The Sherlockian (18 page)

“Tell me,” he began, “did your daughter ever receive any letters from these friends? From Janet and Emily? I suspect that they have information that might be vitally useful to my investigations”—Arthur left aside for the moment what that information might be—“and so finding them is of the utmost importance.”

Mrs. Needling considered the question. “I don’t believe so,” she said. “But if Mr. Needling doesn’t object, you’re welcome to examine her writing table and see for yourself.”

Arthur looked toward Mr. Needling, whose pale face offered neither permission nor disapproval. “I would appreciate that very much, if you don’t mind.” Mr. Needling nodded and remained seated while his wife took Arthur through the palatial house and up the stairs to Sally’s rooms.

As Arthur entered, he was struck first by the immaculate cleanliness of Sally’s quarters. Not a speck of dust flew into the air as the door was opened. Not a stitch of the bedspread lay out of place. The servants must still clean it daily, he thought, though the girl had been dead for months.

Arthur stood before the desk. Six small drawers lay atop it, while two wider ones lay below, between the table legs. He reached his hand out to pull one open and then paused, glancing back toward Mrs. Needling in the doorway. She leaned against the doorframe, her left hand reaching across her body and holding on to the wall as if she were pulling it toward her.

Arthur waited, hoping she would excuse herself. His search would take some time, and he preferred to do it alone. Heaven only knew what he might find, and he did not want to excite the poor woman.

She didn’t budge, however, but instead looked up to the ceiling. She leaned heavier against the doorframe and cupped the plaster in her glove.

Oh well. Arthur pulled open one of the drawers above the desk, yanking it fully out of its hutch. Envelopes and pens and ink bottles rattled around in the drawer as it landed with a clack on the desktop.

Mrs. Needling shivered, shaken from her haze.

“If you’ll excuse me, Dr. Doyle,” she said. “I must attend to a supper goose.” And with that, she left Arthur alone. He felt like a grave robber. Or a ghoul. Lord, where was Bram when you needed him?

His search was methodical. He read the letters carefully. A handful were from Sally’s brothers, who’d been away in the Transvaal the year before. Good lads. Two were from an uncle in Paris. Three from a grandmother in Swansea. Arthur learned much about the weather on the Continent and the Atlantic tides at the Swansea beaches, but little about the secret life of Sally Needling. Who were these girls, Janet and Emily? Exactly what organization had they been a part of? And who was this man who had surreptitiously married Sally without even her parents knowing?

Arthur went through the top drawers one by one until he came to the fifth one in his search. He pulled at the bronze knob. Yet the drawer held firm against his pull. It was locked. He bent over and noticed a small keyhole below the knob. It looked like a purely decorative feature, like the tiny locks affixed to the front of leather-bound diaries. He couldn’t imagine that it provided much in the way of security. Arthur pulled again on the knob, harder. The drawer didn’t budge.

This was promising.

He went to the bedroom door and closed it quietly. He didn’t want the family to hear him at work. He walked back to the dresser and bent over the keyhole once again. He didn’t know much about picking locks, but once, over a tall carafe of brandy, Wilde had explained to him how the job was done. How Wilde knew, Arthur could not be certain, but then again, the man was ever a mystery to all his friends. As Arthur took up a pen from the desk, he became sad, thinking of his old friend. What had happened there?

After the arrest, the trial, prison, Wilde had vanished. Where was he now? Arthur hadn’t the foggiest. Such a great man, such a warm and broad-smiling soul, brought low by mere vice. Every man knew the dangerous pull of sin. Yes, in honesty, every man experienced certain . . .
urges.
It was not the feeling them which had brought kind Wilde so low. It was the giving in. The failure born of weakness. To be a man, a
good
man, was to overcome the natural iniquities of one’s manhood. Wilde had succumbed to sin, but Arthur did not hate him for it. He was only saddened. He wanted Wilde back—the old Wilde, the good Wilde, the witty and buoyant Wilde who lit up every dinner table at which he sat.

Arthur banished the thought from his head as he jabbed the tip of the pen into the keyhole. Best not to think upon it.

But the pen didn’t fit. The keyhole was too small. Arthur tried the other pens at the desk, but none would do the trick. He had to look elsewhere.

