Baker Street Irregulars

by Michael A. Ventrella

  “Bacon?”

  “Janie…”

  “That’s it, Russ. The last bloody straw. First that business with Karen and now this.” Janie reached for the demerara sugar on the counter and defiantly plonked a teaspoon of it in her coffee. “You know what?” she asked her boyfriend in a tone of voice that essentially said, “you’re fired,” “You’re a liar and a perv, I don’t need to watch my bloody weight, and you need to have a good, hard think about yourself. While you’re moving your crap out of my flat. I bet you’re not even studying film. Is he?” She turned her ferocious glare onto the man at the counter.

  “No,” Sherlock assured her.

  “Thought not.” She shoved a lid onto the paper cup and stormed out, leaving Russ alone at the till.

  Russ spared a filthy look for the lanky mongrel at the counter, took off his unnecessary glasses, and retreated, leaving his undrunk, unwanted coffee behind.

  “Shame to waste it,” said Sherlock, sipping the abandoned espresso.

  “Could’ve waited till they’d paid, Lockie,” complained John mildly.

  “They’ll tell their friends what happened, and we’ll get at least a dozen more coming in to see if I can predict their coffee order,” Sherlock said. “She’ll be right.” He took the coffee to his corner table where he was working on an essay.

  John flicked a rubber band at his friend, housemate, and business partner, then resumed his barista duties.

  • • •

  At the corner opposite Sherlock’s claim at The Sign of Four, one of John’s regulars made the place her own. Kylie Mitchell had worked there six hours a day, every day, including lunch, for two months so far. An ancient leather-bound diary was at her left hand; a fresh new Moleskine, in which she wrote furiously, on the right. Propped invariably in front of her was an iPad showing an image of the page she was presently studying.

  Sherlock Holmes knew at least a dozen things about this resident coffee addict. He enumerated them that evening with John.

  “Victorian born and bred,” Sherlock insisted while John whipped up smashed avocado and feta on a black seed bagel for supper. “She owns a chocolate-point Siamese cat, is allergic to nuts, and thinks she can sing like Jessica Mauboy. She can’t, by the way.”

  John nodded, used to the way Sherlock effortlessly read their customers. John could see where some of the conclusions came from, though mostly he confined himself to remembering their coffee orders. Doc Caffeine, the staff sometimes called him: he could fix what ailed you with the best-poured shots in Melbourne. Kylie Mitchell, for example, habitually started with a double-shot espresso and a latte chaser, paced herself with two more flat whites, and finished with a chai latte. She left vibrating like a bloody mosquito.

  Sherlock was still talking. “…a Melbourne University graduate in nanotechnology…”

  “See her in class, did you?” John deftly squeezed lemon juice over the open bagel, then flung on a bit of homegrown mint.

  “It’s a deduction, John. I haven’t studied nanotechnology, or been to the attendant electives.”

  “Yet.”

  “Yet. Let me finish pharmacology first, and I’ll see if nanobots are interesting by then. Do you want to hear the rest of this?”

  “Sorry, mate. Go on.”

  “The handwritten journals she’s scrutinizing are over a hundred years old…”

  “Historian?” John plonked the plates, then a bottle of Sriracha sauce, on the table.

  “Family historian. She has a family tree at the back of the Moleskine she periodically unfolds to check. Her name is at the bottom.”

  “A great-grand-uncle’s scandalous memoirs, then?” Two glasses of Tasmanian Pagan pear cider joined the food and condiments.

  “Grand-aunt more likely, judging from the handwriting. She’s comparing the source documents with scans of the matching pages, looking for discrepancies and hidden elements.”

  John dropped into a chair beside Sherlock. “Maybe she’s looking for a code,” he suggested in melodramatic sotto voce. He twisted the end of his well-groomed moustache to add a bit more dramatic flair to the pronouncement.

  Sherlock sighed. “She’s found the code, John. She’s trying to decipher it.”

  John looked surprised at having got one right for a change. “You going to help her with that?”

