The Sherlockian (30 page)

January 11, 2010

If you were Alex Cale and you had killed yourself and then left a trail of Sherlockian clues behind as to your reasons, to where would those clues lead?

This was the question before Harold and Sarah. They discussed their options. They could head back to New York in order to have another look at Cale’s hotel room, except that the room would certainly have been washed clean of evidence by this point. They could return to Sebastian Conan Doyle’s flat to see if anything Cale had said to him over the past few months provided any hint as to Cale’s motivations, except that their last meeting with Sebastian Conan Doyle hadn’t ended on friendly terms.

So, surveying the absence of excellent investigative options before them, Harold and Sarah decided to give Alex Cale’s writing office another look. “Cale was trying to leave a series of clues for a fellow Sherlockian to follow. Any Sherlockian, like me, would have traced Cale’s steps as far back as his writing office. So it stands to reason that a message might be waiting for us there.”

Sarah admitted that this sounded as reasonable as any other option available to them.

“But,” she added, “the office is a crime scene now. Jennifer Peters called the police. And I don’t think she’s our biggest fan either. How are we supposed to get in?”

As it turned out, this was less of an issue than they expected it to be. After they’d waited around on the building’s front steps for only a quarter of an hour, pretending to search for keys in Sarah’s purse, a teenage boy appeared as if from thin air and let them in. The teenager did not make eye contact with either Harold or Sarah but instead kept his chin aimed at the ground while he unlocked the door. Seemingly lost in his thoughts, the boy trudged up the central staircase to his own flat, dragging his feet and slouching his shoulders the whole way up. Harold was glad to note that even across the Atlantic, general sullenness was the basic cloth of teenage attire.

The door to Cale’s flat was closed, but when Harold turned the knob, he found that the lock was broken. The Goateed Man must have cracked it when he broke in to search the office, and it looked like the building’s owner hadn’t put in a replacement yet. Yellow barricade tape crisscrossed the doorway in the shape of an X. Harold and Sarah ducked under it as they entered the flat.

The rooms appeared much as they had left them two days earlier. Though, had it been two days? Or three? Or was it only yesterday that Harold had been here, sifting through the toppled piles of hard-backed books on the floor? He realized that time since the murder had entirely lost its distinction. Strange, he thought, that these, the most noteworthy days in his whole life, would blend together so easily into a mush of adrenaline and intrigue.

He looked over at Sarah, who was wading through her piles of books and papers, searching for God-knows-what. He realized that in the flurry of revelation about her divorce, and her lie, he’d been so satisfied with himself for finding the answer to that small mystery that he hadn’t actually asked her much about the divorce itself. He knew nothing at all about her soon-to-be-ex-husband or the pressing legal issues that required heated calls with her attorney. He felt a twinge of jealousy, of course. That’s why he hadn’t asked about it. He was afraid to learn about the man she must once have loved so much and who now was fighting with her about some obscure and boring financial matter. Harold, for his own part, had never seriously considered marriage. He wasn’t averse to the idea: it’s just that it had never come up in anything more than a theoretical sense. He always imagined that he’d marry one day—he was still young. Though Sarah didn’t seem much older, and she’d already made the leap. Then she’d crashed on the rocks and come drifting to the shore.

He tried to imagine Sarah making coffee on Sunday morning. Doing the crossword puzzle in bed, wrapping the white sheets around her legs while she reminded Harold that “adze” was a four-letter word for a wood-carving tool. The image seemed absurd. He could only picture Sarah attacking the tires on a black sedan with a switchblade, or examining a ransacked crime scene for secret messages. His relationship with her, whatever sort of relationship it was, had existed under rather unusual circumstances, to say the least.

Harold became suddenly sad. As soon as this was over, Sarah would leave and go back to somewhere that wasn’t in his life. And then he would have to go back to a sparsely tasteful one-bedroom in Los Feliz, to a small stack of civil-court filings and a larger one of old books, to the local friends he had dinner with once a month each, and to a yearly gala in New York where he could put on his deerstalker cap in public and no one would laugh at him. These days with Sarah were fantasy, and real life would soon return. What a miserable thought. This would not end with slow Sunday-morning coffee. It would simply end.

