by Graham Moore
Harold’s search swung, inch by inch, 180 degrees across the room, to the wooden desk and chair. The top of the desk was a mess of papers and pens—whoever ransacked the room seemed to have been particularly concerned with making sure no lost diaries had been hidden in the hotel’s “Guide to Your Pay-Per-View Channels.” Harold pushed the chair away and crawled under the desk, continuing his examination. The darkness underneath made this difficult, however, so he reached up and brought the overturned lamp from the desktop to his assistance.
He flicked it on and pointed its bulb at the wall.
Then he dropped it, his body ricocheting as he gave a start. The bulb shattered, rousing both Sarah and Jeffrey from their thoughts and sending them rushing to Harold’s side. What they saw at first appeared to be a small, murky, dark stain on the bright, clean wall. Then, as they knelt beneath the desk, they began to make out red-brown letters, messily scrawled above the carpet line, as if by finger painting. No magnifying glass was needed to read the still-drying message.
“ELEMENTARY,” it read.
It was written in blood.
CHAPTER 9
Sensational Developments
“You don’t know Sherlock Holmes yet...Perhaps you
would not care for him as a constant companion.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet
October 18, 1900
The letter bomb in Arthur’s mail did not go off as planned.
Some ten minutes prior to the explosion, he settled down to breakfast by the latticework windows. Gray fall light came through the nine square glass panes. On days like these, the strips of white wood that separated the glass seemed brighter to the eye than did the window light. Arthur dug into his eggs and tomato.
Seven years had passed since the death of Sherlock Holmes. Seven years of stories, adventures, and a new life Arthur had constructed for himself far away from his old one. He had left London for Hindhead, and he had left Holmes for better things. This was the life of which he’d always dreamed.
He had built this house, named Undershaw, three years earlier. It was grand then, and as the years passed, it grew grander still. The estate had the air of a carnival about it. There were great stables, which attracted friends from the city nearly every weekend; dear children and distant relatives always scampering around hither and yon; a fireplace fit for a Hindu bonfire; a dark, quiet billiards room in which Arthur had already lost games to Bram and James Barrie. The new landau, had for 150 pounds plus the pair of horses to power it, was having the family crest painted on by the staff. Indeed, Arthur made sure to include the Doyle crest on as many elements of his new home as possible. It reminded him of where he’d come from and of the pride he felt in where he’d arrived. Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn. The house bought on make-believe; the house that a penny dreadful built.
Seven years, and Sherlock Holmes remained blessedly buried below the waters of the Reichenbach Falls. Yes, people still spoke of him. Yes, people—strangers—still wrote of him, discussed him, missed him, and begged for his return in letters to the editors of every magazine in which he’d appeared. But not here. No one dared speak of him in this house. The name Sherlock Holmes was not to be uttered out loud in Arthur’s presence, nor in the opulent home for which the detective had paid.
Five minutes before the explosion, Arthur left the breakfast table and went to retrieve the day’s post from the small mahogany table near the front vestibule. It was a task he enjoyed performing himself. As he walked the halls of his estate, he felt a pleasant moment of contentment. A small army of children and their attendants rampaged upstairs, trotting heavily between the eight bedrooms. Outside, the stable master fed Brigadier, Arthur’s own horse, an eight-year-old of strong Norfolk breeding. Through the front windows, Arthur could see the tall pines rising above his three stories. Perhaps later this winter they might acquire one from the nearby woods for a drawing-room Christmas tree.
He scooped up the morning’s postal stack in the crook of his arm and made his way to his study for the inspection. He opened the letters quickly. There was a kind note from Innes about the elections, which he appreciated, though Arthur would have preferred not to think on them. He had run for Parliament in Edinburgh over the last months on a largely anti-Boer platform. When he had returned from the front earlier in the year, Arthur had written a history of the war, from the British perspective, as well as many a pamphlet urging his fellow citizens to support the military effort. Then he had run for office, thinking that his pro-war views would be manifestly useful at Westminster. His platform, aside from a promise to defeat the Boer insurrection at all costs, contained a plan to raise tariffs on foreign foodstuffs imported into Britain that could as easily be produced locally (wheat, meat), while lowering tariffs on imported foodstuffs that could not be locally manufactured (sugar, tea). This plan had failed to rally the electorate in his favor, and he had been drawn into a rather public debate on the tense issue of women’s suffrage. Arthur had not intended to campaign on this point, but he was a committed antisuffragist, and when asked, he refused to duck the issue. After exaggerated rumors of Arthur’s Catholicism were spread across the district on cheaply printed bills, he lost his hometown seat by a few hundred votes. Rather than fight the slander that he was a papist stooge, Arthur retreated back to Hindhead, and to fiction.
The second letter he opened came from H. Greenhough Smith, the longtime editor of the Strand. It offered nine thousand pounds for a new series of Holmes stories—a new high bid. Arthur crumpled the letter and deposited it briskly into the waste bin. He would not even reply. Collier’s Weekly. in America, had offered twenty-five thousand dollars for the American rights to the same. Arthur, in a show of gentlemanly restraint, simply ignored both requests rather than commit the reasonable response to paper and direct both men to hell.
He had just written two new Brigadier Gerard stories. Where was the demand for them? (The horse he had named for the character, not the reverse.) No matter what feat he accomplished in his life, this Holmes would always be there to drown him in those bloody, sordid adventures which the public—feeble muffs!—so craved. Arthur caught himself and took a few slow, deep breaths. He would not let thoughts of Sherlock Holmes into this house.
He would read no more letters just now. A rather large package lay at the bottom of the mail stack. He would open that instead.
Less than a minute before the explosion, Arthur placed the package before him on his desk. Surprisingly heavy, it was wrapped in cheap brown paper and tied with fraying twine. The postmark read Surrey, but there was no return address.
Arthur cut the twine with a satisfying swipe and carefully removed the brown wrapping. Inside lay a black box. Arthur searched for a note, or a card, or a shop’s bill, but found nothing at all to indicate the package’s sender or its contents.
As he pulled off the lid, he heard the sound of metal scratching metal and then a sharp click. He looked down to find an inch-thick tube of dynamite nestled in pads of crumpled newspapers, like an infant in a crib.
For an instant, Arthur reconsidered his antipapal position and wondered, political slanders aside, whether a relapse into deep and sincere Catholicism might in fact be just the thing he needed.
He stood motionless for a generation, for an eon, for the longest four seconds of his life. There was no explosion. He did not die. As to whether this should provide confirmation for or against belief in the one true church, Arthur was uncertain.
He also did not feel any particular inclination to move, for fear that any shake of the package might restrike the flint inside, setting off the fuse that, at first glance, miraculously had failed to ignite. What little he knew of bomb making—and his knowledge on the topic was quite limited indeed—had come from his time with anti-Boer regiments in Africa. But the letter bomb was not popular among the rebels, and so a method for defusing such lay well o
utside of Arthur’s ken.
He opened his mouth to call for help but then stopped: What if Kingsley heard the cry and came bounding in, or Roger? What if it were one of the maids? It wouldn’t do to risk someone else’s life to save his own. On that point Arthur was assured.
He peered down into the package, for clues to its construction and thus to the method of its destruction. A short fuse—it must last for only a few seconds at best, thought Arthur—led from a flint at the top to the stick of dynamite. A few other strands appeared to coil around the explosive, but for what purpose he could not be certain. The crumpled papers that padded the stick trembled, and Arthur quickly realized they did so at the quivering of his own hands. His fingertips clutched the edge of the package, but the shaking seemed to start in his shoulders and move in short waves through his body.
He looked closer at the newspapers. Amid the small print, he made out a drawing. Some pictorial demonstration of the article’s topic, he thought. Was it a member of the government? A statesman? Arthur pulled the package closer to his face.
The drawing printed on the paper was of a gaunt, bird-faced man in a long cloak, with piercing dots for eyes and a tall deerstalker cap. It was Sherlock Holmes.
The dynamite wasn’t padded with newspapers; it was padded with pages from the Strand. Pages of a Holmes story. Arthur’s fear began giving way to rage.
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it be done with quickly, Arthur thought, misquoting as usual.
He placed the package down on the side table, and the dynamite rolled slightly to the right.
But rather than causing an explosion, the movement of the dynamite exposed another piece of paper beneath it. An envelope. Sealed, by the looks of it.
Did he dare reach down and take it? He did.
Arthur gently eased the envelope from underneath the heavy stick. He could see that there were words written across the front of the letter but couldn’t yet read them. As he pulled the envelope away, gazing upon it as if it were the proverbial sword pulled from the stone, the dynamite settled back down onto something hard. Something metal.
He heard another scrape, and a click. A second flint, hidden beneath the letter, had lit. The fuse that coiled around the stick was afire.
Arthur did what was then the only sensible thing: He turned on his heels and ran, fast as his forty-one-year-old legs could carry him, in the other direction. He made it to the doorway as the bomb exploded. His ears felt as if they were popping off from the sound. Shreds of mahogany splattered across the study. The windows gave way, their white latticework bursting outward and sprinkling glass everywhere. As Arthur collapsed on the floor, on the other side of the open door, there continued smaller crashes from inside, as vases, books, inkwells, and a neverused gasogene fell from their perches.
He heard an approaching clamor from all directions, his household running to find the cause of so great a disturbance. He dared not look back to see what had become of his study.
Rather, still on the floor, his body tense from the shock, Arthur looked at the envelope safely preserved in his hand. Though crumpled and a touch sweat-smudged from being clutched in his palm, the single word scrawled across the front of the sealed envelope was quite legible.
“ELEMENTARY,” it read.
