A Mysterious Affair of Style

Chapter Sixteen

‘Alastair Farjeon?!’ exclaimed Trubshawe. ‘Now how, Evie, how in the name of all that’s holy did you know that Farjeon was the murderer? Or even that he was alive?’

Cora Rutherford’s funeral had taken place that morning in Highgate Cemetery. Graced by the presence of several of the same stage and screen luminaries who had attended the Theatre Royal Charity Show with which the whole case had started, as well as by all four of Cora’s ex-husbands, not excluding the Count who didn’t count, it was a lavishly solemn affair, of which, dead and buried as she was, the actress herself remained somehow the life and soul. Under her veil Evadne shed copious tears, while even Trubshawe had to remove the odd cinder from his eye.

And so the novelist and the policeman had come full circle, back again at the Ivy, if now in the company of Lettice Morley, Philippe Françaix and young Tom Calvert. Rumour of Evadne Mount’s triumph had already spread through London’s Theatreland and she herself, on their arrival at the restaurant, had further contributed to the attention their party received by plucking her tricorne hat from her head and sending it spinning across the room straight onto one of the curlicued hooks of a tall oak-wood hat-rack. (It was a trick she had tirelessly practised at home many years before and, if she’d been challenged to perform any other such trick with the same hat, she would have been incapable of complying. In this she resembled the kind of prankster who, totally ignorant of pianism, has nevertheless mastered by rote a single Chopin Nocturne.)

Instead of answering Trubshawe’s question, Evadne said only:

‘First, I’d like to propose a toast.’

She raised her glass of champagne.

‘To Cora.’

Then, after everyone had echoed her, the Chief-Inspector turned to the friendly nemesis who had once more outsmarted him.

‘We’re all waiting, Evie,’ he said. ‘Just how did you arrive at the correct solution?’

‘Well …’ the novelist hesitated, ‘where should I begin?’

‘At the beginning?’ Lettice pointedly suggested.

‘The beginning?’ she mused. ‘Yes, my dear, that usually is the most sensible place. But it begs the question – where does our story begin?

‘The problem with this crime is that, unlike the one at ffolkes Manor, where there was, or appeared to be, a plethora of suspects and motives, here, for the very longest while, there were neither. It was only when Eustace and I took a few steps backward in time that we finally took our first significant step forward, if you take my meaning. It was only at that point that the case began to make any real sense.

‘It’s a problem that dogs numerous whodunits,’ she continued, oblivious of her listeners’ wistful hope that, for once, she might elect to stick to the business at hand, ‘even, I confess, a few of my own. In real life, the seed of virtually every serious crime, not only murder, is sown long before the performance of the act itself. Yet it’s one of the cast-iron rules of the whodunit, a crucial clause in the contract between writer and reader, that a murder be perpetrated, or at the least attempted, within the first twenty or thirty pages of the book. To leave it to the halfway mark would be a serious test of the reader’s patience. In fact, were this one of my own whodunits, my readers would probably have wondered, around the hundredth page, if there was ever going to be a murder committed to justify the illustration on the book’s cover.

‘Moreover,’ she added, ‘I myself would never dream of making the victim the detective’s best friend and confidante, someone with whom the reader is likely to have identified, as you critics put it.’

She turned to Philippe Françaix.

‘It would be like casting a major star in a picture and having her killed off in the first half-hour of the narrative. Not done, simply not done. That’s one challenge not even Farjeon would ever have dared to set himself.

‘But enough of generalities. Let’s turn to Cora’s murder itself. If we assume, as we all initially did, that it represented the beginning of our story, then it was a totally meaningless crime. Even though five of those present on the film set – Rex Hanway, Leolia Drake, Gareth Knight, you, Lettice, of course, and you too, Monsieur Françaix – had the opportunity of slipping poison into her champagne glass, not one of them, not one of you, had anything which bore the remotest resemblance to a motive.

‘No, it was soon obvious to me – and to Eustace, too,’ she hastily added, ‘that Cora had, if I may put it so, entered in the middle of the real crime, just as we all enter a picture palace in the middle of the picture.

‘It was, in fact, Eustace who first had the idea that there might exist a link between Cora’s death and Farjeon’s. He went even further, proposing that Cora was the wrong victim. In other words, if one chose to regard Farjeon’s death as having not, after all, been the tragic accident everyone had always presumed it to have been, then clearly each of the same five suspects I’ve already mentioned had a much stronger motive for murdering him rather than her.

‘Hanway, because he almost certainly knew that, once Farjeon was out of the way, he would be given the chance to take over the new picture himself. Leolia, because she was Hanway’s mistress and had been promised the leading role in any film he would direct. Knight, because, as he told us himself, Farjeon was more or less blackmailing him over his unfortunate encounter with’ – she couldn’t resist shooting a mischievous glance at Calvert – ‘an attractive young bobby. You, Lettice, because Farjeon had tried to rape you. And you, Philippe – may I call you Philippe, by the way? Given all that we’ve been through together.’

