by Graham Moore
“You took the body and deposited it in the alley just beside your home. You must have brought her down these very stairs—she was heavy, wasn’t she? She must have hit every step on the way down. That’s why the body was so bruised when the police found her. You realized that a naked dead girl would attract rather more attention from the police than a clothed one, so what did you do? You took some skirts from your own closet, didn’t you, and wrapped them around her? A fair trade, I suppose, for her lovely white dress.”
The woman continued to cry as she buried her head between her knees. Arthur wanted to sit beside her, to give her an arm. But there was no room on the narrow staircase. He was forced to stand above her, looking down while her tears dripped onto her soiled shoes.
“You may keep the dress,” he said as he walked backward down the stairs. “And the kerchief.”
CHAPTER 18
Pleasure Reading
“Altogether it cannot be doubted that
sensational developments will follow.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”
January 9, 2010, cont.
After Alex Cale’s answering machine clicked off, there was silence in the cluttered Kensington flat. As the lead detective on the case, Harold felt it was his duty to say something.
“Well then,” he said. “That happened.”
“What the bloody hell?” said Jennifer incredulously.
“Let’s not overreact.”
“Do you know who that was? Do you know that man?”
“Yes. I’m sort of working for him, technically.” Harold was treated to a look of stunned horror from Jennifer.
“His name is Sebastian Conan Doyle,” chimed Sarah. “He had been fighting with your brother publicly.”
“We knew he’d been threatening Alex,” added Harold, “though in more of a legal, trading-angry-letters sense. We didn’t know that he’d been really threatening Alex, in, like, an I’m-going-to-kill-you sense.”
“Let’s sit down,” said Sarah. “Perhaps we should back up for a minute.”
The three sat, and Harold and Sarah spent the next fifteen minutes trying to explain everything they knew about Sebastian Conan Doyle and his fight with Alex. They talked about the angry letters back and forth, about Alex’s fear of being followed, and they even explained that they had come to London on Sebastian’s dime. Though, Harold was quick to add, they had no allegiance to his side in the argument. They simply wanted to find the truth. And the diary.
Jennifer seemed unconvinced. She quieted Harold by slowly raising her palms in front of her, as if she were feeling her way through a dark room. “Hush,” she said. “I need a simple answer. Do you think Sebastian Conan Doyle murdered my older brother?”
Harold and Sarah made a brief moment of eye contact, in which Sarah, ever so slightly, smiled and ducked her chin in deference. This was Harold’s department.
“I don’t know,” he said after a long pause. “He’s certainly the most likely suspect. But the most likely suspect at first is almost never the one who’s actually done it, right? If this were a Conan Doyle story, I think Sebastian would be a red herring.”
The look on Jennifer’s face was not one that conveyed to Harold that she placed much value on this analysis.
“Why don’t you presume for a moment, Mr. White, that this is not a Conan Doyle story? What if you presumed that this was, oh, just for argument’s sake, something that happened in the real world, to a real live person? In that case, don’t you think I should tell the police about Sebastian’s message?”
“Yes, absolutely, tell them about the message. But when you do, maybe don’t mention the part about how we were here? Or about how we talked to you at all? The New York police had sort of...well, asked that I not leave the state. You know. Just for a while. Not that I’m a suspect or anything, myself. Anyhow. You get the point. I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression—”
“Harold,” interrupted Sarah. “Take a deep breath. Back to your original train of thought. Why don’t you think Sebastian killed Alex Cale?”
“A number of reasons. One, why would he do it? Money, sure, yeah, great. But now that Alex is dead, who’s he going to sell the diary to? Everyone knows it was stolen. And the only collectors with enough money or interest to buy the thing were all staying in the hotel where Alex died. And they all think Sebastian probably killed Alex, too! They’d never buy the diary off of him—they’d much rather turn him in and get to play the hero. Which leads me to point number two: If Sebastian killed Alex, he didn’t go to very much trouble to conceal it, did he? If you were planning to murder someone, would you leave a recording of your voice making threats in the possession of your victim? Sebastian is a dick, but he’s not an idiot. So. Point number three: How did he do it? The hotel had cameras in the lobby. He claims not to have visited the hotel that night, so if the NYPD had found his face on one of the tapes . . . well, we’d have heard about it by now, because he’d already have been arrested. And how’d he get into Alex’s room? The door wasn’t forced. Alex opened the door willingly. Three times, even. He knew whoever killed him. If he was as paranoid about being followed as you said he was and . . . well, as I know that he was, because I saw him myself, then do you think he’d just have let Sebastian Conan Doyle into his suite with a smile? He wasn’t going to offer to make the guy a hot cup of Earl Grey with milk, right? Plus, okay now, here’s point the fourth: The message in blood? The shoelace for a murder weapon? Does that really sound like Sebastian to either of you? And if he left those clues in order to frame somebody—another Sherlockian, somebody like me, frankly—well then, didn’t he do a pretty piss-poor job of it? If his goal was to implicate someone else, it’s funny that he remains the only one implicated. Why not shoot him on a dark street corner, grab the suitcase with the diary from his hands, and blame it on some mugger? Why not break in to his apartment here in London, steal the diary, and blame it on some crack team of house burglars? If Sebastian did it, then he did it in about the dumbest way possible.”
With a great humph of an exhale, Harold concluded his monologue. His normally plump, pale cheeks had become taut and red. Both Sarah and Jennifer stared at him, stunned.
“That was shockingly coherent,” said Sarah at last.
Harold squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and gave her a look that he hoped would indicate that he did not find her last comment particularly helpful.
“I can see why Mr. Conan Doyle hired you,” said Jennifer after another pause. Harold couldn’t tell whether or not this was meant as a compliment.
“Ms. Peters,” he began, “there is one question I still have for you.”
“One? ” whispered Sarah, sotto voce.
“In all the books lying around this apartment, I haven’t found a single one written by Arthur Conan Doyle. I haven’t found any notes either, or reference materials, relating to the great work of Alex’s life, his Conan Doyle biography. I understand why he took the original diary to New York with him, but would he have taken all of that secondary material as well?”
“No,” replied Jennifer, “he would have kept it in his writing office.”
“His writing office?”
“Yes. My brother kept a writing office down the street, in which he worked. He didn’t like to write in the same space in which he lived—it made him feel claustrophobic or locked up or something or other.”
“What about all of the books in the study, and that great wooden desk? That’s not his office?”
“That’s his reading office. Or maybe it was his pleasure-reading office, I can’t remember what he called it. But all of the Sherlock material would be in his writing office. It’s literally right down the street. We can head there now, if you like.”
While Jennifer gathered her heavy coat and Harold buttoned his, Sarah whispered to him, quietly enough that Jennifer wouldn’t hear.
“Just to be clear,” Sarah said, “is there one of you p
eople who doesn’t have obsessive-compulsive disorder?”
The walk to Alex Cale’s writing office was indeed brief. It was on the very next block north. Harold couldn’t help but notice that the apartment building looked just like that of Alex’s other, nonwriting flat—a fact that served only to accentuate the idiosyncratic pointlessness of the expense.
On the front stoop, Harold listened to the midday hum of activity in the building while Jennifer fumbled in her bag for the keys. She removed a collection of personal effects—square black makeup cases, rounded contact-lens holders, curved-steel beautifying apparatuses— and then placed them back in her bag as the rummaging continued. Harold considered offering to help, but wondered whether asking a woman to help sort through her purse might be considered rude. He could never tell about situations like this.
But before he could speak up, the door swung open, seemingly of its own accord. A man emerged from inside, carrying a leather bag, and politely held the door open for Jennifer. Though he looked young—he couldn’t be much above thirty—his hairline had already started to recede on the sides, while the center section remained firmly tethered to his brow. His loose jeans were dirty, stained with splotches of blue paint. He sported a nondescript gray sweater and an awful, ill-kempt goatee.
Jennifer smiled at the man as she took the weight of the door from his hand, and he returned a smile as he wordlessly trotted down the front steps.
“I hate goatees, too,” said Sarah to Harold, as if reading his mind, when they had entered the building. “It’s, like, have a beard or don’t, you know?”
By the time they’d reached the door to Alex’s writing office, Jennifer had managed to find the proper ring of keys from her bag. But as she held the key up in front of 2L, she stopped suddenly, realizing that it was unnecessary: The door was already ajar.
It looked like an animal’s jaw, opening wide to eat them.
“Hello?” called Jennifer, a note of fear in her voice. “Hello?!”
There was no response.
“Is someone inside?”
Harold turned to Sarah for guidance, but her eyes were locked on the open door.
She nodded to herself: This would be her department. Without looking at him, she stepped forward, pushing the door open all the way. She entered the bright flat.
It was even more of a mess than Alex’s hotel room in New York. The diffuse London sun shone through wide windows onto a sea of books, all of them toppled onto the floor from their rightful shelves. Cushions had been thrown off the couch and the linings cut open. White tufts of down—or whatever couch pillows were stuffed with—were spread around like snowdrifts. As Harold entered, he noticed the freshly emptied wooden bookshelves, the insides of which were colored more darkly than the outsides, having not been exposed to daylight in years. He could see a tiled kitchenette off to one side of the central living space, with its own mess. Plates shattered on the floor, a clattered array of silverware gleaming from the white tiles. Every drawer on the desk at the far side of the room had been opened, and some even removed. Blue ink spilled across the desktop from an overturned bottle.
Jennifer remained in the doorway, too afraid to enter. Sarah took a quick walk through the flat, from end to end.
“No one’s here,” she pronounced.
Harold watched the blue ink on the desk dribble onto the floor. It was still wet. And still dripping.
“That goatee!” yelled Harold, putting it together. It wasn’t blue paint that he’d seen on the man’s jeans. It was ink.
He ran past Jennifer into the hallway and down the stairs, taking them three at a time. He popped open the building’s front door with a great push. But it was no use. Harold surveyed the long street as he heard the door click shut behind him. He didn’t see a soul.
CHAPTER 19
The Broken Hair Clip
“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through
the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it,
and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet
October 27, 19oo
The Needling family lived in a mansion called Millhead, which rested at the bottom of a hill in West Hampstead. Great white pillars shot forth from the dirt, pressing the sharply angled roof upward, like an arrow to the heavens. Before the pillars lay a row of delicate hedges, and two empty, symmetrical flower beds. Into the distance spread a craggy heath, whose reddish outcroppings of rock stretched into the cloud-covered horizon.
Arthur had sent word of his coming the day before. He’d prepared the first telegram himself, a “Dear Sir” sort of job to Sally Needling’s father, explaining who he was, how he’d become involved in “the tragedy” and all that, and asking permission to visit the man’s home. Then Arthur had decided it might be odd, to send such a missive without warning, and so he’d hurried down to the Yard again, to have them broach the issue. Best to let the authorities handle the awkward bits, Arthur felt. Inspector Miller had made contact with Sally’s father, Bertrand Needling, who quickly assented to a visit. Arthur had sent a brief, yet polite, note this morning, thanking Mr. Needling for his time and letting him know that Arthur would be on the 4:05 from King’s Cross. He’d made no mention of Sally directly, nor of her murder, nor of a cheap East End boardinghouse with a white lace wedding dress tucked away in its back bedroom closet.
Arthur clapped the heavy bronze knocker against the front door. He could hear the sound echo throughout the house. After a wait, a servant answered the door and let him inside. The family had been expecting him.
His interview with the family was tense and hushed, their voices quieted to a whisper. Bertrand and Clara Needling sat on opposite ends of the drawing room. Sally’s two brothers were out. Arthur never learned where. The talk was punctuated by strange, sudden silences. In the middle of describing some facet of her daughter’s brief life, Mrs. Needling would lose the train of her thoughts and her sentence would putter to a halt, like a steam engine cooling to its last breaths. Mr. Needling, a pallid barrister, would not jump in to pick up the thought, however, and Arthur was mindful of interrupting. And thus a lengthy silence would hang, until finally Arthur felt comfortable asking another question, on an unrelated topic so that it seemed he’d received a satisfactory answer before. He found that the household existed in a grief-drunk haze, and he waded through it cautiously and politely.
Sally had been born in ’74, in this very house. A happy girl, Mrs. Needling assured Arthur. She used to run up the hill behind the house and then roll down it with the boys. She’d put on her brothers’ worn and oversize trousers so she didn’t get her dresses dirty. For her eighth birthday, she’d begged and begged for a ruby hair clip she’d seen in a shop window in the city, at Routledge’s on Oxford Street. After some pleading with her father, the hair clip had been acquired and presented in a box filled with pink tissue paper to a squealing Sally. She wore it all day long, and her mother had to pry it from her hair that night at bedtime. And wouldn’t you know? The next day Sally went up the hill with her brothers, the clip still in her hair. As she rolled down the hill, gay as a bird, the clip broke into a dozen pieces. Sally was devastated. Of course another, identical clip had to be purchased, and it was, the very next day. It had taken only the smallest bit of cajoling of Mr. Needling, his wife explained through her first smile of the afternoon.
“Dr. Doyle doesn’t need to be hearing about all this,” said Mr. Needling with a terse and quiet ferocity. “He’s trying to find out who killed her, not write her biography.”
Mrs. Needling began to respond to Mr. Needling’s outburst. “Dear, I was just explaining what a . . .” And then she let her sentence go, fading off into the stuffy air.
“Was she fond of any gentlemen that you knew of? Did she have many callers?” said Arthur, again changing the subject. Best to start here and see if this led to a conversation about Sally’s single-night marriage.
Arthur nodded that he understood. They didn’t know that she’d been married when she died. Her relationship with this man, this killer, had been a secret she’d kept from her family. Should he press further? It is a horrid thing, to tell a mother that she’d missed her murdered daughter’s wedding day.
“She did have her friends in the city, though,” offered Mrs. Needling. “She’d been spending a lot of her time around them.”
“Her friends in the city?” inquired Arthur.
“Janet and . . . Emily. Yes. Janet and Emily—those were the names. Sorry, she only ever mentioned their Christian names in talking about them. And they never came to the house either, Sally always went into the city to see them. They’d attend one of those meetings or some such.”
Mr. Needling stirred in his seat, clearly agitated by the direction the conversation had taken. He said nothing, however. Arthur addressed Mrs. Needling, ignoring her husband’s discomfort.
“What sort of meetings would those be?” he asked casually.
Mrs. Needling looked to her husband for guidance, but he refused to meet her eyes.
“Perhaps they were more ‘talks’ than ‘meetings,’ I should say. Sally wasn’t a terribly active member, you understand—she just went for the speeches. And for her girlfriends, of course. She liked meeting the other young women.”
“We don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Dr. Doyle, that’s all!” interjected Mr. Needling. “She was a good girl. Always was. You must remember that.”
“Of course, Mr. Needling. I’m sure your daughter was the very flower of West Hampstead. Which is all the more reason for me to find the man who did this vile deed and see that he’s punished.” Bertrand Needling hardly appeared comforted by Arthur’s words. “Now, what were these . . . these talks your daughter attended with her friends?”