by John Hall
‘Come, now,’ Holmes told him, ‘do not be too despondent. The boy is safe and well, after all. As for the rest, things may be brighter than you fear.’
‘Blotted my copy book good and proper, didn’t I?’ asked Lestrade.
‘In the circumstances, it was a logical course of action. But I was not referring to this business of Clayton, or the missing boy.’
‘Oh?’ Despite his woes, Lestrade looked interested.
‘I have been actively pursuing my own enquiries,’ Holmes went on, ‘and I have every hope that I may be able to help with the later case, that of Sir Octavius.’
‘Oh?’ Lestrade was more than interested now.
Holmes looked at his watch. ‘In fact,’ said he, ‘I have arranged to meet someone at Baker Street at two this afternoon. Trafalgar Square is not too far from our humble lodgings, so I propose that we convert your sorrow-drowning drink into an early luncheon, and then the three of us can go along and see what we shall see.’ And he relapsed into silence, refusing to answer the many questions which Lestrade and I very naturally wished to put to him.
We left the cab at the rank in Trafalgar Square, and set off on foot, Lestrade saying that his pub was at no great distance.
The square was crowded, and, as luck would have it, on getting down from the cab I almost literally bumped into an old acquaintance, a man I had not seen since my army days. Lestrade and Holmes murmured a polite greeting when I introduced the three of them, then set off, whilst I exchanged some words of reminiscence with my old friend. By the time we had resolved not to wait so long until we met again, Holmes and Lestrade were some fifty yards ahead of me.
As I turned to follow them, I was aware that something was wrong. I did not see precisely what happened, my mind being still full of the recent conversation with a man I had last seen some twelve or fifteen years back, but I saw Lestrade jostled by a short man, heard the detective cry, ‘Hey!’ then the short man set off towards me at a run.
I was wondering in a vague sort of way what was amiss, when Lestrade called out, ‘Stop, thief!’ That was enough for me; I stopped the man by the simple expedient of standing in the path of his headlong flight, and he struck me fair and square.
I have said that he was a short man. He was also a slight man. Indeed, that is something of an understatement; he was a veritable shrimp of a man, it would have taken two or three of him to make a decent jockey. So, although the collision winded me for a moment, it sent him sprawling on the pavement, and by the time he was back on his feet, Holmes and Lestrade had reached us.
‘Now, then,’ said Lestrade, gripping the little man by the shoulders and turning him round roughly. ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ he added. ‘Frankie. I should have known. Gents, you won’t know Frankie, so I’ll introduce you. This is Francis Coombes, known to one and all as Frankie, an old friend of mine; Frankie, you’ve just barged into Doctor John H Watson. And this — ’ and Lestrade could hardly contain himself — ‘is Mr Sherlock Holmes.’
‘Sherlock ’Olmes! Oh, blimey!’ and the poor wretch almost fainted in Lestrade’s arms.
‘I’ll thank you to return my pocketbook,’ said Holmes sharply.
‘Yours, Holmes?’ said I, delighted. ‘I was sure it was Lestrade’s pocket he’d picked.’
‘It’d take a better man than old Frankie here to lift my wallet,’ said Lestrade with a grin.
Holmes regarded us with a contemptuous silence. ‘Thank you,’ said he, as Coombes handed his pocketbook over.
‘Well, Frankie,’ said Lestrade, ‘you’ve done it this time, my lad. Fancy you being so daft as to pick the pocket of Mr Sherlock Holmes, and with me standing there watching.’
‘Honest, Mr Lestrade, I didn’t know it was Mr ’Olmes. I never seen him before, did I? If I’d known, I’d never ’ave done anythink like that. And I didn’t know it was you either, Mr Lestrade. Honest. I never recognized you, not without your uniform.’
Lestrade sighed theatrically. ‘Frankie, Frankie. How long have you known me? Twenty years? And in all that time, have you ever seen me in uniform? I’m a detective, aren’t I? A plain-clothes detective. See,’ he explained carefully, ‘that’s what “plain-clothes” means, that I don’t wear a uniform. See?’
Coombes’s reply to this was a sort of strangled groan.
‘And now I come to think of it,’ said Lestrade, looking closely at his prisoner, ‘there was another little matter. Mr MacDonald was speaking of a spate of puzzling robberies, good stuff one day, rubbish the next. I knew it rang a bell. That was you, Frankie, wasn’t it? See,’ he added to Holmes and me, ‘it was the good stuff being taken that fooled me. If it had been just rubbish, I’d have thought of Frankie right off.’ He regarded Coombes with some concern. ‘’Ere, are you all right?’
