A Mysterious Affair of Style

by Gilbert Adair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  At this she released a sharp ejaculation.

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

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

  Trubshawe ignored this unwarranted calumny on his beloved meerschaum.

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

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

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

  ‘Not in so many words.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘That shouldn’t take long.’

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

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

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

  Now it was Evadne Mount’s turn to splutter.

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

  She trained a malevolent eye on Trubshawe.

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

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

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

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

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

  He got no further.

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

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

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

  Silence.

  ‘Evie?’

  Silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What kind of wager?’

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

  ‘And if you don’t?’

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

  Trubshawe drew in his breath.

  ‘You would do that?’

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

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

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

  ‘Marry you!!??’

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

  ‘Have you lost your mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Trubshawe looked her moistly in the eye.

  ‘We’re on.’

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

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

  She cheerily rubbed her hands together.

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Fourteen

  Trubshawe spent the whole of the next day following through his hunch in the company of Tom Calvert. The younger man had been intrigued by his theory that there might after all have been foul play at Cookham, sufficiently intrigued at any event to pay a series of semi-official calls on all five suspects in Cora Rutherford’s murder. The results were conclusive, to put it mildly, and it was these results that the Chief-Inspector now felt obliged to relate to the novelist. Coupled with that obligation was of course his own devouring curiosity to find out what she herself had been up to in the meantime.

  Until well into the afternoon, however, Evadne was unobtainable on the telephone, and the sole hint of where she had been and what she might have been doing there had been dropped by Lettice Morley, whom he and Calvert had interviewed just after lunch in her charming bijou flat in Pimlico. It appears that Evadne had rung her up early that morning with what Lettice described as a ‘self-consciously vague’ enquiry about film extras, who they were and how they were hired. Needless to say, this tantalising droplet of information only intensified Trubshawe’s curiosity.

  Later, towards five o’clock, when he had returned home to Golders Green, settled into his favourite armchair, a freshly brewed cup of tea at his elbow, and had just begun reading Cora’s obituary in the Daily Sentinel – no fewer than three lavishly illustrated pages were devoted to her career, her matrimonial misadventures, her untimely death and, of course, the sensational circumstances surrounding it – his own telephone finally rang. He leapt up off the armchair to take the call. It wasn’t Evadne herself, though, but Calvert, who had even more tantalising news of her doings to impart. She had rung him up just half-an-hour before to ask whether it might be possible for the Police Force to persuade Benjamin Levey to set up a screening for them of the ‘rushes’ – the word sat as oddly on Trubshawe’s ear as on Calvert’s tongue – that had already been filmed of If Ever They Find Me Dead.

  ‘Good grief,’ muttered Trubshawe, ‘what’s got into Evie now?’

  ‘No idea,’ replied Calvert. ‘She simply asked me if I might use my influence.’

  ‘Did she explain why she wanted to see the stuff?’

  ‘No. I did ask her, as you can imagine, but she played her cards very close to her chest. All she said was that it was of the utmost importance that I grant her this favour.’

  ‘And what was your response to that?’

  ‘Well, Mr Trubshawe, it was, you recall, Miss Mount who, on the very day of the murder, was crafty enough to deduce that there weren’t forty-two suspects to be accounted for, just five. And, during those investigations that we conducted in Hanway’s office, I must say she did ask some pretty pertinent questions – brutal but pertinent. And she’s written all those clever whodunits – not that I’ve actually read any of them myself, you know, but she never stops telling me how clever they are. And she was, after all, a close friend of Cora Rutherford and she’s also, of course, your friend too. And since you and I are – let’s face it – getting nowhere fast –’

  An impatient Trubshawe broke in.

  ‘What you’re saying is, you agreed.’

  ‘To be candid with you, Mr Trubshawe, I couldn’t see my way to refusing. I was struck, though, by something rather queer that she said. I asked her if, as I assumed would be the case, the scene she was keenest to watch was the one during which Miss Rutherford was murdered. Well, you can’t imagine how she replied.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘She shuddered – when your Miss Mount shudders, my goodness me, she does audibly shudder! – anyway, she shuddered and said tartly that she had been called many things in her life but that she was no ghoul and, if there was one piece of film she never, ever wanted to see, it was that. Then I said, well, what? And she breezily answered that it was all one to her! Anything the studio could show her of the picture, she’d be glad to watch! Can you believe that?’

  ‘Of Evie,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I’ve learned to believe almost anything. But it is, as you say, queer. Yet, despite her indifference to what would be served up to her, you still agreed to hold the screening?’

  ‘I told her I couldn’t make any promises and that it was ultimately up to Levey. But, after we ended our conversation, I did get on the ’phone to him. That man’s as jumpy as a scalded cat – all those years of persecution in Nazi Germany, I suppose – and at first he was fairly reluctant. Said it was quite unheard-of to screen the rushes of a film t
o outsiders, which, to be honest, I can well believe is the truth. He asked me what precisely was the reason behind it, since there have been no prints made yet of the footage – his word – of Cora Rutherford drinking out of the poisoned glass. I told him just what Miss Mount had told me – that it was of no importance what she was shown – and even though he was as mystified as I was myself, he finally gave way. I rather think he feared it might attract my suspicion if he didn’t.

  ‘So I’ve arranged for a little private show tomorrow afternoon in one of the studio’s screening-rooms. I thought you might want to be there.’

  ‘Too darn right I would!’ exclaimed Trubshawe.

  ‘Ah …’ said Calvert. ‘So you feel she might be on to something, do you?’

  ‘Pshaw!’

  ‘What? Would you please speak up, sir? There seems to be some interference on the line.’

  ‘I said, no. It’s just Evie. She’s got a bee in her tricorne as usual. But I have to tell you, Tom, I have a very pressing reason of my own for wanting to know where her train of thought might be leading her. I’ll be there all right.’

  ‘I hoped you’d say that. Here’s the plan. We’ll meet at the screening-room at three o’clock. Miss Mount will need a lift down to Elstree, of course, but she told me to inform you that, if by any chance you were thinking of contacting her first by ‘phone, not to bother.’

  ‘Well, that’s delightful of her, I must say.’

  ‘Instead, she proposed that you pick her up at her flat at two on the dot. On the dot – those were her words and she insisted I let you know they were in italics. Said you’d understand.’