And Then There Was No One (14 page)

A queerly spindly object was sticking out of Slavorigin’s chest, an object that had come close to splitting in the middle as he fell. I suppose that, if I hadn’t immediately been conscious of it, it was because I’d naturally been drawn first, as one is, to the face. Or perhaps even then I’d had a premonition of some abnormality, an obscenely protruding bone, for example, that I would live to regret too intently focusing upon. Not that I really did think it was a bone; I didn’t ‘think’ anything. But an internal whisper, bypassing the speculative turmoil of my brain, may have insinuated to me that this – this
thing
had to be a bone, for what else could it be?

It was an arrow. We could all now clearly see the tuft of faded, mangy turkey feathers which had been glued or fletched, I believe the technical term is, to the blunt end of its shaft. It was, in fact, as a backward glance instantly confirmed, the very arrow, with its crudely daubed-on bloodstain, that I had inspected the previous day on the half-moon table where it had lain next to the hundred-year-old copy of the
Daily Telegraph
and the pulpy edition of
His Last Bow,
both of them, incidentally, undisturbed.

There was a collective gasp, as from the audience at the kind of movie where a blonde co-ed opens a closet door and
the dead Dean topples into her scantily pantied lap like a felled oak. Sanary knelt down and, without even bothering to brace himself for the shock, gently turned Slavorigin’s body over. Another, louder gasp. The arrow was stuck deep in his chest, so deep it seemed to have acted as a stopper: the blood that soaked his blue-and-white striped shirt was far less than one would have expected. Tiny bubbles speckled with foamy pink saliva drooled from his gaping mouth. Yet his expression, as I said before, was as unalarmed as if he’d been shot in the back.

‘You know,’ said Evie in a quiet voice, ‘you really shouldn’t have done that.’

Sanary looked up at her, pale-faced.

‘Done what?’

‘You don’t have to be a reader of whodunits to know that you must never take the liberty of touching a dead body before the police arrive.’

He hastily yanked both his hands from off Slavorigin’s snakeskin jacket as if only just realising that it was now being worn by a corpse. But by then it was too late.

During the whole of that afternoon, right there in the Kunsthalle’s lecture hall, we were all questioned by a local police inspector, Schumacher by name. Fiftyish, weedily built, with a tiny, Hitlerian clump of a moustache, he was quite without
the stoic morbidity of Swiss policemen in Dürrenmatt’s thrillers. On the contrary. He actually seemed to regard it as a source of perverse pride that such a celebrated author should have been shot dead (with William Tell’s bow-and-arrow, for God’s sake!) in his own boring backwater of a town.

What was most curious about the interviews – ‘interrogations’ is hardly the word – was that not one of us turned out to have an altogether satisfactory alibi. Not that we all fell under suspicion, as the tacit consensus was that Slavorigin had obviously been slain by a fanatic. The main autobahn out of Meiringen was already under surveillance and all Swiss airports were being patrolled by anti-terrorist units, every wing in the sky accounted for. According to the police doctor’s preliminary report, however, the victim had died within an hour, at most an hour-and-a-half, of our having discovered him, and by some impish coincidence, as I say, not one of us could offer a truly secure alibi for that little skylight window of opportunity.

