The Brothers of Baker Street (27 page)

Bloody hell. Every lockable item in Reggie’s office was programmed with her phone number from when they first met. Why would a man do that?

Now she heard someone rapping on the door.

“Yes?”

The door opened and Lois stepped just inside. She was holding the Moriarty letters and some other slip of paper in her hand.

“The typewriter thing that Nigel asked about?” she said.

“Yes?” said Laura.

“I found it. I mean, I went to the museum, and I found a machine that has characters just like on the letters. It’s a very rare model, more than a hundred years old. And I called every typewriter repair shop in the city—well, there are only three, actually—and I found someone who serviced such a machine this year. Should I call Nigel—?”

“Yes, call him,” said Laura, taking the address note and the letters from her. “But tell him I’ve got it covered. And thank you very much.”

Laura exited the chambers and went downstairs to the street. The air was beginning to condense a bit, but there was no need for an umbrella yet. She stepped to the Baker Street curb to get a cab.

A cab halfway down the block immediately started up and came toward her, but another was already in motion in that direction, and it pulled in ahead.

“Thank you,” said Laura, getting in. “The Standard Typewriter Repair on Portobello Road. Do you know it?”

“It’s all up here, miss,” said the driver.

“So they say,” she replied.

24

A light rain was getting heavier now, as Reggie turned his Jag onto a narrow country lane, looking for Dr. Dillane’s address.

He wanted to get there before the rain became a deluge. Small roads could become impassable in the Cotswolds, and the road back to the M4 looked capable of congealing in both directions. It could prevent him from getting back to London until very late in the evening.

And that would not do. The connection with the psychiatrist might turn out to be nothing at all, and Reggie did not have time to waste on leads that went nowhere.

He was already violating his bail conditions by being out of the city. And he did not want to give Laura any more reasons than she already had to spend the night at Buxton’s compound. She might call Reggie at chambers, and he would not be there. Not an issue under normal circumstances. But these were not normal circumstances.

And something felt wrong. Whatever the reason, he was beginning to feel uneasy about being away.

He had driven through a little hamlet, out of the hamlet, and then past scattered farmhouses, and now the road was narrowing even further. More sheep. And more mud, beginning to run in rivulets along the side of the lightly paved road.

Reggie slowed. There was a turnoff to his right. There was no road sign, but his best reading of the map was that this might—or might not—be the direction to Dr. Dillane’s house.

Even in the best weather, this turnoff would be nothing more than a farmer’s dirt road. Reggie came to a stop for a better look, with rain beginning to come down in sheets now against the windshield.

He could see that the terrain was beginning to change. The flat, green, sheep-dotted fields were giving way to gentle slopes and valleys and in the far distance, to forested hills.

But between here and there, just a couple of miles out on the road, was a high, long hedgerow. There could well be a structure beyond it.

Reggie took the turn.

This road was even narrower than the lane he had been on, with a steep drainage ditch cut in the earth alongside it. The ditch was flanked by high grasses and an occasional copper beech; the road was unpaved, with infrequent sections of gravel to help things out, but not by much, and the rocky bumps and rain-worn creases tortured the Jag’s undercarriage along the way.

Several minutes later, Reggie drove past the hedgerow and crested a hill; he was now above a long valley, and midway down the slope of this valley was a house.

Quite a large house actually, and impressive, situated where it was, with views down the extended valley and of the hills far and away. Even from a distance, Reggie could see that it wasn’t one of the typical farmhouses in the area. It was a residence, built in recent years, and considerable money had been spent—the square-cut stone of the walls was either the yellow limestone indigenous to the area (and not easy to come by legally) or else a fabrication meant to mimic that stone.

Either way, thought Reggie, as he continued on the road toward the house, it’s expensive. Even for a doctor.

The road was passing through fields now, not pastures; Reggie suspected he was entering a conservation area. There were no more sheep, just some black crows that startled up from a beech tree on the opposite side of the narrow road, as Reggie drove past.

Reggie hated crows. He instinctively glanced in his rearview mirror after he saw them. There were at least half a dozen, and several had hopped down to the ground, along the edge of the drainage ditch.

Probably they’d found a rabbit or the like. Bloody crows, and if anyone saw Reggie get out and just on general principle throw a rock at them in the nature conservation area, he’d probably get a bloody fine.

But it wasn’t just the crows. There was something shiny and metallic visible in the rearview mirror.

Reggie put the Jag in reverse and backed up, swirling mud and water off the tires, until he was parallel with the crows and the object of their attention. But he still couldn’t be sure. The crows were after something in the drainage ditch, and it was shielded by the high grass and reeds.

Reggie got out of the car into what was now a full-scale drencher; with rain running under his collar, he tromped several steps through the sucking mud to the opposite edge of the road. The crows scattered, but not far.

He looked down and saw it. A silver Audi A3 had gone off the road and was head-down in the ditch, crashed against the base of the beech tree from which the crows were staging their attack.

One crow kept its perch, on the rain gutter above the open driver’s-side door, even as Reggie pushed toward it through the reeds.

Reggie found a pebble in the mud and threw it. The crow flapped and jumped away.

And then Reggie saw the driver—a white male, his head slumped, and his right arm dangling limply out the door.

He was not strapped in. No airbag had deployed, which was a little odd, but perhaps this vehicle didn’t have one.

