And Then There Was No One

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’?

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 directionless 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 the 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 what in your view was the greatest of my problems?’

‘The usual. Like almost all murderers you underestimated your adversary.’

‘My adversary?’

‘Me, Gilbert, me. Even if you sweated and strained to remove every last one of your cyber-prints from the screen, the Internet is so complex yet also, to an accomplished old hacker like me, so vulnerable you couldn’t help leaving behind a stray datum or two of the kind that would lead me inexorably to you. In the future, except that you have no future, if ever again you’re disposed to commit such a crime and wish to avoid being caught in the net of the Internet, remind yourself of the title of that delicious German thriller for tots, Erich Kästner’s Emil – or, rather, Email – and the Detectives.’

‘A stray datum or two – like what, for example?’

‘Eugene, Oregon.’

‘Eugene, Oregon?’

‘On the page – 17, I think it is – on which you list various shadowy organisations allegedly funded by Hunt, you mention “a fraternity of Doomsday prophesiers whose mailing address was a shopping mall in Eugene, Oregon”. Couldn’t resist it, could you? The arch little literary reference? Such an obvious giveaway.’

‘But Eugene, Oregon exists,’ I said, a trifle rashly as I see now. ‘I’ve been there. I’ve passed through it.’

‘That’s not the point. You just couldn’t help showing off. Of the thousands of small towns in the American West, that was the one you felt compelled to choose. There were other clues, too, metaphors, puns, alliterations and suchlike, which all pointed to your style. Like the dream you pretended to have the night before Slavorigin’s murder.’

‘What? Now you claim to know what I dream about!’

‘My dear, some people talk in their sleep. Typically, you’d like the reader to believe you write in yours. All I had to do was turn back to page 163. Butterflies turning into books! Books with such titles as Pnun and Adair or Ardor! What a blunder! How could you be so careless, Gilbert, when this dream after all was to have been your alibi? Reading those pages, I at once realised that, while you claimed to be asleep in your hotel room, you were in fact in the Museum firing an arrow through Slavorigin’s heart.

‘There’s something strange about a dream,’ she suddenly mused. ‘It may be anything at all it cares to be, it’s governed by no rules of logical or psychological verisimilitude. Yet, in a way I’m not wholly able to account for, a dream can also be implausible. Yours, I’m afraid, was laughably so.’

‘I admit you’ve constructed quite a case against me,’ I said fairly calmly, ‘even if it’s a case propped up on the wobbliest of circumstantial evidence. But, as dear old Trubshawe might have put it, haven’t you overlooked something?’

‘What have I overlooked? And, incidentally, I’d be greatly obliged if you would leave Eustace, God rest his soul, out of it.’

‘Haven’t you overlooked the fact that Slavorigin was invited to the Sherlock Holmes Festival as its Mystery Guest? That none of us was informed in advance of his attending it?’

‘Well, yes, I did at first wonder at that. As I just said, I distrust coincidences. But then a foolish notion occurred to me, although not so foolish I didn’t feel it worth following up. I got Düttmann on the blower. After commiserating with him about what a fiasco the Festival had turned out to be, I casually asked him how it happened that he had invited Slavorigin in the first place. Can you guess what his answer was?’

‘…?’

‘To begin with, he couldn’t remember – it seems it had all taken place months ago – but with a little nudging from me it did finally come back to him. You again, Gilbert. It was you who had proposed not just the idea of a Mystery Guest but who that Mystery Guest ought to be. You made the proposal in June when you yourself were initially invited to the Festival and initially declined – only, and very belatedly, to re-accept when it was far too late for your name to feature in its literature. In June, Gilbert, four months ago! All that blether about being rung up by your agent in the train from Moreton-in-Marsh and reluctantly agreeing to attend was so much sand thrown into the reader’s eyes. Ditto all those red herrings that you’ve so industriously strewn about. The bearded eccentric in the first-class carriage. The spooky little twins and their neglectful parents whom nobody saw but you. The no doubt totally blameless young man who danced with Slavorigin in the discotheque. Even poor Hugh. Now that was unpardonable of you.’

‘What do you mean?’ I stammered.

‘This afternoon, quite by happenstance, I ran into him while we were both taking a stroll around the Falls. Believing him to be on his uppers, I actually offered to lend him two hundred pounds. Well, what an embarrassing position you put me in! He couldn’t believe his ears. Protested that his latest thriller, Ping Pong You’re Dead!, while hardly in the J. K. Rowling league, had done extremely well, thank you very much. Made him a packet of dough. Humongously huge sales in China, etc, etc. He got quite sarky with me in his lovably Oirish way, and I can’t say I blame him.

‘When you took Slavorigin’s life, Gilbert, you not only broke the law, you not only broke the Fourth Commandment, you broke one of the cardinal rules drawn up for the Detection Club by Ronnie Knox. “The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not” – repeat,must not – “be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.” That’s what I cannot and will not forgive – the systematic way you cheated on your readers. Do you still insist you’re a nice man?’

‘It’s true,’ I dreamily replied, ‘I was such a weird child my parents thought I’d been adopted.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Joke. It was a joke, Evie. But do go on. The suspense is killing me.’

