Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never visited the Caxton Private Lending Library, although an open invitation was extended to him. He felt that it was probably for the best that he kept his distance from it for, as he told Mr. Headley, if he needed to spend time with the great characters of literature, he could simply pick up a book. Neither did he ever again meet Holmes and Watson, for they had their own life in his imagination.
Instead he carefully set out to undermine the second incarnation of his inventions, deliberately interspersing his better later stories with tales that were either so improbable in their plots and solutions as to test the credulity of readers to breaking point—”The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” being among the most notable—or simply not terribly good, including “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,” “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez,” or “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier.” He even dropped in hints of more wives for Watson, whom he didn’t actually bother to name. The publication of such tales troubled him less than it might once have done, for even as he tired of his creations he understood that, with each inconsequential tale, he was ensuring the survival of the Caxton, and the continued happiness of his original characters.
Yet his strange encounter with the Caxton had also given Conan Doyle a kind of quiet comfort. In the years following his meeting with Holmes and Watson, he lost his first wife, and, in the final weeks of The Great War, his son Kingsley. He spent many years seeking proof of life after death, and found none, but his knowledge of the Caxton’s existence, and the power of belief to incarnate fictional characters, to imbue them with another reality outside the pages of books, gave him the hope that the same might be possible for those who had been taken from him in this life. The Caxton was a world beyond this one, complete and of itself, and if one such world could exist, then so might others.
Shortly after Conan Doyle’s death in July 1930, copies of the first editions of his later collections duly arrived at the library, as well as another copy of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes with its enlightening manuscript addition. By then Mr. Gedeon was the librarian, and he, Holmes, and Watson endured a slightly nervous couple of days, just in case the plan hatched by Watson and enacted by Conan Doyle had not worked, but no new incarnations of Holmes and Watson appeared on their doorstep, and a strange warm gust of wind blew through the Caxton, as though the great old edifice had just breathed its own sigh of relief.
A small blue plaque now stands on the wall of the Caxton, just above the shelf containing the Conan Doyle collection. It reads: “In Memory of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930: For Services to the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository.”
IRREGULAR
by Meg Gardiner
Suicide, they say. She hears them outside as she leans towards the open window.
The woman in pearls mumbles it, sitting on the curb under city lights. Her face scratched by fragments of safety glass, posh frock bloody. She waves away the paramedic again, insisting she’s fine, but refuses to look there.
The footballer spits it, pacing the pavement, mobile to his ear, speaking to his agent. Pausing to beg a cigarette from a cop guarding the scene. Still so shaky ninety minutes after the thing, he doesn’t care if onlookers snap him smoking. He’d just pulled up in the Merc when it happened. Jesus. Nearly killed us.
The dog walker sobs it. Yes, I saw, she tells the detective, wiping her eyes. She had no warning. The woman simply plunged from the night sky into the windshield of the Mercedes outside the Mayfair Capital Bank. Straight down into the glass, from . . . she looks up at the window.
Shaz jerks back into the shadows.
Under the flashing lights of the ambulance, the silver Merc is a bier. The young woman is embedded in the sunken windshield, like she’s lying in a bed of shattered ice. Glittery mini-dress blown up around her hips. Long legs askew, as pale as curdled cream. A strappy sandal dangling from her foot. Her face is turned away.
So much sparkle. It burns Shaz’s eyes, puts a buzz in her ears. Why would the girl take hours to glam up, just to Superman out a fourth-story window?
Blue lights strobe the office ceiling. Shaz calls a number, the private mobile. “As advertised. Victim took a bloody long drop. She had no chance.”
“Witnesses?”
“Say she jumped.”
But none of them saw her take the leap.
“Get snaps and stop by the office,” he says. “Fallon will have your fee.” He rings off.
Fallon will have her fee, in cash. They could transfer the money with the swipe of a thumb—she’s sixteen, she has a bank account. And fifty pounds for this nighttime reconnaisance, it’s a trifle to them. But they want her to spend time coming by. Showing obeisance.
Her word of the day, obeisance.
They know she needs the dosh. Fifty quid: She’ll put it away. For university. Someday.
Around the corner, from the lifts, come footsteps and radio static. Shaz darts out of the office into the hallway. The detective and a uniformed PC round the corner.
The PC points his flashlight at her. “Oi. Step away from that door.”
She widens her eyes, deerlike. “What’s wrong?”