A Mysterious Affair Of Style Part 20

'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 a.s.sure 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 rea.s.suringly 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?'

'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-gnas.h.i.+ng 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.'

'So,' asked Lettice, 'what do you believe happened at Cookham?'

'We'll know the whole truth only when Mrs Farjeon, who, as I shall demonstrate, was party to the scheme, is questioned at the Yard. But I imagine it went, as c.o.c.ktail-bar pianists say, something like this: 'Alastair Farjeon, prominent film-maker and notorious womaniser, spots Patsy Sloots in the chorus line of the latest Crazy Gang revue and decides to cast her in his forthcoming film. Naturally, young Patsy, a newcomer to the business, is in seventh heaven at having been selected to play the lead in a major picture by one of the most esteemed directors in the world. It's literally the chance of a lifetime and she is this, certainly, must have been Farjeon's own presumption supremely grateful for having had it offered to her. Intending to capitalise on that grat.i.tude, the great director then invites the gossamer wee thing down to his Cookham villa for a dirty weekend.

'We can't any longer know exactly what occurred there, but I think it safe to suppose that he dusts down the casting couch, plies her with expensive food and wine and eventually makes his move, only to discover that his protegee's grat.i.tude stops well short of well, I don't have to draw you a picture, do I? He consequently works himself up into a rage, a struggle ensues and whether by accident or design that's another part of the story which may never see the light of day Patsy is killed.

'Aghast at what he's done, his future in ruins, prison staring him in the face, Farjeon at once telephones his wife, who as usual drops everything and comes running.

'The truth, as I see it, is that, whatever his brilliance as a film director, Farjeon had as much experience of life, of real life, as a precocious three-year-old. Right into adulthood he remained very much the child he must once literally have been, the vile kind of tot who enjoys pulling the wings off insects. And, like any child, good or bad, whenever he got himself into a sc.r.a.pe he instantly cried out for his mummy or rather, his wifie, which in his case amounted to much the same thing. As for Hattie, she was, I would deduce, fairly relaxed about his roving eye because she remained confident that it posed no long-term risk to their marriage; also because, in any case, Farjeon usually came a cropper on account of his taste for women half his age and a quarter of his weight. It's true, she would turn up every day on the set to keep him relentlessly focused on the work at hand, but they were a couple, as they both knew, roped together for the duration.

'So, panic-stricken, he rings her up, she catches the first train down to Cookham and together they contemplate the wreckage of his glittering reputation. Now I'm speculating, you understand, but it does all appear to fit together I couldn't say which of the two came up with the idea most likely Farjeon himself, since he'd spent his entire career, after all, devising murder scenes, so who would be better qualified? let's say Farjeon came up with the bright idea of setting the villa alight in order to conceal the evidence of Patsy's murder.

'But, and it was a beggar of a "but", given Farjeon's caddish willingness to be photographed with his latest paramour, it must have been common knowledge on the grapevine that he'd invited Patsy down for the weekend. Thus there could be no question of hers being the only body discovered in the fire. The police the gutter press, too would instantly, and of course justifiably, smell a rat. And here, I suspect, it was dear, sweet, calculating Hattie who, seizing a Heaven-sent or h.e.l.l-sent opportunity of henceforth keeping her chubby hubby all to herself, putting an end once and for all to those adulterous dalliances of his, succeeded in persuading him that he too would have to "die" in the conflagration.'

'It's true he was in one unholy mess,' put in Trubshawe, 'but that does seem a pretty drastic solution.'

'Ah, but don't forget, if the scandal had broken, his career would have been at an end anyway and he might even have ended on the gallows. He couldn't have survived it which is doubtless why he decided that he literally wouldn't survive it. So he telephones Billy Harker. Why Harker? Because, of all those whom he regularly used as his doubles, Harker had separated from his wife, lived on his own in a furnished bedsit somewhere in the East End and badly needed a pay packet. When Farjeon (as I surmise) tells Harker he wanted to discuss the "double scene" in his new picture, even proposing that he pack an overnight bag and come straight down to Cookham, poor Billy must have thought his luck had finally turned. Not just a job, one sufficiently well paid to expunge a few of his more pressing debts, but an invitation to stay with the Master. You can visualise, I'm sure, the alacrity with which he would have accepted the invitation.'

'How do you suppose he was done away with?' asked Tom Calvert.

'Well, I really couldn't say,' she replied meditatively. 'Probably something that wouldn't show, just in case the flames failed to erase the evidence as cleanly and definitively as they hoped. Poison, I should opine. Or, if no poison was to be had, then strangulation. We'll know the correct answer only when Old Ma Farjeon confesses all, as I'm positive she will.'

