The Sherlockian (14 page)

Arthur wondered about the marriages whose first beginnings he now drew from the wooden chest and skimmed over between his thumbs. Were they all as happy as his had been, when he saw his bride at the altar, when he exchanged a wink with his crying mother in the audience? What would these passions become in a decade and a half?

Love grew docile with age, like a faithful hound. It became precious and prized, locked away from the world like a jewelry box. Love grew commendably dependable—love was eggs, love was ham, love was the morning paper. He loved Touie as much as he ever had. No.
More.
He would always love Touie. Yes, since she’d gotten sick, those years ago, they’d refrained from certain intimacies. They would have no more children—but still Arthur could not be happier with his family. He felt as if he’d grown up with Touie, even though he’d been twenty-six when he met her, and she’d been twenty-eight—as if he’d become a grown man right beside her. As if she were the dear sister from whom he kept no secrets.

Well, perhaps one secret. There was Jean . . .

Three years earlier, he’d met the beautiful and brilliant Jean Leckie, and he’d been clocked clean across the jaw by the sparkle of her conversation, by her immodest wit, by the radiant flourishes of her batting eyelashes. She was young, but she was so wise, so unafraid to think and wonder and express herself as if she were a man. Arthur had never met a woman like her, and he felt quite certain that he never would again. Of course he remained completely pure in his intentions toward her. Their hands would never even touch. He stretched out his chest when he walked beside her, holding his arms behind his back at ninety-degree angles at the elbows. He had taken an oath, the same oath written on the hundreds of papers that lay across his lap at this moment. He would never betray it. But he would continue to see Jean, as much as he honorably could. He would take long walks through the countryside with her. She would cheer him from the stands at his cricket matches.

This, too, was love. And to Arthur’s great surprise, the two loves did not exclude one another. He loved Touie all the more for his loving Jean. He loved them so differently that they magnified one another, that they reflected mirror opposite images of the divine into his bulging heart. He thought that he might pop, sometimes, from the gallons of love that poured into his middle-aged body. The oil and water of separate affections did not mix, but they also did not detonate. They coursed separately and equally through his bloodstream.

How much love could one man store in himself? Did he love more than the fresh-faced grooms who affixed their bachelor names to these allegations? Did he love more than the radiant brides who blushed all the colors of a June rose garden at the thought of becoming the new Mrs. What-Have-You? Did all loves look the same, like plucked and boiled chickens? Or were they different, like corneas, fingerprints, crania?

Arthur thought about the love that had died within the breast of Morgan Nemain. The love that was strangled naked in a filthy Stepney bathtub and left to rot. She had not been dead very long when the boardinghouse proprietor had found her. Her belly might still have been warm to the touch. Her heart had not yet sprouted tiny whitepetal maggots.

Arthur furiously flicked through the allegations for some glimpse of the man who had done this. He scanned the pages for revenge.

Sometime later the friar returned. Arthur did not hear him enter, so engrossed was he in his search for names. The boy tapped Arthur on the shoulder to get his attention, and Arthur jumped up, startled. He held his hand to his chest and took a series of deep breaths.

“My apologies, sir!” said the friar. “I had no intention of startling you!”

“Quite all right,” huffed Arthur. “I had no intention of being startled.”

“How goes your digging?”

“Not well, I fear,” admitted Arthur. “I’ve found no one with the name Morgan Nemain mentioned in any of these documents. She—my daughter—she probably gave a false name.”

The friar nodded knowingly.

“I’m rather hard up for clues.” Arthur had an offhand thought, and he continued with a smile, “You must see so many young men come and go through your doors . . . You wouldn’t happen to remember the name, or the face, of a fellow with a high whine of a voice. He would have been here two weeks ago Tuesday. Black cloak. Black top hat.” Arthur laughed—would there be any way in which he might be
less
specific in his description?

The friar made a face as if he’d just tasted sour milk. He stared at Arthur curiously.

“Funny, sir . . . I think the man you’re looking for asked me the very same question.”

Now it was Arthur’s turn to make an odd face.

“Pardon me?” he said.

