The Sherlockian (16 page)

This most likely would not be it, Arthur realized. A girl being strangled in the alley would make so much of a racket that it would easily be heard in the street. Whatever atrocity had been committed here, he felt confident that it had little to do with the mystery at hand.

It was at this moment in his thoughts that Arthur looked up. A line of clothes hung from a string going across the alley, connecting a window of the building on the alley’s east side with a hook in the wall on its left. All manner of apparel hung from the line: woolly trousers, bright shirtwaists, leg-o’-mutton jackets, soggy white shirts, stockings of every shape and size imaginable. What an odd assortment!

Arthur exited the alley and looked onto the doorstep of the building to the alley’s east side, from the window of which the clothes hung. There was no sign out in front of the four-story brick home. It appeared to be someone’s private residence. And yet so many garments dried outside.

Arthur knocked on the door. He heard nothing from inside. He knocked again. Finally an old woman answered the door. She had a mean face—squat nose, deep-set eyes, and beside her lips the lines of a permanent frown.

“Well then? What is it?” she barked.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” said Arthur. “Is this your home?”

“No, sir, the queen lives here. She’s inside at the moment, tending to the char.”

Arthur was unimpressed by the woman’s sarcasm.

“I’m in need of a place to rest my head for the night,” he replied. “Might you be able to provide me with room and board for a reasonable fee?”

The woman looked up and down the block, as if searching for someone amid the midday traffic.

“What have you heard?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who told you to come here for a bed?”

“No one. I was passing by, and your lovely home appeared so hospitable.”

The woman examined Arthur, then sniffed her nose in the air. “From time to time, I rent my rooms out to strangers,” she said. “If they look like a responsible sort. You seem halfway decent, I suppose.”

The woman turned and led Arthur inside.

“How many rooms do you have here?” he asked.

“I might have a spare one for you, if you behave yourself, and I suggest that’s the only room you need concern yourself with.” Arthur recognized that the woman’s behavior was quite odd, but he said nothing. He was making progress.

She led him through her kitchen into a long hallway. The house seemed quiet, or at least far quieter than Arthur’s previous boardinghouse experience. Various rooms flanked the hallway, and Arthur could make out two bedchambers and an indoor water closet through the half-open doors as he passed by. At the end of the hall lay what looked to be the master bedroom. Its doors were swung wide open, and Arthur could see the late-morning light pouring in from outside. As they approached the room, the woman turned left, ascending the first few steps of a long, narrow staircase as she spoke.

“Your room will be upstairs. The ones downstairs are full.” As Arthur came to the bottom of the stairs, he glanced to his right, into the bright bedroom. The wide bed was neatly made with white sheets and a blue blanket. An oil lamp rested on the woman’s nightstand. And on the far side of the room, a small closet was open—in fact, it was without doors at all, and a pair of useless hinges hung from the wall. As his head turned back toward the staircase, he could just make out the contents of the closet: the dark clothes of a woman who cleaned a large household, the torn dresses, the drab bustles, and one bright white wedding gown.

Arthur stopped at the foot of the steps. He looked back toward the open closet: What in the world was this mean Whitechapel charwoman doing with a dress like that? Arthur planted his feet, refusing to ascend the stairs after the woman.

“Where did you get that?” he asked quietly.

The woman turned. She appeared confused. “Get what, now?”

“You have a sparkling white wedding gown in what I presume is your bedchamber. Forgive my impoliteness, but it is considerably too small for you to wear. Whose is it?”

Suspicion flashed across the woman’s face.

“And what’s it to you?” she asked, with a note of anger in her voice. Arthur decided that in this instance the truth might serve his case better than a fresh lie.

“My name is Arthur Conan Doyle. I am investigating the murder of Morgan Nemain, and as of this moment I am also investigating the murder of one Sally Needling.”

“And what’s that to do with me?”

“Sally Needling stayed here on the night that she died, didn’t she? She was one of your tenants.”

The woman matched Arthur’s deep stare as the seconds ticked by. Neither blinked. The woman’s brow became cross as she emitted a low snarl.

“Get out, you rotting pego!”

