Associates of Sherlock Holmes

PURE SWANK James Lovegrove

Some day the true story may be told.

How I laughed when I read those words in the latest edition of The Strand this morning, and it was a laugh that was scornful and knowing in equal measure. The esteemed Dr Watson, ever the diligent chronicler of the adventures of Mr Sherlock Holmes, has once again set down in print the full facts of a case solved by his remarkable colleague. Yet, in his slavish conviction that nothing Holmes does or says is incorrect, that his long-time friend is infallible, Watson cannot have dreamed that, far from telling the “true story”, he has told only half of it.

Hence I, Clarence Barker, have taken up my pen in order to convey my own account of the same events, one that is accurate in every part. I do not intend to copy Watson’s example and submit this manuscript for publication in a journal with a national readership. That would be a grave mistake. These words are for my eyes only. As I enter my fifty-sixth year, with my faculties dimming daily, this is perhaps a confession, perhaps also a settling of scores, but perhaps most of all an attempt to enshrine a reminiscence before it slips entirely from my memory. By this means I may, as it were, pin the episode in place like a mounted butterfly, so that I can later and at my leisure admire its beauty.

The just-published tale to which I am alluding is one that Dr Watson has entitled “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. It recounts a crime that took place nearly three decades ago, back in 1899, and which caused a scandal and gave rise to many a prurient, melodramatic headline but has since faded into obscurity – at least until now, when Watson has decided to exhume it from his notebooks and dish it up for public consumption. I have already received some telephone calls today from friends and acquaintances wondering whether I am the Barker referred to in the story. Anyone who knows of my past as a consulting detective may be able to infer that I am indeed he whom Holmes is seen disparaging as his “hated rival upon the Surrey shore” but none the less collaborates with quite readily in order to resolve the mystery. The deduction is, for want of a better word, elementary.

I do not feel that I emerge too badly from my portrayal in “The Retired Colourman”. I am described as “tall, dark, heavily-moustachioed, military-looking”, none of which I can gainsay. Thirty years ago I did favour luxuriant facial hair, in the fashion of the day, and prior to that I did see service in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the late 1880s which bestowed upon me the straight back and square shoulders of an infantryman. “Stern-looking” and “impassive” are other epithets Watson applies to me, neither of them uncomplimentary, and he notes my grey-tinted sunglasses, an item of apparel I still wear, not through vanity or to correct any defect in my visual acuity but to ameliorate a sensitivity to bright light which has afflicted me most of my adult life.

There is more to me, however. What Watson was oblivious to, although it is hinted at very heavily by his friend in the story, is that I was formerly a member of that band of young ragamuffins whom Holmes used to employ as spies and errand runners in London. “His methods are irregular, no doubt,” Holmes says to Inspector MacKinnon at the dénouement of the case. “The irregulars are useful sometimes, you know.” He could hardly have been more explicit, could he? And, for that matter, how else could he have commanded my loyalty and complicity so easily – “… as to Barker, he has done nothing save what I told him” – had we not already had an established relationship as employer and employee?

I remember well the sixpences and half-crowns with which he would reward us Irregulars for services rendered. They made all the difference to a poor, homeless, famished orphan such as myself. Sometimes they were the only thing that stood between me and the workhouse. I remember how I and Wiggins, the leader of our merry gang, would sprint from Baker Street to the nearest bakery with our gainfully-gotten bounty and stuff our bellies with Chelsea buns until we felt sick. Moments of bliss in an otherwise miserable existence.

As an Irregular I grew to love and admire Mr Holmes. He was abrupt with us, stern, sometimes even harsh, but you never once doubted that he was on the side of the angels and therefore, by extension, we were too. I came to regard him as the father I never knew.

It was he who, when I reached my majority, advised me to join the army. “They are looking for young men such as you, Barker,” he said. “Stalwart, well-built, with a natural intelligence and aptitude, capable of following an order. A spell taking Her Majesty’s shilling could be the making of you.”

In a way it was. I enjoyed the physicality and uncomplicatedness of military life, and I could cope with the deprivations easily. I had grown up accustomed to hardship and become inured to it. Camp beds and mess rations were luxury compared with the bare floorboards and meagre snatched meals of my youth. Further, I was given the opportunity to learn to read and write, which I seized with both hands. I gained an erudition and a vocabulary that belie my humble, deprived origins. No, I did well by the army, and I think the army did well by me.

