A Mysterious Affair of Style (5 page)

How that same voice, ten years before, had set his false teeth on edge! And how, yesterday, he couldn’t deny it, how it had positively rejuvenated him! As had everything that followed. After tea at the Ritz, a visit to a grand West End theatre, a marvellously funny hoax of which he was just as willing a victim as anybody else in the audience, dinner at the Ivy with Evadne and Cora Rutherford, and finally the shock, but equally (admit it, Trubshawe) the secret thrill, of hearing, before the news hit the headlines, of the death of a famous film director whose name had meant nothing to him just the day before. All that, a good deal more than had happened to him in the past ten years, squeezed into just sixteen hours!

He sat there, at his oblong kitchen table, sucking on his unlit pipe. He had never really looked forward to retirement but had had to resign himself to what was, after all, the ruthless way of a ruthless world. You worked hard for forty years – work, in his case, which he loved unreservedly – and then you retired. Or, as again in his case, you
were
retired.

His own luck, however, had run out almost at once. His wife, with whom he’d looked forward to sharing his retirement, had passed away only a few months after he quit the Yard. His loyal old Labrador, Tobermory, had been shot dead on the moors near ffolkes Manor. Just one exciting thing had happened to him in all the years that followed – meeting Evadne Mount again. Would there be, he wondered wistfully, any more to come?

Naturally, he would never have contemplated ringing her up, even had he known her telephone number. But then a sudden remembrance came to him. What was it she had said? That she could be found at the Ritz every day at teatime. So what if he, Trubshawe, ‘just happened’ to stroll into the hotel one day at around five o’clock and what if he ‘just happened’ to run into her? Oh, not today, not tomorrow, not even the day after tomorrow. Towards the end of the week, perhaps? Or at the beginning of next?

He shook his head sadly. That wouldn’t do at all.

What troubled him wasn’t that Evadne Mount would get ‘the wrong idea’ – considering their respective ages, appearances and dispositions, nothing could be more improbable – but that she would get the right idea. That she would realise at once he’d become a lonely old man whose need for company was such he actually hoped she would accept the terminally lame excuse that he had chanced to drop, yet again, into the poshest hotel in London.

No, forget it. The novelist had re-exited his life as swiftly and casually as he had re-entered hers.

Ho hum. Might as well spend an hour or two in the garden …

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.