The Sherlockian

by Graham Moore

  Sarah raised her eyes to the ceiling, pondering everything Harold had just said. It was a lot to take in, but she seemed to be reasoning through it in her head, searching for flaws in his logic. Based on her grin, and the constant swinging of her legs off the edge of the bed, it didn’t look as if she’d found any.

  “That was some productive thinking you did back there!” she said at last.

  “I know!” said Harold. He was awfully proud of himself.

  “I have two problems with all of that, though,” said Sarah. “Problem number one: Why now? Why, after all these years, would Alex Cale abandon his lifelong quest for the diary in order to kill himself and frame Sebastian?”

  “I agree,” said Harold. “We know what he did, but we’re not sure why he did it. We’ll need to figure that out.”

  “Problem number two—and this one is more serious.” Sarah took a deep breath. “If Alex Cale lied about finding the diary, and killed himself, and ransacked his own hotel room,” she continued, “then who the hell is chasing us?”

  To that, Harold had no response.

  CHAPTER 29

  Arthur Returns to Scotland Yard

  “What is the meaning of it, Watson? . . . What object is served by this

  circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or

  else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.”

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

  “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”

  November 13, 1900

  The New Scotland Yard hummed along pleasantly in the morning, like a gigantic scientific experiment. Identically uniformed constables streamed in and out of the front gate and up into the five-story as if they were tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide in a great bunsen burner. Arthur entered past the wrought-iron fence just at the foot of Big Ben. The clock above his head announced a quarter to eleven.

  He found his way without much difficulty to the office of Inspector Miller. The door was already open, and Arthur walked in without a knock. The inspector looked up from his papers, and Arthur again noticed how youthful he appeared behind his thick beard.

  “Dr. Doyle!” he exclaimed, setting a few papers aside on his cluttered desk. “I wasn’t expecting a visit from you today.”

  “That’s because I hadn’t the time to telegraph my intention to visit,” said Arthur defiantly.

  Inspector Miller paused. He had the air of a man who’d been caught doing something very naughty.

  “Right so, then,” said the inspector. “It is a pleasure to see you nonetheless.” He gestured toward the open chair before his desk. Arthur sat, taking the same position he had when he was last here. Had that been only two weeks past? What speed at which a man’s life might be irrevocably altered!

  “How goes your . . . er . . . your investigation?” said Inspector Miller, feigning curiosity.

  “I have found the criminal who attempted to murder me by way of a letter bomb,” said Arthur.

  Inspector Miller gave a look of surprise. “You have?”

  “Yes. I have—”

  “Pardon me,” came a voice from the doorway. “Do you have a minute, sir?”

  Arthur turned in his chair to see a teenage constable at the door. His hat fit him awkwardly, and his messy hair popped loose beneath the brim. The constable paid Arthur no mind.

  “I am conducting an interview at the moment,” replied the inspector. “I’ll be sure to attend to you when it has concluded.”

  “Yes, well then, right. Very good. Except, you see, it was the chief inspector who sent me down. He said to see if you were busy, and, if not, to send you out on a fresh one. It’s just come in.”

  “As I am quite busy, I’ll see to it when I’ve finished my interview. Thank you, Constable.” Inspector Miller turned back to Arthur and gave him a look of understanding weariness. These new recruits, said the inspector’s face. Look what I am forced to put up with!

  Yet the young man hung idly in the doorway. There seemed to be some sentiment caught in his throat which he found himself unable to express.

  “May I continue?” asked Arthur of Inspector Miller, with more than a trace of sarcasm.

  “Please,” said the inspector.

  “I’ve caught you a murderer. Or an attempted one, at least. And now I am prepared to reveal her identity.”

  “Her?” said the inspector.

  “Yes. Her. It was a woman who built my letter bomb. She is quite insane, though evidently quite intelligent as well.”

  Inspector Miller regarded Arthur blankly. “This is Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle,” he said to the constable, by way of an explanation.

  “Oh!” said the constable. “I see!” He seemed even more embarrassed to have intruded upon this meeting, and yet he still did not turn to leave.

  “. . . So, if you’ve no objection,” said Inspector Miller, “we wouldn’t mind getting back to our business. Dr. Doyle and I have much to discuss, you understand.”

  “Of course! Yes, of course, sir!” The young constable turned to Arthur. “So very pleased to meet you, sir. I’m a great admirer . . . Well, we all are, aren’t we? I don’t think I’d be on the force if it wasn’t for those stories, you know. Read them when I was but a simple boy from the North Country, and now look at me!”

  Arthur looked at him but felt it would be impolite to share his opinion of how far the lad had come.

  “It’s just that,” the boy continued, now addressing Inspector Miller, “I rather got the sense that the chief inspector wanted you to get down there right away.”

  “Constable!” said Inspector Miller. “I am in the middle of an interview. With Dr. Doyle. I am sure that within the hour I will have the time to—”

  “The assistant commissioner CID is already on his way to the scene, sir.” After this abrupt outburst, the constable flinched, as if he’d just taken his first shot with a musket and was afraid to see where it had landed.

