The Formula for Murder (25 page)

Short of waving an American flag, or mentioning to the ticket seller that the police might be inquiring about us, I can’t think of anything to make the two of us more conspicuous.

When Wells slips over to tell a baggage handler that we will be sending over several pieces of luggage for our London trip, I spot a familiar-looking black coach waiting on the street. As with the carriage of the woman in black in Bath, it is an expensive town coach and has much the same lines, only this time the coat of arms on the door is visible though I can’t read it from the distance. I don’t see a passenger as the carriage pulls away.

“I just saw a black coach like the one I saw in Bath.” I tell Wells when he comes back from seeing the baggage man.

“Really…”

We next go to the telegraph office, where I send a cable to Mr. Cockerill, my editor in New York, advising him that I am catching the eight o’clock train from Exeter to London.

The message should puzzle my ever-suffering editor who constantly complains that I never keep him advised of anything. In this case, since he has no idea that I am in Exeter, or probably not even where Exeter is located, he will be more surprised than pleased that I advised him. I picture him rubbing his bald head as he tries to figure out what the heck I’m up to.

While at the telegraph office, I send a messenger lad to the train station to purchase a ticket for me south to Plymouth. Our destination is actually Buckfastleigh, a town about halfway to Plymouth, but since everything I am doing is to confuse and throw off a pursuit, I have only one ticket purchased in advance and for a destination twice as far as we will be going.

Wells and I will be going to the station to catch the Plymouth train, but separately, arriving from two different directions. Staying strictly away from me, he will purchase his ticket just before boarding the train.

Assuming that someone set out from Linleigh-on-the-moor at dawn’s early light to notify the police in Exeter of the artist’s death, Wells assures me that a small-town policeman would not immediately launch a search for us. “Things move very slowly outside of London and Liverpool. And also because we’re both a small country and an island, it isn’t as easy for criminals to hide. We’re safe for a while.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Besides I’m sure the Exeter police will want to investigate the matter first before making arrests based upon what a farmer or shopkeeper from Linleigh says. Based on that, I calculate that at the very minimum, it’ll be midday before the police get up to steam and wonder what has happened to us. And if I’m completely wrong, we’ll have a great deal of explaining to do.” Wells gives me a sheepish grin.

In other words, based upon his lack of practical experience with police and murder, he has absolutely no idea of how and when the police will react.

“Wonderful,” I tell him, “I just hope your calculations are correct.”

I remind him that while we have a backup plan to tell the police in case we are apprehended and questioned, we need to do it in a manner in which we won’t find ourselves unable to continue the pursuit.

“Oh what tangled webs we weave, when we plan to deceive.” Wells wearily smiles.

“I’m sure Shakespeare would approve of our continuing the pursuit at all costs.”

“Sir Walter Scott wrote the phrase.”

“Whatever, they are both dead, anyway.”

“I just hope,” Wells says as he opens a café door for me, “that we have a very imaginative police officer to listen to our story if we have to explain why we salted our train ride out of town with false information for the police to follow.”

I don’t point out to him that police consider flight in the face of a crime to be an admission of guilt.

“Well, I personally am quite pleased at our cleverness.” I smile at Wells after we order breakfast before going to the station.

“Me, too. Do you know that this is the first time I’ve been wanted by the police? How about you, Nellie?”

“Uh, basically…” I mumble with burnt toast stuck to the top of my mouth, hoping it muffles my response. I wonder what he would think of me being arrested by the Paris police and having to go into hiding for days from them, not to mention I started my New York reporting career by getting arrested as a madwoman and committed to an asylum.

*   *   *

W
ALKING BY MYSELF
to the train station as we planned, my thoughts go to last night—we both slept deeply from physical and nervous exhaustion, but I could have used more rest and I’m sure Wells could have, too. He was unable to find a comfortable position to relax on the stuffed chair and ended up curled like a cat on the floor, wrapped in a blanket.

While I had slept hard, I had a difficult time initially getting to sleep. Having a man I am attractive to romantically sleeping a few feet from me not only got my thoughts gurgling, but those urges women keep a firm rein on were heavy on my mind as I wondered what it would be like to make love to him.

I find myself drawn to him, perhaps more than any young man I have ever met. I tend to be attracted to older men, rather than young men like Wells. My mother claims it’s because I was so close emotionally to my father, who was over sixty-years-old when I was born and lost to our family when I was six.

Wells, I believe, is about my own age and in truth, as he implies himself, he is not the average woman’s idea of a heartthrob. He’s neither tall, athletically built, nor particularly handsome, though there is both personal warmth and intellectual intensity about him that I find attractive.

I sense a deep current of sensual sexuality within him, more passion than any other man in a casual relationship with me has conveyed. I feel he has caresses ready to be shared, passions on the verge of exploding.

Even though I was shocked at him saying that he believes a man and a woman have a right to sexually explore others outside the relationship, even if they are married, what he calls “free love,” it’s not my cup of tea. But I respect his openness and honesty about his own feelings—it’s refreshing. Most men lie or skirt around it.

I also am attracted to his analytical approach to so many things, especially how he thinks of women—as equals, a rare thought in our society. I know I poke fun about his book smarts, but I realize long term it has greater use and meaning than what my editor has described as my “street smarts.”

Inviting him into my bed crossed my mind not once but quite a few times, but I’m not prepared for the risk. As a modern young woman, I am aware of the facts of life, and that includes the various methods of contraception, besides the surest method of all—abstinence.

