“Plenty to be going on with there, I think,” he said. “I may well call on you again. This strikes me as a case where local knowledge —or perhaps just a strong right fist—will be frequently needed.”
“I’m here whenever you need me, Mr Holmes,” Johnson replied. “You know that.”
Holmes paid for our meal and announced that a short walk would do us both good.
“We must decide our next step, Watson,” he said. “And the cold air will energise us to do just that.”
Shinwell Johnson left us the minute we had stepped out of the restaurant, slipping away almost mid-sentence to return to the
world he knew so well but which was alien to us. As we walked the streets of Belgravia, Holmes was mostly silent, digesting the facts of the case as well as our meal. Every now and then he would tap out a rhythm on the pavement slabs with his cane, or stop to stare in the window of a shop, the very figure of a relaxed man about town. I knew he was cogitating furiously beneath the surface, however—a swan with urgent, pedalling feet.
“There is nothing to be gained by observing from afar,” he announced after a while, gazing up at the hazy sky above us. “We must make an expedition into enemy territory.”
“A trip to Rotherhithe?”
“Certainly.” He smiled and looked at me. “Will you come?”
“It makes a change for you to ask.” Usually it was all I could do to find out where it was he vanished to in the small hours, leaping— so very unnecessarily—from his bedroom window leaving nothing but the trace of old tobacco and thickly applied spirit gum.
“I know how much you like wandering around the streets with a concealed weapon,” he replied, glancing at my jacket pocket, no doubt checking whether I was carrying it now. I wasn’t.
“In your company I have frequently had occasion to use it.”
“What a good thing it is that the police force owe us a certain latitude.”
“How else would their inspectors keep their reputations?” There could be little doubt that Holmes’ existence accounted for a fair proportion of the law courts’ business.
“It’s hardly that,” he replied, “what with you blowing the whistle on them every week in your stories. Frankly I’m surprised you’ll find a man in uniform to give you the time of day.”
“It’s you that patronises them, not me.”
“A contentious point—your pen …”
“Your words.”
“Sometimes.” Once again, I was being poked at by an editor.
“Always,” I insisted. “Just not necessarily quoted in the right context.”
“Misrepresentation.”
“Dramatic licence,” I sighed. “And my stories have made the entire English-speaking world regard you as a genius. So if you class that as misrepresentation, I’ll be happy to make you seem more idiotic next time.”
He laughed. “Why not? It might at least give our postal service a rest.”
“You couldn’t bear it.”
“Nonsense! The work is its own reward.”
“I believed that of you once,” I replied. “Then I noticed how often you liked to announce a man’s occupation just by looking at his trouser cuffs.”
“Observation.”
“Showing off,” I smiled.
“There is a difference between explaining method to those intellectually incapable of making their own conclusions, and ‘showing off’!” he shouted. And just like that, friendly banter had become earnest—one could never tell with Holmes.
“Indeed there is,” I asserted. “One employs humility.”
My friend was silenced, if only for a moment. “Very well,” he announced finally, his voice as petulant as that of a child, “I shall no longer explain myself and the responsibility falls on you to keep up!”
With that he marched into the road in search of a cab.
It was hardly the first time I had been at the receiving end of one of Holmes’ bad moods. His manner was so changeable, swinging from excitement that bordered on mania to the most impenetrable brown studies. It was inevitable therefore that, as his only friend, I should sometimes see the very worst of him. I will say though that I took these moods with considerably more patience than some might have done. In fact, I have often played them down in my case studies as I didn’t want to give them undue importance. For those who spent any time with Holmes (and there were few who did, both by their choice and his reluctance to be in company) the speed with which his manner could change was an integral part of his personality.
During the first years of our marriage, Mary had wondered how I had managed to stand it. “He is a genius,” she would admit, “but I am at a loss as to how you could have lived with him.” It really wasn’t all that difficult and she grew to understand. Some people are just built differently from others. Holmes’ mind was a thing
of wonder, never to find its match again. But for every leap of deductive brilliance, every astounding piece of analysis, there was a price to be paid. Quite simply, genius has its faults. He exercised that brain of his so much, abused it terribly, that it is no wonder that it repaid him with shifting moods. A man cannot kick a soccer ball between the goalposts with such frequency without occasionally tearing a ligament and suffering from a limp.