  Arthur could not believe the dysfunction of the Yard. Wasn’t this ramshackle conglomeration of incompetents supposed to be a military division? He would love to have seen Lord Kitchener at the helm of this motley lot.

  “ Damn it!” said Inspector Miller. “Mr. Henry has already left? You stupid fool, why didn’t you say so straightaway? I’ve lost valuable minutes thanks to your mealy-mouthed sputterings!” The inspector shot up from his desk and yanked hold of a coat and hat that had been hung on a set of corner hooks.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” said Arthur. “Inspector, I’m sure you have duties to attend to, but this is unbecoming!”

  “Dreadfully sorry, Dr. Doyle, it pains me to have to run out in this manner. But you don’t know Edward Henry. He’s new to the Yard, just come back from India. Straightaway the commissioner has promoted him to the CID, as assistant no less. Some sort of trial run to see how Henry takes to London. I’ll tell you how London takes to him, I will. The man’s been putting darkies in darbies for ten years, and now he thinks he knows how to handle the British criminal classes. A lot for him to learn, a bloody lot. He wants to reorganize the whole unit, shift the priorities, install a bunch of gadgets in the office to replace honest investigation. Rules and regulations, that’s what he’s been on about. Waste of bloody time. Do you know what a detective’s best tool is, Dr. Doyle?” The inspector tapped at his shiny, knee-high boots. “Boots on the ground, that’s what solves a case.”

  Arthur stood and followed the two of them out into the main corridors of Scotland Yard.

  “There is a young girl out there with a mind for bomb making,” he said. “I strongly suggest that you arrest her forthwith.”

  As he walked, Inspector Miller gestured toward the constable. “Certainly. I can have Constable Billings here pick up anyone you like,” he said.

  “You’ll find all the evidence you need in her flat. March in there and you’ll catch her red-handed.”

  “Excellent,” said the inspector as he took the building’s central staircase in long strides, his boots clo
pping down two steps at a time. “We’d be happy to pick up anyone you say on your word alone. Whom would you like Constable Billings to arrest?”

  Arthur felt suddenly powerful. He knew that the Yard would never care about his ideas or his abilities as a sleuth. And yet he could see how they were nevertheless captive to his name. This entire structure bent at the first gust of the winds of reputation.

  “Her name is Emily Davison,” said Arthur. “Clerkenwell.” He provided the young constable with her address.

  “Right on it, sir,” said the constable with a pleased deference.

  “Now,” said Inspector Miller, “to where am I headed?”

  Billings produced a folded sheet of paper, which Arthur only then noticed had been in the boy’s hand for the duration of their conversation. The constable handed the paper to Inspector Miller, who read its contents as he marched double time to the doors of Scotland Yard.

  But then, with his outstretched hand mere inches from the front door, Inspector Miller halted. A perverse look spread across his face.

  “Dr. Doyle,” said the inspector slowly, his eyes stuck on the paper, “would you mind coming with us to the scene of this fresh crime? I think we may be in need of some assistance, of a sort you may be particularly suited to provide.”

  Arthur was quite confused by the man’s request, but he quickly assented with a nod.

  “Of course,” he said. “But might I ask why you think I will be able to help?”

  “Because,” said Inspector Miller as he looked up into Arthur’s face, “I’ve been assigned to investigate the apparent murder of one Emily Davison. Late of Clerkenwell.”

  Of all the thoughts and sensations which flooded into Arthur’s mind at that moment, the one that most consumed him was an awareness of his odd positioning in the lobby of Scotland Yard. A hundred detectives gushed past him on their way out, bumping shoulder to shoulder, while another hundred pushed past him on their way in. Two hundred detectives on two hundred cases, and here was Arthur frozen between them, one middle-aged author fallen into a mystery just deep enough to drown in.

  CHAPTER 30

  British Birds, Catullus, and the Holy War

  “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little

  things are infinitely the most important.”

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

  “A Case of Identity”

  January 11, 2010

  If you were Alex Cale and you had killed yourself and then left a trail of Sherlockian clues behind as to your reasons, to where would those clues lead?

  This was the question before Harold and Sarah. They discussed their options. They could head back to New York in order to have another look at Cale’s hotel room, except that the room would certainly have been washed clean of evidence by this point. They could return to Sebastian Conan Doyle’s flat to see if anything Cale had said to him over the past few months provided any hint as to Cale’s motivations, except that their last meeting with Sebastian Conan Doyle hadn’t ended on friendly terms.

  So, surveying the absence of excellent investigative options before them, Harold and Sarah decided to give Alex Cale’s writing office another look. “Cale was trying to leave a series of clues for a fellow Sherlockian to follow. Any Sherlockian, like me, would have traced Cale’s steps as far back as his writing office. So it stands to reason that a message might be waiting for us there.”

  Sarah admitted that this sounded as reasonable as any other option available to them.

  “But,” she added, “the office is a crime scene now. Jennifer Peters called the police. And I don’t think she’s our biggest fan either. How are we supposed to get in?”