CHAPTER 10
The Applied Science of Deduction
“Crime is common. Logic is rare.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”
January 6, 2010, cont.
Harold did his best to ignore the Sherlockians arguing around him. As the timbre of their voices rose, in both volume and pretension, he focused more intently on the three ice cubes in his lunchtime bourbon. He watched their sharp corners round out as they melted. He shook the glass, splashing fresh liquor up and over the cubes, before taking another long sip from his drink. It was noon somewhere.
The two men behind him stood and pointed their accusatory forefingers at one another. Elsewhere in the hotel, similar arguments formed as the fault lines of every long-standing tension within the organization began to give way. Harold was far from the only attendee to fancy himself an amateur detective on a day like this one. The bar was crowded with theorizing Sherlockians, who in the absence of any actual evidence had created grand machinations to explain the crime. Minor points of canonical disagreement became reasons for brutal murder. Some tried to piece together their theories in small groups, hoping that with enough brainpower and expertise they might arrive at a solution. Others jumped straight over the “investigation” phase and landed square at the end of the story they were creating, instantly accusing the man across the table of some vile treachery. And, moreover, actually employing phrases like “vile treachery” in doing so. Everyone was a suspect. But at the world’s largest Sherlockian gathering, everyone was a detective as well.
For his own part, Harold was brain-throttled, reduced to animal needs (food, quiet, bourbon) and animal sounds (monosyllabic assents, guttural baying). He wanted to go home.
He was terrified. The reality of the death wet Harold’s scalp with a hot sweat. He nervously popped dry pretzels from the bar top into his mouth, crunching them loudly between his teeth in an attempt to drown out the surrounding conversations. Harold had long noticed that most people lost their appetites when they were scared or preoccupied. He had wished he were the same way every anxious night he’d gorged himself on air-packed snacks amid a crisis. When he was depressed, he could restrict himself to mounds of coconut frozen yogurt. But when he was nervous, he needed salty, bite-size carb products: chips, Goldfish crackers, pretzels. Usually he refrained from drinking in such situations, but in light of his close proximity, in the recent past, to the cold, pale corpse of a man he’d briefly known, Harold gave himself a break and employed the ten-year-old single-barrel in the steadying of his nerves.
Sarah, appearing out of nowhere, slid onto the barstool next to him and rubbed a comforting hand between his shoulder blades. Harold was not particularly fond of being touched by strangers in general, although in this specific instance he found it kind of pleasurable.
“It’s eleven-thirty,” she said with a smile, nodding at his glass.
“It’s been a long morning,” Harold responded. Sarah agreed and asked the bartender for some coffee. She stayed silent until it arrived.
“Were the police rough with you? They can sometimes be a little . . . gruff, if you’re not used to dealing with them.”
Harold wasn’t sure whether “gruff” was the right word to describe the police who had detained him—“petrifying” might be better. When they arrived at the crime scene and found him examining the unused pillows for hair fibers, they had immediately placed him in handcuffs. Their thorough, two-man frisking did not turn up any evidence, but it did trigger Harold’s apprehension at the touch of strangers. His skin curdled as they slapped their hands against his waist and thighs. They led him, still cuffed, into an empty room down the hallway, where they interrogated him about his relationship to Alex and his discovery of the killer’s message on the wall for what seemed like the entire day. As Harold grew flustered and hungry, his answers to their questions became more convoluted, and his habit of overtalking garbled the plain fact that not only had he not killed Alex Cale but that he hadn’t the faintest idea who did. Finally, having taken all the information from his driver’s license and making clear in no uncertain terms that Harold was not to leave the city until their investigation had been concluded, they released him. He learned, very much to his surprise, that the whole interrogation hadn’t taken more than ninety minutes.
“Are you used to dealing with them?” Harold asked.
“I worked two years at the Salem News. outside of Boston, when I was younger. I was on the crime beat, but at a small paper like that, the crime beat mostly means calling up the local chief of police and asking who’d been arrested the night before. The guy was an asshole— always called me ‘honey’ in fron
t of the other cops. But there wasn’t much I could say about it if I wanted quotes from him. Anyway, you learn to smile and make nice and let them feel like they’re in charge— and of course they are.” She sipped again from her coffee and turned on her stool to face him directly, forcing Harold by the laws of social convention to turn and look her in the eye. “Are you hanging in there okay?”
Harold was not immediately sure how to answer the question. He wasn’t quite hanging in there, and he certainly wasn’t okay.
“Do you think I’m really a suspect?” he asked.
“I seriously doubt it. I’m sure they just wanted to teach you a lesson about messing around with crime scenes. They were trying to scare you.”
“They pulled it off.”
Sarah laughed. “Seems like everyone here has a theory about who did it,” she said, gesturing around the bar at all of the arguing Sherlockians. “What do you think?”
Harold had been thinking about this a lot, in fact, over the past two hours. But nothing he’d come to in his head had seemed either promising or even pleasant to think about.