The Sherlockian (34 page)

What a dark and sinister madness must have overcome him, to make him think that he should be a detective himself. It was a miserable vocation taken up by miserable men. But, thankfully, that fog had lifted from his brain, and Arthur saw his life anew, as the days of middle age glimmered resplendently before him. He was a father. He was a husband. And he was a writer. He was neither detective nor criminal, and he would leave them both to chase each other around in circles as they saw fit. “The scarlet thread of murder”—he had written that phrase once, many years ago, as if it were something lovely, something vibrant. Well, he would let the thread drop. He would fashion his life—his true life—from another cloth.

Of course, a certain lingering curiosity was only natural. Who had killed Emily Davison and her friends? There was no shame in an occasional moment of wondering, so long as he didn’t give himself over to it. Arthur had never properly learned the name of the second girl to be murdered. She had signed the false name “Morgan Nemain” to the boardinghouse book, but Emily had referred to her as “Anna.” The Yard might have found something among Emily’s possessions that would reveal this Anna’s family name. He could send a quick word to Inspector Miller and—

But no. Down that way lay madness. When Arthur felt that inkling in his brain, that involuntary twitch, he would remind himself of the world right before his eyes. Arthur would feel his feet press against the hardwood floors of his half-reconstructed study, and a sensation of lift would buoy up his spine. From his neck to his tail to his heels to the floor and into the deep soil, Arthur was home. The twitch would pass.

Realism ruled his work. Oh, how good it felt to dive into something sensible for a change! No more of that nonsense about chasing archvillains down foggy alleyways with the aid of scent-sniffing hounds. No more magic, no more fantasy, no more romance. What frivolity was detective fiction, compared to the hard-nosed reality of true literature! Since putting Holmes to rest those years ago, Arthur had tried his hand at historical epics, scientific adventure, and even horror. There had been gallant knights on grand quests, damsels under hypnotic spells, and an evil sorceress of the occult. But now he had found his calling: war stories.

Using his experiences in the Transvaal for inspiration, he began a series of stories about the brave men who fought in the jungles against the Boer raiders. They were rough boys, most not yet twenty years of age, and yet as they battled in the stifling heat, they earned their manhood. The stories were bloody, they were graphic, and, most importantly, they were true.

It occurred to Arthur, as he sat for his tea one afternoon, that in a full seven days the name Sherlock Holmes had not once been uttered in his presence. Nor had it once crossed his mind.

The bell rang the following day. Arthur was in his study when he heard it, finishing up a brief piece about a young Scottish soldier who is snared by an Arab sheikh’s ambush in the Nubian Desert. The clank of the bell sounded foreign. It had been so long since Arthur had last heard it that it took him a moment to place the noise. He lifted his head from his new writing desk when he heard the bell ring a second time. This was odd. Arthur was expecting no visitors. And any deliveries would have gone straight in the back way. The house’s staff were scattered on myriad chores, but a known guest should have been let in instantly. He would have been hard pressed to explain how, but even the jingle of the bell seemed off.

He thought he heard the front door open, and then some hushed conversation at the entryway, but from this distance it could have been whispering from anywhere in the house. He put down his pen and waited for the knock at his study. It was a full minute before his waiting bore fruit, and he attended the gentle rap-rap-rap of the butler’s knuckles on his door.

“Yes?” called Arthur.

“Pardon, sir,” said the butler, Barrow, “but there’s a stranger at the door. She . . . demands an audience with you.”

“Demands?” And then he added, after a moment, “She?”

“Yes, sir. She gave her name as Janet Fry.” Barrow entered Arthur’s study and handed him a sheet of white paper. “She had no card, but said to give you this instead, and that you’d know to what it referred.”

Arthur took the paper from the man’s hand and glanced at the top of the sheet. Before his eyes even landed on the image printed there, he knew what he would find. He looked down upon a three-headed crow.

“Show her in,” said Arthur. He laid the paper on his desk and pushed aside his fiction. “And, Barrow,” added Arthur as his butler was on his way out, “stay close, if you will.”

Barrow nodded and went to grant Janet Fry entry into the study.