The jewelry box next to the mirror was an obvious choice. As he opened it, he blinked at the flare of light that escaped from the glittering jewels inside. Diamonds, opals, golden bracelets and rings of every color. Arthur found three pearl necklaces, and yet the clasps on all of them were U-shaped, and so useless for his purposes. After only a few moments of digging, he found an item with a long, thin clasp. It was perfect for lock picking. He removed it from the pile, clasp first, and stepped toward the desk. He was halfway there when he looked down and saw what he held in his hand: a shimmering, ruby-red hair clip.

Arthur stopped, staring down at it. It was so small in his palm. Two metal bands stretched from end to end, onto which colored stones had been laid. It was ecstatically colorful in the way of all children’s jewelry. He could imagine the thrill inside eight-year-old Sally over opening up a wrapped box to find this on the morning of her birthday. He could imagine her crying inconsolably when she rolled to the bottom of the hill and found pieces of the broken clip buried in her hair. He knew why her father had consented to purchasing an identical replacement— the one that Arthur now held—at once.

Arthur inserted the long metal clasp into the keyhole. It fit perfectly. He flicked it up, then down, then side to side, twisting it to find the tumbler. He remembered what Wilde had described to him, how you had to find the tumblers, however many there were, sequentially. You had to press them one by one. Arthur pressed harder into the lock, jabbing for a deeper tumbler, when the hair clip broke. The miniature screws connecting the clasp to the central two bands popped out, and the clip split into two halves. The bands with the colored stones on them fell to the floor, while his push forward threw him slightly off balance. He removed the end he still held, the clasp, from the keyhole, and looked down.

Heavens! He had stepped on the fallen clip while regaining his balance. The bands were shattered into four or five pieces now, and a few stones had broken loose from their holds. A cloud passed outside the tall windows, and beams of light blanketed the room. The stones glimmered on the floor, islands in a wood-brown sea.

Arthur left the wreckage where it lay. The milk, so to speak, was spilt. No use crying now. He turned back to the desk, again inserting the clasp into the keyhole.

Within another minute he’d gotten it open.

Arthur opened the drawer hungrily. He laid it on the desktop and peered down. Inside, there was nothing but a quarter-inch stack of identical white papers. He lifted a handful of them up, and held them to the window light.

The papers were devoid of writing. He flipped through each one and found them all equally blank.

There was no mark on the pages, save one. At the top of each paper, there was the image, printed in black ink, of a three-headed crow. Arthur gave a start. It was the same image that had been found tattooed on Morgan Nemain’s leg!

But what did it mean?

He folded the papers and committed them to his coat pocket. He replaced the drawer as he’d found it.

He knelt to the floor and swept the bits of shattered hair clip into his hand before gently depositing them back into the jewelry box and leaving.

There remained no sign, after he left, of his ever having been there.

C
HAPTER 20

The Chase

“At the present moment, you thrill with the glamour

of the situation and the anticipation of the hunt.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

The Valley of Fear

January 9, 2010, cont.

“The police are on their way,” said Jennifer Peters as she clapped her cell phone shut. Harold and Sarah were looking through the piles of books and papers in the writing office, while Jennifer remained close to the doorway. In the five minutes since Harold had run downstairs and been unable to find any trace of the goateed man, Jennifer had managed to step only a few feet into the apartment. She remained motionless, arms crossed above her belly, as if giving herself a deep hug.

“Look, this is awkward,” said Harold, “but I’d rather not speak to the police, if that’s okay. I’ve been at the scenes of two crimes in the last seventy-two hours, and I’d kind of like to avoid another grilling about that. If you don’t mind.”

Jennifer hugged herself tighter, and spoke curtly. “Fine. Go. I won’t tell them you were here.”

Harold gave Alex Cale’s bookshelves a quick once-over and then motioned to Sarah that they should leave. She closed the drawer of Alex’s desk that she’d been rifling through and followed Harold to the door. She gave Jennifer a warm look and placed a hand on the older woman’s shoulder as she passed by.

“Thank you,” said Harold as they exited into the hallway.

“I’d rather not see either of you ever again, please,” said Jennifer.

