And Then There Was No One полностью

‘Well, think about it yourself. It seems increasingly to be the case that – just like Alexis Baddeley, the regular detective in my own whodunits, you remember – wherever I happen to be, I find myself infallibly stumbling across a murder. It’s almost as though it were some kind of a Law, and I’m starting to wonder whether we aren’t – I mean me, Alexis, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple – I’m starting to wonder whether the trait shared by us amateur or professional sleuths, the secret trait nobody ever dares mention, is that we’re all jinxes.’

‘Jinxes?’

‘Think about it, I say. We all solve murders, true, but it should be obvious to fans of mystery fiction that we also create the conditions for these murders simply by being there, whether in a snowed-in country house on Dartmoor or on an archaeological dig in Mesopotamia or indeed in an idyllic little town in the Swiss Alps. In fact, you might even say that we have a moral obligation to solve them because they’d doubtless not have been committed in the first place had we not been on the scene.

‘You know, that insight of mine has just given me another idea, an idea so ingenious I might actually use it as the theme of my next whodunit, ha! ha! My regular police inspector, my Trubshawe, if you will – his name, as you may or may not recall, is Tomlinson, Tomlinson of the Yard – well now, let me see, I might have him sitting in his club one evening, nursing all the bruises his self-esteem has received over the years at his having been so consistently outsleuthed by Alexis. Suddenly it dawns on him that the one thread, the only meaningful thread, connecting all the murders she has solved in her lengthy career is her own fortuitous, or allegedly fortuitous, presence at the scene of each and every one of the crimes. So, in the very last chapter, he naturally arrests her as the most subtle and successful serial killer in history.’

‘Are you serious?’ I asked, genuinely impressed. (With Evie, you never knew.)

Shaking her head, she took a sip of her cappuccino.

‘No. Only kidding. My readers wouldn’t stand for it.’

I was about to suggest, on the contrary, that such an original twist might actually have a positive impact on her shrinking circulation, although I wouldn’t have put it so plain-spokenly, when she herself changed tack.

‘What,’ she asked, ‘are we two going to do about this one?’

‘This what?’

‘This murder, of course. Slavorigin’s.’

‘Why should we be expected to do anything about it,’ I replied, ‘except all go home as soon as we’re authorised to?’

‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ she exclaimed (to my flattered amusement). ‘Here we are, two ace criminologists, practically witnesses to one of the most sensational crimes of the century, and what you propose is that we slink away from it with our tails between our legs. Don’t you share my sense of moral obligation? Ah me, if only Eustace were here …’

‘Eustace’, I knew, could mean no other than her lugubrious, long-suffering partner-in-detection in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style, and I took exception, and told her so, to being unfavourably compared to one of my own fictional creations, especially as, with his unerring flair for barking up a whole forest of wrong trees,* if he was present in the books at all, it was solely to serve as her hapless stooge.

‘But you haven’t understood anything!’ she thundered, causing a passing cyclist, a faunlet with the face of a Crivelli angel, a momentary wobble. ‘It’s precisely because he was a plodder that Eustace and I formed so effective a team. Good cop, bad cop, as they say in the pictures. “Good” and “bad”, though, in the sense of “competent” and “incompetent”. Without Watson Holmes would have been nothing. He bounced his own good ideas off on Watson’s poor ones. Ditto me and Eustace.’

‘Is that what you’re suggesting? That I become your Watson?’

‘Gilbert, a man has just been murdered. In my vicinity, surprise surprise. For you, I realise, this is a new and novel experience, but for me it already feels, as it must have done for Holmes and the rest, like another day, another corpse. And yet … Slavorigin’s eminence apart, as well as the kudos I could expect to receive if I were responsible for apprehending his killer – it would do wonders for my back-list – I must also point out that it’s a crime possessed of all sorts of bizarre and even unique features and that it would be extremely contrary of me, as contrary as Poirot opting to quit Cairo on the very day one of his co-expats is found stabbed in the shadow of the Sphinx, not to want to poke and probe at it in the hope of outwitting dear clueless old Inspector Plodder – or Plödder – of the Swiss Police.’

‘But surely there isn’t any mystery as to who did it?’

‘Oh really?’