The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 38 The Pickerel

January 15, 2010

Harold sulked through the next three days, swimming through glass after glass of bourbon and damp Cambridge mist. He should leave, he knew. He should leave Cambridge, because there was nothing else for him there. But leaving Cambridge meant returning to London, it meant boarding a plane at Heathrow and flying west, past the murder scene in New York all the way to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.

The second he left Cambridge, real life would return, minute by minute, until he found himself on his own doorstep, standing on top of a dirty welcome mat that actually read “Welcome.” He would turn the key, lock himself inside, and none of this would ever have happened. The thought was more horrible than Harold could bear.

He should send Sebastian Conan Doyle a message-he knew that, too. As far as Harold was aware, he was still working for the man, and so he might as well let the guy know that the investigation he’d paid for was over. The diary had burned up a hundred years before, and now no one-not even Sebastian Conan Doyle-would be able to profit from it. Harold waited, however. Because if he gave Sebastian a call, if he sent him an e-mail, then he would be one step closer to facing the end of all of this.

But the end was there whether Harold admitted it or not. It couldn’t be held off even with liquor, or long and aimless walks through the university gardens. The end would not be held off by checking his messages, by wondering every few minutes whether Sarah might have called.

So he read through the letters again. Not because he thought there was anything pertinent left in them-he was more than sure that there wasn’t, and he was proved right the more of them he read. Harold read the letters because it was the only way not to leave. For now he could still sit in the same claustrophobic reading room, between the same moistureless walls where he’d been with Sarah. He thought about her standing up, getting her coat, saying something polite, and leaving.

Harold didn’t know where she had gone, or even where she had come from. He knew so little about her, really. And he would never learn more. Like the rest of this adventure, Sarah would be a secret he kept alone. A point of pride, in some small way, that he could never share with anyone.

The Pickerel, an old pub on Magdalene Street, became his home away from his hotel room. It was close and relatively free of shouting, flirting undergrads. It was dark, it kept its “football”-tuned televisions down, and it would do. For three nights it did. Harold kept to himself, and to some books he’d picked up from a shop down the street. They weren’t Holmes. They weren’t even mysteries. Harold wasn’t sure when he’d be able to read anything from the Canon again, but he thought it might be a while.

Strangely, the uncomfortable thought that he would never know the secret within the diaries bothered him less than the thought that his investigations were at an end. He wasn’t plagued by grief over the lack of answers-he was plagued by melancholy over how quickly the answers had come, and how final they appeared to be. Harold found himself pining not for solutions, but for questions. For more. He realized that even after all the stories he’d read, he’d been left completely unprepared for this moment-for the quiet days after the climax when the world ticked onward. He’d read thousands upon thousands of moments of revelation, of grand gestures of explanation in which the torn fabric of life had been stitched tightly shut and patted over. He’d read thousands of happy endings and thousands of sad ones, and he had found himself satisfied with both. What he had not read, he now realized, were the moments after the endings. If Harold believed in the stories because they presented an understandable world… well, what happens when the world is understood and that understanding means nothing to anyone but you and the empty tumbler of bourbon nestled in your palm? Harold had understood that not finding a solution would have been awful, but he had never before thought that finding one, and then having actually to go on living with it, might be worse.

One phrase kept flickering across his drunken sorrows. “The penny dreadful.” Having no one else to laugh to, Harold laughed to himself. It was a term so much more apt than he’d known. For the story he’d been living in had now been revealed to be fleeting, shallow, and cheap. A brief flash of petty magic that entertained only the dull and the naïve. A penny tale, and not even worth so much as that.

The taps on his shoulder came while he was reaching for more pretzels, his arm dangling across the long wooden bar in search of the tiny plastic bowl. They were an insistent series of quick taps-one-two-three on his back, just at the bottom of his shoulder blade. He turned, swiveling on the stool, and saw no one behind him. Strange.

Harold heard a cough and looked down. There he found some manner of black-helmeted gnome staring up at him. He swallowed, blinked, and recognized the face of Dr. Garber. With Harold high on his stool, the top of her head came up only just above his navel. She smiled.

“Harold!” she said, as if she were genuinely happy to see him.

“Hi there,” he replied. He really wasn’t in the mood for conversation right now. He turned himself a half inch farther back toward his drink, trying to be subtle.

“Where’s your friend? Sarah?” The subtlety didn’t seem to be working.

“Gone. She… she had to leave.” He was too tired to come up with a good lie. Plus, he was such a shitty liar anyway.

Dr. Garber frowned. She gave him a concerned look.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” she asked, in a tone equally playful and sympathetic.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll patch it up,” Dr. Garber said as she hopped up on the adjacent barstool. Harold was not aware of having invited her to join him. “I like the sight of you two together. You’re a lovely couple.”

