by Graham Moore
“Maybe,” said Harold. “Except I don’t think that guy has the diary. I think you do.”
A long moment of silence followed.
“Perhaps, Mr. White, you’ve exhausted your usefulness,” said Sebastian icily.
Harold braced himself. Would Sebastian lunge at him? Did he have a weapon? Harold stepped back, trying to prepare himself for anything.
“I suggest you leave,” continued Sebastian. His voice was firm yet calm. He seemed to be a man easily driven to annoyance, but not to anger.
“I’ll be in touch,” said Harold as he made his way toward the door. He felt he’d handled that quite well.
“So where’d you get those balls from?” asked Sarah after she and Harold had made it onto the street below. They walked along Abbotsbury, under the older Oriental planes that grew closer to the park. They hadn’t discussed where to go, but that didn’t stop them from walking. Harold was deep in thought, processing the new information. He felt as if he were at the edge of something, just at the precipice between not-knowing and knowing. He was so irritatingly close to figuring it all out, and yet, damn it, he didn’t quite have it.
“Sorry?” said Harold, awakening from his thoughts.
“Balls. All of a sudden. Up there.” She gestured behind them toward Sebastian’s building. “Do you really think he killed Cale?”
“No,” said Harold after a sizable pause. “I don’t. I suppose there’s a lot of evidence that points to him. Motive, means. And the guy creeps me out, I’ll be honest. But I don’t think he killed Cale.”
“Great way to show it.”
“I don’t think he did, but I could be wrong. And I wanted to see how he’d react. Maybe he’d break down and confess the whole thing. Murderers do that in the Holmes stories all the time, once they’ve been confronted. Even if there isn’t any real evidence against them.”
For a few minutes, they walked in silent lockstep. Holland Park turned into Notting Hill and then Bayswater. The buildings grew a few stories taller, and the street noise a few decibels louder.
“So,déjà vu, we’re being followed,” said Sarah suddenly.
“What?” Harold was incredulous.
“Older man. Mud-brown suit. Glasses. Wing tips so loud I can hear them from here.”
“Christ,” said Harold. “How did they find us? And how are you so good at telling when someone is watching you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they had a man on Sebastian’s flat, figuring that ten to one we’d show up there eventually? And you try being a woman walking down a busy street sometime. You become acutely aware of each set of eyes that’re on you. It’s better training than the CIA.”
Having no experience being stared at himself, Harold felt obligated to accept her reasoning. “You said he’s older?” he asked as they continued walking, faster now.
“Yes,” she replied. “Seventies, maybe.”
“Seventies? You don’t see a lot of goons in their seventies. Unless . . . Unless he’s the boss of the operation! He hired them to follow us, they screwed it up, and now he’s doing the trailing himself.”
“Shit,” said Sarah, suddenly more nervous. “You see the alley up ahead on the left? Ten paces? Eight?”
“Yeah.”
“Turn into it with me. Right . . . now.”
Sarah slid suddenly to her left, and Harold followed into the alley. In an instant she had thrown out her arm, pressing him up against the wall. The bricks felt hard and cold against his back. Her arm felt hard and warm against his chest.
“Don’t move,” she said.
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her retractable knife. She flipped out the blade. It was dark in the alley, even for a foggy midday, as the tall buildings on either side blocked out the sun. The steel blade appeared a murky blue in the dim light.
Sarah flattened her own back against the wall, next to Harold but closer to the alley’s entrance. Harold saw her breath in the cold air, even and measured. He realized then that he’d been holding his breath. He was too scared to exhale. He heard loud footsteps approaching the alley. The man’s wing tips sounded like hooves on the pavement. Harold let out a tiny wisp of air.
There was an instantaneous flash of violence. The old man turned into the alley, and Sarah leaped at him. Her movements seemed half professional and half bestial. Before Harold’s single puff of hot breath disappeared into the cold alley, Sarah had the old man on the ground. Her knife was pressed into his neck.
