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