Meredith, who was up first, told Schumacher that before finally gravitating to the Kunsthalle she had spent the morning wandering about the town’s rather disappointing shopping precinct. Yes, she had been alone and, no, she hadn’t made any purchases, but she had spoken to the odd shop assistant who might be able to vouch for her. Sanary had taken breakfast in the hotel, also on his own, then returned to his bedroom to pick up his emails. He had not responded
to any of them, with the result that nothing of his could be traced or timed, assuming anybody thought it worth doing so. His next hour was spent jotting down preliminary notes on the first three chapters of a children’s fantasy novel he had been commissioned to translate from the English,
The Master of the Fallen Chairs,
and although he had hung a
Bitte nicht stören
sign on his bedroom door he had forgotten, or so he thought, to remove it when he eventually did leave, at five to eleven. No, no, hold on there, he suddenly said. About quarter of an hour earlier a chambermaid had tapped on his door only for him to request that she come back later. Autry, whom I had never heard string so many articulate sentences together at one go, admitted to having mooched about the Reichenbach Falls for an hour or two, alone naturally, although he had noticed, but had also deliberately steered clear of, the usual mob of sightseers. Hugh claimed to have awakened late, if not as late as I had, and been disturbed by the same chambermaid. There was also in his account, for me at least, one piquant detail which would have definitively convinced me of his innocence had I ever imagined anybody might have considered him guilty. If he overslept, he said, it was only because, owing to his unfamiliarity with continental bolsters and duvets, he had taken forever to drift off the night before. I, too, had of course slept late. And Evie, the very last of us to be interviewed – Düttmann and his trio of assistants were out of the running, having all naturally observed each other making last-minute preparations for the
Kunsthalle reception – told Schumacher that she had traipsed for almost an hour from one news kiosk to another in an attempt to find a copy of an English newspaper.

‘Any particular newspaper?’ he asked.

‘The
Daily Sentinel,’
she to my astonishment replied.

‘And did you find it?’

‘Why yes, I finally did. At the railway station. Should have tried there first.’

‘It would be of assistance to me,
gnädige Frau,
if you still had that copy in your possession.’

‘Ah well,’ said Evie, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t. You see, I took it with me to the station cafeteria and read it over a cappuccino. Then – what? – yes, I dumped it in a litter bin and walked to the Kunsthalle. On the way, though, I did pop into a souvenir shop to ask the price of a glass paperweight – it contained a miniature Mont Blanc, you know, which I thought I might buy for my godson’s birthday – but that was just before I arrived here, at exactly eleven o’clock. Sorry.’

The
Daily Sentinel?
What new nonsense was this? Couldn’t she any longer distinguish the fictional Evadne Mount from the real live Evie? Or was she so flustered by Schumacher’s affable drilling of her she absent-mindedly named one of the spurious, jokily named newspapers I had invented for my whodunits? Pish posh! She hadn’t been flustered at all. She had been as cool as the proverbial cucumber – gaarh, now I’m doing it! I was determined to have the matter out with her later, privately.

There was one last, token question which we all had put to us before we were permitted to go about our respective affairs, but only those affairs, mark you, that could be conducted within the strict confines of Meiringen itself. Not, as Schumacher once more took pains to reassure us, that any of us was considered a suspect, but he expected from one hour to the next the arrival from Brussels of a senior official from Interpol – Interpol versus the Internet? I know which I would bet my money on – as also two British intelligence agents, and, begging our pardons, he could not be expected to dismiss us until the three of them had seen for themselves what was and what wasn’t what. I was rather amused to hear that a Belgian detective would soon be on the murderer’s trail. It struck me that, with Evie already
in situ,
his presence would belatedly represent the fulfilment of that ancient dream of all Christie fans, a whodunit in which Marple and Poirot, as rival sleuths, endeavour simultaneously to solve the same crime.
†

And the token question? Slavorigin had definitely been shot, not stabbed, and we all knew where the arrow had come from, but the bow? A bow is not an easy thing to conceal. It’s a big object, usually, bigger than you would expect, and whether it’s fashioned of wood or plastic it mustn’t be bent too far lest it split or, scarcely less serious, cause the
arrow to be so erratically propelled as to be, even at a short distance, deflected from its target. These facts were communicated to us by Schumacher himself, something of an expert, it seemed. He went on:

‘Now the Reichenbach Falls, which you all know, they are the obvious – no, they are the
only
safe place to cast away the bow after it has been employed. But Monsieur Autre has just told us that he spent this morning mooshing about’ – a touch of Clouseau here – ‘at the Falls and so it is difficult for me to comprehend how our killer can then discard his arm, his weapon, in security. You understand me, yes?’ (We all nodded.) ‘So I must ask you this last question. Have any of you espied such a bow in Meiringen?’ (Lots of head-shakes.) ‘Then, ladies and gentlemen, you are free to go on your ways. But, I repeat, for now you must remain here inside our town. If not for a long time, I hope.’

