Chapter Text
Faithful followers of these narratives sometimes ask me how many of Holmes’s cases I have written up but neglected to publish. If my fantasies of literary longevity come true, and any such followers remain more than one hundred years hence, when I have stipulated this tale may be released, I hope they will forgive me for keeping them in the dark so long.
I have sometimes written up Holmes’s cases leaving out elements that could not be made public. However, I feel that doing so with this narrative would make for a tale that’s only a pale shade of the remarkable truth.
I thank Mycroft Holmes and his family, and my beloved Sherlock, for agreeing that this tale might see the light of day in the far future.
—JHW
“Watson, you’ve followed my career for many years now. I expect you’ve picked up knowledge about crime along the way.”
I was pleasantly surprised. Sherlock Holmes was my loyal friend, that I knew, but he was very sparing in his praise for my intellect or knowledge. Yet here he was, assuming that I’d learned a great deal about crime from him.
“I suppose I have, old boy.”
“Yes, yes. Exactly.” Holmes sounded a tad impatient. “Doctor, do you know which crimes are the most difficult to solve?”
“Surely they would be the ones that are the most complex, with many threads running through them.”
“No, Watson. Those are the easiest to solve, outside of the bog standard ones we see written about in the Times every day. Only get hold of all the threads, and they invariably lead to a conclusion.”
“I suppose you’re right. Well, then, my dear Holmes, which crimes are the most difficult to solve?”
“Those committed by what I might call the gentleman criminal. A criminal whose motive for committing a crime is not passion, or greed, or power, but simply the satisfaction of doing a thing well.”
“Holmes! You make it sound as if these people commit crimes for the same reason that other people build ships in bottles!”
“The exact same reasons.”
“That’s horrifying!”
“In defense of the gentleman criminal,” Holmes went on, with a soothing note in his voice, “many have a code of honor that precludes their doing serious harm by practicing their hobby. But I do agree with you that it can be disturbing to be made aware of the societal rules people are willing to break in their pursuit of entertainment.”
“Why are these criminals harder to catch, Holmes?”
“Precisely because of the lack of a traditional motive,” he explained. “Think about it. When we seek to solve a crime, what do we look for?”
“People who disliked the victim, or who wanted something from him,” I said at once. “Or wanted to keep him away from something. Or wanted revenge upon him.”
“Precisely. I would personally put revenge into the same broad category as dislike. But how often do we consider that the crime might have been the work of a person practicing a hobby of crime? Hardly ever. And even if we do consider him, how do we identify him? He may know nothing of the victim, or know him only in the most tenuous way. He might be an opportunity, nothing more.”
“I say,” I said.
“Unless I am very much mistaken,” said my companion, “we are about to receive a visit from our inestimable Scotland Yard man, Inspector Lestrade.”
We listened as Mrs Hudson greeted the Inspector downstairs, and then we heard his stolid tread upon the stair. Holmes dropped his topic of conversation as abruptly as he had taken it up.
“My dear Inspector,” said Holmes, offering his hand. “How very good to see you. Do take your wet boots off, come sit by the fire, and have some of Mrs Hudson’s very fine tea. Watson will fetch you a cup. You look like you need some cheering after the morning you’ve had.”
“I’d appreciate a cup of tea, Mr Holmes, and make no mistake,” said Lestrade. He shed his boots as Holmes had suggested, and stretched his stockinged feet toward the fire, the mantlepiece wound round with Christmas garlands, wiggling his toes with pleasure. “But what do you know about the morning I’ve had?”
“The Docks are an unpleasant place to be on a chill, rainy, December day,” said Holmes. “Especially when there’s murder afoot.”
Lestrade half-choked on his mouthful of tea. “I say, Holmes! How do you know of the murder at the docks? It’s not been in any of the papers yet, I made sure of it.”
“The streaks on your trousers were clearly made by salt water,” Holmes remarked. “And there’s the fishy odor clinging to you. Not that a normal nose would be able to discern it, I hasten to add,” he went on quickly, because Lestrade’s face had turned beet-red with embarrassment. “But my scent organs are more sensitive than most.”
“How did you know I was investigating a murder, Holmes?”
“It was a slight conjecture,” Holmes admitted. “The blood stain on your cuff could be from fish. But I judged that less likely, even though you were at the docks, than murder. It’s not the type of day that sees a police inspector haunting the docks for his dinner at ten o’clock in the morning.”
Lestrade looked at his shirt cuff and swore. “The wife will have my hide,” he muttered.
We drank our tea in silence for a while, and then Holmes remarked, “I am delighted to see you, Inspector, but I suspect this is not entirely a social call. Is there some point upon which you wish to consult me?”
“As a matter of fact, there is,” the Inspector said, without raising his gaze from the fire. “I don’t mind telling you, Mr Holmes, that this case has me at my wit’s end.”
“Do tell me all the particulars, and do not leave anything out, however insignificant.”
“You won’t have read about it in the papers, Mr Holmes, but there’s been something of a rash of robberies recently.”
“I assume you refer to a significant increase in the number of safe-cracking crimes,” said Holmes, “starting in November of this year.”
Lestrade’s jaw dropped. “Mr Holmes, however do you know that? We at Scotland Yard have kept it mum. It won’t do to have the public in a panic over their valuables.”
“And a foolish policy that is, indeed,” retorted Holmes. “For if you had informed the public, you would have had the opportunity to discover more of these crimes, and question more victims, and you would now have a great deal more evidence.”
“Mr Holmes!” cried Lestrade angrily, leaping to his feet. “If you knew of this crime wave, why did you not come to me with your information?”
Holmes dismissively waved his hand. “My dear Lestrade,” he said. “If I shared with Scotland Yard everything I know that you do not, you’d never have time to get any work done.”
Lestrade paced around the room, muttering in frustration.
“Come, come,” said Holmes, a soothing note in his voice. “The sooner we get down to business, the sooner we solve it.”
“In November, a crime was reported,” said Lestrade, subsiding again into his chair. “The victim was a prominent man, one Judge Milbourne. And I don’t mind telling you, if he hadn’t been, he’d probably have been put away for a nutter. He came in saying his safe was broken into and an item had been taken — a valuable snuffbox. But that wasn’t the queer part. He said that the next day, his safe had been broken into again. Nothing was taken, but something had been left inside — a different snuffbox, and one entirely strange to him!”
Lestrade glared at Holmes as if he expected him to scoff, but Holmes merely steepled his fingers and said, “Do go on.”
“We took down a report and interviewed the household staff, but we were not able to find any leads. We filed the case.
“Then several days later, another man of quality reported a crime to us. That in itself is unusual, you know, Mr Holmes. Most of the upper class would rather keep their crimes to themselves, even if they’re the victims, than risk involving the police, lest their names end up in the newspapers.”
“I am well aware,” Holmes told him.
“This time, the victim was one Lord Breckinridge, and the crime was yet another safe-cracking and burglary. Again, a snuffbox was taken, and something was left behind.”
I glanced at my companion. His eyes had lit up. Angled toward the fire, he was rubbing his hands to warm them, but I could see the glee in his movements. He was captivated by what Lestrade was telling him.
“Mr Holmes, you’ll never guess what was left behind in Lord Breckenridge’s safe,” asserted Lestrade.
“The Judge’s snuffbox?” Holmes ventured. He phrased it as a question, but I knew the man well enough to realize he had already figured out the answer, although I had no idea under the heavens how he had managed it.
Lestrade glared at Holmes. He didn’t like having his opportunity to surprise my companion stolen from under his nose.
“Do you know something about this case, Mr Holmes?” he asked suspiciously.
“I only provide what would be the most obvious answer to your very leading question,” said Holmes with false modesty. I noticed he had not answered Lestrade’s question, and let myself feel a moment of pride. I would not have picked up that detail before my attachment to the great detective had begun.
