Chapter 45
“I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.”
-Sherlock Holmes, Abbey Grange
Green, frustrated, looked from Tom to me. “What notes? You keep referring to Doyle’s notes. Will someone please explain?”
“If you think the original manuscript of The White Company is valuable, wait until you hear about the Doyle notes,” I told him. “Grange wrote in his diary that...”
Tom bristled. “Hold on, DD. What I told you was in confidence.” Tom’s distrust of Green was back in full measure.
“Tom, believe me you are the one who’ll be credited for finding the Doyle notes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the one to actually touch them first or I do or Philip Green does. You uncovered the diary and found the reference to the notes. You’ve uncovered their very existence, and nothing is going to change that. But now we have to work together.”
I lowered my voice. “I already said that whoever stole Grange’s diary is looking for the manuscript and the Doyle notes too. That puts us in danger. We have to work together and find them first.”
Tom’s shoulders sunk. He looked tired and downhearted. “But DD, when Lt. Fernandez gets here, he’s gonna take us right back to Chicago. We won’t be able to search this place. What difference does it make? We’re sunk.”
“No we’re not. I’ve got a plan. Lt. Fernandez thinks someone murdered the Dowager.”
Green’s eyes narrowed. He removed his glasses. “Murdered the Dowager?”
“Yes. That’s why I think I can convince Fernandez to give us some time to search this place. He’s got a good idea how important it is to find this material. It’s a motive for killing the Dowager.”
“You’ve got to tell me now,” Green said. “What did Grange say in his diary about the Doyle notes?”
“Tom?” I prompted.
“All right,” Tom said sullenly. “But this is definitely against my better judgement, DD.”
“Trust me.”
Tom shook his head and shrugged. Finally he spoke. “Grange wrote that there were some notes from Doyle that he found in between the manuscript pages of The White Company. They outlined points of evidence in the Jack the Ripper case.”
Green’s head went forward like a great blue heron after prey. His eyes had the glistening stare of a fanatic. “Amazing! Were these notes in Doyle’s handwriting?”
“Grange said they were Doyle’s notes. Remember Grange was familiar with Doyle’s handwriting from the manuscript.”
Philip Green sat down. “My heart is pumping so fast, I’m lightheaded. I understand now why you didn’t want to tell me. If there are Doyle notes on Jack the Ripper, it’s extraordinary - it’s incredible. Every Sherlockian has wondered why Conan Doyle never had Sherlock Holmes mention anything about Jack the Ripper.”
I looked at Tom. He was scowling.
Green leaned forward and asked, “Did Grange indicate that the Doyle notes identified a person?”
Tom stalled, giving me another dirty look. It was so quiet, I could hear them both breathing.
Green added, “And don’t tell me it was Walter Sickert, the one Patricia Cornwell spent a fortune investigating. That would be too hard to believe. All the Ripperologists think that was a hack job.”
“Tom?” I prodded.
“Okay, okay. He said, “Grange listed some clues Doyle highlighted, and he wrote that an envelope addressed to Doyle was stuck in the pages of Doyle’s notes.”
“And?” Green prompted as he put on his glasses again.
“And inside the envelope was written the name of the suspect, “ Tom answered.
“So who was it?”
“I didn’t get a chance to find out. That’s when someone pushed me down the stairs.”
Green collapsed on top the junkpile barricade and expelled a loud breath. “This is fantastic. I agree with you. It’s imperative we find those notes and that envelope before anyone else.”
“It seems that Grange was an obsessive collector,” I interjected, remembering that Tom had described Philip Green in the same words. “His mania must have made him hold onto the Doyle notes but never reveal he had them.”
“Grange couldn’t reveal or announce anything in Doyle’s lifetime anyway,” Tom said, ever practical. “I’ll bet that Doyle contacted him to see if he’d left the notes in the manuscript. Grange must have lied and told him no. Doyle probably looked for those notes the rest of his life.”
“Maybe that’s the real reason he was interested in Spiritualism,” I offered, hoping to avoid another outbreak of hostility.
Tom gave a tired sigh. “DD, you know enough about Doyle to know that’s not true. He attended seances well before this incident. But about the notes - I can understand how he might have lost track of them. During his 1894 trip, he was riding Pullman cars all over the country. They had him booked on an exhausting lecture tour schedule, and...” He stopped cold. The door was being unlocked.