The Sherlockian (15 page)

“Wow,” was all Harold said.

“I think my brother’s . . .
eccentricities
had become more apparent in recent years,” Jennifer responded.

“Do you mind if we look around?”

“Go right ahead,” Jennifer said. “Good luck finding anything.”

There was no way to perform an organized search of such an unorganized collection—Harold gave in to the randomness at his feet and flitted back and forth like a bee hunting for pollen. He nosed around in the yellow study, picking at a copy of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He opened an old cigar box in the purple room to find a collection of foreign currencies, dollars and kroner and four kinds of pesos all collected in clear plastic bags and rubber bands. Sarah searched separately. The two didn’t discuss what they were looking for—Harold wouldn’t have known what to tell her anyway. He hoped that they would know what it was when they found it.

Sarah picked up a set of matching salt and pepper shakers shaped like cats. She placed them neatly on a table, next to a set of four-by-six photographic prints. She tightened the scattered pile of photographs. Harold began to watch her, soon paying less attention to the detritus at his feet and more attention to the way Sarah searched the room. She was cleaning, almost. When she came to a blue ribbon loosened beside a white cardboard box, she retied the ribbon. She was putting things right. Harold looked down at the mess at his own feet—he was simply picking things up and placing them back down approximately where he’d found them. There was no system to what Harold was doing, only mindless entropy. Everything that wasn’t the diary, he treated as dirt. Sarah, on the other hand, was taking the deathly clutter of Alex Cale’s apartment into her hands and making something better of it.

They searched in relative silence, punctuated by an occasional story from Jennifer. Harold or Sarah would produce an object—some trinket or faded memento—and Jennifer would do her best to describe its origin. She often did not know where things had come from but would try to interpolate their origins from what sketches she had of her brother’s travels. That frozen clock looked South American; Alex had been there in ‘98 or ‘99;
ergo,
he must have picked it up in Argentina.

It was Sarah who first noticed the answering machine. She gestured toward the slow, steady blink of its single red light.

“Have you checked his messages?” she asked Jennifer.

“Oh!” Jennifer looked surprised. “I hadn’t seen that.”

“May I?” inquired Sarah.

Jennifer nodded, and Sarah clicked the Play button. There was a loud click and then a piercing beep.

“One. Message.” The anthropomorphic voice of Alex’s answering machine was an older woman’s, and came out in a broken staccato. “First. Message. Received at. Seven. Forty-one. P.M. January. Four. Two thousand. And ten.” That would be five days ago, thought Harold. Three days before the Irregulars’ dinner.

“Mr. Cale, this is Sebastian Conan Doyle,” came the new, human voice from the message. Having spoken with Sebastian just the previous day, Harold found it spooky to hear his voice on the crackly tape. Sebastian sounded angry.

“I trust you received the injunction from my solicitors. I know you’re hiding from me. You won’t answer my letters. You won’t return my calls. You think because you dug up the right trunk in some attic somewhere, you’re entitled to something which belongs to me. You little wanker. Can you hear me, Cale? Are you there right now, listening to my voice? Pissing your trousers in panic. Well, listen to this: If you give that diary away, you will regret it. I will see to it that you come to hate the very name Conan Doyle.”

There was another loud click, and the message ended.

C
HAPTER 17

A List of Atrocities

“We must look for consistency. Where there is a want

of it we must suspect deception.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Problem of Thor Bridge”

October 21,1900, cont.

Arthur Conan Doyle laid his head down on the messy pile of stranglings and took a deep breath.

Who knew that a detective’s work was so infernally tedious?

Arthur had spent most of his day awash in paperwork. He had learned nothing else of importance from the friar at the vicar-general’s office, despite the young man’s eagerness to assist. They had searched through the allegations together, working into vespers, but nothing was found which jogged the friar’s memory into fixing a name to the murderous groom. Satisfied that he had exhausted the usefulness of the vicar-general’s, Arthur made the short walk to Scotland Yard in just a few minutes. Inspector Miller was not in—thankfully!—but the men who were knew Arthur by reputation and were delighted to be of service. He had then spent some hours engaged in the examination of the Yard’s criminal files. If the murderer had in fact struck twice, there must be some record of his earlier crime. And yet, despite the ample quantity of dead girls found within London proper over the past year, none had been found in a cheap East End boardinghouse, naked, tattooed, and accompanied by a fresh white wedding dress.

So Arthur concerned himself with the stranglings, hoping to find some sort of pattern amid these dreadful folios. Having killed Morgan Nemain in such a manner, did it stand to reason that the killer would have employed the same technique in his other crime—or, God forbid, his other
crimes
? Arthur was unsure. Did the criminal mind relish consistency? Arthur wondered whether murderers were like craftsmen, each with his own set of favorite tools. The leatherworker had his awl, the blackguard his blade. Or perhaps villains allowed themselves a beastly serendipity, employing whatever devices lay at hand for their slaughters. Arthur wished for some tool to peer inside the skulls of London’s killers, to see how their perverted brains led them to evil. If only such a device existed.

He heard the clack of boot against tile and the pleasant jingle of a teacup rattling against its saucer. He looked up from the stack of papers before him to see a young police officer bringing him his tea. Squarefaced and professional, the officer presented a welcome sight.

“Your tea, Dr. Doyle?” said the officer as he laid his tray on the desk.

“Thank you,” said Arthur as he pushed the papers into order.

The young man hesitated for a moment, waiting for further instructions. When he received none, he turned on his heel and made his way to the door of the large office Arthur had been loaned for the evening. Night had begun sometime ago, and the black sky, which Arthur could see from the window, made the New Scotland Yard building seem even more massive, and even more quiet.

“Officer!” said Arthur, getting the young man’s attention. “Officer . . . ?”

