The Sherlockian (12 page)

“Ever seen a symbol like that before? Something from the hooligans down by the docks?”

“No, no, I can’t say that I have. It was a funny shape, though. Right down on her leg, by her ankle.”

“Was anything else found in the room? Anything to indicate who this poor woman was?”

“Not a whit. Just a pretty white dress and a dead, naked molly.”

Arthur and Bram spent the next few minutes trying to jog the man’s memory for any other clues as to the woman’s identity but found no success. Arthur then led Bram on a hands-and-knees inspection of the floor, to which Bram begrudgingly acquiesced, though he spent the entire search complaining about the layer of dirt that was being applied to his trousers in the process. The owner of the house produced his guest book, in which they found the signature of “Morgan Nemain”— tall letters, pressed deeply into the page with a wide, heavy stroke. While Holmes was an expert in handwriting analysis, able to discern the most telling clues as to a person’s identity from his or her signature, Arthur was not thus skilled. He closed the book silently, resigned to its secrets.

Finally, and with heavy feet, Arthur and Bram left the boardinghouse. Arthur in particular rejoined the frantic thoroughfares of Stepney in a sour mood. This had not gone as planned.

“Well, are you all done now?” asked Bram. He was waiting for an opportune moment to tell Arthur that they were headed in the wrong direction. “Have you had your fill?”

“I won’t pretend that the day has gone as I had hoped,” said Arthur. “Indeed, this puzzle seems ever darker. My Sherlock had his data with which to work. And what do we have? A dress. An eyewitness who only saw the murderer from behind. A nameless woman of the evening. There must be tens of thousands of them on this block alone. I say this is a mite outside the realm of Sherlock’s adventures.”

Bram thought for a long moment and then made a very fateful decision.

“Arthur, I don’t like that you’re doing this, and for my own part I would very much like simply to return to my theater in peace, inasmuch as the theater can ever be described as being ‘at peace.’ I believe that you’re jiggling the lid of Pandora’s box and that once you become involved, you have nary a notion of what might pop out. Look at where you are right now. This is not a place for you. You’re too good a man, Arthur. Others of us . . .” Bram paused for a long moment. “Well, not everyone is so good a man as you.”

“Thank you,” said Arthur, regarding Bram fondly. “But, though I don’t yet see the way forward, I am too committed to turn back now.”

“Very well,” said Bram. “In that case I have precisely two things I need to tell you. In two distinct ways you’re headed in the wrong direction. First, literally, we are walking north, and Blackwell Station is behind us.” Arthur looked up for confirmation of this, and, finding none, he nodded before turning about and walking back the way he’d come.

“Second,” continued Bram as he turned and walked beside Arthur, “the dead girl was not a prostitute.”

At this, Arthur stopped abruptly.

“Whatever do you mean? She was found in that house, with a man—”

“Balderdash,” said Bram. “What East End prostitute owns a clean white wedding dress? Which of them owns a clean dress of any kind? It’s grim work, and not the sort that tends to induce sartorial cleanliness. That horrible little man we were speaking to said that she burst into his boardinghouse, face bright with smiles, and then paid her nightly rent up front. The gentleman followed a few minutes later. If she were whoring, pardon my language, she would have paid the rent with
his
money. Now, tell me, what sort of prostitute takes her gent’s money in advance and goes blithely into their flophouse to pay for their hours together? If she were on the clock, so to speak, I tell you she’d have stolen the money and snuck away as soon as the man took his eyes off her.”

Arthur thought about this deeply. If the dead girl was not a prostitute

“If not . . . Well, if not that, what was she, then?” asked Arthur.

“I can’t say for sure,” said Bram. “I don’t possess the deductive faculties of which you’ve written so eloquently. But I can’t understand why no one seems to think of the obvious.”

“The obvious?”

“Yes. That she was exactly who she said she was. A bride.”

“If she was a bride,” said Arthur, putting it all together in his head, “then he was . . .”

“Yes,” said Bram, leading him through the York Street square, ensuring that Arthur, adrift in his head, wasn’t hit by a passing hansom. “Then the murderer was the man who’d married her.”

C
HAPTER 14

Jennifer Peters in Mourning

“London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers

and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

A Study in Scarlet

January 9, 2010

In the chilled belly of a British Airways 767, Harold attempted to find out a little more about Sarah. He was not immediately successful.

“Been to London before?” he asked as they settled into their leather seats.

She was silent for a moment before her face brightened into a wry smile.

“Why don’t you tell me?” she replied.

Harold was confused. “What?”

“Isn’t that one of those things that’s in all the Holmes stories? He looks at strangers and can tell everything about their life from the way that they look? The specks of dirt on their shoes, or the calluses on their hands, that kind of thing.”

“So you’ve read the Holmes stories?” asked Harold.

“Bravo! Your first deduction turns out to be correct.”

He could never quite tell whether Sarah was flirting with him or teasing him.

“Only a handful, though,” she added. “As prep for my voyage among the Sherlockians. So. Tell me something else about myself.”

Harold looked down at her stiletto boots, her dark jeans, her plaid flannel shirt with the upturned collar. He got the impression that she was dressed stylishly, but he couldn’t quite say why.

She was right, obviously. Holmes performed these little tricks in practically every story. A new client would enter his drawing room and within moments Holmes would have the gentleman or lady completely sized up. In
The Sign of the Four,
Holmes was able to tell the entire life story of Watson’s brother after examining the man’s pocket watch alone.

The trick was harder than Harold had imagined. His concentration fixed first on Sarah’s clothes, but they didn’t tell him much. They didn’t look cheap, but they didn’t look fantastically expensive either. Her nails were long and uneven, the bright red polish chipped off almost entirely.