Arthur quickly ran to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf along the north wall of the study. On one shelf a wooden box lay at the end of a row of books. Arthur took the box down, flipped open the latch, and removed an old revolver. He had never served in the military himself, except as a medic, but he had seen many a man perform his weapon inspection. Arthur looked over his pistol. There was a bullet in every chamber. The barrel was unobstructed. The hammer was pliant to his thumb.

He sat back at his desk and placed the revolver under his mostly finished story. He returned his hands to his lap just as Barrow opened the study door and introduced one of the most beautiful young women Arthur had ever seen.

“Miss Janet Fry,” said Barrow as he left, closing the door behind him.

Arthur blinked, as if trying to shake off the false sight of a mirage. But no, there she was. From her dark hair to her dark, sunken eyes, her face was seductive and sinister. She was the polar opposite of the mousy, expressive Emily Davison. Janet carried a broad frame, and her expression was like a reflective pool of blackness, shining back at Arthur whatever he brought to it. He found himself immediately drawn to this young woman, while at the same time his right hand reached out to rest on his revolver.

“If you’ve come to kill me,” said Arthur, “I can assure you that you’ll never get away with it.”

Janet dismissed Arthur’s suggestion with the smallest movement of her eyebrows. When she spoke, her voice was calm, measured, and—to Arthur’s great surprise—weary with sadness.

“Is that why you think I’m here?” she said. “To kill you?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve made the attempt. Your friend Emily Davison told me all about your involvement in the letter-bomb plot.”

Janet’s eyes opened wider, and she gave Arthur a pleading look. “So it’s true you found her?”

“Yes.”

“She sent me a letter. The night she died. She said that you’d made contact with her and that you were hesitant, but she thought you would help.”

Arthur would have laughed, were the situation not so dark. This would not be how he would have described the state of affairs when he’d left Miss Davison.

“I
caught
her, Miss Fry. I caught her right in the act of building another bomb. The only reason she’s not in Newgate at present is that she’s in the ground.”

Janet became rigid, as if she were holding a great well of emotion back behind the stone dam that was her face. She sat slowly, gingerly, like an invalid. Arthur felt that she was using every ounce of strength she had not to give herself over to grief, and so she had none left to spend on the simple task of sitting.

“Did she . . .” Janet pressed her hands together in her lap. She was unable to look into Arthur’s eyes. “Did Emily say anything about me? Did she tell you that we . . . Did she mention my name?”

“She said that you were the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen. She said that you were fast friends. She said that the two of you had been inseparable, that you shared every secret of your lives together.”

Janet Fry became short of breath. She looked to be choking on the air in her throat. In a moment, she leaned forward, folded herself over her knees, and vomited.

Arthur called for Barrow, and, based on the speed with which the butler entered, it was clear that he’d been waiting behind the door. He brought water and damp cloths. Janet was too stunned to speak as Barrow wiped the bile from her black dress and rested a warm cloth against the girl’s forehead. She rocked back and forth in her chair while Barrow tended to her, as if her grief were a stone in her belly, the only thing weighting her to the ground while a great wind blew her broad frame to and fro.

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

Crying girls. Grieving girls.

Arthur watched the colorless dribble of bile drip from Janet’s lips to her skirt, but the sight did not horrify him. What horrified him was not the stomach-churning grief of the beautiful girl before him, but rather the resolute indifference in his own heart. All he felt was a bit of gas from breakfast, burping up into his throat.

He knew then that the ugly engine of murder had done its work on him as surely as it had on Sally Needling, or Anna, or Emily Davison. The damage was done. And now he, too, was tainted with blood, drowned into a lifeless indifference. He had not been wounded by the violence—he had been callused. And that, he now realized, was worse.

When Miss Fry had been tidied up, Barrow left her with a clean washcloth and a cup of hot tea. The click of the closing door, as the butler exited, introduced a long silence to the study.

