A Mysterious Affair of Style

Chapter One

‘Great Scott Moncrieff!!!’

That voice!

Chief-Inspector Trubshawe – or, if one is to be a stickler for accuracy, Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, retired, formerly of Scotland Yard – had just stepped into the tea-room of the Ritz Hotel in quest of repose for his feet and refreshment for his palate, and it was while endeavouring to attract the eye of a waitress that he heard the voice which caused him to stop dead in his tracks.

If the truth be told, the Ritz was not the kind of establishment to which he would normally have accorded his patronage, certainly not for the steaming cup of tea which, for the past hour, he had craved. He had never been one to throw his money about, the less so since having had to learn to subsist on a police officer’s pension, and a Lyons Corner House would have been more to his unashamedly plebeian tastes. But he had found himself by chance at the posher end of Piccadilly, whose sole common-or-garden tea-room had teemed with secretaries and short-hand typists gabbling away to one another about the trials and tribulations of their respective working days, all of which had simultaneously come to a close. It was, then, the Ritz or nothing; and he thought to himself, alert to the incongruous reversal of values, well, why not, any old port in a storm.

So there he was, in this unostentatiously elegant room – a room in which the dulcet drone of upper-crust conversation clashed harmoniously (if such an oxymoron is possible) with the silvery rustle of the finest cutlery, a room he had never entered and had never expected to enter in his life – and before he had even properly orientated himself, he had run into somebody from his past!

The person who had hailed him was seated by herself at one of the tables located near the door, her face just visible behind a wobbly stack of green-jacketed Penguin paperback books. When he turned his head to confront her, the voice boomed out a second time:

‘As I live and breathe! Do these rheumy eyes of mine deceive me or is it my old partner-in-detection, Inspector Plodder?’

Trubshawe now looked directly at her.

‘Well, well, well!’ he exclaimed in surprise. Then, a note of sarcasm creeping almost imperceptibly into his voice, he nodded, ‘Oh yes, it’s Plodder all right. Plodder, alias Trubshawe.’

‘So it is you!’ said Evadne Mount, the well-known mystery novelist, ignoring the faint but meaningful modification of his tone. ‘And you do remember me after all these years?’

‘Why, naturally I do. It’s an essential part of my job – I mean to say, it used to be an essential part of my job – never to forget a face,’ laughed Trubshawe.

‘Oh!’ said the slightly deflated novelist.

‘Except,’ he added tactfully, ‘when you and I first met, it was after I’d retired, was it not, which must mean that in this instance it’s a personal not a professional memory. Actually,’ he concluded, ‘it was the voice that did the trick.’

Here came that note of sarcasm again. ‘And the disobliging nickname, of course.’

‘Oh, you must forgive my jollification. “She only does it because she knows it teases”, what? Good heavens, it really is you!’

‘It has been a while, hasn’t it?’ said Trubshawe dazedly, shaking her hand. ‘A very long while indeed.’

‘Well, sit down, man, sit down. Take the weight off your brains, ha ha ha! We must talk over old times. New times, too, if you’re so minded. Unless,’ she said, dropping her voice to a self-consciously theatrical stage-whisper, ‘unless you happen to be here on a romantic assignation. If that’s the case, you know me, I wouldn’t want ever to be de trop.’

Trubshawe lowered himself onto the chair opposite Evadne Mount’s, his broad boxer’s shoulders heaving as he dusted down his trouser-knees.

‘Never had such a thing as a romantic assignation in my life,’ he said with no apparent regret. ‘I met my late missus – Annie was her name – when we were both in the same class at school. I married her when we were in our twenties and I was just a callow young constable on the beat. We had our wedding reception – a real slap-up do it was, too – in the dance-hall of the Railway Hotel at Beaconsfield. And until she passed away, ten years ago now, I never once looked back. Or sideways either, if you know what I mean.’

Evadne Mount sat back in her own chair and fondly took the Chief-Inspector’s measure.

