The Reichenbach Problem, Page 24

  “And you are English like Brown.”

  “Irish. Whereas you are English, if you insist on pursuing this tack.”

  “Yes – but I did not become obsessed with some half-baked story about pipe tools.”

  “We have discussed this…”

  “You may think you have discussed it. However, it is curious, is it not, doctor, that the one thing upon which your whole theory hinges appears, as if by magic? And yet the only person that searched the pockets and made the inventory of his personal effects in the church was you.”

  “You saw them…”

  “I saw nothing, Doyle. You pulled them out like a magician in the dim light from oil lamps, called them out to me and replaced them immediately, before I had the chance to confirm them with you by sight. What would it involve to palm the tool and slip it into your own pocket? What would it involve to take this mysterious and, frankly, convoluted theory to extremes? I tell you what it would involve… someone who wanted to throw the real detectives off the scent.”

  “Now, Holloway…”

  “I put it to you, doctor, that you are more involved in all of this than you make out. Although I cannot prove it yet, I will. Yes… it all makes sense, now. Absinthe, my eye! No wonder you have been so keen on not wishing suspicion to fall upon the Croat couple. The couple, you may remember, with the albatross of the ouzo stopper hanging around their necks. You do not want them suspected because, somehow or other, you are involved. If they are dragged down, you will be dragged down with them.” He leaned towards me over the table and his eyes glinted ominously. “Just what exactly, doctor, is your game?”

  I began to wonder whether I should have pushed him off the mountain when I had the chance.

  He sat back again. “Let me list a second string of evidence that has, little by little, been accumulating as I have been observing your work.” He settled in his seat, thrust his legs out before him and drew, once again, upon his by now slobbery pipe. He inspected the ceiling as he did so and, with no urgency, commenced to enumerate.

  “One. You do not wish to examine the body. At least when I am present. Two. You overset an oil lamp, which ran the risk of cremating any evidence. Of course, you could blame me for this. I do not doubt my insistence on your continuing meant that I reacted in an unfortunate manner. However, it would have taken very little for you to use my frustration to turn the whole business to your advantage and tip the lamp over. Three. You are deliberately obstructive towards any theories that I propose and, indeed, have repeatedly refuted my concerns over the Croats. Four. You offer obscure and ultimately insupportable ideas regarding certain artefacts such as pipe knives. Five. You search the hotel’s office, without permission, for goodness only knows what… Yes, do not bother to goggle at me and bluster, Doyle, Eva noticed you had been in there, too. She’s told the village. What else is there? Oh yes. Five…”

  “Six.”

  “Six… you become lost in a fog and claim you were shot at – or perhaps you had another assignation as yet undisclosed? Did you deliberately engineer a falling out with me upon the cliff top just so that you could cast the pipe knife down the abyss? Did you, in fact, Doyle, meet up with Brown yourself and kill him, and somehow acquire that tool as part of the process of deflecting any suspicion from you?”

  “This is patently absurd.”

  “No, Doyle, elementary.”

  “You were with me throughout the day that Brown died…”

  “Not after we had all retired for the evening.”

  “But he was surely dead by then?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. But the post-mortem report should confirm it.”

  “Should…?” He barked a short sharp dismissive laugh. “Of course, I have no proof, no absolute evidence, Doyle, but you should know that I am on your trail. And if you had even an ounce of decency in you, you would do best to confess it all and allow me to hand you over to the Swiss police when they arrive.”

  “Outrageous. You have now entirely taken leave of your senses.”

  “A shame. I had rather hoped that you would make matters easy for all of us. You shall be brought to book either way – and this way would have been so much more dignified.”

  I stood and jostled my chair aside. The action caused the others around us to turn and stare. “Acquire your evidence if there is any. Of which, I can assure you, there is none.”

  I looked around me. It felt as if the entire village were watching me. It would not be putting too fine a point upon it to say that there was perhaps suspicion in their eyes. There appeared also to be resentment… dislike… even menace. I had dismissed Francesca’s earlier warnings, being confident that Father Vernon would quickly be able to rebuild the villagers’ trust in me. Now I was not so sure, a sense of deep unease fell over me.

  I hastened out of the café and stood on the street gulping in crisp night air. I felt dizzy, betrayed, baffled.

  How on earth was I going to weather this storm? For weather it I would have to try. Whatever had been said, had been said. The thoughts had been thought. The connections made.

  Absurd, preposterous.

  Yet although I could argue every point, the popular mind is prone to fantasies and misconceptions. These rapidly become fact and are almost impossible to dislodge once they have set in the collective conscious, hard as igneous rock.

  I made for my hotel. In the reception area I encountered Eva, returned at last. She glanced up with a hunted look. My presence did not offer her any comfort. It was plain that she too viewed me with distrust, even distaste.

  “Eva…”

  “Do not speak to me, please, doctor.”

  She had been crying.

