A Mysterious Affair of Style

Chapter Five

It was five uneventful weeks later, one Sunday in May, as Trubshawe was preparing to wash his car, a chore he performed every dry Sabbath, that the doorbell rang and he discovered, standing on his doorstep, Evadne Mount.

He had spent those five weeks much as he had spent the preceding five years. He had read his Daily Sentinel, pottered in his garden, drank his daily pint at his local before returning home to his solitary supper. And, every evening, on his way to and from that local, rain and shine alike, he had walked his imaginary dog.

It should be understood, though, that if the dog was imaginary it wasn’t because the former detective had reverted to a state of infantile senility in which he’d started consorting all over again, as in childhood, with a companion who lived exclusively inside his head. It was simply because, when Tobermory had died on Dartmoor, he couldn’t bring himself to replace him.

Tobermory had been his excuse – his alibi, as he affected to call it – for the constitutional he took virtually every evening and his death hadn’t struck him as a good enough reason for giving it up. The passing of his wife, with whom he’d shared his entire adult existence, had already familiarised him with the mildly throbbing, toothachy pain of solitude, never quite intolerable but never, ever fading away altogether. Fond of Tobermory as he had been, he was not prepared to be made twice the grieving widower. He had taken his walks before ever acquiring Tober and he refused to discontinue them now. His sole concession to a dog-lover’s sentimentality was that, as before the Labrador’s killing, he would absent-mindedly pick up its lead from off the hallway table and swing it along with him on his walk, like a soft, rubbery cane. Yet even that habit really couldn’t be put down to sentimentality. He had swung Tobermory’s lead in such a fashion for so many years now, he just wouldn’t have felt right, dog or no dog, without it.

For a few days into the five weeks he had scoured his newspaper in the hope of gaining further information concerning the blaze at Alastair Farjeon’s villa. Once or twice he’d even bought a couple of rival rags as well, his interest in the case being, of course, all the greater in that the investigating officer was his own former protégé, Tom Calvert.

But there was less about Farjeon’s tragically premature death than he might have expected from Cora Rutherford’s effusions. Film directors, geniuses as they may be in the eyes of those who do their bidding, are of significantly less concern to the great unwashed. As for the woman in the case, Patsy Sloots, yes, she was apparently blessed with ‘oodles of S.A.’ (whatever that was) but, he also surmised, she hadn’t been so much of a star as what is termed a starlet, one of Farjeon’s innumerable ‘discoveries’.

From the scant evidence that could still be sifted through the ashes of the conflagration, it seemed that Mr Farjeon and Miss Sloots had been alone in the villa. And though nothing any longer could be ascertained with assurance, it was now pretty obvious that the fire had been started by a cigarette which one or other of the victims – both of whom had now been positively identified by their next of kin – had either dropped onto the floor, while it was still not properly stubbed-out, or else which had been so casually finger-flicked that it ended up missing the fireplace that would have been its target. Whichever it was, the cigarette had almost certainly rolled across the polished parquet flooring and brushed against the lace curtains of the living-room’s big bay window. These curtains would have caught fire at once, the flames immediately spreading to the gauzy chiffon ‘exclusive’, as wispy as a cobweb, which Miss Sloots had been photographed wearing when she was picked up earlier that same day by Farjeon in his silver Rolls-Royce. Most probably, too, in attempting to rescue her, the film director himself had been engulfed.

There was, in short, precious little to go on, but it had clearly been nothing other than a tragic and, as is frequently said on such occasions, stupid mishap.

A late postscript in the Daily Sentinel made delicate mention of the Sloots family’s grief, in particular that of her mother, who was still under sedation. There was no mention at all, however, in any of the newspapers he scanned, of how the tragedy had affected Alastair Farjeon’s ‘tame little wifie’. And then the news, like the world itself, moved on.

Which is just about when Trubshawe’s doorbell rang and he heard someone impatiently hallooing him through its letter-box even before he had time to open the door.

‘Eustace, hello!’ it boomed.

That voice again!

