And Then There Was No One полностью

‘I do,’ she answered doughtily. ‘As for Occam’s Razor, we’re not dealing with nature but with human nature, of which the need to needlessly complicate has been, since the dawn of time, one of the defining characteristics. And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’

I should explain. This Gilbert was not me but G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton. In The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, set as it was in some unspecified year of the nineteen-thirties, I had Evie, as a fictional member of the Detection Club, allude to one of its genuine members, Chesterton, as Gilbert or, more familiarly, as ‘my dear friend Gilbert’. How tiresome but typical of her that she should continue to perpetuate a now totally anachronistic affectation in order to aggrandise her own lonely and uneventful existence. It reminded me of another woman’s delusions of grandeur, a woman whose identity I was at first unable to pin down. Then it came to me: Margaret Thatcher’s references to Churchill, a statesman she couldn’t possibly have met, as ‘dear Winston’. Rewind the tape.

‘And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’

‘Go ahead,’ I said wearily.

‘“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.”’

‘I’m sorry, Evie, I’m not with you.’

‘There’s a price on Slavorigin’s head, an astronomical price which has tempted who knows how many hit men – and, quite possibly, the odd hit woman. That’s the forest. Meredith van Demarest has, let’s say, her own private and personal motive for doing away with him. That’s the leaf. Naturally, whoever does succeed in murdering him, everybody’s initial assumption is that it must have been one of Hermann Hunt’s bounty hunters. Don’t you see? What could be more cunningly Chestertonian than for her to hide the leaf of her individual motive in the forest of their collective one, this human forest which was edging ever closer to him like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane?’

‘H’m. And the ideological motive?’

‘Ideological motive?’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t I hear you imply that Meredith might also have had an ideological motive for doing away with Slavorigin?’

‘In spite of their one torrid night of passion, Meredith loathes Slavorigin. Loathes his arrogance, his preening vanity, his sneering macho boorishness, but perhaps more than anything else loathes his visceral anti-Americanism. She may be the ungiving, unforgiving kind of feminist who wants to prohibit the teaching of Dead White Males and rename Manchester Womanchester – or Womanbreaster, ha ha! But she is, through and through, an American and, like all of her fellow citizens, whatever their ideological differences, a true and intractable patriot. And if, as a radical left-winger, she spent most of her adult life alienated from all her native land’s populist rites and rituals, the shock of September 11 brought her back in a panicky rush to the soft, fleshy twin towers, as it were, of the maternal bosom, no questions asked, no apologies tendered, and to this day, and with all that’s happened since, she can no longer look on America’s enemies with the complicit or half-complicit eye of an old lefty. Did you, perchance, observe the brooch on the lapel of her jacket?’

‘Actually, since you ask, I did. I remember it had four or five words written on it. Something about American womanhood?’

‘You really must learn to be more attentive to details, Gilbert. It read: “For All The Women of America”.’

‘An obscure feminist clique, I dare say.’

‘Possibly. But now I want you to spell out the first capital letter of each word as if it were an acronym.’

‘F. A. T. W. O. A.’

‘The “o” of “of” was lower-case.’

‘F. A. T. W. A.’ (Gasp.) ‘Oh my God, fatwa!’

‘Fatwa, precisely. “Simple chance!” the pedestrian reader may cry. Especially as one would hardly expect a would-be murderess barefacedly to advertise her homicidal designs. Not, to be sure, that the advertisement was so very barefaced. The lettering on that brooch was awfully hard to decipher, even for my famous gimlet eye.’

With her spoon she scooped up her cappuccino’s thin chocolaty dregs and swallowed them.

‘Then there’s the money,’ she continued, smacking her lips. ‘We mustn’t ever forget the money, Gilbert. One hundred million dollars. That’s big change – please note, by the way, how even a fuddy-duddy like me, the me of your books, is capable of mastering modern slang. Poor dear Cora, who didn’t have a truly criminal bone in her body, was prepared to take her life in her hands by blackmailing Rex Hanway.* And for what? For nothing more than a role, a secondary role, mind you, in his film. Just imagine how some normally high-principled, law-abiding individual, someone like Meredith van Demarest, to look no further, might be tempted to murder by the prospect of dosh so unimaginably large it boggles the mind.’

‘Cora Rutherford, you’re forgetting,’ I answered, ‘was merely a character in –’