A Study in Sherlock

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?”

“Hopkins?” I said.

“No, Ezekiah.”

I looked up at the windows above me and said, “Yes, I did.”

The place of birth was recorded as Pennsylvania, USA.

I gave the bagged passport back to Rose and looked at the business card. It was impossible to be certain without handling it, but it seemed to be a cheap item. Thin stock, no texture, plain print, no embossing. It was the kind of thing anyone can order online for a few pounds a thousand. The legend said HOPKINS, ROSS, & SPAULDING, as if there were some kind of partnership of that name. There was no indication of what business they were supposed to be in. There was a phone number on the card, with a 610 area code. Eastern Pennsylvania, but not Philly. The address on the card said simply LEBANON, PA. East of Harrisburg, as I recalled. Correct for the 610 code. I had never been there.

“Did you call the number?” I asked.

“That’s your job,” Rose said.

“No one will answer,” I said. “A buck gets ten it’s phony.”

Rose gave me a long look and took out his phone. He said, “It better be phony. I don’t have an international calling plan. If someone answers in America it’ll cost me an arm and a leg.” He pressed 001, then 610, then the next seven digits. From six feet away I heard the triumphant little phone company triplet that announced a number that didn’t work. Rose clicked off and gave me the look again.

“How did you know?” he asked.

I said, “Omne ignotum pro magnifico.”

“What’s that?”

“Latin.”

“For what?”

“Every unexplained thing seems magnificent. In other words, a good magician doesn’t reveal his tricks.”

“You’re a magician now?”

“I’m an FBI special agent,” I said. I looked up at the windows again. Rose followed my gaze and said, “Yes, I know. Sherlock Holmes lived here.”

“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t exist. He was made up. So were these buildings. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s day Baker Street only went up to about number eighty. Or one hundred, perhaps. The rest of it was a country road. Marylebone was a separate little village a mile away.”

“I was born in Brixton,” Rose said. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“Conan Doyle made up the number two twenty-one,” I said. “Like movies and TV make up the phone numbers you see on the screen. And the license plates on the cars. So they don’t cause trouble for real people.”

“What’s your point?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But you’re going to have to let me have the passport. When you’re done with it, I mean. Because it’s probably phony, too.”

“What’s going on here?”

“Where do you live?”

“Hammersmith,” he said.

“Does Hammersmith have a library?”

“Probably.”

“Go borrow a book. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The second story. It’s called ‘The Red-Headed League.’ Read it tonight, and I’ll come see you in the morning.”

Visiting Scotland Yard is always a pleasure. It’s a slice of history. It’s a slice of the future, too. Scotland Yard is a very modern place these days. Plenty of information technology. Plenty of people using it.

I found Rose in his office, which was nothing more than open space defended by furniture. Like a kid’s fort. He said, “I got the book but I haven’t read it yet. I’m going to read it now.”

He pointed to a fat paperback volume on the desk. So to give him time I took Ezekiah Hopkins’s passport back to the embassy and had it tested. It was a fake, but very good, except for some blunders so obvious they had to be deliberate. Like taunts, or provocations. I got back to Scotland Yard and Rose said, “I read the story.”

“And?”

“All those names were in it. Ezekiah Hopkins, and Ross, and Spaulding. And Lebanon, Pennsylvania, too. And Sherlock Holmes said the same Latin you did. He was an educated man, apparently.”

“And what was the story about?”

“Decoy,” Rose said. “A ruse was developed whereby a certain Mr. Wilson was regularly decoyed away from his legitimate place of business for a predictable period of time, so that an ongoing illegal task of some sensitivity could be accomplished in his absence.”

“Very good,” I said. “And what does the story tell us?”

“Nothing,” Rose said. “Nothing at all. No one was decoying me away from my legitimate place of business. That was my legitimate place of business. I go wherever dead people go.”

“And?”

“And if they were trying to decoy me away, they wouldn’t leave clues beforehand, would they? They wouldn’t spell it out for me in advance. I mean, what would be the point of that?”

“There might be a point,” I said.

“What kind?”

I asked, “If this was just some foreigner stabbed to death on Baker Street, what would you do next?”

“Not very much, to be honest.”

“Exactly. Just one of those things. But now what are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to find out who’s yanking my chain. First step, I’m going back on scene to make sure we didn’t miss any other clues.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Latin.”

“For what?”

“They’re decoying you out. They’ve succeeded in what they set out to do.”

“Decoying me out from what? I don’t do anything important in the office.”

He insisted on going. We headed back to Baker Street. The tents were still there. The tape was still fluttering. We found no more clues. So we studied the context instead, physically, looking for the kind of serious crimes that could occur if law enforcement was distracted. We didn’t find anything. That part of Baker Street had the official Sherlock Holmes museum, and the waxworks, and a bunch of stores of no real consequence, and a few banks, but the banks were all bust anyway. Blowing one up would be doing it a considerable favor.

Then Rose wanted a book that explained the various Sherlock Holmes references in greater detail, so I took him to the British Library in Bloomsbury. He spent an hour with an annotated compendium. He got sidetracked by the geographic errors Conan Doyle had made. He started to think the story he had read could be approached obliquely, as if it were written in code.

Altogether we spent the rest of the week on it. The Wednesday, the Thursday, and the Friday. Easily thirty hours. We got nowhere. We made no progress. But nothing happened. None of Rose’s other cases unraveled, and London’s crime did not spike. There were no consequences. None at all.

So as the weeks passed both Rose and I forgot all about the matter. And Rose never thought about it again, as far as I know. I did, of course. Because three months later it became clear that it was I who had been decoyed. My interest had been piqued, and I had spent thirty hours doing fun Anglophile things. They knew that would happen, naturally. They had planned well. They knew I would be called out to the dead American, and they knew how to stage the kinds of things that would set me off like the Energizer Bunny. Three days. Thirty hours. Out of the building, unable to offer help with the rubber-stamping, not there to notice them paying for their kids’ college educations by rubber-stamping visas that should have been rejected instantly. Which is how four particular individuals made it to the States, and which is why three hundred people died in Denver, and which is why I—unable, in the cold light of day, to prove my naive innocence—sit alone in Leavenworth in Kansas, where by chance one of the few books the prison allows is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Previously a television director, union organizer, theater technician, and law student, Lee Child is the worldwide number one bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series. Born in England, Child now divides his time between New York and the south of France. He clearly remembers his interest in the matter at hand being sparked by reading in his grandmother’s Reader’s Digest an article about Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical school professor, often supposed to be the model for the character and therefore in Child’s opinion the “real” Sherlock Holmes.

“The Red-Headed League” appeared in 1892 and was collected as part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.