A Mysterious Affair of Style (4 page)

‘Or
The Perfect Criminal.
You remember, Evie, that was one of his films you and I saw together? Charles Laughton plays a burglar who never, ever robs his victims the same way twice, never helps himself to leftovers in the pantry, never leaves a half-smoked Turkish cigarette smouldering in an ashtray. And that’s why he’s eventually caught. Because, as you have good cause to know, Trubshawe, there doesn’t exist the criminal who hasn’t got his own little set of quirks and idiosyncrasies, quirks and idiosyncrasies which you coppers gradually come to identify and actually look out for. So, in the film, when one perfect burglary after another is
committed, none of them with the least trace of any known criminal’s tics and tropes, the police eventually realise that it must have been committed by him.

‘Or
Hocus-Focus
, which takes place entirely inside a jam-packed hotel lift which has stalled between two floors. The whole film, mind you! And not only is a murder committed in the lift itself but the camera never stops panning and tracking in and around that cramped space. Only Farje would have attempted such a folly.’

‘I say, hold on there,’ Trubshawe interrupted her. ‘How in Heaven’s name did he succeed in squeezing one of his doubles into that one?’

‘Oh, that was typical of him – all part of the fun, all part of the challenge, the devising of new ways to insert himself into his own films. You see, one of the guests trapped in the lift is a slinky vamp of a Eurasian spy who wears a small cameo brooch pinned to the lapel of her Schiaparelli suit. Well, on the cameo, if you looked hard enough, you could just about make out a tiny portrait of Farje himself. It’s a visual pun,’ she explained. ‘Neat, no?’

Trubshawe’s perplexed eyebrows mounted his forehead.

‘A visual pun?’

‘Darling, that kind of fleeting appearance in a film is what we in the trade call a cameo. In
Hocus-Focus
Farje’s cameo literally was a cameo – a cameo brooch. Now do you understand?’

‘Um … yes,’ came the uncertain reply.

‘You haven’t seen his very latest?’ she went on. ‘
An American in Plaster-of-Paris
? It opened only last month.’

Trubshawe shook his head.

‘Vintage Farjeon. Another absolutely brilliant thriller. The spectator never once catches so much as a glimpse of the murderer, who’s brought to book by the hero, a young G.I. in London whose left leg is in a plaster cast from the first scene to the last. He’s recuperating in a not terribly well sound-proofed flat in Bayswater and he figures out, from no more than the sounds he hears filter down through the ceiling, that his unseen upstairs neighbour has just bludgeoned his wife to death.

‘I tell you, Trubshawe, there’s not an actor, not an actress, in this country who wouldn’t sacrifice their own left leg to appear in one of his films. I had the chance – and now I’ve lost it.’

She shivered, even though the room was, if anything, overheated. It was as though the import of the calamity that had befallen her had only just penetrated the fragile carapace of her sophistication. An actress through and through, on-stage and off, she was so intimately at one with her craft that, like a congenital liar, she was no longer capable of judging where make-believe ended and reality began. Yet there had always been moments in her life when the mask would slip and what was revealed underneath was the anguished face of a woman who had just begun to wonder where her next role, like a pauper his next meal, was coming
from. This, it had been evident to Trubshawe for some little time, was one of those moments.

Evadne clucked her tongue sympathetically.

‘You really, really wanted the part, didn’t you, precious?’

The mask was now slipping off altogether. The tears that glittered in her eyes – even when, as on the present occasion, there was nothing affected or simulated about her distress, Cora remained a star to her fingertips, and a star’s tears don’t just glisten, they glitter – were as distressing to behold as a woman’s, as any woman’s, tears always are.

‘Oh, Evie, you can’t know what I was willing to do to get it. You can’t know how I pleaded, how I grovelled. I had my agent ring Farje’s office every single day, morning and afternoon. He turned me down twenty times. Said I was too old, too old-fashioned, mutton dressed as lamb, jumped-up trash.’

‘Jumped-up trash? He actually said that?’

‘To my face, Evie, to my face!’

‘Oh, my poor darling,’ murmured the novelist, swiftly glancing around the restaurant to check whether anybody had chanced to catch Cora in her moment of panic. Needless to say, everybody
was
watching her, for the Ivy itself had already begun to buzz with the news of Farjeon’s death.