He offered no response, save a few nods. He sipped more bourbon. Dr. Garber sipped at her own drink, something clear and carbonated, most likely gin and tonic. He realized that she wasn’t going to leave, and he determined that his best bet was to change the subject, so at least he didn’t have to talk about Sarah anymore.

“Thanks for your help with the letters,” he said. “I think we found everything we needed.”

“Terrific! You’re on your way to the missing Conan Doyle diary that Cale was on about?”

“Well… no.” It was going to involve more effort not to talk about this than to talk about it, Harold realized. Might as well just give in. “The diary was burned up. Stoker did it, in 1900. He tells Conan Doyle about it in one of his letters.”

“Hmmm,” Dr. Garber pondered. “Is that what he wanted to meet about, then?”

“Meet about?”

“Yes. The meeting Stoker kept trying to arrange. I’ve always wondered about it myself. Did you see the notes from Stoker’s business secretary at the Lyceum? Even she kept pressing Conan Doyle for the two to have a meeting, for a few months, on some pretense of financial concerns.”

Harold frowned. He hadn’t seen any correspondence between Stoker’s business secretary and Conan Doyle in the collection. “Are those letters down there as well?”

“Oh, I suppose not, now that you mention it. They weren’t from Stoker personally, you know, so they’re kept elsewhere. I forget which university they’ve run off to, but they’re in some lesser Stoker collection somewhere. Maybe Austin, actually. The messages are all from Stoker’s secretary to Conan Doyle’s secretary, so they’re really not of much interest. Mostly about Conan Doyle’s unpaid cut of profits from his plays, about making sure various seats of good quality are available for various of Conan Doyle’s friends. But if memory serves, all that fall and winter there’s some harping about scheduling a meeting between the two men.”

“A meeting?”

“Yes.”

In that moment Harold become intensely aware of all the bourbon in his system. He found himself, for the first time in days, fighting against it. The liquor had done its job of subverting and nullifying all rational thought for the past forty-eight hours, but now Harold desired very much to think. And to think clearly.

“Where?” he asked, his lips moving slowly. He was afraid of the answer she might give.

“Where did Stoker want to meet?”

“Yes. In the letters I read, Stoker made a reference each time to wanting to come to Conan Doyle’s house, his study. It didn’t occur to me as noteworthy at the time, but… Oh, Jesus… Did I seriously just…? Okay, try to remember: In the letters between Stoker’s secretary and Conan Doyle’s, did Stoker’s secretary suggest any particular spot he wanted the two to meet in? Like, say, Conan Doyle’s study?”

Dr. Garber made an odd face. She seemed startled by Harold’s sudden bout of intensity.

“I’m not sure,” she said, taking a sip of her clear cocktail and trying to brush Harold’s seriousness off with a smile. “Does it matter?”

“From the letters we have, we know that Conan Doyle was missing his diary. He always wrote in his study, and we know, from the found volumes, that that’s where they were kept. We know that Stoker was involved in the diary’s disappearance, or else why was Conan Doyle so sure that Stoker had taken it? But Conan Doyle wasn’t aware of its being destroyed, of its being burned, before Stoker told him in the letter. So Conan Doyle hadn’t walked in on a fire in the study, for instance. Stoker must have been left alone in the study, where he stole it. But what if he didn’t actually burn it?”

“Why wouldn’t he burn it,” asked Dr. Garber, “if he was trying to get rid of it?”

“I don’t know,” said Harold. “Maybe he didn’t have time. Maybe Conan Doyle was on his way back into the room. Something might have stopped him.”

“What would he have done with it, if he hadn’t burnt it?”

“Hidden it,” said Harold. “Hidden it in Conan Doyle’s own study.”

“The letters!” Dr. Garber exclaimed, her face brightening. She took up her role much faster than Sarah had, for sure. “That’s why you think Stoker wanted so terribly to meet Conan Doyle in person! So that he could get back into the study.”

“Yes,” said Harold, impressed with Dr. Garber’s reasoning. “Did the secretary-to-secretary correspondence talk about meeting at Conan Doyle’s house as well?”

“I don’t know,” she said after some thought. “They very well could have. I just don’t remember.”

Excitement percolated through Harold’s body, tingling every inch of his skin. Was he deluding himself? Was he tricking himself into thinking that the mystery wasn’t over, that there was more to do? He realized it didn’t matter. Whether the clue was real, or whether it was simply a half-remembered fragment of an utterly uneventful business note from a hundred years past that had been divulged in idle conversation, it was a reason to keep going.

He swallowed the rest of his bourbon easily in one gulp. “Sounds like enough to go on,” he said.

“But where will you go? Even if Stoker did hide the diary in Conan Doyle’s study in 1900, how does that help you find it now? Where would you find it?”

Harold stood and collected his coat.

“I think first I’ll try Conan Doyle’s study,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.