‘But yes,’ replied the critic with Gallic gallantry. ‘I would be most ’onoured.’

‘Thank you. I continue. You, Philippe, because Farjeon had coolly lifted your plot for If Ever They Find Me Dead.’

She wetted her lips with another sip of champagne.

‘Simple as ABC, or so it seemed. Except that, as poor Eustace was soon to discover, every one of these suspects had an alibi for the time of Farjeon’s supposed murder.

‘And there you have the fundamental paradox of the case. The same five people who had an opportunity to kill Cora, but no motive, all had a motive for killing Farjeon, but no opportunity. So that led us strictly nowhere.

‘Yet, misguided as it was, Eustace’s ingenious insight did at least serve one useful purpose.’

‘Well, thank you for that, Evie,’ the Chief-Inspector neatly intercepted.

‘It pointed me in what would ultimately turn out to be the right direction. For it made me realise that the beginning of this story had, as I say, occurred a long time before Cora’s murder.

‘As we pursued our investigation, the name which kept coming back to us was Alastair Farjeon. It was around him that everything seemed to revolve. Even more curiously, the case actually began to resemble one of his own films – especially for Eustace and me. It so happened that it was on the very night of my hoax whodunit at the Haymarket that I had the disagreeable task of breaking the news of his death to Cora – a perfect example of the “twist beginning” for which Farjeon himself had always had a penchant.

‘Alastair Farjeon …’ she murmured. ‘That name, a name we barely knew before Cora spoke to us about him, would end by seeping into every vacant pocket of our lives. “Farje this”, “Farje that”, “Farje the other” – that’s all we ever seemed to hear when we set about questioning our five suspects. As Eustace pointed out to me, they all had much more to tell us about Farjeon than about Cora, notwithstanding the fact that it was Cora, not Farjeon, whom they were suspected of having murdered.

‘I felt increasingly that, if I hoped to get to the bottom of Cora’s murder, it would be necessary for me to understand the psychology of this individual whom I had never met but whose name kept popping up with such astonishing regularity in our investigations. Yet, familiar as I couldn’t help becoming, if only posthumously, with the man – with his obesity, his arrogance, his overweening vanity – there was one side to him of which I remained woefully ignorant. I had seen practically none of his films.

‘Why did that fact strike me as so important? Well, as I know better than most, there exists no more powerful truth serum than fiction. Though novelists – and, I am certain, film directors as well – may believe that everything in their work is a pure product of their imagination, the truth, the truth about their own psyches, their own inner demons, has an insidious way of infiltrating itself into that work’s textures and trappings, just as water will always find the narrowest crack in the floorboards, the tiniest of fractures, by which it can then drip down into the flat underneath.’

She herself was now thoroughly enjoying, positively basking in, her discourse. And so resonant was her voice that, even if she imagined she was communicating exclusively to her lunch companions, a number of diners at adjacent tables could already be observed, knives, forks and spoons arrested in mid-mouthful, eavesdropping on her every word. Soon the whole of the Ivy, waiters and kitchen staff included, would be following, point by point, the broad lines of her reasoning.

‘So,’ she went on, nobody caring or daring to interrupt her, ‘when Philippe told me that the Academy Cinema had organised an all-night screening of Farjeon’s films, I forthwith hot-footed it to Oxford Street with him and watched as many of them as I was capable of staying awake for.’

‘And what conclusions did you draw?’ enquired Tom Calvert.

‘It was, I must tell you, an extremely illuminating experience. Superficially, each of Farjeon’s films may seem to resemble lots of others of the same ilk. Yet detectable in all of them, like a watermark on a banknote, is what I can only describe as a self-portrait of their creator.

‘And what an inventive, what an audacious creator he was! In An American in Plaster-of-Paris, for example, there is one terrifically flesh-creeping scene in which the hero, a young Yank who has been confined to a wheelchair, starts to wonder what his sinister upstairs neighbour might be up to. Well, what Farjeon does is have the plaster ceiling of the Yank’s flat become suddenly transparent, as though it were an enormous pane of glass, so that we in the audience can actually see what he suspects his neighbour is doing.

‘Or How the Other Half Dies, which, according to Philippe, is regarded as one of his most brilliant thrillers. I watched only one of them, but did you know that he actually filmed three separate versions of the same story? I say “separate”. In reality, the three films are all identical save for the last ten minutes, at which point a totally different suspect turns out to be the murderer. And each of the three solutions makes just as much sense as the other two!

