The Baker Street Letters Read online

  Wembley declined and then said, “We’ll hear what forensics has to say, of course. One doesn’t want to be hasty—how do the Americans say it, to . . .”

  “Rush to judgment.”

  “Yes. But it’s rather hard to see it as accidental.”

  “I’m sure you must be right, but it’s not my field. I don’t know much about criminal matters.”

  “Quite. I recall how little you knew,” said Wembley. Then, “Did Ocher have conflicts with anyone I should know about?”

  “I don’t know much about his personal life.”

  “I meant in the workplace.”

  “Ocher annoyed pretty much everyone he worked with, none more so than I. He thought it his duty as senior clerk, and quite right about it, too.”

  “Hmm.” Wembley, standing in the middle of the room, put his hands in his pockets, hooked by the thumbs, rocked back on his heels slightly, and took a moment to look about at the appointments for Reggie’s chambers.

  Then he began again.

  “So Mr. Ocher was in your brother’s office when he was killed?”

  “I don’t know. That’s where we found his body.”

  “Does your brother generally lock his office?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “There was no sign of forced entry, you see.”

  “I don’t know that Nigel does lock his office, but in any case, Ocher has his own key.”

  Wembley nodded slightly. “Anything taken that you know of? I mean, it does look like a possible burglary, I’ll grant you. But was anything actually taken?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hmm,” Wembley said again. “Quite right. Yes, I expect I’ll need a word with your brother, won’t I? Is he about?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Expect him soon?”

  “I’m afraid he’s . . . on holiday.”

  “That is unfortunate. When did he leave?”

  “I think last night,” Reggie lied. “But I don’t know exactly when.”

  “Returning?”

  “A few days, I expect.”

  “Where is he taking this holiday?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Not close, then, you two?”

  Reggie shrugged.

  “Have him ring me when you hear from him, will you?”

  “Certainly,” said Reggie.

  “Computer was warm,” said Wembley, turning suddenly. “Know anything about that?”

  “No.”

  Reggie stood and opened the office door; Wembley exited, and Reggie watched until he had seen him enter the lift, the doors close, and the indicator lights show that the lift was actually on its way down.

  Then Reggie went to his own files and opened his list of contacts from the inception of the Dorset House lease. It was a very thorough list, with contacts for people with all sorts of connections with the Dorset National Building Society. Now there was one that he needed.

  He found it.

  It was an address in Theydon Bois. Out of the city, but not all that far.

  Reggie took the back stairs out of the building, looked quickly about for Wembley, and then got in the XJS.

  With any luck, he’d get what he needed and still make an evening flight from Heathrow.

  Reggie got out of the city and drove to Theydon Bois in good time. Just past the Shepherd’s Arms pub, he navigated a little circus where three roads converged and then drove halfway up a small hill to the address referenced in the Dorset House lease.

  It was a smallish two-story structure, in various shades of tan and red brick—nicely maintained, with a flagstone courtyard in front, surrounded by an unintimidating three-foot iron fence.

  Two small children ran from the courtyard into the house as Reggie approached; moments later, a woman in her late thirties came to the door. She had a naturally pale and unfreckled face, with thick, attractive auburn hair, cut short in the way many women would do when they’ve begun a family—but still with a flip above the shoulder.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m Reggie Heath,” said Reggie, offering the woman his business card. “Are you Mrs. Spencer? Formerly with Dorset National?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at the card. “You found me. I hope you’re not here because you think I have need of your services,” she said with just a little bit of a laugh.

  “Not at all,” said Reggie. “I came to ask you about the letters.”

  “The letters?”

  “The Holmes letters.”

  She looked at Reggie’s card again. “Well, I guess I might tell you,” she said. “After all, you’ve taken a leasehold on them, haven’t you? Would you like some tea?”

  “Thank you,” said Reggie as he followed her inside. “I won’t keep you long.”

  She seated him in front of the French windows overlooking the courtyard and her two playing children.

  “I did leave very explicit instructions on how to handle the letters, you know,” she said as she joined him there with the tea. “I was careful about it, especially because the lease was changing hands.”

  “I hope that wasn’t a problem for you—,” began Reggie.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “You didn’t cause me to lose my job. I left just before, to be a full-time mum. There was a temp brought in to replace me.”

  “Yes,” said Reggie. “Mr. Parsons. Other than him—was it just you answering the letters—the whole time you were there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you keep records?”

  “Certainly. And Mr. Parsons was to do a complete historical inventory and archival of them when you took over the lease. It should all be in the tall filing cabinet.”

  “I saw that,” said Reggie. “But I’m afraid a bit of it has been lost. Did you have any other sort of backup? Copies of the letters, anything like that?”

  Her eyes widened slightly, and she put down her tea. “Why would I have such a thing?”

  “I didn’t mean you personally, necessarily,” said Reggie, surprised at what seemed a defensive posture. “I just meant—is there any other record at all? A log of the addresses? Backup copies of the letters?”

  “No,” she said, glancing out the window. “Dorset National did not ask me to keep a log.” She took a moment now to unlatch the French windows and tell one of the children in the courtyard to leave the cat alone.

