The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 24 The Bloodstains Bear Fruit

January 10, 2010

Harold woke to the sound of running water. Groggy, he raised his head and turned to find the source. He gazed across disheveled sheets-deep blue with red stripes crossing in a grid pattern-to a cream carpet and a dark wooden desk. Harold had been in so many different hotel rooms over the past week, hadn’t he, and they all looked exactly the same. Which of them was this?

As he turned to the bathroom door, which could have been any bathroom door in any hotel room on either side of the Atlantic, Harold saw wisps of steam escaping from the bottom. The shower was running inside the bathroom. It looked warm. He heard someone move around inside the shower and realized it was Sarah. The events of the past night came back to him. Harold was sorry to recall that nothing thrilling had occurred the night before.

They’d found this hotel after a quick Google search from the Internet café. It was close, it was quiet, and it accepted payment in cash. They couldn’t risk using credit cards.

They had spent the evening separately reading through Alex’s Conan Doyle biography. Sarah had appreciated the chance finally to read it for herself, while Harold pored over it again and again for any indication of where Alex had found the diary. Or any glimpse as to what was even inside it. No matter how many times he read it, no new facts presented themselves.

The most exciting moment of the evening, for Harold, had come when the two learned that the hotel had a laundry room. They realized that without a return to their previous hotel room they’d be spending another day in the same clothes. They changed into the white robes they found hanging inside the bathroom door and walked, dirty underwear, jeans, and shirts piled in their arms, down the stairs in nothing but the robes. Harold’s eyes kept drifting to the folds of Sarah’s robe, which swayed to expose her right thigh halfway up to her waist every time she stepped forward. He did his best not to stare. He was pretty sure she didn’t notice.

Later that night they slept on opposite sides of the single king-size bed. They wore their robes like pajamas. The whole thing felt dishearteningly chaste, like a teenage sleepover, and yet Harold still had trouble sleeping. He lay on his side, facing away from Sarah even though he usually slept on his back. He didn’t want to risk turning and accidentally staring at her. What if she opened her eyes just at the instant that his happened to be on her? She’d think he’d been staring at her the whole night, which he certainly hadn’t been. Better not to let his head point anywhere near her direction, for fear of a misunderstanding. So he lay on his right side and felt the weight of his body pressing painfully into his shoulder as he failed to fall asleep.

Harold sat up in bed when he heard his BlackBerry buzz from the nightstand. He examined it and found a new e-mail from Sebastian Conan Doyle. Sebastian was in London and wanted to meet with them. “Immediately,” Sebastian had insisted.

As Harold set the BlackBerry on the nightstand, he noticed Sarah’s phone resting beside it. He thought back to her long calls the day before, while they were in the café. He was suspicious. He had no trouble admitting that to himself. Whatever affection he might have for

Sarah-however much he might enjoy her teasing and whatever tiny crush he might have on her-he still didn’t trust her.

As he took Sarah’s phone from the nightstand, he comforted himself with the thought that Holmes hadn’t been totally honest with Watson all the time either. He had lied to Watson frequently, in fact, keeping his companion in the dark so that Holmes could solve his cases as he saw fit. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes even had Watson off on a pointless mission for the majority of their investigation, so that Holmes could hide in the shadows and observe the suspects while they were distracted by his bumbling sidekick. Harold wasn’t doing anything that Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have done himself.

Harold didn’t feel guilty as he examined the call records on Sarah’s phone. However, as he heard the shower shut off in the bathroom, he knew he needed to move quickly.

Yesterday afternoon Sarah had exchanged a number of calls with a New York area code. One of the calls had been at 3:03 p.m. They had definitely been in the café then. This must have been the call she made to her editor.

As Harold heard Sarah puttering in the bathroom, he pressed Redial. The seconds stretched interminably as he waited to hear a ring.

A female voice answered quickly. “Silverman, Rummel, Tabak, and Siegler. How may I direct your call?”

“I… ummm…” Harold hadn’t considered how he’d respond. “Is this a law firm?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Yes, sir. Can I help you?”

The bathroom door opened suddenly, and Sarah came out fully dressed but with a towel wrapped around her wet hair.

“No, thank you,” said Harold into the phone as he hung up.

Sarah stopped when she saw him with her phone in his hand.

“Is something going on?” she asked.

“Who’s Silverman, Rummel, Tabak, and Siegler?”

Her first reaction was anger. “You checked my phone? Why would you check my phone?”

“Because you lied to me about calling your editor. At least I know that now. Look, I’m sorry, but between the car chases and the guns and the dead people, I’m a little bit on edge. And you seemed very eager to follow me to London.”

