And Then There Was No One (16 page)

‘And Slavorigin?’

‘Well, there’s no way I can be sure as yet, but my instinct is that, if Sanary’s energy and erudition can be trusted, and I believe they can, it’s to that last category that Slavorigin belonged. And considering that he was already on a jinxy streak, it’s by no means impossible that this second threat might have pushed him over the edge.’

‘Might, might, might! Evie, I wish now I’d begun to count from the top the number of times you’ve used that handy but unreliable conditional in your exposition. None of this, clever as it is, amounts to more than pure conjecture, you know.’

‘Of course I know. Just as it’s pure conjecture to attribute Slavorigin’s murder to the presence of some lurking loony on whom none of us have ever set eyes.’

‘True. But go on. You claimed your theory would explain a lot. Surely that wasn’t all of it?’

‘No, it isn’t. When I asked above [above??] how Slavorigin could have let himself be lured unaccompanied out of the hotel, you objected that it might not have happened that way; that, deciding on a whim to pay an impromptu visit to
the Museum, he might have chosen for once to dispense with his minders’ irksome vigilance. Well, but what if there was a luring after all, except that it was he, Slavorigin himself, who did it? After all, it was just as possible for him to have inveigled Sanary into meeting him at the Museum as the other way round. As for how he meant to commit the crime, I wouldn’t know. But let’s say a struggle ensued, Sanary eventually gained the upper hand and killed the man who had come to kill him.’

‘By firing an arrow from a bow which has disappeared as mysteriously as it once materialised?’

‘Ah well, Gilbert, that bow remains the unknown quantity of any theory either of us might offer the other. But please don’t forget, when we discovered Slavorigin’s body, it was Sanary who almost at once laid both his hands on it, something he must have been aware he was not supposed to do. Isn’t it possible he wanted to make certain there would be a legitimate reason for his fingerprints being found all over the corpse?’

‘True, true. Yet there’s also the fact that, if it actually turns out that you’re right, it would have been an open-and-shut case of self-defence. Why, then, hasn’t Sanary come forward to explain himself?’

‘Would you?’

‘Well …’

‘Come now, Gilbert. Let’s hypothesise. Let’s assume, just for the argument’s sake, that you yourself are in a position
where you’re forced to kill Slavorigin in self-defence, not with your bare arms, not with some handy poker, not by knocking him down and inadvertently causing him to brain himself against a brass fireguard, say, but by shooting some equally handy arrow into his heart’ – again the comical
Noli Me Tangere
gesture – ‘yes, yes, I realise we know only where the arrow came from, not the bow, but forget that for the nonce. If you had to take so extreme a measure, seriously, would you rush back into the Kunsthalle to announce your guilt to the company which you had left just ten minutes before? Especially when everyone in that company was aware, and the police would soon have to be made aware, that you and your victim happened not to be on the friendliest of terms?’

‘No … no, I suppose not. It would be too easy, and thus too tempting, to make a reappearance as if nothing at all were amiss. Frankly, though, as far as I’m concerned, what scuttles your argument of self-defence is the choice of weapon. When someone attempts to defend himself against an assailant, he surely seizes on the weapon nearest to hand, any weapon, even some blunt object or instrument that was never intended to be used as a weapon. On the other hand, there can be no getting away from the fact that a murder by bow-and-arrow – the bow having to be supplied by the murderer himself – is a premeditated murder. It must be. No, Evie, I’m afraid, when I listen to you theorise, my bottom starts to itch.’

I at once wanted to bite off my tongue. Why? In
A Mysterious Affair of Style,
the whodunit on which, for a number of inglorious reasons, I had shamefully failed to consult Evie, there is a scene in the Ritz Bar fairly late in the narrative where Evadne Mount’s sidekick, the frequently forementioned Trubshawe, expounds his theory on the possible motive behind the murder of the stage and screen actress Cora Rutherford, Evadne’s oldest and dearest friend, once young and famous, now fiftyish if she’s a day and fading fast. Even if, it’s implied, Evadne is secretly intrigued by the ingenuity of Trubshawe’s theory, she none the less announces to him that she remains unpersuaded. When asked why, she replies to his astonishment that her bottom itches; that, if I may quote from myself, ‘Whenever I read a whodunit by one of my rivals, my so-called rivals, and I encounter some device – I don’t know, a motive, a clue, an alibi, whatever – a device I simply don’t trust, even if I can’t immediately articulate to myself why I don’t trust it, I long ago noticed that my bottom started to itch. I repeat, it’s infallible. If my bottom ever once steered me wrong, why, the universe would be meaningless.’