‘What a charming, what a cosy, what an enviably conventional life you make it seem,’ she sighed, and she probably didn’t mean for her approval of that life to sound as condescending as it may well have done.

‘And, quite right, I remember now. Last time we met – the ffolkes Manor murder case* – you’d just become a widower. And you say that was all of ten years ago? Hard to believe.’

‘And what ten years they were, eh, what with the War and the Blitz and V.E. Day and V.J. Day and now this so-called bright new post-war world. I don’t know about you, Miss Mount, but I find that London has changed out of all recognition, and it’s not the better for it. Nothing but spivs, as far as I can see, spivs, Flash Harrys, black marketeers, motor bandits and these gangs of nylon smugglers I keep reading about.

‘And beggars! Beggars right here in Piccadilly! I’ve just spent the last half-hour strolling around Green Park, but I couldn’t bear it any more. I was endlessly pestered by a bunch of grimy street urchins begging for pennies then calling me a tinpot Himmler – pardon me, a tinpot ’immler – when I refused to give them any. Main reason I came in here was for some peace and quiet.’

‘Mmm,’ agreed the novelist, ‘I have to say this isn’t the kind of place I’d associate you with.’

‘It isn’t at that. I was on the lookout for some plain, ordinary, come-as-you-are cafeteria. You, on the other hand, strike me as quite at home here.’

‘Oh, I am. I drop in every day at this time for afternoon tea.’

These mutual pleasantries were interrupted by the arrival of a white-haired, white-capped waitress who hovered expectantly over Trubshawe.

‘Just a pot of tea, miss. And tell them to make it strong.’

‘Right you are, sir. Would you be wanting bread-and-butter with that, sir? Cucumber sandwiches, p’raps?’

‘No thank you very much. Just the tea.’

‘Right away, sir.’

Glancing at the neighbouring tables, most of which had been commandeered by plump, well-nourished dowagers, fur stoles drowsily curling about their necks like equally plump, well-nourished pet foxes, Trubshawe turned again to Evadne Mount.

‘There’s a lot of talk about austerity these days. Not much sign of it here.’

She smiled benignantly at him.

‘I do know what you mean,’ she answered in a voice whose habitual tenor was so stentorian that, even if she said not much more than ‘Pass the sugar, please’, it made heads turn as far as three or four tables away. ‘The War has complicated everything. It isn’t only London that’s changed. The whole country’s changed, the whole world, I dare say. No more manners, no more respect, no more deference. Not the way it was in our day.

‘But then, you know, Trubshawe, those grimy urchins you mentioned, those peaky-faced little ragamuffins? Don’t forget that, a mere couple of years ago, they were being bombed out of house and home by the Luftwaffe. When they insult you by calling you a tinpot ‘immler, well, that’s not just a name to them. It’s quite possible the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of their mothers or fathers or a half-dozen of their school chums. In these terribly trying times, I do believe we all need to be more indulgent than usual.’

Trubshawe took her point.

‘You’re right, of course. I’m just a crochety, antisocial codger, a crusty old curmudgeon.’

‘Pish posh!’ said Evadne Mount. ‘It’s been ten years since I last clapped eyes on you and you haven’t aged a bit. Really, it’s most remarkable.’

‘Now that I take a closer look,’ said Trubshawe in reply, ‘you neither. Why, I wager, if I were to run into you again in ten years’ time, you still wouldn’t have aged. It’s almost as though time has stood still – at least for you. For me too, if you say so. And, of course, for Alexis Baddeley. She never appears to age either.’

‘Alexis Baddeley, eh? My alter ego – or ought I to say, my alter egoist? Why, Trubshawe, don’t tell me you’ve become one of my readers? One of what I like to call the happy many?’

‘Yes, I have. As a matter of fact, ever since we, eh, we collaborated on that nasty Roger Murgatroyd affair, I’ve read every one of your whodunits. Just the other week I finished the latest. What was its title again? Death: A User’s Manual. Yes, indeed, I finished it last – last Wednesday it was.’

