‘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 repriman
ded, 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.
Epilogue
Everything converges at last. In silence Evie and I walked through the lovely, dark, deep woods like Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Suddenly, when we emerged into open ground, she came to a halt. Glancing in my direction, she took a few timid steps forward and peered over our path’s missing edge; then at once, and more nimbly than I might have expected, considering her age and weight, she nipped back in again. At the same time, we both became aware of a low, distant roar drowning out the beats of our two thumping hearts, the roar of what, at the climax to ‘The Final Problem’, Conan Doyle describes as ‘a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house’.
‘Why, it’s the Falls,’ Evie croaked. ‘We’re directly above the Reichenbach Falls.’
‘Naturally we are,’ I replied. ‘Where did you think we were?’
‘Yes, but – but – I don’t understand.’
‘What is it you don’t understand?’
Blinking, she looked around her.
‘Where’s the souvenir shop I visited this afternoon? The funny little funicular? Where, to the point, are the railings? Shouldn’t there be railings here?’
‘Oh,’ said I, ‘haven’t you got it? We’re some distance away from all the props of so-called “civilisation”. Think of one of those tricks of perspective which vulgarising mathematicians have such a fondness for. The eye is so fixated on the sheer drop of the Falls it tends not to register that they’re also several hundred yards wide.’
‘Uh huh …’ she mumbled pensively – stop it! – while continuing to back off.
Thus far things had gone my way more smoothly than I had dared hope. No one had observed our quitting the hotel together; nor, along the mountain path, had we passed any rustic busybody who could have borne subsequent witness to our having been out in each other’s company. To cap it all, the moon had begun to rise on schedule. Yet I was still very nervous. I badly needed a cigarette – ‘the only new pleasure modern man has invented in eighteen hundred years,’ wrote the French pornographer and belle-lettriste Pierre Louÿs – and to hell with the alliterative linkage of tobacco and taboo. I had stopped smoking, it’s true, but I remained jammed at the fragile phase when I made certain I always had a full pack, plus a functioning lighter, somewhere about my person. So from my jacket pocket I drew out my new pack of Dunhills, poked a cigarette between my lips and held the lighter up to them. Except that it wasn’t the lighter at all. To my great mortification, it was a tube of Polo Mints, of almost identical shape and size, which I kept in the same pocket, kept there, ironically, I guess the word has to be, for one of those crises when I just had to have a cigarette and then had to disguise the fact that I’d had one.
While Evie muffled a guffaw, I pulled the real lighter out and shakily lit my cigarette at last.
‘May I have one?’ she said.
‘You don’t smoke.’
‘Are you asking me or telling me?’
‘If you put it like that, then I suppose I’m asking you.’
‘Who says I don’t smoke?’
‘Well …’
‘I’ll tell you who. You.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. In those two whodunits of yours. It’s something you made up about me without consulting me first. Like a lot else.’
‘What are you saying? You’re actually a forty-a-day addict?’
‘No,’ she answered wearily, ‘but I do enjoy an occasional ciggie. Are you going to offer me one or not?’
‘Certainly I am,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid, though, I can’t oblige with Players or Senior Service.’
‘Dunhills were also smoked in the thirties, if that’s the point you’re making.’
‘How would you know? You weren’t even born then.’
‘I looked it up on Wikipedia. When I was researching one of my books.’
I held out the blood-red pack and lit up her cigarette. And, I have to say, unlike the Evadne Mount of my whodunits, she did appear to be at ease with it, horsily exhaling the first intake of smoke through her leathery nostrils before, like an old hand, giving its glowing tip a brief inspection.
‘This, I assume,’ she said, ‘is the condemned woman’s last cigarette.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Come n
ow, let’s not play games with one another. Why else would you bring me here if not to try and kill me? Just like Conan Doyle. The jealous author rids himself of a character who has started to upstage him by hurling him – or, in my case, her – over the Reichenbach Falls.’
‘Pah! You aren’t nearly as famous as Sherlock Holmes.’
‘And just whose fault is that, Gilbert?’
I was beginning to have a real problem containing my detestation of her.
‘But it is why you brought me here, isn’t it?’ she went on, unperturbed. ‘To try and kill me?’
‘You keep saying “try”. Why? As even you must realise, in this lonely colonnade of trees there’s nothing – nothing and no one – to prevent me from succeeding.’
‘I might be armed.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘How so?’
‘You wouldn’t have got through security at Heathrow with a pair of nail-clippers, let alone a pearl-handed pistol, and you’ve certainly had no opportunity of obtaining a gun in Meiringen. Switzerland isn’t some banana republic of despots and sexpots, you know, where a moustachioed moocher in a soiled white suit will happily exchange a second-hand revolver for a few greasy greenbacks.’
She ejaculated again.
‘Despots and sexpots! Greasy greenbacks! God, that’s just so typical of you! There’s not a single reader out there who needs to be told that Switzerland isn’t a banana republic. But you – you don’t think twice about breaking the rhythm of your narrative if it means taking time off to admire one of your own irrelevant metaphors. Who do you think you are? Vladimir Nabokov? A Scotch McNabokov? The Nabokov of Notting Hill? Vlad the Impostor? As dear Cora would have said, puh-lease!’
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