The Sentence Is Death

Lisa Chakraborty opened the proceedings before Hawthorne could say anything more. ‘Good evening, everybody. I am very happy to welcome you to my apartment tonight as we discuss A Study in Scarlet, written in 1886 by Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle. Before we begin our discussion, let me say how fortunate we are to have a very famous writer with us. Tony has worked on Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War. He has also written many detective stories of his own, for adults and for children. I’m sure Anthony has many interesting insights he can share with us and I do hope we’ll have time to hear him speak. But let’s all begin by giving him a River Court Book Club welcome!’

There was a patter of applause, which was embarrassing with so few people in the room, but I smiled gamely. Hawthorne did not join in.

‘And so let’s move straight away to the adventure that has brought us all together . . .’

I had realised by now that I had no interest whatsoever in what anyone in the room thought of A Study in Scarlet and somehow I wasn’t at all surprised that although they had all enjoyed the BBC television series, and despite what Lisa had said, not a single one of them seemed to like the source material.

‘I was disappointed . . . it’s so clumsily written!’ This was Kenneth Brannigan, kicking off the proceedings. ‘It’s meant to be narrated by Dr Watson. He’s set up as the narrator but halfway through you suddenly find yourself transported to the Sierra Blanco in North America and before you know it, you’ve gone back thirty years before the story even began and you’ve got this ridiculous gang of Mormons—’

‘Doyle really doesn’t like Mormons, does he! I would say his depiction is actually quite racist.’

‘The book was very short. At least it had that going for it.’

‘I didn’t understand the end at all. Why are the last two lines written in Latin?’

‘I didn’t believe a single word of it . . .’

A Study in Scarlet is a book I’ve always loved and I only half listened to the group as, one after another, they weighed in with their opinions. Curiously, having invited me to join the group, no one seemed to notice I was in the room – but that suited me fine. My mind was elsewhere.

Kevin and Hawthorne. The snatch of conversation I’d heard on the twelfth floor: I couldn’t do it without you. What couldn’t he do? Why had Kevin even been in Hawthorne’s flat? I had to know.

About forty minutes into the conversation, and still without having contributed anything, I leaned over to Hawthorne and whispered, ‘Where’s the toilet?’

Lisa Chakraborty had overheard me. ‘It’s down the corridor, second on the left,’ she announced loudly, so that everyone in the room could hear. Silence fell as I got up and left the room. I felt the entire group watching me.

‘That clue on the wall,’ I heard someone say. ‘The word “RACHE” painted in blood. That’s silly really. That would never happen in real life . . .’

I continued down the corridor and the voices faded away, swallowed up by the thick walls and carpets and the excess of furniture. I wasn’t going to the toilet. I was a little ashamed of myself, intruding this way – but I’d made up my mind. I almost certainly wouldn’t be invited back to Lisa’s flat so I would never get another chance like this. I continued past the toilet to the room I had seen Kevin entering from the kitchen. I stood there for a moment, with my ear pressed against the wood. There was no sound coming from inside. Gently, I turned the handle. Somewhere in my head a voice was telling me that this was a terrible thing to be doing. But another voice was already practising my excuse. So sorry. I got the wrong door.

I looked inside.

It might have been a typical teenager’s bedroom apart from the hospital-style bed with the hoist standing next to it, the extra-wide doorway into the bathroom and the strange smell of medicine and disinfectant. It was messy. The lights were low. I might have noticed posters from Star Wars and The Matrix on the walls, piles of books and magazines. But instead my eyes were drawn, first to Kevin, who was sitting at a table with his back to me and who hadn’t heard me come in, and then to the screen of the industrial-sized computer that was in front of him. The computer wasn’t an Apple or any make I recognised. It was about five or six metres away from me and if it had been displaying written data, I would have been unable to read it. Even an image would have been hard to identify. But what was on the screen was obvious to me and it was so unexpected, so bewildering, that for a moment I forgot everything else.

I was looking at a photograph of myself.