Meanwhile, back at his home, Green tried to piece together why the archive was about to slip into private hands once more. According to Green’s family, he typed notes in his computer, reexamining the trail of evidence, which he thought proved that the papers belonged to the British Library. He worked late into the night, frequently going without sleep. None of it, however, seemed to add up. At one point, he typed in bold letters, “STICK TO THE FACTS.” After another sleepless night, he told his sister that the world seemed “Kafkaesque.”
Several hours before Green died, he called his friend Utechin at home. Green had asked him to find a tape of an old BBC radio interview, which, Green recalled, quoted one of Conan Doyle’s heirs saying that the archive should be given to the British Library. Utechin said that he had found the tape, but there was no such statement on the recording. Green became apoplectic, and accused his friend of conspiring against him, as if he were another Moriarty. Finally, Utechin said, “Richard, you’ve lost it!”
One afternoon while I was at my hotel in London, the phone rang. “I need to see you again,” John Gibson said. “I’ll take the next train in.” Before he hung up, he added, “I have a theory.”
I met him in my hotel room. He was carrying several scraps of paper, on which he had taken notes. He sat down by the window, his slender figure silhouetted in the fading light, and announced, “I think it was suicide.”
He had sifted through the data, including details that I had shared with him from my own investigation. There was mounting evidence, he said, that his rationalist friend was betraying signs of irrationality in the last week of his life. There was the fact that there was no evidence of forced entry at Green’s home. And there was the fact, perhaps most critically, of the wooden spoon by Green’s hand.
“He had to have used it to tighten the cord” like a tourniquet, Gibson said. “If someone else had garroted him, why would he need the spoon? The killer could simply use his hands.” He continued, “I think things in his life had not turned out the way he wanted. This Christie’s sale simply brought everything to a head.”
He glanced nervously at his notes, which he strained to see without his magnifying glass. “That’s not all,” he said. “I think he wanted it to look like murder.”
He waited to assess my reaction, then went on, “That’s why he didn’t leave a note. That’s why he took his voice off the answering machine. That’s why he sent that message to his sister with the three phone numbers on it. That’s why he spoke of the American who was after him. He must have been planning it for days, laying the foundation, giving us false clues.”
I knew that, in detective fiction, the reverse scenario generally turns out to be true-a suicide is found to have been murder. As Holmes declares in “The Resident Patient,” “This is no suicide… It is a very deeply planned and cold-blooded murder.” There is, however, one notable exception. It is, eerily enough, in one of the last Holmes mysteries, “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” a story that Green once cited in an essay. A wife is found lying dead on a bridge, shot in the head at point-blank range. All the evidence points to one suspect: the governess, with whom the husband had been flirting. Yet Holmes shows that the wife had not been killed by anyone; rather, enraged by jealousy over her husband’s illicit overtures to the governess, she had killed herself and framed the woman whom she blamed for her misery. Of all Conan Doyle’s stories, it digs deepest into the human psyche and its criminal motivations. As the governess tells Holmes, “When I reached the bridge she was waiting for me. Never did I realize till that moment how this poor creature hated me. She was like a mad woman-indeed, I think she was a mad woman, subtly mad with the deep power of deception which insane people may have.”
I wondered if Green could have been so enraged with the loss of the archive that he might have done something similar, and even tried to frame the American, whom he blamed for ruining his relationship with Dame Jean and for the sale of the archive. I wondered if he could have tried, in one last desperate attempt, to create order out of the chaos around him. I wondered if this theory, however improbable, was in fact the least “impossible.”
I shared with Gibson some other clues I had uncovered: the call that Green had made to the reporter days before his death, saying that “something” might happen to him; a reference in a Holmes story to one of Moriarty’s main henchmen as a “garroter by trade;” and a statement to the coroner by Green’s sister, who said that the note with the three phone numbers had reminded her of “the beginning of a thriller.”
After a while, Gibson looked up at me, his face ghastly white. “Don’t you see?” he exclaimed. “He staged the whole thing. He created the perfect mystery.”
Before I went back to America, I went to see Green’s sister, Priscilla West. She lives near Oxford, in a three-story eighteenth-century brick house with a walled garden. She had long, wavy brown hair, an attractive round face, and small oval glasses. She invited me inside with a reticent voice, saying, “Are you a drawing-room person or a kitchen person?”
I shrugged uncertainly, and she led me into the drawing room, which had antique furniture and her father’s children’s books on the shelves. As we sat down, I explained to her that I had been struggling to write her brother’s story. The American had told me, “There is no such thing as a definitive biography,” and Green seemed particularly resistant to explication.
“Richard compartmentalized his life,” his sister said. “There are a lot of things we’ve only found out since he died.” At the inquest, his family, and most of his friends, had been startled when Lawrence Keen, who was nearly half Green’s age, announced that he had been Richard’s lover years ago. “No one in the family knew” that Green was gay, his sister explained. “It wasn’t something he ever talked about.”
As West recalled other surprising fragments of Green’s biography (travels to Tibet, a brief attempt at writing a novel), I tried to picture him as best I could with his glasses, his plastic bag in hand, and his wry smile. West had seen her brother’s body lying on the bed, and several times she told me, “I just wish… ” before falling silent. She handed me copies of the eulogies that Green’s friends had delivered at the memorial service, which was held on May 22nd, the day Conan Doyle was born. On the back of the program from the service were several quotes from Sherlock Holmes stories:
I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.
He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.
His career has been an extraordinary one.
After a while, she got up to pour herself a cup of tea. When she sat down again, she said that her brother had willed his collection to a library in Portsmouth, near where Conan Doyle wrote the first two Holmes stories, so that other scholars could have access to it. The collection was so large that it had taken two weeks, and required twelve truckloads, to cart it all away. It was estimated to be worth several million dollars-far more, in all likelihood, than the treasured archive. “He really did not like the idea of scholarship being put second to greed,” West said. “He lived and died by this.”
She then told me something about the archive which had only recently come to light, and which her brother had never learned: Dame Jean Conan Doyle, while dying of cancer, had made a last-minute deed of apportionment, splitting the archive between herself and the three heirs of her former sister-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle. What was being auctioned off, therefore, belonged to the three heirs, and not to Dame Jean, and, though some people still questioned the morality of the sale, the British Library had reached the conclusion that it was legal.