Authors: David Pirie
The Night Calls (36 page)
At least the drainage was designed to be fast, so I could see the level dropping. And, while I made sure of the controls, it was Bell who opened the door. Over his shoulder I saw Macandrew pressed back against the wall, still white with fear.
‘I think,’ said Bell, ‘I have demonstrated to you the alternative method Hanbury almost certainly used to provide you with what you wanted.’
‘You are mad,’ said Macandrew quietly. Though he still had a frightful appearance, he was recovering a little of his dignity.
‘It is a question,’ said the Doctor, ‘of who is mad and who is sane. Some might think that performing scientific experiments on people who had been deliberately drowned was mad. I fully accept you had no legal guilt, but even so these things would never have happened without your contribution. And what sort of world, what sort of century lies before us if your science is to be conducted with that kind of wilful blindness?’
Little more was said as we went back upstairs and Macandrew dismissed us curtly from the house. But I admit I felt only relief. I had been half dreading that he would threaten the Doctor with some kind of lawsuit, for in many respects justice would have been on his side, and I pointed this out as soon as we were in the street.
The Doctor smiled at me. He looked utterly exhausted but satisfied, exhilarated even. ‘I am sorry to have put
you
through that, Doyle, but not, I fear, for any other reason. If Macandrew had shown the slightest sympathy for the victims I would never have done it, but he is the kind who thinks everything of his science and himself and nothing whatsoever of its effect. Even Hanbury, as I said, had more imagination than that man. But I knew quite well that the famous scientist would never let this affair be made public, so we were quite safe.’
you
through that, Doyle, but not, I fear, for any other reason. If Macandrew had shown the slightest sympathy for the victims I would never have done it, but he is the kind who thinks everything of his science and himself and nothing whatsoever of its effect. Even Hanbury, as I said, had more imagination than that man. But I knew quite well that the famous scientist would never let this affair be made public, so we were quite safe.’
We strolled on slowly, not yet cold despite the weather for we had got warm enough in Macandrew’s house, and also, I suppose, we wished to delay the moment of parting. ‘I also like to think,’ he continued, ‘though it is probably an illusion, that he might have learnt a lesson tonight.’
As we walked down that freezing yet well-lit London street, he counseled me to try and forget about this evening’s horrors and get back to the sanity and warmth of the Morland household. ‘For my part,’ he said, ‘I will be perfectly glad to return to Edinburgh.’ He was taking the train north the next day and there was no way of knowing when we would meet again.
Before he left me he said I should not allow myself to be haunted. But there was something else.
‘I do not want you to mistake me. On our terms, Doyle, yes, but we will never give up the fight. To the death, if necessary.’
And so we parted, and as I watched him disappear in the direction of his hotel in a cab, a part of me felt almost reassured. Of course I knew that by far the greater business stood unfinished, but at least we had dealt with one immediate threat. I had quite forgotten his aphorism that the final and most dangerous stage of a Greek labyrinth is a single straight line.
I turned away after his cab disappeared round the corner of the street and buttoned up my overcoat to the top for the walk back to the Morlands. Consulting my watch as I set off, I was amazed to find it was not even ten o’clock. But we had started for the opium den in early evening and it was hardly surprising that our sojourn there had felt like an eternity.
Looking around me, I saw that the frost had descended on London in earnest and the pavements were white and pretty. A small sprinkling of snow had evidently come down while we were in the scientist’s house, making the streets seem much more cheerful, and I was suddenly pleased to think of Sally and Martin at their fireside, awaiting me. Of course, telling them of my adventures at the den would only raise unhappy memories for the family, so I resolved that I would hear about
their
day. At this moment I could think of nothing better than listening to Sally recounting her outings with the children, telling me what they had drawn or said or done, or even to Martin chronicling his endless travails with the printer.
their
day. At this moment I could think of nothing better than listening to Sally recounting her outings with the children, telling me what they had drawn or said or done, or even to Martin chronicling his endless travails with the printer.
So I walked up to that little door with a light step, full of anticipation, and was not disappointed. For I had hardly opened it when Sally appeared looking radiant and excited in the candlelight which seemed, as I looked around, to be unusually abundant. Sally, who loved candles, had often talked to me about Christmas in the house when masses of extra ones were lit and flowers were everywhere. And now, as I stared round in astonishment, the household seemed to have decided to celebrate it early, for on every surface there were candles, sending out a soft dancing light and shining most of all in her face, which was utterly mischievous.
‘We saw you coming,’ she said, beaming in a way that reminded me of her little girl Lucy’s exultant grin.
‘Has Christmas arrived early?’ I asked, for even I had not anticipated such a pleasant welcome, though it could hardly have come at a better time.
‘No, but we have decided to add to it. And thanks to you it will be such a happy Christmas for we have no debts. But come. Here you are.’
