A Mysterious Affair Of Style Part 19

'Or can there? That was the question that nagged at me the longer I pursued my investigation. I am, as I think most of you are aware, the author of countless best-selling whodunits and what I'm about to say may of course be no more than professional deformation, an extreme consequence of the dexterity with which, over the years, I've had to juggle convoluted storylines, eccentric motives and ingenious last-chapter and even, on a couple of occasions, last-page twists. Yet there's one thing I've always been profoundly sceptical of being faced, as I seem to be now, with a set of suspects not one of whom is even a tiny bit more suspicious than any other.'

Whereupon, half-sliding off her stool, she attempted to scratch her bottom, a gesture which, discreet as it was, none of them failed to notice though only Trubshawe, naturally, understood.

'It never happens like that in my own whodunits,' she went on, awkwardly righting herself, 'and somehow I can never bring myself to believe that it happens like that in life either.

'There is, of course, the old chestnut of the least likely suspect. A long time ago, however, authors of mystery fiction realised that they had to move on from that primitive device. They understood that, if they were going to continue enthralling their readers, they would all have to give their plots one or two extra turns of the screw. In short, they'd have to find an escape-route out of the vicious circle that had begun to bedevil every conventional whodunit. After all, if as tradition dictates, or used to dictate the murderer is the least likely suspect, and if the reader is conversant with that tradition and expects it to be upheld, then the least likely suspect automatically becomes the most likely suspect and we have all, writers and readers alike, returned to square one.'

She fell silent for a few seconds to regain her breath. The voice of Vera Lynn had long vanished into the ether and the only sound still to be heard was a faint creaking in the gantry.

It was at that moment too that, though reluctant to cut in, an increasingly restless Calvert exchanged a fretful glance with Trubshawe, who in return merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to say, 'Yes, yes, I know, but I've been here before and, trust me, she'll get there in the end.' Whether Calvert actually did thus interpret the shrug, he nevertheless chose to give the novelist a little more leeway, while Trubshawe himself, accustomed as he was to Evadne's tendency to digress from the subject, nevertheless started to think, with scalp-scratching puzzlement, that this time she really was pushing it.

From the five suspects, meanwhile, probably relieved above all that she hadn't yet got round to pointing an accusatory finger at any of them, there came nary a peep.

'As I was saying,' she went on, 'we whodunit writers who began to feel the need to adapt to changing tastes were obliged to approach the genre from an entirely new angle.

'Consider, for example, one of my more recent efforts, Murder Without Ease. If you've read it, you'll doubtless recall that, rung up by some local Squire in the first chapter, the Somerset police discover a young c.o.c.kney tough lying dead in his orchard. It turns out that he and his accomplice had been caught red-handed that very morning, at the crack of dawn, in the act of burgling the house. The irate Squire had grabbed the nearest shotgun and, without really meaning to, killed the young c.o.c.kney tough, whose pockets were indeed found to be stuffed with wads of bank-notes removed from the wall-safe in the library. It was, however, the accomplice who had made off with the real prize, a priceless Gainsborough conversation piece.

'As always in my books, I'm afraid, the police are content to swallow whatever dubious evidence has been dangled in front of their noses, without even troubling to give it a good sniff, and set about questioning the usual East End riffraff. As always, too, Alexis Baddeley she's my regular sleuth, you know Alexis Baddeley smells a rat. So she cunningly ingratiates herself with the Squire, learns that he's been taking a number of sea-plane trips over to Le Touquet, where he's been losing heavily at baccarat, and ends by proving that there never was an accomplice.

'It was the Squire himself, you see, who had already pa.s.sed the allegedly stolen Gainsborough on to a fence. It was the Squire himself who had hired the c.o.c.kney tough to go through the motions of burgling the house, with the promise, naturally, of divvying up the insurance payout between the two of them. And it was the Squire himself who had shot down the hapless young rascal in cold blood while he was making his so-called "escape".'

She scanned her silent, captive audience.

'Now why do I tell that story?'

'Yes, why?' Trubshawe, if not yet at the end of his tether, then as close to the end as made no difference, couldn't help responding.

'I'll tell you why,' she boomed out to the rafters. 'Though, in my whodunit, the police, investigating what they imagined to be a straightforward case of theft, deluded themselves that they had an adequate line-up of suspects, it was Alexis Baddeley alone who came to understand that the guilty party belonged to a whole other category of suspect just as I've also come to understand must have been the case here.'

She raised her voice a notch or two higher still, even though in the empty studio it was already more than loud enough.

'In Murder Without Ease the criminal was not simply the least likely suspect from among the seven or eight under investigation. He was, rather, somebody who, until the book's penultimate chapter, was not even regarded as a suspect at all. And that, I submit, has been equally true of this crime. For, in reality, you five were all no more than mere p.a.w.ns either unwitting p.a.w.ns or, as I believe, in one individual case what you might call a witting p.a.w.n in the lethal game of chess which has been played out inside this studio and over which, from the very beginning, has loomed the real mastermind.