The man’s head had hit the windshield hard enough to break the skin, and there was a nasty swelling on his forehead. Reggie knelt at the side of the car and checked for a pulse.

Nothing. The man was gone.

Reggie took out his mobile phone and pressed 999. He knew he himself would be identified by the call, and the police would discover that he was out of bounds if they bothered to look him up, but it couldn’t be helped.

But bloody hell. The call didn’t go through. No signal; in exactly the type of place where you might need it the most, no bloody signal.

At least not on Reggie’s phone. But perhaps the driver had a better service.

Reggie leaned back into the car and began to look about. Several days’ worth of
Daily Sun
editions were on the floor of the passenger side, getting soaked with the rain. It was interesting that the driver seemed to have more than a passing interest in that particular tabloid.

Still, Reggie’s immediate need was for a mobile phone, and there was none—not on the floor or seats, not in the glove compartment, not in the driver’s pockets. Which was a bit surprising, because the driver—mid-forties, expensive business-casual clothes—had the look of someone who should be carrying a mobile.

But the coat pockets weren’t empty. Reggie found a small address book, a wallet with ID, and a passport with a stamp from three months earlier. The driver was Larry Trimball. An American and, according to his business card, the owner of a high-tech startup company.

Nigel’s startup geek? Reggie looked in the address book. He flipped through pages filled with neat block characters, and on the next-to-last page, there it was—the address and number for the Bath Mental Health and Recovery Center.

Reggie put all of it back into the man’s pocket. If the police arrived, it wouldn’t do for Reggie to have the man’s wallet in his possession.

He climbed back up to the muddy road and looked about.

If he went back out on the lane on which he had driven in, it would be a good half hour before he reached a farmhouse to make a call.

But the yellow stone house—the only house within sight in any direction—was less than a mile away.

Reggie got back in his Jag, started it, spun the wheels just slightly in the mud, and continued on toward the house.

In half a mile he turned off the muddy road and onto a long gravel drive.

He drove up to the front of the house and stopped. There were no parked vehicles. There were no exterior lights on. But there were address numbers carved into a placard above the door, and they matched the address Reggie had gotten—it was Dr. Dillane’s house.

Reggie got out and went to the front door. He rapped the heavy metal knocker against solid mahogany and waited. Then he knocked again. No response.

It was twilight now, darkening rapidly. But Reggie peered through the window, past folding wooden shutters, and saw a light source from some back room.

He walked on the wet, crunching gravel path of the drive from the front of the house, around the side, and to the back—where apparently a vehicle had been parked, leaving shallow depressions that were now filling with water.

The gravel ended at a terrace that was paved with flat sheets of more yellow limestone. There was no gate.

But apparently there was a security system. Glaring white flood lamps opened up on Reggie as he stepped onto the terrace, making him pause and blink.

He waited to hear an alarm. None sounded, but that didn’t mean that some private security service somewhere wasn’t being notified.

He had already tripped the alarm, but the nearest response had to be at least twenty minutes away. He would have to be alert to that; they would probably drive right past the vehicle and the body in the ditch to the house, and they would assume Reggie to be an intruder.

Which he was about to be. He wanted to talk to Dr. Dillane. Too bad Dr. Dillane wasn’t there, but there was a dead body down the road, and there was no need to stick to the proprieties—he had the perfect excuse to break in and learn what he could.

He continued on to the wide back windows; they had shutters, too, like the front, but these shutters were open—this was the view side of the house, opening out toward the rolling hills of the conservation area.

Reggie looked in through the main window.

It was the dining room; he could see a long, heavy glass rectangular table and six chairs. But the interior light wasn’t coming from the dining room. It was coming from an interior corridor.

It was time to make damn sure his presence was known, if anyone was here. He shouted. He rapped on the heavy picture window and made it shake.

No response.

Reggie stepped to the side of the picture window, to a sliding glass door.

When he had first stepped on to the terrace, he had thought the door was shut. But he saw now that it was not quite so. The door was unlatched, ajar by a quarter of an inch; rain was running down the edges and pooling at the metal runners.

Reggie pulled on the sliding door. It opened with a loud metallic screech.

He stepped inside. He was in the dining room. The dining table was in the center; to one side of it was the corridor. There was a mobile phone lying on the table—which would seem to indicate that someone was home.

Reggie shouted down the corridor once more for Dr. Dillane. No response. There was still that source of light from some room farther in—probably a cellar; through an open door at the end of the corridor, Reggie could see residual light reflecting on the highly polished wood floor. He continued in that direction.

He passed two side doors—a bedroom and a den—checking very quickly to be sure no one was inside.

There were bits of mud on the otherwise immaculate floor—what looked like same-day trackings of what Reggie had been tromping through outside.

Now he was at the open door at the end of the corridor. There was a descending stairwell, and light—a surprising amount of it—was coming from below.

Reggie stopped in the doorway, rapped on the doorjamb, and called yet again.

Still no response. He started down the stairs.

He saw immediately that this was no wine or storage cellar. It was a fully converted basement, brightly lit with fluorescents in the ceiling. There was a long work surface, of metal and white Formica, attached to one wall, and on that were personal computers, servers, and monitors. There was one padded office chair at the center of the workbench, filing and storage cabinets next to that, and a couple of smaller, more utilitarian stools for quick seating at the several PCs.

It was a small computer lab. Reggie immediately thought of the wild legends about garage startups making fortunes in Silicon Valley.