‘Oh yes? One of those obliging scraps of paper that your whodunits are littered with? Let’s be serious, Evie. It hardly stands up against what I have to offer. You recall what Sherlock Holmes said? “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”’
At this she released a sharp ejaculation.
‘Pshaw, Trubshawe, pshaw! Devotee as I am of Conan Doyle, I’ve always thought that particular apothegm to be complete drivel. There exist lots of things in the world that are theoretically not impossible but extremely unlikely ever to be “the truth”. Playing a perfect round of golf, for instance, by scoring eighteen successive holes-in-one. The fact that yours is, there’s no denying it, the only theory so far – so far, Eustace – which adequately accounts for Cora’s murder doesn’t mean it’s true.
‘Actually,’ she added, ‘the more I think about it, the more offensive I find it. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. If you ever do actually get round to smoking that filthy old pipe of yours.’
Trubshawe ignored this unwarranted calumny on his beloved meerschaum.
‘Offensive?’ he queried. ‘You find it offensive? Now there, Evie, you’ve lost me.’
‘Well, just consider. What you appear to be implying is not only that one of the five suspects murdered Farjeon but that Cora subsequently discovered the identity of that murderer and threatened him or her with the prospect of taking what she knew to the police. In other words, she set about blackmailing the murderer and got murdered herself for her sins.’
‘No, no, no! Now you’re extrapolating, wildly extrapolating. All I said was that Cora had acquired what would turn out to be a very dangerous piece of knowledge. Just knowing that she knew may have been enough for the murderer. I never once suggested that she sought to exploit the secret.’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘Remember how gleeful she was when she announced to us that she’d somehow contrived to have her part “bumped up”? Remember how cagey she then became when you asked her how she’d pulled it off?’
‘There you are!’ cried the novelist, who visibly did remember her friend’s crowing complacency. ‘What is it you’re implying if not blackmail? Well, I won’t have it, Eustace. I won’t hear a word against poor dear dead Cora. I insist that you retract these scurrilous insinuations of yours.’
‘I say, dash it all, Evie, we aren’t going to fight, are we?’
‘That’s entirely up to you. I simply won’t have you trampling over Cora’s memory with your flatfoot’s hob-nailed boots.’
Trubshawe, however, instead of beating a retreat, as he would once have done, elected to pursue what he saw as his advantage.
‘I’m sorry. I understand how sensitive you are about Cora’s death, but I wonder if you aren’t letting your friendship cloud your judgement. I, on the other hand, am free to speak my mind.’
‘That shouldn’t take long.’
‘Now listen, Evie,’ said Trubshawe with steely determination, ‘I know you well enough to know how you can’t tolerate being upstaged, to use Gareth Knight’s word. Obviously, it goes against the grain for you to acknowledge that somebody else might be right for once or simply have got there first. In your books, you make d**ned sure Alexis Baddeley always defeats poor old Inspector Plodder and you’ve deluded yourself that it must happen like that in life. If this were one of your whodunits –’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that,’ the novelist testily interjected. ‘It’s my line, not yours.’
‘I’m right. I’m right about the case and I’m right about you, too. I know it and I think you know it, except that you can’t bring yourself to admit it. And do you know why you can’t bring yourself to admit it? A classic case of sour grapes. You’re jealous, Evie. You’re jealous because, this time around, I’ve come up with the goods for a change instead of you. So all you can think to do is just sit there and be mulish.’
Now it was Evadne Mount’s turn to splutter.
‘What – what – what bally cheek! What a royal nerve you have!’
She trained a malevolent eye on Trubshawe.
‘Jealous? Of you? If I had a single jealous bone in my body, it’s certainly not you I’d be jealous of! But I don’t, you hear, not one.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘I think not, Evie. We both know that there’s at least one person in this world you’re jealous of. Her very existence has you positively a-twitter with jealousy.’
‘And who might that be?’ she asked with as much aplomb as she could muster at short notice.
‘Who might that be?’ he parroted her. ‘I rather think it might be Agatha –’
He got no further.
‘How dare you!’ she spat at him. ‘How dare you! As I’m a lady, I won’t descend to raising my voice, but I must tell you, Eustace Trubshawe, that is an atrocious calumny which I shall find hard, mighty hard, ever to forgive.’
Only when it was too late to retract what he’d said did the Chief-Inspector understand that he’d gone too far, far too far.
‘Look,’ he blundered on, ‘there’s no – I mean to say, there’s no shame in being jealous of the best? Am I right?’
Silence.
‘Evie?’
Silence.
‘Evie, please. I didn’t really – after all, I was just trying to …’
Realising that he was making no headway, he fell silent.
So it was that they sat there for a moment, neither of them speaking, neither of them drinking.
When the novelist eventually did answer back, her voice was calm, unnaturally calm. It was the calm that follows rather than precedes the storm.
‘Very well, Eustace. I can see that you have total confidence in your theory. Are you ready to put that confidence to the test?’
‘Certainly I am,’ answered Trubshawe, unsure where she was leading.
‘Good. Now I am not, by nature, a betting woman, but I’m willing to make a wager with you if you are willing to accept it.’
‘What kind of wager?’
‘I’m willing to bet you that I will solve this crime before you do.’
‘And if you don’t?’
‘Then I swear to you that the dedication of my very next whodunit will read: “To Agatha Christie, the undisputed Queen of Crime Fiction”. There – how you say? – voilà!’
Trubshawe drew in his breath.
‘You would do that?’
‘If I lose, yes. Except that I won’t. Well, do you accept the wager?’
‘I absolutely do,’ Trubshawe replied without hesitation, adding, ‘And what will I have to do if I lose? Except that I won’t.’
‘If you lose,’ she replied, ‘you must agree to marry me.’
‘Marry you!!??’
Once again the Chief-Inspector had spoken so loudly that two startled waiters, both of them bearing trays heaped high with empty glasses, only just averted a collision as their paths crossed in the middle of the bar. First an itching bottom, now a proposal of marriage. These two fossilised old dears – you could almost hear the whisper buzz around the room – perhaps weren’t as superannuated as they looked.
‘Have you lost your mind?’
‘Not at all.’
‘But why on earth would you want to marry me? This very afternoon we’ve done nothing but quarrel like – like –’
‘Like an old married couple?’ said Evadne Mount, deftly completing the phrase for him.
Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she took his hand and squeezed it in her own.
‘Come clean, Eustace. You’re lonely. You can come clean, you know, because you’ve already done so. More than once. Well, now it’s my turn. I’m lonely too. Terrifyingly lonely, if you really want to know. Why do you suppose I drop into this ridiculous hotel every day? Just in the hope of finding somebody to speak to – anybody, Eustace, anybody at all. And when, all those weeks ago, it was you I found to speak to, I can’t tell you how thrilled I was. So thrilled that, for days afterwards, I was hoping – hoping against hope – that you would drop in again. Really I was. It was like some girlish fantasy – that you would pretend to have dropped in by chance and I would pretend to believe you. And because it was like a girlish fantasy, it made me feel young again, almost like a girl myself.