Moriarty Returns a Letter (11 page)

And right at the top of the mezzanine stairs was a video display. It seemed to be triggered by a person stepping in front of it. Or else it was just lucky timing that it lit up and began a show as soon as they reached the top of the ramp:

“Welcome,” said the expensively dressed, sixtyish man in the video. “My name is Harold Redfern, and I’m CEO of Marylebone Grand Hotels. This hotel, our flagship, has been in my family for generations, and I personally thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining us in this, our centennial celebration of its founding.”

“It’s just like Disneyland,” said Laura. “If we go down the stairs and come back up, will he start again?”

The hotel manager smiled slightly. “That’s my brother,” she said. “I manage the family chain of hotels, and he sits in the boardroom, makes executive decisions, and manages public relations. You can never get him to stop talking when you want him to. So you just come this way, and his voice will fade in the distance.”

They moved on down the corridor.

“On these main walls,” said the hotel manager, “we have displayed the memorabilia and documents from the hotel’s own history. And along the way here, each of the members of the merchants association has its own individual exhibit room.”

She paused now outside an empty room.

“Here you are,” she said. “This one’s yours. You have the center easel and all four walls of this room at your disposal, to display what you’d like. Enjoy! Would you like me to send over some additional staff to help out?”

Reggie was about to say yes, but he wasn’t quick enough.

“No,” said Rafferty, immediately. “We’ll muddle through on our own, thank you.”

“I’ll just stop by in a bit to see how you’re getting on then,” said the woman.

“We’ll just be hammering away,” said Reggie, as she exited down the corridor. “Don’t mind our noise.”

“I think,” said Laura, “that I saw mini-cheeseburgers being set out in the exhibit room we just passed, the one with the clown. Can’t you smell them? I think we should stop for a snack on our way out.”

“I wish they had given us a more traditional neighbor,” said Rafferty. “Sherlock Holmes is many things, but he’s not American cheeseburgers.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d skipped breakfast,” said Reggie. “Let’s get these bloody things unpacked.”

Rafferty took one set of letters to one side of the room, and Reggie and Laura took another set to the other.

Laura and Reggie began to take out the letters from the 1890s box.

“I’ll read them and decide which ones we want,” said Laura. “You hammer them onto the wall.”

“Fair enough,” said Reggie.

“Here’s the first one: ‘Please send to me your monograph on how to determine a person’s occupation, quirks, and whether he is a blackmailer, based on the wear on his coat sleeves,’” read Laura.

“Good for a start,” said Reggie.

“We can put that one by the door,” said Laura. “Next letter: ‘I have a map to the treasure of the sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleon
El Conquistador
. If you will only decipher the code for me, I promise to send to you twenty-five percent of all the net proceeds upon recovery of the treasure, except for the royal rubies of Nepal, which I reserve for myself.’”

“Not a very generous offer,” said Reggie.

“So it goes on the side wall,” said Laura, and she pulled out another letter.

This time she paused for a moment, rereading it silently. Then she said:

“I have committed an evil murder, and I am confessing, complete with my name and signature.”

“What?” said Reggie.

“Well, that was just a summary. The highlights are: ‘Dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes:

“‘… I want you to know of the great favor that I have done for you.

“‘Professor Moriarty is now in fact dead. For I have killed him.’ And so on and so on. And then the person adds, ‘I put him in some pain before he expired. No extra charge for that.’”

Laura held the letter out for Reggie to see. “Murder and torture,” she said. “Charming, isn’t it?”

“Well, that’s all right then,” said Reggie. “If someone had confessed in print to an actual murder, I would have expected Scotland Yard to do something about it, and not just stuff it in a box. But given what they’ve confessed to is killing a fictional character—”

Rafferty, at the other end of the room, raised his head and looked over for a moment, but then he just continued on with his own batch of letters.

“Let’s put it in the center display, where everyone can see it,” said Laura. “In place of this other one, which is just to Sherlock Holmes from some Nigerian prince.”