There followed a not-so-brief silence during which Evadne Mount patently began to feel it a mild discourtesy on the Chief-Inspector’s part to have mentioned the title of her most recent book, to have acknowledged having read it, then to have left it at that. Though she tended to be brazen in her relationship with publishers and readers, admirers and critics, it nevertheless was not her style ever to be the first to open up what might be termed the negotiations of praise – she would claim she never had to – but she found Trubshawe’s noncommittal response so frustrating that she finally queried:

‘Is that all?’

‘All what?’

‘All you have to say about my new book? That you finished it last Wednesday?’

‘Well, I …’

‘You don’t suppose you owe it to me to say what you thought of it?’

Just at that moment Trubshawe was served not merely the tea he had requested but a glazed cherry-topped bun he hadn’t. But before he’d had the chance to correct the waitress’s error, Evadne Mount raised her glass – only now did he notice that what she was drinking was a double pink gin, a drink that, by rights, should not have been available in a tea-room – and proposed a toast.

‘To crime.’

Unaccustomed though he was to toasting precisely those nefarious activities he had devoted his professional life to combating, Trubshawe nevertheless decided that it would be both pompous and humourless of him to refuse.

‘To crime,’ he said, raising his teacup.

He took a deep draught of the tea and, the waitress having already disappeared, an unexpectedly voracious bite out of the bun.

‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘I have to confess that – now this is just one man’s point of view, you understand – but I have to confess that I didn’t feel your new whodunit would ever become one of my own personal favourites.’

‘No?’ the lynx-eyed novelist, eyeing him like a hawk, rejoindered. ‘May I ask why not?’

‘Oh well, it’s all very clever and that, the tension building up nicely as usual, so that, as I read on, I was more and more gripped, just as I’m sure you intended me to be.’

‘Interesting you should say that,’ she immediately cut in. ‘It’s my theory, you see, that the tension, the real tension, the real suspense, of a whodunit – more specifically, of the last few pages of a whodunit – has much less to do with, let’s say, the revelation of the murderer’s identity, or the disentangling of his motive, or anything the novelist herself has contrived, than with the growing apprehension in the reader’s own mind that, after all the time and energy he has invested in the book, the ending might turn out to be, yet again, an anticlimactic letdown. In other words, what generates the tension you describe is the reader’s fear not that the detective will fail – he knows that’s never going to happen – but that the author will fail.’

‘But that’s just it,’ Trubshawe maintained, seizing the opportunity to cut back in. He had been inordinately indulgent with her, considering that she had after all solicited his opinion but, familiar as he was with her old ways, he was well aware that, if he permitted her to digress as freely as she was used to doing, he would never get around to letting her know what he actually thought of her book.

‘The suspense, as I say, was building up nicely to the scene in which your lady detective, Alexis Baddeley, re-examines the suspects’ alibis. Then there comes that whole bizarre business of the drunken toff who keeps popping up all over the shop and … and, well, you lost me, frankly. Sorry, but you did ask.’

‘And yet it’s really quite simple,’ persisted Evadne Mount.

‘Is it? I must say I –’

‘You do know what a running gag is, don’t you?’

‘A running gag? Ye-es,’ replied the Chief-Inspector, not altogether sure that he did.

‘Of course you do. You must have seen one of those Hollywood comedies – screwball comedies I think they call them – in which the running gag is that some top-hatted toper keeps, as you say, popping up in the unlikeliest places and asking the hero in a slurred voice, “Haven’t I sheen you shomewhere before?” Am I right?’

‘Uh huh,’ he said as prudently as before.

‘So when the reader encounters the same type of character in Death: A User’s Manual, he thinks, aha, this must be the comic relief, just as it is in the films. But no, Trubshawe, in my book the toper really has seen the hero somewhere before. Where? Leaving the scene of the crime, of course. Because he’s pie-eyed, though, nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to him. Except for Alexis Baddeley, who insists that, inebriated or not, he’s a witness like any other and hence has to be taken as seriously as any other.

