A Study in Sherlock Read online

  “Who would’ve ever thought there’d been so many?” I agreed.

  “All roads lead to Rome and all Sherlocks to London,” he said.

  If you only knew the half of it, I thought, but I said: “You’re so right, the BBC’s Sherlock series is excellent and produced with real affection, I thought.”

  “Yes, very clever, although, as you can well imagine, I didn’t much fancy all that business in the first episode about the barking-mad taxi driver as played by Phil Davis, an otherwise excellent actor. I ask you, why on earth tar the noble fraternal order of London taxicab drivers with such a nasty brush? London cabbies as murderous villains, I should cocoa. Where would visitors to London be, or Londoners themselves for that matter, without the honest, upstanding, supremely knowledgeable London cabby at their constant beck and call? Nowhere, that’s where. They’d have to lump it on the buses and Tube or put up with all the nonsense and malarkey of dealing with all those unlicensed mini-cab drivers, none of whom are required to have an exact knowledge of anything, let alone London. No, that whole rotten business spoiled it for me. I blame the writers, myself: character assassination of a respected hardworking guild, for easy plot gain, showed real lack of imagination on their part.”

  Of course, I had to speak to that. “I didn’t at all take it as an ad hominem attack on all London taxi drivers; merely the portrayal of a single, terminally ill individual with a sick and twisted mind who just happened to drive a black cab. I’m sure the writers didn’t intend that it reflect on the entire profession.”

  “Nevertheless, the damage is already done, isn’t it? Our reputation’s been scarred. Simply putting the thought in people’s minds is bad enough. And I tell you, it’s not easy being a cab driver; it’s hard work having to recall all twenty-five thousand streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross Station. And it’s not just about having an exact knowledge of London, and a green badge to show for it; with me it’s about having an exact knowledge of the Canon, as well.”

  “The Canon? You mean, all fifty-six short stories and all four novels of the adventures and exploits of Sherlock Holmes as recorded by Dr. John Watson?”

  “Of course, what else could I mean? I’m certainly not referring to all that fake Holmes nonsense that gets cobbled together on a depressingly regular basis by all them would-be authors. No, there’s nothing compares to Conan Doyle’s original stories. ’Ere, I’ll show you. You cop hold of this list of points of interest you want to visit.” He opened the tiny window in the plexiglass partition and pushed my notebook through to me. “Now you just shout out places on your list, in any old order, any which way around.”

  “Very well,” I said, sitting back in my seat, “if it’s the complete Canon that you claim to have knowledge of, where does Cannon Street station figure?”

  “Very funny,” he said, “but I can assure you Cannon Street railway station looms large in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip.’ ”

  “What about Euston Station?” I asked.

  “ ‘The Priory School.’ Am I right, sir?”

  “Very probably,” I said. “Very well, then, where do Liverpool Street, Charing Cross, Victoria, and Waterloo stations all figure?”

  “ ‘The Dancing Men,’ ‘The Abbey Grange,’ ‘Silver Blaze,’ and ‘The Crooked Man.’ And while you appear to be blowing smoke, sir, Paddington Station, where I picked you up earlier this morning, figures in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery,’ as well as in The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

  “Alright, then, where we just were: Aldgate Underground station?”

  “Again, easy-peasy, ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans.’ Blimey, I’m really racking up the points here; you’re going to have to try harder than that, sir.”

  “Bentinck Street, Bow Street, and Brook Street?”

  “That’d take us to ‘The Final Problem,’ ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip,’ and ‘The Resident Patient.’ ”

  “And Conduit Street, Covent Garden Market, and Church Street—Stepney, not Paddington?”

  “ABCs, is it? Very well, then, in order: ‘The Empty House,’ ‘The Blue Carbuncle,’ and ‘The Six Napoleons.’ What next, D for Downing Street and ‘The Naval Treaty’? I’m telling you, I know every single point on your list to a T, so even if you were to throw the Temple, the Tower of London, and Trafalgar Square at me, you still wouldn’t catch me out.”

  “Very well,” I said, trying not to show how truly impressed I was, for it was now all too clear he really knew the Canon and was a veritable Leslie S. Klinger, Esq., in the guise of a licensed London cabby, “do pray tell.”

  “The Temple, the Tower of London, and Trafalgar Square will take you, respectively, to ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’ The Sign of the Four, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, again. Had enough? Have I made my case?”

  “Most excellent, I must say,” I said, but I wasn’t going to give up so easily. “Let me try another track, take me to that ‘vile alley lurking behind the high wharves which line the north side of the river to the east of London Bridge.’ ”

  He simply chuckled. “Very well remembered on your part; you’re of course referring to Upper Swandam Lane and ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’? I should cocoa. It doesn’t even exist and never did. I’d give him a twisted lip as soon as look at him, if I only had half the chance. He should’ve known better, a man of his intellect; I mean to say, he could just as easily have written Lower Thames Street and it would’ve been spot on, so to speak.”

  “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you mean?”

  “No, Dr. J. H. Watson, who do you think? And as for him writing about Paul’s Wharf, again in TMWTTL, well it exists, of course, only not at all where he says it is … I mean was.”

