A Mysterious Affair of Style (8 page)

‘Mightn’t that be dangerous?’ asked Trubshawe.

‘Oh well, it isn’t actually a proper glass glass, you know. It’s made out of something called Plastic. On the big screen, though, nobody will be able to tell it from the real McCoy.’

‘Any chance, do you suppose, of Hanway coming up with another last-minute improvement to the scene?’

‘Oh, he already has.’

‘He has?’

‘Just as we were packing it in this morning, he told me that he’d thought of a little gag to add a certain piquancy to the row. That champagne glass I mentioned? In the script it’s empty, you understand. Well now, as I raise it above my head, I happen to notice that there’s still some bubbly left inside and I polish it off before I actually throw the glass. Isn’t that just too brilliant? The fact that this woman is not
even prepared to waste a few drops of flat champagne on her wastrel of a husband conveys to the audience, far more effectively than would a dozen lines of dialogue, the depth of her contempt for him. Yes, I really do believe that Hanway could be the next Alastair Farjeon.’

Back on the set, the novelist and the policeman endeavoured more or less successfully to steer clear of the technicians who were scurrying past them, back, forward, this way and that, rushing out of the studio, then back in, then back out again. Cora, meanwhile, was having her forehead, her chin and the tip of her nose softly dusted by a delicate little Chinese lady of indeterminate age. Gareth Knight was silently rehearsing his dialogue while an effeminate young man with a canary-yellow bandanna, one so tightly knotted as to cause the veins in his neck to stand out, was combing his hair back into wavy perfection. Rex Hanway, a copy of the script tucked under his arm, was peering repeatedly and, it seemed, indiscriminately through his viewfinder. And Hattie Farjeon was sitting alone in her own private nook, her own private world, sublimely indifferent to the hubbub surrounding her, still knitting away as though her life depended upon it.

Everything was finally ready for the first ‘take’. Hanway settled himself into his chair next to the camera, Cato curling up on his lap, while Lettice, clutching a sheaf of notes to
her breast, took her place at his side. The set began to echo to repeated cries of ‘Quiet, please!’ Then it was just ‘Quiet!’ Then, finally, ‘Will everybody
please
shut up! We’re going for a take!’

‘Right,’ said the director to his two performers. ‘This is supposed to be the mother of all marital rows, so I want it to have lots of vigour and vinegar. Don’t forget, Gareth, even though you give as good as you get, you do have an underlying sense of guilt. You
know
that what Cora is accusing you of is all too true. So, when you start shouting back at her, I still want to see, lurking behind those soulful baby blues of yours, a real defensiveness, a real insecurity. At this stage in the picture we don’t want you to lose the audience’s sympathy.

‘And Cora? This may not be the last straw but, for you, it’s the latest one and you’re not prepared for an instant to let Gareth off the hook. You understand?’

He turned to the camera operator.

‘Camera okay?’

The operator nodded.

‘Sound?’

The sound recordist nodded.

Now it was his own turn to nod, to everyone and no one at once.

‘Okay, let’s go. And – action!’

The clapper-boy read out, ‘
If Ever They Find Me Dead,
Scene 25, Take 1,’ and clapped his clapper-board.

It was a juicy scene all right, just as had been promised, and both performers, as they prowled about the set, a sumptuously upholstered drawing-room strewn with cocktail-party debris, played it well beyond the hilt.

Cora, a consummate actress when given the opportunity to be one (as Trubshawe was already saying to himself), contrived to be, all at once, warm and abrasive, sensitive yet as tough as old boots. Like a virtuoso ascending, then dizzily redescending, the scales of human bitterness and resentment, holding in her hysteria all the better to let it explode, she never once delivered two different lines of dialogue with the same intonation, never once repeated an effect.

Knight’s performance was almost as thrilling to watch. There were moments when he struck one as no more than an ogreish, drunken, sinisterly jovial bully wearing a fixed grin that could hardly be told apart from a snarl. At others, straining to avoid the gale force of Cora’s fury, her shrill voice and jabbing forefinger, he would protest his innocence with such apparent candour and sincerity that one felt forced to revise all one’s preconceptions as to which of the two bore ultimate responsibility for the failure of their marriage.

