It was an arrow. We could all now clearly see the tuft of faded, mangy turkey feathers which had been glued or fletched, I believe the technical term is, to the blunt end of its shaft. It was, in fact, as a backward glance instantly confirmed, the very arrow, with its crudely daubed-on bloodstain, that I had inspected the previous day on the half-moon table where it had lain next to the hundred-year-old copy of the Daily Telegraph and the pulpy edition of His Last Bow, both of them, incidentally, undisturbed.
There was a collective gasp, as from the audience at the kind of movie where a blonde co-ed opens a closet door and the dead Dean topples into her scantily pantied lap like a felled oak. Sanary knelt down and, without even bothering to brace himself for the shock, gently turned Slavorigin’s body over. Another, louder gasp. The arrow was stuck deep in his chest, so deep it seemed to have acted as a stopper: the blood that soaked his blue-and-white striped shirt was far less than one would have expected. Tiny bubbles speckled with foamy pink saliva drooled from his gaping mouth. Yet his expression, as I said before, was as unalarmed as if he’d been shot in the back.
‘You know,’ said Evie in a quiet voice, ‘you really shouldn’t have done that.’
Sanary looked up at her, pale-faced.
‘Done what?’
‘You don’t have to be a reader of whodunits to know that you must never take the liberty of touching a dead body before the police arrive.’
He hastily yanked both his hands from off Slavorigin’s snakeskin jacket as if only just realising that it was now being worn by a corpse. But by then it was too late.
*
During the whole of that afternoon, right there in the Kunsthalle’s lecture hall, we were all questioned by a local police inspector, Schumacher by name. Fiftyish, weedily built, with a tiny, Hitlerian clump of a moustache, he was quite without the stoic morbidity of Swiss policemen in Dürrenmatt’s thrillers. On the contrary. He actually seemed to regard it as a source of perverse pride that such a celebrated author should have been shot dead (with William Tell’s bow-and-arrow, for God’s sake!) in his own boring backwater of a town.
What was most curious about the interviews – ‘interrogations’ is hardly the word – was that not one of us turned out to have an altogether satisfactory alibi. Not that we all fell under suspicion, as the tacit consensus was that Slavorigin had obviously been slain by a fanatic. The main autobahn out of Meiringen was already under surveillance and all Swiss airports were being patrolled by anti-terrorist units, every wing in the sky accounted for. According to the police doctor’s preliminary report, however, the victim had died within an hour, at most an hour-and-a-half, of our having discovered him, and by some impish coincidence, as I say, not one of us could offer a truly secure alibi for that little skylight window of opportunity.
Meredith, who was up first, told Schumacher that before finally gravitating to the Kunsthalle she had spent the morning wandering about the town’s rather disappointing shopping precinct. Yes, she had been alone and, no, she hadn’t made any purchases, but she had spoken to the odd shop assistant who might be able to vouch for her. Sanary had taken breakfast in the hotel, also on his own, then returned to his bedroom to pick up his emails. He had not responded to any of them, with the result that nothing of his could be traced or timed, assuming anybody thought it worth doing so. His next hour was spent jotting down preliminary notes on the first three chapters of a children’s fantasy novel he had been commissioned to translate from the English, The Master of the Fallen Chairs, and although he had hung a Bitte nicht stören sign on his bedroom door he had forgotten, or so he thought, to remove it when he eventually did leave, at five to eleven. No, no, hold on there, he suddenly said. About quarter of an hour earlier a chambermaid had tapped on his door only for him to request that she come back later. Autry, whom I had never heard string so many articulate sentences together at one go, admitted to having mooched about the Reichenbach Falls for an hour or two, alone naturally, although he had noticed, but had also deliberately steered clear of, the usual mob of sightseers. Hugh claimed to have awakened late, if not as late as I had, and been disturbed by the same chambermaid. There was also in his account, for me at least, one piquant detail which would have definitively convinced me of his innocence had I ever imagined anybody might have considered him guilty. If he overslept, he said, it was only because, owing to his unfamiliarity with continental bolsters and duvets, he had taken forever to drift off the night before. I, too, had of course slept late. And Evie, the very last of us to be interviewed – Düttmann and his trio of assistants were out of the running, having all naturally observed each other making last-minute preparations for the Kunsthalle reception – told Schumacher that she had traipsed for almost an hour from one news kiosk to another in an attempt to find a copy of an English newspaper.
‘Any particular newspaper?’ he asked.
‘The Daily Sentinel,’ she to my astonishment replied.
‘And did you find it?’
‘Why yes, I finally did. At the railway station. Should have tried there first.’
‘It would be of assistance to me, gnädige Frau, if you still had that copy in your possession.’
‘Ah well,’ said Evie, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t. You see, I took it with me to the station cafeteria and read it over a cappuccino. Then – what? – yes, I dumped it in a litter bin and walked to the Kunsthalle. On the way, though, I did pop into a souvenir shop to ask the price of a glass paperweight – it contained a miniature Mont Blanc, you know, which I thought I might buy for my godson’s birthday – but that was just before I arrived here, at exactly eleven o’clock. Sorry.’
The Daily Sentinel? What new nonsense was this? Couldn’t she any longer distinguish the fictional Evadne Mount from the real live Evie? Or was she so flustered by Schumacher’s affable drilling of her she absent-mindedly named one of the spurious, jokily named newspapers I had invented for my whodunits? Pish posh! She hadn’t been flustered at all. She had been as cool as the proverbial cucumber – gaarh, now I’m doing it! I was determined to have the matter out with her later, privately.
There was one last, token question which we all had put to us before we were permitted to go about our respective affairs, but only those affairs, mark you, that could be conducted within the strict confines of Meiringen itself. Not, as Schumacher once more took pains to reassure us, that any of us was considered a suspect, but he expected from one hour to the next the arrival from Brussels of a senior official from Interpol – Interpol versus the Internet? I know which I would bet my money on – as also two British intelligence agents, and, begging our pardons, he could not be expected to dismiss us until the three of them had seen for themselves what was and what wasn’t what. I was rather amused to hear that a Belgian detective would soon be on the murderer’s trail. It struck me that, with Evie already in situ, his presence would belatedly represent the fulfilment of that ancient dream of all Christie fans, a whodunit in which Marple and Poirot, as rival sleuths, endeavour simultaneously to solve the same crime.†
And the token question? Slavorigin had definitely been shot, not stabbed, and we all knew where the arrow had come from, but the bow? A bow is not an easy thing to conceal. It’s a big object, usually, bigger than you would expect, and whether it’s fashioned of wood or plastic it mustn’t be bent too far lest it split or, scarcely less serious, cause the arrow to be so erratically propelled as to be, even at a short distance, deflected from its target. These facts were communicated to us by Schumacher himself, something of an expert, it seemed. He went on: