‘You like the cold?’
‘You heard me. And please don’t give me one of those condescendingly incredulous looks of yours that we’ve all had to get used to. I know I’m an author and therefore, for someone like you, an eccentric. But there are lots of us who simply hate the sun, who hate being drenched in sweat. Yes, sweat. I call it sweat because that’s what it is. I can’t speak for you, Chief-Inspector, but I sweat. I don’t perspire.’
‘Well, well, well. So it’s true what they always say. There’s nowt so queer as folk.’
Don, enveloped in the racoon coat which had caused a minor sensation when he first arrived at ffolkes Manor, turned, mystified, to the Chief-Inspector.
‘Sorry, I didn’t get that – what you just said.’
‘What I just said? Ah, yes, of course. Well, I don’t wonder you didn’t get it. It’s an old English expression. You can bet your bottom dollar it dates back to Chaucer, just as all those old expressions seem to do, even the smutty ones. “Nowt so queer as folk” – it means there’s nothing in the world as strange as people themselves.’
‘Oh, I see. You mean, like Miss Mount preferring cold to heat?’
‘That’s right. I love the sun myself. With the missus – God rest her soul – I used to go caravanning every August in Torbay. I’d just soak it up. How about you?’
‘Oh yeah, me too. But then, you see, I’m from California.’
‘California? Is that so?’
‘Yeah. Los Angeles. Nice little town. Full of orange groves and movie studios. Ever been there?’
‘Furthest I’ve been is Dieppe. Day trip. Couldn’t see what all the hubbub was about.’
‘You, Miss Mount?’ asked Don.
‘Evadne, dear. Please call me Evadne.’
‘Evadne.’
‘That wasn’t too difficult, was it?’ she said sweetly. ‘Now, what is it you’d like to know?’
‘Los Angeles. Have you ever visited it?’
‘No, I never have. Though, as it happens, I did set one of my whodunits there. I genned up on the place by reading Dashiell Hammett. You familiar with his stories? Not my cup of tea, as you might expect, but he knows his stuff all right.’
The pause that followed was motivated less by any reluctance on Don’s part to enquire about the plot of the whodunit in question than by his expectation that a précis of that plot was going to be volunteered anyway, whether he solicited it or not.
For once, though, the précis was unforthcoming, so he finally said:
‘I’d be interested to hear what it’s about. Your whodunit, I mean.’
‘We-ell, I don’t know,’ answered Evadne Mount, glancing at the Chief-Inspector. ‘I have the distinct impression our friend from Scotland Yard finds me a bit too style-cramping whenever I talk about my work.’
‘Oh, please. Don’t mind me,’ said Trubshawe, batting his two gloved hands together while striding onwards over the snow. ‘You never have before. Besides, it’ll help to pass the time.’
‘Right you are,’ she said, needing no further encouragement. ‘Well, the book was called Murder Murder on the Wall and its central character was an aged, loony silent film actress loosely based on Theda Bara – you remember, the star of A Fool There Was? – well, you won’t remember, Don, you’re not nearly old enough, but she’ll certainly have set off a palpitation or two in the Inspector’s manly young breast.’
‘Couldn’t have been easy for you to create a silent character,’ Trubshawe, not missing a beat, slyly interposed.
‘This film star,’ she continued, declining to rise to his bait, ‘lives a reclusive existence inside a deliriously creaky Bel Air mansion with only her incontinent Pekinese dog for company. Because she can no longer bear to contemplate the ravages of her own physical decline, she’s had all the mirrors in the house turned to the wall and even has a cleaning lady, what we in England call a char, come in every day to dust the furniture – though not the way you think. In fact, the cleaner’s job is to coat with extra dust any shiny surface in which there’s still a chance of her mistress’s appearance being reflected.
‘The thing is that, even though she’s on her uppers, and has been for as long as anyone can remember, it’s common knowledge on the Hollywood grapevine that there’s one valuable she’s never pawned, a fabulous ruby offered her many years before by the Maharajah of Udaipur.
‘Then, one morning, her brutally murdered body is discovered by the cleaner. She duly rings up the police, who can find no trace of the ruby, and the sole clue to the killer’s identity are the letters LAPD which the actress was able to scrawl on her bedroom wall, in her own blood, before she expired.
‘Naturally, suspicion arises that she must have been trying to “point the finger”, as Hammett would put it, at some member of the LAPD itself – you know, the Los Angeles Police Department. That is, until Alexis Baddeley happens to come along. Nosing around in her usual incorrigible fashion, she interprets those four letters as being, instead, the dying woman’s abortive attempt to spell out the word “lapdog” and eventually finds the ruby concealed inside a cheap cameo brooch attached to the Peke’s collar.’
‘Oh gee, wow, that’s really clever,’ said Don. ‘I’d really like to read that.’
Trubshawe cupped his hands and blew into them.
‘Dashed if I can see the point any longer,’ he said. ‘Now that you’ve been served the whole plot up on a plate.’
‘Not so fast, Chief-Inspector, not so fast,’ Evadne Mount sniffily expostulated. ‘You’ll note that I didn’t give away the identity of the real murderer.’
‘Pooh, that’s no brain-teaser. It was obviously the char.’
The novelist let out a cry of triumph.
‘Hah! That’s just what I was counting on the reader to think! Actually, the murderer turns out to be a police officer after all, a “crooked cop”, as the Yanks call them. It’s a double twist, you see. Those letters LAPD meant exactly what everybody originally assumed they meant and had nothing to do with the Peke. In her death throes the film star was genuinely trying to communicate who the killer was. So that, even when Alexis Baddeley gets it wrong, she still gets it right! Eh, Trubshawe, what have you to say to that? Trubshawe? Are you listening?’
Surprised at not receiving any response, she suddenly noticed that the Chief-Inspector had fallen several paces behind her before coming to a complete halt. Arching his hand over his brow, in unnervingly the same gesture as the Colonel’s just an hour before, he was trying to make out something or somebody in the distance ahead of him.
An ominous silence descended on the party. Everyone strained to see for themselves what could have attracted the Chief-Inspector’s attention. At first there was nothing. Then, amid the restless play of shadows, a dark and amorphous form, like a mound of cast-off clothes unceremoniously dumped on the horizon, rose out of the snow. And no sooner had one’s eyes encompassed its contours, they were irresistibly drawn to a second, smaller mound a few feet away.
‘What the –?’ said Trubshawe, doffing his tartan cloth cap and scratching his scalp.
‘Why,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘I – I – I’m positive –’
Swallowing the rest of her sentence with a gulp, she exclaimed, ‘Great Scott-Moncrieff!’
‘What? What is it?’ cried the policeman. ‘My eyesight isn’t what it used to be – one of these days I’m going to have to fork out for a pair of specs – and this torchlight is dazzling my eyes.’
For a few agonising seconds Evadne Mount chose not to speak. Then:
‘Trubshawe,’ she finally said, ‘I can’t yet see what the larger of the two mounds is, though,’ she added grimly, ‘I can guess. But I’m afraid, I’m very much afraid, the smaller one is – is Tobermory.’