‘Excuse me, but I beg to differ. In my experience – which is hardly as great as Farje’s was, of course, but it’s the only experience I can credibly speak from – in my experience, an actress as desperate to land a part as Cora was is precisely the last actress who ever ought to be offered it.’
‘Why so?’
‘Because such an actress would have so hungered after the part she simply wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of squeezing out of it more, in fact, than it actually contained. I had several pre-production conversations with Cora and I swear that, for her, the film itself only mattered because, without it, her own part in it wouldn’t exist. As far as she was concerned, If Ever They Find Me Dead represented above all a comeback for her – to which my film was conveniently attached.
‘Well no, Miss Mount, that’s not what I look for in an actress. I don’t want somebody hogging and ultimately clogging up the screen. Cora’s part, after all, was a fairly secondary one.’
‘Yet, as I understand it, it was one that you yourself were happy – or at least willing – to enlarge. You “bumped it up”, to use Cora’s own expression.’
‘Only,’ he cut in glibly, ‘only because I could anticipate the kind of overheated, overblown – in a word, a cruel word but a justified one, hammy – performance she was likely to give me and I wanted her character to have a more extended presence on the screen in order to accommodate all the hysterics and histrionics that I dreaded. That, I assure you, is the one and only reason I “bumped up” her part.’
‘And when you watched her play the scene, just minutes before her death,’ the novelist quietly asked, ‘did you still think she gave a hammy performance?’
Hanway looked at her for the longest time before shaking his head.
‘No, I didn’t. I was wrong, hopelessly wrong. She was magnificent. I make total amends. To you – and to Cora too, if she can hear me now.’
There was a moment of silence before Calvert spoke again.
‘I have one last question for you, Mr Hanway, and then I’ll let you go.’
‘Yes, Inspector?’
‘As I’ve been informed, it was immediately after the lunch break that Cora Rutherford drank out of the poisoned glass. And that was because, immediately before the lunch break, you yourself had told her she’d be expected to do so because you’d just had the idea of improving the scene. Now you do see, don’t you, how bad that sequence of events looks for you?’
There was no change in Hanway’s expression. It was a question he knew he was going to be asked.
‘Inspector, apart from the fact that I had no conceivable motive for killing Cora – indeed, I had not one but two extremely strong motives for keeping her alive, if I may put it that way. One, as I’ve just told you, I thought the performance she had given me so far was quite magnificent and, two, her death risks seriously endangering the future of this film and my own future with it. Apart from all that, however, let me answer you in this way. Do you really suppose that, if I had wished to kill Cora, I would have requested her – in public – to drink out of a glass into which I myself had just sprinkled poison?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but –’ Calvert began, except that Hanway hadn’t finished.
‘Let me continue, Inspector, since I believe I can predict what you’re about to say. You’re about to say that such an argument simply doesn’t count since, whether I did or did not kill her, I would offer exactly the same response? Am I right?’
‘Ye-es, something along those lines,’ replied Calvert, who couldn’t help smiling at how slyly he had been pre-empted.
‘Then I submit, with all due respect, that the question should never have been posed in the first place. I repeat, with all due respect.’
‘Touché, Mr Hanway,’ said Calvert. ‘But please consider this. Cora Rutherford was neither stabbed nor shot nor strangled. She was poisoned. Now I’ve been involved in quite a few criminal investigations and I’ve never yet had a case in which someone carried poison about him on the off-chance that he was going to feel like committing a murder. The only person who could have poisoned Cora Rutherford was someone who had premeditated the crime, someone who brought the poison into the studio yesterday morning because he knew – he knew, Mr Hanway – that she would be expected to drink out of the champagne glass yesterday afternoon. I’m sorry, but I can’t think of anyone else who fits that description but you.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting one thing, Inspector?’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes. You’re forgetting that this is a film studio. It has a laboratory. And in that laboratory, if I’m not mistaken, you will find many samples of the so-called industrial poisons – hydrocyanic compounds, I believe they’re called – that are widely employed in the photographic and cinematographic industries. Everyone who works at Elstree will confirm what I’ve just said. And everyone would have had just as easy access to these poisons as I had. The lab is only a five-minute stroll from here.’
Calvert gazed at him as though at an insect under a magnifying-glass. Then:
‘Re-touché.’
With a rakish nod of his head, Hanway acknowledged in his turn Calvert’s own rueful acknowledgement of defeat.
‘Oh, and I don’t suppose, Mr Hanway, that you mentioned the idea of half-filling the champagne glass to anyone else before you spoke to Miss Rutherford about it?’
‘Do you mean, did I tell someone about my idea before I had it myself? Come come, Inspector.’
‘Yes, sir, point taken. Well, thank you for giving me so much of your time. If I need to contact you further, I know where I can find you.’
‘Thank you, Inspector, for making it all so painless, so relatively painless.’
Bowing crisply to both the novelist and the detective, the director stood up and strode out of the room.
For a moment no one spoke. Then, plugging his pipe with tobacco, Trubshawe said:
‘Now that’s one cool customer.’
Chapter Eleven
In deference to Benjamin Levey’s concern that the film’s leading man and lady not be imposed upon more than was absolutely necessary, Calvert decided that the very next person to be grilled would be Gareth Knight, followed immediately by Leolia Drake. As before, it was Sergeant Whistler who escorted Knight into Hanway’s office and silently steered him to the interviewees’ chair. With a first vague nod at both Evadne Mount and Trubshawe, the actor turned to face Tom Calvert. Then, removing his cigarette-case from the inside breast-pocket of his impeccably cut sports jacket, he was about to ask whether he might be permitted to smoke when, the two men taking stock of one another, an unexpected thing occurred.
Though probably nothing untoward would have struck the untrained eye, for Trubshawe there was no doubt at all. It wasn’t that he merely fancied he saw – no, he definitely did see – the actor momentarily flush with apprehension. Clearly, Knight recognised Calvert, and it was that recognition which had caused him to – in Cora’s word – start.
Did Calvert, though, recognise Knight? That was less obvious, as the young officer opened the session with a politely neutral, almost sycophantic approach.
‘I want very much to thank you, Mr Knight, for agreeing to appear before us and also to assure you that I mean to take up as little of your valuable time as I humanly can. I’d just like to ask you, if I may, some questions about the terrible thing that happened here yesterday afternoon. You don’t mind, do you?’
Shifting uneasily in his chair, the suddenly rather waxy-complexioned Knight seemed to have more of a problem lighting his cigarette than one might have expected of so urbane an idol of the silver screen.