And Then There Was No One полностью

‘All I’m saying is that it isn’t an impossibility. The ages would seem to match up, and I’ve heard it rumoured that, in his youth, before he was sucked into turbo-capitalism, as I believe the beastly expression is, Hunt’s ambition was to become a writer. So what if he did become a writer after all, pseudonomously? No, nothing as I can see prevents what I have just said from being true. Which doesn’t, of course, automatically make it so.’

‘But why, for heaven’s sake? Hermann Hunt offered one hundred million dollars for the head of Gustav Slavorigin. Why on earth would he suddenly decide to become his own hit man? Where’s the logic in that?’

‘Moi, I think it highly logical. Consider. It’s known – to a select few, I grant you, but what with the dizzying boundlessness of the Internet that select few probably amounts by now to several hundred thousand bloggers – it’s known that Hunt will pay out a portion of his vast personal fortune to whoever succeeds in killing Slavorigin. What more watertight alibi could he ask for? Since it’s on public record that he’s prepared to reward somebody else to commit the crime, and reward him handsomely, it stands to reason that he himself would be the very last person on the planet to come under suspicion.’

‘Logical, perhaps, but very far-fetched.’

‘Yes, I quite agree. Recall, though, what our mutual friend Philippe Françaix once had the wit to reply* when I myself taxed him on how far-fetched some abstruse French theory was that he had begun to bandy at me’ – here she mimicked the crudely parodic patois I had devised for Françaix in hommage, affectionate hommage, I insist, to the Franglais of primarily Hercule Poirot, but also of that long succession of cardboard-thin, language-mangling wogs in Agatha Christie’s whodunits – ‘“But see you, Mademoiselle, all the best ideas must be fetched from afar.”’

‘And the worst,’ I added drily.

‘Yes, of course, that’s true too,’ Evie answered with a sigh. But although she was audibly flagging, she hadn’t yet quite said her piece. ‘There is also,’ she continued, ‘Autry’s own admission that he spent all of yesterday morning mooching about at the Falls. Schumacher took that to mean that the murderer would have been prevented from disposing of his bow. If, however, the murderer were Autry himself …’

She fell silent in mid-sentence, gazing around her as if bored at last by all these mutually exclusive hypotheses of hers. ‘Clouds gathering, I see. Don’t like the look of them.’

She shivered.

‘Well, Gilbert, this little chinwag of ours has been extremely useful, I think. Cleared the deadwood away, you know, always a good start. Did we miss anybody?’

‘Any other potential “suspects”?’ I asked, fully intending for her to hear the inverted commas I’d placed around the word.

‘Uh huh.’

‘Well, it was Düttmann, of course, who actually invited the victim to this accursed Festival, but my personal conviction is that he doesn’t merit a moment’s consideration.’

‘Mine too,’ said Evie.

‘Which leaves only – though, as a suspect, he may be too far-fetched even for you – the tall dark stranger who tangoed last night with Slavorigin. No one knew who he was and no one has seen him since. Did you ever entertain the possibility that that rendezvous in the Museum might have been an amorous tryst?’

‘An amorous tryst? At ten o’clock in the morning? I don’t think so.’

‘Then that, I’m afraid, is it.’

‘Goody goody. Now, Gilbert dear – and don’t protest, please – for at least as long as we find ourselves obliged to stay put in Meiringen, and if for no other reason than to pass the hours and perhaps the days which lie ahead of us here, I once more suggest that we two set about solving this crime. Yes, yes, I do. But separately, independently of one another, each in his or her own inimitable fashion. I also suggest, although I am not by nature a betting woman, making a wager with you if you are game enough to take me on.’

I couldn’t believe what she had just said to me. Unless I was in error, it was almost word for word what I had had her fictional self, her alter ego, her alter Evie, propose to Trubshawe in the Ritz bar.

‘I trust you’re not about to say,’ I answered, ‘that, if you solve the mystery before I do, you will expect me to marry you?’

She laughed, quite softly for once.

‘Oh no. Nothing personal, Gilbert, but neither you nor anybody else could ever take dear Eustace’s place. It’s been nigh on six years since his fatal heart attack, and not a day passes without my thinking of him with undiminished fondness. No, what I was about to suggest was that, if I succeed in solving the mystery before you do, then your very next book must be a new Evadne Mount whodunit.’

I had, as you may suppose, not the slightest intention of writing a new Evadne Mount whodunit, but all I replied, more out of curiosity than because I was tempted by the idea of accepting her wager, was ‘And if I should solve the crime before you?’