Reggie got out of the city and drove to Theydon Bois in good time. Just past the Shepherd’s Arms pub, he navigated a little circus where three roads converged and then drove halfway up a small hill to the address referenced in the Dorset House lease.
It was a smallish two-story structure, in various shades of tan and red brick—nicely maintained, with a flagstone courtyard in front, surrounded by an unintimidating three-foot iron fence.
Two small children ran from the courtyard into the house as Reggie approached; moments later, a woman in her late thirties came to the door. She had a naturally pale and unfreckled face, with thick, attractive auburn hair, cut short in the way many women would do when they’ve begun a family—but still with a flip above the shoulder.
“Yes?” she said.
“I’m Reggie Heath,” said Reggie, offering the woman his business card. “Are you Mrs. Spencer? Formerly with Dorset National?”
“Yes,” she said, looking at the card. “You found me. I hope you’re not here because you think I have need of your services,” she said with just a little bit of a laugh.
“Not at all,” said Reggie. “I came to ask you about the letters.”
“The letters?”
“The Holmes letters.”
She looked at Reggie’s card again. “Well, I guess I might tell you,” she said. “After all, you’ve taken a leasehold on them, haven’t you? Would you like some tea?”
“Thank you,” said Reggie as he followed her inside. “I won’t keep you long.”
She seated him in front of the French windows overlooking the courtyard and her two playing children.
“I did leave very explicit instructions on how to handle the letters, you know,” she said as she joined him there with the tea. “I was careful about it, especially because the lease was changing hands.”
“I hope that wasn’t a problem for you—,” began Reggie.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “You didn’t cause me to lose my job. I left just before, to be a full-time mum. There was a temp brought in to replace me.”
“Yes,” said Reggie. “Mr. Parsons. Other than him—was it just you answering the letters—the whole time you were there?”
“Yes.”
“Did you keep records?”
“Certainly. And Mr. Parsons was to do a complete historical inventory and archival of them when you took over the lease. It should all be in the tall filing cabinet.”
“I saw that,” said Reggie. “But I’m afraid a bit of it has been lost. Did you have any other sort of backup? Copies of the letters, anything like that?”
Her eyes widened slightly, and she put down her tea. “Why would I have such a thing?”
“I didn’t mean you personally, necessarily,” said Reggie, surprised at what seemed a defensive posture. “I just meant—is there any other record at all? A log of the addresses? Backup copies of the letters?”
“No,” she said, glancing out the window. “Dorset National did not ask me to keep a log.” She took a moment now to unlatch the French windows and tell one of the children in the courtyard to leave the cat alone.
In a courtroom, Reggie would have regarded this move as an evasion.
“Sorry,” she said with a slight smile, brushing the curtains back in place. “They tend to pull its tail a bit.”
It seemed a long shot, but Reggie had to try. “Mrs. Spencer,” he said, “is there any chance you made copies of the letters for yourself?”
Her cheeks turned red, and she looked as though she had got caught cutting to the front of the queue at the bakery.
“Is it truly important?” she said.
Now it was Reggie who hesitated. It wouldn’t do to tell her what had transpired in chambers. “Really just bookkeeping,” he said. “Not important at all.”
“Oh,” she said with a slight laugh, and then there was a brief pause as they both pretended the important thing was to adequately stir the sugar in their tea. Then Reggie looked up.
“But did you?” he said.
She sat back, looked at Reggie, and sighed. “One moment,” she said.
She got up, went to a bookcase, and took a laptop out of a satchel there. She started to set it up—and then she stopped.
“You won’t tell Dorset National about this, will you? I mean, not yet, at least. I’ll tell them myself, if the time comes. But before I left the company, I scanned all my favorites, from the very beginning of the letters, into a file. I was thinking that someday I might compile them all—into a book, or some such thing.”
“A book about crazy people who write letters to a character of fiction.”
“No, not at all. A book about people who for one reason or another are a bit naïve in some particular area. We all have our blind spots, don’t we?”
“No doubt,” said Reggie.
“What information is it you need?”
“What’s missing is a file from twenty years ago,” said Reggie. “Although I’m sure that was before your time.”
“Just slightly.” She laughed. “I started when I was nineteen. But I scanned some that were already in the files from before I arrived. So you might be lucky. Here—does this have what you need?”
She put the laptop in front of Reggie, and he began scrolling rapidly through the file.
“These are just the letters themselves, of course,” she said. “People often sent various kinds of collateral material with them—evidence of things that they thought Sherlock Holmes would want to consider—but I didn’t attempt to scan any of that.”
“This should give me what I need,” said Reggie. “For the bookkeeping, I mean.”
He scrolled down two more clicks—and there it was. The twenty-year-old letter from the eight-year-old girl in Los Angeles: Mara Ramirez on Mateo Street. He knew it immediately from the careful crayon script and the plea for Sherlock Holmes to find her father.
Reggie jotted down the letter writer’s name and address. “You’ve been a great help,” he said, standing to leave. “Thank you.”
She gave him a quizzical look as she escorted him to the door.
“You’re quite welcome,” she said. “But was that all that you needed—just the one address?”
“Well . . . yes,” said Reggie, wishing he had covered his intent better—but he couldn’t see how it would matter to her. “It’s the one missing, and if one’s missing, they’re all missing, I like to say.”
“You don’t look like someone who would say that,” she said, and laughed. “But I’ll take your word for it that you do, given you came all this way for just the one letter.”
Reggie paused now. He had what he needed, but he couldn’t help asking.
“In all the time you were handling the letters—did you ever feel tempted to answer one of them yourself, rather than just send the official form?”
She looked at Reggie suspiciously now, and she took a moment before answering.
“If I would have done—you can be sure that Dorset National would have taken a very dim view to learn of it. There’s a firm rule about always just sending the standard form letter. I was very specific about that in the instructions I left.”
“Yes,” said Reggie.
“I used to refer to it as the ‘prime directive’ myself,” she said with a smile that seemed to reference a joke that Reggie did not get. “Dorset National lawyers had concerns about potential liabilities, as I guess you might imagine.”
“Understandably,” said Reggie.
“Which is why, of course, they also included that clause in your lease that terminates the leasehold, and brings all the rent for the entire term immediately due and payable, if that rule should ever be violated.”
“I believe they call it a liquidated damages clause, in which—”
“I’m familiar with the term. Are you telling me that there’s such a clause in the lease pertaining to these letters?”
“Why, yes,” she said, and now she looked at Reggie with her pale brow furrowed. “I hope there’s no reason to say this,” said the woman, “and I would certainly not be the one to snitch to Dorset National—but I trust you are truly just . . . tidying up—and not attempting to contact one of these people directly. That would be—”
“Bloody foolish,” said Reggie.
He thanked the woman again.
And then he drove to Heathrow, with the address for the Los Angeles letter writer in his pocket.