A Mysterious Affair of Style

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘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 throu
ghout 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 al
l. 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!’