In a few minutes more, all the designated wall spaces were covered. Rafferty put the boxes of remaining letters back onto the dolly, and Reggie prepared to wheel it back downstairs.

“You both go right ahead,” said Laura. “I’ll catch up. I’m going next door and get us all some mini-burgers.”

Reggie and Rafferty wheeled the dolly out, and several minutes later Laura joined them in front of the hotel.

“Sorry I was delayed,” she said. She carried a sack of little burgers in red-and-white paper wrappings, which Rafferty declined but Reggie gladly accepted.

“It was the oddest thing,” said Laura. “The hotel manager stopped by to have a look as I was leaving, just as she said she would. I stayed politely for a few minutes, so that she could finish thanking us properly. She walked along the wall, nodding approvingly at how we made only a little mess at hanging the things, and then she came to the center display—where we had put up just that one letter, from someone claiming to have killed Moriarty—and she turned white as a ghost.”

“What, I angled it wrong?” said Reggie.

“I hardly think that was it. One would have thought that she had some personal stake in the matter. She smiled when I first pointed the letter out to her; she actually took a moment to read the whole thing. And then, all at once, her expression changed completely. She didn’t even stay to inspect the remainder of the display. She said that she suddenly remembered an urgent appointment, she turned on her heels, and she just rushed out of the room as if the fire alarm had gone off.”

“That’s a hotel for you,” said Reggie. “Always experiencing a completely predictable crisis. And usually in a way that inconveniences you and makes money for them. I’ve never been in one where they didn’t forget that I requested a room with a view, or insist that I have to put up with construction noise outside the window, or a lack of heat, or a temporary suspension of the free breakfast deal they promised.”

“That’s not how things usually go for me at a hotel,” said Laura. “I always find the staff are quite nice.”

“That’s because you have good hotel luck. I have bad hotel luck.”

“Well, I hope they balance out from now on. In any case, given the look on her face, if your rule holds true, I’m glad this hotel is not on our itinerary,” said Laura.

“I’ll just be glad when the bloody exhibit is over and we get the letters back where they belong,” said Rafferty.

As Laura tossed the bag of mini-burgers into Reggie’s car, she glanced over at Rafferty. Then she looked at Reggie and raised an eyebrow.

Reggie shrugged. Like Laura, he had never heard the man whine before.

8

On the mezzanine level of the Marylebone Grand Hotel, with all the exhibits finally in place (even the Sherlock Holmes letters brought over by the Dorset House folks, who seemed to have never done this sort of thing before), a young tour guide positioned herself at the top of the stairs, right next to the automated video exhibit, and waited for the video to finish.

She wanted to get it right. The hotel manager, a very intimidating woman, had rushed by a few moments earlier, all in a huff—and now, for some reason, she seemed to be watching, having positioned herself at the opposite side of the mezzanine, only partially concealed by a potted palm tree.

The tour guide didn’t know why the hotel manager was watching, but whatever the reason, she knew that now was not the time to botch it up.

She had enough of a crowd now to begin. There was a thirtyish woman with two toddlers, a few older pensioners, a group of half a dozen schoolchildren and their teacher, and, for the third time in a week, a woman of about twenty-five, with green eyes that were startling in their intensity, even at a distance of several feet.

This woman had been present for each day of the exhibit, and she had stared so long on the first day at one particular display that the tour guide, new to her job, had actually gotten nervous, and gone to the trouble to inform security at the end of the tour.

Nothing had come of it though. The woman had not misbehaved. She had simply returned again the next day, as she had again today.

The tour guide began the presentation.

“Welcome to the centennial celebration of the Marylebone Grand Hotel,” said the tour guide. “You are here at a very special time for us, and so we have assembled a very special exhibit—not only to show you the history of the hotel itself, but also to give you the flavor of our business community here in Marylebone, and I don’t mean just the American mini-burgers.”

A couple of the adults in the group chuckled appreciatively. The scent from the burger exhibit, for good or ill, was wafting out into the corridor.

“Which are made especially for our celebration, today only, and are complimentary, I might add, at the conclusion of our little tour.”

