And Then There Was No One (5 page)

‘Come come, Gilbert, I refuse to believe you haven’t read Truffaut’s book of interviews with Hitchcock.’

‘Yes, of course I have.’

‘Indeed, you must have done. You parodied it, did you not, in your novel
A Mysterious Affair of Style.
Well, don’t you remember what Hitch said about
Secret Agent,
his adaptation of Maugham’s Ashenden stories?’

Already tiring of his oneupmanship, I shook my head.

‘I quote [but how did he quote? Did he have a photographic memory?]: “One of the interesting aspects of the picture is that the action takes place in Switzerland. I said to myself, ‘What do they have in Switzerland?’ They have milk
chocolate, they have the Alps, they have village dances, and they have lakes. All of these natural ingredients were woven into the picture.”

‘Mais quel con!
Natural ingredients? Milk chocolate? Village dances?
Village dances??
And Truffaut,
cet autre con,
instead of suggesting, oh ever so politely, ever so deferentially, that one might have the right to expect a filmmaker of Hitchcock’s stature either to invert or, better still, avoid outright such whiskery old clichés, can only reply,
imbécile
that he is, “That’s why the spies have their headquarters in a chocolate factory!” And this is what the French affect to think of as advanced theory? What a couple of blockheads! No? No? True? Faux?’

Then, before I knew how it happened, his monologue had turned again – for Sanary there existed no such thing as a
non sequitur
– to a trio of musical themes, from Puccini’s
Gianni Schicchi,
d’Indy’s
Symphonie sur un Chant Montagnard
Français
and Casella’s
Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano,
all three of which he hummed for us there and then to demonstrate how the composer Bernard Herrmann had purloined them for a few of his best-known scores for Hitchcock’s films. To listen to him, the history of art, of all the arts, was nothing but an unending charge-sheet of theft and countertheft.
‡

He mentioned too, now almost as an afterthought, that not the least of the many logical absurdities in
North by Northwest,
one of the three films, incidentally, whose soundtrack scores he had exposed as second-hand, were the green and improbably symmetrical woods that Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint traverse on their way to the monumental kitsch of Mount Rushmore.

‘I took it upon myself to investigate,’ he declared. ‘There are no such woods,’ adding cavalierly, ‘not, of course, that that matters a jot.’

Düttman, meanwhile, was delighted not just that his eminent guests had taken no time at all to live up to their reputations for argumentative opinionation but also, somewhat contradictorily, that they were all getting on so well together.

As the conversation drew to an end, and Düttmann settled the bill, I was suddenly distracted by an irridescent soap bubble that wafted by my left ear and threatened to pop on the tip of my nose. Then another, and another, then a big fat one, then lots of delicately dainty little ones bumping and bursting against each other: it went on for so long I almost began to wonder if it could be some new, charming and as yet unrecorded species of weather. Turning my head to track it to its source, I noticed at another of the café’s terrace tables, but as far away from us as it was possible to be, the cherubic twins from the flight. Each of them, ignoring the glass of orangeade which stood on the table before him, was blowing a rash of pixilated burps and borborygmi out
through a minute eye-glass on a stick. As on the plane, their parents sat apart, intently discussing some matter of import. They too left their coffees untouched and, from time to time, one of them would good-humouredly swat a bubble. Were they in Meiringen, I wondered, for the Sherlock Holmes Festival? It didn’t appear likely. But what other reason could there be?

Back in my room, I relaxed for an hour in the tub, before pulling the plug to let the slowly receding bathwater perform a soapy striptease over my recumbent nakedness. Then, feeling much refreshed, I strolled down to the Künsthalle, which was only a ten-minute walk from the hotel, and in its bar met up with Düttmann, Hugh, looking sprucer but with something on his mind, Sanary, who had changed into another, almost identical black blazer, the taciturn G. Autry, who, wearing jeans, a hyper-virile denim jacket and a shapeless Stetson hat in spite of being unrelated to singing cowboy Gene, addressed the one word ‘Hi’ to me, a few hovering members of the Festival’s youthful ‘creative team’ who, I couldn’t help noticing, outnumbered us guests three to one, and Meredith van Demarest.

I take no pleasure in coming clean – as I failed to do, deliberately, I suppose, when I first mentioned her name in this memoir – but, physically, Meredith was a stunner. Like
all of us, she wasn’t as young as she used to be – in her mid-forties, most likely – and there was a slightly brassy quality to her slick long blond hair and a glazed Valley vacuousness to her face, which was also blond if you know what I mean. But there could be no denying the fact that that face was almost boringly perfect in form and feature, with its pale tan complexion, sharply highlighted cheekbones and two unexpectedly pitch-black eyebrows. (Was her hair dyed or was it her eyebrows?) Or that her figure caused the long since obsolete, now politically incorrect, expression ‘vital statistics’ to swim up to the surface of one’s memory. She was also tall, far taller than me and, as I watched her swan through the bar of the Kunsthalle towards us, I thought of a blowsily voluptuous B-movie actress whose initials she shared, Mamie van Doren, with the crucial difference that Meredith was an academic, not a film star, a fact which somehow rendered her all the more eyeball-distendingly sexy. As for her behavioural charm, it was, I repeat, of the drawly, eyelash-batting type which is always called ‘disarming’ but which instantly puts me on my guard.

‘Gilbert …’ she said softly. ‘After all these years …’

‘Meredith.’

‘So how are you?’

‘Oh, you know. How is anybody these days?’

‘Mmmm.’

She turned to Düttmann, who took her dry martini off a waiter’s tray and passed it over to her.

‘Thank you so much. You probably didn’t know this, Tommy, but Gilbert and I are old acquaintances.’ (Her ‘probably’ she pronounced as a drawn-out ‘praaahhhly’.)

‘Really? You and – no, I confess I did not know that.’

‘We first met several years ago. Antibes. The French Riviera. How long ago would it have been, Gilbert?’

I had been straining to read what was written on a curiously shaped brooch – of a snake swallowing its own rear end – pinned onto one of the lapels of her grey slim-waisted cotton jacket, and it was only after I had at last made out the words (I think) ‘For All The Women of America’ that I replied to her question.

‘Actually, Meredith, if you think about it, it’s an easy enough calculation. You recall, it was just after September 11. A matter of days after, if I’m not mistaken. So: September 15, 2001, let’s say, to September 10, 2011. A decade almost to the day.’

‘And what a decade it was,’ observed our host.

Meredith smiled. Perfect teeth, natch.

‘You must understand, though, Tommy, that that first meeting of ours was not a success.’

‘No?’

‘No. We definitely didn’t hit it off. I have no desire to reopen old wounds but, as Gilbert rightly remembers, it was just after 9/11 and we were all good, patriotic, united Americans then, and to hell with our ideological quarrels. And no wonder. We thought it was the end of the world, and we
wanted a President who would tuck us into our beds with a promise that the bogey man wouldn’t come and murder us in the night. It sounds kind of puerile now, even babyish, but it was real scary back then and I’m afraid Gilbert just didn’t get it. I can’t blame him any more – nobody who wasn’t American could have got it – and it was a long time ago and some of the things he said then, things that seemed obnoxious to me, have since come to make better sense – though if something’s true now it doesn’t necessarily mean it was always true, right? Anyway, even though it took us longer than all of you to see through that asshole President of ours, we finally did. My God, we finally did! As another President once said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’

I was half-expecting Sanary to inform us that the original of the Lincoln quote could actually be traced back to Chaucer, say, or
The Faerie Queen;
but, if he had such a notion, he was given no opportunity to share it. One of the ‘creative team’ discreetly raising a wrist, and a purple Swatch wristwatch, to Düttmann’s eyes, the latter requested us all to please finish our drinks and proceed to the lecture hall, where we were awaited by an expectant full house.

