And Then There Was No One полностью

Our stroll to the Museum took six minutes. Just as had been the case when I visited it with Düttmann and Spaulding, the box-office was unmanned, a dereliction of duty which elicited tut-tuts from the Mayor and his entourage. We started to file in one by one, there being a turnstile to manoeuvre, one we might have expected to prohibit entry to us visitors without tickets, but in fact it didn’t. I was fifth in the queue. Düttmann, two of his female assistants and somebody else I couldn’t place were in front of me; Hugh, a plume of his chain-smoker’s breath coiling about my earlobes, behind me; Evie and Meredith, if I remember aright, behind him.

Suddenly we all heard Düttmann cry out. One of his assistants began screaming and the queue heaved up with a judder. I had already squeezed through the turnstile and now hastened into the main gallery, that room-size replica of the Baker Street rooms that Holmes shared with Watson. At first I could see nothing but the unnaturally stiffened postures of those who had preceded me and who were standing stock-still in a little semi-circle. Düttmann’s two young assistants were holding their hands cupped over their mouths, the profiles of their frighteningly white faces made visible to me by their both having turned away in horror from whatever spectacle it was that confronted them. Düttmann himself was trembling; and as I rather blunderingly, I fear, pushed past him to see what they had all stumbled upon, he sought momentary support from the high-backed chair that served Watson’s mahogany writing desk.

Deaf to the confused hubbub behind me, as the others continued to step gingerly into the cramped room, I looked down at the figure on the carpet. It was of course Slavorigin. As soon as I saw him, I knew why people said ‘as dead as a doornail’. It was almost as though his body had actually been nailed to the ground. The beautiful face lying sideways, half on the carpet, half on the exposed surround of the wooden floor, was expressionless: no terror, not even a hint of surprise, could be detected in features more serene than I ever remembered them to have been in his mostly angry life. Clearly, he never knew he had died and was still none the wiser.

Gustav Slavorigin dead! What an almighty stink this would cause! But the worst was to come. The din inside the room was now indescribable, as everybody in turn got an eyeful of the corpse, reacting with a shriek or a muffled moan or a stammered ‘Oh my God!’. Evie, who had been here before, as it were, albeit only between the covers of my whodunits, looked much more squeamish than I had described her in print, even in A Mysterious Affair of Style, whose murder victim was, after all, supposed to be her oldest and dearest friend, and I heard Autry muttering a guttural ‘Jesus!’ again and again under his breath. Then quite by chance, as if the reels of Time were being changed, there came upon us all one of those unheralded instants of synchronised hush, the whole room falling silent at once, and Sanary pointed downward at the body and said in a bold clear voice, ‘Look!’

A queerly spindly object was sticking out of Slavorigin’s chest, an object that had come close to splitting in the middle as he fell. I suppose that, if I hadn’t immediately been conscious of it, it was because I’d naturally been drawn first, as one is, to the face. Or perhaps even then I’d had a premonition of some abnormality, an obscenely protruding bone, for example, that I would live to regret too intently focusing upon. Not that I really did think it was a bone; I didn’t ‘think’ anything. But an internal whisper, bypassing the speculative turmoil of my brain, may have insinuated to me that this – this thing had to be a bone, for what else could it be?

It was an arrow. We could all now clearly see the tuft of faded, mangy turkey feathers which had been glued or fletched, I believe the technical term is, to the blunt end of its shaft. It was, in fact, as a backward glance instantly confirmed, the very arrow, with its crudely daubed-on bloodstain, that I had inspected the previous day on the half-moon table where it had lain next to the hundred-year-old copy of the Daily Telegraph and the pulpy edition of His Last Bow, both of them, incidentally, undisturbed.

There was a collective gasp, as from the audience at the kind of movie where a blonde co-ed opens a closet door and the dead Dean topples into her scantily pantied lap like a felled oak. Sanary knelt down and, without even bothering to brace himself for the shock, gently turned Slavorigin’s body over. Another, louder gasp. The arrow was stuck deep in his chest, so deep it seemed to have acted as a stopper: the blood that soaked his blue-and-white striped shirt was far less than one would have expected. Tiny bubbles speckled with foamy pink saliva drooled from his gaping mouth. Yet his expression, as I said before, was as unalarmed as if he’d been shot in the back.