And Then There Was No One (18 page)

‘Now listen, Evie,’ I said, forgetting for a moment the serious pickle I myself was in, ‘you really must try to curb these cranky ravings of yours. They’re beginning to get out of hand.’

‘What
are
you talking about?’ she shot back, as though I were the one hallucinating, not she. ‘It made the front page of all the newspapers. Well, maybe not the – what did you call it? – the
“Guardian”
?’ she said with a genteel jeer.

‘And what,’ I asked her dully, ‘did you discover in the Museum?’

‘Well, Gilbert, I took my time. I was prepared to worry the stuffing out of that room. I poked my nose into everything – empty desk drawers, framed snapshots, pipes and pipe-rack, Conan Doyle’s bust, the cryptogram – everything except the blood-stained arrow itself, which had been removed, I suppose, to be forensically examined for fingerprints. Not that they’re going to find any – even you were canny enough to avoid making so elementary a blooper. I knew that, while you pretended to be snoring your head off in your room, you were actually keeping an early-morning rendezvous with Slavorigin at the Museum. I also knew that, once there, you shot him through the heart, at point-blank range – if I can use that expression for so primitive a weapon – with a bow-and-arrow. The arrow was already at your disposal, just waiting to be fired. But where had the bow come from?

‘It was while I was pondering that conundrum that I chanced to pick up the copy of
His Last Bow
that lay on a
little semi-circular wall-table.
His Last Bow
– now that seemed to me a curious coincidence. Then I noticed, next to it on the same table, Holmes’s violin, its bow laid diagonally on top of it. Another bow. Even curiouser. But, curiousest of all, I said to myself, was the fact that it was, so to speak, the wrong way round, as though in a looking-glass world or a parallel universe. In music-making, after all, the bow is a pendant to the violin and, in archery, the arrow is a pendant to the bow.

‘It was naughty of me, I know, but I picked up that violin – I took lots of music lessons when I was just a gal – and began to play one of my old never-to-be-forgotten party-pieces, Cyril Scott’s
Lullaby.
(Rhymes with alibi, Gilbert!) Well, talk of running a jagged fingernail down a blackboard. I am but an amateur, and a very rusty one at that, and I’m also aware that the difference between a wrong note on a piano, say, and a wrong note on a violin is that the former, wrong though it may be, is none the less, unlike the latter, a real note, but even at my pretty dismal worst I had never produced such an unholy screech. So I inspected the violin – and do you know what I found?’

‘What?’

‘I found that one of its strings had snapped in two. And I suddenly realised that I had also found the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
You
fired that arrow, Gilbert – you fired it
not from a bow but from a violin.
From Sherlock Holmes’s own violin.’

‘Oh really,’ I cried helplessly, ‘what utter nonsense you do speak! I doubt it’s even possible to fire an arrow from a violin.’

‘My dear,’ she said gravely, ‘decades of experience as both a writer and reader have taught me that in a whodunit anything, absolutely anything, is possible.’

There followed a brief pause. The blind pianist had updated his repertoire to Rodgers and Hammerstein. It felt so hot in the bar I could hardly breathe. I finally said to Evie:

‘It’s awfully stuffy in here. What say we take a walk before the others arrive for what sounds like a rather cheerless get-together?’

After another pause she agreed.

Everything converges at last. In silence Evie and I walked through the lovely, dark, deep woods like Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in
North by Northwest.
Suddenly, when we emerged into open ground, she came to a halt. Glancing in my direction, she took a few timid steps forward and peered over our path’s missing edge; then at once, and more nimbly than I might have expected, considering her age and weight, she nipped back in again. At the same time, we both became aware of a low, distant roar drowning out the beats of our two thumping hearts, the roar of what, at the climax to ‘The Final Problem’, Conan Doyle describes as ‘a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house’.

‘Why, it’s the Falls,’ Evie croaked. ‘We’re directly above the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Naturally we are,’ I replied. ‘Where did you think we were?’