The house
was
full. While the others were shown to a half-dozen reserved end-of-row seats, one of which, Umberto Eco’s I suppose, remained empty throughout, Jochen and I manoeuvred our tiptoeing way to the platform along a centre parting in which a half-dozen young people sat cross-legged on the wooden floor with bottles of mineral water on their laps. No applause as yet. Jochen spread his notes in front of him, tapped the microphone and, without, as they say, further ado, started to introduce me in German. Some laughter (I don’t know why), a smattering of applause at the end. He turned to me with an encouraging smile. I removed my glasses – I look better with but read better without them – opened my much-fingered copy of
The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
, took a last unfocused look round the hall, lowered my gaze and began:

‘It has long been an axiom of mine,’ said Sherlock Holmes, wearily glancing up from the formidable web of beakers and test-tubes which seethed and bubbled before his eyes, ‘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 turned my head in his direction. Having just re-entered the lodgings in Baker Street that we shared, from several hours passed at the bedside of a gravely ill patient of mine, I had at once buried myself in the day’s newspapers, perusing them from cover to cover, and had in consequence paid little attention to either my companion or his activities. I contemplated him now. He had evidently chosen to perform one of his amateur experiments with acids and sulphates and, as was all too often true of his intense but also intensely volatile temperament, had come to tire of the pastime with the same sudden swiftness as he had undoubtedly embarked upon it. I myself could have asked at that moment for no more than to continue reading the news without interruption; but, being made belatedly aware that my day, although fatiguing in its exertions and still uncertain as to its outcome, had been filled with incident, I was bound to observe the soundness of his observation.

‘Consider, for instance, my own case,’ Holmes broodily went on, as he took down from the pipe-rack by the fireside what looked to be the oiliest and most ancient of his extensive collection of clay pipes and viciously tapped the dottle into the grate. ‘Here have I been, today, with all the leisure in the world to do with as I pleased, to commence the monograph I have been planning to write on the significance of the typewriter key in modern detection or else’ – and with his languidly tapering forefinger he indicated the instruments arrayed in front of him – ‘undertake this amiable if futile little experiment. And yet, I swear, time has hung far heavier on my hands than on those of the potboy or crossing-sweeper who, since he awoke this morning, has assuredly done nothing but curse the drudgery of his quotidian round. No, my dear Watson,’ he concluded, shaking his head, which was already enhaloed by a cloud of noisome tobacco fumes, ‘it is some holiday excursion, or at the racecourse, or at the Opera when neither Madame Tetrazzini nor the divine Melba is singing – it is there, I say, that we learn to our cost what boredom truly means!’

Long experience had taught me to recognise the symptoms. Only a few days before, Holmes had brought to a satisfying conclusion a sordid affair of blackmail involving as its innocent party one of the noblest, most exalted names in England, and he was at present feelingly aware of his idleness.

‘You have overtaxed yourself of late,’ I said. ‘Perhaps such enforced inaction is a blessing in disguise.’

‘Bah!’ he practically snarled at me. ‘If there is one thing I abominate, it is a blessing in disguise. Surely blessings of any kind are sufficiently uncommon not to have to don a mask? Besides, it is not a blessing in disguise of which I stand most in need, but a criminal in disguise. Alas! The whole city of London appears to have reverted to “the straight and narrer”, as our good Lestrade enjoys putting it. Where are they now, the Napoleons of crime? Languishing on Elba, I dare say.’

‘If they are, then it is you yourself you must blame, Holmes,’ I returned good-naturedly, ‘for you have been their Iron Duke.’ Laying down my copy of the
Gazette,
I rose from the settee and stepped over to the window to draw the curtains. It was an evening in early autumn, grey and overcast but not yet dark; save for an occasional scudding cloud-ball, the dimmed lustre of the heavens was even and neutral-tinted. At once attracting my eye, however, was a gentleman of somewhat cadaverous aspect who stood on the pavement opposite and who seemed quite overwhelmed by a heavy tweed overcoat which enveloped his thin frame like a bell-tent. In his left hand he held a small, unfolded piece of paper, and alternated between consulting it and peering up at the succession of house-numbers which confronted him. At last, having located the number he was searching for (as I surmised), he picked up the travelling-bag which had been sitting on the pavement beside him, crossed the street with a forthright stride and soon quit my view altogether.

