And Then There Was No One (3 page)

Hence the title. That first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

A Reliable Narrator
was published to a set of reviews, not only in Britain, that most writers would die for. Which is undoubtedly why its author was invited to Meiringen by the organisers of its first Sherlock Holmes Festival. (Why he agreed to go is another question.) And which is also when my own part in his story begins.

It was while commuting homeward on the 11.03 from Moreton-in-Marsh to London Paddington one foggy Monday forenoon in early September that I received on my mobile phone the call that was to change everything. Since the previous December I had been renting a pretty weekend cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Blockley. The cottage, Waterside by name, sat sandwiched between my landlady’s grand house and a lively though apparently unlived-in little stream that could be depended on, in anything approaching a downpour, to overflow its timid banks. I would journey down to Moreton on Friday afternoons – on, by what was for me a delightful windfall of a coincidence, the 4.50 from Paddington (yes, really) – then make the same trip in reverse three days later. My train, in both directions, was invariably late, but seldom long enough to put me to serious inconvenience.
*

So there I was, snugly settled in a first-class compartment, reading, with a view to writing an eventual review for the
Spectator,
a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American
wunderkinder
who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves – its title,
The Theory of Colonic Irrigation,
should tell you all you need to know about the sort of thing it was. Since I was already aware that this was a book destined to be jettisoned as soon as my review had been delivered, I was in the process of pencilling some cramped, crabbed notes in the margins of its own pages when, at the Oxford stop, a single, rather extraordinary passenger boarded my nearly empty compartment. He stood for a minute in the doorway as though searching for a friendly or just a familiar face, then for a reason known only to himself sat down in the seat directly opposite mine.

As long as we tarried in Oxford, I felt an obscure compulsion to keep both my eyes trained on the text in front of me and even forebore, for the duration, from dabbing at my smarting nose – I was on the mend from a protracted head cold – with the third of four paper napkins which I had filched for that purpose from the buffet-bar where I had earlier bought a cup of muddy coffee. (The first two snot-saturated napkins were stuffed away in the clammy depths of my jacket pocket.) At long last the train started to glide out of the station, a plummy Indian voice on the loudspeaker
alerted the latest intake of passengers to the sandwiches, pastries and light refreshments available to them, and even if I don’t recall having had the sensation, one I am especially prone to, of being spied upon by some unseen observer, I could no longer resist peeking at my fellow-traveller over the top of the novel, as thick and doughy as a wholemeal loaf, that I held in my hands.

I
was
being spied upon. The man who had sat down opposite me had, I noted uneasily, a livid complexion, a shock of white hair, an unalluring black patch over his left eye which lent him the corny charisma of the Demon King in a provincial pantomime and an unpatched right eye which was staring straight at me. No milquetoast in an awkward situation, I immediately proceeded to stare back, to the point of insolence. As I did, I found myself qualifying my crude first impression. Swimming into sharper focus, he turned out to be less fleshily flamboyant than the description above must have made him sound. His complexion was of the wind-and-weatherbeaten type the English refer to as ‘ruddy’, his hair, if untidy enough, had nevertheless submitted to the recent attentions of a comb, his eyepatch was just an eyepatch. As he was also wearing a rough, fibrous three-piece suit with outsized trouser turn-ups and complicatedly laced-up hiking-boots, I had him pegged for some maverick Oxford classics don, although whether he was loved or feared by his, I guessed, handful of students was beyond my powers of impromptu on-the-spot speculation.

None of which alters the fact that he was still staring at me. He had no reading matter of his own, none visible on his person, at any rate, no scuffed leather briefcase containing papers with which he might have whiled away the trip by consulting or marking. He had nothing to do, in short, but stare at me. Which he went on doing until it was no longer funny. Did he recognise me? Unlikely. One advantage, I thought grimly, of being only a semi-wellknown writer is that you can travel incognito on public transport. No, not grimly. No hackneyed adverbs, please. I thought, I just thought. Did he confuse me with David Hockney, to whom I bear a superficial resemblance (blond hair, prominent horn-rimmed glasses)? Since I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep up for very much longer our ping-pong game of stare and counterstare, something would soon have to give.

