‘No thanks, I’ve got my own car. But just let me say how grateful I am to you and Miss Mount for agreeing to participate in this little experiment of mine. Also for putting some very germane and’ – he couldn’t resist stealing a mischievous glance at Evadne – ‘trenchant questions. What I would ask you to do now is let your minds dwell on everything we’ve heard this afternoon and, if and when you have any new ideas you feel you ought to communicate to me, please don’t hesitate to ring me up. I meanwhile will let you know how things go at the inquest.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Trubshawe with an enigmatic half-smile, ‘I fancy I already have an intriguing new slant on the whole case. If you’ve no objection, though, I’d like to let it simmer awhile before running it past you …’
Chapter Thirteen
To begin with, on the journey back from Elstree in the Chief-Inspector’s Rover, neither he nor Evadne appeared to have much to say to one another. Yet, notwithstanding the policeman’s phlegmatic temperament, coupled with his aversion ever to declaring his hand prematurely, doubtless a product of his years of service at the Yard, she couldn’t help observing in his demeanour a barely repressed excitement that was most unlike the Trubshawe she already felt she knew of old.
‘Eustace, dear?’ she finally asked after having been driven by him in silence for about twenty minutes.
‘H’m?’
‘You’re awfully quiet. There isn’t something you’re concealing from me, is there?’
‘Yes,’ he was forced to avow, ‘there is. I swear to you, though, “conceal” isn’t really the right word. All will be revealed when we get to the Ritz. I’d rather not talk about it and drive at the same time.’ Then he added, ‘But, Evie, what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Only that I have reason to believe you’re concealing something too.’
‘Am I?’
‘I think you are. Out with it.’
‘Out with what, pray?’
‘You know what. Thought nobody noticed, did you?’
‘Eustace, will you please stop speaking in riddles. If you have something to say, then for goodness’ sake say it.’
‘That scrap of paper you snatched from Hanway’s waste-basket. Oh, you were very nimble, very sly. Quite catlike, in fact. But you didn’t fool old Inspector Plodder. We’re partners, aren’t we? Is there any point in not letting me in on the secret?’
‘No point at all,’ she replied. ‘Unlike you, I don’t play Hide-And-Seek.’
Whereupon she opened her handbag, extracted the crumpled-up piece of paper and flattened it over her knees.
‘Shall I read it out to you?’
‘If you will.’
‘All it says – and all of it, mark you, in block capitals – is: “SS ON THE RIGHT”.’
The ex-policeman mulled this over.
‘SS ON THE RIGHT, eh? SS ON THE RIGHT … It mean something to you?’
‘Not yet,’ Evadne prudently replied.
‘Could be anything, anything at all. Could even be some sort of a code.’
‘A code? Lawks Almighty, Eustace, I never thought I’d be the one to make such a remark, but you’ve been reading too many detective stories!’
‘A fine thing for you to say. If this were one of your whodunits, that piece of paper would automatically – I repeat, automatically – constitute a crucial piece of evidence. I can just see it. SS ON THE RIGHT? Why, of course. Benjamin Levey! Since Levey only just managed to escape from Nazi Germany, obviously the SS, the Gestapo – what’s left of it – is hotfoot on his trail.’
She took a moment or two to boggle at the absurdity. Then:
‘Eustace?’
‘Yes?’
‘Keep your mind on the road ahead, there’s a love.’
*
It was just after five o’clock when they entered the Ritz Bar. He escorted her to a secluded table, ordered, together with his own whisky-and-soda, the double pink gin he assumed she would have ordered for herself, in which assumption he was entirely correct, drew out his pipe and posed it on the table’s ashtray, along one of whose four narrow grooves it lay, unlit, like a tiny black odalisque.
Then, once they had been served, once her glass had been clinked against his and each had echoed the other’s ‘Chin chin!’, she turned to him and said:
‘Well now, here we are. Time to tell me what’s afoot.’
‘Evie,’ he said, leaning towards her as though resolved to thwart any passing waiter from even fleetingly eavesdropping on him, ‘I believe I’ve got it.’
‘Got what?’
‘This afternoon, as I was listening to our suspects, I was also running over the case in my mind, tabulating all the salient points in what they had to say, and I had a sudden insight, one, I fancy, that stands a jolly good chance of bringing everything to a swifter conclusion than we ever dreamt possible.’
‘Aha! Been thinking behind my back, I see.’
‘Oh well, if you’re going to be like that …’
‘Forgive me, just my little jest. From what I gather, then, you’ve uncovered some kind of a major clue?’
‘I have at that,’ said Trubshawe, who found it hard to conceal the sense of gratifying trepidation peculiar to anyone gearing up to astound his interlocutor with a startling piece of news. ‘A clue that, as they say in the films, is liable to crack this case wide open. At the very least, it will show Calvert that we old’uns still have an ace or two up our sleeves.’
‘All right,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘My ears are all ears. Let’s hear what it is you’ve got for them.’
‘Well,’ Trubshawe began, ‘you would agree that, logically, only five people could have laced Cora’s champagne glass with cyanide?’
‘Aren’t we forgetting ourselves?’
‘What do you mean, forgetting ourselves?’
‘You and I were also supposed to be suspects, were we not?’
‘Evie,’ he asked, assuming a mock-solemn expression, ‘did you kill Cora?’
‘No, of course I didn’t.’
‘Neither did I. I repeat, then, only five people are known to us to have been aware of the change that Hanway made to the script. Only five people therefore could also have known of the moment of opportunity during which it would have been possible, unobserved, to murder Cora. And given that no one else was about to drink out of that glass, there can’t be any ambiguity whatever as to the identity of the murderer’s predestined victim. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘I repeat yet again, only five people could have murdered Cora – and yet, as we discovered when we questioned them, not one of them had a conceivable motive.’
‘Hold it there, Eustace,’ Evadne pointed out. ‘One of them – indeed, several of them – might have had a secret motive. A motive of which we’re still unaware and which they were naturally averse to revealing to us.’
‘Yes, I thought of that,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Yet my own personal conviction is that they were all telling us the truth – the truth, at least, about their relationship, or lack of it, past or present, with Cora. Nearly all of them, you remember, insisted that they’d never even met her before she turned up at the studio to start shooting the picture. Only Gareth Knight knew her from the old days, when they’d trodden the boards together, and of all of them he was ostensibly the best-disposed towards her. I say ostensibly, because of course he could have been lying – but again, don’t ask me why, I believed him.
‘If that were not enough, they all had a very powerful professional motive for, so to speak, not killing her – for, as Hanway himself put it, keeping her alive. Farjeon’s death had already dealt a near-fatal blow to If Ever They Find Me Dead and Cora’s death will probably be the coup de grâce. Since the future of each and every one of those suspects was tied up in that picture, the last thing any of them would have wanted was to have a second, even darker cloud hanging over it.’