And that’s where things stood when I arrived. Düttmann, I saw, was talking in whispers to an extremely tall, straight-backed man in a double-breasted suit, a sort of General De Gaulle with some of the excess air let out, whom I took (correctly) to be the Mayor. G. Autry, in an outfit not unlike that worn by the Lone Ranger in my dream, minus mask and revolver, was being spoken at by one of Düttmann’s assistants, a gawky, bespectacled, pony-tailed brunette whose fidgety smile testified, even from as far away from them as I myself stood, to her fear of being reprimanded for having left one of the Festival’s guests, if only for a few minutes, to his own devices. Meredith, who kept darting glances at me, was feigning interest in what a gesticulating Hugh had to say to her. (Though I found it hard to credit, particularly under the circumstances, it did cross my mind that this might be a new attempt of his to borrow the ten thousand pounds he was so direly in need of.) And the two bodyguards were looking woebegone indeed.
What was to be done? After a deal of verbal to-ing and fro-ing, it was Sanary who came up with a sensible suggestion.
‘We should,’ he said, ‘take a look in the Museum.’
‘Why do you say the Museum, Monsieur Sanary?’ Düttmann asked, his gammy eye blinking violently.
‘In this town there is nowhere else, it seems to me, that he could have gone. It’s the Museum or the Falls. And since the Museum is the nearer of the two, that’s where we should proceed first.’
Although nothing audible was said for or against his proposal, the general babble that followed sounded more approving than not and we all began to shuffle across to the Museum, which, like virtually everything else in Meiringen, was located just six or seven hundred yards away.
A queer thing occurred en route. I was walking between Evie and Meredith, and I spotted, on the far side of the narrow street, the twin toddlers from the flight whom I had already seen twenty-four hours earlier, seated with their parents on the café terrace. What startled me on this occasion, what really rather disturbed me, was that they were unchaperoned. A pair of foreign two-year-olds alone in the main street of a Swiss resort? What could their parents be thinking of? And where in God’s name were they? As warmly wrapped up as before, matching little bobble hats on matching little heads, the twins waddled happily along the pavement in the direction opposite that in which our party was headed, towing in their parallel wakes two identical wooden Donald Ducks with wheels instead of feet and heads which would metronomically nod, up and down, up and down, as they advanced. Perhaps they also quacked; I was too far away to hear. As I tried to point out to my not at all interested companions, it was most extraordinary.
Our stroll to the Museum took six minutes. Just as had been the case when I visited it with Düttmann and Spaulding, the box-office was unmanned, a dereliction of duty which elicited tut-tuts from the Mayor and his entourage. We started to file in one by one, there being a turnstile to manoeuvre, one we might have expected to prohibit entry to us visitors without tickets, but in fact it didn’t. I was fifth in the queue. Düttmann, two of his female assistants and somebody else I couldn’t place were in front of me; Hugh, a plume of his chain-smoker’s breath coiling about my earlobes, behind me; Evie and Meredith, if I remember aright, behind him.
Suddenly we all heard Düttmann cry out. One of his assistants began screaming and the queue heaved up with a judder. I had already squeezed through the turnstile and now hastened into the main gallery, that room-size replica of the Baker Street rooms that Holmes shared with Watson. At first I could see nothing but the unnaturally stiffened postures of those who had preceded me and who were standing stock-still in a little semi-circle. Düttmann’s two young assistants were holding their hands cupped over their mouths, the profiles of their frighteningly white faces made visible to me by their both having turned away in horror from whatever spectacle it was that confronted them. Düttmann himself was trembling; and as I rather blunderingly, I fear, pushed past him to see what they had all stumbled upon, he sought momentary support from the high-backed chair that served Watson’s mahogany writing desk.
Deaf to the confused hubbub behind me, as the others continued to step gingerly into the cramped room, I looked down at the figure on the carpet. It was of course Slavorigin. As soon as I saw him, I knew why people said ‘as dead as a doornail’. It was almost as though his body had actually been nailed to the ground. The beautiful face lying sideways, half on the carpet, half on the exposed surround of the wooden floor, was expressionless: no terror, not even a hint of surprise, could be detected in features more serene than I ever remembered them to have been in his mostly angry life. Clearly, he never knew he had died and was still none the wiser.
Gustav Slavorigin dead! What an almighty stink this would cause! But the worst was to come. The din inside the room was now indescribable, as everybody in turn got an eyeful of the corpse, reacting with a shriek or a muffled moan or a stammered ‘Oh my God!’. Evie, who had been here before, as it were, albeit only between the covers of my whodunits, looked much more squeamish than I had described her in print, even in A Mysterious Affair of Style, whose murder victim was, after all, supposed to be her oldest and dearest friend, and I heard Autry muttering a guttural ‘Jesus!’ again and again under his breath. Then quite by chance, as if the reels of Time were being changed, there came upon us all one of those unheralded instants of synchronised hush, the whole room falling silent at once, and Sanary pointed downward at the body and said in a bold clear voice, ‘Look!’
A queerly spindly object was sticking out of Slavorigin’s chest, an object that had come close to splitting in the middle as he fell. I suppose that, if I hadn’t immediately been conscious of it, it was because I’d naturally been drawn first, as one is, to the face. Or perhaps even then I’d had a premonition of some abnormality, an obscenely protruding bone, for example, that I would live to regret too intently focusing upon. Not that I really did think it was a bone; I didn’t ‘think’ anything. But an internal whisper, bypassing the speculative turmoil of my brain, may have insinuated to me that this – this thing had to be a bone, for what else could it be?