‘I’m feeling a bit faint, like, Mr Lestrade.’
‘Come along, then. In here and have a drink.’
Lestrade escorted the swaying Coombes through the door of the saloon bar, and, with a quick nod at the proprietor, into a back parlour of sorts. ‘We’ll not be interrupted here,’ said the detective, waving us to seats. When the owner had brought us drinks, Lestrade leaned back and regarded Coombes almost with paternal affection. ‘Yes,’ he repeated with relish, ‘done it good and proper this time. What with the robberies, and picking Mr Holmes’s pocket. Ten years at least! And a lick of the cat to boot, as like as not.’
Coombes shuddered visibly. ‘Ten years, Mr Lestrade? It’ll kill me. And what about my old mum? It’ll kill her, too. I’m all she’s got, you know.’
‘You should have thought of that sooner, shouldn’t you?’ asked Lestrade. His voice was rough, but his gaze betrayed him. He shook his head sadly, and addressed Holmes and me. ‘His old man was just the same,’ he told us. ‘Useless! All the instincts of a tea-leaf, but none of the skill. I arrested him, Frankie’s dad, I mean, when I was just a young copper, only a year on the force. In the “Pillars of ‘Ercules”, it was,’ he added reminiscently. ‘I’m leaning on the bar, out of uniform, of course, taking a quiet drink, when Frankie’s old dad sidles up to me, and talks out of the side of his cake-hole. “Wanna buy a suit, gov’?” says he, running the words all together, as it were. I tell him, I can’t afford no suit, not on my wage, though I didn’t tell him what I did to earn it, of course. “You can afford this suit”, he tells me. “Fell off the back of the cart, didn’t it?” and I booked him then and there! Mind you,’ he went on, ‘it was a lovely suit, and no mistake. Serge, and proper serge it was, too, in them days. You did get some beautiful cloth back then, there’s no denying it.’
‘I never knew that,’ said Coombes, who had listened with fascination.
‘Oh, yes,’ Lestrade told him. ‘And some decent Jewish tailoring as well. Not like the rubbish they try to flog you these days!’
‘No,’ said Coombes patiently, ‘I mean I never knew my old man tried to sell you no knocked-off suit and you lagged ‘im.’
‘Well,’ said Lestrade, ‘it isn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d want to boast about, now is it?’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Coombes took a pull at his beer, and regarded the glass sadly.
‘And now it’s you,’ said Lestrade. ‘Like father, like son, eh, Frankie?’
Coombes shrugged his frail shoulders under his threadbare jacket. ‘No use crying over split whatsit, is there?’ he said. ‘You got me to rights, Mr Lestrade, and I’ll just ’ave to take what’s due to me. Mind you,’ he added, regarding the detective closely, ‘I ’ear that you’ve got a little spot of bother yourself, isn’t that right?’
‘Now, how did you know that?’ Lestrade asked.
‘Oh, you ’ear these things,’ and Coombes waved a hand grandly, as if to indicate that the editor of the Times dropped in frequently with the latest society gossip.
‘Well, that’s neither here nor there,’ and Lestrade too lapsed into a gloomy silence.
Perhaps emboldened by this — or perhaps it was just the beer talking — Coombes went on
, ‘That so-and-so Clayton, wasn’t it?’
Lestrade’s only response was a cross between a shrug of the shoulders and a shake of the head.
‘I knew him,’ said Coombes, unexpectedly. ‘Went to school with ‘im, didn’t I? We was next-door neighbours, as you might say.’
‘Oh?’ This was clearly news to Lestrade, and had the effect of dispelling his gloomy mood at once. ‘I never knew that.’
‘Oh, yes. When we was nippers, like, before all that trouble. ‘E’d moved away from the street by that time.’
‘And how did he strike you?’ asked Lestrade.
‘Strike me? Well, he was a rum cove, and that’s a fact. You know. Odd.’
‘That word again,’ Lestrade said, looking at Holmes. ‘“Odd”, that’s how he struck everyone.’
‘In what did this oddity consist?’ Holmes asked Coombes curiously.
‘Eh? Oh, I see.’ Coombes considered. ‘Well, he was sly, no, not sly, what’s the word?’
