The Baker Street Letters (34 page)

And of late, Reggie had to admit, it was.

“Where?” said Reggie, looking at the empty guest chairs outside his office.

“I mean, you are about to have, I presume. The solicitor is inside,” she said, indicating Reggie's closed chambers door. “Hope that's all right. Her name is Darla Rennie. Didn't want to … you know … let one get away.”

“Good job,” said Reggie, with a slight smile. “Mustn't take chances. Lock them in if you must.”

Lois sat back down, pleased with herself, and Reggie opened the chambers door.

The light was dim inside; Lois had apparently been bold enough to let someone into Reggie's chambers in his absence, but not to turn the lamps on for them. The two main client chairs in Reggie's office—burgundy leather in a deep, wing-back design intended to convey a sense of power and security—faced away from the door, toward Reggie's desk. From the entrance, one couldn't even tell if they were occupied, and for a moment Reggie thought his new clerk must have been mistaken in some uniquely incompetent way.

Then there was a voice from the client chair to Reggie's right. A woman's voice.

“Your clerk let me in. But don't blame her; I insisted. I hope you don't mind.”

The woman had not gotten up from the chair; at the moment, all Reggie could see was the lower portion of two shapely legs in nude-toned stockings—smooth and subtly shining, like the voice.

Reggie walked around behind the desk to get to his chair, and to see her face. He still had the copy of the
Daily Sun
under his arm, and as he crossed behind the desk, he dropped the beat-up tabloid as surreptitiously as he could into the waste basket.

“I'm Reggie Heath,” he said. His inflexion involuntarily changed when he saw her face. “Tell me what I can do for you.”

Her hair was dark as jet, and its curls set off skin that was white to the point of translucence. She had green eyes—not warm olive green, like Laura's, but crystalline green—framed in round gold-rimmed spectacles that were so unembellished and out of fashion that Reggie guessed they had to have been deliberately chosen to add severity to the face.

She was small-boned, almost pixielike, in a forest-green wool business dress. Except for that glimpse of leg, the deep leather chair had nearly swallowed her up. She leaned forward now to speak.

“Lunch,” she said, and then she smiled. “I'm Darla. I'll tell you all about my client; but first things first, and it feels like ages since I had a decent meal.”

Her skin said she was in her early twenties; the sophistication in her voice suggested possibly a few years more.

“And what does decent mean?” said Reggie. From the look of her, he made it even odds that decent meant a Portobello mushroom salad with fresh spinach, or kelp-wrapped sushi and rice, or a very small and selective portion of a free-range hen.

“Anything deeply fried,” said the young woman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reggie and the new solicitor sat down on plastic chairs at Marylebone Fish Fryer, which if not absolutely the best fish-and-chips in London, was certainly the closest. And Darla seemed unconcerned about it either way. The air was filled with the scent of vinegar and deep-fat fried food, and she seemed to almost bask in it.

“My client,” she said, liberally dousing the crisp batter, “is a driver of a Black Cab. I wish to engage you to represent him in a criminal proceeding.”

“What is the accusation?”

“Robbery homicide,” she said. Then she paused to bite eagerly into the fish; she sat back with a contented sigh, and wiped her mouth. She looked back at Reggie watching her, and she gave a little smile.

Then she continued: “A tourist couple from America, robbed and killed after going to the theater in the West End, and their bodies found several miles away.”

“I believe I saw something in the news about that,” said Reggie.

“Really? I haven't seen it, so little time. I can imagine it would make the papers. But publicity is not always a bad thing for a chambers, is it?”

“Not always,” said Reggie. And then he paused. It wasn't the high-profile nature of the case that caused him to hesitate. It was another reason, and the solicitor seemed to sense it.

“I am absolutely convinced my client is innocent,” said Darla. “And I won't hold you to the cab rank rule if you are not equally convinced after speaking with him.”

This was not a huge concession on her part. The rule, that a barrister must accept the client presented to him in the same way that the next cab in line must accept the next passenger, could almost always be got around if need be.

“Fair enough,” said Reggie. “But why me?”

“For starters, I know you have not had much lately, Mr. Heath.”

“Excuse me?”

“In the way of new work. My client is of limited means and he cannot afford, if you'll forgive my saying so, the rates of the current top-ranked criminal advocates.”

“I see your point,” said Reggie, “although I would have put it differently. But you should know that I haven't done much criminal in recent years.”

“In recent years, none at all, I know,” said Darla. “But what you did in years past was quite successful.”

“I won the cases I tried, if that's what you mean.”

“It is exactly what I mean. It's all right, Mr. Heath, really. I know what your concern is. You never lost a case you defended. Even though your last defendant was, in fact, guilty.”

Reggie sat back in his chair at that. He gave Darla a hard look, but she continued.

“Please do not take offense. It is still common knowledge among the legal community. A veteran police officer with a sterling reputation was accused of killing his wife over a divorce. He swore his innocence. But the prosecution allowed themselves to be driven by media, and they brought the case without the facts to support it; their witnesses were unreliable, and you destroyed them, quite rightly, in court. The case was dismissed. And then the police officer accused of murdering his wife promptly went home and murdered his mother-in-law to boot.”

Now she stopped and just looked across at Reggie. He looked directly back.

“There was little I could do at that point,” he said.

“What you did was stop practicing criminal.”

