The Sherlockian (13 page)

“No. Not exactly.”

“What
do
you do, then, exactly?”

“I’m a reader.”

“What does that mean?”

“I read books . . . well, I’ve
read
a lot of books, past tense, I suppose that’s more accurate. See, I’m freelance, I work for the legal departments of most of the major studios, and when someone sues one of them for copyright infringement, I help prepare the defense on the grounds—”

“You’re one of Alex’s Sherlockian friends?”

“Yes.”

She faced Sarah. “And you’re a reporter?”

“Yes.”

Jennifer sighed and crossed her legs, picking lint specks from her red socks. “I hadn’t spoken to my brother for a month or so. We weren’t . . . Well, that’s not true. We were close in our own way.”

“What did you talk about? Did anything seem out of the ordinary?” said Harold.

“Something was always out of the ordinary with Alex. The Great Game was always on, he was always after some relic or precious document or what-have-you. He was always
this
close, ever the last few inches, from finishing his biography. On that day, if I remember, he said that he had been followed ever since he’d found the diary. I thought he was being characteristically overdramatic.”

“Who was following him? What did he say about him—or her?”

“Oh, who the bloody hell knows? It’s not like this was the first time Alex thought some mysterious stranger had it in for him. Once, when he was at university, he rang Father in a fit because two rival students were conspiring against him to steal his thesis. It was silly, of course. They weren’t doing anything of the sort.”

“If he wasn’t being followed, then who do you think killed him?” said Harold, surprised at his own boldness.

“Don’t you think it’s obvious?” said Jennifer. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“What do you mean?”

“One of you lot killed him. You’re a herd of jealous children. He had a candy bar, and you all lusted after it. ‘Give me, give me.’” She uncrossed her legs, pressing her feet into the floor and leaning forward, hands on her knees. “Which one of your friends do you think it was?”

Harold thought of Ron Rosenberg. Jeffrey Engels. A dozen others. A suspicious chill danced up Harold’s spine, but he squelched it with a wiggle in his seat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Yet.”

Sarah piped up. “Think about your last conversation with your brother. Did he have any details on the man he thought was following him?”

Jennifer Peters thought for a moment. “No,” she said.

“We’d like to look at his apartment, if that’s all right with you,” said Sarah.

“Oh, very well, I suppose. What harm could it do?” said Jennifer after a moment of reflection. “I’ll take you now. Let me find some shoes.”

Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren’t brothers. Plot points didn’t leave behind grieving sisters who couldn’t find their shoes.

“You know, your brother,” he began after a few moments, “he was a legend in our organization. And that he finally discovered the lost diary? I don’t know if it’s much consolation to you, but he achieved his dream. He found what he’d been looking for. He was happy, before he passed.”

Jennifer laughed to herself and shook her head.

“Happy?” she said, trying the word out on her lips, listening to its sound. “Do you think people are happy when they finally get the things they’ve been after?” She absentmindedly fiddled with the wedding ring on her left hand.

“He wasn’t, really,” she continued. “I remember the day he called to tell me that he’d found the diary. His voice was so quiet I could barely hear what he was saying over the phone. He seemed very distant, very formal. I offered a glass of champagne, said I’d take him out to celebrate, he deserved it. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said.” Jennifer deepened her voice, mimicking her dead brother. “ ‘That won’t be necessary.’ Who says that? To his sis?”

Jennifer emerged from a back closet with a pair of comfortable walking shoes and a heavy winter coat. As she covered herself up, the fringe of mink at the top of the coat brushed against her earlobes.

“Did he ever tell you where he’d found it?” asked Harold. He’d been waiting for the right moment to ask this question. There wasn’t one, he now realized.

“He never told me,” replied Jennifer.

“You asked him about it?”

