She took a moment or two to boggle at the absurdity. Then:
‘Eustace?’
‘Yes?’
‘Keep your mind on the road ahead, there’s a love.’
*
It was just after five o’clock when they entered the Ritz Bar. He escorted her to a secluded table, ordered, together with his own whisky-and-soda, the double pink gin he assumed she would have ordered for herself, in which assumption he was entirely correct, drew out his pipe and posed it on the table’s ashtray, along one of whose four narrow grooves it lay, unlit, like a tiny black odalisque.
Then, once they had been served, once her glass had been clinked against his and each had echoed the other’s ‘Chin chin!’, she turned to him and said:
‘Well now, here we are. Time to tell me what’s afoot.’
‘Evie,’ he said, leaning towards her as though resolved to thwart any passing waiter from even fleetingly eavesdropping on him, ‘I believe I’ve got it.’
‘Got what?’
‘This afternoon, as I was listening to our suspects, I was also running over the case in my mind, tabulating all the salient points in what they had to say, and I had a sudden insight, one, I fancy, that stands a jolly good chance of bringing everything to a swifter conclusion than we ever dreamt possible.’
‘Aha! Been thinking behind my back, I see.’
‘Oh well, if you’re going to be like that …’
‘Forgive me, just my little jest. From what I gather, then, you’ve uncovered some kind of a major clue?’
‘I have at that,’ said Trubshawe, who found it hard to conceal the sense of gratifying trepidation peculiar to anyone gearing up to astound his interlocutor with a startling piece of news. ‘A clue that, as they say in the films, is liable to crack this case wide open. At the very least, it will show Calvert that we old’uns still have an ace or two up our sleeves.’
‘All right,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘My ears are all ears. Let’s hear what it is you’ve got for them.’
‘Well,’ Trubshawe began, ‘you would agree that, logically, only five people could have laced Cora’s champagne glass with cyanide?’
‘Aren’t we forgetting ourselves?’
‘What do you mean, forgetting ourselves?’
‘You and I were also supposed to be suspects, were we not?’
‘Evie,’ he asked, assuming a mock-solemn expression, ‘did you kill Cora?’
‘No, of course I didn’t.’
‘Neither did I. I repeat, then, only five people are known to us to have been aware of the change that Hanway made to the script. Only five people therefore could also have known of the moment of opportunity during which it would have been possible, unobserved, to murder Cora. And given that no one else was about to drink out of that glass, there can’t be any ambiguity whatever as to the identity of the murderer’s predestined victim. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘I repeat yet again, only five people could have murdered Cora – and yet, as we discovered when we questioned them, not one of them had a conceivable motive.’
‘Hold it there, Eustace,’ Evadne pointed out. ‘One of them – indeed, several of them – might have had a secret motive. A motive of which we’re still unaware and which they were naturally averse to revealing to us.’
‘Yes, I thought of that,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Yet my own personal conviction is that they were all telling us the truth – the truth, at least, about their relationship, or lack of it, past or present, with Cora. Nearly all of them, you remember, insisted that they’d never even met her before she turned up at the studio to start shooting the picture. Only Gareth Knight knew her from the old days, when they’d trodden the boards together, and of all of them he was ostensibly the best-disposed towards her. I say ostensibly, because of course he could have been lying – but again, don’t ask me why, I believed him.
‘If that were not enough, they all had a very powerful professional motive for, so to speak, not killing her – for, as Hanway himself put it, keeping her alive. Farjeon’s death had already dealt a near-fatal blow to If Ever They Find Me Dead and Cora’s death will probably be the coup de grâce. Since the future of each and every one of those suspects was tied up in that picture, the last thing any of them would have wanted was to have a second, even darker cloud hanging over it.’
‘Eustace dear, it gives me no pleasure to say this, sincerely it doesn’t, but you haven’t told me anything yet I didn’t already know.’
‘Be patient with me, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, making a superhuman effort not to lose his own patience. ‘I long ago had to learn how with you.’
‘Sorry, sorry. Go on.’
