THE BONE-HEADED LEAGUE
Lee Child
For once the FBI did the right thing: it sent the Anglophile to England. To London, more specifically, for a three-year posting at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Pleasures there were extensive, and duties there were light. Most agents ran background checks on visa applicants and would-be immigrants and kept their ears to the ground on international matters, but I liaised with London’s Metropolitan Police when American nationals were involved in local crimes, either as victims or witnesses or perpetrators.
I loved every minute of it, as I knew I would. I love that kind of work, I love London, I love the British way of life, I love the theater, the culture, the pubs, the pastimes, the people, the buildings, the Thames, the fog, the rain. Even the soccer. I was expecting it to be all good, and it was all good.
Until.
I had spent a damp Wednesday morning in February helping out, as I often did, by rubber-stamping immigration paperwork, and then I was saved by a call from a sergeant at Scotland Yard, asking on behalf of his inspector that I attend a crime scene north of Wigmore Street and south of Regent’s Park. On the 200 block of Baker Street, more specifically, which was enough to send a little jolt through my Anglophile heart, because every Anglophile knows that Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address was 221B Baker Street. It was quite possible I would be working right underneath the great detective’s fictional window.
And I was, as well as underneath many other windows, because the Met’s crime scenes are always fantastically elaborate. We have CSI on television, where they solve everything in forty-three minutes with DNA, and the Met has scene-of-crime officers, who spend forty-three minutes closing roads and diverting pedestrians, before spending forty-three minutes shrugging themselves into Tyvek bodysuits and Tyvek booties and Tyvek hoods, before spending forty-three minutes stringing KEEP OUT tape between lampposts and fence railings, before spending forty-three minutes erecting white tents and shrouds over anything of any interest whatsoever. The result was that I found a passable imitation of a traveling circus already in situ when I got there.
There was a cordon, of course, several layers deep, and I got through them all by showing my Department of Justice credentials and by mentioning the inspector’s name, which was Bradley Rose. I found the man himself stumping around on the damp sidewalk some yards south of the largest white tent. He was a short man, but substantial, with no tie and snappy eyeglasses and a shaved head. He was an old-fashioned London thief-taker, softly spoken but at the same time impatient with bullshit, which his own department provided in exasperating quantity.
He jerked his thumb at the tent and said, “Dead man.”
I nodded. Obviously I wasn’t surprised. Not even the Met uses tents and Tyvek for purse snatching.
He jerked his thumb again and said, “American.”
I nodded again. I knew Rose was quite capable of working that out from dentistry or clothing or shoes or hairstyle or body shape, but equally I knew he would not have involved me officially without some more definitive indicator. And as if answering the unasked question he pulled two plastic evidence bags from his pocket. One contained an opened-out blue U.S. passport, and the other contained a white business card. He handed both bags to me and jerked his thumb again and said, “From his pockets.”
I knew better than to touch the evidence itself. I turned the bags this way and that and examined both items through the plastic. The passport photograph showed a sullen man, pale of skin, with hooded eyes that looked both evasive and challenging. I glanced up and Rose said, “It’s probably him. The boat matches the photo, near enough.”
Boat was a contraction of boat race, which was Cockney rhyming slang for face. Apples and pears, stairs; trouble and strife, wife; plates of meat, feet; and so on. I asked, “What killed him?”
“Knife under the ribs,” Rose said.
The name on the passport was Ezekiah Hopkins.
Rose said, “Did you ever hear of a name like that before?”
“Hopkins?” I said.
“No, Ezekiah.”
I looked up at the windows above me and said, “Yes, I did.”
The place of birth was recorded as Pennsylvania, USA.
I gave the bagged passport back to Rose and looked at the business card. It was impossible to be certain without handling it, but it seemed to be a cheap item. Thin stock, no texture, plain print, no embossing. It was the kind of thing anyone can order online for a few pounds a thousand. The legend said HOPKINS, ROSS, & SPAULDING, as if there were some kind of partnership of that name. There was no indication of what business they were supposed to be in. There was a phone number on the card, with a 610 area code. Eastern Pennsylvania, but not Philly. The address on the card said simply LEBANON, PA. East of Harrisburg, as I recalled. Correct for the 610 code. I had never been there.
“Did you call the number?” I asked.
“That’s your job,” Rose said.
“No one will answer,” I said. “A buck gets ten it’s phony.”
Rose gave me a long look and took out his phone. He said, “It better be phony. I don’t have an international calling plan. If someone answers in America it’ll cost me an arm and a leg.” He pressed 001, then 610, then the next seven digits. From six feet away I heard the triumphant little phone company triplet that announced a number that didn’t work. Rose clicked off and gave me the look again.
“How did you know?” he asked.
I said, “Omne ignotum pro magnifico.”
“What’s that?”
“Latin.”
“For what?”
“Every unexplained thing seems magnificent. In other words, a good magician doesn’t reveal his tricks.”
“You’re a magician now?”
