Arthur adjusted his overcoat and puffed out his chest.

“I won’t give it back,” said the woman after a long moment, her face falling as she became resigned to confession.

“I truly couldn’t care whether or not you do,” said Arthur. “But I need to know what transpired here between you and the murdered girl.”

“I didn’t kill her!”

“I know,” said Arthur. “Who did?”

“I hardly got a look at him, he came by so quick. He came in with the girl-Sally, you say? And she was wearing that dress. When was the last time you’ve seen a dress like that? It sparkled in the light, shined like electricity. The man had on a black cloak, black hat, nothing much out of the ordinary. He kept his head ducked down a lot, hiding his eyes. The girl paid for their room. I showed them upstairs, and that was that.” The woman sat down on the staircase, folding her bosom over her knees and holding her legs into her body. It seemed to Arthur as if she were cocooning herself.

“Well, I thought that was that,” she continued. “The next morning I go to their door, to ask if they want their breakfast. I’d some porridge, and even some ham from the butcher’s across the way. There was no answer, so I opened the door. She was… The girl, you see, she was… And the dress, crumpled up in the corner like it was trash… Hell.” In the darkened stairwell, Arthur could not tell whether the woman was crying. He suspected that she was.

“You found Sally’s body,” said Arthur. “She was stark naked. She’d been strangled. The man was gone. The dress was by her side.”

The woman said nothing, but she nodded, first once, then many times, as if she were confirming the truth for herself as well as for Arthur.

“Isn’t it such a beautiful dress?” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“You didn’t want it to go to waste. To have the police take it away. You thought that maybe you’d sell it, or maybe you’d keep it for yourself. It must be quite valuable, a dress like that. So you hid it away in your closet. But you had to do something with the body, didn’t you?” The woman was definitely crying now. Arthur took the first few slats of the staircase in small steps, ascending foot by foot. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to the woman. She used it to smear the tears across her cheeks.

“You took the body and deposited it in the alley just beside your home. You must have brought her down these very stairs-she was heavy, wasn’t she? She must have hit every step on the way down. That’s why the body was so bruised when the police found her. You realized that a naked dead girl would attract rather more attention from the police than a clothed one, so what did you do? You took some skirts from your own closet, didn’t you, and wrapped them around her? A fair trade, I suppose, for her lovely white dress.”

The woman continued to cry as she buried her head between her knees. Arthur wanted to sit beside her, to give her an arm. But there was no room on the narrow staircase. He was forced to stand above her, looking down while her tears dripped onto her soiled shoes.

“You may keep the dress,” he said as he walked backward down the stairs. “And the kerchief.”

CHAPTER 18 Pleasure Reading

January 9, 2010, cont.

After Alex Cale’s answering machine clicked off, there was silence in the cluttered Kensington flat. As the lead detective on the case, Harold felt it was his duty to say something.

“Well then,” he said. “That happened.”

“What the bloody hell?” said Jennifer incredulously.

“Let’s not overreact.”

“Do you know who that was? Do you know that man?”

“Yes. I’m sort of working for him, technically.” Harold was treated to a look of stunned horror from Jennifer.

“His name is Sebastian Conan Doyle,” chimed Sarah. “He had been fighting with your brother publicly.”

“We knew he’d been threatening Alex,” added Harold, “though in more of a legal, trading-angry-letters sense. We didn’t know that he’d been really threatening Alex, in, like, an I’m-going-to-kill-you sense.”

“Let’s sit down,” said Sarah. “Perhaps we should back up for a minute.”

The three sat, and Harold and Sarah spent the next fifteen minutes trying to explain everything they knew about Sebastian Conan Doyle and his fight with Alex. They talked about the angry letters back and forth, about Alex’s fear of being followed, and they even explained that they had come to London on Sebastian’s dime. Though, Harold was quick to add, they had no allegiance to his side in the argument. They simply wanted to find the truth. And the diary.

Jennifer seemed unconvinced. She quieted Harold by slowly raising her palms in front of her, as if she were feeling her way through a dark room. “Hush,” she said. “I need a simple answer. Do you think Sebastian Conan Doyle murdered my older brother?”

Harold and Sarah made a brief moment of eye contact, in which Sarah, ever so slightly, smiled and ducked her chin in deference. This was Harold’s department.

“I don’t know,” he said after a long pause. “He’s certainly the most likely suspect. But the most likely suspect at first is almost never the one who’s actually done it, right? If this were a Conan Doyle story, I think Sebastian would be a red herring.”

The look on Jennifer’s face was not one that conveyed to Harold that she placed much value on this analysis.

“Why don’t you presume for a moment, Mr. White, that this is not a Conan Doyle story? What if you presumed that this was, oh, just for argument’s sake, something that happened in the real world, to a real live person? In that case, don’t you think I should tell the police about Sebastian’s message?”

“Yes, absolutely, tell them about the message. But when you do, maybe don’t mention the part about how we were here? Or about how we talked to you at all? The New York police had sort of…well, asked that I not leave the state. You know. Just for a while. Not that I’m a suspect or anything, myself. Anyhow. You get the point. I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression-”

“Harold,” interrupted Sarah. “Take a deep breath. Back to your original train of thought. Why don’t you think Sebastian killed Alex Cale?”

“A number of reasons. One, why would he do it? Money, sure, yeah, great. But now that Alex is dead, who’s he going to sell the diary to? Everyone knows it was stolen. And the only collectors with enough money or interest to buy the thing were all staying in the hotel where Alex died. And they all think Sebastian probably killed Alex, too! They’d never buy the diary off of him-they’d much rather turn him in and get to play the hero. Which leads me to point number two: If Sebastian killed Alex, he didn’t go to very much trouble to conceal it, did he? If you were planning to murder someone, would you leave a recording of your voice making threats in the possession of your victim? Sebastian is a dick, but he’s not an idiot. So. Point number three: How did he do it? The hotel had cameras in the lobby. He claims not to have visited the hotel that night, so if the NYPD had found his face on one of the tapes… well, we’d have heard about it by now, because he’d already have been arrested. And how’d he get into Alex’s room? The door wasn’t forced. Alex opened the door willingly. Three times, even. He knew whoever killed him. If he was as paranoid about being followed as you said he was and… well, as I know that he was, because I saw him myself, then do you think he’d just have let Sebastian Conan Doyle into his suite with a smile? He wasn’t going to offer to make the guy a hot cup of Earl Grey with milk, right? Plus, okay now, here’s point the fourth: The message in blood? The shoelace for a murder weapon? Does that really sound like Sebastian to either of you? And if he left those clues in order to frame somebody-another Sherlockian, somebody like me, frankly-well then, didn’t he do a pretty piss-poor job of it? If his goal was to implicate someone else, it’s funny that he remains the only one implicated. Why not shoot him on a dark street corner, grab the suitcase with the diary from his hands, and blame it on some mugger? Why not break in to his apartment here in London, steal the diary, and blame it on some crack team of house burglars? If Sebastian did it, then he did it in about the dumbest way possible.”