‘Your name, sir?’
The man looked at me. ‘Sigerson,’ he admitted finally. ‘Professor Sigerson.’
‘Professor?’
‘An American university. In San Francisco. A thoroughly modern institution.’ He managed to imbue this description with a level of approval which would have been missing had the words come from my mouth.
‘And your friend?’
‘My brother,’ he corrected.
Had someone told me those two men were picked at random from a thousand such, rounded up off the streets of London I would have believed him. The idea that they shared the same blood was an altogether stranger proposition. One man was fat and small eyed, the other tall and beak nosed, with eyes that belonged to an Ottoman potentate.
‘Professor Sigerson,’ I said, offering my hand. ‘Pray let me call on you to confirm your recovery…’
Needless to say, the address given me was as fake as the name. The house in which this man really resided was behind the new railway station. A shiny brass plate by the gate announced it as the residence of Professor Sigerson, thinker & Dr Sigerson, general physician.
The screws holding this unlikely announcement were new, but a hundred tiny scratches at the four corners spoke of other walls and hurried exits. At least, so Hunter told me when he returned, following them being the task I gave him while I found a blacksmith to repair the broken rim of our wheel.
So, it was entirely my fault the two Sigersons had vanished by the time I presented myself at their door. Stripped bare, their rooms echoed to the sound of my search, even the carpets having been spirited away. A very agitated landlady, who had appeared out of breath, shortly after I had Hunter break down the door, kept demanding of me what kind of fiends stole everything.
‘Efficient ones,’ I told her, although I fear she did not entirely understand my joke. The constable who’d accompanied the landlady began to make notes and, as I listened, her list of items grew longer and ever more valuable.
‘I will never get them back,’ she wailed.
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘you can have them this very afternoon with almost no effort…’
It never ceases to sadden me the things that amaze closed minds. The sun setting over the Hindu Kush, with wild dogs circling the last flames of a fire destined to die before dawn; waves deep enough to swallow St Paul’s in one watery gulp; the innocence of a Nepalese child goddess so beautiful grown Generals cry in her presence, such things are put on this earth to stun us. To be amazed by anything less seems an insult to intelligence.
As I suspected, my comment that her goods would be returned proved enough to silence the landlady. Although I then had to explain to the constable that my certainty the carpets could be found at the nearest pawnbroker was more to do with common sense, than any intimate, not to say inside, knowledge of the crime.
‘We must be off,’ I said.
The constable looked as if he might object but changed his mind at a glance from Hunter, who wore the badge of a Queen’s Messenger beneath his coat. There my day might have ended, with an interesting meeting and my giving Inspector Lestrade descriptions of the two rogues and an order that I be notified when they were found. And so it would have ended, if Hunter and I had not proved woefully incapable of paying the blacksmith for his work on the wheel.
‘Sir?’
I fumbled at the pig-skin bag in my hand and then stopped, angrily. I am not a man who fumbles. In it I felt a map of the empire painted onto silk, my cigars, which actually broke open to reveal sticks of hashish, which the dear Queen herself uses for pain, a little opium, a throwing knife, a set of prayer beads given me by Kais Bey.
Everything was where it should be, except my reward for work well done, the bag of gold I’d gone to Windsor to collect. Apparently, while I was first curing our accident victim, the fat little doctor had come to take a look at my carriage. This, it appeared, was not all he took.
‘Sir?’ said the blacksmith.
‘Here,’ I replied, impatience winning. With a flick of my wrist, I took the throwing knife and slashed open the bag’s handle, revealing a dozen half-sovereigns sewn into a sealed silk tube. I took three coins, more than his work was worth and gave them to the man. ‘That also buys your silence,’ I told him, nodding towards the ruined bag.
He left without another word.
It was then I turned to the rogue’s wallet and found my first real clue and proof of his name. The clue came in the form of a train timetable and the name from a scrap of newspaper. Sherlock Holmes, younger brother to Mycroft and pupil of Professor James Moriarty. Almost every detail in the report was wrong – the events described took place at St Jean, not Pau, in August ‘71, not March ‘72 – but the scribbler was right about one thing, there had been a scandal.
When I put my mind to things I can make them happen quickly. So it proved in engineering my next meeting with the elusive Mr Holmes. The man had money, my money, he had no need to visit the town underlined in his railway timetable, but he would visit it just the same. I’d felt his heart beneath his shirt and it had been racing. He lived for the challenge. No man is so poor he has to jump in front of four galloping horses.
I would have taken Hunter with me, for he is a coachman beyond the ordinary. But the moment Hunter finally realised the crash on the road through Kingston upon Thames had not been an accident, and one of his best greys had been struck down in the course of a simple confidence trick, he vowed to hunt and kill the men responsible. He did so with such barbarity that I cannot even bring myself to put his threats down upon the page.
Choosing Edwards instead, I took a two-seater Hansom drawn by a single horse and a huge cloak in which to disguise myself. I chose an open-top carriage, because I was interested to see how Mr Holmes would handle his fall with no roof on which to somersault.
The city to which we travelled was barely more than a Hampshire town with pretensions to history. It was, however, well chosen. Winchester High Street is long and sloping and overlooked by a grain merchants and a general store, both busy with yeoman farmers, plump wives and red-faced gentlemen, the kind of people one expects to see in such a place.
We wasted a morning hunting for the brass plate, newly put up on the pillar of a narrow house in St Peter’s Street, and the afternoon checking that both rogues were in the city and then Edwards spent his evening in the kind of tavern used by coachmen and servants. I was French, apparently, he was pleased with that touch, newly arrived from Paris and I spoke little English and greatly valued my privacy. Small wonder the brothers Holmes found us impossible to resist.
They took it in turns to watch my hotel for the rest of that night, only abandoning their watch when Edwards strode from his nearby lodgings to prepare my coach.
‘Vite, vite.’
As instructed, he conveyed me down the High Street slightly faster than was decent and, as we passed the Buttercross, with its collection of ragged urchins seated around the base, a man stepped absent-mindedly into the road in front of us and was sent flying.
A woman screamed and Edwards began to apply the brake. A farmer stepped into the road to make sure we did not try to escape and then stepped back quickly, when Edwards took his hand from the lever for a few seconds. This time round the horse was unhurt and my carriage still whole. Which meant that all of the crowd’s attention could be concentrated on the fallen man.
‘He needs a doctor,’ said a woman. ‘Such a terrible accident. He needs…’
‘Madame,’ I said, clambering down. ‘I am a doctor. And, as it happens, I am familiar with such accidents, having seen one almost identical only last week.’ This time, when she fainted it was with no elegant twist or display of ankle, she merely crumpled and hit her head upon the kerb hard enough to make her nose bleed.