“Binns, sir. Frank Binns.” He approached Arthur’s desk once again.

“Have you ever met a murderer, my boy?”

Officer Frank Binns gave himself a moment to reflect before speaking.

“A few, I’d wager. Just last week I picked up a fellow who’d gotten into a fight down at his pub. Man worked for the railways, if I recall. Got into fisticuffs with another railman and beat him over the head with his pint o’ bitters. It was a grim sight.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Arthur, unsatisfied by this response. “But have you ever dealt with a true killer? Someone born for evil?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well now, I’m looking for a man that’s killed two—at the very least two—young girls, and in cold blood. He planned it out. He knew what he meant to do in advance. What sort of man would kill a poor
woman
in such a fashion? It defies reason.”

Officer Binns helped himself to a chair before he responded. “Do you mind a digression, sir?”

“Not at all,” said Arthur, pushing his chair back a few inches from the desk.

“I grew up in Dorset,” Officer Binns began. “I had a pal there, Sean Runny. Runny wasn’t his real name, mind you, it was the name we boys had given him seeing as his nose was always running—winter, spring, summer, or fall. Anyhow, one year we have a rash of sheep killings in the area. Everyone is up in arms. It goes on for six months. No explanation—someone’s sneaking across the fields at night, slitting right into the leg veins of the Border Leicesters we all kept, and standing there while they bleeds to death. Mothers are keeping their kids at home all day for fear the mystery sheep killer is going to switch his tastes to people. It’s a long story, but finally the authorities catch him in the act—and what do you know, it’s Sean Runny that’s been killing the sheep. Sean! I got to see him just once, while he was clapped in the darbies, before they took him away. I ask him why he’d done it. ‘Why’d you kill those sheep, Sean?’ I ask him. And do you know what he says to me?”

“I don’t,” said Arthur.

“He stares me right in the eye,” said Officer Binns. “And gets this confused look on his face. Like he’s thinking it over, thinking real hard. And finally, it’s as if he gives up trying to puzzle it out. ‘I dunno, Frankie,’ he says to me. ‘Why do
you
think I did it?’”

Arthur was unsure of how to respond. He remained silent and still.

“My point is, don’t fret yourself over the why’s, Dr. Doyle. Who knows why people get up to mischief? There’s no way to explain what’s in a man’s head.” He tapped on his own head twice, as if to indicate the thickness of the skull. “Best to spend the time worried over the how’s. And the who’s.”

When Officer Binns left, clapping his feet against the floor, Arthur spent a long minute sipping at his tea. It was horrible—watery and cold. He pushed the tray aside and continued sorting through the papers, dividing them into piles.

Stabbed girls. Shot girls. Drowned girls. Strangled girls.

October 24, 1900

There were options, for Arthur. There was a selection of the dead from which he could choose: a tea-shop girl, recently married, stabbed in St. James’s Park; a nurse run over by a carriage near University College; not one but two separate governesses beaten and robbed in Kensington. He felt as if he were selecting from a chocolate box of horrors.

Focusing on the girls who’d been strangled, Arthur found a number of intriguing possibilities. In the days following his trip to the Yard, he made his grim rounds. He went to see their families, their homes, the places where they’d been killed. He asked the same questions every time: “Pardon me, but had your daughter married before her death?” and “I hate to disturb you further, but did you by any chance notice a wedding dress in the vicinity of the body?” and “So sorry, but when you discovered your sister, was she in the nude?”

It reminded him of his house calls, back in his medical days. He would ask the same questions in the privacy of each bedroom. “And how are we feeling today?” or “How has your appetite been?” or “Does your tooth still ache? Oh, Mrs. Harrington, tell the truth: Have you been taking the cocaine drops I gave you?” He preferred those medical inquisitions to the criminal ones he now conducted.

His interviews concluded, Arthur would, one by one, cross each girl’s name off his list. Within a few days, he had exhausted all of his most likely possibilities. He began exploring the less likely options: Bodies found on the street. More anonymous prostitutes. Even an elderly woman who appeared to have suffocated by accident, in her weakened state, against her own bed pillows.

It was when his options had all but run out that he found himself, on the Friday next, back in the East End. Three months earlier a girl’s body had turned up in an alley behind Watney Street, near Whitechapel. The cause of death, as listed in the coroner’s report, was uncertain. The girl’s trachea had been snapped, and yet there was so much bruising around her body that it was impossible to tell whether the neck injury had killed her or whether it was any one of the other dark blue bruises or deep red cuts spread across her pale body that had done her in. She’d been discovered fully clothed. There was no mention, in the documents retained by Scotland Yard, of a wedding dress among the girl’s possessions. They did, however, know her name: Sally Needling. She was a good girl. Her parents had put her up as missing, and when the body had come in, they had taken one look at it and known she was theirs. They lived far away in Hampstead. Twenty-six years old, she was well on her way to being a spinster and still lived at home. They had money. A nice bit of land. Her father was a barrister. The girl was certainly no harlot; moreover, her parents could think of no reason for her to be in Whitechapel at all, as they’d informed the Yard.

Arthur found the alley behind Watney Street. He went about his rounds in the dark and narrow space. A horrible smell seemed to drift outward from deep within. As Arthur walked a few paces into the alley, he realized the cause of the smell: A butcher’s shop, on the other side of the alley, had stored half-carved piglets and cattle husks that had gone bad outside the shop’s back door. Presumably, Arthur hoped, before they could transport the rotting meat elsewhere. While dim, the alley looked out onto a busy thoroughfare. Arthur could hear the rattling carriages from Watney Street as he walked to the most remote part of the alley. It was indisputably a public place, far removed from the closed-door chambers of the boardinghouse where Morgan Nemain had met her end.