Suddenly, inside the same jacket pocket into which I had stuffed the soaking napkin balls, my mobile, which I had forgotten to switch off, started ringing, loud enough to cause us both momentarily to lose our stride in the game. Now he no longer stared, he glared at me, more unnervingly than if he had been in possession of both his eyes. (In the land of the seeing, the one-eyed man is somehow still king.) It was all the more awkward in that our compartment had been designated the train’s sole Quiet Coach, one in which the use of mobiles was banned – which is precisely why I chose it – and my telephone’s ring-tone was Tchaikovsky’s Walt-Disneyan ‘Waltz of the Flowers’.

Under his glowering gaze, I retrieved the elegant, hateful, indispensable little object from my pocket, flipped open its lid and put it to my ear.

‘Hello?’ I whispered.

It was my literary agent, Carole Blake – Carole who, after all, could be said to work for me, who retained fifteen percent of my royalties, yet by whom I was still, so many years since I joined the agency, ever so slightly intimidated.

‘Ah, Carole,’ I said. ‘Listen, can I ring you when I get home? I’m on a train and I’m not really supposed to be making phone calls. Or taking them.’

But the call wasn’t one that could be postponed. The very next day she was flying to New York on agenting business and needed an immediate yes-or-no reponse.

What she had to tell me was this. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of its Sherlock Holmes Museum, whose doors were first opened to the public in 1991, the Swiss town of Meiringen, in the heart of the Bernese Oberland, its main claim on the attention of the tourist industry being the proximity of the Reichenbach Falls,
†
had organised a Sherlock Holmes Festival to which erudite Sherlockians had been invited from all over the world. Since my own most recent work of fiction was
The Unpublished Case-Book of
Sherlock
Holmes,
and since my German publisher, Martin Hielscher,
‡
had realised at the eleventh hour that my presence at such an event might be crucial to the book’s successful launch, she asked if I would be willing to fly to Switzerland three days hence, all arrangements made and all expenses paid.

Ordinarily I would have at once refused. Not only have I come to loathe travelling to Europe and further afield, from a fear less of flying than of airports, but I flee all fairs, festivals and literary dos. Even under the sole pressure of Carole’s steely entreaties, I would at least have hemmed and hawed before no doubt eventually caving in. Yet now I had Cyclops to contend with, along with my head cold.

‘Oh, Carole, I don’t know,’ I whispered back, holding the mobile in my left hand and cupping the right over my mouth as though I were about to sneeze. ‘I mean, I’ll do my little forty-five-minute stint and then what? It feels like so much hassle for so little result. Besides, as you can probably hear, I’m just getting over a bad cold.’

‘Gilbert,’ said Carole, who enjoyed the advantage over me of not being obliged to lower her voice, ‘I do think that if Martin – Martin, who has really got behind you – believes your attendance will prove a boost to sales, you yourself could unselfishly put up with a little hassle.’

There then came the knockdown argument to which no writer has ever been capable of responding.

‘Or don’t you want your books to sell?’

Without speaking, meanwhile, the Demon King gave the vibrating window between us three impatient taps with the colossally thick, hairy knuckles of his right hand, drawing my attention to the words ‘Quiet Coach’ stencilled on its pane.

I frantically nodded at him, asked Carole if I might have an hour or two to think it over, was told not, then at last helplessly agreed.

‘Oh, very well. Tell them to go ahead and make the arrangements.’

Adding a barely audible ‘Bye’, I snapped the mobile shut, made a silently apologetic gesture to my still unappeased
vis-à-vis
(who was to vanish from my life, as equally from this memoir of it, the instant we arrived at Paddington, leaving as little trace of his intervention in either as a burst soap bubble), and slouched down behind
The Theory of Colonic Irrigation
while the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London.

Back in my Notting Hill
pied-à-terre,
I checked my email, not a convenience of the cottage in Blockley, and found that I had been preceded by two separate communications from Meiringen.