The problem was that I had invented that vulgar little idiosyncrasy for Evie’s fictional self without, as I’d promised I would, obtaining her prior permission. It was, indeed, just the kind of thing to cover which a special clause had been added, at my own urging, to the contract we both signed. Now, by my unthinking confusion of the true and the false
Evadnes, except that it was precisely because I was finding it increasingly difficult to tell one apart from the other that I had committed the gaffe, I risked bringing to an abrupt end the unhoped-for conspiracy of silence which continued to surround the whole question of my repeated breaches of that contract. How, I wondered, was she liable to react?

But I could never second-guess Evie.

She threw her head back and laughed till the tears streamed down her face.

‘Oh, Gilbert!’ she cried. ‘I would never have imagined that an itchy bottom could be contagious! For I’ll let you into a secret!’

‘Yes?’

‘My bottom’s itching too!’

‘It is?’

‘Yes! Which must mean that I don’t even believe in my own theory, ha! ha!’ She wiped away the last of the tears. ‘Best move on, shall we. Autry, now, the self-styled G. Autry. What are we to make of him?’

‘You tell me. Maybe you’ve got another theory?’

‘Well … my initial instinct is to answer you with a categorical no. How could I have a theory about somebody so secretive, so laconic, so unforthcoming. All I know about him is what I see and, when he deigns to speak, hear. And when he does deign to speak, all I hear is yup, nope, mebbe and occasionally, if he’s in a loquacious mood, mebbe not. What on earth, you might ask, have I got to work on? Yet, if
you reread [
sic!
] what I’ve just been saying, you may actually glimpse the first little inkling of a clue to his identity.

‘What, after all, do we know about Autry? Next to nothing. He’s a Texan, from the accent, and he’s almost pathologically determined to keep himself to himself. Now what do we know about Hermann Hunt V? He too is a Texan, and he too is almost pathologically determined to keep himself to himself.’

‘What! You’re suggesting that Autry and Hunt are one and the same?’

‘All I’m saying is that it isn’t an impossibility. The ages would seem to match up, and I’ve heard it rumoured that, in his youth, before he was sucked into turbo-capitalism, as I believe the beastly expression is, Hunt’s ambition was to become a writer. So what if he did become a writer after all, pseudonomously? No, nothing as I can see prevents what I have just said from being true. Which doesn’t, of course, automatically make it so.’

‘But why, for heaven’s sake? Hermann Hunt offered one hundred million dollars for the head of Gustav Slavorigin. Why on earth would he suddenly decide to become his own hit man? Where’s the logic in that?’

‘Moi,
I think it highly logical. Consider. It’s known – to a select few, I grant you, but what with the dizzying boundlessness of the Internet that select few probably amounts by now to several hundred thousand bloggers – it’s known that Hunt will pay out a portion of his vast personal fortune to
whoever succeeds in killing Slavorigin. What more watertight alibi could he ask for? Since it’s on public record that he’s prepared to reward somebody else to commit the crime, and reward him handsomely, it stands to reason that he himself would be the very last person on the planet to come under suspicion.’

‘Logical, perhaps, but very far-fetched.’

‘Yes, I quite agree. Recall, though, what our mutual friend Philippe Françaix once had the wit to reply
*
when I myself taxed him on how far-fetched some abstruse French theory was that he had begun to bandy at me’ – here she mimicked the crudely parodic patois I had devised for Françaix in
hommage,
affectionate
hommage,
I insist, to the Franglais of primarily Hercule Poirot, but also of that long succession of cardboard-thin, language-mangling wogs in Agatha Christie’s whodunits – ‘“But see you, Mademoiselle, all the best ideas must be fetched from afar.”’

