A Study in Sherlock

“You and Doran assumed that Hilton would keep the Paget in his collection and that he wouldn’t tell anyone about it. If the British government learned that Hilton had a Paget that was stolen from Buckingham Palace, it would demand its return. Cubitt assumed we would ignore the moral implications of obtaining stolen goods in our desire to obtain the most important and rare piece of Holmes memorabilia that ever existed, but you couldn’t take the chance that we would make the existence of the Paget public.

“Hilton suffered huge financial losses and needed large sums of money fast. You must have been terrified when he told you he planned to sell the Paget. Even if the buyer decided to keep its existence secret you knew he would insist on independent verification of an object that valuable and you would be exposed. You didn’t steal the Paget to possess it. You stole it to destroy it.”

“Well, this is an interesting theory but you don’t have this so-called air gun or the Paget so all you do have is a theory.”

“Not quite,” Inspector Baynes chimed in. “The New York police have Chester Doran in custody and he has been granted immunity as part of a plea bargain. When he heard he could be an accomplice to murder it wasn’t hard to get him to cooperate. He’s told us everything.

“Mr. Burns, I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Hilton Cubitt.”

William Escott and Robert Altamont drove back to London as soon as Inspector Baynes released them but Baynes asked Ronald to walk with him on the moor. Ronald explained his reluctance to go anywhere near the treacherous bogs but the inspector assured him it was perfectly safe.

Ronald and the inspector set off along a marked path. As they walked Ronald began to see that the moor could be scary but there was also a tranquil beauty in the lush vegetation and a sense of awe that was evoked by the cold, gray, mist-shrouded, low-hanging sky.

“Before you left, I wanted a chance to tell you how impressed I was by your deductions,” the inspector said. “You’ll probably have to testify at Burns’s trial. When you return to England, perhaps you’ll assist the Yard in solving another case.”

Ronald gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I doubt I’d be much use unless the case was connected to Sherlock Holmes. If Doyle hadn’t had Colonel Sebastian Moran use an air gun in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House,’ I’d never have tumbled to Burns’s scheme.”

“Then I’ll keep an eye out for a case with a Doyle connection.”

A stiff wind slashed Ronald’s cheeks. He hunched his shoulders and looked nervously at his fog-shrouded, bog-infested surroundings.

“I’ll think about it, but don’t call me if the case involves a bloodthirsty beast and the moor.”

Jerry Margolin is the owner of the world’s largest collection of original cartoon art and illustrations dealing strictly with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Jerry lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife of forty years and a cat named Paget. He has been a member of the Baker Street Irregulars since 1977. His brother and coauthor, Phillip Margolin, introduced him to Sherlock Holmes at age ten.

Phillip Margolin has been a Peace Corps Volunteer, a schoolteacher, and is the author of fifteen New York Times bestsellers. Phil spent a quarter century as a criminal defense attorney, during which time he handled thirty homicide cases, including twelve death penalty cases, and argued before the United States Supreme Court. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is proud to be a cofounder of Chess for Success, a nonprofit that uses chess to teach elementary school children study skills. When asked to contribute to this anthology, Phil jumped at the chance to collaborate on a Holmes story with his brother.

The resemblance of any of the characters in this story to any living or dead Sherlockians is probably intentional.

THE BONE-HEADED LEAGUE

Lee Child

For once the FBI did the right thing: it sent the Anglophile to England. To London, more specifically, for a three-year posting at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Pleasures there were extensive, and duties there were light. Most agents ran background checks on visa applicants and would-be immigrants and kept their ears to the ground on international matters, but I liaised with London’s Metropolitan Police when American nationals were involved in local crimes, either as victims or witnesses or perpetrators.

I loved every minute of it, as I knew I would. I love that kind of work, I love London, I love the British way of life, I love the theater, the culture, the pubs, the pastimes, the people, the buildings, the Thames, the fog, the rain. Even the soccer. I was expecting it to be all good, and it was all good.

Until.

I had spent a damp Wednesday morning in February helping out, as I often did, by rubber-stamping immigration paperwork, and then I was saved by a call from a sergeant at Scotland Yard, asking on behalf of his inspector that I attend a crime scene north of Wigmore Street and south of Regent’s Park. On the 200 block of Baker Street, more specifically, which was enough to send a little jolt through my Anglophile heart, because every Anglophile knows that Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address was 221B Baker Street. It was quite possible I would be working right underneath the great detective’s fictional window.

And I was, as well as underneath many other windows, because the Met’s crime scenes are always fantastically elaborate. We have CSI on television, where they solve everything in forty- three minutes with DNA, and the Met has scene-of-crime officers, who spend forty-three minutes closing roads and diverting pedestrians, before spending forty-three minutes shrugging themselves into Tyvek bodysuits and Tyvek booties and Tyvek hoods, before spending forty-three minutes stringing KEEP OUT tape between lampposts and fence railings, before spending forty-three minutes erecting white tents and shrouds over anything of any interest whatsoever. The result was that I found a passable imitation of a traveling circus already in situ when I got there.

There was a cordon, of course, several layers deep, and I got through them all by showing my Department of Justice credentials and by mentioning the inspector’s name, which was Bradley Rose. I found the man himself stumping around on the damp sidewalk some yards south of the largest white tent. He was a short man, but substantial, with no tie and snappy eyeglasses and a shaved head. He was an old-fashioned London thief-taker, softly spoken but at the same time impatient with bullshit, which his own department provided in exasperating quantity.

He jerked his thumb at the tent and said, “Dead man.”

I nodded. Obviously I wasn’t surprised. Not even the Met uses tents and Tyvek for purse snatching.

He jerked his thumb again and said, “American.”

I nodded again. I knew Rose was quite capable of working that out from dentistry or clothing or shoes or hairstyle or body shape, but equally I knew he would not have involved me officially without some more definitive indicator. And as if answering the unasked question he pulled two plastic evidence bags from his pocket. One contained an opened-out blue U.S. passport, and the other contained a white business card. He handed both bags to me and jerked his thumb again and said, “From his pockets.”

I knew better than to touch the evidence itself. I turned the bags this way and that and examined both items through the plastic. The passport photograph showed a sullen man, pale of skin, with hooded eyes that looked both evasive and challenging. I glanced up and Rose said, “It’s probably him. The boat matches the photo, near enough.”

Boat was a contraction of boat race, which was Cockney rhyming slang for face. Apples and pears, stairs; trouble and strife, wife; plates of meat, feet; and so on. I asked, “What killed him?”

“Knife under the ribs,” Rose said.

The name on the passport was Ezekiah Hopkins.

Rose said, “Did you ever hear of a name like that before?”