And Then There Was No One полностью

‘Come now, Gilbert. Let’s hypothesise. Let’s assume, just for the argument’s sake, that you yourself are in a position where you’re forced to kill Slavorigin in self-defence, not with your bare arms, not with some handy poker, not by knocking him down and inadvertently causing him to brain himself against a brass fireguard, say, but by shooting some equally handy arrow into his heart’ – again the comical Noli Me Tangere gesture – ‘yes, yes, I realise we know only where the arrow came from, not the bow, but forget that for the nonce. If you had to take so extreme a measure, seriously, would you rush back into the Kunsthalle to announce your guilt to the company which you had left just ten minutes before? Especially when everyone in that company was aware, and the police would soon have to be made aware, that you and your victim happened not to be on the friendliest of terms?’

‘No … no, I suppose not. It would be too easy, and thus too tempting, to make a reappearance as if nothing at all were amiss. Frankly, though, as far as I’m concerned, what scuttles your argument of self-defence is the choice of weapon. When someone attempts to defend himself against an assailant, he surely seizes on the weapon nearest to hand, any weapon, even some blunt object or instrument that was never intended to be used as a weapon. On the other hand, there can be no getting away from the fact that a murder by bow-and-arrow – the bow having to be supplied by the murderer himself – is a premeditated murder. It must be. No, Evie, I’m afraid, when I listen to you theorise, my bottom starts to itch.’

I at once wanted to bite off my tongue. Why? In A Mysterious Affair of Style, the whodunit on which, for a number of inglorious reasons, I had shamefully failed to consult Evie, there is a scene in the Ritz Bar fairly late in the narrative where Evadne Mount’s sidekick, the frequently forementioned Trubshawe, expounds his theory on the possible motive behind the murder of the stage and screen actress Cora Rutherford, Evadne’s oldest and dearest friend, once young and famous, now fiftyish if she’s a day and fading fast. Even if, it’s implied, Evadne is secretly intrigued by the ingenuity of Trubshawe’s theory, she none the less announces to him that she remains unpersuaded. When asked why, she replies to his astonishment that her bottom itches; that, if I may quote from myself, ‘Whenever I read a whodunit by one of my rivals, my so-called rivals, and I encounter some device – I don’t know, a motive, a clue, an alibi, whatever – a device I simply don’t trust, even if I can’t immediately articulate to myself why I don’t trust it, I long ago noticed that my bottom started to itch. I repeat, it’s infallible. If my bottom ever once steered me wrong, why, the universe would be meaningless.’

The problem was that I had invented that vulgar little idiosyncrasy for Evie’s fictional self without, as I’d promised I would, obtaining her prior permission. It was, indeed, just the kind of thing to cover which a special clause had been added, at my own urging, to the contract we both signed. Now, by my unthinking confusion of the true and the false Evadnes, except that it was precisely because I was finding it increasingly difficult to tell one apart from the other that I had committed the gaffe, I risked bringing to an abrupt end the unhoped-for conspiracy of silence which continued to surround the whole question of my repeated breaches of that contract. How, I wondered, was she liable to react?

But I could never second-guess Evie.

She threw her head back and laughed till the tears streamed down her face.

‘Oh, Gilbert!’ she cried. ‘I would never have imagined that an itchy bottom could be contagious! For I’ll let you into a secret!’

‘Yes?’

‘My bottom’s itching too!’

‘It is?’

‘Yes! Which must mean that I don’t even believe in my own theory, ha! ha!’ She wiped away the last of the tears. ‘Best move on, shall we. Autry, now, the self-styled G. Autry. What are we to make of him?’

‘You tell me. Maybe you’ve got another theory?’

‘Well … my initial instinct is to answer you with a categorical no. How could I have a theory about somebody so secretive, so laconic, so unforthcoming. All I know about him is what I see and, when he deigns to speak, hear. And when he does deign to speak, all I hear is yup, nope, mebbe and occasionally, if he’s in a loquacious mood, mebbe not. What on earth, you might ask, have I got to work on? Yet, if you reread [sic!] what I’ve just been saying, you may actually glimpse the first little inkling of a clue to his identity.

‘What, after all, do we know about Autry? Next to nothing. He’s a Texan, from the accent, and he’s almost pathologically determined to keep himself to himself. Now what do we know about Hermann Hunt V? He too is a Texan, and he too is almost pathologically determined to keep himself to himself.’

‘What! You’re suggesting that Autry and Hunt are one and the same?’