Priscilla West left Oxford for London in haste, increasingly fearful for her brother's welfare. She arrived at his luxury flat at noon and rang the bell. No one answered. The police were called and broke down the front door. Mrs West waited anxiously downstairs as the officers searched the flat. Their footsteps stopped in the bedroom.
Richard Lancelyn Green was found lying dead in his double bed. He was surrounded by stuffed toys and a bottle of gin. Around his neck was a shoelace in which a wooden kitchen spoon, which had been used to twist the cord tight, was still entangled. The 50-year-old millionaire bachelor had been garroted.
As Mrs West and other family and friends gathered at a thanksgiving service for Lancelyn Green yesterday, they were no closer to knowing how and why he died. Their last hope now seems to rest with email correspondence sent during his last hours which, when accessed, may provide a clue to his state of mind.
This most curious and macabre demise was instantly linked in many imaginations to Lancelyn Green's lifelong obsession with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was the world's leading authority on the Sherlock Holmes creator and owner of a precious collection of books and artifacts. Prior to the official inquest, Westminster coroner Dr Paul Knapman asked Holmes aficionados if they could find any incident in the 'canon' which Lancelyn Green may have been seeking to re-enact that could have caused his asphyxiation. He was told there is only a single glancing reference to a 'garroter', who is an agent of the Victorian sleuth's arch enemy, Professor Moriarty.
The coroner concluded suicide was the most likely explanation, but acknowledged that there was no note, that garroting was a painful way to kill oneself and that it had therefore been a 'very unusual death'. Murder could not be ruled out. His open verdict failed to solve the mystery which, unlike the Great Detective's casebook, has festered since 27 March without a neat accounting to astound Dr Watson.
Clouding attempts at rational enquiry are vivid conspiracy theories and disquieting talk of 'the curse of Conan Doyle', a suggestion that people connected with the author, a committed spiritualist who died 74 years ago, seem unusually vulnerable to death or mental breakdown. Among them were Conan Doyle's sons, Adrian and Denis, who inherited a substantial legacy but squandered it before both died at surprisingly early ages.
Lancelyn Green was a loner. He was gay and never had a live-in partner. His last known lover was Lawrence Keen, around 20 years his junior. They had known each for eight years, the last six as Platonic friends. Keen, a carer for elderly people, was the last person to see him alive. He told the inquest the pair had been out for a meal during which Lancelyn Green drank the lion's share of a litre of wine before they had gone to his Kensington home for coffee. Lancelyn Green insisted that they talk in the garden 'because the whole house was bugged'. Keen later left the premises.
Keen denied ever having talked to his friend about using strangulation as a form of 'deviant sexual behaviour', which had been suggested as a possible cause of death. Last week he declined to talk to The Observer .
The dead scholar, an Oxford graduate and son of the children's author Roger Lancelyn Green, was remembered yesterday at Poulton Hall, the family seat since before the Norman Conquest, in Lower Bebington on the Wirral. A thanksgiving service at the family's parish church was attended by 150 people from all over the world, including American 'Sherlockians', the British ambassador to Hungary and members of the Sherlock Holmes Society. There were hymns, prayers, trumpeters from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and, of course, readings from the work of Conan Doyle.
An inevitable topic of conversation was the sale for nearly £1 million at Christie's last week of a 'lost archive' of 3,000 letters, notes and drafts for books providing an insight into Conan Doyle's life. Dominated by private American bidders, the lots included correspondence with family and with figures including Winston Churchill, PG Wodehouse, Theodore Roosevelt and Oscar Wilde. What everyone who spoke to Lancelyn Green shortly before his death agrees upon is that he was deeply troubled by the sale.
With his life's work building towards the ultimate Conan Doyle biography, Lancelyn Green was tormented by the prospect of the collection dispersing across the US instead of going to the British Library, where he and the public could access it. The library does have a bequest from Conan Doyle's daughter, Dame Jean Bromet, but the Christie's sale consisted of separate papers that belonged to Anna Conan Doyle, widow of the author's son, Adrian.
Right until the end, Lancelyn Green was seeking to prove that there had been a muddle between the two Conan Doyle wills, and that much of the material sold last week should have belonged to Dame Jean and therefore to the library. He wrote to Christie's in a vain attempt to block the auction, whose beneficiaries included Charles Foley, great-nephew of Sir Arthur. But he was unable to produce any satisfactory evidence and the British Library said it had obtained assurances from the executors of Dame Jean's will and the consignors of the Christie's sale regarding the provenance of the material.
