“When was the last time you spoke to your brother, before his death?” Harold asked.
“I’m sorry, why are you here, again?” Jennifer responded plaintively.
“He was a good friend.” Harold swallowed, embarrassed at the exaggeration. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to him.”
Jennifer turned to Sarah, then away from them both. She looked puzzled, not at the complexity of the problem but at its simplicity. Her brother had died. That was “what happened to him.”
“Harold traveled in the same circles as your brother,” said Sarah. “We think he might have some insight into who did this that’s not available to the police.”
“You’re a detective?” asked Jennifer of Harold.
“No. Not exactly.”
“What do you do, then, exactly?”
“I’m a reader.”
“What does that mean?”
“I read books… well, I’ve read a lot of books, past tense, I suppose that’s more accurate. See, I’m freelance, I work for the legal departments of most of the major studios, and when someone sues one of them for copyright infringement, I help prepare the defense on the grounds-”
“You’re one of Alex’s Sherlockian friends?”
“Yes.”
She faced Sarah. “And you’re a reporter?”
“Yes.”
Jennifer sighed and crossed her legs, picking lint specks from her red socks. “I hadn’t spoken to my brother for a month or so. We weren’t… Well, that’s not true. We were close in our own way.”
“What did you talk about? Did anything seem out of the ordinary?” said Harold.
“Something was always out of the ordinary with Alex. The Great Game was always on, he was always after some relic or precious document or what-have-you. He was always this close, ever the last few inches, from finishing his biography. On that day, if I remember, he said that he had been followed ever since he’d found the diary. I thought he was being characteristically overdramatic.”
“Who was following him? What did he say about him-or her?”
“Oh, who the bloody hell knows? It’s not like this was the first time Alex thought some mysterious stranger had it in for him. Once, when he was at university, he rang Father in a fit because two rival students were conspiring against him to steal his thesis. It was silly, of course. They weren’t doing anything of the sort.”
“If he wasn’t being followed, then who do you think killed him?” said Harold, surprised at his own boldness.
“Don’t you think it’s obvious?” said Jennifer. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“What do you mean?”
“One of you lot killed him. You’re a herd of jealous children. He had a candy bar, and you all lusted after it. ‘Give me, give me.’” She uncrossed her legs, pressing her feet into the floor and leaning forward, hands on her knees. “Which one of your friends do you think it was?”
Harold thought of Ron Rosenberg. Jeffrey Engels. A dozen others. A suspicious chill danced up Harold’s spine, but he squelched it with a wiggle in his seat.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Yet.”
Sarah piped up. “Think about your last conversation with your brother. Did he have any details on the man he thought was following him?”
Jennifer Peters thought for a moment. “No,” she said.
“We’d like to look at his apartment, if that’s all right with you,” said Sarah.
“Oh, very well, I suppose. What harm could it do?” said Jennifer after a moment of reflection. “I’ll take you now. Let me find some shoes.”
Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren’t brothers. Plot points didn’t leave behind grieving sisters who couldn’t find their shoes.
“You know, your brother,” he began after a few moments, “he was a legend in our organization. And that he finally discovered the lost diary? I don’t know if it’s much consolation to you, but he achieved his dream. He found what he’d been looking for. He was happy, before he passed.”
Jennifer laughed to herself and shook her head.
“Happy?” she said, trying the word out on her lips, listening to its sound. “Do you think people are happy when they finally get the things they’ve been after?” She absentmindedly fiddled with the wedding ring on her left hand.
“He wasn’t, really,” she continued. “I remember the day he called to tell me that he’d found the diary. His voice was so quiet I could barely hear what he was saying over the phone. He seemed very distant, very formal. I offered a glass of champagne, said I’d take him out to celebrate, he deserved it. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said.” Jennifer deepened her voice, mimicking her dead brother. “ ‘That won’t be necessary.’ Who says that? To his sis?”
Jennifer emerged from a back closet with a pair of comfortable walking shoes and a heavy winter coat. As she covered herself up, the fringe of mink at the top of the coat brushed against her earlobes.
“Did he ever tell you where he’d found it?” asked Harold. He’d been waiting for the right moment to ask this question. There wasn’t one, he now realized.
“He never told me,” replied Jennifer.
“You asked him about it?”
“I asked him a dozen times. ‘Alex, you’ve been on the bloody hunt for ten years and you won’t tell me where it took you?’ Nothing. I pieced together that he’d been in Cambridge for a week, not sure why. He did most of his research at the British Library, which has excellent Victorian and Edwardian collections. Do you know, he never even told me that he was particularly close, closer than any of the other times he thought he was onto the damned thing. He just rings one day to say, ‘Oh, Jennifer, I’ve found the diary. It’s quite fascinating. I’m going to complete the biography and unveil the whole lot at this year’s convention.’ He sounded mournful-as if someone he’d known had just died. Like he was about to type up the last rites.” She frowned, stopping herself from continuing.
“You don’t think finding the diary gave him peace, just a little?” asked Sarah. “It was the culmination of his life’s work.”
“I think that whatever he found in there made him miserable from the second he laid eyes on it till the day he died. Till the day the diary killed him!” Jennifer said. “I think that finding Conan Doyle’s diary was the worst thing that ever happened to my brother. What do you think it’s going to do for you?”
CHAPTER 15 The Allegations of Love
“At the same time you must admit that the occasion of a lady’s
marriage is a very suitable time for her friends and
relatives to make some little effort upon her behalf.”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”
October 21,1900, cont.
The tallest spire of Westminster Abbey pierced into the pale yellow orb of the setting sun as Arthur left Waterloo Station. Late-afternoon traffic flowed across Westminster Bridge like a gushing stream- like the dread Reichenbach itself, pouring pedestrians and clattering broughams east into the dense city center. Big Ben announced five and twenty.
Somewhere in this city hid the murderous husband of “Morgan Nemain,” and Arthur was going to find him. His first stop was the vicar-general’s office, which issued more than two thousand marriage licenses on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury every year. Typically, couples were married by their local diocese, but if the man and woman came from different parishes, then by law only the archbishop of Canterbury had the authority to legalize their union. This in turn meant that if someone was looking to get married clandestinely, the vicar-general’s building near Waterloo was the place to do it. It was an open secret, and a rather public irony, that the most ungodly marriages in society were granted by the church’s most senior office.