by Graham Moore
“Yes, sir. She gave her name as Janet Fry.” Barrow entered Arthur’s study and handed him a sheet of white paper. “She had no card, but said to give you this instead, and that you’d know to what it referred.”
Arthur took the paper from the man’s hand and glanced at the top of the sheet. Before his eyes even landed on the image printed there, he knew what he would find. He looked down upon a three-headed crow.
“Show her in,” said Arthur. He laid the paper on his desk and pushed aside his fiction. “And, Barrow,” added Arthur as his butler was on his way out, “stay close, if you will.”
Barrow nodded and went to grant Janet Fry entry into the study.
Arthur quickly ran to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf along the north wall of the study. On one shelf a wooden box lay at the end of a row of books. Arthur took the box down, flipped open the latch, and removed an old revolver. He had never served in the military himself, except as a medic, but he had seen many a man perform his weapon inspection. Arthur looked over his pistol. There was a bullet in every chamber. The barrel was unobstructed. The hammer was pliant to his thumb.
He sat back at his desk and placed the revolver under his mostly finished story. He returned his hands to his lap just as Barrow opened the study door and introduced one of the most beautiful young women Arthur had ever seen.
“Miss Janet Fry,” said Barrow as he left, closing the door behind him.
Arthur blinked, as if trying to shake off the false sight of a mirage. But no, there she was. From her dark hair to her dark, sunken eyes, her face was seductive and sinister. She was the polar opposite of the mousy, expressive Emily Davison. Janet carried a broad frame, and her expression was like a reflective pool of blackness, shining back at Arthur whatever he brought to it. He found himself immediately drawn to this young woman, while at the same time his right hand reached out to rest on his revolver.
“If you’ve come to kill me,” said Arthur, “I can assure you that you’ll never get away with it.”
Janet dismissed Arthur’s suggestion with the smallest movement of her eyebrows. When she spoke, her voice was calm, measured, and—to Arthur’s great surprise—weary with sadness.
“Is that why you think I’m here?” she said. “To kill you?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve made the attempt. Your friend Emily Davison told me all about your involvement in the letter-bomb plot.”
Janet’s eyes opened wider, and she gave Arthur a pleading look. “So it’s true you found her?”
“Yes.”
“She sent me a letter. The night she died. She said that you’d made contact with her and that you were hesitant, but she thought you would help.”
Arthur would have laughed, were the situation not so dark. This would not be how he would have described the state of affairs when he’d left Miss Davison.
“I caught her, Miss Fry. I caught her right in the act of building another bomb. The only reason she’s not in Newgate at present is that she’s in the ground.”
Janet became rigid, as if she were holding a great well of emotion back behind the stone dam that was her face. She sat slowly, gingerly, like an invalid. Arthur felt that she was using every ounce of strength she had not to give herself over to grief, and so she had none left to spend on the simple task of sitting.
“Did she . . .” Janet pressed her hands together in her lap. She was unable to look into Arthur’s eyes. “Did Emily say anything about me? Did she tell you that we . . . Did she mention my name?”
“She said that you were the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen. She said that you were fast friends. She said that the two of you had been inseparable, that you shared every secret of your lives together.”
Janet Fry became short of breath. She looked to be choking on the air in her throat. In a moment, she leaned forward, folded herself over her knees, and vomited.
Arthur called for Barrow, and, based on the speed with which the butler entered, it was clear that he’d been waiting behind the door. He brought water and damp cloths. Janet was too stunned to speak as Barrow wiped the bile from her black dress and rested a warm cloth against the girl’s forehead. She rocked back and forth in her chair while Barrow tended to her, as if her grief were a stone in her belly, the only thing weighting her to the ground while a great wind blew her broad frame to and fro.
Stabbed girls. Shot girls. Drowned girls. Strangled girls.
Crying girls. Grieving girls.
