Not Strictly Sherlock

The Ink of Revenge

A man wearing a long black coat, frayed bowler, and shoulder satchel, stood just outside the revealing glow of the gas lamps at the corner of Soho Square and Carlisle Street. He was watching women walk around the square: women of monetary substance and women who were scant, women wearing tawdry dresses or middle-class fashion, women who were well fed, and women who looked as if they only had a passing acquaintance with food.

There were many shapes, sizes, and ages, but amidst all this variety and difference, there was an overwhelming commonality, and that was their shared means of making money. The square was a school for sales, and the experienced had an advantage on the initiate, and the most attractive didn't necessarily win the king's coin. Ugly, plain or pretty, it was all sex.

Like the women he was watching, the streets were the world in which the man wearing the satchel lived, worked, and played. He tossed his cigarette as he finished watching the verbal exchanges between the women and their potential customers, the taunts, the enticements, and the skirt lifts. He momentarily thought about dropping a few pence for a quick encounter, but then decided that he was not really in the mood. He turned and walked away from the square, stepping around a girl getting a stand-up against the side of the building, and headed for a pub. He was annoyed and needed a few drinks to settle himself so that he could think less than clear.

The twin lanterns out front gave away The Sword and Sheath public house, although the man lying in the road and the two street girls outside the door also provided adequate notice. The man walked in and took up a familiar seat at the long end of the bar, taking off his bowler and satchel and dropping them onto the bar top.

"Evening Badger, what'll you 'ave?" said the matronly woman behind the bar.

The man, more commonly referred to as "Badger," lit another cigarette, and exhaling a long breath of smoke replied "porter."

The barmaid nodded and placed a tankard underneath an ale cask, and poured the dark brown liquid until it carried the top, then brought it over to Badger.  He took a long slow drink, then set the glass down, and glanced around the pub looking for any regular customers he knew, and to identify anyone he didn't.

The Sword and Sheath was a long, narrow room, created by dividing a section of the building in half. The sagging ceiling beams were over-taxed and the planks between them were bowed and stained by years of water leaks. The wooden ceiling and wall paneling had long ago given up their natural smell and were now imbued with the odors of smoke, sweat, and beer. The small round tables and mismatched wooden chairs belied years of abuse, and the gas lamp illumination kept the room dim, the shadows permanent, and the patrons comfortable in their anonymity.

Badger reached into his satchel and removed a notebook and pencil. He drew on his cigarette and started to write in the dog-eared, stained pad. "Badger" was more properly known as William Briggs, a penny-a-line reporter for The Globe newspaper. He took on the name "Badger" as a reflection of his tenacity at digging in the dirt of London's seedy streets. The identity of the one who christened him with this flashy moniker is unclear, and some say that Briggs anointed himself with the name.

One set of facts that were indisputable was why Briggs fell from grace as a paid column reporter for the Times, then The Standard, to a man who lived by writing obituaries and penny-a-line stories.

He raised his tankard and took another long pull of porter as he finished scratching out a few sentences before he put his pencil down. Angie, the barkeep, left him alone, spending her time with a few regulars at the other end of the bar. Briggs had been a regular for so long that she could easily read his dispositions, and tonight he was in his angry, self-loathing, mood. She knew to leave him alone except to keep bringing him drinks, so she glanced in his direction from time to time and drew it full when required.

Briggs reached into his satchel, pulled out a small booklet, and set it down on the bar in front of him. He maintained his smoking, one after another, and looked down at the booklet in front of him. The cover had an illustration of Sherlock Holmes and an unknown lady sitting across from one another in a parlor and above that was the title "A Case of Identity."

He took a drink from a fresh glass of beer, picked up the short story, and looked at the cover intently.

"Written by Dr. John Watson," he said to himself with a sneer.

"An amateur, a bloody amateur," he thought to himself. A "coattail rider" was what he was, collecting his celebrity from Sherlock Holmes.

A man Briggs truly hated.

Here he was, a proven and gutsy reporter, a man who has written for two of the largest newspapers in London, who was regularly featured as the front-page column! There was a time when he would only enter a pub like the Sword and Sheath to work on a story he was investigating; certainly never to actually drink and socialize! But this pub was now a reflection of who he was: dirty, falling apart and full of sub-standard alcohol.

He used to walk into pubs and restaurants and drink for free, obtain tables without reserve, and request meetings with the leading politicians and persons of stature in London. But those were the summers of yesterday, and now his life was a cold, gray winter, only to be followed by another winter. Never a spring. He glanced at the whore plying her trade with the teamster in the corner. He emptied his tankard and looked down at the pamphlet: then he raised his hand for another.

Briggs staggered out of the pub, across the square, then Charing Cross, towards St. Giles. He had fallen far but was still floating above the bottom, because even though he lived in "Giles," he didn't reside in a rookery. His rented room, really just a small space, was upstairs in an attic of a tailor's shop. Calling the proprietor a tailor was a stretch because although he could pull a needle and thread, he really just patched up and sold second-hand clothes. But it was quiet, as the tailor had no machinery, very few customers, and lived all alone above his shop, right below the space leased by Briggs. The quiet room enabled Briggs to write, while simultaneously the quiet was a detriment to his writing.

He was almost home when three young toughs stood in front of him, blocking his way, and demanded his purse. One of them flashed a small knife, and another held a club, or more commonly, a "cosh."

"Give us your money G'randad," said one of the boys.

"So my fine gentlemen, you want my purse do ya?" sneered the Badger.

"Well, here it is," and with that, Briggs reached into his satchel and pulled out a large hunting knife that he brandished at the toughs. They took a step or two backward, then looking back to forth at one another, they turned and ran. When Briggs had pulled the knife, the booklet of the "A Case of Identity" came out of the bag and fell onto the muddy cobbles.

The Badger replaced the knife but failed to notice the pamphlet on the ground. He spat at the fleeing toughs and continued his meandering walk home.

His brain was pickled, but anger kept the wheels and cogs turning. He had to get back... back on top. It angered him to no end that John Watson was a celebrated author, by the masses at least, but if the great unwashed were willing to put out two pence, you can become a wealthy man indeed.

He placed his key into the lock of the tailor's shop and stepped inside, made for the stairs, and then up the three flights. There was no need to light a candle as he knew the way, and his room was empty except for his bed and a small desk and chair. He slung his satchel off then flopped down on the tick mattress. He lay awake for a time in the windowless dark, yet sleep and bad dreams eventually won out.