Chapter 14

“You are aware that no two thumb-marks are alike?”

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventure of the Norwood Builder

I was fuming. Woodley’s treachery grated. Yesterday he’d been so cooperative. What caused this Jekyll-Hyde transformation? I had the funny tingle in my neck that I get when something’s going on. But what was it? Auntie Elizabeth insists I’m fey, but I refuse to believe a word of it.

I had to concentrate on the job at hand. I keep a micro DV camcorder in my glove compartment. I like to have it handy in case I need to use it to record the sins of whatever insurance scofflaw I happen to be investigating - in this case Claudine Romani. It’s a nifty gadget with a wide-angle field of view, yet small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I checked to make sure it was fully charged, then put it back next to the bottle of Macallan 12-year old Highland Single Malt Scotch Whisky. Aunt Elizabeth, a/k/a The Scottish Dragon, swears by its medicinal purposes. For once I agreed with her. I unscrewed it and breathed in the hints of vanilla and ginger. One small sip of its smooth, balanced notes of toffee and dried fruit was enough to warm a body and bring some blood into the brain. The 87 proof helped a lot, too. But today, with what I had in mind, was going to be a very long day. I needed to be sober and count on every ounce of wit I could muster.

At seven o’clock, I reached Debra. She had good news about Tom. He was out of recovery and now could have visitors for five minutes every hour on the hour. They were keeping him in the ICU for continued monitoring of any swelling around the brain, but his vitals were stable and he was breathing well. His doctors were confident he would shortly regain consciousness without complications.

“They wrapped his ankle, put a brace on the fractured collarbone, and bandaged his right wrist. They let me stay there until very late last night. I talked to him all day yesterday and told him everything that’s happening. What’s with your end?”

I explained my frustrations and lack of success at the mansion.

“You did find out a few interesting things from that Mrs. Toller,” Debra said.

I agreed and related my plans to return there tonight.

“Why would you risk it?” she asked. “Ivy Douglas is already suing you.”

“The safe. I want to locate it. That could be where Grange stashed the Doyle notes and The White Company manuscript that Tom mentioned. If no one except the Dowager knew about the safe, maybe the estate never found it or what’s in it.”

“Assuming you find it, how will you get it open?” Debra asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t open it. But I would contact the estate lawyer - that Dodd guy from Morrison, Morrison and Dodd. Then it could be opened it in front of everybody and whatever’s in it could be properly catalogued. That way it would all become a legitimate part of the estate contents, but Tom would have been the one to discover its existence.”

“That’s assuming someone hasn’t already taken out what was in there.”

“True. I’m relying on what Jean Toller told me.”

‘That’s also assuming you don’t get arrested for breaking and entering.”

“That hasn’t happened yet in my career.”

“There’s always a first time,” Debra warned.

“I’ve been thinking about the Jack the Ripper case a lot.” I changed the subject and told her about the research I’d done late last night.

“That’s peculiar,” she mused. “If the top cops all said they knew who the Ripper was but they never arrested anyone, it must have been a conspiracy. And that quote referencing Sherlock Holmes is an interesting connection with Doyle.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Debra, do you know anyone who’s an expert Ripperologist?”

“I do know someone - Jack Bennett. He’s been at Newberry Library to research all kinds of things connected to Jack the Ripper case. He’s asked me to help him locate some particularly obscure reference materials on the case, and we’ve gotten friendly.”

“Great. Can you talk with him? Don’t tell him about the Grange diary or the Conan Doyle notes. Just ask him for any information that’s recently come out on the Ripper case. There’s bound to be some new forensics they didn’t have access to before. Also get any information on Phillip Green, if he knows him.”

“I’m sure he’d be willing to help,” Debra offered.

“Oh, and can you do some more cross reference checks to see whether there are any other connections between Conan Doyle and the Ripper case. Make the search wide-ranging. Check out people Doyle knew and their connection to the Ripper murders, that sort of thing,” I suggested. “I didn’t get a chance to do that last night.”

“Sure. Standard research procedures.”

“Do you know what I can’t stop thinking about?” I asked.

“What?”

“When Doyle couldn’t find those notes he’d written, what did he do? What did he think? He must have realized that they might surface at any time. Was he going to publish his notes in future, or was there some reason he didn’t want his notes to be read by the public?”

“We may never know the answer to that,” Debra suggested. “Maybe he remembered that he’d put the notes in The White Company manuscript. If so, he knew that David Grange had them but that Grange wouldn’t admit it, let alone return them.”

“Avid collectors like Grange, Tom always tells me, are a strange and devious breed.”

“Remember DD, that’s what you’re up against when you go back to the mansion, so be careful,” she warned.