  In a courtroom, Reggie would have regarded this move as an evasion.

  “Sorry,” she said with a slight smile, brushing the curtains back in place. “They tend to pull its tail a bit.”

  It seemed a long shot, but Reggie had to try. “Mrs. Spencer,” he said, “is there any chance you made copies of the letters for yourself?”

  Her cheeks turned red, and she looked as though she had got caught cutting to the front of the queue at the bakery.

  “Is it truly important?” she said.

  Now it was Reggie who hesitated. It wouldn’t do to tell her what had transpired in chambers. “Really just bookkeeping,” he said. “Not important at all.”

  “Oh,” she said with a slight laugh, and then there was a brief pause as they both pretended the important thing was to adequately stir the sugar in their tea. Then Reggie looked up.

  “But did you?” he said.

  She sat back, looked at Reggie, and sighed. “One moment,” she said.

  She got up, went to a bookcase, and took a laptop out of a satchel there. She started to set it up—and then she stopped.

  “You won’t tell Dorset National about this, will you? I mean, not yet, at least. I’ll tell them myself, if the time comes. But before I left the company, I scanned all my favorites, from the very beginning of the letters, into a file. I was thinking that someday I might compile them all—into a book, or some such thing.”

  “A book about crazy people who write letters to a character of fiction.”

  “No, not at all. A book about people who for one reason or another are a bit naïve in s
ome particular area. We all have our blind spots, don’t we?”

  “No doubt,” said Reggie.

  “What information is it you need?”

  “What’s missing is a file from twenty years ago,” said Reggie. “Although I’m sure that was before your time.”

  “Just slightly.” She laughed. “I started when I was nineteen. But I scanned some that were already in the files from before I arrived. So you might be lucky. Here—does this have what you need?”

  She put the laptop in front of Reggie, and he began scrolling rapidly through the file.

  “These are just the letters themselves, of course,” she said. “People often sent various kinds of collateral material with them—evidence of things that they thought Sherlock Holmes would want to consider—but I didn’t attempt to scan any of that.”

  “This should give me what I need,” said Reggie. “For the bookkeeping, I mean.”

  He scrolled down two more clicks—and there it was. The twenty-year-old letter from the eight-year-old girl in Los Angeles: Mara Ramirez on Mateo Street. He knew it immediately from the careful crayon script and the plea for Sherlock Holmes to find her father.

  Reggie jotted down the letter writer’s name and address. “You’ve been a great help,” he said, standing to leave. “Thank you.”

  She gave him a quizzical look as she escorted him to the door.

  “You’re quite welcome,” she said. “But was that all that you needed—just the one address?”

  “Well . . . yes,” said Reggie, wishing he had covered his intent better—but he couldn’t see how it would matter to her. “It’s the one missing, and if one’s missing, they’re all missing, I like to say.”

  “You don’t look like someone who would say that,” she said, and laughed. “But I’ll take your word for it that you do, given you came all this way for just the one letter.”

  Reggie paused now. He had what he needed, but he couldn’t help asking.

  “In all the time you were handling the letters—did you ever feel tempted to answer one of them yourself, rather than just send the official form?”

  She looked at Reggie suspiciously now, and she took a moment before answering.

  “If I would have done—you can be sure that Dorset National would have taken a very dim view to learn of it. There’s a firm rule about always just sending the standard form letter. I was very specific about that in the instructions I left.”

  “Yes,” said Reggie.

  “I used to refer to it as the ‘prime directive’ myself,” she said with a smile that seemed to reference a joke that Reggie did not get. “Dorset National lawyers had concerns about potential liabilities, as I guess you might imagine.”

  “Understandably,” said Reggie.

  “Which is why, of course, they also included that clause in your lease that terminates the leasehold, and brings all the rent for the entire term immediately due and payable, if that rule should ever be violated.”

  “What?”

  “I believe they call it a liquidated damages clause, in which—”

  “I’m familiar with the term. Are you telling me that there’s such a clause in the lease pertaining to these letters?”

  “Why, yes,” she said, and now she looked at Reggie with her pale brow furrowed. “I hope there’s no reason to say this,” said the woman, “and I would certainly not be the one to snitch to Dorset National—but I trust you are truly just . . . tidying up—and not attempting to contact one of these people directly. That would be—”

  “Bloody foolish,” said Reggie.

  He thanked the woman again.

  And then he drove to Heathrow, with the address for the Los Angeles letter writer in his pocket.

  At Heathrow, the only available evening flight required a layover and was not scheduled to arrive at Los Angeles until the following morning. Reggie knew this would put him nearly a full day behind Nigel, but it was the best that could be done, and he took it.

  His seat was behind an American woman and her two young boys, probably ages four and six. In what seemed to Reggie a major tactical error, she had positioned herself on the aisle and the two boys next to each other on the inside seats.

  Now an elbow was launched from one inside seat at the occupant of the other, and with that effort the little culprit threw himself back in his seat, causing it to crash into Reggie’s knee. Reggie shifted his position. A retaliatory elbow came from the other side, with a similar effect, and Reggie adjusted his position once more.

