And Then There Was No One

by Gilbert Adair

  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.’r />
  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.

  * Interestingly, it has long been rumoured of Hermann Hunt V that, being of too craven a disposition to ingest any of the better-known mind-altering substances but curious none the less to experience their effect, he once paid – handsomely, as usual – a locally based avant-gardist theatrical troupe to ‘act out’ a series of hallucinations in front of him. I personally have never believed the story.

  † Which of the two would come out on top? I was reminded of the old metaphysical conundrum: Can God, who after all can do everything, create an object so heavy not even He can lift it off the ground?

  Chapter Nine

  ‘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.’