“I’m an FBI special agent,” I said. I looked up at the windows again. Rose followed my gaze and said, “Yes, I know. Sherlock Holmes lived here.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t exist. He was made up. So were these buildings. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s day Baker Street only went up to about number eighty. Or one hundred, perhaps. The rest of it was a country road. Marylebone was a separate little village a mile away.”
“I was born in Brixton,” Rose said. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Conan Doyle made up the number two twenty-one,” I said. “Like movies and TV make up the phone numbers you see on the screen. And the license plates on the cars. So they don’t cause trouble for real people.”
“What’s your point?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But you’re going to have to let me have the passport. When you’re done with it, I mean. Because it’s probably phony, too.”
“What’s going on here?”
“Where do you live?”
“Hammersmith,” he said.
“Does Hammersmith have a library?”
“Probably.”
“Go borrow a book. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The second story. It’s called ‘The Red-Headed League.’ Read it tonight, and I’ll come see you in the morning.”
Visiting Scotland Yard is always a pleasure. It’s a slice of history. It’s a slice of the future, too. Scotland Yard is a very modern place these days. Plenty of information technology. Plenty of people using it.
I found Rose in his office, which was nothing more than open space defended by furniture. Like a kid’s fort. He said, “I got the book but I haven’t read it yet. I’m going to read it now.”
He pointed to a fat paperback volume on the desk. So to give him time I took Ezekiah Hopkins’s passport back to the embassy and had it tested. It was a fake, but very good, except for some blunders so obvious they had to be deliberate. Like taunts, or provocations. I got back to Scotland Yard and Rose said, “I read the story.”
“And?”
“All those names were in it. Ezekiah Hopkins, and Ross, and Spaulding. And Lebanon, Pennsylvania, too. And Sherlock Holmes said the same Latin you did. He was an educated
man, apparently.”
“And what was the story about?”
“Decoy,” Rose said. “A ruse was developed whereby a certain Mr. Wilson was regularly decoyed away from his legitimate place of business for a predictable period of time, so that an ongoing illegal task of some sensitivity could be accomplished in his absence.”
“Very good,” I said. “And what does the story tell us?”
“Nothing,” Rose said. “Nothing at all. No one was decoying me away from my legitimate place of business. That was my legitimate place of business. I go wherever dead people go.”
“And?”
“And if they were trying to decoy me away, they wouldn’t leave clues beforehand, would they? They wouldn’t spell it out for me in advance. I mean, what would be the point of that?”
“There might be a point,” I said.
“What kind?”
I asked, “If this was just some foreigner stabbed to death on Baker Street, what would you do next?”
“Not very much, to be honest.”
“Exactly. Just one of those things. But now what are you going to do next?”
“I’m going to find out who’s yanking my chain. First step, I’m going back on scene to make sure we didn’t miss any other clues.”
“Quod erat demonstrandum,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Latin.”
“For what?”
“They’re decoying you out. They’ve succeeded in what they set out to do.”
“Decoying me out from what? I don’t do anything important in the office.”
He insisted on going. We headed back to Baker Street. The tents were still there. The tape was still fluttering. We found no more clues. So we studied the context instead, physically, looking for the kind of serious crimes that could occur if law enforcement was distracted. We didn’t find anything. That part of Baker Street had the official Sherlock Holmes museum, and the waxworks, and a bunch of stores of no real consequence, and a few banks, but the banks were all bust anyway. Blowing one up would be doing it a considerable favor.
Then Rose wanted a book that explained the various Sherlock Holmes references in greater detail, so I took him to the British Library in Bloomsbury. He spent an hour with an annotated compendium. He got sidetracked by the geographic errors Conan Doyle had made. He started to think the story he had read could be approached obliquely, as if it were written in code.
Altogether we spent the rest of the week on it. The Wednesday, the Thursday, and the Friday. Easily thirty hours. We got nowhere. We made no progress. But nothing happened. None of Rose’s other cases unraveled, and London’s crime did not spike. There were no consequences. None at all.
So as the weeks passed both Rose and I forgot all about the matter. And Rose never thought about it again, as far as I know. I did, of course. Because three months later it became clear that it was I who had been decoyed. My interest had been piqued, and I had spent thirty hours doing fun Anglophile things. They knew that would happen, naturally. They had planned well. They knew I would be called out to the dead American, and they knew how to stage the kinds of things that would set me off like the Energizer Bunny. Three days. Thirty hours. Out of the building, unable to offer help with the rubber-stamping, not there to notice them paying for their kids’ college educations by rubber-stamping visas that should have been rejected instantly. Which is how four particular individuals made it to the States, and which is why three hundred people died in Denver, and which is why I—unable, in the cold light of day, to prove my naive innocence—sit alone in Leavenworth in Kansas, where by chance one of the few books the prison allows is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Previously a television director, union organizer, theater technician, and law student, Lee Child is the worldwide number one bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series. Born in England, Child now divides his time between New York and the south of France. He clearly remembers his interest in the matter at hand being sparked by reading in his grandmother’s Reader’s Digest an article about Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical school professor, often supposed to be the model for the character and therefore in Child’s opinion the “real” Sherlock Holmes.