‘There’s a marvellous scene, too, in his espionage thriller Remains to be Seen, a scene that contrives to be both gruesome and funny, like a lot of his work, when I come to think of it. A half-dozen archaeologists are posing for a group photograph at the site which they’re about to excavate and the photographer requests them all to say “cheese”, or whatever its Egyptian equivalent might be, just before darting under – you know – that black cloak thingie draped over the tripod. And there they all stand – smiling – and smiling – and smiling – until, but only after three or four minutes, which is, I can tell you, an excruciatingly long time to wait, not just for the archaeologists on the screen but for the audience in the cinema, until the camera – tripod, cloak and all – topples over in front of them and they discover that the photographer, dead as the proverbial doornail, has a dagger stuck between his shoulder-blades!’

Whereupon she herself speared a crab-cake, deftly sliced it into four equal quarters, forked one quarter into her mouth, chewed on it for a few seconds, washed it down with champagne, swallowed hard and was ready to continue.

‘After watching several of Farjeon’s pictures back-to-back, I began to have an even more vivid image of the man than we had been vouchsafed by all the interviews we conducted with those who might possibly have had a motive for doing away with him. What I saw, above all, was the pleasure he took in devising ever more extreme methods of killing off his characters, methods which were almost like practical jokes, cruel, callous pranks. His brain seemed to be galvanised by evil – only then was he truly inspired. When it came to scenes of violence, murder, even torture, the scenes which were his stock-in-trade, there was absolutely no one to beat him.’

‘Ah, but you have reason to say what you say, Madame!’ Françaix excitedly broke in, like an actor who has just received his cue. ‘It is what I call in my book “the Farjeoni-an touch”. His camera, it is like a pen, no? Like – how we say? – a stylo?’

‘A stylo?’ Evadne dubiously repeated the word, with a frown of distaste for foreign phraseology. ‘Well, perhaps. Though that’s a bit – how we say? – far-fetched, is it not?’

‘But see you, Mademoiselle,’ said Françaix, shaking his head, not for the first time, at the intellectual conservatism of the English, ‘all the best ideas must be fetched from afar.’

‘In any event,’ she went on, averse as ever to interruptions when in full flight, ‘following my session at the Academy, I asked Tom here to arrange for us to be screened some rushes, as they call them, from If Ever They Find Me Dead. Rushes which were, as it handily turned out, of the scene in which the heroine’s young female friend is murdered on the doorstep of her Belgravia flat.’

‘I have to confess, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, ‘that that’s when you had me really confused. You were watching the scene not just with your eyes but with your whole body, and I simply couldn’t understand why. Cora, after all, had been poisoned on a crowded film set, while the woman in the picture was stabbed in a deserted street. I spent the whole night racking my brains to grasp what connection you were trying to draw between the two crimes. Now perhaps you’ll explain.’

‘There’s nothing to explain,’ said Evadne calmly. ‘I was drawing no connection whatever.’

‘But you were studying the murder so closely, so intently, as though it had just given you a clue to Cora’s.’

‘Nothing of the kind. I wasn’t studying the murder at all. I wasn’t looking at the murder. The murder was irrelevant.’

‘You weren’t looking at the murder?’ cried Trubshawe, his brow furrowing perplexedly. ‘What in heaven’s name were you looking at?’

‘I was looking at the camera,’ came the unexpected reply.

‘The camera? What camera? There was no camera.’

‘No camera? Eustace dear, what are you talking about?’ she answered, with a queer little titter.

‘How can you possibly say,’ she went on as patiently as though addressing an infant, ‘that there was no camera when the picture wouldn’t have existed in the first place without one?’

‘Oh, as to that,’ the policeman grudgingly conceded, ‘I’ll grant you. But, well, it’s not up there on the screen. It – dash it all, it’s what the pictures on the screen come out of. So, by definition, it’s not something you can see.’

‘Not literally, to be sure. If you learn to look at films the way I’ve just been doing, though, you’ll certainly start to see the presence of the camera. It’s not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. After finishing a hundred-piece puzzle, one can’t help but briefly see the world too, all curvily, squirmily snippeted, as a gigantic jigsaw. Well, after watching a handful of Farjeon’s films, I couldn’t help seeing the world exactly the way he saw it.

‘So perhaps you were right after all, Philippe. Perhaps it is appropriate to compare a film camera to a pen.’

While listening to her, the Frenchman had drawn out his own fountain pen and now frantically scribbled some cryptic notes on the linen tablecloth.

‘You mean,’ he said, his always moot fluency in English starting to desert him, ‘ze director of a film is a kind of – how you say? – autoor? Like ze autoor of a book?’

