The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 22 The Great Hiatus

January 9, 2010, cont.

Harold and Sarah sat in a run-down Internet café, sipping tea and staring at two dim computer screens. A few computers to their left, a heavy man in his forties clicked through page after page of online porn.

There had been a lengthy debate earlier, in the cab, about the relative safety of returning to their hotel. The driver had seemed remarkably invested in the outcome of their conversation. Both Harold and Sarah eventually came to the conclusion that the men in the black car-the Goateed Man and his associate with the gun-must have known who they were. Who knew how long the men had been following them? The hotel couldn’t be regarded as safe. And so, as the first order of business was to access the contents of the flash drive that Sarah had filched from Alex Cale’s desk, the cabbie had deposited them at the Kensington Internet Café, where they now searched through the drive’s files.

Harold was still impressed with Sarah’s cool in the car chase. His body had been practically convulsing, and it was only through the single-minded focus of will that he was able to plant himself in front of the oncoming car. But Sarah had slipped behind and punctured the tires without pause. He felt himself to be an endless buzz of confusion, of questions and doubt and uncertainty. Outside of his books, the whole world was a mystery to Harold. And Sarah always seemed to understand. He wished he could be more like her.

He opened up the flash drive and thought he’d hit pay dirt. A massive text file labeled “ACD BIO DRAFT 12.14.09” greeted him promisingly. He opened the document, and there it was-the most recent draft of Alex Cale’s long-awaited Conan Doyle biography. Obviously, Harold thought, there must be a lengthy section in the manuscript about the missing diary, where Cale had found it, and what it contained.

Harold spent two hours reading through the entire biography while Sarah sipped green tea and checked her e-mail. She went outside once to make a call, then again when her phone rang and she left to take it.

Harold went through the manuscript quickly. He was already familiar with most of the details of Conan Doyle’s life-born in Edinburgh in 1859, studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, married to Touie in 1885, married to Jean in 1907-and so Harold read even faster than usual.

Alex’s tone was loving and deliriously antiquarian. He seemed to mimic the prose of Conan Doyle himself. “Determined was the face, and hardened was the resolve, of Arthur Conan Doyle as he descended from the steps of the P &O ocean liner to the dirty port of Cape Town,” opened the passage on Conan Doyle’s time in the Boer War. It was pretentious and yet infectious, a delight for Harold to read. His eyes watered as he got to the section on Conan Doyle’s death, in his bed, in the loving arms of his second wife. “You are wonderful,” were Conan Doyle’s final words, whispered to the teary face of his wife of twentythree years. Harold thought of Alex Cale dying alone, in a sterile hotel room, his eyes bulging from his head and his muscles taut from struggling. Harold realized that in the days since Alex’s death he had not paused to mourn. To measure the loss. What would it matter, really, if Harold did find the diary? What difference would it make if he found Alex’s killer? If the man were put in jail for the rest of his wretched life? Alex would never see his own life’s work completed or published. He would never be able to undertake a new project. The world had lost his voice, it had forever lost the maker of these sentences-“Defying Conan Doyle’s incorrigible belief in the supernatural, Harry Houdini sought to prove to him once and for all that genuine magic did not exist. Houdini did so by performing feat after feat for the author but was confounded to find that Conan Doyle refused to believe, after each card was pulled from the deck, that no magic had transpired. ‘I produced your card by sleight of hand, not paranormal force,’ one imagines Houdini saying. ‘And yet my card is here,’ one imagines Conan Doyle responding. ‘However it was done, it is magic to me.’” Harold concealed his tears with a napkin, blowing his nose and crumpling the cheap white paper into a tight little ball before flicking it into the trash.

Harold realized for the first time that he wasn’t doing this for Alex. He was doing this for himself. He was doing this for the solution. The almighty answer that lay just beyond his vision, past the murky clouds and into the heavens. This was not about justice. This was about mystery.

He looked up from his screen to find that Sarah was not beside him. Through the front windows of the café, he could see her on the street outside, talking animatedly into her phone. She had taken a number of these mysterious calls in the last few days, always leaving to talk so Harold couldn’t hear. He was trying not to be paranoid, but someone had recently just pointed a gun at him. That had been a singular experience in Harold’s life, and he dearly hoped he would not have another like it.

“Who was that on the phone?” he asked Sarah when she returned.

“My editor, back in New York,” she replied. “He’s very excited about the piece.”

