‘Well, you didn’t drop in. All those days I spent sitting near the door, glancing up at everybody who passed through it, hoping, praying, that this time it might be you, all for nothing. You never did make a reappearance. It probably never crossed your mind for an instant.
‘But that wasn’t going to stop me. Oh no, this was my last chance and, like Cora, I was willing to do anything, abase myself if need be, to grasp it. So I waited more or less patiently for the opportunity, for the excuse I needed, to present itself. And it finally did. Out of the blue, Cora rang me up, invited me to Elstree to watch her play her big scene and I invited you.
‘And now I’m grasping the chance even more tightly by proposing this wager. My calculation is that you’re so bloody cocksure you’ll solve the crime I doubt you’ll risk seeming a coward by refusing to pick up the gauntlet. And if you’re worried about – about, you know, S-E-X – well, you needn’t be. We’re both much too set in our ways, not to mention too old and creaky, for any of that tomfoolery.
‘So, Eustace dear, what do you say? Are we on?’
Trubshawe looked her moistly in the eye.
‘We’re on.’
He then momentarily turned away, pleading a cinder in one of his eyelashes – a cinder as big as the Ritz itself! – and, after feigning to have removed it, added, ‘But only because I know I’m going to win.’
‘At my age, love, I’ve learned not to be too picky. So long as you accept the wager, I really don’t care why.’
She cheerily rubbed her hands together.
‘So – where are you off to next in your investigation?’
‘Next?’ said Trubshawe, drinking down his whisky-and-soda. ‘Next I believe I’ll go alibi-hunting. I’ll consult with Tom Calvert and, perhaps, if we both put on our thinking caps –’
‘Make a nice change from that tartan terror you always wear.’
‘If Tom and I put our heads together,’ Trubshawe repeated between gritted teeth, ‘maybe we’ll find out just what those five suspects of ours were up to on the afternoon of the Cookham fire. And you?’
‘Me?’ said Evadne Mount. ‘I’m going to the Pictures.’
Chapter Fourteen
Trubshawe spent the whole of the next day following through his hunch in the company of Tom Calvert. The younger man had been intrigued by his theory that there might after all have been foul play at Cookham, sufficiently intrigued at any event to pay a series of semi-official calls on all five suspects in Cora Rutherford’s murder. The results were conclusive, to put it mildly, and it was these results that the Chief-Inspector now felt obliged to relate to the novelist. Coupled with that obligation was of course his own devouring curiosity to find out what she herself had been up to in the meantime.
Until well into the afternoon, however, Evadne was unobtainable on the telephone, and the sole hint of where she had been and what she might have been doing there had been dropped by Lettice Morley, whom he and Calvert had interviewed just after lunch in her charming bijou flat in Pimlico. It appears that Evadne had rung her up early that morning with what Lettice described as a ‘self-consciously vague’ enquiry about film extras, who they were and how they were hired. Needless to say, this tantalising droplet of information only intensified Trubshawe’s curiosity.
Later, towards five o’clock, when he had returned home to Golders Green, settled into his favourite armchair, a freshly brewed cup of tea at his elbow, and had just begun reading Cora’s obituary in the Daily Sentinel – no fewer than three lavishly illustrated pages were devoted to her career, her matrimonial misadventures, her untimely death and, of course, the sensational circumstances surrounding it – his own telephone finally rang. He leapt up off the armchair to take the call. It wasn’t Evadne herself, though, but Calvert, who had even more tantalising news of her doings to impart. She had rung him up just half-an-hour before to ask whether it might be possible for the Police Force to persuade Benjamin Levey to set up a screening for them of the ‘rushes’ – the word sat as oddly on Trubshawe’s ear as on Calvert’s tongue – that had already been filmed of If Ever They Find Me Dead.
‘Good grief,’ muttered Trubshawe, ‘what’s got into Evie now?’
‘No idea,’ replied Calvert. ‘She simply asked me if I might use my influence.’
‘Did she explain why she wanted to see the stuff?’
‘No. I did ask her, as you can imagine, but she played her cards very close to her chest. All she said was that it was of the utmost importance that I grant her this favour.’
‘And what was your response to that?’
‘Well, Mr Trubshawe, it was, you recall, Miss Mount who, on the very day of the murder, was crafty enough to deduce that there weren’t forty-two suspects to be accounted for, just five. And, during those investigations that we conducted in Hanway’s office, I must say she did ask some pretty pertinent questions – brutal but pertinent. And she’s written all those clever whodunits – not that I’ve actually read any of them myself, you know, but she never stops telling me how clever they are. And she was, after all, a close friend of Cora Rutherford and she’s also, of course, your friend too. And since you and I are – let’s face it – getting nowhere fast –’
An impatient Trubshawe broke in.
‘What you’re saying is, you agreed.’
‘To be candid with you, Mr Trubshawe, I couldn’t see my way to refusing. I was struck, though, by something rather queer that she said. I asked her if, as I assumed would be the case, the scene she was keenest to watch was the one during which Miss Rutherford was murdered. Well, you can’t imagine how she replied.’
‘Tell me.’
‘She shuddered – when your Miss Mount shudders, my goodness me, she does audibly shudder! – anyway, she shuddered and said tartly that she had been called many things in her life but that she was no ghoul and, if there was one piece of film she never, ever wanted to see, it was that. Then I said, well, what? And she breezily answered that it was all one to her! Anything the studio could show her of the picture, she’d be glad to watch! Can you believe that?’
‘Of Evie,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I’ve learned to believe almost anything. But it is, as you say, queer. Yet, despite her indifference to what would be served up to her, you still agreed to hold the screening?’
‘I told her I couldn’t make any promises and that it was ultimately up to Levey. But, after we ended our conversation, I did get on the ’phone to him. That man’s as jumpy as a scalded cat – all those years of persecution in Nazi Germany, I suppose – and at first he was fairly reluctant. Said it was quite unheard-of to screen the rushes of a film to outsiders, which, to be honest, I can well believe is the truth. He asked me what precisely was the reason behind it, since there have been no prints made yet of the footage – his word – of Cora Rutherford drinking out of the poisoned glass. I told him just what Miss Mount had told me – that it was of no importance what she was shown – and even though he was as mystified as I was myself, he finally gave way. I rather think he feared it might attract my suspicion if he didn’t.
‘So I’ve arranged for a little private show tomorrow afternoon in one of the studio’s screening-rooms. I thought you might want to be there.’