The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 14 Jennifer Peters in Mourning

January 9, 2010

In the chilled belly of a British Airways 767, Harold attempted to find out a little more about Sarah. He was not immediately successful.

“Been to London before?” he asked as they settled into their leather seats.

She was silent for a moment before her face brightened into a wry smile.

“Why don’t you tell me?” she replied.

Harold was confused. “What?”

“Isn’t that one of those things that’s in all the Holmes stories? He looks at strangers and can tell everything about their life from the way that they look? The specks of dirt on their shoes, or the calluses on their hands, that kind of thing.”

“So you’ve read the Holmes stories?” asked Harold.

“Bravo! Your first deduction turns out to be correct.”

He could never quite tell whether Sarah was flirting with him or teasing him.

“Only a handful, though,” she added. “As prep for my voyage among the Sherlockians. So. Tell me something else about myself.”

Harold looked down at her stiletto boots, her dark jeans, her plaid flannel shirt with the upturned collar. He got the impression that she was dressed stylishly, but he couldn’t quite say why.

She was right, obviously. Holmes performed these little tricks in practically every story. A new client would enter his drawing room and within moments Holmes would have the gentleman or lady completely sized up. In The Sign of the Four, Holmes was able to tell the entire life story of Watson’s brother after examining the man’s pocket watch alone.

The trick was harder than Harold had imagined. His concentration fixed first on Sarah’s clothes, but they didn’t tell him much. They didn’t look cheap, but they didn’t look fantastically expensive either. Her nails were long and uneven, the bright red polish chipped off almost entirely.

“Holmes had an advantage,” said Harold.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“He lived in Victorian England. He came from a society so class-stratified that you could tell where people grew up within a few miles by their accent. The word ‘Cockney’ originally meant someone who lived within hearing distance of the bells at St. Mary-le-Bow. Your shirt cuffs were your destiny. Holmes was able to tell so much about a man’s walking stick-in, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles-because gentlemen carried walking sticks. There are no more rules nowadays. You have a million options of clothing and style to choose from. If your clothes look expensive, they could still be from a secondhand store. I live in L.A., where the basic code seems to be the more casual you look, the more money you have. We’re both Americans, so outside of a few very specific regions, accents tend to move around. Especially among people who actually do move around. You’re a reporter-how many different cities have you lived in? Four? Six? You could have been born in any one of them.”

“Excuses, excuses,” said Sarah. “You’re not the only Sherlockian who’s off chasing Cale’s killer right now. But you’re the one I bet on. You don’t want me to think I’ve put my money on the wrong horse, do you?”

“You haven’t.”

“Good. So, have I been to London before or not?”

Harold paused. A flight attendant deposited plastic champagne flutes on each of their tray tables.

Harold believed in Sherlock Holmes. He knew the stories weren’t “real,” of course-he didn’t believe in Holmes like that. But he believed in what the stories represented. He believed in rationality, in the precise science of deduction. Sherlock Holmes could do this. And so could Harold.

He examined her. Bright blue eyes. Thin nose. Two hoop earrings hanging from her earlobes. Curly brown hair held up in a ponytail, a few loose strands dangling down. Something behind her ear. He leaned in closer, over the gap between the first-class seats. There was a small tattoo behind her left earlobe.

“Yes,” said Harold. “You’ve been to London before.”

Sarah smiled. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. But it was a reasonable guess. You have a small mark on your nose, where a piercing used to be. And there’s a tiny tattoo of a musical note behind your left ear. Who gets musical-note tattoos? Musicians, obviously. So you were a musician at one point. I’m going with rock band, because you don’t take care of your fingers like a classical musician would, and you used to have a stud in your nose. Bass player? You were dedicated, or else you wouldn’t have gotten the tattoo. But then you quit and became a reporter. You’re freelance, which means that either you’re semifamous or you don’t make that much money. I don’t think you’re famous, or I would have heard of you. So you didn’t quit music because you needed the money, and you didn’t become a reporter for that reason either. So I don’t think you’ve ever been strapped for cash. You were a rich kid, or at least a relatively welloff one, pursuing a crazy dream to piss off your parents. Between your childhood, with parents who could have taken you on European vacations if they wanted to, and your time in your band, which must have toured if you were that committed, it stands to reason that you would have been through London at one point or another.”