The first of these was in the way of a round-robin flyer for the Festival, which had hopes of becoming, I learned, a regular and even annual event. The second specifically targeted me. I was thanked for ‘gracing our festival with your august self’ and afforded the information I needed regarding the airline company I was to fly with, the reference number of my e-ticket, by whom I would be met at Zurich airport, and the like. Also what was expected of me personally. There would be a presentation by my translator Jochen Schimmang, himself a prizewinning novelist and by now a dear friend of mine, followed by a reading by me of one of the tales from my collection. (Knowing what was coming, I had already, on the train, mentally selected the shortest of them, ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’, alluded to by Holmes in ‘The Sussex Vampire’ as
‘a story for which the world is not yet prepared’.) The evening would end with a public Q & A session, one that risked being ‘stormy’, I was gleefully warned, in view of the high quota of Holmes fanatics expected to attend and, for many of them, the near-sacreligious liberties taken by my book.

I printed out both emails, slipped into my suitcase the one I’d be required to show at Heathrow and took the other off to study over a coffee in a Catalan delicatessen I frequented, the Salvador Deli, across the street from me in Portobello Road.

It was three pages long. Down the left-hand side of its first page zigzagged a
faux
-slapdash formation of four picture-postcard views of Meiringen: a chalet decked with multi-coloured pennants; cows grazing on a gently tilting meadow; a bluish-white Alplet; and, on a dizzyingly narrow ledge overhanging the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes and Moriarty locked in hand-to-hand combat. Another column of images bordered the right-hand side, consisting this time of photographic portraits of the Conan Doyle specialists who had signed up for the Festival presumably well before I myself was asked. In fact, I was so belated an invitee that my own name went unlisted, and I couldn’t help wondering whether, as is often the case with events planned long in advance, some more illustrious guest than I had dropped out at the last minute.

Of my five fellow speakers there were three with whom I was, to varying degrees, on nodding terms.

I knew Hugh Spaulding, a jocose, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking Dubliner, a former sportswriter on the
Irish Times,
who was the first to have been astonished by the small fortune he had made, and no sooner made had gambled away on ‘the nags’, out of a cycle of thick-ear thrillers each of which was set in a different professional sporting milieu. These thrillers all had titles so formulaic as to verge on provocation: e.g.
An Offside Murder, Death in the Scrum, Killer Mid-On, Bullseye!
and
To Live and Die on the Centre
Court
, a novel in which the No 1 Seed is poisoned, in full view of thousands of spectators, during the fourth-set tie-break of a Wimbledon final. Tennis being the sole sport of interest to me, this latter book was the only one of his I had ever read. It was, though, enough for us to converse upon when I met him, a crumpled codger, now a self-confessedly impecunious has-been, with a can of lager in one hand and a minute battery-operated fan in the other, a fan whose open plastic rotor buzzed less than an inch away from his very veiny nose, at a mutual friend’s birthday party one exceptionally warm August evening in a fairy-lit garden in Putney.

Hugh, I suppose, wasn’t ‘my kind of person’. But, as in sex, so also in the most superficial friendships, one finds oneself on occasion inexplicably drawn to somebody who isn’t at all one’s type. In any event, I rather liked him, and his book, and looked forward to catching up with him again.

A former acquaintance, too, was Pierre Sanary, who was down to speak on ‘The Posthumous Holmes’, which I interpreted
to refer to the countless post-Doyle manifestations of the Great Detective in fiction, theatre and film, my own collection of stories perhaps included. Sanary was Swiss, widely travelled but with a home, if I’m not mistaken, in Geneva. He spoke an English so impeccably unstilted that to the English themselves it sounded haughty and condescending, as if every perfectly calibrated cadence were a rebuke to their risibly imperfect French. Stupendously erudite, an editor, publisher, anthologist, literary historian and I know not what else, he had written a series of monographs on such
petits-maîtres
of primitive pulp fiction as Jean Ray, Ernest Bramah, Sax Rohmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as a two-volume, thousand-page history of the whodunit,
Poë et Cie: Histoire du roman d’énigme de Poë au postmoderne,
*
which covered all the usual suspects or, rather, all the usual detectives: Dupin, Lecoq, Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Harry Dickson, Nick Carter, Gideon Fell, etc. He was also the author of a single whodunit of his own, one I wish I had written.

