The Sherlockian

The bookshop lasted an unimpressive twenty-eight months before abandoning its lease to an Indian restaurant, the proprietors of which promptly turned Alex’s old back office into a delightfully smelly kitchen. Alex would walk past the Indian restaurant in later years and find himself both nostalgic and hungry at the same time. He ate there frequently. Je

Further financial misadventures followed, though none with quite so much of their father’s money at stake. Poor investments had been made in a fledgling literary magazine, a collection of nineteenth- century antiques, and on an inexplicable six months Alex had spent apprenticing an artisan who built wickerwork furniture. If anyone were to construct a biography of Alex Cale, thought Harold, this might be the detail glossed over because it didn’t conform to the general thrust of the man’s narrative.

Yet, Je

When Henry Cale died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in I989, his two children began to drift apart, no longer tethered to the cold steel pole of their disapproving father. They no longer needed one another as protection against him. It was as if they’d been trenchmates in the war, and now that the bombing had stopped, neither knew what to say to the other. Je

It was after his father’s death that Alex’s quest to find Conan Doyle’s lost diary became all-consuming. He was armed now with a figurative fortune in shovels for digging into Conan Doyle’s life. There would be no distractions for Alex from then on. There was no one left to tell him no. His father would at last be proved wrong when Alex found the diary and completed his biography; Alex would have amounted to something grand indeed, only not grand in the way his father had hoped. He would have achieved victory and rebellion at the same time.

Harold was surprised by how confessional Je

The cab pulled up to one of a series of similar-looking three-stories along Phillimore. Tall trees rose from backyards behind the buildings, and Harold could see them poking over the tops of the sharply slanted roofs. Harold paid, with Sebastian Conan Doyle’s money, and the three approached Alex’s flat.

Je

From hallway to sitting room to dining room to whatever lay beyond, each area had wallpapering of a different color. Yellow, pink, purple. The flat looked like a gigantic piece of candy. Harold imagined that Willy Wonka’s private study might have looked similar.

“Wow,” was all Harold said.

“I think my brother’s… eccentricities had become more apparent in recent years,” Je

“Do you mind if we look around?”

“Go right ahead,” Je

There was no way to perform an organized search of such an unorganized collection-Harold gave in to the randomness at his feet and flitted back and forth like a bee hunting for pollen. He nosed around in the yellow study, picking at a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He opened an old cigar box in the purple room to find a collection of foreign currencies, dollars and kroner and four kinds of pesos all collected in clear plastic bags and rubber bands. Sarah searched separately. The two didn’t discuss what they were looking for-Harold wouldn’t have known what to tell her anyway. He hoped that they would know what it was when they found it.

Sarah picked up a set of matching salt and pepper shakers shaped like cats. She placed them neatly on a table, next to a set of four-by-six photographic prints. She tightened the scattered pile of photographs. Harold began to watch her, soon paying less attention to the detritus at his feet and more attention to the way Sarah searched the room. She was cleaning, almost. When she came to a blue ribbon loosened beside a white cardboard box, she retied the ribbon. She was putting things right. Harold looked down at the mess at his own feet-he was simply picking things up and placing them back down approximately where he’d found them. There was no system to what Harold was doing, only mindless entropy. Everything that wasn’t the diary, he treated as dirt. Sarah, on the other hand, was taking the deathly clutter of Alex Cale’s apartment into her hands and making something better of it.

They searched in relative silence, punctuated by an occasional story from Je

It was Sarah who first noticed the answering machine. She gestured toward the slow, steady blink of its single red light.

“Have you checked his messages?” she asked Je

“Oh!” Je

“May I?” inquired Sarah.

Je

“One. Message.” The anthropomorphic voice of Alex’s answering machine was an older woman’s, and came out in a broken staccato. “First. Message. Received at. Seven. Forty-one. P.M. January. Four. Two thousand. And ten.” That would be five days ago, thought Harold. Three days before the Irregulars’ di

“Mr. Cale, this is Sebastian Conan Doyle,” came the new, human voice from the message. Having spoken with Sebastian just the previous day, Harold found it spooky to hear his voice on the crackly tape. Sebastian sounded angry.

“I trust you received the injunction from my solicitors. I know you’re hiding from me. You won’t answer my letters. You won’t return my calls. You think because you dug up the right trunk in some attic somewhere, you’re entitled to something which belongs to me. You little wanker. Can you hear me, Cale? Are you there right now, listening to my voice? Pissing your trousers in panic. Well, listen to this: If you give that diary away, you will regret it. I will see to it that you come to hate the very name Conan Doyle.”