The Brothers of Baker Street Read Online Free PDF

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.

4
    The police station and the adjacent magistrate’s court were in a mostly unrestored area of the East End. Reggie had not spent much time in this part of London since his parents died, but it was familiar territory. He had grown up here. When the cab took the last turn onto Old Street toward the police station, he was less than half a mile from his childhood home.
    They passed a parked scaffolding truck, and Reggie remembered that he and his father and Nigel had all painted a block of flats nearby, on Shoreditch High Street, many years ago. Reggie had been seventeen then, and it was his last summer working regularly with his father.
    By the end of that summer, before he went off to Cambridge on scholarship, he had been able to climb to the top of a sixteen-foot, two-piece rickety extension ladder, hold a full gallon of paint in the palm of one hand, and paint the top fascia board of the house with the other. At that age he had been a bit proud of the strength and balance it took to do it. In fact, he was still, though he had not tested that skill since … well, since that summer. And, at least in his memory of it, he had never spilled a drop—except for once, when Nigel had been holding the ladder, standing directly below, and pointing out a flaw in Reggie’s technique, on which occasion Reggie had somehow managed to let go of the entire gallon of oil-based paint.
    That had been a splendid summer, and not solely because Nigel had still been trying to get the paint out of his hair two months later. But it was the last of the summers like that. Their father had died the following December, under circumstances that still rankled when Reggie was reminded of them.
    But the cab came to a stop now. Reggie got out and entered the Shoreditch police station.
    The exterior of the place was old and on the verge of becoming an historical landmark, but the interior conference