The Brothers of Baker Street

by Michael Robertson

  There was a dartboard at the far corner, with half a dozen patrons, all drivers by the look of them, and all probably with money on the match. There were murmurs now as the next contestant stepped up to the line.

  Nigel went to the barman, requested a pint, and asked which of the darts enthusiasts was Edwards.

  “None of ’em” said the barkeeper. “He’s in the back room.” Nigel looked in that direction—at a door at the opposite end from the darts—and the barkeeper nodded.

  Nigel took his pint with him and entered the back room.

  He heard no noise when he entered. Instead there was a hushed, suspenseful silence, enveloped by floating clouds of tobacco smoke and accompanied by the scents of chalk dust, leather, and felt.

  Nigel knew immediately that he had entered a snooker room. And that was even better than darts.

  In the center of the room was a full-size mahogany-and-slate snooker table, with deep, leather-mesh pockets, and green felt that had seen so much action over so many years that it was beginning to look just a little faded in the area of the racking dot, like the top of the heads of the older men in the room.

  There were two men well past sixty; the other three were much younger. There was one young woman, who stood leaning into the embrace of one of the younger men, seated at a bar stool along the wall. Another of the younger men was involved in a contest at the snooker table with the oldest man; everyone else was watching.

  No one was looking at Nigel as he closed the door quietly behind him, and no one was speaking. The only number ball left on the table was the seven, the final ball, and exactly the same color, and pretty much the same glossiness, as the Black Cabs. The younger man had a shot at it—but a very long shot—from the opposite end of the table.

  The older man was close to eighty, or perhaps even a few years past. He had not quite a full head of hair, but he still had most of it; it was salt and pepper, mostly salt, but carefully slicked back. His trimmed mustache was like something out of a twenties Errol Flynn movie; he wore a long-sleeve shirt, crimson and black, in a narrow-stripe pattern that looked like it had been in style about a hundred years ago; his cuffed, slightly overlong gray trousers were held up by suspenders, not a belt.

  He was leaning back against the wall, arms crossed patiently, eyes fixed on some point on the snooker table that apparently only he was aware of, as the younger man took a shot—a tentative, uncertain roller—that missed, with the black seven ball ending up flat against the green side-cushion.

  “Didn’t want it,” said the older man, unfolding his arms and stepping over to the table. “You just didn’t want it.”

  He lined up the shot with no apparent effort, leaned over the table slightly, and banked the seven firmly and cleanly into the opposite corner pocket.

  The three younger men groaned, the girl laughed, and money was paid to the other older man, who sat on a bar stool and smiled.

  Nigel smiled at it, too. And now with the game done, he knew he was allowed to speak.

  “Bill Edwards?” he said, addressing the man who had just won the game.

  The man nodded, said that Nigel looked like someone who could play, and offered that the table was open for the next challenger.

  Nigel shook his head. “Perhaps when I was nineteen and foolish,” said Nigel. “But not now. People say you know more about the licensed Black Cab drivers in London than all the databases at the Carriage Office.”

  “What people tell you that?” asked the older man, though he did not seem surprised at the assertion. He put a triangular wooden frame on the table and began to rack up the red snooker balls for the next victim.

  “The bloke at the steam clean,” said Nigel.

  Edwards nodded. “He might be right.”

  “What can you tell me about Neil Walters?”

  The man stopped, with the frame still on the table. Everyone else stopped what they were doing as well; one of the younger men stood up from his bar stool, snooker cue in hand, as if ready to turn it into a cudgel. All eyes were on Nigel.

  “Why are you asking?” said the older man.

  “I intend to clear Reggie Heath of his murder,” said Nigel.

  Now the room relaxed a bit, but just a bit. Apparently, among cab drivers, the jury was still out on Reggie Heath. Which made perfect sense, as Nigel considered it. They probably didn’t know whether to regard Reggie as the inventive barrister who cleared their fellow cabbie’s name, even if only temporarily—or as the duped and annoyed lawyer who killed his own cab-driver client.