I was stationed in India for a time – the Nicobar Islands. The heat was lethal, the natives only a little less so. There was the penal colony at Port Blair to keep an eye on. There were mosquitoes that ate you alive and stomach ailments that hollowed you from the inside out. Worst of all there were the Sentinelese, savage Andaman Islanders who arrived at regular intervals in canoe-borne raiding parties to give us merry hell.

What I recall most, though, is the hour upon hour of guard duty, standing watch in the relentless, glaring tropical sun. It is to this that I ascribe the problems with my eyes. Those ferociously bright rays, reflecting off the ocean, seared and scarred my retinas. Only sunglasses brought relief.

I discharged myself from the Lancashires in 1892, whereupon I set about pursuing my true ambition, the vocation that I had had a hankering to follow ever since my stint as an Irregular under Holmes. I wished to be a consulting detective, like him. I wished to emulate his exploits and gain some of the wealth and celebrity he had accrued.

It came as a surprise when I returned to England to discover that Sherlock Holmes was dead. News of his demise had not reached us in our far-flung outpost of the Raj. He had perished the previous year in a life-and-death tussle with the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty in Switzerland.

I was shocked. I had harboured the hope that Holmes would at least mentor me in the early stages of my career, or even engage me as an apprentice.

Yet I saw it also as a sign. Holmes was gone. There was a vacuum left by his absence. Who better than I to fill it?

Using what scant savings I had accumulated from my army pay, I set up a practice south of the river in one of the cheaper corners of Brixton. The first few months were dismal. I had barely a trickle of clients, and none of them were what one might call illustrious, and certainly none of them had deep pockets.

I persevered, however, and built up a reputation, and gradually more work came my way. I took it upon myself to join the Freemasons, and it was a productive move. Through the Brotherhood I broadened my social circle. Fellow members of my Lodge, the Camberwell, came to consult me on matters that bedevilled them, and I was recommended by them to members of other Lodges, and thus my renown spread through the tendrils of that not so secret society.

It was thanks to a Mark Master Mason of the Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch, no less, that I was brought in to investigate the notorious Park Lane Mystery. This was, of course, the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, who was found dead in his home on the aforementioned thoroughfare, shot in his second-floor sitting room. The door to the room was fastened on the inside. No gun was discovered anywhere on the premises. It was all perfectly baffling.

Adair had belonged to the Grand Temple, like the gentleman who engaged me. I took it as a personal mission to unmask his killer, in a spirit of Masonic solidarity. And it was in the execution of this quest that I first came to the notice of Dr Watson and cropped up in one of his tales. The irony is that he did not realise who I was.

The story in question is “The Empty House”, and any alert follower of Watson’s writings will recall his mention of “a tall, thin man with coloured glasses, whom I strongly suspected of being a plain-clothes detective”. Watson overheard me, amid the crowd that had gathered outside Adair’s house, delivering my theory about the murder to those around me. He does not vouchsafe what that theory was, and I cannot myself recall it exactly, but I believe it involved a rigged gasogene, primed to fire a bullet into the head of the first person who used it to add soda to their whisky.

The real answer – an air-gun – eluded me at the time. I had not yet been able to view the crime scene and was merely giving vent to informed speculation. I would doubtless have come to the correct conclusion had I been given the liberty to inspect the sitting room and its environs for myself, but a wiser, better man than I got there first and the mystery was cleared up before I could even begin work on it.

Why did Dr Watson not recognise me as an erstwhile Irregular? For the same reason he did not recognise me four years later when he encountered me outside Josiah Amberley’s house in Lewisham, as recounted in “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. As a boy I had been just one of a dozen scruffy, smudge-faced urchins who passed through the door of 221B Baker Street. He probably had not even known my name. I was merely an Irregular, anonymous, part of a horde. Also, I had grown considerably since, my features lengthening and hardening with the onset of adulthood, although still retaining their slightly swarthy cast. I believe my father, whoever he was, must have come from the Levant or North Africa. Perhaps he was a sailor passing through Tilbury, who used his shore leave profitably and departed never knowing he had conceived a son whose mother neither wanted offspring nor cared for the one who arrived nine months later.

At any rate, it was Sherlock Holmes who inferred that Adair’s murderer had shot him from afar with an air-gun loaded with expanding bullets. The culprit, moreover, was Professor Moriarty’s own henchman, that old shikari Colonel Sebastian Moran, whom Adair had accused, not without justification, of cheating at cards. I did not know any of this back then, and neither did anyone else, for Dr Watson did not see fit to publish “The Empty House” until 1903.

What mattered most, however, was that Holmes was alive! He had not died in that lonely spot on a Swiss mountainside. He had survived his struggle with Moriarty and was back to re-assume his crown as the country’s foremost consulting detective.

This turn of events – Holmes’s reappearance – left me in a quandary. I realised I would only ever be second best, now that he was back. Who would go to Clarence Barker when the great Sherlock Holmes was once again available? I wondered whether I should carry on regardless, tenaciously ploughing my furrow, or present myself to Holmes and suggest we set ourselves up in a partnership.

I opted for the latter. I plucked up my nerve and paid a call on him in his rooms at Baker Street. How small and cramped and cluttered the place seemed to me then, as I returned to it some half-dozen years after my last visit. To my boyish eyes it had been a sprawling wonderland of books, chemistry apparatus, knickknacks and oddments. Now it was like some queer museum of intellect, admirable but stuffy, bewildering in its chaotic disarray. Holmes’s landlady Mrs Hudson had not allowed his lodgings to be let during his three-year absence. She had kept the place untouched and undisturbed, almost as a shrine. Perhaps, through some preternatural womanly instinct, she had known he was not really dead. Or could it be that she was privy all along to the fact that he was alive, as was his brother? She must at least have wondered why Mycroft Holmes continued to pay the rent on the rooms.

Holmes greeted me warmly enough. He was alone, Watson elsewhere. He performed his customary trick of evaluating details of my recent past from my appearance and attire. He was spot-on in his assessments as always. He was even aware that I was now pursuing the same line of work as he.

“I do not mind another detective in my orbit,” said he as we smoked a pipe together. “London is a vast, populous city. There is surely room for two of us. There will be plenty of clients to go round.”

“Indubitably,” I said.

He must have registered a hesitation in my voice, for he then said, “But that is not the reason for your visit, pleasant though it is for the two of us to catch up and compare notes. You are wishing to propose an alliance, are you not? A merging of the streams. Holmes and Barker, Consulting Detectives, no?”

“Astute as ever, sir. It would seem sensible. Where one man can achieve great things, two together can achieve still greater.”

“Out of the question.” This was accompanied by an airily dismissive flap of the hand.

“You will not even consider the idea?”

“I already have a partner, Barker. You may have heard of him. Name of John Watson. Physician, ex-serviceman, courageous, trustworthy.”

“Yes, but with all due respect, Holmes, Dr Watson is not a peer. He is your scribe. Your amanuensis. He trots at your heel as faithfully and eagerly as any dog. You snap at him, you belittle him, you mock him openly, yet his obedience to you remains undimmed. By all means he should remain at hand, taking notes about your exploits to turn into reading fodder for the masses. But I could be more useful than him by far. I could be a sounding-board, an accomplice to share ideas with, a chess player of near equal skill with whom you may hone the excellence of your own game.”

“Excellence at chess,” said Holmes, “is one mark of a scheming mind.”

“It was merely a metaphor. You are rejecting my overtures outright, then, I take it. That is your final judgement on the matter.”

“Watson is all I need or could ask for in a cohort, Barker. I do not require any other. I nonetheless wish you luck in your career. May you flourish to the best of your abilities. May you prosper to the extent that you deserve.”

To anyone else’s ears it would have sounded like encouragement, but I could read between the lines. Holmes was exhorting me to accept my limited prospects. He was telling me the scraps from his table were mine to scoop up and devour. He was consigning me to the fate of forever living in his shadow. London would lavish its acclaim on one consulting detective – and it would not be me.

That settled it. I resolved there and then to stick at the job. I would take whatever cases I was offered. I would not be proud. I would be content even if any clients came to me and said they had chosen me because Mr Holmes had refused to help them; or Mr Holmes charged too much; or Mr Holmes was too busy to accommodate them; or they simply did not like the cut of Mr Holmes’s jib.

