A Mysterious Affair of Style by Gilbert Adair Page B

remembered how Evie had revealed, during his interrogation of her at ffolkes Manor, that she and Cora had once shared a minuscule flat in Bloomsbury when they were both barely out of their teens and – no, no, try to forget what else she had inadvertently let slip about that cohabitation of theirs! At any rate, it all did seem to imply that actress and novelist were pretty much the same age, and the latter, he knew, was certainly no spring chicken. No summer chicken either. Autumn, he said to himself, autumn was the season, late autumn at that. Poor woman, he mused, and he did feel a genuine sympathy for Cora’s plight. Life was assuredly no sinecure for an actress past her prime.
    And Evadne Mount herself? Quite a character, she was. It’s strange. If he had been asked, Trubshawe would unquestionably have answered that he hadn’t given her more than a passing thought in the decade since their initial encounter. Even when he read her novels (and had taken the trouble to catch up with her long-running stage play,
The Tourist Trap,
whose murderer had turned out, to his naïve surprise and obscure resentment, to be the investigating police officer), he had found them so absorbing that it simply hadn’t occurred to him to attribute their qualities to a woman he had actually met – just as a mother, watching her offspring grow up, soon forgets that these autonomous and increasingly independent little beings were once the inhabitants of her own womb.
    Yes, he was a fan of Evadne Mount’s work; nor was he in any way ashamed to admit it. Yet he almost never spoke to his cluster of acquaintances of his enthusiasm for her whodunits and, on the very rare occasions he did, it was not at all his manner airily to brag of having struck up an acquaintanceship with their author.
    By chance, however, she had walked back into his life – or rather, he had walked back into hers, as into a lamp-post – and, less than twenty-four hours later, here he was thinking of her and Cora Rutherford and Alastair Farjeon and Patsy Sloots and young Tom Calvert and all. Like her or loathe her, impossible as she often could be, things did tend to happen around Evadne Mount.
    And that was the crux of the matter. Nothing much tended any longer to happen around him. After years of serving the Law, years of being universally respected as one of the Yard’s top men, here he was, what, a codger? Yes, a codger. An old geezer.
    He owned a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached house in Golders Green in which he lived a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached life. He had a thriving little vegetable garden in which he would grow his own leeks and radishes and carrots. He had an ever-diminishing circle of friends from the old days whom he would meet for a congenial pint in his local hostelry. And he had an occasional, these days extremely occasional, lunch in Town with a few pals from the Yard.
    When it was with former colleagues of his own generation that he lunched, it was a real treat. He enjoyed reminiscing with his peers about the curiously, paradoxically,
innocent
criminals whom they had all dealt with at one time or another over the years, criminals for whom, by virtue of an unvarying, even comforting, routine of arrest, charge, trial, sentence, release and re-arrest, they had all acquired a certain fondness.
    But every so often, or every so seldom, he would be invited out to lunch by one of the younger crowd, somebody whose mentor he’d once been or flattered himself he’d been – and that tended to prove something of an ordeal.
    It wasn’t just the mortifying impression they left, howeverkindly disposed they seemed to be towards him, that, compared to their methods, his generation’s had been almost comically outmoded; that, far from having advanced the science of criminology, as he secretly prided himself he had done, he and his contemporaries had actually set it back a couple of decades. It was also the fact that they all appeared to be engaged on