by David Fable
The Renault shot out through the gates and headed south toward Whitechapel Road. I reasoned he was making another run for the river, but going through the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields would give the maneuverability of my motorbike an advantage in keeping up with him. I hoped that if I could stay on his tail long enough, I would find an opportunity to pull even with him and learn the driver’s identity.
The Renault took no heed of lanes or traffic signals as it hurtled through the sleeping streets. There was no traffic to speak of and only occasionally did I have to pass a lingering taxi or lorry crawling along the route with its predawn deliveries.
The chase wound us mercilessly back toward the Thames with the Renault’s driver never taking his foot off the gas pedal. As we reached the old Whitechapel foundry, I tried to creep up on the flank of the car and the driver swerved violently toward my motorbike then swung a turn onto Dock Street, heading hard for the river. I skidded past the intersection then righted myself, rode up over the pavement, weaving between a mailbox and streetlamp, and resumed the pursuit.
When I had the car back in my sights, it was approaching the embankment road at full speed. Beyond I could see the full-shouldered width of the Thames with scattered lights on the opposite bank.
The Renault took a screaming left onto the Upper Embankment Road, and I arrived at the turn just in time to see it speeding head-on toward a hapless bakery truck. Horns blared and the Renault swerved hard, leaped off the road and tumbled out of control down the steep embankment with a tremendous crashing of metal and shattering of glass.
I sped to the spot where the automobile had left the road and looked down. I could see the outline of the car lying on its side on the stony shore with water lapping at it. There was no movement detectable. It had been a long drop down to a dark part of the bank and trying to reproduce it on foot would be too treacherous. I quickly rode to the path, a hundred yards beyond, leading down to the lower embankment. Not far off was Tower Bridge, lit up and powerfully straddling the Thames. I sped down to the embankment and parked my motorbike by a barge that was moored there. Crunching across the gravel shore, I reached the crippled automobile. I stepped up on the running board and peered inside. The car was empty. The driver might have been thrown into the river and drowned or thrown from the automobile on the way down and was laying on the incline. There was no way to tell in the darkness. I also had to admit to myself the possibility that he had escaped. Whether injured or not, he might have taken to foot along the river heading east. If that were the case, the choice would be to pursue him on foot in the pitch dark and risk leaving the automobile and having any evidence be contaminated, or stay with the car and do as thorough an examination as possible while waiting for the police to arrive and supervise their efforts as well. Given the variables, I opted to stay with the car and not make the same mistake I had made at the building on Weymouth. My instinct proved to be right, as a worker who had been sleeping on the barge came shuffling and squinting through the darkness to see what the commotion was about.
“There’s been an accident,” I told him as he approached me leerily. “I rolled my car off the road. Do you happen to have a torch?” I asked him, since mine had been shattered during the chase.
He took a look at the mangled automobile and another look at me and said, “You’re lucky to be alive, man…Yeah, I’ve got a torch on the barge.”
I offered him a crown for the use of the torch and his assistance in alerting the authorities. He gladly accepted and returned with the desired item posthaste.
28
C limbing around in a car that is toppled on its side on the bank sof the Thames at two thirty in the morning is a bit of a challenge. I removed my shoes, brushed off my clothes as well as I could and left on my driving gloves. The passenger-side door was flopped open with that portion of the car facing skyward. I climbed in, being careful not to smudge any fingerprints. I wanted to do some evidence gathering before the police arrived. This would not affect their investigation as they would have no interest in the items I collected. Hair and soil samples held little interest for them, cigar and cigarette ash even less. I found all three in the vehicle. Wedging myself into the driver’s seat, and careful not to touch the steering wheel or shift knob, I collected several black hairs from the backrests, some soil specimens from the floor and a miraculously almost intact cigar ash from the floor of the backseat. All these I put into sample tubes, which I had taken to carrying with me at all times. Unfortunately, one had smashed in my pocket during the chase, which later necessitated three stitches to my thigh. I hadn’t even noticed it during the pursuit, but, in the calmness of my investigation, I started to become aware of the injuries from the night’s activities.
I must admit that I probably did one investigation that should have been left to the police first, but I was disinclined to trust them to do proper analysis based on recent experience, and so I opened and examined the contents of the glove box. I found nothing unusual in it. The Renault, as I suspected, was indeed the one stolen in Kensington from a Nigel Loughlin, as confirmed by the registration paper. It also contained the owner’s manual, a handkerchief and a penknife. Any fingerprint that might have been on the latch had probably been smeared by my probing, but I was confident that there would be plenty of prints to find when the police got there.
