And Then There Was No One (15 page)

‘Well, Gilbert,’ Evie opined – said, goddamn it, said! – after a moment of reflection, ‘I can see that, despite your professed indifference to this crime, you have after all given it some thought. And I’m prepared to endorse your objections one, two and three. Yes, quite so, a Festival of this type would have been so leaky from the start that a lot of outsiders were bound to have had advance knowledge of Slavorigin’s attendance. And, yes, my caricature of a typical crazed crusader was crass in the extreme. And, yes again, although I’d very much like to have been the proverbial fly on the proverbial wall when they endeavoured to justify their negligence to the authorities, I can well imagine how easily those two brawny pin-heads, Thomson and Thompson, could have been outfoxed by somebody whose mind was set on it.

‘Furthermore, for your information, I had not at all overlooked the numerological symbolism of yesterday’s date. Good grief, Gilbert, even without the extra coincidence of Slavorigin having been born on America’s national holiday it was staring us all in the face. What isn’t staring us in the face, though, is how it undermines my theory that the murderer might have been one of the official invitees, two of whom, let me recall the fact to your attention, are Americans themselves. But any one of them might have been what you’ve just described as an ideological killer. More than once I’ve heard you make disobliging comments about this Festival. Has it never struck you as odd that it managed none the less to attract a not altogether undistinguished guest-list?’

‘Yes,’ I replied thoughtfully, ‘I confess it has rather. Yet writers, you know, will go anywhere if offered a freebie. Four days in the Swiss Alps, all expenses paid, and only a lecture to deliver for one’s supper. I can see how that might appeal.’

‘To Meredith van Demarest, who flew here all the way from California?’

‘Ah, but you’re forgetting that she also has plans to call on Agota Kristof in Zurich and pay homage to Nabokov in Montreux or wherever it is his remains are buried. She almost certainly regarded the Sherlock Holmes Festival as no more than a handy means for her to make the trip gratis. Anyway, what possible motive could she have?’

‘What motive? You surprise me. Putting to one side the ideological motive you mention above [above?], let me draw
your mind back to the revelation that she and Slavorigin had, if only for a single night, been an item.’

‘Which revelation means for you that she must have murdered him?’

‘Don’t be silly, please. I merely register the fact that they knew each other better than she was initially prepared to let on, a fact she may have had her own good reason for withholding from us.’

‘Perhaps so, yet I still can’t help thinking you’re pointlessly looking for any motive other than the glaringly obvious one. Remember Occam’s Razor. Don’t postulate the existence of an entity if you are able to get by without it. In other words, where there are several conceivable solutions to a problem, it makes sense, and it saves time, to opt for the simplest one, for nature never needlessly complicates.’

‘Pshaw!’ she exclaimed.

‘Evie,’ I said, smiling, ‘no one in the real world actually says “Pshaw!”.’

‘I do,’ she answered doughtily. ‘As for Occam’s Razor, we’re not dealing with nature but with human nature, of which the need to needlessly complicate has been, since the dawn of time, one of the defining characteristics. And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’

I should explain. This Gilbert was not me but G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton. In
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd,
set as it was in some unspecified year of the nineteen-thirties, I had
Evie, as a fictional member of the Detection Club, allude to one of its genuine members, Chesterton, as Gilbert or, more familiarly, as ‘my dear friend Gilbert’. How tiresome but typical of her that she should continue to perpetuate a now totally anachronistic affectation in order to aggrandise her own lonely and uneventful existence. It reminded me of another woman’s delusions of grandeur, a woman whose identity I was at first unable to pin down. Then it came to me: Margaret Thatcher’s references to Churchill, a statesman she couldn’t possibly have met, as ‘dear Winston’. Rewind the tape.

‘And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’

‘Go ahead,’ I said wearily.

‘“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.”’

‘I’m sorry, Evie, I’m not with you.’

‘There’s a price on Slavorigin’s head, an astronomical price which has tempted who knows how many hit men – and, quite possibly, the odd hit woman. That’s the forest. Meredith van Demarest has, let’s say, her own private and personal motive for doing away with him. That’s the leaf. Naturally, whoever does succeed in murdering him, everybody’s initial assumption is that it must have been one of Hermann Hunt’s bounty hunters. Don’t you see? What could be more cunningly Chestertonian than for her to hide the leaf of her individual motive in the forest of their collective one, this human forest which was edging ever closer to him like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane?’

