A Mysterious Affair of Style

Chapter Fifteen

‘If there were such a thing as reincarnation, I’m convinced I should return to earth as a sheepdog.’

Evadne Mount unfurled this mock-solemn introduction like a miniature red carpet, one that Trubshawe knew was likely sooner or later to be pulled out from beneath her audience of listeners.

There they all were again, the novelist herself and, arrayed around her in a seated semi-circle (the ideal configuration, as she well knew, for having one’s every word hung upon), Trubshawe, Tom Calvert and the five suspects whom the latter had summoned at her request. There they all were, once more on the set of If Ever They Find Me Dead, its decor now gathering dust but not yet dismantled. Like some portly Sunday-School mistress, she faced them, sitting side-saddle, as it were, on a tall three-legged bar-stool, surrounded by the empty cocktail glasses and overflowing ashtrays which had been the props for Cora’s big scene – a bigger scene, as it tragically transpired, than the actress had anticipated. High over their heads was the complex lighting gantry typical of a contemporary film studio, with its criss-crossing circuitry of lights and cables, pipes and planks. And standing watch at each of the four corners of the eerily echoing hangar was a uniformed policeman, straining not to appear too obviously on duty.

Until Evadne began to speak, when beckoned to do so by Calvert, no one had addressed a word, not even a casual, passing-the-time-of-day sort of word, to his or her colleagues. What protests there were, and they were mostly formulary, had been lodged the previous day when Calvert had initially mooted the idea of a climactic gathering. Not one of the five, however, had dared to counter with a categorical refusal.

To complete the slightly macabre tableau, there could just about be heard – was it from an adjacent sound set? or else from the commissary? – the raspy strains of a gramophone recording of Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’.

‘Yes,’ the novelist reiterated, ‘a sheepdog. For, in truth, there’s nothing I seem to thrive on more than rounding up a flock of – no, no, my dears, don’t be offended, I wasn’t going to say “sheep” – rounding up a flock of witnesses and herding them back onto the scene of a crime. To be honest with you, the only thing which prevents me from enjoying this present experience as I otherwise might is the fact that the victim of the particular crime I’ve come here to solve was one of my very oldest chums.

‘But now to our onions, as our friends across the Channel whimsically have it. I’m not sure whether Inspector Calvert has already told you what’s behind this little gathering of ours, but I myself am prepared to put you in the picture without any further humming or hawing. You five are here for the simple reason that we seven would appear to be the principal – indeed, the only possible – suspects in the murder of Cora Rutherford.’

Needless to say, so characteristically blunt a statement of intentions provoked an immediate outburst of protestations.

‘This is outrageous, quite outrageous!’ spluttered Leolia Drake. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in all my life!’

‘Inspector, I insist,’ asserted Gareth Knight, ‘that these farcical proceedings be brought to an end at once.’

Rex Hanway meanwhile murmured an aside to Calvert:

‘Surely not the dog-eared old cliché of the detective confronting the suspects at the scene of the crime? Inspector, I know how much faith you place in Miss Mount’s abilities, but really …’

Evadne waved a conjuror’s hand over them.

‘Calm yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, calm yourselves. All I ask is that you hear me out.

‘As you know, Cora was poisoned from drinking out of a prop glass of champagne – more accurately, a prop glass of sham champagne. She drank out of that glass because, just as the cast and crew broke for lunch, the film’s director, Rex Hanway, came up with the clever idea of adding this little piece of business to the action, a piece of business of which only eight people were aware. Mr Hanway himself, naturally, since the idea had been his. Cora, just as naturally, being the first to have been told of it. Lettice Morley, Mr Hanway’s assistant, who had to know everything he decided the instant the decision was taken. You, Mr Knight, because it was you, precisely, who were due to play the scene opposite Cora. You, Miss Drake, because you happened to be conversing with Mr Knight when Lettice informed him of the last-minute change. And Monsieur Françaix, Chief-Inspector Trubshawe and myself because we all lunched with Cora, who couldn’t resist telling us about it.

‘Nobody else, on the face of it, knew or could have known that she was about to drink from that glass, which means that nobody else knew or could have known that there existed an opportunity of lacing it with cyanide. That’s why I say, calmly and dispassionately, that you – rather, we – are the sole suspects. No matter how one looks at the case, how one turns it around in one’s mind, there can be no getting away from that bedrock fact of the matter.

