‘But Eugene, Oregon exists,’ I said, a trifle rashly as I see now. ‘I’ve been there. I’ve passed through it.’
‘That’s not the point. You just couldn’t help showing off. Of the thousands of small towns in the American West, that was the one you felt compelled to choose. There were other clues, too, metaphors, puns, alliterations and suchlike, which all pointed to your style. Like the dream you pretended to have the night before Slavorigin’s murder.’
‘What? Now you claim to know what I dream about!’
‘My dear, some people talk in their sleep. Typically, you’d like the reader to believe you write in yours. All I had to do was turn back to page 163. Butterflies turning into books! Books with such titles as Pnun and Adair or Ardor! What a blunder! How could you be so careless, Gilbert, when this dream after all was to have been your alibi? Reading those pages, I at once realised that, while you claimed to be asleep in your hotel room, you were in fact in the Museum firing an arrow through Slavorigin’s heart.
‘There’s something strange about a dream,’ she suddenly mused. ‘It may be anything at all it cares to be, it’s governed by no rules of logical or psychological verisimilitude. Yet, in a way I’m not wholly able to account for, a dream can also be implausible. Yours, I’m afraid, was laughably so.’
‘I admit you’ve constructed quite a case against me,’ I said fairly calmly, ‘even if it’s a case propped up on the wobbliest of circumstantial evidence. But, as dear old Trubshawe might have put it, haven’t you overlooked something?’
‘What have I overlooked? And, incidentally, I’d be greatly obliged if you would leave Eustace, God rest his soul, out of it.’
‘Haven’t you overlooked the fact that Slavorigin was invited to the Sherlock Holmes Festival as its Mystery Guest? That none of us was informed in advance of his attending it?’
‘Well, yes, I did at first wonder at that. As I just said, I distrust coincidences. But then a foolish notion occurred to me, although not so foolish I didn’t feel it worth following up. I got Düttmann on the blower. After commiserating with him about what a fiasco the Festival had turned out to be, I casually asked him how it happened that he had invited Slavorigin in the first place. Can you guess what his answer was?’
‘…?’
‘To begin with, he couldn’t remember – it seems it had all taken place months ago – but with a little nudging from me it did finally come back to him. You again, Gilbert. It was you who had proposed not just the idea of a Mystery Guest but who that Mystery Guest ought to be. You made the proposal in June when you yourself were initially invited to the Festival and initially declined – only, and very belatedly, to re-accept when it was far too late for your name to feature in its literature. In June, Gilbert, four months ago! All that blether about being rung up by your agent in the train from Moreton-in-Marsh and reluctantly agreeing to attend was so much sand thrown into the reader’s eyes. Ditto all those red herrings that you’ve so industriously strewn about. The bearded eccentric in the first-class carriage. The spooky little twins and their neglectful parents whom nobody saw but you. The no doubt totally blameless young man who danced with Slavorigin in the discotheque. Even poor Hugh. Now that was unpardonable of you.’
‘What do you mean?’ I stammered.
‘This afternoon, quite by happenstance, I ran into him while we were both taking a stroll around the Falls. Believing him to be on his uppers, I actually offered to lend him two hundred pounds. Well, what an embarrassing position you put me in! He couldn’t believe his ears. Protested that his latest thriller, Ping Pong You’re Dead!, while hardly in the J. K. Rowling league, had done extremely well, thank you very much. Made him a packet of dough. Humongously huge sales in China, etc, etc. He got quite sarky with me in his lovably Oirish way, and I can’t say I blame him.
‘When you took Slavorigin’s life, Gilbert, you not only broke the law, you not only broke the Fourth Commandment, you broke one of the cardinal rules drawn up for the Detection Club by Ronnie Knox. “The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not” – repeat,must not – “be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.” That’s what I cannot and will not forgive – the systematic way you cheated on your readers. Do you still insist you’re a nice man?’
‘It’s true,’ I dreamily replied, ‘I was such a weird child my parents thought I’d been adopted.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Joke. It was a joke, Evie. But do go on. The suspense is killing me.’
‘Well, the single question whose answer continued to elude me was, of course, how the crime had been committed. So I trotted down to the Kunsthalle with the intention of obtaining from Düttmann information about a certain somebody whose aid I was going to need in my enquiries. As it happened, though, that certain somebody was already there when I arrived.’
‘You mean?’
‘I mean the Belgian agent from Interpol. He was, I fear, a letdown for all of us fans of Poirot and Maigret. A big strapping ginger-haired fellow with a crushing handshake and a sergeant-major’s bark, he bore as little resemblance to one as to the other. Although you might be amused, Gilbert,’ she added, ‘given your weakness for wordplay, to know that his name, Magrite, was actually an anagram of the latter’s.
‘Anyway, he was at first rather standoffish, cold if not quite rude – correct, I believe, is the French word for what I mean. But when he discovered who I was, he couldn’t have been more charming. He knew all about my career, the cases I’d solved [?], the murderers I’d brought to justice [??], so when I asked him if I might, as a special favour, be permitted to snoop about inside the Museum, he became positively deferential. Told me how greatly he would value my contribution to what was proving to be a trickier case than he had anticipated and, right there on the spot, made out a chit, kind of a pass, for me to show to the two bobbies on guard.’
‘You always did have a knack for twisting the authorities round your chubby little finger,’ I twitted her. ‘Remember young Calvert, Inspector Tom Calvert in A Mysterious Affair of Style, and how happy he always was to bend the regulations for you?’
‘Naturally I remember him.’ She sighed. ‘What a tragedy.’
‘Tragedy?’
‘Didn’t you read about him? About six months ago it happened, maybe nine. He was caught up in a sting – one of Scotland Yard’s own stings, ironically – to entrap an international network of paedophiles who had been swapping indecent photographs over the Internet. Operation WWW.’
‘World Wide Web?’
‘Wee Willie Winkie. Got a custodial sentence, of course. Three years in Broadmoor. Poor, poor man. What he did was vile, to be sure, and it would have been unjust for others to have been punished and him merely reprimanded, but even so … Married with two children. As I say, what a tragedy. Thank God Eustace wasn’t alive to hear of it. It would have been the death of him. He’d been Calvert’s mentor at the Yard, you recall.’
‘Now listen, Evie,’ I said, forgetting for a moment the serious pickle I myself was in, ‘you really must try to curb these cranky ravings of yours. They’re beginning to get out of hand.’