On this occasion, though, as he owned up to himself, hearing it thrilled him to the core.

She was standing on the doorstep in one of the hairiest and tweediest outfits he had ever seen worn, voluntarily, by a woman.

‘Miss Mount!’ he boomed back. ‘What a very pleasant surprise!’

‘I rather thought it might be,’ she replied complacently.

‘But wait,’ he said, just as he was about to invite her in, ‘how is it you know where I live?’

Like most of his colleagues at the Yard, Trubshawe had always kept his home number off-limits, even into retirement, as there were just too many ex-convicts at large who would have been delighted to learn, merely by turning the pages of the telephone directory, the current whereabouts of the copper who had been responsible for putting them out of commission. Thrilled as he was to encounter Evadne Mount again, a policeman he had always been and, if only by virtue of his own sense of self, a policeman he still was, and it was as a policeman that he was mightily interested in discovering how she had contrived to track him down.

‘My, but aren’t you the suspicious one!’ she laughed, wagging a podgy finger at him. ‘You might have said how glad you were to see me instead of subjecting me to an instant interrogation.’

‘Of course I’m glad to see you, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, made aware of how rude he had been. ‘Very glad. That goes without saying.’

‘Yes, but it would have been nicer if you’d said it. I haven’t come to nit-pick, though. How have you been these last few weeks?’

‘Oh, well, you know …’ came the policeman’s characteristically wary response. ‘Much as ever. I’ve been doing a bit of gardening now that the Spring’s here and, if I say so myself, it’s all beginning to look –’

He interrupted himself.

‘Very neat, Evie, very neat.’

‘What is?’ she asked, all innocence.

‘Changing the subject the way you just did. I asked you how you obtained my home address.’

‘If you must know, I got it from Calvert.’

‘Calvert?’

‘Inspector Thomas Calvert? You remember him, don’t you? You ought to. According to him, you took him under your wing when he was just a bobby on the beat.’

‘Of course I remember Tom Calvert. Most promising newcomer to the Force I ever came across. But how do you happen to be acquainted with him?’

‘You may or may not have heard, but Calvert was the copper assigned to that dreadful business at Alastair Farjeon’s villa. The fire? We talked about it with Cora at the Ivy, but you’ve probably forgotten all about it by now.’

‘No,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I haven’t forgotten’ – and, in his heart of hearts, he somehow knew that Evadne Mount knew he hadn’t forgotten.

‘Well,’ she went on, ‘he was investigating the affair and he questioned a few of Farje’s acquaintances to discover whether they might be able to throw some light on the subject and Cora was one of those questioned and it so happened that I was in her Mayfair flat when she was being interviewed by him and, in short, that’s how I met him. A sweet young man, very bright, very sharp. He’ll go far, I fancy.’

‘He certainly will,’ replied Trubshawe gruffly, ‘as soon as he learns not to give out confidential information, like the addresses of former Scotland Yard detectives, to complete strangers.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a fusspot. I told him how you and I had met again after so many years and how we’d had a lovely blether at the Ritz and then gone on to the theatre and how I now needed to get in touch with you. I must say, he couldn’t have been more obliging.’

‘H’m, well, all right, fair enough. But where are my manners? Come in, will you, come in.’

‘Both of us?’

‘What do you mean, both of you?’

‘For a detective,’ said Evadne, ‘you’re not very observant, are you?’

She jerked her head behind her.

‘Look who’s here.’

Trubshawe shot a swift glance over the novelist’s shoulder. Parked in front of his house, the object of admiration by a throng of street urchins, an admiration bordering on slack-jawed, gap-toothed awe, was a powder-blue Bentley motor-car. Inside it, at the steering-wheel, gaily waving at him, was Cora Rutherford.

‘Why, it’s … it’s Miss Rutherford,’ he said, waving back.

‘Coo-eee!’ called out the actress, to the uncontainable ecstasy of her tatterdemalion public. Even if not one of them appeared to recognise her, since not one of them asked for her autograph, they all knew a copper-bottomed star when they saw one. The girls had given up their hopscotch, the boys their soccer, and all of them started crowding about and practically clambering over the car, which was probably more of an attraction to them – to the boys at least – than its bewitching occupant.