So powerfully acted, so nerve-rackingly tense and realistic, was the row – to the point where it felt almost obscene to be eavesdropping on such an intimate tragedy – that, even if everybody on the set had not been ordered to remain silent, they would surely have done so in any case.

Suddenly Knight, drawing himself up to his full six-foot-two height, loomed over a momentarily cowed Cora.

‘Admit it, Louise,’ he said, his voice dropping an octave. ‘Our marriage is a sham.’

‘A sham?’

‘Yes, it’s always been a sham. Right from the day I proposed to you. I asked for your hand, but, as I see now, all you were willing to offer me was your arm.’

‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’

‘You didn’t want a husband. What you were looking for was an escort.’

‘That’s absolutely –’

‘As for love, it’s something you could never give me, because you don’t know what it is. You’ve never known what it is. Which is why,’ he ended sadly, ‘I admit it, I did turn elsewhere.’

By some indefinable alchemy, its secret known only to the greatest actors, the anger that had so disfigured Cora’s features was abruptly replaced by a brief but vivid flash of self-realisation, when one saw not just the woman’s emotional frigidity but also, terrifyingly, that she too had seen it. It was an epiphany which rendered the character, if only for a second or two, sympathetic, even faintly pathetic.

Not more than a couple of seconds later, however, the virago reasserted herself.

‘Why, you …!’ she shrieked, raising the champagne glass above her head. It was at that instant, of course – and everyone
simultaneously realised what a brilliant conceit it had been of Hanway’s – that she noticed it was still half-full. A queer, misshapen smile on her lips, she swallowed the champagne at a single go and, raising the glass again, prepared to hurl it at Knight.

Then it happened.

Time itself was suspended. One moment Cora was holding the empty glass above her head, the next she had let it fall onto the floor. With both hands at once she clasped her throat so tightly that her bulging eyes appeared about to pop out of their sockets. Whereupon, straining to scream but managing only to moan, the colour draining from her face, she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Not again!

The two words resonated in Trubshawe’s brain. It seemed only yesterday that he’d watched a similar scene being played out on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. That one turned out to be an April Fool’s hoax. Would this scene, too, prove to be some sort of tasteless practical joke?

He shot a swift glance at Evadne Mount. If it were a joke, she would be in the know. But she was mesmerised, petrified. For the novelist this was no hoax.

Nor for anybody else. The entire studio resembled a
tableau vivant
of a type one would ordinarily expect to see on the cover of a cheap thriller. No one spoke, no one moved, no one was capable of taking any action whatever. No one, that is, but the Chief-Inspector himself. Despite his
age, despite his bulky frame, he rushed forward onto the set, tripping over wires, shoving technicians out of his way, until he was standing directly over the body.

He at once knelt beside Cora, lifted her arm, felt her pulse and laid his head sideways against her chest.

Though he was, of course, a stranger to every member of the cast and crew, not one of them disputed his authority to examine the actress or questioned his right to be there at all. And if many of those watching him already knew what he was about to say, they all waited tensely to hear him say it.

A few seconds later he said it.

‘She’s dead.’

‘Steady, old girl …’

Trubshawe crouched in front of Evadne, who was sitting at one of the empty commissary’s Formica-topped tables, her forehead glistening, her pince-nez also glistening, her face still as chalky-white as when she had witnessed the spectacle of Cora’s death.

An hour had elapsed. The police had immediately been alerted, and had undoubtedly already arrived, and on Trubshawe’s own advice none of those present on the set when the murder was committed (and, perhaps influenced by the type of picture they were making, everyone had at once assumed it couldn’t be anything but murder) had been allowed to leave. But, seeing how distraught Evadne was, he had also made the suggestion that he might absent himself to take her somewhere less crowded, somewhere more private, somewhere, in short, where she would be able to compose herself away from public scrutiny.

No objection had been raised. The memory of authority
exerts nearly as powerful a pressure as authority itself and, even had anyone wished to, no one was tempted to contradict an ex-Scotland Yard officer.

‘How do you feel, Evie?’ he now enquired in a surprisingly tender voice. ‘Bearing up, are you …?’

She eked out a wan smile.

‘Eustace, you’re wonderful.’

‘Wonderful?’ he echoed her. ‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. I never realised that great big burly police officers could have such perfect bedside manners. Certainly none of those in my whodunits ever had and I realise I’ve been libelling you all. Without you I don’t know what I’d have done. Made a right Charley of myself, I dare say.’

‘Chut! Chut! You’ve pulled yourself together wondrously well, in my opinion, considering what close friends you and – and Miss Rutherford were.’

Though he and the actress had eventually made it to first-name terms, he felt awkward about being posthumously familiar with her.

‘You know, Eustace,’ replied the novelist, ‘I’ve spent the last twenty years blithely killing off my characters, devising the most picturesque forms of death for them, and somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind I suppose I’ve always wondered how I myself would react if the same kind of fate were to befall somebody I knew. Roger ffolkes was already a test – but Cora! How could such a thing happen to Cora?

‘We’d lost touch with each other in the last few years. But you know, as they say of the last breath of a drowning man, when a woman like Cora dies, it’s also her friends who see her whole life flash before their eyes. So many good times to remember … She was a game old bird and, my God, she’d really been a game young bird. Oh, she had her faults. She could be a proper she-devil when crossed, but she never really meant any harm. She just couldn’t resist a bitchy comeback. Half the time she was genuinely surprised to discover that your feelings had been hurt.’

‘I understand,’ murmured Trubshawe, scouting the idea. ‘Of course I barely knew her, but I do believe I recognise her in what you’ve just been saying. With all her badinage it was as though she were acting in a play, if you know what I mean, as though nothing she said should affect you more than it would some actor she was playing opposite.’

‘Why, that’s it exactly. After all, you don’t start booing the actor you’ve just watched play Iago or Richard III if you meet him afterwards in the street, do you? Cora was simply playing a role, the role she was born to play, the witty, catty stage and screen star. And now she’s dead. Poor, dear, glorious, outrageous Cora. Heaven’s finally Heaven now that she’s there …

‘It’s funny,’ she added softly. ‘I’m not sure why, but I’d always taken it for granted that, of the two of us, I would be the first to go. It’s almost as though she jumped the queue.

‘Cora dead …’ she said again, still not quite able to credit it. And she was just repeating, ‘Cora dead …’ when the door to the commissary opened and Lettice Morley walked in. Behind her was a boyishly handsome young man in a fawn raincoat, a prim black bowler hat held in his hands.

‘Here you are, Miss Mount,’ Lettice said, holding out a battered silver hip-flask. ‘It’s Gareth Knight’s. Scotch, I’m afraid, not brandy, but it ought to do the trick. Go on, take a swig.’

‘Why, thank you, my dear, you really are a very sweet girl.’

She unscrewed the top of the flask, raised it to her lips and took a long, gurgly drink. Almost immediately, a splash of colour suffused each of her cheeks.

‘Ah,’ she sighed, ‘I needed that.’

Sensing that the moment was propitious, the raincoat-clad young man stepped forward and respectfully addressed the Chief-Inspector.

‘Mr Trubshawe, sir?’

‘Yes?’

Trubshawe shot a keen glance at him.

‘I’m sorry. Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

‘Well, you I’d know anywhere, sir,’ said the young man with a hesitant smile, his restless Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, ‘even if we haven’t clapped eyes on each other for longer than I care to remember. I’m Tom Calvert.’

Trubshawe peered at him.

‘Why, of course. P.C. Tom Calvert. My apologies – Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D., so I’ve been reading. Congratulations, young ’un!’

The young policeman nodded, shyly twirling his bowler.

‘Thanks. I owe my success to you as much as to anyone. And may I say, sir, it’s quite amazing, but in all those years you haven’t changed a bit.’