“I asked him a dozen times. ‘Alex, you’ve been on the bloody hunt for ten years and you won’t tell me where it took you?’ Nothing. I pieced together that he’d been in Cambridge for a week, not sure why. He did most of his research at the British Library, which has excellent Victorian and Edwardian collections. Do you know, he never even told me that he was particularly close, closer than any of the other times he thought he was onto the damned thing. He just rings one day to say, ‘Oh, Jennifer, I’ve found the diary. It’s quite fascinating. I’m going to complete the biography and unveil the whole lot at this year’s convention.’ He sounded mournful—as if someone he’d known had just died. Like he was about to type up the last rites.” She frowned, stopping herself from continuing.

“You don’t think finding the diary gave him peace, just a little?” asked Sarah. “It was the culmination of his life’s work.”

“I think that whatever he found in there made him miserable from the second he laid eyes on it till the day he died. Till the day the diary killed him!” Jennifer said. “I think that finding Conan Doyle’s diary was the worst thing that ever happened to my brother. What do you think it’s going to do for you?”

C
HAPTER 15

The Allegations of Love

“At the same time you must admit that the occasion of a lady’s

marriage is a very suitable time for her friends and

relatives to make some little effort upon her behalf.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”

October 21,1900, cont.

The tallest spire of Westminster Abbey pierced into the pale yellow orb of the setting sun as Arthur left Waterloo Station. Late-afternoon traffic flowed across Westminster Bridge like a gushing stream— like the dread Reichenbach itself, pouring pedestrians and clattering broughams east into the dense city center. Big Ben announced five and twenty.

Somewhere in this city hid the murderous husband of “Morgan Nemain,” and Arthur was going to find him. His first stop was the vicar-general’s office, which issued more than two thousand marriage licenses on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury every year. Typically, couples were married by their local diocese, but if the man and woman came from different parishes, then by law only the archbishop of Canterbury had the authority to legalize their union. This in turn meant that if someone was looking to get married clandestinely, the vicar-general’s building near Waterloo was the place to do it. It was an open secret, and a rather public irony, that the most ungodly marriages in society were granted by the church’s most senior office.

Marriage records were eventually sent to the library for safekeeping, but if the dead girl had wedded just weeks earlier, there was a great chance that Arthur might find a copy of her license still at the vicargeneral’s.

Arthur and Bram had worked all this out on the train back in from Blackwall, before Bram had begged off the hunt and returned to his Lyceum, to manage his theater and his actors. He had to round up that godforsaken live horse for
Don Quixote.
Egos required tending.

On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefolk and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London’s public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dim evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle shell of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleansing glare of the twentieth century.

As Arthur hailed a noisy hansom, he averted his gaze from the New Scotland Yard just across the Thames. Curse them.

The coach led Arthur to Kensington, then turned the sharp right onto Lambeth Road. The Lambeth Palace lay squat and blocky ahead of them, its medieval crenellations anachronistically militaristic in the unfortified modern city. To Arthur, the palace resembled a stout and angry Irishman, ready to pick a fight with the pavilions of St. Thomas’s Hospital to the north. And beside it lay the office of the vicar-general.

The grand entrance to the church office was a series of openings shaped like upside-down V’s, each a few inches smaller than the preceding one. It felt, to Arthur, like entering into a dark tunnel.

Though not a proper church, the building retained that sense of quiet and majestic stillness with which Arthur had always associated both the Catholic and the Anglican houses. He held suspicions toward the church—indeed, any church—and yet he had to admit that he did love churches. Arthur admired anything that connected him with antiquity, that made him feel like a part of the Britain that stretched back over the millennia. He believed in his people and the ideals of their civilization more than he believed in their God. He had more love for the Saxon than for the Anglican.

Arthur was faintly embarrassed by the loud
clomps
his boots made on the floor as the sound reverberated through the long hallways. Robed friars with thick bellies walked past him and yet didn’t seem to make nearly so much noise as they moved.

The friar who attended the marriage desk looked young enough to be Arthur’s son. His robes were a muddy brown, and his face appeared open and completely unwrinkled, as if the boy were without a trouble in the world. As he looked Arthur straight in the eye, he did not blink or flick his eyes elsewhere in politeness. He simply stared directly at Arthur, holding his position with the certainty and clear head of the resolutely devout.

