I had, as you may suppose, not the slightest intention of writing a new Evadne Mount whodunit, but all I replied, more out of curiosity than because I was tempted by the idea of accepting her wager, was ‘And if I should solve the crime before you?’
‘If you solve the crime first, which you won’t, then I solemnly promise, Gilbert, that I will cast you as the presiding sleuth of my next book. There’s a postmodern prank for you! The heroine of a whodunit makes the author of that same whodunit the hero of one of her own whodunits, ha ha! Whatever will I think of next?’
I wasn’t to learn the answer to that, in any case, rhetorical question for, just as she posed it, I brusquely raised my right hand to my left ear and gave it a wiggle.
‘Tsk!’
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I said carelessly. ‘It felt as though something wet just burst against my ear.’
‘Something wet?’
‘You know, like a bubble. Like a little soap bubble.’
* Memo to self: The Forest of Wrong Trees, the perfect title for a Chestertonian or Borgesian thriller.
* A trick which everyone missed, however, was the existence of a 1973 film, an anarcho-Utopian fantasy by the French director Jacques Doillon, in which an interpolated four-minute sequence by Alain Resnais depicted a number of ruined Wall Street financiers leaping out of their skyscraping office windows. The film, interestingly, was called L’An 01, or The Year 01.
* In A Mysterious Affair of Style.
* Author of a series of mystery novels set in the world of the Turf. When you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. Indeed, when Francis had written one, he’d written them all.
* Again in A Mysterious Affair of Style.
Chapter Ten
The next day proved to be not merely the strangest but the most significant of my life. I awoke late again, to the usual mild shock of a sunburst of light abruptly banishing my sleeping mask’s velvety delusion of darkness. As ever I began my blurry daily existence with a satisfying albeit never quite definitive bowel movement (I knew, as sure as fate, that I would have seconds before I even descended to breakfast), and it was only when I re-emerged from the bathroom that I noticed a plain white envelope which somebody had slid under my door. I picked it up and opened it. The typed letter inside, from Düttmann, was addressed to all the guests of the Sherlock Holmes Festival. We were free to leave. The Belgian official from Interpol was confident that Slavorigin’s murderer was some as yet unidentified bounty hunter, most likely an American, and thus saw no reason for any of us to be inconvenienced further. Should subsequent enquiries have to be made, the hotel had our passport numbers, home addresses and so forth. Unfortunately, it had not been possible to reserve Business Class seats on flights out of Zurich that very day, but a hired car would be stationed in front of the hotel at exactly 8.00 the next morning to take Evie, Hugh, Autry and me to the airport where we would catch the first available plane to Heathrow, arrangements having also been made for Autry to transfer to a later London–Dallas flight. (Both Meredith and Sanary planned to quit Meiringen by train, Meredith to Montreux, Sanary to Geneva.) The day ahead, ended the letter, was in consequence ours to do with as we liked, but would we please all gather in the hotel bar at seven o’clock for one last ‘hopefully not so sad get-together’?
Downstairs, I plucked a complimentary Herald Tribune from a newspaper rack in the foyer. Not only was the murder still front-page news, as I expected it would be, I was amused to note, on the editorial page, a column on ‘the Slavorigin affair’, translated from L’Espresso, by Umberto Eco, who for some mysterious reason omitted to mention that he too had received an invitation to attend the Festival. I then walked into the breakfast room, where I spied, sitting alone, an exceptionally morose-looking Hugh and felt obliged – no, because of something I had meanwhile decided to do, I was actually glad – to join him.
It transpired that, after I myself had left the disco, Hugh had finally succeeded in cornering Slavorigin and had asked him in his turn for a handout. Apparently recovered from the débâcle in the restaurant, fatally reverting to character, the novelist had laughed in his face. When Hugh none the less reminded him of the admiration he had expressed for his own novels, Slavorigin had replied – wittily, I thought but refrained from remarking – that ‘they were written in Prosak, a cross between Prozac and musak’.
‘Know what the bastard said?’
‘What?’
‘He said I’d written thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of words, and that the day I died, etc, etc, every single one of them would be forgotten. It would be like, professionally, I had never lived.’
‘The man was a despicable bully. Both a pain and a pill. In my opinion –’
‘I know, I know! The worst is,’ he mumbled into his cornflakes, ‘it’s true.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘No, Gilbert, it’s good of you to, etc. But I know it’s true. I’ve always known.’
I half-expected two pearly cartoon tears to dribble down his blotchy red face.
‘Look, Hugh, I insist I’m in no position to lend you anything close to ten thousand pounds, and I don’t fool myself that the counter-offer I’m about to make will compensate for that, but there’s a cashpoint machine right here in the hotel lobby and I’d be happy to withdraw, shall we say, five hundred Swiss francs? Would that go any way to easing your situation?’
He perked up like an infant handed a plaything which has been teasingly withheld from him. ‘Jesus, Gilbert, it’d be just the ticket!’ he cried. ‘I’ve got this idea, etc, for a new thriller. Don’t know yet what I’ll call it, either Murder Off-Piste or Death Slalom, but I had the brainstorm staring out at those fucking Alps every day. I thought if I got a little recce in before going back to Blighty, maybe stop over in St Moritz, etc, for a few days, not the season, I know, but your – your how much did you say? Five hundred pounds?’
‘Francs.’
‘Five hundred francs’ – a mental yet visible shrug of regret – ‘yeah, that’ll really do the trick. And it is only a loan, you know. Don’t you be worrying about that. I’ll pay you back just the moment I get the advance.’
‘I know, I know.’
He noisily scraped the palms of his hands together, a nervous habit I’m afraid I’ve never been able to stomach.
‘So where exactly is this cashpoint machine?’ he asked, looking around him.
‘Let me finish my breakfast first, Hugh,’ I replied, ‘if you don’t mind.’
‘Oh, sure, sure. Take your time. No rush.’
Once our business had been done with, I recalled that I had hoped to take advantage of the hotel’s wi-fi Internet connection, whose cabin happened to be next door to the cashpoint machine. It had been empty when I withdrew Hugh’s money, but we had carried on talking for a while afterwards in the foyer, and when I eventually shook free of him I cursed inwardly to note not just that the cabin was occupied but that its occupant was, of all people, Evie.
Ironically, it was because of her that I desired to go online. I own that, unsettled as well as completely mystified by that newspaper ad that Slavorigin had shown us, it was my intention, an intention of whose fundamental fatuousness I was very much aware, to Google ‘Cora Rutherford’ to find out whether anything else was listed but the odd tangential allusion to her as a literary character. Actually, I felt a queasy kinship with Max Beerbohm’s doomed poetaster Enoch Soames who, having sold his soul, literally, in order that he be granted advance knowledge of posterity’s judgment on his verse, discovers to his chagrin that the sole reference to his name in the British Library catalogue is precisely as the fictional protagonist of Beerbohm’s short story.