was. It was like some girlish fantasy – that you would pretend to have dropped in by chance and I would pretend to believe you. And because it was like a girlish fantasy, it made me feel young again, almost like a girl myself.

‘Well, you didn’t drop in. All those days I spent sitting near the door, glancing up at everybody who passed through it, hoping, praying, that this time it might be you, all for nothing. You never did make a reappearance. It probably never crossed your mind for an instant.

‘But that wasn’t going to stop me. Oh no, this was my last chance and, like Cora, I was willing to do anything, abase myself if need be, to grasp it. So I waited more or less patiently for the opportunity, for the excuse I needed, to present itself. And it finally did. Out of the blue, Cora rang me up, invited me to Elstree to watch her play her big scene and I invited you.

‘And now I’m grasping the chance even more tightly by proposing this wager. My calculation is that you’re so bloody cocksure you’ll solve the crime I doubt you’ll risk seeming a coward by refusing to pick up the gauntlet. And if you’re worried about – about, you know, S-E-X – well, you needn’t be. We’re both much too set in our ways, not to mention too old and creaky, for any of that tomfoolery.

‘So, Eustace dear, what do you say? Are we on?’

Trubshawe looked her moistly in the eye.

‘We’re on.’

He then momentarily turned away, pleading a cinder in one of his eyelashes – a cinder as big as the Ritz itself! – and, after feigning to have removed it, added, ‘But only because I know I’m going to win.’

‘At my age, love, I’ve learned not to be too picky. So long as you accept the wager, I really don’t care why.’

She cheerily rubbed her hands together.

‘So – where are you off to next in your investigation?’

‘Next?’ said Trubshawe, drinking down his whisky-and-soda. ‘Next I believe I’ll go alibi-hunting. I’ll consult with Tom Calvert and, perhaps, if we both put on our thinking caps –’

‘Make a nice change from that tartan terror you always wear.’

‘If Tom and I put our heads together,’ Trubshawe repeated between gritted teeth, ‘maybe we’ll find out just what those five suspects of ours were up to on the afternoon of the Cookham fire. And you?’

‘Me?’ said Evadne Mount. ‘I’m going to the Pictures.’