And she picked up a glass from the table with a little smile.
I walked a few paces into that brilliant hallway and thought it had never seemed such a safe haven. ‘What is it?’ I held up the glass which contained a greenish liquid.
‘Oh, it is a wonderful cordial. Prepared for you. You look so tired and anyway it is part of the surprise.’
‘Very well,’ said I, downing the drink in one. It tasted deliciously refreshing, with a hint of apple and lime, though a little bitter.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘someone is here. Someone who wants to meet you so badly. I have spoken to you of Uncle Tim and what his visits are like. It is such a shame Martin has to stay late working on the calendar, but he will be here soon. And the children have had Tim all to themselves and loved every moment of it.’
Of course I recalled her talk of Tim before. Tim, who arrived from abroad, armed with presents for the children. And we moved on as if in a dream to the drawing room which was a little darker but here the firelight flickered merrily. I was happy but I thought also that it was a pity how tired I was, too tired to do justice to such a joyful occasion.
By the fire I saw a rocking chair that was usually in the window. Lucy and little Will were clustered around a smartly clad figure with longish hair who had his back towards me. The children turned around, all smiles and mischief like their mother, laughing uncontrollably at some secret joke, the firelight flickering on Lucy Morland’s fair hair. And before them was the evidence of presents. Oranges and nuts and dates and other fruit, and Will was sucking at an orange.
Sally whispered in my ear, ‘You see, I know now that it was Tim who learned of Dr Small’s visit to Egypt when he was last here a year ago and mentioned you then. We had no idea you were known to Tim.’
I did not quite follow that as I sat down on the armchair, for my legs felt very tired. Yet, as he turned, I looked.
And there he was, smiling, so handsome, as he stroked Lucy’s hair.
Though my senses were all but gone, I glimpsed the whole of it.
‘It is so good to see you again, Doyle,’ said Cream.
People often want to know how much of my writing about Arthur Conan Doyle is based on actual events and whether I have made any fresh discoveries. The fact that the question still looms so large is in its own way a remarkable thing. Doyle ranks among the most famous of all Victorian writers, easily the most durable in terms of film and television, yet even today this man’s life, particularly his early life, is shrouded in quite as much mystery as one of his own stories.
My own interest in the subject dates from a childhood in a Scottish seaside town only an hour away from where he grew up. This gave me an early acquaintance with the atmosphere of Edinburgh, not least its wind, and with Doyle’s work. I still have a battered copy of the complete Holmes stories I bought when I was seven, a book I used to discuss avidly with a school friend, appropriately enough the son of a Professor of Anatomy.
Much to our surprise we were told by one of our teachers that the Holmes detective stories were not serious creations at all, but the playthings of a man who grew tried of their superficiality and killed off his detective. This summary never seemed quite right to me, although I had no idea then that T.S. Eliot harboured the same doubts and was himself so puzzled by Holmes’s ambiguous connection to Doyle, that he called it the ‘greatest’ of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Today, rereading Doyle’s stories with some knowledge of the contradictions in their creator (and a little experience of what it is to write fiction), the whole notion of Holmes as a bit of casual fun, undertaken for commercial reasons, seems to me absurd. Just as Bram Stoker blamed Count Dracula on a meal of crab and Mary Shelley put Frankenstein down to a kind of literary party game, Doyle’s reflections on his own gothic creation, written years after the event, reveal all the telltale hallmarks of a nineteenth-century author carefully, if unconsciously, sanitising a painful literary birth.
What lay behind this birth? Countless biographies have rehearsed what is known about Doyle, but to a very large extent this was dictated by the man himself. Not a single researcher has ever had unhampered access to his personal letters and papers. Indeed, following bitter legal battles, the bulk of these papers have not been seen by anyone for half a century and nobody can even say for sure where they are, or if they have been destroyed. As a result most recent chroniclers have had to do heroic detective work to arrive at new facts. That Arthur Conan Doyle himself suppressed many things is no longer in doubt and even the most cursory study of his life reveals a yawning gap between his public and private self. He could not keep the latter out of his writing, but he could keep it out of everything else with the result that, until quite recently, only the most public facts were available to us while Doyle himself stared out of his photos like a man in disguise. The school friend with whom I shared a liking for Holmes is now a distinguished consultant psychiatrist with a particular interest in the psychology of public people. In his view there is a greater tension between the public and the private in Conan Doyle than in any other historical figure he has ever studied, with the exception of the former American President Richard Nixon.
It is this paradox between the writing and the man which lies at the heart of Doyle for me. Here is the central mystery and every aspect of my own stories is an attempt to elucidate it, sometimes through documented fact and Doyle’s own writing, sometimes by assumption based on evidence, sometimes by invention and metaphor. I was never interested in pure pastiche but I am very preoccupied by material Doyle would have known about, and considered in private, but could never publicly discuss, and also by events which challenge the whole basis of his most precious beliefs (the ending of
The Patient’s Eyes
is intimately related to his belief in chivalry). He must, there is no way around it, have had to face such challenges, but how he did, and what effect they had on him, we can only conjecture.