This was completely true; she had it right. He had indeed turned to corporate, where the consequences of successfully representing a client who turns out to be deceptive and in the wrong are—usually—less severe. But it was bad business to explicitly acknowledge such qualms to the legal community, and he did not want to do so now. He just nodded very slightly to her in response.

“Wherever would the legal system be if all lawyers shared your compunction, Mr. Heath?”

“Everyone is entitled to the best defense available,” said Reggie. “That doesn't mean everyone is entitled to me.”

Darla smiled slightly and said, “In my opinion, it does mean exactly that. But you've clearly paid a price for your scruples.”

“How do you mean?”

“All one has to do is look about you, Mr. Heath. You have one person as both clerk and secretary. You have no junior to do the scut work for you, and no pupil seeking to train with you. I did not see another brief on your clerk's desk, or on yours, and your shelf is empty. But there is no shortage of accused clients in London. What could account for the sad state of your chambers if not your resistance to taking on any case where you're afraid your client might have done it?”

Reggie was about to answer that, then stopped. It was actually refreshing—apparently she was the one person in London who did not read the tabloids or know what that coverage had done to his chambers reputation.

He shrugged in response to her question.

“Well,” she said. “You needn't worry. My client meets your strict criteria. He is innocent. And because he is, I will be able to get him the best defense available, in my opinion—I will get you—and, I hope, at a bit of a cut rate?”

Reggie had no other case work pending, and this solicitor clearly knew it.

“I'll check with my clerk,” said Reggie, bluffing anyway. He paused, then said, “I'll need to see the discovery file first and meet your client. No promises beyond that.”

“Of course,” said Darla. “His name is Neil Walters. He's at Shoreditch police station. Can you see him this afternoon?”

“Yes, I think that will work.”

“Brilliant. I have another engagement myself. But my client, of course, will be available.”

She stood. She offered her hand. Reggie took it, and she left it in his possession for just a moment longer than courtesy required.

“You are just as I expected,” she said. Then she let go of his hand, smiled again, and exited the little café before Reggie had a chance to ask what that expectation had been.

As she walked away down Marylebone High Street, Reggie was aware that his blood was pumping fast. This was partly because he desperately needed a new brief.

And partly because this young female solicitor was quite … well, no point in going there. He did not need that sort of complication.

Reggie returned to Baker Street Chambers and got the bundle of information that Darla had left with his clerk. He sat down behind his desk and opened the packet. It included both her case summary and the police report, annotated with her own elegantly formed handwritten comments.

Reduced to its essentials, it said this:

A young couple from Houston were visiting London for the first time. They took in an early show at Covent Garden and then spent a couple of hours trying to understand the English fondness for warm Guinness at a pub nearby. They exited the pub shortly after eleven, by which time both of them, according to several accounts, had fully grasped the concept and were more than a little inebriated.

The barman at the pub went to the trouble of flagging down a Black Cab for them and he made sure the couple got into it, confident that he had deposited them into the safest means of getting home in all of London.

That was the last seen of them alive. Their bodies were found the next morning in a muddy Thames tidewater channel at an abandoned power-generating station at Lots Road, on the outer edges of Chelsea. Her purse and jewelry and his wallet and Rolex were gone, but a hotel key was still in his pocket, and from that, routine work by Scotland Yard traced the two victims back to their hotel, the bar they had visited, and the single most damning piece of evidence against Reggie's potential client: the license number of the cab, which the barman claimed to remember, and which two witnesses in Chelsea claimed to have seen just moments before the time of the crime.

The proposed theory was that the perpetrator drove the American couple behind the abandoned power station to rob them, and something went wrong—the husband decided at the last moment, perhaps, to resist. The perpetrator killed the man first, bashing his head on the concrete edge of the sea wall, and then asphyxiated his wife, and then dumped both bodies into the muddy channel.

Or so the police believed from their examination at the scene.

Police had already searched the home of the cab driver, and found nothing there to link him to the victims.

They also searched the interior and exterior of the cab itself, and found nothing there either—none of the victim's personal belongings, no traces of blood or a struggle, or anything at all to indicate that the cab had been at the scene of the crime.

That fact would have been more exculpatory if only the cab had not been thoroughly and professionally cleaned earlier in the morning before it was seized by police. That cleaning itself, Reggie knew, would make them suspicious. But Reggie's potential client did have a receipt for the work, and the report said he claimed to have it done routinely every week.

That was all of it. Reggie stood and walked to the window, looking out on Baker Street as he mulled it over.

The prosecution's case really boiled down to just the eyewitness sightings. There were two independent testimonies about that, with mutually corroborating details, and despite how much he needed the work, Reggie's first thought on reading their accounts was that the defendant might indeed be guilty.

But, of course, that impression was based just on the prosecutor's report. It therefore meant nothing. At least not until he talked to the possible client.

Reggie got his coat and exited his chambers office, just in time to encounter Lois, who was approaching from her secretary's station. She had a letter in hand.

“I found this under Nigel's desk,” she said. “I think you really should look at it.”

Reggie accepted the letter, feeling guilty now for just having left it there earlier under the desk, for Lois or the cleaning lady to deal with. He took a look.

It was typewritten, on a very old manual from all appearances, and that by itself made it stand out. There was no return address. Reggie read it now, as follows: