And Then There Was No One полностью

‘Anyway, he was at first rather standoffish, cold if not quite rude – correct, I believe, is the French word for what I mean. But when he discovered who I was, he couldn’t have been more charming. He knew all about my career, the cases I’d solved [?], the murderers I’d brought to justice [??], so when I asked him if I might, as a special favour, be permitted to snoop about inside the Museum, he became positively deferential. Told me how greatly he would value my contribution to what was proving to be a trickier case than he had anticipated and, right there on the spot, made out a chit, kind of a pass, for me to show to the two bobbies on guard.’

‘You always did have a knack for twisting the authorities round your chubby little finger,’ I twitted her. ‘Remember young Calvert, Inspector Tom Calvert in A Mysterious Affair of Style, and how happy he always was to bend the regulations for you?’

‘Naturally I remember him.’ She sighed. ‘What a tragedy.’

‘Tragedy?’

‘Didn’t you read about him? About six months ago it happened, maybe nine. He was caught up in a sting – one of Scotland Yard’s own stings, ironically – to entrap an international network of paedophiles who had been swapping indecent photographs over the Internet. Operation WWW.’

‘World Wide Web?’

‘Wee Willie Winkie. Got a custodial sentence, of course. Three years in Broadmoor. Poor, poor man. What he did was vile, to be sure, and it would have been unjust for others to have been punished and him merely reprimanded, but even so … Married with two children. As I say, what a tragedy. Thank God Eustace wasn’t alive to hear of it. It would have been the death of him. He’d been Calvert’s mentor at the Yard, you recall.’

‘Now listen, Evie,’ I said, forgetting for a moment the serious pickle I myself was in, ‘you really must try to curb these cranky ravings of yours. They’re beginning to get out of hand.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she shot back, as though I were the one hallucinating, not she. ‘It made the front page of all the newspapers. Well, maybe not the – what did you call it? – the “Guardian”?’ she said with a genteel jeer.

‘And what,’ I asked her dully, ‘did you discover in the Museum?’

‘Well, Gilbert, I took my time. I was prepared to worry the stuffing out of that room. I poked my nose into everything – empty desk drawers, framed snapshots, pipes and pipe-rack, Conan Doyle’s bust, the cryptogram – everything except the blood-stained arrow itself, which had been removed, I suppose, to be forensically examined for fingerprints. Not that they’re going to find any – even you were canny enough to avoid making so elementary a blooper. I knew that, while you pretended to be snoring your head off in your room, you were actually keeping an early-morning rendezvous with Slavorigin at the Museum. I also knew that, once there, you shot him through the heart, at point-blank range – if I can use that expression for so primitive a weapon – with a bow-and-arrow. The arrow was already at your disposal, just waiting to be fired. But where had the bow come from?

‘It was while I was pondering that conundrum that I chanced to pick up the copy of His Last Bow that lay on a little semi-circular wall-table. His Last Bow – now that seemed to me a curious coincidence. Then I noticed, next to it on the same table, Holmes’s violin, its bow laid diagonally on top of it. Another bow. Even curiouser. But, curiousest of all, I said to myself, was the fact that it was, so to speak, the wrong way round, as though in a looking-glass world or a parallel universe. In music-making, after all, the bow is a pendant to the violin and, in archery, the arrow is a pendant to the bow.

‘It was naughty of me, I know, but I picked up that violin – I took lots of music lessons when I was just a gal – and began to play one of my old never-to-be-forgotten party-pieces, Cyril Scott’s Lullaby. (Rhymes with alibi, Gilbert!) Well, talk of running a jagged fingernail down a blackboard. I am but an amateur, and a very rusty one at that, and I’m also aware that the difference between a wrong note on a piano, say, and a wrong note on a violin is that the former, wrong though it may be, is none the less, unlike the latter, a real note, but even at my pretty dismal worst I had never produced such an unholy screech. So I inspected the violin – and do you know what I found?’

‘What?’

‘I found that one of its strings had snapped in two. And I suddenly realised that I had also found the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. You fired that arrow, Gilbert – you fired it not from a bow but from a violin. From Sherlock Holmes’s own violin.’

‘Oh really,’ I cried helplessly, ‘what utter nonsense you do speak! I doubt it’s even possible to fire an arrow from a violin.’

‘My dear,’ she said gravely, ‘decades of experience as both a writer and reader have taught me that in a whodunit anything, absolutely anything, is possible.’