‘Well, I fancy your Calvary is at an end,’ I remarked, ‘for, unless I am much mistaken, the bell will ring this very minute to announce a new client.’

Holmes growled churlishly from the depths of his armchair. ‘A client, is it? Most likely the distraught owner of a terrier gone missing from Kensington Gardens.’

‘We shall soon find out,’ I replied: ‘here he is now.’

In effect, the front doorbell had already chimed, two sets of footsteps were to be heard on the stairs, and an instant later Mrs. Hudson was ushering into our room the very gentleman I had spied in the street below.

At a first glance, the man who stood before us was somewhere in his fifties. The almost military erectness of his bearing was impaired by a slight but perceptible stoop in his shoulders. From each side of his head, which was totally bald at the middle, protruded a shapeless tuft of white, fleecy hair resembling the stuffing from a mattress. And, divested as he now was of his generously sized overcoat, he could be seen to be most amazingly lean and bony, with facial features so near-skeletal that, taken along with his keen, lively eyes and unexpectedly warm skin colouring, I thought of a death’s-head with a lighted candle posed inside it.

Since Holmes had not yet thrown off his fit of petulance, and appeared disinclined to do the honours, it was I who went forward, presented my companion and myself, and invited our visitor to take a chair.

‘My dear sirs,’ he murmured apologetically, ‘you must forgive me for intruding on your intimacy unannounced, and at this late hour, but I … I truly am at my wits’ end. If I had known where else I might turn, I assure you I would never have presumed to disturb you. Oh, but here I am so far forgetting myself that I have failed to offer you my card.’

‘And yet, even as you are, you are not entirely a stranger to us,’ said I. ‘Am I not right, Holmes?’

‘Why,’ said our visitor, perplexed, ‘what can you mean? To my recollection, we have not met before.’

‘I mean only,’ I answered, eager this once to exercise my own powers of deduction, ‘that you are obviously left-handed and a former Army officer, that you have a brother of far stockier physique than yourself and that, having lived in Devon for a good many years, you are naturally unfamiliar with our metropolis.’

‘But, bless my soul, sir, you astonish me!’ he cried. ‘I can hardly believe –’

‘Oh,’ I said lightly, ‘it was really very elementary, you know. Your left-handedness you gave away when –’

‘Dr. Watson,’ he interrupted me in no little degree of agitation, ‘if I say you astonish me, it is that I am in fact right-handed, I have never been a soldier, I was an only child, I have had to visit London four times this past fortnight and, far from living in Devon, I’ve not once set foot in the place!’

For a moment or two there was a disconcerting silence; then, to my relief, Holmes suavely intervened.

‘My friend Watson here,’ he said, ‘whom it has amused to chronicle a few of my trifling successes, has, as you may observe, his own rather underhand method of enquiry. To wit, by postulating the exact contrary of what he senses to be true, he hopes to elicit all the requisite information at once.’ He yawned. ‘It sometimes works.’

‘Most … most ingenious,’ responded our visitor, although, to judge by his prolonged scrutiny of me, his doubts as to my competence, and possibly even my sanity, were by no means allayed.

‘But to your problem,’ Holmes went on. ‘You are, I think, Dr. Eustace Gable, one of our most esteemed botanists. Oh, be assured,’ he drawled, seeing his interlocutor about to speak, ‘it is through no process of ratiocination that I have identified you. It happens that I recently attended an event at the Royal Botanical Society at which you read a most stimulating paper on the variety and luxuriance of South American fronds.’

‘Fronds are my passion, Mr. Holmes!’ Gable said fervently. ‘And, in a way, it is that passion that has brought me here tonight.’

‘Pray continue,’ said Holmes, placing the tips of his fingers together and pensively propping his chin upon them.

‘I should explain that I inhabit a large family estate called The Gables, by a curious coincidence, and situated halfway between Aylesbury and the village of Mentmore. The servants apart, the sole company I have in my rather lonely
household are my sons James and Edward. They are not brothers, you understand, but half-brothers: my first wife died in childbirth, poor dear girl, and my second barely more than twelvemonth ago. Yet James and Edward have been as loving to one another as if they were indeed brothers, and their pranks have brightened many a winter evening for me.

