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But then The American added
that he had a full-time job and a family: “The danger is if you have
nothing else in your life but Sherlock Holmes.” The implication is that
Green had no such defense against the descent into madness and
obsession.Grann went back to London, where Green’s friend and former
collaborator John Michael Gibson met him at his hotel. (The New Yorker
must pay their contributors pretty handsomely, the way this guy could
afford to bop back and forth across the Atlantic for a fifteen-page
article!) Anyway, in an earlier interview with Grann, Gibson had called
Green’s death “a complete and utter mystery.” Now, having gone over all the
evidence, he shocked Grann by saying: “I think it was suicide.”
He cited Green’s
growing irrationality in the week before his death, the lack of any sign of
forcible entry, and, especially, the wooden spoon found lying next to
Green’s hand: “He had to have used it to tighten the cord” like a
tourniquet. “If someone else had garroted him, why would he need the spoon?
The killer could simply use his hands. . . . I think things in his life had
not turned out the way he wanted. This Christie’s sale simply brought
everything to a head. That’s not all. I think he wanted it to look like
murder. That’s why he didn’t leave a note. That’s why he took his voice off
the answering machine. That’s why he sent that message to his sister with
the three phone numbers on it. That’s why he spoke of the American who was
after him. He must have been planning it for days, laying the foundation,
giving us false clues. . . . Don’t you see? He staged the whole thing. He
created the perfect mystery.” Grann notes that “in detective fiction, the
reverse scenario generally turns out to be true–a suicide is found to have
been murder. As Holmes declares in ‘The Resident Patient,’ “This is no
suicide. . . . It is a very deeply planned and cold-blooded murder.’” But
Grann points to what he calls “one notable exception”: “The Problem of Thor
Bridge,” in which a spurned and jealous wife commits suicide but arranges
it to appear that she was killed by the governess with whom her husband has
fallen in love.
Finally,
Grann went to Oxford to talk Green’s sister, Priscilla West. She told him
that Green “had willed his collection to a library in Portsmouth, near
where Conan Doyle wrote the first two Holmes stories, so that other
scholars could have access to it. The collection was so large that it had
taken two weeks, and required twelve truckloads, to cart it all away. It
was estimated to be worth several million dollars–far more, in all
likelihood, than the treasured archive.” Grann asked her about the
mysterious American voice on Green’s answering machine and the three phone
numbers on the note he had given her. She said that the answering machine
was manufactured in the United States; when Green deleted his personal
greeting, a prerecorded default message in an American voice appeared. The
three phone numbers turned out to be two reporters Green had spoken to and
someone at Christie’s.
So the
conclusion seems to be that Green, believing that the papers he had wanted
for so long were never going to be available to him, had become unhinged
and garroted himself, setting up the scene to make it appear that he had
been murdered by The American. I have a couple of problems with this
theory. First, it seems possible that Green could have garroted himself by
twisting the shoelace around his neck with the spoon and then lying on top
of the spoon so that it would be held in place by the weight of his body
after he lost consciousness. But then why was the spoon not still in place
when his body was found? Instead, it was no longer wrapped up in the
shoelace but was lying next to his hand. Did he change his mind at the last
minute and undo the garrote? And if so, why didn’t he survive? Second, I’ve
never heard of an answering machine on which the built-in greeting is
“Sorry, not available.” Every one I’ve ever seen defaults to something like
“Please leave a message.”
In any case, if
Green did kill himself because of the papers, the joke was on him. What he
did not know, because it was only made public after his death, was that the
British Library was still getting its bequest from Jean Conan Doyle; the
Christie’s sale consisted of papers that had belonged to her sister-in-law,
Anna Conan Doyle,
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Adrian’s widow. When Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930 he had left piles of papers scattered
around Windlesham, his home in Sussex. After the death of his widow, the
former Jean Leckie, ten years later, they were gathered together by Adrian,
who was his father’s literary executor. In 1966 Adrian asked retired army
major Innes Foley, the son of Conan Doyle’s sister Ida, to come to his
château in Switzerland and help catalogue the papers; Major Foley brought
his ten-year-old son, Charles, along.
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