Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (8 page)

“What do you make of it?” He passed me the fabric. It was white, a sort of scarf or bandana, still crisp from an iron. Otherwise pristine, it had been speckled with ash from the fire.

“Left behind by one of the thieves?”

“Dropped as he was climbing into the plane.”

“Holmes!”

“Can you not see the airstrip, Watson?”

I had to squint, but I saw it eventually: the ground had been packed down in a wide strip. We stood near the foot of it, and it stretched past the melted wax into the distance.

“The sequence is clear from the marks on the ground. There were two thieves, one over six feet in height and a shorter one who was heavier and less active than the other—most likely our man in the Hawaiian shirt. They drove a van packed with mannequins to this spot. They were met by a small plane; I’d say a Piper Cherokee Arrow, from the tire marks. The man in the Hawaiian shirt boarded the plane and left, and the remaining thief unloaded his cargo and burnt it. The fire was set after the plane took off; otherwise it would have driven straight through the flames.”

“If we know the make of the plane, perhaps we can trace it from yesterday’s flight records.”

“It would be an arduous job, Watson, and uncertain to succeed if the plane embarked from a private or remote airstrip like this one. No, I already know the destination of the plane. It is clear from this speckled bandana.” He turned abruptly. “Let’s go, Watson. We have some unwelcome news for Mr. Lowe.”

K
EVIN
L
OWE DIDN
’
T
take the news well. He turned white and staggered to a chair. “But why, Mr. Holmes?” he gasped. “Why would someone steal my entire life’s work, only to burn it?”

“Do you have any enemies?” I asked, but Holmes shook his head.

“It’s not revenge,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think this was done for malicious motives at all; rather out of kindness, though perhaps not from your perspective. Tell me, Mr Lowe, the elderly man who acted so strangely the day before your theft: was he overweight and bald, with an eggshaped head?”

“Yes. Was he the thief? Can you find him?”

“He was the mastermind behind the theft,” said Holmes. “I know where to find him, and most likely his accomplices, too. But I will not.”

Lowe leapt from his chair, his face suffused with anger. “I hired you! Why won’t you catch the man who’s ruined me?”

“While I feel sorry for your loss, and pained that you are the innocent victim, you aren’t ruined, Mr. Lowe. You have the funds and the skill to replace the waxworks you’ve lost. You said yourself that you wanted to start afresh somewhere else. It means hard work for you, yes. But for a person close to the man who stole your mannequins, it means life or death.”

“How could it possibly be so important?”

As an answer, Holmes held up the white bandana, speckled with ash. Lowe’s eyes widened.

“Him?”

Holmes passed a cigarette to Lowe; the modeller’s fine hands shook as he lit it.

“I believe we will have an answer in the national news in a day or two, perhaps a week,” said Holmes. “Meanwhile, Watson and I will return to New York. We’ll be in touch when events come to a head. If you’re looking for a way to pass the time, I suggest you begin a new collection of waxworks. Perhaps starting with Chewbacca.”

Holmes was silent for the journey back to Bleecker Street. Although I called in on him several times in the days that followed, eager to find out if there had been any developments in the case, he remained taciturn, refusing to answer any of my questions relating to Mr. Lowe or the speckled bandana. Indeed, he seemed almost melancholy, as if he had been saddened by the events in Las Vegas.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY MORNING
, August 17
^th
, I looked in on Holmes just after sunrise. He was sunk deep into his armchair, his brows drawn down over his eyes, surrounded by smoke so thick it made me cough. He looked as if he hadn’t moved all night.

“Holmes,” I said, “this is no good, man. You’ve got to get out. Take up jogging, or something. These moods aren’t healthy.”

“Have you listened to the radio this morning? Seen any papers or the TV?”

“I’ve been with a patient.”

Holmes passed me that morning’s
New York Times
. In the headline, in the photo, I saw the news that he had been expecting, although until that moment, I had had no idea what it could be.

“Good God, Holmes,” I gasped. “Not—”

He nodded. “We must call Kevin Lowe and get him on a plane to Tennessee.”

Although we started early in the morning, Holmes had several phone calls to make, and we didn’t arrive in Memphis until nearly noon. Lowe arrived half an hour later. He was drawn and worried; even his paisley polyester shirt added no colour to his features.

