by George Mann
“You may yet hear from her,” he observed as if making a remark about the weather.
My answering smile was one of thanks and not joy. “That’s past praying for, I fear, Mr Holmes. Highly improbable.”
“But not impossible.” The sleuth stood fully, gathering up the hat and gloves he had laid upon my desk. “Thank you for the candour of your reply. Inspector Hopkins, I intend to make a detective of you.”
“I… just a moment, you…” I trailed off, reduced again to a blithering neophyte, as appears to be my natural state when in the presence of Sherlock Holmes.
“One cannot help but agree that you would make an execrable clergyman, and so we must see what we can do about making you a crack investigator.” He winked, and for the first time I was granted a glimpse of the impish humour Dr Watson had so often recorded in early adventures.
“Do you really mean it?” I whispered in awe. “You’ll share your methods, allow me to ask questions, that sort of thing?”
“I’ll teach you the whole art of detection myself, only supposing you don’t mistake wheelbarrow tracks for bicycle tracks again as you did last –”
The unfortunate Mr Holmes was interrupted, for I was wringing his hand so hard he must have been in some pain.
“All right, all right,” he gasped, laughing. “I ask a single favour in return, mind.”
“Name it, please,” I urged, half delirious with happiness. “Anything you like. I am yours to command. I was before, anyhow.”
“The name of this bucolic hospital in Sussex. Tut, tut! This is not about your former fiancée, whose health I hope improves by the hour – I’ve been struck by a sudden inspiration, one the doctor will enjoy tremendously, and keeping Watson in good spirits has direct bearing upon the quality of my living arrangements.”
Deeply puzzled, I wrote down the address. “It has nothing to do with me, then?”
“I did not say that either,” Mr Holmes chided, declining to meet my questioning eyes as he tapped his cigarette out against his boot sole and then flicked it into my rubbish bin. He took the paper with a flourish. “Good day, Hopkins. Until you have need of me.”
Dunce that I am, it took me all evening to work it out. What an ass I’ve been, and what a worthy hero I’ve chosen to guide me on my chosen path. As mired in penury as Mr Holmes and Dr Watson were in A Study in Scarlet, now they are internationally celebrated and sought after – and wealthy to boot.
Of course his asking after the asylum had nothing to do with my poor, precious Lilla.
It had everything to do with Arlie, however.
Telegram from SCOTLAND YARD, WHITEHALL to BEXLEY, Tuesday October 9th, 1894
INCREDIBLE NEWS STOP AM TO TUTOR WITH THE GREAT DETECTIVE SHERLOCK HOLMES STOP WHO KNOWS BUT THAT YOUR BOY MIGHT NOT FIND HIMSELF IN THE STRAND ONE DAY STOP WILL BE HOME FOR SUPPER TOMORROW WITH CHAMPAGNE
– STANLEY
PURE SWANK
James Lovegrove
The character of Barker, Sherlock Holmes’s “hated rival on the Surrey shore”, appears in only one Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. He is also a private detective and happens to be investigating the same mystery as Holmes. Their paths cross, and they set aside their differences and agree to work on the case together. Barker cuts such a striking figure in the tale, from his military bearing to his heavy moustaches to his grey-tinted sunglasses, that there is clearly a great deal more to him than meets the eye, and I felt it would be fun to fill in some of the background detail. What sort of man would have the temerity to set himself up as a consulting detective while Sherlock Holmes is around? Why does Holmes consider him a rival, and a hated one at that? Are there greater depths to their relationship than Watson knows (or is letting on)? When I was asked to contribute to this anthology, Barker was the first “associate” that sprang to mind, and my questions about him started swirling and coalescing in my mind. I envisaged an antagonism much like that between Mozart and Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, the bonafide genius and the pretender to his crown, and the story just unfurled from there.
—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 anoth
er 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.”
