And Then There Was No One

Chapter Eight

Dreams like hallucinations divine and speak to our fear of dying, and sleep, as many have written before me, is the green room of the hereafter.* That night I slept fitfully. On one of my room’s twin bedside tables I had earlier in the evening laid out a brand new sleeping-mask and a pair of boules Quiès, by then as grey and tough as wads of chewed-out gum. Now, wandering naked into the bathroom to brush my teeth, swallow a blood-pressure pill and take one last pee for the road, I switched on the alarm-clock radio and located a sort of classical-music channel: Honegger’s Pacific 231 followed by the ‘big tune’ of a Rachmaninov piano concerto, etc. Although I had packed a snug little compact-disc player along with three favourite late-night discs, whenever I am about to sleep alone, away from home, I do prefer the radio to records. Somebody is out there.

It was close to midnight when I slid beneath the duvet. As predicted, I had to wrestle with the bolster, wedging it under the nape of my neck (which made me feel as though I were in a barber’s chair), piling a second bolster on top of the first (a dentist’s chair), then experimenting at length to discover whether it might be practical to dispense with the damn things altogether (a coffin). At last, faute de mieux, I arrived at a tolerable position by clasping one of them to my jawline like a violinist his violin.

Only after these and other such threshings, turning my face over on my left cheek then my right cheek then my left again, then, as a despairing last resort, trying to sleep flat on my back, my eyes sightlessly open under the already sticky mask, then getting up twice to fiddle with the radiator’s complicated thermostat – the room abruptly revealed itself to be suffocatingly warm, something I seemed not to have noticed before – only then did I succeed in losing consciousness. And I was no sooner asleep, so it felt, than I started to dream.

Now for me all dreams, all dreams, are nightmares; there is, I find, a denaturingly strange and suggestive something about the state-of-the-art scene-shifting of even the prosiest of dreamscapes, just as in the staidest of surrealist paintings. Hence, however unscary this dream of mine may strike the reader, it was from my point of view a nightmare none the less. I didn’t wake up screaming but, when I finally did surface, I feared at first I would have to vomit.

I dreamt I was in Switzerland (a less logical and realistic setting than it may appear, since the semi-self-aware ‘I’ who was doing the dreaming was not in Switzerland but in Notting Hill, dreams like mobile phones tending to adopt the default assumption that the dreamer is in his own territory). This dream-Switzerland was a picture-postcard platitude, from which not one of Hitchcock’s clichés was missing, not even the village-square dance, the whirl of dirndl, on which curtains used to rise in nineteenth-century operettas. It also had a Swiss-themed soundtrack, Rossini’s William Tell Overture.

Naked, then again sometimes fully clothed, I was being chased across a Tobleronish range of small, no more than knee-high, perfectly triangular mountains, the foothills of the infinite, by somebody or something whose contours I couldn’t at first make out with exactitude. The chase, moreover, was a very uneven one. For a while he, if he it were (but I gradually came to understand that my pursuer was indeed male), appeared to glide above the mountains in a sustained and seamless arc underneath a sky of tampons and rainbows, while I found myself obliged by my dream’s martinet of a metteur-en-scène to plod over the lovely, dark, deep snow (shades of Frost!) at the much more pedestrian pace of a cross-country skier. There couldn’t be any doubt, then, that he would catch up with me.

And he kept coming. Without even having to turn my head, I somehow knew that he was dressed in the garb – quilted anorak, its fur-lined hood reposing on his slightly stooped shoulders, old-fashioned khaki shorts and thick woollen stockings which nearly met those shorts halfway up his chubby legs – of a portly butterfly-hunter. In actual fact (if I can use that phrase about a dream), he wasn’t chasing me after all. Waving his long-stemmed net every which way, he was endeavouring to nab a colony of butterflies that waltzed insouciantly around his head as though dangled on as many strings. And it was only when he was about to overtake me that I realised that the butterflies weren’t butterflies at all but books, open books, their pages fluttering in the wind-machine breeze. I could even read their titles, about most of which, however, there seemed to me something not quite right. Pnun was one. Another was Son of Palefire. A third, which I caught sight of at the very instant he snared the book, was Adair or Ardor.

At that same instant, as Rossini’s overture swelled on the soundtrack and the shadow of my pursuer’s net cast its own net over me, he morphed into the Lone Ranger. Wearing a black sleeping-mask just like mine, brandishing in his right hand the butterfly-net with the captured and still vainly fluttering book inside it, the book which bore my name, digging a bejewelled spur into his horse’s tender haunch so that it reared up on its two hind legs, he cried out, ‘Hi-Yo, Silver!’ Then, accompanied by his faithful pard Tonto (now where had he sprung from?), he galloped away on thundering hoofbeats into the thrilling days of yesteryear and I awoke.