The important thing to remember about Holmes is this: the man was brilliant and also the very best friend I ever had. That he could manage to be both sets him apart as a giant amongst men.
This is not to say he couldn’t often be extremely annoying.
“Quite why we need to go to all this fuss is beyond me,” I admitted as Holmes set to combing the long, grey wig he had prepared for me.
“I have said I’ll offer no explanations,” he replied, “though the fact that you’d not last five minutes wandering about the backstreets of Rotherhithe as John Watson MD should be obvious. If you want to thoroughly explore an environment you must immerse yourself in it, you must
belong!”
That and the fact that Holmes always did like dressing up.
By the time he’d finished I was an itching, irritable mess of false hair and make-up. Looking in the mirror that hung above the fireplace, I found myself face to face with a creature so grimy and hirsute I found it hard to accept him as me, no matter how much my logical mind knew better.
Holmes certainly had an eye for disguise. As I believe I may have mentioned before, his skill when he applied it to himself was not so much to hide his features beneath layer and layer of artificial
subterfuge, but rather to adapt himself so as to appear to be someone else entirely. He achieved this trick by posture, intonation and natural expression, just as much as he did make-up. It appeared he had little faith that I might share his ability, as there was so little of John Watson to be seen! I must confess he was probably right to err on the side of caution. I had enjoyed theatricals at school—my Laertes brought a tear to the eye of the old nurse as she stood on hand to offer assistance should the fencing get out of hand—but I can’t say it was a skill that came readily. Perhaps it was my time in the army, for certainly the comradeship of soldiers teaches a man to be nothing more or less than himself, but the idea of pretending to be the natural occupier of this beard and hair made me distinctly nervous. I decided to experiment with a limp.
“My dear Watson,” came Holmes’ voice from the other room, “affecting problems with one’s gait is the province of music-hall comics and lousy Richard the Thirds. Kindly walk normally or you’ll stand out a mile.”
I gritted my blackened teeth in irritation and prepared to ask how he had known I was doing any such thing. Then I held my tongue, damned if I was going to give him the satisfaction.
I looked at myself in the mirror again and experimented with my stance. Clearly I was affecting a personality much older than myself so I should stoop a little and maybe even allow my head to hang a little crookedly. A sharp pain in my neck soon knocked that idea out of me.
“Do nothing to draw attention,” Holmes continued, still absent from the room. “People will have no interest in you unless you give them cause to do so. Most people are extremely unobservant, as you know, so rely on that fact. Simply believe that wherever you
are, you belong; you are in your element; you are natural and at home. Do that—” he appeared in the doorway, bald, tattooed and dressed in the most terribly stained overcoat “—and you’ll never be seen.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I replied, in the closest I could manage to a thick Irish brogue, much to his apparent disgust.
We avoided the unnecessarily ostentatious route of Holmes’ bedroom window and instead left Baker Street by the front door. I could tell he was far from content about it, but I made it clear that I had no intention of breaking my legs before we’d even begun. From there it was a long walk to the river. Holmes insisted that one didn’t go to all the effort of disguising oneself only to then alight from a taxi-cab at one’s destination. I could see his logic but felt we could have at least travelled in comfort halfway there. But then, Holmes was not a man to do things by halves.
He also liked to walk through the city, to remind himself of the beating heart of it; of the twists of its streets and back alleys; the little dramas that played out on each corner. Holmes was not always the most empathetic of men, but it was a failing he was aware of and it was during moments like this that he did his best to compensate. He noted everything about people, not just the usual analysis—reading their personality and environment from traces
on their person—but also how they interacted with each other. That was where the real mysteries lay, something he knew only too well. “If only the rest of the world was as logical as me,” he once said, “I could solve any crime in a matter of moments. It would be a matter of arithmetic, the inarguable sum of its composite parts. But, no—nothing muddies the waters as much as the human mind.” Everybody was different and that, for a detective, is where the hard work comes in.
