‘As Eustace will confirm, she announced to us one day that her role in the film, a minor one to start with, had unexpectedly got much larger and juicier. It had been mysteriously “bumped up”, as she put it. To know the whole truth we’ll again have to wait for Hattie Farjeon’s confession, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that Cora, who never lost the atrocious habit of barging into her acquaintances’ private affairs, had gone to have a word with Hanway, had found his office unoccupied, had started nosing about, as was her natural wont, and had eventually laid her hands on one of Farjeon’s memos.
‘She instantly recognised his handwriting, handwriting that she would have known, even in block capitals, from all those brutal rejections she’d received from him before he consented to give her the part. And, just as instantly realising the most significant implication of the text itself, she understood that what she held in her hands was a major bargaining chip.’
‘So in that at least I was right,’ crowed Trubshawe. ‘What you’re saying is that she blackmailed Hanway?’
‘Oh,’ replied Evadne Mount evasively, ‘blackmail is such an ugly word, don’t you think?’
‘Not half as ugly as the crime itself.’
Declining to be drawn, she continued:
‘Let’s just say that she put it to Hanway that there seemed no good reason why she shouldn’t take such a damning piece of evidence to the police. Let’s also say that Hanway, thinking on his feet, actually did come up with the one good reason for which she herself was angling. And let’s end by saying that, if he were indeed to have proposed that her part in the picture be fleshed out, or bumped up, I fear that Cora, desperate as she was for a comeback, would simply not have been able to resist making a pact with the Devil.
‘What she did was wrong, terribly wrong, and God knows she paid for it. But she was my oldest friend, and I’ve always stood by my friends, and I’m not about to desert her now, even though she’s dead.’
‘Bravo, Evie,’ said Tom Calvert.
‘Thank you, Tom,’ she replied. Then, in a voice that was becoming a trifle hoarse, so unduly long and wordy, even for her, had been her monologue, she went on:
‘Yes, poor old Cora, it just didn’t dawn on her that she had set herself against an individual as evil as any of the characters in his films. And she never was what anybody would call the soul of discretion. Farjeon and Hanway knew that they couldn’t trust her. Excactly as a blackmailer will always come back for more, what was to stop her – I can almost hear them ask themselves – demanding a leading role in Hanway’s second picture? And his third? And his fourth? No, no, no, she had to be silenced at once.
‘The murder method almost certainly emerged from Farjeon’s own diseased brain. Having already fed his protégé several last-minute alterations to the script, he must have calculated that the introduction of this new idea of his – Cora drinking from the half-filled champagne glass – would arouse no suspicion whatever on the set. Hanway would be garlanded with praise and Cora would meanwhile have been disposed of.
‘As for who actually did the dirty by filching poison from the laboratory and spiking the lemonade, well, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that it was Hattie, our Madonna of the knitting-needles, to whom no one ever paid too much attention.’
‘Evie,’ said Trubshawe after a moment of silence, ‘you are unquestionably right in all these suppositions of yours, but yesterday you were nearly murdered yourself, which would have been devastating for us all. Me more than anyone,’ he couldn’t prevent himself adding.
‘Why, Eustace, I’d begun to wonder if you really cared.’
‘None of that, none of that!’ he riposted gruffly. ‘You know what I mean – and what I don’t mean. But, damn it all, why didn’t you share your suspicions with the rest of us, instead of exposing yourself alone to the risk?’
‘Don’t you see, my dear, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Everything I knew, or thought I knew, was a mere hypothesis, a house of cards which wouldn’t for a second have stood up in a court of law. It was all based on a single fact – at least, I regarded it as a fact, though no one else did – the fact, as I say, that Farjeon was still alive. A fact, however, which I absolutely could not prove.
‘Can you imagine me at the Old Bailey, requesting the judge to screen the murder sequence from If Ever You Find Me Dead, then pleading with him, “M’Lud, I submit that the visual style of the scene we have all just watched constitutes conclusive proof not only that Alastair Farjeon did not die in the fire which destroyed his villa but also that he was responsible for the deaths of Patsy Sloots, Billy Harker and Cora Rutherford”? ‘Pshaw! I’d be thrown out of court on my rear end!
‘No, I had to produce the only evidence which would prove me right – Alastair Farjeon himself. I had to flush him out, and the only way I could do that was to set myself up as a decoy. Which is why I insisted that everybody be present on the set for yesterday afternoon’s session, even the one suspect, Rex Hanway, whom I’d already guessed had been an accomplice. Why, too, I promised to reveal the murderer’s identity. I had to be certain that everybody would be there so that, if anybody was going to try and prevent me from making my announcement, it could only be Farjeon himself. And, if I was confident that he would try to stop me, it was because he had, after all, the perfect alibi. He was dead!’
‘I’ll be for ever in your debt, Evie,’ said Calvert, adding, ‘Yours too, of course, Mr Trubshawe.’
‘Oh, me,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Don’t feel you have to thank me. As usual, I was just Inspector Plodder, the hapless butt of all the amateur sleuth’s jokes.’
‘Please, no false modesty. You two formed a great team. And, talking of teams, I gather from Evie here that I’ll be offering you congratulations of a very different order before not too much time has passed, eh, Eustace?’
‘Tush tush!’ growled the Chief-Inspector. ‘You’re getting a touch too big for your breeches.’
‘In any case, my dear,’ Evadne piped up, ‘you may or may not be relieved to know that you’re going to have a breathing space before we eventually tie the knot.’
‘Oh, and why would that be?’ asked Trubshawe.
‘I’ve got to write my new whodunit first.’
‘You’re going to write a new whodunit?’ asked Lettice.
‘I most certainly am. It will be dedicated to Cora’s memory, not’ – she glanced meaningfully in her future husband’s direction – ‘repeat not, to Agatha Christie.’
‘But that’s terribly exciting news, Evie. Dare one ask what it’s about?’
‘Why, what do you suppose?’ she replied as though the answer were obvious. ‘The story we’ve all just lived through. We authors are a thrifty race, you know. We never waste anything, never throw anything away.’
‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ cried an incredulous Trubshawe. ‘You mean you’re planning to write about Cora and Farjeon and Hattie and the rest of them and put them all in a book?’
‘That I am. Naturally, I won’t use their real names. I’m a novelist, after all, an artist. I’ll have to invent lots of new ones. But don’t you worry, Eustace, don’t go snapping your cummerbund. You’re going to be in it too. As a matter of fact, you’re all going to be in it.’
‘Sacre bleu!’ exclaimed Philippe Françaix, his eyes swimming heavenwards. ‘This is – how you say? – the end!’
About the Author
Gilbert Adair published novels, essays, translations, children’s books and poetry. He also wrote screenplays, including The Dreamers from his own novel for Bernardo Bertolucci. He died in 2011.