A Study in Sherlock

“Decoy,” Rose said. “A ruse was developed whereby a certain Mr. Wilson was regularly decoyed away from his legitimate place of business for a predictable period of time, so that an ongoing illegal task of some sensitivity could be accomplished in his absence.”

“Very good,” I said. “And what does the story tell us?”

“Nothing,” Rose said. “Nothing at all. No one was decoying me away from my legitimate place of business. That was my legitimate place of business. I go wherever dead people go.”

“And?”

“And if they were trying to decoy me away, they wouldn’t leave clues beforehand, would they? They wouldn’t spell it out for me in advance. I mean, what would be the point of that?”

“There might be a point,” I said.

“What kind?”

I asked, “If this was just some foreigner stabbed to death on Baker Street, what would you do next?”

“Not very much, to be honest.”

“Exactly. Just one of those things. But now what are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to find out who’s yanking my chain. First step, I’m going back on scene to make sure we didn’t miss any other clues.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Latin.”

“For what?”

“They’re decoying you out. They’ve succeeded in what they set out to do.”

“Decoying me out from what? I don’t do anything important in the office.”

He insisted on going. We headed back to Baker Street. The tents were still there. The tape was still fluttering. We found no more clues. So we studied the context instead, physically, looking for the kind of serious crimes that could occur if law enforcement was distracted. We didn’t find anything. That part of Baker Street had the official Sherlock Holmes museum, and the waxworks, and a bunch of stores of no real consequence, and a few banks, but the banks were all bust anyway. Blowing one up would be doing it a considerable favor.

Then Rose wanted a book that explained the various Sherlock Holmes references in greater detail, so I took him to the British Library in Bloomsbury. He spent an hour with an annotated compendium. He got sidetracked by the geographic errors Conan Doyle had made. He started to think the story he had read could be approached obliquely, as if it were written in code.

Altogether we spent the rest of the week on it. The Wednesday, the Thursday, and the Friday. Easily thirty hours. We got nowhere. We made no progress. But nothing happened. None of Rose’s other cases unraveled, and London’s crime did not spike. There were no consequences. None at all.

So as the weeks passed both Rose and I forgot all about the matter. And Rose never thought about it again, as far as I know. I did, of course. Because three months later it became clear that it was I who had been decoyed. My interest had been piqued, and I had spent thirty hours doing fun Anglophile things. They knew that would happen, naturally. They had planned well. They knew I would be called out to the dead American, and they knew how to stage the kinds of things that would set me off like the Energizer Bunny. Three days. Thirty hours. Out of the building, unable to offer help with the rubber-stamping, not there to notice them paying for their kids’ college educations by rubber-stamping visas that should have been rejected instantly. Which is how four particular individuals made it to the States, and which is why three hundred people died in Denver, and which is why I—unable, in the cold light of day, to prove my naive innocence—sit alone in Leavenworth in Kansas, where by chance one of the few books the prison allows is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Previously a television director, union organizer, theater technician, and law student, Lee Child is the worldwide number one bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series. Born in England, Child now divides his time between New York and the south of France. He clearly remembers his interest in the matter at hand being sparked by reading in his grandmother’s Reader’s Digest an article about Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical school professor, often supposed to be the model for the character and therefore in Child’s opinion the “real” Sherlock Holmes.

“The Red-Headed League” appeared in 1892 and was collected as part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

THE STARTLING EVENTS IN THE ELECTRIFIED CITY

(A MANUSCRIPT SIGNED “JOHN WATSON,” IN THE COLLECTION OF THOMAS PERRY)

During the many years while I was privileged to know the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and, I fancy, serve as his closest confidant, he often permitted me to make a record of the events in which we played some part, and have it printed in the periodicals of the day. It would be false modesty to deny that the publication of these cases, beginning in 1887, added something to his already wide reputation.