‘The author of a book? Ye-es, I suppose you could put it like that,’ was the novelist’s guarded response, ‘though it does sound more convincing when you say it, Philippe, French as you are. But yes, indeed, the director – or, rather, this one director, the late Alastair Farjeon, both lamented and unlamented – was indeed ze autoor of his films.

‘Exactly like one of your villains, Eustace, Farjeon always had recourse to the same methods, always displayed the same little tics and tropes, quirks and quiddities, whatever the subject-matter. Which is why I wasn’t at all particular as to the nature and content of the rushes we were to have screened to us. And why, when I watched that one scene from If Ever They Find Me Dead, what I saw – what, I assure you, I simply couldn’t help seeing – in fact, I’d go so far as to state that it was all I saw – was not the murder itself – frankly, I doubt that I could any longer offer you a detailed description of how it was committed and I am, of course, celebrated for my powers of observation – not the murder itself, I repeat, but the style in which it was filmed.

‘Consider, for example, the manner in which the camera follows the young woman along the lonely dark street. True, it’s the sort of thing we’ve all seen in lots of other thrillers, except that here, subtly, almost imperceptibly, the pacing of the scene begins to change as we hear the second set of footsteps and we understand with a deliciously queasy sensation that the street is suddenly no longer quite as lonely as it was, no longer quite so reassuringly deserted. The camera, a camera as fluid and flexible as a human eye, is, before our own eyes, actually, gradually, ever so artfully, turning into the murderer. So that when, for the first time, the woman looks round nervously, we realise with an inward groan – and indeed, speaking for myself, with an outward groan – that it’s not just the camera lens she’s looking into but her future murderer’s face. It’s as though she recognises the camera, as though, ultimately, it’s the camera itself that murders her.

‘It was at that instant that I knew there was only one man in the world who could have directed that specific scene in that specific style – whether or not he himself had actually been on the film set when it was being shot, whether or not he himself had actually had any direct contact with the actors or the cameraman – I say again, there was only one man in the world who could have done it, and that man was Alastair Farjeon.’

‘Meaning …?’ said Tom Calvert, speaking in a voice that was to a whisper what a whisper is to a shout.

‘Meaning that Farjeon was alive. He had not perished in the fire at Cookham and he had certainly not been murdered. I’m sorry, Eustace, yours was a nice, neat theory – a nice, neat theory in theory – but I’m afraid it simply didn’t stand up. Alastair Farjeon, not Rex Hanway, was the man who directed If Ever They Find Me Dead. Just as Farjeon was a murderer, not the victim of a murder. It was he who killed Patsy Sloots, just as it was he who later killed Cora – by proxy, as we shall see – and yesterday afternoon tried to kill me.’

Tom Calvert was the first to speak.

‘My dear Miss Mount,’ he said, ‘I really must congratulate you!’

‘Thank you so much, young man,’ replied the novelist with a smile. ‘But do call me Evie.’

‘Evie. But, tell me, you who know everything, did you never entertain the possibility that Hanway had simply imitated Farjeon’s style?’

‘Never. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my thirty years as a much-acclaimed author, it’s that the style of an artist, an authentic artist, can never be successfully imitated by someone else. Never, never, never. Many have tried, all have failed.’

‘Then who really did die in that villa in Cookham – along with Miss Sloots, I mean?’

‘Oh, once I’d guessed that Farjeon was still alive, it was child’s play working out how he’d managed to fake his own death.’

‘Since none of us is a child,’ muttered Trubshawe, ‘you’re still going to have to spell it out.’

‘It was one of his doubles, of course.’

‘His doubles?’ queried Calvert. ‘What doubles?’

‘The very first thing Cora told Eustace and myself about Farjeon was that the man’s ego was such, he invariably introduced into the storylines of his films a scene in which a double – I mean someone, an extra, who looked exactly like him – would make a brief cameo appearance. It became such a trademark conceit, conceit in both senses of the word, that his fans would actually start looking out for it.

‘Doubles … Extras … I couldn’t get those two words out of my head. I became so intrigued by the notion that there might have been a double Farjeon, an extra Farjeon, that I immediately determined to find out what I could about these stand-ins of his.

‘It was from Lettice that I obtained the West End address of an agency which specialised in the hiring of film extras and, in the hope of learning whether any of those who had ever played Farjeon’s doubles had lately gone AWOL, I trooped along to an insalubrious back street in Soho, one of those corkscrewy little cul-de-sacs whose houses seem to be leaning out of their own windows.

‘Well, what do you know, it actually did transpire that a certain Mavis Harker, wife or ex-wife of Billy Harker, I never quite gathered which, had recently been nagging the agency for news of her husband. Not that she was pining for the poor chump, exactly, but she admitted to being on her uppers and in dire need of an influx of ready cash.

