‘Then, when he finally screwed up what little courage he possessed to make a pass at one of them and, inevitably, was repulsed, he’d take his revenge by tormenting, by practically torturing, her on the set.
‘He got himself into trouble with the odd husband or boyfriend, I can tell you. I seem to remember he was once seriously duffed up in the lobby of the Dorchester.’
‘So he was an unmarried man?’
‘Not at all. He’s been – I mean, he was – married to the same woman for Heaven knows how many years. Hattie. Everyone in the industry knows Hattie Farjeon. She’s one of those unthreatening little wifies insecure men attach themselves to by the proverbial ball-and-chain.
‘It’s curious. Whenever Farje wasn’t around, Hattie was Miss Bossy-Boots incarnate, a whinging fussbudget, a real besom, as my dear old mum used to say, a meddling, scheming know-it-all, physically unprepossessing, to put it mildly, very mildly, and given to stamping her two little flat feet if crossed. When they were together, though, it was obvious just how terrified she was of him.’
‘And you say,’ Trubshawe enquired, ‘that your reasons for regretting his death were purely professional?’
‘I had just signed up for a part in his new picture,’ she said bitterly.
‘Ah … I see. The leading role, I assume?’
‘Thank you, Trubbers, thank you for being so galant,’ replied the actress. ‘No, it wasn’t the leading role. Oh, small as it was, it was a showy part all right, with one big scene where I positively chew up the furniture, but the lead? No. In fact, I wouldn’t normally have accepted such a – well, such a petite role. If I did so in this case, it was only because it was Farje.’
‘Sorry,’ said Trubshawe, ‘but I still don’t follow. You claim you abominated the man. You also said that he was famous for tormenting his actresses. You even went so far as to use the word “torture”. And you’ve just admitted that the part you signed up for wasn’t even the lead. Why were you so eager to play it?’
Even though the tragic gaze that Cora now trained on him had done stellar service, as the policeman was well aware, in a dozen West End melodramas, it was one in which, on this occasion, real pain was nevertheless detectable. There was the barnstorming actress on stage. Waiting in the wings, however, there was also the bruised human being.
‘Listen, my dear,’ she said, ‘in your long and doubtless varied career you must have had to deal with crooks who were as villainous as they come, except that you just couldn’t help grudgingly admiring their professional panache. Am I right or am I right?’
‘Yes – yes, you are,’ replied the detective. ‘Yes, I see what you’re getting at.’
‘That’s how we all felt about Farje. He may have been a rat, but he was also a genius, the nearest thing the British film industry has ever had to a Wyler or a Duvivier or a Lubitsch. For him the cinema was not just a job of work, it was a challenge, a perpetual challenge. Haven’t you seen any of his films?’
‘Ah well, there you have me, I’m afraid. I may well have done. The thing is, I used just to go to the Pictures, not to any one particular Picture. Most of the time, I didn’t actually know in advance what it was I was going to see. I didn’t go to Casablanca, I went to the Tivoli – and if Casablanca happened to be showing at the Tivoli that night, then Casablanca is what I’d end up watching. This whole complicated business of, you know, directors and producers and suchlike is something of a closed book to me.’
‘Well, I can only say that, if you’re unfamiliar with Farje’s work, you’ve been denying yourself a great deal of pleasure.’
‘There was that wonderful thriller of his, Remains to be Seen, about a party of English archaeologists working on a dig in Egypt. The “remains to be seen” are the ruins they’re excavating – already an awfully clever conceit, don’t you think? – but they’re also the remains of the victim, whose freshly murdered body is discovered inside an underground tomb which has lain undisturbed for three thousand years! And it all ends with a glorious shoot-out in and around the Sphinx.
‘Or The Perfect Criminal. You remember, Evie, that was one of his films you and I saw together? Charles Laughton plays a burglar who never, ever robs his victims the same way twice, never helps himself to leftovers in the pantry, never leaves a half-smoked Turkish cigarette smouldering in an ashtray. And that’s why he’s eventually caught. Because, as you have good cause to know, Trubshawe, there doesn’t exist the criminal who hasn’t got his own little set of quirks and idiosyncrasies, quirks and idiosyncrasies which you coppers gradually come to identify and actually look out for. So, in the film, when one perfect burglary after another is committed, none of them with the least trace of any known criminal’s tics and tropes, the police eventually realise that it must have been committed by him.
‘Or Hocus-Focus, which takes place entirely inside a jam-packed hotel lift which has stalled between two floors. The whole film, mind you! And not only is a murder committed in the lift itself but the camera never stops panning and tracking in and around that cramped space. Only Farje would have attempted such a folly.’
‘I say, hold on there,’ Trubshawe interrupted her. ‘How in Heaven’s name did he succeed in squeezing one of his doubles into that one?’
‘Oh, that was typical of him – all part of the fun, all part of the challenge, the devising of new ways to insert himself into his own films. You see, one of the guests trapped in the lift is a slinky vamp of a Eurasian spy who wears a small cameo brooch pinned to the lapel of her Schiaparelli suit. Well, on the cameo, if you looked hard enough, you could just about make out a tiny portrait of Farje himself. It’s a visual pun,’ she explained. ‘Neat, no?’
Trubshawe’s perplexed eyebrows mounted his forehead.
‘A visual pun?’
‘Darling, that kind of fleeting appearance in a film is what we in the trade call a cameo. In Hocus-Focus Farje’s cameo literally was a cameo – a cameo brooch. Now do you understand?’
‘Um … yes,’ came the uncertain reply.
‘You haven’t seen his very latest?’ she went on. ‘An American in Plaster-of-Paris? It opened only last month.’
Trubshawe shook his head.
‘Vintage Farjeon. Another absolutely brilliant thriller. The spectator never once catches so much as a glimpse of the murderer, who’s brought to book by the hero, a young G.I. in London whose left leg is in a plaster cast from the first scene to the last. He’s recuperating in a not terribly well sound-proofed flat in Bayswater and he figures out, from no more than the sounds he hears filter down through the ceiling, that his unseen upstairs neighbour has just bludgeoned his wife to death.
‘I tell you, Trubshawe, there’s not an actor, not an actress, in this country who wouldn’t sacrifice their own left leg to appear in one of his films. I had the chance – and now I’ve lost it.’
She shivered, even though the room was, if anything, overheated. It was as though the import of the calamity that had befallen her had only just penetrated the fragile carapace of her sophistication. An actress through and through, on-stage and off, she was so intimately at one with her craft that, like a congenital liar, she was no longer capable of judging where make-believe ended and reality began. Yet there had always been moments in her life when the mask would slip and what was revealed underneath was the anguished face of a woman who had just begun to wonder where her next role, like a pauper his next meal, was coming from. This, it had been evident to Trubshawe for some little time, was one of those moments.