The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 36 A Problem Without a Solution

January 12, 2010, cont.

Dr. Gwen Garber was easily among the smallest women Harold had ever seen. She sat behind her desk, in her office at St. John’s College, and seemed dwarfed by the book stacks in front of her. She angled her chin upward in order to place her elbows on her desk, and looked up to Harold and Sarah like a penitential child to a cross.

“Yes,” she said after they had been in her office for a few minutes politely explaining their purpose at Cambridge. “Alex Cale was here. Just a few months ago. He came to read the Stoker letters, so of course he stopped by to talk with me. I’m the only one about who’s done much work on them at all.”

“Did he say what he was looking for, specifically?” asked Harold.

“I don’t recall,” said Dr. Garber, searching her memory with a series of finger taps to her chin. “But I’m sure he’d be more than happy to assist you with your research. He’s the friendliest man. He truly is.”

“He died,” said Harold.

Despite all the inquiries he’d conducted into Alex’s death, he realized that this was the first time he’d ever had to break the news to someone. Dr. Garber took it well, though perhaps that was only because she barely knew him. She blinked a few times, as if waiting for Harold to correct himself and admit that he’d been talking about someone else. When no correction or addendum came, she gave a shiver and looked down at her shoes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea. Were you… friends?”

“We were friendly.”

“We’re continuing his research,” added Sarah. “Finishing up his work.”

“In memoriam,” said Harold.

“Oh, my, that’s so good of you,” said Dr. Garber. “Please, any information I can provide, I’d be quite happy to help. It’s so sad. Can you… can you tell me what happened? Was he sick?”

“He was murdered,” said Harold, more quickly than he might have liked. It was only in hindsight that it occurred to him that he probably should have lied. And yet, ironically, even the truth was more complicated than this. “Well, possibly,” he added lamely.

“Hell.” Dr. Garber seemed to recede into her chair as she digested the news. If possible, she looked to be growing even smaller.

“The more you can tell us about the letters, and what Alex Cale might have been looking for in them, the better we can help finish his book,” said Sarah.

Dr. Garber looked at her for a moment. As always, Sarah seemed utterly convincing.

“All right then, let’s head down there. I’ll explain what I can along the way.” Dr. Garber put on a bright yellow winter coat. “Our collection of Stoker’s letters,” she began, “is quite exhaustive. But, of course, Alex was only interested in his correspondence with Arthur Conan Doyle. They were good friends, you know. And Conan Doyle wrote a number of plays which were put on by Stoker’s client, Henry Irving, at his theater. Since Stoker managed both Irving and the theater, he of course had plenty of business to discuss with Conan Doyle. There’s a fine book of correspondence down there concerning only the details of the various payment schemes that Bram had devised. Hard to tell, from only one end of the conversation, but it rather looks like Stoker was cheating Conan Doyle out of some chunk of the box office. Funny, really. But I don’t think that’s the part of the conversation you’re interested in, is it?”

“Under normal circumstances I would be,” said Harold. “But right now… Well, do you have any sense of what period Alex was looking at? Was it the fall of 1900?”

“Yes… yes, I think that’s it. Cale was trying to piece together what Conan Doyle and Stoker had gotten up to during the fall of 1900. Stoker had been working on a production of Don Quixote at the Lyceum, and he was at work on a few short stories as well. But I believe that Cale was interested in what Stoker knew of Conan Doyle’s activities in those months. October, November, December.”

“That’s the period covered by the missing diary,” Harold explained to Sarah. She returned a look indicating that not only did she not require his explanation, she did not particularly appreciate it.

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Garber. “That rings a bell. Cale said something about a missing diary of Conan Doyle’s, how he’d been after the thing for ages. ‘Since I first began my study of Sherlockiana,’ I think that was the phrase he used. He was such a character, that one.”

“Do you know if he found anything about the missing diary in the letters?”

Dr. Garber pushed open the double doors of the library building and stopped. Her hands continued to hold open the doors in front of her, as if she were announcing the entrance of royalty.

“To be honest, I don’t know,” she replied after some thought. “He did not seem pleased with what he’d found. I can tell you that. He left in rather a hurry, when he’d finished. He didn’t even stop by to say goodbye-it was only that I happened to pass him on the footpath back there as I was on my way to give a lecture. He was all mumbles, very twitchy. I’d have thought it was rude, but I’ve had my share of researchers around over the years, and I know how they can get. Like a bunch of actresses, always overemotional about some crisis or another.”