‘Are we coming in,’ asked the novelist, ‘or aren’t we?’

‘Of course, of course you’re coming in,’ Trubshawe replied.

He strode down his front drive, good-humouredly shooed away the pack of urchins, opened the door of the Bentley and ushered the actress back into his house.

A few minutes later, after he had returned from the kitchen bearing a bottle of Dubonnet and three glasses, they were all seated together around his living-room fireside.

‘Now listen, Trubbers,’ said Evadne Mount, not bothering with the conventional pleasantries, ‘can I take it you’re no busier tomorrow morning than you were the other afternoon when you popped into the Ritz?’

‘Ah, well …’

He hesitated for a few seconds – it’s never easy affording others a glimpse of how empty your own life has become – before deciding that, whatever the novelist and her friend had come to offer him, it couldn’t but be more eventful than what awaited him if he declined.

‘No, I’m not,’ he reluctantly conceded. ‘Same old dull routine. Why do you ask?’

‘Because a truly wonderful thing has happened. You recall our little supper à trois at the Ivy?’

‘Naturally I do.’

‘And my having to bear the bad news to Cora about Alastair Farjeon’s death?’

‘How could I forget?’

‘Ah, but do you remember that, because of his death, his new film was due to be shut down?’

‘Yes, I remember that very well.’

‘Well, it has, so to speak, been opened up again.’

Trubshawe’s first thought was to offer the actress his congratulations.

‘Well, well, well, that’s extremely good news for you, isn’t it? I can’t tell you how happy I am.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ she said. ‘How very sweet of you to care.’

‘Oh, I do, I most sincerely do,’ he insisted. ‘But explain something to me, please.’

‘Yes?’

‘When we talked about the situation, Farjeon dying and all, you made it clear to me – in no uncertain terms, as they say – that it would be impossible for the picture to be made by anyone else because he was – irreplaceable, I suppose the word is. Yes, irreplaceable in some sense I couldn’t really follow.’

‘Except,’ she replied, ‘it turned out in this case that, because the preparations for the film were so far advanced, because the sets had already been built and the actors had all signed their contracts, that kind of thing, the studio bosses were horrified at the financial loss they were liable to incur if the thing never got made. But they just didn’t know who, if anybody, would be capable of stepping into Farjeon’s shoes.

‘Well, then, Hattie – you recall, Farjeon’s wife? – Hattie was apparently rummaging through his papers in their London flat and – what do you think? – she unearthed this rather curious document. It was written in his own hand and it stated that, if, for whatever reason, he was unable to direct the picture, the person it should be assigned to was his assistant – what we in the trade call his First Assistant. And that’s precisely what’s happened.’

‘H’m,’ Trubshawe muttered pointedly. ‘Queer, that …’

‘Oh? What makes you say so?’

‘Well, it sounds almost as though Farjeon had already suspected he might be prevented from directing it.’

‘Oh, you ex-policemen!’ exclaimed Evadne. ‘You can’t stop seeing underhand motives wherever you look. Forget Farjeon. What’s important is that the filming started last week and Cora, as you can imagine, is over the moon.’

‘Yes, yes, I repeat, my congratulations,’ said Trubshawe to the actress. ‘I couldn’t help observing how badly you took the news of the man’s death.’

‘The point is,’ said Cora, ‘the picture is being shot at Elstree and, as I think I told you, I don’t actually have all that many big scenes, but one of them is to be shot tomorrow afternoon and, because I’ve let Evie share in everything I’ve done since we were both knee-high to a brace of grasshoppers, I naturally invited her down to watch it.

‘Then the same idea occurred to both of us at once – as it still sometimes does, I may say. Since dear old Trubbers was present at the bad news, why shouldn’t he also be present at the good?