Arthur watched the colorless dribble of bile drip from Janet’s lips to her skirt, but the sight did not horrify him. What horrified him was not the stomach-churning grief of the beautiful girl before him, but rather the resolute indifference in his own heart. All he felt was a bit of gas from breakfast, burping up into his throat.
He knew then that the ugly engine of murder had done its work on him as surely as it had on Sally Needling, or Anna, or Emily Davison. The damage was done. And now he, too, was tainted with blood, drowned into a lifeless indifference. He had not been wounded by the violence—he had been callused. And that, he now realized, was worse.
When Miss Fry had been tidied up, Barrow left her with a clean washcloth and a cup of hot tea. The click of the closing door, as the butler exited, introduced a long silence to the study.
“Pardon me,” said Janet Fry after a good while. “I loved her, too. She was impulsive and so deeply angry, and she could never be mollified by reason. But she was brilliant, and she was passionate, and she would giggle sometimes—I can’t begin to describe it—as if life itself were some dirty little joke and only she had heard it. When she’d begun all that talk of the bombs . . . well, that’s when we split. I wouldn’t be a part of that. ‘No one will be hurt, you dummy!’ That’s what she’d say to me. But she was wrong, of course—someone always gets hurt. That’s what bombs are for, aren’t they? Hurting people. We had an argument. I left her there, took a train back to my parents’ home in Norwich. You have to understand, I was angry. She was going to ruin everything we believed in by sending you that bomb. It’s a blessing she didn’t kill you. It was so stupid . . . But I’d written letters, before. To you. Do you remember receiving them?” Arthur said nothing, but his silence was clear. He received many letters.
“Yes,” Miss Fry continued, “you must get so many. We needed your help . . . We simply couldn’t think of any other way to get it! I’m just glad that her stupid bomb didn’t hurt you, that’s all. But yes, I was angry. I didn’t respond when she wrote me. What else was there to say? I mean, there was no convincing Emily when she had her mind on something. I couldn’t have stopped her, even if I’d tried. You must believe me.”
Arthur absorbed this monologue with only a few blinks by way of response.
“I don’t care,” he said when he was sure that she was finished. “Please leave my home.”
Janet stared at him in disbelief. “I’m in desperate need of your help,” she pleaded.
“I don’t care.”
Janet gave Arthur a look of such horror and revulsion as he had never before seen in his life. “She was neither saint nor angel, that I will grant you, but she was a human being. And I loved her. And she is murdered.”
“I don’t care.” The words had become a catechism to Arthur, a chant that was equally ritual and revelation.
“I already know who killed her, Dr. Doyle. I only need your help to prove it.”
“I don’t care.”
“It was Millicent Fawcett. It must have been. She must have found out about our group, the Morrigan. I can’t say how she found us out, but she must have. And so she killed us off, one by one. She would have done anything to halt a schism in the NUWSS. She was the only one with the motive. Who else would have wanted us all dead? And she certainly had the means. Our names, our addresses. Have you ever met her? Have you ever looked into that woman’s eyes? I don’t believe she’s felt a single emotion in her entire life. Everything to her is tactics, the whole world merely rationed out by politics. She
wouldn’t have spent a tear on killing us off.”
“I don’t care.”
“The police know you. They trust you. They have to, don’t they? You’re a man of the realm. You’re a man. You’re the only one of us that’s fully a citizen. For you, they’ll catch a killer.”
“I. Do. Not. Care.”
Janet Fry stared deeply into Arthur’s eyes. She saw the anger that had welled up within him, as well as the implacable determination he had to keep it back.
“You’re lying,” she said. “You do care. You’re just too bloody cowardly to do anything about it.” Janet stood. She laid the now-cool washcloth across her wooden chair. She bowed and, with one hand on the doorknob, turned back to Arthur.
“So damn you to hell regardless,” she said. “I’ll see myself out.”
It was only after she’d been gone for a minute that Arthur managed to turn to his desk. Laying his hands on the desktop, he felt a bulge of steel underneath his papers. The revolver. He’d forgotten about it entirely.
