Chapter Twenty-Two
After Lapin-Défunt had escorted Deirdre to her room and, having extracted a promise not to take her life just yet—if for no other reason, he’d joked, than to spare him the suspicion of having had a hand in it—left her, he returned to his room and, barely registering the presence of his wife’s immobile form in the bed, fell asleep. In the morning, he awoke without hope to another day in this hotel, rubbed his eyes, smelt his breath on the top of his fist, put on his socks and pulled on a right shoe, only to find it much too small. Cursing under his breath, under the assumption that his wife had idiotically left her shoes where his should be, he got up and strode around the suite in his socks, searching in vain for his own footwear.
“Petunia?” She was not in bed, nor in the toilet. She was probably down at breakfast. Had she taken his shoes? Hid them, out of malice? Or, out of plain stupidity, had she actually put on his (much larger and unladylike) shoes and worn them to breakfast without noticing? But hadn’t she said she wished to refrain from leaving the room unnecessarily, now? So had she made a special trip just to dispose of his shoes?
Lapin-Défunt could not have known it, but his wife had left the room for none of those reasons, but, rather, to seek to recover her own shoes, which had likewise gone missing. In their place, she had found a pair of boots tailor-made to counterbalance a congenital gait impediment. In fact, overnight, many pairs of guests’ shoes had been switched, from room to room, across floors and even between different wings of the hotel. The only people who found this funny, besides, presumably, the perpetrator him- or her-self, were the Drig children, who hugged each other laughing at the increasingly exasperated grownups scampering about.
Enid, having just got dressed, received a visit from Gangakanta, who had surmised, correctly, that his shoes had been switched with hers. As they sat in her sitting room, pulling on their respective footwear, she asked him, “How?”
“How what, please?”
“How did you know that I would have your shoes?”
“I found a pair of ladies’ shoes in my room, and they reminded me of yours.”
“But these are quite ordinary shoes. They could have been anyone’s.”
“I thought of that possibility too. Which is why I mapped out this.” He produced (from a pocket, not from thin air) a piece of paper on which he’d diagrammed a complicated statistical formula which your narrator of course understands but feels would be far too undramatic and, frankly, boring for the reader to merit transcription, but suffice it to say, it traced all possible locations of all the guests’ shoes and concluded with a high degree of probability that Gangakanta’s were in Enid’s room, and vice-versa.
“That’s brilliant!” said Enid. “Could you apply this to murders?”
“What do you mean?”
“This statistical analysis, this maths—thing—couldn’t you use the same principle for murders?”
Gangakanta sat up stiffly. “I. . .I might boast some talent with statistics, but I could never be tempted into using it to kill a fellow human being.”
“I mean to solve the murders!”
“Do you mean—use this method to calculate the probabilities of different guests and members of staff being the murderer or murderers?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Yes.”
Gangakanta stared at a small crack in the wainscoting—it might have been anything, but that is where his glance chanced to fall—and whispered: “. . Yes. . .I might try it, at that.” He looked to her: she was standing, while he was still seated, and so his glance, carrying along at the same height from the floor, struck upon the portion of her anatomy where, had she not been clothed, her navel would be. He cleared his throat, readjusted his glance so that it rested on his knee, and continued: “But we will need to gather much more information about everyone.”
“I have my notes, from the interviews.”
He nodded. “Good. But we will need still more.”