He’d had a girlfriend, Amanda, just after college. The thing he remembered most about her—more than the eleven blissful days they spent in Buenos Aires or that one night when they’d had sex four and a half times and he’d been seconds away from using the words “soul mate” when she fell asleep—was her ability to live entirely in the present moment. She was able to accept the joys and misfortunes in front of her as they came, without wondering endlessly when the joys would end or the misfortunes would lift.

Harold was paralyzed by endings. He couldn’t think about where he was or what he was doing without thinking about when it would end. He would try so hard to experience current pleasures, and to divorce them from the knowledge of a past that was comparatively more or less pleasurable; he would try to separate the present from its eventual conclusion, but he never felt that he was able to accomplish it. He tried in that moment to focus on the books at his feet, on the mystery and adventure around him, and mostly on Sarah’s quiet breath, the sound of which he could just make out from across the room. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the spoiled milk he’d return to in his fridge in L.A. or the four messages he’d find on his answering machine, none of which he cared to listen to. This, too, would end.

“When does this stop?” Harold asked out loud. He hadn’t remembered deciding to speak, and yet there it was. The words had already been loosed.

“What do you mean?” asked Sarah. She plopped the book in her hands down on a pile and crossed her legs in front of her.

He wasn’t sure how to have this conversation. And he certainly didn’t want to. But he’d started it, improbably, and he knew of no conversational exit.

“Well . . . when does the investigation stop? What are we even looking for now? It’s funny about detective work. It’s like it becomes its own self-justifying, self-sustaining machine. You find a clue, you deduce an explanation for something or other, and then you follow that to the next one. And then the next one. And maybe we’re making progress somewhere, or maybe being a detective is like being trapped inside a perpetual-motion machine. There’s always more to analyze. There’s always more to find. We can start analyzing our own analysis. We could run on our own fumes forever!”

Sarah responded with a curious look. “I appreciate that you’re feeling very philosophical about this,” she said gingerly. “But I’m not sure what you mean.”

“What did we set out to do? We wanted to figure out who killed Alex Cale. And we wanted to recover the diary. Well, we know who killed Alex Cale. And we know that the diary can’t be recovered, because it was never found in the first place.”

“We don’t know why Cale did it.”

“But does it matter? Do the why’s matter if we already know the what’s?”

Sarah paused, trying to read Harold’s face. He was getting at something, certainly, but neither of them was sure what it was.

“What are you saying, Harold? Do you want to go home?”

“No,” he said. “But why are you still here?”

“Why am I still here?” Sarah looked confused by the question.

“I can tell you why I’m still here. Because Alex Cale killed himself in order to leave me a message. But why are you still here?”
For me,
thought Harold.
Say that you’re here for me.

Sarah looked him coolly in the eyes. “For the diary,” she said. “I’m here to find the diary. That’s my story.”

Harold returned her stare and tried to match her expressionless look. He was sure he failed. She must be able to see the sadness he was holding back.

“Alex never found the diary,” he said. He did a very good job of minimizing the quivering in his voice.

“No. But you can.”

“What’re the books you’ve got there?” he said, gesturing to a pile beside her as if nothing had passed between them.

“Some history,” she said. “And poetry. German, Roman.”

“Wait. Is the poetry Roman, or is that the history?”

“Umm . . .” She pulled an old, heavy hardback from the pile. It didn’t have a glossy sleeve, just a bruised and black cardboard cover.
“The Poetry of Catullus.
He was Roman, right?”

Harold laughed. “Yeah. And I’ll bet there’s a military history in there as well—something called
The Holy War
?”

Surprised at Harold’s specificity, Sarah looked down at her pile. In a moment she removed another hard-backed book.

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know this was here?”

“Open the book.”

She did, then looked up at Harold in shock. “The pages are empty!” she exclaimed.