The Patient’s Eyes
is intimately related to his belief in chivalry). He must, there is no way around it, have had to face such challenges, but how he did, and what effect they had on him, we can only conjecture.
I can lay claim to few major detective triumphs but I do still recall my amazement when, during my research, I stumbled on the fact that one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious serial killers, an American and a doctor, studied medicine in Edinburgh in 1878, exactly the year that Doyle – a medical student at the same institution – met Joseph Bell. It seemed to me extraordinary that here, right in his creator’s back yard, was exactly the kind of villain Holmes never encountered. Why?
And what of Doyle’s teacher and inspiration Joseph Bell? Here was the acknowledged basis of Holmes but, before we can reach any understanding of the meeting between the two men, it is necessary to explore the strange and appalling circumstances of Doyle’s life when it happened, circumstances which he did everything in his power to conceal.
His attempts were so successful that thanks largely to a number of intrepid biographers the full story is only now starting to emerge, and it is quite as gothic as any fiction he ever wrote. By the late 1870s, his father Charles appears to have been enduring an agonized twilight existence in the Doyle family home as he made a spectacular decline into drunken insanity. Doyle, living at home throughout his student days, would have experienced this at close quarters. It was years before his father was committed to a mental institution, and even then he made at least one violent escape attempt. All of this was bad enough for the young Doyle in those crucial years and the horror of it is reflected in his work, not least in eerie Holmes stories like ‘The Crooked Man’ and ‘The Yellow Face’. But there was far worse.
During this critical period Doyle’s mother’s affections had strayed. With his older sisters often away, he may well have been the sole grown-up witness to the spectacle of his father being cuckolded in his own home, and by a man who was only five years older than Doyle himself.
Bryan Waller, a young doctor, arrived first in the Doyle family home as a lodger, while Doyle was still away at school, but the emotional attachment to Doyle’s mother was quickly formed and soon Waller took over all charge of the household with Charles Doyle still in it. The arrangement was therefore bizarre and, in almost every contemporary account, Waller emerges as a cruel, arrogant and snobbish (if cultured) man with a notorious temper. A physical relationship between him and Mary Doyle, who was fifteen years older, cannot be proved. It may have been merely a close personal bond. Waller is also thought at one time to have considered an engagement to Doyle’s sister, Annette. In a way it scarcely matters for, given the Victorian penchant for secrecy about such things, Doyle probably had no more idea of the truth than we do. The fact of this usurping father’s presence while his own father failed would have been quite unbearable enough.
There are, however, some suggestive facts. The last child born to Doyle’s mother, when her husband was already far into his illness and Waller ruled the roost, was christened Bryan Julia Doyle (Julia being the name of Bryan Waller’s mother). Eventually Waller moved Mary Doyle to his estate in Masongill in the Pennines where she lived until she was eighty, and where rumours have survived to this day not merely about the relationship, but about the true parentage of Bryan Julia Doyle.
So what on earth can life have been like for Doyle living in this household, which bears a startling resemblance to
Hamlet
with Doyle as prince, throughout his most formative teenage years, years when he met Bell and the seeds of Sherlock Holmes were sown? As yet, we have no letters to consult. But Doyle’s own silence on the subject is suggestive. According to many biographers, Waller must have been a crucial influence and probably determined Doyle’s career choice. But in the whole of Conan Doyle’s writing there is not a single solitary mention of him. Doyle’s autobiography is written as if Waller never existed. Even so, this spectacularly evasive book, published well after Doyle’s mother’s death, does contain one chilling if elliptical reference to the whole affair, and it was surely placed by Doyle in the full knowledge that Waller himself, unlike his mother, was still alive to read it. ‘My mother,’ Doyle wrote of his student days, ‘had adopted the device of sharing a large house, which may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others …’
Hamlet
with Doyle as prince, throughout his most formative teenage years, years when he met Bell and the seeds of Sherlock Holmes were sown? As yet, we have no letters to consult. But Doyle’s own silence on the subject is suggestive. According to many biographers, Waller must have been a crucial influence and probably determined Doyle’s career choice. But in the whole of Conan Doyle’s writing there is not a single solitary mention of him. Doyle’s autobiography is written as if Waller never existed. Even so, this spectacularly evasive book, published well after Doyle’s mother’s death, does contain one chilling if elliptical reference to the whole affair, and it was surely placed by Doyle in the full knowledge that Waller himself, unlike his mother, was still alive to read it. ‘My mother,’ Doyle wrote of his student days, ‘had adopted the device of sharing a large house, which may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others …’
‘Disastrous’? The adjective speaks volumes, but the author makes no further attempt to explain it, moving on instead to describe ‘the most notable’ encounter of his university life, and the man who represented everything that the vain and bullying Waller did not — Joseph Bell. ‘For some reason I have never understood,’ Doyle writes with obvious feeling, ‘he singled me out …’
It is hard to imagine a more important moment for the young Doyle than the arrival of Joseph Bell at this desperate time. At home were two highly disturbing fathers, the one pathetic and insane, the other a threatening usurper. And then, like a miracle, enters the handsome charismatic teacher who ‘singles’ him out. Thin, wiry, dark, handsome, with the long fingers of a pianist and the aquiline features of an actor, Joseph Bell was one of the foremost medical academics of his generation, a consulting surgeon and also, incidentally, Queen Victoria’s personal doctor when in Scotland. Even in the guarded prose of his autobiography Doyle was emphatic in describing the man as the most important person he met in all his crucial years in Edinburgh. Indeed in one of the few letters available (thanks to the Bell family) Doyle famously wrote to his former teacher: ‘It is to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.’
