Moriarty

He shook out the match and discarded it. ‘I had not been a police inspector for very long at the time,’ he explained. ‘I had only recently been promoted. Perhaps if Dr Watson had known this, he might have been a little more charitable. At any event, I happened to be in Norwood one evening in September — this was ’88 — investigating a trifling matter, a housemaid who had been accused by her mistress of theft. I had just finished interviewing her when a messenger arrived with the news of a murder that had taken place in a house not far away and, being the most senior officer present, it was my duty to attend.

‘That was how I came upon Pondicherry Lodge, a great white Aladdin’s Cave of a place, standing in its own grounds with a garden that could have been a graveyard, it was filled with so many holes. The owner was one Bartholomew Sholto and I will never forget my first sight of him, sitting in a wooden armchair in a study that was more like a laboratory, up on the third floor, quite dead, with a hideous grin stamped across his face.

‘Sherlock Holmes was there. He had broken down the door to get in which by rights he shouldn’t have because this was a police matter. It was the first time I had seen the great man at close quarters and in action too, for he had already begun his investigation. What can I tell you, Chase? He was taller than I remembered, with the leanness of an aesthete as if he had deliberately starved himself. This gave prominence to his chin, his cheekbones and above all to his eyes which never seemed to settle on anything without stripping them of all the information they might provide. There was an energy about him, a restlessness that I had never encountered in any other man. His movements were brief and economical. He gave you the sense that there was no time to be wasted. He was wearing a dark frock coat and no hat. When I first saw him, he was holding a tape measure which he folded away.’

‘And Dr Watson …?’

‘I took less notice of him. He stood in the shadows at the edge of the room, a shorter man, round-faced, genial.

‘I do not need to describe the details of the case. You can read them if they are of interest to you. The dead man was, as I said, Bartholomew Sholto. It transpired that he and his twin brother, Thaddeus, had been bequeathed a great treasure by their father. They’d had trouble finding it, mind, hence all the holes in the garden. But the facts of the case seemed quite straightforward to me. The two of them had argued as men often will when confronted by unexpected wealth. Thaddeus had killed his brother using a blowpipe and a poison dart — I should have explained that the house was full of Indian curiosities. I arrested him and also took in his servant, a man called McMurdo, as his accomplice.’

‘And were you right?’

‘No, sir, as it turned out, I was wrong. I had made a complete fool of myself and although I was not the first to do so — I had colleagues who had been in exactly the same position as I — at the time it was small consolation.’

He fell silent, staring out of the window at the French countryside although, from the look in his eyes, I was sure he saw none of it.

‘And the third time?’ I asked.

‘That was a few months later … the curious business of the Abernettys. I will not discuss it now, if you don’t mind. It still annoys me. It began with what seemed to be, on the face of it, a burglary — although a very unusual one. All I will say is that once again I missed everything of importance and stood idly by while Mr Holmes made the arrest. It will not happen again, Mr Chase. I promise you that.’

Jones barely spoke to me for the next few hours. We made our connection in Paris quite easily and it was the second time I had crossed the city without so much as glimpsing the Eiffel Tower. But what did it matter? London lay ahead of us and already I was uneasy. I felt that a shadow had fallen over us but to whom it belonged — be it Holmes, Devereux or even Moriarty — I dared not say.

And so to London.

It has been said that good Americans, when they die, go to Paris. Perhaps the less saintly variety would end up like me, dragging my steamer trunk from Charing Cross Station with the drivers shouting, the beggar boys circling, and the crowds streaming past. For this was where Inspector Jones and I parted company; he to return to his home in Camberwell, I to find a hotel that would suit a general operative travelling on a Pinkerton’s budget. I had been surprised to learn that he had a wife and child. He had struck me as a single, even a solitary, man. But he had mentioned them to me in Paris and as we disembarked from our steamship at Dover he was clutching an India rubber ball and a puppet of the French policeman Flagéolet, which he had picked up near the Gare du Nord. The revelation troubled me but I said nothing until we reached the very end of our trip.