I knew that Holmes had called in favours from his local contacts, but I didn’t know how powerful those contacts were until we stepped out of the airport into the crushing southern heat, and straight into a snow-white Cadillac.

Even from the airport, the roads were crowded with cars and pedestrians, and the crowds grew and grew as we approached our destination. Lowe gazed out the tinted window at the people sobbing, clutching flowers and records.

“Mr Holmes,” he began, but Holmes just shook his head. The car parted the throng of people, waved through by the policemen in their helmets and sunglasses. The white iron gates opened for us, and we proceeded up the drive to the columned entry of the mansion. A suited guard opened the car door and we walked in solemn silence, past the flowers arranged into bouquets and guitars, into the marbled-floored foyer of the house.

The coffin lay under a crystal chandelier. The man lying inside it wore a white suit and a blue shirt. His hair was as dark and gleaming as it had ever been in life. To my left, I heard Kevin Lowe gasp. I sensed rather than saw him stagger and I caught him and offered him the support of my arm as we were ushered from the house. Hardly a single minute had passed since we had been admitted.

Holmes did not speak until we were back in the car, driving out the gates of the mansion, with the glass panel closed between us and the driver.

“Was it yours inside the coffin?” he asked.

Beside me, Lowe was trembling. “It was mine,” he said. “That was my waxwork, sure as anything.”

“And so now you have your answer,” Holmes said. “They burned the other waxworks so that no one would suspect that the goal of the robbery was to take only one. It was unfortunate for you, to be sure. But I think you can see, Mr. Lowe, and appreciate, the need for confidentiality in this matter. If it is to work—if such a man, hounded by the press and his fans, is to find peace in this world—no one must know he is still in it.”

“I understand, Mr. Holmes,” said Kevin Lowe in a hoarse voice. “I won’t tell anyone. He... he deserves some rest, after all he’s given the world. But all these people...” He wiped his eyes as we drove through the crowds, even larger now than they had been on our way in.

“It’s a necessary path, but one which may give one’s friends pain,” said Holmes, and he caught my eye.

I nodded, remembering my own pain, and understanding at last the reason for my friend’s melancholy over the past several days. At times, Sherlock Holmes appeared to be no more than a calculating, deducing machine. In moments like this, I knew otherwise.

“Still,” resumed Holmes, “take heart, Mr. Lowe. Your work was chosen because of its quality, because of its absolute adherence to current fact. You’re an artist, and you were chosen by an artist, in his last, most desperate hour. I hope you will remember that.”

“I will,” Mr. Lowe said. “I will never forget.”

In the silence, I could dimly hear the car’s radio playing Heartbreak Hotel.

“Alright,” said Joan to me, when I cornered her at a convention, “but it’s apt to be a bit... twisted.” Joan de la Haye’s a razor-sharp, brutal young South African horror author, and she wasn’t kidding. ‘The Rich Man’s Hand’ is a bleak, sun-baked glimpse of life in one of the tougher corners of her native Pretoria that nudges at the boundary of the impossible.

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES WAS
on the verge of a relapse and needed a distraction. The Nigerians would be showing up on our doorstep soon to collect on the debt he accrued on his last bender. I’d already searched his office and flat for the little packets containing crack and found one hidden in the toilet cistern. He’d glowered at me while I emptied the rocks into the toilet bowl and flushed it. Thankfully, we’d received several emails asking for help since the success of our last case was smeared across the Pretoria News and on News 24.

The sensationalised case of the farmer and the lion had originally been thought of as an average farm murder by the local police, but had turned out to be a murderous love triangle. Detective Lestrade had, in his usual bungling manner, overlooked most of the pertinent facts. Holmes, while sucking on his electronic cigarette—its LED tip shining blue with each intake of nicotine—took great pleasure in pointing out his main error. The farmer, a Mr. Petrous Marais, had been described as a brutal man by his wife and farm workers. They’d claimed that he’d tormented his labourers with threats of feeding them to his pet lion, which apparently was the only creature the man had shown any affection to. His wife had insisted that he’d beaten her and the workforce on a regular basis, but the lack of bruises on her person, or any other evidence of spousal abuse, like medical records, and the comfort in which the workers lived had given Holmes pause. Surely a man who beat his workers and threatened to feed them to his lion wouldn’t house them quite so well. The workers had indoor plumbing and didn’t live in tin shanties like some workers on other farms across the country. The atrocious living conditions of South African farm labourers was a familiar plight, but it was not the case on that particular farm.

