A Mysterious Affair of Style
GILBERT ADAIR
The cinema is not a slice of life but a slice of cake.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
To My Editor, Walter Donohue
Dear Walter,
When, prompted by your enthusiasm for The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, you proposed that I write a sequel, I immediately rejected the idea on the grounds that I’ve always made it a point of honour never to repeat myself. Later, however, it occurred to me that I had never written a sequel before (to one of my own books, at least) and hence, applying what I acknowledge is a slightly warped species of logic, to write one now would represent another new departure for me. So if, to adapt Hitchcock’s metaphor, fiction can also be a slice of cake, I hope you’ve left room for seconds.
Gilbert
PART ONE
Chapter One
‘Great Scott Moncrieff!!!’
That voice!
Chief-Inspector Trubshawe – or, if one is to be a stickler for accuracy, Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, retired, formerly of Scotland Yard – had just stepped into the tea-room of the Ritz Hotel in quest of repose for his feet and refreshment for his palate, and it was while endeavouring to attract the eye of a waitress that he heard the voice which caused him to stop dead in his tracks.
If the truth be told, the Ritz was not the kind of establishment to which he would normally have accorded his patronage, certainly not for the steaming cup of tea which, for the past hour, he had craved. He had never been one to throw his money about, the less so since having had to learn to subsist on a police officer’s pension, and a Lyons Corner House would have been more to his unashamedly plebeian tastes. But he had found himself by chance at the posher end of Piccadilly, whose sole common-or-garden tea-room had teemed with secretaries and short-hand typists gabbling away to one another about the trials and tribulations of their respective working days, all of which had simultaneously come to a close. It was, then, the Ritz or nothing; and he thought to himself, alert to the incongruous reversal of values, well, why not, any old port in a storm.
So there he was, in this unostentatiously elegant room – a room in which the dulcet drone of upper-crust conversation clashed harmoniously (if such an oxymoron is possible) with the silvery rustle of the finest cutlery, a room he had never entered and had never expected to enter in his life – and before he had even properly orientated himself, he had run into somebody from his past!
The person who had hailed him was seated by herself at one of the tables located near the door, her face just visible behind a wobbly stack of green-jacketed Penguin paperback books. When he turned his head to confront her, the voice boomed out a second time:
‘As I live and breathe! Do these rheumy eyes of mine deceive me or is it my old partner-in-detection, Inspector Plodder?’
Trubshawe now looked directly at her.
‘Well, well, well!’ he exclaimed in surprise. Then, a note of sarcasm creeping almost imperceptibly into his voice, he nodded, ‘Oh yes, it’s Plodder all right. Plodder, alias Trubshawe.’
‘So it is you!’ said Evadne Mount, the well-known mystery novelist, ignoring the faint but meaningful modification of his tone. ‘And you do remember me after all these years?’
‘Why, naturally I do. It’s an essential part of my job – I mean to say, it used to be an essential part of my job – never to forget a face,’ laughed Trubshawe.
‘Oh!’ said the slightly deflated novelist.
‘Except,’ he added tactfully, ‘when you and I first met, it was after I’d retired, was it not, which must mean that in this instance it’s a personal not a professional memory. Actually,’ he concluded, ‘it was the voice that did the trick.’
Here came that note of sarcasm again. ‘And the disobliging nickname, of course.’
‘Oh, you must forgive my jollification. “She only does it because she knows it teases”, what? Good heavens, it really is you!’
‘It has been a while, hasn’t it?’ said Trubshawe dazedly, shaking her hand. ‘A very long while indeed.’
‘Well, sit down, man, sit down. Take the weight off your brains, ha ha ha! We must talk over old times. New times, too, if you’re so minded. Unless,’ she said, dropping her voice to a self-consciously theatrical stage-whisper, ‘unless you happen to be here on a romantic assignation. If that’s the case, you know me, I wouldn’t want ever to be de trop.’
Trubshawe lowered himself onto the chair opposite Evadne Mount’s, his broad boxer’s shoulders heaving as he dusted down his trouser-knees.
‘Never had such a thing as a romantic assignation in my life,’ he said with no apparent regret. ‘I met my late missus – Annie was her name – when we were both in the same class at school. I married her when we were in our twenties and I was just a callow young constable on the beat. We had our wedding reception – a real slap-up do it was, too – in the dance-hall of the Railway Hotel at Beaconsfield. And until she passed away, ten years ago now, I never once looked back. Or sideways either, if you know what I mean.’
Evadne Mount sat back in her own chair and fondly took the Chief-Inspector’s measure.
‘What a charming, what a cosy, what an enviably conventional life you make it seem,’ she sighed, and she probably didn’t mean for her approval of that life to sound as condescending as it may well have done.
‘And, quite right, I remember now. Last time we met – the ffolkes Manor murder case* – you’d just become a widower. And you say that was all of ten years ago? Hard to believe.’
‘And what ten years they were, eh, what with the War and the Blitz and V.E. Day and V.J. Day and now this so-called bright new post-war world. I don’t know about you, Miss Mount, but I find that London has changed out of all recognition, and it’s not the better for it. Nothing but spivs, as far as I can see, spivs, Flash Harrys, black marketeers, motor bandits and these gangs of nylon smugglers I keep reading about.
‘And beggars! Beggars right here in Piccadilly! I’ve just spent the last half-hour strolling around Green Park, but I couldn’t bear it any more. I was endlessly pestered by a bunch of grimy street urchins begging for pennies then calling me a tinpot Himmler – pardon me, a tinpot ’immler – when I refused to give them any. Main reason I came in here was for some peace and quiet.’
‘Mmm,’ agreed the novelist, ‘I have to say this isn’t the kind of place I’d associate you with.’
‘It isn’t at that. I was on the lookout for some plain, ordinary, come-as-you-are cafeteria. You, on the other hand, strike me as quite at home here.’
‘Oh, I am. I drop in every day at this time for afternoon tea.’
These mutual pleasantries were interrupted by the arrival of a white-haired, white-capped waitress who hovered expectantly over Trubshawe.
‘Just a pot of tea, miss. And tell them to make it strong.’
‘Right you are, sir. Would you be wanting bread-and-butter with that, sir? Cucumber sandwiches, p’raps?’
‘No thank you very much. Just the tea.’
‘Right away, sir.’
Glancing at the neighbouring tables, most of which had been commandeered by plump, well-nourished dowagers, fur stoles drowsily curling about their necks like equally plump, well-nourished pet foxes, Trubshawe turned again to Evadne Mount.