“Pardon me,” said Janet Fry after a good while. “I loved her, too. She was impulsive and so deeply angry, and she could never be mollified by reason. But she was brilliant, and she was passionate, and she would giggle sometimes—I can’t begin to describe it—as if life itself were some dirty little joke and only she had heard it. When she’d begun all that talk of the bombs . . . well, that’s when we split. I wouldn’t be a part of that. ‘No one will be hurt, you dummy!’ That’s what she’d say to me. But she was wrong, of course—someone always gets hurt. That’s what bombs are for, aren’t they? Hurting people. We had an argument. I left her there, took a train back to my parents’ home in Norwich. You have to understand, I was angry. She was going to ruin everything we believed in by sending you that bomb. It’s a blessing she didn’t kill you. It was so stupid . . . But I’d written letters, before. To you. Do you remember receiving them?” Arthur said nothing, but his silence was clear. He received many letters.

“Yes,” Miss Fry continued, “you must get so many. We needed your help . . . We simply couldn’t think of any other way to get it! I’m just glad that her stupid bomb didn’t hurt you, that’s all. But yes, I was angry. I didn’t respond when she wrote me. What else was there to say? I mean, there was no
convincing
Emily when she had her mind on something. I couldn’t have stopped her, even if I’d tried. You must believe me.”

Arthur absorbed this monologue with only a few blinks by way of response.

“I don’t care,” he said when he was sure that she was finished. “Please leave my home.”

Janet stared at him in disbelief. “I’m in desperate need of your help,” she pleaded.

“I don’t care.”

Janet gave Arthur a look of such horror and revulsion as he had never before seen in his life. “She was neither saint nor angel, that I will grant you, but she was a human being. And I loved her. And she is murdered.”

“I don’t care.” The words had become a catechism to Arthur, a chant that was equally ritual and revelation.

“I already know who killed her, Dr. Doyle. I only need your help to prove it.”

“I don’t care.”

“It was Millicent Fawcett. It must have been. She must have found out about our group, the Morrigan. I can’t say how she found us out, but she must have. And so she killed us off, one by one. She would have done anything to halt a schism in the NUWSS. She was the only one with the motive. Who else would have wanted us all dead? And she certainly had the means. Our names, our addresses. Have you ever met her? Have you ever looked into that woman’s eyes? I don’t believe she’s felt a single emotion in her entire life. Everything to her is tactics, the whole world merely rationed out by politics. She wouldn’t have spent a tear on killing us off.”

“I don’t care.”

“The police know you. They trust you. They have to, don’t they? You’re a man of the realm. You’re a
man.
You’re the only one of us that’s fully a citizen. For you, they’ll catch a killer.”

“I. Do. Not.
Care.
”

Janet Fry stared deeply into Arthur’s eyes. She saw the anger that had welled up within him, as well as the implacable determination he had to keep it back.

“You’re lying,” she said. “You do care. You’re just too bloody cowardly to do anything about it.” Janet stood. She laid the now-cool washcloth across her wooden chair. She bowed and, with one hand on the doorknob, turned back to Arthur.

“So damn you to hell regardless,” she said. “I’ll see myself out.”

It was only after she’d been gone for a minute that Arthur managed to turn to his desk. Laying his hands on the desktop, he felt a bulge of steel underneath his papers.
The revolver.
He’d forgotten about it entirely.

Arthur returned the revolver to the wooden box on the shelf. He would certainly not be requiring that again. Back at his desk, he breathed deeply. He banished all thoughts of Janet Fry and Emily Davison from his head. He focused himself completely on his war story, on the sheikh’s trap and on the brave strategies of the small Scottish regiment, committing his day to realist fiction.

C
HAPTER 36

A Problem Without a Solution

A problem without a solution may interest the student,

but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Problem of Thor Bridge”

January 12, 2010, cont.

Dr. Gwen Garber was easily among the smallest women Harold had ever seen. She sat behind her desk, in her office at St. John’s College, and seemed dwarfed by the book stacks in front of her. She angled her chin upward in order to place her elbows on her desk, and looked up to Harold and Sarah like a penitential child to a cross.

“Yes,” she said after they had been in her office for a few minutes politely explaining their purpose at Cambridge. “Alex Cale was here. Just a few months ago. He came to read the Stoker letters, so of course he stopped by to talk with me. I’m the only one about who’s done much work on them at all.”