“The Red-Headed League” appeared in 1892 and was collected as part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
THE STARTLING EVENTS IN THE ELECTRIFIED CITY
(A MANUSCRIPT SIGNED “JOHN WATSON,” IN THE COLLECTION OF THOMAS PERRY)
During the many years while I was privileged to know the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and, I fancy, serve as his closest confidant, he often permitted me to make a record of the events in which we played some part, and have it printed in the periodicals of the day. It would be false modesty to deny that the publication of these cases, beginning in 1887, added something to his already wide reputation.
There were a number of cases presented to him by people responding to the new, larger reputation my amateurish scribbles brought upon him. There were others on which I accompanied him that I have never intended to submit for publication during my lifetime or his. The event in Buffalo is a bit of both. It is a case that came to him from across the Atlantic because his reputation had been carried past the borders of this kingdom between the covers of The Strand Magazine. And yet it is a case deserving of such discretion and secrecy that when I finish this narrative, I will place the manuscript in a locked box with several others that I do not intend to be seen by the public until time and mortality have cured them of their power to harm.
It was the twenty-fifth of August in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death. I was with Holmes that afternoon in the rooms that he and I had shared at 221B Baker Street since Holmes returned to London in 1894. I was glad I had closed my medical office early that day, because he seemed to be at a loss, in a bout of melancholy, which I silently diagnosed as a result of inactivity. It was a day of unusually fine late summer weather after a week of dismal rainstorms, and at last I managed to get him to extinguish the tobacco in his pipe and agree to stroll with me and take the air. We had already picked up our hats and canes from the rack and begun to descend the stairs, when there came a loud ringing of the bell.
Holmes called out, “Hold, Mrs. Hudson. I’m on sentry duty. I’ll see who goes there.” He rapidly descended the seventeen steps to the door and opened it. I heard a man say, “My name is Frederick Allen. Am I speaking to Mr. Holmes?”
“Come in, sir,” said Holmes. “You have come a long way.”
“Thank you,” the man said, and followed Holmes up the stairs to Holmes’s sitting room. He looked around and I could see his eyes taking in the studied disorder of Holmes’s life. His eyes lingered particularly on the papers spread crazily on the desk, and the very important few papers that were pinned to the mantel by a dagger.
“This is my good friend, Dr. John Watson.”
The stranger shook my hand heartily. “I’ve heard of you, Doctor, and read some of your writings.”
“Pardon, Mr. Allen,” Holmes said at this juncture. “But I wish to use this moment for an experiment. Watson, what would you say is our guest’s profession?”
“I’d guess he was a military man,” I said. “He has the physique and the bearing, the neatly trimmed hair and mustache. And I saw the way he looked at the manner in which you’ve arranged your rooms. He’s a commissioned officer who has inspected quarters before.”
“Excellent, my friend. Any further conjecture?”
“He’s American, of course. Probably late of the conflict with Spain. American army, then, judging from his age and excellent manners, with a rank of captain or above.”
Mr. Allen said, “Remarkable, Dr. Watson. You have missed in only one particular.”
“Yes,” said Holmes. “The branch of service. Mr. Allen is a naval officer. When I heard his accent, I too knew he was American, and said he’d come a long way, implying he’d just come off a trans-Atlantic voyage. He didn’t deny it. And we all know that the weather the pa
st week has been positively vile. Yet he didn’t think it worth a mention, because he’s spent half his life at sea.” He nodded to Allen. “I’m sorry to waste your time, sir. Watson and I play these games. What brings you to us, Captain Allen?”
“I’m afraid it’s a matter of the utmost urgency and secrecy, gentlemen.”
Holmes strolled to the window and looked down at the street. “I assure you that I have been engaged in matters of trust many times before. And Dr. Watson has been with me every step in most of these affairs. He is not only an accomplished Royal Medical Officer who has been through the Afghan campaigns, he is also a man of the utmost discretion.”
“I believe you, Mr. Holmes. I have permission from the highest levels to include Dr. Watson in what I’m about to impart.”
“Excellent.”
“No doubt you know that in my country, in the city of Buffalo, New York, the Pan-American Exposition opened on the first of May. It’s been a highly publicized affair.”
“Yes, of course,” Holmes said. “A celebration of the future, really, wouldn’t you say? Calling the world together to witness the wonders of electricity.”
“That’s certainly one of the aspects that have made us most proud. It was hoped that President McKinley would visit in June, but he had to postpone because of Mrs. McKinley’s ill health. At least that was the public story.”
“If there’s a public story, then there must be a private story,” said Holmes.
“Yes. There were indications that there might be a plot on the president’s life.”
“Good heavens,” I said.
“I know how shocking it must be to you. Your country is renowned for its stability. Not since Charles the First in 1649 has there been the violent death of a head of state, and when your late, beloved Queen Victoria’s reign ended a few months ago, it had lasted nearly sixty-four years. In my country, during just the past forty years, as you know, there have been a civil war that killed six hundred thousand men, and two presidents assassinated.”
“It’s not a record that would instill complacency,” I admitted, but Holmes seemed to be lost in thought.
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