The Brothers of Baker Street

by Michael Robertson

  Divers were already attaching the cable as Wembley spoke. Now the police crew started the winch. There was a high-pitched squeal from the cable, and then a deep mechanical groan from the undercarriage of the vehicle, and then a series of rhythmic clanks as the cab began to be pulled slowly toward the shore.

  The black rear bumper became visible first. Then the boot, and then the white placard that showed the ID number for the taxi. And then the yellow-and-black number plate for the vehicle itself:

  WHAMU1.

  Reggie stared at the numbers as they surfaced ever more clearly.

  He knew that Wembley, who obviously had advance knowledge from the divers, was looking at him for a reaction. He didn’t want to give him one. Truth was, he was urgently trying to think of an explanation himself.

  “I believe that is the same number as your client’s cab, is it not?” said Wembley, sounding just a little exasperated with Reggie’s silence.

  “It is the same number,” said Reggie, putting no inflexion on it at all.

  “Any idea how that can be?”

  “Of course I don’t know how that can be,” said Reggie. Then he added, “Unless someone used my client’s number to frame him after the fact. Do we know when this vehicle was deposited in the river?”

  “Not yet,” said Wembley. “But we’ve now got two cabs with the same number, so we know something’s wrong somewhere. And forensics has gotten quite good at these things, especially given the windows were still up when it went in. River water or no, I think we may soon know which of the two cabs was used in the crime, and we’ll also know which one really belongs to your client.”

  Reggie said, “I hope we do.”

  “I know you’ve been picky about who you represent, Heath. More so than most. But this could put your client’s alibi in a different light. And you could have some explaining to do about that CCTV tape. I mean, just how did you know it would show what you needed? Nine times out of ten the CCTV camera doesn’t catch what you want it to, just the back of someone’s arse.”

  “It was a guess.”

  “Damn lucky guess,” said Wembley. “What kind of luck, we’ll see.”

  Reggie could only nod. He watched as the cab was winched slowly from the river, dirty water pouring out from the undercarriage.

  The crew was moving at a painstaking pace. Wembley had been embarrassed at how little information they had gotten from the cab found at Walters’s home, and clearly he intended to make sure this one was done right. It would take hours.

  Reggie thanked Wembley for the heads-up and turned to go back to his car.

  In mid step, he almost fell over someone standing directly behind him. There was a blinding flash, and Reggie instinctively thrust his arm out, grabbing the source of the flash by the collar.

  There was no struggle. Reggie realized almost immediately what the flash had been; it had just been so close to his face that there wasn’t time to think.

  “Probably you should let him loose,” Reggie heard Wembley say.

  Eyes blinking, Reggie relaxed his grip and let go of a photographer from the Daily Sun.

  And standing right next to the photographer was a Daily Sun reporter. It was Emma Swoop—her press badge said so. And he recognized the face as well. It was her, with this photographer close on her heels, who had been in the lead of the press attack outside the courthouse.

  The photographer didn’t want a confrontation, he just wanted photos, and he took a step back from Reggie now. But Reggie could see that Emma—early twenties and no doubt ambitiously at the beginning of her career—felt obliged to say something.

  “Very nice,” she said to Reggie. “Would you now like to take a free swing at me, too, like you did our boss?”

  She spoke in a clipped, perfectly enunciated, rapid-fire speech pattern that gave the listener no time to think. You couldn’t pretend you didn’t hear all that was said, because it was said so perfectly; but it was said so quickly that you had no time to formulate a response as you were hearing it.

  A useful skill, for journalists as well as lawyers. It was the sort of style that one acquired only from the best public schools. She had family money, no doubt, and certainly that family money must regard this sort of grubby journalism as beneath her station. Reggie guessed she must have a chip on her shoulder.

  He knew better than to respond to her question. Anything he said would end up misquoted in the next day’s paper. But he took a free swing anyway.

  “Your parents don’t approve, do they?” he said.

  She recoiled a bit in surprise, looking almost hurt—and in that moment Reggie turned again to leave.

  But first he looked back at Wembley. “Did you invite them?”

  “It wasn’t me,” said Wembley. “But as long as they don’t impede the investigation, I’ve no legal right to keep them out. Or so my superiors have said.”

  Reggie continued on to his car, with the photographer and the reporter running close behind, flashing photos and tossing questions at him along the way. And the young reporter wouldn’t let up. She had the defiantly head-on attitude of a spoiled adolescent freight train.

  “How do you explain a second cab with your client’s license number? Do you regret getting your client released? Do you feel any sense of responsibility for this new murder?”

  Emma Swoop had assessed Reggie’s sore points every bit as well as he had assessed hers. So much so that he actually considered responding to her questions.

  He looked back at her. Her eyes lit up with journalistic anticipation. And Reggie caught himself just in time and said nothing.

  He got in his Jag, shut the door quickly, put it in reverse to avoid running the Daily Sun duo over, and then, fishtailing just a little in the mud, he fled the scene.