  The older man at the table, looking thoughtful, went back to racking the balls, as everyone else waited for him to speak. Now he lifted the wooden frame from the felt, with the balls in perfect formation.

  “If Walters did what the police say he did,” said Edwards, “then I hope your brother did drive a knife into him.” He looked Nigel in the eye as he said this, to see if he had guessed right on the relationship. Nigel nodded slightly.

  “And twisted it, too,” said one of the younger men.

  “Our reputation is our livelihood,” Edwards continued, completing the rack by placing a red ball down perfectly in front of the six, “and anyone—even one of our own—who does anything to harm it will have me to deal with.”

  “Bloody well right,” said the other younger man, tapping the base of his snooker cue on the ground for emphasis.

  Edwards continued. “But I don’t believe Walters had it in him to murder anyone. He’s a big enough guy to have done it, all right. I’ll give you that. But I’ve seen him deal with snockered toss-pots and fare-jumping yobs who flipped him off on the way out of his cab, thinking he couldn’t catch them, and then when he did, he was as gentle as Gandhi.”

  Edwards moved on toward the other end of the snooker table as he said this, and Nigel wondered if that move was an evasion. He followed.

  “So, it must have been the other driver who did it?” suggested Nigel.

  “What other driver?”

  “The driver of the other cab.”

  Edwards shook his head, and continued, unhurried, to place each numbered ball on its own spot on the green felt. “I don’t believe there was another cab driver. Not a real one. Two Black Cabs driving about London at the same time with the same license numbers? Perhaps, perhaps for just a short time without me hearing about it. But two different drivers learning the streets of London and passing the Knowledge, the years it takes to do that, and then driving those two identical cabs without me knowing of them?” Edwards walked to the opposite end of the table now and put the seven ball down on its spot, with just a bit of emphasis. “Not bloody likely,” he said.

  “All right then,” said Nigel. “If there aren’t two Black Cab drivers, and Walters didn’t do it, then what’s your answer?”

  Edwards started to chalk up his queue.

  “Who said I had an answer?” he said calmly.

  Now the door to the general pub area opened, and before Edwards could get a challenger for the next game, or Nigel ask his next question, one of the dart-playing cab drivers entered.

  “They moved the time up, mates. It starts in an hour.”

  “Imagine that,” said Edwards, calmly. “Who would have thought they’d change the schedule on us?” He and the other drivers in the room immediately put away their cues and picked up their macintoshes.

  “You can ride along if you like,” he said to Nigel.

  Five minutes later, Nigel was riding in the back of one Black Cab in a procession of at least twenty Black Cabs, all of them heading toward the north end of Caledonia Road—so many shining Black Cabs all in a row that even for London it was a bit unusual, and pedestrians turned their heads to look.

  “Where are we headed?” asked Nigel.

  “To defend our livelihoods,” said the driver. This cab driver was one of the younger men from the snooker room; there seemed to be something of a pecking order, and Nigel apparently wasn’t of sufficient importance to ride in the cab with Edwards.
/>   “From what?”

  “Bloody satellites,” said the driver.

  Nigel thought about that. “Global positioning?” he asked.

  “Right. Every year for the past three years they’ve tried to push this down our throats. Every year we throw them back across the pond. You’d think they’d get tired trying.”

  Ten minutes later they were at the London Transport Authority building in Penton. The meeting hall was quite ordinary: a large wooden emblem at the back wall behind the oak speaker’s dais tried to be ornate, but the lime-green plaster walls and the two hundred folding metal chairs made it clear that this was a working-class meeting hall. Nigel felt quite at home.

  All of the chairs were already occupied; and almost all of them by cab drivers, judging by the style of their macs. Nigel and his cab driver stood along the wall near the entrance.