‘Besides which, I’ve got to be at the studio at some ungodly hour and Evie, who’s never been a morning person, would naturally prefer to make a later appearance, only she doesn’t drive, but I assume you do. You do, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do. A Rover. So,’ he concluded, ‘as I understand it, you’re inviting me to become Evie’s chauffeur for the day?’

‘Ingrate!’ Cora pretended to snap at him. ‘Must you always be so officious and stiff-necked and policeman-y? I just thought, as we’d all met up together again, it would amuse you to accompany Evie. I can’t believe you’ve ever visited a picture studio before, so you ought to find it terribly interesting. What do you say?’

It was without the least hesitation that Trubshawe replied in the affirmative. Truth to tell, he couldn’t believe his luck.

‘And so, Miss Rutherford,’ he asked her, ‘Exactly what sort of new film is this?’

‘Call me Cora, darling,’ she answered airily, and the Scotland Yard man was struck anew by how miraculously rejuvenated she appeared now that, by an unforeseen reversal of fortune, her career seemed to be back on track. He was also, however, a trifle embarrassed, since he was uncertain whether she meant him to call her ‘Cora’ or ‘Cora darling’.

But she gave him no time to call her anything, instantly launching into a description of the film.

‘Its title is If Ever They Find Me Dead. Good, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, definitely,’ he approved. ‘Very enticing. If Ever They Find Me Dead, eh? Yes, that’s a picture I feel confident I’d want to see. Sounds to me like a jolly exciting thriller. And may I ask what it’s about? Or would that be giving too much away?’

‘I’m afraid it just might … It’s Farjeon’s own screenplay, you understand, and, where other directors’ thrillers often have twist endings, his have always had twist beginnings.’

The concept was a novel one to Trubshawe.

‘Twist beginnings?’

‘You never saw his Semi-Coma?’

‘Sorry. You know, I don’t –’

‘– go to the Pictures. Yes, you told us already.’

‘Then, my dear Miss Rutherford,’ he remarked tartly, ‘if I told you already, why ask me again? And, while I seem to have the upper hand for once, may I ask you something?’

The actress blinked.

‘Why – why, yes,’ she replied. ‘Please do.’

‘Hocus-Focus. Semi-Coma. An American in Plaster-of-Paris. Didn’t this Farjeon fellow ever give one of his pictures some ordinary, everyday title that actually deigned to tell you a little bit about what was in it?’

‘Trubbers, my dear,’ said Cora, who had never yielded the last word to anyone, and certainly wasn’t about to change the habit of a lifetime, ‘I seem to recall, when we first met, that you had a dog, no?’

‘That’s right. A Labrador.’

‘And his name was?’

‘Tobermory.’

‘What!’ she exclaimed satirically. ‘Not Fido?’

Trubshawe gracefully accepted defeat.

‘You win,’ he said with a smile. ‘Please go on.’

‘Well, in Semi-Coma Robert Donat plays a meek, mild-mannered bank teller who, in the film’s opening scene, goes to bed in his dingy little flat in Clerkenwell. But when he wakes up next morning – the very next morning, mind you – he finds himself, still clad in the same striped jammies he went to bed in, stretched out in a leafy clearing in the Canadian Rockies, of all places, with a solitary stag – a wonderful touch! – a solitary stag placidly grazing just a few yards away. And, of course, it takes him the whole film to figure out how – and why – he crossed the Atlantic overnight.

‘That’s pure Farje. At the press screenings of his films, the critics would be handed out little slips of paper advising them not to give away the beginning, which meant, in effect, that the films were critic-proof. The critics couldn’t give away the beginning, they couldn’t give away the ending, and they certainly couldn’t give away the middle. They couldn’t give anything away at all.

‘Dear, dear Farje,’ she sighed. ‘Such a genius.’

Trubshawe was on the point of expressing his astonishment at hearing her speak so warmly of an individual whom, only a month before, she had called a verminous, arachnoid pig. But then, he told himself, the poor man himself was dead, and Cora in such high spirits. Why cast a shadow over her euphoria by even bringing up the subject?

‘So what,’ he asked instead, ‘happens at the beginning of your picture?’