Outside, on the steps of the Kunsthalle, I asked Hugh, for want of something better to do that afternoon, if he played chess. He didn’t. He counter-proposed a game of poker, suggesting that we make up a foursome with Autry and Sanary, but, like Bartleby, I preferred not to. I still meant anyway to have my say with Evie, whom I was determined not to let out of my sight. She was conversing with Meredith, and I heard the latter address her as ‘Y’all’ and she wasn’t even from the South! What an astounding woman Evie was.

It was near the bronze Sherlock Holmes, as she was
trudging back to the hotel on her own, that I eventually caught up with her.

‘Evie,’ I said, panting slightly, ‘there you are.’

‘Ah, Gilbert. So tell me, what do you make of all this?’

‘Frankly, I still can’t believe it’s happened. What about you?’

‘Likewise. In fact, I was just returning to my room to think it through. Perhaps we could meet up later in the bar. At cocktail hour.’

‘Of course, of course. It’s just …’

‘What?’

‘Just that I wanted to ask you a question.’

‘Fire away.’

‘In the Kunsthalle,’ I said, trying to sound offhand, ‘when you were interviewed by Schumacher …’

‘Yes?’

‘You told him you’d spent most of the morning looking for a newspaper.’

‘That’s right. I did.’

‘Um, what was its name again?’

‘Its name?’

‘The newspaper’s name.’

‘The
Daily Sentinel.
Why?’

‘The
Daily Sentinel.
I see. And you finally did find it at the railway station?’

‘Yes, I did. What is this all about, Gilbert?’

‘Evie,’ I said as composedly as I could, ‘I’ve never heard of
a newspaper called the
Daily Sentinel.
A real newspaper, that is.’

She contemplated me for a moment or two.

‘What daily newspaper do
you
read?’

‘Why,’ I replied, caught off-guard, ‘the
Guardian.’

‘Well, there you are. I never heard of that either.’

‘You’ve never heard of the
Guardian
?!’

‘The
Guardian
? Guardian of what, I wonder.’

‘It’s a world-famous newspaper!’

‘If you say so, Gilbert, if you say so,’ she answered with an exasperating smirk.

‘Tell me,’ I ventured, now less and less willing to humour her, ‘I suppose you also take a regular Sunday paper?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Which one?’

‘The
Sunday Sundial,’
was her answer, as of course I knew it would be. Then, adopting a brusque businesslike tone, she said, ‘Gilbert, I’d love to continue this fascinating chat with you, but I really do have a lot of mulling over to do. Shall we say six o’clock in the hotel bar?’

Without another word she left me standing alone in the deserted street.

I myself didn’t return at once to the Hilton. Instead, I wandered over to the railway station where I soon found its modestly cosmopolitan news kiosk. After purchasing a packet of Dunhills, I asked the young man who served me, his eyes a mystery under the shade of a scarlet baseball cap,
if he happened to stock a copy of the
Daily Sentinel.
He didn’t, but I’d be lying if I pretended he didn’t first riffle through various publications I had already noticed on the foreign-newspaper stand –
The Times, Telegraph, Independent, Guardian
– before shaking his head.

‘Sold out,’ he said in English.

At an adjacent ice-cream parlour I bought myself a giant bicephalic cone – pistachio and apricot – and slowly made my way back to the hotel.

‘Heavens to Murgatroyd!’

It was a lovely fresh sky-blue morning, and Evie and I were seated on two grubby plastic white chairs on the terrace of the same café in which I had had a coffee and chat with Düttmann, Sanary and Hugh Spaulding the day of my arrival. Only thirty-eight hours ago! It was not to be believed. The once drowsy little Meiringen was crawling with plainclothes police agents, Swiss but also no doubt British, whom we tried to single out from holidaying promenaders. From time to time, the fanfare of a siren would wail way off on the far side of town, an odd occurrence in a place where formerly the loudest noise would have been the routine peal of church bells. Every so often, too, our voices, even Evie’s, were outroared by the drilling of construction workers who had started digging up both transverse thoroughfares of the junction on which the café was situated. Not for the first time I fantasised about patenting a device to fit silencers to pneumatic drills as to firearms.