When I consulted my wristwatch, I was shocked to discover that it was twenty-five past eleven and that, oversleeping as I had, I risked missing altogether the Mayor’s reception which would already be well underway. I leapt out of bed, raced into the bathroom and, twelve minutes later, a personal record, had shaved, showered and dressed. Breakfast was no longer being served in the dining room, nor would I have had time to consume it even if it were, and my hope was that coffee as well as alcohol would be available at the Kunsthalle.

I rushed downstairs, through the lobby and out into the car park. Ignoring the appeals of my palpitating heart to take it easy, I ran straight to the Kunsthalle building, which I made out ahead of me every step of the way but which still felt unpleasantly distant for one as out-of-shape as I was.

As I drew closer, I saw a crowd of people with glasses of champagne in their hands, some I knew, others not, milling about on its front steps. I recognised Sanary, his blazer a black blot among so many pastel shades, and the ubiquitous Evie, and I heard a loud drawl – ‘I tell you, he’s ghaarstly, he’s perfectly ghaarstly!’ – which told me that Meredith too was of the company. A minute later I myself was among them.

‘What’s happened?’ I breathily asked.

As I might have foreseen, Evie was the first to reply.

‘It’s Slavorigin.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?’

What I learned from her was that Slavorigin had so far failed to put in an appearance at the reception which had been organised in his honour. For a while everybody had sought to stay calm and convivial. By twenty-past eleven, however, it had become impossible to continue pretending that his ongoing absence was no cause for alarm, and somebody – ‘I fancy,’ she said, ‘it was Pierre here’ – suggested that Düttmann return at once to the Hilton to find out whether and when Slavorigin had left it. But just as he was preparing to go, who should turn up at the Kunsthalle but Thomson and Thompson, ‘neither of them a happy bunny’. At a quarter to eleven they had knocked on Slavorigin’s door to escort him to the reception, even though the Kunsthalle was just a five-minute stroll away. No response. They had then taken the lift back down to the ground floor to ask the receptionist whether Mr Slavorigin by chance had already gone. They were told no, that he would certainly have been seen crossing the lobby area. One of them – let’s say it was Thompson – took the lift back up to the twelfth floor while his twin remained behind at the reception desk. A couple of minutes later Thomson’s mobile phone rang. It was Thompson to say that there was still no response. Accompanied by Thomson, the manager himself then took the lift up and unlocked the bedroom door with his own set of keys. All three entered the room together. No Slavorigin. On which, alert to the implications of what they stubbornly refused to admit could have been their own professional negligence, the two low-rent minders set off for the Kunsthalle in the hope that their charge had somehow contrived to exit the hotel unnoticed.

And that’s where things stood when I arrived. Düttmann, I saw, was talking in whispers to an extremely tall, straight-backed man in a double-breasted suit, a sort of General De Gaulle with some of the excess air let out, whom I took (correctly) to be the Mayor. G. Autry, in an outfit not unlike that worn by the Lone Ranger in my dream, minus mask and revolver, was being spoken at by one of Düttmann’s assistants, a gawky, bespectacled, pony-tailed brunette whose fidgety smile testified, even from as far away from them as I myself stood, to her fear of being reprimanded for having left one of the Festival’s guests, if only for a few minutes, to his own devices. Meredith, who kept darting glances at me, was feigning interest in what a gesticulating Hugh had to say to her. (Though I found it hard to credit, particularly under the circumstances, it did cross my mind that this might be a new attempt of his to borrow the ten thousand pounds he was so direly in need of.) And the two bodyguards were looking woebegone indeed.

What was to be done? After a deal of verbal to-ing and fro-ing, it was Sanary who came up with a sensible suggestion.

‘We should,’ he said, ‘take a look in the Museum.’

‘Why do you say the Museum, Monsieur Sanary?’ Düttmann asked, his gammy eye blinking violently.

‘In this town there is nowhere else, it seems to me, that he could have gone. It’s the Museum or the Falls. And since the Museum is the nearer of the two, that’s where we should proceed first.’

Although nothing audible was said for or against his proposal, the general babble that followed sounded more approving than not and we all began to shuffle across to the Museum, which, like virtually everything else in Meiringen, was located just six or seven hundred yards away.

A queer thing occurred en route. I was walking between Evie and Meredith, and I spotted, on the far side of the narrow street, the twin toddlers from the flight whom I had already seen twenty-four hours earlier, seated with their parents on the café terrace. What startled me on this occasion, what really rather disturbed me, was that they were unchaperoned. A pair of foreign two-year-olds alone in the main street of a Swiss resort? What could their parents be thinking of? And where in God’s name were they? As warmly wrapped up as before, matching little bobble hats on matching little heads, the twins waddled happily along the pavement in the direction opposite that in which our party was headed, towing in their parallel wakes two identical wooden Donald Ducks with wheels instead of feet and heads which would metronomically nod, up and down, up and down, as they advanced. Perhaps they also quacked; I was too far away to hear. As I tried to point out to my not at all interested companions, it was most extraordinary.

