Downstairs, I plucked a complimentary Herald Tribune from a newspaper rack in the foyer. Not only was the murder still front-page news, as I expected it would be, I was amused to note, on the editorial page, a column on ‘the Slavorigin affair’, translated from L’Espresso, by Umberto Eco, who for some mysterious reason omitted to mention that he too had received an invitation to attend the Festival. I then walked into the breakfast room, where I spied, sitting alone, an exceptionally morose-looking Hugh and felt obliged – no, because of something I had meanwhile decided to do, I was actually glad – to join him.
It transpired that, after I myself had left the disco, Hugh had finally succeeded in cornering Slavorigin and had asked him in his turn for a handout. Apparently recovered from the débâcle in the restaurant, fatally reverting to character, the novelist had laughed in his face. When Hugh none the less reminded him of the admiration he had expressed for his own novels, Slavorigin had replied – wittily, I thought but refrained from remarking – that ‘they were written in Prosak, a cross between Prozac and musak’.
‘Know what the bastard said?’
‘What?’
‘He said I’d written thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of words, and that the day I died, etc, etc, every single one of them would be forgotten. It would be like, professionally, I had never lived.’
‘The man was a despicable bully. Both a pain and a pill. In my opinion –’
‘I know, I know! The worst is,’ he mumbled into his cornflakes, ‘it’s true.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘No, Gilbert, it’s good of you to, etc. But I know it’s true. I’ve always known.’
I half-expected two pearly cartoon tears to dribble down his blotchy red face.
‘Look, Hugh, I insist I’m in no position to lend you anything close to ten thousand pounds, and I don’t fool myself that the counter-offer I’m about to make will compensate for that, but there’s a cashpoint machine right here in the hotel lobby and I’d be happy to withdraw, shall we say, five hundred Swiss francs? Would that go any way to easing your situation?’
He perked up like an infant handed a plaything which has been teasingly withheld from him. ‘Jesus, Gilbert, it’d be just the ticket!’ he cried. ‘I’ve got this idea, etc, for a new thriller. Don’t know yet what I’ll call it, either Murder Off-Piste or Death Slalom, but I had the brainstorm staring out at those fucking Alps every day. I thought if I got a little recce in before going back to Blighty, maybe stop over in St Moritz, etc, for a few days, not the season, I know, but your – your how much did you say? Five hundred pounds?’
‘Francs.’
‘Five hundred francs’ – a mental yet visible shrug of regret – ‘yeah, that’ll really do the trick. And it is only a loan, you know. Don’t you be worrying about that. I’ll pay you back just the moment I get the advance.’
‘I know, I know.’
He noisily scraped the palms of his hands together, a nervous habit I’m afraid I’ve never been able to stomach.
‘So where exactly is this cashpoint machine?’ he asked, looking around him.
‘Let me finish my breakfast first, Hugh,’ I replied, ‘if you don’t mind.’
‘Oh, sure, sure. Take your time. No rush.’
Once our business had been done with, I recalled that I had hoped to take advantage of the hotel’s wi-fi Internet connection, whose cabin happened to be next door to the cashpoint machine. It had been empty when I withdrew Hugh’s money, but we had carried on talking for a while afterwards in the foyer, and when I eventually shook free of him I cursed inwardly to note not just that the cabin was occupied but that its occupant was, of all people, Evie.
Ironically, it was because of her that I desired to go online. I own that, unsettled as well as completely mystified by that newspaper ad that Slavorigin had shown us, it was my intention, an intention of whose fundamental fatuousness I was very much aware, to Google ‘Cora Rutherford’ to find out whether anything else was listed but the odd tangential allusion to her as a literary character. Actually, I felt a queasy kinship with Max Beerbohm’s doomed poetaster Enoch Soames who, having sold his soul, literally, in order that he be granted advance knowledge of posterity’s judgment on his verse, discovers to his chagrin that the sole reference to his name in the British Library catalogue is precisely as the fictional protagonist of Beerbohm’s short story.
