The Murder of Sherlock Holmes

by David Fable

  The light changed and I zagged into Green Park, a favorite route of mine because of the vast lawns, abundant trees and lack of traffic. I had spotted the Renault while at Wiggins’s brothel, an unlikely coincidence. But still I couldn’t imagine what motive Wiggins would have for killing Holmes. And why now?

  I shot out of the park along Birdcage Walk, crossed Westminster Bridge and parked in front of the assessor’s office on Lambeth Road.

  My friend Colin was from a Scottish farming family. He had a broad, freckled face that years in the field had made almost brick red. He hoped to go into politics and had taken a job at the assessor’s office as a first step. He had told me the job was viciously dull, and spent most of his time trading crop futures, which had financed his way through Oxford. Colin was as good as anyone I’ve ever known at keeping countless calculations in his head. All of us would check with him after exams as he could repeat back every question and equation. When he saw me, Colin broke into that big, friendly Scottish grin of his. “Wha’ are you doin’ 'ere. Ya coom ta take me ta lunch, aye?”

  “Fish and chips on me if you do me a favor.”

  “It is legal?” he joked.

  “Not strictly.”

  I had Colin look at the tax rolls for Beatrice Smithwick and found that she owned an astonishing twenty-two properties, including the three I had already visited. Many were due to be reassessed as they were undergoing improvements. There were building permits pending on many of them, and most interesting was the fact that attached to the files were directives to the building department to have the projects expedited per request of the office of Lord Andrew Fitzroy. In all, this elderly lady had purchased and commenced renovation on eighteen properties in the last year.

  I took Colin to the corner stand and had one of the greasier pieces of cod to be found on this side of the Thames. I did not discuss with him the reason for my inquiries or my suspicions of malfeasance in the matter. My obvious conclusion was that someone else was using the old lady to buy these properties, and Fitzroy was exerting influence to push them through for renovations, but Colin didn’t need to know these things, and he happily munched on a second helping of fish and chips as I bid him farewell with a list of properties in my pocket that I felt required investigation.

  The first property was on Freemasons Road, not far from Wiggins’s headquarters. It was a nicely renovated three-story brick building very much in the character of Wiggins’s own. However, unlike Wiggins’s “gentlemen’s club,” the front door was wide open and children were running in and out, laughing and playing on the stoop and the stairs.

  I climbed the steps and entered the lobby. The mailbox showed sixteen different names on the various slots. There was a sense of gaiety inside the building. Sunlight poured in through the front windows. I could hear women’s cheerful voices socializing with each other in the hallways of the apartments above. Three little girls were on the floor of the spotless lobby playing jacks. All seemed idyllic in this small oasis on the gritty East End street. The only thing shadowy here was the identity of the owner.

  I proceeded to a second address on Waterloo Road. The building was an austere, gray granite with a Roman-pillar façade of the kind used in banks and government buildings, which I speculated the structure had been at one time. It was a rather imposing edifice and took up half the block. The street was not well traveled and a group of boys were playing marbles in the road. The goal of their game was to flip the marble into the grooves of a manhole cover that was in the center of the street. They were playing for pennies, as opposed to when I was a child and we would play for each other’s marbles, the winner getting the pick of the loser’s collection. I was a tolerably good player, but my neighbor Charles Dawkins could flip a cat’s eye into a thimble at ten paces. His collection was quite impressive as he accumulated the top-grade marbles from all the neighborhood boys.

  As I walked along the front of the building, I noticed that all the windows were draped from the inside, without a ray of light getting in or out. The front entrance had a gate of steel bars with a wide glass door behind it. Nothing could be seen through the glass. There was a buzzer beside the gate and I pushed on it. After a few more attempts and several minutes of waiting, it was apparent that no one was going to respond. The boys playing marbles had begun to eye me as if I was some kind of fool.

  I ambled over to them in my most unthreatening way. “Hello, lads. Could one of you tell me what goes on in that building?”

  One youngster with the largest pile of pennies and best collection of marbles sneered up at me. “If you don’t know, then maybe you shouldn’t know.” The boy, who was about eleven years old, had a manner reminiscent of Wiggins in his youth. He took the stub of a cigarette from behind his ear and put it in the corner of his mouth as if making a show of ignoring me and resumed the game of marbles.

  “Half a crown to the one who tells me what goes on in that building,” I declared, regaining their attention.

  One boy with a wool cap and smudged face squinted up at me. “Bet he’s a copper.”

  “I’m not a cop,” I assured them.

  “Doesn’t matter. Creed pays off the cops anyway,” blurted a chubby one proudly.