‘And the worst,’ I added drily.

‘Yes, of course, that’s true too,’ Evie answered with a sigh. But although she was audibly flagging, she hadn’t yet quite said her piece. ‘There is also,’ she continued, ‘Autry’s own admission that he spent all of yesterday morning mooching about at the Falls. Schumacher took that to mean that the murderer would have been prevented from disposing of his bow. If, however, the murderer were Autry himself …’

She fell silent in mid-sentence, gazing around her as if
bored at last by all these mutually exclusive hypotheses of hers. ‘Clouds gathering, I see. Don’t like the look of them.’

She shivered.

‘Well, Gilbert, this little chinwag of ours has been extremely useful, I think. Cleared the deadwood away, you know, always a good start. Did we miss anybody?’

‘Any other potential “suspects”?’ I asked, fully intending for her to hear the inverted commas I’d placed around the word.

‘Uh huh.’

‘Well, it was Düttmann, of course, who actually invited the victim to this accursed Festival, but my personal conviction is that he doesn’t merit a moment’s consideration.’

‘Mine too,’ said Evie.

‘Which leaves only – though, as a suspect, he may be too far-fetched even for you – the tall dark stranger who tangoed last night with Slavorigin. No one knew who he was and no one has seen him since. Did you ever entertain the possibility that that rendezvous in the Museum might have been an amorous tryst?’

‘An amorous tryst? At ten o’clock in the morning? I don’t think so.’

‘Then that, I’m afraid, is it.’

‘Goody goody. Now, Gilbert dear – and don’t protest, please – for at least as long as we find ourselves obliged to stay put in Meiringen, and if for no other reason than to pass the hours and perhaps the days which lie ahead of us
here, I once more suggest that we two set about solving this crime. Yes, yes, I do. But separately, independently of one another, each in his or her own inimitable fashion. I also suggest, although I am not by nature a betting woman, making a wager with you if you are game enough to take me on.’

I couldn’t believe what she had just said to me. Unless I was in error, it was almost
word for word
what I had had her fictional self, her alter ego, her alter Evie, propose to Trubshawe in the Ritz bar.

‘I trust you’re not about to say,’ I answered, ‘that, if you solve the mystery before I do, you will expect me to marry you?’

She laughed, quite softly for once.

‘Oh no. Nothing personal, Gilbert, but neither you nor anybody else could ever take dear Eustace’s place. It’s been nigh on six years since his fatal heart attack, and not a day passes without my thinking of him with undiminished fondness. No, what I was about to suggest was that, if I succeed in solving the mystery before you do, then your very next book must be a new Evadne Mount whodunit.’

I had, as you may suppose, not the slightest intention of writing a new Evadne Mount whodunit, but all I replied, more out of curiosity than because I was tempted by the idea of accepting her wager, was ‘And if
I
should solve the crime before you?’

‘If you solve the crime first, which you won’t, then I solemnly promise, Gilbert, that I will cast
you
as the presiding
sleuth of
my
next book. There’s a postmodern prank for you! The heroine of a whodunit makes the author of that same whodunit the hero of one of her own whodunits, ha ha! Whatever will I think of next?’

I wasn’t to learn the answer to that, in any case, rhetorical question for, just as she posed it, I brusquely raised my right hand to my left ear and gave it a wiggle.

‘Tsk!’

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said carelessly. ‘It felt as though something wet just burst against my ear.’

‘Something wet?’

‘You know, like a bubble. Like a little soap bubble.’

