And Then There Was No One полностью

There followed a brief pause. The blind pianist had updated his repertoire to Rodgers and Hammerstein. It felt so hot in the bar I could hardly breathe. I finally said to Evie:

‘It’s awfully stuffy in here. What say we take a walk before the others arrive for what sounds like a rather cheerless get-together?’

After another pause she agreed.

Everything converges at last. In silence Evie and I walked through the lovely, dark, deep woods like Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Suddenly, when we emerged into open ground, she came to a halt. Glancing in my direction, she took a few timid steps forward and peered over our path’s missing edge; then at once, and more nimbly than I might have expected, considering her age and weight, she nipped back in again. At the same time, we both became aware of a low, distant roar drowning out the beats of our two thumping hearts, the roar of what, at the climax to ‘The Final Problem’, Conan Doyle describes as ‘a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house’.

‘Why, it’s the Falls,’ Evie croaked. ‘We’re directly above the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Naturally we are,’ I replied. ‘Where did you think we were?’

‘Yes, but – but – I don’t understand.’

‘What is it you don’t understand?’

Blinking, she looked around her.

‘Where’s the souvenir shop I visited this afternoon? The funny little funicular? Where, to the point, are the railings? Shouldn’t there be railings here?’

‘Oh,’ said I, ‘haven’t you got it? We’re some distance away from all the props of so-called “civilisation”. Think of one of those tricks of perspective which vulgarising mathematicians have such a fondness for. The eye is so fixated on the sheer drop of the Falls it tends not to register that they’re also several hundred yards wide.’

‘Uh huh …’ she mumbled pensively – stop it! – while continuing to back off.

Thus far things had gone my way more smoothly than I had dared hope. No one had observed our quitting the hotel together; nor, along the mountain path, had we passed any rustic busybody who could have borne subsequent witness to our having been out in each other’s company. To cap it all, the moon had begun to rise on schedule. Yet I was still very nervous. I badly needed a cigarette – ‘the only new pleasure modern man has invented in eighteen hundred years,’ wrote the French pornographer and belle-lettriste Pierre Louÿs – and to hell with the alliterative linkage of tobacco and taboo. I had stopped smoking, it’s true, but I remained jammed at the fragile phase when I made certain I always had a full pack, plus a functioning lighter, somewhere about my person. So from my jacket pocket I drew out my new pack of Dunhills, poked a cigarette between my lips and held the lighter up to them. Except that it wasn’t the lighter at all. To my great mortification, it was a tube of Polo Mints, of almost identical shape and size, which I kept in the same pocket, kept there, ironically, I guess the word has to be, for one of those crises when I just had to have a cigarette and then had to disguise the fact that I’d had one.

While Evie muffled a guffaw, I pulled the real lighter out and shakily lit my cigarette at last.

‘May I have one?’ she said.

‘You don’t smoke.’

‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

‘If you put it like that, then I suppose I’m asking you.’

‘Who says I don’t smoke?’

‘Well …’

‘I’ll tell you who. You.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. In those two whodunits of yours. It’s something you made up about me without consulting me first. Like a lot else.’

‘What are you saying? You’re actually a forty-a-day addict?’

‘No,’ she answered wearily, ‘but I do enjoy an occasional ciggie. Are you going to offer me one or not?’

‘Certainly I am,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid, though, I can’t oblige with Players or Senior Service.’

‘Dunhills were also smoked in the thirties, if that’s the point you’re making.’

‘How would you know? You weren’t even born then.’

‘I looked it up on Wikipedia. When I was researching one of my books.’

I held out the blood-red pack and lit up her cigarette. And, I have to say, unlike the Evadne Mount of my whodunits, she did appear to be at ease with it, horsily exhaling the first intake of smoke through her leathery nostrils before, like an old hand, giving its glowing tip a brief inspection.

‘This, I assume,’ she said, ‘is the condemned woman’s last cigarette.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Come now, let’s not play games with one another. Why else would you bring me here if not to try and kill me? Just like Conan Doyle. The jealous author rids himself of a character who has started to upstage him by hurling him – or, in my case, her – over the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Pah! You aren’t nearly as famous as Sherlock Holmes.’

‘And just whose fault is that, Gilbert?’

I was beginning to have a real problem containing my detestation of her.

‘But it is why you brought me here, isn’t it?’ she went on, unperturbed. ‘To try and kill me?’