As he watched the two guards mill around the entrance to the museum, laughing at a joke that Harold couldn’t hear, he turned and looked behind him to the east. The Swiss Alps broke clear of the earth not fifty yards from where he was standing. Snow blanketed the top third of the range like a white silk shawl.
Harold shifted his weight, feeling the bulky bag slung across his shoulder. The steel tire iron inside pressed against his back. The guards laughed again and began a slow wander in the direction of the parking lot. The museum was dark. Empty. The last morsel of the sun vanished into the distance, and Harold stepped from the shadows into the nighttime.
There was nothing left for him to lose anymore. He had no life he wanted to return to, and the life he knew he wanted, the life of these weeks in which he’d for the first time come truly alive, had been revealed as a fraud. And not even a complicated fraud at that. The twist had come so easily, and bowled him over with such self-evident obviousness, that Harold couldn’t even muster up anger at Sarah, or at Sebastian. He’d known he shouldn’t have trusted her from the beginning, hadn’t he? Her whole story had been just as improbable then as it was now. Harold knew enough to blame himself.
At first he couldn’t believe that she’d gotten away with her lie. Sebastian Conan Doyle’s wife-or soon-to-be-ex-wife-had walked into the world’s largest Sherlockian convention under a fake identity, and no one had known who she was? But of course they hadn’t, Harold realized. Most of the attendees spent their days pretending that Sherlock Holmes was real and that Arthur Conan Doyle was just Watson’s literary agent. They didn’t care about Conan Doyle or his descendants. Harold was even aware, when he searched the recesses of his memory, that Sebastian Conan Doyle was married, and he might even have known that his wife’s name was Sarah, though it was hard to remember now. But of course he hadn’t made the connection. She’d lied so obviously, so plainly, that no one would ever have thought to question her. “You’re really, really smart,” she’d said to him when she left.
Harold couldn’t understand why she had deceived him. What were she and Sebastian planning? Were they actually getting a divorce? The lawyer she’d called was real, but had the story she’d told him been utterly fake? And who the hell had been chasing them in London? Was that all for show? Harold had realized, over the past day, that he simply didn’t care. He didn’t care who the men with the guns were, he didn’t care what Sebastian was after, and he didn’t care who Sarah Lindsay, or Sarah Conan Doyle, really was. Alex Cale’s “murder” had been solved, his trail of clues followed to perfection. But the pursuit gave Harold no joy anymore; it granted him no peace. All he wanted now, all he craved, like a drowning man’s last gasp of oxygen, was the diary.
But he knew that the diary wouldn’t make him happy either. When he put his sweaty palms on its cover and peeled open its parched pages, he would hear no choir of angels in his head. There would be no swelling of his heart; no sense of contentment would fill his panting lungs. He understood that in just a few minutes, when he laid his hands on the leather-bound book and learned its secrets, things would only get worse. But that would not stop him. He would see this through to its awful conclusion, because he had to. Because he had to know.
His footsteps felt quick and firm as he marched through the snow. He came through the blackness to the front of the museum. The building had once been a church, and a humble spire still poked up from the angled roof of the simple two-story. Even in the dark, Harold could make out the reddish hues of the bricks and the beautiful glasswork in the windows.
There were many ways that Harold could have snuck into the museum. He could have entered during the day and hidden in some forgotten storage closet. He could have learned to disengage the alarm system. He could have learned to pick locks. But even if those methods worked, they would take an impossibly long time to accomplish. He didn’t have the heart. He couldn’t bear this anymore. He was going to know now.
Harold was home, at the base of the Reichenbach Falls. The place where everything ended.
He removed the tire iron from his bag and stared at the antique stained glass in a low-hanging window. The image was of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. A golden halo surrounded Lazarus’s head as he stepped from his cave, toward the beckoning hand of Jesus. A legion of apostles and followers stood behind, marveling at Christ’s divinity and soaking up the comfort of his presence.
Harold raised the tire iron above his head and smashed it down on the glass. The sound of the window shattering was much louder than he’d anticipated, and yet he didn’t flinch at the noise. Tiny shards of glass sprinkled back at him from the broken window, covering his coat sleeves and muddy shoes. He flicked the tire iron around the open window a few times, knocking out the remaining hunks of sharp glass. He dropped the iron back into his bag and placed both gloved hands on the windowsill, pressing himself up and through the window. In a moment he was inside.
Harold heard no alarm but assumed that one must have been activated. He didn’t have much time, but he didn’t think he needed it. And if the Swiss police found him smashing a priceless gasogene in the private museum? Well, then they could tell the New York police they’d found him, and the various authorities could figure out which jail they’d want him in. Harold didn’t care. All he wanted was the diary.
He walked quickly through the museum, and as it was small and Harold’s destination was its main attraction, he found what he was looking for in no time at all. He entered the carefully prepared study of Sherlock Holmes, flicked on the lights, and looked around. Of all the places to end, this one made as much sense as any.
The room was cramped with objects. The fireplace was adorned with sharp pokers and a long singlestick, with which Holmes had stalked Moriarty in “The Final Problem.” Drawings of various Holmes adventures littered every available surface. On a small table lay Watson’s stethoscope, as well as Holmes’s violin. Another table held Holmes’s chemical kit, with which he would test bloodstains, tobacco, and the other assorted residues of murder. A deerstalker hat, just like Harold’s, rested on a hook. First editions of all of the Holmes stories covered the bookshelves. A tea set was laid out on a breakfast table, spoons and knives set in their places as if Holmes and Watson were midmeal. Newspapers of the period sat beside the cups and saucers. And along the far wall, in what Harold couldn’t help but notice was the darkest corner of the darkened room, a small desk held an antique gasogene up to his gaze.
Without hesitation Harold walked to the gasogene and raised it from the table. He shook it. The base was easily wide enough to hold a diary, and, for a piece of hollow glass, the gasogene felt quite heavy. He twisted at one of the screws on the base, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried the other, with no better luck. It occurred to him that besides a steel tire iron something along the lines of a screwdriver would have been a pretty smart addition to his collection of break-in tools.
He set the gasogene back down on the table, went to the fireplace, and lifted the poker. It was heavier than the tire iron. Longer. It was perfect. Harold gripped it with both hands and could see his knuckles whitening around the hilt. He raised the poker over his head. Was he sure that the diary was in the gasogene? Yes. No. It honestly no longer mattered. He’d smash it to pieces, or he’d smash something else to pieces, or he’d break every heirloom in this entire museum if that’s what it would take.