  “I thought you should know Holloway has been…”

  “Do not talk to me about Mr Holloway. Now… if you will excuse me…” She rushed off into the office and closed the door firmly.

  I stood there for some moments, finally utterly overwhelmed.

  Eventually I retreated to my room. I stepped out onto my balcony.

  Night had long fallen. The mountains could be distinguished as Prussian blue against a navy blue sky. The stars looked like the living room lights of a million hillside cottages, reaching back across an infinitely expanding landscape. The actual living room lights of the remote cottages, speckled across the opposite side of the valley, looked like stars. An alpenhorn began its mournful mellifluous moan. It sang a forlorn tune that wandered the lonely valleys in search of a home.

  SIXTEEN

  The next morning, moving rather stiffly after my bout with Hugo, I arose, washed, dressed and then sought consolation in the view: the gleaming mountains, the wide blue skies, the constant sun. However, I was still angry. I unwisely called to mind my interview with Holloway the previous evening. I ran through the conversation again and again. I inspected the whole interview from every angle. This naturally served to provoke me more. I finished my ablutions and dressed. In doing so, I sought to distance myself from all that might have vexed me. This enabled me to slip into a far more positive and determined frame of mind, and to clarify things, rather than wallow in self-pity and resentment.

  My thoughts now ran thus. If Holloway had felt it was important he take over the case, what else had he done? That is to say, what else might he have done to engineer a situation whereby he was in the position to take the case over? This led to a second question. If he were capable of such behaviour, was he capable of murder? I got no further than that. For, I reasoned, if I had been in his company most of that fateful day, then he, too, had also been in my company. It would be a relatively simple matter at some point to address the issue and bring my innocence out into the open. Although I confess I was presently at a loss to know when that precise point would come.

  A further aid to my release from doleful thoughts was that a telegram, slit, had been pushed under my door during the night. It was from the hospital and confirmed that the injuries sustained by Brown were consistent with a fall
of the kind that he had experienced. It went on to state that the injuries had been sustained while he was still alive, and that they had brought about his demise. There were no other injuries of note. Also confirmed was the fact that he had ingested a significant amount of anise-seed and alcohol. The report did not speculate whether the two were possibly linked. Most revealingly, a trace of wormwood was also found. This confirmed, as far as I was concerned, that what I had smelt on his lips that night in the chapel of rest was absinthe and not ouzo. Unless, of course, there was a brand of ouzo which also used wormwood as an ingredient.

  The most interesting thing about all this information, however, was that it no longer meant as much to me as it might once have done. I was at war with Holloway, and whatever conclusions he was reaching, rightly or wrongly, I would henceforward stubbornly plough my own furrow. I noticed that I did not even feel any sense of self-righteousness at this evident exoneration of at least part of my theories. It was just an item of fact that I could store away and put together with other evidence gathered as I continued my own investigation.

  I was just reaching for my smoking things, when the door received a light knock. With a sigh, I called for whomever it was to enter. Mevrouw van Engels joined me on the balcony. She sat in my little wicker armchair across from my little wicker table. She had a weal on her left cheekbone. It was livid and fresh.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “It is nothing. An accident. Really, an accident.”

  That second insistence that it was an accident caused my suspicious faculties to prick into life. “Was it your husband?”

  “No.”

  “Then who? Werner, after I saw the two of you last night?”

  Her eyes flickered off down to her left and then returned to engage mine. “It was an accident. Say no more about it. It is not important.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “An accident, I tell you.”

  “Mevrouw van Engels, I do not know what is going on and I am sure that you do. You should be aware that whether you know it or not, you wish to tell me. If you did not, you would not have come here. Not with your face marked with the obvious product of some sort of violence. You need sympathy, help, and some way out of the morass in which you find yourself. I can offer all three. Perhaps not a solution, but a path. But I cannot begin to put what I can do into your hands unless we are perfectly frank with one another.” I looked at her. She was meeting my gaze on equal terms. “So, what is it to be?”

  “I do need your help, it is true. But this accident,” she touched her face lightly with her fingers, “this is not to do with it. So, I will tell you about my husband.”

  I considered for a moment and realized that half the truth was at least better than none for the time being. I also reasoned that the other half would most likely follow as a matter of course, by explicit or implicit references.

  “Please, proceed.”

  She nodded gratefully and commenced her tale.

  “My husband is a very intelligent, hard-working and kind man. A decent man. Ever since he was a young boy he has studied very diligently and passed all of his examinations with flying colours. He learned from his youth how to work, and work well. This made him, you will understand, a very solitary person – but not inhuman.” She paused in order that I might indicate my understanding of this important point, which I did gladly. “We met at university – while I was living with my father, a professor of English – he was a student of mathematics. I sometimes wondered if he married me because marriage was something to add to his things that he felt he needed to achieve in his lifetime. But that is another story.”

  Or was it the whole story? I thought, but said nothing.