'Evie,' said Trubshawe, 'you've been your usual super-efficient self, I'll grant you that. I'm hanged, though, if I can understand how, as you say, Alastair Farjeon actually "directed" the film. In practical terms, I mean.'

'Well now,' said Evadne Mount, 'let us agree, shall we, that Farjeon felt obliged to accept his wife's argument that he had to "die" in the fire along with Patsy. I imagine, however, that he'd be loathe to let the new film also go up in smoke because of that "death". If nothing else, there would have been a financial imperative for ensuring that it go ahead nevertheless. So he and Hattie decided to concoct a bogus doc.u.ment stating that, if anything were to happen to him, Rex Hanway was to direct If Ever They Find Me Dead in his place.'

'This Hanway,' said Francaix, 'you are saying he also was part of the plan?'

'Absolutely. He immediately agreed to become what our detective friends here would call an accessory after the fact. Let's not forget that Hanway was so fiercely ambitious that no legalistic scruples were going to prevent him from taking over the picture. He had waited years for such a chance and he wasn't about to let Patsy Sloots' death, which Farjeon in any case probably convinced him was an accident, s.n.a.t.c.h it from his greedy little paws.

'But now,' she said, 'there arose an unexpected snag. Hattie continued to turn up on the set every single day, just as though Farjeon himself were directing the picture, to keep an eye not only on her husband's financial interests, as Cora conjectured, but also on his artistic interests. She was his spy, his mole, whose job it was to bring him back daily reports on Hanway's work. But that was precisely the problem. Hanway's work was duff. Farjeon's script was followed to the letter, but what he himself had forgotten was that most of his best ideas, certainly the most original ones, had always come to him at the last minute, generally once he was on the set. And Hanway just didn't have it. He may have been a competent craftsman, but he didn't possess an ounce of his mentor's genius. There came a point you remember, Eustace, what Cora told us? there came a point when it was touch-and-go whether the production would actually proceed.

'For Farjeon that wouldn't do at all. He was a vain, arrogant narcissist who couldn't accept, who wouldn't accept, that he might be denied the chance of once more flaunting his brilliance to a suitably awe-struck world, even if only by proxy. Already, just as he himself had been about to start shooting the film, a stupid mishap which is no doubt how he rationalised Patsy's pa.s.sing had prevented it from going ahead. To have his cherished project aborted a second time, because of another man's incompetence, no, no, that would have been intolerable to somebody of his type.

'So this film-maker, this artist, this genius, who had taken on one outlandish challenge after another having one of his protagonists go to bed in Clerkenwell and wake up in the Rocky Mountains, having another confined to a wheelchair throughout the entire picture, setting yet another of his pictures inside a cramped lift decided that he would accept the supreme challenge. Like the lovers who kissed each other through a little girl in the one scene of If Ever They Find Me Dead which Eustace and I watched being shot, he would direct the film through somebody else.

'And so it was that, all of a sudden, Hanway miraculously found his creative feet. n.o.body could understand how, like Farjeon before him, he began to have these wonderful ideas right there on the set ideas worthy, for a reason you will now all understand, of Alastair Farjeon himself.

'The modus operandi was actually, unwittingly, revealed to us by Hanway in Levey's office the day after Cora's murder. You recall that, when I asked him to explain how he'd abruptly regained his confidence on the set, his reply was that he no longer asked himself what Farje would have done. He was being more honest than we knew. If he no longer had to ask himself what Farje would have done, it was because Farje, precisely, was now telling him what to do! Farjeon, in fact, was using Hattie as a secret conduit to Hanway of all the last-minute ideas and eleventh-hour changes which had always made his films so unique.'

'Why didn't he just telephone Hanway?' asked Lettice.

'Too risky. His voice, that plummy, lugubrious voice of his, would certainly have been recognised by the studio's telephonist, who had doubtless heard it many times before. No, it was safer by far if Hattie were discreetly to take her "late" husband's detailed notes to Hanway's office where, once he had read them, they would instantly be destroyed. Which they were, save for this one singed sc.r.a.p of paper that I rescued from his waste-basket.'

So saying, she dipped her two hands into her handbag, located the memo and ironed it out on the table before them. 'Though I realised, naturally, that it could have been any one of a thousand-and-one memos unrelated to the case, what I found especially suggestive was the fact that it had been set alight as well as torn into strips. Patently, it was a piece of paper whose recipient wanted n.o.body else to read and, thinking about why that should be so, I began to wonder, for the first time, whether this so-called wunderkind might not after all be little more than a ventriloquist's dummy.

