by Graham Moore
“Come on,” she said. It was Sarah.
“The man . . . Eric . . . Is he . . . ?” Harold had only the faintest idea of what he was saying.
“No, he’s alive,” she said quickly. “Bleeding, but alive. Which is about where you’re at right now. Time to run away. We have what we need.”
Harold looked down, wiping the blood from his eyes.
Under the crook of Sarah’s left arm, she held the diary.
CHAPTER 43
The Murderer
“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,”
returned my companion, bitterly. “The question is, what can
you make people believe that you have done?”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet
December 4,1900, cont.
The bullet tore off Bobby Stegler’s left cheek. Blood and skin sprayed against the window behind him and then slid down the glass, down onto the dirty sill.
There was screaming. The boy wailed, still very much alive. He bellowed like some demon, and he looked the part, half-faced and grotesque.
Arthur watched the boy tear at his face and the blood spurt onto his blond hair. The bullet, Arthur’s single bullet, had transformed him into something monstrous. His true form was now revealed.
Still wailing, Bobby lashed out at Arthur, grasping at the gun in his hand. They struggled. Arthur strained every muscle in his arms to hold on to his revolver, while his nose was pressed up against Bobby’s open jaw. Arthur could see the bones poking out from behind what once was a cheek.
Arthur heard Bram fire as well, but Bobby was undeterred by the shot. Arthur fought, pushing and pulling, trying to get hold of his pistol for one more shot.
He was faintly aware of a sound at the door. A single breath, caught in someone’s throat. Arthur could not turn to look.
He struggled against Bobby. The boy was so much younger than Arthur, and he was clearly stronger, despite his injuries. Arthur felt his own biceps strain to the point of bursting. He ground his teeth as he pulled, and he thought he might bite through his own molars.
The revolver in Arthur’s hand went off again. When he would think on these moments, later, this is how he would think of them: The gun simply went off. No one fired it. Certainly not he. It was simply fired. The passive voice was there for Arthur, and it understood. The gun was fired. The bullet was loosed. And yet Arthur and Bobby still struggled with all their might. The bullet had not hit either man.
Bram fired again. This time Arthur saw the metal ball carry what was left of the boy’s brains out the other end. He felt the boy’s grip slacken. With a dull, wet thump, Bobby Stegler’s corpse smacked against the wooden floorboards. He was dead.
It took Arthur a few moments to hear Bram’s voice. Arthur’s mind was pure white snow, clean and uncluttered by thoughts. He regarded Bram, his friend, his Watson, dazed and dreaming.
“What have you done, Arthur?”
There was another sound, from the doorway. A gasping and gurgling, like a country brook. Arthur turned, and saw Melinda Stegler, Bobby’s sister, slumped in the doorframe. Her neck had been opened wide by the stray bullet.
Arthur did not kill her. This point would become of paramount importance to him, later on. He did not pull the trigger. Bobby must have done it. Arthur would have remembered pulling with his forefinger. In the struggle, amid the blood and the noise and the allconsuming shock of violence, Bobby had shot his sister.
Melinda’s body did not fall as easily as her brother’s had. She did not die. At least not at first. As her blood spouted into the thickening air, she clutched at it, trying to hold it in. The sickly red liquid gushed through the cracks between her fingers before falling onto the front of her sky blue dress. A stream of blood rushed into the fabric between her breasts, soaking through her corset and then down toward her waist. From her throat came the gargling noise, as her lungs took in deep swallows of blood and coughed them back up again.
When Melinda fell, she fell only to her knees. There, while she knelt on the floor, her eyes went wide as she gripped tighter at her throat. The look on her face, as Arthur watched her die, was not of horror or pain but of wonder. She beamed at Arthur, her eyes shining a brighter blue than even those of her brother. She looked like a baby, staring at the new world for the first time. She held her mouth open, but Arthur knew that she did so out of awe for the lights dancing across her vision. Yes, Arthur noted to himself later on, she was happy when she died. She saw something beautiful before her, and she went to it. She did not suffer.
In another moment her heavy head tugged her body over to the side. She slumped there on the floor, blood still flowing freely from her wounds. He watched it come toward him across the room until it mingled with her brother’s, right between Arthur’s feet. Arthur thought about Emily Davison’s brutalized corpse. This was so very different. The passing of these two children so much more gentle than Emily’s would have been. Arthur was no monster. A killer, perhaps. But he was no monster.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Bram. And he was squeezing firmly.
“Let’s be off, then,” said Bram.
CHAPTER 44
Is It Your Turn to Kill Me Now?
“It is of the first importance,” he cried, “not to allow your
judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me
a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are
antagonistic to clear reasoning.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Sign of the Four
January 17, 2010, cont.
Harold and Sarah sat down, finally, on a small outcropping of rocks. The stones were cold against his thin pants. The wind was blowing fast and cold across his face.
