The Sherlockian (7 page)

“I’m calling the police,” said the manager. He reached for the phone on the nightstand and then stopped abruptly, his hand an inch from the receiver. The blinking red message light gave his face a demonic glare. He thought better of disturbing the scene. “Please don’t touch anything,” he said with unexpected force, before slipping out of the room, off to the house phone in the hall.

“Let’s go,” said Jeffrey, his eyes glassy and wet.

Harold knew that a smart man would quietly walk out the door this instant, head bent low with the gravity of death. A normal man, even, would defer to the police and await news of their investigations in the coming morning papers. A sane man would, under no circumstances, approach the dead body of Alex Cale.

Harold stepped forward.

“Harold, no.” The strain in Jeffrey’s voice was manifest.

“What would Sherlock Holmes do?” asked Harold. He was deliriously earnest. He had to do this, he had to see if he could.

“Holmes would crawl back onto the page from which he came, because he’s made of ink and pine-tree pulp.”

“If he were real. If the stories were real. What would he do?” Harold couldn’t help his curiosity.

“Harold, this is sick. I will not be a part of this.”

“Search the floor for footprints! That’s what he does. In the very first Holmes story,
A Study in Scarlet,
the first act of detection he ever does is to examine the ground for footprints.”

“It’s carpeted,” responded Jeffrey.

Harold looked down. Indeed, the entire floor was covered in a plush, taupe carpet. There were no footprints in sight. Sherlock Holmes was not real. Harold was not a detective.

“But Holmes always finds footprints,” pleaded Harold. He couldn’t stop himself.

Sarah looked at him with a mixture of wonderment and stupefaction.

“You’re serious,” she said with a growing smile. Behind her raised eyebrows and open mouth, Harold could see her mind flying in a thousand directions at once, working out the angles.

“You can’t be serious,” said Jeffrey. “This is deranged. You’re a literary researcher, not a goddamned detective.”

As Harold’s eyes swept from Jeffrey to Sarah, desperate for support, he caught a brief glimpse of himself in the tall mirror that hung on the back of the open bathroom door. He saw his own dirty sneakers and the dead body behind them. He followed his straight spine to the deerstalker cap on his head. Harold paused for a moment, transfixed by the image.

He looked at Sarah as if he were a small child, hoping for even the slightest approval.

“What’s the second thing Holmes does?” she asked.

Harold and Jeffrey stared at each other for a long moment, Harold daring Jeffrey to say the answer out loud.

“Don’t,” Jeffrey said firmly. “Damn it, don’t you dare.”

“ ‘Sherlock Holmes approached the body, and, kneeling down, examined it intently,’ ” Harold quoted.

He leaned over, bending from the waist like a ballet dancer. Alex’s left eye was almost closed, but his right eye was opened surprisingly wide, more than Harold thought normal—though, truth be told, what exactly was normal supposed to be here? Alex’s bushy light brown hair squatted on his head like a chicken laying an egg, an impression made stronger by the near-translucent whiteness of his face. He still wore his millimeter-thin titanium glasses, unbent and unbroken. A rainbow of red-purple streaks wrapped around his neck, swirling with tiny color variations and forming an impressive impressionist bruise. Hanging loose around the purple neck was a slender black cord. It appeared soft, like cloth. Harold dropped to one knee to examine it, and only then did he finally catch the light scent of feces circulating in the air. From the body, Harold thought. As he died.

“What’s that around his neck?” asked Sarah as she knelt by Harold’s side. She both repudiated Jeffrey’s caution and encouraged Harold’s examination.

Harold peered closer and reached out to touch the cord.

It felt, on his fingertips, like cotton, and as he ran his hand along it, he found a plastic tip clasped to one end.

“It’s a shoelace,” said Harold. As Sarah reached out to feel it herself, Harold looked over at Alex’s shoes, which sat symmetrically by the side of the body. Sure enough, the left shoe was without a lace.

“It’s
his
shoelace,” said Harold.

There is an undeniable exhilaration in the moment of even the smallest discovery—the house keys unearthed from the deep pockets of yesterday’s pants; the mysterious recurring tinkle you hear as you fail to fall asleep explained, upon examination, by the dripping bathroom faucet; the digits of your mother’s old telephone number recalled, magically, from some moss-covered Precambrian mental arcadia. The human mind thrills at few things so much as making connections. Discovering. Solving. Harold quivered all over.

“What did Holmes do next?” Sarah asked.