The old man clutched at his knee. Sarah must have kicked it.
“Ahhhh!” he yelped.
Harold’s eyes settled on the man’s face. His big glasses. His patchy gray skin. His thick, dark eyebrows. His nose, seemingly too large for his face, looked soft and mushy. As if it were a costume nose, knocked halfway off in the man’s fall...Oh, Jesus.
“Don’t! Ah! It’s me!” yelped the old man again.
“Let him up,” said Harold.
Sarah didn’t budge, keeping her eyes firmly on the old man and her knife scraping against his neck.
“Harold, please, owww, don’t let her kill me!”
“Sarah,” said Harold after a deep gulp of oxygen. “It’s okay. Let him up.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. For the first time, she took her eyes off the old man and looked up at Harold.
“It’s okay,” said Harold. “It’s Ron.” His face grew flush with embarrassment. “From the Irregulars. It’s Ron Rosenberg.”
CHAPTER 25
Surveillance
“Danger is part of my trade.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of the Final Problem”
November 12, 19oo
Arthur inhaled a deep lungful of Morris tobacco, then coughed it up, sputtering as a mist of gray smoke floated up into the gaslight above him. He leaned against the streetlamp and inhaled again on his cigarette. Arthur was not a regular cigarette smoker, and yet he felt that while one was engaged in the work of surveillance, smoking seemed the only practicable method for passing the time. He glanced across the street, into the third-floor window of a moderate four-story. The lights were on inside, and they shone clear out into the night. He saw a figure move in front of the window, framed in the light like an actor in a Chinese shadow play. Arthur instantly stepped backward, out of the narrow beam of the streetlight above him, and dipped his head. The figure in the window was Emily, the petite suffragist from the night before, and it was of the utmost importance that she not discover Arthur spying on her. She passed out of the window’s frame, deeper into her flat and out of Arthur’s vision. He took another puff of his Morris, this one a bit less full. Goodness, was not surveillance the most infernally tedious activity to which he’d ever submitted himself?
The “chase” the previous evening had been so utterly typical that Arthur felt he must have scripted it himself. Emily had dashed into a passing two-wheeler on Palmer Street, and Arthur and Bram had quickly found another free cab behind her. They had shown their driver a handful of coins and let him know that it would be his fee were he to successfully follow the two-wheeler up ahead to its destination. He’d given Arthur a heartening “As you say, ma’am” and whipped at his reins. If the cabbie had any concerns as to the disassociation between Arthur’s clothing and his voice, he did not express them.
They had ridden from Westminster all the way to Clerkenwell, as the whole while their driver kept Emily’s hansom in view. They arrived at the four-story on Aylesbury Street just as Emily was turning her key in the front door. Arthur had the cabbie stop a few houses before Emily’s and then instructed him to pull up outside it after she had entered. They’d waited a few moments, until a light turned on inside the thirdfloor flat. Arthur and Bram couldn’t see far enough into the windows to tell what Emily was doing, but they now knew where she lived.
After they had let the cabbie go, there’d been considerable disagreement over what to do next. Arthur had wanted to bang on the front door, demand to be let up, and t
hen confront this girl as to her role in the affair. Bram noted that this plan carried with it a considerable amount of danger. It was likely that Emily was a clandestine associate of at least two murdered suffragists. She had been involved in the murders of Sally Needling and her friend, and perhaps the letter bombing of Arthur’s study. They still didn’t know what the tattoos meant. And most importantly, they had no information about the murderous husband they were after. If Emily knew him, or if she even conspired with him, he might come calling on her at any moment. Perhaps it would be helpful to have a little more information before they confronted her.
Arthur had not been entirely convinced by Bram’s arguments, though he had been cautioned by them. “Very well,” he allowed. “Let us first set up watch over Emily and her quarters. We’re going to have to get out of these ridiculous clothes sooner or later, so let’s take turns running home for trousers and shirts while the other keeps a view on those windows. If Emily leaves, we shall again give chase. If she stays, we shall do the same. Agreed?”
