In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, “The Red-Headed League,” the criminals want Jabez Wilson out of his pawnbroker’s shop because they want to use that shop in a criminal enterprise. Specifically, they want to use it to rob a branch of the City and Suburban Bank. We do not find this out until Sherlock Holmes reveals it to us and his colleagues at the end of the story.
In the story, Holmes and Watson go to Saxe-Coburg Square to get a look at Wilson’s establishment. The square is a quiet little part of town. However, when they turn the corner, they see something very different. As Watson relates,
The road in which we found ourselves as we turned round the corner from the retired Saxe-Coburg Square… was one of the main arteries which conveyed the traffic of the City to the north and west.
On this road, there were a number of businesses. One of them was the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank. With this information, Holmes knows everything he needs to know and he proceeds to plan his trap.
The bank has just borrowed a large amount of gold from the Bank of France. The thieves are going to try to steal the gold, so Holmes invites Watson, the police, and a bank official to wait with him in the bank’s vault for the thieves to strike. They have dug a tunnel from Wilson’s basement to the basement of the bank, where the vault is. They wanted Wilson out of the pawnbroker’s shop so they could have the privacy they needed to dig their tunnel between the two cellars.
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