“A bloody awful cabbie”
On re-watching ASiP it struck me that Jeff Hope, the serial killing cabbie, is indeed remarkably bad at his profession. He seems to believe that he’s an excellent strategic thinker:
Oh really, can you now? The only person in the show that does seem to have a map inside his head is Sherlock Holmes:
But the route this experienced taxi driver uses to take a tourist from the airport to his destination in Soho is by far not the fastest one, as it seems. Sherlock, however, has it all in his head and manages to shortcut him. ”He's probably memorised the London A-Z”, according to John’s blog. Not that anyone would realistically arrive faster running up and down rooftops, but John refers to it differently on his blog: “We ran down street after street and we managed to catch up with the taxi”. Not a word about how bad the cabbie was on the blog, though.
Anyway, in the show this seems to be a rather incompetent cabbie, which is said once and repeated twice in ASiP, so I assume it’s important:
But in ACD canon (STUD) Jefferson Hope - originally a hunter from Utah - appears to manage just fine as a London cab driver, as far as I know: “The hardest job was to learn my way about, for I reckon that of all the mazes that ever were contrived, this city is the most confusing. I had a map beside me, though, and when once I had spotted the principal hotels and stations, I got on pretty well.” (X):
(Picture source: X).
In our days, though, cabbies have GPS in their cars. And John’s blog tells us nothing about Hope’s incompetence. So how come Jeff Hope is such an awful cabbie in the show? My guess would be that perhaps he actually isn’t; the traffic might have been heavy with long queues and they really did manage to shortcut him running down the streets and alleys. I rather suspect this is code for something else in Sherlock’s Mind Palace. “The route he took us to get here” might mean, for example, that this story is circular; we’re somehow gonna wind up where we started from, probably at the end of S5.
Next thing from here, Sherlock and John goes to have a late dinner at a restaurant on Baker Street and we all know what that means, so I assume they’re not very far from home ;)
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