The previous evening, as agreed, she and I had met in the hotel bar for cocktails. I was unable, however, to pump her on the matter, which had nagged at me since we parted, of her favourite newspaper. I had been looking forward to firing one question after another at her – what was the
Daily Sentinel’
s politics? How much did it cost? Broadsheet or tabloid? Names and opinions of star columnists? – in the hope of causing her to trip up somewhere along the way. But no sooner had we ordered drinks than we were joined by Sanary and Hugh, who had taken the lift down together, and the conversation had immediately turned to Slavorigin’s death and how long we might expect to be held under what was coming to seem tantamount to house, or hotel, arrest.

Hugh’s accent, I couldn’t help remarking, mysteriously came and went, like that of an insecure English actor miscast in Synge or O’Casey, depending on whether he was speaking to Evie (all hammy Oirishry) or to me (nary a trace of Irishness, which was surely to be expected after so many years lived in England); while Sanary, hearing that Evie had not after all spent the afternoon cogitating in her room, as she assured me she would, but propping up the bar, drawing out not merely the two disgraced minders but the Museum tick-et-issuer, a whiny white-haired pensioner who insisted to her that he had absented himself for no more than ten minutes because of a spongy bladder, cried ‘
Zut
alors!
I doff my hat, Madame!’ Whereupon he doffed an imaginary topper, and I thought I would go mad.

Then a despondent Düttmann entered the bar and our party eventually drifted into the hotel’s own restaurant, in which we consumed a none too animated supper before, with perceptible relief on all sides, retiring early.

Coming back to the present, as I had said not a word in response to her exclamation, Evie repeated it, although this time it was more in the nature of a sigh.

‘Heavens to Murgatroyd!’

‘A penny for your thoughts.’

‘I was thinking,’ she replied, ‘what a rum affair this has turned out to be. For me above all.’

‘Oh. And why you above all?’

‘Well, think about it yourself. It seems increasingly to be the case that – just like Alexis Baddeley, the regular detective in my own whodunits, you remember – wherever I happen to be, I find myself infallibly stumbling across a murder. It’s almost as though it were some kind of a Law, and I’m starting to wonder whether we aren’t – I mean me, Alexis, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple – I’m starting to wonder whether the trait shared by us amateur or professional sleuths, the secret trait nobody ever dares mention, is that we’re all
jinxes.
’

‘Jinxes?’

‘Think about it, I say. We all solve murders, true, but it should be obvious to fans of mystery fiction that we also
create the conditions
for these murders simply by being there, whether in a snowed-in country house on Dartmoor
or on an archaeological dig in Mesopotamia or indeed in an idyllic little town in the Swiss Alps. In fact, you might even say that we have a moral obligation to solve them because they’d doubtless not have been committed in the first place had we not been on the scene.

‘You know, that insight of mine has just given me another idea, an idea so ingenious I might actually use it as the theme of my next whodunit, ha! ha! My regular police inspector, my Trubshawe, if you will – his name, as you may or may not recall, is Tomlinson, Tomlinson of the Yard – well now, let me see, I might have him sitting in his club one evening, nursing all the bruises his self-esteem has received over the years at his having been so consistently outsleuthed by Alexis. Suddenly it dawns on him that the one thread, the only meaningful thread, connecting all the murders she has solved in her lengthy career is her own fortuitous, or
allegedly
fortuitous, presence at the scene of each and every one of the crimes. So, in the very last chapter, he naturally arrests her as the most subtle and successful serial killer in history.’

‘Are you serious?’ I asked, genuinely impressed. (With Evie, you never knew.)

Shaking her head, she took a sip of her cappuccino.

‘No. Only kidding. My readers wouldn’t stand for it.’

I was about to suggest, on the contrary, that such an original twist might actually have a positive impact on her shrinking circulation, although I wouldn’t have put it so plain-spokenly, when she herself changed tack.