‘The fact is that all the evidence we heard either took us round in circles or else led us nowhere. Yet, despite the irrelevance of most of what they had to tell us, there was something I felt for the longest time without being able to pin it down, some underlying coherence or consistency, some mysterious thread running through the testimonies of everyone we questioned.’
‘Then at last – it was when Françaix told us of the theft of his script – it struck me what that consistency was. At that instant I saw, as though in a flash of lightning, what I’d been groping towards.’
‘Yes? What is it you saw?’ she asked, by now almost as wound up as he himself was.
‘I saw that the thread running through all their evidence was Alastair Farjeon. We were interrogating them about Cora and all they wanted to talk about was Farjeon. It was as though they weren’t actually that interested in Cora. As though they couldn’t understand the point of being asked about her. That’s why I say I believed them when they claimed they had no earthly reason to commit the crime. As we all did, I listened to their protestations of innocence but what I found myself increasingly listening for was, in every instance, the almost offhand way they made that claim. Of course – each of them told us – of course I didn’t kill Cora Rutherford. Meaning, she wasn’t an important enough figure in my life to be worth killing.
‘And did you notice,’ he went on, swept up in the tide of his own momentum, ‘did you notice how not one of them seemed to be nervous or shifty-eyed? Now, Evie, that just isn’t natural, even when the suspects you’re dealing with are innocent. You’ll always find a trace of what we used to call at the Yard the Plain-Clothes Syndrome. People are nervous when they’re being questioned by the police. Why? Because they’re guilty? Not necessarily. Then why? Because they’re being questioned by the police, that’s why. For most people a police interrogation is such an ordeal, it’s enough to make anyone nervous, guilty or innocent. It’s exactly like blood pressure.’
‘Blood pressure?’
‘A doctor can never obtain an exact measurement of a patient’s blood pressure for one very elementary reason: blood pressure automatically rises when it’s being measured. Which is why, during interrogations at the Yard, we were always more suspicious of those who responded calmly to being questioned than those who were sweaty and jittery and never stopped shifting about in the hot seat.’
‘But, Eustace, you’re contradicting yourself. If, as you say, our five suspects all responded calmly, then logically that suggests we shouldn’t trust any of them.’
‘That’s exactly what I do say. We should and we shouldn’t.’
‘Explain.’
‘As far as Cora’s murder is concerned, we should trust them. It was, I repeat, as though the question – “Did you murder Cora Rutherford?” – a question, I grant you, we never did actually ask, but they all knew that it was implied in well-nigh every question we did ask – it was as though such a question was just too foolish to be dignified with a serious answer, as the saying goes, like asking them if they’d poisoned Hitler in his bunker. But we shouldn’t trust them further than that, for the very simple reason that, when they started talking freely about Alastair Farjeon, and none of them could resist talking about him, they all revealed something about themselves that made me realise just what slippery custom
ers they potentially were. One of them, at any rate.’
‘And what was it they revealed?’
The Chief-Inspector held himself back for a few seconds in order for his response to make the greatest possible impact on his listener.
‘That, if none of them had a motive for murdering Cora Rutherford, all of them did have a motive for murdering Alastair Farjeon.’
‘Alastair Farjeon?! But Farjeon wasn’t murdered.’
‘Oh, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, unable to resist a smile of condescension, ‘you disappoint me. Don’t you ever read your own books?’
‘No, of course I don’t. Why should I? I know who did it!’ she petulantly snapped back at him, slamming the statement shut with an audible exclamation mark.
‘Just let me remind you, though,’ she went on. ‘Your young protégé Tom Calvert – “the most promising newcomer to the Force I ever came across”, if I may quote your own assessment of his quality as a police officer – issued a statement to the press that categorically excluded any suspicion of foul play in the Cookham fire. And, by the way, what have my books got to do with the price of potatoes?’