‘Billy, it seems, had launched his career in the show business as a music-hall juggler. Then, before seriously putting on weight, he reinvented himself as the Great Kardomah, an Arab tumbler, whatever that is. Then, when the onset of the War led to the closure of most of the theatres on the variety-hall circuit, like many of his type he started to eke out a precarious living as a film extra. And it was then, to the teeth-gnashing chagrin of Mrs Harker, that he vanished off the face of the earth.

‘The agency had a photograph of him in its files, a photograph they allowed me to take a peek at. I knew in advance, of course, pretty much what to expect. Still, when I found myself face to face with the chubby jowls, the pouty little mouth and the triple-layered chin of you know who, you could have knocked me down even without the proverbial feather. Harker was the spitting image of Farjeon, whose stand-in he’d been in The Perfect Criminal and Remains to Be Seen and who, I was informed, had been hoping for a repeat engagement in If Ever They Find Me Dead.’

‘So,’ asked Lettice, ‘what do you believe happened at Cookham?’

‘We’ll know the whole truth only when Mrs Farjeon, who, as I shall demonstrate, was party to the scheme, is questioned at the Yard. But I imagine it went, as cocktail-bar pianists say, something like this:

‘Alastair Farjeon, prominent film-maker and notorious womaniser, spots Patsy Sloots in the chorus line of the latest Crazy Gang revue and decides to cast her in his forthcoming film. Naturally, young Patsy, a newcomer to the business, is in seventh heaven at having been selected to play the lead in a major picture by one of the most esteemed directors in the world. It’s literally the chance of a lifetime and she is – this, certainly, must have been Farjeon’s own presumption – supremely grateful for having had it offered to her. Intending to capitalise on that gratitude, the great director then invites the gossamer wee thing down to his Cookham villa for a dirty weekend.

‘We can’t any longer know exactly what occurred there, but I think it safe to suppose that he dusts down the casting couch, plies her with expensive food and wine and eventually makes his move, only to discover that his protégée’s gratitude stops well short of – well, I don’t have to draw you a picture, do I? He consequently works himself up into a rage, a struggle ensues and whether by accident or design – that’s another part of the story which may never see the light of day – Patsy is killed.

‘Aghast at what he’s done, his future in ruins, prison staring him in the face, Farjeon at once telephones his wife, who as usual drops everything and comes running.

‘The truth, as I see it, is that, whatever his brilliance as a film director, Farjeon had as much experience of life, of real life, as a precocious three-year-old. Right into adulthood he remained very much the child he must once literally have been, the vile kind of tot who enjoys pulling the wings off insects. And, like any child, good or bad, whenever he got himself into a scrape he instantly cried out for his mummy – or rather, his wifie, which in his case amounted to much the same thing. As for Hattie, she was, I would deduce, fairly relaxed about his roving eye because she remained confident that it posed no long-term risk to their marriage; also because, in any case, Farjeon usually came a cropper on account of his taste for women half his age and a quarter of his weight. It’s true, she would turn up every day on the set to keep him relentlessly focused on the work at hand, but they were a couple, as they both knew, roped together for the duration.

‘So, panic-stricken, he rings her up, she catches the first train down to Cookham and together they contemplate the wreckage of his glittering reputation. Now – I’m speculating, you understand, but it does all appear to fit together – I couldn’t say which of the two came up with the idea – most likely Farjeon himself, since he’d spent his entire career, after all, devising murder scenes, so who would be better qualified? – let’s say Farjeon came up with the bright idea of setting the villa alight in order to conceal the evidence of Patsy’s murder.

‘But, and it was a beggar of a “but”, given Farjeon’s caddish willingness to be photographed with his latest paramour, it must have been common knowledge on the grapevine that he’d invited Patsy down for the weekend. Thus there could be no question of hers being the only body discovered in the fire. The police – the gutter press, too – would instantly, and of course justifiably, smell a rat. And here, I suspect, it was dear, sweet, calculating Hattie who, seizing a Heaven-sent – or Hell-sent – opportunity of henceforth keeping her chubby hubby all to herself, putting an end once and for all to those adulterous dalliances of his, succeeded in persuading him that he too would have to “die” in the conflagration.’

‘It’s true he was in one unholy mess,’ put in Trubshawe, ‘but that does seem a pretty drastic solution.’

‘Ah, but don’t forget, if the scandal had broken, his career would have been at an end anyway and he might even have ended on the gallows. He couldn’t have survived it – which is doubtless why he decided that he literally wouldn’t survive it. So he telephones Billy Harker. Why Harker? Because, of all those whom he regularly used as his doubles, Harker had separated from his wife, lived on his own in a furnished bedsit somewhere in the East End and badly needed a pay packet. When Farjeon (as I surmise) tells Harker he wanted to discuss the “double scene” in his new picture, even proposing that he pack an overnight bag and come straight down to Cookham, poor Billy must have thought his luck had finally turned. Not just a job, one sufficiently well paid to expunge a few of his more pressing debts, but an invitation to stay with the Master. You can visualise, I’m sure, the alacrity with which he would have accepted the invitation.’

