The Baker Street Translation (10 page)

Timing is everything, and he had sworn to himself that he would not bollix it up again.

Then he saw the message light flashing on his phone. Reggie immediately punched the button and listened to the message. It was from Laura. A sick cat. All right, then.

Then he punched the replay button and listened to it again.

He could not recall ever hearing this exact tone of voice from Laura before. It was hard to know what to make of it.

She was an actress, of course, and even more than most women, she knew how to convey what she wanted to convey just by her tone of voice.

But for the life of him, Reggie could not figure this one out.

He wasn't at all sure, but it sounded as though—just possibly—something might be wrong.

He hoped to God it had nothing to do with the proposal that he had not quite been able to make before rushing off to Soho.

Was “I have a sick cat” the new code phrase for “I won't marry you”?

He hoped not.

But if it was not that, what was it?

He rang Laura's home phone. No answer.

He rang her mobile. No answer there, either; it played her usual personalized greeting and invited the caller to leave a message. He did. He asked her to please ring him back.

For several minutes more, Reggie sat at his desk and resisted the impulse to just get in his car and drive out to Laura's home in Chelsea.

And then, with no other urgent task available to distract him, Reggie gave in to those instincts. He left chambers, and instead of driving directly home to Butler's Wharf, he drove to Chelsea.

He pulled up underneath a tree directly across the street from Laura's home. The porch light was on. None of the other lights in the house was. She was either not home or she was home and had gone to bed.

But if she was home and had gone to bed, she would have picked up when Reggie rang her. That assumed, of course, that she had gone to bed alone. Reggie considered the alternative for just a moment.

Was she with Buxton? If she was simply going to a publicity conference or some such thing with him, why leave a message about a sick cat?

Perhaps Reggie had just been fooling himself. Perhaps there had never been any hope at all.

He resisted the impulse to go up and bang on the door. If she answered, he would be standing there like a fool. If she did not answer, it meant she would be at Buxton's.

And his earlier sense that something was wrong, that Laura might be in some kind of trouble, was surely mistaken. He had simply been projecting—something was seriously wrong from his own perspective if Laura was going back to Buxton. But that did not translate into something going wrong for Laura.

And it was one thing to be concerned; it was another to become a stalker.

Reggie started the XJS and drove on.

16

When Reggie arrived at chambers the next morning, he immediately checked for a phone message from Laura.

There wasn't one.

But there was a message waiting for him from Wembley.

Reggie returned the call.

“I had an officer talk to your translator's employer,” said Wembley.

“What did he find?”

“A woman running a small business. But nothing of particular interest.”

“What do you mean by ‘nothing'?”

“Don't cross-examine me, Heath. I mean we talked with the woman, we found no reason to suspect her of anything, and there's nothing there worth our time.”

“Who did you send?”

“I forget his name. Someone from Traffic Division.”

“Bloody hell, Wembley, is that the best—”

“As a matter of fact, yes. We're just a tad understaffed at the moment.”

“How so?”

“I'm sure you know Scotland Yard is responsible for protecting the royals. Not my usual assignment anymore, but I used to do it back in the day.”

“And so they're recruiting you from Homicide?”

“For the next few days. There's not just one but two royal events coming up. First and foremost, we've got the Prince of Wales. He hasn't been out and about all that much, since the death of the princess last year, but now he's set to host a bunch of foreign dignitaries at a dinner party at the palace, so that's a big deal. At the same time, there's a birthday party and celebrity half marathon, or jogathon, or whatever it's called, to honor Lady Asthon-Tate for her conservation efforts. That's at Hyde Park. One of the queen's cousins is attending that one; apparently, it takes a royal to help protect the endangered red squirrel, and it takes Scotland Yard to protect a royal, so we not only have to cover the prince but we also have to spare a team to cover the Hyde Park event and look after the cousin.”

“Which cousin? The Duke of Kent?”

“No, the other one.”

“The Duke of Gloucester?”

“No, the other one.”

“The Viscount of Linley?”

“No, that's a nephew.”

Reggie racked his brain. He'd never really tried to keep close tabs on the royals.

“Anyway, it's a duke,” said Wembley. “And on top of that, apparently there are blokes at MI5 who spend all their waking hours on the Internet, and they think they've detected some chatter about shedding some royal blood, damaging international relations, and accomplishing whatever the bloody hell it is that anarchists hope to accomplish. In any case, most of my team is either on the royal protection detail itself or indirectly assisting MI5 in some lowly and subservient way. If there were five of me, I couldn't keep up with everything that needs to be done. As my dear mum used to say, might as well jam a broomstick up my arse and ask me to sweep the floors while I'm at it.”

“So MI5 jumps in and brings half of Scotland Yard along for the ride,” said Reggie, “even if there are more than twenty other royals between you and the throne?”

“Of course they do. Doesn't matter how high up the target is.”

“Seems like a lot of bother,” said Reggie. “They wouldn't do this for a commoner.”

“Well, MI5 would,” said Wembley. “Or so they say. For them, it's the terror threat that counts. They'd jump in even if it was your birthday party that was threatened.” Then Wembley thought about it. “Well, maybe not yours. I'm sure they have some standards. But for Laura's they would.”

“Fine,” said Reggie. “You're shorthanded because you're protecting a self-promoting royal toff and you can't afford to send a full-fledged inspector to investigate a full-fledged murder. I take it you won't mind then if I talk to this woman on my own?”

“Under the circumstances, I won't try to stop you,” said Wembley. He told Reggie the woman's address. “You just make it clear to her that you're in no official capacity.”

17

Reggie drove to the address Wembley had provided. It was not far, just a few miles north of Regent's Park.

