The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 19 The Broken Hair Clip

October 27, 19oo

The Needling family lived in a mansion called Millhead, which rested at the bottom of a hill in West Hampstead. Great white pillars shot forth from the dirt, pressing the sharply angled roof upward, like an arrow to the heavens. Before the pillars lay a row of delicate hedges, and two empty, symmetrical flower beds. Into the distance spread a craggy heath, whose reddish outcroppings of rock stretched into the cloud-covered horizon.

Arthur had sent word of his coming the day before. He’d prepared the first telegram himself, a “Dear Sir” sort of job to Sally Needling’s father, explaining who he was, how he’d become involved in “the tragedy” and all that, and asking permission to visit the man’s home. Then Arthur had decided it might be odd, to send such a missive without warning, and so he’d hurried down to the Yard again, to have them broach the issue. Best to let the authorities handle the awkward bits, Arthur felt. Inspector Miller had made contact with Sally’s father, Bertrand Needling, who quickly assented to a visit. Arthur had sent a brief, yet polite, note this morning, thanking Mr. Needling for his time and letting him know that Arthur would be on the 4:05 from King’s Cross. He’d made no mention of Sally directly, nor of her murder, nor of a cheap East End boardinghouse with a white lace wedding dress tucked away in its back bedroom closet.

Arthur clapped the heavy bronze knocker against the front door. He could hear the sound echo throughout the house. After a wait, a servant answered the door and let him inside. The family had been expecting him.

His interview with the family was tense and hushed, their voices quieted to a whisper. Bertrand and Clara Needling sat on opposite ends of the drawing room. Sally’s two brothers were out. Arthur never learned where. The talk was punctuated by strange, sudden silences. In the middle of describing some facet of her daughter’s brief life, Mrs. Needling would lose the train of her thoughts and her sentence would putter to a halt, like a steam engine cooling to its last breaths. Mr. Needling, a pallid barrister, would not jump in to pick up the thought, however, and Arthur was mindful of interrupting. And thus a lengthy silence would hang, until finally Arthur felt comfortable asking another question, on an unrelated topic so that it seemed he’d received a satisfactory answer before. He found that the household existed in a grief-drunk haze, and he waded through it cautiously and politely.

Sally had been born in ’74, in this very house. A happy girl, Mrs. Needling assured Arthur. She used to run up the hill behind the house and then roll down it with the boys. She’d put on her brothers’ worn and oversize trousers so she didn’t get her dresses dirty. For her eighth birthday, she’d begged and begged for a ruby hair clip she’d seen in a shop window in the city, at Routledge’s on Oxford Street. After some pleading with her father, the hair clip had been acquired and presented in a box filled with pink tissue paper to a squealing Sally. She wore it all day long, and her mother had to pry it from her hair that night at bedtime. And wouldn’t you know? The next day Sally went up the hill with her brothers, the clip still in her hair. As she rolled down the hill, gay as a bird, the clip broke into a dozen pieces. Sally was devastated. Of course another, identical clip had to be purchased, and it was, the very next day. It had taken only the smallest bit of cajoling of Mr. Needling, his wife explained through her first smile of the afternoon.

“Dr. Doyle doesn’t need to be hearing about all this,” said Mr. Needling with a terse and quiet ferocity. “He’s trying to find out who killed her, not write her biography.”

Mrs. Needling began to respond to Mr. Needling’s outburst. “Dear, I was just explaining what a…” And then she let her sentence go, fading off into the stuffy air.

“Was she fond of any gentlemen that you knew of? Did she have many callers?” said Arthur, again changing the subject. Best to start here and see if this led to a conversation about Sally’s single-night marriage.

“No, sir,” said Mr. Needling. “She was a quiet girl, you see. Kept to the estate a lot. She was quite fond of her horses.”

Arthur nodded that he understood. They didn’t know that she’d been married when she died. Her relationship with this man, this killer, had been a secret she’d kept from her family. Should he press further? It is a horrid thing, to tell a mother that she’d missed her murdered daughter’s wedding day.

“She did have her friends in the city, though,” offered Mrs. Needling. “She’d been spending a lot of her time around them.”

“Her friends in the city?” inquired Arthur.

“Janet and… Emily. Yes. Janet and Emily-those were the names. Sorry, she only ever mentioned their Christian names in talking about them. And they never came to the house either, Sally always went into the city to see them. They’d attend one of those meetings or some such.”

Mr. Needling stirred in his seat, clearly agitated by the direction the conversation had taken. He said nothing, however. Arthur addressed Mrs. Needling, ignoring her husband’s discomfort.

“What sort of meetings would those be?” he asked casually.

Mrs. Needling looked to her husband for guidance, but he refused to meet her eyes.

“Perhaps they were more ‘talks’ than ‘meetings,’ I should say. Sally wasn’t a terribly active member, you understand-she just went for the speeches. And for her girlfriends, of course. She liked meeting the other young women.”