‘Or can there? That was the question that nagged at me the longer I pursued my investigation. I am, as I think most of you are aware, the author of countless best-selling whodunits and what I’m about to say may of course be no more than professional deformation, an extreme consequence of the dexterity with which, over the years, I’ve had to juggle convoluted storylines, eccentric motives and ingenious last-chapter and even, on a couple of occasions, last-page twists. Yet there’s one thing I’ve always been profoundly sceptical of – being faced, as I seem to be now, with a set of suspects not one of whom is even a tiny bit more suspicious than any other.’

Whereupon, half-sliding off her stool, she attempted to scratch her bottom, a gesture which, discreet as it was, none of them failed to notice though only Trubshawe, naturally, understood.

‘It never happens like that in my own whodunits,’ she went on, awkwardly righting herself, ‘and somehow I can never bring myself to believe that it happens like that in life either.

‘There is, of course, the old chestnut of the least likely suspect. A long time ago, however, authors of mystery fiction realised that they had to move on from that primitive device. They understood that, if they were going to continue enthralling their readers, they would all have to give their plots one or two extra turns of the screw. In short, they’d have to find an escape-route out of the vicious circle that had begun to bedevil every conventional whodunit. After all, if – as tradition dictates, or used to dictate – the murderer is the least likely suspect, and if the reader is conversant with that tradition and expects it to be upheld, then the least likely suspect automatically becomes the most likely suspect and we have all, writers and readers alike, returned to square one.’

She fell silent for a few seconds to regain her breath. The voice of Vera Lynn had long vanished into the ether and the only sound still to be heard was a faint creaking in the gantry.

It was at that moment too that, though reluctant to cut in, an increasingly restless Calvert exchanged a fretful glance with Trubshawe, who in return merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to say, ‘Yes, yes, I know, but I’ve been here before and, trust me, she’ll get there in the end.’ Whether Calvert actually did thus interpret the shrug, he nevertheless chose to give the novelist a little more leeway, while Trubshawe himself, accustomed as he was to Evadne’s tendency to digress from the subject, nevertheless started to think, with scalp-scratching puzzlement, that this time she really was pushing it.

From the five suspects, meanwhile, probably relieved above all that she hadn’t yet got round to pointing an accusatory finger at any of them, there came nary a peep.

‘As I was saying,’ she went on, ‘we whodunit writers who began to feel the need to adapt to changing tastes were obliged to approach the genre from an entirely new angle.

‘Consider, for example, one of my more recent efforts, Murder Without Ease. If you’ve read it, you’ll doubtless recall that, rung up by some local Squire in the first chapter, the Somerset police discover a young Cockney tough lying dead in his orchard. It turns out that he and his accomplice had been caught red-handed that very morning, at the crack of dawn, in the act of burgling the house. The irate Squire had grabbed the nearest shotgun and, without really meaning to, killed the young Cockney tough, whose pockets were indeed found to be stuffed with wads of bank-notes removed from the wall-safe in the library. It was, however, the accomplice who had made off with the real prize, a priceless Gainsborough conversation piece.

‘As always in my books, I’m afraid, the police are content to swallow whatever dubious evidence has been dangled in front of their noses, without even troubling to give it a good sniff, and set about questioning the usual East End riffraff. As always, too, Alexis Baddeley – she’s my regular sleuth, you know – Alexis Baddeley smells a rat. So she cunningly ingratiates herself with the Squire, learns that he’s been taking a number of sea-plane trips over to Le Touquet, where he’s been losing heavily at baccarat, and ends by proving that there never was an accomplice.

‘It was the Squire himself, you see, who had already passed the allegedly stolen Gainsborough on to a fence. It was the Squire himself who had hired the Cockney tough to go through the motions of burgling the house, with the promise, naturally, of divvying up the insurance payout between the two of them. And it was the Squire himself who had shot down the hapless young rascal in cold blood while he was making his so-called “escape”.’

She scanned her silent, captive audience.

‘Now why do I tell that story?’

‘Yes, why?’ Trubshawe, if not yet at the end of his tether, then as close to the end as made no difference, couldn’t help responding.