‘I like to think of it as my variation on “The Invisible Man”. The Father Brown story, you know.’

After listening to her argument no less patiently than she had presented it to him, Trubshawe shook his heavy head.

‘No, no, I’m sorry, Miss Mount, it won’t do.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I grant you, now that you’ve spelt it out for me, I just about get the hang of the idea. But it’s not good enough.’

Evadne Mount prepared to bristle.

‘Not good enough?’

‘I’ve read enough whodunits now – mostly yours, I have to say, though once I’d exhausted all of those, I found I was so addicted I even dipped into one or two thrillers of the thick-ear school, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney –’

‘The adventures of Lemmy Caution, you mean? Ugh, not my thing at all.’

‘Nor mine either. Anyhow, as I was saying, I’ve read enough of them now to know that, in the best ones, the only really effective ones, you don’t have to read the sentence or the paragraph or even the whole page twice to understand what the author’s getting at, as you might have to do with, you know, the classics. That’s not to denigrate whodunits, yours or anybody else’s. All I’m saying is that, when the revelations come tumbling out one after the other, their impact on the reader has got to be instantaneous. They’ve got to hit you – practically smack you – in the face.

‘It’s like a joke. If you don’t laugh at a joke at once, you’re never going to laugh at it. And now I come to think about it, isn’t that what’s really meant by the Perfect Crime, in whodunits at least? Not a crime whose perpetrator goes undetected – I mean, whose murderer goes undetected, for nowadays people are so bloodthirsty I don’t suppose anything short of murder will do – not a crime where, as I say, the murderer goes undetected – no, you couldn’t have such a book, the reader would ask for his money back – but a crime in which everything fits together perfectly, in which there’s neither too much nor too little evidence to digest and in which the revelation of the murderer’s identity turns out to be as inevitable as it’s unforeseeable. It couldn’t be him, you say to yourself, yet it couldn’t be anybody else. That, surely, is the Perfect Crime.’

Trubshawe ended his discourse almost apologetically, as though conscious of his effrontery. Lecturing on whodunits, and at such length, to the Dowager Duchess of Crime herself! As he finally lit up his pipe, after knocking the dottle into a glass ashtray that was at once whisked away from their table by a hitherto unnoticed waitress and replaced by an identical but pristine one, he gave the novelist a wary sidelong glance.

For a moment, she seemed dumbfounded. Then, to his astonishment, she let rip with an explosive laugh.

The detective cocked his head enquiringly.

‘Did I say something funny?’

‘No,’ was her answer, once she had sufficiently calmed down to speak. ‘You didn’t say something funny, you said something honest. That’s what made me laugh – laugh so much I think I’ve got a run in my stocking!

‘I’ve become such a success, you see, such a star, nobody else dares to be honest to me. My publishers, my readers, my critics – well, most of them,’ she qualified, not quite suppressing an embryonic snarl – ‘they all tell me that my latest book, whichever it happens to be, is wonderful, is terrific, is the finest so far, though we all know it’s a dud. And even if the reviews are a teensy bit less ecstatic than I’m used to, that’s not going to stop the publishing house, when it’s reissued, from describing it on the cover as “much-acclaimed”. I tell you, Trubshawe, there’s never been a book published in this country that wasn’t “much-acclaimed”. Before too long, you’ll see, they’ll be advertising “the much-acclaimed Bible” and “the much-acclaimed telephone directory”, ha ha ha!

‘Not,’ she went on, switching to her ‘serious’ voice, ‘not that I’m suggesting Death: A User’s Manual is a dud, you understand. It isn’t one of my few, one of my very few, outright misfires. But you’re right, it’s too clever for its own good. It’s what you might call clever-clever, which sounds twice as clever as clever itself but is actually only half.

‘So thank you, Trubshawe,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘What are you thanking me for?’

