“Innocent?” Bobby Stegler’s face lit up with incredulity. “You can’t mean that. Innocent? Three queer dollymops with a boxful of dynamite? You must know they were… well, I think they loved each other. I mean, I think they loved each other, as if one were a man! Emily Davison and Janet Fry most certainly did. My God, can you imagine? They were horrors, those hairy cunts. And they were out to remake the world-our world-in their hairy-cunted image.”

As Arthur held the revolver in his hand, he felt a shaking in his arm. He felt himself twitching. He imagined the faces of those dead girls-sweet, pale, and mutilated. More than anything else he had ever wanted, he wanted at this moment to pull the trigger. To see this ugly thing before him smitten from the face of the earth.

“Arthur,” said Bram. “Don’t.”

As usual, Bram could read his thoughts exactly. Bobby Stegler looked back and forth between the two men, and something new registered on the boy’s face. Curiosity. As if it had never before occurred to him that Arthur might actually fire the revolver.

“Oh!” Bobby said. “Are you going to shoot me? I mean, you’re honestly thinking about shooting me? I just can’t… My!” He pressed his hair away from his face again and scratched at his scalp. “Seems rather unlike you, doesn’t it, Dr. Doyle? I mean, I don’t have a weapon on me. Unarmed and all that. Not a threat to your person. You’d be killing me in cold blood like, wouldn’t you? The storyteller has a gun, and he’s fit to use it. Well then. All right. It’s up to you then, I suppose. What are you going to do now, Dr. Doyle? Are you going to shoot me? Or are you going to tell me a story?”

Arthur looked deeply into the boy’s clear blue eyes and scanned the contours of his handsome face. Arthur could hear something, faintly, in the distance. A rushing sound. A crash of water against rock. He wasn’t sure if it was real or not, but he heard it all the same. Torrents of water rushing over a cliff. He tuned his ears to the noise and recognized the tone. He steadied his hand and listened to the sound, from the back of his mind, of the Reichenbach Falls.

CHAPTER 42 The Sherlock Holmes Museum

January 17, 2010

From the base of the mountain, below the Reichenbach Falls, Harold stared across the Hauptstrasse at the Sherlock Holmes Museum. He shivered and pulled his thin coat tighter against the Swiss air. At just after six in the evening, the final spots of orange sunlight were disappearing to the west, behind the museum. The unlit streets were getting darker, and with every passing minute they were getting darker faster. From his perch on the other side of the wide road, Harold could see two museum guards locking up for the night. It would only be a few more minutes now. He clenched his fists in his pocket. He could not remember the last time he’d been so cold.

As he watched the two guards mill around the entrance to the museum, laughing at a joke that Harold couldn’t hear, he turned and looked behind him to the east. The Swiss Alps broke clear of the earth not fifty yards from where he was standing. Snow blanketed the top third of the range like a white silk shawl.

Harold shifted his weight, feeling the bulky bag slung across his shoulder. The steel tire iron inside pressed against his back. The guards laughed again and began a slow wander in the direction of the parking lot. The museum was dark. Empty. The last morsel of the sun vanished into the distance, and Harold stepped from the shadows into the nighttime.

There was nothing left for him to lose anymore. He had no life he wanted to return to, and the life he knew he wanted, the life of these weeks in which he’d for the first time come truly alive, had been revealed as a fraud. And not even a complicated fraud at that. The twist had come so easily, and bowled him over with such self-evident obviousness, that Harold couldn’t even muster up anger at Sarah, or at Sebastian. He’d known he shouldn’t have trusted her from the beginning, hadn’t he? Her whole story had been just as improbable then as it was now. Harold knew enough to blame himself.

At first he couldn’t believe that she’d gotten away with her lie. Sebastian Conan Doyle’s wife-or soon-to-be-ex-wife-had walked into the world’s largest Sherlockian convention under a fake identity, and no one had known who she was? But of course they hadn’t, Harold realized. Most of the attendees spent their days pretending that Sherlock Holmes was real and that Arthur Conan Doyle was just Watson’s literary agent. They didn’t care about Conan Doyle or his descendants. Harold was even aware, when he searched the recesses of his memory, that Sebastian Conan Doyle was married, and he might even have known that his wife’s name was Sarah, though it was hard to remember now. But of course he hadn’t made the connection. She’d lied so obviously, so plainly, that no one would ever have thought to question her. “You’re really, really smart,” she’d said to him when she left.

Harold couldn’t understand why she had deceived him. What were she and Sebastian planning? Were they actually getting a divorce? The lawyer she’d called was real, but had the story she’d told him been utterly fake? And who the hell had been chasing them in London? Was that all for show? Harold had realized, over the past day, that he simply didn’t care. He didn’t care who the men with the guns were, he didn’t care what Sebastian was after, and he didn’t care who Sarah Lindsay, or Sarah Conan Doyle, really was. Alex Cale’s “murder” had been solved, his trail of clues followed to perfection. But the pursuit gave Harold no joy anymore; it granted him no peace. All he wanted now, all he craved, like a drowning man’s last gasp of oxygen, was the diary.

But he knew that the diary wouldn’t make him happy either. When he put his sweaty palms on its cover and peeled open its parched pages, he would hear no choir of angels in his head. There would be no swelling of his heart; no sense of contentment would fill his panting lungs. He understood that in just a few minutes, when he laid his hands on the leather-bound book and learned its secrets, things would only get worse. But that would not stop him. He would see this through to its awful conclusion, because he had to. Because he had to know.

His footsteps felt quick and firm as he marched through the snow. He came through the blackness to the front of the museum. The building had once been a church, and a humble spire still poked up from the angled roof of the simple two-story. Even in the dark, Harold could make out the reddish hues of the bricks and the beautiful glasswork in the windows.

There were many ways that Harold could have snuck into the museum. He could have entered during the day and hidden in some forgotten storage closet. He could have learned to disengage the alarm system. He could have learned to pick locks. But even if those methods worked, they would take an impossibly long time to accomplish. He didn’t have the heart. He couldn’t bear this anymore. He was going to know now.

Harold was home, at the base of the Reichenbach Falls. The place where everything ended.

He removed the tire iron from his bag and stared at the antique stained glass in a low-hanging window. The image was of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. A golden halo surrounded Lazarus’s head as he stepped from his cave, toward the beckoning hand of Jesus. A legion of apostles and followers stood behind, marveling at Christ’s divinity and soaking up the comfort of his presence.