“Don’t encourage him!” barked Jeffrey. “The police are coming. And they will have real detectives. With real tools. This is a murder scene, Harold—you can’t just go on touching things. Holmes didn’t have fingerprint analysis, but we do.”

“Good point,” said Harold thoughtfully. “But Holmes did pretty well without it, didn’t he? Nowadays we’ve got CSI teams and electrostatic print lifting. But New York City’s murder clearance rate is . . . what, sixty percent? I think Holmes did substantially better, don’t you?”

“This is
insane
,” pleaded Jeffrey. “You’re in shock. Fine. Alex is dead and you’re in shock. But don’t you dare mess up this crime scene so the real police can’t find the killer. They’ll be here any minute.”

“You’re right,” responded Harold. “They’ll be here soon. We’d better examine the room before they get here and trample over everything. In
Scarlet
—well, gosh, in half the stories—the police come in and make a mess of the place, obscuring all the real evidence. We don’t want to miss any clues.”

“Do you hear the words you’re saying, Harold? Do you have any idea what you sound like?” Jeffrey grunted out a deep breath. “I never wanted to tell you this, but you have always looked stupid in that hat. Take it off, and let’s go.”

Ignoring him, Harold moved to the far left corner of the room and, proceeding from the exact intersection of the two walls, began a systematic search of the room’s edges.

“Sarah, we don’t have a lot of time. Will you look around for the diary? I don’t think we’ll find it—the killer seems to have gone through the room thoroughly and presumably found what he or she was looking for.”

It’s not that Sarah didn’t need to pause to consider whether or not she should actively displace the contents of a capital crime scene—she did. It’s that her pause lasted only a subatomic fraction of a second, a quantum period of decision making. In what seemed to Harold to be an instant, Sarah was among the strewn papers, picking them up in piles and gauging their importance.

“What does the diary look like?” she asked.

Harold considered. “Leather-bound. Old. It’ll be the thing that looks like a hundred-year-old diary.”

“I thought Holmes spoke in aphorisms, not tautologies.”

“I think it’ll be pretty obvious when you see it, all right?”

The stray papers that Sarah found contained little of interest to the amateur detectives—pages 709 through 841 of Alex Cale’s unfinished Conan Doyle biography, which, by the looks of things, would have been impeccably thorough in its completion. She picked up an antique fountain pen from beside the body and held it up for Harold to see. It was a Parker Duofold “Big Red” model, probably from the 1920s— black on the blind cap, red on the barrel. It was the same model that Conan Doyle would have used to write the final Holmes stories.

She found a handful of hardbound books as well: a complete collection of the Holmes tales, dirty and frayed from overuse and almost solidly blue with marginal notes from the antique pen. Nearly every paragraph had words underlined or scrawled exclamations in the margins. She found Cale’s briefcase beneath a low chair, and when she pulled it across the carpet, Harold recognized it from the night before. It was already open. And empty.

As he searched the floor, Harold adopted a rodent’s-eye view of the area where the taupe carpet met the off-white wallpaper, below the vertical streaks of
fleur-de-lis
patterning that provided most of the wall’s decoration. He reached into his coat pocket and removed the magnifying glass that had previously found use only as a finger toy when he became nervous or bored.

At the sight of Harold with his glass, Jeffrey shook his head in shame.

Harold began a methodical examination of the hotel room’s walls. He could see puckers in the wallpaper through the lens, as every unevenness in the paper’s application to the drywall seemed to pop out like a series of sand dunes. What was Holmes looking for, when he searched through that fateful Lauriston Gardens house in his first case? That room had been dilapidated, dust-covered, and mildewy from years of inattention. Holmes dug through the dust and shone bright match light into the darkest corners, discovering the word
“RACHE”
—the German for “revenge”—written in blood at the bottom of the wall in an empty, unused portion of the room. But, thought Harold, sensational though such a clue might be, what was Holmes looking for when he found it? You couldn’t expect a
real
murderer to conveniently leave you a message explicating his motivations, could you? Stepping back, all Harold saw here was clean hotel wallpaper and freshly vacuumed carpet. He couldn’t possibly hope to find a clue as dramatic as Holmes’s, after all; there would be no bloody messages here. He was being responsible in his expectations. But Holmes’s method—that would work. It simply had to. So what the hell was Harold supposed to be looking for?

