by Graham Moore
Harold tried to imagine Stoker’s involvement in Conan Doyle’s other known activities at the time. Had Stoker joined him in one of his brief, unsuccessful investigations for Scotland Yard? None of the newspaper reports at the time mentioned anything about Conan Doyle having discovered anything particularly noteworthy. Scholars had even checked the Scotland Yard records, which were quite thorough. Whatever Conan Doyle had gotten up to there, it hadn’t amounted to much.
Curiously, Harold did find a letter in one of the piles addressed to one “Inspector Miller, Scotland Yard.” Bram had written him a brief note thanking him for his assistance. “Your kind help at Newgate was very much appreciated,” read the letter. Harold thought this odd but didn’t know quite what to make of it. Why would Stoker have been writing to Scotland Yard? And Newgate . . . Did that mean someone had been in prison?
After an hour of poring over the semi-legible letters, most of Harold’s excitement had faded. In all the letters Bram Stoker had written in the fall of 1900, and into the winter of 1900-1901, there was nothing addressed to Conan Doyle and nothing that seemed like it could have sent Alex Cale into a depressive stupor.
“Nothing, right?” said Sarah as she set down a handful of letters.
“Right. Nothing.” Harold wasn’t sure what to do next.
“That’s about it for these boxes.”
Harold could do nothing but nod. There was something here, he was sure of it. But where? He turned the words of Alex Cale’s final message over and over in his head. Then he spoke them aloud.
“ ‘ The old centuries . . . have powers of their own . . . ’ ” He let the Dracula quote drip from his lips. “The old centuries . . .” It was a beautiful phrase, Harold thought. “. . . ‘Which mere modernity cannot kill.’ ” How poignant and poetic that last bit was as well—“mere modernity.” There are some things, some evil things, so old that not even a little thing like modernity can stomp them out.
“What was Cale trying to tell us about Stoker? Why was he pointing us to Stoker’s letters? What did Stoker know that Cale discov . . .” Harold trailed off midword. The flash of inspiration in his head was sudden and discrete. It was like the moment he’d had in the hotel armchair. There had been a period of not-knowing, and then this moment, and now Harold had entered a period of knowing. He simply knew.
“The diary is gone.” As Harold spoke the words, their truth became even more manifest.
“What do you mean?”
“The diary is gone. Destroyed. That’s got to be it. What other news would have upset Cale so much? Remember, in the hotel, he didn’t have the diary. In his two flats, he didn’t have the diary. In the suicide note we found in the British Library, he didn’t even say he had the diary, only that he knew what had happened to it.”
“So what happened to it?” Sarah asked.
“It’s gone. There never was a diary to find.”
“I don’t understand. Everyone agrees that Conan Doyle had written the diary, right? He’d written dozens of other volumes of the thing.”
“Yes. Conan Doyle wrote it. But then it was destroyed.”
“Why would he have destroyed it?”
“He didn’t.”
“Then who did?”
Harold smiled and gestured to the letters at their feet. “Bram Stoker.”
Sarah made a sour face. This news was not making her happy. But Harold was exhilarated. The thrill of inspiration overtook him, the pleasure of a problem solved. As Harold’s face brightened, Sarah’s darkened in equal measure.
“How did Cale know that?” she said.
“It must be in the letters. But not these letters. Later ones. Do you get it? Conan Doyle wrote the diary. Bram Stoker stole it, or threw it out, or something like that. And then he and Conan Doyle must have exchanged letters about it. That’s how Cale knew. ‘Mere modernity’ didn’t destroy Conan Doyle’s old diary. Bram Stoker did.”
Harold was up in a flash, ringing the bell for the library attendant to come back. He hurriedly asked her for the volume of letters chronologically after the ones they were currently looking at. She made him fill out a new request form, which he did impatiently. His own handwriting became quickly more smudged and illegible than even Stoker’s.
