'As I already did tell you, darling, the scene as it's going to be played is quite a lot juicier than it was to start with. I managed to persuade Hanway that it ought to be developed so that the neglected wife that's me becomes a more rounded character, psychologically speaking. But there's no need to go into that. All you have to know is that, because of my husband's blatant dallying with Margot that's the part played by Leolia Drake I'm about to blow a gasket.'

'That Leolia Drake ...' murmured Trubshawe appreciatively. 'She can put her high heels under my bed any time she likes. Pardon my French, ladies,' he said to Cora and Evadne with an apologetic twinkle in his eye, while Francaix treated him to a look of bewilderment.

'Men!' sneered Cora. 'It doesn't matter what age you are, you just can't help s...o...b..ring over a pair of bee-sting lips and eyelashes out to here. Be warned, Trubbers, don't let little Leolia fool you. She's about as sweet as a swastika. And you should hear the way she talks about herself as though she were the next Vivien Leigh. The silly cow has only just made it to the first rung of the ladder and already she's dizzy.'

'What a spiteful cat you are,' Evadne grunted at her. 'You were young once, I can just about recall.'

'As I was saying,' Cora went on, declining to rise to the bait, 'I confront my husband after a c.o.c.ktail party, a horrific row ensues and I end by hurling a champagne gla.s.s at his head.'

'Mightn't that be dangerous?' asked Trubshawe.

'Oh well, it isn't actually a proper gla.s.s gla.s.s, you know. It's made out of something called Plastic. On the big screen, though, n.o.body will be able to tell it from the real McCoy.'

'Any chance, do you suppose, of Hanway coming up with another last-minute improvement to the scene?'

'Oh, he already has.'

'He has?'

'Just as we were packing it in this morning, he told me that he'd thought of a little gag to add a certain piquancy to the row. That champagne gla.s.s I mentioned? In the script it's empty, you understand. Well now, as I raise it above my head, I happen to notice that there's still some bubbly left inside and I polish it off before I actually throw the gla.s.s. Isn't that just too brilliant? The fact that this woman is not even prepared to waste a few drops of flat champagne on her wastrel of a husband conveys to the audience, far more effectively than would a dozen lines of dialogue, the depth of her contempt for him. Yes, I really do believe that Hanway could be the next Alastair Farjeon.'

Back on the set, the novelist and the policeman endeavoured more or less successfully to steer clear of the technicians who were scurrying past them, back, forward, this way and that, rushing out of the studio, then back in, then back out again. Cora, meanwhile, was having her forehead, her chin and the tip of her nose softly dusted by a delicate little Chinese lady of indeterminate age. Gareth Knight was silently rehearsing his dialogue while an effeminate young man with a canary-yellow bandanna, one so tightly knotted as to cause the veins in his neck to stand out, was combing his hair back into wavy perfection. Rex Hanway, a copy of the script tucked under his arm, was peering repeatedly and, it seemed, indiscriminately through his viewfinder. And Hattie Farjeon was sitting alone in her own private nook, her own private world, sublimely indifferent to the hubbub surrounding her, still knitting away as though her life depended upon it.

Everything was finally ready for the first 'take'. Hanway settled himself into his chair next to the camera, Cato curling up on his lap, while Lettice, clutching a sheaf of notes to her breast, took her place at his side. The set began to echo to repeated cries of 'Quiet, please!' Then it was just 'Quiet!' Then, finally, 'Will everybody please shut up! We're going for a take!'

'Right,' said the director to his two performers. 'This is supposed to be the mother of all marital rows, so I want it to have lots of vigour and vinegar. Don't forget, Gareth, even though you give as good as you get, you do have an underlying sense of guilt. You know that what Cora is accusing you of is all too true. So, when you start shouting back at her, I still want to see, lurking behind those soulful baby blues of yours, a real defensiveness, a real insecurity. At this stage in the picture we don't want you to lose the audience's sympathy.

'And Cora? This may not be the last straw but, for you, it's the latest one and you're not prepared for an instant to let Gareth off the hook. You understand?'

He turned to the camera operator.

'Camera okay?'

The operator nodded.

'Sound?'

The sound recordist nodded.

Now it was his own turn to nod, to everyone and no one at once.

'Okay, let's go. And action!'

The clapper-boy read out, 'If Ever They Find Me Dead, Scene 25, Take 1,' and clapped his clapper-board.

It was a juicy scene all right, just as had been promised, and both performers, as they prowled about the set, a sumptuously upholstered drawing-room strewn with c.o.c.ktail-party debris, played it well beyond the hilt.