I cooled my heels in the lobby for nearly fifteen minutes waiting in vain for Evie to re-surface, before taking the stairs back up to my room. In the hope of catching a news item on Slavorigin’s murder, I started zapping the multi-channelled television set but came up empty-handed. Like the giant timepiece it is, the world was already moving on. Instead, for half-an-hour or so until a chambermaid knocked on the door and asked if she might do my room, I found myself vaguely watching an old Hollywood parody-western, Son of Paleface, with Bob Hope, Jane Russell and, a boyhood idol of mine, Roy Rogers, once an even more famous singing cowboy than Gene Autry, all dubbed into German.
When I returned to the lobby (it was now close to noon), Evie was still, incredibly, squatting inside the wi-fi cabin. What was she up to? I wondered whether I should tap on the semi-frosted glass door and make a pointing gesture at my wristwatch, but thought better of it. Still uncertain how to occupy the hours ahead of me, I caught sight of Meredith window-shopping in the lobby’s glossy arcade of duty-free boutiques. She also spotted me. Yet she at once – and, I knew, deliberately – turned her face away and pretended to study a display of cashmere sweaters in the nearest window. So it was like that, was it? Perhaps, thinking only of getting out of this godforsaken dump and back to the humdrum dissatisfactions of our ordinary lives, none of us was any longer up to making the usual meaningless hotel-lobby chitchat.
I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on the forecourt, taking the air as I polluted it, and almost tripped over Sanary’s suitcase. He had managed to book himself onto the afternoon express to Geneva. A hired car was due to take him to the station via the Kunsthalle, where he meant both to thank Düttmann and advise him that he was leaving Meiringen today, not tomorrow as planned, and therefore wouldn’t be attending the last-night gathering. We conversed for a few minutes about this and that until, on a whim, I decided I would pop the question I’d been aching to put to him from practically the first day.
‘Tell me, Pierre,’ I said, ‘why is it, when you speak to Evie, you start to sound just like a Frenchman from one of her whodunits?’
I sensed him staring at me, his eyes unblinking behind his dark glasses.
‘Saperlipopette!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do I? I wasn’t aware.’
Just at that moment his car pulled up. We shook hands, made traditional rhubarbing noises about keeping in touch and waved to each other as he was driven off. I felt somehow left behind and lonelier than ever.
The afternoon passed as if in a dream. Rather than loiter uselessly and self-consciously about the lobby, I decided to stroll down into town, mindful all the while of the aphorism I had attributed to Sherlock Holmes in the first paragraph of ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’: ‘It has long been an axiom of mine 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 wandered into souvenir shops, cheese shops, a couple of bookshops (whose English-language books, apart from a prominent display of Hugh’s, mine and of course Conan Doyle’s, were all populist pap, what you might call McFiction, Kentucky Fried Chick-lit, lad-lit, genteel-elderly-lady-lit and, still hanging on in there, Dan Brown-lit) and even, in desperation, took a quick turn around an overwhelmingly quaint picture gallery that specialised in painted-by-number views of the same two or three Alpine vistas. I was in and out of there in a few seconds.
By five I had had it. I had run into neither Evie nor Meredith nor Autry nor Hugh, although I did see more than once as I passed and re-passed them on my dir
ectionless ramblings about the town a scruffily conspiratorial group of what I took to be foreign correspondents from the British press, boozing steadily through the afternoon at one of the tables on the same café terrace that we guests of the Festival had got into the habit of frequenting. I also noticed two uniformed Swiss sentries posted outside the taped-off Museum. But enough, I said to myself, is enough. Time to drag my sore feet back to the hotel.
Forgetting my earlier intention to Google Cora, I went straight to my room, where I discovered that a second envelope had meanwhile been slipped under my door. The letter inside, from Evie, read: ‘It’s 4.30. I’m going to be in the bar from now on. Join me, why don’t you. It’s time to compare notes.’ Compare notes? She really had meant what she said, then, about each of us doing some detective work.