‘Secretive?’
‘You ’ave it, Mr ’Olmes. Secretive, that’s him to a “T”, all right. Mark my words,’ he told Lestrade, ‘there was somethink that never come out at the trial.’
‘Oh?’ Lestrade sat bolt upright. ‘And what might that have been, then?’
Coombes shrank back in his seat. ‘I don’t know that, do I? I mean, I hadn’t got nothink to do with any of that. Only, I know there’ll have been somethink, somewhere, see?’
‘Oh.’ The bitter disappointment was palpable in Lestrade’s tone. He tapped Coombes’s empty glass, and raised an eyebrow.
‘Yes, please, Mr Lestrade. It’s very kind — ’ but Lestrade had gathered up the glasses and was striding through the door to the bar.
‘Tell me,’ said Holmes, ‘this “something” that you say never came out at the trial, what did you mean by that?’ and he gazed hard at Coombes.
Coombes shrugged. ‘I don’t know, like I told the inspector. But he’ll have somethink, mark my words. Clayton, I mean. It was his nature, so to speak. You follow?’
‘But what sort of thing?’ Holmes persisted.
Another shrug, then a glance round the room, and, in a low voice, ‘Bodies, like as not!’ and Coombes gave a finer shudder than ever I saw on the professional stage.
‘But the police searched his lodgings, as I understand it?’
‘His lodgings! I arsk you!’ Coombes sneered. ‘It wouldn’t be there, would it? Whatever it was?’
Holmes shot a look at me, and I recalled Lestrade’s description of Clayton’s rooms as being almost clinically clean. Was this the reason, then? Might there be some clue hidden elsewhere?
My thoughts were interrupted by Lestrade, who returned and slapped full glasses on to the table top.
‘Lestrade, a word if you will?’
‘Certainly, Mr Holmes.’
Holmes glanced significantly at Coombes, and Lestrade added, ‘We’ll be more private in the corner, there. Don’t you think of running off without us, will you, Frankie?’
Coombes gave a sickly grin, and raised his glass to Lestrade in a hollow imitation of good fellowship. The three of us moved a short way off, but I noticed that Lestrade kept a sharp eye on his prisoner. ‘Well, Mr Holmes?’ said he.
‘It’s this way, Lestrade. I think this little contretemps might yet be of some use.’ Lestrade looked puzzled, as I confess I was. Holmes went on, ‘What have you against this fellow, Coombes?’
‘Well, sir, there’s the robberies that MacDonald spoke of; and that little matter earlier today.’
‘H’mm. Some of the robberies were nothing special, though?’
‘Mostly just rubbish taken, Mr Holmes, like I told you. One or two pieces of value, though.’
‘You see, Lestrade, it occurred to me that this Coombes, being an old acquaintance of Clayton’s, as it were, might perhaps gain his confidence, learn something of use from him?’
Lestrade looked sceptical. ‘In return for — ?’
Holmes nodded.
‘The Yard would never wear it, Mr Holmes.’
‘It is not the Yard’s decision, Lestrade. It is entirely up to you.’
‘And the other little matter, sir?’
I cut in, trying desperately to keep my voice level, ‘Mr Holmes would scarcely wish it to be generally known that his pocket has been picked by the most unlikely, unsuccessful criminal in London!’
Holmes’s look would have melted the largest glacier in Iceland, but he said merely, ‘No great harm was done, after all. Save, perhaps, to my reputation!’ he added, with a laugh.
‘I dunno.’ Lestrade was still unconvinced. ‘It’s a bit irregular. More than a bit.’
‘Come, Lestrade,’ I urged him, ‘it is surely worth a try? Arrest this fellow now, and you gain some kudos, true, but think of what you might gain if you get his co-operation.’
Lestrade stood up, determinedly. ‘I’ll do it.’ He marched across to Coombes, who looked up in some apprehension. ‘ ’Ave you still got them good bits that you pinched?’ he demanded.
‘Still got ’em, Mr Lestrade? I should think I ’ave!’ Coombes laughed, mirthlessly. ‘Couldn’t get rid, could I?’
‘Oh? But they were valuable pieces, as I recall?’
‘They was too valuable. The fence said he daredn’t touch ’em.’
Holmes frowned. ‘I cannot believe that any receiver would turn down a decent profit. Where did you offer them, then?’
