The Sherlockian (11 page)

Bram did not appear convinced.

“Someone blew apart my writing desk. My family was in the house. My well-being aside, that of my family’s ought to concern you.”

Bram sighed. “Arthur, what am
I
doing here?”

Arthur stopped. “I need your help.”

“My Lord. You want me to be your Watson, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You think that because you squirted life into Holmes from the tip of your pen, you might become him yourself. So you need a Watson, and for some reason known only to yourself, you’ve chosen me. Why not Barrie or, better yet, Shaw? I’m certain
he
has nothing else to do.”

“That’s quite a deduction. Perhaps you’re the one who fancies himself a detective.”

“Very well, if you’re to act like that, then yes, let’s speak plainly,” said Bram. “Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn’t need him to solve the crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The
audience,
Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes’s thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told the stories from Holmes’s perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They’d have their culprit fingered on page one. But if you tell the stories from Watson’s perspective, the reader is permitted to chase in the darkness with the bumbling oaf. Watson is a comic flourish. He’s a gag. A good one, all right, I’ll give you that, but I hardly see how you’ll be needing one of him.”

Arthur addressed his friend as if he were forced to explain for the hundredth time why the sky shone blue. “Look here,” he began, “I’m trying to put this with all the respect you’re due. I’m not well versed in this—yes, you understand—this
neighborhood,
you see? And I’m no gossiping crone, of course. But, let us speak frankly. I’ve come to understand that you’ve spent some time in this neck of the woods, and you might have some experience with the local inhabitants that might prove useful in our investigations. Very good?”

Bram was offended by Arthur’s implication.

“You do me wrong, my old friend. I don’t believe I can stand here and take your insinuations lightly. You know very well what sort of women call this place home, and what a gentleman like you or me would be looking for if we were to come down this way. I’ll have you know that your words are most unkind.”

Arthur stared Bram dead in the eyes for a moment. He looked up at the surrounding buildings, finding nothing to provide directions save the advertisements for Duke of Wellington Cigars and Grover’s Lime Juice. He looked down at the address he’d printed neatly on a scrap of writing paper and scrunched his face in befuddlement.

“My deepest apologies. I had no intention of giving offense. I most certainly did not mean to imply that you were the sort of fellow who sought comfort in this wretched, ungodly place. Blast it, I’m properly lost. Is this Salmon Street?”

“No,” said Bram without pausing to think. “Salmon is the next right up that way. You’ve wandered onto—” Bram stopped himself, realizing his accidental admission. “Yes, give me a moment. I don’t know this area.” He made a great show of looking around for street signs as well, and of being surprised to find none.

“Pardon me, ma’am?” said Bram to a passing young woman in a black dress. “Might you know the way to Salmon Street?”

The woman stopped, quickly looked Bram up and down, and smiled flirtatiously. Her cheeks were brighter, as she grinned, than the copper buttons on her dress.

“I do, sir,” she said. “Might you be looking to take a trip to Hairyfordshire?”

Arthur looked genuinely confused; what in the world was she talking about?

“I’m very sorry, ma’am, you’ve misunderstood me,” said Bram in a hurry. “We’re just looking for Salmon Street. Is it that way?” He pointed up ahead, in the direction he had already suggested.

Now it was the young woman’s turn to look confused.

“Why, yes,” she said. “It’s just up there, take a right.”

“Thank you most kindly,” said Bram as he turned to walk in that direction.

“But I do think,” said the lady, “that if two right gentlemen such as yourselves are looking to take a trip elsewhere, perhaps somewhere more soothing, threepence apiece might pay your fare.”

Arthur figured out what she was driving at. He was shocked by the woman’s bluntness.

“Good day, madam,” he said simply, and walked away in the direction she, and Bram, had indicated. As Bram trotted behind Arthur, he turned back to the confused young woman and offered her a look of apology for his rude and simple companion. She shrugged and continued on her way.

A few minutes later, Arthur had found the address and rapped at the small door. Begrudgingly, Bram stood at his side, shifting his weight tediously from foot to foot.

