‘Evie,’ I said tetchily, ‘must you keep exclaiming “Great Scott Moncrieff!”? The joke’s long since worn off.’
She looked back at me in reproachful surprise, but retained a dignified silence.
‘Oh well, never mind. To return to what we were talking about, I suppose it’s not wholly out of the question that Hugh possesses some small degree of skill with a bow and arrow, if that’s what you’ve been waiting to hear me say.’
‘You must say only what you know to be true and relevant. Now let’s move on. Our friend Sanary. What motive are we to attribute to him, would you suggest?’
‘Your guess, Evie,’ I replied with a maladroitly stifled yawn, ‘is as good as mine.’
‘No, Gilbert, I fear that’s not the case at all. I rather fancy my guess is much better than yours. You see, I already have a theory about Sanary.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘My theory is that it may well have been Slavorigin who tried to murder Sanary, not vice versa.’
‘What!’
‘You heard me.’
‘Evie, be reasonable. I’ve indulged you to the extent of pretending, yes, pretending, that other murderers and other motives might exist for a crime which, in my opinion, is so limpid and lucid as to be in no need of such extramural explanations. Now you spring on me the theory that Sanary could have been the real victim and Slavorigin potentially the real murderer. My head’s spinning!’
‘Stop it spinning and listen, for this theory of mine may explain a lot. For example, it may just explain why as eminent a literary lion as Slavorigin would accept an invitation from one of the least-known literary festivals in the world. Why, I say? Perhaps because he noticed from the literature he received from Düttmann that one of his fellow guests would be Pierre Sanary, his enemy quite as much as Hermann Hunt V, a man who had already caught him out in two whopping fibs and was now threatening to add insult to injury, intellectual disgrace to social ostracism, by destroying not his life but his reputation.’
‘So you think as Sanary does, that Slavorigin is a serial plagiarist, a cannibal of other writers’ work? A Hannibal Lecter. A Hannibal Lecteur.’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. But I’ve given a lot of thought to plagiarists, and what people fail to comprehend is that, as with theft proper, there exist several categories of the offence. [Anticipating one of Evie’s ‘proverbial’ disgressions, I dreamt, again not for the first time, of attaching a silencer to her tongue.]
‘The easiest to forgive is of course the pickpocket’s petty larceny. What he steals is a noun here, an adjective there, nothing florid or conspicuous and above all no dazzlingly original similes or metaphors, which like expensive jewellery can be too easily traced. Then there are the shoplifters who, systematically combing through some rival’s book, will make off with a few, but never too many, of its shorter and neater phrases. The counterfeiters are those who nick entire paragraphs, type them out on their computers and, a Thesaurus propped up on their knees, painstakingly replace every rare or rarish word with a suitable synonym. Last are the embezzlers. What they have is a word-flow problem. They know precisely what it is they want to say but they can’t find the language in which to say it. Suddenly they recall that X, writing on a more or less identical topic, managed to express a similar sentiment with enviable succinctness. So, but only to get the words flowing again, you understand, they “borrow” the entire passage, intending to return it to its rightful owner when their own little local difficulty has been overcome. Except, of course, that they almost never do.’
‘And Slavorigin?’
‘Well, there’s no way I can be sure as yet, but my instinct is that, if Sanary’s energy and erudition can be trusted, and I believe they can, it’s to that last category that Slavorigin belonged. And considering that he was already on a jinxy streak, it’s by no means impossible that this second threat might have pushed him over the edge.’
‘Might, might, might! Evie, I wish now I’d begun to count from the top the number of times you’ve used that handy but unreliable conditional in your exposition. None of this, clever as it is, amounts to more than pure conjecture, you know.’
‘Of course I know. Just as it’s pure conjecture to attribute Slavorigin’s murder to the presence of some lurking loony on whom none of us have ever set eyes.’
‘True. But go on. You claimed your theory would explain a lot. Surely that wasn’t all of it?’
‘No, it isn’t. When I asked above [above??] how Slavorigin could have let himself be lured unaccompanied out of the hotel, you objected that it might not have happened that way; that, deciding on a whim to pay an impromptu visit to the Museum, he might have chosen for once to dispense with his minders’ irksome vigilance. Well, but what if there was a luring after all, except that it was he, Slavorigin himself, who did it? After all, it was just as possible for him to have inveigled Sanary into meeting him at the Museum as the other way round. As for how he meant to commit the crime, I wouldn’t know. But let’s say a struggle ensued, Sanary eventually gained the upper hand and killed the man who had come to kill him.’
‘By firing an arrow from a bow which has disappeared as mysteriously as it once materialised?’
‘Ah well, Gilbert, that bow remains the unknown quantity of any theory either of us might offer the other. But please don’t forget, when we discovered Slavorigin’s body, it was Sanary who almost at once laid both his hands on it, something he must have been aware he was not supposed to do. Isn’t it possible he wanted to make certain there would be a legitimate reason for his fingerprints being found all over the corpse?’
‘True, true. Yet there’s also the fact that, if it actually turns out that you’re right, it would have been an open-and-shut case of self-defence. Why, then, hasn’t Sanary come forward to explain himself?’
‘Would you?’
‘Well …’
‘Come now, Gilbert. Let’s hypothesise. Let’s assume, just for the argument’s sake, that you yourself are in a position where you’re forced to kill Slavorigin in self-defence, not with your bare arms, not with some handy poker, not by knocking him down and inadvertently causing him to brain himself against a brass fireguard, say, but by shooting some equally handy arrow into his heart’ – again the comical Noli Me Tangere gesture – ‘yes, yes, I realise we know only where the arrow came from, not the bow, but forget that for the nonce. If you had to take so extreme a measure, seriously, would you rush back into the Kunsthalle to announce your guilt to the company which you had left just ten minutes before? Especially when everyone in that company was aware, and the police would soon have to be made aware, that you and your victim happened not to be on the friendliest of terms?’
‘No … no, I suppose not. It would be too easy, and thus too tempting, to make a reappearance as if nothing at all were amiss. Frankly, though, as far as I’m concerned, what scuttles your argument of self-defence is the choice of weapon. When someone attempts to defend himself against an assailant, he surely seizes on the weapon nearest to hand, any weapon, even some blunt object or instrument that was never intended to be used as a weapon. On the other hand, there can be no getting away from the fact that a murder by bow-and-arrow – the bow having to be supplied by the murderer himself – is a premeditated murder. It must be. No, Evie, I’m afraid, when I listen to you theorise, my bottom starts to itch.’
I at once wanted to bite off my tongue. Why? In A Mysterious Affair of Style, the whodunit on which, for a number of inglorious reasons, I had shamefully failed to consult Evie, there is a scene in the Ritz Bar fairly late in the narrative where Evadne Mount’s sidekick, the frequently forementioned Trubshawe, expounds his theory on the possible motive behind the murder of the stage and screen actress Cora Rutherford, Evadne’s oldest and dearest friend, once young and famous, now fiftyish if she’s a day and fading fast. Even if, it’s implied, Evadne is secretly intrigued by the ingenuity of Trubshawe’s theory, she none the less announces to him that she remains unpersuaded. When asked why, she replies to his astonishment that her bottom itches; that, if I may quote from myself, ‘Whenever I read a whodunit by one of my rivals, my so-called rivals, and I encounter some device – I don’t know, a motive, a clue, an alibi, whatever – a device I simply don’t trust, even if I can’t immediately articulate to myself why I don’t trust it, I long ago noticed that my bottom started to itch. I repeat, it’s infallible. If my bottom ever once steered me wrong, why, the universe would be meaningless.’