And Then There Was No One

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.’

‘But surely there isn’t any mystery as to who did it?’

‘Oh really?’

‘We’re all aware that Slavorigin’s life was under threat from some nitwitted survivalist sects whose members, even if we leave aside their hatred of everything he stood for, must have entertained the odd fantasy about how much comfier Armageddon would be if cushioned by a buried stash of a hundred million dollars. It’s evident that one of these loonies pursued Slavorigin here to Meiringen and shot him through the heart. A bow and arrow, after all, the survivalist’s favourite choice of weapon.’

‘Maybe, maybe. Except that your theory, which is all it is, begs a few questions.’

‘For instance?’

‘Well, one, how would such a loony, as you call him – or her – know that Gustav Slavorigin was due to make an appearance in Meiringen at all?’ I was about to parry that question with its logical answer when she held her splayed right hand up to my face, all but blotting out her own, to advise me of the fact that she had not yet completed what she wished to say. It was a tic I thought I had invented for her, but perhaps I had half-consciously recalled her behaving so at Carmen’s little supper. She continued:

‘Since he was the Festival’s Mystery Guest, after all, there was no indication of his identity in the programme. Then two, is it probable that a rabid rightwing fanatic from some one-horse burg in Texas or Kansas or Oklahoma, armed with a great big bow-and-arrow and probably even sporting a coonskin hat, could pass unremarked by any of us, including Slavorigin’s minders, in a town as small as Meiringen? Three, how did he – or, I repeat, she – succeed in luring Slavorigin unaccompanied into the Museum? And four, and last for now, who’s to say your so-called loony isn’t actually one of the Festival’s official guests?’

That final question threw me, being the only one I hadn’t expected. Yet, even if I was by no means convinced I could knock down all four of her objections one after the other, I decided to take up the challenge.

‘In the first place, Evie, Slavorigin’s presence here was one of those secrets that could never be held secret for long. This Festival of ours, you’d agree, is a pretty amateurish affair – also the very first of its kind – and the last too, I fancy, after such a hoohah – and you don’t suppose, no, let me continue, you’ve had your say, you don’t suppose that, when they all heard to their stupefaction, if I’m not mistaken, that Slavorigin had actually accepted their ludicrously quixotic invitation, all those sweet, bungling young people who hand me your gin-and-tonic and you my whisky-on-the-rocks, you really don’t suppose that, even if sworn to silence on pain of the rack, they would have been capable of keeping so enthralling a piece of news to themselves? A word here, a word there, and it would have been all over the blogosphere.

‘Two, rabid rightwingers they may be, but I really do think that these bounty-hunters – and what a bounty! – would be savvy enough to disguise themselves before setting off on the great crusade. In fact, considering the average American’s ignorance of how we Europeans live, like something out of an episode of The Simpsons, I would guess, the kind of stranger I’d tend to look at twice is one wearing a Tyrolean hat and lederhosen instead of one in a Davy Crockett cap and leather britches.

‘Three, we have absolutely no cause to assume that our murderer needed to “lure” Slavorigin at all. We’ve all had to pay a dutiful visit to the Museum, but he arrived too late to join us. What could be more natural than for him to take a solitary stroll there, a matter of a few hundred yards from the Hilton, and also to be surreptitiously tailed?’ It was now my turn to ward off an impending interruption with a raised hand. ‘Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say. His bodyguards. Thomson and Thompson, as I call them. Why didn’t they insist on accompanying him? That is queer. Except that Slavorigin is, was, a spoilt brat, accustomed to getting his way in everything, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have wanted to shake off his twin shadows for a blissful half-hour or so on his own. After all, he must have said to himself, what could possibly happen to him in a sleepy hamlet like Meiringen?

‘As for your hunch – which is all it is, if I may take the liberty of quoting you – that one of the Festival’s guests could have been responsible, the problem as I see it is crucially one of motive. The motive of, let’s say, an ideological murderer positively screams out at us whereas, as far as our co-festivaliers are concerned, I have to admit to not having heard so much as a whisper.

‘Finally, let me raise an issue that you appear to have overlooked.’

