A Mysterious Affair Of Style Part 4

Even before he had read a line of it, however, his eye was drawn to the two portrait photographs between which it was sandwiched.

The first was of a man in his mid-forties with a face so puffily corpulent it looked as though a twinned pair of thinner faces had been rolled into one and a double chin so fat and fleshy it spilled onto his white shirt-collar like a souffle oozing out over the top of a cooking-pot. This, according to its caption, was 'Alastair Farjeon, the world-famous producer, familiarly known to those in the film business as Farje'.

H'm, said Trubshawe to himself, so he wasn't alone in having a problem distinguishing a producer from a director.

The second was of a poutily unsmiling young woman. Despite her faintly beady piglet eyes and an elongated slash of a mouth that her lip rouge accentuated to near-freakish proportions, she was an undeniably attractive specimen of feminine allure, except that hers was a kind of chilly, standoffish, inaccessible beauty 'marmoreal' was the fancy adjective that came to mind by which he personally had never felt aroused. The caption to her photograph read: '22-year-old Patsy Sloots, Mr Farjeon's ill-fated discovery'.

Trubshawe now turned to the article itself.

Shaken to its glamorous foundations, the British cinema world was in mourning today following the tragic death of Alastair Farjeon, the celebrated producer of such cla.s.sic pictures as An American in Plaster-of-Paris, The Perfect Criminal, The Yes Man Said No and others too numerous to mention.

The 47-year-old Mr Farjeon perished in a fire yesterday afternoon while week-ending at his luxurious and secluded residence in Cookham. A second fatal victim of the flames which swept uncontrollably through the wooden chalet-style villa was Patsy Sloots, the 22-year-old dancer and promising motion-picture actress whom Mr Farjeon, widely regarded as the British cinema's foremost discoverer of new talent, had spotted in the chorus line of the Crazy Gang revue, You Know What Sailors Are!, currently in its second year at the Victoria Palace.

It was at exactly 4.45 pm that the Cookham police and fire brigade were simultaneously alerted to the conflagration by one of Mr Farjeon's neighbours, a Mrs Thelma Bentley, who reported to them of having seen, as she stepped into her garden to mow the lawn, a 'wall of flames' rising out of the villa's living-room windows. Unfortunately, by the time three separate fire-engines had arrived on the scene only a few minutes later, the fire was too far advanced to be immediately extinguished and the villa itself proved impossible of access, or even of approach, so intense was the heat given off.

The priority of the eighteen-strong team of firemen was therefore to get the blaze sufficiently under control to ensure that it would not spread to adjacent residences, all of whose occupants were speedily evacuated. At the height of the conflagration, a heavy pall of smoke was visible from a distance of up to thirty miles away.

At 6.15 firemen were finally able to gain entry to what was now no more than a smoking, skeletal carca.s.s. There the horrific discovery was made of two badly burnt corpses. These have still to be officially identified, but the police have already let it be known to this reporter that there would seem to be no doubt at all that they are Mr Farjeon, the film producer, and his young protegee.

Asked if there was any suspicion of foul play, Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D., the officer in charge of the case, confined himself to stating that the circ.u.mstances of the catastrophe would be thoroughly investigated but that every indication so far suggested that it had been a tragic accident.

Later, interviewed on the telephone, the well-known film-maker Herbert (I Live in Grosvenor Square) Wilc.o.x paid a warm and heartfelt tribute to Mr Farjeon. 'His death,' he said, 'is a tragedy for the post-war revival of the British film industry. He was a true artist who brought clever ideas and bizarre angles to a medium which has never been more sorely in need of them. One did not have to approve of all his work to sense that one was in the presence of genius.'

Maurice Elvey, whose many popular pictures have included The Lamp Still Burns and Strawberry Roan, declared, 'I doubt we shall see his like again.'

The investigation continues.

