Several minutes later, Reggie drove past the hedgerow and crested a hill; he was now above a long valley, and midway down the slope of this valley was a house.
Quite a large house actually, and impressive, situated where it was, with views down the extended valley and of the hills far and away. Even from a distance, Reggie could see that it wasn’t one of the typical farmhouses in the area. It was a residence, built in recent years, and considerable money had been spent—the square-cut stone of the walls was either the yellow limestone indigenous to the area (and not easy to come by legally) or else a fabrication meant to mimic that stone.
Either way, thought Reggie, as he continued on the road toward the house, it’s expensive. Even for a doctor.
The road was passing through fields now, not pastures; Reggie suspected he was entering a conservation area. There were no more sheep, just some black crows that startled up from a beech tree on the opposite side of the narrow road, as Reggie drove past.
Reggie hated crows. He instinctively glanced in his rearview mirror after he saw them. There were at least half a dozen, and several had hopped down to the ground, along the edge of the drainage ditch.
Probably they’d found a rabbit or the like. Bloody crows, and if anyone saw Reggie get out and just on general principle throw a rock at them in the nature conservation area, he’d probably get a bloody fine.
But it wasn’t just the crows. There was something shiny and metallic visible in the rearview mirror.
Reggie put the Jag in reverse and backed up, swirling mud and water off the tires, until he was parallel with the crows and the object of their attention. But he still couldn’t be sure. The crows were after something in the drainage ditch, and it was shielded by the high grass and reeds.
Reggie got out of the car into what was now a full-scale drencher; with rain running under his collar, he tromped several steps through the sucking mud to the opposite edge of the road. The crows scattered, but not far.
He looked down and saw it. A silver Audi A3 had gone off the road and was head-down in the ditch, crashed against the base of the beech tree from which the crows were staging their attack.
One crow kept its perch, on the rain gutter above the open driver’s-side door, even as Reggie pushed toward it through the reeds.
Reggie found a pebble in the mud and threw it. The crow flapped and jumped away.
And then Reggie saw the driver—a white male, his head slumped, and his right arm dangling limply out the door.
He was not strapped in. No airbag had deployed, which was a little odd, but perhaps this vehicle didn’t have one.
The man’s head had hit the windshield hard enough to break the skin, and there was a nasty swelling on his forehead. Reggie knelt at the side of the car and checked for a pulse.
Nothing. The man was gone.
Reggie took out his mobile phone and pressed 999. He knew he himself would be identified by the call, and the police would discover that he was out of bounds if they bothered to look him up, but it couldn’t be helped.
But bloody hell. The call didn’t go through. No signal; in exactly the type of place where you might need it the most, no bloody signal.
At least not on Reggie’s phone. But perhaps the driver had a better service.
Reggie leaned back into the car and began to look about. Several days’ worth of Daily Sun editions were on the floor of the passenger side, getting soaked with the rain. It was interesting that the driver seemed to have more than a passing interest in that particular tabloid.
Still, Reggie’s immediate need was for a mobile phone, and there was none—not on the floor or seats, not in the glove compartment, not in the driver’s pockets. Which was a bit surprising, because the driver—mid-forties, expensive business-casual clothes—had the look of someone who should be carrying a mobile.
But the coat pockets weren’t empty. Reggie found a small address book, a wallet with ID, and a passport with a stamp from three months earlier. The driver was Larry Trimball. An American and, according to his business card, the owner of a high-tech startup company.
Nigel’s startup geek? Reggie looked in the address book. He flipped through pages filled with neat block characters, and on the next-to-last page, there it was—the address and number for the Bath Mental Health and Recovery Center.
Reggie put all of it back into the man’s pocket. If the police arrived, it wouldn’t do for Reggie to have the man’s wallet in his possession.
He climbed back up to the muddy road and looked about.
If he went back out on the lane on which he had driven in, it would be a good half hour before he reached a farmhouse to make a call.
But the yellow stone house—the only house within sight in any direction—was less than a mile away.
Reggie got back in his Jag, started it, spun the wheels just slightly in the mud, and continued on toward the house.
In half a mile he turned off the muddy road and onto a long gravel drive.
He drove up to the front of the house and stopped. There were no parked vehicles. There were no exterior lights on. But there were address numbers carved into a placard above the door, and they matched the address Reggie had gotten—it was Dr. Dillane’s house.
Reggie got out and went to the front door. He rapped the heavy metal knocker against solid mahogany and waited. Then he knocked again. No response.
It was twilight now, darkening rapidly. But Reggie peered through the window, past folding wooden shutters, and saw a light source from some back room.
He walked on the wet, crunching gravel path of the drive from the front of the house, around the side, and to the back—where apparently a vehicle had been parked, leaving shallow depressions that were now filling with water.
The gravel ended at a terrace that was paved with flat sheets of more yellow limestone. There was no gate.
But apparently there was a security system. Glaring white flood lamps opened up on Reggie as he stepped onto the terrace, making him pause and blink.
