Associates of Sherlock Holmes - George Mann Page 0,10
my desk. “Upon my word, I didn’t imagine you’d react so strongly. The brandy flask I once observed in your top left drawer –”
“No, thank you.” I chuckled weakly as Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street offered me both my own chair and my own brandy. “I’m surprised at myself. Forgive me.”
“Pray don’t ask such a thing. It’s hardly the first time I’ve staggered a stout fellow. Recently, at that.” He glanced away, an unreadable look briefly warping his perfect suavity. “I did you a disservice. Let us abandon the topic in favour of –”
“Not a bit of it!” I exclaimed, recovering. “Now you explain how you knew. I shall catalogue every detail.”
Mr Holmes did not smile, but his wintry eyes warmed. “There were a number of small indications, so many that I must take a moment to sort them. Yes, first I noted that the button on your left ulster sleeve is cheaper than that on the right, and mended in a slipshod fashion by a man unversed in the art of tailoring. Clearly, that man is you, and while you are impeccably neat in appearance, you neither bothered to match the expense of your lost button, which was made of polished horn like its brethren, nor to match the thread colour, using instead whatever you had to hand. That you are a bachelor would have been obvious from your hat brim, but your financial straits speak more clearly through your buttonhole.”
“I’ll have to be more meticulous in future. Why need there have been a tragedy?”
Mr Holmes jutted his bold chin at my torso as he lit a cigarette. “Your watch chain is an old family heirloom, but the type of locket hanging from it with the scalloped edge was in fashion some five years ago, before I met my untimely demise.”
“Thankfully very untimely indeed.”
“Your servant. The locket is a memento, and five years is approximately the amount of time it takes to lose a well-sewn button and for one’s hat colour to pass out of style. No offence intended.”
I shrugged. “None taken. So I have financial problems, and you say they point to a tragedy. Supposing I merely had onerous debts?”
“You’d have pawned the locket or the watch chain or simply the watch to ease your path.”
“What if they were all too dear to me?”
“After having gifted your beloved late father’s Bible to a cousin? Please. You aren’t a man driven by foolish sentiment, and your high expenses haunt you monthly, which is why you know better than to squander your keepsakes at a jerryshop. Economy is the only solution. Your mother posts you dinner, for heaven’s sake, or at least so the writing on your many savoury-smelling packages indicates. No, don’t ask, it’s too obvious and I’ve glimpsed the addresses – you write a male version of her penmanship.”
Despite my distress, I smiled ruefully. “The tragically afflicted – you said not a family member? It might be my sister.”
“If your sister were impoverished or afflicted, she would live with you and reattach your buttons, or live with your mother and eat her mince pies,” Mr Holmes said so smoothly that his tone might nearly have been called kind.
“Quite so.” I cleared my throat. “Mr Holmes, what is this about?”
Sherlock Holmes’s head swivelled to regard me fully, a bird of prey ruminating over a hapless mammal.
“You joined H Division at the age of twenty-five in the immediate wake of the Ripper murders,” he said with clinical detachment. “Why? Men spat at the uniformed constables in the streets, women refused to look at them. I was acquainted with canines that wouldn’t so much as bark in a bobby’s direction. You are intelligent, active, and approachable, and even if you’d no desire to be a clergyman, the world was still your oyster, and you chose to join an institution that had been hung out to dry. Pray refrain from telling me it was all thanks to The Strand, though the doctor has every right to be flattered some good has come out of his melodramas. There is another, darker reason, and if I am to rely upon your sober judgement, as I wish to do in future, I request you tell me what it is.”
Despite my reluctance to reveal the source of my heartache, there is nothing quite so persuasive as Sherlock Holmes urging a man to prove himself trustworthy. I straightened my shoulders, tugged down my waistcoat, and set to.
“I was engaged to be married in eighteen eighty-eight to a