A Mysterious Affair of Style Read online

  For a few moments they stood together on the unlit stage, neither of them saying a word, both of them listening intently to the muffled din from the next room. When it became obvious that, for now, their absence had gone undetected, the young man switched on the light.

  All at once, their facial features having suddenly become visible, a tremendous salvo of applause swept through the auditorium, running the gamut from the vigorously genteel (in the stalls) to the downright raucous (from the gallery). If the Chief-Inspector alone failed to recognise either of the two faces, let alone attach names to them, even he could see on those faces that both stars, as he assumed them to be, were positively aching to step out of character, face the audience of their peers and gratefully acknowledge their accolade.

  They resisted nevertheless and instead fell into one another’s arms.

  Then, when she had finally unsealed her lips from her lover’s, the young woman cried out:

  ‘Oh, Harry! How perfectly frightful this evening’s been! I don’t think I can bear it a minute longer!’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said.

  He pummelled his right fist into the palm of his left hand.

  ‘He’s a brute, a swine! The way he kept taunting you in front of everybody. Oh, I wanted to kill him!’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to run away together.’

  ‘Run away?’ she repeated tremulously. ‘But – but when?’

  ‘Tonight. Now.’

  ‘Heavens! Where will we go?’

  ‘Anywhere. Anywhere we please. I’m a rich man, Debo, a very rich man. I can take you anywhere you could ever want to go. I can give you anything your heart could ever desire. A Mediterranean villa, a yacht, a stable of polo ponies …’

  ‘Now, Harry’ – the first hint of a half-smile playing on her lips – ‘what on earth would I do with a stable of polo ponies?’

  ‘Debo darling, how naïve you are! How exquisitely naïve! One doesn’t do anything with polo ponies. One just has them. That’s what being rich is all about.’

  ‘I don’t give a fig about being rich. All I want is to be with you, as far away as possible from that beast.’

  Just then – but one had to be paying very close attention, so surreptitious, so nearly invisible, was the stage business – the door behind them re-opened. The five fingers of a male hand slithered, one by one, around the frame, started groping for the light-switch and, finding it, flicked off the light again. Before either of the two characters already on stage had time to react to this new development, a nerve-jangling shot rang out. The door was immediately slammed shut, the woman named Debo screamed, the audience gave out a loud collective gasp and the young man, or rather his dimly illuminated silhouette, collapsed in a heap on the carpet.

  All Hell erupted. The off-stage Negro music came to an abrupt halt – one would almost swear to having heard the scratch of a needle as it was yanked off a record – the library door opened once more, opened wide this time, the light was switched on again and, squeezed into the doorway, faces as white as shirt-fronts, cigarettes, cigars and cocktail glasses clutched in trembling hands, were a half-dozen horrified guests – one of them, as Trubshawe remarked, togged out in full kilted regalia.

  Another, as he also remarked, was Cora Rutherford. The quintessence of pre-war chic in a long black evening gown and matching elbow-length gloves, she seemed scarcely altered from the woman he had encountered and indeed interrogated those many years before at ffolkes Manor. At once taking charge of the situation, she strode superbly across the stage, bent over the victim’s body exactly (in Trubshawe’s memory) as he himself had so often done in his career, put her ear to his chest – meanwhile shoving aside an exquisite tear-drop pearl earring as conspicuously as though she actually intended to raise a smile from the audience – felt his pulse, drew down both his eyelids, then looked back up at the others.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  This announcement caused an even greater commotion. What was to be done? The police would have to be called in, of course; but in the meantime, there being no doubt whatever that the murder had been committed by one of those present, how were they to spend the time in the uneasy truce that would follow?

  Now it must be said that even in those of Evadne Mount’s whodunits he had found most satisfying it was the obligatory but, to his way of thinking, faintly tiresome connective tissue that Trubshawe had always least looked forward to; and here too, after such a suspenseful opening scene, his mind began to wander. So it was that he chanced temporarily to turn his attention away from the stage and towards the novelist who, from the very start of the sketch, had been utterly absorbed in the to-ings and fro-ings of her own creations.

