“What does the diary look like?” she asked.

Harold considered. “Leather-bound. Old. It’ll be the thing that looks like a hundred-year-old diary.”

“I thought Holmes spoke in aphorisms, not tautologies.”

“I think it’ll be pretty obvious when you see it, all right?”

The stray papers that Sarah found contained little of interest to the amateur detectives-pages 709 through 841 of Alex Cale’s unfinished Conan Doyle biography, which, by the looks of things, would have been impeccably thorough in its completion. She picked up an antique fountain pen from beside the body and held it up for Harold to see. It was a Parker Duofold “Big Red” model, probably from the 1920s- black on the blind cap, red on the barrel. It was the same model that Conan Doyle would have used to write the final Holmes stories.

She found a handful of hardbound books as well: a complete collection of the Holmes tales, dirty and frayed from overuse and almost solidly blue with marginal notes from the antique pen. Nearly every paragraph had words underlined or scrawled exclamations in the margins. She found Cale’s briefcase beneath a low chair, and when she pulled it across the carpet, Harold recognized it from the night before. It was already open. And empty.

As he searched the floor, Harold adopted a rodent’s-eye view of the area where the taupe carpet met the off-white wallpaper, below the vertical streaks of fleur-de-lis patterning that provided most of the wall’s decoration. He reached into his coat pocket and removed the magnifying glass that had previously found use only as a finger toy when he became nervous or bored.

At the sight of Harold with his glass, Jeffrey shook his head in shame.

Harold began a methodical examination of the hotel room’s walls. He could see puckers in the wallpaper through the lens, as every unevenness in the paper’s application to the drywall seemed to pop out like a series of sand dunes. What was Holmes looking for, when he searched through that fateful Lauriston Gardens house in his first case? That room had been dilapidated, dust-covered, and mildewy from years of inattention. Holmes dug through the dust and shone bright match light into the darkest corners, discovering the word “RACHE”-the German for “revenge”-written in blood at the bottom of the wall in an empty, unused portion of the room. But, thought Harold, sensational though such a clue might be, what was Holmes looking for when he found it? You couldn’t expect a real murderer to conveniently leave you a message explicating his motivations, could you? Stepping back, all Harold saw here was clean hotel wallpaper and freshly vacuumed carpet. He couldn’t possibly hope to find a clue as dramatic as Holmes’s, after all; there would be no bloody messages here. He was being responsible in his expectations. But Holmes’s method-that would work. It simply had to. So what the hell was Harold supposed to be looking for?

Harold’s search swung, inch by inch, 180 degrees across the room, to the wooden desk and chair. The top of the desk was a mess of papers and pens-whoever ransacked the room seemed to have been particularly concerned with making sure no lost diaries had been hidden in the hotel’s “Guide to Your Pay-Per-View Channels.” Harold pushed the chair away and crawled under the desk, continuing his examination. The darkness underneath made this difficult, however, so he reached up and brought the overturned lamp from the desktop to his assistance.

He flicked it on and pointed its bulb at the wall.

Then he dropped it, his body ricocheting as he gave a start. The bulb shattered, rousing both Sarah and Jeffrey from their thoughts and sending them rushing to Harold’s side. What they saw at first appeared to be a small, murky, dark stain on the bright, clean wall. Then, as they knelt beneath the desk, they began to make out red-brown letters, messily scrawled above the carpet line, as if by finger painting. No magnifying glass was needed to read the still-drying message.

“ELEMENTARY,” it read.

It was written in blood.

CHAPTER 9 Sensational Developments

October 18, 1900

The letter bomb in Arthur’s mail did not go off as planned.

Some ten minutes prior to the explosion, he settled down to breakfast by the latticework windows. Gray fall light came through the nine square glass panes. On days like these, the strips of white wood that separated the glass seemed brighter to the eye than did the window light. Arthur dug into his eggs and tomato.

Seven years had passed since the death of Sherlock Holmes. Seven years of stories, adventures, and a new life Arthur had constructed for himself far away from his old one. He had left London for Hindhead, and he had left Holmes for better things. This was the life of which he’d always dreamed.

He had built this house, named Undershaw, three years earlier. It was grand then, and as the years passed, it grew grander still. The estate had the air of a carnival about it. There were great stables, which attracted friends from the city nearly every weekend; dear children and distant relatives always scampering around hither and yon; a fireplace fit for a Hindu bonfire; a dark, quiet billiards room in which Arthur had already lost games to Bram and James Barrie. The new landau, had for 150 pounds plus the pair of horses to power it, was having the family crest painted on by the staff. Indeed, Arthur made sure to include the Doyle crest on as many elements of his new home as possible. It reminded him of where he’d come from and of the pride he felt in where he’d arrived. Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn. The house bought on make-believe; the house that a penny dreadful built.

Seven years, and Sherlock Holmes remained blessedly buried below the waters of the Reichenbach Falls. Yes, people still spoke of him. Yes, people-strangers-still wrote of him, discussed him, missed him, and begged for his return in letters to the editors of every magazine in which he’d appeared. But not here. No one dared speak of him in this house. The name Sherlock Holmes was not to be uttered out loud in Arthur’s presence, nor in the opulent home for which the detective had paid.

Five minutes before the explosion, Arthur left the breakfast table and went to retrieve the day’s post from the small mahogany table near the front vestibule. It was a task he enjoyed performing himself. As he walked the halls of his estate, he felt a pleasant moment of contentment. A small army of children and their attendants rampaged upstairs, trotting heavily between the eight bedrooms. Outside, the stable master fed Brigadier, Arthur’s own horse, an eight-year-old of strong Norfolk breeding. Through the front windows, Arthur could see the tall pines rising above his three stories. Perhaps later this winter they might acquire one from the nearby woods for a drawing-room Christmas tree.

He scooped up the morning’s postal stack in the crook of his arm and made his way to his study for the inspection. He opened the letters quickly. There was a kind note from Innes about the elections, which he appreciated, though Arthur would have preferred not to think on them. He had run for Parliament in Edinburgh over the last months on a largely anti-Boer platform. When he had returned from the front earlier in the year, Arthur had written a history of the war, from the British perspective, as well as many a pamphlet urging his fellow citizens to support the military effort. Then he had run for office, thinking that his pro-war views would be manifestly useful at Westminster. His platform, aside from a promise to defeat the Boer insurrection at all costs, contained a plan to raise tariffs on foreign foodstuffs imported into Britain that could as easily be produced locally (wheat, meat), while lowering tariffs on imported foodstuffs that could not be locally manufactured (sugar, tea). This plan had failed to rally the electorate in his favor, and he had been drawn into a rather public debate on the tense issue of women’s suffrage. Arthur had not intended to campaign on this point, but he was a committed antisuffragist, and when asked, he refused to duck the issue. After exaggerated rumors of Arthur’s Catholicism were spread across the district on cheaply printed bills, he lost his hometown seat by a few hundred votes. Rather than fight the slander that he was a papist stooge, Arthur retreated back to Hindhead, and to fiction.