I cooled my heels in the lobby for nearly fifteen minutes waiting in vain for Evie to re-surface, before taking the stairs back up to my room. In the hope of catching a news item on Slavorigin’s murder, I started zapping the multi-channelled television set but came up empty-handed. Like the giant timepiece it is, the world was already moving on. Instead, for half-an-hour or so until a chambermaid knocked on the door and asked if she might do my room, I found myself vaguely watching an old Hollywood parody-western, Son of Paleface, with Bob Hope, Jane Russell and, a boyhood idol of mine, Roy Rogers, once an even more famous singing cowboy than Gene Autry, all dubbed into German.
When I returned to the lobby (it was now close to noon), Evie was still, incredibly, squatting inside the wi-fi cabin. What was she up to? I wondered whether I should tap on the semi-frosted glass door and make a pointing gesture at my wristwatch, but thought better of it. Still uncertain how to occupy the hours ahead of me, I caught sight of Meredith window-shopping in the lobby’s glossy arcade of duty-free boutiques. She also spotted me. Yet she at once – and, I knew, deliberately – turned her face away and pretended to study a display of cashmere sweaters in the nearest window. So it was like that, was it? Perhaps, thinking only of getting out of this godforsaken dump and back to the humdrum dissatisfactions of our ordinary lives, none of us was any longer up to making the usual meaningless hotel-lobby chitchat.
I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on the forecourt, taking the air as I polluted it, and almost tripped over Sanary’s suitcase. He had managed to book himself onto the afternoon express to Geneva. A hired car was due to take him to the station via the Kunsthalle, where he meant both to thank Düttmann and advise him that he was leaving Meiringen today, not tomorrow as planned, and therefore wouldn’t be attending the last-night gathering. We conversed for a few minutes about this and that until, on a whim, I decided I would pop the question I’d been aching to put to him from practically the first day.
‘Tell me, Pierre,’ I said, ‘why is it, when you speak to Evie, you start to sound just like a Frenchman from one of her whodunits?’
I sensed him staring at me, his eyes unblinking behind his dark glasses.
‘Saperlipopette!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do I? I wasn’t aware.’
Just at that moment his car pulled up. We shook hands, made traditional rhubarbing noises about keeping in touch and waved to each other as he was driven off. I felt somehow left behind and lonelier than ever.
The afternoon passed as if in a dream. Rather than loiter uselessly and self-consciously about the lobby, I decided to stroll down into town, mindful all the while of the aphorism I had attributed to Sherlock Holmes in the first paragraph of ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’: ‘It has long been an axiom of mine that it is when we indulge ourselves in some pursuit of pure relaxation, not when we are at our labours, tedious and repetitive though they may be, that we are most receptive to the gnawing torments of ennui.’ I wandered into souvenir shops, cheese shops, a couple of bookshops (whose English-language books, apart from a prominent display of Hugh’s, mine and of course Conan Doyle’s, were all populist pap, what you might call McFiction, Kentucky Fried Chick-lit, lad-lit, genteel-elderly-lady-lit and, still hanging on in there, Dan Brown-lit) and even, in desperation, took a quick turn around an overwhelmingly quaint picture gallery that specialised in painted-by-number views of the same two or three Alpine vistas. I was in and out of there in a few seconds.
By five I had had it. I had run into neither Evie nor Meredith nor Autry nor Hugh, although I did see more than once as I passed and re-passed them on my directionless ramblings about the town a scruffily conspiratorial group of what I took to be foreign correspondents from the British press, boozing steadily through the afternoon at one of the tables on the same café terrace that we guests of the Festival had got into the habit of frequenting. I also noticed two uniformed Swiss sentries posted outside the taped-off Museum. But enough, I said to myself, is enough. Time to drag my sore feet back to the hotel.
Forgetting my earlier intention to Google Cora, I went straight to my room, where I discovered that a second envelope had meanwhile been slipped under my door. The letter inside, from Evie, read: ‘It’s 4.30. I’m going to be in the bar from now on. Join me, why don’t you. It’s time to compare notes.’ Compare notes? She really had meant what she said, then, about each of us doing some detective work.
I found her seated in one of the bar’s padded and buttoned American-style booths, a double whisky-and-soda in front of her. (So I’d got it wrong in my whodunits, in which I’d had her drinking double pink gins.) Exceptionally for me, I ordered the same, and we both waited for my drink to arrive before beginning to talk. At the far end of the darkishly lit room a blind black pianist was playing a medley of what, after a moment, I identified as Cole Porter show tunes.
‘Bottoms up,’ I said, raising my glass.
‘Bottoms up.’
‘Well now, what sort of a day have you had?’ I asked her.
‘Instructive,’ she said, ‘really most instructive. You?’
‘The reverse. Whatever is the opposite of ditto,’ I said, ‘that’s what I’d have to reply. My day has been wretched. Nothing to show for it.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Evie. ‘Then we won’t be comparing notes after all?’
‘Sorry.’ I sipped my whisky. ‘But what are you saying? That you’ve made progress?’
‘Progress? Gilbert, my dear, I know everything.’
‘Oh really?’ I said, and attempting to sound subtly sarcastic I succeeded only in sounding malevolently camp. ‘Everything, you say?’
‘Everything.’
‘Then you know the murderer’s identity?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’
At this point I expected that, like all fictional detectives, she would childishly insist on titillating the reader, building up the suspense, even declaring, as I had had her do in the corresponding scene of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, that ‘if I were baldly to announce who I believe did it, it would be like a maths teacher proposing a problem to his students, then instantly giving them the solution without in the meantime exposing any of the connective tissue which enabled him to arrive at that solution, connective tissue which would also enable those students of his to understand why it was the only solution possible’.
But she didn’t. To my direct question she gave me a direct answer. Rewind the tape.
‘Then you know the murderer’s identity?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’
‘You did, of course.’
‘Me? Are you mad?’
For an author to be accused of murder by one of his own characters – now this was a first! Bizarrely, however, before the meaning of those four words had properly begun to sink in, they had a queer little Proustian effect on me. I was immediately reminded of a long-forgotten, although in its day long-running, television programme called This Is Your Life, whose guest, a celebrity supposedly invited not as the evening’s victim but as just another member of the studio audience, would nevertheless find himself accosted by the show’s emcee. ‘X,’ this emcee would say with ominous aplomb, ‘this is your life!’ The tape again.