The Sherlockian

by Graham Moore

  “Yes,” said Arthur. “Don’t you see? Once he knew who I was . . . well, he’d thought he’d found a fellow in his cause. And for my own part, I didn’t see much point in disabusing him of that notion. Strange, damn it. Everyone thinks I’m on his side. Inspector Miller thinks I’m trying to help him cover up my own crimes. And Stegler thinks I’m working to help him cover up his own.”

  “So then, whose side are you on really, Arthur? That of justice? That of law?”

  “No. Emily’s. Sally’s. Anna’s. I’m on the side of the girls.”

  “Well then, what do you think your girls would have you do now?”

  Arthur considered the question, turning to face both men’s reflections in the dressing-room mirrors. He noticed how well his own mustache had grown back, how quickly his visage had again taken on the form of a proper man’s. A strange image appeared in his head. It was of his own wedding day. Except that Arthur was not wearing his black tuxedo. Rather he was wearing a sparkling white wedding dress. He imagined himself stitched all in white silk, a flowing train following behind him as he walked blushingly down the aisle toward his betrothed. He imagined the smile on his face, the exuberance of a bride on her wedding day.

  Arthur noticed Bram regarding him curiously, and he shook himself from this vision. What a queer thing to imagine!

  “I think,” Arthur said at last, “that these girls would have us see to it that their killer was brought to justice. At any cost. Any cost at all.”

  Bram stood and began unrolling his sleeves. He fastened the buttons on his cuffs one by one before he spoke again.

  “Very well,” said Bram. “Then I am with you.” He took his coat and slid it over his outstretched arms. “Whatever that cost might be.”

  December 6, 1900

  Arthur and Bram stood on Bridge Street, just across from the Jews’ Burial Ground. Though it was quite dark, they could still make out a few of the tallest headstones, chipped and ragged, illuminated by the lights of the workhouse behind them. They heard the groans of drunks from somewhere beyond, and from the large road they heard the faint pitter-patter of prostitutes’ feet along the dirt. Arthur had not planned this return to the East End, to be sure. But now that he was here, and had been venturing here for the past two days, he realized that of course there was nowhere else for this matter to properly end.

  Arthur regarded the Stegler family’s staunch two-story in front of him. He and Bram had found the house easily, by a simple search of the public records regarding the Stegler printing business. Over the last two days, they had kept watch over the property. In a small black notebook, they had kept track of the identities and schedules of each resident of the house. First there was Bobby, who left the house early every morning to attend to his duties at the family press. Bobby’s father, Tobias, left each day a bit later in the morning, stopping in on the press and then on other errands in regard to his business. Bobby’s sister, whose name they learned was Melinda, lived in the house as well and seemed to be at home most of the day, watching after the various servant girls who came by and attending to some of the chores herself. In the evenings she would dine out with friends. These three characters made up the sum of the house’s residents—a search of the death notices revealed that Bobby’s mother had passed many years ago, when he was just a boy.

  Arthur had followed Tobias Stegler the day before, and to Arthur’s shock he learned that the man owned a number of houses on Watney Street, near Whitechapel, including the one that had been rented out secretly as a boardinghouse by its caretaker—the one behind which the body of Sally Needling had been found. When he’d seen Mr. Stegler give a few raps on the outside of that house’s door and then saw the lady of the house answer, Arthur had almost lost his wits with surprise. The last time he’d seen this woman, she had been disconsolate, sitting on the narrow staircase of her black-market boardinghouse and crying over the body she’d found and robbed. And here she was calmly opening the door for her landlord, the father of the boy who had done that very murdering. Arthur remembered her fear, he remembered that she’d been keeping the business she ran from this house secret from the landlord—from the man he now knew was Tobias Stegler. Arthur watched as she passed Mr. Stegler a clump of bills and sent him on his way. He never entered the house, as he was seemingly content to have collected his rents and saw no need for further inquiry into the state of his property.

