And Then There Was No One полностью

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.