The Sherlockian (5 page)

“Did you come here for the lecture? I’m Harold. Is it still raining out? Harold White.”

The woman raised her eyebrows in thought; she was probably trying to figure out which of Harold’s prompts to respond to.

“Harold,” she said. “Do you know Alex Cale?” Apparently she’d chosen none-of-the-above.

“We’re friends,” he replied, excited to have somehow begun the conversation with what for him was a solid subject. “Well, we’re friendly. I saw him last night. In the hotel.”

“He was here last night?”

“Yes. He got caught in the rain.” Harold chided himself silently for continuing to focus on the rain. He was sure there was something more interesting he could say to this woman. “He seemed nervous, actually. Said someone was following him. But you know— He’s got a flair for the dramatic.”

The woman looked up at Harold’s deerstalker hat. She gestured to it with her right eyebrow.

“It looks to me like you both do. Do you think someone was following him?”

This was a difficult question. It was probably the most difficult question she could have asked.

“No. Maybe. I mean, wouldn’t that be fantastic? Well, not fantastic, not if something bad happened, but . . . noteworthy. You know what I mean.” Something about her just made Harold want to talk—and keep talking. It was an appealing trait. A handy one for a...
journalist
?

After Alex Cale had announced his discovery, those months before, the Baker Street Irregulars had received a deluge of requests from reporters looking to attend this January’s convention. Well, “deluge” by Sherlockian standards. Professional Sherlock Holmes obsessives tended not to garner much attention from the media. But they still had firm rules about this sort of thing—no one who was not a member of an accredited Sherlockian organization was allowed to attend the weekend’s lecture. All requests were denied.

“Excuse me,” said Harold, interrupting himself. “Who are you?”

“Sarah Lindsay,” said the woman buoyantly. “Nice to meet you!” She extended her hand for a shake.

“Which organization are you a member of?”

“Oh, none,” she said. “I’m a reporter. I’m doing a story on Alex Cale and the missing diary.”

“How did you get in here?”

In response Sarah shrugged. “Jeffrey Engels,” she said. “We e-mailed back and forth for a while, and he let me in.”

Harold thought this was a little strange—if Jeffrey had decided to make an exception for Sarah, wouldn’t he have mentioned something about it?

“He’s such a sweet guy, Jeffrey,” she continued. “Are you an Irregular, too?”

“Yes.” Harold realized that he had already spilled every secret he might know about Alex—his odd behavior last night, his paranoia. Sarah would make Alex, and the Irregulars, look like fools. She would mock their bits of period costuming, their occasionally self-serious lapses into indecipherable scholarship, their “flair for the dramatic,” as Harold had just said. He made a nervous face.

“Are you worried about my being here? You don’t need to be, I promise.”

“No, I . . .I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just, we have rules about reporters. Strangers of any kind, actually. I didn’t—”

“Harold, it’s okay. What were you worried about? That I’d tease you about your hat? Or those little pipes that half of the men here are carrying in their coat pockets?”

Harold smiled. She was funny.

“Look,” he replied, “we’re at a Sherlock Holmes convention. If I
wasn’t
wearing a deerstalker cap, don’t you think that would be a little weird?”

“Very. If you’re going to be an expert on nineteenth-century detective fiction, I say you should dress the part. But aren’t you a little . . .
young
to be an Irregular?”

“I might be the youngest Irregular, but I know this stuff as well as anyone.”

“I believe you,” she said. “And I might just ask you to prove it.”

They were interrupted then by a sound from the front of the room. At the podium, Jeffrey was testing the microphone.

Yes. Testing. One-two, or some such. Yes? You can hear me? Good.” Jeffrey took a deep breath and spread some notes out in front of him. “Ladies and gentlemen, while we wait for the belated appearance of this morning’s honored guest, Alexander Cale, let me say a few introductory words. I’d planned to go through this once he’d arrived, but I’m sure Mr. Cale doesn’t need to hear yet another recitation of his exploits, or to bide his time while I make still more saucy jokes about a particular evening of drink we shared in Sussex many summers ago.”

There were a few giggles throughout the room, and more knowing chortles.

“It’s a funny story,” Harold explained to Sarah. “There was a poorly planned late-night visit to the stables.”

