The Brothers of Baker Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 his 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