The Baker Street Letters

by Michael Robertson

  This was not a huge concession on her part. The rule, that a barrister must accept the client presented to him in the same way that the next cab in line must accept the next passenger, could almost always be got around if need be.

  “Fair enough,” said Reggie. “But why me?”

  “For starters, I know you have not had much lately, Mr. Heath.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “In the way of new work. My client is of limited means and he cannot afford, if you’ll forgive my saying so, the rates of the current top-ranked criminal advocates.”

  “I see your point,” said Reggie, “although I would have put it differently. But you should know that I haven’t done much criminal in recent years.”

  “In recent years, none at all, I know,” said Darla. “But what you did in years past was quite successful.”

  “I won the cases I tried, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It is exactly what I mean. It’s all right, Mr. Heath, really. I know what your concern is. You never lost a case you defended. Even though your last defendant was, in fact, guilty.”

  Reggie sat back in his chair at that. He gave Darla a hard look, but she continued.

  “Please do not take offense. It is still common knowledge among the legal community. A veteran police officer with a sterling reputation was accused of killing his wife over a divorce. He swore his innocence. But the prosecution allowed themselves to be driven by media, and they brought the case without the facts to support it; their witnesses were unreliable, and you destroyed them, quite rightly, in court. The case was dismissed. And then the police officer accused of murdering his wife promptly went home and murdered his mother-in-law to boot.”

  Now she stopped and just looked across at Reggie. He looked directly back.

  “There was little I could do at that point,” he said.

  “What you did was stop practicing criminal.”

  This was completely true; she had it right. He had indeed turned to corporate, where the consequences of successfully representing a client who turns out to be deceptive and in the wrong are—usually—less severe. But it was bad business to explicitly acknowledge such qualms to the legal community, and he did not want to do so now. He just nodded very slightly to her in response.

  “Wherever would the legal system be if all lawyers shared your compunction, Mr. Heath?”

  “Everyone is entitled to the best defense available,” said Reggie. “That doesn’t mean everyone is entitled to me.”

  Darla smiled slightly and said, “In my opinion, it does mean exactly that. But you’ve clearly paid a price for your scruples.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “All one has to do is look about you, Mr. Heath. You have one person as both clerk and secretary. You have no junior to do the scut work for you, and no pupil seeking to train with you. I did not see another brief on your clerk’s desk, or on yours, and your shelf is empty. But there is no shortage of accused clients in London. What could account for the sad state of your chambers if not your resistance to taking on any case where you’re afraid your client might have done it?”

  Reggie was about to answer that, then stopped. It was actually refreshing—apparently she was the one person in London who did not read the tabloids or know what that coverage had done to his chambers reputation.

  He shrugged in response to her question.

  “Well,” she said. “You needn’t worry. My client meets your strict criteria. He is innocent. And because he is, I will be able to get him the best defense available, in my opinion—I will get you—and, I hope, at a bit of a cut rate?”

  Reggie had no other case work pending, and this solicitor clearly knew it.

  “I’ll check with my clerk,” said Reggie, bluffing anyway. He paused, then said, “I’ll need to see the discovery file first and meet your client. No promises beyond that.”

  “Of course,” said Darla. “His name is Neil Walters. He’s at Shoreditch police station. Can you see him this afternoon?”

  “Yes, I think that will work.”

  “Brilliant. I have another engagement myself. But my client, of course, will be available.”

  She stood. She offered her hand. Reggie took it, and she left it in his possession for just a moment longer than courtesy required.

  “You are just as I expected,” she said. Then she let go of his hand, smiled again, and exited the little café before Reggie had a chance to ask what that expectation had been.

  As she walked away down Marylebone High Street, Reggie was aware that his blood was pumping fast. This was partly because he desperately needed a new brief.

  And partly because this young female solicitor was quite … well, no point in going there. He did not need that sort of complication.

  Reggie returned to Baker Street Chambers and got the bundle of information that Darla had left with his clerk. He sat down behind his desk and opened the packet. It included both her case summary and the police report, annotated with her own elegantly formed handwritten comments.

  Reduced to its essentials, it said this:

  A young couple from Houston were visiting London for the first time. They took in an early show at Covent Garden and then spent a couple of hours trying to understand the English fondness for warm Guinness at a pub nearby. They exited the pub shortly after eleven, by which time both of them, according to several accounts, had fully grasped the concept and were more than a little inebriated.