Harold’s search swung, inch by inch, 180 degrees across the room, to the wooden desk and chair. The top of the desk was a mess of papers and pens—whoever ransacked the room seemed to have been particularly concerned with making sure no lost diaries had been hidden in the hotel’s “Guide to Your Pay-Per-View Channels.” Harold pushed the chair away and crawled under the desk, continuing his examination. The darkness underneath made this difficult, however, so he reached up and brought the overturned lamp from the desktop to his assistance.

He flicked it on and pointed its bulb at the wall.

Then he dropped it, his body ricocheting as he gave a start. The bulb shattered, rousing both Sarah and Jeffrey from their thoughts and sending them rushing to Harold’s side. What they saw at first appeared to be a small, murky, dark stain on the bright, clean wall. Then, as they knelt beneath the desk, they began to make out red-brown letters, messily scrawled above the carpet line, as if by finger painting. No magnifying glass was needed to read the still-drying message.

“ELEMENTARY,” it read.

It was written in blood.

C
HAPTER 9

Sensational Developments

“You don’t know Sherlock Holmes yet...Perhaps you

would not care for him as a constant companion.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

A Study in Scarlet

October 18, 1900

The letter bomb in Arthur’s mail did not go off as planned.

Some ten minutes prior to the explosion, he settled down to breakfast by the latticework windows. Gray fall light came through the nine square glass panes. On days like these, the strips of white wood that separated the glass seemed brighter to the eye than did the window light. Arthur dug into his eggs and tomato.

Seven years had passed since the death of Sherlock Holmes. Seven years of stories, adventures, and a new life Arthur had constructed for himself far away from his old one. He had left London for Hindhead, and he had left Holmes for better things. This was the life of which he’d always dreamed.

He had built this house, named Undershaw, three years earlier. It was grand then, and as the years passed, it grew grander still. The estate had the air of a carnival about it. There were great stables, which attracted friends from the city nearly every weekend; dear children and distant relatives always scampering around hither and yon; a fireplace fit for a Hindu bonfire; a dark, quiet billiards room in which Arthur had already lost games to Bram and James Barrie. The new landau, had for 150 pounds plus the pair of horses to power it, was having the family crest painted on by the staff. Indeed, Arthur made sure to include the Doyle crest on as many elements of his new home as possible. It reminded him of where he’d come from and of the pride he felt in where he’d arrived. Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn. The house bought on make-believe; the house that a penny dreadful built.

Seven years, and Sherlock Holmes remained blessedly buried below the waters of the Reichenbach Falls. Yes, people still spoke of him. Yes, people—strangers—still wrote of him, discussed him, missed him, and begged for his return in letters to the editors of every magazine in which he’d appeared. But not here. No one dared speak of him in this house. The name Sherlock Holmes was not to be uttered out loud in Arthur’s presence, nor in the opulent home for which the detective had paid.

Five minutes before the explosion, Arthur left the breakfast table and went to retrieve the day’s post from the small mahogany table near the front vestibule. It was a task he enjoyed performing himself. As he walked the halls of his estate, he felt a pleasant moment of contentment. A small army of children and their attendants rampaged upstairs, trotting heavily between the eight bedrooms. Outside, the stable master fed Brigadier, Arthur’s own horse, an eight-year-old of strong Norfolk breeding. Through the front windows, Arthur could see the tall pines rising above his three stories. Perhaps later this winter they might acquire one from the nearby woods for a drawing-room Christmas tree.

He scooped up the morning’s postal stack in the crook of his arm and made his way to his study for the inspection. He opened the letters quickly. There was a kind note from Innes about the elections, which he appreciated, though Arthur would have preferred not to think on them. He had run for Parliament in Edinburgh over the last months on a largely anti-Boer platform. When he had returned from the front earlier in the year, Arthur had written a history of the war, from the British perspective, as well as many a pamphlet urging his fellow citizens to support the military effort. Then he had run for office, thinking that his pro-war views would be manifestly useful at Westminster. His platform, aside from a promise to defeat the Boer insurrection at all costs, contained a plan to raise tariffs on foreign foodstuffs imported into Britain that could as easily be produced locally (wheat, meat), while lowering tariffs on imported foodstuffs that could not be locally manufactured (sugar, tea). This plan had failed to rally the electorate in his favor, and he had been drawn into a rather public debate on the tense issue of women’s suffrage. Arthur had not intended to campaign on this point, but he was a committed antisuffragist, and when asked, he refused to duck the issue. After exaggerated rumors of Arthur’s Catholicism were spread across the district on cheaply printed bills, he lost his hometown seat by a few hundred votes. Rather than fight the slander that he was a papist stooge, Arthur retreated back to Hindhead, and to fiction.