‘Yes, you old trout,’ Evadne Mount piped up, ‘don’t keep us in suspense. That’s the job of the film.’

Cora inserted a new cigarette into its holder and lowered her already husky voice to a conspiratorial level.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it all starts with these two chums, both of them women in their early twenties, at Drury Lane. They’ve done some shopping up West, just had lunch, and have a couple of tickets for a matinée – some sort of musical-comedy, I think it’s supposed to be. And there they are, in the seventh or eighth row of the stalls, browsing through their programmes, chattering away about this and that – the stars of the show, whether it’s had a good or bad press, you know, the sort of thing we all talk about when settling down in a theatre.

‘Then, suddenly, one of them starts.’

‘Starts what?’

‘Oh really, Evie, what an idiotic question. She doesn’t start anything. She just starts. She goes stiff and tense. It’s called starting. If I remember aright, your cardboard characters do it all the time.

‘Anyhow, noticing her start, her friend naturally asks her what the matter is. Nothing, says the woman, nothing at all. But, as she’s turned quite pale, the friend insists and the woman finally says, “You see that man sitting four rows down, alone at the end of row C?” The other woman takes a gander, locates the man her friend has just mentioned and says yes, what about him? The first woman doesn’t speak for a few seconds. Then she replies, in a deathly quiet voice, “If ever they find me dead” – the film’s title, remember? – “if ever they find me dead, that’s the man who did it.”

‘Now, as you can imagine, her friend is well and truly hooked, but all she can see of the chap, unfortunately, is the back of his head. And, just as she cranes for a better view, the lights dim, the orchestra strikes up, the curtain rises, a leggy line of high-stepping chorines comes tripping onto the stage and, of course, in her subsequent enjoyment of the show, she forgets all about him.’

Cora had nothing to complain of in the attention paid her by her two listeners. They were literally hanging on her every word.

‘At which point,’ she continued, after what Evadne Mount herself, in one of her whodunits, would unreflectingly have described as a ‘pregnant’ pause, ‘we at once cut to the following scene – in which, as I’m sure you’ve both already guessed, the police are examining the woman’s dead body in her mews flat in Belgravia.’

‘H’m,’ said Evadne Mount thoughtfully, ‘I must confess I’m slightly envious of that idea. What happens next?’

‘Well, I really don’t think I ought to reveal any more.’

‘Now, now, don’t be coy. Doesn’t suit you.’

‘Oh, all right. Suffice to say that the friend naturally decides to do a bit of sleuthing on her own account and eventually, at a dinner party, she finds herself sitting opposite the man in row C – or so she believes. Except, you see, she just can’t be sure. So she ingratiates herself with him, starts flirting madly and, still not knowing if he really is the murderer she believes he might be, falls for him in the biggest way.

‘Which, I think,’ she ended grandly, ‘is all you need to know for the nonce. If you want to learn more, you’ll just have to wait till the film comes out at your local picture palace.’

‘And you, dear lady,’ said Trubshawe, ‘you play the glamorous young sleuth, I suppose?’

Cora, uncertain for the moment whether or not her leg was being gently pulled, cast him a penetrating glance.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, Trubshawe, I believe I told you when we last met that my role was not – no, I’d be lying if I said it was the lead.’

‘Which role do you play?’ asked Evadne.

‘The mur-’ – she hastily bit off the tail of the word – ‘I mean, the man’s long-suffering wife, long-suffering because, as she’s become all too aware, hubby has been conducting a whole string of casual affairs behind her back.

‘It was a smallish role to start with, insultingly small – but, only the other day, I managed to get it bumped up quite a considerable bit. Now I have two or three really very juicy scenes where I not only get to chew up the furniture but spit it out.

‘Oh yes,’ she said in a voice of faintly chilling self-satisfaction, ‘if I play my cards right, which I fully intend to do, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t turn out to be the first stage of my comeback.’

The novelist looked at her sharply.

‘Cora?’

‘Yes?’

‘Just how did you manage to do that?’

‘What?’

‘Bump up the role?’