‘Yes, but – but – I don’t understand.’

‘What is it you don’t understand?’

Blinking, she looked around her.

‘Where’s the souvenir shop I visited this afternoon? The funny little funicular? Where, to the point, are the railings? Shouldn’t there be railings here?’

‘Oh,’ said I, ‘haven’t you got it? We’re some distance away from all the props of so-called “civilisation”. Think of one of those tricks of perspective which vulgarising mathematicians have such a fondness for. The eye is so fixated on the sheer drop of the Falls it tends not to register that they’re also several hundred yards wide.’

‘Uh huh …’ she mumbled pensively – stop it! – while continuing to back off.

Thus far things had gone my way more smoothly than I had dared hope. No one had observed our quitting the hotel together; nor, along the mountain path, had we passed any rustic busybody who could have borne subsequent witness to our having been out in each other’s company. To cap it all, the moon had begun to rise on schedule. Yet I was still very nervous. I badly needed a cigarette – ‘the only new pleasure modern man has invented in eighteen hundred years,’ wrote the French pornographer and
belle-lettriste
Pierre Louÿs – and to hell with the alliterative linkage of tobacco and taboo. I had stopped smoking, it’s true, but I remained jammed at the fragile phase when I made certain I always had a full pack, plus a functioning lighter, somewhere about my person. So from my jacket pocket I drew out my new
pack of Dunhills, poked a cigarette between my lips and held the lighter up to them. Except that it wasn’t the lighter at all. To my great mortification, it was a tube of Polo Mints, of almost identical shape and size, which I kept in the same pocket, kept there, ironically, I guess the word has to be, for one of those crises when I just
had
to have a cigarette and then had to disguise the fact that I’d had one.

While Evie muffled a guffaw, I pulled the real lighter out and shakily lit my cigarette at last.

‘May I have one?’ she said.

‘You don’t smoke.’

‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

‘If you put it like that, then I suppose I’m asking you.’

‘Who says I don’t smoke?’

‘Well …’

‘I’ll tell you who. You.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. In those two whodunits of yours. It’s something you made up about me without consulting me first. Like a lot else.’

‘What are you saying? You’re actually a forty-a-day addict?’

‘No,’ she answered wearily, ‘but I do enjoy an occasional ciggie. Are you going to offer me one or not?’

‘Certainly I am,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid, though, I can’t oblige with Players or Senior Service.’

‘Dunhills were also smoked in the thirties, if that’s the point you’re making.’

‘How would you know? You weren’t even born then.’

‘I looked it up on Wikipedia. When I was researching one of my books.’

I held out the blood-red pack and lit up her cigarette. And, I have to say, unlike the Evadne Mount of my whodunits, she did appear to be at ease with it, horsily exhaling the first intake of smoke through her leathery nostrils before, like an old hand, giving its glowing tip a brief inspection.

‘This, I assume,’ she said, ‘is the condemned woman’s last cigarette.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Come now, let’s not play games with one another. Why else would you bring me here if not to try and kill me? Just like Conan Doyle. The jealous author rids himself of a character who has started to upstage him by hurling him – or, in my case, her – over the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Pah! You aren’t nearly as famous as Sherlock Holmes.’

‘And just whose fault is that, Gilbert?’

I was beginning to have a real problem containing my detestation of her.

‘But it
is
why you brought me here, isn’t it?’ she went on, unperturbed. ‘To try and kill me?’

‘You keep saying “try”. Why? As even you must realise, in this lonely colonnade of trees there’s nothing – nothing and no one – to prevent me from succeeding.’

‘I might be armed.’

‘I know you’re not.’

‘How so?’

‘You wouldn’t have got through security at Heathrow with a pair of nail-clippers, let alone a pearl-handed pistol, and you’ve certainly had no opportunity of obtaining a gun in Meiringen. Switzerland isn’t some banana republic of despots and sexpots, you know, where a moustachioed moocher in a soiled white suit will happily exchange a second-hand revolver for a few greasy greenbacks.’