Arthur returned the revolver to the wooden box on the shelf. He would certainly not be requiring that again. Back at his desk, he breathed deeply. He banished all thoughts of Janet Fry and Emily Davison from his head. He focused himself completely on his war story, on the sheikh’s trap and on the brave strategies of the small Scottish regiment, committing his day to realist fiction.
CHAPTER 36
A Problem Without a Solution
A problem without a solution may interest the student,
but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Problem of Thor Bridge”
January 12, 2010, cont.
Dr. Gwen Garber was easily among the smallest women Harold had ever seen. She sat behind her desk, in her office at St. John’s College, and seemed dwarfed by the book stacks in front of her. She angled her chin upward in order to place her elbows on her desk, and looked up to Harold and Sarah like a penitential child to a cross.
“Yes,” she said after they had been in her office for a few minutes politely explaining their purpose at Cambridge. “Alex Cale was here. Just a few months ago. He came to read the Stoker letters, so of course he stopped by to talk with me. I’m the only one about who’s done much work on them at all.”
“Did he say what he was looking for, specifically?” asked Harold.
“I don’t recall,” said Dr. Garber, searching her memory with a series of finger taps to her chin. “But I’m sure he’d be more than happy to assist you with your research. He’s the friendliest man. He truly is.”
“He died,” said Harold.
Despite all the inquiries he’d conducted into Alex’s death, he realized that this was the first time he’d ever had to break the news to someone. Dr. Garber took it well, though perhaps that was only because she barely knew him. She blinked a few times, as if waiting for Harold to correct himself and admit that he’d been talking about someone else. When no correction or addendum came, she gave a shiver and looked down at her shoes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea. Were you . . . friends?”
“We were friendly.”
“We’re continuing his research,” added Sarah. “Finishing up his work.”
“In memoriam,” said Harold.
“Oh, my, that’s so good of you,” said Dr. Garber. “Please, any information I can provide, I’d be quite happy to help. It’s so sad. Can you . . . can you tell me what happened? Was he sick?”
“He was murdered,” said Harold, more quickly than he might have liked. It was only in hindsight that it occurred to him that he probably should have lied. And yet, ironically, even the truth was more complicated than this. “Well, possibly,” he added lamely.
“Hell.” Dr. Garber seemed to recede into her chair as she digested the news. If possible, she looked to be growing even smaller.
“The more you can tell us about the letters, and what Alex Cale might have been looking for in them, the better we can help finish his book,” said Sarah.
Dr. Garber looked at her for a moment. As always, Sarah seemed utterly convincing.
“All right then, let’s head down there. I’ll explain what I can along the way.” Dr. Garber put on a bright yellow winter coat. “Our collection of Stoker’s letters,” she began, “is quite exhaustive. But, of course, Alex was only interested in his correspondence with Arthur Conan Doyle. They were good friends, you know. And Conan Doyle wrote a number of plays which were put on by Stoker’s client, Henry Irving, at his theater. Since Stoker managed both Irving and the theater, he of course had plenty of business to discuss with Conan Doyle. There’s a fine book of correspondence down there concerning only the details of the various payment schemes that Bram had devised. Hard to tell, from only one end of the conversation, but it rather looks like Stoker was cheating Conan Doyle out of some chunk of the box office. Funny, really. But I don’t think that’s the part of the conversation you’re interested in, is it?”
“Under normal circumstances I would be,” said Harold. “But right now . . . Well, do you have any sense of what period Alex was looking at? Was it the fall of 1900?”
“Yes . . . yes, I think that’s it. Cale was trying to piece together what Conan Doyle and Stoker had gotten up to during the fall of 1900. Stoker had been working on a production of Don Quixote at the Lyceum, and he was at work on a few short stories as well. But I believe that Cale was interested in what Stoker knew of Conan Doyle’s activities in those months. October, November, December.”