  “Shut up, Snail!” snapped the leader. He motioned to the others and the five boys left off their game and huddled by a post box. When they returned, their leader spoke for the group. “We’ll tell you, but we need a pound.”

  I produced a pound note from my wallet and held it up for all to see. “Give it here,” said the leader assertively. I scowled down at him. There was only so much of his impudence that I was willing to take. Reading my expression, he surrendered the information. “It’s for tarts and bets,” he said.

  “You mean they use it for a gambling house and brothel?” I asked.

  “Brawful?!” exclaimed Snail, apparently unfamiliar with the term “brothel.”

  They all peered up at me like I was an idiot. “Do ya know wha’ a whorehouse is, mister?” said the leader, as if speaking to a simpleton.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So when the lucky ones is done winning downstairs, they go upstairs to the girls.”

  “I see.” I handed the leader the one-pound note. “Another pound to the one who can tell me of a different 'whorehouse’ within a mile of here.”

  “You don’t need another whorehouse,” said Snail. “This is the best one around.”

  The boy in the woolen cap chimed in, “Snail should know. His mum works there.”

  “Does not!” protested Snail and pushed the other boy as they all had a good laugh at his expense.

  “Does anyone have an answer? I must be going.”

  “Coin Street. Long white building with the doors all in rows,” volunteered the leader.

  “How many blocks from the river?” I asked.

  “Four,” he answered with authority.

  I handed him the pound note. Snail immediately piped up, “Hey, we get part of that, too, Wyatt!”

  “Shut your mouth,” responded the leader, and they quickly gathered up their marbles and headed off down the street squabbling about their proper share of the earnings.

  One of the addresses on my list that I had yet to visit was indeed 400 Coin Street. I climbed on my motorbike to take a pass by. It turned out to be a long, white-plaster set of typical row houses, with two rooms downstairs and two rooms up. I stopped and straddled my motorbike as an older man in a top hat and long coat exited one of the front doors. He kept his eyes averted as he hurried off down the street.

  I decided I had done enough investigation of Mrs. Smithwick’s properties. Whoever was her heir would inherit interest in several very upscale whorehouses, at least two gambling parlors and some nicely renovated residential buildings. How she had the time and why she had the inclination to accumulate all this property in the prior year, and also be complicitous in the attempted murder of Watson and myself, was still a mystery. Lord Fitzroy was helping her procure permits and Fitzroy was adv
ocating for Moriarty. This Sergio character was involved with Mrs. Smithwick and now both were dead. All of them were acquainted with Wiggins and the mention of Creed’s name by the boy called Snail confirmed the fact that Wiggins was either managing the operations at these properties or was the party for whom Smithwick was fronting. Some or none of this might have anything to do with Holmes’s death. There were many strands to follow. I determined to follow the one that led me to the home of Lord Andrew Fitzroy.

  Fitzroy lived in one of those gaudy, dynastic mansions along the Thames. I was halted at the gate by his oversized chauffeur, who had a pronounced Irish accent and a thick, waxed moustache. I announced myself, and he told me to wait at the closed gate while he passed the word on to Fitzroy’s aged butler. The chauffeur returned and smugly told me that Lord Fitzroy could not see me presently. I said, “Please tell him that I’m here by request of our mutual friend on Butchers Road.” The chauffeur eyed me impatiently and then went back to the house to relay my message. I suspected that conjuring Wiggins’s influence might get me over this barrier, and I was correct as the chauffeur returned and grudgingly opened the gate. I courteously thanked him for his assistance and proceeded to the house where the aged butler, whose name I learned was Phelps, led me into an extremely formal living room with the traditional portraits of aristocratic ancestors covering every inch of the walls. Such paintings in such houses made me bristle, as I had become increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of aristocracy. As a youth, I was taught to accept the fact that there was a privileged class descended from wealthy landowners and friends of the king upon whom privilege and benefits were heaped by virtue of class distinction. Upon growing up, I had become more and more resentful that these elitists had long since abandoned any sense of noblesse oblige and took their entitlement as divinely ordained and absent of any obligation or responsibility. Mostly, it seemed to me they used their positions to further aggrandize themselves and attempt to drive progress off the road and into a ditch to forestall the inevitable day when they would be seen as what they are—relics of a medieval past, a vain and heartless hierarchy created to manage an ignorant population of people who were pronounced unable to reason for themselves or provide for their own welfare. I have to admit that the communist ideology had some limited appeal for me, but primarily I was devoted to progress, both social and scientific, and in my mind this ancient notion of a ruling class was diametrically opposed to both.

  I waited in this chamber of pomposity with growing resentment as the centuries of Fitzroys stared down at me with their regal poses. Finally, after twenty minutes, Lord Fitzroy deigned to enter.

