“No,” said Arthur as he walked toward the door. “I am not. You may expect the police at your doorstep on the morrow. Good evening.” Arthur yanked open the door and exited.

Bram finally stood from the couch, resting his teacup gently on its saucer.

“Good evening, Miss Davison,” he said. “It was a pleasure to have met you.”

With that, Bram followed behind his friend, leaving Emily Davison alone in her drawing room. She did not follow them out.

CHAPTER 28 Thinking

January 10, 2010, cont.

It was time for Harold to do some deep thinking.

That’s how Sherlock Holmes had done it. He’d sit in his armchair, wearing his dressing gown, puffing away at his pipe, while he kept his eyes closed to all distraction. And he’d methodically, step by step, go through the problem at hand. He would break it down logically and figure out what had to have happened. After a few hours, he’d burst up suddenly, without any warning, and he’d have his answer.

That was Holmes’s greatest gift, Harold realized. Not his uncanny powers of observation, not his encyclopedic knowledge of footprints and poisons, not his facility with disguises or scent-sniffing dogs. The real trick was concentration. It was his ability to think through a mystery. Reason was his weapon against the unknown.

If Harold was going to become Holmes, or at least a worthy heir, then he’d have to do the same thing. The only trouble was that it was proving harder than he’d hoped.

Harold sat in the red armchair, his elbows resting against the curved armrests. The cushioned seat below him was comfortable, though it pressed his wallet, which was in his right rear jeans pocket, awkwardly into his buttocks.

He should get up and remove it. Then he’d be more comfortable.

Harold was back in the hotel room in which he and Sarah had spent the previous night. She lay on the bed eating a Greek salad while she flipped through the pages of Alex Cale’s Conan Doyle biography. Harold could hear the crunching of the romaine lettuce in her mouth and the dull sound of her plastic fork scraping her plastic salad bowl. The noise made it difficult to concentrate.

The wallet in his pocket was really starting to bother him. It tilted the weight of his pelvis so that there wasn’t any truly comfortable way to sit. He should get up and take out his wallet so he could get back to thinking. But he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t stand up until he had a solution. He would stick to his plan. He would remain seated.

Sarah was chewing again. God, he should have told her to take a walk or something. Since she had nowhere else to go, she had decided to finish Cale’s work and have some lunch. She’d asked if he’d mind her hanging around while he did his thinking, and he’d said that he didn’t. Harold was very polite, and he liked having Sarah around, a lot. But she was making it very hard to sustain a logical train of thought.

Here was the problem at hand: In October, Alex Cale had announced that he’d found the lost diary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He’d called his sister to tell her the good news, and he’d declined her offer to celebrate. He’d spent the next months reading and studying the diary, preparing to integrate the information gleaned from it into his biography. Though, as of December 14, the manuscript of the biography hadn’t been rewritten to include any of it. On January 5, Cale had arrived at the Algonquin Hotel in New York to present the diary to his fellow Sherlockians. He reported being followed, and he seemed afraid. In the middle of the night, his door was opened to visitors three times. There was no clue whatsoever as to who those visitors might have been, and no one had yet claimed to be among them. Between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., he was strangled to death with his own shoelace.

His own shoelace. That was pretty odd, wasn’t it? There weren’t any instances of shoelace stranglings in the Canon…

The killer had written the word “elementary” on the wall, in the darkest corner of the darkened hotel room. He’d written it using Cale’s blood, which he’d gotten from puncturing the inside of Cale’s nose. The room had then been ransacked. The diary was found and removed.

Or, thought Harold, wait. What if the diary hadn’t actually been removed from the hotel room in New York? What if Alex had left it in his writing office in London? That’s why the killer had to break in to that office, to search for the diary there as well! No. Damn. That didn’t work. Harold knew who’d ransacked the London office: It was the Goateed Man, and his friend with the gun. But the Goateed Man didn’t have the diary, because if he did, he wouldn’t have asked Harold for it. So the diary hadn’t been in the London office. It had to have been in the hotel. Did that mean two different sets of people were searching for it? The killer, who’d taken it from the hotel, and the Goateed Man, who’d failed to find it in London? But if that were true, then what did the Goateed Man know about the true killer? Did he, like Ron Rosenberg, think that Harold was the killer? Is that why he’d asked him for the diary? If he-

Sarah crunched loudly into a chunk of crisp lettuce. Harold heard every gnash of her teeth while she chewed. He heard the plastic fork rummage around again in the bowl, and then he heard her bite into something else. It sounded duller… Maybe a cucumber? Or a fetacovered olive?

Harold completely lost track of his thoughts. His concentration had been shot. And now his wallet was bothering him again.

Did Sherlock Holmes have these difficulties concentrating? Did Arthur Conan Doyle? Harold thought of Conan Doyle’s attempts at consulting with Scotland Yard. No one seemed to regard them as having been particularly successful. What an ego Conan Doyle must have had, to think that just because he wrote mystery stories, he could solve real-life mysteries.

Harold closed his eyes tighter and focused his thoughts. “We must look for consistency,” Sherlock Holmes had said. “When there is a want of it we must suspect deception.” So what was inconsistent here? What didn’t make sense?

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

For the love of God, thought Harold. If she doesn’t stop chewing that salad like she’s operating a trash compactor, there’s going to be another murder. Harold heard her chewing stop, as if she’d read his thoughts. He heard her walk into the bathroom and shut the door. Then he heard the rush of running water. Harold felt he would have only a minute of uninterrupted concentration before Sarah left the bathroom and her chewing started up again.

Even though his wallet was now digging sharply into his backside, he would ignore it. He would give this one last minute of pure mental energy. He was committed to his task, and nothing would keep him from it. So then: What doesn’t make sense?

That’s when he figured it out.

His eyes burst open. He squinted, adjusting his eyes to the daylight. They had been closed for a while. He stood up from his armchair and heard a creak in his knees. He must have been sitting there for hours. He called to Sarah in the bathroom.

“Sarah!” he yelled.

“Yeah?” she called back over the sound of running water.

“Alex Cale never found the lost diary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!”

Harold heard the water stop. A second later Sarah emerged from the bathroom, a very strange look on her face.