‘H’m. And the ideological motive?’

‘Ideological motive?’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t I hear you imply that Meredith might also have had an ideological motive for doing away with Slavorigin?’

‘In spite of their one torrid night of passion, Meredith loathes Slavorigin. Loathes his arrogance, his preening vanity, his sneering macho boorishness, but perhaps more than anything else loathes his visceral anti-Americanism. She may be the ungiving, unforgiving kind of feminist who wants to prohibit the teaching of Dead White Males and rename Manchester Womanchester – or Womanbreaster, ha ha! But she is, through and through, an American and, like all of her fellow citizens, whatever their ideological differences, a true and intractable patriot. And if, as a radical left-winger, she spent most of her adult life alienated from all her native land’s populist rites and rituals, the shock of September 11 brought her back in a panicky rush to the soft, fleshy twin towers, as it were, of the maternal bosom, no questions asked, no apologies tendered, and to this day, and with all that’s happened since, she can no longer look on America’s enemies with the complicit or half-complicit eye of an old lefty. Did you, perchance, observe the brooch on the lapel of her jacket?’

‘Actually, since you ask, I did. I remember it had four or five words written on it. Something about American womanhood?’

‘You really must learn to be more attentive to details, Gilbert. It read: “For All The Women of America”.’

‘An obscure feminist clique, I dare say.’

‘Possibly. But now I want you to spell out the first capital letter of each word as if it were an acronym.’

‘F. A. T. W. O. A.’

‘The “o” of “of” was lower-case.’

‘F. A. T. W. A.’ (Gasp.) ‘Oh my God, fatwa!’

‘Fatwa, precisely. “Simple chance!” the pedestrian reader may cry. Especially as one would hardly expect a would-be murderess barefacedly to advertise her homicidal designs. Not, to be sure, that the advertisement was so very barefaced. The lettering on that brooch was awfully hard to decipher, even for my famous gimlet eye.’

With her spoon she scooped up her cappuccino’s thin chocolaty dregs and swallowed them.

‘Then there’s the money,’ she continued, smacking her lips. ‘We mustn’t ever forget the money, Gilbert. One hundred million dollars. That’s big change – please note, by the way, how even a fuddy-duddy like me, the me of your books, is capable of mastering modern slang. Poor dear Cora, who didn’t have a truly criminal bone in her body, was prepared to take her life in her hands by blackmailing Rex Hanway.
*
And for what? For nothing more than a role, a secondary role, mind you, in his film. Just imagine how
some normally high-principled, law-abiding individual, someone like Meredith van Demarest, to look no further, might be tempted to murder by the prospect of dosh so unimaginably large it boggles the mind.’

‘Cora Rutherford, you’re forgetting,’ I answered, ‘was merely a character in –’

‘Yes,’ Evie interrupted me, ‘it’s true, she
was
a character, an eccentric, the kind of person who refuses to believe that society’s codes and conventions ever apply to her. My point is that, where a hundred million dollars are involved, all the moral imperatives which dictate the way we conduct our private and professional lives are suspended. This Hugh Spaulding, for instance. I may be slandering him – like a lot of writers, he may be just as much of a character as Cora – but he does strike me as a man in urgent need of money.’

‘Funny you should say that.’

‘Why so?’

‘Well, only yesterday he asked me if I would lend him some. A tidy amount it was too, considering we barely know each other.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten thousand pounds. Though he said he’d settle for seven.’

‘Ten thousand! Blimey! Did he tell you what it was for?’

‘He’s being pursued by the Inland Revenue for years of unpaid back taxes. It appears he moved to London in the nineties when his books were bestsellers but never paid a
penny in tax. And now that his thrillers have gone out of fashion, or else he’s running out of sporting milieux to write about, the British tax authorities have caught up with him and he no longer has anything like the necessary wherewithal to pay them. He also squandered his royalties a few years back on some hilarious show-business venture,
Doctor Zhivago
on Ice,
I kid you not. But, please, you mustn’t ever let him know I told you.’

‘Mum’s the word. You didn’t lend it to him, I suppose?’

‘What do you think? The only money I’m ready to lend, even to close friends, is money I can afford to lose, and I certainly can’t afford to kiss goodbye to ten thousand pounds. There’s something else, though, which may be worth mentioning. As we were all waiting to go into dinner, I saw him attempt to ingratiate himself with Slavorigin. I too may be slandering him, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had tried to touch him for the same amount. Slavorigin may have been an arch-meanie, the man we loved to hate, but at least he had it to spare.’