Sarah sighed. She stared at the floor for a moment, collecting herself, and then sat down on the bed. She curled and uncurled her bare toes on the carpet as she spoke.

“Yes. I lied to you. I didn’t want to tell you that… the law firm. They’re my divorce attorneys. I’m in the middle of getting a divorce.”

Of all the things Harold was expecting her to say, this was definitely not among them. “Marc Epstein. That’s the name of my lawyer. You can call him and check. I didn’t want to tell you because… well, I don’t have an editor. I’m not actually working as a reporter right now. But I used to. I wrote for a bunch of papers, a few magazines-I’m sure you Googled me. But then, after I got married, I sort of stopped. My husband-my ex-husband-made enough, and I ended up moving away from writing. And now that I’m getting divorced, I want to do it again. So I’m writing freelance articles. Or trying to, at any rate. And when I heard about Alex finding the diary, when I started reading about the Irregulars, all of you guys, it just seemed too perfect. Anyone would buy this. It’s an amazing story.”

“That’s why you put me in touch with Sebastian. Why you made all of this happen. You wanted something to write about.”

Sarah looked up from her feet for the first time since she’d started talking. Her eyes shone with moisture. “I needed it, Harold. I needed this story to happen. I needed to get my life back.”

After his shock had subsided, what Harold realized was that he wasn’t angry. He understood her, more than he wanted to.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I get it. We’re going to find the diary. I promise. But let’s make a deal first. We’re in this together. You won’t lie to me, and I won’t go through your phone logs.” He smiled. She smiled back. In a moment that he would recall fondly later, he even reached out and put his arm around her. She laid her towel-wrapped head on his shoulder.

“Thanks,” she said at last.

“No problem. I know what it’s like to need to prove yourself. To imagine yourself a certain way in your head for so long, and then to get a chance to put it into action in real life. And real life is a lot trickier than I was hoping for.”

Sarah laughed.

“We both need to solve this,” Harold added.

“Yes,” she replied. “And the funny part is, I think I need to solve this more than you do.”

Sebastian Conan Doyle’s London home was in Holland Park, along Abbotsbury Road. The four-story was tooth white and bracketed on either side by tall plane trees. Harold and Sarah took the few steps from the street to the entryway quickly and gave their names to the doorman. He let them in right away. He’d been expecting them.

The house swallowed Harold within its massive enclosure. The ceilings seemed a few feet taller than they needed to be and the hallways a few feet wider. Even the doorways seemed oversize, stretching almost to the ceiling. Art hung genteelly from the walls. It was all modern, or so Harold assumed, though he didn’t know much about art. The paintings seemed structural, architectural, full of simple colored shapes smashing into one another.

Sebastian met them at the upstairs landing. He seemed happy to see them. He shook Harold’s hand warmly, and did the same with Sarah. “Come,” he said, leading them through the flat into what could only be described as a drawing room.

Sebastian settled onto a large couch, the cushions of which looked as if they’d never before been rested on. Harold and Sarah sat delicately on an opposing couch. Harold felt as if he didn’t want to break it, or disturb it, as it looked so pristine. A fat and unmarked manila envelope lay on a coffee table between them.

“Let’s get to it, shall we?” began Sebastian quickly. “What have you found?”

Harold and Sarah exchanged a furtive look: What should they tell him? Harold felt it was his duty to be the one to respond.

“First of all,” Harold said, “did you get anything from the New York police?”

“Yes, of course,” said Sebastian. “I’ve everything you’d asked for. Autopsy results, police reports, crime-scene photographs. All the bloody horrors.” He plucked the manila envelope from the coffee table, then tossed it to Harold.

Harold opened it and began flipping through its contents. Indeed, there were photocopies of the handwritten police reports, computer printouts of the crime-scene photos, hotel manifests, and a thick set of documents labeled “CORONER’S REPORT.”

“How did you get these?” asked Sarah.

Sebastian turned to her with a look of pure condescension. He did not respond to her question.

“I’ve flipped through them myself, out of curiosity,” he said. “The photos especially are more gruesome than I’d have thought.”

There was something about Sebastian that made Harold uneasy. Something about his casual intensity. His ever-tilted head. Sebastian conveyed the impression that your number was already up and he was just waiting for the right moment to let you know.

“The most interesting bit here,” continued Sebastian, “is in the supplemental section of the detective’s report. It concerns the DNA test of the blood on the walls.”

“Oh?” said Harold as he looked for the page. “The blood in the word ‘elementary’? Do they know whose it was?”

