A Mysterious Affair of Style (18 page)

‘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?’

‘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.’

‘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 cocktail-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 gratitude, 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 protégée’s gratitude 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 scrape 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 Hell-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 document stating that, if anything were to happen to him, Rex Hanway was to direct
If Ever They Find Me Dead
in his place.’