‘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.’
‘And Slavorigin?’
‘Well, there’s no way I can be sure as yet, but my instinct is that, if Sanary’s energy and erudition can be trusted, and I believe they can, it’s to that last category that Slavorigin belonged. And considering that he was already on a jinxy streak, it’s by no means impossible that this second threat might have pushed him over the edge.’
‘Might, might, might! Evie, I wish now I’d begun to count from the top the number of times you’ve used that handy but unreliable conditional in your exposition. None of this, clever as it is, amounts to more than pure conjecture, you know.’
‘Of course I know. Just as it’s pure conjecture to attribute Slavorigin’s murder to the presence of some lurking loony on whom none of us have ever set eyes.’
‘True. But go on. You claimed your theory would explain a lot. Surely that wasn’t all of it?’
‘No, it isn’t. When I asked above [above??] how Slavorigin could have let himself be lured unaccompanied out of the hotel, you objected that it might not have happened that way; that, deciding on a whim to pay an impromptu visit to the Museum, he might have chosen for once to dispense with his minders’ irksome vigilance. Well, but what if there was a luring after all, except that it was he, Slavorigin himself, who did it? After all, it was just as possible for him to have inveigled Sanary into meeting him at the Museum as the other way round. As for how he meant to commit the crime, I wouldn’t know. But let’s say a struggle ensued, Sanary eventually gained the upper hand and killed the man who had come to kill him.’
‘By firing an arrow from a bow which has disappeared as mysteriously as it once materialised?’
‘Ah well, Gilbert, that bow remains the unknown quantity of any theory either of us might offer the other. But please don’t forget, when we discovered Slavorigin’s body, it was Sanary who almost at once laid both his hands on it, something he must have been aware he was not supposed to do. Isn’t it possible he wanted to make certain there would be a legitimate reason for his fingerprints being found all over the corpse?’
‘True, true. Yet there’s also the fact that, if it actually turns out that you’re right, it would have been an open-and-shut case of self-defence. Why, then, hasn’t Sanary come forward to explain himself?’
‘Would you?’
‘Well …’
‘Come now, Gilbert. Let’s hypothesise. Let’s assume, just for the argument’s sake, that you yourself are in a position where you’re forced to kill Slavorigin in self-defence, not with your bare arms, not with some handy poker, not by knocking him down and inadvertently causing him to brain himself against a brass fireguard, say, but by shooting some equally handy arrow into his heart’ – again the comical Noli Me Tangere gesture – ‘yes, yes, I realise we know only where the arrow came from, not the bow, but forget that for the nonce. If you had to take so extreme a measure, seriously, would you rush back into the Kunsthalle to announce your guilt to the company which you had left just ten minutes before? Especially when everyone in that company was aware, and the police would soon have to be made aware, that you and your victim happened not to be on the friendliest of terms?’
‘No … no, I suppose not. It would be too easy, and thus too tempting, to make a reappearance as if nothing at all were amiss. Frankly, though, as far as I’m concerned, what scuttles your argument of self-defence is the choice of weapon. When someone attempts to defend himself against an assailant, he surely seizes on the weapon nearest to hand, any weapon, even some blunt object or instrument that was never intended to be used as a weapon. On the other hand, there can be no getting away from the fact that a murder by bow-and-arrow – the bow having to be supplied by the murderer himself – is a premeditated murder. It must be. No, Evie, I’m afraid, when I listen to you theorise, my bottom starts to itch.’
I at once wanted to bite off my tongue. Why? In A Mysterious Affair of Style, the whodunit on which, for a number of inglorious reasons, I had shamefully failed to consult Evie, there is a scene in the Ritz Bar fairly late in the narrative where Evadne Mount’s sidekick, the frequently forementioned Trubshawe, expounds his theory on the possible motive behind the murder of the stage and screen actress Cora Rutherford, Evadne’s oldest and dearest friend, once young and famous, now fiftyish if she’s a day and fading fast. Even if, it’s implied, Evadne is secretly intrigued by the ingenuity of Trubshawe’s theory, she none the less announces to him that she remains unpersuaded. When asked why, she replies to his astonishment that her bottom itches; that, if I may quote from myself, ‘Whenever I read a whodunit by one of my rivals, my so-called rivals, and I encounter some device – I don’t know, a motive, a clue, an alibi, whatever – a device I simply don’t trust, even if I can’t immediately articulate to myself why I don’t trust it, I long ago noticed that my bottom started to itch. I repeat, it’s infallible. If my bottom ever once steered me wrong, wh
y, the universe would be meaningless.’