‘For being so candid. Candid – and interesting. You may be a relative newcomer to whodunits, but you’re already quite the theorist.’

‘Well, you know, Miss Mount, I wouldn’t like you to think I didn’t enjoy it. I did, really, only not so much as your earlier ones.’

‘Very nice of you to say so. And you really must call me Evadne. Old pals and allies as we are. Better still, call me Evie. Cut out the middle-woman, what? You will eventually, so why not start now?’

‘Evie,’ said Trubshawe unconvincingly.

‘And may I call you – well, whatever it is your friends call you?’

The detective drew on his pipe.

‘Don’t have too many of those left, I’m afraid. But if you mean, what’s my first name, well, it’s Eustace.’

‘Eustace? Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I don’t see you as a Eustace at all.’

‘Nor do I,’ grunted Trubshawe. ‘But there you are. It’s the name I was given, it’s the name on my birth certificate and it’s the name that makes me turn my head in the street if ever I hear it called out. Which nowadays, frankly, is never.’

Evadne Mount took a moment to contemplate him.

‘I say, Eustace,’ she said, consulting her wrist-watch, ‘do you have anything special on this evening?’

‘Me?’ he answered dejectedly. ‘I’ve nothing special on most evenings.’

‘I take it that means you aren’t in Town for some specific reason?’

‘I live in London now. Bought myself a semi-detached in Golders Green.’

‘Really? You don’t any longer have that cottage on Dartmoor?’

‘Sold up and moved on six-seven years ago. It became too lonely for me, you know, after the death of poor old Tobermory. You remember, that blind Labrador of mine that was shot on the moors?’

‘Of course, of course I do. So there’s nowhere you have to be tonight?’

‘Nowhere at all.’

‘Then why don’t you join me? Eh? For old times’ sake?’

‘Join you?’ he echoed her. ‘I don’t think I understand.’

Evadne Mount ground her ample frame into the defenceless little chair.

‘As it so happens, this is a very special evening for me. At the Haymarket tonight – the Theatre Royal, Haymarket – they’re giving a Grand Charity Benefit Show in aid of East End Orphans. Everybody in London will be there,’ she said, deliberately courting the cliché. ‘Bobbie Howes, Jack and Cicely, the Western Brothers, Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea and I don’t know who else, all doing their bit for nothing. It’s in the best of causes, after all.

‘I’m one of the writers – I cooked up a short curtain-raiser, a mini-whodunit – and you’ll never guess who’s playing Alexis Baddeley.’

‘Who?’

‘Another of your former acquaintances. Cora.’

‘Cora?’ repeated a mystified Trubshawe.

‘Cora Rutherford. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten her?’

For a few seconds more he racked his brains. Then, in a rush, it all came back to him.

‘Cora Rutherford! Well, of course, I’m with you now. She was also one of the guests at ffolkes Manor, was she not?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So you too are as inseparable as ever?’

‘Well, no … To be honest, I’d rather lost touch with Cora until this show brought us together again. Oh, we’ve had the odd natter on the blower, but we never quite manage to synchronise our watches. When I’m free, she’s busy; when she’s free, I’m busy. You know what they say, though. Our best friends aren’t those we see the most but those we’ve known the longest. Where it really counts, she and I are still bosom pals.’

‘Ye-es,’ muttered Trubshawe, for whose taste the novelist’s choice of words had proved a touch too vividly fleshy. He pronounced the name thoughtfully.

‘Cora Rutherford … It’s true enough,’ he went on, ‘I was never a great fan of the Pictures, even when Annie was alive. We’d go together because she liked them even if I didn’t. Still, I can’t say I’ve heard much about her of late. Cora Rutherford, I mean. She hasn’t retired, has she?’

‘Oh no,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Cora’s still gamely hanging in there. Actually, she rang me up just the other day to tell me that she’d landed a part in a brand-new film production. Confidentially, though, she fancies herself as a bit of a recluse, occasionally sighted flitting along Bond Street like a rare specimen of some exotic avian species – the seldom-spotted film star!’