‘What,’ she asked, ‘are we two going to do about this one?’

‘This what?’

‘This murder, of course. Slavorigin’s.’

‘Why should we be expected to do anything about it,’ I replied, ‘except all go home as soon as we’re authorised to?’

‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ she exclaimed (to my flattered amusement). ‘Here we are, two ace criminologists, practically witnesses to one of the most sensational crimes of the century, and what you propose is that we slink away from it with our tails between our legs. Don’t you share my sense of moral obligation? Ah me, if only Eustace were here …’

‘Eustace’, I knew, could mean no other than her lugubrious, long-suffering partner-in-detection in
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
and
A Mysterious Affair of Style,
and I took exception, and told her so, to being unfavourably compared to one of my own fictional creations, especially as, with his unerring flair for barking up a whole forest of wrong trees,
*
if he was present in the books at all, it was solely to serve as her hapless stooge.

‘But you haven’t understood anything!’ she thundered, causing a passing cyclist, a faunlet with the face of a Crivelli angel, a momentary wobble. ‘It’s precisely because he was a plodder that Eustace and I formed so effective a team. Good cop, bad cop, as they say in the pictures. “Good” and “bad”,
though, in the sense of “competent” and “incompetent”. Without Watson Holmes would have been nothing. He bounced his own good ideas off on Watson’s poor ones. Ditto me and Eustace.’

‘Is that what you’re suggesting? That I become your Watson?’

‘Gilbert, a man has just been murdered. In my vicinity, surprise surprise. For you, I realise, this is a new and novel experience, but for me it already feels, as it must have done for Holmes and the rest, like another day, another corpse. And yet … Slavorigin’s eminence apart, as well as the kudos I could expect to receive if I were responsible for apprehending his killer – it would do wonders for my back-list – I must also point out that it’s a crime possessed of all sorts of bizarre and even unique features and that it would be extremely contrary of me, as contrary as Poirot opting to quit Cairo on the very day one of his co-expats is found stabbed in the shadow of the Sphinx, not to want to poke and probe at it in the hope of outwitting dear clueless old Inspector Plodder – or Plödder – of the Swiss Police.’

‘But surely there isn’t any mystery as to who did it?’

‘Oh really?’

‘We’re all aware that Slavorigin’s life was under threat from some nitwitted survivalist sects whose members, even if we leave aside their hatred of everything he stood for, must have entertained the odd fantasy about how much comfier Armageddon would be if cushioned by a buried stash of a
hundred million dollars. It’s evident that one of these loonies pursued Slavorigin here to Meiringen and shot him through the heart. A bow and arrow, after all, the survivalist’s favourite choice of weapon.’

‘Maybe, maybe. Except that your theory, which is all it is, begs a few questions.’

‘For instance?’

‘Well, one, how would such a loony, as you call him – or her – know that Gustav Slavorigin was due to make an appearance in Meiringen at all?’ I was about to parry that question with its logical answer when she held her splayed right hand up to my face, all but blotting out her own, to advise me of the fact that she had not yet completed what she wished to say. It was a tic I thought I had invented for her, but perhaps I had half-consciously recalled her behaving so at Carmen’s little supper. She continued:

‘Since he was the Festival’s Mystery Guest, after all, there was no indication of his identity in the programme. Then two, is it probable that a rabid rightwing fanatic from some one-horse burg in Texas or Kansas or Oklahoma, armed with a great big bow-and-arrow and probably even sporting a coonskin hat, could pass unremarked by any of us, including Slavorigin’s minders, in a town as small as Meiringen? Three, how did he – or, I repeat, she – succeed in luring Slavorigin unaccompanied into the Museum? And four, and last for now, who’s to say your so-called loony isn’t actually one of the Festival’s official guests?’

That final question threw me, being the only one I hadn’t expected. Yet, even if I was by no means convinced I could knock down all four of her objections one after the other, I decided to take up the challenge.