  “So, we went on in life. After his graduation, I gave up my work in the library to help him with his research. He would toil away into the early hours. He would not speak a word to me. I would run the family home and call him when I thought it was time he took a little more sustenance. Every day, without fail, he would get up and go straight into his study at about seven o’clock in the morning. He would appear at around midday to spend twenty minutes with me for our lunch, and then he would return to his work. At about six o’clock, he would appear and I would have a cup of fresh coffee and cake ready for him. He would drink and eat and we would exchange the day’s news. Or, rather, I would inform him of everything that was going on in the world. Then he would return to his work for another two hours, after which time we would have our supper. He would then either read an academic or mind-improving book, or he would play the piano. He was a very accomplished musician, doctor.”

  “Was?”

  “He has stopped these last two years – and you should know why.”

  “Pray, continue.”

  “You see, he is, as I have explained, a very clever man. A terribly clever man. All his life he has been told this; his work and its results have confirmed this. Although on the outside he was very humble, hard-working and placid, inside I believe his achievements were eating away at him. Gnawing at his very soul. I mean to say… how could anyone so successful not feel a sense of pride and a growing self-belief?”

  I agreed.

  “And yet, he was a solitary man. Oh yes, we would talk, but we would never talk about his work, his achievements. I thought that he was a remarkably modest human being and admired him. I did not know that inside he was brooding. Lusting after greatness. Striving for more and more achievements. Can you understand? He was driven by vanity. Everybody believes they have a unique part to play in this world. Everybody. But if that means you will destroy everything else in your life to do this one unique thing, well, it can be a good thing – or it can be very bad.”

  I understood. An introspective fellow driven by success to greater and greater heights – and no one to provide a balancing, objective perspective because he did not rub up against anyone else to any significant degree except his wife, who was totally compliant. No one, then, to keep him rooted in reality, normality.

  “And then it happened.” Her voice was thick with emotion.

  “What happened?”

  “The news came through from Sweden. The project that he had been working towards, for seemingly his whole adult life; the project upon which he had built his every waking moment, for which he had received every encouragement, plaudit and help from the university; the project that he was, perhaps, just a few weeks away from completing… it was announced that a French mathematician had had a breakthrough as a result of a mathematical competition. Everything that my husband had incarcerated himself in his study for over those many long years, had worked his fingers to the bone and his brain to a standstill over – all gone. Ashes. Wasted. Pointless.”

  “He believed his life had no further value?”

  “It was not to do with feeling anything, doctor. He was too numb to feel or think. It was fact and it destroyed him. All his work had been directed towards this one target. Apart from a few scraps of philosophical argument and an item or two of inspired calculus, there was nothing salvageable from the wreck of his life’s work.”

  “Did he know that this… Frenchman… was approaching the same conclusions as he?”

  “Of course. All these people were constantly in communication with one another. Each group had different orbits: Paris, Heidelberg, Cambridge, Leiden, Utrecht, Yale, Oxford, Berlin. Each had their own little communities, and occasionally information was even slipped between the groups and this advanced the work for everybody. But you do not understand academic rivalry. It becomes a matter of honour to be the first and bring tribute – and funds – into your university.”

  “An honour or an obsession?”

  “When you spend your life on one task, do you want it all to go to waste?”

  It was a terrible tale. No one who engages upon a life’s work like this starts out wishing to be famous. But as time goes on, and one battles away in one’s ivory tower, the only true motivation must be to either simply complete the ta
sk and be grateful that the work is done, or to set your name in stone in the history books. The danger comes when you contain both within yourself and do not seek a perspective from those around you – especially your loved ones. Van Engels’s relationship with his wife was very probably secure and loving in its own way. Yet he had devoted himself so much more fully to his mistress, academic achievement, that they were unable to share the most personal matters with each other. Holmes swore he would never marry, as it would distract him from his life’s work. I began to wonder: no matter how laudable – how wise or sustainable was that position in practical terms?

  “When did this happen?”

  “Two years ago. The eruption came in the form of the results of a mathematical competition announced a year before by the king of Sweden and Norway to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. My husband entered it with a will, as did many others from various universities – some helping others, some attempting it alone.”

  “This is the competition the Frenchman won?”

  She nodded. “At first the shock was so great it was as if our lives had exploded. Desolation lay all around us for weeks, months. Despair, depression, tantrums, arguments. I hated it. You know, even now I am not allowed to mention that Frenchman’s name, or discuss what it was that he did. Even with people like you, out of my husband’s hearing.”

  “It really is desperate. I suspect that it was a matter of either proving or disproving a classic mathematical proposition. Euclid’s. A long-established anomaly that had not been resolved over many years.”

  “No. It was not this achievement that so destroyed my husband. Others had shown that Euclid’s fifth proposition was impossible to prove some years ago. This was a revelation in itself and set many academics on the particular path my husband, among others, set out upon. No, the significant development was the Frenchman’s winning memoir on the three body problem in celestial mechanics. It included the first description of homoclinic points, chaotic motion and the utilization of the idea of invariant integrals…”