And Then There Was No One Read Online Free PDF Page A

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
vis-à-vis
(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
The Theory of Colonic Irrigation
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 story titled ‘The Final Problem’, plunge to his death in the grip of his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty.
    ‡ Of the Munich-based house Beck.

Chapter Two
    Back in my Notting Hill
pied-à-terre,
I checked my email, not a convenience of the cottage in Blockley, and found that I had been preceded by two separate communications from Meiringen.
    The first of these was in the way of a round-robin flyer for the Festival, which had hopes of becoming, I learned, a regular and even annual event. The second specifically targeted me. I was thanked for ‘gracing our festival with your august self’ and afforded the information I needed regarding the airline company I was to fly with, the reference number of my e-ticket, by whom I would be met at Zurich airport, and the like. Also what was expected of me personally. There would be a presentation by my translator Jochen Schimmang, himself a prizewinning novelist and by now a dear friend of mine, followed by a reading by me of one of the tales from my collection. (Knowing what was coming, I had already, on the train, mentally selected the shortest of them, ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’, alluded to by Holmes in ‘The Sussex Vampire’ as‘a story for which the world is not yet prepared’.) The evening would end with a public Q & A session, one that risked being ‘stormy’, I was gleefully warned, in view of the high quota of Holmes fanatics expected to attend and, for many of them, the near-sacreligious liberties taken by my book.
    I printed out both emails, slipped into my suitcase the one I’d be required to show at Heathrow and took the other off to study over a coffee in a Catalan delicatessen I frequented, the Salvador Deli, across the street from me in Portobello Road.
    It was three pages long. Down the left-hand side of its first page zigzagged a
faux
-slapdash formation of four picture-postcard views of Meiringen: a chalet decked with multi-coloured pennants; cows grazing on a gently tilting meadow; a bluish-white Alplet; and, on a dizzyingly narrow ledge overhanging the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes