The Brothers of Baker Street

by Michael Robertson

  Also on the table top was a brown leather satchel, lying open, and just visible inside it was something that glinted slightly. It looked like a man’s watch band.

  Reggie called out Walters’s name again. Still no response. The machinelike clunking from the rear of the house continued.

  Reggie wanted to assure himself that the faint glint in that leather bag was not what he was afraid it might be. Surely it was not; surely the police search would have turned it up in their initial investigation.

  Reggie was already standing in the doorway. In for a penny, in for a pound; he took two steps into the room, and without touching anything, leaned down to get a better look into the bag.

  Bloody hell.

  In this light, and without touching and taking it out of the bag, he couldn’t be certain—but it looked like a gold Rolex, the watch stolen from the murdered American tourist.

  Touching that—or the bag, or anything else—was out of the question. A new reason to be accused of messing with something that might be evidence was not something Reggie needed. It was time to leave the premises.

  But there was still that noise from the kitchen.

  Reggie took three steps to the kitchen entry. He looked in.

  It was a narrow kitchen. There was a pine breakfast table with two chairs, a worn-out Formica counter with some dishes in a porcelain sink, and a paper shopping bag in the corner containing crumpled food wrappers and empty beer bottles.

  But the noise was not coming from the kitchen. There was another small room at the other end, with the door partly closed, and the noise was coming from there.

  And Reggie recognized the sound now, or at least part of it. It was a washing machine. He had no use for one himself in recent years, sending all of his laundry out to be done. But his mother had one when he was growing up, and her small laundry room had also been adjacent to the kitchen.

  It was such a normal and comforting sound that for a moment Reggie doubted all the worries that had begun to occur to him. As if the door was not ajar in the middle of night and the bag on the dining table did not contain anything that might have been related in any way to the Black Cab murders. None of that could be so, because there was a washing machine running, as there had always been in the most ordinary of days in Reggie’s childhood home.

  But this was not Reggie’s childhood home, and now he heard that metal screech again.

  Reggie moved on through the kitchen toward the laundry room. The noise was much louder here; clearly this was the source of it.

  The laundry-room door was just partly open; it was too dark and the aperture too narrow to see anything inside. He pushed on the door.

  It didn’t open. There was resistance; something was blocking it.

  Reggie put his shoulder against the door, shoved hard, and forced it open.

  The door opened suddenly and banged with a thud against the adjacent wall. With the door fully open now, Reggie saw the washing machine and heard in full force the racket it was producing.

  In the dim light, he saw that there were two more doorways in the little laundry room—one, open, led to the bedroom; the other, closed, led to the outside.

  And then he looked down for the source of the resistance against the door—and he saw the body.

  It was Walters.

  He was faceup, motionless, his feet toward the door.

  There wasn’t much doubt, even in this light, but Reggie knelt down and checked. No life signs. Blood saturated the floor and the silk dress shirt Walters was wearing.

  All this time the washing machine had continued loudly chugging. Now the chugging ceased and the machine again emitted a loud shriek. It was an unbearable sound, and Reggie instinctively stood and opened the lid to make it stop.

  It did not stop. Reggie looked down into the washing compartment and saw dark sudsy water, but he didn’t know why the noise was continuing.

  He reached into the hot water and found something that was much too hard and sharp to be an article of clothing. He withdrew the item immediately, and as he set it on the top of the machine, he realized he had cut himself in the process.

  It was a kitchen knife, but something else must have cut him, because he had withdrawn the knife by the handle.

  As Reggie looked at the cut in the palm of his hand, a shrieking noise continued, but Reggie realized that the sound he was hearing now wasn’t coming from the machine at all. It was coming from outside.

  It was the sound of sirens, which were winding down now, directly in front of the house.

  For a moment, Reggie wondered whether his fingerprints would register on the sudsy knife, and whether, in his carelessness, he might have dripped his own blood onto the body or the floor. But there was no time to think or do anything further about it. The police were already at the porch.

  Since he could not possibly run, the only thing to do was go meet them. He walked quickly into the living room and managed to get his mobile phone out of his pocket, as if he were about to ring for help, just as the police came onto the porch.

  “Back there, through the kitchen,” said Reggie to the first officer who paused at the door. Reggie only wished that his hands hadn’t still been dripping with blood and suds when he said it.

  12

  In Chelsea, Laura sat alone at breakfast at the Bluebird Café, just a few blocks from Sloane Square. She watched through the window, waiting for the younger Heath brother to arrive.

  She was wearing faded jeans and a black top, looking much like a graduate student from King’s College, and hoping to blend in among them and all the Sloane’s rangers shopping in the square.

  It wasn’t working. She should have covered her striking red hair. But it was ingrained habit not to; she had gotten teased about it as a child, and so had taught herself early on to never cover it up, out of defiance. And then later, by adolescence, the boys had begun to notice in a different way, as they were doing now, and so she hadn’t wanted to cover it up.

  She was drawing stares, even though she had been deliberately loud in telling the maître d’ to leave both settings. She hoped Nigel would get here soon.

