‘And since you’ve just quoted Occam to me, let me now quote my dear friend Gilbert to you.’
‘Go ahead,’ I said wearily.
‘“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.”’
‘I’m sorry, Evie, I’m not with you.’
‘There’s a price on Slavorigin’s head, an astronomical price which has tempted who knows how many hit men – and, quite possibly, the odd hit woman. That’s the forest. Meredith van Demarest has, let’s say, her own private and personal motive for doing away with him. That’s the leaf. Naturally, whoever does succeed in murdering him, everybody’s initial assumption is that it must have been one of Hermann Hunt’s bounty hunters. Don’t you see? What could be more cunningly Chestertonian than for her to hide the leaf of her individual motive in the forest of their collective one, this human forest which was edging ever closer to him like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane?’
‘H’m. And the ideological motive?’
‘Ideological motive?’
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t I hear you imply that Meredith might also have had an ideological motive for doing away with Slavorigin?’
‘In spite of their one torrid night of passion, Meredith loathes Slavorigin. Loathes his arrogance, his preening vanity, his sneering macho boorishness, but perhaps more than anything else loathes his visceral anti-Americanism. She may be the ungiving, unforgiving kind of feminist who wants to prohibit the teaching of Dead White Males and rename Manchester Womanchester – or Womanbreaster, ha ha! But she is, through and through, an American and, like all of her fellow citizens, whatever their ideological differences, a true and intractable patriot. And if, as a radical left-winger, she spent most of her adult life alienated from all her native land’s populist rites and rituals, the shock of September 11 brought her back in a panicky rush to the soft, fleshy twin towers, as it were, of the maternal bosom, no questions asked, no apologies tendered, and to this day, and with all that’s happened since, she can no longer look on America’s enemies with the complicit or half-complicit eye of an old lefty. Did you, perchance, observe the brooch on the lapel of her jacket?’
‘Actually, since you ask, I did. I remember it had four or five words written on it. Something about American womanhood?’
‘You really must learn to be more attentive to details, Gilbert. It read: “For All The Women of America”.’
‘An obscure feminist clique, I dare say.’
‘Possibly. But now I want you to spell out the first capital letter of each word as if it were an acronym.’
‘F. A. T. W. O. A.’
‘The “o” of “of” was lower-case.’
‘F. A. T. W. A.’ (Gasp.) ‘Oh my God, fatwa!’
‘Fatwa, precisely. “Simple chance!” the pedestrian reader may cry. Especially as one would hardly expect a would-be murderess barefacedly to advertise her homicidal designs. Not, to be sure, that the advertisement was so very barefaced. The lettering on that brooch was awfully hard to decipher, even for my famous gimlet eye.’
With her spoon she scooped up her cappuccino’s thin chocolaty dregs and swallowed them.
‘Then there’s the money,’ she continued, smacking her lips. ‘We mustn’t ever forget the money, Gilbert. One hundred million dollars. That’s big change – please note, by the way, how even a fuddy-duddy like me, the me of your books, is capable of mastering modern slang. Poor dear Cora, who didn’t have a truly criminal bone in her body, was prepared to take her life in her hands by blackmailing Rex Hanway.* And for what? For nothing more than a role, a secondary role, mind you, in his film. Just imagine how some normally high-principled, law-abiding individual, someone like Meredith van Demarest, to look no further, might be tempted to murder by the prospect of dosh so unimaginably large it boggles the mind.’
‘Cora Rutherford, you’re forgetting,’ I answered, ‘was merely a character in –’
‘Yes,’ Evie interrupted me, ‘it’s true, she was a character, an eccentric, the kind of person who refuses to believe that society’s codes and conventions ever apply to her. My point is that, where a hundred million dollars are involved, all the moral imperatives which dictate the way we conduct our private and professional lives are suspended. This Hugh Spaulding, for instance. I may be slandering him – like a lot of writers, he may be just as much of a character as Cora – but he does strike me as a man in urgent need of money.’
‘Funny you should say that.’
‘Why so?’
‘Well, only yesterday he asked me if I would lend him some. A tidy amount it was too, considering we barely know each other.’
‘How much?’
‘Ten thousand pounds. Though he said he’d settle for seven.’
‘Ten thousand! Blimey! Did he tell you what it was for?’
‘He’s being pursued by the Inland Revenue for years of unpaid back taxes. It appears he moved to London in the nineties when his books were bestsellers but never paid a penny in tax. And now that his thrillers have gone out of fashion, or else he’s running out of sporting milieux to write about, the British tax authorities have caught up with him and he no longer has anything like the necessary wherewithal to pay them. He also squandered his royalties a few years back on some hilarious show-business venture, Doctor Zhivago on Ice, I kid you not. But, please, you mustn’t ever let him know I told you.’
‘Mum’s the word. You didn’t lend it to him, I suppose?’
‘What do you think? The only money I’m ready to lend, even to close friends, is money I can afford to lose, and I certainly can’t afford to kiss goodbye to ten thousand pounds. There’s something else, though, which may be worth mentioning. As we were all waiting to go into dinner, I saw him attempt to ingratiate himself with Slavorigin. I too may be slandering him, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had tried to touch him for the same amount. Slavorigin may have been an arch-meanie, the man we loved to hate, but at least he had it to spare.’
‘Interesting, very interesting. But you mentioned sporting milieux?’
‘You don’t know his thrillers? Each of them is set in the world of a different sport. He’s apparently written scores of the things, about soccer, cricket, tennis – that’s the only one I read. He used to be a decent all-rounder himself, I believe, before he took to drinking heavily.’
‘Soccer, cricket, tennis … Archery, anyone?’
It took me a few seconds to understand what she was driving at.
‘H’m, I see what you mean. Well, let me think. It’s true, I’m not all that au fait with the Spaulding oeuvre. But Hugh did tell me once, when he was in his cups, that his big mistake as a writer was switching sports with each thriller instead of, like Dick Francis,* sticking with a single one, soccer ideally, and that he was so prolific that, in his later books, he found himself reduced to writing about motocross and curling, for God’s sake, and darts and the tedious Tour de France and … and yes, bullseye!’
‘What?’
‘I said Bullseye! That’s the title of one of his books.’
‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’ exclaimed Evie. ‘You may be on to something there.’