They looked down at the valley below. In the distance they could just make out the museum, illuminated by the flashing lights of a few police cars. Officers, little black dots scampering between the light beams, seemed to be approaching the scene.
“We should be safe here,” Sarah said. “Eric’s the only one who knows we were even in the museum, and he didn’t see where we went. The cops didn’t follow us. No one knows where we are.”
Harold nodded but didn’t speak.
“How’s your head?” she asked.
“Bleeding.”
Sarah took the bright yellow scarf from her neck and wrapped it around his head, covering the wound. She pulled the scarf tight, tying it off, and Harold winced. She had been wearing this scarf the day he met her, he realized. He watched now as the bright yellow of the scarf was blotted black by the red blood gushing into the fabric.
“You’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s not a deep cut. Head wounds just bleed a lot.”
He gestured toward the gun she’d placed on her lap. “Is it your turn to kill me now?”
She smiled. “No. It was never my turn to kill you. Nobody was ever going to kill anyone.”
“Eric?” Harold said, pronouncing the name with particular bitterness.
“Eric wasn’t supposed to kill you either, all right? I promise. Look. I’m sorry. Okay? I know I have a lot to explain, and I’m going to, but before I start, I just want to say I’m sorry.”
“Do you want me to forgive you?”
“Yes, I do. But not right now. I know that you won’t. At least I wouldn’t. But please, believe me, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” said Harold after a sizable pause. “I’m sure.”
“Here.” Sarah took the gun from her lap and handed it to Harold. It felt cold and heavy in his hand. “You take this. If you want to shoot me, then shoot me.”
Harold felt the weight of the gun, turning it over curiously between his hands. He regarded it as he would a mysterious relic dug up from a lost civilization.
“No,” he said. “I don’t shoot people.” He wound up his arm behind him as best he could, and pitched the gun over the ledge. They heard no sound of its landing, though it most
likely fell into the river at the mountain’s base.
“Were you following me?” Harold asked after another long silence.
“I wasn’t. Eric was. I followed him, which was easy enough. He works for my ex-husband.” She looked at Harold, trying to gauge how much of this he already knew. His expression did not register much in the way of surprise.
“I used to be married to Sebastian Conan Doyle,” Sarah continued. “Used to be, okay? Everything I said about the divorce was true. He’s a bastard, let me just say that straight out. But I seem to have a long history with bastards. I don’t know. They find me, I guess.”
“Why do I care?” The harshness in Harold’s voice surprised even himself. As he felt calmer, and safer, he also felt angrier.
“Because none of this was my idea, okay? At least not the worst parts. You have to think I’m a terrible person, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Sarah sighed. “I understand. But listen. I really am a reporter. Well, I really was a reporter. That was all true, too. Sebastian and I separated six months ago. We did. You can look it up. It’s a long story, and you don’t care. After we split, I wanted to write again. And I had all these Sherlockian connections, because of him. Or at least I knew a lot about Alex Cale, and about all of your organizations, because Sebastian followed them religiously. He hated you all so much, I can’t even begin to tell you. But he wanted that diary. And I’ll tell you right now, I think he would have killed Alex to get it. He didn’t, I know. But I think he would have.
“When Alex announced his discovery . . .I wasn’t there, but I can only imagine how furious Sebastian was. When I heard about it, I knew this would be my opportunity to write again. That’s when Sebastian called me. I honestly don’t know how he found out about the piece I was working on. He said we could combine forces. We could work together to find the diary. I could write whatever I wanted, as long as I helped him. And we were finalizing our divorce . . . He offered to make things easier. A lot easier. There were some complications that didn’t make me look very good, and he was offering to be very generous, and . . . I said yes, okay? I said yes. I accept responsibility for that. It was complicated, and I said yes. I’d play the reporter, and I’d help him get the diary.”
“Where the hell did Eric come from?”
“He works for Sebastian. He has for a while. But that’s all I know.”
“If Sebastian got you to help him find the diary,” said Harold, “and then he got me to help him find the diary, then what was Eric doing? Why did Sebastian need Eric running around with a gun if he had me and you?”
Sarah paused for a moment. This was a problem she’d thought about before.
“Because he didn’t trust you,” she said. “And God knows he didn’t trust me. It’s just like Sebastian, really. You have a problem, so you throw as much money at it as possible. Hire three different people to work on it, but don’t tell them about each other, keep everyone in the dark, and if they kill each other . . . well, whatever. At least one of them will find what you’re looking for. I told you, Harold. He’s really, truly, totally, and completely a bastard.”
Harold looked up at the glittering stars. They barely lit the side of the mountain. Even Sarah’s face was disappearing in the blackness. He believed her. But believing her didn’t make him feel any better.
Sarah reached behind her and took the diary, placing it on Harold’s knees.
“We can use the light from my phone,” she offered, “if you want to read it.”
Harold swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
Sarah removed a cell phone from her pocket and opened it, using the face of the phone like a spotlight as she pointed it at the diary. Harold gently pried open the covers. The pages were fragile and yellow, but he could make out the words written in Arthur Conan Doyle’s broad hand.