“We don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Dr. Doyle, that’s all!” interjected Mr. Needling. “She was a good girl. Always was. You must remember that.”

“Of course, Mr. Needling. I’m sure your daughter was the very flower of West Hampstead. Which is all the more reason for me to find the man who did this vile deed and see that he’s punished.” Bertrand Needling hardly appeared comforted by Arthur’s words. “Now, what were these… these talks your daughter attended with her friends?”

“Voting rights for women,” replied Mrs. Needling unabashedly. “She went to the talks about extending the vote to women. She was a suffragist, Sally.”

“Now, now,” said Mr. Needling. “Let’s not overstate the case, shall we, dear? She went to some talks. She had a few friends. It was all relatively harmless. But I’m a Primrose man myself. I’m in the League.” Mr. Needling raised his right hand, flashing a silver ring on his index finger. Arthur leaned forward and recognized the familiar five-leafrosette shape adorning the ring. “Disraeli right through our Cecil,” Mr. Needling continued, “now, those are statesmen. And I’d never have let a daughter of mine go too far into a folly like that. I’ve read you on the subject as well-of course you agree with me. Understand that it was a youthful diversion for the girl, that’s all. Nothing serious.”

“She was a suffragist,” repeated Mrs. Needling. “She would talk about it whenever she got the chance.” Her husband gave a loud cough, and Mrs. Needling became quiet again. Arthur had no urge to get involved in this family’s politics. He had a lingering fondness for Disraeli, he had to admit, but goodness, Cecil? The Marquess of Salisbury was a rotten prig. How the Conservatives had atrophied, that he was their new standard-bearer. But Arthur, thankfully, had the good sense to refrain from saying as much.

“Do you know the name of her organization? Or the location of those meetings?”

“She didn’t go to meetings,” said Mr. Needling. “She traipsed into a few harmless talks. And she was not a member of any organization. These girlfriends may have been, I can’t vouch for them, but Sally was not. I’m sure I’ve forgotten the names of the groups, or where she went. Somewhere in London.”

“I apologize for bringing up such an unsettling point, but her body was found in Whitechapel,” said Arthur. Mr. Needling frowned and gritted his teeth. “Is it possible that your daughter’s meetings may have been-”

“My daughter, sir, had no business in Whitechapel, of that you can be most certain. Do you understand me? No business at all.” Mr. Needling slapped both his hands down against the arms of his chair. “The police are in error. Or her body was transported to that foul spot by the villain who killed her, in order to obscure his tracks.” Her body indeed had been moved, thought Arthur, but, sadly, only from inside the boardinghouse to the alley beside it. The girl had spent her wedding night in Whitechapel.

“Tell me,” he began, “did your daughter ever receive any letters from these friends? From Janet and Emily? I suspect that they have information that might be vitally useful to my investigations”-Arthur left aside for the moment what that information might be-“and so finding them is of the utmost importance.”

Mrs. Needling considered the question. “I don’t believe so,” she said. “But if Mr. Needling doesn’t object, you’re welcome to examine her writing table and see for yourself.”

Arthur looked toward Mr. Needling, whose pale face offered neither permission nor disapproval. “I would appreciate that very much, if you don’t mind.” Mr. Needling nodded and remained seated while his wife took Arthur through the palatial house and up the stairs to Sally’s rooms.

As Arthur entered, he was struck first by the immaculate cleanliness of Sally’s quarters. Not a speck of dust flew into the air as the door was opened. Not a stitch of the bedspread lay out of place. The servants must still clean it daily, he thought, though the girl had been dead for months.

Arthur stood before the desk. Six small drawers lay atop it, while two wider ones lay below, between the table legs. He reached his hand out to pull one open and then paused, glancing back toward Mrs. Needling in the doorway. She leaned against the doorframe, her left hand reaching across her body and holding on to the wall as if she were pulling it toward her.

Arthur waited, hoping she would excuse herself. His search would take some time, and he preferred to do it alone. Heaven only knew what he might find, and he did not want to excite the poor woman.

She didn’t budge, however, but instead looked up to the ceiling. She leaned heavier against the doorframe and cupped the plaster in her glove.

Oh well. Arthur pulled open one of the drawers above the desk, yanking it fully out of its hutch. Envelopes and pens and ink bottles rattled around in the drawer as it landed with a clack on the desktop.

Mrs. Needling shivered, shaken from her haze.

“If you’ll excuse me, Dr. Doyle,” she said. “I must attend to a supper goose.” And with that, she left Arthur alone. He felt like a grave robber. Or a ghoul. Lord, where was Bram when you needed him?