  “Maybe,” Sherlock hedged. “I want to see how far she gets.”

  “Fair enough. It’s sometimes better to wait until you’re asked. We know what happened last time you tried to finish Mrs. H’s crossword puzzle for her, don’t we?”

  “Our chef has surprisingly sharp skills as a tea towel snapper.”

  “Worst bosses in Melbourne, she called us. Lumping me in with you, I might add.” John clicked his tongue and his dog, a blue heeler named Gough Whitlam, trotted over for a treat of bacon rind.

  “You’ll make him fat as a wombat,” Sherlock complained.

  “As befits a great statesman,” John countered. “And don’t go fat-shaming the dog.”

  Later, while John wasn’t looking, Sherlock sneaked another piece of bacon to the canine prime minister. It never hurt to keep on his good side.

  • • •

  John had chosen the location for The Sign of Four carefully, wanting to avoid the cliché of the common Melbourne laneway locale. As a result, the café wasn’t Melbourne’s most obscurely located coffee house. It overlooked a main thoroughfare from the first floor, although the entrance was via seventeen steps from an alley full of camping shops.

  The reason for the odd name (not even the oddest in this city) was contained in the coffee molecule painted in sepia tones on the back wall, and its four components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. That was a nod to Sherlock’s interests. John’s were represented along the opposite wall, where a series of framed digital images each told a story, if you knew their history.

  Photography had been a hobby, even in the army. John loved exploring new ways to look at the unruly world, and to find objects of curiosity and beauty amid the anarchy of it. One of the things he’d loved about being a combat paramedic was his capacity to bring order out of chaos. God knew the rest of it was a shambles.

  His penchant for dapper dressing when on leave—and didn’t his army mates like taking the piss out of him over that—translated naturally into the vintage suits, bespoke leather shoes, waxed moustache, and dedication to the single origin coffee beans he favored these days. Hell, as hipsters went, in this city famous for the breed, he was hardly alone or even the most hip.

  John daily thanked his early posting to East Timor for teaching him about coffee, which had previously been merely a hot beverage. Whatever the Australian Army’s Operation Astute had achieved for the people of Timor-Leste, it had introduced John to the local coffee farmers and the nuanced joys of a proper brew.

  For a while, John had also daily cursed his filthy luck in being deployed to Afghanistan. A double-car bomb in Kabul had ended his military career, and almost his life, when shrapnel from the second bomb cut him down while he was helping victims of the first explosion.

  Good had come from his medical discharge, but only after John had endured long bouts of surgery, therapy, and misery. His brother, Henry, got sick of him hanging around the spare room of his Brisbane house like a bad smell.

  “You’ve got a face like a wet week,” Henry said, gruff-loving, “and you know you hate the humidity here. Stop moping, move back to Melbourne, and go open that café you kept talking about when you were in Dili.”

  Henry’s advice was rare and rarely good, but there was a first time for everything. Back to Melbourne John gladly went, to find somewhere to live and a business partner for his dream café.

  He found both in Sherlock ‘Lockie’ Holmes—mercurial genius and perpetual science student—via their mutual friend, Jay Stamford. John’s first sight of Sherlock was of a slender man with keen features, making himself a cup of coffee with lab equipment on campus.

  “A homemade sypho
n set-up,” John had commented admiringly. “Though you’d get a better result with a lighter roast.”

  “All I could get on short notice.” Sherlock stood up, smoothing his hair back behind his ears and staring piercingly at John. “You were an army medic in Afghanistan, I see,” he continued finally. “That’s turned into a dog’s breakfast, hasn’t it?”

  John, amazed, agreed, and two days later they were sharing a two-bedroom, nineteenth-century terrace house in Richmond, a ten-minute tram ride from the city. A month later, they set up The Sign of Four, funded by their savings, John’s meager pension, and Sherlock’s regular income from a patented diagnostic algorithm that rendered blood type identification both faster and more accurately.