Cora, a consummate actress when given the opportunity to be one (as Trubshawe was already saying to himself), contrived to be, all at once, warm and abrasive, sensitive yet as tough as old boots. Like a virtuoso ascending, then dizzily redescending, the scales of human bitterness and resentment, holding in her hysteria all the better to let it explode, she never once delivered two different lines of dialogue with the same intonation, never once repeated an effect.

Knight's performance was almost as thrilling to watch. There were moments when he struck one as no more than an ogreish, drunken, sinisterly jovial bully wearing a fixed grin that could hardly be told apart from a snarl. At others, straining to avoid the gale force of Cora's fury, her shrill voice and jabbing forefinger, he would protest his innocence with such apparent candour and sincerity that one felt forced to revise all one's preconceptions as to which of the two bore ultimate responsibility for the failure of their marriage.

So powerfully acted, so nerve-rackingly tense and realistic, was the row to the point where it felt almost obscene to be eavesdropping on such an intimate tragedy that, even if everybody on the set had not been ordered to remain silent, they would surely have done so in any case.

Suddenly Knight, drawing himself up to his full six-foot-two height, loomed over a momentarily cowed Cora.

'Admit it, Louise,' he said, his voice dropping an octave. 'Our marriage is a sham.'

'A sham?'

'Yes, it's always been a sham. Right from the day I proposed to you. I asked for your hand, but, as I see now, all you were willing to offer me was your arm.'

'What on earth is that supposed to mean?'

'You didn't want a husband. What you were looking for was an escort.'

'That's absolutely '

'As for love, it's something you could never give me, because you don't know what it is. You've never known what it is. Which is why,' he ended sadly, 'I admit it, I did turn elsewhere.'

By some indefinable alchemy, its secret known only to the greatest actors, the anger that had so disfigured Cora's features was abruptly replaced by a brief but vivid flash of self-realisation, when one saw not just the woman's emotional frigidity but also, terrifyingly, that she too had seen it. It was an epiphany which rendered the character, if only for a second or two, sympathetic, even faintly pathetic.

Not more than a couple of seconds later, however, the virago rea.s.serted herself.

'Why, you ...!' she shrieked, raising the champagne gla.s.s above her head. It was at that instant, of course and everyone simultaneously realised what a brilliant conceit it had been of Hanway's that she noticed it was still half-full. A queer, misshapen smile on her lips, she swallowed the champagne at a single go and, raising the gla.s.s again, prepared to hurl it at Knight.

Then it happened.

Time itself was suspended. One moment Cora was holding the empty gla.s.s above her head, the next she had let it fall onto the floor. With both hands at once she clasped her throat so tightly that her bulging eyes appeared about to pop out of their sockets. Whereupon, straining to scream but managing only to moan, the colour draining from her face, she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Not again!

The two words resonated in Trubshawe's brain. It seemed only yesterday that he'd watched a similar scene being played out on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. That one turned out to be an April Fool's hoax. Would this scene, too, prove to be some sort of tasteless practical joke?

He shot a swift glance at Evadne Mount. If it were a joke, she would be in the know. But she was mesmerised, petrified. For the novelist this was no hoax.

Nor for anybody else. The entire studio resembled a tableau vivant of a type one would ordinarily expect to see on the cover of a cheap thriller. No one spoke, no one moved, no one was capable of taking any action whatever. No one, that is, but the Chief-Inspector himself. Despite his age, despite his bulky frame, he rushed forward onto the set, tripping over wires, shoving technicians out of his way, until he was standing directly over the body.

He at once knelt beside Cora, lifted her arm, felt her pulse and laid his head sideways against her chest.

Though he was, of course, a stranger to every member of the cast and crew, not one of them disputed his authority to examine the actress or questioned his right to be there at all. And if many of those watching him already knew what he was about to say, they all waited tensely to hear him say it.

A few seconds later he said it.

'She's dead.'

PART TWO.

Chapter Eight.

'Steady, old girl ...'

Trubshawe crouched in front of Evadne, who was sitting at one of the empty commissary's Formica-topped tables, her forehead glistening, her pince-nez also glistening, her face still as chalky-white as when she had witnessed the spectacle of Cora's death.

An hour had elapsed. The police had immediately been alerted, and had undoubtedly already arrived, and on Trubshawe's own advice none of those present on the set when the murder was committed (and, perhaps influenced by the type of picture they were making, everyone had at once a.s.sumed it couldn't be anything but murder) had been allowed to leave. But, seeing how distraught Evadne was, he had also made the suggestion that he might absent himself to take her somewhere less crowded, somewhere more private, somewhere, in short, where she would be able to compose herself away from public scrutiny.

No objection had been raised. The memory of authority exerts nearly as powerful a pressure as authority itself and, even had anyone wished to, no one was tempted to contradict an ex-Scotland Yard officer.