  As he watched her from the corner of his eye, however, he saw her features suddenly twitch with a spasm of disbelief, of shock, almost of horror.

  A moment later, she caught his wrist in a painfully tight grip and, half-moaning, murmured:

  ‘Oh no … No …’

  ‘Why, what is it?’ whispered Trubshawe.

  ‘Look!’ she cried out, seemingly forgetting that she was in a theatre. ‘The blood! It’s wrong! It’s all wrong! There’s not supposed to be any blood!’

  While some spectators immediately attempted to shoosh this blithering female who had had the nerve, so they imagined, to interrupt the show with her own dim-witted chatter, others who had recognised Evadne Mount as the author of the playlet and on whom the ominous implication of her words was already having its effect, began to wonder aloud if there really could be …

  As for the performers on stage, they were visibly at a loss to know what to do next. Should they continue to deliver the lines as they had been written? Or should they pay heed to this grotesque if, all the same, anxiety-inducing outburst from the woman who had written them?

  Their minds were made up for them by the eventual realisation, on both sides of the footlights at once, that from the ‘dead body’ of the character who had just been ‘murdered’ a thin trickle of blood had indeed started to snake its way downstage and was even now dripping into the orchestra pit, right in front of the seat occupied by, precisely, Evadne Mount.

  This was too much for her. Without addressing another word to her companion, she leapt to her feet, hurriedly climbed the half-dozen steps leading up to the performing area and, in front of the entire cast, the petrified audience and a Trubshawe who for the moment was too discombobulated to think of taking any rational action, bounded onto the stage.

  Like Cora Rutherford before her, she bent over the body. Bracing herself, she gently turned the young actor’s face upward. The audience gasped again – except that this was a different type of gasp, the gasp no longer of spectators at a theatrical show but of bystanders at a car crash. Blood was now sweating freely through the snow-white dickey of the actor’s tuxedo, forming an ever-expanding circular stain that resembled nothing so much as the Japanese national flag.

  Evadne Mount looked up grimly, straight at the audience instead of at the members of the cast.

  ‘Oh my God, ladies and gentlemen, this is real blood. The bullet – the bullet wasn’t a blank!’

  Hearing these words, one of the actors, a sixtyish, silver-templed gentleman who had been cast as a retired military officer – so at least intimated the lavishly beribboned and bemedalled lapels of his dinner jacket, the pronounced limp with which he had walked onto the stage and, not least, the monocle which dangled from a red ribbon about his neck – at once stepped forward (now minus the limp) and, prompting yet another gasp, held up what Trubshawe recognised as a German army pistol, a Luger.

  ‘I – I got it from props,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t even take a look inside it. Why should I? I naturally assumed everything was …’

  Even before he had completed his piece, his fellow cast members could all be seen gradually distancing themselves from him and gathering in a nervous huddle at the opposite end of the stage.
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  ‘Oh, come now. You can’t possibly suspect me of … Look here, I had no earthly reason to murder Emlyn. Not like this. Not in full view of everybody. No, no, no, that’s not what I meant to say. I had no reason to murder him anyway – at all! But if I’d had a reason – I mean, just for the sake of the argument – if I had had a reason – which, I repeat, I didn’t have – I certainly wouldn’t …’

  His voice trailed off in a series of inaudible ramblings. The audience sat as though collectively turned to stone. They were so mesmerised by the extraordinary events which had taken place on stage, it hadn’t occurred to any of them to propose that the police, the real police, be instantly summoned.

  Except that there was a real policeman, a real ex-policeman, in the house. Trubshawe had finally come to his senses. Realising that he alone of all those present in the Theatre Royal was qualified to ensure that the appropriate protocols would be implemented from that point on, he rose up from his seat.

  And he was just about to follow Evadne Mount onto the stage by the same half-dozen steps when she herself stared back at him from the supine body over which she was still crouching and, to his stupefaction, she winked at him!

