Adair And Then There Was No One

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31978-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

The writer and professional controversialist Gustav Slavorigin is murdered in the small Swiss town of Meiringen during its annual Sherlock Holmes Festival, his body discovered with an arrow through the heart. With a price of ten million dollars on Slavorigin's head, almost none of the Festival's guests can be regarded as above suspicion. Except Evadne Mount, of course, the stubborn amateur sleuth and bestselling crime novelist from Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style. Neither of those two cases, however, prepared her for the jaw-dropping twists of this new investigation, which climaxes at Meiringen's principal tourist attraction, the Reichenbach Falls - the site of Holmes's fatal confrontation with his nemesis, Moriarty . . .

Gilbert Adair has published novels, essays, translations, children's books and poetry. He has also written screenplays, including The Dreamers from his own novel for Bernardo Bertolucci.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Adair, Gilbert

Leseproben

Chapter One

It was while commuting homeward on the 11.03 from Moreton-in-Marsh to London Paddington one foggy Monday forenoon in early September that I received on my mobile phone the call that was to change everything. Since the previous December I had been renting a pretty weekend cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Blockley. The cottage, Waterside by name, sat sandwiched between my landlady’s grand house and a lively though apparently unlived-in little stream that could be depended on, in anything approaching a downpour, to overflow its timid banks. I would journey down to Moreton on Friday afternoons – on, by what was for me a delightful windfall of a coincidence, the 4.50 from Paddington (yes, really) – then make the same trip in reverse three days later. My train, in both directions, was invariably late, but seldom long enough to put me to serious inconvenience.*

So there I was, snugly settled in a first-class compartment, reading, with a view to writing an eventual review for the a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves – its title, should tell you all you need to know about the sort of thing it was. Since I was already aware that this was a book destined to be jettisoned as soon as my review had been delivered, I was in the process of pencilling some cramped, crabbed notes in the margins of its own pages when, at the Oxford stop, a single, rather extraordinary passenger boarded my nearly empty compartment. He stood for a minute in the doorway as though searching for a friendly or just a familiar face, then for a reason known only to himself sat down in the seat directly opposite mine.

As long as we tarried in Oxford, I felt an obscure compulsion to keep both my eyes trained on the text in front of me and even forebore, for the duration, from dabbing at my smarting nose – I was on the mend from a protracted head cold – with the third of four paper napkins which I had filched for that purpose from the buffet-bar where I had earlier bought a cup of muddy coffee. (The first two snot-saturated napkins were stuffed away in the clammy depths of my jacket pocket.) At long last the train started to glide out of the station, a plummy Indian voice on the loudspeaker alerted the latest intake of passengers to the sandwiches, pastries and light refreshments available to them, and even if I don’t recall having had the sensation, one I am especially prone to, of being spied upon by some unseen observer, I could no longer resist peeking at my fellow-traveller over the top of the novel, as thick and doughy as a wholemeal loaf, that I held in my hands.

I being spied upon. The man who had sat down opposite me had, I noted uneasily, a livid complexion, a shock of white hair, an unalluring black patch over his left eye which lent him the corny charisma of the Demon King in a provincial pantomime and an unpatched right eye which was staring straight at me. No milquetoast in an awkward situation, I immediately proceeded to stare back, to the point of insolence. As I did, I found myself qualifying my crude first impression. Swimming into sharper focus, he turned out to be less fleshily flamboyant than the description above must have made him sound. His complexion was of the wind-and-weatherbeaten type the English refer to as ‘ruddy’, his hair, if untidy enough, had nevertheless submitted to the recent attentions of a comb, his eyepatch was just an eyepatch. As he was also wearing a rough, fibrous three-piece suit with outsized trouser turn-ups and complicatedly laced-up hiking-boots, I had him pegged for some maverick Oxford classics don, although whether he was loved or feared by his, I guessed, handful of students was beyond my powers of impromptu on-the-spot speculation.

