The Sherlockian (9 page)

“Someone who’s read way too many mysteries,” said Sarah.

C
HAPTER 11

Scotland Yard

“The authorities are excellent at amassing facts,

though they do not always use them to advantage.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Naval Treaty”

October
19,1900

“Look, now,” said the hairy-faced inspector. “It doesn’t seem that they was actually trying to kill you, like. Rather more likely they was just trying to give you a good scare there, eh?”

Arthur sighed and tapped his fingertips on the inspector’s tiny desk. A bronze nameplate rested atop the desk, proclaiming “INSPECTOR MILLER” in freshly minted block letters. Two vertical pips pinned to the man’s collar served to further emphasize the seniority of this stupid bobby’s rank.

The main offices of the New Scotland Yard, where Arthur now found himself for the first time, were surprisingly quiet on a Wednesday morning. The building was only a few years old and seemed too spacious for its inhabitants. Arthur could hear the various clomps of uniform boots against the floor, both close by and from the distant lengths of long hallways. They added a gentle percussive accompaniment to this otherwise irritating conversation, like a native tribal instrument, something he might have heard in the Transvaal while searching for Boer raiders.

“It was a bomb, sir, that someone put in my mailbox,” Arthur said. “It took off half my writing desk. You can understand my alarm. My family was at home.” Arthur was doing his very best to restrain himself. His evident stupidity notwithstanding, it was Inspector Miller’s irritatingly sanguine expression which so riled Arthur. Woolly muttonchop whiskers drooped down the inspector’s face, giving him the impression of a crisply uniformed beagle.

“Right so, Dr. Doyle. Right so. We at the Yard will do everything in our power to apprehend the rogue what was behind this here outrage. Trust we won’t see a moment’s rest till he’s been fixed in darbies. All’s I’m saying, sir, is that you needn’t fret yourself. The bomb was built quite poorly. It did a big pop, sure enough, but it were a simple black powder, with an extra dose of sulfur in the mix. I dare say it was more for smoke than fire, if you catch my meaning.”

Arthur had never before challenged a man to a duel, but in this moment he understood the magnificent reasonableness of the tradition. It was either that or slugging him outright this very second, which didn’t seem nearly so gentlemanly.

Arthur spoke slowly, in order to contain himself.

“And the accompanying letter? What do you make of that?” He picked the envelope up from Inspector Miller’s desk and shook it before the man’s face like a Chinese fan. The right edge of the envelope had been torn open hastily by Arthur the day before. Inside, he had found not a letter but simply a clipping from the
Times,
a two-week-old issue. It was a short article on a killing in the East End. “Foul Murder in Stepney,” ran the headline. “Bride Found Dead in Her Bath.” It described a young woman who’d been drowned in the bathtub of a rent on Salmon Street. A cheap wedding dress lay beside her corpse, though no information about her identity, or that of her possible husband, had been found—save, however, for a strange tattoo on the young woman’s body. It depicted a black crow with three heads. As anonymous female bodies found in the East End were not so rare these days, this was not a case that would warrant much attention. Given the location of the body and the presence of the tattoo, in fact, the Yard had easily assumed her to be a harlot and let it go as another sad example of society’s Great Curse.

“I can’t imagine but someone’s having a bit of wretched fun with you,” replied Inspector Miller. “I don’t see how bringing a dead dollymop to the attention of a man of your stature is much but a twist and a folly.”

“Might it not be the case that the murderer of this poor unfortunate, whoever she may be, is in fact the selfsame bomber who so tore up my study?”

“As I was saying, Dr. Doyle, an investigation is well under way. You rest assured that the situation is in hand. I dare say we’ve got our best people on it.” Inspector Miller tugged on the bottom of his coat, straightening his appearance as he stood a few inches more erect. The movement served only to make him seem even more youthful in Arthur’s eyes. The inspector’s crisp dark suit appeared to be an even size too large for his undernourished frame. He looked more like a child playing at dress-up in his father’s clothes than he did a soldier of justice entrusted with shielding society from the depravity of the underworld. If Miller was the best the Yard had to offer, thought Arthur, then the darkness of these crimes would never see the light of justice.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” continued Inspector Miller, “seeing as how you’re here anyway and I’m put in charge of getting to the bottom of your case . . .” He fetched an old, yellowing magazine from beneath some papers and laid it down so Arthur could see. “Well, my boys, you see, they’d right have my whiskers if I didn’t ask you for a signature when I’ve got you plain in front of me.”