  “On purpose, do you think? To throw people off the trail?” I said.

  “Wouldn’t put it past any of them, Holmes in the deducing, Dr. Watson in the writing, or Conan Doyle, himself, as agent, nom de plume, or whatever his preferred style of address. It’s always wheels within wheels with them three, mysteries and enigmas and riddles, always and forever in plain sight to catch you unawares. ‘The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant’? Do me a favour; it was never published. So who’s to say there ever was such a case? And what about his so-called monographs: ‘The Typewriter and Its Relation to Crime,’ ‘Upon the Tracing of Footsteps,’ or ‘Upon Secret Writing’? They’re all of them just titles as tittle-tattle, nothing but springes to catch woodcocks.”

  “I must say your knowledge of the Canon is truly astonishing,” I said. “I’m sure it must be the perfect complement to The Knowledge—the official examination you had to undergo to become a licensed London taxi driver.”

  “Yes, three years’ hard slog that was, but a Knowledge of Holmes is the work of a lifetime; several of them, truth be told. And it’s funny you should put the two together like that, as there are many cabbies reckon the term originated with Sherlock Holmes and not, as some would have it, some nameless Victorian-era Commissioner of Police. Stands to reason, really; Holmes said it was a hobby of his to have an exact knowledge of London and an exact knowledge of London is the sine qua non, so to speak, of the London Hackney Carriage Act, which, I think, proves my point all the more. After all, who better to give it name than one who employed so many hansom cabs in the prosecution of so many of his famous cases? That’s why so many of us always have a well-thumbed copy of the Canon in the cab, along with a London A to Z and the latest edition of Time Out.”

  “All the necessary tools of the trade,” I said, handing back my empty cup. “Thanks for the coffee and food for thought.” And with that we resumed our clockwise traverse of London, visiting all the remaining Holmesian points of interest as itemized in my little Moleskine notebook. As I’d done throughout the morning, I sent a short text message to confirm each point visited. And within two and a half hours we’d completed the tour and arrived at my final destination.

  “Right, then, here we are, 221B Baker Street, not that any of the so-called experts even agr
ee to this day exactly where it is or was.”

  “Just here, at the corner of George Street, will do fine,” I said, quickly looking around me to ensure I wasn’t inadvertently about to leave anything of mine behind. I gathered my overcoat, tweed cap, woolen scarf, and canvas bag and even double-checked to see that I had my mobile phone with me. “Thank you for a most illuminating ride,” I called out. “I learned a great deal.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said. Then to my surprise he exited his cab and came round to retrieve my garment bag himself. As I stood there on the pavement, he looked me in the face and shook my hand. “Very pleased to have made your acquaintance,” he said. “You be sure to go safe, now.”

  I nodded my thanks and stood there as he returned to his cab and drove off, soon to be lost in the steady flow of traffic down Baker Street. I turned and quickly walked back up Baker Street and within minutes had come to my lodgings. I let myself in with my key. I closed the front door, locked and bolted it, dropped the walking stick in the rack in the hallway, the garment bag on the floor, and raced up the stairs, removing my leather gloves as I did so.

  My companion hardly glanced up as I entered and all I received by way of a greeting was a single nod of acknowledgement and a long bony finger that pointed toward the much-abused, oversized partners’ desk, covered as it was with stacks of produced and yet-to-be produced screenplays and TV adaptations; piles of books, book proposals, and uncorrected proofs; and boxes galore of graphic novels and video games; even the latest action figures of Downey and Law as they appear in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Transmedia to the max, as the trade papers would have it. I let slip my overcoat and dropped my shoulder bag onto a chair, hurriedly retrieving my Canon EOS 600D digital SLR camera and attaching it to the USB cable already plugged into the iMac, so that all the photos and video clips I’d taken of the taxi driver could upload while I was attending to everything else. As I sat down, the iMac computer’s twenty-seven-inch display had already refreshed the IMDb page devoted to Jared Harris, the actor cast as dastardly Professor Moriarty in the new Warner Brothers film. I closed it, quickly scrolled down to the appropriate application in the Dock, launched it, selected “Audio” from the drop-down menu and immediately heard the now all too familiar voice coming from the external loudspeakers. One odd thing, though: the accent seemed to have undergone a remarkable change, with all traces of “Mockney” now fully expunged.

  “Of course, I had him picked out in a trice, what with his off-the-rack British warm, ghastly tweed flat cap, cheap brown leather gloves. On sartorial grounds alone, I think we can definitely discount this one; the very idea of him being the real thing is just too fanciful by half. Not sure where you got your intelligence about him, but to my eye he’s a rank amateur who doesn’t know his Conan Doyle, his Sherlock, or his Shakespeare. And limp or no limp, you’d have thought his walking stick was made of rubber; as clumsy a person as ever I’ve met; dropping things, simply everywhere. I tell you, the quality of target candidates has most definitely gone down.”

  I took the proffered glass of sherry and continued to listen in as the cab driver reported the day’s events back to his lord and master. The sound quality was rather good, even if I say so myself, and despite the slight static it was clear I’d managed to get all the miniature microphones positioned to optimum effect. My colleague leaned forward and tapped the desk with a long finger to attract my attention. “He deduced you were RAMC?” he asked, quietly.