She ejaculated again.

‘Despots and sexpots! Greasy greenbacks! God, that’s just so typical of you! There’s not a single reader out there who needs to be told that Switzerland isn’t a banana republic. But you – you don’t think twice about breaking the rhythm of your narrative if it means taking time off to admire one of your own irrelevant metaphors. Who do you think you are? Vladimir Nabokov? A Scotch McNabokov?
The Nabokov of Notting Hill
? Vlad the Impostor? As dear Cora would have said, puh-lease!’

That stung. ‘They weren’t metaphors, they were alliterations,’ was all I was able lamely to answer.

‘Same difference. They stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs.’

‘Stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs, did they?’ I jeered at her. ‘Poor Evie, no one’s ever going to compliment you on the originality of
your
metaphors.’

‘The point, Gilbert, is that you’ve always been such a narcissistic writer. Which is why you’ve never had the popular
touch, not even when writing whodunits. No one but himself loves a narcissist, or even likes a narcissist – and, I must tell you, Jane and Joe Public know in advance that, because of your overbearing egotism, there’s going to be precious little room left in your books for them.’

‘Oh, the banter! The banter!’ I cried, like Conrad’s Kurtz.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ she remarked with, in the circumstances, such amazing coolness I set to wondering whether she knew something I didn’t. ‘We’re wasting time. Are you going to tell me why you murdered Slavorigin? And don’t bother pretending you didn’t. We’ve come too far along the road, and we’re too close to the end of the plot, for that.’

‘You who know everything,’ I replied, ‘why don’t you tell me?’

She took a last puff on the Dunhill, then flicked the half-smoked cigarette over into the ravine with the sort of effortlessness that comes only with practice.

‘Since you ask, I’m rather inclined to believe it was a
crime passionnel.
To be more precise, a long-deferred
crime passionnel.’

‘Explain.’

‘Naturally,’ she opined – said! said! said! – ‘naturally, when I understood that you and only you could have been the murderer, I started sniffing around for a motive. I immediately ruled out money. I could observe, from the queasy way you circled each other when you were introduced, that you and Slavorigin were more than merely professional literary
acquaintances. But no matter how sketchy a picture I had of your shared past – if any – I simply couldn’t conceive of a relationship which would involve your gaining financially from his death. There was of course his prestige as a writer, a prestige you most certainly envied – ah, envy, Gilbert, envy! – although not enough, surely, to provoke you to murder. Which seemed to leave just one motive – sexual jealousy. You had both been at Edinburgh University and at much the same time. Notwithstanding his night at the Carlyle with Meredith, he was homosexual, which it’s obvious you are as well, obvious even if you hadn’t written that disgusting
Buenas Noches Buenos Aires
book. He was attractive, which you obviously aren’t. And when you and he first met all those years ago, he must have been out-and-out gorgeous, which even then you could obviously never have been.
Ergo
–’

‘What a witch you are!’ I cried.

‘So I
have
touched a sore point?’

‘For pity’s sake, no clichés. This isn’t one of your whodunits.’

‘I have, haven’t I?’

She was right. It was too late to lie. Almost forgetting why we were there, although in reality not at all, I decided to tell her about Gustav and me.

Yes, it was in Edinburgh that we first met – at, of all improbable settings, an orgy.

He was sitting alone, in profile from my point of view,
curled up on the carpet, his back resting against an unoccupied divan, in uncannily the pose of Flandrin’s
Jeune Homme assis au bord de la mer.
His naked arms were wrapped around his knees and his head was tilted so far forward, concealing four-fifths of his face, that his eyes were invisible to me. It wasn’t even his body as such but its linear silhouette which attracted my attention, from the nape of his neck and his shiny shoulder-blades down along the perfect curve of his back.