The problem was that I had invented that vulgar little idiosyncrasy for Evie’s fictional self without, as I’d promised I would, obtaining her prior permission. It was, indeed, just the kind of thing to cover which a special clause had been added, at my own urging, to the contract we both signed. Now, by my unthinking confusion of the true and the false Evadnes, except that it was precisely because I was finding it increasingly difficult to tell one apart from the other that I had committed the gaffe, I risked bringing to an abrupt end the unhoped-for conspiracy of silence which continued to surround the whole question of my repeated breaches of that contract. How, I wondered, was she liable to react?
But I could never second-guess Evie.
She threw her head back and laughed till the tears streamed down her face.
‘Oh, Gilbert!’ she cried. ‘I would never have imagined that an itchy bottom could be contagious! For I’ll let you into a secret!’
‘Yes?’
‘My bottom’s itching too!’
‘It is?’
‘Yes! Which must mean that I don’t even believe in my own theory, ha! ha!’ She wiped away the last of the tears. ‘Best move on, shall we. Autry, now, the self-styled G. Autry. What are we to make of him?’
‘You tell me. Maybe you’ve got another theory?’
‘Well … my initial instinct is to answer you with a categorical no. How could I have a theory about somebody so secretive, so laconic, so unforthcoming. All I know about him is what I see and, when he deigns to speak, hear. And when he does deign to speak, all I hear is yup, nope, mebbe and occasionally, if he’s in a loquacious mood, mebbe not. What on earth, you might ask, have I got to work on? Yet, if you reread [sic!] what I’ve just been saying, you may actually glimpse the first little inkling of a clue to his identity.
‘What, after all, do we know about Autry? Next to nothing. He’s a Texan, from the accent, and he’s almost pathologically determined to keep himself to himself. Now what do we know about Hermann Hunt V? He too is a Texan, and he too is almost pathologically determined to keep himself to himself.’
‘What! You’re suggesting that Autry and Hunt are one and the same?’
‘All I’m saying is that it isn’t an impossibility. The ages would seem to match up, and I’ve heard it rumoured that, in his youth, before he was sucked into turbo-capitalism, as I believe the beastly expression is, Hunt’s ambition was to become a writer. So what if he did become a writer after all, pseudonomously? No, nothing as I can see prevents what I have just said from being true. Which doesn’t, of course, automatically make it so.’
‘But why, for heaven’s sake? Hermann Hunt offered one hundred million dollars for the head of Gustav Slavorigin. Why on earth would he suddenly decide to become his own hit man? Where’s the logic in that?’
‘Moi, I think it highly logical. Consider. It’s known – to a select few, I grant you, but what with the dizzying boundlessness of the Internet that select few probably amounts by now to several hundred thousand bloggers – it’s known that Hunt will pay out a portion of his vast personal fortune to whoever succeeds in killing Slavorigin. What more watertight alibi could he ask for? Since it’s on public record that he’s prepared to reward somebody else to commit the crime, and reward him handsomely, it stands to reason that he himself would be the very last person on the planet to come under suspicion.’
‘Logical, perhaps, but very far-fetched.’
‘Yes, I quite agree. Recall, though, what our mutual friend Philippe Françaix once had the wit to reply* when I myself taxed him on how far-fetched some abstruse French theory was that he had begun to bandy at me’ – here she mimicked the crudely parodic patois I had devised for Françaix in hommage, affectionate hommage, I insist, to the Franglais of primarily Hercule Poirot, but also of that long succession of cardboard-thin, language-mangling wogs in Agatha Christie’s whodunits – ‘“But see you, Mademoiselle, all the best ideas must be fetched from afar.”’
‘And the worst,’ I added drily.
‘Yes, of course, that’s true too,’ Evie answered with a sigh. But although she was audibly flagging, she hadn’t yet quite said her piece. ‘There is also,’ she continued, ‘Autry’s own admission that he spent all of yesterday morning mooching about at the Falls. Schumacher took that to mean that the murderer would have been prevented from disposing of his bow. If, however, the murderer were Autry himself …’
She fell silent in mid-sentence, gazing around her as if bored at last by all these mutually exclusive hypotheses of hers. ‘Clouds gathering, I see. Don’t like the look of them.’
She shivered.
‘Well, Gilbert, this little chinwag of ours has been extremely useful, I think. Cleared the deadwood away, you know, always a good start. Did we miss anybody?’
‘Any other potential “suspects”?’ I asked, fully intending for her to hear the inverted commas I’d placed around the word.
‘Uh huh.’
‘Well, it was Düttmann, of course, who actually invited the victim to this accursed Festival, but my personal conviction is that he doesn’t merit a moment’s consideration.’
