And Then There Was No One полностью

For an author to be accused of murder by one of his own characters – now this was a first! Bizarrely, however, before the meaning of those four words had properly begun to sink in, they had a queer little Proustian effect on me. I was immediately reminded of a long-forgotten, although in its day long-running, television programme called This Is Your Life, whose guest, a celebrity supposedly invited not as the evening’s victim but as just another member of the studio audience, would nevertheless find himself accosted by the show’s emcee. ‘X,’ this emcee would say with ominous aplomb, ‘this is your life!’ The tape again.

‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’

‘You did, of course.’

‘Me? Are you mad?’

‘No,’ she replied placidly, ‘although I rather think you may be.’

‘But, Evie,’ I protested, ‘what in heaven’s name are you talking about? I’m Gilbert Adair. I’m a nice man. People generally like me. Ask anybody.’

‘Pooh!’ she ejaculated. ‘As though nice men never commit murders!’

I stared at her.

‘Did you just ejaculate?’

‘Certainly I did. I’m Evadne Mount. It’s what I do.’

‘Well,’ I muttered crossly, glancing round the nearly empty bar in case somebody else had heard her, ‘don’t do it in public, please.’

‘If I’m not mistaken, Gilbert,’ she said, ‘you’re trying to change the subject. Aren’t you interested to learn why I’ve just accused you of murder?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed. I’m actually very keen to discover how you could have arrived at such a ridiculous deduction.’

‘In point of fact, it all began with a coincidence. Now, as both a writer and a reader of whodunits, I heartily dislike coincidences, which I regard as the jokes of reason and the conceits of time, and I never – well, almost never – have recourse to them myself. But yesterday, if you recall, I quoted a couple of lines of Chesterton to you – “Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest” – and last night it suddenly occurred to me that my travel reading, or rereading, was precisely the volume, The Innocence of Father Brown, in which that quote appears. So I dug it out of my suitcase and I re-checked the reference. The story in question is “The Sign of the Broken Sword”, and the relevant conversation takes place between Father Brown and Flambeau, former jewel thief turned Brown’s fellow-sleuth – first name Hercule, by the way. Would you like to know how their conversation continues?’

‘Why not? Anything to humour you.’

She pulled a dog-eared Penguin paperback out of her capacious handbag, withdrew a Hatchards bookmark and started to read:

‘“‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?’ ‘Well, well,’ cried Flambeau irritably, ‘what does he do?’ ‘He grows a forest to hide it in,’ said the priest in an obscure voice. ‘A fearful sin.’”’

‘How very Chestertonian,’ I said. ‘But what has it to do with Slavorigin’s death?’

‘Ah well,’ she replied in, I fancy, much the same obscure voice as Father Brown’s, ‘it so happened that the longer I speculated on the brouhaha surrounding Out of a Clear Blue Sky as a convincing motive for murder, by you or anybody else, the itchier my bottom got. Try as I might, I just couldn’t believe it. Gilbert, some things never change. We sleep on more or less the same beds our ancestors slept on, we act on more or less the same stages our ancestors acted on and we commit murders for more or less the same reasons our ancestors committed them.

‘So, having persuaded myself that the F.A.T.W.A. website represented nothing in reality but a monstrous shoal of red herrings, I ruthlessly swept aside the rubble of all my former theories and decided to do a little web-surfing myself.’

‘You?’

‘Yes, Gilbert, me. I may not look the part but I really am remarkably cyber-literate, I think they call it. This morning, at any rate, I wolfed down breakfast and, in pursuance of my hunch, ensconced myself in the hotel’s wi-fi cabin. You can’t know how much impatient door-tapping I had to ignore – I never knew Japanese businessmen could be so potty-mouthed! – but what I was in the process of unearthing was just too important to allow my investigation to be even momentarily interrupted.