Titled simply and superbly
Fin
– the English translation,
The End,
although both literal and unavoidable, forfeits half the original’s clipped concision – it revolves around a group of American whodunit writers. One of them, we soon discover, is a serial killer, and all of them are in frantically competitive pursuit of the ‘legendary’ twist ending that was
supposedly mentioned in passing by Poe in one of his letters to Hawthorne but never used by him because he never could think of a plot to which it would constitute the logical conclusion. Needless to say, at the end of
Fin
itself, at the very moment the serial killer discovers the nature of the twist, so equally, to his own rage, is revealed the utter futility of his quest, since the brilliantly original method by which he himself has contrived to dispose of his rivals is shown to be exactly that which was posited by Poe.

In, I would say, his early fifties, the totally bald Sanary resembled, with his poached-egg eyes and pale thin legalistic lips, a transvestite whose wig has just been snatched off. I had met him through my close friendship with the Chilean, Paris-based film director Raoul Ruiz, who had long and in vain nurtured the project of a cinematic adaptation of
Fin
. We had both been invited to supper at Raoul’s flat near the Père-Lachaise cemetery and, even if Sanary displayed scant interest in anything I contributed to the table-talk and none at all in what I had achieved in my professional life, he himself proved to be so amazingly incapable of making a dull remark I could almost forgive his boorish manners. He had an inexhaustible pool of anecdotes and allegations involving instances of witting or unwitting aesthetic plagiarisms which he would serve up to us with a series of meaningful leers. He informed us, for example, that the out-of-control-carousel climax of Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train,
absent from Patricia Highsmith’s source novel, had been appropriated,
soi-disant
‘Hitchcockian’ touches and all, from Edmund Crispin’s donnish Oxford-set whodunit
The Moving
Toyshop,
published in 1945 and therefore predating the film by six years. Also that the plot of Cocteau’s pretty much forgotten boulevard play
Les Monstres sacrés
(1940) was too similar to that of the still remembered and indeed cherished Joseph L. Mankiewicz film
All About Eve
(1950) for it to have been a coincidence. Also, most intriguingly, that in the first movement, with a reprise in the third, of a Sonata for Violin and Piano composed in the twenties by the Russian-born pianist and conductor Issay Dobrowen there can be heard a tune indistinguishable from ‘As Time Goes By’, which was reputedly conceived a decade later by one Herman Hupfeld and of course immortalised in the film
Casablanca.

As for another of the Festival’s invited speakers, Meredith van Demarest, I cannot honestly say that it was with much enthusiasm that I anticipated meeting her again. A hellish Hellenist from an obscure Californian college, she had sat next to me at a lunch in Antibes to which I had been invited by friends of friends many years ago, all the other guests being left-wing American academics spending their sabbaticals in sexy France rather than in dreary England, even though it was the latter country’s language and literature most of them were being paid to teach.

She and I had got on well enough to begin with, in a discussion about some new French films which had just been
released after the long hot hiatus of summer. Yet, even then, I couldn’t quite suppress the conviction that the almost overplayed attention she paid to my opinions derived not from any intrinsic interest they held for her but from her own avid consumption, to which she had slightly shamefacedly admitted, of gossipy literary biographies. My belief was that what she extrapolated from these was above all the fact that the secret of their subjects’ success as conversationalists had resided less in what they themselves had had to say, however witty, than in the flattering intensity with which they had attended to the discourses, however trite, of their gratified interlocutors. Thus, whenever it was my turn to speak, she would peer into my eyes as though nothing in the world mattered more to her at that instant than my recommendation of Resnais or Rohmer (Eric not Sax).