Being a woman, an unwanted pregnancy is the most dominant thought when it comes to sex. I am certain that Wells ranks the satisfaction of his passions as of primary importance rather than a woman’s pregnancy since it is almost impossible to prove who the father of a child is.

There is a rather awkward but reasonably safe method of contraception—Mr. Goodyear’s rubbers. These are tubes made of rubber that a man can buy and are usually only purchased by married men. Kept in a small box, the rubbers are washed after use, coated with a petroleum jelly, and then stored away for the next time coitus is had. From what I’ve overheard from the boys in the newsroom, one of these vulcanized rubber objects can last a number of years.

Suffrage leaders have spoken out against the use of rubbers and have lobbied lawmakers to make their purchase difficult because they believe the use of the contraceptive gives married men free rein to cheat on their wives without fear of consequences.

Single men rarely use them, except a smart few to avoid syphilis when having sex with a prostitute.

The other methods available—withdrawal by the male, calculating one’s fertile period to avoid it, douching, and vaginal sponges soaked in vinegar, are all risky, with most of their “success” based upon wishful thinking by women. I’ve also been told by some women that they’ve successfully used “womb veils”—a penny inserted inside a woman’s private part.

While doing a story on prostitution, I was told by a prostitute that she clamps the man’s penis between her thighs, leaving him with the impression that he is having vaginal intercourse. She claimed that men she had sex with rarely realized they were not actually entering her.

However you cut it, the techniques are highly risky and most of them would take the pleasure out of lovemaking.

With the train station in sight, and the possibility of policemen waiting for us, I put away my girlish thoughts about sex and worry about being arrested for murder.

PART III

Dartmoor

43

Buckfastleigh, Devonshire

Conan Doyle mulled over the telegram he received from Oscar Wilde. An American reporter famous for her stunt reporting, including a race around the world to beat a record that existed only on paper, and a young science teacher were on their way to consult him.

The Scottish author was a medical doctor, but from the context of the telegram he already knew the visit was not to be about their health but a mystery that featured black beasts and the death of the woman’s friend.

Rereading the telegram, he chuckled over Oscar’s description of the situation in which Oscar described the purpose of the visit as work on a novel. Clever of him to make it a work of fiction, Conan Doyle thought, since telegrams pass through a number of hands as they make their way from sender to receiver.

Oscar had an amazing mind, a clever wit, and a tongue that could lay bare the worst hypocrisies; the thing he lacked most besides respectability was modesty. An incredible persona that could leave people awed, he often spoke in hyperboles. Understatements were not his strong point, that was for sure. Nor was keeping a low profile, a fact which made him a target for gossip and personality assassination.

Doyle hoped that the two visitors had simply come for information about the legend of the black beast, the great hound that is said to be the evil reincarnation of an evil man who lost his soul to the devil.

The other possibility was that they had come seeking help solving a mystery. That was a problem he faced since his fictional detective caught the interest of a reading audience.

When he is asked to step into the shoes of his fictional detective, and such requests have ranged from a police inspector investigating a crime to a businessman plagued by theft, he explains that while Sherlock Holmes may sound like he is unraveling a complex problem, Holmes in fact knows all the facts and the solution from the very beginning. “Because I don’t scribble out the story until I have all the puzzling facts and clever answers already jotted down,” he tells them, deflating the notion that he could stand in the shoes of his detective and solve a mystery.

People were generally disappointed, Doyle thought, when they found out that he was himself neither a master detective nor was his protagonist as spontaneous as they imagined. Some people even believed that there was an actual detective that he based the stories upon and he had, in fact, borrowed the traits of a living person when he constructed his fictional detective.

Dissatisfied with his medical practice, which proved a constant struggle to make a living at and which over a few short years moved him from one city to another in a quest to build a profitable practice, he finally set out to write.

Storytelling was in his blood. His father had been a great teller of tales to him as a child, and Doyle had gone from listening to tales to becoming a voracious reader of them. Reading tales of honor and adventure had filled the gaps in his own life, permitting him to experience at least vicariously what few men had experienced in real life.

Finding his historical writing attracted neither publishers nor readers, he had turned to writing a mystery novel featuring a detective. Stories featuring a detective had been done before and he particularly admired one created by Edgar Allan Poe in what was considered the first story featuring a private detective, or as Doyle preferred to think of him, a consulting detective.

Poe’s tale,
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
, featured C. Auguste Dupin as a detective smarter than the police in solving a crime that seemed completely impossible to have been committed. But solve it Dupin did, even though the solution was rather bizarre, because as Conan Doyle has his own detective observe, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Conan Doyle also admired the thought processes of a French police officer, Monsieur Lecoq, created by author Émile Gaboriau, and the way Lecoq didn’t just collect information about a crime but used reasoning and what little “forensic science” was available to solve offenses.

He paid homage to the American and French writers who he drew upon to create his own detective by having Sherlock Holmes claim he was a better detective than either of them.

After several not very successful ventures in storytelling, he knew that to succeed, to catch the eye of a publisher and the loyalty of readers he had to come up with something different. As a person trained in the art of medical science, he knew that doctors approached diagnosing an illness not unlike an investigator’s approach to solving a crime. His professor at the university, Joseph Bell, had drilled into his students that a successful diagnosis was the recognition in the symptoms of the minor differences—those differences leading the doctor to eliminate causes in order to arrive at the one that most fits the symptoms.