Over the next few years, dozens of clients turned up at my door saying just that. Many even told me that Holmes had evinced no interest in their problem but had referred them to me with the suggestion that I, being more modest in my outlook and accomplishments, might be of avail. I do not know if he used that precise verbal formulation, but it certainly seemed to be implied. I had called Dr Watson a dog, but I was the dog now, the abandoned stray to whom Holmes threw a bone every now and then.

My respect for him abated further, curdling little by little into resentment. He, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. To his door travelled nobles and royals and industrialists and the landed gentry, presenting him with their concerns and conundrums, some outré, some involving affairs of state, some with consequences that reached far beyond Britain’s borders, none tawdry or lacking in depth. To my door, by contrast, came the dregs, with their lost baubles and missing pets and gossipy concerns about neighbours and grievances about embezzling employees. It was more than galling. But it was a living.

His “hated rival upon the Surrey shore” indeed! Such airs and graces. Trying to imply that between us there was a mutual antipathy, when all too obviously the hatred went one way: I loathed him, he was indifferent to me. He was trying to convey that he somehow regarded me as an equal, a threat to his position, a pretender to the throne, when he and I both knew I was not and never could be.

My Masonic brethren kept me supplied with a few cases of sufficient merit and intrigue that I did not completely succumb to despair and become eaten away by envy. Every so often I performed what I considered a sterling piece of deduction. For example, the time I identified a sign-writer as a blackmailer through his use of stencils in his demands for payment, and the time I ascertained that a draper was the one who had stolen certain legal deeds thanks to the saw-tooth pattern of the pinking shears with which he cut through the ribbon of a portfolio. These were victories but, next to Holmes’s, pale ones. Still, they instilled in me enough gratitude to my fellow Masons that I took to wearing a tie-pin with the set square and compasses on it as a symbol of pride.

Dr Ray Ernest was a Mason too. We ran into one another by chance one evening in a West End pub. My tie-pin announced to him our shared affiliation. A handshake – forefinger applying pressure to a certain of the other’s knuckles – sealed our bond. We were both “on the square”. We both paid homage to Hiram Abiff, the Widow’s Son. We had that instant commonality and camaraderie.

We talked. We drank. Then Dr Ernest happened to mention casually that he had of late entered into a friendship with a certain Josiah Amberley, a retired manufacturer of artistic materials, junior partner of the Brickfall and Amberley brand. In his early sixties, Amberley had taken up with a spinster some twenty years younger than him, and married her. She was a comely woman, Dr Ernest said, and too good for Amberley, who was a tyrant and a miser, niggardly both with his affections and his money, despite having ample of the latter.

Amberley did not deserve the woman, that was the long and the short of it. Ernest did. Moreover, he desired her and she him.

He confided this intelligence to me when we were both fairly inebriated. I proposed, only half in jest, that he should do something about the situation. Woo Mrs Amberley, gain her trust, then elope with her. In addition, he should inflict some other punishment on Amberley. He should not be content with simply absconding with the man’s wife. He should hit him where it really hurt.

I do not know what motivated me to say all this. The devil may have got into me. The drink undoubtedly had.

Ernest, for his part, alighted on my suggestion with delight. “Capital idea!” he declared. “Being cuckolded is something Amberley might well recover from. The shame and ignominy would pass. But he would never get over the loss of that which is truly dear to him, his money.”

I left it to Ernest to concoct a method for depriving Amberley of the competence that was keeping him so comfortable. Ernest was a chess player. It was a hobby he and Amberley shared and the mortar that bound their friendship together. And what was it Holmes said about excellence at chess? I could tell Ernest had a scheming mind. He was, too, just unscrupulous enough to get whatever he set his cap at, however immoral the means or the goal.

I was keen to get my hands on some of that money myself, though, so I volunteered to aid Ernest in his undertaking by cunningly deflecting any suspicion of guilt away from him. This I would do by offering myself to Amberley to investigate the theft and, through misdirection and misguidance, steering him onto a wholly erroneous path. When I was done with him, Amberley would believe his wife and her beau to be innocent of the crime. I would use my wiles and whatever evidence presented itself to pin the blame on, say, some hapless vagrant or a passing Lascar. In return, I would expect a cut of the proceeds.