‘Well, the single question whose answer continued to elude me was, of course, how the crime had been committed. So I trotted down to the Kunsthalle with the intention of obtaining from Düttmann information about a certain somebody whose aid I was going to need in my enquiries. As it happened, though, that certain somebody was already there when I arrived.’

‘You mean?’

‘I mean the Belgian agent from Interpol. He was, I fear, a letdown for all of us fans of Poirot and Maigret. A big strapping ginger-haired fellow with a crushing handshake and a sergeant-major’s bark, he bore as little resemblance to one as to the other. Although you might be amused, Gilbert,’ she added, ‘given your weakness for wordplay, to know that his name, Magrite, was actually an anagram of the latter’s.

‘Anyway, he was at first rather standoffish, cold if not quite rude – correct, I believe, is the French word for what I mean. But when he discovered who I was, he couldn’t have been more charming. He knew all about my career, the cases I’d solved [?], the murderers I’d brought to justice [??], so when I asked him if I might, as a special favour, be permitted to snoop about inside the Museum, he became positively deferential. Told me how greatly he would value my contribution to what was proving to be a trickier case than he had anticipated and, right there on the spot, made out a chit, kind of a pass, for me to show to the two bobbies on guard.’

‘You always did have a knack for twisting the authorities round your chubby little finger,’ I twitted her. ‘Remember young Calvert, Inspector Tom Calvert in A Mysterious Affair of Style, and how happy he always was to bend the regulations for you?’

‘Naturally I remember him.’ She sighed. ‘What a tragedy.’

‘Tragedy?’

‘Didn’t you read about him? About six months ago it happened, maybe nine. He was caught up in a sting – one of Scotland Yard’s own stings, ironically – to entrap an international network of paedophiles who had been swapping indecent photographs over the Internet. Operation WWW.’

‘World Wide Web?’

‘Wee Willie Winkie. Got a custodial sentence, of course. Three years in Broadmoor. Poor, poor man. What he did was vile, to be sure, and it would have been unjust for others to have been punished and him merely reprimanded, but even so … Married with two children. As I say, what a tragedy. Thank God Eustace wasn’t alive to hear of it. It would have been the death of him. He’d been Calvert’s mentor at the Yard, you recall.’

‘Now listen, Evie,’ I said, forgetting for a moment the serious pickle I myself was in, ‘you really must try to curb these cranky ravings of yours. They’re beginning to get out of hand.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she shot back, as though I were the one hallucinating, not she. ‘It made the front page of all the newspapers. Well, maybe not the – what did you call it? – the “Guardian”?’ she said with a genteel jeer.

‘And what,’ I asked her dully, ‘did you discover in the Museum?’

‘Well, Gilbert, I took my time. I was prepared to worry the stuffing out of that room. I poked my nose into everything – empty desk drawers, framed snapshots, pipes and pipe-rack, Conan Doyle’s bust, the cryptogram – everything except the blood-stained arrow itself, which had been removed, I suppose, to be forensically examined for fingerprints. Not that they’re going to find any – even you were canny enough to avoid making so elementary a blooper. I knew that, while you pretended to be snoring your head off in your room, you were actually keeping an early-morning rendezvous with Slavorigin at the Museum. I also knew that, once there, you shot him through the heart, at point-blank range – if I can use that expression for so primitive a weapon – with a bow-and-arrow. The arrow was already at your disposal, just waiting to be fired. But where had the bow come from?

‘It was while I was pondering that conundrum that I chanced to pick up the copy of His Last Bow that lay on a little semi-circular wall-table. His Last Bow – now that seemed to me a curious coincidence. Then I noticed, next to it on the same table, Holmes’s violin, its bow laid diagonally on top of it. Another bow. Even curiouser. But, curiousest of all, I said to myself, was the fact that it was, so to speak, the wrong way round, as though in a looking-glass world or a parallel universe. In music-making, after all, the bow is a pendant to the violin and, in archery, the arrow is a pendant to the bow.

‘It was naughty of me, I know, but I picked up that violin – I took lots of music lessons when I was just a gal – and began to play one of my old never-to-be-forgotten party-pieces, Cyril Scott’s Lullaby. (Rhymes with alibi, Gilbert!) Well, talk of running a jagged fingernail down a blackboard. I am but an amateur, and a very rusty one at that, and I’m also aware that the difference between a wrong note on a piano, say, and a wrong note on a violin is that the former, wrong though it may be, is none the less, unlike the latter, a real note, but even at my pretty dismal worst I had never produced such an unholy screech. So I inspected the violin – and do you know what I found?’

‘What?’

‘I found that one of its strings had snapped in two. And I suddenly realised that I had also found the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. You fired that arrow, Gilbert – you fired it not from a bow but from a violin. From Sherlock Holmes’s own violin.’

‘Oh really,’ I cried helplessly, ‘what utter nonsense you do speak! I doubt it’s even possible to fire an arrow from a violin.’

‘My dear,’ she said gravely, ‘decades of experience as both a writer and reader have taught me that in a whodunit anything, absolutely anything, is possible.’

There followed a brief pause. The blind pianist had updated his repertoire to Rodgers and Hammerstein. It felt so hot in the bar I could hardly breathe. I finally said to Evie:

‘It’s awfully stuffy in here. What say we take a walk before the others arrive for what sounds like a rather cheerless get-together?’

After another pause she agreed.