The Brothers of Baker Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

room was quite up to standards, with the presumably calming pale green walls and plastic chairs. Reggie took a seat in one and waited, as the guard went to fetch the defendant.
    Moments later the guard returned, escorting Neil Walters—a white male, something under thirty years of age, strongly built. Reggie motioned for him to sit down.
    “I’m Reggie Heath. Did your solicitor tell you about me?”
    “Yes. She said you are tops. She said you would save me, and not take my house to do it.”
    “We’ll see.”
    “Which is good, because I haven’t got one.”
    “No house, you mean.”
    “Yes. I rent in Stepney.”
    Walters spoke with an East End accent. Reggie had lost his own at university. But he had always assumed he could pick it up again at will, and he never minded hearing it. It reminded him of an earlier time. Of his father, and of growing up.
    Walters was slightly over six feet, almost as tall as Reggie. His demeanor was both confused and defiant—which didn’t tell Reggie much, because both attitudes were typical for a young working-class male caught up in the system for the first time, whether guilty or innocent.
    “Tell me about the night of the crime,” said Reggie.
    “I didn’t do it, Mr. Heath,” said Walters.
    “Understood. But tell me about that evening. Were you driving?”
    “Yes.”
    “From what time?”
    “I started at ten in the morning and I got home just before midnight that evening.”
    “Sounds like a rough shift,” said Reggie.
    “It’s my usual. The cream fares are the morning and evening commuter crowds—but everyone wants those, and I’m new. So I work the hours I must and take the spots in the cab rank that I can get.”
    “It was a normal day for you?”
    “Yes, and it was a good one. I ran twenty fares, and without taking a single wrong turn.”
    He said that with evident pride.
    “Drivers keep score about that?” said Reggie.
    Walters shrugged. “I do.”
    “Anyone see you after you got home? Did you go out, buy groceries, have friends over?”
    “No. I mean, on some other Saturday I might have had a bird there. I do all right, if you know what I mean.”
    Reggie made a mental note that Walters should avoid that sort of bragging if this went to trial. Jurors might start inferring things all on their own about what caused the robbery to go fatally violent.
    But that was assuming Reggie decided to take the case at all.
    “You’re single and you live alone then, and you had no company that evening?”
    “Right,” said Walters. Then he seemed to feel obliged to add something more, and he leaned forward earnestly.
    “I have no alibi Mr. Heath … but I did not do it.”
    “Do you know why the police think you did?”
    “Because I drive a Black Cab.”
    “Because you drive a Black Cab, and because witnesses say it was your license plate number.”
    “But I was on the other side of town driving home, wasn’t I? I couldn’t have done it when they said it happened. I was in the East End, driving home.”
    “Can anyone vouch for that? Did you have a passenger?”
    Walters looked surprised by the question.
    “To Stepney at that time of night? No one in my neighborhood takes a cab home, Mr. Heath. We’re not lawyers.”
    Reggie nodded slightly.
    “No offense meant,” said Walters, scrambling quickly to correct himself. “People there just can’t afford it, is all.”
    “Yes,” said Reggie. “I know.” Now Reggie was silent for just a moment, and Walters seemed to take that as a sign that he still needed to bolster his case.
    “Mr. Heath, ever since I was a child, I’ve never wanted to do anything else but be the driver of a Black Cab. And it’s no easy thing, I can tell you.”
    “Why is that?” said Reggie.
    “Well, for one thing, there’s getting the Knowledge, and then there’s the chats with the examiners, which you have to do every three months and they just get harder each time, and you have to go to the Black Cab school, and you learn