• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 543 0

from all debt by a special covenant with Parliament. There was never a danger of the piece going to his creditors. There was, of course, no way, in those circumstances, that Fromental could get the Silver for himself. He had to engineer first a burglary – and then a murder, which looked like a consequence of that burglary. The suicide note was a forgery, but hard to decipher. His plan was to use your honesty and decency, Mr Macklesworth, to carry the Silver through to America. Then he planned to obtain it from you by any means he found necessary.”

Macklesworth shuddered. “I am very glad I found you, Mr Holmes. If I had not, by coincidence, chosen rooms in Dorset Street, I would even now be conspiring to further that villain’s ends!”

“As, it seems, did Sir Geoffrey. For years he trusted Fromental. He appears to have doted on him, indeed. He was blind to the fact that his estate was being stripped of its remaining assets. He put everything down to his own bad judgement and thanked Fromental for helping him! Fromental had no difficulty, of course, in murdering Sir Geoffrey when the time came. It must have been hideously simple. That suicide note was the only forgery, as such, in the case, gentlemen. Unless, of course, you count the murderer himself.”

Once again, the world had been made a safer and saner place by the astonishing deductive powers of my friend Sherlock Holmes.

Postscript

And that was the end of the Dorset Street affair. The Fellini Silver was taken by the Victoria and Albert Museum who, for some years, kept it in the special “Macklesworth” Wing before it was transferred, by agreement, to the Sir John Soane Museum. There the Macklesworth name lives on. John Macklesworth returned to America a poorer and wiser man. Fromental died in hospital, without revealing the whereabouts of his stolen fortune, but happily a bank book was found at Willesden and the money was distributed amongst Sir Geoffrey’s creditors, so that the house did not have to be sold. It is now in the possession of a genuine Macklesworth cousin. Life soon settled back to normal and it was with some regret that we eventually left Dorset Street to take up residence again at 22lb. I have occasion, even today, to pass that pleasant house and recall with a certain nostalgia the few days when it had been the focus of an extraordinary adventure.

At the start of “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez,” which took place in November 1894, Watson refers to his three massive manuscript volumes covering the cases of 1894, and he lists five other cases in addition to the six that had already happened in the first half of the year. Four of those cases tumbled one on top of each other during October and early November, and I present them here without interruption. I must thank the individuals who helped reconstruct these cases.

Barrie Roberts, the tireless delver into matters Sherlockian, spent many years tracking down the clues that allowed him to rebuild the case of the Addleton tragedy. Robert Weinberg is an American bookdealer, collector and writer who has a remarkable talent for finding obscure papers and records. He acquired a batch of notes some years ago and amongst these were early scribblings by Watson on a number of incidental cases, which he later wrote up but did not publish. One of these was the case of Huret the Boulevard assassin, which Mr Weinberg was able to complete with the assistance of Lois Gresh. Stephen Baxter, is a well-known science-fiction writer. His investigations into the early life of H.G. Wells identified the clues that allowed us to reconstruct the forgotten “Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor”. Alert readers will find a passing reference to a red leech suggesting that this story may be the one Watson refers to under that name although, as we shall see, there is another story by that title. Finally Peter Crowther, who hails from Yorkshire, had some remarkable luck only recently in some research he was undertaking for a book on angels, when he came across some old records which enabled him to piece together the case of Crosby