Trubshawe then turned to the newspaper's necrological page. There was, as he noted at once, a lengthy, laudatory obituary of Farjeon himself but none at all of the far less celebrated Patsy Sloots. Her name, indeed, was mentioned only once in Farjeon's own obituary, as the actress who had been selected to play the leading female role in the producer's (as the obituarist also insisted on describing him) new project, If Ever They Find Me Dead, alongside Gareth Knight, Patricia Roc, Mary Clare, Raymond Lovell, Felix Aylmer and 'At last!' muttered Trubshawe Cora Rutherford.

He laid the newspaper down and began to mull over what he had just read. Burnt to death! What a ghastly way to go! Puts you on a par with Joan of Arc and what was the name of the Italian scientist condemned to death for heresy? Giordano somebody? Bruno! Giordano Bruno! We all shudder inwardly whenever we read of how these martyrs were roped to the stake and the f.a.ggots piled up around their bare feet and everything set alight and how long did it take before they were asphyxiated and surely the fact itself of asphyxiation couldn't quite mean that they wouldn't have started to feel the flames creeping up their legs? It didn't bear thinking of ...

Yet, after all, both Joan of Arc and Giordano Bruno were long dead, centuries long dead, ghosts who belonged to a dim, unknowable past and who have survived into the present as not much more than musty ill.u.s.trations in a schoolboy's history-book. What about all those ordinary what's-their-names who simply had the misfortune to be caught inside a blazing building? Not Alastair Farjeon, of course, who certainly wasn't a what's-his-name and, from all accounts, couldn't have been further from ordinary. No, think instead of those decent, hard-working, G.o.d-fearing East End folk who, bombed out of their beds in the Blitz, some of them at least, suffered no less hideous a fate than Joan of Arc or Giordano Bruno, except that their names will never ring gloriously down the ages. Yes, it did make you think ...

He thought, as well, of the news, the slightly startling news, that the case had been a.s.signed to Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D. Well, well, well. Young Tom Calvert, already an Inspector. And in Richmond, too a pip of a posting, if he wasn't mistaken. He had known Tom's father well and had followed the son's progress when he was just a policeman on the beat, down Bermondsey way, he seemed to recall. He had been the kind of fair and friendly bobby everybody warmed to. Always had a gobstopper or a digestive biscuit for the poorer kiddies, always greeted the regulars at the Horse and Groom with a cheery 'Evening all!', never laid too heavy a hand on the shoulder of some bedraggled old biddy who'd had a tawny port or three over the limit. And now he's an Inspector, if you please.

His reflections turned next to Cora Rutherford. It was a queer experience meeting up with her again after the pa.s.sage of so many years years, he couldn't help feeling, that had taken their toll on her once flawless facade. She was still, to be sure, the epitome of sheen and self-a.s.surance, still enhaloed by that l.u.s.trous aura of the ethereal and the unapproachable that, against all the odds, theatricals and what would you call them? cinematicals? somehow manage to preserve, more or less intact, into their dotage, their anecdotage, as the old joke has it. There could be no doubt, though, that she no longer possessed the bubbly vivaciousness of old, quite that potent mixture of film-star poise and spoilt-child petulance that had made her, a decade before, so distinctive a personality. And the fact that she was the very last to be cited among the players who had been cast in Farjeon's new picture, coupled with the equally telling fact that, when she realised that it was no longer going to be made, she had let herself go to pieces so rashly and recklessly and in the sw.a.n.kiest restaurant in London, too only confirmed that she wasn't nearly as confident now of her what's the word? magnetism? as when they had first met. It was sad, of course, it was really dreadfully sad. But, after all, just what was the woman's age? Fifty? Sixty?

Trubshawe remembered how Evie had revealed, during his interrogation of her at ffolkes Manor, that she and Cora had once shared a minuscule flat in Bloomsbury when they were both barely out of their teens and no, no, try to forget what else she had inadvertently let slip about that cohabitation of theirs! At any rate, it all did seem to imply that actress and novelist were pretty much the same age, and the latter, he knew, was certainly no spring chicken. No summer chicken either. Autumn, he said to himself, autumn was the season, late autumn at that. Poor woman, he mused, and he did feel a genuine sympathy for Cora's plight. Life was a.s.suredly no sinecure for an actress past her prime.