  It was an odd thing. She had known since age seven that she wanted to be an actress. And now she was living that dream, and on top of it, she had one of the richest men in the world trying to lavish everything imaginable upon her.

  So why did her life now seem like such chaos?

  Everything would get more complicated, not less, when the movie came out, she knew that. But thankfully there were no cameras in the side breakfast room of the Bluebird Café this morning. And thank God no one had managed to get them into the bloody mobile phones.

  Finally, Nigel came in sight. He was on foot, having taken the tube again, apparently. Nigel seemed to never feel that he could afford a taxi, though she had always seen him tip as frequently and overgenerously as an American. She had always liked that about him.

  But she made a mental note to tell Mara soon that if Nigel ever began to make any money, he would need some training in how to spend it.

  Nigel seated himself across from Laura at the little table.

  “How was your flight?” said Laura.

  “A bit long. Three stopovers. Have you heard of this thing called Priceline?”

  “A game show?”

  “Very similar; you take a guess and hope for the best.”

  The waiter came over.

  “I’ll get the continental breakfast,” said Nigel.

  “Brunch is on me,” said Laura.

  “Won’t hear of it.”

  “Yes, you will, or I won’t pay for your flight either.”

  “In that case, I’ll get the lobster omelet.”

  “Better. I’m having that as well.”

  The waiter went away.

  “Mara did not come with you?”

  “She has an exhibit. I intend to be back before it closes,” said Nigel. “So Reggie had better listen to reason.”

  “We can always hope,” said Laura.<
br />
  Nigel proceeded to unfold a letter from his coat pocket.

  “I alerted him to this when it arrived, of course, but he just made light of it.”

  Laura took the letter, placed it flat on the white tablecloth, and read it.

  She started to laugh halfway through, then looked up and saw Nigel’s expression, and managed to read the remainder with a straight face.

  “Well,” she said when she was done, “I suppose it is a bit threatening.”

  “‘I shall have my forefather’s revenge’? I’d say more than a bit threatening.”

  “Well, all right then, if you get past the ‘forefather’ part of it. But the threat is against Sherlock Holmes, not Reggie.”

  “No, the threat is against the barrister at 221b Baker Street whom the letter writer thinks is Sherlock Holmes. And that barrister is Reggie.”

  “Nigel, the letter is signed ‘Moriarty.’ It’s a joke.”

  “It is not inconceivable that there might be a person out there with delusions of being Moriarty.”

  “I suppose,” said Laura doubtfully.

  “Such a person could be dangerous.”

  Laura looked at the letter again, nodded, and said, “You’re right, I suppose. It just seems so … theoretical, compared to what has actually taken place.”

  “I knew it!” Nigel almost jumped out of his chair. “I knew you were holding back. You didn’t pay my airfare just to see this letter. What has happened?”

  “He’s in jail.”

  Nigel settled back down and breathed a sigh of relief; clearly he had been expecting something worse.

  “For murder,” Laura added.

  Nigel perked up a bit. “Not someone in chambers. It will give him the devil of a time hiring.”

  “No.”

  “Who then? We don’t have many relatives to choose from.”

  “A client.”

  Nigel paused to take that in, then said, “He does get annoyed when bills go unpaid.”

  “The police said it was because Reggie’s client fooled him, made him a party to falsifying evidence, and then committed a murder while out on the dismissal that Reggie so cleverly obtained.”

  “Hmm.” Nigel stirred some sugar into his tea.

  “That’s an awfully weak motive, isn’t it?” said Laura.

  “Well, just the getting-fooled part might be enough for Reggie.”

  “That does seem to bother him even more than getting arrested. But honestly, Nigel, how likely is it a barrister will kill his own client just for being guilty?”

  Nigel shrugged. “I wanted to kill one once. And that was just a tort case.”

  “Well, I thought you were the exception. And anyway, you didn’t.”

  Nigel nodded, put some butter on his toast, and said, “Do you know why my brother stopped doing criminal a few years ago?”

  “No. But he told me why he started.”

  “He did?” Nigel seemed surprised.

  “Yes, just the other night.”

  “About Dad and the football match and all?”

  “Yes,” said Laura. “Why? It’s all true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I’ve never heard him talk about it. Nice work for you to pry it out.”

  “I didn’t actually have to pry all that much,” said Laura, allowing herself to take just a little satisfaction in that. But then she noticed that Nigel was continuing to butter the same piece of toast.

  “What is it, Nigel?” said Laura. “Speak.”

  “He told you why he started with criminal. Did he tell you why he stopped?”

  “Not directly.”

  “It was a bit before your time. I mean, before either of us met you.”

  “Yes, I understand what before my time means.”

  “There was a veteran police officer accused of killing his wife over a divorce. Reggie got it tossed out at the preliminary hearing, and then the copper promptly went home and murdered his mother-in-law to boot.”

  “I think I have heard rumors of that.”

  “Reggie never accepted a criminal case again after that. But there was more to it than just the one bad client. Reggie told me at the time that he’d had it with criminal anyway. He said, ‘I thought I would be defending people being railroaded by the system, like Dad. Instead I’m defending people like the louts who roughed him up.’”

  “Yes,” said Laura, quietly. “I can see how that would annoy him.”

  “He hasn’t done a criminal case since,” said Nigel. “Which sort of makes me wonder why he accepted this one.”

  Laura considered that, then said, “I’ve heard him talk about this client. How hard he’s had to work. How he’s dedicated to his career and improving himself. I think he thought he was defending your father—or someone like him as a younger man. He said he wanted to make sure it turns out right this time.”

  Nigel thought about that, then nodded affirmatively. “Unfortunately, that just supports the prosecution theory about why Reggie would be so angry at getting fooled.”

  “But they can’t convict just on motive, can they?” said Laura.

  “No. Do they have anything else?”

  “Hardly. Just Reggie’s prints on a kitchen knife, and on the washing machine, and a drop or two of his blood on the floor, and Reggie himself at the crime scene with a cut on his hand just ten minutes or so after the time of death.”

  “Well, how in bloody hell did all that happen?”

  “One foolish step led to another, I think. Like anything else. Anyway, I got the police report from Reggie’s chambers,” said Laura. She took that document out of her purse and gave it to Nigel. “For what it’s worth, they also found a broken wineglass in the washing machine where Reggie fished out the knife.”

  “A wineglass and a knife were in the washing machine?”

  “Yes,” said Laura. “And they found a man’s Rolex in a bag on the dining table.”

  Nigel studied the report. “The knife wound was from the front, and there were no defensive wounds. Was there a second wineglass? Not in the washing machine?”

  “I don’t know. Does it make a difference?”

  “All the difference, probably. Trust Scotland Yard not to mention it one way or the other. Fingerprints?” said Nigel, still searching through the report.

  “Not yet, apparently. But I presume they won’t be able to get anything from what was chugging away in the hot suds?”

  “No,” said Nigel. “But it looks to me like the victim knew his attacker, and the attacker didn’t wear gloves, and so had to try to clean up after, and your average murderer just isn’t sufficiently neat and tidy to wipe away every possible print.”

  “And if the murderer isn’t average?”

  “Somewhere there’s going to be some square inch of a print that didn’t get wiped down. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Laura. And then she said, “Powder or liquid?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Boxed, or bottled? Does the report say what sort of detergent it was?”

  “No,” said Nigel. “Does it matter?”

  “Boxed, I hope, and as poorly constructed as most,” said Laura.

  “Why?”

  “Nigel, haven’t you ever done your own laundry?”

  “Of course I…” began Nigel, and then he stopped and thought about it. “Well, that might be a long shot,” he said. “But I’ll ask Wembley to make sure they check it.”

  Nigel continued reading the report. “Damn. They say the Rolex has the initials of the male tourist Reggie’s client allegedly killed.”

  “Do we have to say allegedly even when the person who probably did it is already dead himself?”

  “Let’s do,” said Nigel. “It will make my brother feel better to think there is still some doubt about him having released a guilty man.”

  “Well, it has made him very mopey. I could get hardly a word out of him at the jail. He’s being very dense about it. That’s why
you’re here.”

  Nigel looked back at Laura as though she had paid him a compliment. The look surprised her; she thought she had stated the obvious.

  “Have they indicted?” said Nigel, almost authoritatively now.

  “Yes. This morning. The magistrate who heard it was the same one who released Reggie’s client two days ago, and he was not at all pleased. He immediately committed Reggie’s case to the Old Bailey.”

  “And when is the bail hearing?” said Nigel.

  “It’s this afternoon.”

  “We’ll need a barrister. The court won’t like it if Reggie gets up and argues for his own bail.”

  “Reggie said to get Geoffrey Langdon,” said Laura. “Is he any good?”

  “Yes,” said Nigel. “And scary as hell, if you ask me. Very sneaky fellow. But all the better for us, when he’s on our side instead of the prosecution’s. What about the solicitor that engaged Reggie for the client? Does he have anything that can help us?”

  “She. And she seems to be either missing, or accidentally out of town, or deliberately unavailable, depending upon whether you are talking to Reggie, or to New Scotland Yard, or to me. Reggie said she sounded as though she were in some distress. He hasn’t heard from her since, but she has an answering service, and the service says she left word that she will be out of town on holiday for a few days.”

  “Well, that’s bloody convenient for her.”

  “That’s what I thought as well.”

  “So because of that message she left with the answering service, the police aren’t looking for her?”

  “Right. At least not yet.”

  “All right,” said Nigel. “I’ll see if I can track her down while you and Langdon are at the bail hearing.”

  “You won’t be there?” said Laura.

  “Me and Reggie at the same bail hearing?” said Nigel. “I don’t think so. Not unless you want to see us both locked up.”

  13

  When Nigel entered the Dorset House lobby on Baker Street, he was surprised at how different it felt.

  So far as he could tell, nothing had changed: the glass doors at the entrance, the marble flooring of the lobby, the security station with the elderly guard, the nicely business-seductive attired women moving to and from the financial floors—all seemed pretty much the same.