'That said, the time has now come for me, as promised, to announce to you all the ident.i.ty of that mastermind, the murderer of Cora Rutherford '

Before she could utter another word, Lettice Morley, her coltish features livid, warped out of shape, rendered almost ugly, suddenly leapt to her feet and made a demented dash in Evadne Mount's direction. At first, the others, suspects and detectives, could do no more than goggle at her. And she seized that moment of dazed inaction to grasp Evadne by both her shoulders at once, giving her so violent a kick in the small of her back that it sent her sprawling over the wire-entangled studio floor.

A split-second later, the young a.s.sistant jerking her own body backward as swiftly as the elderly novelist's had been propelled forward, a gigantic arc-light came plummeting down from the gantry. Hitting the ground with a window-rattling crash, practically at their feet, completely crushing the stool on which the novelist had been delivering her tirade, it exploded into a thousand glinting fragments.

For a few moments n.o.body moved. Then, slowly picking herself up, agitatedly dusting slivers of gla.s.s and metal off her clothing, too shocked at first to react, too winded to speak, Evadne stared with disbelief at the smouldering debris.

'Great Scott Moncrieff!' she croaked. 'That was meant for me!'

She turned to face Lettice Morley. Resembling nothing so much as a half-naked infant who has just scampered out of the freezing ocean and waits to be enveloped by her mother in a thick warm towel, the latter stood pale and shivering in front of her.

'Lettice! My dear, dear girl, you saved my life!'

Without responding, Lettice pointed shakily at the gantry.

'Look! Oh my G.o.d, look!'

Gazing up, they were all confronted by a hair-raising spectacle. With a velvet fedora pulled down low over the forehead, a creature enveloped in a long black cape, a cape so voluminous it was impossible not merely to know who the creature was but to which gender it belonged, was attempting, with the coiled tensity of a trapped wild beast, to forge a path across the intricate web of cables and planks.

'There's your murderer, Inspector!' cried Evadne.

'Get going!' Calvert immediately shouted at his men. 'Now, now, now! Make sure all the doors are locked! This is one villain who won't slip through our fingers!'

And the four uniformed policemen were just about to carry out his orders when a chilling sound arrested them all at once, just as it arrested everybody else on the set.

It was a scream. A scream the like of which none of them had ever heard in their lives. An androgynous scream, paradoxically both ba.s.so and falsetto.

The individual in the black cape had caught one foot in the narrow gap between two iron girders struggled to prise it loose tugged at it tugged at it again and again, more and more frantically then gave it one last desperate tug, a tug that did finally release the foot but also caused the creature itself, for one agonising instant, to careen helplessly above their raised heads until, arms outstretched like a pair of giant bat-wings, it toppled over altogether and, with a second and even more nightmarish scream, came plunging down towards them.

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

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

Seconds later, Calvert and Trubshawe together approached the silent, shapeless ma.s.s; 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, b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

Chapter Sixteen.

'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 Francaix 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 gla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 Francaix.

'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 a.s.sume, 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 Francaix had the opportunity of slipping poison into her champagne gla.s.s, 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, n.o.body 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 gla.s.s, 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!' Francaix 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 Francaix, 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.'

'But you were studying the murder so closely, so intently, as though it had just given you a clue to Cora's.'

'Nothing of the kind. I wasn't studying the murder at all. I wasn't looking at the murder. The murder was irrelevant.'

'You weren't looking at the murder?' cried Trubshawe, his brow furrowing perplexedly. 'What in heaven's name were you looking at?'

'I was looking at the camera,' came the unexpected reply.

'The camera? What camera? There was no camera.'

'No camera? Eustace dear, what are you talking about?' she answered, with a queer little t.i.tter.

'How can you possibly say,' she went on as patiently as though addressing an infant, 'that there was no camera when the picture wouldn't have existed in the first place without one?'

'Oh, as to that,' the policeman grudgingly conceded, 'I'll grant you. But, well, it's not up there on the screen. It dash it all, it's what the pictures on the screen come out of. So, by definition, it's not something you can see.'

'Not literally, to be sure. If you learn to look at films the way I've just been doing, though, you'll certainly start to see the presence of the camera. It's not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. After finishing a hundred-piece puzzle, one can't help but briefly see the world too, all curvily, squirmily snippeted, as a gigantic jigsaw. Well, after watching a handful of Farjeon's films, I couldn't help seeing the world exactly the way he saw it.

'So perhaps you were right after all, Philippe. Perhaps it is appropriate to compare a film camera to a pen.'

While listening to her, the Frenchman had drawn out his own fountain pen and now frantically scribbled some cryptic notes on the linen tablecloth.

'You mean,' he said, his always moot fluency in English starting to desert him, 'ze director of a film is a kind of how you say? autoor? Like ze autoor of a book?'

'The author of a book? Ye-es, I suppose you could put it like that,' was the novelist's guarded response, 'though it does sound more convincing when you say it, Philippe, French as you are. But yes, indeed, the director or, rather, this one director, the late Alastair Farjeon, both lamented and unlamented was indeed ze autoor of his films.