I discharged myself from the Lancashires in 1892, whereupon I set about pursuing my true ambition, the vocation that I had had a hankering to follow ever since my stint as an Irregular under Holmes. I wished to be a consulting detective, like him. I wished to emulate his exploits and gain some of the wealth and celebrity he had accrued.
It came as a surprise when I returned to England to discover that Sherlock Holmes was dead. News of his demise had not reached us in our far-flung outpost of the Raj. He had perished the previous year in a life-and-death tussle with the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty in Switzerland.
I was shocked. I had harboured the hope that Holmes would at least mentor me in the early stages of my career, or even engage me as an apprentice.
Yet I saw it also as a sign. Holmes was gone. There was a vacuum left by his absence. Who better than I to fill it?
Using what scant savings I had accumulated from my army pay, I set up a practice south of the river in one of the cheaper corners of Brixton. The first few months were dismal. I had barely a trickle of clients, and none of them were what one might call illustrious, and certainly none of them had deep pockets.
I persevered, however, and built up a reputation, and gradually more work came my way. I took it upon myself to join the Freemasons, and it was a productive move. Through the Brotherhood I broadened my social circle. Fellow members of my Lodge, the Camberwell, came to consult me on matters that bedevilled them, and I was recommended by them to members of other Lodges, and thus my renown spread through the tendrils of that not so secret society.
It was thanks to a Mark Master Mason of the Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch, no less, that I was brought in to investigate the notorious Park Lane Mystery. This was, of course, the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, who was found dead in his home on the aforementioned thoroughfare, shot in his second-floor sitting room. The door to the room was fastened on the inside. No gun was discovered anywhere on the premises. It was all perfectly baffling.
Adair had belonged to the Grand Temple, like the gentleman who engaged me. I took it as a personal mission to unmask his killer, in a spirit of Masonic solidarity. And it was in the execution of this quest that I first came to the notice of Dr Watson and cropped up in one of his tales. The irony is that he did not realise who I was.
The story in question is “The Empty House”, and any alert follower of Watson’s writings will recall his mention of “a tall, thin man with coloured glasses, whom I strongly suspected of being a plain-clothes detective”. Watson overheard me, amid the crowd that had gathered outside Adair’s house, delivering my theory about the murder to those around me. He does not vouchsafe what that theory was, and I cannot myself recall it exactly, but I believe it involved a rigged gasogene, primed to fire a bullet into the head of the first person who used it to add soda to their whisky.
The real answer – an air-gun – eluded me at the time. I had not yet been able to view the crime scene and was merely giving vent to informed speculation. I would doubtless have come to the correct conclusion had I been given the liberty to inspect the sitting room and its environs for myself, but a wiser, better man than I got there first and the mystery was cleared up before I could even begin work on it.
Why did Dr Watson not recognise me as an erstwhile Irregular? For the same reason he did not recognise me four years later when he encountered me outside Josiah Amberley’s house in Lewisham, as recounted in “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. As a boy I had been just one of a dozen scruffy, smudge-faced urchins who passed through the door of 221B Baker Street. He probably had not even known my name. I was merely an Irregular, anonymous, part of a horde. Also, I had grown considerably since, my features lengthening and hardening with the onset of adulthood, although still retaining their slightly swarthy cast. I believe my father, whoever he was, must have come from the Levant or North Africa. Perhaps he was a sailor passing through Tilbury, who used his shore leave profitably and departed never knowing he had conceived a son whose mother neither wanted offspring nor cared for the one who arrived nine months later.
At any rate, it was Sherlock Holmes who inferred that Adair’s murderer had shot him from afar with an air-gun loaded with expanding bullets. The culprit, moreover, was Professor Moriarty’s own henchman, that old shikari Colonel Sebastian Moran, whom Adair had accused, not without justification, of cheating at cards. I did not know any of this back then, and neither did anyone else, for Dr Watson did not see fit to publish “The Empty House” until 1903.
What mattered most, however, was that Holmes was alive! He had not died in that lonely spot on a Swiss mountainside. He had survived his struggle with Moriarty and was back to re-assume his crown as the country’s foremost consulting detective.
This turn of events – Holmes’s reappearance – left me in a quandary. I realised I would only ever be second best, now that he was back. Who would go to Clarence Barker when the great Sherlock Holmes was once again available? I wondered whether I should carry on regardless, tenaciously ploughing my furrow, or present myself to Holmes and suggest we set ourselves up in a partnership.
I opted for the latter. I plucked up my nerve and paid a call on him in his rooms at Baker Street. How small and cramped and cluttered the place seemed to me then, as I returned to it some half-dozen years after my last visit. To my boyish eyes it had been a sprawling wonderland of books, chemistry apparatus, knickknacks and oddments. Now it was like some queer museum of intellect, admirable but stuffy, bewildering in its chaotic disarray. Holmes’s landlady Mrs Hudson had not allowed his lodgings to be let during his three-year absence. She had kept the place untouched and undisturbed, almost as a shrine. Perhaps, through some preternatural womanly instinct, she had known he was not really dead. Or could it be that she was privy all along to the fact that he was alive, as was his brother? She must at least have wondered why Mycroft Holmes continued to pay the rent on the rooms.
Holmes greeted me warmly enough. He was alone, Watson elsewhere. He performed his customary trick of evaluating details of my recent past from my appearance and attire. He was spot-on in his assessments as always. He was even aware that I was now pursuing the same line of work as he.
“I do not mind another detective in my orbit,” said he as we smoked a pipe together. “London is a vast, populous city. There is surely room for two of us. There will be plenty of clients to go round.”
“Indubitably,” I said.
He must have registered a hesitation in my voice, for he then said, “But that is not the reason for your visit, pleasant though it is for the two of us to catch up and compare notes. You are wishing to propose an alliance, are you not? A merging of the streams. Holmes and Barker, Consulting Detectives, no?”
“Astute as ever, sir. It would seem sensible. Where one man can achieve great things, two together can achieve still greater.”
“Out of the question.” This was accompanied by an airily dismissive flap of the hand.
“You will not even consider the idea?”
“I already have a partner, Barker. You may have heard of him. Name of John Watson. Physician, ex-serviceman, courageous, trustworthy.”
“Yes, but with all due respect, Holmes, Dr Watson is not a peer. He is your scribe. Your amanuensis. He trots at your heel as faithfully and eagerly as any dog. You snap at him, you belittle him, you mock him openly, yet his obedience to you remains undimmed. By all means he should remain at hand, taking notes about your exploits to turn into reading fodder for the masses. But I could be more useful than him by far. I could be a sounding-board, an accomplice to share ideas with, a chess player of near equal skill with whom you may hone the excellence of your own game.”