  Three people were seated in chairs on a platform directly behind the speaker’s dais. One of them, farthest from the dais, was Edwards, apparently as the official representative for the cab drivers. The other two were not cab drivers: one was wearing a black blazer with an official gold insignia for the Carriage Office; the other man was wearing a corporate-gray suit, with the shade of pink shirt always worn by wearers of corporate-gray suits who want to demonstrate creativity.

  A fourth person on the platform was seated unobtrusively in the dark of a full-length stage curtain at the far right corner of the platform. His face wasn’t visible, but he sat with a posture that seemed familiar to Nigel somehow. But Nigel couldn’t place it, and the man was probably just someone in charge of the hall facilities themselves.

  The man from the Carriage Office stood, screeched the microphone, and then introduced Mr. Trimball from Transatlantic Software.

  Mr. Trimball was a lean, trim man, in his late forties probably, according to his bearing, but possibly older from his face, which was both more lined and more tanned that those of the other people in the room.

  An unwelcoming murmur rippled through the audience of cab drivers as he stepped to the microphone. He looked out over the crowd, paused for the noise to subside just a bit, and then began to speak.

  “The Black Cabs of London are the safest mode of transportation in the world,” he began, quite loudly. From his accent it was immediately apparent that he was an American.

  The murmuring stopped on those first words, as he must have hoped it would; there were even a couple of “hear, hears.” He continued: “So it is said. So has it been said for one hundred years, and it has always been true. But recent events compel us to realize that it is true no longer.”

  Now the crowd emanated a tense silence.

  “There was a time when you saw a Black Cab on the street and you knew what it was and the caliber of the person driving it, and if you were an elderly pensioner on holiday, or a stockbroker who had one or two too many after work, or even a honeymooning couple from America, you knew that if you took that Black Cab, your driver was licensed and bonded and had spent years achieving the Knowledge and the privilege of driving a Black Cab, and that you would be got safely home, without question, and with no wrong turns taken either.

  “But no longer. Today, more Black Cabs are manufactured overseas than in the UK. We do not know where those cabs end up. Nor do we even know what has become of all the Black Cabs manufactured here at home. There is no legal prohibition against selling to anyone at all, whether at home or abroad. Gangster drug lords in the US can own Black Cabs if they choose to, and some do, I’ve seen them. Anyone who chooses to do so can own one here as well. And as we have seen, a person of ill intent can forge a license placard and claim to be a licensed Black Cab driver on the streets of London when in fact he is nothing of the kind.

  “Is the driver of a Black Cab still the best taxi driver in the world? Yes. But can we still say with a certainty that every apparent Black Cab serving the streets of London is indeed what it seems? Clearly, we cannot. And if we cannot vouch for the cabs, can we possibly vouch for the persons driving them?”

  A heavy murmur rolled through the hall now.

  “But there is a solution. What I propose to you here today will solve not only the rare problem of the bad-apple Black Cab driver, but also the problem of the false Black Cab, being driven by a false Black Cab driver. And—even better—it will make all of your jobs easier to boot.”

  Now, with a flourish, Trimball held up a small silver object, about the size of a cigarette case.

  “Meet ‘highway,’” he announced. “That’s H-A-I-W-A-Y, otherwise known as “Here Am I, Where Are You?” A satellite navigation system so advanced that the US Department of Defense wouldn’t even let us tell you about it until now. With HAIWAY as a mandatory installation on every newly manufactured Black Cab and on every existing licensed Black Cab in the city, not only will you always know how to get where you’re going without even thinking about it, but also, no person of criminal intent will ever again be able to create a fake Black Cab and use the impeccable reputation of the honest Black Cab drivers to help him commit his crimes.”

  Trimball paused just for a moment and smiled at the new round of murmurs.

  “Why is that, you ask?” He looked back over his shoulder as he said this, and on this cue, the man seated at the curtain stood and flipped a switch at the back of the platform. The lights in the audience went dark, and a projection screen descended into place at the back of the platform.