I found her seated in one of the bar’s padded and buttoned American-style booths, a double whisky-and-soda in front of her. (So I’d got it wrong in my whodunits, in which I’d had her drinking double pink gins.) Exceptionally for me, I ordered the same, and we both waited for my drink to arrive before beginning to talk. At the far end of the darkishly lit room a blind black pianist was playing a medley of what, after a moment, I identified as Cole Porter show tunes.
‘Bottoms up,’ I said, raising my glass.
‘Bottoms up.’
‘Well now, what sort of a day have you had?’ I asked her.
‘Instructive,’ she said, ‘really most instructive. You?’
‘The reverse. Whatever is the opposite of ditto,’ I said, ‘that’s what I’d have to reply. My day has been wretched. Nothing to show for it.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Evie. ‘Then we won’t be comparing notes after all?’
‘Sorry.’ I sipped my whisky. ‘But what are you saying? That you’ve made progress?’
‘Progress? Gilbert, my dear, I know everything.’
‘Oh really?’ I said, and attempting to sound subtly sarcastic I succeeded only in sounding malevolently camp. ‘Everything, you say?’
‘Everything.’
‘Then you know the murderer’s identity?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’
At this point I expected that, like all fictional detectives, she would childishly insist on titillating the reader, building up the suspense, even declaring, as I had had her do in the corresponding scene of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, that ‘if I were baldly to announce who I believe did it, it would be like a maths teacher proposing a problem to his students, then instantly giving them the solution without in the meantime exposing any of the connective tissue which enabled him to arrive at that solution, connective tissue which would also enable those students of his to understand why it was the only solution possible’.
But she didn’t. To my direct question she gave me a direct answer. Rewind the tape.
‘Then you know the murderer’s identity?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’
‘You did, of course.’
‘Me? Are you mad?’
For an author to be accused of murder by one of his own characters – now this was a first! Bizarrely, however, before the meaning of those four words had properly begun to sink in, they had a queer little Proustian effect on me. I was immediately reminded of a long-forgotten, although in its day long-running, television programme called This Is Your Life, whose guest, a celebrity supposedly invited not as the evening’s victim but as just another member of the studio audience, would nevertheless find himself accosted by the show’s emcee. ‘X,’ this emcee would say with ominous aplomb, ‘this is your life!’ The tape again.
‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’
‘You did, of course.’
‘Me? Are you mad?’
‘No,’ she replied placidly, ‘although I rather think you may be.’
‘But, Evie,’ I protested, ‘what in heaven’s name are you talking about? I’m Gilbert Adair. I’m a nice man. People generally like me. Ask anybody.’
‘Pooh!’ she ejaculated. ‘As though nice men never commit murders!’
I stared at her.
‘Did you just ejaculate?’
‘Certainly I did. I’m Evadne Mount. It’s what I do.’
‘Well,’ I muttered crossly, glancing round the nearly empty bar in case somebody else had heard her, ‘don’t do it in public, please.’
‘If I’m not mistaken, Gilbert,’ she said, ‘you’re trying to change the subject. Aren’t you interested to learn why I’ve just accused you of murder?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed. I’m actually very keen to discover how you could have arrived at such a ridiculous deduction.’
‘In point of fact, it all began with a coincidence. Now, as both a writer and a reader of whodunits, I heartily dislike coincidences, which I regard as the jokes of reason and the conceits of time, and I never – well, almost never – have recourse to them myself. But yesterday, if you recall, I quoted a couple of lines of Chesterton to you – “Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest” – and last night it suddenly occurred to me that my travel reading, or rereading, was precisely the volume, The Innocence of Father Brown, in which that quote appears. So I dug it out of my suitcase and I re-checked the reference. The story in question is “The Sign of the Broken Sword”, and the relevant conversation takes place between Father Brown and Flambeau, former jewel thief turned Brown’s fellow-sleuth – first name Hercule, by the way. Would you like to know how their conversation continues?’
‘Why not? Anything to humour you.’