“Yeah? What did you tell him?”

“Not much. That we’re making progress. That you’re a fascinating character to hang the piece on. He’d love to meet you, when we head back to New York.”

Harold wasn’t sure which he was more flattered by-Sarah’s calling him fascinating or the idea that they were headed back to New York. Together.

It did seem odd that she’d have to leave the room to speak to her editor, though. Harold tried to quiet his suspicions.

“I’d love to meet your editor,” he said simply. “After all of this is over.”

“Speaking of which,” she said, “what have you found?”

“There’s something weird here.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“There’s nothing new in here from the section of Arthur’s life that the missing diary should cover-October through December of 1900. There’s only a few pages on that period of his life, and everything in it comes from the public record. There aren’t any secrets.” Harold flipped through the pages on the screen. “We learn that Conan Doyle ran for public office back home in Edinburgh, lost miserably, played a lot of cricket, did some consulting for Scotland Yard, and then finally resurrected Sherlock Holmes. Those details have been in a dozen other Conan Doyle bios before. We all knew that already.”

“Hold up there,” said Sarah. “I didn’t know that already. Arthur Conan Doyle consulted for Scotland Yard?”

“Yeah. There are plenty of newspaper accounts of his work at the time. He started to become more… let’s say more ‘eccentric’ as the years went on. Somebody made a half-assed attempt to kill him by planting a letter bomb in his mail slot. It didn’t work, needless to say. But Arthur started talking to Scotland Yard, and he got quite invested in a few of their cases. At one point there was some serial killer he thought he was chasing, actually, but it never amounted to much.”

“He never caught who he was after?”

“No. In fact, I don’t even think the Yard regarded it as a serial-killer case. Jack the Ripper had shocked all of London a few years earlier, and I imagine they thought Arthur was letting his literary sensibilities get the best of him. But they were happy for the publicity, happy with the public’s knowing that Arthur Conan Doyle was on their side. As the years went on, actually, there would every now and then be this huge public outcry for Scotland Yard to deputize him again on some major case. When Agatha Christie disappeared, in 1926, all the newspapers had editorials asking Conan Doyle to get involved. And you know what’s funny? He did. And he found her. She had gone off for a drive in the country one day and never returned. Her car was crashed against a tree, but there was no blood or sign of a body.”

“Jesus. How’d he find her?”

“He correctly figured that there was only one train station she could have walked to-or been walked to-in the area, and only one train she could have gotten on without being noticed. Somehow, and I honestly forget how, he figured out which stop she would have had to get off at. Sure enough, her husband found her in that town, three days later, living under an assumed name. She’d had a nervous breakdown after catching him in an affair with another woman. It was kind of sad, really.”

“Wow. This doesn’t have anything to do with the missing diary, does it?”

“No.”

“Okay, so… Conan Doyle worked for Scotland Yard, and then- shortly after-resurrected Sherlock Holmes?”

“Yeah. The Great Hiatus came to an end with the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles in March 1901. Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, Arthur decided to bring him back. To write more stories about the fictional detective he loathed, by all accounts. He told people it was for the money, but that never quite made sense. He had all the money in the world already, plus he’d had blank-check offers from every publisher and magazine in the world for years at that point. Why then? And why bring Holmes back so… so different.”

“Different?” said Sarah, intrigued.

“Yeah,” said Harold. “After the Great Hiatus, when Holmes returned in those later stories, he was just different. Meaner. Colder. He starts manipulating witnesses for information. Lying to people. Committing crimes himself if he thinks it’ll serve his cause. One time he even seduces and proposes marriage to a housemaid in order to get her to let him into her house. Then he never calls on her again. He becomes a real bastard. He also seemed to have lost his faith in the English justice system. All of a sudden, he was acting as judge and jury, even meting out punishments for the criminals he caught. Early on, Holmes worked in conjunction with Scotland Yard, but in the later years he was completely independent. And he’d developed real contempt and animosity toward the police. Sure, the cop characters were always dumb in the Holmes stories, the better to show off how smart he was, but after the Hiatus the cops become obsolete. Holmes wants nothing to do with them at all.

“The question of the Great Hiatus-the question that Alex’s biography doesn’t seem like it’s capable of answering-is, what happened to Holmes while he was gone?”

“It sounds to me,” said Sarah, thinking it over, “that the question is, what happened to Arthur Conan Doyle?”