  Clearly, this was no coincidence. But it took an hour of talking through the situation with Bram, later that night, before Arthur figured out what it meant. Tobias Stegler did not know about the boardinghouse being run out of his property, they reasoned. If he did, then the woman of the house would have had no cause to respond to Arthur’s threat, all those weeks ago, that he would tell her landlord of her secret. But, they also reasoned, somehow Bobby Stegler did know, and he’d used this to his advantage. He knew that he would need an out-of-theway place, a quiet boardinghouse without a lot of guests, to bring his first victim. When he learned, probably through some simple accident, that one of the women his father rented to was secretly keeping lodgers, it only made sense for him to make use of it. He would not, however, have risked a second trip to the same house, for his second victim. He had gotten lucky enough that the woman hadn’t recognized him once—though as far as Arthur and Bram could tell, she might not even know the boy’s face.

  If Arthur had harbored any doubts as to Bobby Stegler’s guilt in the murders, this revelation eliminated them. Bobby had particular means to have committed these crimes, he had the opportunity, and he certainly had a motive, however perverse it might be. What the boy had done was more evil, Arthur knew, than simple murder. He had toyed with his victims first; he had seduced them, he had said he loved them, he had made them feel love, and then he had strangled them in dirtflecked bathtubs. He had not simply slaughtered these women; he had first violated their womanhood. He had cruelly struck each woman at the core of her female being. It was worse than murdering a man. And it was worse even than simply murdering a woman. He had struck at the entire womanly sex.

  Arthur and Bram waited until the house was empty. At 8:30 p.m., as expected, Bobby’s sister, Melinda, left the house for an evening rendezvous with her girlfriends. Bobby had not yet returned from the printing house; the past two nights, he had not returned until after ten. Tobias was out at this hour as well, dining with another neighborhood landlord. The house was dark, and perfectly still. This was as planned. As Arthur and Bram watched Melinda Stegler turn the corner on to Harford Street, they each finished a final cigarette of the evening and stepped across Bridge Street, toward the house.

  They had discussed their plan at length, and so as the men stepped around the house, to the back, neither needed to speak a word. The back door was cheap and thin, probably held shut with only a small lock, but they went for the window next to it. As Arthur raised his booted foot and kicked straight through it, the glass broke easily. Amid the squalid noise of the East End, the sound of shattering glass blended into the din. One more violent crash hardly added to the neighborhood’s clamor.

  Arthur stepped through the window, and Bram followed close behind. Their boots crunched the glass underfoot as they walked through the kitchen. Their earliest reconnaissance had told them that Bobby’s bedroom was on the second floor, and they wasted no time in heading straight for it. They knew what they were here for. They had abandoned all caution to get it.

  The staircase creaked with the weight of two bodies on it. The house was of poor construction, and the wooden boards felt as if they might snap at any moment. Arthur’s boots left a trail of tiny glass shards as he walked, a line of glinting sparkles from the kitchen to the second-floor bedroom and into the mouth of hell itself.

  When both men had entered Bobby Stegler’s quarters, they shut the door and lit the single gas lamp upon the wall. A narrow four-poster bed rested, unmade, in one corner of the room. Two broad chairs sat across from it, as if ready to entertain guests. But, judging from the messy
piles of clothes which covered them, Arthur found it unlikely that many guests came up here. The sloppiness of the boy’s room pointed to a loneliness within him—as if he could allow his private quarters to be in disarray because he would never, at any point, need to share them. Did this raging child have friends? Did he have cricket with the other boys his age? Had he ever felt love? Had he ever looked into the face of a woman and known that tender feeling, that warmth which spread from belly to beard? Had his hands ever quivered as they touched a young girl’s glove? Had he ever bit his lip to keep from crying out with joy as he bent over to kiss a woman’s hand?

  Arthur looked at the messy sheets of printing paper on the small desk, he looked at the ink-stained clothes strewn haphazardly across the floor, and he knew that Bobby Stegler was not a man. He was a beast. And Arthur would see that he was put in a cage where he belonged, to live out his miserable days until his death, when his heart could be cut from his chest by a doctor’s scalpel and that black, wrinkled organ could be placed in a jar for the edification of future generations. “This is the cold heart of a dead man,” the typewritten sleeve on the bell jar would read, “and this is what it looks like when a heart dies years before its owner.” In the bright twentieth century, when reason ruled the world, this boy would serve as a reminder of the dark years that had passed, and of the generation—Arthur’s generation—which had led them all from superstition into the brilliant rationality of science.

  But first he would need to be caught. And so Arthur and Bram got to work, silently and methodically. They searched the clothes, the bed, the desk, the chairs, and into the tight closet. They searched for evidence. Arthur hoped to find the wedding allegations—this boy would be arrogant enough, proud enough of his villainy, to have saved them, Arthur suspected. And with the allegations in hand, the Yard would have to listen to him. Failing that, they hoped to find letters from any of the dead girls written to Bobby Stegler. Or perhaps proofs of the girls’ pamphlets, which would at least prove that he knew them. There were a dozen possible pieces of evidence they might find here, and they needed only one.

  When the first sweep of the room produced nothing of interest, they searched again. The minutes wore on, and Bram began to express concern about the hour. At some point one of the inhabitants of the house was bound to return. And it wouldn’t do for Arthur and Bram to be caught ransacking their home.

  But Arthur would not leave. He would not think of it until something useful had been discovered. He had followed his scarlet thread of murder too far to stop here, or even to come back and try again at a later date. This would end tonight, and by the morning, so help him, Bobby Stegler would be in the care of Inspector Miller and his men.

  The search continued.

  “We must leave, Arthur,” said Bram as his impatience grew. “What if Tobias returns? Or the sister?”

  Arthur pulled back his coat, showing off the revolver strapped to his waist.

  “Then we will explain the situation fearlessly and be on our way. What are they going to do to us? Call the Yard? I’m sure Bobby Stegler would appreciate having the Yard men sniffing about his quarters.”

  “I have no natural aversion to breaking and entering, don’t misunderstand. But we have to be discreet about this, don’t you think?”

  “I think,” said Arthur, “that we have to find something that we can use here. And this jabbering is not going to help us do it.”

  He turned from the desk before him to the windowsill. A few used, broken pens lay on the sill, and one had even dripped ink onto the white paint. Arthur touched at the pens and then raised his head to the window, where he found himself inches away from the smiling face of Bobby Stegler.

  Arthur froze and caught his breath. For a second he was motionless, watching what could only be a specter in the window. But as the boy’s smile widened and the window was pulled open from the outside, Arthur realized that there was no ghostly presence at work. The boy was sitting on a tree branch outside the window. For all Arthur knew, he might have been watching them the whole time.

  Arthur stepped back as Bobby Stegler stepped into the bedroom through the open window.

  “As soon as I saw the light on, from the street, why, I knew it was you!” said Bobby. “I just knew it!” He closed the window behind him and looked at Bram.

  “And you would be Mr. Stoker, wouldn’t you?” continued the boy as he moved the blond hair from his eyes. “I’ve been looking after you two. It seems you’ve been looking about for me, too!” Bobby laughed then, and the sound was hideous.

  Arthur drew the gun from his waist and held it in front of him.

  “Be quiet,” said Arthur, “and be very still, do you understand? Or I will shoot you here and now.”

  The boy smiled again and looked over at Bram.

  “If Arthur doesn’t,” said Bram as he pulled a revolver from his own coat, “then I most certainly will.”

  “Oh, ho,” said Bobby, “my two detectives! You’ve really taken your roles quite seriously, haven’t you? But come off it. You don’t want to shoot me, not after everything I’ve done for you.

  “Why, Arthur, don’t look at me so! I’ve saved your life! Frankly, don’t you think we should be sharing a pint o’ bitters and laughing over our good fortune? Those bleeding cunts were going to kill you. I know about the letter bomb. Didn’t find out till I’d already had my way with that last one, mind you. I can’t give myself too much credit. I didn’t kill them to save your life, but by the by, as I’ve killed, so I’ve without a doubt saved you!”

