And Then There Was No One полностью

‘The Sunday Sundial,’ was her answer, as of course I knew it would be. Then, adopting a brusque businesslike tone, she said, ‘Gilbert, I’d love to continue this fascinating chat with you, but I really do have a lot of mulling over to do. Shall we say six o’clock in the hotel bar?’

Without another word she left me standing alone in the deserted street.

I myself didn’t return at once to the Hilton. Instead, I wandered over to the railway station where I soon found its modestly cosmopolitan news kiosk. After purchasing a packet of Dunhills, I asked the young man who served me, his eyes a mystery under the shade of a scarlet baseball cap, if he happened to stock a copy of the Daily Sentinel. He didn’t, but I’d be lying if I pretended he didn’t first riffle through various publications I had already noticed on the foreign-newspaper stand – The Times, Telegraph, Independent, Guardian – before shaking his head.

‘Sold out,’ he said in English.

At an adjacent ice-cream parlour I bought myself a giant bicephalic cone – pistachio and apricot – and slowly made my way back to the hotel.

* Interestingly, it has long been rumoured of Hermann Hunt V that, being of too craven a disposition to ingest any of the better-known mind-altering substances but curious none the less to experience their effect, he once paid – handsomely, as usual – a locally based avant-gardist theatrical troupe to ‘act out’ a series of hallucinations in front of him. I personally have never believed the story.

† Which of the two would come out on top? I was reminded of the old metaphysical conundrum: Can God, who after all can do everything, create an object so heavy not even He can lift it off the ground?

‘Heavens to Murgatroyd!’

It was a lovely fresh sky-blue morning, and Evie and I were seated on two grubby plastic white chairs on the terrace of the same café in which I had had a coffee and chat with Düttmann, Sanary and Hugh Spaulding the day of my arrival. Only thirty-eight hours ago! It was not to be believed. The once drowsy little Meiringen was crawling with plainclothes police agents, Swiss but also no doubt British, whom we tried to single out from holidaying promenaders. From time to time, the fanfare of a siren would wail way off on the far side of town, an odd occurrence in a place where formerly the loudest noise would have been the routine peal of church bells. Every so often, too, our voices, even Evie’s, were outroared by the drilling of construction workers who had started digging up both transverse thoroughfares of the junction on which the café was situated. Not for the first time I fantasised about patenting a device to fit silencers to pneumatic drills as to firearms.

The previous evening, as agreed, she and I had met in the hotel bar for cocktails. I was unable, however, to pump her on the matter, which had nagged at me since we parted, of her favourite newspaper. I had been looking forward to firing one question after another at her – what was the Daily Sentinel’s politics? How much did it cost? Broadsheet or tabloid? Names and opinions of star columnists? – in the hope of causing her to trip up somewhere along the way. But no sooner had we ordered drinks than we were joined by Sanary and Hugh, who had taken the lift down together, and the conversation had immediately turned to Slavorigin’s death and how long we might expect to be held under what was coming to seem tantamount to house, or hotel, arrest.

Hugh’s accent, I couldn’t help remarking, mysteriously came and went, like that of an insecure English actor miscast in Synge or O’Casey, depending on whether he was speaking to Evie (all hammy Oirishry) or to me (nary a trace of Irishness, which was surely to be expected after so many years lived in England); while Sanary, hearing that Evie had not after all spent the afternoon cogitating in her room, as she assured me she would, but propping up the bar, drawing out not merely the two disgraced minders but the Museum tick-et-issuer, a whiny white-haired pensioner who insisted to her that he had absented himself for no more than ten minutes because of a spongy bladder, cried ‘Zut alors! I doff my hat, Madame!’ Whereupon he doffed an imaginary topper, and I thought I would go mad.

Then a despondent Düttmann entered the bar and our party eventually drifted into the hotel’s own restaurant, in which we consumed a none too animated supper before, with perceptible relief on all sides, retiring early.

Coming back to the present, as I had said not a word in response to her exclamation, Evie repeated it, although this time it was more in the nature of a sigh.

‘Heavens to Murgatroyd!’

‘A penny for your thoughts.’

‘I was thinking,’ she replied, ‘what a rum affair this has turned out to be. For me above all.’

‘Oh. And why you above all?’