It was an agonizing fifteen minutes for Harold while the attendant was off to fetch the letters, and he and Sarah were forced to wait in the rare-manuscript room. He paced back and forth maniacally, hands behind him. When he looked over at Sarah, he found her lost in her own thoughts. Yet something on her face—some shadow of concern and disappointment—gave him the impression that her thoughts were very different from his own. He couldn’t imagine what she was feeling, and he didn’t know how to ask.
Finally the attendant returned with another box, tied with the same white string.
It was less than five minutes before Harold found what he was looking for, though it felt a lot longer to him. His sweaty fingers slipped across the smooth plastic as he shuffled through the pages. “Dear Arthur,” began the letter he held. “Your anger is understandable, but unfounded. Anything I have done—no, everything that I have done— has been done in the spirit of friendship and goodwill that exists between men such as you and I. If you will not thank me now, then I trust that one day you will thank me from the gates of heaven, when St. Peter alone whispers the truth from his lips. Let us discuss this in person, shall we? I can call on you anytime you like. B.S.”
The next letter in the stack continued the argument.
“Dear Arthur,” it read. “These bitter insults do not become you. But there is no reason for us to exclaim our opposite views in these missives. Let us sit in your study with a bottle of brandy, as we have so many times before, and hash out this affair. B.S.”
The third letter conveyed even more anger and ill will between the men than the first two.
“Dear Arthur,” read the third letter. “Please stop this childish behavior. I’m afraid that what you want from me I cannot give. It’s been burnt in your own fireplace, from the first ‘elementary’ to the bitter end. And your rude and unseemly letters have been burnt up in mine. Please, I beg of you, let me come to your house and discuss this matter with you. Allow me the chance to explain myself, and I will allow you the same chance as well. B.S.”
And that was it.
Harold flipped through further letters but found no more written to Conan Doyle in the box. Sarah flipped through the same piles, achieving the same result. Neither spoke until they’d both satisfied themselves that this was it, that this was the end of the trail.
“I was right,” said Harold when his mind had settled enough to speak. “Stoker stole the diary and burned it in Arthur’s fireplace. That’s the secret that’s been hidden for a hundred years. There never was a diary to find.”
“But,” Sarah replied, “but that’s so . . . What was in the diary? Why did Stoker burn it?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” said Harold. “And that’s why Alex Cale killed himself. Because at the end of the mystery, at the conclusion of the story he’d been living for his entire adult life, there was no solution. So he built a new mystery above his grave. Something that someone else could investigate. He wrote the word ‘elementary’ at the scene because he read these letters and wanted us to know when we’d found them. ‘Elementary’ wasn’t the beginning of the mystery, it was the end. It’s ironic, I suppose, but it seems so obvious when you think about it now. The most upsetting truth that Alex Cale could have figured out wouldn’t be whatever ugly, dark secret is hidden in the diary—it’s that there was no diary. That the secret that had been inside it would be hidden forever.”
“That’s sick.”
She was right, Harold knew. But he also understood Cale’s reasoning completely.
“There’s a quote from Conan Doyle,” Harold began. “ ‘A problem without a solution may interest the student, but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader.’ ” Harold gave a small laugh. “But I think Conan Doyle was wron
g. In this case the problem without a solution upset the student, too.”
“He killed himself to preserve a mystery? Then why leave all these clues?”
“He killed himself because his life was a failure. His great work was never going to be completed. It couldn’t be. He would never be able to be the success that his father wanted, he’d never be able to toss his thick, award-winning Conan Doyle biography on his father’s grave. His life was over. So he figured if he was going to kill himself anyway, why not plant a seed? He couldn’t just tell everyone that the mystery was over . . . So he left behind a gift. For us. For me.”
Harold could not place the look that Sarah gave him then. It was not disgust, exactly, and it was not despair, but it was a kind of sadness.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked finally. He didn’t know what else to say. He was still exhilarated, but it was starting to wear off.
“No,” she said. “Of course I’m not.” She stood up from her chair and gave a long stretch. She arched her arms over her head and then folded them across her chest, curling herself inward. “So that’s it, then? You’re sure? The diary is gone? Burned up by Bram Stoker in Conan Doyle’s own house. We’ll never be able to find it, or what it says?”
Harold took a few seconds and ran through the chain of events in his mind that had led him to this conclusion. They were so orderly, so logical, and so flawless.
“Yes,” he said. “This is it.” An awful thought occurred to him.
“You’re not going to tell anyone?” he asked. “Your article. I don’t think Cale wanted anyone to . . . Well, look, he wanted to leave a mystery. He wanted someone to follow the clues, but only one person. Only the best. That was me. He didn’t want everyone to know. You can’t write about this. I know how much this article means to you. But you can’t write about what Alex did. Please.”
Sarah squeezed herself tighter. “Sure,” she said. “I understand. I won’t tell anyone.” She put on her coat. “Your secret is safe with me.”
Harold stood as well. It had felt so good to share his victory with someone. With Sarah. There was a puzzle, a test, and he’d solved it. But now his elation was somehow giving way to a hollow sensation. Why wasn’t she enjoying this with him? Why had he been left to experience this alone?
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
“Yes. I think . . . Well, it’s over now. There’s no diary. There’s nothing to write about. It was a pleasure to meet you.” She reached out her hand, and before he could process what he was doing, Harold gave it a polite shake.
“What’s going on?”
“Good-bye,” she said. “You’re really, really smart.” Sarah picked up her purse and knocked on the door. The attendant answered quickly and asked Harold if he was coming along as well. He had nothing to say besides no. The attendant led Sarah out, and Harold was left alone with a jumble of thoughts more confusing than the scribbled letters of Bram Stoker before him.
It was only minutes later, as he sat in the bright, quiet reading room, that he remembered the car chase in London. The handgun. The Goateed Man. Was he still looking for Harold? For Sarah?
Harold knew then that a problem without a solution was not an annoyance, but the most maddening and horrible sensation in the world.
CHAPTER 37
A Death in the Family
“The things which we do wrong—although they may seem little
at the time, and though from the hardness of our hearts we pass
them lightly by—come back to us with bitterness, when danger
makes us think how little we have done to deserve help,
and how much to deserve punishment.”
—Bram Stoker,
Under the Sunset
December 1,1900
“Come at once,” read the telegram. “Please.” It was signed simply “B.S.”
Arthur was angry, but he went all the same. It was the sort of message that Holmes was always sending to Watson in his stories, and Bram knew it. What gall! To drag Arthur back into this horrible affair without even the courtesy of an explanation. It was conduct unbefitting a man of Bram’s stature, and especially a friend of Bram’s caliber. “Come at once.” For heaven’s sake. Arthur would have liked to think that Bram was a better man than to commit such skulduggery.
Arthur received the message a little after three in the afternoon and managed to make the 3:55 for Waterloo. From there it was but a twentyminute ride in a two-wheeler to get to Bram’s home along St. Leonard’s Terrace, Kensington.
He couldn’t imagine what Bram had found that was so urgent that Arthur had to drop his day’s cricket and head into the city. It was assuredly nothing, of course. Bram most likely just could not accept Arthur’s refusal to further engage in detective work. But to tantalize him like this . . . to tease him with the promise of clues! It was like holding cheap gin under the nose of a recovering dipsomaniac. Arthur would not forget this.
Nor, obviously, would he take the bait. He would go to St. Leonard’s Terrace, yes, and he would see what Bram was making such a fuss about. And then he would explain, calmly and resolutely, that he was of an age too advanced for such follies. If Bram wanted to continue his investigations, Arthur would not stand in his way. But for Arthur there would be no more interviewing of witnesses and no more sniffing of rancid bloodstains. The circus had left town, and Arthur would not travel with it.
Number 18 , St. Leonard’s Terrace was rather larger than Arthur had remembered. Four years previously Bram had moved here from Number 19—he’d moved all of one house over in order to acquire an extra floor. The new house was re-created like the old one, almost down to the positioning of the vases in the drawing room. It was a move so very like Bram—expensive, a touch indulgent, and yet meticulous in its labors. There were rumors that Bram had been forced to borrow around town in order to pay for the new furnishings. Some said six hundred pounds from Hall Caine alone, while others said as much as seven hundred. But there were always rumors, and Arthur paid them little mind. And it was not as if it were Arthur’s place to ask. He and Bram knew enough about each other’s sins and shortcomings at this point. There was no cause for adding weight to the scales.
The butler recognized his face, and before Arthur had a chance to speak, the man issued a polite, “Right this way, Dr. Doyle.
“Mr. Stoker has been expecting you,” added the butler for effect.
“Yet I suspect he’ll be disappointed when he finds me,” said Arthur.
The house was both dark and ornate. It received little light from the street outside, despite the fact that it was buttressed to the south by the open parks of the Royal Hospital. The windows were too small, thought Arthur, and there were not enough of them. The drawing room seemed sodden with a princely and expensive gloom. The golds and silvers of the exposed tea set were transmuted into bronze by the pervasive dim. The lush reds of the oil paintings on the wall were darkened into bloody browns.
As Bram turned from his desk, Arthur saw that he was in the midst of lighting his cigar. The match burst orange light into the room and then was squashed out quickly with a blow from Bram’s lips. Cigar smoke trailed into the darkness above.
“I don’t care what you have to tell me,” Arthur began. “I haven’t the faintest interest in knowing who killed Emily Davison.”
Bram simply stared.
“Very well,” he said at last. “Thank you for making me aware. But that’s not why I asked you here.”
“Oh,” was all Arthur managed in reply. It had not occurred to him that Bram could have asked him over to discuss anything other than the murders.
“Oscar is dead.”
It took Arthur a long moment to understand what Bram was saying.
“. . . Wilde?” asked Arthur lamely.
Bram nodded. Who else would it have been?
Arthur sat down on a plush chair. He allowed his body to tumble into it as if he were diving bottom-first off a cliff.
“Where?” he asked. “When?
”
“Paris. Did you even know that’s where he’s been? I didn’t. He’s been two years in the Hôtel d’Alsace. I never sent him a letter, or even a bloody note. Did you? Well, no. Of course you didn’t. He died sometime yesterday. Florence, of all people, got a telegram this morning, and she informed me.” Bram sighed. “Since he was released from prison, we didn’t offer him so much as a kind word, did we? We left the poor chap to drink and bugger himself to death on the Continent.”
Arthur didn’t take kindly to the implied accusation in Bram’s tone.
“And what were we to do?” he said. “Oscar had . . .proclivities. He was drawn inexorably to sin. It is a tragedy that such a great man was brought so low by vice. But the villain here is the vice, not you and I.”
“Vice?” said Bram. “Do you think that’s what killed him? No. A vice is a thing which may be applauded in moderation but becomes horrific in overuse. Morphine is splendid by the ounce, but it’s a vice by the gallon. A healthy desire for one’s wife, that’s a virtue. But a compulsive desire for another, however . . . well, that’s a vice that will do a man ill.”
Bram looked Arthur dead in the eyes. Arthur wondered if he was referring to Jean, if Bram was judging him. Well, so what if he was?
“No,” Bram continued. “It wasn’t the vice that killed Oscar. It was the loneliness.”
“Do you remember that night we met, he and I?” said Arthur. “At that dinner in the Langham Hotel? Wait, no, you weren’t there. It was hosted by Joseph Stoddart, of Lippincott’s. Oscar was so deliriously funny, and he was a towering figure. It was a golden evening for me. Oscar told me he admired my work. Stoddart commissioned novels from us both, did you know that? On the same evening. Oscar wrote his Dorian Gray, and I wrote The Sign of the Four”
“And then,” added Bram, “he went to prison. And you to an audience with the queen. Oh, say, I’ve simply forgotten to ask—has your knighthood come through yet?”
“Look here, it’s not so simple as you make it seem, all right? It’s not as if they locked him up in jail over Dorian Gray, and it’s not as if The Sign of the Four were the proximate cause of this knighthood everyone says I should be expecting. There was a series of intermediate steps. We took two different paths, do you see?”