Reggie drove through Camden Town, past flea markets that sold cheap knockoff jackets and hats, and music stores that sold used vinyl LPs to the town's resurgent bohemians. He continued across Camden Lock, and the muddy stretch of the Fleet River that ran beneath it, flowing with just barely enough water to support a struggling tour boat on one side and about a ton of floating trash on the other.

Now he was in Kentish Town. He stopped at a block of recently constructed estate flats—not extravagantly built by any means, but recent enough to at least not be run-down.

The sort of place for a young, ambitious, midlevel entrepreneur trying to work her way up and maybe someday own a mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath. And perhaps cut a few corners along the way, thought Reggie. Cheat an overseas contractor who she thought was too far away to do anything about it. Save a few extra pounds. Murder him in an alley in Soho when he comes to collect. Well, by itself, that hardly seemed sufficient motive. But sometimes things get out of control. And in any case, Reggie already knew he wouldn't like her. He didn't like cheats.

He walked up the exterior stairs to the second-floor flat and rang the bell.

A thin, fiftyish woman opened the door.

“Yes,” she said. “I am Mrs. Winslow.”

She had dark hair drawn tightly back, with no apparent attempt to hide that it was going gray. Narrow metal spectacles sat rather sternly, just a little lower than they should, on the bridge of her nose.

She didn't give the wannabe-upscale appearance Reggie had expected. If he had guessed, he would have said she was a public school headmistress.

Thank God he wasn't eight years old any more. And he was very much taller than she was.

Reggie introduced himself and gave her his card. “I'm here about Mr. Liu,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow, scrutinizing Reggie, staring at his barrister's business card and then back at him again.

“The man the police said was killed?”

Her voice was carefully modulated, but she couldn't help but put an inflexion on the last word of that question. It betrayed tension. But there could be all sorts of reasons for that.

“Yes,” said Reggie.

“Has there been an arrest? Are you handling the prosecution?”

She seemed quite eager about the prospect.

“No, and no. But Mr. Liu had contacted me earlier regarding the work he did for you, and I feel obliged to follow up.”

“Really?” she said. She paused, apparently taken aback. “He actually engaged a barrister?”

“In a manner of speaking.” There was no point in mentioning that Mr. Liu had come looking for Sherlock Holmes.

But the woman looked again at Reggie's card. “Baker Street Chambers,” she said pointedly.

“Yes.”

“One hears things about that chambers,” she said.

Reggie made no response.

“Mr. Liu told me that he was going to take the matter to Sherlock Holmes,” said the woman. “I chalked that up to just one more of his misunderstandings.”

She looked at Reggie on that, clearly expecting some sort of confirmation from him. But he said nothing, hoping his silence would keep her talking. Maybe that tension behind her voice would cause something to spill.

And she did continue. But Reggie didn't like what spilled.

“If Mr. Liu really wanted to make an issue of it, he should have just had his solicitor send a letter,” she said with a hint of exasperation. “Instead, he wrote a letter to Sherlock Holmes. And then, when I told him I would not take the word of someone claiming to be Sherlock Holmes that Mr. Liu's translations were fine when I knew they were not, he engages you—a barrister. Do I have it right?”

“Close enough,” said Reggie. The letter had put him on the defensive; now she was grilling him, instead of the other way around.

But now the woman paused, sighed, and said, “Given the terrible thing the police told me about, I wish he had just gone with the solicitor approach and stayed home.”

“So do I,” said Reggie.

“Or,” she continued sadly, “that I had been able to accept the work that he sent. But I simply couldn't. Do you want to see the errors he made?”

“I don't think that will be necessary,” said Reggie. Perhaps Wembley was right. This woman was seeming less and less murderous. She was not likely to have gone herself to confront anyone in a Soho alley, and her business wasn't large enough for her to hire someone for it.

“Do you happen to know whether Mr. Liu was working for anyone else in London?” asked Reggie.

“No, I don't.'

“How did you come to hire him?”

“He answered an ad that I placed in a Chinese language newspaper. He had completed appropriate course work and he did fine on the proficiency exam I sent him. But his actual work product was another matter.”

“In what way?”

“When I hire new translators, I look very carefully at the first translations they return to our customers, as a quality check. I don't think most of my competitors take the time to do that, but I personally regard accuracy as critical in my business.”

“Of course,” said Reggie.

“And unfortunately, Mr. Liu's work had many errors. The first one—‘Rub-a-dub-dub'—was accurate enough, but for that one he seems to have had the assistance of someone in your office. And a couple of the other rhymes were acceptable, as well. But several rhymes had clear errors. And although I pointed them out to him and asked him to try again, he still came back with the same errors. He insisted he had it right, but I knew he didn't. I was very sorry to reject him, but it couldn't be helped. He was causing me to miss my deadline; I could hardly send the translation on to the customer's distribution list with blatant mistakes in it. Could I?”

“No,” said Reggie, “I suppose not.”

“‘Suppose'?” said the woman, as though she were about to rap Reggie's knuckles with a ruler.

“No, of course you couldn't send it on with errors.”

But he didn't say it with enough conviction, and he immediately wished he had, because now he could see in Mrs. Winslow's eyes that she was going to defend her position further.

“I'll show you,” she said.

She led Reggie to the back of the house, to a smallish room that she used as an office.

“I've got one of the older versions, from a few years ago, right here.”

She turned to a set of shelves that had been converted from a bedroom closet. She dug deep into one of them, located a cardboard box, and from it she pulled out a large yellow-and-white plastic duck.

She plunked it on the desk in front of Reggie. “You can press the bill if you want to see how it works.” she said.

“What?”

“Press the duck's bill. I mean the goose's. I swear it looks like a duck to me, but Elgar Imports markets it as Mother Goose.”

Reggie pressed the plastic bill as the woman began to unfold a sheet of thin laser-printed paper.

“One, two, buckle my shoe,” said the toy duck in an annoyingly tinny female voice.