‘How do you suppose he was done away with?’ asked Tom Calvert.

‘Well, I really couldn’t say,’ she replied meditatively. ‘Probably something that wouldn’t show, just in case the flames failed to erase the evidence as cleanly and definitively as they hoped. Poison, I should opine. Or, if no poison was to be had, then strangulation. We’ll know the correct answer only when Old Ma Farjeon confesses all, as I’m positive she will.’

‘Evie,’ said Trubshawe, ‘you’ve been your usual super-efficient self, I’ll grant you that. I’m hanged, though, if I can understand how, as you say, Alastair Farjeon actually “directed” the film. In practical terms, I mean.’

‘Well now,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘let us agree, shall we, that Farjeon felt obliged to accept his wife’s argument that he had to “die” in the fire along with Patsy. I imagine, however, that he’d be loathe to let the new film also go up in smoke because of that “death”. If nothing else, there would have been a financial imperative for ensuring that it go ahead nevertheless. So he and Hattie decided to concoct a bogus document stating that, if anything were to happen to him, Rex Hanway was to direct If Ever They Find Me Dead in his place.’

‘This Hanway,’ said Françaix, ‘you are saying he also was part of the plan?’

‘Absolutely. He immediately agreed to become what our detective friends here would call an accessory after the fact. Let’s not forget that Hanway was so fiercely ambitious that no legalistic scruples were going to prevent him from taking over the picture. He had waited years for such a chance and he wasn’t about to let Patsy Sloots’ death, which Farjeon in any case probably convinced him was an accident, snatch it from his greedy little paws.

‘But now,’ she said, ‘there arose an unexpected snag. Hattie continued to turn up on the set every single day, just as though Farjeon himself were directing the picture, to keep an eye not only on her husband’s financial interests, as Cora conjectured, but also on his artistic interests. She was his spy, his mole, whose job it was to bring him back daily reports on Hanway’s work. But that was precisely the problem. Hanway’s work was duff. Farjeon’s script was followed to the letter, but what he himself had forgotten was that most of his best ideas, certainly the most original ones, had always come to him at the last minute, generally once he was on the set. And Hanway just didn’t have it. He may have been a competent craftsman, but he didn’t possess an ounce of his mentor’s genius. There came a point – you remember, Eustace, what Cora told us? – there came a point when it was touch-and-go whether the production would actually proceed.

‘For Farjeon that wouldn’t do at all. He was a vain, arrogant narcissist who couldn’t accept, who wouldn’t accept, that he might be denied the chance of once more flaunting his brilliance to a suitably awe-struck world, even if only by proxy. Already, just as he himself had been about to start shooting the film, a stupid mishap – which is no doubt how he rationalised Patsy’s passing – had prevented it from going ahead. To have his cherished project aborted a second time, because of another man’s incompetence, no, no, that would have been intolerable to somebody of his type.

‘So this film-maker, this artist, this genius, who had taken on one outlandish challenge after another – having one of his protagonists go to bed in Clerkenwell and wake up in the Rocky Mountains, having another confined to a wheelchair throughout the entire picture, setting yet another of his pictures inside a cramped lift – decided that he would accept the supreme challenge. Like the lovers who kissed each other through a little girl in the one scene of If Ever They Find Me Dead which Eustace and I watched being shot, he would direct the film through somebody else.

‘And so it was that, all of a sudden, Hanway miraculously found his creative feet. Nobody could understand how, like Farjeon before him, he began to have these wonderful ideas right there on the set – ideas worthy, for a reason you will now all understand, of Alastair Farjeon himself.

‘The modus operandi was actually, unwittingly, revealed to us by Hanway in Levey’s office the day after Cora’s murder. You recall that, when I asked him to explain how he’d abruptly regained his confidence on the set, his reply was that he no longer asked himself what Farje would have done. He was being more honest than we knew. If he no longer had to ask himself what Farje would have done, it was because Farje, precisely, was now telling him what to do! Farjeon, in fact, was using Hattie as a secret conduit to Hanway of all the last-minute ideas and eleventh-hour changes which had always made his films so unique.’

‘Why didn’t he just telephone Hanway?’ asked Lettice.

‘Too risky. His voice, that plummy, lugubrious voice of his, would certainly have been recognised by the studio’s telephonist, who had doubtless heard it many times before. No, it was safer by far if Hattie were discreetly to take her “late” husband’s detailed notes to Hanway’s office where, once he had read them, they would instantly be destroyed. Which they were, save for this one singed scrap of paper that I rescued from his waste-basket.’

