The sherlockian by Graham Moore

Author:Graham Moore [Graham Moore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9780446572590
Published: 2010-12-01T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

The Bloodstains Bear Fruit

“You have brought detection as near an exact science

as it will ever be brought in this world.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

A Study in Scarlet

January 10, 2010

Harold woke to the sound of running water. Groggy, he raised his head and turned to find the source. He gazed across disheveled sheets—deep blue with red stripes crossing in a grid pattern—to a cream carpet and a dark wooden desk. Harold had been in so many different hotel rooms over the past week, hadn’t he, and they all looked exactly the same. Which of them was this?

As he turned to the bathroom door, which could have been any bathroom door in any hotel room on either side of the Atlantic, Harold saw wisps of steam escaping from the bottom. The shower was running inside the bathroom. It looked warm. He heard someone move around inside the shower and realized it was Sarah. The events of the past night came back to him. Harold was sorry to recall that nothing thrilling had occurred the night before.

They’d found this hotel after a quick Google search from the Internet café. It was close, it was quiet, and it accepted payment in cash. They couldn’t risk using credit cards.

They had spent the evening separately reading through Alex’s Conan Doyle biography. Sarah had appreciated the chance finally to read it for herself, while Harold pored over it again and again for any indication of where Alex had found the diary. Or any glimpse as to what was even inside it. No matter how many times he read it, no new facts presented themselves.

The most exciting moment of the evening, for Harold, had come when the two learned that the hotel had a laundry room. They realized that without a return to their previous hotel room they’d be spending another day in the same clothes. They changed into the white robes they found hanging inside the bathroom door and walked, dirty underwear, jeans, and shirts piled in their arms, down the stairs in nothing but the robes. Harold’s eyes kept drifting to the folds of Sarah’s robe, which swayed to expose her right thigh halfway up to her waist every time she stepped forward. He did his best not to stare. He was pretty sure she didn’t notice.

Later that night they slept on opposite sides of the single king-size bed. They wore their robes like pajamas. The whole thing felt dishearteningly chaste, like a teenage sleepover, and yet Harold still had trouble sleeping. He lay on his side, facing away from Sarah even though he usually slept on his back. He didn’t want to risk turning and accidentally staring at her. What if she opened her eyes just at the instant that his happened to be on her? She’d think he’d been staring at her the whole night, which he certainly hadn’t been. Better not to let his head point anywhere near her direction, for fear of a misunderstanding. So he lay on his right side and felt the weight of his body pressing painfully into his shoulder as he failed to fall asleep.

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