  “I told you to stop it,” said the mother. “Someday you’ll both be grown up, and if you don’t learn to stop fighting, you won’t be friends. Then where will you be?”

  Do all mothers say this? thought Reggie. Do they read it in a book somewhere?

  “Gin and tonic,” he called out, perhaps more loudly than he had intended. The flight attendant was finished helping someone several seats away, and she came over.

  “Would you like ice, sir?” She was standing near him now, quite attractive, leaning in, making him warmly aware of an intoxicating scent, and when Reggie smiled, her smile in response seemed genuine.

  Reggie said that ice was unnecessary.

  She smiled again. This one was not required professionally, and to Reggie it indicated possibilities. It had been his longstanding rule to always act on possibilities. Even if the odds were against—and rarely had he thought they were—one still had to presume a positive outcome and make one’s move.

  He had not in fact been with any other woman since Laura and had no intent to follow through on such a move—but of course that was not a reason to get out of practice.

  But the flight attendant gave him his gin and tonic now, and he failed to think of anything clever to say before she moved off.

  That was odd. Why was that?

  But now there was another annoyance.

  The two boys had been settled for a moment. But now the one next to his mother threw his right elbow again. War recommenced.

  “Do I have to separate you two?” said the mother.

  “No,” said one brother and then the other, and they seemed to settle back again, but Reggie guessed this would be temporary, and he tried to cross his legs in advance to get out of the way of the next skirmish. He inadvertently kicked the back of the woman’s seat in the process.

  She looked around at Reggie.

  “Forgive me,” said Reggie.

  She glanced to the side at her two boys, then smiled at Reggie.

  “I hope they’re not bothering you,” she said.

  “Not a bit,” said Reggie in a bit of a lie, and then, feeling churlish for his own initial impatience, he observed aloud that they both had their mother’s blond hair.

  “Yes, they do,” she said, “but I’m their grandmother.”

  She laughed, complimented by Reggie’s mistake. Reggie was unsettled; this woman could not have been more than ten years older than he.

  “Do you have any of your own?” she asked. “Children, I mean?”

  He said that he hadn’t. She looked at him closely for a moment.

  “Well,” she said, “you are getting to that age.”

  There was no opportunity to ask what age she was referring to, for she was suddenly distracted by the activities of the child nearest her.

  “Stop that, Richard,” she said, but it was too late. Richard had snuck down around her feet and loosed his battery-powered Robotron upon the aisle. It must have been set on Mach cruise, for it had already marched in a wobbly fashion past Reggie’s seat and on down the aisle.

  Reggie turned, but it was beyond his reach.

  It whirred and clanked on a diagonal path, two rows, then three, finally, five rows back—then it butted up against the metal base of an empty aisle seat, and it stuck there, making a high-pitched whine, though its arms continued to move with precision and regularity.

  In the seat adjacent to the irritating toy sat a tall man reading a Hollywood trade magazine. Reggie expected the man
to reach down and turn the device around. But the man didn’t and instead kept his bald head averted to the side, too intent, apparently, on his day-old edition of Variety.

  Reggie watched as Richard, with instructions from his grandmother to apologize to the nice man, ran down the aisle to ask for his toy back. In a whisper that carried into the next cabin, the grandmother repeated the instruction to apologize.

  Richard stood in the aisle and mumbled something. “Nicely,” instructed his grandmother.

  “I’m sorry,” Richard said loudly. “May I have my toy back?”

  Now the man had no choice but to acknowledge his presence. He nodded slightly in the boy’s direction.

  “Here,” he said. “Take your action figure.”

  Without dropping his paper, he pushed the toy toward Richard.

  Richard grabbed it, returned at top speed to his grandmother, and surrendered the Robotron.

  “They’re a handful, but they’re good boys,” said the grandmother, and Reggie, on some instinct looking curiously back down the aisle but unable to clearly see the face of the man attacked by the toy, understood that this was the proper thing for her to say.

  Reggie exited the terminal at LAX under a hazy sky but fierce heat.

  He quickly discovered that his mobile phone didn’t work—apparently the Americans had a completely different system. He hunted up a public phone to ring Laura’s hotel room in New York—and also Nigel’s flat in London, on the chance that his brother would at some point check his answering machine. He left messages for both, and for Ms. Brinks at chambers, that he would be at the Bonaventure.

  Then he found a cab in front of the terminal. He showed the letter writer’s address to the driver, and in a few moments they were moving east on the Santa Monica Freeway, toward the center of a ring of dirty haze.

  It was late morning, not rush hour, but they had traveled only about five miles before traffic slowed to a crawl. The driver did not seem surprised.

  “Wanna know the worst jam I ever seen?”

  Reggie guessed that he really had no choice and said nothing.

  “It was that big fire in the new subway dig on Lankershim. Somebody left a blowtorch on or something. Closed down the Ventura Freeway, the Hollywood, killed a guy—it was a mess. It was all over the news, even CNN. I’ll bet they showed it even where you’re from.”