It is no surprise that the drama and emotional release of such a meeting in such extraordinary circumstances was the spark that ignited Holmes. And, for me, it was not merely an irresistible spur for a thriller, but for an imaginative reconstruction of Doyle’s whole world. I decided to make the entry to this world not Edinburgh but the other most tortured and mysterious period of Doyle’s life, namely the years leading up to the turn of the century. The writer had killed off his detective and was tending his invalid wife even though he had already fallen in love with another woman. Believing, as I do, that many of Doyle’s best stories are grounded in his own conflicts and his pain, and that the outer man belies the inner, I found it productive and exciting to look back from this later period on a series of difficult and occasionally traumatic cases undertaken with Joseph Bell.
The idea of Bell and Doyle as a somewhat reluctant team is not quite as fantastical as it seems. For there is no question that Joseph Bell did have a secret. Shortly before Doyle met him in 1878 he had been called in by the Crown to sort out a murder case in Edinburgh which was going badly wrong. The murderer was a Frenchman called Eugene Chantrelle, the victim was Chantrelle’s wife, but there had been many blunders in the case and Joseph Bell managed to steer the doctors and police back on the right track, before personally tracing the likely cause of death to a doctored gas pipe. At least three contemporary accounts by pathologists and colleagues attest to the Doctor’s crucial role, yet Bell preferred to work in confidence and insisted his name was kept out of the trial.
He was especially careful not to attend the execution but on this occasion he had underestimated his man. For Chantrelle knew Bell’s role at first hand and may well have seen a way of getting revenge. On the gallows itself, as many witnesses attest, Chantrelle made a point of airily asking the forensic pathologist Littlejohn to pass on his compliments to the absent Dr Bell for bringing him to justice.
This sudden unexpected publicity for Bell could explain why he sought anonymity in all the cases that followed. We know there were other cases, from many colleagues, but the details are far harder to establish. It was not until 1892 that the resourceful reporter Harry How made the connection between Holmes and Bell, shortly before Doyle decided to bring his own fictional detective’s career to an end at Reichenbach.
What Doyle made of Bell’s forensic and detective work remains a complete mystery. The Chantrelle case happened in the year the two men first met so he could hardly have avoided hearing about it. But Doyle never alluded to it in public, presumably because, like so much else in these Victorian lives, he knew it was confidential.
The obvious question then is what else was confidential? After Doyle’s university training we can discover almost nothing of the relationship between the two men, but the few letters we have suggest there was one. Of course, there can be no certainty that Doyle’s papers, if they ever appear, will solve all such questions. Doyle may well have guarded his inner world even from those closest to him but the frequent signs of cover up and destroyed evidence only arouse greater curiosity. When Bryan Waller died in Masongill in 1932, members of his staff were urgently instructed to go to the attic and hurl from the window on to the lawn all Waller’s personal papers including notebooks and diaries. These were then taken to the back of the house and burned on a bonfire. But one servant glanced at a diary and according to her statement it contained a jealous lament, by the woman Waller married late in life, about her husband’s continuing relationship with Mrs Doyle.
Later, Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Arthur and for many years guardian of the Doyle estate, restricted access and threatened legal action when any interpretation or fact did not suit him. Letters were made available at his whim, and withdrawn again, when the conclusions of this or that biographer did not appeal. After Adrian died, the long and complex legal case began, making it hard to establish even the whereabouts of many of the papers. One cache in Switzerland appears in the end to have yielded very little. But even as we await a resolution to the more practical aspect of the mystery I think we can already reach two conclusions. The first is that Doyle’s casual and distanced account of the origins of Sherlock Holmes is not the whole truth. Given all the personal circumstances the author was trying to hide, the ambivalence he showed towards his great creation seems entirely understandable.
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