That got an appreciative response, and the guide continued with the tour, stepping just inside the first exhibit room.

“Most of the documents and photographs in our exhibit have never before been seen by the public. In this room are letters written over many years to Marylebone’s most famous resident—Sherlock Holmes.”

The woman with the green eyes spoke up. “He’s not real, you know,” she said.

“Excuse me?” said the tour guide. On each of her previous visits, the green-eyed woman had asked the tour guide when the exhibit of the Sherlock Holmes letters would be in place. Now, for the first time, it was.

“Sherlock Holmes is not real,” said the green-eyed woman again, as if it were a revelation. “He’s a character of fiction.”

There were a couple of titters from the schoolchildren, and a tolerant smile from one of the pensioners.

“Yes, of course,” said tour guide. “But these are the letters, even so, should you want to have a closer look later.”

The tour guide didn’t actually intend to take the little group through the whole room; it was only a ten-minute tour, and she needed to keep them moving on down the corridor—especially with the hotel manager still watching from behind the indoor shrubberies. Probably the manager wanted the tour to focus more on the displays that were specific to the hotel itself, and so the tour guide wanted to get along to it.

But the young woman with the green eyes didn’t budge; she seemed stuck on the letter in the center Sherlock Holmes display, and was now standing directly in front of it, with the rest of the group gravitating into the room along with her.

“Moving right along,” said the tour guide. “If you’ll just come around the corner here and into the corridor, you’ll see the first of our displays for the history of the Marylebone Grand Hotel itself.”

The group hesitated.

“Moving right along, then,” said the tour guide again, and this time she used her authoritative tour-guide command voice.

The little group, including the green-eyed woman, finally responded, and moved just a few steps from the letters exhibit to the first display in the corridor. And it was a good thing, too, because the hotel manager was still watching.

“Yes, that’s right, thank you,” said the tour guide. “Now, here you see the original partnership document for the founding of the hotel—exactly one hundred years ago this month. You’ll notice the slightly old-fashioned form of communication—handwritten, as many people still did in those days who did not possess one of those newfangled gadgets known as typewriters.”

Most of the group didn’t seem to care much. Only the green-eyed woman, again, seemed to think this document was something remarkable. A group of tourists like her would be the perfect audience—if only the tour was scheduled to last the whole day.

But it wasn’t. The guide tried to put an end point on this display and move on to the next.

“The entire agreement, written and signed by all the parties, on just one page. Talk about a simpler time!”

Again, a couple of polite smiles and chuckles from the adults, and that was the best that could be hoped for.

The tour guide herded the little group on down to the end of the corridor. Or at least most of them. The green-eyed woman was lagging behind again, standing all by herself and staring at the handwritten partnership agreement that had created the hotel.

Fine. The tour would have to go on without her. The guide moved everyone along briskly, past several more documents in the corridor. Then she stopped, gathering everyone in front of a newly placed photograph on the wall.

“As you’d expect in the life of any great lady, there were dark days as well as bright ones. Here you see a photo of the hotel in October of 1944, when a V-2 flying bomb struck between the hotel and the pub down the street. The photo was taken not very long at all after the blast, by a guest from the hotel. In the upper right, here, you can see the members of the Fire Brigade still on the scene, with the fire just then put out, which of course was always first priority. There were twenty-three bomb hits on that one particular day, and though everyone pitched in to help, full cleanup did not take place immediately—there was always another place that needed more urgent attention.”

This was the last display in the guided tour, it had just been received from the National Archives and put up that morning, and the young tour guide knew full well that of all the documents and photos on the mezzanine, there were none with comparable gravitas. She paused and let everyone take a look.

Two of the pensioners stepped up closer, saying something softly about it and nodding to each other, as though they understood it firsthand.

It was a black-and-white photo, only eighteen inches wide by twelve high, and not visually spectacular. It showed a portion of a twenty-foot-wide crater where the bomb had made direct impact in the street. Firemen and bystanders stood to the right of that, and in the center, behind the crater, was where the front of the pub had once been.