  He knew the headlines in the morning would be flaming, more so than anything he had yet seen. The Daily Sun would not wait for the forensics; it would start whipping up the firestorm now.

  Reggie rang his client’s number as he drove from Lots Road. No response. He rang Darla’s number as well. No answer there either, which was a little annoying—she should be making herself more available. He left another message on her machine.

  Then he drove on to New Scotland Yard, to do what he knew he should have done at the outset—look at the tapes himself.

  At the Yard, a cautious and watchful evidence clerk made the alibi CCTV tape available to Reggie in a small, overly air-conditioned viewing room.

  Reggie reviewed the tape repeatedly, but he could find nothing to indicate that it had been tampered with in any way—no breaks, no flickers, no repeated or out-of-place content. Besides, the chain of evidence was intact from the moment the police had taken the tape from the camera to the moment they had delivered it to Langdon at the Crown Prosecution Service. And as sneaky as Langdon was, even he would not falsify evidence. It wouldn’t be worth the risk to his career.

  So the tape was real and valid; that was the working presumption. But there were two cabs with the same number, and no proof—at least not yet—of which one Walters had been driving. At this moment, Walters had no alibi.

  And aside from the damage done to his client’s defense, Reggie knew that the certainty with which he had pressed the issue at the preliminary hearing would make it look now as though he had had advance knowledge of what the tape would show—as if, in fact, he had been complicit in arranging that one cab be at that location at that time for the express purpose of establishing an alibi for the other.

  He had no good answer for that. It simply would not do to say that he had received a tip in a letter addressed to Sherlock Holmes. He needed the actual source of the information. He needed to know who had sent the letter.

  Reggie left New Scotland Yard and drove back to Baker Street Chambers. Lois greeted him and told him, quite apologetically, there were no messages—not from the solicitor, or from the client, or from anyone else.

  Reggie went to his chambers office, unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk,
and took out the letter to Sherlock Holmes that had provided the CCTV tip.

  There was no return address on either the letter or the envelope it had arrived in. The postmark was from Bath. The letter was printed on what looked like very common printer paper with what looked like very common laser-jet ink.

  He studied it for nearly half an hour, but could infer no clue to its origin. This was the sort of thing that Nigel liked to deal with, and Reggie wished now that he had just sent this letter on to him when it first arrived.

  Or, better, that he had just ignored it entirely. Too late for that now. Reggie locked the letter back in his desk.

  The only thing he could be reasonably certain of was that whoever wrote the letter must have at some point been near the location of the CCTV camera—otherwise, they could not have known about either the camera or the cab.

  Reggie exited his chambers, got in the XJS, and drove to the East End.

  It was early evening when he reached the intersection at Lower Clapton Road. It was a major thoroughfare, but the neighborhood itself was just a mix of garment factories and residential blocks of flats, and small take-away restaurants and launderettes to service them.

  The evening commute was still in process, and heavy with bus traffic and private autos—not so many people taking taxis in this part of the city.

  Reggie parked and walked to the corner, craning his neck upward, looking for the camera.

  It didn’t take long to find it. The deployment of CCTV cameras in London was mainly in dodgy public areas—including bus shelters on streets that seemed to need the supervision. This camera, mounted on a traffic signal, had a field of view that included the bus shelter and probably an additional fifty feet or so.

  There was a convenience store within just a few yards of the bus shelter. Of the establishments within a reasonably close line of sight, it was the only one that could possibly have been open at the time Walters’s cab was caught on tape.

  Reggie approached the shopkeeper, paused for the loud diesel whine of an approaching double-decker to subside, then introduced himself. Two minutes later, another bus rolled up, and the conversation paused again.

  “Is it always like this?” said Reggie.

  “Always,” said the shopkeeper. “Day and night.”

  Reggie thought about that.

  “Excuse me just one moment,” he said.

  Reggie went back to the corner where the camera was positioned. He looked at the angle of it, as yet another bus rolled in, stopped, and then moved on.

  The extraordinary thing—given the frequency and height of the double-deckers, obscuring a clear view of anything on the other side of them from the camera—was that the camera had been able to capture the cab number at all. What incredible luck that had been, to catch a Black Cab license number without a bus or lorry getting in the way.

  Still, it could happen. Obviously, because it had happened.

  Reggie walked back to the shopkeeper.

  “You’re open late here?”

  “Till midnight, usually.”

  “Were you here the night of the murders in Chelsea?

  The shopkeeper thought about it. “Four, five nights ago, was it?” Then he nodded. “I was here. Pretty much always am.”

  “Notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  “What would I notice here about murders in the West End?”

  “Nothing, of course. I just mean anything at all out of the ordinary.”

  “No. Everything was … ordinary.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “Now, the night after, that was memorable.”

  Reggie stopped and came back.

  “In what way?”

  “A real stunner came in. Lovely little chippy, never seen her before. She got out of a cab right over there. Great legs. She walked to the corner, just sort of looking up, kind of like you did just now. Then she went over to the bus shelter and studied the schedule. I think she wanted to write something down, but her pen wouldn’t work. My good luck, I thought, because then she came right in to my shop to buy one of these fine implements.”

