‘What are you talking about?’ she shot back, as though I were the one hallucinating, not she. ‘It made the front page of all the newspapers. Well, maybe not the – what did you call it? – the “Guardian”?’ she said with a genteel jeer.
‘And what,’ I asked her dully, ‘did you discover in the Museum?’
‘Well, Gilbert, I took my time. I was prepared to worry the stuffing out of that room. I poked my nose into everything – empty desk drawers, framed snapshots, pipes and pipe-rack, Conan Doyle’s bust, the cryptogram – everything except the blood-stained arrow itself, which had been removed, I suppose, to be forensically examined for fingerprints. Not that they’re going to find any – even you were canny enough to avoid making so elementary a blooper. I knew that, while you pretended to be snoring your head off in your room, you were actually keeping an early-morning rendezvous with Slavorigin at the Museum. I also knew that, once there, you shot him through the heart, at point-blank range – if I can use that expression for so primitive a weapon – with a bow-and-arrow. The arrow was already at your disposal, just waiting to be fired. But where had the bow come from?
‘It was while I was pondering that conundrum that I chanced to pick up the copy of His Last Bow that lay on a little semi-circular wall-table. His Last Bow – now that seemed to me a curious coincidence. Then I noticed, next to it on the same table, Holmes’s violin, its bow laid diagonally on top of it. Another bow. Even curiouser. But, curiousest of all, I said to myself, was the fact that it was, so to speak, the wrong way round, as though in a looking-glass world or a parallel universe. In music-making, after all, the bow is a pendant to the violin and, in archery, the arrow is a pendant to the bow.
‘It was naughty of me, I know, but I picked up that violin – I took lots of music lessons when I was just a gal – and began to play one of my old never-to-be-forgotten party-pieces, Cyril Scott’s Lullaby. (Rhymes with alibi, Gilbert!) Well, talk of running a jagged fingernail down a blackboard. I am but an amateur, and a very rusty one at that, and I’m also aware that the difference between a wrong note on a piano, say, and a wrong note on a violin is that the former, wrong though it may be, is none the less, unlike the latter, a real note, but even at my pretty dismal worst I had never produced such an unholy screech. So I inspected the violin – and do you know what I found?’
‘What?’
‘I found that one of its strings had snapped in two. And I suddenly realised that I had also found the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. You fired that arrow, Gilbert – you fired it not from a bow but from a violin. From Sherlock Holmes’s own violin.’
‘Oh really,’ I cried helplessly, ‘what utter nonsense you do speak! I doubt it’s even possible to fire an arrow from a violin.’
‘My dear,’ she said gravely, ‘decades of experience as both a writer and reader have taught me that in a whodunit anything, absolutely anything, is possible.’
There followed a brief pause. The blind pianist had updated his repertoire to Rodgers and Hammerstein. It felt so hot in the bar I could hardly breathe. I finally said to Evie:
‘It’s awfully stuffy in here. What say we take a walk before the others arrive for what sounds like a rather cheerless get-together?’
After another pause she agreed.
Epilogue
Everything converges at last. In silence Evie and I walked through the lovely, dark, deep woods like Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Suddenly, when we emerged into open ground, she came to a halt. Glancing in my direction, she took a few timid steps forward and peered over our path’s missing edge; then at once, and more nimbly than I might have expected, considering her age and weight, she nipped back in again. At the same time, we both became aware of a low, distant roar drowning out the beats of our two thumping hearts, the roar of what, at the climax to ‘The Final Problem’, Conan Doyle describes as ‘a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house’.
‘Why, it’s the Falls,’ Evie croaked. ‘We’re directly above the Reichenbach Falls.’
‘Naturally we are,’ I replied. ‘Where did you think we were?’
‘Yes, but – but – I don’t understand.’
‘What is it you don’t understand?’
Blinking, she looked around her.
‘Where’s the souvenir shop I visited this afternoon? The funny little funicular? Where, to the point, are the railings? Shouldn’t there be railings here?’
‘Oh,’ said I, ‘haven’t you got it? We’re some distance away from all the props of so-called “civilisation”. Think of one of those tricks of perspective which vulgarising mathematicians have such a fondness for. The eye is so fixated on the sheer drop of the Falls it tends not to register that they’re also several hundred yards wide.’
‘Uh huh …’ she mumbled pensively – stop it! – while continuing to back off.
Thus far things had gone my way more smoothly than I had dared hope. No one had observed our quitting the hotel together; nor, along the mountain path, had we passed any rustic busybody who could have borne subsequent witness to our having been out in each other’s company. To cap it all, the moon had begun to rise on schedule. Yet I was still very nervous. I badly needed a cigarette – ‘the only new pleasure modern man has invented in eighteen hundred years,’ wrote the French pornographer and belle-lettriste Pierre Louÿs – and to hell with the alliterative linkage of tobacco and taboo. I had stopped smoking, it’s true, but I remained jammed at the fragile phase when I made certain I always had a full pack, plus a functioning lighter, somewhere about my person. So from my jacket pocket I drew out my new pack of Dunhills, poked a cigarette between my lips and held the lighter up to them. Except that it wasn’t the lighter at all. To my great mortification, it was a tube of Polo Mints, of almost identical shape and size, which I kept in the same pocket, kept there, ironically, I guess the word has to be, for one of those crises when I just had to have a cigarette and then had to disguise the fact that I’d had one.
While Evie muffled a guffaw, I pulled the real lighter out and shakily lit my cigarette at last.
‘May I have one?’ she said.
‘You don’t smoke.’
‘Are you asking me or telling me?’
‘If you put it like that, then I suppose I’m asking you.’
‘Who says I don’t smoke?’
‘Well …’
‘I’ll tell you who. You.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. In those two whodunits of yours. It’s something you made up about me without consulting me first. Like a lot else.’
‘What are you saying? You’re actually a forty-a-day addict?’
‘No,’ she answered wearily, ‘but I do enjoy an occasional ciggie. Are you going to offer me one or not?’
‘Certainly I am,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid, though, I can’t oblige with Players or Senior Service.’
‘Dunhills were also smoked in the thirties, if that’s the point you’re making.’
‘How would you know? You weren’t even born then.’
‘I looked it up on Wikipedia. When I was researching one of my books.’
I held out the blood-red pack and lit up her cigarette. And, I have to say, unlike the Evadne Mount of my whodunits, she did appear to be at ease with it, horsily exhaling the first intake of smoke through her leathery nostrils before, like an old hand, giving its glowing tip a brief inspection.
‘This, I assume,’ she said, ‘is the condemned woman’s last cigarette.’