She pulled a dog-eared Penguin paperback out of her capacious handbag, withdrew a Hatchards bookmark and started to read:
‘“‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?’ ‘Well, well,’ cried Flambeau irritably, ‘what does he do?’ ‘He grows a forest to hide it in,’ said the priest in an obscure voice. ‘A fearful sin.’”’
‘How very Chestertonian,’ I said. ‘But what has it to do with Slavorigin’s death?’
‘Ah well,’ she replied in, I fancy, much the same obscure voice as Father Brown’s, ‘it so happened that the longer I speculated on the brouhaha surrounding Out of a Clear Blue Sky as a convincing motive for murder, by you or anybody else, the itchier my bottom got. Try as I might, I just couldn’t believe it. Gilbert, some things never change. We sleep on more or less the same beds our ancestors slept on, we act on more or less the same stages our ancestors acted on and we commit murders for more or less the same reasons our ancestors committed them.
‘So, having persuaded myself that the F.A.T.W.A. website represented nothing in reality but a monstrous shoal of red herrings, I ruthlessly swept aside the rubble of all my former theories and decided to do a little web-surfing myself.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, Gilbert, me. I may not look the part but I really am remarkably cyber-literate, I think they call it. This morning, at any rate, I wolfed down breakfast and, in pursuance of my hunch, ensconced myself in the hotel’s wi-fi cabin. You can’t know how much impatient door-tapping I had to ignore – I never knew Japanese businessmen could be so potty-mouthed! – but what I was in the process of unearthing was just too important to allow my investigation to be even momentarily interrupted.
‘Oh, it wasn’t easy. The whole diabolical swizz had been prepared and plotted with extraordinary cunning. Practically every loophole had been plugged. Practically, I say. That adverb, though, is the bane of every clever or, rather, clever-clever criminal. For, as I sat there, studying the screen, clicking that funny little mousy thing more or less at random, it suddenly dawned on me that, if I were to synergise the hegemonic co-terminousness of the website, all the while making sure I had accurately gauged its beaconicity – I had a few hairy moments there, I can tell you, but I was resolved to plough on at whatever the cost to my sanity – I could deploy th
e marginalisation lever to arrive at a degree of holistic governance enabling me to unscramble its causality and ultimately dismantle its true source and authorship.’
My head was spinning again, but I said nothing.
‘Oh, Gilbert, you really wanted him dead, didn’t you? ‘“He grows a forest to hide it in,’ said the priest in an obscure voice.” I’m right, aren’t I? Aren’t I? The single leaf you wanted to hide was the murder of Gustav Slavorigin and the forest you hid it in was the Internet.
‘It was you who created that site, Gilbert. It was you who devised those riddles for the faithful and the gullible. It was you who concealed your identity behind a screen – a screen in both senses of the word – of pseudonyms. It was you, memories of the Salman Rushdie affair gnawing away at your festering grey cells, who whipped up an incendiary cyber-climate calculated to send scores, perhaps hundreds, of pathetic psychopaths, all just waiting for the call, off on the world’s grandest wild-goose chase. And it was you, of course, who on the same site posted an easily decipherable announcement of Slavorigin’s presence at the Festival.
‘It must have seemed foolproof. If – I can hear you saying to yourself – if none of these would-be hit men ever actually succeeded in murdering him, thereby doing your dirty work for you, why, then, you would simply take a lethal potshot at him yourself and let them accept the blame or the credit for the crime, depending on the point of view. Neat, Gilbert, very neat.’
‘What about Hermann Hunt?’ I answered her back. ‘If F.A.T.W.A. were nothing but a hoax, don’t you suppose he might have had something to say on the matter?’
‘Oh, as for Hunt, assuming he was aware of what was going on, as he surely would have been, he probably just sat back in his Texan castle and enjoyed the escapade. He had his own hyper-patriotic reason, after all, for wanting to see Slavorigin wiped off the face of the earth and, if whoever killed him then came calling for his reward, he might well feel inclined to write out a compensatory check for a million or two – he certainly could afford to. Hunt was the least of your problems.’
And Then There Was No One Page 17