  “Mr. Hudson,” he said extending a hand. “How can I help you?”

  “Lord Fitzroy, so glad to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand. “Thank you for giving me your time.”

  “Yes, well, what is it that you need?” he asked, already beginning to get impatient.

  “Do you know Beatrice Smithwick?”

  “No. I do not.”

  “At her home I saw a picture of you and her at a groundbreaking.”

  “I go to many ceremonies and meet many people. To be quite candid with you it’s hard to remember everyone I meet at those events. Many are quite pro forma,” he said, making his best efforts to remain affable.

  “I see. But your relationship with Mrs. Smithwick is such that your office has expedited over a dozen projects for her in the last year.” I decided to press a little harder and see what his reaction might be.

  “Well it’s possible she knows someone in my office and that person is trying to help with some worthy projects that this Mrs. Smithwick is pursuing,” he answered, tossing off the implications of my question.

  “Some of these worthy projects are whorehouses.” I intended there to be no mistaking the implications of that statement. After the last couple of days, I was feeling irritable and was in no mood to fence about with this fat aristocrat.

  “What are you implying Mr. Hudson?” he asked with a dangerousglare.

  “Do you know a man named Sergio, a 'gentleman friend’ of Mrs. Smithwick?”

  “As I told you, I don’t know either of these people, and I’m growing impatient with this conversation.”

  “They are both dead, Lord Fitzroy.” I could see from his eyes that this was new information to him, but he immediately hid his surprise.

  “Are you threatening me, Mr. Hudson?”

  “Not at all. I’m merely informing you that as of yesterday those two people are dead, and I am not displeased about that as they attempted to murder Doctor Watson and me.”

  Lord Fitzroy stared past me for a moment as he absorbed this information then regained his regal composure. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” he asked and didn’t wait for an answer.

  “I would rather not,” I said tightly as he quickly left the room.

  I strolled over to his liquor collection and toyed with the idea of pouring myself one of his eighteen-year-old whiskies when I heard a woman’s voice from behind. “I like the way you stand up to him.”

  It was the diminutive Lady Fitzroy entering through the French doors that led to the garden. She was wearing narrow tweed slacks and a matching blazer. Her dark hair was short and parted at the side. “Pour me some of whatever you decide on,” she said as she approached. I poured a glass of whisky and handed it to her as she stood suggestively close to me and took a sip.

  “This may seem like an impertinent question,” I said, “but how well do you know your husband?”

  “Too well.” She slithered around behind me and slipped her hand into the pocket of my trousers. “Lord Fitzroy and I have an understanding. I’m a modern woman. You seem like a modern man,” she said, fishing around with her hand.

  “Are you searching for a handkerchief? I keep it in my breast pocket.” I produced my white handkerchief and waved it at her.

  She put her chin against my back and whispered, “I have a friend. She could join us.”

  I pulled her hand out of my pocket and turned around to face her. “That’s a generous offer, but…”

  “I hope you don’t think I’m too old,” she said, acting wounded. “I’m only thirty-two. That’s not much of an age difference.”

  “I will take all factors into consideration,” I said, trying to sound open-minded.

  She smiled and swallowed the rest of her Scotch. “Lord Fitzroy wouldn’t murder anyone.”

  “Did someone suggest he was a murderer?” I probed.

  “I know who you are, and I know you’re investigating the murder of Sherlock Holmes.”

  Now I was interested. “So why are you sure he wouldn’t murder anyone?”

  “Because he’s a coward,” Lady Fitzroy said with perfect confidence. With that, she turned and wandered back into the garden.

  I sat down on the couch with my Scotch and waited for Fitzroy to return. After another five minutes he did so, accompanied by his bulky Irish chauffeur.

  “I’m 'air ta esskoort ya out,” he said, with his heavy Irish accent.

  “I’ll leave after a few more questions,” I said calmly.

  “Do you know who you are talking to, boy?” fumed Fitzroy, finally showing his temper. “I had lunch with the king last week.”

  “Does the king know you bugger twelve-year-old boys?” I didn’t appreciate his attitude, and I was determined to indicate that to him.

  Livid, Fitzroy motioned to his chauffeur to take care of me.

  “If you move toward me, you will regret it,” I cautioned the brawny chauffeur. But the Irishman took no heed and stepped forward with fists raised. This is a common mistake nowadays. The ill-informed belief that fights are won from the waist up remains prevalent among a class of boxing ring and barroom brawlers. The notion that I would engage this oaf in some sort of bare-knuckle battle was absurd. He swung and I ducked, and, as I spun away, I stomped down hard on the inside of his bent left knee. There was an audible snap, and he dropped to the floor in excruciating pain.
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