What I learned from her was that Slavorigin had so far failed to put in an appearance at the reception which had been organised in his honour. For a while everybody had sought to stay calm and convivial. By twenty-past eleven, however, it had become impossible to continue pretending that his ongoing absence was no cause for alarm, and somebody – ‘I fancy,’ she said, ‘it was Pierre here’ – suggested that Düttmann return at once to the Hilton to find out whether and when Slavorigin had left it. But just as he was preparing to go, who should turn up at the Kunsthalle but Thomson and Thompson, ‘neither of them a happy bunny’. At a quarter to eleven they had knocked on Slavorigin’s door to escort him to the reception, even though the Kunsthalle was just a five-minute stroll away. No response. They had then taken the lift back down to the ground floor to ask the receptionist whether Mr Slavorigin by chance had already gone. They were told no, that he would certainly have been seen crossing the lobby area. One of them – let’s say it was Thompson – took the lift back up to the twelfth floor while his twin remained behind at the reception desk. A couple of minutes later Thomson’s mobile phone rang. It was Thompson to say that there was still no response. Accompanied by Thomson, the manager himself then took the lift up and unlocked the bedroom door with his own set of keys. All three entered the room together. No Slavorigin. On which, alert to the implications of what they stubbornly refused to admit could have been their own professional negligence, the two low-rent minders set off for the Kunsthalle in the hope that their charge had somehow contrived to exit the hotel unnoticed.
And that’s where things stood when I arrived. Düttmann, I saw, was talking in whispers to an extremely tall, straight-backed man in a double-breasted suit, a sort of General De Gaulle with some of the excess air let out, whom I took (correctly) to be the Mayor. G. Autry, in an outfit not unlike that worn by the Lone Ranger in my dream, minus mask and revolver, was being spoken at by one of Düttmann’s assistants, a gawky, bespectacled, pony-tailed brunette whose fidgety smile testified, even from as far away from them as I myself stood, to her fear of being reprimanded for having left one of the Festival’s guests, if only for a few minutes, to his own devices. Meredith, who kept darting glances at me, was feigning interest in what a gesticulating Hugh had to say to her. (Though I found it hard to credit, particularly under the circumstances, it did cross my mind that this might be a new attempt of his to borrow the ten thousand pounds he was so direly in need of.) And the two bodyguards were looking woebegone indeed.
What was to be done? After a deal of verbal to-ing and fro-ing, it was Sanary who came up with a sensible suggestion.
‘We should,’ he said, ‘take a look in the Museum.’
‘Why do you say the Museum, Monsieur Sanary?’ Düttmann asked, his gammy eye blinking violently.
‘In this town there is nowhere else, it seems to me, that he could have gone. It’s the Museum or the Falls. And since the Museum is the nearer of the two, that’s where we should proceed first.’
Although nothing audible was said for or against his proposal, the general babble that followed sounded more approving than not and we all began to shuffle across to the Museum, which, like virtually everything else in Meiringen, was located just six or seven hundred yards away.
A queer thing occurred
