‘Two, rabid rightwingers they may be, but I really do think that these bounty-hunters – and what a bounty! – would be savvy enough to disguise themselves before setting off on the great crusade. In fact, considering the average American’s ignorance of how we Europeans live, like something out of an episode of The Simpsons, I would guess, the kind of stranger I’d tend to look at twice is one wearing a Tyrolean hat and lederhosen instead of one in a Davy Crockett cap and leather britches.
‘Three, we have absolutely no cause to assume that our murderer needed to “lure” Slavorigin at all. We’ve all had to pay a dutiful visit to the Museum, but he arrived too late to join us. What could be more natural than for him to take a solitary stroll there, a matter of a few hundred yards from the Hilton, and also to be surreptitiously tailed?’ It was now my turn to ward off an impending interruption with a raised hand. ‘Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say. His bodyguards. Thomson and Thompson, as I call them. Why didn’t they insist on accompanying him? That is queer. Except that Slavorigin is, was, a spoilt brat, accustomed to getting his way in everything, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have wanted to shake off his twin shadows for a blissful half-hour or so on his own. After all, he must have said to himself, what could possibly happen to him in a sleepy hamlet like Meiringen?
‘As for your hunch – which is all it is, if I may take the liberty of quoting you – that one of the Festival’s guests could have been responsible, the problem as I see it is crucially one of motive. The motive of, let’s say, an ideological murderer positively screams out at us whereas, as far as our co-festivaliers are concerned, I have to admit to not having heard so much as a whisper.
‘Finally, let me raise an issue that you appear to have overlooked.’
‘Oh yes?’ she said, ever ready to bristle at the faintest hint of criticism.
‘What’s today’s date?’
‘The twelfth of September.’
‘Right. Which means that yesterday was the eleventh.’
‘I’m quite aware of that, Gilbert. How could I not be after all that’s happened here?’
‘Ah yes, but do you know – or do you remember – Gustav Slavorigin’s birthdate?’
‘Course I don’t. I met the man for the first time two days ago, and in the Festival’s booklet there was obviously no mini-bio of its Mystery Guest.’
‘Well, I do. He was born, wait for it, on July 4.’
‘Ah …’
‘Born on the Fourth of July, died September 11, exactly ten years to the day after the attack on the World Trade Center. Added to which, this is the year 2011. 2 equals the Twin Towers of 1 + 1 and 20 minus 11 equals 9. The numbers, Evie, the symbolism! For Hermann Hunt’s henchmen it would have been what Düttmann calls the “clincher”. Don’t forget, these are neanderthals who claim to detect a daffy significance in the fact that Manhattan Island was discovered on September 11, 1609, by Henry Hudson, whose name has eleven letters, that the first Tower collapsed at 10.28am and 1 + 0 + 2 + 8 = 11, that 119, 9/11 in reverse, is the area code for both Iraq and Iran (I and I) and 1 + 1 + 9 = 11, that the first of the two attacking planes was American Airlines Flight 11, number 1-800-245-0999 and 1 + 8 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 0 + 9 + 9 + 9 equals 47, which two numbers combined also equal 11, that, standing side by side, the Twin Towers themselves resembled the number 11, that Hermann Hunt’s initials, like Henry Hudson’s, are HH, twin sets of Twin Towers – and I can assure you there’s a lot more gibberish out there where that came from.* If Slavorigin was to be murdered, yesterday was the day it had to be done. I rest my case.’
‘Well, Gilbert,’ Evie opined – said, goddamn it, said! – after a moment of reflection, ‘I can see that, despite your professed indifference to this crime, you have after all given it some thought. And I’m prepared to endorse your objections one, two and three. Yes, quite so, a Festival of this type would have been so leaky from the start that a lot of outsiders were bound to have had advance knowledge of Slavorigin’s attendance. And, yes, my caricature of a typical crazed crusader was crass in the extreme. And, yes again, although I’d very much like to have been the proverbial fly on the proverbial wall when they endeavoured to justify their negligence to the authorities, I can well imagine how easily those two brawny pin-heads, Thomson and Thompson, could have been outfoxed by somebody whose mind was set on it.
‘Furthermore, for your information, I had not at all overlooked the numerological symbolism of yesterday’s date. Good grief, Gilbert, even without the extra coincidence of Slavorigin having been born on America’s national holiday it was staring us all in the face. What isn’t staring us in the face, though, is how it undermines my theory that the murderer might have been one of the official invitees, two of whom, let me recall the fact to your attention, are Americans themselves. But any one of them might have been what you’ve just described as an ideological killer. More than once I’ve heard you make disobliging comments about this Festival. Has it never struck you as odd that it managed none the less to attract a not altogether undistinguished guest-list?’
‘Yes,’ I replied thoughtfully, ‘I confess it has rather. Yet writers, you know, will go anywhere if offered a freebie. Four days in the Swiss Alps, all expenses paid, and only a lecture to deliver for one’s supper. I can see how that might appeal.’
‘To Meredith van Demarest, who flew here all the way from California?’
‘Ah, but you’re forgetting that she also has plans to call on Agota Kristof in Zurich and pay homage to Nabokov in Montreux or wherever it is his remains are buried. She almost certainly regarded the Sherlock Holmes Festival as no more than a handy means for her to make the trip gratis. Anyway, what possible motive could she have?’
‘What motive? You surprise me. Putting to one side the ideological motive you mention above [above?], let me draw your mind back to the revelation that she and Slavorigin had, if only for a single night, been an item.’
‘Which revelation means for you that she must have murdered him?’
‘Don’t be silly, please. I merely register the fact that they knew each other better than she was initially prepared to let on, a fact she may have had her own good reason for withholding from us.’
‘Perhaps so, yet I still can’t help thinking you’re pointlessly looking for any motive other than the glaringly obvious one. Remember Occam’s Razor. Don’t postulate the existence of an entity if you are able to get by without it. In other words, where there are several conceivable solutions to a problem, it makes sense, and it saves time, to opt for the simplest one, for nature never needlessly complicates.’
‘Pshaw!’ she exclaimed.
‘Evie,’ I said, smiling, ‘no one in the real world actually says “Pshaw!”.’
‘I do,’ she answered doughtily. ‘As for Occam’s Razor, we’re not dealing with nature but with human nature, of which the need to needlessly complicate has been, since the dawn of time, one of the defining characteristics. And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’
I should explain. This Gilbert was not me but G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton. In The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, set as it was in some unspecified year of the nineteen-thirties, I had Evie, as a fictional member of the Detection Club, allude to one of its genuine members, Chesterton, as Gilbert or, more familiarly, as ‘my dear friend Gilbert’. How tiresome but typical of her that she should continue to perpetuate a now totally anachronistic affectation in order to aggrandise her own lonely and uneventful existence. It reminded me of another woman’s delusions of grandeur, a woman whose identity I was at first unable to pin down. Then it came to me: Margaret Thatcher’s references to Churchill, a statesman she couldn’t possibly have met, as ‘dear Winston’. Rewind the tape.