Harold turned to Sarah for guidance, but her eyes were locked on the open door.
She nodded to herself: This would be her department. Without looking at him, she stepped forward, pushing the door open all the way. She entered the bright flat.
It was even more of a mess than Alex’s hotel room in New York. The diffuse London sun shone through wide windows onto a sea of books, all of them toppled onto the floor from their rightful shelves. Cushions had been thrown off the couch and the linings cut open. White tufts of down-or whatever couch pillows were stuffed with-were spread around like snowdrifts. As Harold entered, he noticed the freshly emptied wooden bookshelves, the insides of which were colored more darkly than the outsides, having not been exposed to daylight in years. He could see a tiled kitchenette off to one side of the central living space, with its own mess. Plates shattered on the floor, a clattered array of silverware gleaming from the white tiles. Every drawer on the desk at the far side of the room had been opened, and some even removed. Blue ink spilled across the desktop from an overturned bottle.
Jennifer remained in the doorway, too afraid to enter. Sarah took a quick walk through the flat, from end to end.
“No one’s here,” she pronounced.
Harold watched the blue ink on the desk dribble onto the floor. It was still wet. And still dripping.
“That goatee!” yelled Harold, putting it together. It wasn’t blue paint that he’d seen on the man’s jeans. It was ink.
He ran past Jennifer into the hallway and down the stairs, taking them three at a time. He popped open the building’s front door with a great push. But it was no use. Harold surveyed the long street as he heard the door click shut behind him. He didn’t see a soul.
CHAPTER 19 The Broken Hair Clip
“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through
the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it,
and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet
October 27, 19oo
The Needling family lived in a mansion called Millhead, which rested at the bottom of a hill in West Hampstead. Great white pillars shot forth from the dirt, pressing the sharply angled roof upward, like an arrow to the heavens. Before the pillars lay a row of delicate hedges, and two empty, symmetrical flower beds. Into the distance spread a craggy heath, whose reddish outcroppings of rock stretched into the cloud-covered horizon.
Arthur had sent word of his coming the day before. He’d prepared the first telegram himself, a “Dear Sir” sort of job to Sally Needling’s father, explaining who he was, how he’d become involved in “the tragedy” and all that, and asking permission to visit the man’s home. Then Arthur had decided it might be odd, to send such a missive without warning, and so he’d hurried down to the Yard again, to have them broach the issue. Best to let the authorities handle the awkward bits, Arthur felt. Inspector Miller had made contact with Sally’s father, Bertrand Needling, who quickly assented to a visit. Arthur had sent a brief, yet polite, note this morning, thanking Mr. Needling for his time and letting him know that Arthur would be on the 4:05 from King’s Cross. He’d made no mention of Sally directly, nor of her murder, nor of a cheap East End boardinghouse with a white lace wedding dress tucked away in its back bedroom closet.
Arthur clapped the heavy bronze knocker against the front door. He could hear the sound echo throughout the house. After a wait, a servant answered the door and let him inside. The family had been expecting him.
His interview with the family was tense and hushed, their voices quieted to a whisper. Bertrand and Clara Needling sat on opposite ends of the drawing room. Sally’s two brothers were out. Arthur never learned where. The talk was punctuated by strange, sudden silences. In the middle of describing some facet of her daughter’s brief life, Mrs. Needling would lose the train of her thoughts and her sentence would putter to a halt, like a steam engine cooling to its last breaths. Mr. Needling, a pallid barrister, would not jump in to pick up the thought, however, and Arthur was mindful of interrupting. And thus a lengthy silence would hang, until finally Arthur felt comfortable asking another question, on an unrelated topic so that it seemed he’d received a satisfactory answer before. He found that the household existed in a grief-drunk haze, and he waded through it cautiously and politely.
Sally had been born in ’74, in this very house. A happy girl, Mrs. Needling assured Arthur. She used to run up the hill behind the house and then roll down it with the boys. She’d put on her brothers’ worn and oversize trousers so she didn’t get her dresses dirty. For her eighth birthday, she’d begged and begged for a ruby hair clip she’d seen in a shop window in the city, at Routledge’s on Oxford Street. After some pleading with her father, the hair clip had been acquired and presented in a box filled with pink tissue paper to a squealing Sally. She wore it all day long, and her mother had to pry it from her hair that night at bedtime. And wouldn’t you know? The next day Sally went up the hill with her brothers, the clip still in her hair. As she rolled down the hill, gay as a bird, the clip broke into a dozen pieces. Sally was devastated. Of course another, identical clip had to be purchased, and it was, the very next day. It had taken only the smallest bit of cajoling of Mr. Needling, his wife explained through her first smile of the afternoon.
“Dr. Doyle doesn’t need to be hearing about all this,” said Mr. Needling with a terse and quiet ferocity. “He’s trying to find out who killed her, not write her biography.”
Mrs. Needling began to respond to Mr. Needling’s outburst. “Dear, I was just explaining what a…” And then she let her sentence go, fading off into the stuffy air.
“Was she fond of any gentlemen that you knew of? Did she have many callers?” said Arthur, again changing the subject. Best to start here and see if this led to a conversation about Sally’s single-night marriage.
“No, sir,” said Mr. Needling. “She was a quiet girl, you see. Kept to the estate a lot. She was quite fond of her horses.”
Arthur nodded that he understood. They didn’t know that she’d been married when she died. Her relationship with this man, this killer, had been a secret she’d kept from her family. Should he press further? It is a horrid thing, to tell a mother that she’d missed her murdered daughter’s wedding day.
“She did have her friends in the city, though,” offered Mrs. Needling. “She’d been spending a lot of her time around them.”
“Her friends in the city?” inquired Arthur.
“Janet and… Emily. Yes. Janet and Emily-those were the names. Sorry, she only ever mentioned their Christian names in talking about them. And they never came to the house either, Sally always went into the city to see them. They’d attend one of those meetings or some such.”
Mr. Needling stirred in his seat, clearly agitated by the direction the conversation had taken. He said nothing, however. Arthur addressed Mrs. Needling, ignoring her husband’s discomfort.
“What sort of meetings would those be?” he asked casually.
Mrs. Needling looked to her husband for guidance, but he refused to meet her eyes.
“Perhaps they were more ‘talks’ than ‘meetings,’ I should say. Sally wasn’t a terribly active member, you understand-she just went for the speeches. And for her girlfriends, of course. She liked meeting the other young women.”
“We don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Dr. Doyle, that’s all!” interjected Mr. Needling. “She was a good girl. Always was. You must remember that.”
“Of course, Mr. Needling. I’m sure your daughter was the very flower of West Hampstead. Which is all the more reason for me to find the man who did this vile deed and see that he’s punished.” Bertrand Needling hardly appeared comforted by Arthur’s words. “Now, what were these… these talks your daughter attended with her friends?”