‘Miss Rutherford, did Raymond Gentry actually threaten to expose your – your –’
‘My addiction?’
‘Yes, your addiction. Did he threaten to write it up in The Trombone?’
‘No, not in so many words. Just as the article itself, had he had the time and opportunity to write it, wouldn’t have been in so many words, if you follow me. But it was all too obvious what he intended to do. By debunking his Molnar story, I’d made him look an ass in front of Selina and he was determined to take his revenge.
‘Oh, he wouldn’t have dared to use the word “cocaine” in print – that would have been positively actionable, since he couldn’t have proved a thing – but his readers all understand the Trombone code and he would have left no doubt in their minds what he was talking about.’
‘Yet,’ said the Chief-Inspector, ‘if rumours of your dependency had been circulating for years, as we heard from Miss Mount, surely it wouldn’t have made too much of a difference if some what-you-call coded piece were to be published in The Trombone?’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? These things, though, never work like that. So long as rumours just “circulate”, as you put it, they can’t do too much harm, because so many stories circulate, true and false alike. It’s when they get into print, even as rumours, and they become news – that’s when they become dangerous.’
‘Yes, I believe I get what you’re saying.’
‘And it wasn’t only the drugs. There was also –’
At that point she fell silent again.
Trubshawe waited a few seconds before pressing her.
‘There was also what?’
‘I – well, it’s really not for me to bring up the – the other thing.’
‘Please, Miss Rutherford, as far as I’m aware you’ve dealt an honest hand so far. I insist you let me know everything that could be relevant to the situation you’re all in.’
The actress continued to remain mute.
‘Could your reluctance to go on,’ he then asked her, ‘have something to do with’ – he once more pulled Gentry’s page of notes out of his pocket and read aloud what he suspected must be the operative line: ‘“CR + EM = COCA + LES”?’
‘Ye-es – yes, it could,’ answered Cora Rutherford after a moment of hesitation. ‘The problem, Trubshawe, is that another person’s privacy is involved. I feel it would be –’
‘Oh, Cora, just tell the man,’ Evadne Mount brusquely interrupted her. ‘It’s bound to come out. Eventually.’
‘You really mean that, Evie?’ said the actress. ‘After all, can we be certain he was referring to – you know what?’
‘Course he was, the obnoxious little toad. What else could it have been? But if we have Trubshawe’s word that none of this will leak beyond these four walls, then I’m willing to be as outspoken as you were.’
‘I’ve already given you that word.’
Now the moment had come for the novelist to take up the story.
‘Well, you see, Chief-Inspector, Cora and I – we’ve been best friends since the year dot. When we were both still in our twenties, she was a struggling young actress and I an aspiring young writer. For a couple of years we actually shared a flat in Bloomsbury, quite the weeest flat you ever saw.’
‘Wee!’ said the actress. ‘Wee wasn’t the word! You literally couldn’t have swung a cat.’
‘A cat?’ said the novelist. ‘You couldn’t have swung a mouse!’
Suddenly assailed by memories of a dim, unknowable past to which they alone were privy, both women fell to giggling like the two gawky, galumphing young gals they probably once were. There was something almost poignant about the spectacle.
‘Anyway,’ Evadne Mount continued, wiping a nostalgic tear from her eye, ‘I was writing my very first book and –’
‘Ah no!’ the Chief-Inspector shouted her down. ‘Here I really must insist! Now is not – I repeat, not – the time or place for another one of your hyper-ingenious plots.’
‘Oh, don’t get yourself into such a tizz! This is one novel whose plot I wouldn’t dare to relate in detail. At least, not in front of the Vicar.’
‘Eh? What’s that you say?’ interjected the policeman, now clearly intrigued in spite of himself. ‘So, eh, so tell me, exactly what kind of a novel was it?’
‘That’s just it. It wasn’t a whodunit. In those days my ambition was to be a great literary genius. The model for the book was The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall, you know. Its title – I blush to think of it now – but its title was The Urinal of Futility and it was all about a virginal young woman who has just graduated from Somerville, about her painful reconciliation with her own’ – here the novelist’s voice dropped to a whisper – ‘her own h-o-m-o-s-e-x-a-l – no, wait, there’s something wrong there, h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l-i-t-y’ – then, having at last managed to spell out the offending word, she at once raised her voice again to its natural booming resonance, just as though she’d turned up the volume switch on a wireless – ‘and her intimate relationship with a – with a – well, let’s just say it was autobiographical and be done with it.
‘Yes, Clem, you heard me. It was autobiographical. And, yes, I know how terribly delicate your susceptibilities are, but there’s no call for you to look so scandalised. I’m not the only one of us on whom life has played a sneaky, underhand trick. You have flat feet, after all.’
‘Evie, please!’ the Vicar tut-tutted. ‘I cannot concur with such an idea – that flat feet and what you suffered from – and I hope I may use the past tense – are to any degree comparable.’
‘This is all very interesting, Miss Mount,’ Trubshawe intervened, ‘but I must be getting dense again, for I simply cannot figure out what it has to do with Miss Rutherford.’
‘Judas to Judas, man,’ cried the novelist, ‘it’s positively shrieking at you!’
‘Is it? Yet I still –’
‘Look. Cora and I were both, as I say, in our early twenties and she was ravishing and, incredible as it may seem to you, I wasn’t actually too bad-looking myself – certainly not the tweedy panda you have in front of you now – and we were lonely and we shared a minuscule flat which had just one great big bed and – well, to quote Cora, would you like me to draw a picture?’
‘No!’ shuddered the Chief-Inspector. ‘I’m afraid you already have.’
‘In any event,’ was Evadne Mount’s brisk rejoinder, ‘nothing was ultimately to come of it for either of us. Indeed, as readers of Kine Weekly well know, Cora has had no fewer than three husbands. It is three, isn’t it, Cora darling?’
‘Four, darling, if you count the Count.’
‘I never count the Count.’
‘Neither do I,’ chuckled Cora.
‘As for me, I chose to channel my emotional energies into my books, by which I mean my whodunits. The Urinal of Futility was published – privately – but I’ve never let it be reprinted and I’ve always left it out of my entry in Who’s Who. Its author is not Who I am any longer nor Who I’ve been for many years. It was a road not taken, as they say. And thank God too, I say. My readers are all very nice people, I’m sure, but it’s my experience that, once you get beyond the pleasantries, the how-d’you-dos and lovely-to-see-yous, it’s these same very nice people who tend to spout the most horrendously bigoted opinions.’