“Yeah. It’s a fake. Just a little joke on Cale’s part. When Sherlock Holmes came back to life, after the Great Hiatus, he reappeared to Watson disguised as an elderly bookseller. He carried three books with him, which he gave to his unsuspecting friend as a gift. The books were a collection of Catullus’s poetry, plus something called
The Holy War,
which so far as we can tell wasn’t even a real book, and a nature guide called
British Birds.
I’m sure you’ll find that last one in there, too.” Sarah began to look through the books in her pile, in search of
British Birds.
“The Catullus part has always been a curious point for Sherlockians. He was one of the most openly sexual of the Roman poets, in both hetero- and homo- varieties. It’s a funny thing to give to your best friend after a long absence.”

Sarah completed her search of the books beside her and turned to Harold empty handed.

“There’s nothing here called
British Birds
,” she said.

“I’m sure it’s there somewhere.”

Harold joined her on the floor, and together they went through the pile again. Nothing.

So they searched the entire flat. They roamed the floor on hands and knees, picking up every book they found along the way. At first Harold took the south end and Sarah took the north, but when they still couldn’t find the book, they traded and re-searched each other’s section. Again, nothing.

“It’s not here,” said Sarah finally.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Harold. “There’s no way Alex Cale would have had only two books of this little Sherlockian trilogy. Someone as obsessive as he was? Of course he’d have a copy.”

“So the Goateed Man stole it,” said Sarah.

Harold thought about this. “Maybe,” he said. “It’s possible. But why would he think there was anything special about that book? And if he
did
know there was something special about it, then why did he turn the whole apartment upside down?”

“That’s a good point.”

“And if the Goateed Man didn’t steal it . . .” concluded Harold. “Well . . . if he didn’t steal it, then it was never here. And Alex Cale was trying to send us another message.”

C
HAPTER 31

Introducing Mr. Edward Henry

“Criminal cases are continually hinging upon that one point. A man

is suspected of a crime months perhaps after it has been committed.

His . . . clothes are examined and brownish stains discovered upon

them. Are they blood stains, or mud stains, or . . . what are they? That

is a question that has puzzled many an expert, and why? Because

there was no reliable test. Now we have the Sherlock Holmes test,

and there will no longer be any difficulty.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

A Study in Scarlet

November 13, 1900, cont.

Arthur had quite a bit of explaining to do. This he attempted during the brief ride to Clerkenwell aboard the Scotland Yard carriage. He and Inspector Miller traveled quickly, and so Arthur spoke more quickly still. By the time their carriage, a broad four-wheeler, had pulled in front of Emily Davison’s lodgings, Arthur had given Inspector Miller a more or less satisfactory summary of his investigations.

Emily Davison’s flat was swarming with police. A dozen bobbies milled about the drawing room as they performed a variety of odd tasks. Two poured charcoal powder over every available surface, the lumps of black soot giving the room the appearance of a long-sinceerupted volcano. The men pressed clear glass onto the powder lumps and then pulled the glass up into the light. They gazed intently at the kaleidoscopic images produced by the powder on the glass, and then, seemingly unhappy with their results, they pressed the glass down again to create another image. Another group of investigators hovered in a circle over something on the floor. With their hands full of odd devices, they took turns kneeling down and applying their tools to whatever lay there. As Arthur stepped farther into the drawing room, he could see a pair of stockinged legs on the floor, at the center of the group. Then he could make out a black frock above the legs, torn and folded at a strange angle. This must be the body of Emily Davison, Arthur realized. Through the crush of hovering detectives, Arthur saw one man kneeling beside it. He held a long steel rod, which was curved in the shape of a half-moon. In the center of the rod stood a hinge, which allowed the man to open and close the half-moon shape as if it were the jaws of an animal. He placed the device around Emily’s skull and gazed at some sort of scale at the top of the instrument. The kneeling constable barked a series of numbers at the standing ones, who replied by barking the numbers right back at him for confirmation. Arthur realized that the man was measuring the diameter of her cranium.