‘I kind of thought you’d say that,’ replied Trubshawe with a sardonic smile.

‘Oh, why?’

‘No reason, no reason at all. So you’ve been assigned to this case too, have you?’

‘Too?’

‘Well, I read of how you investigated the fire at Alastair Farjeon’s villa in Cookham, and now here you are.’

‘You heard about that, did you?’

‘I not only heard about it, I’ve been following it more closely than you’d ever imagine.’

‘Well, sir, it seemed pretty logical to have me cover this business. Not that we have any reason to believe there might be a connection between the two – except that, as I’m sure you know, Farjeon, before he died, was to be the producer of the picture they’ve been making here.’

‘Director,’ said Trubshawe drily.

‘What?’

‘Take it from me, Tom, my boy. Director, not producer.’

‘Very well, sir. I see you’ve come to know the patois.’

‘I have indeed. You see, I’ve been spending the day down here with –’

He turned to Evadne.

‘– with the well-known mystery writer Evadne Mount.’

‘Ah yes, of course,’ said Calvert warmly, shaking her hand. ‘Very pleased to re-make your acquaintance, Miss Mount. And just let me say how terribly sorry I am. I know that Cora Rutherford was a very old friend of yours.’

‘Re-make her acquaintance?’ said a baffled Trubshawe. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Have you forgotten, Eustace?’ said the novelist, ‘When I wanted to invite you down here, it was Mr Calvert who was kind enough to give me your home address.’

Before Trubshawe could reply, Calvert, who had to stifle a smile on hearing the Chief-Inspector’s Christian name, explained:

‘That’s right, sir. I did give Miss Mount your address. I know we’re not supposed to do that, even for retired officers like yourself, but she insisted you’d be glad to hear from her and I assumed …’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ Trubshawe answered genially. ‘As a matter of fact, I
was
extremely glad. Unfortunately, what started out so very pleasantly has now turned into a nightmare.’

‘It’s a nasty one all right.’

‘She
was
poisoned, I suppose?’

‘It’s what all the signs point to, sir. Of course, the doctor’s
only just arrived, and even he won’t be able to give us anything conclusive until he’s performed an autopsy. Poison, though, would seem to be the obvious bet so far. Which poison is another matter.’

‘No lingering aroma of burnt almonds, I suppose?’ asked Evadne Mount.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Calvert. ‘But I’m afraid, Miss Mount, since we’re in the real world here, we can’t rely on having that kind of clue served up to us on a plate.’

He turned to address Trubshawe again.

‘The police surgeon – that’s Dr Beckwith, by the way, you probably remember him from the old days –’

Trubshawe nodded.

‘Well, he’s a cagey one, the type that won’t say much till he’s two hundred-percent sure of his facts and figures, but I did get it out of him that he thought it most likely to be one of the acid-based poisons. They’re quite tasteless and colourless, you see, and, even if they’re pretty horrendous things to swallow, it’s all over in ten seconds. As I say, though, we won’t really know until the autopsy.’

‘A tricky case, Calvert,’ said Trubshawe, ‘with so many people milling around.’

‘You can say that again,’ replied Calvert with a sigh. ‘Between the lunch break and the moment Cora Rutherford dropped dead, do you know that there were no fewer than forty-three people on the studio set? And all of them had an opportunity to administer the poison. We already know
when the lemonade was poured into the glass, and by whom, but that’s it.’

‘Lemonade? I thought it was champagne.’

‘Can’t have the cast quaffing champagne, you know. No, it was some kind of transparent soda pop. As the doctor was examining the body, this chap came forward – almost in tears, he was – he’d been in charge of props and it was he who, at one o’clock, just as the afternoon filming was about to start, opened a bottle of the fizzy stuff and half-filled the champagne glass, as per his instructions. He wanted to get his defence in before he was questioned, and I can’t say I blame him. The first person we would have gone after was whoever actually filled the glass.’

‘And he’s to be believed, you think?’

