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I wondered if Green could have been so enraged with the loss of the archive that he might have done something similar, and even tried to frame the American, whom he blamed for ruining his relationship with Dame Jean and for the sale of the archive. I wondered if he could have tried, in one last desperate attempt, to create order out of the chaos around him. I wondered if this theory, however improbable, was in fact the least "impossible."
I shared with Gibson some other clues I had uncovered: the call that Green had made to the reporter days before his death, saying that "something" might happen to him; a reference in a Holmes story to one of Moriarty's main henchmen as a "garroter by trade";
and a statement to the coroner by Green's sister, who said that the note with the three phone numbers had reminded her of "the begi
After a while, Gibson looked up at me, his face ghastly white. "Don't you see?" he exclaimed. "He staged the whole thing. He created the perfect mystery."
Before I went back to America, I went to see Green's sister, Priscilla West. She lives near Oxford, in a three-story eighteenth-century brick house with a walled garden. She had long, wavy brown hair, an attractive round face, and small oval glasses. She invited me inside with a reticent voice, saying, "Are you a drawing-room person or a kitchen person?"
I shrugged uncertainly, and she led me into the drawing room, which had antique furniture and her father's children's books on the shelves. As we sat down, I explained to her that I had been struggling to write her brother's story. The American had told me, "There is no such thing as a definitive biography," and Green seemed particularly resistant to explication.
"Richard compartmentalized his life," his sister said. "There are a lot of things we've only found out since he died." At the inquest, his family, and most of his friends, had been startled when Lawrence Keen, who was nearly half Green's age, a
As West recalled other surprising fragments of Green's biography (travels to Tibet, a brief attempt at writing a novel), I tried to picture him as best I could with his glasses, his plastic bag in hand, and his wry smile. West had seen her brother's body lying on the bed, and several times she told me, "I just wish…" before falling silent. She handed me copies of the eulogies that Green's friends had delivered at the memorial service, which was held on May 22, the day Conan
Doyle was born. On the back of the program from the service were several quotes from Sherlock Holmes stories:
I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge. His career has been an extraordinary one.
After a while, she got up to pour herself a cup of tea. When she sat down again, she said that her brother had willed his collection to a library in Portsmouth, near where Conan Doyle wrote the first two Holmes stories, so that other scholars could have access to it. The collection was so large that it had taken two weeks, and required twelve truckloads, to cart it all away. It was estimated to be worth several million dollars-far more, in all likelihood, than the treasured archive. "He really did not like the idea of scholarship being put second to greed," West said. "He lived and died by this."
She then told me something about the archive which had only recently come to light, and which her brother had never learned: Dame Jean Conan Doyle, while dying of cancer, had made a last-minute deed of apportionment, splitting the archive between herself and the three heirs of her former sister-in-law, A
Green also could not know that after the auction, on May 19, the most important papers ended up at the British Library. Dame Jean had not allotted those documents to the other heirs, and had willed many of them to the library; at the same time, the library had purchased much of the remaining material at the auction. As Gibson later told me, "The tragedy is that Richard could have still written his biography. He would have had everything he needed."
Two questions, however, remained unclear. How, I asked West, did an American voice wind up on her brother's answering machine?
"I'm afraid it's not that complicated," she said. The machine, she continued, was made in the United States and had a built-in recorded message; when her brother took off his personal message, a prerecorded American voice appeared.
I then asked about the phone numbers in the note. She shook her head in dismay. They added up to nothing, she said. They were merely those of two reporters her brother had spoken to, and the number of someone at Christie's.
Finally, I asked what she thought had happened to her brother. At one point, Scirard Lancelyn Green had told the London Observer that he thought murder was "entirely possible"; and, for all my attempts to build a case that transcended doubt, there were still questions. Hadn't the police told the coroner that an intruder could have locked Green's apartment door while slipping out, thus giving the illusion that his victim had died alone? Wasn't it possible that Green had known the murderer and simply let him in? And how could someone, even in a fit of madness, garrote himself with merely a shoelace and the help of a spoon?
His sister glanced away, as if trying one last time to arrange all the pieces. Then she said, "I don't think we'll ever know for sure what really happened. Unlike in detective stories, we have to live without answers."
David Gra
Ever since I was a boy, I have read the Holmes stories, enthralled by them. Critics have long tried to determine the source of their hold on the popular imagination. Some have argued that it is because of the spell of their logic, or the dialogue between Holmes and Watson, or the Victorian mood they evoke. But for me it was simply the thrill of the chase-that the game was indeed afoot, as Holmes always put it with delight.
When I started this story, I inevitably found myself approaching it in the same fashion. Here at last, I thought, was a mystery worthy of Holmes. And initially as I went about my reporting, piecing together each clue, I could feel that same sense of wonder I had as a boy when, say, I discovered, in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," that the suspect had killed his stepdaughter with "the deadliest snake in India." But the more I spoke with Richard Lancelyn Green's family and friends, the more I was reminded of another sensation, one that rarely intrudes in the Sherlockian game: grief. Indeed, by the end it occurred to me that I had never been investigating a mystery, but a tragedy.