‘Ah, but you have reason to say what you say, Madame!’ Françaix excitedly broke in, like an actor who has just received his cue. ‘It is what I call in my book “the Farjeoni-an touch”. His camera, it is like a pen, no? Like – how we say? – a stylo?’
‘A stylo?’ Evadne dubiously repeated the word, with a frown of distaste for foreign phraseology. ‘Well, perhaps. Though that’s a bit – how we say? – far-fetched, is it not?’
‘But see you, Mademoiselle,’ said Françaix, shaking his head, not for the first time, at the intellectual conservatism of the English, ‘all the best ideas must be fetched from afar.’
‘In any event,’ she went on, averse as ever to interruptions when in full flight, ‘following my session at the Academy, I asked Tom here to arrange for us to be screened some rushes, as they call them, from If Ever They Find Me Dead. Rushes which were, as it handily turned out, of the scene in which the heroine’s young female friend is murdered on the doorstep of her Belgravia flat.’
‘I have to confess, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, ‘that that’s when you had me really confused. You were watching the scene not just with your eyes but with your whole body, and I simply couldn’t understand why. Cora, after all, had been poisoned on a crowded film set, while the woman in the picture was stabbed in a deserted street. I spent the whole night racking my brains to grasp what connection you were trying to draw between the two crimes. Now perhaps you’ll explain.’
‘There’s nothing to explain,’ said Evadne calmly. ‘I was drawing no connection whatever.’
‘But you were studying the murder so closely, so intently, as though it had just given you a clue to Cora’s.’
‘Nothing of the kind. I wasn’t studying the murder at all. I wasn’t looking at the murder. The murder was irrelevant.’
‘You weren’t looking at the murder?’ cried Trubshawe, his brow furrowing perplexedly. ‘What in heaven’s name were you looking at?’
‘I was looking at the camera,’ came the unexpected reply.
‘The camera? What camera? There was no camera.’
‘No camera? Eustace dear, what are you talking about?’ she answered, with a queer little titter.
‘How can you possibly say,’ she went on as patiently as though addressing an infant, ‘that there was no camera when the picture wouldn’t have existed in the first place without one?’
‘Oh, as to that,’ the policeman grudgingly conceded, ‘I’ll grant you. But, well, it’s not up there on the screen. It – dash it all, it’s what the pictures on the screen come out of. So, by definition, it’s not something you can see.’
‘Not literally, to be sure. If you learn to look at films the way I’ve just been doing, though, you’ll certainly start to see the presence of the camera. It’s not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. After finishing a hundred-piece puzzle, one can’t help but briefly see the world too, all curvily, squirmily snippeted, as a gigantic jigsaw. Well, after watching a handful of Farjeon’s films, I couldn’t help seeing the world exactly the way he saw it.
‘So perhaps you were right after all, Philippe. Perhaps it is appropriate to compare a film camera to a pen.’
While listening to her, the Frenchman had drawn out his own fountain pen and now frantically scribbled some cryptic notes on the linen tablecloth.
‘You mean,’ he said, his always moot fluency in English starting to desert him, ‘ze director of a film is a kind of – how you say? – autoor? Like ze autoor of a book?’
‘The author of a book? Ye-es, I suppose you could put it like that,’ was the novelist’s guarded response, ‘though it does sound more convincing when you say it, Philippe, French as you are. But yes, indeed, the director – or, rather, this one director, the late Alastair Farjeon, both lamented and unlamented – was indeed ze autoor of his films.
‘Exactly like one of your villains, Eustace, Farjeon always had recourse to the same methods, always displayed the same little tics and tropes, quirks and quiddities, whatever the subject-matter. Which is why I wasn’t at all particular as to the nature and content of the rushes we were to have screened to us. And why, when I watched that one scene from If Ever They Find Me Dead, what I saw – what, I assure you, I simply couldn’t help seeing – in fact, I’d go so far as to state that it was all I saw – was not the murder itself – frankly, I doubt that I could any longer offer you a detailed description of how it was committed and I am, of course, celebrated for my powers of observation – not the murder itself, I repeat, but the style in which it was filmed.
‘Consider, for example, the manner in which the camera follows the young woman along the lonely dark street. True, it’s the sort of thing we’ve all seen in lots of other thrillers, except that here, subtly, almost imperceptibly, the pacing of the scene begins to change as we hear the second set of footsteps and we understand with a deliciously queasy sensation that the street is suddenly no longer quite as lonely as it was, no longer quite so reassuringly deserted. The camera, a camera as fluid and flexible as a human eye, is, before our own eyes, actually, gradually, ever so artfully, turning into the murderer. So that when, for the first time, the woman looks round nervously, we realise with an inward groan – and indeed, speaking for myself, with an outward groan – that it’s not just the camera lens she’s looking into but her future murderer’s face. It’s as though she recognises the camera, as though, ultimately, it’s the camera itself that murders her.
‘It was at that instant that I knew there was only one man in the world who could have directed that specific scene in that specific style – whether or not he himself had actually been on the film set when it was being shot, whether or not he himself had actually had any direct contact with the actors or the cameraman – I say again, there was only one man in the world who could have done it, and that man was Alastair Farjeon.’
‘Meaning …?’ said Tom Calvert, speaking in a voice that was to a whisper what a whisper is to a shout.
‘Meaning that Farjeon was alive. He had not perished in the fire at Cookham and he had certainly not been murdered. I’m sorry, Eustace, yours was a nice, neat theory – a nice, neat theory in theory – but I’m afraid it simply didn’t stand up. Alastair Farjeon, not Rex Hanway, was the man who directed If Ever They Find Me Dead. Just as Farjeon was a murderer, not the victim of a murder. It was he who killed Patsy Sloots, just as it was he who later killed Cora – by proxy, as we shall see – and yesterday afternoon tried to kill me.’
Tom Calvert was the first to speak.
‘My dear Miss Mount,’ he said, ‘I really must congratulate you!’
‘Thank you so much, young man,’ replied the novelist with a smile. ‘But do call me Evie.’
‘Evie. But, tell me, you who know everything, did you never entertain the possibility that Hanway had simply imitated Farjeon’s style?’
‘Never. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my thirty years as a much-acclaimed author, it’s that the style of an artist, an authentic artist, can never be successfully imitated by someone else. Never, never, never. Many have tried, all have failed.’
‘Then who really did die in that villa in Cookham – along with Miss Sloots, I mean?’
‘Oh, once I’d guessed that Farjeon was still alive, it was child’s play working out how he’d managed to fake his own death.’
‘Since none of us is a child,’ muttered Trubshawe, ‘you’re still going to have to spell it out.’