“Good day, sir,” began Arthur. “I was hoping I might trouble you for a look into your marriage records.”

“Is it your daughter?” said the youthful friar pluckily.

“Pardon me?”

“Your daughter. Don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that you’re married yourself.” The friar smiled and directed his gaze down to Arthur’s gold wedding band. “Most fellows like yourself—older gentlemen, a few specks of salt in the hair—come in here, they’re chasing after a lost daughter. I’m not supposed to let just anyone go digging about in the files, but I tend to make an exception for a kind-looking sort who’s after his darling girl. You’d be surprised at how many come in.”

Arthur thought about this, and decided quite rationally that lying was by far the best approach to take.

“Yes. My daughter,” he said. “She’s gone missing. I fear she’s run off with her beau, a dastardly fright of a man. Nemain—that’s my name. Archibald Nemain. My dear girl is Morgan. Might I give a quick once-over to your records book, to see if she’s come through here to be married?”

“I feared as much,” said the friar knowingly. “Please follow me. We keep the allegations back here.”

The young man led Arthur behind his desk, into a small antechamber of the marriage office. The room was quite cloistered, walled in by massive gray stones. Arthur felt as if they pressed in on him from all sides. He thought of Poe, the sweet horror of “The Cask of Amontillado.”

The room’s only furniture was a massive wooden chest, pocked with two dozen small sliding drawers. Whatever the chest’s original function, it had been at some point more recently converted into a storage space for alphabetically organized wedding allegations—the legal documents that spelled out formally a couple’s intention to marry.

As Arthur surveyed the task before him, the murmurings of a young man and woman came from the direction of the friar’s desk. He left Arthur alone while he went to attend to their certification.

For the better part of an hour, Arthur sifted through the drawers of allegations. At first his hunt was underscored by the excited giggles of the bride-to-be at the friar’s desk and the slow, even responses of her groom, who calmly presented the friar with the necessary details: the couple’s names, their parents’ names, their places of birth and residence, and the signed approval of the bride’s father. After they had left, the friar attended to the further couples and eager young men who entered his office. Some men came to fulfill these duties alone, sparing their fiancées the trouble. Arthur could hear them all come and go like hummingbirds drifting onto a nearby tree—the clicks and clumps of their arrival, the squeaks and cries of their business, the whisks and flaps of their heartened departures.

The handwritten documents before him possessed the romance of governmental bureaucracy. Though each was filled out by the loving right hand of its willing groom, the allegations read less like Shakespeare and more like a will.

“4 October 1900,” began the first of many, “which day appeared personally Thomas Stacey Junior of Morden in the County of Surrey, aged twenty-four years and a Bachelor, and alleged he intends to marry with Mary Beach of the County of Norfolk, aged twenty years, a minor and spinster, by and with the consent of Richard Norris, her uncle and guardian lawfully appointed, she having neither father, mother, testamentary or other Guardian whatsoever to her appointed.” It droned on for a solid page, ascertaining that neither bride nor groom was married prior, and that no other “impediment by reason of any precontract” existed that would hinder their ability to be lawfully married.

Arthur’s mind drifted to his own wedding, sixteen years before— My! Had it really been so long since that sweet August day at Masongill? Arthur had been a poor doctor when he met Touie; poor in both senses of the word. His fledgling practice had yielded but a meager income, though it was only now, years later, that he was able to realize that this might have had something to do with his poverty of talent. He had met his dear Touie—then Louisa Hawkins, a name that now sounded so foreign to Arthur that it might have referred to someone else’s wife— when her brother had come to him suffering from cerebral meningitis and had become Arthur’s resident patient. Arthur had given him a nightly sedative of chloral hydrate, and the man had died within a week. Occasionally Arthur still wondered, as he had at the time, whether the treatment had actually killed him—most likely not, he assured himself. Sixteen years later, Arthur understood that a dose of chloral hydrate did carry certain risks. But his patient had been wasting away in delirious fits—surely some sedative was necessary? What an imprecise science was medicine. It was more an art than was fiction.