‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ she croaked. ‘That was meant for me!’
She turned to face Lettice Morley. Resembling nothing so much as a half-naked infant who has just scampered out of the freezing ocean and waits to be enveloped by her mother in a thick warm towel, the latter stood pale and shivering in front of her.
‘Lettice! My dear, dear girl, you saved my life!’
Without responding, Lettice pointed shakily at the gantry.
‘Look! Oh my God, look!’
Gazing up, they were all confronted by a hair-raising spectacle. With a velvet fedora pulled down low over the forehead, a creature enveloped in a long black cape, a cape so voluminous it was impossible not merely to know who the creature was but to which gender it belonged, was attempting, with the coiled tensity of a trapped wild beast, to forge a path across the intricate web of cables and planks.
‘There’s your murderer, Inspector!’ cried Evadne.
‘Get going!’ Calvert immediately shouted at his men. ‘Now, now, now! Make sure all the doors are locked! This is one villain who won’t slip through our fingers!’
And the four uniformed policemen were just about to carry out his orders when a chilling sound arrested them all at once, just as it arrested everybody else on the set.
It was a scream. A scream the like of which none of them had ever heard in their lives. An androgynous scream, paradoxically both basso and falsetto.
The individual in the black cape had caught one foot in the narrow gap between two iron girders – struggled to prise it loose – tugged at it – tugged at it again and again, more and more frantically – then gave it one last desperate tug, a tug that did finally release the foot but also caused the creature itself, for one agonising instant, to careen helplessly above their raised heads – until, arms outstretched like a pair of giant bat-wings, it toppled over altogether and, with a second and even more nightmarish scream, came plunging down towards them.
Everybody scrambled out of its way as it hit the cement floor with a bone-crunching splatter.
Lettice Morley screamed, Philippe Françaix blanched, Leolia Drake all but swooned into Gareth Knight’s arms.
Seconds later, Calvert and Trubshawe together approached the silent, shapeless mass; but seeing Calvert momentarily hesitate, it was Trubshawe alone who knelt down in front of it. Bracing himself, he gently turned the body face upward. Even he, however, no stranger to the horrors routinely encountered in a policeman’s round, couldn’t help recoiling from the sight that met his eyes.
The face that he looked upon had been pulped to a bony, bloody mash by the impact of such a landing from such a height. Yet there could be no doubt at all as to whom that face had once belonged.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Alastair Farjeon?!’ exclaimed Trubshawe. ‘Now how, Evie, how in the name of all that’s holy did you know that Farjeon was the murderer? Or even that he was alive?’
Cora Rutherford’s funeral had taken place that morning in Highgate Cemetery. Graced by the presence of several of the same stage and screen luminaries who had attended the Theatre Royal Charity Show with which the whole case had started, as well as by all four of Cora’s ex-husbands, not excluding the Count who didn’t count, it was a lavishly solemn affair, of which, dead and buried as she was, the actress herself remained somehow the life and soul. Under her veil Evadne shed copious tears, while even Trubshawe had to remove the odd cinder from his eye.
And so the novelist and the policeman had come full circle, back again at the Ivy, if now in the company of Lettice Morley, Philippe Françaix and young Tom Calvert. Rumour of Evadne Mount’s triumph had already spread through London’s Theatreland and she herself, on their arrival at the restaurant, had further contributed to the attention their party received by plucking her tricorne hat from her head and sending it spinning across the room straight onto one of the curlicued hooks of a tall oak-wood hat-rack. (It was a trick she had tirelessly practised at home many years before and, if she’d been challenged to perform any other such trick with the same hat, she would have been incapable of complying. In this she resembled the kind of prankster who, totally ignorant of pianism, has nevertheless mastered by rote a single Chopin Nocturne.)
Instead of answering Trubshawe’s question, Evadne said only:
‘First, I’d like to propose a toast.’
She raised her glass of champagne.
‘To Cora.’
Then, after everyone had echoed her, the Chief-Inspector turned to the friendly nemesis who had once more outsmarted him.
‘We’re all waiting, Evie,’ he said. ‘Just how did you arrive at the correct solution?’
‘Well …’ the novelist hesitated, ‘where should I begin?’
‘At the beginning?’ Lettice pointedly suggested.
‘The beginning?’ she mused. ‘Yes, my dear, that usually is the most sensible place. But it begs the question – where does our story begin?
‘The problem with this crime is that, unlike the one at ffolkes Manor, where there was, or appeared to be, a plethora of suspects and motives, here, for the very longest while, there were neither. It was only when Eustace and I took a few steps backward in time that we finally took our first significant step forward, if you take my meaning. It was only at that point that the case began to make any real sense.
‘It’s a problem that dogs numerous whodunits,’ she continued, oblivious of her listeners’ wistful hope that, for once, she might elect to stick to the business at hand, ‘even, I confess, a few of my own. In real life, the seed of virtually every serious crime, not only murder, is sown long before the performance of the act itself. Yet it’s one of the cast-iron rules of the whodunit, a crucial clause in the contract between writer and reader, that a murder be perpetrated, or at the least attempted, within the first twenty or thirty pages of the book. To leave it to the halfway mark would be a serious test of the reader’s patience. In fact, were this one of my own whodunits, my readers would probably have wondered, around the hundredth page, if there was ever going to be a murder committed to justify the illustration on the book’s cover.
‘Moreover,’ she added, ‘I myself would never dream of making the victim the detective’s best friend and confidante, someone with whom the reader is likely to have identified, as you critics put it.’
She turned to Philippe Françaix.
‘It would be like casting a major star in a picture and having her killed off in the first half-hour of the narrative. Not done, simply not done. That’s one challenge not even Farjeon would ever have dared to set himself.
‘But enough of generalities. Let’s turn to Cora’s murder itself. If we assume, as we all initially did, that it represented the beginning of our story, then it was a totally meaningless crime. Even though five of those present on the film set – Rex Hanway, Leolia Drake, Gareth Knight, you, Lettice, of course, and you too, Monsieur Françaix – had the opportunity of slipping poison into her champagne glass, not one of them, not one of you, had anything which bore the remotest resemblance to a motive.
‘No, it was soon obvious to me – and to Eustace, too,’ she hastily added, ‘that Cora had, if I may put it so, entered in the middle of the real crime, just as we all enter a picture palace in the middle of the picture.
‘It was, in fact, Eustace who first had the idea that there might exist a link between Cora’s death and Farjeon’s. He went even further, proposing that Cora was the wrong victim. In other words, if one chose to regard Farjeon’s death as having not, after all, been the tragic accident everyone had always presumed it to have been, then clearly each of the same five suspects I’ve already mentioned had a much stronger motive for murdering him rather than her.