It was the December
1893
issue of the
Strand.
“The Final Problem” was the lead story. Arthur had not come face-to-face with a copy of his last Holmes story for a number of years. The feelings aroused in him were great and diverse. A sense of pride, a stiffening in his spine on account of the hard-earned fame that preceded him into Scotland Yard this morning, came first. But this quickly gave way to incredulous irritation, which scrunched Arthur’s face inward till his mustache tickled against the tip of his nose. Of all stupidities, at a time like this,
Holmes
? He was like one of Bram’s dead-undead—a ghastly vampire who followed Arthur everywhere he went and from whose all-seeing malevolence Arthur could never escape. It was not Arthur’s acclaim that excited the inspector; it was Holmes’s.

Arthur took the magazine from the desk and held it to his face.

“And oh, now, don’t think it queer, but mightn’t you write, ‘To Eddie, from one detective to another,’ if you don’t think that’s too presumptuous, sir. And then, if you could, sign it ‘Sherlock Holmes’?”

That was substantially more than Arthur could bear. He slapped the magazine back onto the desk and reared up on his feet like a horse. Arthur looked and spoke down to Inspector Miller.

“Sir, if you will not treat these crimes with the seriousness with which they are due, then I shall be forced to investigate them myself.” Arthur snatched up the envelope and placed it triumphantly in his coat pocket before the inspector could object. “I will deduce the identity of the man who killed this helpless young bride and who nearly succeeded in his attempt to kill me. And I will do it without your help. Good day.”

Arthur spun on his heels and huffed to the door.

“Dr. Doyle,” the inspector began, hoping that Arthur acted in jest. “We don’t know a thing about this dead girl. No possessions, no rings or jewelry. Fellow who runs the inn says she— Wait, I have it here somewhere, I even looked up the file for you.” Inspector Miller rummaged amid the papers on his desk until he got ahold of what he’d been searching for.

“He says she’d come in the night before with a tall gent, real skinny. Man didn’t say a word. The girl paid their thruppence for the night right away. She gave the name of Morgan Nemain. Ran it out, it’s most certainly a fake. Nothing in the room to put a name on either the lady or the gent. Just a dirty wedding dress. Lord knows where that’s from. And that odd tattoo, the three-headed crow, which she must’ve had inked on by one of her customers, you ask me. You know how that sort does. They said it was hardly fresh either, which meant she’d been at it for a while. My man took a drawing of it.” Inspector Miller held up a piece of white paper, on which was drawn a replica of the dead girl’s tattoo. Arthur saw what first appeared to be a large black splotch, but as he looked closer, the splotch assumed the rough shape of a pitchblack crow, with three heads poking out of its neck. One faced left, one forward, one right. Arthur thought of the photographs he’d seen of American Natives at war, paint brushed angrily onto their skin.

“Plus,” continued Inspector Miller, “they say you ought to be made a knight of the realm soon enough, I hear. Do you really want to be getting yourself mixed up in such ugliness? And have you even thought about why someone would want to be drowning an East End tart and then blowing up a right gentleman such as yourself? Then letting everyone know he’d done so? Please. Be reasonable.”

Arthur stopped, his hand on the doorknob. The inspector had a point. The plot was very dark indeed. The solution lay dim in the distance, and Arthur had not the slightest idea how he’d find his way there.

“It’s a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself,” said Inspector Miller with a smile.

Arthur thought again of dueling. There would indeed be a fight this day. But not with this foolish inspector.

“No,” began Arthur. “It is not a case worthy of Sherlock bloody Holmes. It is a case worthy of his creator.”

And with that, he marched out, swinging the door shut and leaving Inspector Miller alone to contemplate what mayhem he’d just wrought.

C
HAPTER 12

A Proposal

“My professional charges are upon a fixed scale.

I do not vary them, save when I remit them altogether.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Problem of Thor Bridge”

January 6,
2010,
cont.