  The shopkeeper held up a cheap touristy ballpoint, fashioned to resemble a tiny plastic Big Ben.

  “I gave it to her free. She was that much of a looker.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I asked if there was anything else I could do for her, if you know what I mean.” He laughed. “She gave me a look that would freeze hell over. I mean, I’ve had my share of turndowns, but to get that kind of look—and from the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen—that was something. Then she went back into the cab, and away she went.”

  “Green eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of green?”

  The shopkeeper gave Reggie a blank stare.

  “Green, like I said. I’m not an optometrist.”

  “You would recognize her if you saw her again?”

  The shopkeeper grinned. “You bet I would. I recorded every bit of that bird up here, for replays as needed.”

  “Think you might recognize the driver of the cab if you saw him again?”

  The shopkeeper shook his head. “That’s not who I was looking at.”

  Reggie turned to leave. The possible identity of the stunning woman was so disturbing that there seemed little point in asking anything else.

  But then he remembered the most obvious question:

  “One more thing. Ever happen to write a letter to Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Say again?”

  “Have you ever written a letter to Sherlock Holmes? Especially in the last few days or so?”

  The shopkeeper gave Reggie another dumbfounded stare.

  “Or do you know anyone who has?” said Reggie.

  “Are you daft? Or is it just you think I am?”

  “No more so than most. Thanks for your time.”

  Reggie went back to his car, got his mobile, and rang Darla’s number again.

  It seemed to ring interminably, but the answering service did not pick up. Then the phone switched over to another line and there were several more rings.

  And then Darla picked up. It was her; the call was staticky, probably her mobile, but it was clearly her, there was no mistaking her voice. The tenor of it, though, was one Reggie hadn’t heard from her before. She was worried.

  “He called me,” she said.

  “Who did?”

  “Our client. Didn’t he ring you as well?”

  “No.”

  “I told him to call you at chambers. You’re not there?”

  “No. I’m at the intersection of Lower Clapton Road and Newick. Do you know that intersection?”

  “Yes. That’s where he was seen on camera, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And I just had a chat with a shopkeeper near the CCTV camera.”

  There was a pause. “A shopkeeper?”

  “Yes, a shopkeeper. At the news agents. Where they sell tourist pens. Pens shaped like Big Ben, for tourists, if they ever get any, and for people who forget theirs.”

  Another pause. Then, “Why in God’s name are you telling me about a shopkeeper and pens?” She was sounding frantic now.

  “You have no idea?”

  “I am trying to tell you about our client, and you are prattling about bloody pens!”

  “Where are you?” said Reggie

  “I’m on my way to his place now. I’m only minutes away. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Whose place?”

  “Our client’s, for God’s sake. Will you meet me there?”

  Reggie tried to take a moment to think about that, but when he did not respond instantly, she said:

  “Please meet me there,” she said, sounding on the verge of tears, whether from frustration with Reggie or from something else was hard to tell. “I don’t want to confront him alone.”

  And then there was a beep and the connection was gone.

  Reggie started the XJS and drove south.

  The anger he had been
feeling toward Darla just moments before was gone. Certainly she had not found a way to falsify evidence for a client and make Reggie the fall guy for it. He was churlish to even have begun thinking along those lines.

  Now, as Reggie sped toward Stepney, he wasn’t angry at her. He was afraid for her.

  Twenty minutes later he turned the corner onto Locksley Street in Stepney.

  It was night, not terribly late, but there was little activity on the street, and all of the townhomes—some of them recently renovated, and others quite decrepit—were lit only weakly by lamps on some of the front porches.

  Reggie pulled up to Walters’s brownstone, at the more decrepit end of the street. He saw that Darla had still not arrived.

  He got out of his car and looked up and down the street. There was no traffic at all approaching from either direction. There were only a few parked cars, and none of them visibly occupied.

  Darla wasn’t here. But Walters’s Black Cab was.

  There was no point in waiting for her to arrive. Reggie walked up to the unlit front of Walters’s townhome, and then paused. It hadn’t been obvious from the street, but the front door was ajar. And there was a sound coming from inside—an intermittent, high-pitched mechanical screech, and then, behind that, a sort of rhythmic chug.

  Reggie stood on the porch and knocked, without pushing the door fully open. He knocked again, and then called out for Walters. No answer.

  Now Reggie pushed on the door. The sound continued; it was coming from farther inside the home.

  He called out again for Walters. He stepped just inside the doorway, waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark interior, and looked about.

  Reggie could see two doorways from the living room; one was direct to the kitchen, and the other was to the hallway.

  The living room was what one would expect for a single working-class male—inexpensive, but as garish as possible to impress the ladies.

  Most of the furnishing money had been spent on the black leather couch, and the surround-sound stereo, and a two-person dining table with a top of blue-black glass that reflected the little bit of light from the neighbor’s porch.

  There was an opened bottle of wine on the dining table, though Reggie could see no wineglasses.