‘In the first place, Evie, Slavorigin’s presence here was one of those secrets that could never be held secret for long. This Festival of ours, you’d agree, is a pretty amateurish affair – also the very first of its kind – and the last too, I fancy, after such a hoohah – and you don’t suppose, no, let me continue, you’ve had your say, you don’t suppose that, when they all heard to their stupefaction, if I’m not mistaken, that Slavorigin had actually accepted their ludicrously quixotic invitation, all those sweet, bungling young people who hand me your gin-and-tonic and you my whisky-on-the-rocks, you really don’t suppose that, even if sworn to silence on pain of the rack, they would have been capable of keeping so enthralling a piece of news to themselves? A word here, a word there, and it would have been all over the blogosphere.

‘Two, rabid rightwingers they may be, but I really do think that these bounty-hunters – and what a bounty! – would be savvy enough to disguise themselves before setting off on the great crusade. In fact, considering the average American’s ignorance of how we Europeans live, like something out of an episode of
The Simpsons,
I would guess, the kind of stranger I’d tend to look at twice is one wearing a Tyrolean hat and lederhosen instead of one in a Davy Crockett cap and leather britches.

‘Three, we have absolutely no cause to assume that our murderer needed to “lure” Slavorigin at all. We’ve all had to pay a dutiful visit to the Museum, but he arrived too late to join us. What could be more natural than for him to take a solitary stroll there, a matter of a few hundred yards from the Hilton, and also to be surreptitiously tailed?’ It was now my turn to ward off an impending interruption with a raised hand. ‘Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say. His bodyguards. Thomson and Thompson, as I call them. Why didn’t they insist on accompanying him? That
is
queer. Except that Slavorigin is, was, a spoilt brat, accustomed to getting his way in everything, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have wanted to shake off his twin shadows for a blissful half-hour or so on his own. After all, he must have said to himself, what could possibly happen to him in a sleepy hamlet like Meiringen?

‘As for your hunch – which is all it is, if I may take the liberty of quoting you – that one of the Festival’s guests could have been responsible, the problem as I see it is crucially one of motive. The motive of, let’s say, an
ideological
murderer positively screams out at us whereas, as far as our co-
festivaliers
are concerned, I have to admit to not having heard so much as a whisper.

‘Finally, let me raise an issue that you appear to have overlooked.’

‘Oh yes?’ she said, ever ready to bristle at the faintest hint of criticism.

‘What’s today’s date?’

‘The twelfth of September.’

‘Right. Which means that yesterday was the eleventh.’

‘I’m quite aware of that, Gilbert. How could I not be after all that’s happened here?’

‘Ah yes, but do you know – or do you remember – Gustav Slavorigin’s birthdate?’

‘Course I don’t. I met the man for the first time two days ago, and in the Festival’s booklet there was obviously no mini-bio of its Mystery Guest.’

‘Well, I do. He was born, wait for it, on July 4.’

‘Ah …’

‘Born on the Fourth of July, died September 11, exactly ten years to the day after the attack on the World Trade Center. Added to which, this is the year 2011. 2 equals the Twin Towers of 1 + 1 and 20 minus 11 equals 9. The numbers, Evie, the symbolism! For Hermann Hunt’s henchmen it would have been what Düttmann calls the “clincher”. Don’t forget, these are neanderthals who claim to detect a daffy significance in the fact that Manhattan Island was discovered on September 11, 1609, by Henry Hudson, whose name has eleven letters, that the first Tower collapsed at 10.28am and 1 + 0 + 2 + 8 = 11, that 119, 9/11 in reverse, is the area code for both Iraq and Iran (I and I) and 1 + 1 + 9 = 11, that the first of the two attacking planes was American Airlines Flight 11, number 1-800-245-0999 and 1 + 8 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 0 + 9 + 9 + 9 equals 47, which two numbers
combined also equal 11, that, standing side by side, the Twin Towers themselves resembled the number 11, that Hermann Hunt’s initials, like Henry Hudson’s, are HH, twin sets of Twin Towers – and I can assure you there’s a lot more gibberish out there where that came from.
*
If Slavorigin was to be murdered, yesterday was the day it had to be done. I rest my case.’