‘Now it’s this way, Mr. Holmes. As I have said, I specialise, as a botanist, in those leaves characteristic of the palm or fern, and my enthusiasm has made of me a
much-travelled
man. There scarcely remains a corner of the globe to which I have not ventured in search of rare specimens, and I lately spent a fascinating two months in Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. Well, exactly four weeks ago we docked at Southampton and the specimens I had had crated in Padang were forwarded to Aylesbury by the railway and then brought to the house by my man Jerrold in the dog-cart.

‘It was on that morning that was set in motion the inexplicable train of events which prompted me to seek outside assistance. We were in the kitchen – my two boys and I, along with one or two members of the staff – watching Jerrold screw open the crates with a crowbar. And it was when we were starting to lay the fronds out on the fine tissue paper which I purchase and store for just that purpose that, with a frightful scream, Jerrold suddenly withdrew his bare arm from within one of the crates. Gathering about him, we were
all aghast to find him bleeding copiously from a profound and horribly corrugated gash in his wrist. Although he has always been of a robust constitution, I own I was quite afraid for him: he had in a trice turned white, there was terror in his eyes and my foremost anxiety was that he was about to faint. However, the thing appeared so abruptly I had no more time to think about him.’

‘The thing?’ echoed Holmes, rousing himself at last from the apathy into which he had sunk and fixing Gable with a penetrating eye. ‘What nature of thing?’

‘The rat!’ cried Gable.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Holmes, now bolt upright.

‘A rat, a giant rat!’ Gable went on breathlessly. ‘Oh, when I call it a giant, you must not infer from the term that there was anything supernatural about its size – I make this distinction now that you may better understand the import of what is to follow – but by the standard of our common-or-garden English rodents it certainly was disagreeably large. It darted from the crate, scurried across the kitchen floor and vanished out of the door leading to the main hallway.’

‘But this rat,’ I asked: ‘where could it have sprung from?’

‘Well, Dr. Watson,’ Gable replied, ‘when you collect and study fronds, you learn to expect the discovery of all kinds of living creatures, spiders, beetles and a few rather more outlandish insects, which have crept unnoticed inside the packing crates. But a rat, and of such a dimension! I can only suppose that the native bearers, who are lazy at the best
of times, had been especially dilatory. The point, Mr. Holmes, is that this … this rat has poisoned my whole existence! Although I myself am persuaded that it must have made its way into the grounds, where it would soon have perished for want of its natural sources of nourishment, it has not ceased to cast an evil shadow over my house.’

‘You interest me extremely,’ said Holmes, refilling his pipe. ‘Continue, do.’

‘I know not if it is the animal itself or its legend that has since grown to monstrous proportions, but we have all, for a month now, heard queer nocturnal patterings under the floorboards as of some huge, restless beast on the prowl. Meat has been found, half-devoured and spat out in a corner of the pantry. And if these manifestations already had the servants quivering with dread, just above a week ago one of the scullery maids, on her way upstairs to bed, saw what she swears was an enormous rat, with bright yellow phosphorescent eyes and a head the size of a full-grown otter’s, slithering across the first-floor landing! On that same night, too, as the first excitement was subsiding at last, there was a further alarum when Edward awoke to find the creature lurking in his bedroom.’

‘And Jerrold?’ Holmes asked. ‘How has he fared?’

‘Jerrold?’ said Gable, seeming distracted by the question. ‘Oh, he lay in a bad fever for several days but is now quite recovered. My worry is not with Jerrold. It is with servants who daily threaten to hand in their notice, with tradesmen
who will no longer deliver their wares – the atmosphere in the household has become, as I say, poisonous, quite unbreathable. As a man of science, I refuse to lend credence to old wives’ tales of phantom rodents with phosphorescent eyes, but I tell you something must be done or I shall go insane! Will you help me, Mr. Holmes?’