“That’s why you put me in touch with Sebastian. Why you made all of this happen. You wanted something to write about.”

Sarah looked up from her feet for the first time since she’d started talking. Her eyes shone with moisture. “I needed it, Harold. I needed this story to happen. I needed to get my life back.”

After his shock had subsided, what Harold realized was that he wasn’t angry. He understood her, more than he wanted to.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I get it. We’re going to find the diary. I promise. But let’s make a deal first. We’re in this together. You won’t lie to me, and I won’t go through your phone logs.” He smiled. She smiled back. In a moment that he would recall fondly later, he even reached out and put his arm around her. She laid her towel-wrapped head on his shoulder.

“Thanks,” she said at last.

“No problem. I know what it’s like to need to prove yourself. To imagine yourself a certain way in your head for so long, and then to get a chance to put it into action in real life. And real life is a lot trickier than I was hoping for.”

Sarah laughed.

“We both need to solve this,” Harold added.

“Yes,” she replied. “And the funny part is, I think I need to solve this more than you do.”

Sebastian Conan Doyle’s London home was in Holland Park, along Abbotsbury Road. The four-story was tooth white and bracketed on either side by tall plane trees. Harold and Sarah took the few steps from the street to the entryway quickly and gave their names to the doorman. He let them in right away. He’d been expecting them.

The house swallowed Harold within its massive enclosure. The ceilings seemed a few feet taller than they needed to be and the hallways a few feet wider. Even the doorways seemed oversize, stretching almost to the ceiling. Art hung genteelly from the walls. It was all modern, or so Harold assumed, though he didn’t know much about art. The paintings seemed structural, architectural, full of simple colored shapes smashing into one another.

Sebastian met them at the upstairs landing. He seemed happy to see them. He shook Harold’s hand warmly, and did the same with Sarah. “Come,” he said, leading them through the flat into what could only be described as a drawing room.

Sebastian settled onto a large couch, the cushions of which looked as if they’d never before been rested on. Harold and Sarah sat delicately on an opposing couch. Harold felt as if he didn’t want to break it, or disturb it, as it looked so pristine. A fat and unmarked manila envelope lay on a coffee table between them.

“Let’s get to it, shall we?” began Sebastian quickly. “What have you found?”

Harold and Sarah exchanged a furtive look: What should they tell him? Harold felt it was his duty to be the one to respond.

“First of all,” Harold said, “did you get anything from the New York police?”

“Yes, of course,” said Sebastian. “I’ve everything you’d asked for. Autopsy results, police reports, crime-scene photographs. All the bloody horrors.” He plucked the manila envelope from the coffee table, then tossed it to Harold.

Harold opened it and began flipping through its contents. Indeed, there were photocopies of the handwritten police reports, computer printouts of the crime-scene photos, hotel manifests, and a thick set of documents labeled “CORONER’S REPORT.”

“How did you get these?” asked Sarah.

Sebastian turned to her with a look of pure condescension. He did not respond to her question.

“I’ve flipped through them myself, out of curiosity,” he said. “The photos especially are more gruesome than I’d have thought.”

There was something about Sebastian that made Harold uneasy. Something about his casual intensity. His ever-tilted head. Sebastian conveyed the impression that your number was already up and he was just waiting for the right moment to let you know.

“The most interesting bit here,” continued Sebastian, “is in the supplemental section of the detective’s report. It concerns the DNA test of the blood on the walls.”

“Oh?” said Harold as he looked for the page. “The blood in the word ‘elementary’? Do they know whose it was?”

“They do. It was Alex Cale’s.”

Harold stopped flipping through the documents, and looked up at Sebastian.

“Damn,” he said. “In the story the blood came from the killer, not the victim.”

“There are a whole bunch of departures from the story, though,” interjected Sarah. “In A Study in Scarlet, the victim is poisoned, not strangled.”

Harold turned to Sarah, surprised that she was already so familiar with Conan Doyle’s work.

“Jesus,” she said in response to his look, “you’ve been talking about the stories nonstop for the past three days-you can’t blame me for wanting to read more of them myself. I read a bit online while we were in the café.”

“Did the coroner find any poison in Cale’s blood?” Harold asked the room.

“No,” said Sebastian. “Alex Cale was strangled to death, no doubt about it.”

“What about his nose?” Harold asked strangely.

“His nose?” said Sebastian.

“Hisnose?” said Sarah.

“The blood,” said Harold. “Was it from Cale’s nose?”

“Harold,” said Sebastian, “I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think they can tell you where in the body a person’s blood came from. They can only tell you that it’s someone’s blood.”

“No, no, the coroner’s report…” Harold trailed off, thinking rapidly as he tore through the pages in front of him. He slowed down as he found what he was looking for, trying to read the illegible scribbles of the coroner’s handwriting. The photocopy itself was blurry, making the report even more difficult to read than it would otherwise be. “Can either of you tell what this says?”

Sarah leaned in close and ran her fingers down the page. She squinted. Harold could smell the hotel shampoo on her hair as a strand fell across the coroner’s report. She flicked it back behind her ear with a swipe of her hand.

“Hemorrhage?” she said. “Something about a hemorrhage?”

“In the nasal cavity. A blood clot in…” Harold again let his sentence collapse halfway through.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re trying to communicate, Harold,” said Sebastian. “So Alex had a blood clot in his nasal cavity? He might easily have smashed up his nose fighting with his killer.”

“No. His face wasn’t bruised when we found him. His nose wasn’t broken. It was more deliberate than that. In A Study in Scarlet, the message from the killer, written in blood on the walls-the blood came from the killer’s nose. He’d gotten a nosebleed while he argued with the victim.”

“So here,” said Sarah, “the killer used Alex’s blood instead of his own. He made an incision inside Alex’s nose, or something along those lines, after he killed him. He was probably worried about DNA evidence. Didn’t want to make it too easy for you.”

“It’s strange,” said Harold. “He’s not re-creating the story exactly. He’s using bits and pieces of it. Is he trying to tell us something, with what he’s including? Or is he…” Harold again let his sentence collapse midway through. He exhaled the rest of the air in his lungs through pursed lips.

“Or what?” asked Sebastian.

“Or,” finished Harold, “what if the killer didn’t actually know the story very well? What if he didn’t know it by heart? He killed Cale in haste. He wasn’t planning it. They had a fight. Some sort of argument. Had to be about the diary. Then he tried to cover his tracks by making it look like a Sherlockian did it. Dressing the murder up with these Sherlockian clues. He half remembered the beginning of A Study in Scarlet, but he got it wrong.”

Sarah looked confused.

“So now you think it wasn’t a Sherlockian who did it?”

“I’m suggesting the possibility,” said Harold as he fixed his gaze dead on Sebastian, “that the murderer might have been someone familiar with the Sherlockians and yet not of them.”