“Holmes had an advantage,” said Harold.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“He lived in Victorian England. He came from a society so class-stratified that you could tell where people grew up within a few miles by their accent. The word ‘Cockney’ originally meant someone who lived within hearing distance of the bells at St. Mary-le-Bow. Your shirt cuffs were your destiny. Holmes was able to tell so much about a man’s walking stick—in, say,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
—because gentlemen carried walking sticks. There are no more rules nowadays. You have a million options of clothing and style to choose from. If your clothes look expensive, they could still be from a secondhand store. I live in L.A., where the basic code seems to be the more casual you look, the more money you have. We’re both Americans, so outside of a few very specific regions, accents tend to move around. Especially among people who actually do move around. You’re a reporter—how many different cities have you lived in? Four? Six? You could have been born in any one of them.”

“Excuses, excuses,” said Sarah. “You’re not the only Sherlockian who’s off chasing Cale’s killer right now. But you’re the one I bet on. You don’t want me to think I’ve put my money on the wrong horse, do you?”

“You haven’t.”

“Good. So, have I been to London before or not?”

Harold paused. A flight attendant deposited plastic champagne flutes on each of their tray tables.

Harold believed in Sherlock Holmes. He knew the stories weren’t “real,” of course—he didn’t believe in Holmes like that. But he believed in what the stories represented. He believed in rationality, in the precise science of deduction. Sherlock Holmes could do this. And so could Harold.

He examined her. Bright blue eyes. Thin nose. Two hoop earrings hanging from her earlobes. Curly brown hair held up in a ponytail, a few loose strands dangling down. Something behind her ear. He leaned in closer, over the gap between the first-class seats. There was a small tattoo behind her left earlobe.

“Yes,” said Harold. “You’ve been to London before.”

Sarah smiled. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. But it was a reasonable guess. You have a small mark on your nose, where a piercing used to be. And there’s a tiny tattoo of a musical note behind your left ear. Who gets musical-note tattoos? Musicians, obviously. So you were a musician at one point. I’m going with rock band, because you don’t take care of your fingers like a classical musician would, and you used to have a stud in your nose. Bass player? You were dedicated, or else you wouldn’t have gotten the tattoo. But then you quit and became a reporter. You’re freelance, which means that either you’re semifamous or you don’t make that much money. I don’t think you’re famous, or I would have heard of you. So you didn’t quit music because you needed the money, and you didn’t become a reporter for that reason either. So I don’t think you’ve ever been strapped for cash. You were a rich kid, or at least a relatively welloff one, pursuing a crazy dream to piss off your parents. Between your childhood, with parents who could have taken you on European vacations if they wanted to, and your time in your band, which must have toured if you were that committed, it stands to reason that you would have been through London at one point or another.”

Sarah beamed at him, and then pressed her hands together in a playful golf clap.

“Accordion,” she said. “Not bass. I played accordion in a punk band.”

“Your punk band had an accordion player?”

“It was pretty cool. But we never made it out of the East Coast. I grew up near Berkeley, and my parents were ‘comfortable,’ as they’d put it. They took me to Europe three times when I was a kid. Paris, Madrid, and a week in Italy, traveling from Rome to Cinque Terre by way of Florence. But we never went to London.”

“But you said you’d been,” said Harold.

“Yes,” said Sarah. “I have an ex who’s British. Born in London. We met in New York, but we went back to visit his family a few times.”

She raised her champagne flute and clinked it against Harold’s.

“Cheers,” she said before taking a long gulp. “I think you did great for your first time.”

Alex Cale’s sister was crying when they arrived. And judging from the pork-pink bags around her eyes, it looked as though she had been for some time.

Though a few years younger than her brother, Jennifer Peters looked much older when she answered the door to her spacious flat in London Fields, on the third ring, and allowed Harold and Sarah inside. Her short hair looked both shiny and frayed, and as they talked, she kept brushing the ends of her severe bob behind her ears. She wore jeans, a low-necked sweater, and thick red socks—no shoes. She would have appeared Sunday-morning comfortable had she not been so clearly miserable.

Her husband was not in the flat with her, and Harold didn’t inquire as to his whereabouts. The couple had no children and spent much of the year abroad. She had arrived in London only the day before, to attend to the disposal of Alex’s possessions, to recover his body, and see it interred at Highgate Cemetery, where some generations of their family had been laid to rest. Jennifer was her brother’s sole next of kin.

When the three of them sat down, Harold and Sarah on the hard couch and Jennifer on a wide, white plush chair, Harold felt grief lying sickly in the room like mildew. The couch felt sticky and wet.

And Harold felt like a tremendous ass. At least he’d had the good sense to leave the deerstalker cap at the hotel, with all of his bags. (Actually, he did so less because of his good sense and more because of Sarah’s gentle urging, but still, he thought he deserved credit for the decision.) He couldn’t help feeling like a grave robber as he forced Alex’s sister to talk about her dead brother, just when she had to deal head-on with the sensation that she had so very little family left.

“When was the last time you spoke to your brother, before his death?” Harold asked.

“I’m sorry, why are you here, again?” Jennifer responded plaintively.

“He was a good friend.” Harold swallowed, embarrassed at the exaggeration. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to him.”

Jennifer turned to Sarah, then away from them both. She looked puzzled, not at the complexity of the problem but at its simplicity. Her brother had died. That was “what happened to him.”

“Harold traveled in the same circles as your brother,” said Sarah. “We think he might have some insight into who did this that’s not available to the police.”

“You’re a detective?” asked Jennifer of Harold.