Harold did his best not to appear twitchy himself. The more Dr. Garber said, the more promising these letters seemed. Clearly, what was in them had meant a great deal to Cale’s investigation. Harold’s tongue fluttered inside his mouth. He bit down on his lip. As soon as he saw these letters, he felt, the whole of the mystery would reveal itself to him…

And yet when, ten minutes later, Dr. Garber left Harold and Sarah alone in the underground rare-manuscript reading room, little was instantly revealed. Locked in the moistureless, climate-controlled room, Harold laid two cardboard boxes on the small wooden table. Both boxes were fastened shut with white string and marked with lined index cards. “STOKER, BRAM,” read the cards. “COLLECTED LETTERS.” The years of Stoker’s life contained within each box had been marked as well. Harold ran his hand underneath the string. It felt like lingerie against his stubby forefinger.

He couldn’t get the string untied, so Sarah, with her long, thin nails, stepped in to help. She scratched at the string with a catlike playfulness, and it fell apart from the box at the stroking of her nails. At the same time, both Harold and Sarah dug their hands into the cardboard box hungrily, pulling out thick stacks of plastic-protected papers. Each page was filled with Bram Stoker’s own narrow and nearly illegible handwriting. Flipping through them left Harold both excited and awestruck. Millimeters from his fingers, behind the clear plastic sleeves, lay the dirty pen marks of Bram Stoker himself.

Where had Stoker been when he wrote these letters? In the study of his home in… Kensington? Yes, that’s right, Stoker was living in Kensington in 1900. Harold remembered from Conan Doyle’s diary-that is, in one of the volumes that hadn’t been lost-about how Stoker had had his house outfitted for electric lights in that year; it had been one of the first private houses in London to have them. Conan Doyle talked about the shocking experience he encountered each time he’d visit Bram under those electric bulbs. Harold held the plastic sheets up very close to his face, communing with the pen strokes. What did they say?

Everything, Harold soon learned, and yet nothing at the same time. He and Sarah divided up the letters from the fall of 1900, trying to find any written to Conan Doyle. They found short letters to Stoker’s entire extended family, they found obsequious letters to every well-known theater professional in London, and they even found repentant letters to the writer Hall Caine, to whom it seemed that Stoker owed a considerable sum of money. But they found none written to Conan Doyle, except the carbon-copy receipt of a single telegram Stoker had sent. On December 1, 1900, Stoker had sent a telegram to Conan Doyle that read, in its entirety, “Come at once. Please. B.S.”

It was equal parts thrilling and infuriating. What did Stoker need to see Conan Doyle about so urgently? Where was Conan Doyle’s reply? What were those two up to, after all?

Harold felt sure that Stoker held the key to everything that was happening, but he couldn’t think of what Stoker and Conan Doyle had gotten into together. His first thought was that they had composed a story together, and yet that failed to explain any of the mystery surrounding Cale’s final clue. Why not just make that story public, however poor it might have been?

Harold tried to imagine Stoker’s involvement in Conan Doyle’s other known activities at the time. Had Stoker joined him in one of his brief, unsuccessful investigations for Scotland Yard? None of the newspaper reports at the time mentioned anything about Conan Doyle having discovered anything particularly noteworthy. Scholars had even checked the Scotland Yard records, which were quite thorough. Whatever Conan Doyle had gotten up to there, it hadn’t amounted to much.

Curiously, Harold did find a letter in one of the piles addressed to one “Inspector Miller, Scotland Yard.” Bram had written him a brief note thanking him for his assistance. “Your kind help at Newgate was very much appreciated,” read the letter. Harold thought this odd but didn’t know quite what to make of it. Why would Stoker have been writing to Scotland Yard? And Newgate… Did that mean someone had been in prison?

After an hour of poring over the semi-legible letters, most of Harold’s excitement had faded. In all the letters Bram Stoker had written in the fall of 1900, and into the winter of 1900-1901, there was nothing addressed to Conan Doyle and nothing that seemed like it could have sent Alex Cale into a depressive stupor.

“Nothing, right?” said Sarah as she set down a handful of letters.

“Right. Nothing.” Harold wasn’t sure what to do next.