Ernest agreed. We haggled but settled on a two-to-one ratio. I would get one third of whatever he managed to steal. He and Mrs Amberley would keep the rest.

The compact was sealed. The wheels were set in motion. Ray Ernest and I had become, in one fell swoop, a mirror image of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson – a detective and his medical confederate whose aims were not noble and benevolent but dark and illicit.

A week passed.

Then I learned that both Ernest and Mrs Amberley had vanished, and with them a large proportion of Josiah Amberley’s pension fund.

At first I was outraged. I knew just what had happened. I had been double-crossed. I had been betrayed. The pair of them had taken off with Amberley’s money and decided to keep it all for themselves. I had been cut out of the deal. Masonic solidarity clearly meant nothing to the treacherous wretch Ernest.

Perhaps I ought to have anticipated that Ernest would stab me in the back. He was, after all, a man to whom the fundamental tenet of his Hippocratic Oath – “First do no harm” – did not extend to his private life. How could I have trusted someone so patently ruthless?

I went to Ernest’s home and his surgical practice as well, but he was to be found at neither. His housekeeper and his receptionist had seen neither hide nor hair of him for several days and professed themselves baffled and concerned.

Clearly, then, he had gone to ground elsewhere, along with his paramour, and would not be showing his face publicly any time soon.

So, out of desperation more than anything, I started staking out the Haven, Amberley’s house in Lewisham. The criminal sometimes returns to the scene of the crime, does he not? I reasoned that Ernest at least might pass by the property at some point, if only to gloat. Failing that, I might be able to insinuate myself into Amberley’s life and learn more about the circumstances of the theft and possibly glean some insight into the whereabouts of the guilty parties.

That was how I became apprised of Holmes’s involvement in the affair. I saw Dr Watson arrive at the Haven – an incongruously grand edifice, set in its own grounds yet surrounded by humble suburban terraces – and enter via the gateway. He spotted me but, of course, had no idea who I was or what my purpose was for being there. He did not even correlate me with the fellow he had seen on Park Lane less than half a decade ago. How can Sherlock Holmes ever have borne the company of such a plodding, unobservant clod? It is almost as though Holmes enjoyed having someone present that he could look down on from his lofty intellectual height; and the duller-witted that person was, the more superior he might feel to him. That would surely be why he had not wanted me as a partner. He could not view me with quite the same Olympian disdain as he did Watson.

Having watched Watson go into Amberley’s house and then an hour or so later leave, I was led to intuit that there was more going on here than met the eye. I went away and did some surreptitious asking around. I spoke to various police contacts at my Lodge. It soon became apparent that Amberley was not the tragic dupe he seemed. Something sinister was afoot.

While I was attempting to discern what that something sinister might be, who should I run into but Sherlock Holmes? I had returned to Lewisham and, having ascertained that Amberley was out, was contemplating the best means of breaking into his house in order to look for clues. As I crossed the unkempt, overgrown garden, I saw to my startlement that someone else had had the same idea. A man was crawling out of a ground-floor window.

Amusingly, I did not realise who it was at first. His face was hidden from me, and I took him to be a common-or-garden cracksman. I seized him by the collar while he was still halfway through the window and yelled, “Now, you rascal, what are you doing in there?”

There followed a scuffle, in which Holmes managed to turn the tables and get the better of me, depositing me prone on the lawn in an arm lock. Him and his deuced baritsu. Underhand tactics, if you ask me, using an Oriental martial art. What’s wrong with a man’s own strength and good old-fashioned fisticuffs?

Be that as it may, once he saw who I was, he released me and we dusted ourselves down and had a good laugh. Two detectives independently investigating the same case – or such was the situation as far as Holmes was aware – and we were battling each other like a pair of rogues. Absurd!

“How about this?” Holmes said. “Why not forge a temporary alliance? Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes. I do not necessarily ascribe to that principle, but on this one occasion it might pertain. Let us pool our resources and work together.”

I should have said no, but in all honesty how could I? Although I had come to nurse a deep-seated grudge towards this man, he remained my boyhood benefactor, my exemplar, even my hero. Here he was, offering to conduct an investigation side by side with me. It was, in many ways, a dream come true. If only for a while, we would be Holmes and Barker, Consulting Detectives after all. A fusion of talents. Greatness squared.