'How do you feel, Evie?' he now enquired in a surprisingly tender voice. 'Bearing up, are you ...?'

She eked out a wan smile.

'Eustace, you're wonderful.'

'Wonderful?' he echoed her. 'Me?'

'Yes, you. I never realised that great big burly police officers could have such perfect bedside manners. Certainly none of those in my whodunits ever had and I realise I've been libelling you all. Without you I don't know what I'd have done. Made a right Charley of myself, I dare say.'

'Chut! Chut! You've pulled yourself together wondrously well, in my opinion, considering what close friends you and and Miss Rutherford were.'

Though he and the actress had eventually made it to first-name terms, he felt awkward about being posthumously familiar with her.

'You know, Eustace,' replied the novelist, 'I've spent the last twenty years blithely killing off my characters, devising the most picturesque forms of death for them, and somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind I suppose I've always wondered how I myself would react if the same kind of fate were to befall somebody I knew. Roger ffolkes was already a test but Cora! How could such a thing happen to Cora?

'We'd lost touch with each other in the last few years. But you know, as they say of the last breath of a drowning man, when a woman like Cora dies, it's also her friends who see her whole life flash before their eyes. So many good times to remember ... She was a game old bird and, my G.o.d, she'd really been a game young bird. Oh, she had her faults. She could be a proper she-devil when crossed, but she never really meant any harm. She just couldn't resist a b.i.t.c.hy comeback. Half the time she was genuinely surprised to discover that your feelings had been hurt.'

'I understand,' murmured Trubshawe, scouting the idea. 'Of course I barely knew her, but I do believe I recognise her in what you've just been saying. With all her badinage it was as though she were acting in a play, if you know what I mean, as though nothing she said should affect you more than it would some actor she was playing opposite.'

'Why, that's it exactly. After all, you don't start booing the actor you've just watched play Iago or Richard III if you meet him afterwards in the street, do you? Cora was simply playing a role, the role she was born to play, the witty, catty stage and screen star. And now she's dead. Poor, dear, glorious, outrageous Cora. Heaven's finally Heaven now that she's there ...

'It's funny,' she added softly. 'I'm not sure why, but I'd always taken it for granted that, of the two of us, I would be the first to go. It's almost as though she jumped the queue.

'Cora dead ...' she said again, still not quite able to credit it. And she was just repeating, 'Cora dead ...' when the door to the commissary opened and Lettice Morley walked in. Behind her was a boyishly handsome young man in a fawn raincoat, a prim black bowler hat held in his hands.

'Here you are, Miss Mount,' Lettice said, holding out a battered silver hip-flask. 'It's Gareth Knight's. Scotch, I'm afraid, not brandy, but it ought to do the trick. Go on, take a swig.'

'Why, thank you, my dear, you really are a very sweet girl.'

She unscrewed the top of the flask, raised it to her lips and took a long, gurgly drink. Almost immediately, a splash of colour suffused each of her cheeks.

'Ah,' she sighed, 'I needed that.'

Sensing that the moment was propitious, the raincoat-clad young man stepped forward and respectfully addressed the Chief-Inspector.

'Mr Trubshawe, sir?'

'Yes?'

Trubshawe shot a keen glance at him.

'I'm sorry. Don't I know you from somewhere?'

'Well, you I'd know anywhere, sir,' said the young man with a hesitant smile, his restless Adam's apple bobbing up and down, 'even if we haven't clapped eyes on each other for longer than I care to remember. I'm Tom Calvert.'

Trubshawe peered at him.

'Why, of course. P.C. Tom Calvert. My apologies Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D., so I've been reading. Congratulations, young 'un!'

The young policeman nodded, shyly twirling his bowler.

'Thanks. I owe my success to you as much as to anyone. And may I say, sir, it's quite amazing, but in all those years you haven't changed a bit.'

'I kind of thought you'd say that,' replied Trubshawe with a sardonic smile.

'Oh, why?'

'No reason, no reason at all. So you've been a.s.signed to this case too, have you?'

'Too?'

'Well, I read of how you investigated the fire at Alastair Farjeon's villa in Cookham, and now here you are.'

'You heard about that, did you?'

'I not only heard about it, I've been following it more closely than you'd ever imagine.'

'Well, sir, it seemed pretty logical to have me cover this business. Not that we have any reason to believe there might be a connection between the two except that, as I'm sure you know, Farjeon, before he died, was to be the producer of the picture they've been making here.'

'Director,' said Trubshawe drily.

'What?'

'Take it from me, Tom, my boy. Director, not producer.'

'Very well, sir. I see you've come to know the patois.'