A bit more than an hour later Gregson arrived with his fingerprint man, Richardson, and two other officers in tow. The police superintendent seemed a bit dour and, frankly, I couldn’t blame him since he had been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night. He had left specific instructions down at Scotland Yard to contact him if either Watson or I called, and, good to his word, he was on the case.
He strode down the shore, put his hands on his hips and eyed the wreckage of the Renault. “You can be awful annoying, Master Hudson, but you seem to be onto something.”
“Yes, Superintendent, I believe you’re looking at the murder weapon,” I said motioning to the car.
“Then maybe you can inform me regarding the obvious questions. How did it get here and who was driving it?”
“I chased it from Butchers Road to Victoria Park and then down here. I didn’t see who was driving. The car was empty by the time I was able to make it down to the shore. He may be laying dead up there on the incline for all I can tell.”
He motioned to his two officers and pointed to the incline. “Sweep the hill as best you can. It’ll be daylight soon, so don’t go breaking your leg in the dark.”
The officers turned on their torches and went about the assignment. Gregson turned back to me rubbing his chin. “So what was a fine young man like yourself doing on Butchers Road late at night?”
“What do most young men like me do on Butchers Road at night?” I answered.
“Well, most of them wouldn’t dare to question Wiggins, but I suspect you did.”
I gave him an innocent shrug and chose to leave it at that.
“Richardson, check the car,” he said nodding to his fingerprint specialist. Richardson opened up his kit and set about his work.
“Mr. Hudson, you didn’t happen to collect any evidence from this car before we arrived?”
“None you’d be interested in, Superintendent Gregson. Some soil and ash perhaps,” I answered offhandedly.
“You know, Master Hudson, you’re beginning to remind me of somebody,” Gregson said with the smallest trace of a smile.
I chose to stay and observe the fingerprint collection process, during which time I explained to Gregson the particulars of the prior twenty-four hours. Instead of the expected chastisement, Gregson was quite supportive of my efforts. I did not reveal the name of our attempted murderer, as he would ask me how I knew it and I intended, at all costs, to protect Daisy’s anonymity as a source. Even the information that I knew the first name of this character might get her in trouble somehow. I told him that I would come in and look through criminal-file photographs in order to identify our attacker.
/> By 6:15 a.m. there was enough light to finish the investigation. No one was found on the incline. No bodies were seen bobbing in the water. No trail of escape could be detected. I walked a mile eastward along the rocky shore as soon as the sun came up and found nothing of use. When I returned, the policemen were discussing with Gregson the strategy for towing the Renault from the river’s edge.
The worker who had called the police for me had long since lost interest and returned to his barge to go back to sleep. I left his torch on the deck and decided to make one last stop before returning home.
I was utterly exhausted and the Charing Cross Hospital was out of my way, but I wanted to speak to this Smithwick woman if possible. The city was waking up as I rode along the Thames on the edge of Chelsea. The lorries were out and about making deliveries, workers were boarding buses as shopkeepers swept the pavements in front of their establishments. Everything appeared so normal and yet the last week had given me a glimpse of a dark and sinister world beneath the surface, where thieves and murderers roamed and even targeted me. Intellectually, I had always understood the duality of our society, and, more to the point, of the human condition, but something about staring down the barrel of a gun personalizes that intellectual exercise. Plenty of times I had been on the rugby field with opponents who would gladly break your arm or cripple your knee if that were their road to victory, but out here the contest was for one’s whole existence. If this were to be my calling, then I would have to prepare myself to fight fire with fire. The gentlemanly investigatory practices of Holmes and Watson’s day were faded. This was a new century with new and deadlier technologies, with higher stakes and shifting desires. This is not to say that the dark side of man had fundamentally changed since he walked out of the cave. Those same impulses drive him, but just as the new industries had fomented massive changes in manner and method to Queen Victoria’s empire, the dawning of a new century and the ascendancy of machines that fly and others that speed along the earth with the power of 120 horses would change the nature and scope of the perils in our world.
I parked and locked my motorbike in front of Charing Cross Hospital and took the stairs to the second-floor nurses’ station. There I waited to address two nurses who were changing shifts and updating each other on the patients’ charts. The younger of the two finally looked up at me. “May I help you, sir?”
“Yes, I’m here to visit my grandmother…Mrs. Smithwick. She was brought by ambulance last night with some heart trouble.” I tried to sound as concerned as possible.
“What’s her first name?” asked the gruff older nurse, looking up from her chair.
I stared back at her totally stumped. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the old bat’s first name. I had looked through her papers and belongings, but, after the day and night I had experienced, my mind was too muddled to find it. “We just call her Grandma Smithwick,” I smiled meekly.
