by George Mann
“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 ide
a 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 sheav
es 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.