He lazily uncurled himself and steered his gaze straight at me. He was darker than most in the heavily curtained room, with foppishly lank black hair, black eyes, brilliantly white and even teeth, and a wispy burnt bush of chest-hair. We looked into each other’s faces for a moment or two, and I started to wonder if he was wordlessly inviting me to join him when he himself stood up and picked his nimble way through the snake pit between us.

Once at my side, smiling, he said a single word:

‘Gustav.’

At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard right and I asked him to repeat it. He did, this time I understood and answered in kind.

‘Gilbert.’

I at once felt confident enough to raise the stakes.

‘Shall we …?’

He smiled again, but shook his head too and said something that was ridiculous if also, when you think of it, magnificent.

‘Not here.’

‘Not here?’

‘I’m with somebody,’ he explained, turning to look over his own shoulder. Then, smiling still, he patted the two pocketless sides of his naked body.

‘This is terrible. I want to give you my number, but I’ve got nothing to write it on. Or with.’

‘Then just tell me,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll remember.’

He did, and I did.

‘How terribly, terribly poignant,’ Evie broke in, ‘but could we please get to the other end of the story?’

‘The other end?’

‘When and why you fell out.’

Ignoring her, I continued.

Our first date took place just two days later in a pub that I had never frequented. He arrived before me, but only by literally a couple of minutes, so he insisted. And there was something wonderfully topsy-turvy to me about meeting, fully clothed – to this day, if I close my eyes, I can see his black Saint-Laurent jacket, pale grey slacks, grey-black roll-neck pullover, black untasselled loafers – about meeting a stranger, which he still was, who had been stark naked when I originally set eyes on him. So vivid in my memory was that earlier encounter that, the first thirty minutes we spent together, the spectral afterimage of his nudity had the effect of rendering his clothing all but transparent.

Evie’s echoing boom again disrupted my reverie.

‘What in God’s name have a Saint-Laurent jacket and a pair of black loafers to do with anything? Get on, won’t you!’

That night we went straight from the pub to his digs, practically without exchanging a word, and became lovers. Three days later, I moved in with him.

Oh, he was adorable! During the sixteen months of our cohabitation Gustav remained such a
boy,
what the French call a
grand gamin,
distracted by everything about him, by an interesting-looking ballpoint pen that he would insist on clicking for himself, and clicking again, and again; by a camera, any camera, anyone’s camera; by a slimline pocket calculator; by a fleeting face in the crowd, even one that wasn’t, for how could it be, a patch on his own.

As for his body, every single part of it – his shoulder-blades, the hollows behind his knees, the hairy, aromatic spaces between his toes – became for me an erogenous zone. There should perhaps be another word for ‘we’, a separate grammatical form, when it refers to two people in love. A ‘singular’ we?

Yes, we sometimes bickered, and not always tenderly, each of us boasting a kitty of pet tics that set the other’s teeth on edge. He was driven to silent rage – silent because, for the longest time, he said nothing to me of his exasperation and it was only when I asked what was eating him that he let me have it – driven to rage, I say, by my habit, when wondering whether or not to buy a book, of pawing it in the bookshop for minutes on end before, having at last made up my mind,
picking up
another
copy, an
unpawed
copy, unpawed by me, to carry off to the sales counter. I felt likewise about his habit of wedging taste-drained wads of chewing-gum on the undersides of chair castors and the paper-lined insides of kitchen-cabinet drawers; also of his forgetting, as if it were the most delightful quirk in the world, where he had parked the Mini whenever we sleepily staggered out of some club at five in the morning.

We shared our lives, I repeat, for sixteen months. Gustav was the first to graduate, in the summer of the following year, with a B.A. in English. But he hung on for several months afterwards in Edinburgh, except for an overnight stay in Sofia for the hundredth birthday of one of his two surviving great-grandfathers. Later that year, in August, we spent a squally fortnight together in blisteringly hot, madly gay Mykonos.