“Your fellow. The groom. It was the strangest thing. A man comes in, tight, high little voice, black-on-black clothes, two weeks or so past, like you said. Wouldn’t have thought twice about it myself, of course, except that I felt I recognized him. And he saw that I did, and asked me whether I did, and I said yes. I did, and he said I couldn’t have, that didn’t make sense, and I agreed, and that was that.”

“I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying.”

“I recognized the gent because he’d come in
before.
Some months back. He’d filled out an allegation, and he’d gone off to be married. Then, a few weeks ago, a fellow comes in looks just the same. I smelled, what,
déjà vu,
yes? That’s what the French say? I wouldn’t have remembered him, except I get this funny feeling in my gut that I’ve seen him before. I ask him if I have, and he gets just terribly nervous.

“ ‘From when do you think you’d be recognizing me?’ he says.

“ ‘ I hardly know,’ I say. And I have a laugh, jesting with the man. ‘Have you ever been married before?’ I’m kidding, of course—he was young, not yet thirty, how would he have been? But he becomes frightfully agitated. Flops his arms around like he’s a marionette.

“ ‘I am quite certain, my good friar,’ he says to me, ‘I am quite certain that I haven’t the faintest idea to what you might be referring.’ His voice gets so high it’s like he’s playing a William Byrd. Then he goes into it, gives me quite a talking-to. He uses some language which I don’t fancy hearing under this roof, you understand? I would have taken umbrage and caused a stir, for my part, but I am in the service of the Lord. I turn the other cheek. He produces his allegation, I sign in my place at the bottom, and he goes on his way.”

As Arthur listened to the friar’s monologue, he felt a prickly sensation along his spine and a widening of his brow. He felt the intoxicating tingle of discovery.

“Do you recall what name the young man gave?” asked Arthur, leaning forward onto the tips of his toes toward the friar.

The friar looked down. “I don’t, sir, I’m sorry to say.”

Arthur’s mind whirled around like a top, spinning in circles, running through possibilities. “But you say you think he’d been married before?” he asked.

“Well, I hardly thought it too likely at the time, except for the man’s surliness,” said the friar. “But now . . . Do you think it’s so?”

“I think,” Arthur wanted to say but could not, “that whatever this man did to Morgan Nemain he did to another girl
first.”

C
HAPTER 16

The Answering Machine

“Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,” answered Holmes

thoughtfully. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if

you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in

an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”

January 9, 2010, cont.

In the thirty-three-minute cab ride from Jennifer Peters’s flat in London Fields to Alex Cale’s in Kensington, Harold and Sarah learned much about Jennifer and Alex’s family history.

They were both, as anyone could gather, quite wealthy. Henry Cale, their father, had built a shipping fortune from nothing—he had been a hardscrabble Newcastle man, who carried to his death the Geordie provincialism and classist suspicion of the wealthy with which he’d been brought up. He was not a man to sit idly by while his children sat idle. He would not allow them to rest on their family’s newish fortune.

Which, Harold gathered from Jennifer’s bitter ramblings, largely explained Henry Cale’s emphatic annoyance when his children steadfastly refused to make money. Alex and his sister were both next to useless in this regard—fine universities, American graduate schools, any position in the world open to their letters of application. Yet Jennifer dabbled incessantly: a graduate program in the writing of poetry (her father bellowed at her when he heard the news), a teaching position looking over six-year-old tots (her father broke a wineglass that time), an administrative role in a campaign for Third World debt relief (he threatened to remove her from his will), eventually leading to a marriage with one of the campaign’s wealthy founders (all threats rescinded, if only because she no longer needed his inheritance anyway). Jennifer now directed her husband’s charitable trust.

Alex Cale had been decidedly more driven than his sister, though no less a disappointment to old Henry. He’d been a promising boy— quick-witted, a good head for numbers, sterling marks all around. Things went sour in his third year at university, when he asked to take a leave to finish a novel. His father ended that conversation sensibly by having Ms. Whitman, his secretary, show Alex out of his office.

