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Authors: Carol McCleary
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being anything but a bare-knuckle street fighter when it comes to the news.
My gut tells me I can’t go to Abberline until I have more evidence. He has the suicide note and I can’t tell him what is in the diary. As for the mugger, he’ll point out that purse snatchings are common instincts in any city anywhere—and it so happens that London is the most populous city in the entire world. I can almost hear him telling me exactly how many purse snatchings occur every day in the city—and my retort being, of course, how many of them discarded the money in a purse and ran off with a young woman’s diary?
His rebuttal will be that the thief got confused and simply starting throwing things. And he’d want to know if I continued after the thief to see if he had soon discarded the diary. I didn’t and my failure to do so would be the inspector’s coup de grace in the discussion.
No, a simple purse snatching isn’t going to impress him or win him over to my side, not without something solid. Nor will the feelings of a maid and an office clerk that Hailey wasn’t suicidal, since neither was an intimate of Hailey’s.
Until I have an explanation for the suicide note, I can’t go to the inspector. At the moment, the only explanation that sits well with me is that she was coerced into writing it under duress. Unfortunately, I have no proof except the hairs standing up on the back of my neck and someone mugging me.
Where to start is not a difficult question for me. Like Hailey, I am a reporter and know the beat: She was working on a story about a medical scandal involving a health doctor and a high-society woman, so I will start there and see where it leads me.
Hopefully the news story and the man in her life who betrayed and probably murdered her will intersect.
I could drop by a newspaper office and ask reporters about recent stories featuring a health doctor and a dead noblewoman, but I already have an inside source for London high society and its rumors, innuendos, and scandals—basically an artery to all that goes on in London society.
“Drop me at the nearest telegraph office,” I tell the cabbie, through the hansom cab’s roof door.
It is time to contact an old friend, one who once fought killers with me, and who is not only a world-champion purveyor of gossip, but perhaps also the most common subject of gossip in the city, and a shameless instigator of the most outrageous, titillating, and racy scandals on the planet.
You will find me at the Langham under the name of Count Von Kramm.
—The king of Bohemia from “A Scandal in Bohemia” by S IR A RTHUR C ONAN D OYLE
14
“I’m meeting Mr. Ernest,” I tell the maître d’ at the dining room in the Langham Hotel, the grande dame of hotels in the world and the epitome of elite chic.
I’m escorted to a table to bide my time while I wait for “Mr. Ernest,” who is my friend and sometime partner in crime—detection, of course—Oscar Wilde.
Oscar’s reply to my telegraph had advised me cryptically that he would present himself “incognito” at the restaurant, thus the Mr. Ernest bit, and would offer explanations that must be kept “under the rose.” It took me a moment to realize that “under the rose” was an idiom for secrecy dating back to ancient times.
As the wit and scandalous rascal of London society, both because of his sharp tongue and refusal to limit his sexual activities to those dictated by “respectable” people and straitlaced religious organizations, Oscar’s need to hide out could have arisen from any number of things he said—or did.
The fact we were meeting in the most fashionable and exquisite hotel dining room in London at a time when Oscar is “incognito” is merely part of the charm of a man who upon his arrival in America to begin his speaking tour advised a customs officer that he had nothing to declare but his genius.
I admit I had been taken in by Oscar’s secrecy-laden message, but when
My gut tells me I can’t go to Abberline until I have more evidence. He has the suicide note and I can’t tell him what is in the diary. As for the mugger, he’ll point out that purse snatchings are common instincts in any city anywhere—and it so happens that London is the most populous city in the entire world. I can almost hear him telling me exactly how many purse snatchings occur every day in the city—and my retort being, of course, how many of them discarded the money in a purse and ran off with a young woman’s diary?
His rebuttal will be that the thief got confused and simply starting throwing things. And he’d want to know if I continued after the thief to see if he had soon discarded the diary. I didn’t and my failure to do so would be the inspector’s coup de grace in the discussion.
No, a simple purse snatching isn’t going to impress him or win him over to my side, not without something solid. Nor will the feelings of a maid and an office clerk that Hailey wasn’t suicidal, since neither was an intimate of Hailey’s.
Until I have an explanation for the suicide note, I can’t go to the inspector. At the moment, the only explanation that sits well with me is that she was coerced into writing it under duress. Unfortunately, I have no proof except the hairs standing up on the back of my neck and someone mugging me.
Where to start is not a difficult question for me. Like Hailey, I am a reporter and know the beat: She was working on a story about a medical scandal involving a health doctor and a high-society woman, so I will start there and see where it leads me.
Hopefully the news story and the man in her life who betrayed and probably murdered her will intersect.
I could drop by a newspaper office and ask reporters about recent stories featuring a health doctor and a dead noblewoman, but I already have an inside source for London high society and its rumors, innuendos, and scandals—basically an artery to all that goes on in London society.
“Drop me at the nearest telegraph office,” I tell the cabbie, through the hansom cab’s roof door.
It is time to contact an old friend, one who once fought killers with me, and who is not only a world-champion purveyor of gossip, but perhaps also the most common subject of gossip in the city, and a shameless instigator of the most outrageous, titillating, and racy scandals on the planet.
You will find me at the Langham under the name of Count Von Kramm.
—The king of Bohemia from “A Scandal in Bohemia” by S IR A RTHUR C ONAN D OYLE
14
“I’m meeting Mr. Ernest,” I tell the maître d’ at the dining room in the Langham Hotel, the grande dame of hotels in the world and the epitome of elite chic.
I’m escorted to a table to bide my time while I wait for “Mr. Ernest,” who is my friend and sometime partner in crime—detection, of course—Oscar Wilde.
Oscar’s reply to my telegraph had advised me cryptically that he would present himself “incognito” at the restaurant, thus the Mr. Ernest bit, and would offer explanations that must be kept “under the rose.” It took me a moment to realize that “under the rose” was an idiom for secrecy dating back to ancient times.
As the wit and scandalous rascal of London society, both because of his sharp tongue and refusal to limit his sexual activities to those dictated by “respectable” people and straitlaced religious organizations, Oscar’s need to hide out could have arisen from any number of things he said—or did.
The fact we were meeting in the most fashionable and exquisite hotel dining room in London at a time when Oscar is “incognito” is merely part of the charm of a man who upon his arrival in America to begin his speaking tour advised a customs officer that he had nothing to declare but his genius.
I admit I had been taken in by Oscar’s secrecy-laden message, but when
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