Arthur knocked on the door once again, this time banging with the flat, pinkie side of his coiled fist. Paint peeling from its edges, the door creaked open, and a squat, angry man appeared behind it.

“And who all are you lot supposed to be, then?” he barked. He wore britches, and a dull gray vest open over his work shirt. His hair, slicked to the back of his head, receded aggressively from his brow, as if running flat out for the nape of his neck.

“Good sir, we are here investigating the case of the poor girl who was murdered two weeks past in your boardinghouse.”

“You don’t look like bobbies,” he said.

“No, we’re not. We’re—”

The man quickly shut the door in Arthur’s face. Arthur was stunned.

“Sir!” he yelled inside after a moment had passed. “Sir, if you’ll open the door again, I give you my word that we won’t take up too much of your time. We’d just like to see your rooms for a moment. To get a look at the crime scene, if we might. We—”

“This is Arthur Conan Doyle!” shouted Bram at the stolid door. Arthur turned to his friend, surprised to hear his voice.

“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” Arthur said.

But before he could continue, the door opened halfway and the angry man popped his head out into the street.

“You’re Arthur Conan Doyle?” he said to Bram.

“No,” Bram replied. “I’m . . .well, I’m nobody. This”—and here he gestured at Arthur—“this is Arthur Conan Doyle.”

The man gave Arthur a long once-over.

“Yes,” he said when he’d finished. “That looks like you. I’ve seen your pictures in the paper, awhile back. You sitting at your writing desk, bent over with pen and paper, looking like a grubby queer.”

Focused on the task at hand, Arthur did his best to conceal his annoyance.

“Sir, might we come in and take a look around the room where this girl stayed?” he said.

The little man opened the door a bit farther. “A spiffy gent like yourself, I don’t see why not,” he said. He turned away, pushing the door open wide behind him as indication for Arthur and Bram to follow. They did, taking care as they stepped in to avoid tripping on the raised door sill. They entered a small kitchen area and felt a slight warmth emanating from the stove on the far side of the room.

“Are you working on a new story?” said the man as he led his guests through the kitchen and up a back staircase.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “I suppose you might put it like that.”

The man’s face sparkled with excitement. “So you’re going to do it, then, eh? Bring him back to life?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Sherlock Holmes!” exclaimed the man as he turned at the top of the staircase to look downward at Arthur, circled in a halo of light from windows on the higher floor. “It’s about time, you ask me. He was always good for a snort, you know, to get a workingman through the day. I miss him like he were family.” The man laughed to himself. “More than my own family, right, if I do say so.”

In silence, Bram followed Arthur up onto the second floor. They could hear noises—muffled but close—from behind some of the locked bedroom doors.

“How many people do you typically have staying here?” asked Arthur, desperate for a change in subject.

“Oh, that depends,” said the man. “I’ve got ten or so regulars who lay their heads here every night, and then another five or ten who come and go as the whim pleases them. You’d be surprised, but it’s the regulars who give me more trouble. Think they can get a day behind in their rents and I won’t notice, or I’ll give them credit for another night. They get right indignant when I refuse. The comers and the goers, though, they know damn well they’ve to pay in advance. Threepence a night, and none of that Jew haggling neither.”

“Which sort was the dead woman?” asked Arthur.

“Neither, really,” said the man. “She only come that one night. With a gentleman, so I gathered, but I never got much look at him.”

“Why was that?”

“She come in first, asking if I had a room for the night for her and her husband. ‘Husband,’ she says! If I had a shiny copper for every ‘husband’ jerked out his dirty peter in these—”

“But you never saw his face?” interrupted Arthur, trying to learn as little of the sordid details of the man’s business as he was able.

“No, sir. Like I says, she come in first, in that pretty white dress, pocketful of coins, talking about a husband. She’s giddy, you know, talking all quick, got a blush in her face. Like my own girl on Easter, knows she’s got a fresh sweet orange waiting for her from Mum and Pop when she comes down the stairs. This girl is chock-full of grins. Tells me her name is Morgan Nemain, writes it down in my book and—”

“Might I take a look at that book?” interrupted Arthur.

“Surely, I’ll fetch it from downstairs on your way out,” said the man.