‘Oh yes?’ she said, ever ready to bristle at the faintest hint of criticism.

‘What’s today’s date?’

‘The twelfth of September.’

‘Right. Which means that yesterday was the eleventh.’

‘I’m quite aware of that, Gilbert. How could I not be after all that’s happened here?’

‘Ah yes, but do you know – or do you remember – Gustav Slavorigin’s birthdate?’

‘Course I don’t. I met the man for the first time two days ago, and in the Festival’s booklet there was obviously no mini-bio of its Mystery Guest.’

‘Well, I do. He was born, wait for it, on July 4.’

‘Ah …’

‘Born on the Fourth of July, died September 11, exactly ten years to the day after the attack on the World Trade Center. Added to which, this is the year 2011. 2 equals the Twin Towers of 1 + 1 and 20 minus 11 equals 9. The numbers, Evie, the symbolism! For Hermann Hunt’s henchmen it would have been what Düttmann calls the “clincher”. Don’t forget, these are neanderthals who claim to detect a daffy significance in the fact that Manhattan Island was discovered on September 11, 1609, by Henry Hudson, whose name has eleven letters, that the first Tower collapsed at 10.28am and 1 + 0 + 2 + 8 = 11, that 119, 9/11 in reverse, is the area code for both Iraq and Iran (I and I) and 1 + 1 + 9 = 11, that the first of the two attacking planes was American Airlines Flight 11, number 1-800-245-0999 and 1 + 8 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 0 + 9 + 9 + 9 equals 47, which two numbers combined also equal 11, that, standing side by side, the Twin Towers themselves resembled the number 11, that Hermann Hunt’s initials, like Henry Hudson’s, are HH, twin sets of Twin Towers – and I can assure you there’s a lot more gibberish out there where that came from.* If Slavorigin was to be murdered, yesterday was the day it had to be done. I rest my case.’

‘Well, Gilbert,’ Evie opined – said, goddamn it, said! – after a moment of reflection, ‘I can see that, despite your professed indifference to this crime, you have after all given it some thought. And I’m prepared to endorse your objections one, two and three. Yes, quite so, a Festival of this type would have been so leaky from the start that a lot of outsiders were bound to have had advance knowledge of Slavorigin’s attendance. And, yes, my caricature of a typical crazed crusader was crass in the extreme. And, yes again, although I’d very much like to have been the proverbial fly on the proverbial wall when they endeavoured to justify their negligence to the authorities, I can well imagine how easily those two brawny pin-heads, Thomson and Thompson, could have been outfoxed by somebody whose mind was set on it.

‘Furthermore, for your information, I had not at all overlooked the numerological symbolism of yesterday’s date. Good grief, Gilbert, even without the extra coincidence of Slavorigin having been born on America’s national holiday it was staring us all in the face. What isn’t staring us in the face, though, is how it undermines my theory that the murderer might have been one of the official invitees, two of whom, let me recall the fact to your attention, are Americans themselves. But any one of them might have been what you’ve just described as an ideological killer. More than once I’ve heard you make disobliging comments about this Festival. Has it never struck you as odd that it managed none the less to attract a not altogether undistinguished guest-list?’

‘Yes,’ I replied thoughtfully, ‘I confess it has rather. Yet writers, you know, will go anywhere if offered a freebie. Four days in the Swiss Alps, all expenses paid, and only a lecture to deliver for one’s supper. I can see how that might appeal.’

‘To Meredith van Demarest, who flew here all the way from California?’

‘Ah, but you’re forgetting that she also has plans to call on Agota Kristof in Zurich and pay homage to Nabokov in Montreux or wherever it is his remains are buried. She almost certainly regarded the Sherlock Holmes Festival as no more than a handy means for her to make the trip gratis. Anyway, what possible motive could she have?’

‘What motive? You surprise me. Putting to one side the ideological motive you mention above [above?], let me draw your mind back to the revelation that she and Slavorigin had, if only for a single night, been an item.’

‘Which revelation means for you that she must have murdered him?’