“Right. Now that you’ve had your little fun at my expense,” grumbled Lestrade, and he went on. “Since then, we’ve had reports of several similar incidents,” Lestrade went on. “We’ve looked for connections among the victims. But we can find none, beyond that they’re all based in London and all relatively wealthy — many people of that description know each other. But it’s not enough of a connection to predict who might be targeted next.”
Holmes’s eyes were unfocused, and he was tapping his long, bony forefinger against the fingers of his other hand, as if ticking off an internal list.
“Tell me about the safe break-ins,” he said at last. “In what ways were the safes defeated?”
“That’s another strange thing about it, Mr Holmes. It led us astray for quite some time. The safes were unharmed, so we assumed the burglaries had to be inside jobs. Someone must have used the keys to open them. After all, safes these days are uncrackable.”
Holmes smiled in a patronizing way and shook his head.
“My dear Lestrade,” he said. “If a man can invent a lock, another man can invent a way to defeat that lock. It’s an axiom of crime, and I’m surprised you do not know it.”
“Mr Holmes, I’ve spoken to many people knowledgeable about safes over this matter. And to a man, they insist that today’s high quality safes are uncrackable.”
“Tell that to Alfred Charles Hobbs,” Holmes said.
“Who’s that?”
“He cracked a so-called uncrackable lock, the Chubb Detector lock, during the Great Exhibiton of 1851.”
“Look on my works, ye burglars, and despair,” I said.
Holmes smiled at me. “Yes, Watson. That is a bit before your time, though, is it not?”
“My father collected Dickens’s serialized works,” I told him. “As a young man, I laid my hands on his copies of the Bleak House serials, published starting in 1852. The Chubb Detector Lock was so advertised therein.”
I frowned. I was unaccountably annoyed to learn that the lock had been picked before any of the Bleak House serials had even been published. It was as if yet another certainty of my childhood had now been lost.
Holmes waxed didactic. “The Detector was a lever that rendered the lock unusable if any of the its standard levers was moved too far out of position. Chubb, in his patent, explained, ’In this state the lock is what I call detected, and the possessor of the true key has evidence that an attempt has been made to violate the lock, because the true key will not now open it.’ The lock could be reset using a separate regulating key. A genius-level invention, to be sure. But for every genius lock-inventor, there is a genius lock-defeater.”
Lestrade was unconvinced. “That was thirty years ago. I’m sure an improved lock has been invented.”
“Indeed it has. By Alfred Charles Hobbs. A founder of the company currently known as Hobbs, Ashley & Fortescue. He invented a lock he called the Protector.”
“Well, then. Chubb’s locking mechanism wasn’t impregnable, but Hobbs’s improvement surely is.”
“No again, Inspector. In 1854, one of Chubb’s locksmiths was able to crack the Protector lock. Do you begin to see my point now?”
Inspector Lestrade scrubbed his hand across his damp hair and wrinkled his ferret-like face.
“So we might have a lock-picker on our hands after all,” he muttered. “Dash it all. Now you’ve made the case even more complicated, Mr Holmes.”
“But at least you’ll be looking under the right streetlamp now, Inspector.”
“What the devil do you mean? Streetlamp?”
“Surely you’ve heard the old joke about the drunk and the streetlamp.”
“Can’t say I have,” Lestrade grumbled.
Holmes folded his hands in his lap, looking for all the world like a student about to recite.
“A man came upon a drunk searching the ground under a streetlamp,” he said. “He asked the drunk what he was looking for.
Holmes dropped effortlessly into the speech of a lower-class Londoner. “‘Me spect’cles,’ said the drunk. ‘I dropped ’em cross t’street.’
“‘If you dropped them across the street, my man, why on Earth are you looking for them here?’
“T’ light’s better ’ere.’”
Holmes unfolded his hands and, with a small, smug smile, picked up his tea cup once more.
Lestrade groaned. “Very funny, Mr Holmes. Can you help me with this case?”
“I have some ideas I shall pursue,” said Holmes, picking up his pipe. “Come by again to-morrow and I shall be able to assist you.”