  Neither had bargained on making a best friend at the same time, but they got on like a house on fire from the start. Sherlock was something of a cocky beggar, but John had enough larrikin tendencies of his own to find that mostly appealing.

  So John settled into being a café co-owner and barista, and extracting simple joys from life out of gratitude for still having one.

  “Doc Caffeine” made The Sign of Four a Mecca for coffee lovers, but what made it famous was Sherlock Holmes, its resident smartarse. He dressed as snappily as his friend and colleague, except for those days he lounged around in jeans and a band T-shirt, usually featuring Devil’s Foot, the alternative indie band in which he played violin.

  John loved that Sherlock could tell anyone six things about themselves upon meeting them—one of which might be new even to the listener. Only one person had ever tried to punch Sherlock in reaction; only one had ever cried. Australian coffee drinkers were a hardy lot, willing to put up with a lot of smartarsery if the coffee was good enough, and if the smartarse in question was willing to help them out with weird problems.

  Sherlock, enthusiastically aided by John where necessary, had uncovered a full range of scandals, from stepdads pretending to be boyfriends to prospective employers whose businesses didn’t actually exist. He’d thwarted attempted blackmail by recovering incriminating video footage, and proven that a family “ghost hound” was just a joker at the farm next door tying a sheepskin onto his Labrador and smearing the poor mutt with glow-in-the-dark paint.

  Kylie Mitchell might have asked the two of them for help, if she’d gotten the chance.

  Instead, two days after Sherlock had deduced her to John, Kylie failed to arrive at her usual table.

  Sherlock noticed. (He noticed everything.) But he was busy in his own corner, making notes for an essay for his current (and fourth) degree. (“I’m avoiding getting a proper job,” he always claimed.)

  John set a long macchiato next to his housemate then straddled a stool beside him.

  “Kylie’s not in.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Sick, you reckon?”

  “Possibly. Or she’s cracked the code.”

  “Maybe.”

  Sherlock looked straight at John. “Are you having one of your ‘gut feelings’?”

  “Could be,” John reluctantly admitted.

  “I’ve told you before, what you call gut instinct is just experience and knowledge giving you a conclusion without your brain consciously taking the intervening steps. Deconstruct.”

  John deconstructed. “She left early yesterday. Seemed excited about something to do with the three diaries she’s been working on.”

  “She had all three on the table?” Sherlock closed his laptop lid and sipped at his coffee. “Unusual.”

  “She kept putting them side by side, then slipping the page of one underneath the page of another. Interleaving them, you know? I thought she might be comparing the handwriting on the right hand pages by getting similar words close together.”

  “Not a bad hypothesis,” said Sherlock.

  “Really?”

  “Wrong, though. She could compare individual words more effectively from the scans on her computer. To compare the physical document indicates there was something about the primary source itself that drew her attention. And she left after that?”

  “She had all three interleaved, with one left page underneath one right page. Then she said ‘you little beauty,’ put her stuff into her satchel, and took off, about an hour ahead of her usual schedule.”

  Sherlock finished his coffee. “There’s probably nothing in it,” he said. “Ask her about it tomorrow.”

  John brushed a knuckle beneath his moustache to hide his frown and returned to refill the hopper, clean the steam wand and resume pouring perfect shots.

  John’s faith in his instincts was justified an hour later when a woman strode into The Sign of Four. She was clutching an iPad close to her chest like it gave her life. Her greying hair was in wild disarray, her pale face free of makeup. Two blotches of red on her cheeks were the final evidence of her agitation.

  “Is Lockie Holmes here?”

  John nodded at Sherlock in his corner. The woman strode straight towards him. John handed barista duties over to Jess, his bean-apprentice, and followed the woman to where the interesting stuff was about to happen.

  “Lockie?”

  Sherlock pushed his essay aside. “You’re Kylie’s mother,” he said calmly. “That’s her iPad, isn’t it?”

  Kylie’s mother blinked at him, nodded vigorously, then thrust the iPad towards him. “Lorraine Mitchell. Kylie’s talked about you. She’s said you’re like a detective and you know things about people just by looking at them.”