‘And we weren’t even alone.’

‘No!’

‘He was with his latest discovery, Patsy Sloots. Patsy Sloots! What a name! He apparently plucked her from the chorus line in the new Crazy Gang revue.

‘Now that
is
jumped-up trash. You remember Dorothy Parker’s quip? “Let’s go watch Katharine Hepburn run the gamut from A to B.” From what I hear, little Patsy’s gamut doesn’t even stretch to B. Her speciality is bottoming bills rather than topping them. But she’s just the sort of skinny blonde ninny Farje always did fall for. And there she was, draped over his desk at Elstree, looking as though her whole body, not only her face, had been lifted, while he was telling me that my number was up. I couldn’t believe how he enjoyed humiliating me!’

Evadne had more than once been witness to her friend’s vulnerability, but it had always been when they were
tête-à-tête,
in the privacy and intimacy of either woman’s flat. That Cora should be on the point of breaking down here, the cynosure of the Ivy, was a vivid indication of what losing out on such an opportunity meant to her.

‘And yet,’ she said softly, ‘you
did
let yourself be humiliated.’

‘It was my very last chance. Such a role – I know I could have been superb in it, I just know! That’s why I was ready to grovel before him. And the horrible irony of it all,’ she said, the words choking in her throat, ‘is that I believe, I truly believe, he always did mean to give the part to me. My agent assured me that no other actress had been tested. Farje simply couldn’t resist torturing me anyway, just for his own perverted amusement. And, yes,’ – she turned to an embarrassed Trubshawe, who had tried during her tirade to render
himself as inconspicuous as was possible for the large, hulking man that he was – ‘actors will do anything to land a halfway decent part,
anything
.’

‘As I already told you, I know nothing about the picture business,’ Trubshawe replied, ‘but Farjeon was only the director, after all. If the script has been written, can’t they just find somebody else to direct the film?’

‘You’re right,’ Cora replied coldly.

‘Well, I did think –’

‘I say you’re right. You
do
know nothing about the picture business.’

‘Now now, Cora,’ said Evadne, ‘I realise how terribly upset you must be, but it’s unfair to take it out on poor Eustace. He only means to be kind.’

Cora immediately took Trubshawe’s right hand in her own and squeezed it.

‘
Mea culpissima
,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes with the folded tip of her napkin. ‘Oh dear, I’ve been shedding so many tears my cheeks are rusty. Sorry to be so beastly. Forgive me?’

‘Course I do,’ he said magnanimously. ‘I quite understand.’

‘And what you just suggested, well, I wouldn’t like you to think it was totally beside the point. If it were any other film director who had suddenly died, that’s exactly what would happen – the studio would simply hire somebody else to take his place. The problem is, there
is
nobody else who can take Farje’s place.’

For a moment not one of the trio spoke. Then Evadne delivered herself of one of those edifying truisms which sometimes do succeed, in the short term, in easing an uncomfortable situation.

‘Darling Cora,’ she said, ‘something’s bound to turn up. It always does. You know better than most that Life is more like the Pictures than the Pictures are like Life – if you take my meaning – which, to be frank, I’m not at all sure I do myself.’

Little did she know how true these trite, unsingular words of hers were destined to prove …

The very next morning, as Trubshawe was tucking into a breakfast that consisted of one pork sausage and two thin slices of fried bread (an egg had become a once-a-fortnight treat, if that), he heard his
Daily Sentinel
thump onto the door mat. He stood up, padded along the hallway in his dressing-gown and slippers, picked up the newspaper and scanned its front-page headline.

‘Famous Film Producer Dies in Fire!’ is what it screamed at him.

Back in the kitchen, he took his place once more at the little oblong table tucked away in a cosy, windowless corner, stirred his tea, treated the bundled-up newspaper to a noisy, impatient straightening-out, started mechanically to chew on a modest mouthful of sausage and turned his attention to the article in question.

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 soufflé 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.

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 faggots 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 illustrations 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, God-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 assigned 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 passage of so many years – years, he couldn’t help feeling, that had taken their toll on her once flawless façade. She was still, to be sure, the epitome of sheen and self-assurance, still enhaloed by that lustrous 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 swankiest 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 assuredly 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 passing 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 naïve 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 cluster 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 amusement, 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.