Sarah beamed at him, and then pressed her hands together in a playful golf clap.

“Accordion,” she said. “Not bass. I played accordion in a punk band.”

“Your punk band had an accordion player?”

“It was pretty cool. But we never made it out of the East Coast. I grew up near Berkeley, and my parents were ‘comfortable,’ as they’d put it. They took me to Europe three times when I was a kid. Paris, Madrid, and a week in Italy, traveling from Rome to Cinque Terre by way of Florence. But we never went to London.”

“But you said you’d been,” said Harold.

“Yes,” said Sarah. “I have an ex who’s British. Born in London. We met in New York, but we went back to visit his family a few times.”

She raised her champagne flute and clinked it against Harold’s.

“Cheers,” she said before taking a long gulp. “I think you did great for your first time.”

Alex Cale’s sister was crying when they arrived. And judging from the pork-pink bags around her eyes, it looked as though she had been for some time.

Though a few years younger than her brother, Jennifer Peters looked much older when she answered the door to her spacious flat in London Fields, on the third ring, and allowed Harold and Sarah inside. Her short hair looked both shiny and frayed, and as they talked, she kept brushing the ends of her severe bob behind her ears. She wore jeans, a low-necked sweater, and thick red socks-no shoes. She would have appeared Sunday-morning comfortable had she not been so clearly miserable.

Her husband was not in the flat with her, and Harold didn’t inquire as to his whereabouts. The couple had no children and spent much of the year abroad. She had arrived in London only the day before, to attend to the disposal of Alex’s possessions, to recover his body, and see it interred at Highgate Cemetery, where some generations of their family had been laid to rest. Jennifer was her brother’s sole next of kin.

When the three of them sat down, Harold and Sarah on the hard couch and Jennifer on a wide, white plush chair, Harold felt grief lying sickly in the room like mildew. The couch felt sticky and wet.

And Harold felt like a tremendous ass. At least he’d had the good sense to leave the deerstalker cap at the hotel, with all of his bags. (Actually, he did so less because of his good sense and more because of Sarah’s gentle urging, but still, he thought he deserved credit for the decision.) He couldn’t help feeling like a grave robber as he forced Alex’s sister to talk about her dead brother, just when she had to deal head-on with the sensation that she had so very little family left.

“When was the last time you spoke to your brother, before his death?” Harold asked.

“I’m sorry, why are you here, again?” Jennifer responded plaintively.

“He was a good friend.” Harold swallowed, embarrassed at the exaggeration. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to him.”

Jennifer turned to Sarah, then away from them both. She looked puzzled, not at the complexity of the problem but at its simplicity. Her brother had died. That was “what happened to him.”

“Harold traveled in the same circles as your brother,” said Sarah. “We think he might have some insight into who did this that’s not available to the police.”

“You’re a detective?” asked Jennifer of Harold.

“No. Not exactly.”

“What do you do, then, exactly?”

“I’m a reader.”

“What does that mean?”

“I read books… well, I’ve read a lot of books, past tense, I suppose that’s more accurate. See, I’m freelance, I work for the legal departments of most of the major studios, and when someone sues one of them for copyright infringement, I help prepare the defense on the grounds-”

“You’re one of Alex’s Sherlockian friends?”

“Yes.”

She faced Sarah. “And you’re a reporter?”

“Yes.”

Jennifer sighed and crossed her legs, picking lint specks from her red socks. “I hadn’t spoken to my brother for a month or so. We weren’t… Well, that’s not true. We were close in our own way.”

“What did you talk about? Did anything seem out of the ordinary?” said Harold.