The novelist laughed indulgently at her friend’s eccentricity.

‘It’s all rather preposterous, you know, because, from what I hear, she’s as much the woman-about-town as she ever was. But if it helps Cora to grow old painlessly by thinking of herself as the British Garbo, well, who am I to spoil her fun?’

‘And you say she’s appearing in the show?’

‘She plays Alexis Baddeley in the opening sketch, the one by yours truly. After which, there’ll be some singing, some dancing, a few laughs, a few tears, and a spectacular grand finale. So why don’t you come along as my guest?’

Trubshawe was tempted. It was obvious that, of late, not much singing, dancing, laughter or tears had enlivened his existence. Yet he was as cautious a private individual as he had been an officer of the law and he needed to tot up the pros and cons of any revision to his plans, particularly his immediate plans, before saying yes or no. In short, he definitely wanted to go to the show, but he was also determined to ascertain in advance whether there was any likelihood of his subsequently regretting having done so.

‘The question is,’ he finally said, scratching his chin, which wasn’t even itching, ‘will there be tickets left? You’ve made it sound such a prestigious event.’

‘There isn’t a single ticket to be had for love or money. The show was sold out weeks ago, even at the prices they’re asking. Five guineas for a seat in the stalls, can you imagine? Not to worry, though. I’ve been given a couple of comps, so that’s all taken care of.’

Trubshawe now cast a downward glance at his suit and tie. It was a perfectly respectable suit and tie, the suit grey worsted, the tie belonging to one of London’s less well-frequented gentlemen’s clubs. But even he, no habitué of Theatreland, was aware that not one of his fellow-members of what promised to be an exceptionally glamorous audience was likely to beg him for the name of his tailor.

A small grey cloud drifted across his stolid features.

‘You’re fine, absolutely fine!’ she said loudly and encouragingly. ‘Besides, just take a look at me, will you, and then tell me you’re going to feel out of place!’

It was true. She was dressed, as he recalled had been the case those ten years ago, in a shapeless tweed suit that protruded in the places in which she herself protruded but also contrived to protrude in a few places on its own initiative. Lying on the tablecloth, moreover, creased every conceivable way a hat can be creased, and then some, was the matelot’s navy-blue tricorne which had long been her trademark in London’s literary circles. No, Evadne Mount hadn’t changed.

‘Well, Eustace,’ she said, ‘shall we be off? The show starts at half-past seven, which really means quarter-to-eight, so we’ve just got twenty minutes to make it.’

Trubshawe nodded agreement. He also insisted on picking up the bill not merely for his own pot of tea but also for his companion’s order, which turned out to be not one but two double pink gins and pricier than he had bargained for.

Never mind, he thought to himself, as he cast a handful of silver onto the table and his companion, with a nonchalantly maladroit gesture, swept the stack of green Penguins all at once into her capacious handbag. Things happen around Evadne Mount. She had already teased him out of his sulks, cheered him out of his loneliness, half-cured him of what, in his rare introspective, even poetical moments, he would describe to himself as his ‘spiritual gout’, and here he was, wholly out of the blue, about to join the elite at a splendid theatrical gala. Well worth the twelve shillings and sixpence.

‘By the way,’ he said, escorting her from the Ritz, its door held open by a resplendently uniformed flunky, who bowed them into the street with the utmost correctitude, ‘what’s the name of this show we’re going to see?’

Pulling the tricorne hat down hard on her head, she gave its middle furrow a vicious bash.

‘Save the Last Valise for Me,’ she answered. ‘Oh, I know, it’s a daft title, but then, I fear it’s going to be a pretty daft evening. Except,’ she added, ‘for my own little sketch. That, I do assure you, is deadly serious.’

And, with these enigmatic words, in the gathering shades of a Friday evening in early April, they wandered off together towards the nearest bus-stop.

* See The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006).