  I nodded. “The regimental tie, of course. He also identified the rod and serpent on the lapel pin. And as for the carefully contrived mufti, the badly scratched Rolex, and the suntan you had me work on these past many weeks, they all proved inspired.”

  “So very cooperative of him to have seen what we wanted him to see.”

  “Yes, and as you can hear, he’s rather pleased with himself about it. But as you’ve always said, ‘Blood will out.’ ”

  My colleague nodded and I opened a second application that brought up a detailed map of London onto the screen. The red dot moving slowly across the display, as if directed by some unseen force, told us that the tiny Hitachi satellite navigation transponder I’d managed to get positioned up under the rear wheel arch was functioning properly. It remained to be seen just how effective the dozen or so specially colour-matched RFID tags of various sizes I’d secreted around the cab would prove to be, especially in conjunction with the Real-Time Location System we’d only recently acquired, but that was work for another day. Meanwhile, our once-friendly cab driver continued to vent his spleen.

  “Why on earth the constant need to push Holmes onto an ever-gullible public? You’d have thought everyone would be sick to death of him by now, but there’s a never-ending stream of it and it’s only gotten worse of late. Every damn Tom, Dick, and Harry is dreaming up some new madcap scheme or other to do with Holmes and Watson. There are those dreadful big-budget Hollywood films, the damn TV series, seemingly multiple one-offs; books and audio books and bloody e-books, all coming out of our bloody ears; and that’s not counting those violent bloody video games and all those weird comic books intended for illiterate adults. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what it is everyone hopes to achieve with it all. And I absolutely dread to think where it’s all going to end. They should just bloody well leave well enough alone and stick with the Canon, plain and simple; surely that should be good enough? I know none of it’s still in copyright, but is that any reason for everyone to keep on taking a bite out of the old beekeeping bugger?”

  There was a long pause and but for the continued background noise I would’ve thought there’d been a break in transmission. I held my breath, hoping against hope that the “cabby” hadn’t spotted any of the microphones I’d hidden inside his taxi. Thankfully, though, my worries proved groundless, as it soon became very clear he’d simply been gathering his thoughts.

  “And you know what really gets my goat, it’s the fact that it’s us who’ve actually done the most to keep his reputation alive. I mean, where would the name of Sherlock Holmes be without your own particular brand of genius? He’d be a mere footnote to detective fiction, nothing more. The plain truth is, whenever his name is mentioned, people always remember you in the same breath; it’s you they remain most in awe of. So if, as they say, a man is truly defined by his enemies, then it’s you that’s most clearly defined him and that should rightfully take the lion’s share of any glory that’s going.”

  It was then we heard the voice that once heard can never be forgotten. I glanced over at my companion, who nodded and removed the long cherrywood pipe from his mouth, his eyes suddenly as hard and as black as obsidian.

  “My dear young Sebastian,” said the silken voice of the Napoleon of Crime, for it was he, undoubtedly, who was now speaking. “You should not judge by outward appearances alone. Our fiendish would-be nemesis is the very wiliest of adversaries, as too is his seemingly clumsy and bumbling partner-in-crime. Always remember that what is on the outside is always on the inside, but what is on the inside is not necessarily always revealed on the outside. We have no earthly idea when or where the real Holmes will return or in what guise. It could be as bookseller, ornithologist, apiarist, pathologist, or priest, or any one of a thousand disguises. That is why we must remain ever vigilant and seek out and examine each and every one who would play the role of consulting detective and each and every one who would then act as his fawning amanuensis. We must establish who is really who and then determine whether they might prove a future hindrance to our purpose and, if such be the case, to deal with them in the most severe, most expeditious manner possible.”

  It was very apparent that a particular hot button had just been pressed again and pressed particularly hard. And I admit I was moved to lower the volume somewhat.

  “Fiend is right, the wily, scheming bastard should up, up and play the game and come out and fight like a real man. ‘Steel true, blade straight’? What utter tosh. He’s the one who ruined my family’s good n
ame and brought us all so low, damn him to hell. All I’ve ever asked for, all any of us have ever asked for, is the chance to get a good, clear shot at Holmes’s head, which as you well know is all I really live for. As for the rest of it, as always, dear Uncle Morrie, when you hit the nail on the head, you hit it so very good and hard. And I hear you, I do. I know we have no choice but to continue searching for the cunning swine and I give you my word I’ll keep on doing that. I’m only sorry the day turned out such an utter waste, but there it is. We’ll get him, eventually, though, we will. Anyway, look, I’ll get the taxi garaged and the garb of London cabby put away in the props cupboard until next time. I’ll also make good and sure the VH-V2 air gun, telescopic sight, and hollow-point ammunition are all safely tucked away. After which, of course, I’ll take the usual precautions to ensure I’m not followed. One can never be too careful, as you’re always so very fond of telling me. I’ll report in again in an hour when I’m en route to my club. For now, Sebastian Moran, Holmes hunter, over and out.”