  Winked at him? Winked at him??? Could it be …? Surely not? Surely everything that had happened wasn’t just …?

  Then, for Trubshawe as for the rest of the audience, the penny dropped.

  Already, centre-stage, the novelist Evadne Mount and her most celebrated character, Alexis Baddeley, the former played by herself, as it were, the latter played by the actress known to be her oldest friend, were squabbling (exactly as he recalled them squabbling at ffolkes Manor) as to who had priority in investigating the murder of the juvenile lead. Every gibe, every aside, every taunt and twit, was greeted with gales of laughter as, in their turn, the other members of the cast, all of them famous, though not to Trubshawe, also started insulting each other with coded comments about private lives and loves, professional successes and, even more gleefully, professional failures.

  ‘I never smoke. I never drink. I never take drugs,’ was the high-minded claim of one cast member who, in real life, had become notorious for trumpeting each of these abstemious virtues of his in the illustrated magazines.

  ‘Blimey O’Reilly,’ riposted Evadne Mount, who had naturally given herself the best of her own lines, ‘how do you find the time to do all these things you never do?’

  Or when, a few minutes later, Cora Rutherford, half-Alexis Baddeley, half-herself, was asked her opinion of the ingenue, a simpering redhead with insufferable freckles, she cattishly replied, ‘My dear, I rather fancy that tonight will turn out to be her farewell debut.’

  The audience, needless to say, adored all the rudery and ribaldry, all the banter and bitching and back-stabbing. So too did Trubshawe, once he had quietly decided to forget that so irresponsible a stunt, played out in a packed theatre, really ought not to be condoned by laughter or crowned by applause.

  What a strange business, he thought, the show business is. The theatre, for example. If people go to a play, it’s surely because they take pleasure in being caught up in all the illusions the theatre can offer. Yet, if there’s one thing in which they take pleasure even more than these illusions, it’s to have them unexpectedly shattered.

  It always seems as though the warmest round of applause is reserved for the actor who understudies a role at the last minute and has to go on-stage with script in hand or the actress so decrepit she can hardly remember her lines or the matinée idol known to have served a prison sentence for buying petrol on the black market or the chorus girl whose husband has dragged both her and her swarthy masseur-cum-lover through the divorce courts. As Trubshawe had good cause to know, considering how often she had told him during their former acquaintance, Evadne Mount’s plays had all enjoyed lengthy runs in the West End. Yet he would have wagered his last ten-shilling note that not one of them had been so rapturously received as this trivial squib, the whole point of which was to mock the whiskery props and devices by which the same audience would have been enthralled when watching one of her more serious efforts.

  And it fleeted across his mind that if the audience knew what he knew – that, the moment the curtain came down, the leading lady was fated to receive some as yet unspecified piece of bad news – they would have adored it even more.

  In any case, after a running time that was neither too long nor too short but, like the baby bear’s bowl of porridge, just right, the sketch reached its triumphant climax. The ‘victim’ abruptly sprang to his feet and, turning to face the audience, let his blood-stained dickey roll up his chest like a circus clown’s. Beneath it, on his undervest, three words had been scribbled: APRIL THE FIRST.

  *

  ‘Anywhere,’ declared Cora, ‘but the Ivy.’

  It was just after ten-thirty when the three companions stood on the steps of the Theatre Royal and wondered where to have supper together.

  ‘But, Cora,’ protested Evadne, ‘you adore the Ivy.’

  ‘Used to, darling, used to,’ Cora drawled, bundling her pale furs about her neck. ‘You seem to forget, I’ve withdrawn from that frivolous world. No more hugging and mugging and table-hopping for poor lonely little Cora.’

  ‘But I saw you there only last week.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ replied the actress defensively, ‘but then I was dining with Noël. I mean to say, Noël …’

  ‘Oh, very well, have it your own foolish way. The thing is, it’s cold and it’s late. Do we eat or do we don’t? And, if we do, then where?’

  ‘What about the Kit-Kat?’