‘Come now, Evie, you’re being unfair. Prior to Cora’s murder, young Tom had no reason to suppose that there might have been foul play. And, as far as your books are concerned, I’d just like to remind you that, if this were one of your whodunits, the so-called accidental death of a character like Farjeon would certainly be regarded as suspicious by the reader. By Alexis Baddeley, too, if not, of course, by dependable, doddery old Inspector Plodder, Plodder of the Yard.’
‘Sorry, Eustace,’ said Evadne, ‘but this is not one of my books. It’s a case of real bloody murder, the murder, you seem to forget, of a very dear friend of mine. A human heart has ceased to beat, and I can’t help feeling it’s tasteless of you to compare Cora’s murder with the sort I write about in whodunits whose sole ambition is to entertain my readers.’
‘If you would just listen to me, instead of flying off in a rage,’ a flustered Trubshawe replied, ‘you’d realise that what I’m saying might actually help us apprehend Cora’s murderer.’
‘Oh, very well,’ said the novelist ungraciously, ‘continue with your exposition.’
‘What I deduced, then, is that all five suspects did indeed have a motive for murder, except that it was for the murder not of Cora but of Alastair Farjeon, a man few of them took the trouble to deny that they cordially detested. And, just before we left Elstree, I went off to the Gents and scribbled down a quick list so that you’d be able to see at one fell swoop what I was getting at.’
He pulled from his pocket a neatly folded sheet of lined writing-paper and handed it over to Evadne Mount.
This is what she read:
POSSIBLE SUSPECTS IN THE MURDER OF
ALASTAIR FARJEON
AND THEIR POTENTIAL MOTIVES
Rex Hanway. Farjeon’s death meant that he was free at last to make a picture on his own, an ambition he himself admitted he had waited many years to satisfy.
Philippe Françaix. Farjeon plagiarised his script of If Ever They Find Me Dead.
Lettice Morley. Farjeon attempted to ravish her in his Cookham villa.
Gareth Knight. Farjeon threatened to peach on him about his having served a sentence in the Scrubs for making indecent overtures to a young policeman in a public lavatory.
Leolia Drake. She knew that only if Farjeon were out of the way would she have a chance of playing the leading role in If Ever They Find Me Dead. (Or could she have been merely Hanway’s accomplice?)
Evadne laid the sheet of paper down on the table between them and was about to speak, except that Trubshawe, who would have been less than human if he hadn’t experienced a certain smug satisfaction in having managed to give her a taste of her own medicine, got in first by raising his hand to silence her.
‘Before you answer,’ he said, ‘let me just add one crucial point. If, as I believe, Alastair Farjeon was murdered, then it finally gives us something which we have all been seeking in vain from the very beginning of this case.’
‘What?’
‘A motive for murdering Cora.’
They both spoke at the same time.
‘Because Cora had found out who murdered Farjeon!’
‘Because Cora had found out who murdered Farjeon!’
‘Snap!’
‘Snap!’
‘Now,’ said Trubshawe, taking triumphant note of what he imagined was the novelist’s belated conversion to the cause, ‘it’s time for you to tell me what you think.’
He sat comfortably back in his chair, his glass of whisky in his hand, waiting for the inevitable accolade.
But Evadne’s voice, when she spoke again, was not as encouraging as he had expected.
‘We-ll …’
‘Yes?’
‘…?’
‘What? What is it you’re trying to say?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all. That is, I …’
‘Out with it, Evie.’
‘Well, Eustace, frankly I don’t know.’
‘What in Heaven’s name is the problem?’
‘The problem,’ she said, ‘is that my bottom itches.’
Trubshawe gaped at her in disbelief.
‘Your bottom itches!’ he cried out so loudly that not a few of those customers who were seated at nearby tables turned their heads to stare at them both.
‘Yes,’ she repeated in a half-whisper, ‘my bottom itches. And I have to tell you, Eustace, my bottom has never let me down.’
‘What the –’ he spluttered incontinently. Then:
‘Even from you, Evie,’ he said in a low hiss, ‘this is going too far.’
