And Then There Was No One полностью

‘You know,’ said Evie in a quiet voice, ‘you really shouldn’t have done that.’

Sanary looked up at her, pale-faced.

‘Done what?’

‘You don’t have to be a reader of whodunits to know that you must never take the liberty of touching a dead body before the police arrive.’

He hastily yanked both his hands from off Slavorigin’s snakeskin jacket as if only just realising that it was now being worn by a corpse. But by then it was too late.

*

During the whole of that afternoon, right there in the Kunsthalle’s lecture hall, we were all questioned by a local police inspector, Schumacher by name. Fiftyish, weedily built, with a tiny, Hitlerian clump of a moustache, he was quite without the stoic morbidity of Swiss policemen in Dürrenmatt’s thrillers. On the contrary. He actually seemed to regard it as a source of perverse pride that such a celebrated author should have been shot dead (with William Tell’s bow-and-arrow, for God’s sake!) in his own boring backwater of a town.

What was most curious about the interviews – ‘interrogations’ is hardly the word – was that not one of us turned out to have an altogether satisfactory alibi. Not that we all fell under suspicion, as the tacit consensus was that Slavorigin had obviously been slain by a fanatic. The main autobahn out of Meiringen was already under surveillance and all Swiss airports were being patrolled by anti-terrorist units, every wing in the sky accounted for. According to the police doctor’s preliminary report, however, the victim had died within an hour, at most an hour-and-a-half, of our having discovered him, and by some impish coincidence, as I say, not one of us could offer a truly secure alibi for that little skylight window of opportunity.

Meredith, who was up first, told Schumacher that before finally gravitating to the Kunsthalle she had spent the morning wandering about the town’s rather disappointing shopping precinct. Yes, she had been alone and, no, she hadn’t made any purchases, but she had spoken to the odd shop assistant who might be able to vouch for her. Sanary had taken breakfast in the hotel, also on his own, then returned to his bedroom to pick up his emails. He had not responded to any of them, with the result that nothing of his could be traced or timed, assuming anybody thought it worth doing so. His next hour was spent jotting down preliminary notes on the first three chapters of a children’s fantasy novel he had been commissioned to translate from the English, The Master of the Fallen Chairs, and although he had hung a Bitte nicht stören sign on his bedroom door he had forgotten, or so he thought, to remove it when he eventually did leave, at five to eleven. No, no, hold on there, he suddenly said. About quarter of an hour earlier a chambermaid had tapped on his door only for him to request that she come back later. Autry, whom I had never heard string so many articulate sentences together at one go, admitted to having mooched about the Reichenbach Falls for an hour or two, alone naturally, although he had noticed, but had also deliberately steered clear of, the usual mob of sightseers. Hugh claimed to have awakened late, if not as late as I had, and been disturbed by the same chambermaid. There was also in his account, for me at least, one piquant detail which would have definitively convinced me of his innocence had I ever imagined anybody might have considered him guilty. If he overslept, he said, it was only because, owing to his unfamiliarity with continental bolsters and duvets, he had taken forever to drift off the night before. I, too, had of course slept late. And Evie, the very last of us to be interviewed – Düttmann and his trio of assistants were out of the running, having all naturally observed each other making last-minute preparations for the Kunsthalle reception – told Schumacher that she had traipsed for almost an hour from one news kiosk to another in an attempt to find a copy of an English newspaper.

‘Any particular newspaper?’ he asked.

‘The Daily Sentinel,’ she to my astonishment replied.

‘And did you find it?’

‘Why yes, I finally did. At the railway station. Should have tried there first.’

‘It would be of assistance to me, gnädige Frau, if you still had that copy in your possession.’

‘Ah well,’ said Evie, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t. You see, I took it with me to the station cafeteria and read it over a cappuccino. Then – what? – yes, I dumped it in a litter bin and walked to the Kunsthalle. On the way, though, I did pop into a souvenir shop to ask the price of a glass paperweight – it contained a miniature Mont Blanc, you know, which I thought I might buy for my godson’s birthday – but that was just before I arrived here, at exactly eleven o’clock. Sorry.’