So saying, she dipped her two hands into her handbag, located the memo and ironed it out on the table before them. ‘Though I realised, naturally, that it could have been any one of a thousand-and-one memos unrelated to the case, what I found especially suggestive was the fact that it had been set alight as well as torn into strips. Patently, it was a piece of paper whose recipient wanted nobody else to read and, thinking about why that should be so, I began to wonder, for the first time, whether this so-called wunderkind might not after all be little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy.

‘As you see, since most of the paper has been burnt, all we have left to work on are these twelve surviving letters: SS ON THE RIGHT. And Eustace, ever on the qui vive, at once came up with the theory that “SS” might somehow be related to Benjamin Levey’s eleventh-hour flight from Nazi Germany.’

‘Oh, come now, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, flushing, ‘you know quite well I was only joking.’

‘I, on the other hand,’ she continued, ‘and despite my reputation as an incorrigible romancer, immediately let my mind run along more practical lines. Unearthing my old rhyming dictionary, I inspected a column of words ending in “ss” until I came to a pensive halt at “kiss”. Why? Because it at once reminded me of the scene from If Ever They Find Me Dead that I mentioned just a few minutes ago, the one in which Gareth Knight and Leolia Drake simultaneously kissed a little girl’s left and right cheeks.

‘Now just think of it. Couldn’t SS ON THE RIGHT once have been part of a sentence that read in toto: DRAKE GIVES HER A KISS ON THE RIGHT CHEEK, KNIGHT ON THE LEFT?’

They all stared at her. The world, which three-quarters of an hour ago had been upside-down, had now slowly revolved until it was once more positioned the right way up.

‘’Pon my word!’ grunted Trubshawe.

‘Good grief,’ cried Lettice, ‘you’re the cat’s pyjamas all right!’

‘What an imbecile that I am!’ Françaix effused. ‘Why, it leaps to the eye! It is pure Farjeon!’

‘My dear Evie,’ said Calvert admiringly, ‘in the Middle Ages you would have been burnt as a witch.’

‘Thank you, Tom. So kind.’

‘There is, though, one crucial question you still haven’t answered.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Why did Farjeon kill Cora Rutherford? Or, as you seemed to imply a moment ago, why did he have her killed?’

Up to this point, the novelist had been so intoxicated by her own powers of ratiocination she had almost forgotten that at the heart of the case, after all, was the murder of a very dear old friend.

‘Ah yes,’ she said sadly. ‘Cora, poor Cora … I’m afraid she must have thought she was being awfully cunning. The Achilles’ heel of so many cunning people, though, is that they tend blithely to ignore the fact that others can also be cunning, even more than they are themselves.

‘As Eustace will confirm, she announced to us one day that her role in the film, a minor one to start with, had unexpectedly got much larger and juicier. It had been mysteriously “bumped up”, as she put it. To know the whole truth we’ll again have to wait for Hattie Farjeon’s confession, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that Cora, who never lost the atrocious habit of barging into her acquaintances’ private affairs, had gone to have a word with Hanway, had found his office unoccupied, had started nosing about, as was her natural wont, and had eventually laid her hands on one of Farjeon’s memos.

‘She instantly recognised his handwriting, handwriting that she would have known, even in block capitals, from all those brutal rejections she’d received from him before he consented to give her the part. And, just as instantly realising the most significant implication of the text itself, she understood that what she held in her hands was a major bargaining chip.’

‘So in that at least I was right,’ crowed Trubshawe. ‘What you’re saying is that she blackmailed Hanway?’

‘Oh,’ replied Evadne Mount evasively, ‘blackmail is such an ugly word, don’t you think?’

‘Not half as ugly as the crime itself.’

Declining to be drawn, she continued:

‘Let’s just say that she put it to Hanway that there seemed no good reason why she shouldn’t take such a damning piece of evidence to the police. Let’s also say that Hanway, thinking on his feet, actually did come up with the one good reason for which she herself was angling. And let’s end by saying that, if he were indeed to have proposed that her part in the picture be fleshed out, or bumped up, I fear that Cora, desperate as she was for a comeback, would simply not have been able to resist making a pact with the Devil.

‘What she did was wrong, terribly wrong, and God knows she paid for it. But she was my oldest friend, and I’ve always stood by my friends, and I’m not about to desert her now, even though she’s dead.’

‘Bravo, Evie,’ said Tom Calvert.

