‘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 co
nducted 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.’
‘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 titter.
‘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.
‘Exactly like one of your villains, Eustace, Farjeon always had recourse to the same methods, always displayed the same little tics and tropes, quirks and quiddities, whatever the subject-matter. Which is why I wasn’t at all particular as to the nature and content of the rushes we were to have screened to us. And why, when I watched that one scene from If Ever They Find Me Dead, what I saw – what, I assure you, I simply couldn’t help seeing – in fact, I’d go so far as to state that it was all I saw – was not the murder itself – frankly, I doubt that I could any longer offer you a detailed description of how it was committed and I am, of course, celebrated for my powers of observation – not the murder itself, I repeat, but the style in which it was filmed.
‘Consider, for example, the manner in which the camera follows the young woman along the lonely dark street. True, it’s the sort of thing we’ve all seen in lots of other thrillers, except that here, subtly, almost imperceptibly, the pacing of the scene begins to change as we hear the second set of footsteps and we understand with a deliciously queasy sensation that the street is suddenly no longer quite as lonely as it was, no longer quite so reassuringly deserted. The camera, a camera as fluid and flexible as a human eye, is, before our own eyes, actually, gradually, ever so artfully, turning into the murderer. So that when, for the first time, the woman looks round nervously, we realise with an inward groan – and indeed, speaking for myself, with an outward groan – that it’s not just the camera lens she’s looking into but her future murderer’s face. It’s as though she recognises the camera, as though, ultimately, it’s the camera itself that murders her.
‘It was at that instant that I knew there was only one man in the world who could have directed that specific scene in that specific style – whether or not he himself had actually been on the film set when it was being shot, whether or not he himself had actually had any direct contact with the actors or the cameraman – I say again, there was only one man in the world who could have done it, and that man was Alastair Farjeon.’
‘Meaning …?’ said Tom Calvert, speaking in a voice that was to a whisper what a whisper is to a shout.
‘Meaning that Farjeon was alive. He had not perished in the fire at Cookham and he had certainly not been murdered. I’m sorry, Eustace, yours was a nice, neat theory – a nice, neat theory in theory – but I’m afraid it simply didn’t stand up. Alastair Farjeon, not Rex Hanway, was the man who directed If Ever They Find Me Dead. Just as Farjeon was a murderer, not the victim of a murder. It was he who killed Patsy Sloots, just as it was he who later killed Cora – by proxy, as we shall see – and yesterday afternoon tried to kill me.’
Tom Calvert was the first to speak.
‘My dear Miss Mount,’ he said, ‘I really must congratulate you!’
‘Thank you so much, young man,’ replied the novelist with a smile. ‘But do call me Evie.’
‘Evie. But, tell me, you who know everything, did you never entertain the possibility that Hanway had simply imitated Farjeon’s style?’
‘Never. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my thirty years as a much-acclaimed author, it’s that the style of an artist, an authentic artist, can never be successfully imitated by someone else. Never, never, never. Many have tried, all have failed.’
‘Then who really did die in that villa in Cookham – along with Miss Sloots, I mean?’
‘Oh, once I’d guessed that Farjeon was still alive, it was child’s play working out how he’d managed to fake his own death.’
‘Since none of us is a child,’ muttered Trubshawe, ‘you’re still going to have to spell it out.’
‘It was one of his doubles, of course.’
‘His doubles?’ queried Calvert. ‘What doubles?’
&n
bsp; ‘The very first thing Cora told Eustace and myself about Farjeon was that the man’s ego was such, he invariably introduced into the storylines of his films a scene in which a double – I mean someone, an extra, who looked exactly like him – would make a brief cameo appearance. It became such a trademark conceit, conceit in both senses of the word, that his fans would actually start looking out for it.
‘Doubles … Extras … I couldn’t get those two words out of my head. I became so intrigued by the notion that there might have been a double Farjeon, an extra Farjeon, that I immediately determined to find out what I could about these stand-ins of his.
‘It was from Lettice that I obtained the West End address of an agency which specialised in the hiring of film extras and, in the hope of learning whether any of those who had ever played Farjeon’s doubles had lately gone AWOL, I trooped along to an insalubrious back street in Soho, one of those corkscrewy little cul-de-sacs whose houses seem to be leaning out of their own windows.
‘Well, what do you know, it actually did transpire that a certain Mavis Harker, wife or ex-wife of Billy Harker, I never quite gathered which, had recently been nagging the agency for news of her husband. Not that she was pining for the poor chump, exactly, but she admitted to being on her uppers and in dire need of an influx of ready cash.
‘Billy, it seems, had launched his career in the show business as a music-hall juggler. Then, before seriously putting on weight, he reinvented himself as the Great Kardomah, an Arab tumbler, whatever that is. Then, when the onset of the War led to the closure of most of the theatres on the variety-hall circuit, like many of his type he started to eke out a precarious living as a film extra. And it was then, to the teeth-gnashing chagrin of Mrs Harker, that he vanished off the face of the earth.
‘The agency had a photograph of him in its files, a photograph they allowed me to take a peek at. I knew in advance, of course, pretty much what to expect. Still, when I found myself face to face with the chubby jowls, the pouty little mouth and the triple-layered chin of you know who, you could have knocked me down even without the proverbial feather. Harker was the spitting image of Farjeon, whose stand-in he’d been in The Perfect Criminal and Remains to Be Seen and who, I was informed, had been hoping for a repeat engagement in If Ever They Find Me Dead.’
A Mysterious Affair of Style Page 20