“It’s not a bloody
mystery,
” insisted Ron Rosenberg, slapping a sharp palm to the bar top for punctuation. Harold gave a jolt. Ron had a tendency to throw his wiry arms around when he became agitated. The more dire Ron’s inflection grew, the more alert Harold had to be for an errant elbow swipe.

“You’re going to pin this on me, and I think we both know exactly why,” continued Ron.

“Look,” replied Harold, “I’m seriously not saying you had anything to do with this. With the murder.”

“Hush!” said Ron, flitting his eyes across the hotel bar. “Quietly. This is between us.”

Ron swung his elbows out again, and Harold dodged. Ron Rosenberg was not among Harold’s favorite Irregulars, and it was moments like this that reminded him why. Ron was in his forties, though he looked older. Squinting eyes gave his face the impression of wrinkles, and the impeccably tailored three-piece suits he wore every day made him look like an aged banker. Which he was not. Harold vaguely remembered something about Ron’s owning a small real-estate firm in London, though he wasn’t sure what kind. Harold was sure, however, that Ron was not the focus of anyone’s investigations.

Ron had descended upon Harold a few minutes earlier, after Sarah had left to take a phone call, and had immediately begun professing his innocence. He was growing more animated by the minute, even as he was trying to contain their conversation by pressing in close to Harold’s shoulder and whispering angrily. The effect was that Harold felt he was chatting with a bee—ever buzzing and vibrating.

“What are you so worried about?” asked Harold.

“He was there when you found the body, wasn’t he? What did he say? I know he talked about me, don’t bloody lie.”

It took Harold a few moments to figure out whom Ron was referring to.

“Jeffrey? You’re worried about Jeffrey Engels?”

Ron scanned the bar again for prying ears. Sherlockians still surrounded most of the tables in groups of three or four. Strains of elaborate conspiracy—hushed with gravity and paranoia—wafted toward Harold and Ron.

“You know that he and I have had our . . . polite disagreements,” said Ron. “And, very well, some of them have not been so polite. But they have been civil, as such things go, don’t you think? We’re friends. I would fairly call us friends. Do you think he knew Cale was dead already when he gave that introduction this morning?”

Harold was briefly stunned by the last question.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t.”

“You know he had his disagreements with Cale as well, don’t you? Yes, right, they gave a good show of camaraderie, but it was rubbish. Jeffrey kept pressing him for information about the diary and about what he would say at his lecture, but Cale was mum. Jeffrey wasn’t happy about it, I can tell you that.”

“Look,” said Harold, “I don’t think either of you did it, okay?”

Ron made a curious face. He seemed genuinely surprised to hear Harold say that.

“Really?” he replied. “Because one of us must have.”

Harold hadn’t known all of his fellow members for very long, but he had known them. And he genuinely liked these people. He enjoyed being with them. He felt like he was almost at home among them. In the exchange of the faded shilling the night before, Harold had almost
—almost
—found a place in which he belonged.

He was surrounded by dozens of his colleagues, his supposed friends, and he was alone. One of them was a killer. Maybe more than one, Harold had to reason, if they’d read
Murder on the Orient Express.
Of course they had. They’d all read the same books. They all knew the same stories by heart—Christie, Chandler, Hammett, on and on, the list would fill pages. How could any of them have done this?

For the first time that morning, Harold felt angry. He was angry with the killer for taking Alex Cale, and for taking the diary, but he was also angry at him for taking the Baker Street Irregulars. What would the group be like now? At Harold’s last Sherlockian meeting, in Los Angeles, they had stayed up drinking scotch until
2
a.m. and laughing about that one massive plot hole in “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist.” They would never do that again. How could they?

No one could be allowed to get away with this. These things meant too much to him—the group, the club, the people. No one would be allowed to let Harold slip back into the loneliness of his life.

He felt the narcissism of his growing anger.

“Why
did
Jeffrey give that speech this morning?” Harold said. His thoughts were moving quickly.

Ron smiled. “That’s an excellent question,” he said. “Why not hold off until he knew where Cale was? Why start expounding on the issue at hand, to a roomful of people who already knew everything he had to say?”