‘Thank you, Tom,’ she replied. Then, in a voice that was becoming a trifle hoarse, so unduly long and wordy, even for her, had been her monologue, she went on:

‘Yes, poor old Cora, it just didn’t dawn on her that she had set herself against an individual as evil as any of the characters in his films. And she never was what anybody would call the soul of discretion. Farjeon and Hanway knew that they couldn’t trust her. Excactly as a blackmailer will always come back for more, what was to stop her – I can almost hear them ask themselves – demanding a leading role in Hanway’s second picture? And his third? And his fourth? No, no, no, she had to be silenced at once.

‘The murder method almost certainly emerged from Farjeon’s own diseased brain. Having already fed his protégé several last-minute alterations to the script, he must have calculated that the introduction of this new idea of his – Cora drinking from the half-filled champagne glass – would arouse no suspicion whatever on the set. Hanway would be garlanded with praise and Cora would meanwhile have been disposed of.

‘As for who actually did the dirty by filching poison from the laboratory and spiking the lemonade, well, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that it was Hattie, our Madonna of the knitting-needles, to whom no one ever paid too much attention.’

‘Evie,’ said Trubshawe after a moment of silence, ‘you are unquestionably right in all these suppositions of yours, but yesterday you were nearly murdered yourself, which would have been devastating for us all. Me more than anyone,’ he couldn’t prevent himself adding.

‘Why, Eustace, I’d begun to wonder if you really cared.’

‘None of that, none of that!’ he riposted gruffly. ‘You know what I mean – and what I don’t mean. But, damn it all, why didn’t you share your suspicions with the rest of us, instead of exposing yourself alone to the risk?’

‘Don’t you see, my dear, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Everything I knew, or thought I knew, was a mere hypothesis, a house of cards which wouldn’t for a second have stood up in a court of law. It was all based on a single fact – at least, I regarded it as a fact, though no one else did – the fact, as I say, that Farjeon was still alive. A fact, however, which I absolutely could not prove.

‘Can you imagine me at the Old Bailey, requesting the judge to screen the murder sequence from If Ever You Find Me Dead, then pleading with him, “M’Lud, I submit that the visual style of the scene we have all just watched constitutes conclusive proof not only that Alastair Farjeon did not die in the fire which destroyed his villa but also that he was responsible for the deaths of Patsy Sloots, Billy Harker and Cora Rutherford”? ‘Pshaw! I’d be thrown out of court on my rear end!

‘No, I had to produce the only evidence which would prove me right – Alastair Farjeon himself. I had to flush him out, and the only way I could do that was to set myself up as a decoy. Which is why I insisted that everybody be present on the set for yesterday afternoon’s session, even the one suspect, Rex Hanway, whom I’d already guessed had been an accomplice. Why, too, I promised to reveal the murderer’s identity. I had to be certain that everybody would be there so that, if anybody was going to try and prevent me from making my announcement, it could only be Farjeon himself. And, if I was confident that he would try to stop me, it was because he had, after all, the perfect alibi. He was dead!’

‘I’ll be for ever in your debt, Evie,’ said Calvert, adding, ‘Yours too, of course, Mr Trubshawe.’

‘Oh, me,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Don’t feel you have to thank me. As usual, I was just Inspector Plodder, the hapless butt of all the amateur sleuth’s jokes.’

‘Please, no false modesty. You two formed a great team. And, talking of teams, I gather from Evie here that I’ll be offering you congratulations of a very different order before not too much time has passed, eh, Eustace?’

‘Tush tush!’ growled the Chief-Inspector. ‘You’re getting a touch too big for your breeches.’

‘In any case, my dear,’ Evadne piped up, ‘you may or may not be relieved to know that you’re going to have a breathing space before we eventually tie the knot.’

‘Oh, and why would that be?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘I’ve got to write my new whodunit first.’

‘You’re going to write a new whodunit?’ asked Lettice.

‘I most certainly am. It will be dedicated to Cora’s memory, not’ – she glanced meaningfully in her future husband’s direction – ‘repeat not, to Agatha Christie.’

‘But that’s terribly exciting news, Evie. Dare one ask what it’s about?’

‘Why, what do you suppose?’ she replied as though the answer were obvious. ‘The story we’ve all just lived through. We authors are a thrifty race, you know. We never waste anything, never throw anything away.’

‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ cried an incredulous Trubshawe. ‘You mean you’re planning to write about Cora and Farjeon and Hattie and the rest of them and put them all in a book?’

‘That I am. Naturally, I won’t use their real names. I’m a novelist, after all, an artist. I’ll have to invent lots of new ones. But don’t you worry, Eustace, don’t go snapping your cummerbund. You’re going to be in it too. As a matter of fact, you’re all going to be in it.’

‘Sacre bleu!’ exclaimed Philippe Françaix, his eyes swimming heavenwards. ‘This is – how you say? – the end!’