“How did her corpse get from your boardinghouse to the alley behind? I don’t believe you killed her—a man did. But you were here when it happened.”

“I don’t care who you are or what business you’re on. The door is thataway. Make use of it.”

Arthur was in need of some means to compel this woman to talk. He thought of her strangeness at the door. She had treated her boardinghouse as if it were clandestine. As if she did not want anyone to know what she did in this house.

“You’ve been keeping lodgers here against the wishes of someone nearby, haven’t you? Someone who frequents this very block, I’d wager. Hmmm, now . . .” Arthur broke eye contact, rubbing his palms together and humming as he pieced together the most likely possibilities.

This woman did not appear to share his regard for the cause of justice. He would have to be more firm.

“Quite a large place, isn’t this?” he said. “For a woman such as yourself to possess? You’ve no ring on your finger . . . You don’t own this house, do you? You’re looking after it for someone else and renting out rooms on the side for an extra few shillings a week. But your little business would be shut down if the house’s owner became aware of what you’re doing, would it not? I would hate, of course, to be the one to have to tell him.”

Arthur adjusted his overcoat and puffed out his chest.

“I won’t give it back,” said the woman after a long moment, her face falling as she became resigned to confession.

“I truly couldn’t care whether or not you do,” said Arthur. “But I need to know what transpired here between you and the murdered girl.”

“I didn’t kill her!”

“I know,” said Arthur. “Who did?”

“I hardly got a look at him, he came by so quick. He came in with the girl—Sally, you say? And she was wearing that dress. When was the last time you’ve seen a dress like that? It sparkled in the light, shined like electricity. The man had on a black cloak, black hat, nothing much out of the ordinary. He kept his head ducked down a lot, hiding his eyes. The girl paid for their room. I showed them upstairs, and that was that.” The woman sat down on the staircase, folding her bosom over her knees and holding her legs into her body. It seemed to Arthur as if she were cocooning herself.

“Well, I thought that was that,” she continued. “The next morning I go to their door, to ask if they want their breakfast. I’d some porridge, and even some ham from the butcher’s across the way. There was no answer, so I opened the door. She was . . . The girl, you see, she was . . . And the dress, crumpled up in the corner like it was
trash
. . . Hell.” In the darkened stairwell, Arthur could not tell whether the woman was crying. He suspected that she was.

“You found Sally’s body,” said Arthur. “She was stark naked. She’d been strangled. The man was gone. The dress was by her side.”

The woman said nothing, but she nodded, first once, then many times, as if she were confirming the truth for herself as well as for Arthur.

“Isn’t it such a beautiful dress?” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“You didn’t want it to go to waste. To have the police take it away. You thought that maybe you’d sell it, or maybe you’d keep it for yourself. It must be quite valuable, a dress like that. So you hid it away in your closet. But you had to do something with the body, didn’t you?” The woman was definitely crying now. Arthur took the first few slats of the staircase in small steps, ascending foot by foot. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to the woman. She used it to smear the tears across her cheeks.

“You took the body and deposited it in the alley just beside your home. You must have brought her down these very stairs—she was heavy, wasn’t she? She must have hit every step on the way down. That’s why the body was so bruised when the police found her. You realized that a
naked
dead girl would attract rather more attention from the police than a clothed one, so what did you do? You took some skirts from your own closet, didn’t you, and wrapped them around her? A fair trade, I suppose, for her lovely white dress.”

The woman continued to cry as she buried her head between her knees. Arthur wanted to sit beside her, to give her an arm. But there was no room on the narrow staircase. He was forced to stand above her, looking down while her tears dripped onto her soiled shoes.

“You may keep the dress,” he said as he walked backward down the stairs. “And the kerchief.”

C
HAPTER 18

Pleasure Reading

“Altogether it cannot be doubted that

sensational developments will follow.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”

January 9, 2010, cont.

After Alex Cale’s answering machine clicked off, there was silence in the cluttered Kensington flat. As the lead detective on the case, Harold felt it was his duty to say something.

“Well then,” he said. “That happened.”

“What the bloody hell?” said Jennifer incredulously.

“Let’s not overreact.”

“Do you know who that was? Do you know that man?”