  “I observe, and deduce from my observations.” He took the iPad from her white-knuckled grip. “You found this in a garden. Any bougainvillea nearby?”

  Lorraine stared at him as though he had two heads and was made of miracles. “Under the bougainvillea in our front yard. How did you know?”

  Sherlock pointed at smudges of dirt and fragments of bark, grass, and purple blossom clinging to the cover. Then he folded the cover back and examined the tablet, from the small crack across the corner of the screen to the power and headphone sockets. He sniffed at it and dabbed the tip of his tongue against the cover.

  “On the ground less than four hours,” he declared.

  “You can tell that from licking it?”

  Sherlock arched an eyebrow at her. “It rained last night. The cover is dry on both sides. The bougainvillea canopy might have protected it from rainfall, but the ground water would’ve marked the back of it if it’d lain there all night. When did you last see your daughter?”

  “She came home yesterday afternoon, worked up about something in those journals she’s been poking into. She looked up something in a book at home and took off again.”

  “She took her satchel with her?”

  “I told her not to,” Lorraine said, half-distressed, half-exasperated.

  Sherlock leaned keenly towards the woman. “And why would you tell her that?”

  Lorraine’s mouth snapped shut and she stared, round-eyed, at Sherlock.

  “Mrs. Mitchell, you believe your daughter to be missing after less than half a day. She had those family journals and her iPad with her in her satchel, and yet here’s the iPad, which has been dropped in your yard some time this morning. So Kylie didn’t lose it last night. It’s much more likely that after being out all night, she was coming home and something happened when she was nearly to safety. What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

  “I told her to leave those journals be,” Lorraine snapped back at him. “It’s old news and nothing good can come of it.”

  “Nothing has,” Sherlock assured her.

  “But why would anyone kidnap her?”

  “If that’s what you think this is, why haven’t you gone to the police?”

  “I did, but they say it’s too soon to do anything.”

  “Instead, you think it might be too late.”

  “No. Of course it’s not. It’s not…nobody would hurt her. Would they?”

  “Tell me everything,” said Sherlock, “and we’ll make sure they don’t. John. I think this mig
ht be a three-espresso problem.”

  John took his place back on the Strada and poured the shots. Three espressos for Sherlock; long macchiato for himself. Skim latte for Lorraine Mitchell, who looked like a skim latte kind of person. He took the lot into Sherlock’s corner on a tray and listened while Lorraine confessed to the family skeleton.

  “My family are descendants of Irene Hodgson, adopted daughter of Caroline Hodgson,” she began, as though that meant something.

  “Who?” asked John.

  Lorraine’s face grew pinched, clearly hating to make the next admission. “Madame Brussels.”

  “Oh!” John was immediately impressed. “The Victorian-era brothel keeper. There’s a fantastic rooftop bar named after her. I guess you know that.” He pulled at the tip of his moustache.

  Lorraine’s furious expression proved that while Australians were generally delighted to find convicts in their ancestry, this Australian was not amused by brothel owners in the family tree.

  Sherlock, on his second espresso, merely smiled. “One of my favorite unsolved mysteries is the disappearance of the Speaker’s mace from the Victorian Parliament in 1891,” he said. “It wasn’t especially valuable, and the most persistent theory is that a parliamentarian took it to a brothel in Little Lonsdale Street, used it for unparliamentary purposes, and then left it there.” He turned his keen gray eyes onto Lorraine Mitchell. “One of Madame Brussels’s brothels, it’s posited, or that of her rival, Annie Wilson.”

  Purse-lipped, Lorraine said, “The family legend is that it was stolen from Caroline’s brothel and that Caroline wrote about it in her journals. She doesn’t mention it by name, or any Ministers, but there’s a note about being unfairly blamed for the scandal.”

  “An Inquiry in 1893 found it had never been taken to a brothel,” said Sherlock. “Though they could be expected to say that to save face.”