Saying yes to his proposal would also deflect any hint of suspicion away from me, for Holmes gave no sign of perceiving my true motives for being at the Haven. His assumption that I had come there in the course of my enquiries would only be reinforced if I consented to co-operate with him. It would have been out of character, and risk arousing his curiosity, were I to have refused.

Josiah Amberley, Holmes confided to me, was not a victim. He was the perpetrator of a heinous crime. It was as plain as the nose on your face.

“It is?” I said, thinking that for a man with a nose as prominent as Holmes’s, everything must be plain.

“It most certainly is.”

He reeled off the facts he had unearthed about the case. There was the Haven’s strong-room, where Amberley kept his cash and securities. There was the malodorous green paint Amberley had been using to carry out some redecoration. There were the peculiar pair of words written in purple indelible pencil just above the skirting: “We we”. Most of all there were the tickets for two upper circle seats at the Haymarket Theatre, one of which Amberley had presented to Watson as his alibi for the night Dr Ernest and Mrs Amberley went missing. It transpired that neither seat had been occupied during the performance, according to the theatre’s box-office chart.

I must have still looked perplexed, for Holmes said, “Tut, man! Think about it. Consider the data. Data, data, data. What does it all add up to? You style yourself a detective. You have studied my methods. Apply them.”

I did. “The strong-room, you say, has an iron door and window shutters. It is all but hermetically sealed. That is suggestive.”

“Suggestive at the very least.”

“As for the paint, its smell may have been intended to disguise another smell.”

“May have been, Barker? Was!”

“A smell such as that of gas.”

“A-ha! Very much so.”

“He killed them – Dr Ernest and Mrs Amberley. He gassed them to death in the strong-room.”

“But how?” said Holmes. “How did he manage it?”

“Do you not know?”

“I have an inkling, but tell me your thoughts.”

“Well, I imagine he set the jet for a lamp going, without lighting it. Then he inveigled the two of them into the room on some pretext and slammed the door on them. Unable to escape, they would have asphyxiated within minutes.”

“My interpretation precisely, Barker. And the ‘We we’?”

“I cannot but think that it was scribbled by one or other of the doomed couple as they lay gasping their last on the strong-room floor. It represents a desperate last-ditch attempt to leave a clue for anyone who might inspect the room looking for signs of foul play. The first ‘we’ is an abortive attempt to write a sentence. The second ‘we’ likewise met with failure.”

“Or,” said Holmes, “the second ‘we’ is part of a new word, which was left unfinished: ‘were’.”

“As in ‘We were here’. ‘We were innocent’.”

“Or ‘We were murdered’.”

“That seems plausible,” I said, nodding, even as a slight chill ran through me. “And if Amberley was not at the theatre as he maintains…”

“Then his alibi crumbles like a sandcastle before the incoming tide,” said Holmes. “He may be diabolical, but he is not as clever as he thinks he is. We have him. All that remains is for us to extract a confession out of him. Would you, pray, care to assist me with that?”

“Holmes,” I said, “I should like nothing better.”

It seemed I would not be getting the portion of Amberley’s worldly wealth that I had been hoping for. That was a source of great regret. I would, however, be on hand to see a double murderer brought to justice and play a significant role in his apprehension. The glory would be an almost adequate substitute for the money.

Events played out more or less as Watson has described in the closing passages of “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. Amberley attempted suicide by poison pellet when Holmes confronted him with an accusation of murder. Holmes’s extraordinarily swift reflexes prevented him from cheating the hangman’s noose, and together we wrestled that great brawling brute of a man to the floor, subdued and secured him. Inspector MacKinnon took him into custody. In all, it was a satisfactory conclusion to the proceedings.

Save in one respect.

There was still the question of where the money and securities had gone. If they were not in the strong-room, where were they? Dr Ernest and Mrs Amberley had, obviously, not made off with them. Their bodies were revealed to have been buried in the garden of the Haven, down a disused well whose opening was concealed by a dog-kennel. In the breast pocket of Ernest’s jacket was a purple indelible pencil. One can only presume Amberley tucked it there after finding it on the strong-room floor and failing to spy the truncated message Ernest had scrawled with it on the skirting.