‘Don’t be silly, please. I merely register the fact that they knew each other better than she was initially prepared to let on, a fact she may have had her own good reason for withholding from us.’

‘Perhaps so, yet I still can’t help thinking you’re pointlessly looking for any motive other than the glaringly obvious one. Remember Occam’s Razor. Don’t postulate the existence of an entity if you are able to get by without it. In other words, where there are several conceivable solutions to a problem, it makes sense, and it saves time, to opt for the simplest one, for nature never needlessly complicates.’

‘Pshaw!’ she exclaimed.

‘Evie,’ I said, smiling, ‘no one in the real world actually says “Pshaw!”.’

‘I do,’ she answered doughtily. ‘As for Occam’s Razor, we’re not dealing with nature but with human nature, of which the need to needlessly complicate has been, since the dawn of time, one of the defining characteristics. And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’

I should explain. This Gilbert was not me but G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton. In The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, set as it was in some unspecified year of the nineteen-thirties, I had Evie, as a fictional member of the Detection Club, allude to one of its genuine members, Chesterton, as Gilbert or, more familiarly, as ‘my dear friend Gilbert’. How tiresome but typical of her that she should continue to perpetuate a now totally anachronistic affectation in order to aggrandise her own lonely and uneventful existence. It reminded me of another woman’s delusions of grandeur, a woman whose identity I was at first unable to pin down. Then it came to me: Margaret Thatcher’s references to Churchill, a statesman she couldn’t possibly have met, as ‘dear Winston’. Rewind the tape.

‘And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’

‘Go ahead,’ I said wearily.

‘“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.”’

‘I’m sorry, Evie, I’m not with you.’

‘There’s a price on Slavorigin’s head, an astronomical price which has tempted who knows how many hit men – and, quite possibly, the odd hit woman. That’s the forest. Meredith van Demarest has, let’s say, her own private and personal motive for doing away with him. That’s the leaf. Naturally, whoever does succeed in murdering him, everybody’s initial assumption is that it must have been one of Hermann Hunt’s bounty hunters. Don’t you see? What could be more cunningly Chestertonian than for her to hide the leaf of her individual motive in the forest of their collective one, this human forest which was edging ever closer to him like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane?’

‘H’m. And the ideological motive?’

‘Ideological motive?’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t I hear you imply that Meredith might also have had an ideological motive for doing away with Slavorigin?’

‘In spite of their one torrid night of passion, Meredith loathes Slavorigin. Loathes his arrogance, his preening vanity, his sneering macho boorishness, but perhaps more than anything else loathes his visceral anti-Americanism. She may be the ungiving, unforgiving kind of feminist who wants to prohibit the teaching of Dead White Males and rename Manchester Womanchester – or Womanbreaster, ha ha! But she is, through and through, an American and, like all of her fellow citizens, whatever their ideological differences, a true and intractable patriot. And if, as a radical left-winger, she spent most of her adult life alienated from all her native land’s populist rites and rituals, the shock of September 11 brought her back in a panicky rush to the soft, fleshy twin towers, as it were, of the maternal bosom, no questions asked, no apologies tendered, and to this day, and with all that’s happened since, she can no longer look on America’s enemies with the complicit or half-complicit eye of an old lefty. Did you, perchance, observe the brooch on the lapel of her jacket?’

‘Actually, since you ask, I did. I remember it had four or five words written on it. Something about American womanhood?’

‘You really must learn to be more attentive to details, Gilbert. It read: “For All The Women of America”.’

‘An obscure feminist clique, I dare say.’

‘Possibly. But now I want you to spell out the first capital letter of each word as if it were an acronym.’

‘F. A. T. W. O. A.’

‘The “o” of “of” was lower-case.’

‘F. A. T. W. A.’ (Gasp.) ‘Oh my God, fatwa!’

‘Fatwa, precisely. “Simple chance!” the pedestrian reader may cry. Especially as one would hardly expect a would-be murderess barefacedly to advertise her homicidal designs. Not, to be sure, that the advertisement was so very barefaced. The lettering on that brooch was awfully hard to decipher, even for my famous gimlet eye.’