The younger nurse came around from behind the station with a look of compassion. “I’m so sorry. Your grandma passed away,” she said as she sympathetically took my hand. “Would you like to see her?”
I had no interest in looking at the corpse of the woman who had set us up to be murdered. At this point I just wanted to go to bed. “No. Never mind,” I said dismissively. “But you’ve been very kind.” The young nurse blinked at me, clearly taken aback by my callousness at the passing of my dear grandma. I turned and walked back to the stairs.
29
WATSON
W hen I awoke Christopher was gone and I had no idea how long I had been sleeping. I remembered Christopher poking me endlessly with needles, a mention of dinner and that was the extent of it. I sat up on the couch with the blanket wrapped around me. The pain in my back was much more bearable. On the table was my meal, and, next to it, Christopher’s empty plate. I was famished. I rose from the couch, put on a robe and checked Christopher’s room. He was not there. “Curious,” I thought to myself. The clock said ten fifteen, and I couldn’t imagine where he could have gone after the day we had suffered through. I put on some clothes and sat down at the table to have my cold pork chop and Yorkshire pudding when I noticed the note that Christopher had left for me. I could see it had been written hastily. It read:
Sergeant Archibald Hayes was a fraud. I’m going back to the building to investigate. Do not worry about me. Christopher.
Well, he had certainly anticipated my reaction. I was concerned that my young friend was feeling a little overconfident. He was not experienced enough in our line of work to be out alone on a case while someone was trying to kill him. He did, however, know a thing or two about Chinese medicine. I stretched in my chair, and my back was much relieved. As I ate my cold dinner I pondered what Christopher meant by the police sergeant “was a fraud.” There was little point in trying to track young Hudson down at the building and, in any event, I was in no condition to do so. I determined I had been asleep for roughly three hours and could easily use another seven hours of rest.
As always, Mrs. Hudson’s Yorkshire pudding was excellent and I’ve never minded my meat cold, so, all in all, it was a very satisfying meal. I was in the process of inspecting Christopher’s enhanced timeline, when there came a timid knock on the door followed by Mrs. Hudson’s voice. “Doctor Watson, are you awake?”
I opened the door for her. “Yes, I’m awake, Mrs. Hudson. Please come in.”
“I’ve come to collect the dishes,” she said as she shuffled in wearing her slippers and Japanese robe.
“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson. The pudding was just as good as I remembered it.”
“You’re very welcome, Doctor,” she said as she stacked the plates and placed them back on the tray. “It seems your back is feeling better.”
“Yes, much looser,” I said as I twisted side to side to test it.
“Christopher would make a fine doctor, wouldn’t he?” she said, as if a prelude to something else that was on her mind.
“Yes, I’m sure he would be an excellent physician.”
“Doctor Watson, would it be possible for you to have dinner with Captain Hudson and me tomorrow night?”
“Absolutely…if events permit. What time would you like me there?” This struck me as an abrupt invitation and likely something more than social.
“We’ll be downstairs. Let’s say between six thirty and seven.”
“Splendid. If my schedule changes, I will let you know.”
Mrs. Hudson picked up the tray and moved to the door. “Oh, and please don’t mention our dinner to Christopher. I will tell you why later.” She exited the room without waiting for an answer. I stared after her for a beat and then closed the door. I couldn’t imagine what that was about.
30
A fter a fine night’s sleep, I arose at seven thirty. My energy was good and my back felt splendid. I went into the drawing room and pulled aside the drapes. The dew was still fresh on the elms that lined the street. I opened the window and took a deep breath of the cool, damp air. I noticed that Christopher’s door was closed. It had been open when I retired last night, so I quietly took a peek into his room. He was sleeping quite soundly on top of his covers as if he had come home, removed his boots and collapsed on the bed. I silently withdrew. I was anxious to get the whole story of his evening. Undoubtedly it was eventful, but I didn’t intend to wake him as I didn’t know what time he came in or how long he had been sleeping.
I went back to the drawing room and was considering lighting a fire when I heard a faint, irregular knocking on the door. I grabbed the fire poker and walked across the room. “Who is it?” I asked. The experience of the day before made me abundantly cautious. A garbled woman’s voice could be heard from the landing. I cracked open the door and standing on the threshold was Lilah Church. The blue-and-yellow makeup on her bewildered eyes was running down her face in streaks. The red coating on her lips was smeared across her teeth and chin. Her hat was gone and her raven ringlets hung in disordered clumps down the sides of her face. Her powde
r-blue slippers and the bottom third of her white tea dress were caked in dry mud as though she had waded waist-deep through the marshes. “Doctor Watson, thank the lord!” She shot past me into the drawing room, and, fretfully wringing her hands, rushed to the window.