Henry was encouraged when, a few years later, Alex asked for a loan so that he might open up a bookshop. Henry did not know much about what the market was for a little used-book shop in Chelsea in 1973, but at least the boy wanted to start a
business.
Let us be thankful for small gifts.

The bookshop lasted an unimpressive twenty-eight months before abandoning its lease to an Indian restaurant, the proprietors of which promptly turned Alex’s old back office into a delightfully smelly kitchen. Alex would walk past the Indian restaurant in later years and find himself both nostalgic and hungry at the same time. He ate there frequently. Jennifer remembered that he had taken her and her husband out to dinner at the Indian restaurant on the night of its closing, before it gave way to a French-Asian-fusion type of something or other. (Their father had been too busy to attend.) Alex had seemed more upset about losing the Indian restaurant than he’d been at the loss of his own shop.

Further financial misadventures followed, though none with quite so much of their father’s money at stake. Poor investments had been made in a fledgling literary magazine, a collection of nineteenth- century antiques, and on an inexplicable six months Alex had spent apprenticing an artisan who built wickerwork furniture. If anyone were to construct a biography of Alex Cale, thought Harold, this might be the detail glossed over because it didn’t conform to the general thrust of the man’s narrative.

Yet, Jennifer explained as the cab skimmed the southern edge of Hyde Park and Harold looked out at the bark-naked trees, the overarching narrative theme of Alex’s life was indisputably Sherlock Holmes. He’d fallen in love as a boy, asking their nanny, Deirdre, to read the stories to him over and over again at bedtime. He’d written on Conan Doyle at school and finally joined the Irregulars when he was only twenty-four. He wrote regularly for the
Baker Street Journal
in every phase of his life. In all of his passions, there was Sherlock.

When Henry Cale died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in I989 , his two children began to drift apart, no longer tethered to the cold steel pole of their disapproving father. They no longer needed one another as protection against him. It was as if they’d been trenchmates in the war, and now that the bombing had stopped, neither knew what to say to the other. Jennifer had her husband and their charity, Alex had his Holmes and his endless research.

It was after his father’s death that Alex’s quest to find Conan Doyle’s lost diary became all-consuming. He was armed now with a figurative fortune in shovels for digging into Conan Doyle’s life. There would be no distractions for Alex from then on. There was no one left to tell him no. His father would at last be proved wrong when Alex found the diary and completed his biography; Alex would have amounted to something grand indeed, only not grand in the way his father had hoped. He would have achieved victory and rebellion at the same time.

Harold was surprised by how confessional Jennifer Peters had become, though he was unnerved by the odd rhythms of her speech. She would speak beautifully and painfully of her brother’s deepest feelings in one moment and then, in the middle of a sentence, clam up, her thoughts drifting out into the gray winter sky. A minute later she would light up again, and a torrent of words would touch on her brother’s childhood and their familial anxieties. She reminded Harold of the locks to the Chicago River, where he’d grown up—closing shut to fill up with water and then swinging open to dump thousands of muddy gallons out of the lake.

The cab pulled up to one of a series of similar-looking three-stories along Phillimore. Tall trees rose from backyards behind the buildings, and Harold could see them poking over the tops of the sharply slanted roofs. Harold paid, with Sebastian Conan Doyle’s money, and the three approached Alex’s flat.

Jennifer let them into what first appeared to be a carnival’s back lot. Fantastical toys and ancient gewgaws littered every available surface. A shimmering silver gasogene, an ornamental saber, a copper lamp, a dozen medicine jars full of heaven-only-knows, a glass-encased revolver, an atomically dainty tea set, a banjo, fourteen flowerless vases in every color, and books, books, books. Books of every size, shape, and design. Books settled neatly on shelves, books strewn in scattered piles, lone books perched improbably off the ends of tabletops and footrests. Neither the books nor anything else within Harold’s field of vision seemed in any sort of order—it was a decorative cacophony, an interior designer’s manic breakdown.

From hallway to sitting room to dining room to whatever lay beyond, each area had wallpapering of a different color. Yellow, pink, purple. The flat looked like a gigantic piece of candy. Harold imagined that Willy Wonka’s private study might have looked similar.