With her spoon she scooped up her cappuccino’s thin chocolaty dregs and swallowed them.

‘Then there’s the money,’ she continued, smacking her lips. ‘We mustn’t ever forget the money, Gilbert. One hundred million dollars. That’s big change – please note, by the way, how even a fuddy-duddy like me, the me of your books, is capable of mastering modern slang. Poor dear Cora, who didn’t have a truly criminal bone in her body, was prepared to take her life in her hands by blackmailing Rex Hanway.* And for what? For nothing more than a role, a secondary role, mind you, in his film. Just imagine how some normally high-principled, law-abiding individual, someone like Meredith van Demarest, to look no further, might be tempted to murder by the prospect of dosh so unimaginably large it boggles the mind.’

‘Cora Rutherford, you’re forgetting,’ I answered, ‘was merely a character in –’

‘Yes,’ Evie interrupted me, ‘it’s true, she was a character, an eccentric, the kind of person who refuses to believe that society’s codes and conventions ever apply to her. My point is that, where a hundred million dollars are involved, all the moral imperatives which dictate the way we conduct our private and professional lives are suspended. This Hugh Spaulding, for instance. I may be slandering him – like a lot of writers, he may be just as much of a character as Cora – but he does strike me as a man in urgent need of money.’

‘Funny you should say that.’

‘Why so?’

‘Well, only yesterday he asked me if I would lend him some. A tidy amount it was too, considering we barely know each other.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten thousand pounds. Though he said he’d settle for seven.’

‘Ten thousand! Blimey! Did he tell you what it was for?’

‘He’s being pursued by the Inland Revenue for years of unpaid back taxes. It appears he moved to London in the nineties when his books were bestsellers but never paid a penny in tax. And now that his thrillers have gone out of fashion, or else he’s running out of sporting milieux to write about, the British tax authorities have caught up with him and he no longer has anything like the necessary wherewithal to pay them. He also squandered his royalties a few years back on some hilarious show-business venture, Doctor Zhivago on Ice, I kid you not. But, please, you mustn’t ever let him know I told you.’

‘Mum’s the word. You didn’t lend it to him, I suppose?’

‘What do you think? The only money I’m ready to lend, even to close friends, is money I can afford to lose, and I certainly can’t afford to kiss goodbye to ten thousand pounds. There’s something else, though, which may be worth mentioning. As we were all waiting to go into dinner, I saw him attempt to ingratiate himself with Slavorigin. I too may be slandering him, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had tried to touch him for the same amount. Slavorigin may have been an arch-meanie, the man we loved to hate, but at least he had it to spare.’

‘Interesting, very interesting. But you mentioned sporting milieux?’

‘You don’t know his thrillers? Each of them is set in the world of a different sport. He’s apparently written scores of the things, about soccer, cricket, tennis – that’s the only one I read. He used to be a decent all-rounder himself, I believe, before he took to drinking heavily.’

‘Soccer, cricket, tennis … Archery, anyone?’

It took me a few seconds to understand what she was driving at.

‘H’m, I see what you mean. Well, let me think. It’s true, I’m not all that au fait with the Spaulding oeuvre. But Hugh did tell me once, when he was in his cups, that his big mistake as a writer was switching sports with each thriller instead of, like Dick Francis,* sticking with a single one, soccer ideally, and that he was so prolific that, in his later books, he found himself reduced to writing about motocross and curling, for God’s sake, and darts and the tedious Tour de France and … and yes, bullseye!’

‘What?’

‘I said Bullseye! That’s the title of one of his books.’

‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ exclaimed Evie. ‘You may be on to something there.’

‘Evie,’ I said tetchily, ‘must you keep exclaiming “Great Scott Moncrieff!”? The joke’s long since worn off.’

She looked back at me in reproachful surprise, but retained a dignified silence.

‘Oh well, never mind. To return to what we were talking about, I suppose it’s not wholly out of the question that Hugh possesses some small degree of skill with a bow and arrow, if that’s what you’ve been waiting to hear me say.’

‘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, why, 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 Borgesian 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.