“They do. It was Alex Cale’s.”

Harold stopped flipping through the documents, and looked up at Sebastian.

“Damn,” he said. “In the story the blood came from the killer, not the victim.”

“There are a whole bunch of departures from the story, though,” interjected Sarah. “In A Study in Scarlet, the victim is poisoned, not strangled.”

Harold turned to Sarah, surprised that she was already so familiar with Conan Doyle’s work.

“Jesus,” she said in response to his look, “you’ve been talking about the stories nonstop for the past three days-you can’t blame me for wanting to read more of them myself. I read a bit online while we were in the café.”

“Did the coroner find any poison in Cale’s blood?” Harold asked the room.

“No,” said Sebastian. “Alex Cale was strangled to death, no doubt about it.”

“What about his nose?” Harold asked strangely.

“His nose?” said Sebastian.

“Hisnose?” said Sarah.

“The blood,” said Harold. “Was it from Cale’s nose?”

“Harold,” said Sebastian, “I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think they can tell you where in the body a person’s blood came from. They can only tell you that it’s someone’s blood.”

“No, no, the coroner’s report…” Harold trailed off, thinking rapidly as he tore through the pages in front of him. He slowed down as he found what he was looking for, trying to read the illegible scribbles of the coroner’s handwriting. The photocopy itself was blurry, making the report even more difficult to read than it would otherwise be. “Can either of you tell what this says?”

Sarah leaned in close and ran her fingers down the page. She squinted. Harold could smell the hotel shampoo on her hair as a strand fell across the coroner’s report. She flicked it back behind her ear with a swipe of her hand.

“Hemorrhage?” she said. “Something about a hemorrhage?”

“In the nasal cavity. A blood clot in…” Harold again let his sentence collapse halfway through.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re trying to communicate, Harold,” said Sebastian. “So Alex had a blood clot in his nasal cavity? He might easily have smashed up his nose fighting with his killer.”

“No. His face wasn’t bruised when we found him. His nose wasn’t broken. It was more deliberate than that. In A Study in Scarlet, the message from the killer, written in blood on the walls-the blood came from the killer’s nose. He’d gotten a nosebleed while he argued with the victim.”

“So here,” said Sarah, “the killer used Alex’s blood instead of his own. He made an incision inside Alex’s nose, or something along those lines, after he killed him. He was probably worried about DNA evidence. Didn’t want to make it too easy for you.”

“It’s strange,” said Harold. “He’s not re-creating the story exactly. He’s using bits and pieces of it. Is he trying to tell us something, with what he’s including? Or is he…” Harold again let his sentence collapse midway through. He exhaled the rest of the air in his lungs through pursed lips.

“Or what?” asked Sebastian.

“Or,” finished Harold, “what if the killer didn’t actually know the story very well? What if he didn’t know it by heart? He killed Cale in haste. He wasn’t planning it. They had a fight. Some sort of argument. Had to be about the diary. Then he tried to cover his tracks by making it look like a Sherlockian did it. Dressing the murder up with these Sherlockian clues. He half remembered the beginning of A Study in Scarlet, but he got it wrong.”

Sarah looked confused.

“So now you think it wasn’t a Sherlockian who did it?”

“I’m suggesting the possibility,” said Harold as he fixed his gaze dead on Sebastian, “that the murderer might have been someone familiar with the Sherlockians and yet not of them.”

Sebastian looked down his nose at Harold in silence. Finally he grinned devilishly, his cheeks turning apple red.

“Really, Harold? Is that it? Is that the best you’ve got?”

Sarah looked back and forth between the two men. She seemed unsure of her position.

“We found the message you left on Cale’s machine,” said Harold. “You sounded pretty angry.”

“Yes, yes, yes, and then after Cale died, I offered to help you two silly twats find the killer. And I told you all about my fight with Cale. I never made a secret of it.”

“Who’s following us?” blurted Sarah suddenly.

Now Sebastian appeared confused. “I’m sorry, someone is following you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Someone with a gun,” added Harold. “A very large gun. And whoever it is ransacked Cale’s office as well.”

Harold studied Sebastian’s expression as best he could. Sebastian gave every indication of processing this information for the very first time.

“Then don’t you think,” Sebastian said, “that it’s likely that whoever this armed pursuer is, he might be, oh, let’s just suppose, Cale’s bloody killer?”

“Maybe,” said Harold. “Except I don’t think that guy has the diary. I think you do.”

A long moment of silence followed.

“Perhaps, Mr. White, you’ve exhausted your usefulness,” said Sebastian icily.