Harold held the diary between them, and together they read.
CHAPTER 45
The Missing Diary of Arthur Conan Doyle
“Come, come, sir,” said Holmes, laughing. “You are like
my friend, Dr. Watson, who has a bad habit
of telling his stories wrong end foremost.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge”
December 8,1900
Arthur wrote it all down.
That’s what he did—he wrote things down. Writing was both his occupation and his calling. He was celebrated around the globe because was so very good at it. When he wrote, when he put events into words, into clear and tidy sentences, they were understood. Things made sense when Arthur wrote them down. And so, terrible as these events were, they demanded to be chronicled. They demanded to be wrought onto paper, to be sculpted from raw feeling into refined language. That’s what writers did, wasn’t it? They named that which needed naming, they enunciated that which had previously been unspoken.
The night of the deaths of Bobby and Melinda Stegler, Arthur stayed up till dawn, describing everything that had happened in as much detail as he could recall. When a particular moment escaped his memory, he embellished upon what he knew. He wrote the story as it existed for him. He did not glorify himself. He did not make it seem as if he were blameless, as if he bore no responsibility for the evening’s tragedy. He did, and he would not deny it. But nor would he gloss over the villainy of Bobby Stegler. That the boy had deserved to die was really beyond debate, and Arthur had to be sure to be clear on that point. It did not justify the tragedy of his sister. Nothing would. But then, in these weeks, in all this time since that bomb had exploded, no tragedy had ever been justified. None of the violence that had stained Arthur’s life had ever been explained. Death, murder—perhaps in the end they were never explainable. They simply were.
Arthur and Bram did not see each other again for a few days. Neither man, it seemed, wanted to talk about what had happened. They read the reports in the newspapers, and when no culprits were found— and no bobbies came knocking on either of their doors—they knew that it was over. They would never see Tobias Stegler again, and the burden of his children’s death would live with him and him alone. For that they were quite sorry. Arthur did wonder whether Janet Fry would call on him again—she knew the name Bobby Stegler. She must have been in his shop. If she saw the notice of his death in the papers, would she make the connection to the deaths of her friends? Or would she chalk it up to odd coincidence? She had been so convinced of the guilt of Millicent Fawcett, after all . . .
But as the days went by and Arthur heard nothing from her, he became satisfied that he wouldn’t. And so he was free. If Inspector Miller suspected anything, which he probably did—well, what would he do about it? Inspector Miller had, at least so he thought, helped Arthur cover up one murder already. He would do the same for another two. Was Inspector Miller at work, pulling strings to keep Arthur’s name in the clear? Or was Scotland Yard really incompetent enough not to be able to trace the murders back to Arthur’s doorstep? He would never know. He was free, whether through corruption, incompetence, or dumb luck.
On December 8, 1900 , Bram Stoker made his last visit to Undershaw, and to Arthur’s study. He came to talk. It was time for them to consult about what had occurred and to properly bid farewell to this period in their lives.
For two men of such intimacy, the meeting felt curiously formal. As Bram entered and Arthur put down his pen, he felt awkward for the first time in his friend’s company.
Silence followed.
“What are you writing?” asked Bram, after the strangest quiet in their friendship.
“It’s . . . Well, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” said Arthur, oddly embarrassed by the words on the page before him.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“It’s Holmes. I haven’t told a soul yet. You’re the first to hear. But it’s Holmes.”
Bram simply nodded, as if somehow he had expected as much.
“The other day,” Arthur continued, “I had an idea
. Have you been to Dartmoor? Those frightful heaths? They’re quite terrifying. I thought it would be a great setting for the old fool. I had this notion of a plot, after my friend Robinson described to me this story about a gigantic hound terrifying the countryside. Ha. Sherlock Holmes on the trail of a terrific hound . . . Well, maybe it’s too far-fetched. But perhaps it would be a good yarn, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Bram. He appeared content. “It would be an excellent yarn. And the world is short, nowadays, of good yarns.”
Arthur described the plot to Bram, and both men went over the pages. Bram was more than approving; he was ecstatic. He described the tale as a return to form—Arthur was delighted.
The conversation took an odd turn when Arthur told Bram about what else he had written.
“You’ve kept a diary of all . . .of all that happened?” asked Bram, stunned.
“I needed to put it all down. Oh, don’t give me that look, man! I’m no fool. It’s not for anyone to read. I won’t share it with a soul. But I needed at least to share it with my diary.” Arthur smiled then, his face turning wistful. “Perhaps one day when I pass into the next world, if someone finds the book and reads what happened . . . well then, what do I care if people know the truth? And what do you? Perhaps the truth deserves to go free at last, one day.”
“You cannot be serious, Arthur,” said Bram angrily. “Your reputation . . . your worth to generations . . . It’s not just your name you’re tearing down, don’t you see? It’s Holmes’s. This is about more than just you.”