He waited to hear an alarm. None sounded, but that didn’t mean that some private security service somewhere wasn’t being notified.
He had already tripped the alarm, but the nearest response had to be at least twenty minutes away. He would have to be alert to that; they would probably drive right past the vehicle and the body in the ditch to the house, and they would assume Reggie to be an intruder.
Which he was about to be. He wanted to talk to Dr. Dillane. Too bad Dr. Dillane wasn’t there, but there was a dead body down the road, and there was no need to stick to the proprieties—he had the perfect excuse to break in and learn what he could.
He continued on to the wide back windows; they had shutters, too, like the front, but these shutters were open—this was the view side of the house, opening out toward the rolling hills of the conservation area.
Reggie looked in through the main window.
It was the dining room; he could see a long, heavy glass rectangular table and six chairs. But the interior light wasn’t coming from the dining room. It was coming from an interior corridor.
It was time to make damn sure his presence was known, if anyone was here. He shouted. He rapped on the heavy picture window and made it shake.
No response.
Reggie stepped to the side of the picture window, to a sliding glass door.
When he had first stepped on to the terrace, he had thought the door was shut. But he saw now that it was not quite so. The door was unlatched, ajar by a quarter of an inch; rain was running down the edges and pooling at the metal runners.
Reggie pulled on the sliding door. It opened with a loud metallic screech.
He stepped inside. He was in the dining room. The dining table was in the center; to one side of it was the corridor. There was a mobile phone lying on the table—which would seem to indicate that someone was home.
Reggie shouted down the corridor once more for Dr. Dillane. No response. There was still that source of light from so
me room farther in—probably a cellar; through an open door at the end of the corridor, Reggie could see residual light reflecting on the highly polished wood floor. He continued in that direction.
He passed two side doors—a bedroom and a den—checking very quickly to be sure no one was inside.
There were bits of mud on the otherwise immaculate floor—what looked like same-day trackings of what Reggie had been tromping through outside.
Now he was at the open door at the end of the corridor. There was a descending stairwell, and light—a surprising amount of it—was coming from below.
Reggie stopped in the doorway, rapped on the doorjamb, and called yet again.
Still no response. He started down the stairs.
He saw immediately that this was no wine or storage cellar. It was a fully converted basement, brightly lit with fluorescents in the ceiling. There was a long work surface, of metal and white Formica, attached to one wall, and on that were personal computers, servers, and monitors. There was one padded office chair at the center of the workbench, filing and storage cabinets next to that, and a couple of smaller, more utilitarian stools for quick seating at the several PCs.
It was a small computer lab. Reggie immediately thought of the wild legends about garage startups making fortunes in Silicon Valley.
An odd sort of thing to find in an English psychiatrist’s cellar, though. Even if the therapist was inclined to put his case histories and such online, he would hardly need an entire computer lab to do it. This facility had some other purpose.
And the American in the ditch had come a long way if it was just to render simple tech support.
On the floor at the near end of the Formica counter was a three-ring binder—a logbook, probably—which looked to have been dropped hastily; the binder and its pages were askew. Reggie set it on the counter, and opened it.
The first spread of pages were a calendar—two months, the current and most recent, were marked. Dates were circled in red and were annotated. Something was familiar about them, and Reggie looked closer.
They were hearing dates. And if Reggie was reading the notations correctly, the hearings were for Trimball’s navigation system. They were spread out over several weeks, each of them progressively more final. One of them had been that morning—the hearing Nigel had attended. There was another circled for that evening, and the last date circled—tomorrow—was for the transport authority’s final decision.
But something else about the dates was familiar.
Reggie took a pencil from the desk, and on the same calendar, he put a check mark for each of the dates on which a Black Cab crime had been reported.
At first they did not seem to match up exactly, which, for some reason, seemed to Reggie a good thing.
But then he looked again. There was, in fact, a pattern.
Except for the very first crime, the flurry of Black Cab robberies and other rudenesses at the start had all been in the same week—just prior to the first hearing for the navigational software.
And then, from that first hearing on, the crimes had gotten increasingly serious and more high profile, culminating in the murder of the American couple just one night before the second hearing.
The Black Cab crimes were not random. They were a scheme. They were deliberately timed and designed to create a perceived need for Trimball’s software system.
But whose scheme was it? The software proposal was Trimball’s. But the logbook and the computer lab were in Dr. Dillane’s house.
Reggie began to flip rapidly through the pages of the logbook. The remainder of the calendar was blank, but in the log portion there were pages of handwritten notes with references to “C1,” “C2,” and “C3,” and routes in London for each.
Cabs, Reggie realized. The references were to Black Cabs.
From the nature of the handwriting, it was obvious that two different people had been making journal entries. But neither of them was Trimball; Reggie had seen Trimball’s address book, hand-printed in clean block letters. Both of the note makers in the book wrote in longhand; one was scrawled and almost illegible, like a doctor’s signature. The other was old-fashioned and clear, and … and Reggie knew he had seen it before. It was the same elegant handwriting he had seen in Darla Rennie’s briefing papers.