'As you see, since most of the paper has been burnt, all we have left to work on are these twelve surviving letters: SS ON THE RIGHT. And Eustace, ever on the qui vive, at once came up with the theory that "SS" might somehow be related to Benjamin Levey's eleventh-hour flight from n.a.z.i Germany.'

'Oh, come now, Evie,' said Trubshawe, flus.h.i.+ng, 'you know quite well I was only joking.'

'I, on the other hand,' she continued, 'and despite my reputation as an incorrigible romancer, immediately let my mind run along more practical lines. Unearthing my old rhyming dictionary, I inspected a column of words ending in "ss" until I came to a pensive halt at "kiss". Why? Because it at once reminded me of the scene from If Ever They Find Me Dead that I mentioned just a few minutes ago, the one in which Gareth Knight and Leolia Drake simultaneously kissed a little girl's left and right cheeks.

'Now just think of it. Couldn't SS ON THE RIGHT once have been part of a sentence that read in toto: DRAKE GIVES HER A KISS ON THE RIGHT CHEEK, KNIGHT ON THE LEFT?'

They all stared at her. The world, which three-quarters of an hour ago had been upside-down, had now slowly revolved until it was once more positioned the right way up.

''Pon my word!' grunted Trubshawe.

'Good grief,' cried Lettice, 'you're the cat's pyjamas all right!'

'What an imbecile that I am!' Francaix effused. 'Why, it leaps to the eye! It is pure Farjeon!'

'My dear Evie,' said Calvert admiringly, 'in the Middle Ages you would have been burnt as a witch.'

'Thank you, Tom. So kind.'

'There is, though, one crucial question you still haven't answered.'

'Which is what?'

'Why did Farjeon kill Cora Rutherford? Or, as you seemed to imply a moment ago, why did he have her killed?'

Up to this point, the novelist had been so intoxicated by her own powers of ratiocination she had almost forgotten that at the heart of the case, after all, was the murder of a very dear old friend.

'Ah yes,' she said sadly. 'Cora, poor Cora ... I'm afraid she must have thought she was being awfully cunning. The Achilles' heel of so many cunning people, though, is that they tend blithely to ignore the fact that others can also be cunning, even more than they are themselves.

'As Eustace will confirm, she announced to us one day that her role in the film, a minor one to start with, had unexpectedly got much larger and juicier. It had been mysteriously "b.u.mped up", as she put it. To know the whole truth we'll again have to wait for Hattie Farjeon's confession, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that Cora, who never lost the atrocious habit of barging into her acquaintances' private affairs, had gone to have a word with Hanway, had found his office unoccupied, had started nosing about, as was her natural wont, and had eventually laid her hands on one of Farjeon's memos.

'She instantly recognised his handwriting, handwriting that she would have known, even in block capitals, from all those brutal rejections she'd received from him before he consented to give her the part. And, just as instantly realising the most significant implication of the text itself, she understood that what she held in her hands was a major bargaining chip.'

'So in that at least I was right,' crowed Trubshawe. 'What you're saying is that she blackmailed Hanway?'

'Oh,' replied Evadne Mount evasively, 'blackmail is such an ugly word, don't you think?'

'Not half as ugly as the crime itself.'

Declining to be drawn, she continued: 'Let's just say that she put it to Hanway that there seemed no good reason why she shouldn't take such a d.a.m.ning piece of evidence to the police. Let's also say that Hanway, thinking on his feet, actually did come up with the one good reason for which she herself was angling. And let's end by saying that, if he were indeed to have proposed that her part in the picture be fleshed out, or b.u.mped up, I fear that Cora, desperate as she was for a comeback, would simply not have been able to resist making a pact with the Devil.

'What she did was wrong, terribly wrong, and G.o.d knows she paid for it. But she was my oldest friend, and I've always stood by my friends, and I'm not about to desert her now, even though she's dead.'

'Bravo, Evie,' said Tom Calvert.

'Thank you, Tom,' she replied. Then, in a voice that was becoming a trifle hoa.r.s.e, so unduly long and wordy, even for her, had been her monologue, she went on: 'Yes, poor old Cora, it just didn't dawn on her that she had set herself against an individual as evil as any of the characters in his films. And she never was what anybody would call the soul of discretion. Farjeon and Hanway knew that they couldn't trust her. Excactly as a blackmailer will always come back for more, what was to stop her I can almost hear them ask themselves demanding a leading role in Hanway's second picture? And his third? And his fourth? No, no, no, she had to be silenced at once.

