Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

Then I discovered that two letters listed in the register were missing. Both were dated April 16, 1890. One to Doyle. And one to James Payn.

“That shouldn’t be,” said the young woman who’d signed me in.

Who else had had access to the letters? Since Saturday? The register showed one name: Michael Y. Naismith.

“This is terrible,” said the assistant. She’d begun checking the trash cans.

“Do you remember this Naismith?” I asked.

“Not really. We have a lot of people who come in here.”

There was no Michael Y. Naismith listed anywhere in the area. While I was looking, Sandra called from the book store. Catastrophe Well in Hand, the collection of Payn’s letters, hadn’t come in yet, she explained, but she’d discovered a copy at the library. In case I was interested.

I read through it that evening. Payn had been the editor of Chambers’s Journal for fifteen years, and The Cornhill Magazine for fourteen more, ending his run in 1896. He wrote essays, poetry, and approximately one hundred novels. I wondered what he’d done with his spare time.

I was looking for connections with Stevenson or Doyle. They all seemed to know one another, and letters had been exchanged. Payn was an admirer especially of the Professor Challenger novels. But there was one item that caught my eye: He comments in a letter to Oscar Wilde that he’d rejected a short novel from Doyle. ‘An excellent mystery,’ he says, ‘that unfortunately takes a sharp turn into the American West.’

A sharp turn into the American West.

I began looking into McBride’s background.

He’d been the English Department chairman at his high school. The administration there couldn’t say enough kind words about him. The students had loved his classes. Test scores had risen dramatically during his tenure. He’d been theatre coach for fifteen years, had edited the yearbook for a decade. He’d helped found a support group for handicapped kids.

He’d invited student groups to his home for discussions during which his wife Mary had prepared lunches and served soft drinks. (Mary had died seven years earlier of complications from heart surgery.)

To date, he’d published eight Holmes adventures: two short novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, and six stories. All had appeared in the Chesbro Magazine, headquartered in London, although the novels had proven so popular they’d later been published separately in hard cover editions. The stories had appeared at intervals of approximately three months, but there’d been no new one for a year. The most recent one, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” had been published last winter.

I took the train to London and, accompanied by a local officer, called on Chesbro’s editor, Marianne Cummings. She was a diminutive woman, barely five feet tall, well into her sixties. But she showed a no-nonsense attitude as she ushered us into her office. “I don’t often receive visits from the police,” she said. “I hope we haven’t done anything to attract your attention. How may I help you?”

I couldn’t help smiling because I knew how my question would affect her. “Ms. Cummings,” I said, “have you scheduled a new Sherlock Holmes story?”

She peered at me over her glasses. “I beg your pardon?”

“Sherlock Holmes? Is there another one in the pipeline?”

She broke into a wide skeptical smile. “Is Scotland Yard using Mr. Holmes for training purposes?”

“I’ve a good reason for asking, Ms. Cummings.”

That produced a standoff of almost a minute. “No,” she said finally. “We’ve not scheduled any.”

“Will there be any more?”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Why the delay?”

She sat down behind a desk and turned to stare out a window. A pigeon looked back at us. “Will my answer go any farther?”

“I can’t promise that, but I’ll be as discrete as I can.”

“Mr. McBride has submitted several stories since “The Twisted Lip.”

“And—?”

“I think he’s hired someone else to do the writing. That he’s just putting his name on the work.”

“They’re not as good as the ones you’ve published?”

“Not remotely.”

“You’ve told him that?”

“Of course.”

“What’s his explanation?”

“He says he’s been tired. Promises that he’ll get something to me shortly.”

Christopher McBride’s connection with the Doyles was through his cousin Emma Hasting, who’d married Doyle’s grandson, three generations removed. Emma Hasting lived in Southsea, just a few blocks from the site where Doyle had lived during the 1880s. She was widowed now. Her husband had been a software developer, and Emma had taught music.

She lived in a villa with a magnificent view of the sea. I arrived there on a cold, gray, rainswept morning. “I’ve been here all my life,” she said, as we settled onto a divan in the living room. There was a piano and a desk. And a photo of a young Conan Doyle. “It’s from his years here,” she said. “According to family tradition, it was taken while he was working on ‘The Man from Archangel.’ It was also the period during which he was trying to save Jack Hawkins.” She turned bright blue eyes on me. The gaze, somehow, of a young woman. “He was also a physician, you know.”

I knew. I had no idea who Jack Hawkins was, though, and I didn’t really care. But I wanted to keep her talking about Doyle. So I asked.

“Jack Hawkins was a patient,” she explained. “He had cerebral meningitis. But Conan refused to give up on him. He took him into his home and did everything he could. But that was 1885, and medicine had no way to deal with that sort of problem.” She used the first name casually, as if Doyle were an old friend. “In the end they lost him.”

“I see.”

“During the course of the struggle, Conan fell in love with his sister, Louise Hawkins, and married her that same year.”

I called her attention to the photo. “Has anything else of his survived and come down to you?”

She considered it. “A lamp,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”

It was an oil lamp, and she kept it, polished and sparkling, atop a shelf in the dining room. “He wrote The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard by its light,” she said. “And several of his medical stories.” She gave me a sly wink. There was really no way to be certain of the facts.

“And is there anything else of Doyle’s that you have? Or that Christopher might have received?”

“Oh. Do you know Christopher?”

“Somewhat,” I said. “It’s he who first got me interested in Doyle.”

“There’s a trunk that once belonged to the doctor,” she said. “It’s upstairs.”

“A trunk.”

“Yes. James had it. My husband.”

“May I ask what’s in it?”

“I use it for general storage. Mostly I pack off-season clothes in it.”

“Is there anything connected with Doyle?”

“Not anymore.”

“I see. But there was something at one time?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “My husband never bothered with it. When I first looked into it, it was packed with old clothes and a few books. And several folders filled with manuscripts. The books were not in good condition. I got rid of them, got rid of everything, except the manuscripts. I thought someone might be interested in them. A scholar, perhaps.”