“Something was always out of the ordinary with Alex. The Great Game was always on, he was always after some relic or precious document or what-have-you. He was always this close, ever the last few inches, from finishing his biography. On that day, if I remember, he said that he had been followed ever since he’d found the diary. I thought he was being characteristically overdramatic.”

“Who was following him? What did he say about him-or her?”

“Oh, who the bloody hell knows? It’s not like this was the first time Alex thought some mysterious stranger had it in for him. Once, when he was at university, he rang Father in a fit because two rival students were conspiring against him to steal his thesis. It was silly, of course. They weren’t doing anything of the sort.”

“If he wasn’t being followed, then who do you think killed him?” said Harold, surprised at his own boldness.

“Don’t you think it’s obvious?” said Jennifer. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“What do you mean?”

“One of you lot killed him. You’re a herd of jealous children. He had a candy bar, and you all lusted after it. ‘Give me, give me.’” She uncrossed her legs, pressing her feet into the floor and leaning forward, hands on her knees. “Which one of your friends do you think it was?”

Harold thought of Ron Rosenberg. Jeffrey Engels. A dozen others. A suspicious chill danced up Harold’s spine, but he squelched it with a wiggle in his seat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Yet.”

Sarah piped up. “Think about your last conversation with your brother. Did he have any details on the man he thought was following him?”

Jennifer Peters thought for a moment. “No,” she said.

“We’d like to look at his apartment, if that’s all right with you,” said Sarah.

“Oh, very well, I suppose. What harm could it do?” said Jennifer after a moment of reflection. “I’ll take you now. Let me find some shoes.”

Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren’t brothers. Plot points didn’t leave behind grieving sisters who couldn’t find their shoes.

“You know, your brother,” he began after a few moments, “he was a legend in our organization. And that he finally discovered the lost diary? I don’t know if it’s much consolation to you, but he achieved his dream. He found what he’d been looking for. He was happy, before he passed.”

Jennifer laughed to herself and shook her head.

“Happy?” she said, trying the word out on her lips, listening to its sound. “Do you think people are happy when they finally get the things they’ve been after?” She absentmindedly fiddled with the wedding ring on her left hand.

“He wasn’t, really,” she continued. “I remember the day he called to tell me that he’d found the diary. His voice was so quiet I could barely hear what he was saying over the phone. He seemed very distant, very formal. I offered a glass of champagne, said I’d take him out to celebrate, he deserved it. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said.” Jennifer deepened her voice, mimicking her dead brother. “ ‘That won’t be necessary.’ Who says that? To his sis?”

Jennifer emerged from a back closet with a pair of comfortable walking shoes and a heavy winter coat. As she covered herself up, the fringe of mink at the top of the coat brushed against her earlobes.

“Did he ever tell you where he’d found it?” asked Harold. He’d been waiting for the right moment to ask this question. There wasn’t one, he now realized.

“He never told me,” replied Jennifer.

“You asked him about it?”

“I asked him a dozen times. ‘Alex, you’ve been on the bloody hunt for ten years and you won’t tell me where it took you?’ Nothing. I pieced together that he’d been in Cambridge for a week, not sure why. He did most of his research at the British Library, which has excellent Victorian and Edwardian collections. Do you know, he never even told me that he was particularly close, closer than any of the other times he thought he was onto the damned thing. He just rings one day to say, ‘Oh, Jennifer, I’ve found the diary. It’s quite fascinating. I’m going to complete the biography and unveil the whole lot at this year’s convention.’ He sounded mournful-as if someone he’d known had just died. Like he was about to type up the last rites.” She frowned, stopping herself from continuing.

“You don’t think finding the diary gave him peace, just a little?” asked Sarah. “It was the culmination of his life’s work.”

“I think that whatever he found in there made him miserable from the second he laid eyes on it till the day he died. Till the day the diary killed him!” Jennifer said. “I think that finding Conan Doyle’s diary was the worst thing that ever happened to my brother. What do you think it’s going to do for you?”