Since this was 2001, however, and mid-September to boot, the conversation had inevitably turned to the Twin Towers attack, which had taken place just five days before. Speaking about the atrocity and its global implications – and I acknowledge I was a touch, shall we say, premature – I had bemoaned the fact that the military reprisals we all knew would follow were at the mercy of a buffoon of a politician the like of whom not even the United States, never a nation famous for voting its intellectuals into power, had known.

For a moment the table was silent. Then Meredith suddenly screeched at me:

‘You little shit!’

‘
What
did you say?’ I managed to stammer out.

‘Who fucking gave you the right to insult our President?’

Our
President? George Bush? Would I be caught dead calling Tony Blair ‘our Prime Minister’? And this from a self-styled radical left-winger.

‘But all I said was –’

‘Oh, can it!’ she spat at me. ‘I don’t have to listen to such Eurotrash garbage!’ Pulling a hundred-franc note from her purse, she tossed it onto the chequered tablecloth – ‘That’ll cover what I had!’ – stood up and stalked alone out of the restaurant.

If everyone present was as startled as I was by her behaviour, one of her compatriots did coldly chide me for having been flippant, which was simply not true, about an event of such magnitude, and actually went so far as to propose the eccentric theory that, the instant those planes ploughed into the Twin Towers, George Bush, ex-drunk, ex-deserter, ex-all-round-loser, had been alchemically transmuted into the Platonic essence of Presidential resolve. Whatever, the meal never recovered from Meredith’s
coup de théâtre.
Just fifteen minutes later, we all quietly and sheepishly trooped out of the restaurant without dessert or coffee.

Several years, of course, had elapsed since the Towers crumbled to dust, and one had to suppose that, like so many liberal Americans who had put their critical faculties on hold, Meredith had since had time and cause to qualify her
once unreflecting support for the cross-eyed cretin in the White House. But what mystified me was why she had not only been invited to but had herself agreed to attend what promised to be a frivolous Conan Doyle bash. Then, glancing at her minuscule bibliography, I learned from it that she had recently published a ‘much-acclaimed’ book-length essay titled
From Shylock to Sherlock
and subtitled ‘Judaism, Patriarchy and the Forensic Imagination’. Ah.

The fourth speaker listed was G. Autry, a name calculated to stimulate critical inquisitiveness, like ‘B. Traven’. Nobody knew what the G. stood for, if anything. He had hardly ever been photographed (on the Festival’s flyer his photo had been replaced by a generic black silhouette against a plain white background), in recent years he had certainly never posed for a camera, and all he let be known about himself was that he was
not
related to Gene Autry, a once well-known singing cowboy whose horse would regularly rear up on its hind legs like that of a Spanish monarch in an equestrian portrait by Velasquez while he himself spun a lazy lasso above his head as though blowing a smoke ring. I had naturally never met him – who had? – but I had tried to read one of his novels, a sadistic thriller in the James Ellroy mode set in the racist Arkansas of the fifties. I laid it down again unfinished when the praeternatural vividness of its violence started to haunt my dreams.

Oddly enough, Autry’s work had always had a pulpy reputation until Sanary, of all people, published an eccentric
defence of it with the amusing title
G. est un Autry.
†
It was that essay which had prompted me to give his fiction a go. But I had, I repeat, so hated the novel in question that I only half-read it and, again, I couldn’t imagine why such a grouchy recluse would make one of his extremely rare public appearances at an insignificant Sherlock Holmes Festival in the Swiss Alps.

Fifth and last – or, rather, first – was Umberto Eco, no less. But when I noted the parenthesis
(unconfirmed)
after his name, I just knew he wouldn’t turn up. And I was about to fold up the attachment and pay for my coffee when I remarked, so discreetly boxed-off from the body of the text as to suggest that the festival’s organisers were consciously playing hard-to-get with the reader, the two words, in the smallest of block capitals,
MYSTERY GUEST.
Underneath them I read as follows: ‘The Meiringen Sherlock Holmes Festival is proud to announce the presence of a Mystery Guest, one whose identity, like those of so many murderers in mystery novels, will be revealed to you all in the library, that of our famous Kunsthalle. Do not attempt to guess in advance who he or she will be. You will certainly be proved wrong!’