“That’s the period covered by the missing diary,” Harold explained to Sarah. She returned a look indicating that not only did she not require his explanation, she did not particularly appreciate it.
“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Garber. “That rings a bell. Cale said something about a missing diary of Conan Doyle’s, how he’d been after the thing for ages. ‘Since I first began my study of Sherlockiana,’ I think that was the phrase he used. He was such a character, that one.”
“Do you know if he found anything about the missing diary in the letters?”
Dr. Garber pushed open the double doors of the library building and stopped. Her hands continued to hold open the doors in front of her, as if she were announcing the entrance of royalty.
“To be honest, I don’t know,” she replied after some thought. “He did not seem pleased with what he’d found. I can tell you that. He left in rather a hurry, when he’d finished. He didn’t even stop by to say goodbye—it was only that I happened to pass him on the footpath back there as I was on my way to give a lecture. He was all mumbles, very twitchy. I’d have thought it was rude, but I’ve had my share of researchers around over the years, and I know how they can get. Like a bunch of actresses, always overemotional about some crisis or another.”
Harold did his best not to appear twitchy himself. The more Dr. Garber said, the more promising these letters seemed. Clearly, what was in them had meant a great deal to Cale’s investigation. Harold’s tongue fluttered inside his mouth. He bit down on his lip. As soon as he saw these letters, he felt, the whole of the mystery would reveal itself to him . . .
And yet when, ten minutes later, Dr. Garber left Harold and Sarah alone in the underground rare-manuscript reading room, little was instantly revealed. Locked in the moistureless, climate-controlled room, Harold laid two cardboard boxes on the small wooden table. Both boxes were fastened shut with white string and marked with lined index cards. “STOKER, BRAM,” read the cards. “COLLECTED LETTERS.” The years of Stoker’s life contained within each box had been marked as well. Harold ran his hand underneath the string. It felt like lingerie against his stubby forefinger.
He couldn’t get the string untied, so Sarah, with her long, thin nails, stepped in to help. She scratched at the string with a catlike playfulness, and it fell apart from the box at the stroking of her nails. At the same time, both Harold and Sarah dug their hands into the cardboard box hungrily, pulling out thick stacks
of plastic-protected papers. Each page was filled with Bram Stoker’s own narrow and nearly illegible handwriting. Flipping through them left Harold both excited and awestruck. Millimeters from his fingers, behind the clear plastic sleeves, lay the dirty pen marks of Bram Stoker himself.
Where had Stoker been when he wrote these letters? In the study of his home in . . . Kensington? Yes, that’s right, Stoker was living in Kensington in 1900. Harold remembered from Conan Doyle’s diary—that is, in one of the volumes that hadn’t been lost—about how Stoker had had his house outfitted for electric lights in that year; it had been one of the first private houses in London to have them. Conan Doyle talked about the shocking experience he encountered each time he’d visit Bram under those electric bulbs. Harold held the plastic sheets up very close to his face, communing with the pen strokes. What did they say?
Everything, Harold soon learned, and yet nothing at the same time. He and Sarah divided up the letters from the fall of 1900, trying to find any written to Conan Doyle. They found short letters to Stoker’s entire extended family, they found obsequious letters to every well-known theater professional in London, and they even found repentant letters to the writer Hall Caine, to whom it seemed that Stoker owed a considerable sum of money. But they found none written to Conan Doyle, except the carbon-copy receipt of a single telegram Stoker had sent. On December 1, 1900, Stoker had sent a telegram to Conan Doyle that read, in its entirety, “Come at once. Please. B.S.”
It was equal parts thrilling and infuriating. What did Stoker need to see Conan Doyle about so urgently? Where was Conan Doyle’s reply? What were those two up to, after all?
Harold felt sure that Stoker held the key to everything that was happening, but he couldn’t think of what Stoker and Conan Doyle had gotten into together. His first thought was that they had composed a story together, and yet that failed to explain any of the mystery surrounding Cale’s final clue. Why not just make that story public, however poor it might have been?