‘The adventures of Lemmy Caution, you mean? Ugh, not my thing at all.’
‘Nor mine either. Anyhow, as I was saying, I’ve read enough of them now to know that, in the best ones, the only really effective ones, you don’t have to read the sentence or the paragraph or even the whole page twice to understand what the author’s getting at, as you might have to do with, you know, the classics. That’s not to denigrate whodunits, yours or anybody else’s. All I’m saying is that, when the revelations come tumbling out one after the other, their impact on the reader has got to be instantaneous. They’ve got to hit you – practically smack you – in the face.
‘It’s like a joke. If you don’t laugh at a joke at once, you’re never going to laugh at it. And now I come to think about it, isn’t that what’s really meant by the Perfect Crime, in whodunits at least? Not a crime whose perpetrator goes undetected – I mean, whose murderer goes undetected, for nowadays people are so bloodthirsty I don’t suppose anything short of murder will do – not a crime where, as I say, the murderer goes undetected – no, you couldn’t have such a book, the reader would ask for his money back – but a crime in which everything fits together perfectly, in which there’s neither too much nor too little evidence to digest and in which the revelation of the murderer’s identity turns out to be as inevitable as it’s unforeseeable. It couldn’t be him, you say to yourself, yet it couldn’t be anybody else. That, surely, is the Perfect Crime.’
Trubshawe ended his discourse almost apologetically, as though conscious of his effrontery. Lecturing on whodunits, and at such length, to the Dowager Duchess of Crime herself! As he finally lit up his pipe, after knocking the dottle into a glass ashtray that was at once whisked away from their table by a hitherto unnoticed waitress and replaced by an identical but pristine one, he gave the novelist a wary sidelong glance.
For a moment, she seemed dumbfounded. Then, to his astonishment, she let rip with an explosive laugh.
The detective cocked his head enquiringly.
‘Did I say something funny?’
‘No,’ was her answer, once she had sufficiently calmed down to speak. ‘You didn’t say something funny, you said something honest. That’s what made me laugh – laugh so much I think I’ve got a run in my stocking!
‘I’ve become such a success, you see, such a star, nobody else dares to be honest to me. My publishers, my readers, my critics – well, most of them,’ she qualified, not quite suppressing an embryonic snarl – ‘they all tell me that my latest book, whichever it happens to be, is wonderful, is terrific, is the finest so far, though we all know it’s a dud. And even if the reviews are a teensy bit less ecstatic than I’m used to, that’s not going to stop the publishing house, when it’s reissued, from describing it on the cover as “much-acclaimed”. I tell you, Trubshawe, there’s never been a book published in this country that wasn’t “much-acclaimed”. Before too long, you’ll see, they’ll be advertising “the much-acclaimed Bible” and “the much-acclaimed telephone directory”, ha ha ha!
‘Not,’ she went on, switching to her ‘serious’ voice, ‘not that I’m suggesting Death: A User’s Manual is a dud, you understand. It isn’t one of my few, one of my very few, outright misfires. But you’re right, it’s too clever for its own good. It’s what you might call clever-clever, which sounds twice as clever as clever itself but is actually only half.
‘So thank you, Trubshawe,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘What are you thanking me for?’
‘For being so candid. Candid – and interesting. You may be a relative newcomer to whodunits, but you’re already quite the theorist.’
‘Well, you know, Miss Mount, I wouldn’t like you to think I didn’t enjoy it. I did, really, only not so much as your earlier ones.’
‘Very nice of you to say so. And you really must call me Evadne. Old pals and allies as we are. Better still, call me Evie. Cut out the middle-woman, what? You will eventually, so why not start now?’
‘Evie,’ said Trubshawe unconvincingly.
‘And may I call you – well, whatever it is your friends call you?’
The detective drew on his pipe.
‘Don’t have too many of those left, I’m afraid. But if you mean, what’s my first name, well, it’s Eustace.’
‘Eustace? Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I don’t see you as a Eustace at all.’
‘Nor do I,’ grunted Trubshawe. ‘But there you are. It’s the name I was given, it’s the name on my birth certificate and it’s the name that makes me turn my head in the street if ever I hear it called out. Which nowadays, frankly, is never.’
Evadne Mount took a moment to contemplate him.
‘I say, Eustace,’ she said, consulting her wrist-watch, ‘do you have anything special on this evening?’
‘Me?’ he answered dejectedly. ‘I’ve nothing special on most evenings.’
‘I take it that means you aren’t in Town for some specific reason?’
‘I live in London now. Bought myself a semi-detached in Golders Green.’
‘Really? You don’t any longer have that cottage on Dartmoor?’
‘Sold up and moved on six-seven years ago. It became too lonely for me, you know, after the death of poor old Tobermory. You remember, that blind Labrador of mine that was shot on the moors?’
‘Of course, of course I do. So there’s nowhere you have to be tonight?’
‘Nowhere at all.’
‘Then why don’t you join me? Eh? For old times’ sake?’
‘Join you?’ he echoed her. ‘I don’t think I understand.’
Evadne Mount ground her ample frame into the defenceless little chair.
‘As it so happens, this is a very special evening for me. At the Haymarket tonight – the Theatre Royal, Haymarket – they’re giving a Grand Charity Benefit Show in aid of East End Orphans. Everybody in London will be there,’ she said, deliberately courting the cliché. ‘Bobbie Howes, Jack and Cicely, the Western Brothers, Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea and I don’t know who else, all doing their bit for nothing. It’s in the best of causes, after all.
‘I’m one of the writers – I cooked up a short curtain-raiser, a mini-whodunit – and you’ll never guess who’s playing Alexis Baddeley.’
‘Who?’
‘Another of your former acquaintances. Cora.’
‘Cora?’ repeated a mystified Trubshawe.
‘Cora Rutherford. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten her?’
For a few seconds more he racked his brains. Then, in a rush, it all came back to him.
‘Cora Rutherford! Well, of course, I’m with you now. She was also one of the guests at ffolkes Manor, was she not?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So you too are as inseparable as ever?’
‘Well, no … To be honest, I’d rather lost touch with Cora until this show brought us together again. Oh, we’ve had the odd natter on the blower, but we never quite manage to synchronise our watches. When I’m free, she’s busy; when she’s free, I’m busy. You know what they say, though. Our best friends aren’t those we see the most but those we’ve known the longest. Where it really counts, she and I are still bosom pals.’
‘Ye-es,’ muttered Trubshawe, for whose taste the novelist’s choice of words had proved a touch too vividly fleshy. He pronounced the name thoughtfully.
‘Cora Rutherford … It’s true enough,’ he went on, ‘I was never a great fan of the Pictures, even when Annie was alive. We’d go together because she liked them even if I didn’t. Still, I can’t say I’ve heard much about her of late. Cora Rutherford, I mean. She hasn’t retired, has she?’
‘Oh no,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Cora’s still gamely hanging in there. Actually, she rang me up just the other day to tell me that she’d landed a part in a brand-new film production. Confidentially, though, she fancies herself as a bit of a recluse, occasionally sighted flitting along Bond Street like a rare specimen of some exotic avian species – the seldom-spotted film star!’