Harold braced himself. Would Sebastian lunge at him? Did he have a weapon? Harold stepped back, trying to prepare himself for anything.

“I suggest you leave,” continued Sebastian. His voice was firm yet calm. He seemed to be a man easily driven to annoyance, but not to anger.

“I’ll be in touch,” said Harold as he made his way toward the door. He felt he’d handled that quite well.

“So where’d you get those balls from?” asked Sarah after she and Harold had made it onto the street below. They walked along Abbotsbury, under the older Oriental planes that grew closer to the park. They hadn’t discussed where to go, but that didn’t stop them from walking. Harold was deep in thought, processing the new information. He felt as if he were at the edge of something, just at the precipice between not-knowing and knowing. He was so irritatingly close to figuring it all out, and yet, damn it, he didn’t quite have it.

“Sorry?” said Harold, awakening from his thoughts.

“Balls. All of a sudden. Up there.” She gestured behind them toward Sebastian’s building. “Do you really think he killed Cale?”

“No,” said Harold after a sizable pause. “I don’t. I suppose there’s a lot of evidence that points to him. Motive, means. And the guy creeps me out, I’ll be honest. But I don’t think he killed Cale.”

“Great way to show it.”

“I don’t think he did, but I could be wrong. And I wanted to see how he’d react. Maybe he’d break down and confess the whole thing. Murderers do that in the Holmes stories all the time, once they’ve been confronted. Even if there isn’t any real evidence against them.”

For a few minutes, they walked in silent lockstep. Holland Park turned into Notting Hill and then Bayswater. The buildings grew a few stories taller, and the street noise a few decibels louder.

“So,déjà vu, we’re being followed,” said Sarah suddenly.

“What?” Harold was incredulous.

“Older man. Mud-brown suit. Glasses. Wing tips so loud I can hear them from here.”

“Christ,” said Harold. “How did they find us? And how are you so good at telling when someone is watching you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they had a man on Sebastian’s flat, figuring that ten to one we’d show up there eventually? And you try being a woman walking down a busy street sometime. You become acutely aware of each set of eyes that’re on you. It’s better training than the CIA.”

Having no experience being stared at himself, Harold felt obligated to accept her reasoning. “You said he’s older?” he asked as they continued walking, faster now.

“Yes,” she replied. “Seventies, maybe.”

“Seventies? You don’t see a lot of goons in their seventies. Unless… Unless he’s the boss of the operation! He hired them to follow us, they screwed it up, and now he’s doing the trailing himself.”

“Shit,” said Sarah, suddenly more nervous. “You see the alley up ahead on the left? Ten paces? Eight?”

“Yeah.”

“Turn into it with me. Right… now.”

Sarah slid suddenly to her left, and Harold followed into the alley. In an instant she had thrown out her arm, pressing him up against the wall. The bricks felt hard and cold against his back. Her arm felt hard and warm against his chest.

“Don’t move,” she said.

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her retractable knife. She flipped out the blade. It was dark in the alley, even for a foggy midday, as the tall buildings on either side blocked out the sun. The steel blade appeared a murky blue in the dim light.

Sarah flattened her own back against the wall, next to Harold but closer to the alley’s entrance. Harold saw her breath in the cold air, even and measured. He realized then that he’d been holding his breath. He was too scared to exhale. He heard loud footsteps approaching the alley. The man’s wing tips sounded like hooves on the pavement. Harold let out a tiny wisp of air.

There was an instantaneous flash of violence. The old man turned into the alley, and Sarah leaped at him. Her movements seemed half professional and half bestial. Before Harold’s single puff of hot breath disappeared into the cold alley, Sarah had the old man on the ground. Her knife was pressed into his neck.

The old man clutched at his knee. Sarah must have kicked it.

“Ahhhh!” he yelped.

Harold’s eyes settled on the man’s face. His big glasses. His patchy gray skin. His thick, dark eyebrows. His nose, seemingly too large for his face, looked soft and mushy. As if it were a costume nose, knocked halfway off in the man’s fall…Oh, Jesus.

“Don’t! Ah! It’s me!” yelped the old man again.

“Let him up,” said Harold.

Sarah didn’t budge, keeping her eyes firmly on the old man and her knife scraping against his neck.

“Harold, please, owww, don’t let her kill me!”

“Sarah,” said Harold after a deep gulp of oxygen. “It’s okay. Let him up.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. For the first time, she took her eyes off the old man and looked up at Harold.

“It’s okay,” said Harold. “It’s Ron.” His face grew flush with embarrassment. “From the Irregulars. It’s Ron Rosenberg.”