“That’s about it for these boxes.”

Harold could do nothing but nod. There was something here, he was sure of it. But where? He turned the words of Alex Cale’s final message over and over in his head. Then he spoke them aloud.

“ ‘ The old centuries… have powers of their own… ’ ” He let the Dracula quote drip from his lips. “The old centuries…” It was a beautiful phrase, Harold thought. “… ‘Which mere modernity cannot kill.’ ” How poignant and poetic that last bit was as well-“mere modernity.” There are some things, some evil things, so old that not even a little thing like modernity can stomp them out.

“What was Cale trying to tell us about Stoker? Why was he pointing us to Stoker’s letters? What did Stoker know that Cale discov…” Harold trailed off midword. The flash of inspiration in his head was sudden and discrete. It was like the moment he’d had in the hotel armchair. There had been a period of not-knowing, and then this moment, and now Harold had entered a period of knowing. He simply knew.

“The diary is gone.” As Harold spoke the words, their truth became even more manifest.

“What do you mean?”

“The diary is gone. Destroyed. That’s got to be it. What other news would have upset Cale so much? Remember, in the hotel, he didn’t have the diary. In his two flats, he didn’t have the diary. In the suicide note we found in the British Library, he didn’t even say he had the diary, only that he knew what had happened to it.”

“So what happened to it?” Sarah asked.

“It’s gone. There never was a diary to find.”

“I don’t understand. Everyone agrees that Conan Doyle had written the diary, right? He’d written dozens of other volumes of the thing.”

“Yes. Conan Doyle wrote it. But then it was destroyed.”

“Why would he have destroyed it?”

“He didn’t.”

“Then who did?”

Harold smiled and gestured to the letters at their feet. “Bram Stoker.”

Sarah made a sour face. This news was not making her happy. But Harold was exhilarated. The thrill of inspiration overtook him, the pleasure of a problem solved. As Harold’s face brightened, Sarah’s darkened in equal measure.

“How did Cale know that?” she said.

“It must be in the letters. But not these letters. Later ones. Do you get it? Conan Doyle wrote the diary. Bram Stoker stole it, or threw it out, or something like that. And then he and Conan Doyle must have exchanged letters about it. That’s how Cale knew. ‘Mere modernity’ didn’t destroy Conan Doyle’s old diary. Bram Stoker did.”

Harold was up in a flash, ringing the bell for the library attendant to come back. He hurriedly asked her for the volume of letters chronologically after the ones they were currently looking at. She made him fill out a new request form, which he did impatiently. His own handwriting became quickly more smudged and illegible than even Stoker’s.

It was an agonizing fifteen minutes for Harold while the attendant was off to fetch the letters, and he and Sarah were forced to wait in the rare-manuscript room. He paced back and forth maniacally, hands behind him. When he looked over at Sarah, he found her lost in her own thoughts. Yet something on her face-some shadow of concern and disappointment-gave him the impression that her thoughts were very different from his own. He couldn’t imagine what she was feeling, and he didn’t know how to ask.

Finally the attendant returned with another box, tied with the same white string.

It was less than five minutes before Harold found what he was looking for, though it felt a lot longer to him. His sweaty fingers slipped across the smooth plastic as he shuffled through the pages. “Dear Arthur,” began the letter he held. “Your anger is understandable, but unfounded. Anything I have done-no, everything that I have done- has been done in the spirit of friendship and goodwill that exists between men such as you and I. If you will not thank me now, then I trust that one day you will thank me from the gates of heaven, when St. Peter alone whispers the truth from his lips. Let us discuss this in person, shall we? I can call on you anytime you like. B.S.”

The next letter in the stack continued the argument.

“Dear Arthur,” it read. “These bitter insults do not become you. But there is no reason for us to exclaim our opposite views in these missives. Let us sit in your study with a bottle of brandy, as we have so many times before, and hash out this affair. B.S.”

The third letter conveyed even more anger and ill will between the men than the first two.

“Dear Arthur,” read the third letter. “Please stop this childish behavior. I’m afraid that what you want from me I cannot give. It’s been burnt in your own fireplace, from the first ‘elementary’ to the bitter end. And your rude and unseemly letters have been burnt up in mine. Please, I beg of you, let me come to your house and discuss this matter with you. Allow me the chance to explain myself, and I will allow you the same chance as well. B.S.”