‘Interesting, very interesting. But you mentioned sporting milieux?’

‘You don’t know his thrillers? Each of them is set in the world of a different sport. He’s apparently written scores of the things, about soccer, cricket, tennis – that’s the only one I read. He used to be a decent all-rounder himself, I believe, before he took to drinking heavily.’

‘Soccer, cricket, tennis … Archery, anyone?’

It took me a few seconds to understand what she was driving at.

‘H’m, I see what you mean. Well, let me think. It’s true, I’m not all that
au fait
with the Spaulding
oeuvre
. But Hugh did tell me once, when he was in his cups, that his big mistake as a writer was switching sports with each thriller instead of, like Dick Francis,
*
sticking with a single one, soccer ideally, and that he was so prolific that, in his later books, he found himself reduced to writing about motocross and curling, for God’s sake, and darts and the tedious Tour de France and … and yes, bullseye!’

‘What?’

‘I said
Bullseye
! That’s the title of one of his books.’

‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ exclaimed Evie. ‘You may be on to something there.’

‘Evie,’ I said tetchily, ‘must you keep exclaiming “Great Scott Moncrieff!”? The joke’s long since worn off.’

She looked back at me in reproachful surprise, but retained a dignified silence.

‘Oh well, never mind. To return to what we were talking about, I suppose it’s not wholly out of the question that Hugh possesses some small degree of skill with a bow and arrow, if that’s what you’ve been waiting to hear me say.’

‘You must say only what you know to be true and relevant.
Now let’s move on. Our friend Sanary. What motive are we to attribute to him, would you suggest?’

‘Your guess, Evie,’ I replied with a maladroitly stifled yawn, ‘is as good as mine.’

‘No, Gilbert, I fear that’s not the case at all. I rather fancy my guess is much better than yours. You see, I already have a theory about Sanary.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘My theory is that it may well have been Slavorigin who tried to murder Sanary, not vice versa.’

‘What!’

‘You heard me.’

‘Evie, be reasonable. I’ve indulged you to the extent of pretending, yes, pretending, that other murderers and other motives might exist for a crime which, in my opinion, is so limpid and lucid as to be in no need of such extramural explanations. Now you spring on me the theory that Sanary could have been the real victim and Slavorigin potentially the real murderer. My head’s spinning!’

‘Stop it spinning and listen, for this theory of mine may explain a lot. For example, it may just explain why as eminent a literary lion as Slavorigin would accept an invitation from one of the least-known literary festivals in the world. Why, I say? Perhaps because he noticed from the literature he received from Düttmann that one of his fellow guests would be Pierre Sanary, his enemy quite as much as Hermann Hunt V, a man who had already caught him out in
two whopping fibs and was now threatening to add insult to injury, intellectual disgrace to social ostracism, by destroying not his life but his reputation.’

‘So you think as Sanary does, that Slavorigin is a serial plagiarist, a cannibal of other writers’ work? A Hannibal Lecter. A Hannibal
Lecteur.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. But I’ve given a lot of thought to plagiarists, and what people fail to comprehend is that, as with theft proper, there exist several categories of the offence. [Anticipating one of Evie’s ‘proverbial’ disgressions, I dreamt, again not for the first time, of attaching a silencer to her tongue.]

‘The easiest to forgive is of course the pickpocket’s petty larceny. What he steals is a noun here, an adjective there, nothing florid or conspicuous and above all no dazzlingly original similes or metaphors, which like expensive jewellery can be too easily traced. Then there are the shoplifters who, systematically combing through some rival’s book, will make off with a few, but never too many, of its shorter and neater phrases. The counterfeiters are those who nick entire paragraphs, type them out on their computers and, a Thesaurus propped up on their knees, painstakingly replace every rare or rarish word with a suitable synonym. Last are the embezzlers. What they have is a word-flow problem. They know precisely what it is they want to say but they can’t find the language in which to say it. Suddenly they recall that X, writing on a more or less identical topic, managed
to express a similar sentiment with enviable succinctness. So, but only to get the words flowing again, you understand, they “borrow” the entire passage, intending to return it to its rightful owner when their own little local difficulty has been overcome. Except, of course, that they almost never do.’