Mr Marais, while a hard man, was not brutal or cruel. He’d treated his workers fairly and paid them what he could afford. His wife, on the other hand, while attractive in the conventional and obvious sense, was not a fair woman. She piqued Holmes’s interest when he noticed the tennis bracelet she wore on her right wrist showed no scratches on the clasp, and was obviously—to him—brand new. The wrapping from the jeweller’s shop and the credit card slip in the rubbish bin backed up his premise. She’d bought it the day after her husband’s death, as though to reward herself for a deed well done. It was not the act of a woman in shock over the brutal murder of her husband. He also noticed traces of lint on her blouse, which matched the fibres from the farm foreman’s shirt, and traces of lipstick on the foreman’s collar that matched the shade of lipstick Mrs Marais favoured. Holmes deduced that they had been having an affair and that the foreman had riled up the workers against Mr. Marais and convinced them to feed him to his outsized pet. Once confronted, the lovers had turned on each other in a rush to secure a plea bargain. The farm labourers had felt contrite and come clean on all the details. The poor animal had been put down and Mrs. Marais and her lover were charged with conspiracy to commit murder and sundry other charges.

But that was over a month ago, and Sherlock needed a new diversion to prevent another crack-induced manic episode. Mrs. Hudson put the tea tray down as I read through the potential cases. Most of the requests for help were the usual twaddle, a missing dog or a necklace that Holmes said was clearly taken by the maid. There was one that briefly held some interest—a missing child—until Sherlock surmised that the father had absconded with the boy because the mother refused him visitation rights. He claimed there was something in the wording of the woman’s email that had led him to that conclusion; I personally didn’t see it. Holmes sent the distraught mother an email informing her that perhaps if she hadn’t used the child as a weapon against his father, the father wouldn’t have resorted to such measures, and that perhaps she should endeavour to be a better and less selfish parent.

Her response had been less than friendly.

A text message from Lestrade, sent from a crime scene along with a photo, finally caught Sherlock’s attention for longer than five seconds. The dismembered body of a well-dressed white businessman, found in Mamelodi Township, was not something that happened every day, and was therefore noteworthy to Holmes.

“Watson,” he said after sucking on his e-cig, the blue LED light glowing in the dimly-lit room. The blinds were closed. Holmes had a hangover and bright sunlight bothered his bloodshot eyes. “I think Lestrade will be out of his depth on this one, as per usual, and it would only be right if we did our civic duty and solved it for him.” With that, he stood, tossed the car keys at me and marched out of the room. He winced as the bright sunlight hit his eyes and a pair of sunglasses was promptly propped up on his nose.

We drove from our small office on Baker Street in Brooklyn and then down Jan Shoba, before we turned into Stanza Bopape.

A beggar outside the Silverton Police Station held a cardboard sign declaring that he would rather starve than steal. I’d seen the same sign a few days ago being held by another beggar outside our office; it was evidently doing the rounds. Silverton was a lower-middle class suburb, and also the heart of the motor industry in the city. We could see the decline in the value of houses as we drew closer to Mamelodi.

Inside Mamelodi itself, we found a mix of small houses with well-tended patches of garden next door to tin shanties or shacks built out of whatever building materials could be pilfered from the surrounding area. Mixed in with the informal shacks and small one-bedroom homes—which housed ten people—were larger houses that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the more affluent suburbs.

The body had been dumped next to the river, and the smell from the stagnant, polluted water made me gag. The odour from the water was worse than the stench from the corpse, which was still relatively fresh. He’d only been killed the night before. Somehow the stink of it didn’t affect Sherlock, though. His nose was always raised up in the air, above the rest of us. Lestrade stood next to the body, holding his nose. Unfortunately, the Vicks vapour rub he’d smeared under his nose to combat the stench from the river didn’t seem to be doing the trick this time around. His handlebar moustache was caked with the stuff. His ample beer gut protruded over his belt and prevented him from bending over the body to get a proper look.