Harold nodded, and without another word he and Sarah left the building.

After a reflective half minute on the street outside, Harold finally spoke.

“Well,” he said, “the bad news: Whoever that guy was, with the goatee, he took everything of any use out of that apartment. No diary, okay, but not even a spare photocopy of the diary. Or any excerpts that Alex had typed up. Or notes on what was in it. Did you notice the laptop power cable beside the desk? Ten to one there used to be a laptop attached to it, and he took that, too. There were plenty of books on Conan Doyle, sure, but not a single piece of information about the diary itself, or how Alex had found it.”

“Is there any good news?” asked Sarah as they walked toward Argyll Road.

“Yeah. We’ve actually laid eyes on someone who’s mixed up in this, whatever the hell ‘this’ is. And we know the guy’s not a Sherlockian. Or at least not an Irregular; I’d have recognized him if he was.”

“I suppose that’s something like good news. But I think I can do you one better.” Sarah reached into her coat pocket and removed a thumbsize piece of purple plastic. She handed it to Harold. “A flash drive. It was in one of the drawers on Alex’s desk.”

“You stole it?”

Sarah just shrugged.

Harold was impressed. He could never tell whether she was two steps behind him or two steps ahead.

“Not sure if anything useful is on it, but we can check it out back at the hotel,” said Sarah, turning her head to look behind them once, and then again a few seconds later. “I have some bad news, too.”

“What?”

“I think we’re being followed.”

Harold felt his body grow suddenly tense. “Seriously?” he asked.

“I’m going to kneel down on one knee, as if I’m adjusting my shoe. When I do that, come in front of me and turn to face me, and talk to me as if you’re just naturally continuing our conversation. Then look casually behind us and see if you notice a big guy in a leather jacket. Ready? Go.”

Sarah dropped her right knee to the pavement, and, leaning over her left, she reached into her left shoe as if she were trying to remove a stone from it. She had on thin black flats, out of which she pulled her heel, running her fingers along the inside lining of the well-worn shoe.

Harold turned to face her, doing his best to seem casual. He placed his hands in his pockets as he spoke.

“Okay, this is me talking to you,” he said, “I’m still talking, blahblah-blah, here I am talking.” He gazed past her down the street. Among the throng of pedestrians—a hand-holding couple, a jogger in a tracksuit, an Indian family of four—Harold quickly made eye contact with a large man in a leather jacket and loose blue jeans. He was heavyset, with a circular head and puffy cheeks. The coat looked flimsy, and the man held his hands in his pockets to keep them from the cold.

Shit,
thought Harold, realizing he’d just exchanged a glance with the man. Harold flicked his head abruptly to the right, finding a distant street sign at which to stare.

“We just looked right at each other,” he said. “I think he saw me notice him.”

“What’s he doing now?” asked Sarah as she continued to fiddle with her shoe.

Harold kept his face aimed at the street sign—”KENSINGTON PALACE,” it read, accompanied by a tiny picture of a walking man, and an arrow pointing behind Harold’s back—while he tried to turn only his eyes to the left, in order to spy on the man. The motion made his eyes hurt. The heavyset man had averted his gaze as well, and he seemed to be occupying himself by staring into the front windows of a tanning shop.

“He’s looking away,” said Harold. “Definitely seems fishy.”

Sarah placed her heel back in her shoe and stood up. She led Harold down Kensington Road with a quickened step.

“What should we do?” Harold finally asked.

Sarah raised her hand and stepped from the curb onto the street. “Get out of here,” she said.

A cab came quickly, and the two shuffled inside. It was only after they had shut the taxi’s door behind them and the driver had turned his head around to inquire about their destination that they both realized they weren’t sure what to say.

“Umm . . . not the hotel?” asked Harold.

“He might know where we’re staying already, but just in case, let’s not tell him.” Sarah raised her voice as she spoke to the driver. “Do you mind just heading straight for a minute while we figure out where we’re going?”

By way of response, the driver—a South Asian man with dark hair and a prodigious mustache—shrugged. He switched the car into Drive.

Harold and Sarah both swiveled in their seats and looked out the taxi’s rear window. The man in the leather coat was on his cell phone.