“I don’t care.”

“The police know you. They trust you. They have to, don’t they? You’re a man of the realm. You’re a man. You’re the only one of us that’s fully a citizen. For you, they’ll catch a killer.”

“I. Do. Not. Care.”

Janet Fry stared deeply into Arthur’s eyes. She saw the anger that had welled up within him, as well as the implacable determination he had to keep it back.

“You’re lying,” she said. “You do care. You’re just too bloody cowardly to do anything about it.” Janet stood. She laid the now-cool washcloth across her wooden chair. She bowed and, with one hand on the doorknob, turned back to Arthur.

“So damn you to hell regardless,” she said. “I’ll see myself out.”

It was only after she’d been gone for a minute that Arthur managed to turn to his desk. Laying his hands on the desktop, he felt a bulge of steel underneath his papers. The revolver. He’d forgotten about it entirely.

Arthur returned the revolver to the wooden box on the shelf. He would certainly not be requiring that again. Back at his desk, he breathed deeply. He banished all thoughts of Janet Fry and Emily Davison from his head. He focused himself completely on his war story, on the sheikh’s trap and on the brave strategies of the small Scottish regiment, committing his day to realist fiction.

CHAPTER 36 A Problem Without a Solution

January 12, 2010, cont.

Dr. Gwen Garber was easily among the smallest women Harold had ever seen. She sat behind her desk, in her office at St. John’s College, and seemed dwarfed by the book stacks in front of her. She angled her chin upward in order to place her elbows on her desk, and looked up to Harold and Sarah like a penitential child to a cross.

“Yes,” she said after they had been in her office for a few minutes politely explaining their purpose at Cambridge. “Alex Cale was here. Just a few months ago. He came to read the Stoker letters, so of course he stopped by to talk with me. I’m the only one about who’s done much work on them at all.”

“Did he say what he was looking for, specifically?” asked Harold.

“I don’t recall,” said Dr. Garber, searching her memory with a series of finger taps to her chin. “But I’m sure he’d be more than happy to assist you with your research. He’s the friendliest man. He truly is.”

“He died,” said Harold.

Despite all the inquiries he’d conducted into Alex’s death, he realized that this was the first time he’d ever had to break the news to someone. Dr. Garber took it well, though perhaps that was only because she barely knew him. She blinked a few times, as if waiting for Harold to correct himself and admit that he’d been talking about someone else. When no correction or addendum came, she gave a shiver and looked down at her shoes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea. Were you… friends?”

“We were friendly.”

“We’re continuing his research,” added Sarah. “Finishing up his work.”

“In memoriam,” said Harold.

“Oh, my, that’s so good of you,” said Dr. Garber. “Please, any information I can provide, I’d be quite happy to help. It’s so sad. Can you… can you tell me what happened? Was he sick?”

“He was murdered,” said Harold, more quickly than he might have liked. It was only in hindsight that it occurred to him that he probably should have lied. And yet, ironically, even the truth was more complicated than this. “Well, possibly,” he added lamely.

“Hell.” Dr. Garber seemed to recede into her chair as she digested the news. If possible, she looked to be growing even smaller.

“The more you can tell us about the letters, and what Alex Cale might have been looking for in them, the better we can help finish his book,” said Sarah.

Dr. Garber looked at her for a moment. As always, Sarah seemed utterly convincing.

“All right then, let’s head down there. I’ll explain what I can along the way.” Dr. Garber put on a bright yellow winter coat. “Our collection of Stoker’s letters,” she began, “is quite exhaustive. But, of course, Alex was only interested in his correspondence with Arthur Conan Doyle. They were good friends, you know. And Conan Doyle wrote a number of plays which were put on by Stoker’s client, Henry Irving, at his theater. Since Stoker managed both Irving and the theater, he of course had plenty of business to discuss with Conan Doyle. There’s a fine book of correspondence down there concerning only the details of the various payment schemes that Bram had devised. Hard to tell, from only one end of the conversation, but it rather looks like Stoker was cheating Conan Doyle out of some chunk of the box office. Funny, really. But I don’t think that’s the part of the conversation you’re interested in, is it?”

“Under normal circumstances I would be,” said Harold. “But right now… Well, do you have any sense of what period Alex was looking at? Was it the fall of 1900?”

“Yes… yes, I think that’s it. Cale was trying to piece together what Conan Doyle and Stoker had gotten up to during the fall of 1900. Stoker had been working on a production of Don Quixote at the Lyceum, and he was at work on a few short stories as well. But I believe that Cale was interested in what Stoker knew of Conan Doyle’s activities in those months. October, November, December.”

“That’s the period covered by the missing diary,” Harold explained to Sarah. She returned a look indicating that not only did she not require his explanation, she did not particularly appreciate it.

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Garber. “That rings a bell. Cale said something about a missing diary of Conan Doyle’s, how he’d been after the thing for ages. ‘Since I first began my study of Sherlockiana,’ I think that was the phrase he used. He was such a character, that one.”

“Do you know if he found anything about the missing diary in the letters?”

Dr. Garber pushed open the double doors of the library building and stopped. Her hands continued to hold open the doors in front of her, as if she were announcing the entrance of royalty.

“To be honest, I don’t know,” she replied after some thought. “He did not seem pleased with what he’d found. I can tell you that. He left in rather a hurry, when he’d finished. He didn’t even stop by to say goodbye-it was only that I happened to pass him on the footpath back there as I was on my way to give a lecture. He was all mumbles, very twitchy. I’d have thought it was rude, but I’ve had my share of researchers around over the years, and I know how they can get. Like a bunch of actresses, always overemotional about some crisis or another.”

Harold did his best not to appear twitchy himself. The more Dr. Garber said, the more promising these letters seemed. Clearly, what was in them had meant a great deal to Cale’s investigation. Harold’s tongue fluttered inside his mouth. He bit down on his lip. As soon as he saw these letters, he felt, the whole of the mystery would reveal itself to him…

And yet when, ten minutes later, Dr. Garber left Harold and Sarah alone in the underground rare-manuscript reading room, little was instantly revealed. Locked in the moistureless, climate-controlled room, Harold laid two cardboard boxes on the small wooden table. Both boxes were fastened shut with white string and marked with lined index cards. “STOKER, BRAM,” read the cards. “COLLECTED LETTERS.” The years of Stoker’s life contained within each box had been marked as well. Harold ran his hand underneath the string. It felt like lingerie against his stubby forefinger.

He couldn’t get the string untied, so Sarah, with her long, thin nails, stepped in to help. She scratched at the string with a catlike playfulness, and it fell apart from the box at the stroking of her nails. At the same time, both Harold and Sarah dug their hands into the cardboard box hungrily, pulling out thick stacks of plastic-protected papers. Each page was filled with Bram Stoker’s own narrow and nearly illegible handwriting. Flipping through them left Harold both excited and awestruck. Millimeters from his fingers, behind the clear plastic sleeves, lay the dirty pen marks of Bram Stoker himself.