The next day proved to be not merely the strangest but the most significant of my life. I awoke late again, to the usual mild shock of a sunburst of light abruptly banishing my sleeping mask’s velvety delusion of darkness. As ever I began my blurry daily existence with a satisfying albeit never quite definitive bowel movement (I knew, as sure as fate, that I would have seconds before I even descended to breakfast), and it was only when I re-emerged from the bathroom that I noticed a plain white envelope which somebody had slid under my door. I picked it up and opened it. The typed letter inside, from Düttmann, was addressed to all the guests of the Sherlock Holmes Festival. We were free to leave. The Belgian official from Interpol was confident that Slavorigin’s murderer was some as yet unidentified bounty hunter, most likely an American, and thus saw no reason for any of us to be inconvenienced further. Should subsequent enquiries have to be made, the hotel had our passport numbers, home addresses and so forth. Unfortunately, it had not been possible
to reserve Business Class seats on flights out of Zurich that very day, but a hired car would be stationed in front of the hotel at exactly 8.00 the next morning to take Evie, Hugh, Autry and me to the airport where we would catch the first available plane to Heathrow, arrangements having also been made for Autry to transfer to a later London–Dallas flight. (Both Meredith and Sanary planned to quit Meiringen by train, Meredith to Montreux, Sanary to Geneva.) The day ahead, ended the letter, was in consequence ours to do with as we liked, but would we please all gather in the hotel bar at seven o’clock for one last ‘hopefully not so sad get-together’?

Downstairs, I plucked a complimentary
Herald Tribune
from a newspaper rack in the foyer. Not only was the murder still front-page news, as I expected it would be, I was amused to note, on the editorial page, a column on ‘the Slavorigin affair’, translated from
L’Espresso,
by Umberto Eco, who for some mysterious reason omitted to mention that he too had received an invitation to attend the Festival. I then walked into the breakfast room, where I spied, sitting alone, an exceptionally morose-looking Hugh and felt obliged – no, because of something I had meanwhile decided to do, I was actually glad – to join him.

It transpired that, after I myself had left the disco, Hugh had finally succeeded in cornering Slavorigin and had asked him in his turn for a handout. Apparently recovered from the débâcle in the restaurant, fatally reverting to character, the novelist had laughed in his face. When Hugh none the
less reminded him of the admiration he had expressed for his own novels, Slavorigin had replied – wittily, I thought but refrained from remarking – that ‘they were written in Prosak, a cross between Prozac and musak’.

‘Know what the bastard said?’

‘What?’

‘He said I’d written thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of words, and that the day I died, etc, etc, every single one of them would be forgotten. It would be like, professionally, I had never lived.’

‘The man was a despicable bully. Both a pain and a pill. In my opinion –’

‘I know, I know! The worst is,’ he mumbled into his cornflakes, ‘it’s true.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘No, Gilbert, it’s good of you to, etc. But I know it’s true. I’ve always known.’

I half-expected two pearly cartoon tears to dribble down his blotchy red face.

‘Look, Hugh, I insist I’m in no position to lend you anything close to ten thousand pounds, and I don’t fool myself that the counter-offer I’m about to make will compensate for that, but there’s a cashpoint machine right here in the hotel lobby and I’d be happy to withdraw, shall we say, five hundred Swiss francs? Would that go any way to easing your situation?’

He perked up like an infant handed a plaything which
has been teasingly withheld from him. ‘Jesus, Gilbert, it’d be just the ticket!’ he cried. ‘I’ve got this idea, etc, for a new thriller. Don’t know yet what I’ll call it, either
Murder Off-Piste
or
Death Slalom,
but I had the brainstorm staring out at those fucking Alps every day. I thought if I got a little recce in before going back to Blighty, maybe stop over in St Moritz, etc, for a few days, not the season, I know, but your – your how much did you say? Five hundred pounds?’

‘Francs.’

‘Five hundred francs’ – a mental yet visible shrug of regret – ‘yeah, that’ll really do the trick. And it
is
only a loan, you know. Don’t you be worrying about that. I’ll pay you back just the moment I get the advance.’

‘I know, I know.’

He noisily scraped the palms of his hands together, a nervous habit I’m afraid I’ve never been able to stomach.

‘So where exactly is this cashpoint machine?’ he asked, looking around him.

‘Let me finish my breakfast first, Hugh,’ I replied, ‘if you don’t mind.’

‘Oh, sure, sure. Take your time. No rush.’

