“Her name is Emily Davison,” said Arthur. “Clerkenwell.” He provided the young constable with her address.

“Right on it, sir,” said the constable with a pleased deference.

“Now,” said Inspector Miller, “to where am I headed?”

Billings produced a folded sheet of paper, which Arthur only then noticed had been in the boy’s hand for the duration of their conversation. The constable handed the paper to Inspector Miller, who read its contents as he marched double time to the doors of Scotland Yard.

But then, with his outstretched hand mere inches from the front door, Inspector Miller halted. A perverse look spread across his face.

“Dr. Doyle,” said the inspector slowly, his eyes stuck on the paper, “would you mind coming with us to the scene of this fresh crime? I think we may be in need of some assistance, of a sort you may be particularly suited to provide.”

Arthur was quite confused by the man’s request, but he quickly assented with a nod.

“Of course,” he said. “But might I ask why you think I will be able to help?”

“Because,” said Inspector Miller as he looked up into Arthur’s face, “I’ve been assigned to investigate the apparent murder of one Emily Davison. Late of Clerkenwell.”

Of all the thoughts and sensations which flooded into Arthur’s mind at that moment, the one that most consumed him was an awareness of his odd positioning in the lobby of Scotland Yard. A hundred detectives gushed past him on their way out, bumping shoulder to shoulder, while another hundred pushed past him on their way in. Two hundred detectives on two hundred cases, and here was Arthur frozen between them, one middle-aged author fallen into a mystery just deep enough to drown in.

CHAPTER 30 British Birds, Catullus, and the Holy War

January 11, 2010

If you were Alex Cale and you had killed yourself and then left a trail of Sherlockian clues behind as to your reasons, to where would those clues lead?

This was the question before Harold and Sarah. They discussed their options. They could head back to New York in order to have another look at Cale’s hotel room, except that the room would certainly have been washed clean of evidence by this point. They could return to Sebastian Conan Doyle’s flat to see if anything Cale had said to him over the past few months provided any hint as to Cale’s motivations, except that their last meeting with Sebastian Conan Doyle hadn’t ended on friendly terms.

So, surveying the absence of excellent investigative options before them, Harold and Sarah decided to give Alex Cale’s writing office another look. “Cale was trying to leave a series of clues for a fellow Sherlockian to follow. Any Sherlockian, like me, would have traced Cale’s steps as far back as his writing office. So it stands to reason that a message might be waiting for us there.”

Sarah admitted that this sounded as reasonable as any other option available to them.

“But,” she added, “the office is a crime scene now. Jennifer Peters called the police. And I don’t think she’s our biggest fan either. How are we supposed to get in?”

As it turned out, this was less of an issue than they expected it to be. After they’d waited around on the building’s front steps for only a quarter of an hour, pretending to search for keys in Sarah’s purse, a teenage boy appeared as if from thin air and let them in. The teenager did not make eye contact with either Harold or Sarah but instead kept his chin aimed at the ground while he unlocked the door. Seemingly lost in his thoughts, the boy trudged up the central staircase to his own flat, dragging his feet and slouching his shoulders the whole way up. Harold was glad to note that even across the Atlantic, general sullenness was the basic cloth of teenage attire.

The door to Cale’s flat was closed, but when Harold turned the knob, he found that the lock was broken. The Goateed Man must have cracked it when he broke in to search the office, and it looked like the building’s owner hadn’t put in a replacement yet. Yellow barricade tape crisscrossed the doorway in the shape of an X. Harold and Sarah ducked under it as they entered the flat.

The rooms appeared much as they had left them two days earlier. Though, had it been two days? Or three? Or was it only yesterday that Harold had been here, sifting through the toppled piles of hard-backed books on the floor? He realized that time since the murder had entirely lost its distinction. Strange, he thought, that these, the most noteworthy days in his whole life, would blend together so easily into a mush of adrenaline and intrigue.

He looked over at Sarah, who was wading through her piles of books and papers, searching for God-knows-what. He realized that in the flurry of revelation about her divorce, and her lie, he’d been so satisfied with himself for finding the answer to that small mystery that he hadn’t actually asked her much about the divorce itself. He knew nothing at all about her soon-to-be-ex-husband or the pressing legal issues that required heated calls with her attorney. He felt a twinge of jealousy, of course. That’s why he hadn’t asked about it. He was afraid to learn about the man she must once have loved so much and who now was fighting with her about some obscure and boring financial matter. Harold, for his own part, had never seriously considered marriage. He wasn’t averse to the idea: it’s just that it had never come up in anything more than a theoretical sense. He always imagined that he’d marry one day-he was still young. Though Sarah didn’t seem much older, and she’d already made the leap. Then she’d crashed on the rocks and come drifting to the shore.

He tried to imagine Sarah making coffee on Sunday morning. Doing the crossword puzzle in bed, wrapping the white sheets around her legs while she reminded Harold that “adze” was a four-letter word for a wood-carving tool. The image seemed absurd. He could only picture Sarah attacking the tires on a black sedan with a switchblade, or examining a ransacked crime scene for secret messages. His relationship with her, whatever sort of relationship it was, had existed under rather unusual circumstances, to say the least.

Harold became suddenly sad. As soon as this was over, Sarah would leave and go back to somewhere that wasn’t in his life. And then he would have to go back to a sparsely tasteful one-bedroom in Los Feliz, to a small stack of civil-court filings and a larger one of old books, to the local friends he had dinner with once a month each, and to a yearly gala in New York where he could put on his deerstalker cap in public and no one would laugh at him. These days with Sarah were fantasy, and real life would soon return. What a miserable thought. This would not end with slow Sunday-morning coffee. It would simply end.

He’d had a girlfriend, Amanda, just after college. The thing he remembered most about her-more than the eleven blissful days they spent in Buenos Aires or that one night when they’d had sex four and a half times and he’d been seconds away from using the words “soul mate” when she fell asleep-was her ability to live entirely in the present moment. She was able to accept the joys and misfortunes in front of her as they came, without wondering endlessly when the joys would end or the misfortunes would lift.

Harold was paralyzed by endings. He couldn’t think about where he was or what he was doing without thinking about when it would end. He would try so hard to experience current pleasures, and to divorce them from the knowledge of a past that was comparatively more or less pleasurable; he would try to separate the present from its eventual conclusion, but he never felt that he was able to accomplish it. He tried in that moment to focus on the books at his feet, on the mystery and adventure around him, and mostly on Sarah’s quiet breath, the sound of which he could just make out from across the room. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the spoiled milk he’d return to in his fridge in L.A. or the four messages he’d find on his answering machine, none of which he cared to listen to. This, too, would end.