‘Hanway, because he almost certainly knew that, once Farjeon was out of the way, he would be given the chance to take over the new picture himself. Leolia, because she was Hanway’s mistress and had been promised the leading role in any film he would direct. Knight, because, as he told us himself, Farjeon was more or less blackmailing him over his unfortunate encounter with’ – she couldn’t resist shooting a mischievous glance at Calvert – ‘an attractive young bobby. You, Lettice, because Farjeon had tried to rape you. And you, Philippe – may I call you Philippe, by the way? Given all that we’ve been through together.’
‘But yes,’ replied the critic with Gallic gallantry. ‘I would be most ’onoured.’
‘Thank you. I continue. You, Philippe, because Farjeon had coolly lifted your plot for If Ever They Find Me Dead.’
She wetted her lips with another sip of champagne.
‘Simple as ABC, or so it seemed. Except that, as poor Eustace was soon to discover, every one of these suspects had an alibi for the time of Farjeon’s supposed murder.
‘And there you have the fundamental paradox of the case. The same five people who had an opportunity to kill Cora, but no motive, all had a motive for killing Farjeon, but no opportunity. So that led us strictly nowhere.
‘Yet, misguided as it was, Eustace’s ingenious insight did at least serve one useful purpose.’
‘Well, thank you for that, Evie,’ the Chief-Inspector neatly intercepted.
‘It pointed me in what would ultimately turn out to be the right direction. For it made me realise that the beginning of this story had, as I say, occurred a long time before Cora’s murder.
‘As we pursued our investigation, the name which kept coming back to us was Alastair Farjeon. It was around him that everything seemed to revolve. Even more curiously, the case actually began to resemble one of his own films – especially for Eustace and me. It so happened that it was on the very night of my hoax whodunit at the Haymarket that I had the disagreeable task of breaking the news of his death to Cora – a perfect example of the “twist beginning” for which Farjeon himself had always had a penchant.
‘Alastair Farjeon …’ she murmured. ‘That name, a name we barely knew before Cora spoke to us about him, would end by seeping into every vacant pocket of our lives. “Farje this”, “Farje that”, “Farje the other” – that’s all we ever seemed to hear when we set about questioning our five suspects. As Eustace pointed out to me, they all had much more to tell us about Farjeon than about Cora, notwithstanding the fact that it was Cora, not Farjeon, whom they were suspected of having murdered.
‘I felt increasingly that, if I hoped to get to the bottom of Cora’s murder, it would be necessary for me to understand the psychology of this individual whom I had never met but whose name kept popping up with such astonishing regularity in our investigations. Yet, familiar as I couldn’t help becoming, if only posthumously, with the man – with his obesity, his arrogance, his overweening vanity – there was one side to him of which I remained woefully ignorant. I had seen practically none of his films.
‘Why did that fact strike me as so important? Well, as I know better than most, there exists no more powerful truth serum than fiction. Though novelists – and, I am certain, film directors as well – may believe that everything in their work is a pure product of their imagination, the truth, the truth about their own psyches, their own inner demons, has an insidious way of infiltrating itself into that work’s textures and trappings, just as water will always find the narrowest crack in the floorboards, the tiniest of fractures, by which it can then drip down into the flat underneath.’
She herself was now thoroughly enjoying, positively basking in, her discourse. And so resonant was her voice that, even if she imagined she was communicating exclusively to her lunch companions, a number of diners at adjacent tables could already be observed, knives, forks and spoons arrested in mid-mouthful, eavesdropping on her every word. Soon the whole of the Ivy, waiters and kitchen staff included, would be following, point by point, the broad lines of her reasoning.
‘So,’ she went on, nobody caring or daring to interrupt her, ‘when Philippe told me that the Academy Cinema had organised an all-night screening of Farjeon’s films, I forthwith hot-footed it to Oxford Street with him and watched as many of them as I was capable of staying awake for.’
‘And what conclusions did you draw?’ enquired Tom Calvert.
‘It was, I must tell you, an extremely illuminating experience. Superficially, each of Farjeon’s films may seem to resemble lots of others of the same ilk. Yet detectable in all of them, like a watermark on a banknote, is what I can only describe as a self-portrait of their creator.
‘And what an inventive, what an audacious creator he was! In An American in Plaster-of-Paris, for example, there is one terrifically flesh-creeping scene in which the hero, a young Yank who has been confined to a wheelchair, starts to wonder what his sinister upstairs neighbour might be up to. Well, what Farjeon does is have the plaster ceiling of the Yank’s flat become suddenly transparent, as though it were an enormous pane of glass, so that we in the audience can actually see what he suspects his neighbour is doing.
‘Or How the Other Half Dies, which, according to Philippe, is regarded as one of his most brilliant thrillers. I watched only one of them, but did you know that he actually filmed three separate versions of the same story? I say “separate”. In reality, the three films are all identical save for the last ten minutes, at which point a totally different suspect turns out to be the murderer. And each of the three solutions makes just as much sense as the other two!
‘There’s a marvellous scene, too, in his espionage thriller Remains to be Seen, a scene that contrives to be both gruesome and funny, like a lot of his work, when I come to think of it. A half-dozen archaeologists are posing for a group photograph at the site which they’re about to excavate and the photographer requests them all to say “cheese”, or whatever its Egyptian equivalent might be, just before darting under – you know – that black cloak thingie draped over the tripod. And there they all stand – smiling – and smiling – and smiling – until, but only after three or four minutes, which is, I can tell you, an excruciatingly long time to wait, not just for the archaeologists on the screen but for the audience in the cinema, until the camera – tripod, cloak and all – topples over in front of them and they discover that the photographer, dead as the proverbial doornail, has a dagger stuck between his shoulder-blades!’
Whereupon she herself speared a crab-cake, deftly sliced it into four equal quarters, forked one quarter into her mouth, chewed on it for a few seconds, washed it down with champagne, swallowed hard and was ready to continue.
‘After watching several of Farjeon’s pictures back-to-back, I began to have an even more vivid image of the man than we had been vouchsafed by all the interviews we conducted with those who might possibly have had a motive for doing away with him. What I saw, above all, was the pleasure he took in devising ever more extreme methods of killing off his characters, methods which were almost like practical jokes, cruel, callous pranks. His brain seemed to be galvanised by evil – only then was he truly inspired. When it came to scenes of violence, murder, even torture, the scenes which were his stock-in-trade, there was absolutely no one to beat him.’