“Yes. I’m sort of working for him, technically.” Harold was treated to a look of stunned horror from Jennifer.

“His name is Sebastian Conan Doyle,” chimed Sarah. “He had been fighting with your brother publicly.”

“We knew he’d been threatening Alex,” added Harold, “though in more of a legal, trading-angry-letters sense. We didn’t know that he’d been
really
threatening Alex, in, like, an I’m-going-to-kill-you sense.”

“Let’s sit down,” said Sarah. “Perhaps we should back up for a minute.”

The three sat, and Harold and Sarah spent the next fifteen minutes trying to explain everything they knew about Sebastian Conan Doyle and his fight with Alex. They talked about the angry letters back and forth, about Alex’s fear of being followed, and they even explained that they had come to London on Sebastian’s dime. Though, Harold was quick to add, they had no allegiance to his side in the argument. They simply wanted to find the truth. And the diary.

Jennifer seemed unconvinced. She quieted Harold by slowly raising her palms in front of her, as if she were feeling her way through a dark room. “Hush,” she said. “I need a simple answer. Do you think Sebastian Conan Doyle murdered my older brother?”

Harold and Sarah made a brief moment of eye contact, in which Sarah, ever so slightly, smiled and ducked her chin in deference. This was Harold’s department.

“I don’t know,” he said after a long pause. “He’s certainly the most likely suspect. But the most likely suspect at first is almost never the one who’s actually done it, right? If this were a Conan Doyle story, I think Sebastian would be a red herring.”

The look on Jennifer’s face was not one that conveyed to Harold that she placed much value on this analysis.

“Why don’t you presume for a moment, Mr. White, that this is
not
a Conan Doyle story? What if you presumed that this was, oh, just for argument’s sake, something that happened in the real world, to a real live person? In that case, don’t you think I should tell the police about Sebastian’s message?”

“Yes, absolutely, tell them about the message. But when you do, maybe don’t mention the part about how we were here? Or about how we talked to you at all? The New York police had sort of...well,
asked
that I not leave the state. You know. Just for a while. Not that I’m a suspect or anything, myself. Anyhow. You get the point. I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression—”

“Harold,” interrupted Sarah. “Take a deep breath. Back to your original train of thought. Why don’t you think Sebastian killed Alex Cale?”

“A number of reasons. One,
why
would he do it? Money, sure, yeah, great. But now that Alex is dead, who’s he going to sell the diary to? Everyone knows it was stolen. And the only collectors with enough money or interest to buy the thing were all staying in the hotel where Alex died. And
they
all think Sebastian probably killed Alex, too! They’d never buy the diary off of him—they’d much rather turn him in and get to play the hero. Which leads me to point number two: If Sebastian killed Alex, he didn’t go to very much trouble to conceal it, did he? If you were planning to murder someone, would you leave a recording of your voice making threats in the possession of your victim? Sebastian is a dick, but he’s not an idiot. So. Point number three:
How
did he do it? The hotel had cameras in the lobby. He claims not to have visited the hotel that night, so if the NYPD had found his face on one of the tapes . . . well, we’d have heard about it by now, because he’d already have been arrested. And how’d he get into Alex’s room? The door wasn’t forced. Alex opened the door willingly. Three times, even. He knew whoever killed him. If he was as paranoid about being followed as you said he was and . . . well, as I
know
that he was, because I saw him myself, then do you think he’d just have let Sebastian Conan Doyle into his suite with a smile? He wasn’t going to offer to make the guy a hot cup of Earl Grey with milk, right? Plus, okay now, here’s point the fourth: The message in blood? The shoelace for a murder weapon? Does that really sound like Sebastian to either of you? And if he left those clues in order to frame somebody—another Sherlockian, somebody like me, frankly—well then, didn’t he do a pretty piss-poor job of it? If his goal was to implicate someone else, it’s funny that he remains the only one implicated. Why not shoot him on a dark street corner, grab the suitcase with the diary from his hands, and blame it on some mugger? Why not break in to his apartment here in London, steal the diary, and blame it on some crack team of house burglars? If Sebastian did it, then he did it in about the dumbest way possible.”