And Evadne Mount herself? Quite a character, she was. It's strange. If he had been asked, Trubshawe would unquestionably have answered that he hadn't given her more than a pa.s.sing thought in the decade since their initial encounter. Even when he read her novels (and had taken the trouble to catch up with her long-running stage play, The Tourist Trap, whose murderer had turned out, to his nave surprise and obscure resentment, to be the investigating police officer), he had found them so absorbing that it simply hadn't occurred to him to attribute their qualities to a woman he had actually met just as a mother, watching her offspring grow up, soon forgets that these autonomous and increasingly independent little beings were once the inhabitants of her own womb.

Yes, he was a fan of Evadne Mount's work; nor was he in any way ashamed to admit it. Yet he almost never spoke to his cl.u.s.ter of acquaintances of his enthusiasm for her whodunits and, on the very rare occasions he did, it was not at all his manner airily to brag of having struck up an acquaintanceship with their author.

By chance, however, she had walked back into his life or rather, he had walked back into hers, as into a lamp-post and, less than twenty-four hours later, here he was thinking of her and Cora Rutherford and Alastair Farjeon and Patsy Sloots and young Tom Calvert and all. Like her or loathe her, impossible as she often could be, things did tend to happen around Evadne Mount.

And that was the crux of the matter. Nothing much tended any longer to happen around him. After years of serving the Law, years of being universally respected as one of the Yard's top men, here he was, what, a codger? Yes, a codger. An old geezer.

He owned a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached house in Golders Green in which he lived a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached life. He had a thriving little vegetable garden in which he would grow his own leeks and radishes and carrots. He had an ever-diminishing circle of friends from the old days whom he would meet for a congenial pint in his local hostelry. And he had an occasional, these days extremely occasional, lunch in Town with a few pals from the Yard.

When it was with former colleagues of his own generation that he lunched, it was a real treat. He enjoyed reminiscing with his peers about the curiously, paradoxically, innocent criminals whom they had all dealt with at one time or another over the years, criminals for whom, by virtue of an unvarying, even comforting, routine of arrest, charge, trial, sentence, release and re-arrest, they had all acquired a certain fondness.

But every so often, or every so seldom, he would be invited out to lunch by one of the younger crowd, somebody whose mentor he'd once been or flattered himself he'd been and that tended to prove something of an ordeal.

It wasn't just the mortifying impression they left, however kindly disposed they seemed to be towards him, that, compared to their methods, his generation's had been almost comically outmoded; that, far from having advanced the science of criminology, as he secretly prided himself he had done, he and his contemporaries had actually set it back a couple of decades. It was also the fact that they all appeared to be engaged on fascinating cases which, just to hear about, caused his mouth literally to water.

He felt old and irrelevant, a back-number. If he offered a suggestion as to how they might proceed on some ongoing case, they would listen politely enough until he had finished speaking, then simply pick up where they had left off as though he himself had never opened his mouth. Contrariwise, if he pointed out some striking resemblance between that ongoing case and one with which he himself had been involved several years back, they would shake their heads with ill-concealed amus.e.m.e.nt, as though to answer him would merely be to humour him, and they would end by remarking, unfailingly, 'You know, Mr Trubshawe, things have changed since your day ...'

Ah yes, things had changed since his day ... But if it wouldn't be true to say that he had got definitively used to his becalmed way of life, at least he had, if one can phrase it so, got used to not getting used to it. Until, that is, he had idly wandered into the tearoom of the Ritz Hotel and heard the unforgettable and, he realised, never quite forgotten voice of Evadne Mount, his old sparring partner.

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. .h.i.t 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 pa.s.sed 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 ...

Chapter Five.

It was five uneventful weeks later, one Sunday in May, as Trubshawe was preparing to wash his car, a ch.o.r.e 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 const.i.tutional he took virtually every evening and his death hadn't struck him as a good enough reason for giving it up. The pa.s.sing 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 protege, 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 a.s.surance, 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, h.e.l.lo!' 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 a.s.signed 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 gla.s.ses, 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 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?'