Reggie took a deep breath and sat down on one of the workbench stools. There was no doubt about it now—Darla and the woman Nigel encountered in Dr. Dillane’s therapy group were the same person. That person believed herself to be Moriarty, and almost undoubtedly that person was the Moriarty wannabe who had written the threatening letter to Sherlock Holmes.
But what else had she done?
Reggie moved to the center terminal, found an attached mouse, and moved it to see if the monitor display would react.
The power was on, but he got no reaction from the mouse or the keyboard.
He swiveled the chair over to the other PCs and tried each in turn.
Nothing.
Of course not. It had been too much to hope for.
He got up to leave the cellar; perhaps he could learn more from something upstairs.
And then he heard a beep.
The central computer had come on.
And then, simultaneously, both the other PCs came on as well.
Timers. Reggie checked his watch and saw that it was exactly the top of the hour; the entire configuration must be on a timer switch.
And now all three displays lit up.
Reggie knew he could not have much time. The timer probably meant that someone was due to return, and in any case, he had already tripped the alarm.
He sat down at the center chair as the main display began to define itself. He waited for logos and icons to appear.
But they did not. All he had was a blinking log-on screen, and the system was demanding both a user name and a password.
He was no hacker, and any decent security set up would freeze him out after a few wrong attempts. If he was going to guess, he would have to guess right.
Certainly Dillane would have a user name on the system, but Reggie had no idea what Dillane’s password would be. Trimball might have a user name on the system as well; after all, he had created it. That password might very well be noted somewhere in Trimball’s wallet or address book, but Reggie had left both of those in Trimball’s car.
But Darla also had made entries in the logbook. So she must have an account as well. For her, he could at least make a guess.
He typed in her initial and surname to log in. Good so far; the log-on screen was still blinking normally.
Now for the password guess. Reggie typed it in:
M-O-R-I-A-R-T-Y
The log-on immediately disappeared, the entire screen display disintegrated into thousands of pixels, and then—a moment later—it all reassembled again.
He was in. The display had opened directly into some kind of video link. Whatever was on camera was not well lit; Reggie stared, trying to discern what he was looking at. It was dark and shadowy, and the sides of the image were curved—he had to be looking through a small camera lens. There was slightly more light in the center, and there was some sort of movement taking place; but it was all blurry, like peering through dirty glass.
Reggie got up and tried the terminal display to his right, with a similar result.
But now he tried right-clicking the mouse, with the cursor on the image. When he did that, the angle of the image shifted.
And Reggie realized that he was controlling a bloody camera remotely.
He panned to the left and could make out essentially nothing—he was looking at a surface that was dark, solid, and textured, and something above it that was smooth and reflecting like glass, but he could tell nothing more.
He panned to the right and saw more black textured surface—but also a square patch of yellow. He right-clicked, left-clicked, double-clicked, tried the center wheel control—and finally he was able to adjust the focus and bring the yellow portion in more sharply.
It took a moment to register, but then he knew exactly what he was looking at: it was the interior of a Black Cab. The yellow square that had finally come into focus was the identification plate on the passenger door, and on that plate was the license number for the cab: WHAMU1
Reggie knew those numbers. They were ingrained in his memory from the court briefs. He was looking through a remote camera, tucked away somewhere inside a Black Cab—and, according to the numbers, it was his dead client’s Black Cab.
Reggie stared point-blank at the screen.
Why in hell did Dillane have a remote camera set up in a Black Cab?
Reggie turned back to the monitor. He panned the camera up, down, left, right, and finally was able to get a view through the driver’s side window. He could make out a plain gray concrete wall with black lettering on it, and now he knew exactly where the Black Cab was.
It was in the evidence garage at New Scotland Yard. He was looking through a remote lens so well disguised that the Scotland Yard team hadn’t discovered it yet.
Reggie moved immediately to the next terminal, and repeated the same process. It was another camera in a Black Cab, and from the angle on the garage lettering, it was clearly a different Black Cab—but it had the same license number.
Both of the Black Cabs from Reggie’s case were sitting in the Scotland Yard garage, just waiting for the surveillance devices to be discovered.
Well, give them time. They would get to it eventually.
Reggie went back to the central terminal, and knowing the controls a bit better now, quickly brought the display into focus.
It was a Black Cab. But this one was different. It had a different license number. And but this one wasn’t in the Scotland Yard impound garage.
This one was in motion. It took a moment, but Reggie realized he was looking through the passenger window of a Black Cab as it moved through traffic.
Reggie stared at the screen, at fleeting, blurry images of London shops and street signs and pedestrians, and considered what this meant.
The Carriage Office would make its decision tomorrow. If the pattern Reggie saw in the logbook calendar held true, then there would be a new, and spectacularly high-profile Black Cab crime tonight—almost certainly another murder.
The Brothers of Baker Street Page 20