“Pray continue.”

“I show her to the room,” the man went on, “and she says a gentleman’ll be along shortly. I tend to my affairs, and a few minutes later I’m in Hattie Stark’s room, explaining to her why the slavey girl hasn’t done her wash yet. She’s putting up a fuss, saying she needs her wash, and I’m trying to explain that if she doesn’t have it out in the morning before ten o’clock, the slavey can’t get to it till the next day.” Arthur looked down the hall at the row of locked bedchambers. The room in question was at the far end.

“We’re going back and forth, like Hattie will do, when I hear a knock on the front door and a voice calling out to get let in. Thought it was a woman’s voice at first, to be honest, it was so high and squeaky, but then the ‘bride,’ she says that’s her husband and she’ll let him in.

“She seems like a good enough sort, so I let her do it. And I hear her and the gent laughing, coming up the stairs. I poke my head out of Hattie’s room to make sure it’s just the two of them—three or more people to a room is extra, you know—and I see her leading a tall fellow into the bedroom. I just see him from behind. Black evening cloak, top hat. Walked like a fine sort. Then I’m back to Hattie and her hollering. Told the detectives from the Yard as much.”

Arthur and Bram followed the man into the cramped bedroom. A well-made bed sat in the right corner, low to the floor. A pitcher of water rested on top of a bedside table. A stained bathtub that might one day, long ago, have shone bright white was in the left corner.

There were no bloodstains anywhere. There was no visible echo of the horrible killing that had happened just two weeks before. And yet, standing there, conscious of all that had happened and of the great mystery before him, Arthur shivered. The air seemed to reverberate with a distant death, like far-off explosions from the war in the Transvaal.

“What’s your story about?” asked the man as Arthur and Bram surveyed the scene of the murder.

“My story?” said Arthur.

“The one you said you’re writing! Is Holmes after another thief? Or is it a murder story? I like the murders the best, if you care for my opinion.”

“I can’t tell you,” said Arthur. “It would ruin the surprise.”

The man laughed, slapping at his thigh. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“You know what I like to do, when I read your stories?” he asked. “I like to try to guess the endings early. To figure out who’s done it before Mr. Holmes has.”

“And do you manage it?” asked Bram, joining the conversation. “Can you outsmart Sherlock Holmes?”

“Haven’t done it yet,” said the boardinghouse proprietor. “But I have an idea, you know. For how you could bring him back to life.”

“And what’s that?”

“You don’t need a wizard or nothing,” the man said. “How’s about maybe Mr. Holmes didn’t die at all? Maybe he didn’t fall off that ledge into the Reichenbach Falls—what if he faked it? To fool Moriarty, like? And then he’s been in hiding, off on adventures all around the globe. You bring him back home to London for a triumphant return. That’s the way, I’ll tell you. There’s no one wants to think of Holmes as being dead. Sits ill in the stomach.”

“Is that so?” asked Bram, amused by the man’s ramblings.

“Honor bright. You swells, you get so accustomed to your writing you forget to think of how your readers will feel about it. We don’t want to see Holmes dead, no matter how good is the battle that does him in. We want Mr. Holmes to live forever.”

“How about that, Arthur?” said Bram, needling his friend. “How about pushing aside the rock and resurrecting the divine Sherlock Holmes?”

“Do all your rooms have baths in them?” asked Arthur of the boardinghouse owner. “It seems like a fine feature.”

“No, no. Just this one,” said the man. “This was a powder room years back, when the place was built. Now I rent it out for extra. For a higher class of customers, you understand.”

Arthur walked to the bathtub and ran his forefinger along its smooth rim. It felt thoroughly cold, like a windowpane on a snowy day.

“They found her body here?” he said.

“
I
found her body here, myself. She was laying right in the tub, naked as a baby. Her neck was blue and purple, her eyes all bursting out of her head. Like someone grabbed tight around her tiny throat and squeezed till she was going to pop. The dress was set out on the bed, like it were laid out for somebody to put on.”

“Did you notice the tattoo? On her leg? Shape of a crow, black, with three heads?”

“I saw it, yes, sir.”