Of course his asking after the asylum had nothing to do with my poor, precious Lilla.
It had everything to do with Arlie, however.
INCREDIBLE NEWS STOP AM TO TUTOR WITH THE GREAT DETECTIVE SHERLOCK HOLMES STOP WHO KNOWS BUT THAT YOUR BOY MIGHT NOT FIND HIMSELF IN THE STRAND ONE DAY STOP WILL BE HOME FOR SUPPER TOMORROW WITH CHAMPAGNE
PURE SWANK
James Lovegrove
The character of Barker, Sherlock Holmes’s “hated rival on the Surrey shore”, appears in only one Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. He is also a private detective and happens to be investigating the same mystery as Holmes. Their paths cross, and they set aside their differences and agree to work on the case together. Barker cuts such a striking figure in the tale, from his military bearing to his heavy moustaches to his grey-tinted sunglasses, that there is clearly a great deal more to him than meets the eye, and I felt it would be fun to fill in some of the background detail. What sort of man would have the temerity to set himself up as a consulting detective while Sherlock Holmes is around? Why does Holmes consider him a rival, and a hated one at that? Are there greater depths to their relationship than Watson knows (or is letting on)? When I was asked to contribute to this anthology, Barker was the first “associate” that sprang to mind, and my questions about him started swirling and coalescing in my mind. I envisaged an antagonism much like that between Mozart and Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, the bonafide genius and the pretender to his crown, and the story just unfurled from there.
Some day the true story may be told.
How I laughed when I read those words in the latest edition of The Strand this morning, and it was a laugh that was scornful and knowing in equal measure. The esteemed Dr Watson, ever the diligent chronicler of the adventures of Mr Sherlock Holmes, has once again set down in print the full facts of a case solved by his remarkable colleague. Yet, in his slavish conviction that nothing Holmes does or says is incorrect, that his long-time friend is infallible, Watson cannot have dreamed that, far from telling the “true story”, he has told only half of it.
Hence I, Clarence Barker, have taken up my pen in order to convey my own account of the same events, one that is accurate in every part. I do not intend to copy Watson’s example and submit this manuscript for publication in a journal with a national readership. That would be a grave mistake. These words are for my eyes only. As I enter my fifty-sixth year, with my faculties dimming daily, this is perhaps a confession, perhaps also a settling of scores, but perhaps most of all an attempt to enshrine a reminiscence before it slips entirely from my memory. By this means I may, as it were, pin the episode in place like a mounted butterfly, so that I can later and at my leisure admire its beauty.
The just-published tale to which I am alluding is one that Dr Watson has entitled “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. It recounts a crime that took place nearly three decades ago, back in 1899, and which caused a scandal and gave rise to many a prurient, melodramatic headline but has since faded into obscurity – at least until now, when Watson has decided to exhume it from his notebooks and dish it up for public consumption. I have already received some telephone calls today from friends and acquaintances wondering whether I am the Barker referred to in the story. Anyone who knows of my past as a consulting detective may be able to infer that I am indeed he whom Holmes is seen disparaging as his “hated rival upon the Surrey shore” but none the less collaborates with quite readily in order to resolve the mystery. The deduction is, for want of a better word, elementary.
I do not feel that I emerge too badly from my portrayal in “The Retired Colourman”. I am described as “tall, dark, heavily-moustachioed, military-looking”, none of which I can gainsay. Thirty years ago I did favour luxuriant facial hair, in the fashion of the day, and prior to that I did see service in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the late 1880s which bestowed upon me the straight back and square shoulders of an infantryman. “Stern-looking” and “impassive” are other epithets Watson applies to me, neither of them uncomplimentary, and he notes my grey-tinted sunglasses, an item of apparel I still wear, not through vanity or to correct any defect in my visual acuity but to ameliorate a sensitivity to bright light which has afflicted me most of my adult life.
There is more to me, however. What Watson was oblivious to, although it is hinted at very heavily by his friend in the story, is that I was formerly a member of that band of young ragamuffins whom Holmes used to employ as spies and errand runners in London. “His methods are irregular, no doubt,” Holmes says to Inspector MacKinnon at the dénouement of the case. “The irregulars are useful sometimes, you know.” He could hardly have been more explicit, could he? And, for that matter, how else could he have commanded my loyalty and complicity so easily – “… as to Barker, he has done nothing save what I told him” – had we not already had an established relationship as employer and employee?
I remember well the sixpences and half-crowns with which he would reward us Irregulars for services rendered. They made all the difference to a poor, homeless, famished orphan such as myself. Sometimes they were the only thing that stood between me and the workhouse. I remember how I and Wiggins, the leader of our merry gang, would sprint from Baker Street to the nearest bakery with our gainfully-gotten bounty and stuff our bellies with Chelsea buns until we felt sick. Moments of bliss in an otherwise miserable existence.
As an Irregular I grew to love and admire Mr Holmes. He was abrupt with us, stern, sometimes even harsh, but you never once doubted that he was on the side of the angels and therefore, by extension, we were too. I came to regard him as the father I never knew.
It was he who, when I reached my majority, advised me to join the army. “They are looking for young men such as you, Barker,” he said. “Stalwart, well-built, with a natural intelligence and aptitude, capable of following an order. A spell taking Her Majesty’s shilling could be the making of you.”
In a way it was. I enjoyed the physicality and uncomplicatedness of military life, and I could cope with the deprivations easily. I had grown up accustomed to hardship and become inured to it. Camp beds and mess rations were luxury compared with the bare floorboards and meagre snatched meals of my youth. Further, I was given the opportunity to learn to read and write, which I seized with both hands. I gained an erudition and a vocabulary that belie my humble, deprived origins. No, I did well by the army, and I think the army did well by me.
I was stationed in India for a time – the Nicobar Islands. The heat was lethal, the natives only a little less so. There was the penal colony at Port Blair to keep an eye on. There were mosquitoes that ate you alive and stomach ailments that hollowed you from the inside out. Worst of all there were the Sentinelese, savage Andaman Islanders who arrived at regular intervals in canoe-borne raiding parties to give us merry hell.
What I recall most, though, is the hour upon hour of guard duty, standing watch in the relentless, glaring tropical sun. It is to this that I ascribe the problems with my eyes. Those ferociously bright rays, reflecting off the ocean, seared and scarred my retinas. Only sunglasses brought relief.