Our stroll to the Museum took six minutes. Just as had been the case when I visited it with Düttmann and Spaulding, the box-office was unmanned, a dereliction of duty which elicited tut-tuts from the Mayor and his entourage. We started to file in one by one, there being a turnstile to manoeuvre, one we might have expected to prohibit entry to us visitors without tickets, but in fact it didn’t. I was fifth in the queue. Düttmann, two of his female assistants and somebody else I couldn’t place were in front of me; Hugh, a plume of his chain-smoker’s breath coiling about my earlobes, behind me; Evie and Meredith, if I remember aright, behind him.

Suddenly we all heard Düttmann cry out. One of his assistants began screaming and the queue heaved up with a judder. I had already squeezed through the turnstile and now hastened into the main gallery, that room-size replica of the Baker Street rooms that Holmes shared with Watson. At first I could see nothing but the unnaturally stiffened postures of those who had preceded me and who were standing stock-still in a little semi-circle. Düttmann’s two young assistants were holding their hands cupped over their mouths, the profiles of their frighteningly white faces made visible to me by their both having turned away in horror from whatever spectacle it was that confronted them. Düttmann himself was trembling; and as I rather blunderingly, I fear, pushed past him to see what they had all stumbled upon, he sought momentary support from the high-backed chair that served Watson’s mahogany writing desk.

Deaf to the confused hubbub behind me, as the others continued to step gingerly into the cramped room, I looked down at the figure on the carpet. It was of course Slavorigin. As soon as I saw him, I knew why people said ‘as dead as a doornail’. It was almost as though his body had actually been nailed to the ground. The beautiful face lying sideways, half on the carpet, half on the exposed surround of the wooden floor, was expressionless: no terror, not even a hint of surprise, could be detected in features more serene than I ever remembered them to have been in his mostly angry life. Clearly, he never knew he had died and was still none the wiser.

Gustav Slavorigin dead! What an almighty stink this would cause! But the worst was to come. The din inside the room was now indescribable, as everybody in turn got an eyeful of the corpse, reacting with a shriek or a muffled moan or a stammered ‘Oh my God!’. Evie, who had been here before, as it were, albeit only between the covers of my whodunits, looked much more squeamish than I had described her in print, even in A Mysterious Affair of Style, whose murder victim was, after all, supposed to be her oldest and dearest friend, and I heard Autry muttering a guttural ‘Jesus!’ again and again under his breath. Then quite by chance, as if the reels of Time were being changed, there came upon us all one of those unheralded instants of synchronised hush, the whole room falling silent at once, and Sanary pointed downward at the body and said in a bold clear voice, ‘Look!’

A queerly spindly object was sticking out of Slavorigin’s chest, an object that had come close to splitting in the middle as he fell. I suppose that, if I hadn’t immediately been conscious of it, it was because I’d naturally been drawn first, as one is, to the face. Or perhaps even then I’d had a premonition of some abnormality, an obscenely protruding bone, for example, that I would live to regret too intently focusing upon. Not that I really did think it was a bone; I didn’t ‘think’ anything. But an internal whisper, bypassing the speculative turmoil of my brain, may have insinuated to me that this – this thing had to be a bone, for what else could it be?

It was an arrow. We could all now clearly see the tuft of faded, mangy turkey feathers which had been glued or fletched, I believe the technical term is, to the blunt end of its shaft. It was, in fact, as a backward glance instantly confirmed, the very arrow, with its crudely daubed-on bloodstain, that I had inspected the previous day on the half-moon table where it had lain next to the hundred-year-old copy of the Daily Telegraph and the pulpy edition of His Last Bow, both of them, incidentally, undisturbed.

There was a collective gasp, as from the audience at the kind of movie where a blonde co-ed opens a closet door and the dead Dean topples into her scantily pantied lap like a felled oak. Sanary knelt down and, without even bothering to brace himself for the shock, gently turned Slavorigin’s body over. Another, louder gasp. The arrow was stuck deep in his chest, so deep it seemed to have acted as a stopper: the blood that soaked his blue-and-white striped shirt was far less than one would have expected. Tiny bubbles speckled with foamy pink saliva drooled from his gaping mouth. Yet his expression, as I said before, was as unalarmed as if he’d been shot in the back.

‘You know,’ said Evie in a quiet voice, ‘you really shouldn’t have done that.’

Sanary looked up at her, pale-faced.

‘Done what?’

‘You don’t have to be a reader of whodunits to know that you must never take the liberty of touching a dead body before the police arrive.’

He hastily yanked both his hands from off Slavorigin’s snakeskin jacket as if only just realising that it was now being worn by a corpse. But by then it was too late.

*

During the whole of that afternoon, right there in the Kunsthalle’s lecture hall, we were all questioned by a local police inspector, Schumacher by name. Fiftyish, weedily built, with a tiny, Hitlerian clump of a moustache, he was quite without the stoic morbidity of Swiss policemen in Dürrenmatt’s thrillers. On the contrary. He actually seemed to regard it as a source of perverse pride that such a celebrated author should have been shot dead (with William Tell’s bow-and-arrow, for God’s sake!) in his own boring backwater of a town.

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.’

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?