His search was methodical. He read the letters carefully. A handful were from Sally’s brothers, who’d been away in the Transvaal the year before. Good lads. Two were from an uncle in Paris. Three from a grandmother in Swansea. Arthur learned much about the weather on the Continent and the Atlantic tides at the Swansea beaches, but little about the secret life of Sally Needling. Who were these girls, Janet and Emily? Exactly what organization had they been a part of? And who was this man who had surreptitiously married Sally without even her parents knowing?

Arthur went through the top drawers one by one until he came to the fifth one in his search. He pulled at the bronze knob. Yet the drawer held firm against his pull. It was locked. He bent over and noticed a small keyhole below the knob. It looked like a purely decorative feature, like the tiny locks affixed to the front of leather-bound diaries. He couldn’t imagine that it provided much in the way of security. Arthur pulled again on the knob, harder. The drawer didn’t budge.

This was promising.

He went to the bedroom door and closed it quietly. He didn’t want the family to hear him at work. He walked back to the dresser and bent over the keyhole once again. He didn’t know much about picking locks, but once, over a tall carafe of brandy, Wilde had explained to him how the job was done. How Wilde knew, Arthur could not be certain, but then again, the man was ever a mystery to all his friends. As Arthur took up a pen from the desk, he became sad, thinking of his old friend. What had happened there?

After the arrest, the trial, prison, Wilde had vanished. Where was he now? Arthur hadn’t the foggiest. Such a great man, such a warm and broad-smiling soul, brought low by mere vice. Every man knew the dangerous pull of sin. Yes, in honesty, every man experienced certain… urges. It was not the feeling them which had brought kind Wilde so low. It was the giving in. The failure born of weakness. To be a man, a good man, was to overcome the natural iniquities of one’s manhood. Wilde had succumbed to sin, but Arthur did not hate him for it. He was only saddened. He wanted Wilde back-the old Wilde, the good Wilde, the witty and buoyant Wilde who lit up every dinner table at which he sat.

Arthur banished the thought from his head as he jabbed the tip of the pen into the keyhole. Best not to think upon it.

But the pen didn’t fit. The keyhole was too small. Arthur tried the other pens at the desk, but none would do the trick. He had to look elsewhere.

The jewelry box next to the mirror was an obvious choice. As he opened it, he blinked at the flare of light that escaped from the glittering jewels inside. Diamonds, opals, golden bracelets and rings of every color. Arthur found three pearl necklaces, and yet the clasps on all of them were U-shaped, and so useless for his purposes. After only a few moments of digging, he found an item with a long, thin clasp. It was perfect for lock picking. He removed it from the pile, clasp first, and stepped toward the desk. He was halfway there when he looked down and saw what he held in his hand: a shimmering, ruby-red hair clip.

Arthur stopped, staring down at it. It was so small in his palm. Two metal bands stretched from end to end, onto which colored stones had been laid. It was ecstatically colorful in the way of all children’s jewelry. He could imagine the thrill inside eight-year-old Sally over opening up a wrapped box to find this on the morning of her birthday. He could imagine her crying inconsolably when she rolled to the bottom of the hill and found pieces of the broken clip buried in her hair. He knew why her father had consented to purchasing an identical replacement- the one that Arthur now held-at once.

Arthur inserted the long metal clasp into the keyhole. It fit perfectly. He flicked it up, then down, then side to side, twisting it to find the tumbler. He remembered what Wilde had described to him, how you had to find the tumblers, however many there were, sequentially. You had to press them one by one. Arthur pressed harder into the lock, jabbing for a deeper tumbler, when the hair clip broke. The miniature screws connecting the clasp to the central two bands popped out, and the clip split into two halves. The bands with the colored stones on them fell to the floor, while his push forward threw him slightly off balance. He removed the end he still held, the clasp, from the keyhole, and looked down.

Heavens! He had stepped on the fallen clip while regaining his balance. The bands were shattered into four or five pieces now, and a few stones had broken loose from their holds. A cloud passed outside the tall windows, and beams of light blanketed the room. The stones glimmered on the floor, islands in a wood-brown sea.

Arthur left the wreckage where it lay. The milk, so to speak, was spilt. No use crying now. He turned back to the desk, again inserting the clasp into the keyhole.

Within another minute he’d gotten it open.

Arthur opened the drawer hungrily. He laid it on the desktop and peered down. Inside, there was nothing but a quarter-inch stack of identical white papers. He lifted a handful of them up, and held them to the window light.

The papers were devoid of writing. He flipped through each one and found them all equally blank.

There was no mark on the pages, save one. At the top of each paper, there was the image, printed in black ink, of a three-headed crow. Arthur gave a start. It was the same image that had been found tattooed on Morgan Nemain’s leg!

But what did it mean?

He folded the papers and committed them to his coat pocket. He replaced the drawer as he’d found it.

He knelt to the floor and swept the bits of shattered hair clip into his hand before gently depositing them back into the jewelry box and leaving.

There remained no sign, after he left, of his ever having been there.