‘There’s a lot of talk about austerity these days. Not much sign of it here.’
She smiled benignantly at him.
‘I do know what you mean,’ she answered in a voice whose habitual tenor was so stentorian that, even if she said not much more than ‘Pass the sugar, please’, it made heads turn as far as three or four tables away. ‘The War has complicated everything. It isn’t only London that’s changed. The whole country’s changed, the whole world, I dare say. No more manners, no more respect, no more deference. Not the way it was in our day.
‘But then, you know, Trubshawe, those grimy urchins you mentioned, those peaky-faced little ragamuffins? Don’t forget that, a mere couple of years ago, they were being bombed out of house and home by the Luftwaffe. When they insult you by calling you a tinpot ‘immler, well, that’s not just a name to them. It’s quite possible the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of their mothers or fathers or a half-dozen of their school chums. In these terribly trying times, I do believe we all need to be more indulgent than usual.’
Trubshawe took her point.
‘You’re right, of course. I’m just a crochety, antisocial codger, a crusty old curmudgeon.’
‘Pish posh!’ said Evadne Mount. ‘It’s been ten years since I last clapped eyes on you and you haven’t aged a bit. Really, it’s most remarkable.’
‘Now that I take a closer look,’ said Trubshawe in reply, ‘you neither. Why, I wager, if I were to run into you again in ten years’ time, you still wouldn’t have aged. It’s almost as though time has stood still – at least for you. For me too, if you say so. And, of course, for Alexis Baddeley. She never appears to age either.’
‘Alexis Baddeley, eh? My alter ego – or ought I to say, my alter egoist? Why, Trubshawe, don’t tell me you’ve become one of my readers? One of what I like to call the happy many?’
‘Yes, I have. As a matter of fact, ever since we, eh, we collaborated on that nasty Roger Murgatroyd affair, I’ve read every one of your whodunits. Just the other week I finished the latest. What was its title again? Death: A User’s Manual. Yes, indeed, I finished it last – last Wednesday it was.’
There followed a not-so-brief silence during which Evadne Mount patently began to feel it a mild discourtesy on the Chief-Inspector’s part to have mentioned the title of her most recent book, to have acknowledged having read it, then to have left it at that. Though she tended to be brazen in her relationship with publishers and readers, admirers and critics, it nevertheless was not her style ever to be the first to open up what might be termed the negotiations of praise – she would claim she never had to – but she found Trubshawe’s noncommittal response so frustrating that she finally queried:
‘Is that all?’
‘All what?’
‘All you have to say about my new book? That you finished it last Wednesday?’
‘Well, I …’
‘You don’t suppose you owe it to me to say what you thought of it?’
Just at that moment Trubshawe was served not merely the tea he had requested but a glazed cherry-topped bun he hadn’t. But before he’d had the chance to correct the waitress’s error, Evadne Mount raised her glass – only now did he notice that what she was drinking was a double pink gin, a drink that, by rights, should not have been available in a tea-room – and proposed a toast.
‘To crime.’
Unaccustomed though he was to toasting precisely those nefarious activities he had devoted his professional life to combating, Trubshawe nevertheless decided that it would be both pompous and humourless of him to refuse.
‘To crime,’ he said, raising his teacup.
He took a deep draught of the tea and, the waitress having already disappeared, an unexpectedly voracious bite out of the bun.
‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘I have to confess that – now this is just one man’s point of view, you understand – but I have to confess that I didn’t feel your new whodunit would ever become one of my own personal favourites.’
‘No?’ the lynx-eyed novelist, eyeing him like a hawk, rejoindered. ‘May I ask why not?’
‘Oh well, it’s all very clever and that, the tension building up nicely as usual, so that, as I read on, I was more and more gripped, just as I’m sure you intended me to be.’
‘Interesting you should say that,’ she immediately cut in. ‘It’s my theory, you see, that the tension, the real tension, the real suspense, of a whodunit – more specifically, of the last few pages of a whodunit – has much less to do with, let’s say, the revelation of the murderer’s identity, or the disentangling of his motive, or anything the novelist herself has contrived, than with the growing apprehension in the reader’s own mind that, after all the time and energy he has invested in the book, the ending might turn out to be, yet again, an anticlimactic letdown. In other words, what generates the tension you describe is the reader’s fear not that the detective will fail – he knows that’s never going to happen – but that the author will fail.’
‘But that’s just it,’ Trubshawe maintained, seizing the opportunity to cut back in. He had been inordinately indulgent with her, considering that she had after all solicited his opinion but, familiar as he was with her old ways, he was well aware that, if he permitted her to digress as freely as she was used to doing, he would never get around to letting her know what he actually thought of her book.
‘The suspense, as I say, was building up nicely to the scene in which your lady detective, Alexis Baddeley, re-examines the suspects’ alibis. Then there comes that whole bizarre business of the drunken toff who keeps popping up all over the shop and … and, well, you lost me, frankly. Sorry, but you did ask.’
‘And yet it’s really quite simple,’ persisted Evadne Mount.
‘Is it? I must say I –’
‘You do know what a running gag is, don’t you?’
‘A running gag? Ye-es,’ replied the Chief-Inspector, not altogether sure that he did.
‘Of course you do. You must have seen one of those Hollywood comedies – screwball comedies I think they call them – in which the running gag is that some top-hatted toper keeps, as you say, popping up in the unlikeliest places and asking the hero in a slurred voice, “Haven’t I sheen you shomewhere before?” Am I right?’
‘Uh huh,’ he said as prudently as before.
‘So when the reader encounters the same type of character in Death: A User’s Manual, he thinks, aha, this must be the comic relief, just as it is in the films. But no, Trubshawe, in my book the toper really has seen the hero somewhere before. Where? Leaving the scene of the crime, of course. Because he’s pie-eyed, though, nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to him. Except for Alexis Baddeley, who insists that, inebriated or not, he’s a witness like any other and hence has to be taken as seriously as any other.
‘I like to think of it as my variation on “The Invisible Man”. The Father Brown story, you know.’
After listening to her argument no less patiently than she had presented it to him, Trubshawe shook his heavy head.
‘No, no, I’m sorry, Miss Mount, it won’t do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I grant you, now that you’ve spelt it out for me, I just about get the hang of the idea. But it’s not good enough.’
Evadne Mount prepared to bristle.
‘Not good enough?’
‘I’ve read enough whodunits now – mostly yours, I have to say, though once I’d exhausted all of those, I found I was so addicted I even dipped into one or two thrillers of the thick-ear school, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney –’