‘If you solve the crime first, which you won’t, then I solemnly promise, Gilbert, that I will cast
I wasn’t to learn the answer to that, in any case, rhetorical question for, just as she posed it, I brusquely raised my right hand to my left ear and gave it a wiggle.
‘Tsk!’
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I said carelessly. ‘It felt as though something wet just burst against my ear.’
‘Something wet?’
‘You know, like a bubble. Like a little soap bubble.’
* Memo to self:
* A trick which everyone missed, however, was the existence of a 1973 film, an anarcho-Utopian fantasy by the French director Jacques Doillon, in which an interpolated four-minute sequence by Alain Resnais depicted a number of ruined Wall Street financiers leaping out of their skyscraping office windows. The film, interestingly, was called
* In
* Author of a series of mystery novels set in the world of the Turf. When you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. Indeed, when Francis had written one, he’d written them all.
* Again in
The next day proved to be not merely the strangest but the most significant of my life. I awoke late again, to the usual mild shock of a sunburst of light abruptly banishing my sleeping mask’s velvety delusion of darkness. As ever I began my blurry daily existence with a satisfying albeit never quite definitive bowel movement (I knew, as sure as fate, that I would have seconds before I even descended to breakfast), and it was only when I re-emerged from the bathroom that I noticed a plain white envelope which somebody had slid under my door. I picked it up and opened it. The typed letter inside, from Düttmann, was addressed to all the guests of the Sherlock Holmes Festival. We were free to leave. The Belgian official from Interpol was confident that Slavorigin’s murderer was some as yet unidentified bounty hunter, most likely an American, and thus saw no reason for any of us to be inconvenienced further. Should subsequent enquiries have to be made, the hotel had our passport numbers, home addresses and so forth. Unfortunately, it had not been possible to reserve Business Class seats on flights out of Zurich that very day, but a hired car would be stationed in front of the hotel at exactly 8.00 the next morning to take Evie, Hugh, Autry and me to the airport where we would catch the first available plane to Heathrow, arrangements having also been made for Autry to transfer to a later London–Dallas flight. (Both Meredith and Sanary planned to quit Meiringen by train, Meredith to Montreux, Sanary to Geneva.) The day ahead, ended the letter, was in consequence ours to do with as we liked, but would we please all gather in the hotel bar at seven o’clock for one last ‘hopefully not so sad get-together’?
Downstairs, I plucked a complimentary
It transpired that, after I myself had left the disco, Hugh had finally succeeded in cornering Slavorigin and had asked him in his turn for a handout. Apparently recovered from the débâcle in the restaurant, fatally reverting to character, the novelist had laughed in his face. When Hugh none the less reminded him of the admiration he had expressed for his own novels, Slavorigin had replied – wittily, I thought but refrained from remarking – that ‘they were written in Prosak, a cross between Prozac and musak’.
‘Know what the bastard said?’
‘What?’
‘He said I’d written thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of words, and that the day I died, etc, etc, every single one of them would be forgotten. It would be like, professionally, I had never lived.’
‘The man was a despicable bully. Both a pain and a pill. In my opinion –’
‘I know, I know! The worst is,’ he mumbled into his cornflakes, ‘it’s true.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘No, Gilbert, it’s good of you to, etc. But I know it’s true. I’ve always known.’
I half-expected two pearly cartoon tears to dribble down his blotchy red face.
