‘Evie,’ said Trubshawe, ‘you’ve been your usual super-efficient self, I’ll grant you that. I’m hanged, though, if I can understand how, as you say, Alastair Farjeon actually “directed” the film. In practical terms, I mean.’
‘Well now,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘let us agree, shall we, that Farjeon felt obliged to accept his wife’s argument that he had to “die” in the fire along with Patsy. I imagine, however, that he’d be loathe to let the new film also go up in smoke because of that “death”. If nothing else, there would have been a financial imperative for ensuring that it go ahead nevertheless. So he and Hattie decided to concoct a bogus document stating that, if anything were to happen to him, Rex Hanway was to direct If Ever They Find Me Dead in his place.’
‘This Hanway,’ said Françaix, ‘you are saying he also was part of the plan?’
‘Absolutely. He immediately agreed to become what our detective friends here would call an accessory after the fact. Let’s not forget that Hanway was so fiercely ambitious that no legalistic scruples were going to prevent him from taking over the picture. He had waited years for such a chance and he wasn’t about to let Patsy Sloots’ death, which Farjeon in any case probably convinced him was an accident, snatch it from his greedy little paws.
‘But now,’ she said, ‘there arose an unexpected snag. Hattie continued to turn up on the set every single day, just as though Farjeon himself were directing the picture, to keep an eye not only on her husband’s financial interests, as Cora conjectured, but also on his artistic interests. She was his spy, his mole, whose job it was to bring him back daily reports on Hanway’s work. But that was precisely the problem. Hanway’s work was duff. Farjeon’s script was followed to the letter, but what he himself had forgotten was that most of his best ideas, certainly the most original ones, had always come to him at the last minute, generally once he was on the set. And Hanway just didn’t have it. He may have been a competent craftsman, but he didn’t possess an ounce of his mentor’s genius. There came a point – you remember, Eustace, what Cora told us? – there came a point when it was touch-and-go whether the production would actually proceed.
‘For Farjeon that wouldn’t do at all. He was a vain, arrogant narcissist who couldn’t accept, who wouldn’t accept, that he might be denied the chance of once more flaunting his brilliance to a suitably awe-struck world, even if only by proxy. Already, just as he himself had been about to start shooting the film, a stupid mishap – which is no doubt how he rationalised Patsy’s passing – had prevented it from going ahead. To have his cherished project aborted a second time, because of another man’s incompetence, no, no, that would have been intolerable to somebody of his type.
‘So this film-maker, this artist, this genius, who had taken on one outlandish challenge after another – having one of his protagonists go to bed in Clerkenwell and wake up in the Rocky Mountains, having another confined to a wheelchair throughout the entire picture, setting yet another of his pictures inside a cramped lift – decided that he would accept the supreme challenge. Like the lovers who kissed each other through a little girl in the one scene of If Ever They Find Me Dead which Eustace and I watched being shot, he would direct the film through somebody else.
‘And so it was that, all of a sudden, Hanway miraculously found his creative feet. Nobody could understand how, like Farjeon before him, he began to have these wonderful ideas right there on the set – ideas worthy, for a reason you will now all understand, of Alastair Farjeon himself.
‘The modus operandi was actually, unwittingly, revealed to us by Hanway in Levey’s office the day after Cora’s murder. You recall that, when I asked him to explain how he’d abruptly regained his confidence on the set, his reply was that he no longer asked himself what Farje would have done. He was being more honest than we knew. If he no longer had to ask himself what Farje would have done, it was because Farje, precisely, was now telling him what to do! Farjeon, in fact, was using Hattie as a secret conduit to Hanway of all the last-minute ideas and eleventh-hour changes which had always made his films so unique.’
‘Why didn’t he just telephone Hanway?’ asked Lettice.
‘Too risky. His voice, that plummy, lugubrious voice of his, would certainly have been recognised by the studio’s telephonist, who had doubtless heard it many times before. No, it was safer by far if Hattie were discreetly to take her “late” husband’s detailed notes to Hanway’s office where, once he had read them, they would instantly be destroyed. Which they were, save for this one singed scrap of paper that I rescued from his waste-basket.’
So saying, she dipped her two hands into her handbag, located the memo and ironed it out on the table before them. ‘Though I realised, naturally, that it could have been any one of a thousand-and-one memos unrelated to the case, what I found especially suggestive was the fact that it had been set alight as well as torn into strips. Patently, it was a piece of paper whose recipient wanted nobody else to read and, thinking about why that should be so, I began to wonder, for the first time, whether this so-called wunderkind might not after all be little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy.
‘As you see, since most of the paper has been burnt, all we have left to work on are these twelve surviving letters: SS ON THE RIGHT. And Eustace, ever on the qui vive, at once came up with the theory that “SS” might somehow be related to Benjamin Levey’s eleventh-hour flight from Nazi Germany.’
‘Oh, come now, Evie,’ said Trubshawe, flushing, ‘you know quite well I was only joking.’
‘I, on the other hand,’ she continued, ‘and despite my reputation as an incorrigible romancer, immediately let my mind run along more practical lines. Unearthing my old rhyming dictionary, I inspected a column of words ending in “ss” until I came to a pensive halt at “kiss”. Why? Because it at once reminded me of the scene from If Ever They Find Me Dead that I mentioned just a few minutes ago, the one in which Gareth Knight and Leolia Drake simultaneously kissed a little girl’s left and right cheeks.
‘Now just think of it. Couldn’t SS ON THE RIGHT once have been part of a sentence that read in toto: DRAKE GIVES HER A KISS ON THE RIGHT CHEEK, KNIGHT ON THE LEFT?’
They all stared at her. The world, which three-quarters of an hour ago had been upside-down, had now slowly revolved until it was once more positioned the right way up.
‘’Pon my word!’ grunted Trubshawe.
‘Good grief,’ cried Lettice, ‘you’re the cat’s pyjamas all right!’
‘What an imbecile that I am!’ Françaix effused. ‘Why, it leaps to the eye! It is pure Farjeon!’
‘My dear Evie,’ said Calvert admiringly, ‘in the Middle Ages you would have been burnt as a witch.’
‘Thank you, Tom. So kind.’
‘There is, though, one crucial question you still haven’t answered.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Why did Farjeon kill Cora Rutherford? Or, as you seemed to imply a moment ago, why did he have her killed?’
Up to this point, the novelist had been so intoxicated by her own powers of ratiocination she had almost forgotten that at the heart of the case, after all, was the murder of a very dear old friend.
‘Ah yes,’ she said sadly. ‘Cora, poor Cora … I’m afraid she must have thought she was being awfully cunning. The Achilles’ heel of so many cunning people, though, is that they tend blithely to ignore the fact that others can also be cunning, even more than they are themselves.