‘Oh, I really can’t imagine why not. No motive, you see. Been in the picture business upwards of thirty years, so he claims. And, above all, he’s got witnesses.’

‘Witnesses?’

‘It appears that his assistant, the chap who brought the bottle of lemonade from the studio canteen, actually hung around long enough to see him unscrew the top.’

‘I don’t suppose the bottle could already have been tampered with in the canteen itself?’

‘Not a chance. It was picked up at random out of a couple of dozen on display. And the top was unscrewed in the presence of this lady here’ – he indicated Lettice – ‘who also verified that the glass had just enough liquid in it.’

He hesitated, turning to Lettice herself to complete the explanation.

‘Tell us again, Miss, what you just told me.’

Lettice answered with characteristic composure.

‘The fact is,’ she said to Trubshawe, ‘I’m responsible for what’s called continuity, for making sure that, if there’s a red handkerchief in an actor’s jacket pocket in one scene, it hasn’t turned into a yellow handkerchief in the next, that kind of detail. Well, when Props – his real name’s Stan but everybody calls him Props – when Props came on set with the bottle of lemonade, I had to be present to check that there was going to be exactly the right amount of “champagne” in Miss Rutherford’s glass. And I can testify that Props opened the bottle in front of me.’

‘So that puts him out.’ Calvert sighed once more. ‘Which leaves us with just forty-two potential suspects, any one of whom could have introduced the poison. I’ve already gathered – these picture people are a pretty talkative lot, I can tell you – I’ve already gathered that it takes so long to set up a new shot, as they say, that the glass sat on the table for about an hour while everyone went about their respective jobs, installing lights, laying cables, making up the actors and actresses and I don’t know what else. I haven’t a clue where we’re going to start. In fact, I haven’t a clue, full stop.’

‘Then may I offer you one?’ said Evadne Mount, who had been paying close attention to the exchanges between Calvert and Trubshawe.

‘One what?’

‘Clue. An important one, if I’m not in error.’

‘I’d be grateful, Miss Mount, for even the most trivial of clues.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘as Eustace here will confirm, we watched this morning’s filming together before going off to the commissary to lunch with Cora. And it was during our meal that she mentioned how Rex Hanway, the director, had taken her aside just before the break to tell her about a new idea he’d had for the afternoon’s big scene, the idea being that there should be some champagne, or lemonade, still in the glass and that Cora should swallow it before throwing it at Gareth Knight. In the original script, you see, she was simply to pick up an empty glass, which was naturally how everyone expected it to be filmed.

‘
Ergo
,’ she ended, taking evident pleasure in hearing the Latin word trip off her tongue, ‘whoever decided to poison Cora could only have hatched the plot between twelve noon, when Hanway apprised her of his idea, and two o’clock, when she herself drank the lemonade.’

‘Curses!’ Trubshawe berated himself. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Which means, of course,’ she went on, once more raising her arm like a policeman to control the conversational traffic, and more especially to warn the Chief-Inspector not to venture down what she regarded as her own private one-way street, ‘that the murderer would also have had to
belong to what must surely be an extremely select group. That’s to say, only those who were actually privy to Hanway’s change of plan.’

Both Calvert and Trubshawe instantly saw the justice and relevance of her words.

‘My God, Evie!’ cried Trubshawe. ‘Poor old Cora has just been murdered and already you’ve come up with an important clue. You’re the real thing.’

‘Yes, bravo!’ Calvert chimed in. ‘With that one insight you’ve considerably narrowed the scope of the investigation. Now all we have to do is draw up a list of everyone whose job would have necessitated their being told of the business with the champagne glass. My word, we’re actually getting somewhere.’

‘Is there any reason, Mr Calvert, why we don’t start right away?’ asked the novelist. ‘This crime isn’t going to solve itself.’

‘What do you mean, start right away?’

‘Start drawing up a list. It shouldn’t take too long. I can’t believe that any of the – what did Cora call them? – the ordinary grips and geezers would have been informed of the change. As I said, it could only have been a select few. Indeed, I rather think a couple of the prime suspects may be sitting right here in this room.’