‘Oh, a slop shop in Limehouse,’ said Coombes vaguely.
Lestrade shook his head sadly. ‘Hasn’t a clue, has he? Mr Holmes, this other notion of yours. I’m not sure — ’
Holmes waved him to silence. ‘Mr Coombes, could you lay your hands on the more valuable of the pieces that you have, ah, acquired?’
Coombes looked at Lestrade for a moment, then nodded.
Holmes went on, ‘Inspector Lestrade here has it in mind to be lenient. Provided the goods are returned to his satisfaction, neither he nor I will press any charges against you.’
Coombes took a moment to work this out, then began, ‘God bless you, gents — ’
‘However,’ said Holmes, ‘there is one small favour we would wish in return.’
‘Oh.’ Coombes fell silent.
‘We would wish you to ingratiate yourself with Clayton.’
‘Ingrate? Oh, I see. Get chummy, like?’
‘You could do that?’ asked Holmes.
Coombes thought a moment. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I could do it.’
‘You might perhaps draw on your old friendship, or say that you can fully sympathize with his predicament, having yourself had some difficulty with the police? I am sure you will readily think of other openings.’
‘Oh, yes. Rely on me, Mr ’Olmes.’ Coombes broke off as the door opened, and someone came into the room.
I glanced round, and saw Inspector MacDonald. He stood there, turning his hat in his hands in some evident embarrassment.
Lestrade nodded to him. ‘Sent to fetch me, is that it?’
MacDonald said, ‘I fear that’s so, Inspector. I had a most uncomfortable time with the chief, and the upshot was he sent me to scour all London for you, if need be.’
‘I expected as much,’ said Lestrade. ‘I’ll be right with you.’ He glanced at Coombes, and then said to Holmes, ‘I’m not sure about Frankie here, Mr Holmes. ‘Clayton’s new friends are a bit different from those he knew in the old days. Frankie here — well, no offence, old son, but there are some high-class ladies hanging round him now, and I just don’t know how you’d blend into that sort of company.’
‘Don’t give it a thought, Mr Lestrade,’ said Coombes with confidence. ‘I don’t have no trouble in that direction.’
‘No?’
‘Not me. I get my share.’
‘You astound me,’ said Lestrade. ‘The women of London just went down badly in my estimation!’
Holmes cleared his throat noisily. ‘Be all this as it may,’ said he, ‘have we reached some agreem
ent here?’
Lestrade nodded, and looked at Coombes, who nodded in his turn and said, ‘I’m your man, sir.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘Er — only thing is, having got alongside him, like — ’
‘Well?’
‘Well, sir, what I am to do then?’
‘You are to keep your eyes and ears open,’ said Holmes, ‘and your mouth shut. You will report anything that you think might be of interest to Inspector Lestrade here, or to me. We may both be reached at number 221b, Baker Street. Can you remember that?’
Coombes nodded again, then frowned.
‘What is it now?’ asked Lestrade.
‘Well, where do I find him? ‘Ow do I make myself known, like?’
Lestrade knotted his brow. ‘Mr Holmes?’
‘It must look accidental, I agree,’ said Holmes.
MacDonald, who had been listening to this exchange in some bewilderment, now cleared his throat.
‘Ah,’ said Holmes, ‘Mr Coombes here is to help us, if he can, with the Clayton affair. He is to be our man in the enemy camp, so to speak. The problem, Inspector, is how to introduce him into that enemy camp.’
‘You want him to meet Clayton by accident, then? There’s no difficulty there,’ said MacDonald. ‘He’s in the habit of calling into a little public, of an evening, on his own. Probably by way of an antidote to his fancy friends.’
‘You are certain?’ asked Holmes.
‘I told you I’d had him watched, and that was one thing my man spotted.’
‘Capital! You can give Mr Coombes the details, and leave the rest to him.’
‘Cut along then, Frankie,’ Lestrade told him, when MacDonald had supplied the necessary information. ‘I’ll be round later to pick up those bits and pieces.’ His gaze followed Coombes as the little man left the pub. ‘Now, gents,’ Lestrade went on, ‘I feel like celebrating. We may not have reached the end of the tunnel, but at least we seem to be moving towards the light. It’s good to be doing something, even if comes to nothing in the end. So, I’m buying the drinks.’
MacDonald coughed. ‘I can only do so much,’ he complained, ‘or I’ll be in hot water with the chief myself.’