‘Oh, very well. I’ll worm it out of you later, you silly old stick-in-the-mud. What about Lettice Morley?’
‘She was in hospital.’
‘What? Had she fallen ill?’
‘No. Her mother had just that day gone under the surgeon’s knife. Lettice was at her bedside all afternoon. Even though the nurses admit they were more or less permanently on the go, they’re all ready to vouch for her.’
‘So where does that leave you?’
He shook his big heavy head.
‘Up the proverbial gum tree. We have five suspects in one crime for which they all had an opportunity but no motive. And we have the same five suspects in another crime – or so I truly believe – for which they all had a motive but no opportunity. It pains me to admit it, Evie, but the only person capable of breaking one, some or all of their alibis is Alexis Baddeley.’
‘Very sweet of you to say so. Don’t forget, though, there is at least one advantage to being faced with five separate alibis.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘It takes only one of them to crack for you to have your guilty party.’
This logical notion, which had never occurred to Trubshawe, cheered him up no end as they continued the pleasant drive down to Elstree.
*
The cosily raked and padded screening-room held, all in all, just three rows, counting four seats to a row. When Evadne and Eustace arrived, slightly late, both Tom Calvert and Lettice Morley were already present and making perfunctory attempts at conversation. Behind them was the projectionist’s box; and behind the projector itself stood the projectionist, primed to start the film as soon as he had been given the nod by Lettice. Seated alone at the very back was the inevitable, ubiquitous Sergeant Whistler.
Once everyone else had settled in the front row, Calvert said to Lettice:
‘Perhaps, Miss Morley, you’d like to explain what you’re going to show us?’
‘Of course, Inspector.’
Lettice stood up in front of the white screen.
‘What you’re about to see are what we in the trade call rushes – that’s to say, different takes, shots, sometimes even entire scenes, which are printed up the night after they’re filmed so that they can be viewed the very next day by the director. To give him at least a rough idea of how the film is progressing. Now you must realise that very little of If Ever They Find Me Dead was shot before the production was closed down. And I trust that none of you is expecting to see footage of Cora Rutherford drinking from the champagne glass, because nothing of that specific scene was ever printed.’
‘We do understand that, Miss Morley,’ said Calvert. ‘Actually, I’ve already requested from Mr Levey a print of the scene you just mentioned – it may well aid me in my inquiry – but we know that’s not why we’re here today.’
‘Very well. Now, just in case any of you are still unfamiliar with it, let me quickly summarise the plot of the film. It all begins inside a West End theatre, and the very first shot is of two young women in the audience, one of whom, indicating a man sitting three or four rows in front of them – and I should point out that no more than the back of his head is visible, either to her or to the audience of the film itself – whispers to her friend, “If ever they find me dead, that’s the man who did it.”
‘Then we immediately cut to the young woman’s Belgravia flat, where the police are indeed investigating her murder. Later in the plot, when the victim’s friend, the character played by Leolia Drake, decides to do a little detecting herself, she chances to meet, at a dinner party, a good-looking older man who seems to fit the bill. That’s Gareth Knight, of course. She starts flirting with him and, before she knows quite what has happened to her, she has genuinely fallen in love. And so it goes from there.
‘The thing is, for all kinds of practical and budgetary reasons, we in the cinema business seldom shoot pictures in chronological order. The opening scene I’ve just described, for example, was never filmed, since we intended to shoot it at Drury Lane and we would have had to wait for the current show to finish its run. And, in fact, the particular scene you’re about to see comes right at the end of the film. It’s what we call a flashback – which is to say, it flashes back to an earlier moment in the plot so that the audience can better understand the events leading up to the crime. It is, in fact, the murder scene, the one in which the young woman we already saw in the theatre is stabbed on her own doorstep by an unknown assailant. He or she then snatches the young woman’s key from her, quickly opens the door and drags her body inside – except that we never actually managed to get that far in the filming.
‘That is, I think, all you need to know. No, sorry, there’s one other thing. As I said before, these are rushes. By that I mean, they’re no more than fragments, very imperfect fragments. Extraneous noises-off, no background music, all the flaws that would be cleaned up once the shoot itself was over. The projectionist tells me that just two takes of the murder scene were printed. Rex actually shot six, but four were discarded, one because the actress began walking too fast, another because the boom shadow was visible in the shot, a third – well, I can’t any longer remember what the remaining problems were. I trust, though, that two will be enough for your purposes,’ she concluded, resisting the temptation to add, ‘whatever they could possibly be.’
She glanced at Calvert, who nodded back at her. Then she looked up at the projectionist’s box and cried, ‘Okay, Fred. Ready when you are.’ Then she settled down in her chair at the end of the row.
The lights dimmed.
On the small white screen, after a few seconds of assorted squeaks, squawks and squiggles, there flashed up in front of them that universal emblem of the film-making process, the clapper-board. Holding it up to the camera’s eye was an only just visible crew-member, who called out, ‘If Ever They Find Me Dead, Scene 67, Take 3.’ Upon which, crisply snapping its two halves together, he vanished from the screen, carrying the clapper-board with him.
What that clapper-board had been obscuring was a snowy, nocturnal, totally deserted residential street along which a young fur-coated woman started to walk. At first only her own footsteps were audible. Then, gradually, insidiously, these were juxtaposed with another, heavier set, producing an effect not unlike that of listening to two percussionists beating drums independently of one another. The young woman shot a first, furtive glance behind her, but, there being no lamp-post located in the vicinity, could see virtually nothing. As she picked up speed, though, the second set of footsteps grew louder and therefore, by implication, closer. The young woman now broke into a run. She fumbled in her handbag, presumably in search of her keys, but it was only when she had reached her own front door, lipstick and powder-puff spilling out onto the snow-blanketed pavement, that she succeeded in retrieving them. With a trembling left hand she clumsily struggled to pull off her right-hand glove, whose furry lining prevented her from getting a grip on the door-key. By then, however, it was too late. His features eclipsed by his overcoat’s turned-up collar, a tall, broad-shouldered man – or what certainly seemed to be a man – had silently stolen up behind her. Clapping his own left hand over her lips, he extracted with his right an ivory-handled dagger from his overcoat pocket and drove it deep into her throat. The screen went blank.
More squeaks, more squiggles. Clapper-board. Scene 67, Take 5. The same scene, verbatim, unfolded all over again.
Throughout the first screening – the first ‘rush’? – Trubshawe had been just as alert, out of the corner of his eye, to Evadne’s own facial expressions as to what was happening in the film itself. He had never seen her so caught up in anything as she was in the suspenseful little drama which had played out before them. And then, during the second one, he actually heard her murmur to herself – as usual with her, murmur loud enough for her neighbours to overhear – ‘I knew it!’ Then again, as the sequence drew to a close, ‘Of course! Of course that’s how it must have been done!’