‘No, no, let me explain,’ she replied with dignity. ‘Whenever I read a whodunit by one of my rivals, my so-called rivals, and I encounter some device – I don’t know, a motive, a clue, an alibi, whatever – a device I simply don’t trust, even if I can’t immediately articulate to myself why I don’t trust it, I long ago noticed that my bottom started to itch. I repeat, it’s infallible. If my bottom ever once steered me wrong, why, the universe would be meaningless.’
‘How is it you never mentioned this at ffolkes Manor?’
‘Really, Eustace, my bottom is scarcely something I care to bring up in mixed company. Besides, we had only just met.’
‘So you’re telling me, are you, that you’d put your trust in your – in your bottom before you’d ever put it in me, and I’m not just a friend, a close friend, I hope, but also a police officer who spent his professional life investigating crimes of this nature?’
‘Yes, Eustace, I know how odd it must sound. Yet, close friend as you assuredly are, I’m closer still to my own bottom, after all, and I’ve known it far longer than I’ve known you.
‘It works even when I’m writing my own books. It’ll sometimes happen that I’m dog-tired, I desperately want to finish a chapter and I botch it by lazily employing some whiskery, second-hand plot device. Then, sure as Fate, my bottom starts itching and I realise that I’ve just got to go back to the drawing-board and replace it with something cleverer and more original. Which, I may say, I invariably do.’
‘You could have fooled me,’ muttered a sullen Trubshawe.
‘I find I usually do,’ she countered airily.
His face crimsoned.
‘I see. Now you’re being nasty – nasty and gratuitous. Have a care, Evie, have a care. Two can play at that game.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I readily admit that your theory is attractive, really very attractive, and for the moment I can’t quite explain – except, of course, for the itch in my bottom – why I’m ill-at-ease with it.’
‘You certainly seemed to share my excitement when I proposed that it at least provided us with a clue as to why Cora had been murdered.’
‘True enough. Even now, that strikes me as by far the best argument that can be made for it. It’s just that, where those five suspects are concerned, well …’
‘Wh
at?’
‘Yes, they do all appear to have had motives for wanting to murder Farjeon, I grant you that. I just can’t help feeling that some of those motives are a little – let’s say – weak.’
‘Oh. Which ones?’
‘Leolia Drake’s, for example. She’s a putrid little minx, to be sure, but do you really believe she’d be ready to murder Farjeon – and not only Farjeon, remember, but poor Patsy Sloots along with him – just because, in the first place, she knew, or merely expected, that Hanway would consequently be assigned to direct If Ever They Find Me Dead and, in the second place, because she had total confidence in his authority to cast her in the leading role? I have to say I do find that a strain on my credulity.’
‘We-ell,’ the Chief-Inspector defensively replied, aware as he was that, with this particular suspect, he was on shaky ground, ‘I did add a rider to the effect that she might merely have acted as Hanway’s accomplice.’
‘Even so, Eustace, even so. And Lettice. Now, I agree, she is, as the Yanks say, a tough little cookie. But, after all, Farjeon didn’t actually succeed in having his evil way with her.’
‘I can’t see as that makes a ha’p’orth of difference. Don’t forget that, if it was Lettice, she may not actually have meant to kill Farjeon. It may just have been her intention to give him the fright of his life. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we were talking of manslaughter here.’
‘And Philippe? A French film critic committing murder? I mean, literally. Difficult to swallow.’
‘Oh, please, let’s have no truck with such tired old generalisations. Put yourself in his position. All his adult life he had lived and breathed Alastair Farjeon. Farjeon was his life, the only life, in a sense, he’d ever known. And now here he was, instead of having to worship him from afar, finally at his side, not just as an admirer but, so he hoped, as a colleague. He had written a script he believed would be ideal for his favourite film director. And it was ideal – if it hadn’t been, Farjeon would never have stolen it in the first place. He does steal it, though, and all of Françaix’s dreams crumble to dust. Can’t you imagine how he must have felt when it dawned on him that he had wasted his whole life on someone totally unworthy of his admiration. People have killed for less, much less, in my experience.’
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