‘I’ll tell you why,’ she boomed out to the rafters. ‘Though, in my whodunit, the police, investigating what they imagined to be a straightforward case of theft, deluded themselves that they had an adequate line-up of suspects, it was Alexis Baddeley alone who came to understand that the guilty party belonged to a whole other category of suspect – just as I’ve also come to understand must have been the case here.’

She raised her voice a notch or two higher still, even though in the empty studio it was already more than loud enough.

‘In Murder Without Ease the criminal was not simply the least likely suspect from among the seven or eight under investigation. He was, rather, somebody who, until the book’s penultimate chapter, was not even regarded as a suspect at all. And that, I submit, has been equally true of this crime. For, in reality, you five were all no more than mere pawns – either unwitting pawns or, as I believe, in one individual case what you might call a witting pawn – in the lethal game of chess which has been played out inside this studio and over which, from the very beginning, has loomed the real mastermind.

‘That said, the time has now come for me, as promised, to announce to you all the identity of that mastermind, the murderer of Cora Rutherford –’

Before she could utter another word, Lettice Morley, her coltish features livid, warped out of shape, rendered almost ugly, suddenly leapt to her feet and made a demented dash in Evadne Mount’s direction. At first, the others, suspects and detectives, could do no more than goggle at her. And she seized that moment of dazed inaction to grasp Evadne by both her shoulders at once, giving her so violent a kick in the small of her back that it sent her sprawling over the wire-entangled studio floor.

A split-second later, the young assistant jerking her own body backward as swiftly as the elderly novelist’s had been propelled forward, a gigantic arc-light came plummeting down from the gantry. Hitting the ground with a window-rattling crash, practically at their feet, completely crushing the stool on which the novelist had been delivering her tirade, it exploded into a thousand glinting fragments.

For a few moments nobody moved. Then, slowly picking herself up, agitatedly dusting slivers of glass and metal off her clothing, too shocked at first to react, too winded to speak, Evadne stared with disbelief at the smouldering debris.

‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ she croaked. ‘That was meant for me!’

She turned to face Lettice Morley. Resembling nothing so much as a half-naked infant who has just scampered out of the freezing ocean and waits to be enveloped by her mother in a thick warm towel, the latter stood pale and shivering in front of her.

‘Lettice! My dear, dear girl, you saved my life!’

Without responding, Lettice pointed shakily at the gantry.

‘Look! Oh my God, look!’

Gazing up, they were all confronted by a hair-raising spectacle. With a velvet fedora pulled down low over the forehead, a creature enveloped in a long black cape, a cape so voluminous it was impossible not merely to know who the creature was but to which gender it belonged, was attempting, with the coiled tensity of a trapped wild beast, to forge a path across the intricate web of cables and planks.

‘There’s your murderer, Inspector!’ cried Evadne.

‘Get going!’ Calvert immediately shouted at his men. ‘Now, now, now! Make sure all the doors are locked! This is one villain who won’t slip through our fingers!’

And the four uniformed policemen were just about to carry out his orders when a chilling sound arrested them all at once, just as it arrested everybody else on the set.

It was a scream. A scream the like of which none of them had ever heard in their lives. An androgynous scream, paradoxically both basso and falsetto.

The individual in the black cape had caught one foot in the narrow gap between two iron girders – struggled to prise it loose – tugged at it – tugged at it again and again, more and more frantically – then gave it one last desperate tug, a tug that did finally release the foot but also caused the creature itself, for one agonising instant, to careen helplessly above their raised heads – until, arms outstretched like a pair of giant bat-wings, it toppled over altogether and, with a second and even more nightmarish scream, came plunging down towards them.

Everybody scrambled out of its way as it hit the cement floor with a bone-crunching splatter.

Lettice Morley screamed, Philippe Françaix blanched, Leolia Drake all but swooned into Gareth Knight’s arms.

Seconds later, Calvert and Trubshawe together approached the silent, shapeless mass; but seeing Calvert momentarily hesitate, it was Trubshawe alone who knelt down in front of it. Bracing himself, he gently turned the body face upward. Even he, however, no stranger to the horrors routinely encountered in a policeman’s round, couldn’t help recoiling from the sight that met his eyes.

The face that he looked upon had been pulped to a bony, bloody mash by the impact of such a landing from such a height. Yet there could be no doubt at all as to whom that face had once belonged.