We couldn’t have asked for more variety during that walk. We began in the rarefied air of Mayfair, where the gentlemen experienced fresh air only in brief snatches, moving between the velvet-lined wombs of their carriages and the smoky interiors of their clubs. When Holmes had talked of looking as if we belonged he had not expected us to succeed in that aim here; in fact, we were looked upon with nothing less than open hostility by a number of the doormen and the few passers-by who deigned to waste shoe-leather.
“Move along there,” cried one old soldier, stitched up in his serge and braid, swapping the uniform of a foreign field for that of the Mummerset Club, where he could live out his years still tugging a forelock to the ranks above him. “We don’t like your sort around here.”
The fact that, as an ex-serviceman of sufficient rank, I was perfectly entitled to step through the club’s doors was something I chose not to mention. He would never believe me. In fact I had more right to step into its bar than he; with my service record I would have a brandy in my hand within moments whereas he would be out on his ear as an upstart pushing beyond his station in life. What ridiculous games we play and how little it all means
in the end! Holmes gave him a theatrical salute and moved along the pavement, chuckling in a decidedly drunken manner.
So much for not drawing attention to yourself,
I thought, as we crossed into the theatre district. Here at least we could claim to belong, two strolling players heading towards their chosen stage.
It was the time of evening when many of the performances were ejecting their audiences back out into the world and the streets were busy with happy patrons and those who took advantage of the fact. We were far from being the only people on the street who seemed a long way from home. The crowds were studded with down-at-heel, grimy faces either calling on the generosity of the passers-by or simply helping themselves from unguarded pockets. As we moved past a small group of toughs, loitering by the Adelphi, I became conscious of allowing my hands to loiter near my coat pockets, ready to snatch at any intruding fingers. It took me a moment to realise that, looking as I did, I was hardly likely to present much of a target. As far as these street Arabs were concerned I was one of them, not a potential victim. It was a strange feeling, to be so removed from one’s usual sense of self.
From The Strand it was only a short walk to the river and the next available steamboat.
Pressed hard against the rail, I looked out at our smoky city as we made our way along the Thames. It seemed that no matter how long I lived here, I would never stop finding a different angle from which to view it. It was a city of so many faces, and it showed a different one to each and every one of its citizens. To the gentry it was an austere collection of ancient architecture; to the clerk a place of commerce and bustle; to the lower classes it was a dark and unforgiving mother, a place of soot and death that nonetheless
gathered its shadowy skirts around the poor and disenfranchised if they begged hard enough.
Now it was a coastal city, an island of noise and light just out of reach across the choppy waters of the river that had always kept it alive.
“She’s a dark and ruinous place,” I said, unaware I had spoken aloud until Holmes fixed me with a curious stare.
After a moment he nodded. “On my low days, when it seems that nothing will rise from above the commonplace to engage my attention, I remember where it is we live.” He watched the towering factories pass us by. “In this city you are never far away from the extraordinary.” He thought for a moment. “Or the terrifying.”
We travelled in silence for the rest of our journey. I continued to watch the passing city while Holmes turned his attention towards our fellow passengers. The boat was far from full at that time of the night, but the people it did carry were, for the most part, in boisterous mood.
By the time we arrived at the docks in Rotherhithe, the main bulk of our fellow passengers had taken to singing a bawdy tune regarding the medical health of an excitable young barmaid called Sadie. I can’t say I was familiar with the tune before our journey but it was damnably hard to shake from my head after it. From time to time I even found myself whistling a few bars of it as we pushed our way through the busy quayside. I’m sure it helped me fit in amongst the sailors and warehouse men as they shouted to one another, offloading produce or loading supplies, a seemingly endless to and fro of crates and people. The air was thick with the smell of tar and the creak of old ropes. Everybody seemed to be shouting, though it was so commonplace I ceased to be able
to discern a single word—the whole became a background roar of voices. It brought to mind the animal noise of a jungle, all the species calling out to one another.