And so they had proceeded, with Arthur taking the first trip home for a fresh change of clothes. There had been no more trains at that hour, so he had engaged another hansom in the most expensive cab ride of his life. At home he was greeted by the stillness of a sleeping household. At the sound of his key in his lock, at the clap of his shoe on the floor of the front hallway, he had felt suddenly alien. Like a thief in his own home. Not one of the souls peacefully sleeping underneath this roof knew a thing about the quest which had so consumed him over these past weeks. His obsessive machinations were hidden from these drowsy snorers on the second floor. Not his wife, Touie, nor his love Jean, was so alive in his mind as were the dead and their killer.
No one had stirred as he had ascended the stairs to his chambers. Fortunately, he and Touie still kept separate sleeping arrangements, on account of her illness, so he had no need to disturb her slumber as he fumbled about with his corset.
He had returned to Clerkenwell three hours later, riding in the same hansom in which he’d left. It was then Bram’s turn to make use of the cab, the driver of which was having the most prosperous of evenings. Arthur and Bram had alternated thus for much of the following day. They took turns sleeping in a nearby hotel, though neither man managed much in the way of decent rest.
And now, at a quarter to six in the evening on the day after the suffragist lecture, Arthur manned his post alone, with only a silver case of Morris cigarettes to keep him company. The night had been long, yes, but the day had been even longer. The midnight chill had kept him awake until dawn, but Arthur was growing disoriented by the day of half-sleeping and half-waking attention to a single window. Pedestrians came and went, yet Arthur remained, forcing himself alert despite the stultifying inactivity. He had heard soldiers in the Transvaal describe sentry duty as being one in which the hour of the day became lost entirely. A second might feel like an hour, and an hour like a second, until one had no idea whether it was noon or night. Arthur found himself having just the opposite experience. He knew precisely what hour it was, and he counted down the minutes to Bram’s next arrival on his pocket watch.
At six o’clock exactly, Arthur saw Bram turn the corner onto Aylesbury Street. Bram looked considerably more rested than Arthur, though he seemed no happier about their mission. The men traded pleasantries, though neither seemed in the mood to be particularly pleasant about it.
When the light in Emily’s window clicked off, it stole Arthur and Bram’s attention toward the darkened flat. They each instinctively stepped away from the streetlight, well outside the range of the gas lamp twelve feet above their heads. After a long few moments, Emily appeared in the building’s front door. She carried a heavy purse, into which she deposited her keys after locking the door behind her. At the bottom of the four steps between her front door and the street, she almost smacked directly into an old woman. Emily appeared to blurt out a quick apology and continue on her way, while the old woman regained her balance along the handrail and ascended toward the door of Emily’s building.
Arthur turned to Bram. “Do you think we have the same plan in mind?” he asked.
“I’m sure we do not,” replied Bram cautiously.
“Then I’ll explain in a moment,” said Arthur. “For now, come!” Arthur spun around and headed straight for the door to Emily’s building. She was walking east and was already approaching the corner. In a few seconds, she would be out of view.
But Arthur paid her no mind. Rather, he hopped up the four steps to Emily’s residence while the old woman fumbled with her keys.
“Pardon me,” said Arthur to the old woman. “Might I give you a hand with that?”
The woman looked confused as she glanced up from her ring of keys and into Arthur’s bright face. He’d shaved at home, but left his upper lip untouched. Not yet twenty-four hours old, Arthur’s nascent mustache was ill shaped and splotchy. He looked like a teenager overeager to prove his manhood.
“I . . .” stammered the old woman. “Well . . . I . . . certainly . . .”
Arthur reached out and snatched the keys from her hand. He found the right one and opened the door to her building. He handed the keys back to her while he held the door open and gestured for her to pass inside.
“After you, madam,” he said.