Once our business had been done with, I recalled that I had hoped to take advantage of the hotel’s wi-fi Internet connection, whose cabin happened to be next door to the cashpoint machine. It had been empty when I withdrew Hugh’s money, but we had carried on talking for a while afterwards in the foyer, and when I eventually shook free of
him I cursed inwardly to note not just that the cabin was occupied but that its occupant was, of all people, Evie.

Ironically, it was because of her that I desired to go online. I own that, unsettled as well as completely mystified by that newspaper ad that Slavorigin had shown us, it was my intention, an intention of whose fundamental fatuousness I was very much aware, to Google ‘Cora Rutherford’ to find out whether anything else was listed but the odd tangential allusion to her as a literary character. Actually, I felt a queasy kinship with Max Beerbohm’s doomed poetaster Enoch Soames who, having sold his soul, literally, in order that he be granted advance knowledge of posterity’s judgment on his verse, discovers to his chagrin that the sole reference to his name in the British Library catalogue is precisely as the fictional protagonist of Beerbohm’s short story.

I cooled my heels in the lobby for nearly fifteen minutes waiting in vain for Evie to re-surface, before taking the stairs back up to my room. In the hope of catching a news item on Slavorigin’s murder, I started zapping the multi-channelled television set but came up empty-handed. Like the giant timepiece it is, the world was already moving on. Instead, for half-an-hour or so until a chambermaid knocked on the door and asked if she might do my room, I found myself vaguely watching an old Hollywood parody-western,
Son of Paleface,
with Bob Hope, Jane Russell and, a boyhood idol of mine, Roy Rogers, once an even more famous singing cowboy than Gene Autry, all dubbed into German.

When I returned to the lobby (it was now close to noon), Evie was still, incredibly, squatting inside the wi-fi cabin. What
was
she up to? I wondered whether I should tap on the semi-frosted glass door and make a pointing gesture at my wristwatch, but thought better of it. Still uncertain how to occupy the hours ahead of me, I caught sight of Meredith window-shopping in the lobby’s glossy arcade of duty-free boutiques. She also spotted me. Yet she at once – and, I knew, deliberately – turned her face away and pretended to study a display of cashmere sweaters in the nearest window. So it was like that, was it? Perhaps, thinking only of getting out of this godforsaken dump and back to the humdrum dissatisfactions of our ordinary lives, none of us was any longer up to making the usual meaningless hotel-lobby chitchat.

I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on the forecourt, taking the air as I polluted it, and almost tripped over Sanary’s suitcase. He had managed to book himself onto the afternoon express to Geneva. A hired car was due to take him to the station via the Kunsthalle, where he meant both to thank Düttmann and advise him that he was leaving Meiringen today, not tomorrow as planned, and therefore wouldn’t be attending the last-night gathering. We conversed for a few minutes about this and that until, on a whim, I decided I would pop the question I’d been aching to put to him from practically the first day.

‘Tell me, Pierre,’ I said, ‘why is it, when you speak to Evie,
you start to sound just like a Frenchman from one of her whodunits?’

I sensed him staring at me, his eyes unblinking behind his dark glasses.

‘Saperlipopette!’
he exclaimed. ‘Do I? I wasn’t aware.’

Just at that moment his car pulled up. We shook hands, made traditional rhubarbing noises about keeping in touch and waved to each other as he was driven off. I felt somehow left behind and lonelier than ever.

The afternoon passed as if in a dream. Rather than loiter uselessly and self-consciously about the lobby, I decided to stroll down into town, mindful all the while of the aphorism I had attributed to Sherlock Holmes in the first paragraph of ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’: ‘It has long been an axiom of mine that it is when we indulge ourselves in some pursuit of pure relaxation, not when we are at our labours, tedious and repetitive though they may be, that we are most receptive to the gnawing torments of ennui.’ I wandered into souvenir shops, cheese shops, a couple of bookshops (whose English-language books, apart from a prominent display of Hugh’s, mine and of course Conan Doyle’s, were all populist pap, what you might call McFiction, Kentucky Fried Chick-lit, lad-lit, genteel-elderly-lady-lit and, still hanging on in there, Dan Brown-lit) and even, in desperation, took a quick turn around an overwhelmingly quaint picture gallery that specialised in painted-by-number views of the same two or three Alpine vistas. I was in and out of there in a few seconds.