‘Ask me no questions, dearie, and I’ll tell you no lies. Let’s just say, little Cora has never been backward coming forward. Whenever a windfall drops into her lap, she knows how to exploit it.’

She turned to Trubshawe.

‘The first of these big scenes of mine is being shot tomorrow, which is why I thought you and Evie might like to spend the day at Elstree and watch it from behind the camera.’

‘I’d like that very much,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘Things going smoothly so far, are they?’

Cora suddenly turned rather pensive.

‘Well,’ she replied, ‘they are now, thank goodness. For a while there, it was touch-and-go.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You understand, I haven’t done any filming myself yet. But, naturally, I’ve had to be at the studio every day. Hair tests, complexion tests, clothes tests, make-up tests, you know the kind of thing. Well, you don’t, but I’m sure you get what I mean. And from what I could gather from the back-room boys, in addition to what I myself happened to witness, Hanway was an absolute disaster to start with.’

‘Hanway?’

‘Rex Hanway. Farjeon’s former assistant, now the film’s director. And, oh God, was he nervous when he first walked onto the set. Positively quaking in his brogues, he was. Didn’t have a clue. Couldn’t decide where to place the camera, couldn’t give directions to the actors, had no idea what the cameraman was referring to when he asked him about lenses and filters.

‘To be fair to him, it’s a bloody terrifying job making a film for the first time. All those people on the set, all of them old hands, far older hands than you are, firing a hundred-and-one different questions at you and expecting a hundred-and-one correct answers. Not to mention the constant thought of the cinema audiences who are going to be watching it one day. All those hungry eyes waiting to be fed!

‘I studied Hanway myself whenever I had some free time. Oh, he looked perfect, with his dungarees creased just so and his Turnbull and Asser shirt and his Charvet silk tie and his viewfinder dangling on his chest as elegantly as a monocle. But when it came to the nuts and bolts of getting the picture made, he didn’t know whether he was on his head or his heels. He just couldn’t handle all the decisions and indecisions of film production, all the meddling and the muddling you have to cope with.

‘It got so bad by the end of the first three days that there was talk all over again of closing down the picture.’

‘What happened?’ asked Evadne.

‘What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. On the fourth day – that would have been Thursday – he was a new man. You could almost see the confidence ooze out of his pores. How he overcame his stage fright or screen fright or whatever you care to call it, I have no idea, but that he had overcome it there wasn’t the slightest doubt at all. Drink? Dope? Medication? Whichever it was, he suddenly seemed to know not only what he wanted but how he’d be able to obtain it.

‘The transformation was uncanny. He would bark orders at gaffers and grips, he knew how to talk shop with the technical crew and, as for the actors, he had them eating out of his hand. The studio bosses are delighted with the rushes – don’t ask what those are, Trubshawe, I’ll tell you some sunny day – the money men never stop rubbing their sweaty palms together, everything is running on rails.’

‘You know, Cora,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘what you’ve just been describing, I actually don’t find so hard to explain. Matter of fact, I’ve often had exactly the same experience myself.’

‘You?’

‘Absolutely. I sit at my old Oliver typewriter and I sit and I sit and nothing happens. Then, who knows how or why, all of a sudden I find myself merrily typing away. It’s as though my fingers have started to have ideas of their own, ideas they don’t even bother consulting me about. And the oddest part of it all is that it usually turns out to be my best stuff.’

None too interested in the metaphysics of literary creation, Cora shrugged her shoulders.

‘What can I say? As I remarked to Orson only the other day, that’s the business we call show.’

Extracting from her handbag two or three delicate little tools of her trade, she rapidly adjusted her face, a face that had begun to bear an increasingly distant acquaintance with her age, and said:

‘Voilà. Evie will be waiting for you, Trubbers, to pick her up at her Albany flat – at, shall we say, nine o’clock tomorrow morning? You’ll drive down to Elstree, where I’ll meet you, show you round, introduce you to some of the cast and crew, the usual drill. Then I’ll do my big scene in the afternoon. Right?’

Trubshawe had only to nod his head.