‘That’s pure Farje. At the press screenings of his films, the critics would be handed out little slips of paper advising them not to give away the beginning, which meant, in effect, that the films were critic-proof. The critics couldn’t give away the beginning, they couldn’t give away the ending, and they certainly couldn’t give away the middle. They couldn’t give anything away at all.
‘Dear, dear Farje,’ she sighed. ‘Such a genius.’
Trubshawe was on the point of expressing his astonishment at hearing her speak so warmly of an individual whom, only a month before, she had called a verminous, arachnoid pig. But then, he told himself, the poor man himself was dead, and Cora in such high spirits. Why cast a shadow over her euphoria by even bringing up the subject?
‘So what,’ he asked instead, ‘happens at the beginning of your picture?’
‘Yes, you old trout,’ Evadne Mount piped up, ‘don’t keep us in suspense. That’s the job of the film.’
Cora inserted a new cigarette into its holder and lowered her already husky voice to a conspiratorial level.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it all starts with these two chums, both of them women in their early twenties, at Drury Lane. They’ve done some shopping up West, just had lunch, and have a couple of tickets for a matinée – some sort of musical-comedy, I think it’s supposed to be. And there they are, in the seventh or eighth row of the stalls, browsing through their programmes, chattering away about this and that – the stars of the show, whether it’s had a good or bad press, you know, the sort of thing we all talk about when settling down in a theatre.
‘Then, suddenly, one of them starts.’
‘Starts what?’
‘Oh really, Evie, what an idiotic question. She doesn’t start anything. She just starts. She goes stiff and tense. It’s called starting. If I remember aright, your cardboard characters do it all the time.
‘Anyhow, noticing her start, her friend naturally asks her what the matter is. Nothing, says the woman, nothing at all. But, as she’s turned quite pale, the friend insists and the woman finally says, “You see that man sitting four rows down, alone at the end of row C?” The other woman takes a gander, locates the man her friend has just mentioned and says yes, what about him? The first woman doesn’t speak for a few seconds. Then she replies, in a deathly quiet voice, “If ever they find me dead” – the film’s title, remember? – “if ever they find me dead, that’s the man who did it.”
‘Now, as you can imagine, her friend is well and truly hooked, but all she can see of the chap, unfortunately, is the back of his head. And, just as she cranes for a better view, the lights dim, the orchestra strikes up, the curtain rises, a leggy line of high-stepping chorines comes tripping onto the stage and, of course, in her subsequent enjoyment of the show, she forgets all about him.’
Cora had nothing to complain of in the attention paid her by her two listeners. They were literally hanging on her every word.
‘At which point,’ she continued, after what Evadne Mount herself, in one of her whodunits, would unreflectingly have described as a ‘pregnant’ pause, ‘we at once cut to the following scene – in which, as I’m sure you’ve both already guessed, the police are examining the woman’s dead body in her mews flat in Belgravia.’
‘H’m,’ said Evadne Mount thoughtfully, ‘I must confess I’m slightly envious of that idea. What happens next?’
‘Well, I really don’t think I ought to reveal any more.’
‘Now, now, don’t be coy. Doesn’t suit you.’
‘Oh, all right. Suffice to say that the friend naturally decides to do a bit of sleuthing on her own account and eventually, at a dinner party, she finds herself sitting opposite the man in row C – or so she believes. Except, you see, she just can’t be sure. So she ingratiates herself with him, starts flirting madly and, still not knowing if he really is the murderer she believes he might be, falls for him in the biggest way.
‘Which, I think,’ she ended grandly, ‘is all you need to know for the nonce. If you want to learn more, you’ll just have to wait till the film comes out at your local picture palace.’
‘And you, dear lady,’ said Trubshawe, ‘you play the glamorous young sleuth, I suppose?’
Cora, uncertain for the moment whether or not her leg was being gently pulled, cast him a penetrating glance.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, Trubshawe, I believe I told you when we last met that my role was not – no, I’d be lying if I said it was the lead.’
‘Which role do you play?’ asked Evadne.
‘The mur-’ – she hastily bit off the tail of the word – ‘I mean, the man’s long-suffering wife, long-suffering because, as she’s become all too aware, hubby has been conducting a whole string of casual affairs behind her back.
‘It was a smallish role to start with, insultingly small – but, only the other day, I managed to get it bumped up quite a considerable bit. Now I have two or three really very juicy scenes where I not only get to chew up the furniture but spit it out.
‘Oh yes,’ she said in a voice of faintly chilling self-satisfaction, ‘if I play my cards right, which I fully intend to do, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t turn out to be the first stage of my comeback.’
The novelist looked at her sharply.
‘Cora?’
‘Yes?’
‘Just how did you manage to do that?’
‘What?’
‘Bump up the role?’
‘Ask me no questions, dearie, and I’ll tell you no lies. Let’s just say, little Cora has never been backward coming forward. Whenever a windfall drops into her lap, she knows how to exploit it.’
She turned to Trubshawe.
‘The first of these big scenes of mine is being shot tomorrow, which is why I thought you and Evie might like to spend the day at Elstree and watch it from behind the camera.’
‘I’d like that very much,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘Things going smoothly so far, are they?’
Cora suddenly turned rather pensive.
‘Well,’ she replied, ‘they are now, thank goodness. For a while there, it was touch-and-go.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You understand, I haven’t done any filming myself yet. But, naturally, I’ve had to be at the studio every day. Hair tests, complexion tests, clothes tests, make-up tests, you know the kind of thing. Well, you don’t, but I’m sure you get what I mean. And from what I could gather from the back-room boys, in addition to what I myself happened to witness, Hanway was an absolute disaster to start with.’
‘Hanway?’
‘Rex Hanway. Farjeon’s former assistant, now the film’s director. And, oh God, was he nervous when he first walked onto the set. Positively quaking in his brogues, he was. Didn’t have a clue. Couldn’t decide where to place the camera, couldn’t give directions to the actors, had no idea what the cameraman was referring to when he asked him about lenses and filters.
‘To be fair to him, it’s a bloody terrifying job making a film for the first time. All those people on the set, all of them old hands, far older hands than you are, firing a hundred-and-one different questions at you and expecting a hundred-and-one correct answers. Not to mention the constant thought of the cinema audiences who are going to be watching it one day. All those hungry eyes waiting to be fed!
‘I studied Hanway myself whenever I had some free time. Oh, he looked perfect, with his dungarees creased just so and his Turnbull and Asser shirt and his Charvet silk tie and his viewfinder dangling on his chest as elegantly as a monocle. But when it came to the nuts and bolts of getting the picture made, he didn’t know whether he was on his head or his heels. He just couldn’t handle all the decisions and indecisions of film production, all the meddling and the muddling you have to cope with.