  Cora turned to Trubshawe who, because he suspected that no proposal he might make would cut much ice with his two redoubtable dining companions, had so far refrained from taking part in the conversation.

  ‘You know it?’ she queried. ‘It’s in Chelsea – the King’s Road. First it was the Kafka Klub. Then it was the Kandinsky Klub. Then the Kokoschka Klub. Now it’s the Kit-Kat Klub. It’s one of those places that are renamed a hundred times but never go out of fashion.’

  Evadne Mount’s answer was pat and to the point.

  ‘I absolutely refuse to go to the Kit-Kat,’ she said. ‘The food costs the earth – and tastes like it too. But I say,’ she changed tack, ‘if what you’re hankering after is something off the beaten track, I know a simply marvellous Chinese restaurant in Limehouse. There may be table-smashing but I can assure you there won’t be any table-hopping. What say you, Eustace?’

  The Chief-Inspector looked slightly ill-at-ease.

  ‘What’s the matter? You aren’t afraid, as an ex-copper, of being caught in such a den of iniquity? You really needn’t worry. Frankly, it couldn’t be more respectable.’

  ‘No, no, it isn’t that at all.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Well, you see,’ he explained, ‘I ate Chinese food once. When my wife and I took a weekend break in Dieppe. I just couldn’t get a grip on those – those whatyamacallums.’

  ‘You mean chopsticks?’

  ‘That’s the word. Chopsticks. I couldn’t handle them at all. It felt as though I was eating on stilts, don’t you know.’

  ‘Well, of course Trubbers doesn’t want to have some foul Chinee muck in the East End!’ said Cora Rutherford.

  With a plaintive sigh she faded further into her furs.

  ‘I can see it’s up to me as usual to make the sacrifice. Oh well, if it must be the Ivy, then the Ivy it is. Allons-y, les enfants.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘I’m simply gasping for a ciggie!’

  A short taxi ride later, they were comfortably installed at one of the most enviable of the Ivy’s tables. The two women had ordered a couple of exotic cocktails, Trubshawe was hospitably aquainting himself with a whisky-and-soda, and the incipient conversation awaited only the lighting of Cora’s first cigarette.

  It was a real performance. For the actress, a cigarette represented a sixth finger. Once, indeed, she had languorously informed an impressionabl
e lady columnist from the Sunday Sundial that she was incapable of contemplating Michelangelo’s image of God breathing life into Adam without transforming it in her mind into an allegory – an allegory, darling! – of the immemorial gesture of one smoker offering a light to another. The columnist was suitably thrilled. So too, presumably, were her readers.

  Now, the cigarette extracted from its platinum case, inserted into a jet-black ebony holder, lit up and luxuriously inhaled, she was ready to rejoin the living.

  She turned to face Trubshawe.

  ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘After all those years! So much more gemütlich than last time around. I think we all prefer a spoof murder to a genuine one – except for Evie, of course. Now this is a question I really don’t have to put to you, because I could plainly see you sitting there large as life in the front row, but I’ll put it to you anyway. How did you enjoy the show?’

  ‘The show?’ replied Trubshawe. ‘I haven’t laughed so much since – I don’t know when I last laughed so much. And watching you two bicker on the stage certainly brought back a few memories. If I still had my hat on, I’d take it off to both of you.’

  He hesitated before pursuing his train of thought.

  ‘Even if …’

  ‘Even if what?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘even if it did seem to me you were sailing a wee bit close to the wind. Pulling a stunt like that inside a crowded theatre, you know, it’s tantamount to crying “Fire!”. Had the worst come to the worst, you could have provoked a stampede. It was all so very believable, at least for the first few minutes, I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the more gullible members of the audience had assumed there really was a murderer skulking about backstage. I don’t suppose you bothered to apply for authorisation, now did you?’

  ‘Well, naturally we didn’t,’ snorted the novelist. ‘Imagine how much red tape we would have had spewed out at us. It was in a Good Cause, don’t forget. Besides, that was an exceptionally sophisticated audience out front. Did they look to you about to stampede?’