‘Well, tell me, Evie,’ I said, ‘who did kill Slavorigin?’
‘You did, of course.’
‘Me? Are you mad?’
‘No,’ she replied placidly, ‘although I rather think you may be.’
‘But, Evie,’ I protested, ‘what in heaven’s name are you talking about? I’m Gilbert Adair. I’m a nice man. People generally like me. Ask anybody.’
‘Pooh!’ she ejaculated. ‘As though nice men never commit murders!’
I stared at her.
‘Did you just ejaculate?’
‘Certainly I did. I’m Evadne Mount. It’s what I do.’
‘Well,’ I muttered crossly, glancing round the nearly empty bar in case somebody else had heard her, ‘don’t do it in public, please.’
‘If I’m not mistaken, Gilbert,’ she said, ‘you’re trying to change the subject. Aren’t you interested to learn why I’ve just accused you of murder?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed. I’m actually very keen to discover how you could have arrived at such a ridiculous deduction.’
‘In point of fact, it all began with a coincidence. Now, as both a writer and a reader of whodunits, I heartily dislike coincidences, which I regard as the jokes of reason and the conceits of time, and I never – well, almost never – have recourse to them myself. But yesterday, if you recall, I quoted a couple of lines of Chesterton to you – “Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest” – and last night it suddenly occurred to me that my travel reading, or rereading, was precisely the volume, The Innocence of Father Brown, in which that quote appears. So I dug it out of my suitcase and I re-checked the reference. The story in question is “The Sign of the Broken Sword”, and the relevant conversation takes place between Father Brown and Flambeau, former jewel thief turned Brown’s fellow-sleuth – first name Hercule, by the way. Would you like to know how their conversation continues?’
‘Why not? Anything to humour you.’
She pulled a dog-eared Penguin paperback out of her capacious handbag, withdrew a Hatchards bookmark and started to read:
‘“‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?’ ‘Well, well,’ cried Flambeau irritably, ‘what does he do?’ ‘He grows a forest to hide it in,’ said the priest in an obscure voice. ‘A fearful sin.’”’
‘How very Chestertonian,’ I said. ‘But what has it to do with Slavorigin’s death?’
‘Ah well,’ she replied in, I fancy, much the same obscure voice as Father Brown’s, ‘it so happened that the longer I speculated on the brouhaha surrounding Out of a Clear Blue Sky as a convincing motive for murder, by you or anybody else, the itchier my bottom got. Try as I might, I just couldn’t believe it. Gilbert, some things never change. We sleep on more or less the same beds our ancestors slept on, we act on more or less the same stages our ancestors acted on and we commit murders for more or less the same reasons our ancestors committed them.
‘So, having persuaded myself that the F.A.T.W.A. website represented nothing in reality but a monstrous shoal of red herrings, I ruthlessly swept aside the rubble of all my former theories and decided to do a little web-surfing myself.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, Gilbert, me. I may not look the part but I really am remarkably cyber-literate, I think they call it. This morning, at any rate, I wolfed down breakfast and, in pursuance of my hunch, ensconced myself in the hotel’s wi-fi cabin. You can’t know how much impatient door-tapping I had to ignore – I never knew Japanese businessmen could be so potty-mouthed! – but what I was in the process of unearthing was just too important to allow my investigation to be even momentarily interrupted.
‘Oh, it wasn’t easy. The whole diabolical swizz had been prepared and plotted with extraordinary cunning. Practically every loophole had been plugged. Practically, I say. That adverb, though, is the bane of every clever or, rather, clever-clever criminal. For, as I sat there, studying the screen, clicking that funny little mousy thing more or less at random, it suddenly dawned on me that, if I were to synergise the hegemonic co-terminousness of the website, all the while making sure I had accurately gauged its beaconicity – I had a few hairy moments there, I can tell you, but I was resolved to plough on at whatever the cost to my sanity – I could deploy the marginalisation lever to arrive at a degree of holistic governance enabling me to unscramble its causality and ultimately dismantle its true source and authorship.’
My head was spinning again, but I said nothing.
‘Oh, Gilbert, you really wanted him dead, didn’t you? ‘“He grows a forest to hide it in,’ said the priest in an obscure voice.” I’m right, aren’t I? Aren’t I? The single leaf you wanted to hide was the murder of Gustav Slavorigin and the forest you hid it in was the Internet.
‘It was you who created that site, Gilbert. It was you who devised those riddles for the faithful and the gullible. It was you who concealed your identity behind a screen – a screen in both senses of the word – of pseudonyms. It was you, memories of the Salman Rushdie affair gnawing away at your festering grey cells, who whipped up an incendiary cyber-climate calculated to send scores, perhaps hundreds, of pathetic psychopaths, all just waiting for the call, off on the world’s grandest wild-goose chase. And it was you, of course, who on the same site posted an easily decipherable announcement of Slavorigin’s presence at the Festival.
‘It must have seemed foolproof. If – I can hear you saying to yourself – if none of these would-be hit men ever actually succeeded in murdering him, thereby doing your dirty work for you, why, then, you would simply take a lethal potshot at him yourself and let them accept the blame or the credit for the crime, depending on the point of view. Neat, Gilbert, very neat.’
‘What about Hermann Hunt?’ I answered her back. ‘If F.A.T.W.A. were nothing but a hoax, don’t you suppose he might have had something to say on the matter?’
‘Oh, as for Hunt, assuming he was aware of what was going on, as he surely would have been, he probably just sat back in his Texan castle and enjoyed the escapade. He had his own hyper-patriotic reason, after all, for wanting to see Slavorigin wiped off the face of the earth and, if whoever killed him then came calling for his reward, he might well feel inclined to write out a compensatory check for a million or two – he certainly could afford to. Hunt was the least of your problems.’
‘And what in your view was the greatest of my problems?’
‘The usual. Like almost all murderers you underestimated your adversary.’
‘My adversary?’
‘Me, Gilbert, me. Even if you sweated and strained to remove every last one of your cyber-prints from the screen, the Internet is so complex yet also, to an accomplished old hacker like me, so vulnerable you couldn’t help leaving behind a stray datum or two of the kind that would lead me inexorably to you. In the future, except that you have no future, if ever again you’re disposed to commit such a crime and wish to avoid being caught in the net of the Internet, remind yourself of the title of that delicious German thriller for tots, Erich Kästner’s Emil – or, rather, Email – and the Detectives.’
‘A stray datum or two – like what, for example?’
‘Eugene, Oregon.’
‘Eugene, Oregon?’
‘On the page – 17, I think it is – on which you list various shadowy organisations allegedly funded by Hunt, you mention “a fraternity of Doomsday prophesiers whose mailing address was a shopping mall in Eugene, Oregon”. Couldn’t resist it, could you? The arch little literary reference? Such an obvious giveaway.’