And that was it.

Harold flipped through further letters but found no more written to Conan Doyle in the box. Sarah flipped through the same piles, achieving the same result. Neither spoke until they’d both satisfied themselves that this was it, that this was the end of the trail.

“I was right,” said Harold when his mind had settled enough to speak. “Stoker stole the diary and burned it in Arthur’s fireplace. That’s the secret that’s been hidden for a hundred years. There never was a diary to find.”

“But,” Sarah replied, “but that’s so… What was in the diary? Why did Stoker burn it?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” said Harold. “And that’s why Alex Cale killed himself. Because at the end of the mystery, at the conclusion of the story he’d been living for his entire adult life, there was no solution. So he built a new mystery above his grave. Something that someone else could investigate. He wrote the word ‘elementary’ at the scene because he read these letters and wanted us to know when we’d found them. ‘Elementary’ wasn’t the beginning of the mystery, it was the end. It’s ironic, I suppose, but it seems so obvious when you think about it now. The most upsetting truth that Alex Cale could have figured out wouldn’t be whatever ugly, dark secret is hidden in the diary-it’s that there was no diary. That the secret that had been inside it would be hidden forever.”

“That’s sick.”

She was right, Harold knew. But he also understood Cale’s reasoning completely.

“There’s a quote from Conan Doyle,” Harold began. “ ‘A problem without a solution may interest the student, but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader.’ ” Harold gave a small laugh. “But I think Conan Doyle was wrong. In this case the problem without a solution upset the student, too.”

“He killed himself to preserve a mystery? Then why leave all these clues?”

“He killed himself because his life was a failure. His great work was never going to be completed. It couldn’t be. He would never be able to be the success that his father wanted, he’d never be able to toss his thick, award-winning Conan Doyle biography on his father’s grave. His life was over. So he figured if he was going to kill himself anyway, why not plant a seed? He couldn’t just tell everyone that the mystery was over… So he left behind a gift. For us. For me.”

Harold could not place the look that Sarah gave him then. It was not disgust, exactly, and it was not despair, but it was a kind of sadness.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked finally. He didn’t know what else to say. He was still exhilarated, but it was starting to wear off.

“No,” she said. “Of course I’m not.” She stood up from her chair and gave a long stretch. She arched her arms over her head and then folded them across her chest, curling herself inward. “So that’s it, then? You’re sure? The diary is gone? Burned up by Bram Stoker in Conan Doyle’s own house. We’ll never be able to find it, or what it says?”

Harold took a few seconds and ran through the chain of events in his mind that had led him to this conclusion. They were so orderly, so logical, and so flawless.

“Yes,” he said. “This is it.” An awful thought occurred to him.

“You’re not going to tell anyone?” he asked. “Your article. I don’t think Cale wanted anyone to… Well, look, he wanted to leave a mystery. He wanted someone to follow the clues, but only one person. Only the best. That was me. He didn’t want everyone to know. You can’t write about this. I know how much this article means to you. But you can’t write about what Alex did. Please.”

Sarah squeezed herself tighter. “Sure,” she said. “I understand. I won’t tell anyone.” She put on her coat. “Your secret is safe with me.”

Harold stood as well. It had felt so good to share his victory with someone. With Sarah. There was a puzzle, a test, and he’d solved it. But now his elation was somehow giving way to a hollow sensation. Why wasn’t she enjoying this with him? Why had he been left to experience this alone?

“Are you leaving?” he asked.

“Yes. I think… Well, it’s over now. There’s no diary. There’s nothing to write about. It was a pleasure to meet you.” She reached out her hand, and before he could process what he was doing, Harold gave it a polite shake.

“What’s going on?”

“Good-bye,” she said. “You’re really, really smart.” Sarah picked up her purse and knocked on the door. The attendant answered quickly and asked Harold if he was coming along as well. He had nothing to say besides no. The attendant led Sarah out, and Harold was left alone with a jumble of thoughts more confusing than the scribbled letters of Bram Stoker before him.

It was only minutes later, as he sat in the bright, quiet reading room, that he remembered the car chase in London. The handgun. The Goateed Man. Was he still looking for Harold? For Sarah?

Harold knew then that a problem without a solution was not an annoyance, but the most maddening and horrible sensation in the world.