  “They weren’t going to kill me,” said Arthur. “Not really. And I won’t defend them, all right, I won’t defend the horrible things those girls were planning. But you . . . What you’ve done is infinitely so very much worse. You murdered three innocent women.”

  “Innocent?” Bobby Stegler’s face lit up with incredulity. “You can’t mean that. Innocent? Three queer dollymops with a boxful of dynamite? You must know they were . . . well, I think they loved each other. I mean, I think they loved each other, as if one were a man! Emily Davison and Janet Fry most certainly did. My God, can you imagine? They were horrors, those hairy cunts. And they were out to remake the world—our world—in their hairy-cunted image.”

  As Arthur held the revolver in his hand, he felt a shaking in his arm. He felt himself twitching. He imagined the faces of those dead girls—sweet, pale, and mutilated. More than anything else he had ever wanted, he wanted at this moment to pull the trigger. To see this ugly thing before him smitten from the face of the earth.

  “Arthur,” said Bram. “Don’t.”

  As usual, Bram could read his thoughts exactly. Bobby Stegler looked back and forth between the two men, and something new registered on the boy’s face. Curiosity. As if it had never before occurred to him that Arthur might actually fire the revolver.

  “Oh!” Bobby said. “Are you going to shoot me? I mean, you’re honestly thinking about shooting me? I just can’t . . . My!” He pressed his hair away from his face again and scratched at his scalp. “Seems rather unlike you, doesn’t it, Dr. Doyle? I mean, I don’t have a weapon on me. Unarmed and all that. Not a threat to your person. You’d be killing me in cold blood like, wouldn’t you? The storyteller has a gun, and he’s fit to use it. Well then. All right. It’s up to you then, I suppose. What are you going to do now, Dr. Doyle? Are you going to shoot me? Or are you going to tell me a story?”

  Arthur looked deeply into the boy’s clear blue eyes and scanned the contours of his handsome face. Arthur could hear something, faintly, in the distance. A rushing sound. A crash of water against rock. He wasn’t sure if it was real or not, but he heard it all the same. Torrents of water rushing over a cliff. He tuned his ears to the noise and recognized the tone. He steadied his hand and listened to the sound, from the back of his mind, of the Reichenbach Falls.

  CHAPTER 42

  The Sherlock Holmes Museum

  [Holmes]pushed to an extreme the axiom that the only safe plotter<
br />
  was he who plotted alone. I was nearer him than anyone else,

  and yet I was always conscious of the gap between.

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

  “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”

  January 17, 2010

  From the base of the mountain, below the Reichenbach Falls, Harold stared across the Hauptstrasse at the Sherlock Holmes Museum. He shivered and pulled his thin coat tighter against the Swiss air. At just after six in the evening, the final spots of orange sunlight were disappearing to the west, behind the museum. The unlit streets were getting darker, and with every passing minute they were getting darker faster. From his perch on the other side of the wide road, Harold could see two museum guards locking up for the night. It would only be a few more minutes now. He clenched his fists in his pocket. He could not remember the last time he’d been so cold.

  As he watched the two guards mill around the entrance to the museum, laughing at a joke that Harold couldn’t hear, he turned and looked behind him to the east. The Swiss Alps broke clear of the earth not fifty yards from where he was standing. Snow blanketed the top third of the range like a white silk shawl.

  Harold shifted his weight, feeling the bulky bag slung across his shoulder. The steel tire iron inside pressed against his back. The guards laughed again and began a slow wander in the direction of the parking lot. The museum was dark. Empty. The last morsel of the sun vanished into the distance, and Harold stepped from the shadows into the nighttime.

  There was nothing left for him to lose anymore. He had no life he wanted to return to, and the life he knew he wanted, the life of these weeks in which he’d for the first time come truly alive, had been revealed as a fraud. And not even a complicated fraud at that. The twist had come so easily, and bowled him over with such self-evident obviousness, that Harold couldn’t even muster up anger at Sarah, or at Sebastian. He’d known he shouldn’t have trusted her from the beginning, hadn’t he? Her whole story had been just as improbable then as it was now. Harold knew enough to blame himself.