“When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle passed from this consciousness to the next, as he would have put it, on July seventh, 1930, he left behind twenty-eight novels, well over a hundred short stories, seven books of essays on spiritualism, four memoirs, and, of course, a voluminous collection of letters and diaries, which immediately fell into the care of an eager network of scholars. From his letters and diaries, we’ve gotten to know a Conan Doyle quite different from his public persona: We’ve seen him as the eternal schoolboy, ever imagining himself to be a knight-errant jumping to the defense of helpless, hapless maidens. We’ve seen him as the conflicted romantic, embroiled in a passionate mental affair with a younger woman—which from all evidence never became physical—while his invalid wife slowly passed. And we’ve seen him as jealous creator, raging against his brightly shining creation in page after page of broad, precise script. With this wealth of material, scholars have been able to piece together a fine variety of excellent biographies.” Jeffrey leaned forward. “That more than a few of these scholars happened to be members of this august institution is a small matter in which I personally take some great pride. Andrew Lycett, John Dickson Carr, Martin Booth, and, perhaps most definitively, Daniel Stashower have all crafted masterful portraits of John Watson’s friend and literary agent.”

Sarah made a curious face. “Friend and literary agent?”

“Yes, welcome to Jeffrey being politic,” whispered Harold. “Most Sherlockians sort of...uh,
pretend...
that Holmes was real and that Conan Doyle had his adventures published as fiction to preserve his privacy. The rival Doyleans, as they call themselves, think the Sherlockians are stupid. If Jeffrey acknowledged Doyle as the
author
of the stories, half the room would bleat blasphemy. Better to side with the Sherlockians. The Doyleans are less prone to rebellion.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t come to make fun of you,” said Sarah.

“. . . was a testament to Stashower’s work in putting together the most detailed account of Doyle’s life and times that we’ve seen,” continued Jeffrey. “But a truly complete biography of the man has always remained out of reach. His diary from October through December of 1900 was not among his papers, all the rest of which were found neatly arranged in his study at Undershaw after his death. Rumors circulated, of course, that various of his children might have hidden it away somewhere, to sell privately. But no substantiation for such claims ever materialized. Indeed, beyond a few quickly unmasked forgeries, there has been no trace of the diary over the past eighty years.” Jeffrey paused, took a deep breath, and smiled. “Until now.”

The room erupted in applause. Jeffrey said it again triumphantly, for effect: “Until now! Mr. Alexander Cale, known to many of you personally, and known to all of you professionally as an unparalleled Sherlockian scholar and critic, has been on the hunt for this diary for over twenty years. He has made it his life’s work to solve Conan Doyle’s final mystery. And recently he has done so. He is here today”—and with that, Jeffrey looked behind him, to see if Alex had come in; he had not—“ to present the disappearing, reappearing diary to us and to unburden it of its secrets. Foremost, of course, are why this diary wasn’t among the others and where has it been hiding all this time? But perhaps even more profoundly for the future of Holmes studies is the question of what Conan Doyle had gotten up to in this brief period.

“Our gap in knowledge occurs just after Conan Doyle returned from South Africa, plying his medical trade among the wounded British soldiers in the Boer War. Ever the patriot, Doyle had done a tour as a medical doctor and, in the summer, returned to England to convince his countrymen of the justness of the British cause. He ran for Parliament in Edinburgh, his hometown, and lost, narrowly. He was focused on politics, on his historical novels and plays. Sherlock Holmes had been dead for seven years, and according to everything we know of Conan Doyle, his presence had not been missed by the great writer.

“Then, suddenly, in March of 1901 , we have a letter received by H. Greenhough Smith at the
Strand
magazine. Conan Doyle wanted to serialize a new Holmes tale, set before his death. This story, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ marked a new high point in the Canon. Next came a short story that would drive London wild: ‘The Adventure of the Empty House,’ set in 1894, brought Sherlock Holmes back to life. In it we learn that Holmes had faked his own death in 1891 to foil Moriarty’s henchmen, traveled the world anonymously for three years, and was now back to set things right. This magical, perplexing interlude in which Holmes was in exile, presumed dead, we call, as you know, the Great Hiatus. But we know much more of Holmes’s activity during this Hiatus than we do of Doyle’s. What great change had occurred in him that would move him to bring Holmes back? He certainly had no need of money, though publishers had been banging at his door for another Holmes mystery. So why just then? And why so suddenly? Why return to the mystery stories—to the ‘cheap penny dreadfuls,’ as he’d call them—and to the hero for whom he felt, we must acknowledge, no little antipathy? It is at this moment when we would most like to peer into the mind of Conan Doyle that his thoughts are closed to us. Until now.”