None of which alters the fact that he was still staring at me. He had no reading matter of his own, none visible on his person, at any rate, no scuffed leather briefcase containing papers with which he might have whiled away the trip by consulting or marking. He had nothing to do, in short, but stare at me. Which he went on doing until it was no longer funny. Did he recognise me? Unlikely. One advantage, I thought grimly, of being only a semi-wellknown writer is that you can travel incognito on public transport. No, not grimly. No hackneyed adverbs, please. I thought, I just thought. Did he confuse me with David Hockney, to whom I bear a superficial resemblance (blond hair, prominent horn-rimmed glasses)? Since I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep up for very much longer our ping-pong game of stare and counterstare, something would soon have to give.

Suddenly, inside the same jacket pocket into which I had stuffed the soaking napkin balls, my mobile, which I had forgotten to switch off, started ringing, loud enough to cause us both momentarily to lose our stride in the game. Now he no longer stared, he glared at me, more unnervingly than if he had been in possession of both his eyes. (In the land of the seeing, the one-eyed man is somehow still king.) It was all the more awkward in that our compartment had been designated the train’s sole Quiet Coach, one in which the use of mobiles was banned – which is precisely why I chose it – and my telephone’s ring-tone was Tchaikovsky’s Walt-Disneyan ‘Waltz of the Flowers’.

Under his glowering gaze, I retrieved the elegant, hateful, indispensable little object from my pocket, flipped open its lid and put it to my ear.

‘Hello?’ I whispered.

It was my literary agent, Carole Blake – Carole who, after all, could be said to work for me, who retained fifteen percent of my royalties, yet by whom I was still, so many years since I joined the agency, ever so slightly intimidated.

‘Ah, Carole,’ I said. ‘Listen, can I ring you when I get home? I’m on a train and I’m not really supposed to be making phone calls. Or taking them.’

But the call wasn’t one that could be postponed. The very next day she was flying to New York on agenting business and needed an immediate yes-or-no reponse.

What she had to tell me was this. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of its Sherlock Holmes Museum, whose doors were first opened to the public in 1991, the Swiss town of Meiringen, in the heart of the Bernese Oberland, its main claim on the attention of the tourist industry being the proximity of the Reichenbach Falls,† had organised a Sherlock Holmes Festival to which erudite Sherlockians had been invited from all over the world. Since my own most recent work of fiction was and since my German publisher, Martin Hielscher,‡ had realised at the eleventh hour that my presence at such an event might be crucial to the book’s successful launch, she asked if I would be willing to fly to Switzerland three days hence, all arrangements made and all expenses paid.

Ordinarily I would have at once refused. Not only have I come to loathe travelling to Europe and further afield, from a fear less of flying than of airports, but I flee all fairs, festivals and literary dos. Even under the sole pressure of Carole’s steely entreaties, I would at least have hemmed and hawed before no doubt eventually caving in. Yet now I had Cyclops to contend with, along with my head cold.

‘Oh, Carole, I don’t know,’ I whispered back, holding the mobile in my left hand and cupping the right over my mouth as though I were about to sneeze. ‘I mean, I’ll do my little forty-five-minute stint and then what? It feels like so much hassle for so little result. Besides, as you can probably hear, I’m just getting over a bad cold.’

‘Gilbert,’ said Carole, who enjoyed the advantage over me of not being obliged to lower her voice, ‘I do think that if Martin – Martin, who has really got behind you – believes your attendance will prove a boost to sales, you yourself could unselfishly put up with a little hassle.’

There then came the knockdown argument to which no writer has ever been capable of responding.

‘Or don’t you want your books to sell?’

Without speaking, meanwhile, the Demon King gave the vibrating window between us three impatient taps with the colossally thick, hairy knuckles of his right hand, drawing my attention to the words ‘Quiet Coach’ stencilled on its pane.

I frantically nodded at him, asked Carole if I might have an hour or two to think it over, was told not, then at last helplessly agreed.

‘Oh, very well. Tell them to go ahead and make the arrangements.’

Adding a barely audible ‘Bye’, I snapped the mobile shut, made a silently apologetic gesture to my still unappeased (who was to vanish from my life, as equally from this memoir of it, the instant we arrived at Paddington, leaving as little trace of his intervention in either as a burst soap bubble), and slouched down behind while the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London.

* Ever since Mussolini got the trains running on time the British have behaved as though there were something inherently Fascistic about a competently managed railway network.

† Over which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, desirous of ridding himself once and for all of what had become a beaky, brilliant albatross around his neck, chose to have Holmes, in the...