by Graham Moore
“I was told that you have photographs of this room?” he said. “From when Conan Doyle was living here?”
“Yes. I have many of them. Conan Doyle was fascinated with photography, as you know. He had this whole house documented, from the first stone to his last days here.”
She dutifully flipped through her books and produced the photographs. Harold stared down at the black-and-white shots and then up at the same space, ravaged by the century since. The bookshelves along the walls no longer held their dusty volumes. The oak desk, which once sat heavy against the far wall, was long gone. The armchairs had been taken away, the lamps, the case in which Conan Doyle had kept his revolver. Gone, gone, gone.
Harold stood in the spot where Conan Doyle’s desk had been. Where his chair had been set back. Where the stories had been composed, where they had been written down in longhand. Where Sherlock Holmes was resurrected.
The old centuries had, and have, powers of their own, which mere modernity cannot kill. Stoker had been right. So had Alex Cale. There was something alive in this house. Not even modernity, not even the horrible rinse of history, could kill what had been born here.
Harold formed his hand around an imaginary pen. He placed it on his imaginary paper, on top of his imaginary desk. He wrote, imaginarily, with a wide flourish.
Penelope Higgins coughed. She seemed used to this sort of behavior from visiting Sherlockians.
“What are you looking for, Mr. White?” Her tone was firm. She wanted a real answer.
“The diary,” said Harold, absentmindedly. “I’m looking for the diary.”
Ms. Higgins smiled. “Best of luck to you, then,” she responded. “You’ve an illustrious set you’re following. Since 1930 we’ve had chaps like yourself in and out of this room looking for that diary. How many times do you think they’ve paced around here? How many times do you think they’ve pulled at the floorboards? Tapped at the walls for hollow spaces? Unscrewed the light fixtures? They must have gone over this room . . .what, now? A hundred times? A thousand? That’s more than eighty years of Sherlockians that’ve been in here. I don’t think there’s much left for you to search.”
Now it was Harold’s turn to smile. And he smiled bigger and wider than Penelope Higgins ever would. Here he was in Conan Doyle’s own study, in his own house, and here before him was a mystery worthy of his efforts.
“Elementary,” Harold said, because he simply could not resist.
Penelope Higgins shook her head.
“I’ll leave you to it, then. Here are the photos. Just don’t poke yourself on a rusty nail, give yourself tetanus.”
Penelope Higgins left, though she did not close the door. It seemed she would wearily give Harold the benefit of the doubt.
He settled in. He sat on the broken floor. He closed his eyes. He pressed his stubby fingers together in his lap, and he devoted his mind to the task at hand.
The diary would not be found by searching. It would be found by thinking. All problems have solutions, even if they’ve evaded a generation of inquisitors.
The diary was here. It had been hidden here a hundred years before. But how? But where? He had no doubt that scores of Sherlockians, of scholars both professional and amateur, had combed over every inch of this room. What would they have missed? What hiding place was obvious enough that Bram Stoker was able to quickly stash a leatherbound book in it, without plan or preparation, and yet was ingenious enough that both Conan Doyle and a thousand literary detectives had missed it? What spot had remained untouched over a century of icy winters, summer storms, and ravaging descendants?
Harold thought of “The Purloined Letter.” No. In this case, the diary had not been hidden in plain sight. That would be too easy.
What was the twist? If Conan Doyle had hidden the diary himself, where would he have hidden it? Or, better yet, if Conan Doyle had hidden the diary for Holmes to find and Holmes were strolling through this study right now, where would he look? If Harold was sure that the diary was hidden here, and he was . . . well then, he was only more sure of one thing: that there would be a twist. Because there always was.
He thought of all the great twists he’d read at the ends of all the great mystery novels. Some were small shifts of focus, others were radical shifts of plot, such that everything you thought you knew turned out to be false. Harold wasn’t certain what sort of twist he hoped for. But all the best twists he’d read shared one key feature.
The well-written twist always preyed upon the reader’s assumptions. Something the reader had simply assumed to be true—because how could it not be?—turned out to be false. Something unquestioned was questioned. Something that had never felt worth examining was examined, and an answer was found in the most unlikely place.
What did Harold assume? That Bram Stoker had hidden the diary so that he could come back later and destroy it. That Bram Stoker had hidden the diary within this room. That no one had ever found it. That the room had been emptied, destroyed, turned over a thousand times and that the diary wasn’t here.
That the diary had been here. That the diary wasn’t here.
Harold stopped breathing.
The diary had been here. The diary wasn’t here.
And it was all so stunningly, embarrassingly obvious.
He flipped through the pages of photographs quickly, looking hard at the gray-on-gray images.
“Have we found the diary yet?” came the voice of Penelope Higgins.
He looked up to find her stocky frame in the doorway.
“Yes,” said Harold, in no mood for games.
Ms. Higgins laughed at him through her nose. “Right then! Well, where is it?”
Harold earnestly turned back to the photos, plowing through her sarcasm. “The diary was hidden here in 1900 . But it’s not here anymore, and it wasn’t here after Conan Doyle died. So at some point between 1900 and 1930, someone took it out of this room.”
“So somebody stole it?”
“No. Somebody took it out of this room. But I don’t think they knew what they were taking. I think somebody removed the diary by accident, not realizing what it was. So what I want to know now is, what was taken out of here in those years? What was big enough, and obvious enough, and hollow enough, that somebody could have quickly shoved a diary in it but that no one would have looked inside? It’s not a vase, it’s not a chest . . . Maybe the empty base of a lamp?”
“The lamps all went to Conan Doyle’s daughter, I believe. And there weren’t many of them. Fairly little, too, if I remember. Probably kept them in her attic. But I don’t think you’d be the first to search Conan Doyle’s daughter’s attic for the diary, Mr. White.”
Harold turned the page and laid his eyes on a small, dark photograph from 1899. It was of the study, of a liquor table in one corner, festooned with clear decanters and a strange, tall object. He squinted and looked closer. It was bigger than any of the liter-size decanters, wider around the bottom and rising a good two feet into the air. Both the base and the balloon-shaped body were made of opaque glass. A series of what looked like tubes ran around it, and something like a nozzle poked out from the top.
He flipped the pages quickly, finding a later photograph of the same space. It had been taken in 1905 . The angle was different, and the liquor cabinet was in a slightly farther spot along the wall . . . But the object was gone. In its place was something similar but smaller. Much smaller.
He pressed his finger against the first photograph. “What is this?” he asked. “It’s hard to make out.”
Penelope Higgins bent over the photograph book herself, squinting past her thick, round glasses.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “The gasogene!” Harold remembered reading about gasogenes over the years, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen one. They were early carbonators, used privately to put the bubbles in a gentleman’s seltzer. They were expensive and rather unwieldy, and they were found only among the bar sets of the wealthy.
“It’s huge,” said Harold
.
“Yes, rather. It was an early gasogene, I think. Conan Doyle received one of those monstrous nineteenth-century ones early on and got rid of it when the newer ones were developed a few years later. This one was a gift, if I recall.”
“From who?”
“Bram Stoker. They were friends, you know.”
Harold froze again.
“He got rid of it? To where?”
“Hell if I know,” said Ms. Higgins. “Conan Doyle would have sent the thing away long before he died. 1901? ’02? ’03? Must have been.”
“Did he toss it away?” Harold asked, worried that she might say yes. If Stoker had been able to stuff the diary in the wide base of the gasogene and then Conan Doyle had carelessly tossed it in the trash a year later . . .
“I don’t think so,” said Ms. Higgins, doing her best to recall. She sighed. “If I must, I can check my books. We have lists, you see, of all of Conan Doyle’s possessions and where they’ve gotten off to.”
“Please,” said Harold. “Please.”
“I think I’ve one in my car. The thing is dreadfully heavy. Hold on.” With an irritated sigh, she left him alone while she went outside. Harold sat, tapping his fingers, waiting for her to return.
He flipped through the photograph book listlessly. He was so close now. So miserably close . . . He skimmed through the end of the book, where he saw portraits of the Conan Doyle family. Harold looked over the faces of Conan Doyle and his wife, his second wife, his children. Generations of Conan Doyles had been in this house and had never known the secret that Harold was about to uncover.
He stopped at the very last photo in the book. It was bright and colorful, modern—clearly taken only a few years past. It must be of the great-grandchildren of the Conan Doyle family. It was unlabeled, but Harold recognized a few of the faces. He even saw Sebastian, grinning out at him from the photograph. If only Sebastian knew where Harold was now. Harold grinned back at the photograph. He felt as if he’d beaten them all.
His eye caught on a young woman standing next to Sebastian in the photograph. She was a solid foot shorter than Sebastian, with curly brown hair and a bright yellow scarf wrapped around her neck.
As Harold’s eyes went wide and every muscle in his body tensed in shock, Ms. Higgins came back in holding a folder full of papers.
“Lucerne,” she said. “It looks like Conan Doyle’s first gasogene, miraculously, made its way to the collection in Lucerne.”
Harold didn’t look at her. He couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph. He mumbled something about Switzerland.
“Yes,” said Ms. Higgins, not expecting this level of indifference from Harold. “It’s at the Sherlock Holmes museum in Lucerne, in Switzerland. You know it?”
“Yes,” muttered Harold. “It’s at the base of the Reichenbach Falls, where Holmes died. They have a complete re-creation of Sherlock Holmes’s study. It’s made up with all items from the period, including a number from Conan Doyle himself. I’m sorry, who is this?”
Ms. Higgins stepped toward him. “What?” she asked. “Who?”
“This woman. In the photograph.” Harold pointed, his hand shaking in the air. He felt as if he were pointing straight at a ghost.
Ms. Higgins approached the photograph. She followed his outstretched fingertip to the beautiful face of the young woman.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s Sarah.”
“Yes,” said Harold. “I know that. What the hell is Sarah doing in a Conan Doyle family photograph? Why is she standing next to Sebastian?”
Ms. Higgins laughed. “Well, I think she’s done a bit more than stand next to him,” she said. “That’s Sebastian Conan Doyle’s wife, Sarah.” She paused, regarding Harold curiously. “Sarah Conan Doyle.”
Harold felt the bitter bile well up in his throat, and he did everything in his power not to collapse.
CHAPTER 41
Whatever That Cost Might Be
“If the law can do nothing we must take the risk ourselves.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge”
December 4,1900
Arthur threw the rock as hard as he could against the gray stones of Scotland Yard. With a sharp clack, the rock bounced off the new Yard building and landed ineffectually at the feet of a nearby constable. Seeing the stone below him, the constable looked up to find its source. He saw Arthur backing away along Victoria Street, and as the constable opened his mouth to shout at the strange rock thrower, Arthur turned his back to the Yard and sped off. The brisk walk was a good outlet for his anger, and so he kept trotting west until, just before Westminster, he slowed and began to pant.
No one had believed him. No one had listened. Arthur’s name was more synonymous with the art of detection than any other in London, save that of Sherlock Holmes, and yet still they had not had the slightest interest in a word he’d said. Inspector Miller, in particular, had been the worst offender, given his recent dealings with Arthur. When Arthur had marched into Miller’s office and announced that he’d found the murderer of Emily Davison, Sally Needling, and their friend Anna, the man had calmly set down the report he’d been reading, awkwardly adjusted the pens on his desk, and then launched into a series of polite platitudes which overwhelmed Arthur in their obsequious banality.“We do so appreciate your help,” Inspector Miller had said, before thanking Arthur for all the time he’d devoted to the cause of justice. The Yard knew that Arthur must be terribly busy, what with all of his novelistic work. His generosity in taking so much time away from his writing had been noticed and appreciated. If he wished, a formal letter from Commissioner Bradford himself could be written, signed, and even framed for placement in Arthur’s home. “We value your assistance more than any other man of the realm,” continued Miller’s flattery. Arthur tried to hush him, tried to concern Inspector Miller with the case at hand rather than this disgraceful sycophancy. His ego did not need burnishing, he explained, but his findings deserved a public hearing. And one Mr. Bobby Stegler, of Stegler & Sons Printing House along the Strand, deserved to be clapped in the inspector’s most uncomfortable darbies and led forthwith to the gallows.
Inspector Miller had sighed. He’d told Arthur that after his recent trip to Newgate, it was best for Arthur to abstain from further involvement in this matter. No one wanted another mistake, after all. Why, careers that had taken a lifetime to build might be rubbed out with a single compromising word! If Arthur ended up in Newgate again, Inspector Miller’s own position of influence within the Yard might be shaken. Wasn’t it better for everyone if Arthur simply let the matter slide?
Arthur insisted that he did not know what would be best for himself or for the inspector or for the imbecilic muffs who ran this ragtag institution, but surely the world would be better off with a murderer placed properly behind bars! The man had killed three women. He would doubtless kill more.
Yes, very well, Arthur had been forced to admit that he had precious little in the way of actual evidence. In fact, he had none at all, save the man’s indirect confession, which only Arthur had heard. Moreover, Arthur did grant that the boy had not actually admitted to having killed those girls—but he certainly alluded to having done so. And that must count for something, mustn’t it? Arthur would stake his own life on this boy’s having been the murderer they’d been hunting for.
Inspector Miller had not been convinced. He had not believed. And, so Arthur realized with a growing anger, Inspector Miller seemed to be harboring suspicions elsewhere as to the identity of the killer.
“You went to the home of Sally Needling’s family?” Miller had asked. “You’ve made contact with this other girl—what was her name? Janet Fry? How do you know these young women so well?”
“I don’t,” Arthur had insisted. He’d tried to explain again. But the inspector’s questions revealed something dark and unspoken about the man’s thoughts—he thought he already knew who had killed Emily Davison. And, Arthur realized to his own horror
, the inspector thought it was Arthur.
“What are you insinuating?” Arthur had finally asked him.
“Nothing, Dr. Doyle. As I said, it was my pleasure and my privilege to free you from the chains of Newgate the once. But I think no good would be served by my having to do it again.” The sympathetic nod which Inspector Miller had then given Arthur was the most aggravating part. As if Arthur were a co-conspirator in this corruption.
“If you think I killed Emily Davison,” Arthur had said furiously, spitting the words wetly from his mouth, “then you had better lock me up this very instant. Do not dare let my station in life deter you from bringing the full weight of the law down upon my back, do you hear me?”
The inspector had demurred. He’d defused the situation quietly and then had a constable show Arthur to the door. Arthur had been sputtering with rage when he grabbed the rock from the dirty cobblestones along Victoria Street and pitched it at the ugly stone face of British justice.
He found Bram less than three-quarters of an hour later in one of the Lyceum’s basement dressing rooms. Arthur entered to find Bram polishing the mirrors himself, wiping them clean with an old rag and a stick of Lever Bros. Sunlight Soap. Bram’s sleeves were rolled past his elbows as he scrubbed the soap streaks from the brilliant surfaces. The electric bulbs which surrounded the mirrors were reflected in the newly clean glass, doubling their brightness and making it appear, for an instant, as if the entire mirrored wall were constituted only of bursting flame.
Bram turned to face Arthur, setting down his rag.
“I’d know that face anywhere,” said Bram. “Welcome back, Mr. Holmes.”
Arthur did not smile. Rather he unburdened himself upon his friend, sharing the events of the past few days in detail, and in a rueful tone. When Arthur had finished, Bram scratched at his bushy red beard thoughtfully.
“The boy,” said Bram. “Bobby Stegler. He just let you leave? After he’d near confessed to you? He let you walk out of there in one piece?”