‘I swear,’ she announced, ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then some!’ she huskily added with a flamboyant flourish of her cigarette-holder.
‘Very well,’ said Trubshawe. ‘Then can I please hear your own first-person account of the run-in you had last night with Raymond Gentry?’
‘Certainly,’ she answered, a tiny smoke-ring drifting over her head like a halo in search of a saint. ‘As you’re doubtless sick to the back-teeth of hearing, Gentry took the absolute pip. He was a beast, a rotter of the first water, a self-infatuated, sallow-complexioned little climber, with his artistic hair and his scarlet lips and his T. S. this and his D. H. that and his eternal boasting and bragging about his acquaintance with the Maharani of Rajasthan or the Oom of Oompapah or some other equally improbable pasha or pashette.
‘But there was one particular story he told of which it so happened that I had heard a distinctively different version from the horse’s mouth. As ever, he was bending our ears back with tales of all the famous people he had met and he mentioned that he’d once had a cocktail at Claridge’s with Molnar – the Hungarian playwright, you know, entrancing man, as witty as a barrel of monkeys. Well, it turns out that I know Ferenc – Ferenc Molnar, that is – I know him really rather well – I starred in his play Olympia, you recall, Evie? – and long before I ever had the ill-fortune to encounter Gentry, he himself had told me what actually occurred.
‘One evening Gentry had accosted him in the bar at Claridge’s and asked if he’d consent to be interviewed for that filthy rag of his. Ferenc naturally refused – he could smell a slice of phoney-baloney a mile off – and when Gentry continued to badger him, he simply turned on his heels and stalked out. As he was leaving the bar, though, he chanced to look back and what do you suppose he saw? The preposterous Gentry was furtively finishing off his – I mean Ferenc’s – cocktail!
‘So when I heard him talk about “having a cocktail with Molnar”, I just laughed in his face. In fact, I haven’t laughed so much since Minnie Battenberg got her knickers in a twist – literally her knickers and literally in a twist – on the opening night of Up in Mabel’s Room!
‘I can’t stand male gossips anyway,’ she continued. ‘In my experience, and I’ve had plenty, they’re all nancy boys. Frankly, when Gentry first sashayed into the drawing-room, I immediately pegged him for a pansy and I wondered what in heaven’s name poor Selina could be getting out of it. You know who he reminded me of, Evie?’
‘No, who?’
‘The villain in that story of yours that was so naughty you had to have it published in France.’
‘The Case of the Family Jewels?’
‘That’s the one. Such a scream! But, of course, it wasn’t a book Evie could ever have hoped to bring out in stuffy old Blighty. It all took place in Portofino, as I recall.’
‘That’s right,’ said the novelist. ‘I set the scene among a –’
‘I fancy it’s my turn, ducks,’ said Cora Rutherford waspishly, loath to let herself be upstaged even by the author of the book in question. ‘It revolved around a group of British aristos partying at a beach-side villa and what was so awfully ingenious was that the crime was solved before any of them actually realised it had been committed. Old Lady – Lady – Lady Beltham, was it, who’s hosting the party has left this priceless heirloom lying about her boudoir just itching to be pinched, a heavy, multi-stringed pearl choker – you know, the kind of thing Queen Mary always wears. She’s also procured for herself a brand-new hombre young enough to be her son – or even grandson – in the book he’s named just Boy – and it’s obvious to everybody but la Beltham herself that he’s the worst type of leech. All the more so because there’s no doubt whatever from his manners and mannerisms that he’s, you know, iffy? Of the Uranian persuasion, as the Oscar Wilde set used to call it, and camp as all-get-out. So, of course, everyone suspects the only reason he’s canoodling with the besotted old crone is that he can’t wait to get his greedy, grubby little paws on the pearl choker.
‘Really, Miss Ruther –’ the Chief-Inspector began to say in an endeavour to stem the flow.
‘Which is when her nephew – Lady Beltham’s nephew and the heir to the heirloom – engages a private detective and introduces him to his aunt as a former school pal so he can fit in with the house-party. I say “him” because, for once, this detective isn’t Alexis Baddeley but a fey young laddie – Elias Lindstrom, I think his name was – who, we are led to understand, is also a Uranian.
‘Well, one morning everyone’s lounging on the beach when Boy emerges from the villa, disrobes and, watched by his clucking sugar-mummy, wades into the ocean in a pair of resplendent figure-hugging bathing-trunks. And it’s at that moment that Lindstrom realises he’s just stolen the choker.
The twist is that he himself – Lindstrom, I mean – has already indulged in a little bout of bedroom hanky-panky with Boy, just in the line of business, you understand, and when he catches sight of the really rather impressive bulge in his trunks, a bulge that bears no relation to what he …. Well, I don’t have to draw a picture, do I? He knows there has to be something else in there besides the family jewels. So when Boy wades back out of the ocean, the detective, without so much as a by-your-leave, yanks his trunks down to his ankles – and out pops the pearl choker!
‘Anyway, to return to last night – yes, yes, Trubshawe, I am getting there – to return to last night, Gentry reminded me of that sleazy young bounder and, to repeat, I simply couldn’t fathom what lay behind his interest in Selina, not to mention hers in him. But when I showed him up over the bogus Molnar business, I realised at once I’d made an enemy for life.
‘What I didn’t realise, though, was how quickly he’d go on the offensive. For some people, you know, an enemy’s blood is like a fine vintage wine. It has to be savoured, swilled about the palate, all that wine-bore guff and stuff. Not Gentry. He immediately went for the jugular.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Trubshawe.
‘The first thing he said – I mean, insinuated – the first thing he insinuated was that, professionally, I was on the skids because – because –’
At this point, just as the Chief-Inspector had predicted, the actress seemed to find herself suddenly as tongue-tied as the Vicar before her. For all her brazen self-possession, airing in public what was, even for her, an unpalatable home truth was patently turning out to be not as easy as she had expected.
‘Oh, well,’ she finally sighed, ‘here goes nothing. He insinuated that I was on the skids because of my increasing and, so he implied, incapacitating dependency on certain – on certain substances.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Cocaine, if you must know.’
The horrified silence with which this last statement was met derived less from the revelation that Cora Rutherford was a dope fiend – as Evadne Mount had already hinted, such a rumour had been circulating for years – than from the cool defiance with which she acknowledged it as a fact of her life.
‘And was what he insinuated true?’
‘To that, Chief-Inspector, my answer would be yes, no and certainly not.’
‘Explain, dear lady.’
‘Yes, I do take cocaine. No, I am not incapacitated. And certainly not, as far as my career being on the skids is concerned. I’ve just ended a ten-week run at the Haymarket, playing Ginevra in The Jest by Sem Benelli, a dramatist whose plays, it goes without saying, will be staged as long as theatres exist to stage them in. I’m currently in talks with Hitch – Hitch? Alfred Hitchcock? The famous film director? No? You’ve really never heard of him?? None of you??? Lawks almighty! Well, anyhow, I’m in talks with Hitch about playing Alexis Baddeley in a forthcoming picture version of Evadne’s Death Be My Deadline. A character role for me, of course. I’m going to need lashings of slap’.