  As it turned out, this was less of an issue than they expected it to be. After they’d waited around on the building’s front steps for only a quarter of an hour, pretending to search for keys in Sarah’s purse, a teenage boy appeared as if from thin air and let them in. The teenager did not make eye contact with either Harold or Sarah but instead kept his chin aimed at the ground while he unlocked the door. Seemingly lost in his thoughts, the boy trudged up the central staircase to his own flat, dragging his feet and slouching his shoulders the whole way up. Harold was glad to note that even across the Atlantic, general sullenness was the basic cloth of teenage attire.

  The door to Cale’s flat was closed, but when Harold turned the knob, he found that the lock was broken. The Goateed Man must have cracked it when he broke in to search the office, and it looked like the building’s owner hadn’t put in a replacement yet. Yellow barricade tape crisscrossed the doorway in the shape of an X. Harold and Sarah ducked under it as they entered the flat.

  The rooms appeared much as they had left them two days earlier. Though, had it been two days? Or three? Or was it only yesterday that Harold had been here, sifting through the toppled piles of hard-backed books on the floor? He realized that time since the murder had entirely lost its distinction. Strange, he thought, that these, the most noteworthy days in his whole life, would blend together so easily into a mush of adrenaline and intrigue.

  He looked over at Sarah, who was wading through her piles of books and papers, searching for God-knows-what. He realized that in the flurry of revelation about her divorce, and her lie, he’d been so satisfied with himself for finding the answer to that small mystery that he hadn’t actually asked her much about the divorce itself. He knew nothing at all about her soon-to-be-ex-husband or the pressing legal issues that required heated calls with her attorney. He felt a twinge of jealousy, of course. That’s why he hadn’t asked about it. He was afraid to learn about the man she must once have loved so much and who now was fighting with her about some obscure and boring financial matter. Harold, for his own part, had never seriously considered marriage. He wasn’t averse to the idea: it’s just that it had never come up in anything more than a theoretical sense. He always imagined that he’d marry one day—he was still young. Though Sarah didn’t seem much older, and she’d already made the leap. Then she’d crashed on the rocks and come drifting to the shore.

  He tried to imagine Sarah making coffee on Sunday morning. Doing the crossword puzzle in bed, wrapping the white sheets around her legs while she reminded Harold that “adze” was a four-letter word for a wood-carving tool. The image seemed absurd. He could only picture Sarah attacking the tires on a black sedan with a switchblade, or examining a ransacked crime scene for secret messages. His relationship with her, whatever sort of relationship it was, had existed under rather unusual circumstances, to say the least.

  Harold became suddenly sad. As soon as this was over, Sarah would leave and go back to somewhere that wasn’t in his life. And then he would have to go back to a sparsely tasteful one-bedroom in Los Feliz, to a small stack of civil-court filings and a larger one of old books, to the local friends he had dinner with once a month each, and to a yearly gala in New York where he could put on his deerstalker cap in public and no one would laugh at him. These days with Sarah were fantasy, and real life would soon return. What a miserable thought. This would not end with slow Sunday-morning coffee. It would simply end.

  He’d had a girlfriend, Amanda, just after college. The thing he remembered most about her—more than the eleven blissful days they spent in Buenos Aires or that one night when they’d had sex four and a half times and he’d been seconds away from using the words “soul mate” when she fell asleep—was her ability to live entirely in the present moment. She was able to accept the joys and misfortunes in front of her as they came, without wondering endlessly when the joys would end or the misfortunes would lift.

  Harold was paralyzed by endings. He couldn’t think about where he was or what he was doing without thinking about when it would end. He would try so hard to experience current pleasures, and to divorce them from the knowledge of a past that was comparatively more or less pleasurable; he would try to separate the present from its eventual conclusion, but he never felt that he was able to accomplish it. He tried in that moment to focus on the boo
ks at his feet, on the mystery and adventure around him, and mostly on Sarah’s quiet breath, the sound of which he could just make out from across the room. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the spoiled milk he’d return to in his fridge in L.A. or the four messages he’d find on his answering machine, none of which he cared to listen to. This, too, would end.

  “When does this stop?” Harold asked out loud. He hadn’t remembered deciding to speak, and yet there it was. The words had already been loosed.

  “What do you mean?” asked Sarah. She plopped the book in her hands down on a pile and crossed her legs in front of her.

  He wasn’t sure how to have this conversation. And he certainly didn’t want to. But he’d started it, improbably, and he knew of no conversational exit.

  “Well . . . when does the investigation stop? What are we even looking for now? It’s funny about detective work. It’s like it becomes its own self-justifying, self-sustaining machine. You find a clue, you deduce an explanation for something or other, and then you follow that to the next one. And then the next one. And maybe we’re making progress somewhere, or maybe being a detective is like being trapped inside a perpetual-motion machine. There’s always more to analyze. There’s always more to find. We can start analyzing our own analysis. We could run on our own fumes forever!”

  Sarah responded with a curious look. “I appreciate that you’re feeling very philosophical about this,” she said gingerly. “But I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “What did we set out to do? We wanted to figure out who killed Alex Cale. And we wanted to recover the diary. Well, we know who killed Alex Cale. And we know that the diary can’t be recovered, because it was never found in the first place.”