A Mysterious Affair of Style (17 page)

Everybody scrambled out of its way as it hit the cement floor with a bone-crunching splatter.

Lettice Morley screamed, Philippe Françaix blanched, Leolia Drake all but swooned into Gareth Knight’s arms.

Seconds later, Calvert and Trubshawe together approached the silent, shapeless mass; but seeing Calvert momentarily hesitate, it was Trubshawe alone who knelt down in front of it. Bracing himself, he gently turned the body face upward. Even he, however, no stranger to the horrors routinely encountered in a policeman’s round, couldn’t help recoiling from the sight that met his eyes.

The face that he looked upon had been pulped to a bony, bloody mash by the impact of such a landing from such a height. Yet there could be no doubt at all as to whom that face had once belonged.

‘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.’