‘Mine too,’ said Evie.
‘Which leaves only – though, as a suspect, he may be too far-fetched even for you – the tall dark stranger who tangoed last night with Slavorigin. No one knew who he was and no one has seen him since. Did you ever entertain the possibility that that rendezvous in the Museum might have been an amorous tryst?’
‘An amorous tryst? At ten o’clock in the morning? I don’t think so.’
‘Then that, I’m afraid, is it.’
‘Goody goody. Now, Gilbert dear – and don’t protest, please – for at least as long as we find ourselves obliged to stay put in Meiringen, and if for no other reason than to pass the hours and perhaps the days which lie ahead of us here, I once more suggest that we two set about solving this crime. Yes, yes, I do. But separately, independently of one another, each in his or her own inimitable fashion. I also suggest, although I am not by nature a betting woman, making a wager with you if you are game enough to take me on.’
I couldn’t believe what she had just said to me. Unless I was in error, it was almost word for word what I had had her fictional self, her alter ego, her alter Evie, propose to Trubshawe in the Ritz bar.
‘I trust you’re not about to say,’ I answered, ‘that, if you solve the mystery before I do, you will expect me to marry you?’
She laughed, quite softly for once.
‘Oh no. Nothing personal, Gilbert, but neither you nor anybody else could ever take dear Eustace’s place. It’s been nigh on six years since his fatal heart attack, and not a day passes without my thinking of him with undiminished fondness. No, what I was about to suggest was that, if I succeed in solving the mystery before you do, then your very next book must be a new Evadne Mount whodunit.’
I had, as you may suppose, not the slightest intention of writing a new Evadne Mount whodunit, but all I replied, more out of curiosity than because I was tempted by the idea of accepting her wager, was ‘And if I should solve the crime before you?’
‘If you solve the crime first, which you won’t, then I solemnly promise, Gilbert, that I will cast you as the presiding sleuth of my next book. There’s a postmodern prank for you! The heroine of a whodunit makes the author of that same whodunit the hero of one of her own whodunits, ha ha! Whatever will I think of next?’
I wasn’t to learn the answer to that, in any case, rhetorical question for, just as she posed it, I brusquely raised my right hand to my left ear and gave it a wiggle.
‘Tsk!’
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I said carelessly. ‘It felt as though something wet just burst against my ear.’
‘Something wet?’
‘You know, like a bubble. Like a little soap bubble.’
* Memo to self: The Forest of Wrong Trees, the perfect title for a Chestertonian or Borg
esian thriller.
* A trick which everyone missed, however, was the existence of a 1973 film, an anarcho-Utopian fantasy by the French director Jacques Doillon, in which an interpolated four-minute sequence by Alain Resnais depicted a number of ruined Wall Street financiers leaping out of their skyscraping office windows. The film, interestingly, was called L’An 01, or The Year 01.
* In A Mysterious Affair of Style.
* Author of a series of mystery novels set in the world of the Turf. When you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. Indeed, when Francis had written one, he’d written them all.
* Again in A Mysterious Affair of Style.
Chapter Ten
The next day proved to be not merely the strangest but the most significant of my life. I awoke late again, to the usual mild shock of a sunburst of light abruptly banishing my sleeping mask’s velvety delusion of darkness. As ever I began my blurry daily existence with a satisfying albeit never quite definitive bowel movement (I knew, as sure as fate, that I would have seconds before I even descended to breakfast), and it was only when I re-emerged from the bathroom that I noticed a plain white envelope which somebody had slid under my door. I picked it up and opened it. The typed letter inside, from Düttmann, was addressed to all the guests of the Sherlock Holmes Festival. We were free to leave. The Belgian official from Interpol was confident that Slavorigin’s murderer was some as yet unidentified bounty hunter, most likely an American, and thus saw no reason for any of us to be inconvenienced further. Should subsequent enquiries have to be made, the hotel had our passport numbers, home addresses and so forth. Unfortunately, it had not been possible to reserve Business Class seats on flights out of Zurich that very day, but a hired car would be stationed in front of the hotel at exactly 8.00 the next morning to take Evie, Hugh, Autry and me to the airport where we would catch the first available plane to Heathrow, arrangements having also been made for Autry to transfer to a later London–Dallas flight. (Both Meredith and Sanary planned to quit Meiringen by train, Meredith to Montreux, Sanary to Geneva.) The day ahead, ended the letter, was in consequence ours to do with as we liked, but would we please all gather in the hotel bar at seven o’clock for one last ‘hopefully not so sad get-together’?
And Then There Was No One Page 16