  “It’s because satellites are a two-way street,” continued Trimball, over a slick audiovisual presentation featuring shining Black Cabs, a blue-and-green Earth, and animated, smiling satellites.

  “Not only does the central processing system tell every Black Cab where to go and how to get there, but every Black Cab is at all times sending a signal right back to the central processing system, saying where it actually is at that moment. And more—every metropolitan police car in London will be equipped with a client device that will ping every Black Cab for its identity—automatically—and the police will immediately know if any cab is false. Because HAIWAY will tell them.”

  The presentation stopped now, and the lights came back up. Trimball looked out over his audience to gather their attention back in. He leaned forward on the podium.

  “Think about it,” he said, earnestly. “No one will ever dare drive a fake Black Cab again. And no one—not the Daily Sun, not the Crown Prosecution Service, no one—will ever again, falsely or otherwise, be able to accuse a Black Cab driver of committing a crime.”

  Now Trimball stopped and took a half step back from the podium to demonstrate that he was done, squaring his shoulders in anticipated triumph and looking out boldly over the crowd.

  The man in the Carriage Office blazer immediately leaped to his feet. “Hear, hear!” he cried.

  No one seconded it, but no one shouted it down either. There was a long silence in the hall. From his vantage point, standing near the doorway, Nigel could see the cab drivers, who had all seemed so certainly opposed on the way in, turning to each other in a confused state. By the look of things, they weren’t necessarily all seeing the proposal the same way.

  Nigel himself had not yet formed an opinion about it. In fact, for the past five minutes of the presentation, he hadn’t been paying all that much attention to the content. He’d been trying to remember where he had seen Trimball before. The name wasn’t familiar at all—but he knew he had seen the face.

  “Huh,” said the young driver standing next to Nigel. “Well, that’s not exactly what I expected now, is it?”

  “How is it different?” said Nigel.

  “Why, the whole tracking and identification thing. I thought it was just going to be something that would make the Knowledge unnecessary, so that any wanker or unlicensed minicab driver could drop in and pick up a Black Cab license on his way to lunch. But always knowing the real thing from the fake … well, that’s not a bad idea now, is it?”

  “I’m not at all sure,” said Nigel. He was watching Edwards, who had slow
ly stood after the presentation, said nothing to anyone that Nigel could see, and was now making his way toward the door. As the man drew closer, it seemed to Nigel that all of the starch had gone out of him.

  17

  Laura rode in a cab from Baker Street, down along the east edge of Hyde Park, toward the solicitor’s home address in Mayfair.

  In Mayfair, the cab turned onto a lovely street, lined with townhomes that by tradition had belonged to the likes of cabinet ministers and mercantile barons. All a bit stuffy for Laura’s taste. But she had to admit that even with her recent success, if she herself wanted one of these stately white-stone Edwardians, she would hardly be able to afford it.

  So … great legs and family money, thought Laura, as the cab came to a stop. The more she learned of Reggie’s enigmatic solicitor, the less she liked her.

  The home had a particularly nice front garden of pink and white roses. Great legs, family money, and good with a garden. Worse and worse.

  Laura went up the short walkway and knocked. After a short moment, a servant girl answered the door. She opened it only a few inches.

  “I’m looking for Darla Rennie,” said Laura. “Is this her residence?”

  The servant girl hesitated. In a Russian accent, she said, “Yes. But she’s not at home.”

  “Do you know when she is coming back?”

  “No,” said the girl, looking about rather helplessly, as though she wished someone else were there to answer for her. “I think … perhaps she will be gone a long time.”

  “It’s very important that I get in touch with her,” said Laura. “She is the solicitor for a friend of mine.”

  The servant girl thought about that for a moment, then said, “Is a solicitor a professor?”

  “Not necessarily. But I suppose one could be, if one were teaching.”

  The servant girl thought about that, and then nodded. “I think she became one just recently.”

  Laura had no idea what that might mean. And she wasn’t learning anything just standing on the doorstep.