The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 16 The Answering Machine

January 9, 2010, cont.

In the thirty-three-minute cab ride from Jennifer Peters’s flat in London Fields to Alex Cale’s in Kensington, Harold and Sarah learned much about Jennifer and Alex’s family history.

They were both, as anyone could gather, quite wealthy. Henry Cale, their father, had built a shipping fortune from nothing-he had been a hardscrabble Newcastle man, who carried to his death the Geordie provincialism and classist suspicion of the wealthy with which he’d been brought up. He was not a man to sit idly by while his children sat idle. He would not allow them to rest on their family’s newish fortune.

Which, Harold gathered from Jennifer’s bitter ramblings, largely explained Henry Cale’s emphatic annoyance when his children steadfastly refused to make money. Alex and his sister were both next to useless in this regard-fine universities, American graduate schools, any position in the world open to their letters of application. Yet Jennifer dabbled incessantly: a graduate program in the writing of poetry (her father bellowed at her when he heard the news), a teaching position looking over six-year-old tots (her father broke a wineglass that time), an administrative role in a campaign for Third World debt relief (he threatened to remove her from his will), eventually leading to a marriage with one of the campaign’s wealthy founders (all threats rescinded, if only because she no longer needed his inheritance anyway). Jennifer now directed her husband’s charitable trust.

Alex Cale had been decidedly more driven than his sister, though no less a disappointment to old Henry. He’d been a promising boy- quick-witted, a good head for numbers, sterling marks all around. Things went sour in his third year at university, when he asked to take a leave to finish a novel. His father ended that conversation sensibly by having Ms. Whitman, his secretary, show Alex out of his office.

Henry was encouraged when, a few years later, Alex asked for a loan so that he might open up a bookshop. Henry did not know much about what the market was for a little used-book shop in Chelsea in 1973, but at least the boy wanted to start a business. Let us be thankful for small gifts.

The bookshop lasted an unimpressive twenty-eight months before abandoning its lease to an Indian restaurant, the proprietors of which promptly turned Alex’s old back office into a delightfully smelly kitchen. Alex would walk past the Indian restaurant in later years and find himself both nostalgic and hungry at the same time. He ate there frequently. Jennifer remembered that he had taken her and her husband out to dinner at the Indian restaurant on the night of its closing, before it gave way to a French-Asian-fusion type of something or other. (Their father had been too busy to attend.) Alex had seemed more upset about losing the Indian restaurant than he’d been at the loss of his own shop.

Further financial misadventures followed, though none with quite so much of their father’s money at stake. Poor investments had been made in a fledgling literary magazine, a collection of nineteenth- century antiques, and on an inexplicable six months Alex had spent apprenticing an artisan who built wickerwork furniture. If anyone were to construct a biography of Alex Cale, thought Harold, this might be the detail glossed over because it didn’t conform to the general thrust of the man’s narrative.

Yet, Jennifer explained as the cab skimmed the southern edge of Hyde Park and Harold looked out at the bark-naked trees, the overarching narrative theme of Alex’s life was indisputably Sherlock Holmes. He’d fallen in love as a boy, asking their nanny, Deirdre, to read the stories to him over and over again at bedtime. He’d written on Conan Doyle at school and finally joined the Irregulars when he was only twenty-four. He wrote regularly for the Baker Street Journal in every phase of his life. In all of his passions, there was Sherlock.

When Henry Cale died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in I989, his two children began to drift apart, no longer tethered to the cold steel pole of their disapproving father. They no longer needed one another as protection against him. It was as if they’d been trenchmates in the war, and now that the bombing had stopped, neither knew what to say to the other. Jennifer had her husband and their charity, Alex had his Holmes and his endless research.

It was after his father’s death that Alex’s quest to find Conan Doyle’s lost diary became all-consuming. He was armed now with a figurative fortune in shovels for digging into Conan Doyle’s life. There would be no distractions for Alex from then on. There was no one left to tell him no. His father would at last be proved wrong when Alex found the diary and completed his biography; Alex would have amounted to something grand indeed, only not grand in the way his father had hoped. He would have achieved victory and rebellion at the same time.

Harold was surprised by how confessional Jennifer Peters had become, though he was unnerved by the odd rhythms of her speech. She would speak beautifully and painfully of her brother’s deepest feelings in one moment and then, in the middle of a sentence, clam up, her thoughts drifting out into the gray winter sky. A minute later she would light up again, and a torrent of words would touch on her brother’s childhood and their familial anxieties. She reminded Harold of the locks to the Chicago River, where he’d grown up-closing shut to fill up with water and then swinging open to dump thousands of muddy gallons out of the lake.