Holmes submitted that Amberley must have hidden the cash and documents elsewhere in the house, in a safe place, as part of his scheme to frame the adulterous couple as thieves and throw the police off the scent. Accordingly, constables searched the Haven the following day and found a bureau with a secret drawer capacious enough to hold all those papers and sheaves of pound notes. The drawer, however, proved to be empty, and although they continued to comb the house from attic to cellar, they discovered no other suitable potential location.

Amberley himself refused to divulge where he had concealed the items. Throughout his trial, all the way to his appointment with the scaffold, he kept the secret. I think that, even to the bitter end, he felt there was a remote chance he would escape justice. He anticipated that he might somehow receive a custodial sentence instead of a capital one, on grounds of diminished responsibility perhaps, the balance of his mind disturbed by jealousy, that sort of thing. He might even – for all that it was an almost impossibly unlikely outcome – be exonerated.

He was not. Amberley went to his grave knowing that the bulk of his competence was not where he had stowed it but believing that it was still recoverable should he ever be set free. The cash might be forfeit but the bonds would be impossible to sell through any legitimate outlet and would fetch a tiny fraction of their worth on the black market. Even if they were disposed of somehow, it would not be beyond the bounds of feasibility to track them down and through them trace a path back to the original seller, the thief.

This, I am sure, was his logic. In his imagined future, where he was released at some stage to resume life as a free citizen, Josiah Amberley would hunt down the individual who had raided the bureau and its secret drawer and exact a terrible vengeance upon him.

That I am sitting here writing down these words is proof, if proof were needed, that Amberley did not get to fulfil his desire. He was hanged that autumn, after a trial in which the jury took no more than ten minutes to return a guilty verdict. He never knew who it was that had made off with his fortune.

The securities that I extricated from the bureau, I burned. I could not take the chance of them being found in my possession, and trying to sell them posed an even greater risk.

As for the few thousand pounds, I eked it out and made the most of it. I spent it carefully and judiciously, little by little, a bit here, a bit there, using it to prop up my finances during lean times when business was not good. I was not rash with it. I did not make any extravagant or ostentatious purchases, lest this alert someone – specifically Sherlock Holmes – that I was living beyond my means. It was Holmes whom I feared, above all else. He, more than anyone, might deduce where the loot had gone. He might work out that I had broken into the Haven the night after Amberley was arrested. He might realise that I had, as a change from solving crimes, elected to commit one.

Because Holmes never troubled himself to enquire further into the matter, I can only assume that the mystery of the missing lucre was too petty for him. Maybe he felt it was beneath his dignity to follow up on a case he had so triumphantly cracked. The money was a minor loose end. Why not leave it to the police to tie up? He, the mighty Sherlock Holmes, had bigger fish to fry. It is highly likely that the subject slipped his mind altogether, for soon after the Amberley case another problem engaged his attention, the vexing affair of Lady Eva Blackwell and “the worst man in London”, the blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton.

I do wonder, though, whether he actually knew all along that I had taken the money. By all accounts he lives in Sussex now, near Eastbourne. He is in his dotage, keeping bees. Does he ever think of me, down there in his retirement cottage by the sea? Does he smile fondly, perchance, as he recalls his former Irregular and one-time collaborator Clarence Barker?

Does he ruminate on how he let me get away with an audacious act of thievery?

If so, why did he not pursue me at the time? Why did he not apprehend me, as he did so many other wrongdoers?

I like to think that he felt I had earned the money. I deserved it. It was due to me not because I joined forces with him and went unpaid for my efforts, but rather because he was ashamed by the way he spurned me when I approached him with my offer of a partnership. He felt guilty that he did not take me on as a protégé and help me make the most of my talents. Deliberately allowing me to slip through the net was his penance.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

At least he never knew that I had urged Dr Ernest on in his romantic pursuit of Mrs Amberley and his bid to steal from her husband. He never learned about that.

In that one regard, I am unequivocally Sherlock Holmes’s better. I got away with something that virtually no one else has: pulling the wool over the great detective’s eyes. I outwitted him. He failed to see through me, as he did so many others, Josiah Amberley among them.

There is this sentence in one of the final paragraphs of “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”:

“Pure swank!” Holmes answered. “He felt so clever and sure of himself that he imagined no one could touch him.”

The subject is Amberley, of course, and it is as apt a description of that fiend as any.

But it could just as easily be me.