Priscilla West, breaking her silence for the first time since the inquest into her brother's death, told The Observer: 'I spoke to him several times during the week before he died. He was clearly very stressed about these papers. He made clear to me he felt some papers going on sale at Christie's should be in the British Library.
'He became delusional. He said he felt the world was "Kafkaesque". Certain people were doing what he wouldn't expect, certain people were not doing what he'd expect and so on. He said he hadn't slept for several nights. At one point he said he wasn't sure I was me. It was because I was very concerned about his state of mind that I went to see him on the Saturday.'
Despite her concerns for his state of mind at the time, Ms West, 52, a writer from Watlington, Oxfordshire, said: 'The coroner's open verdict is the right one. Richard was very disturbed but I wouldn't have said suicidal. I have one or two recent files from his computer and they are models of lucid argument. Just occasionally there is a sense of helplessness about it all.
'We are trying to see if there is anything in his email. He was afraid of something. It was nebulous and we do wonder if his email will reveal what it was. He was proud of his scholarship and could defend it, but he was a shy man who didn't like personal attacks. It's possible somebody said something which got to him. He had a Hotmail account and it's now in the hands of MSN [Microsoft Network].'
Her brother, Scirard Lancelyn Green, 54, said: 'It doesn't seem like suicide in that there's no note. He was very organised and tidy. I can't believe he would have done something without leaving some kind of evidence. It's entirely possible [he was murdered], that's all we can say.'
Shortly before his death, Lancelyn Green, a former chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, contacted a national newspaper and warned: 'Something might happen to me.'
A friend, Owen Dudley Edwards, 65, a reader at Edinburgh University and author of The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, said: 'I don't think my friend committed suicide. He was absolutely devoted to his mother and he would have done anything rather than put her through the incredible grief she's been caused. Not all the circumstances of the death are consistent. He had finished a dinner with wine, yet when he was found dead there was a bottle of gin with him. You don't combine the two and he wouldn't have done so.
'Nothing can be said with any certainty, but the balance of probability is in favour of his being murdered. It is possible he might have been influential in preventing the sale from going ahead. That is the most obvious motive for murder, but there are others we might not know of. It is possible somebody who had something to fear might have decided he was better out of the way. We can't go any further than that.'
But Nicholas Utechin, editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal , who knew Lancelyn Green for 40 years, said: 'I have no doubt it was suicide due to his mind being deranged. I spoke to him by phone for half-an-hour a few hours before his death. He seemed to be accusing me of conniving and conspiring. At one point I said: "Richard, you're losing it." He called up a few people because he thought people were out to get him and he was being bugged. I do not for one minute think there was anything in the suggestions of bugging or being followed. The coroner said take no notice of conspiracy theories.'
Among the wilder theories is that Lancelyn Green feared he was being spied on by the Pentagon. The inquest heard from Lawrence Keen that the scholar believed 'an American was trying to bring him down'. One friend, who wished to remain nameless, said Lancelyn Green had become paranoid about Jon Lellenberg, a policy strategy analyst in the office of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Lellenberg, a respected author of books about Holmes and prominent figure in the US appreciation society The Baker Street Irregulars, contributed to Christie's catalogue for the sale and was in London for a meeting with the Sherlock Holmes Society in the week of Lancelyn Green's most erratic behaviour.
Speaking from his home in Washington, Lellenberg said: 'I have no knowledge of why he was paranoid about it. It would be silly and delusional to be concerned about me because the work I do has nothing to do with intelligence and surveillance at any level. The last time I met or spoke to Richard was a year ago in Chicago at the dedication of a collection at the Newberry Library. He was fine and gave a terrific talk. He was almost bubbly.'
Scotland Yard said it would reopen the case of Lancelyn Green's death only if fresh evidence came to light. Unlike the papers last week, his own vast collection of 'Doyleiana' will be donated to a public institution. Whatever the ongoing speculation about his peculiar end, Owen Dudley Edwards said his friend would have little sympathy with talk of a 'curse'. 'Richard was very sceptical about the supernatural. He had no truck with spiritualism at all. The "curse of Conan Doyle" is bloody nonsense invented by drunken journalists to save themselves from doing a day's work.'