  The barman at the pub went to the trouble of flagging down a Black Cab for them and he made sure the couple got into it, confident that he had deposited them into the safest means of getting home in all of London.

  That was the last seen of them alive. Their bodies were found the next morning in a muddy Thames tidewater channel at an abandoned power-generating station at Lots Road, on the outer edges of Chelsea. Her purse and jewelry and his wallet and Rolex were gone, but a hotel key was still in his pocket, and from that, routine work by Scotland Yard traced the two victims back to their hotel, the bar they had visited, and the single most damning piece of evidence against Reggie’s potential client: the license number of the cab, which the barman claimed to remember, and which two witnesses in Chelsea claimed to have seen just moments before the time of the crime.

  The proposed theory was that the perpetrator drove the American couple behind the abandoned power station to rob them, and something went wrong—the husband decided at the last moment, perhaps, to resist. The perpetrator killed the man first, bashing his head on the concrete edge of the sea wall, and then asphyxiated his wife, and then dumped both bodies into the muddy channel.

  Or so the police believed from their examination at the scene.

  Police had already searched the home of the cab driver, and found nothing there to link him to the victims.

  They also searched the interior and exterior of the cab itself, and found nothing there either—none of the victim’s personal belongings, no traces of blood or a struggle, or anything at all to indicate that the cab had been at the scene of the crime.

  That fact would have been more exculpatory if only the cab had not been thoroughly and professionally cleaned earlier in the morning before it was seized by police. That cleaning itself, Reggie knew, would make them suspicious. But Reggie’s potential client did have a receipt for the work, and the report said he claimed to have it done routinely every week.

  That was all of it. Reggie stood and walked to the window, looking out on Baker Street as he mulled it over.

  The prosecution’s case really boiled down to just the eyewitness sightings. There were two independent testimonies about that, with mutually corroborating details, and despite how much he needed the work, Reggie’s first thought on reading their accounts was that the defendant might indeed be guilty.

  But, of course, that impression was based just on the prosecutor’s report. It therefore meant nothing. At least not until he talked to the possible client.

  Reggie got his coat and exited hi
s chambers office, just in time to encounter Lois, who was approaching from her secretary’s station. She had a letter in hand.

  “I found this under Nigel’s desk,” she said. “I think you really should look at it.”

  Reggie accepted the letter, feeling guilty now for just having left it there earlier under the desk, for Lois or the cleaning lady to deal with. He took a look.

  It was typewritten, on a very old manual from all appearances, and that by itself made it stand out. There was no return address. Reggie read it now, as follows:

  Dear Mr. Holmes:

  I am not fooled.

  That you survived Reichenbach Falls was never a surprise to me.

  That the interests of Dr. Watson’s literary agent in the afterlife should have led him finally to the exploration of cryogenics (though he must have gone to great pains to keep it so well from the public), and that he should have passed this information on to you, and that you should have used your own intense, though narrow, scientific focus to bring the investigation to a successful conclusion while pretending retirement in Sussex does not surprise me either.

  That you should then use that knowledge to make yourself available to what you hoped would be a more civilized and yet still intellectually challenging time, follows naturally.

  I don’t know precisely when you revived, but I am sure you find today’s London eminently satisfying on the second count, but disappointing on the first.

  And I know that your current guise as a self-centered lawyer is just that, a disguise.

  I am not fooled, and I shall have my forefather’s revenge. I shall take from you what you value most.

  Your Humble Servant,

  Moriarty

  “Self-centered lawyer.” That was annoying. And the fact that the letter writer seemed to think he was communicating with both Reggie Heath and Sherlock Holmes at the same time was odd; all of the other letters had been intended simply for Sherlock Holmes, period.

  But the letters not written by either schoolchildren or people from other cultures were almost always just jokes. Taking such things seriously was his brother’s quirk, not his own, and Reggie had already wasted too much time on this one.

  “It’s just a prank,” said Reggie. He gave the letter back to Lois. “Send it on to Nigel with the others.”

  Reggie took the lift down to the lobby. He left his own vehicle at Baker Street—the undercarriage of the XJS had begun to make noises on even small bumps—and he caught a Black Cab to take him to Shoreditch Police Station.