Moran glowered at me.
"So you tipped them off, you young interfering…" He made a sudden aggressive lunge at me.
Mycroft inserted his large frame between me and Moran. His fist impacted on the colonel's nose and Moran went sprawling back only to be neatly caught by the doorman and his assistant.
"Kindly escort Colonel Moran off the premises, gentlemen," ordered the chairman, "and you do not have to be gentle."
Moran twisted in their gasp to look back at me with little option but to control his foul temper.
"I have your measure, Sherlock Holmes," he glowered, seething with an inner rage, as they began to propel him towards the door. "You have not heard the last of me."
It was as Mycroft was sharing a cab in the direction of my rooms in Lower Baggott Street that he frowned and posed the question:
"But I cannot see how you could have identified Moran as the culprit in the first place?"
"It was elementary, Mycroft," I smiled. "When we left the luncheon room and passed behind Moran's chair, I saw that the colonel had dandruff on his shoulders. Now he had jet-black hair. But with the dandruff lay a number of silver strands. It meant nothing to me at the time for I was not aware of the facts. When I discovered that the missing case contained a hairbrush and comb, everything fell into place. The duke not only had silver hair but, I noticed, he also had dandruff to boot. By brushing his hair in such a foolhardy gesture, Moran had transferred the dandruff and silver hair to his own shoulders. It was easy to witness that Moran was a vain man. He would not have allowed dandruff and hair, if it had been his, to lay on his shoulders when he entered a public dining room. Indeed, I saw him rise from his table and go out, brushing himself as he did so. The sign of a fastidious man. He had, therefore, unknowingly picked it up during his short absence. Everything else was a matter of simple deduction."
As Moran had been thrown out of the Kildare Street Club, he had called out to me that I had not heard the last of him. Indeed, I had not. But I could not have conceived of how our paths would meet at that time nor of the sinister role Moran's friend, Professor Moriarty, would play in my life. While Moriarty became my most implacable foe, Colonel Sebastian Moran was certainly the second most dangerous man that I ever had to deal with.
Part II: The 1880s
After Holmes left university he settled in rooms in Montague Street in London spending much of his time researching into those branches of science that were relevant to his new vocation, and gradually building a practice as the world's first consulting detective. It seems that not all of these early cases were successful or particularly interesting and although he referred Watson to several, including the Tarleton murders, the case of Vamberry the wine merchant, the adventure of the old Russian wife plus two particularly tempting ones – the singular affair of the aluminium crutch and the story of Ricoletti of the club foot and his abominable wife – nothing sufficient on these cases has come to light to allow me to retell them. Records of them that I have seen, and which I mention in the appendix, I believe to be apocryphal. Holmes did tell Watson the story of "The Musgrave Ritual", which was his third case (and which we shall return to later), but he did not relate any others in detail. Without Watson as his amanuensis, and with Watson's papers stolen it has proven difficult to piece these years together. I have found some leads on the cases Holmes refers to as "Merridew of Abominable Memory" and "Mrs Farintosh and the Opal Tiara", but details of these must wait for another time.
It was when Holmes was searching for new rooms, in January 1881, that he and Watson met and came to share an apartment. At the outset, as related in "A Study in Scarlet", Watson was at a loss to know what Holmes did for a living, and was rather bemused at all the visitors who came to see him, including officers from Scotland Yard. It is clear that in these four years Holmes had established a strong reputation though he had not, at that stage, made much financial gain. That would come later.
After his own involvement in "A Study in Scarlet", Watson became increasingly drawn into Holmes's cases and recorded several that happened in the next couple of years: "The Resident Patient", "The Beryl Coronet" and the famous "The Speckled Band". At this stage, though, Watson was not fully into the habit of keeping methodical notes of the cases, because he had not yet pursued the idea of publishing them. At the start of "The Resident Patient" he talks about his "incoherent series of memoirs". However, by the time he came to write-up the case of "The Speckled Band" in 1888, five years after the events, he was clearly getting his notes in order, as he states so at the outset.
It means that for the first few years of their acquaintanceship, Watson's record of Holmes's cases is hit-and-miss, and he seems to have preserved only those that made a special mark on his memory because of their bizarre or unusual nature. It may not be that sinister, therefore, that so few of these early cases survive and that, by 1884, we enter a relatively dark period when Holmes's activities are not well recorded. It may simply be that none of Holmes's cases were worth recording. Of course, the contrary could also be true. Since Holmes carefully vetted everything he let Watson publish we could deduce that he was involved in some very secret cases at this time. Some of the cases referred to in passing in later stories may date from this period, particularly those where Holmes began to move in higher circles in society, such as the help he gave to the King of Scandinavia and another time to Lord Backwater. These cases not only brought him prestige but were financially rewarding so that by the start of 1885 we find Holmes's practice on a firmer footing, and Watson keeping a better account of his cases.
Thanks to the help of Claire Griffen, who came across some fragments of Watson's notes and related memorabilia that surfaced in an old book shop in South Australia, we have been able to piece together one of these cases that Holmes alluded to many years later. In "The Six Napoleons" he reminded Watson how the business of the Abernetty family came to his attention because of the depth that the parsley had sunk into the butter, an example of how not to overlook what may appear trifling detail.That case has puzzled Sherlockians for decades but at last we can report it in full.
The Case of the Incumbent Invalid – Claire Griffen
Of all the adventures I shared with my friend Sherlock Holmes I cannot recall one other in which he was quite so ambivalent about its outcome than the dreadful affair of the Abernettys, nor one which he felt so reluctant to pursue, yet was driven to its tragic and macabre denouement.
Because of his peculiar sensitivity regarding the role he played therein I have never chronicled the affair, but a chance remark recently while discussing with Inspector Lestrade the bizarre case of the Six Napoleons, and the fact that the main participants have long since been freed to seek new lives in South Australia, encourage me to believe he will tolerate my jotting down a few remembrances of the case.
The trivial remark of how far a sprig of parsley had sunk into melting butter on a hot day first seized his attention, but it was on a raw day in early January, 1885 when we first became embroiled in the question of Lady Abernetty's possible murder.
I was standing at our bow window gloomily surveying the prospect. Fog had shrouded the city in the earlier hours of the day and would probably return in the late afternoon, but at that hour a pale straggle of sunlight lit a street almost deserted but for the occasional cab and passerby ulstered and mufflered against the chill damp. Despite the warmth of the fire I could not resist a shiver.
"I'm sorry you feel you cannot afford to take the cure at Baden-Baden next spring," drawled my friend from his easy chair beside the hearth.