By five I had had it. I had run into neither Evie nor Meredith nor Autry nor Hugh, although I did see more than once as I passed and re-passed them on my directionless ramblings about the town a scruffily conspiratorial group of what I took to be foreign correspondents from the British press, boozing steadily through the afternoon at one of the tables on the same café terrace that we guests of the Festival had got into the habit of frequenting. I also noticed two uniformed Swiss sentries posted outside the taped-off Museum. But enough, I said to myself, is enough. Time to drag my sore feet back to the hotel.

Forgetting my earlier intention to Google Cora, I went straight to my room, where I discovered that a second envelope had meanwhile been slipped under my door. The letter inside, from Evie, read: ‘It’s 4.30. I’m going to be in the bar from now on. Join me, why don’t you. It’s time to compare notes.’ Compare notes? She really had meant what she said, then, about each of us doing some detective work.

I found her seated in one of the bar’s padded and buttoned American-style booths, a double whisky-and-soda in front of her. (So I’d got it wrong in my whodunits, in which I’d had her drinking double pink gins.) Exceptionally for me, I ordered the same, and we both waited for my drink to arrive before beginning to talk. At the far end of the darkishly lit room a blind black pianist was playing a medley of what, after a moment, I identified as Cole Porter show tunes.

‘Bottoms up,’ I said, raising my glass.

‘Bottoms up.’

‘Well now, what sort of a day have you had?’ I asked her.

‘Instructive,’ she said, ‘really most instructive. You?’

‘The reverse. Whatever is the opposite of ditto,’ I said, ‘that’s what I’d have to reply. My day has been wretched. Nothing to show for it.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Evie. ‘Then we won’t be comparing notes after all?’

‘Sorry.’ I sipped my whisky. ‘But what are you saying? That you’ve made progress?’

‘Progress? Gilbert, my dear, I know everything.’

‘Oh really?’ I said, and attempting to sound subtly sarcastic I succeeded only in sounding malevolently camp. ‘Everything, you say?’

‘Everything.’

‘Then you know the murderer’s identity?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’

At this point I expected that, like all fictional detectives, she would childishly insist on titillating the reader, building up the suspense, even declaring, as I had had her do in the corresponding scene of
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd,
that ‘if I were baldly to announce who I believe did it, it would be like a maths teacher
proposing
a problem to his students, then instantly giving them the solution without in the meantime
exposing
any of the connective tissue which enabled
him to arrive at that solution, connective tissue which would also enable those students of his to understand why it was the only solution possible’.

But she didn’t. To my direct question she gave me a direct answer. Rewind the tape.

‘Then you know the murderer’s identity?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’

‘You did, of course.’

‘Me? Are you mad?’

For an author to be accused of murder by one of his own characters – now this was a first! Bizarrely, however, before the meaning of those four words had properly begun to sink in, they had a queer little Proustian effect on me. I was immediately reminded of a long-forgotten, although in its day long-running, television programme called
This Is Your Life,
whose guest, a celebrity supposedly invited not as the evening’s victim but as just another member of the studio audience, would nevertheless find himself accosted by the show’s emcee. ‘X,’ this emcee would say with ominous aplomb, ‘this is
your
life!’ The tape again.

‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’

‘You did, of course.’

‘Me? Are you mad?’

‘No,’ she replied placidly, ‘although I rather think you may be.’

‘But, Evie,’ I protested, ‘what in heaven’s name are you
talking about? I’m Gilbert Adair. I’m a nice man. People generally like me. Ask anybody.’

‘Pooh!’ she ejaculated. ‘As though nice men never commit murders!’

I stared at her.

‘Did you just ejaculate?’

‘Certainly I did. I’m Evadne Mount. It’s what I do.’

‘Well,’ I muttered crossly, glancing round the nearly empty bar in case somebody else had heard her, ‘don’t do it in public, please.’