“Didn’t he say that already?”

“Shhh.”

But there wasn’t much more to hear. Jeffrey looked behind him one final time, confirming that no, Alex had not in fact entered the ballroom. As the ducks began to quack again, Jeffrey turned around, back to the podium, allowing his calm to massage the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we now have a fresh mystery on our hands!” There was a smattering of chuckles and smiles around the room. “If you’ll pardon the further delay, I shall commence the investigation at once.”

Before Jeffrey had even stepped off the dais, a fresh gaggle of chatter had washed over the room. A handful of excited Sherlockians stood and then realized they had nowhere to go. Harold recognized Satoru Ishii, the quiet head of Tokyo’s largest Sherlockian group. He stood at full attention near the front of the crowd, practically bursting from the need for something to do.

“Well, it looks like you have some excitement for your story,” said Harold to Sarah. Only, when he turned, Sarah wasn’t there. Perking up his head, he whipped around to see her click-clacking across the slippery wood in her clunky flats. Her brisk walk was aimed unmistakably at Jeffrey, who, ever polite, was trying to back his way out of the room and fend off the rowdy queue of Sherlockians all waiting to ask him the same questions.

Harold was not conscious of making the decision to take off behind Sarah. He would tell himself, later, that he did so in order to be useful to Jeffrey—it wouldn’t do to have her pestering him with her questions just now—but in truth Harold had a distinct urge to be useful to
her.

Facing the emboldened horde of inquiring mystery enthusiasts, Sarah quickly changed course and slipped quietly out between the solid doors. Harold gingerly maneuvered down the aisle, tiptoeing between the feet of a woolly-bearded German before stretching across the lap of a petite, professorially tweeded American. Harold’s quiet excuse-me’s and sorry’s added little to the general clamor.

As he shimmied between the closing doors, the corridor beyond seemed shockingly silent. There was no sign of Sarah.

Harold didn’t see her at any point along the labyrinthine hallway or in the bustling lobby into which it fed. But there, by the elevator bank, he glimpsed her hair bobbing in between the opening elevator doors. Harold was in—of all things—hot pursuit.

Accelerating, he was at a near gallop by the time he got to the elevators. There was a curious sensation in his calves, shooting up to his knees. Thinking it over, he believed, not from any recent experience, that that must be called “running.” He huffed and puffed his hand between the elevator doors just in time, and delighted at the satisfying
ding!
he heard as the doors began reopening.

“Are you following me?” she asked.

Panting, Harold stepped into the elevator and steadied himself on the golden railing.

“Deep breaths,” she added. “You’ll be okay.”

“We . . . humph . . . we should . . . humph . . . back downstairs . . . hunnnh,” was about all Harold could manage in response.

“Well put.” Faced with Sarah’s implacability, Harold decided to gather himself before again trying to dissuade her from heading upstairs. But as his breathing slowed, another mechanical
ding!
announced their arrival on the eleventh floor. Sarah made her way through the bright padded corridor, and Harold followed suit.

Arriving at the door of Room 1117, Sarah gave two quick, friendly raps near the eyehole. A “Privacy, Please” sign hung from the doorknob. They waited.

“How did you know what room he’s in?”

Sarah smiled. “I asked politely.”

She rapped again, perkily. “Alex?” she said, as if nothing were at all the matter. Harold joined in.

“Alex, it’s Harold White! Are you awake?” Again the door gave them nothing in return. Harold stared at the privacy sign, and it seemed to stare back, taunting him with its bland efficiency.

As the stillness became, to Harold, increasingly disconcerting, he heard a shuffling down the hallway. Harold and Sarah turned to see a man in a dark suit. Jeffrey followed a pace behind the man, as Harold had followed Sarah.
He must be the hotel manager,
thought Harold.