And Then There Was No One (17 page)

‘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.’