“I cannot hardly say. Isn’t it just the devil’s own, that image? The girls brought that paper in here with them, told me how they wanted it inked. I practiced a few times on paper before moving on to the skin. You saw the image I tacked up outside this place? One of my practice drawings. I took a liking to it. The girls never said what it meant.” The tattooist gave a chortle. “But do you know? I tacked it to the wall in here, and sailors, they have made inquiries. Off the boat they’ve come, and when they’ve seen that design, they’ve said, ‘Aye, paint me up with that.’ I moved the sketch outside, since it had become so popular. Don’t think they know what it means any more than I do. But it’s a spooky shape, isn’t it, that crow, and I think it drums me up business.”

“What did the girls’ conversation consist of, when they were in your shop?”

“I hardly remember, there was so much chattering. They were loud. Giddy, I think, nervous about the pain from the needle. People will go one of two ways when it’s their first time. Either they grow quiet like little mice, too scared to speak, or else they talk my ear off, can’t shut them up for anything. And they cried out, too, when the needle hit. Had to give them each a double dose.” The man gestured to his table, at a hypodermic syringe.

“Morphine?” inquired Arthur.

The tattooist nodded. “And lately I’ve been adding a shot of that imported heroin. It seems to make the customers less drowsy than the morphine, but just as docile.”

“We believe that these girls were part of some club. Or a group of some sort. Can you recall if they spoke at all about women’s suffrage?”

“What’s that, then?”

“Never mind,” said Bram. “Can you recall anything they said? Even the littlest word or phrase could make all the difference.”

The tattooist raised his hand to the top of his head while he thought. He tapped idly on his bald scalp. It sounded like the ticks of a clock.

“A faucet,” he said at last.

Arthur and Bram exchanged a look.

“A faucet?” said Bram.

“Yes, odd, I know,” said the tattooist. “That’s why I remember it. One of them would make some joke, and another would say, ‘Tell it to the faucet!’ And they’d all double over in giggles. They kept repeating the jokes again and again. The morphine will do that to you. Little girls, really, couldn’t have weighed more than six, seven stone apiece. Probably should have used less anesthetic. Anyhow, they became quite giggly.”

“About a faucet?”

“ ‘I’d like to see the faucet do that!’ Or, ‘And what’ll the faucet say now?’ And then, ‘Drip, drip, drip!’ and they’d flop on the floor with their laughing.”

“What in the world does that mean?” asked Bram, a puzzled look across his face.

“It means,” said Arthur, “that these girls were disgruntled members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.”

Even the tattooist looked impressed. He and Bram regarded Arthur with cocked heads and raised eyebrows.

“And how do you know that?” asked Bram.

“Because when you’re pumped full of opiates, a lot of things seem funny that really are not. Even bad puns. It appears our girls didn’t care too much for the leader of the NUWSS, one Millicent Fawcett.”

“Arthur, my God, you’ve given Holmes a run for his money today. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never heard of this Millicent Fawcett.”

Arthur sighed, wishing that he, too, had never heard that woman’s name.

“Do you remember my run for Parliament, at the seat from Edinburgh?”

“Of course,” said Bram, surprised at the question.

“Do you remember that my candidacy was sunk by a set of vicious rumors as to my alleged papist sympathies?”

“Yes. They were petty drivel. Balderdash.”

“Just so. And Millicent Fawcett was the one who spread them.”

CHAPTER 22 The Great Hiatus

January 9, 2010, cont.

Harold and Sarah sat in a run-down Internet café, sipping tea and staring at two dim computer screens. A few computers to their left, a heavy man in his forties clicked through page after page of online porn.

There had been a lengthy debate earlier, in the cab, about the relative safety of returning to their hotel. The driver had seemed remarkably invested in the outcome of their conversation. Both Harold and Sarah eventually came to the conclusion that the men in the black car-the Goateed Man and his associate with the gun-must have known who they were. Who knew how long the men had been following them? The hotel couldn’t be regarded as safe. And so, as the first order of business was to access the contents of the flash drive that Sarah had filched from Alex Cale’s desk, the cabbie had deposited them at the Kensington Internet Café, where they now searched through the drive’s files.

Harold was still impressed with Sarah’s cool in the car chase. His body had been practically convulsing, and it was only through the single-minded focus of will that he was able to plant himself in front of the oncoming car. But Sarah had slipped behind and punctured the tires without pause. He felt himself to be an endless buzz of confusion, of questions and doubt and uncertainty. Outside of his books, the whole world was a mystery to Harold. And Sarah always seemed to understand. He wished he could be more like her.

He opened up the flash drive and thought he’d hit pay dirt. A massive text file labeled “ACD BIO DRAFT 12.14.09” greeted him promisingly. He opened the document, and there it was-the most recent draft of Alex Cale’s long-awaited Conan Doyle biography. Obviously, Harold thought, there must be a lengthy section in the manuscript about the missing diary, where Cale had found it, and what it contained.

Harold spent two hours reading through the entire biography while Sarah sipped green tea and checked her e-mail. She went outside once to make a call, then again when her phone rang and she left to take it.

Harold went through the manuscript quickly. He was already familiar with most of the details of Conan Doyle’s life-born in Edinburgh in 1859, studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, married to Touie in 1885, married to Jean in 1907-and so Harold read even faster than usual.

Alex’s tone was loving and deliriously antiquarian. He seemed to mimic the prose of Conan Doyle himself. “Determined was the face, and hardened was the resolve, of Arthur Conan Doyle as he descended from the steps of the P &O ocean liner to the dirty port of Cape Town,” opened the passage on Conan Doyle’s time in the Boer War. It was pretentious and yet infectious, a delight for Harold to read. His eyes watered as he got to the section on Conan Doyle’s death, in his bed, in the loving arms of his second wife. “You are wonderful,” were Conan Doyle’s final words, whispered to the teary face of his wife of twentythree years. Harold thought of Alex Cale dying alone, in a sterile hotel room, his eyes bulging from his head and his muscles taut from struggling. Harold realized that in the days since Alex’s death he had not paused to mourn. To measure the loss. What would it matter, really, if Harold did find the diary? What difference would it make if he found Alex’s killer? If the man were put in jail for the rest of his wretched life? Alex would never see his own life’s work completed or published. He would never be able to undertake a new project. The world had lost his voice, it had forever lost the maker of these sentences-“Defying Conan Doyle’s incorrigible belief in the supernatural, Harry Houdini sought to prove to him once and for all that genuine magic did not exist. Houdini did so by performing feat after feat for the author but was confounded to find that Conan Doyle refused to believe, after each card was pulled from the deck, that no magic had transpired. ‘I produced your card by sleight of hand, not paranormal force,’ one imagines Houdini saying. ‘And yet my card is here,’ one imagines Conan Doyle responding. ‘However it was done, it is magic to me.’” Harold concealed his tears with a napkin, blowing his nose and crumpling the cheap white paper into a tight little ball before flicking it into the trash.