'The murder method almost certainly emerged from Farjeon's own diseased brain. Having already fed his protege several last-minute alterations to the script, he must have calculated that the introduction of this new idea of his Cora drinking from the half-filled champagne gla.s.s would arouse no suspicion whatever on the set. Hanway would be garlanded with praise and Cora would meanwhile have been disposed of.

'As for who actually did the dirty by filching poison from the laboratory and spiking the lemonade, well, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that it was Hattie, our Madonna of the knitting-needles, to whom no one ever paid too much attention.'

'Evie,' said Trubshawe after a moment of silence, 'you are unquestionably right in all these suppositions of yours, but yesterday you were nearly murdered yourself, which would have been devastating for us all. Me more than anyone,' he couldn't prevent himself adding.

'Why, Eustace, I'd begun to wonder if you really cared.'

'None of that, none of that!' he riposted gruffly. 'You know what I mean and what I don't mean. But, d.a.m.n it all, why didn't you share your suspicions with the rest of us, instead of exposing yourself alone to the risk?'

'Don't you see, my dear, I couldn't, I just couldn't. Everything I knew, or thought I knew, was a mere hypothesis, a house of cards which wouldn't for a second have stood up in a court of law. It was all based on a single fact at least, I regarded it as a fact, though no one else did the fact, as I say, that Farjeon was still alive. A fact, however, which I absolutely could not prove.

'Can you imagine me at the Old Bailey, requesting the judge to screen the murder sequence from If Ever You Find Me Dead, then pleading with him, "M'Lud, I submit that the visual style of the scene we have all just watched const.i.tutes conclusive proof not only that Alastair Farjeon did not die in the fire which destroyed his villa but also that he was responsible for the deaths of Patsy Sloots, Billy Harker and Cora Rutherford"? 'Pshaw! I'd be thrown out of court on my rear end!

'No, I had to produce the only evidence which would prove me right Alastair Farjeon himself. I had to flush him out, and the only way I could do that was to set myself up as a decoy. Which is why I insisted that everybody be present on the set for yesterday afternoon's session, even the one suspect, Rex Hanway, whom I'd already guessed had been an accomplice. Why, too, I promised to reveal the murderer's ident.i.ty. I had to be certain that everybody would be there so that, if anybody was going to try and prevent me from making my announcement, it could only be Farjeon himself. And, if I was confident that he would try to stop me, it was because he had, after all, the perfect alibi. He was dead!'

'I'll be for ever in your debt, Evie,' said Calvert, adding, 'Yours too, of course, Mr Trubshawe.'

'Oh, me,' said Trubshawe. 'Don't feel you have to thank me. As usual, I was just Inspector Plodder, the hapless b.u.t.t of all the amateur sleuth's jokes.'

'Please, no false modesty. You two formed a great team. And, talking of teams, I gather from Evie here that I'll be offering you congratulations of a very different order before not too much time has pa.s.sed, eh, Eustace?'

'Tush tus.h.!.+' growled the Chief-Inspector. 'You're getting a touch too big for your breeches.'

'In any case, my dear,' Evadne piped up, 'you may or may not be relieved to know that you're going to have a breathing s.p.a.ce before we eventually tie the knot.'

'Oh, and why would that be?' asked Trubshawe.

'I've got to write my new whodunit first.'

'You're going to write a new whodunit?' asked Lettice.

'I most certainly am. It will be dedicated to Cora's memory, not' she glanced meaningfully in her future husband's direction 'repeat not, to Agatha Christie.'

'But that's terribly exciting news, Evie. Dare one ask what it's about?'

'Why, what do you suppose?' she replied as though the answer were obvious. 'The story we've all just lived through. We authors are a thrifty race, you know. We never waste anything, never throw anything away.'

'Great Scott Moncrieff!' cried an incredulous Trubshawe. 'You mean you're planning to write about Cora and Farjeon and Hattie and the rest of them and put them all in a book?'

'That I am. Naturally, I won't use their real names. I'm a novelist, after all, an artist. I'll have to invent lots of new ones. But don't you worry, Eustace, don't go snapping your c.u.mmerbund. You're going to be in it too. As a matter of fact, you're all going to be in it.'

'Sacre bleu!' exclaimed Philippe Francaix, his eyes swimming heavenwards. 'This is how you say? the end!'

About the Author.

Gilbert Adair published novels, essays, translations, children's books and poetry. He also wrote screenplays, including The Dreamers from his own novel for Bernardo Bertolucci. He died in 2011.

ISBN 9780571319770.

end.