“Excellence at chess,” said Holmes, “is one mark of a scheming mind.”
“It was merely a metaphor. You are rejecting my overtures outright, then, I take it. That is your final judgement on the matter.”
“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.