In League with Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon (2020) by Laurie R. King; Leslie S. Klinger

Author:Laurie R. King; Leslie S. Klinger [Klinger, Laurie R. King; Leslie S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

BENCHLEY

by Derek Haas

Gerard James would not be attending his niece’s christening at the Southwark Cathedral on Sunday—an event that was to be exhausting but obligatory—because he had been murdered. As it was not uncommon to find a factory hand lying face down in the mud outside the George and Dragon, James’s body went unnoticed well past time when assistance might have proved beneficial. He was twenty-three years old, the same number of stab wounds in his side and back.

The body’s discoverer, a man named Benchley, sent for a peeler, and an officer named Rice arrived a half hour later, scowling. Rice had enlisted the Thursday before to fight the Russians in the Crimean Peninsula. He did not much like being in the Metropolitan Police. This was his last shift before reporting to Dover.

“Stand clear, stand clear,” he ordered in an officious voice he was fond of employing. Rice toed James’s body from its back to its side to its front like rolling a felled log.

The crowd of a dozen or so gasped at the dead man’s bloodless face and the expression fixed forever upon it. Horror. Fright. Recognition?

Rice’s face soured and his mustache, usually horizontal, pulled down into an arch. “Hup. Who are you then?” he asked the man who had sent for him.

“Me, sir?”

“Aye.”

“Benchley, sir. I’m a printer’s apprentice. That’s me shoppe across the street.”

Rice sniffed like he smelled something spoiled. The accent pinned Benchley for a Scotsman, and there was little he detested more than a thin Scotsman. “Don’t need your life story. How came you upon this body?”

“I just said, me shoppe’s across the street.”

Rice eyed him, then looked at the crowd to see if they were enjoying or encouraging this witness’s insolence. Neither was the answer; the gawkers were too focused on the unfortunate victim’s expression. Rice took his hand off the handle of his billy club. He sniffed again, one nostril widening, then the other, a habit he’d had since he was a boy.

“Well. He has passed beyond. Send for a horseman and alert the funeral house—”

“Are you going to ask his name?” Benchley asked.

“His name?”

“Aye.”

Rice straightened. A few of the lookers turned their eyes to him and then to this thin printer’s apprentice as though they were attending the theater.

“Right, then. What’s his name?” Rice asked.

“Gerard James, sir.”

A few members of the audience—as that was what they were becoming—stirred at the sound of this name.

Rice stiffened.

Benchley examined him, his expression as blank as a debtor’s ledger. “D’ye know the name, officer?”

Rice’s nostrils flared again, left, right. “Why should I?”

Benchley shook his head as if he couldn’t fathom an answer to that question. Rice was starting not to like the man.

“Right, then. As I said before—”

“How d’ye s’pose he died?”

“S’pose he died?” Rice blurted, his voice pitching upward like a ship rolling in the ocean. “It’s obvious, innit? By knife.”

“By concealed knife.”

“What’s that now?” Rice looked at Benchley with increasing annoyance. He glanced at the crowd, hooked a thumb at the wee Scotsman as if

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