She seemed unsure of how to handle this situation, but years of social training kicked in.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, and walked into her building. She moved through the small vestibule, and, the correct key already in hand, she unlocked the door to her flat and went inside. Arthur remained smiling at the building’s entryway, continuing to hold open the door as if he were a shoddy butler. As soon as she’d vanished into her flat, Arthur let his smile drop and called outside to Bram.
“What are you waiting for? Let’s go!” he cried.
Bram followed Arthur up the building’s winding central staircase and onto the third-floor landing. They came to a sturdy door with the letter “C” marked in brass upon its face. Arthur tried the knob, on the off chance that it happened to be unlocked. It was not.
“Well then,” said Bram. “Fine work. What now?”
By way of response, Arthur picked up his right leg, leaned back, and kicked at the door with all his might. There was a loud crunching sound, and both men could see the doorframe shake. And yet the door itself did not budge. Arthur kicked again, just beside the knob, and again the hallway was filled with the slap and crunch of boot against wood. But again the door did not give.
They could hear the old woman from downstairs coming out into the hall, drawn from her flat by the noises from upstairs.
“What’s going on there?” she shouted up the staircase. Bram and Arthur exchanged a look. What should they say?
“Almost done!” shouted Arthur in response. “We’ll be through in a minute!” This did not remotely address the woman’s question, but it seemed to provide them with a little bit of time. The old woman seemed not to know what next to say.
Arthur shrugged and then wound himself up for another kick. This one was no more effective than the others.
“You’re quite sure there’s no problem?” the woman called.
“No, ma’am!” yelled Arthur. As he prepared himself for another kick—his knees were growing sore—Bram stuck out his hand.
“Wait,” whispered Bram. “If you really intend to break in to Emily’s lodgings by force, then we might as well just see it done.” Bram reached a hand into his coat pocket and removed a pearl-handled revolver. He drew back the pin, pointed it at the door, and pulled the trigger.
The whole building seemed to echo from the gunshot. As Arthur’s hearing returned, he began to make out reverberations from every corner of the four-story. But it wasn’t until the ringing in his ears began to subside that he became fully aware of what had just occurred.
“Sorry about that, ma’am!” Bram yelled down the staircase. “That’ll be all for now!”
Arthur looked at the door.
The knob hung loose from the door’s face, and the lock inside appeared permanently disfigured. Bram easily pushed the door open with one gentle stroke of his hand.
The old woman did not respond, but seemed instead to return to her flat. Or so Arthur could deduce from the sounds he heard burbling up the staircase.
“That was a good bit louder, and rather more sudden, than I might have expected,” Arthur said. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard a shot go off indoors before. Frightfully loud.”
“If your plan is to search through Emily’s lodgings,” said Bram, “then I suggest we do it quickly. We’ll have inquiries about the noise soon enough.” He entered the flat, and Arthur followed.
Inside, they found a mess that had little to do with their break-in. A tea set lay out beside a couch, cups and saucers scattered over every flat surface. Murky liquid, which might once have been called tea, pooled inside the cups. It gave off a gentle whiff of spoiled milk.
Off to one side of the room was an open doorway leading to a cramped bedroom. Arthur could see from the main sitting room that the bed was unmade and that articles of ladies’ clothing were strewn about the floor alongside the bedsheets. Though the windows had seemed large from across the street, as they were Arthur’s only portals into Emily’s world, now that he was inside, they seemed rather small. They mustn’t let in much light, even in the daytime. Outside, it was dark, and as Arthur approached the window, he looked down at the lonely streetlamp under which he’d stood. He could barely make it out, given all the fog.
Across from the bedroom door sat a worktable, on which all manner of objects seemed to coexist. There were chemical beakers and test tubes, sacks of colored powders and wide Corning vials, balls of twine and a stack of cheap brown wrapping paper. The work done upon this table was scientific, Arthur could tell at least that much. In the center of the table, a white box lay opened. Arthur peered inside and found himself face-to-face with a tube of dynamite.