The cab pulled up to one of a series of similar-looking three-stories along Phillimore. Tall trees rose from backyards behind the buildings, and Harold could see them poking over the tops of the sharply slanted roofs. Harold paid, with Sebastian Conan Doyle’s money, and the three approached Alex’s flat.

Jennifer let them into what first appeared to be a carnival’s back lot. Fantastical toys and ancient gewgaws littered every available surface. A shimmering silver gasogene, an ornamental saber, a copper lamp, a dozen medicine jars full of heaven-only-knows, a glass-encased revolver, an atomically dainty tea set, a banjo, fourteen flowerless vases in every color, and books, books, books. Books of every size, shape, and design. Books settled neatly on shelves, books strewn in scattered piles, lone books perched improbably off the ends of tabletops and footrests. Neither the books nor anything else within Harold’s field of vision seemed in any sort of order-it was a decorative cacophony, an interior designer’s manic breakdown.

From hallway to sitting room to dining room to whatever lay beyond, each area had wallpapering of a different color. Yellow, pink, purple. The flat looked like a gigantic piece of candy. Harold imagined that Willy Wonka’s private study might have looked similar.

“Wow,” was all Harold said.

“I think my brother’s… eccentricities had become more apparent in recent years,” Jennifer responded.

“Do you mind if we look around?”

“Go right ahead,” Jennifer said. “Good luck finding anything.”

There was no way to perform an organized search of such an unorganized collection-Harold gave in to the randomness at his feet and flitted back and forth like a bee hunting for pollen. He nosed around in the yellow study, picking at a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He opened an old cigar box in the purple room to find a collection of foreign currencies, dollars and kroner and four kinds of pesos all collected in clear plastic bags and rubber bands. Sarah searched separately. The two didn’t discuss what they were looking for-Harold wouldn’t have known what to tell her anyway. He hoped that they would know what it was when they found it.

Sarah picked up a set of matching salt and pepper shakers shaped like cats. She placed them neatly on a table, next to a set of four-by-six photographic prints. She tightened the scattered pile of photographs. Harold began to watch her, soon paying less attention to the detritus at his feet and more attention to the way Sarah searched the room. She was cleaning, almost. When she came to a blue ribbon loosened beside a white cardboard box, she retied the ribbon. She was putting things right. Harold looked down at the mess at his own feet-he was simply picking things up and placing them back down approximately where he’d found them. There was no system to what Harold was doing, only mindless entropy. Everything that wasn’t the diary, he treated as dirt. Sarah, on the other hand, was taking the deathly clutter of Alex Cale’s apartment into her hands and making something better of it.

They searched in relative silence, punctuated by an occasional story from Jennifer. Harold or Sarah would produce an object-some trinket or faded memento-and Jennifer would do her best to describe its origin. She often did not know where things had come from but would try to interpolate their origins from what sketches she had of her brother’s travels. That frozen clock looked South American; Alex had been there in ‘98 or ‘99; ergo, he must have picked it up in Argentina.

It was Sarah who first noticed the answering machine. She gestured toward the slow, steady blink of its single red light.

“Have you checked his messages?” she asked Jennifer.

“Oh!” Jennifer looked surprised. “I hadn’t seen that.”

“May I?” inquired Sarah.

Jennifer nodded, and Sarah clicked the Play button. There was a loud click and then a piercing beep.

“One. Message.” The anthropomorphic voice of Alex’s answering machine was an older woman’s, and came out in a broken staccato. “First. Message. Received at. Seven. Forty-one. P.M. January. Four. Two thousand. And ten.” That would be five days ago, thought Harold. Three days before the Irregulars’ dinner.

“Mr. Cale, this is Sebastian Conan Doyle,” came the new, human voice from the message. Having spoken with Sebastian just the previous day, Harold found it spooky to hear his voice on the crackly tape. Sebastian sounded angry.

“I trust you received the injunction from my solicitors. I know you’re hiding from me. You won’t answer my letters. You won’t return my calls. You think because you dug up the right trunk in some attic somewhere, you’re entitled to something which belongs to me. You little wanker. Can you hear me, Cale? Are you there right now, listening to my voice? Pissing your trousers in panic. Well, listen to this: If you give that diary away, you will regret it. I will see to it that you come to hate the very name Conan Doyle.”

There was another loud click, and the message ended.