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“The best disguise is in the eye of the observer, not the face of the quarry. You saw a tuba player; I saw what I expected. Meyer simply absorbed himself into the part of the bandsman.”

“Excellent, Holmes.”

“Not at all. Once one recalled the man’s passion, it was merely a question of scanning the programme for suitable venues. I have listened to many execrable brass bands in the course of the last week. For a violin player it was torment.”

Fortunately the sudden noise from the crowd distracted his attention from my involuntary smile.

As the Colonial troops began to pass the sun shone out at last, and “Queen’s weather” blessed us for the rest of that memorable day. After the Colonial contingent came the advance guard of the Royal procession. The mass of colour, scarlet, gold, purple and emerald, was followed by an open carriage drawn by eight cream-coloured horses. In it, sat a small figure, clad in black, with touches of grey, quite still under a white sunshade. Gone now was any desire to feast the eye on dazzling colour; for a moment the crowd was silent, even the sound of the horses’ hooves could be heard. The carriage had no escort; nothing could come between Her Majesty and her people. Then the roars of the spectators rose to the sky.

Holmes’s eyes followed the carriage as it made its way along Whitehall.” I am told that when in due course circumstances permit, I may expect a knighthood.”

“Holmes, my dear fellow, that is no more than you deserve,” I replied warmly.

“You are mistaken, Watson. I shall, should a knighthood be offered, be obliged to refuse it.”

“Refuse, Holmes?” I was astounded.” Surely such an honour can be nothing but welcome.”

He brushed this aside with a smile. “You know my methods, Watson. I would consider the majority of my cases more suitable to be worthy of such an honour than this present affair. As an exercise in the pure logic of deduction it has proved disappointingly simple.”

“Simple, Holmes?” I rebutted this argument energetically. “With such an enemy, and so much at stake?”

“Yet the game so narrowly won.” We watched as the carriage finally disappeared from our view. “No, Watson, they may keep their honours, and I shall continue to remain Their present and future Majesties’ most loyal and faithful retainer, Mr Sherlock Holmes.”

By 1898 the number of Holmes’s recorded cases seemed to be running down. This does not necessarily mean that Holmes was investigating any less, but that Watson was not recording them so avidly. We know that Holmes was often critical of Watson’s accounts, sometimes mercilessly so, and he was also very strict over what Watson could publish. The cases towards the end of the century, therefore, were almost certainly more secretive, but also perhaps of less interest in terms of unusual incident. The only ones that Watson did publish were “The Retired Colourman”, which overlapped with the unpublished case of the two Coptic patriarchs, and “The Six Napoleons”. It is almost certain that during this period Holmes also investigated the disappearance of the cutter Alicia and the fate of Isadora Persano. I have the papers about that last case but there remain some unresolved details which make it as yet unready for publication.

Part IV

The Final Years

The Case of the Suicidal Lawyer

Martin Edwards

The change in the century did not diminish Holmes’s caseload. Within a week or two of the death of Queen Victoria, Holmes was heavily involved in at least three cases. The first was the Abergavenny Murders. Martin Edwards, a writer who is also a solicitor, was allowed access to old files in the archives of the Director of Public Prosecutions, which enabled him to reconstruct the case. At the same time circumstances arose which allowed Sherlock Holmes to revisit one of his very earliest cases, “The Musgrave Ritual”. After considerable research Michael Doyle, who is not related to Watson’s agent, or so he tells me, was able to piece together this strange coda, which at last settled matters after over twenty-five