There are many cases in the career of Sherlock Holmes that Dr. Watson documented, and I do not mean the ones he mentions and withholds, the giant rat, the politician and his cormorant, all those teasing half sentences meant to make a reader's mouth water for stories he will never be allowed to read in full. I mean cases the good doctor never so much as heard of, because they were never brought to Baker Street in the ordinary way, by a frightened client on the stair or a telegram from Scotland Yard. They came in sideways, through drawing rooms and card tables and the hush that falls over a room when a certain name is mentioned and everyone present has decided, by unspoken agreement, not to explain why.
The affair of the Sunderland necklace, which was never a jewel theft at all but something a good deal uglier dressed up to look like one. The business of Colonel Ashworth's second family, kept eleven years in a cottage outside Guildford while his first family entertained half of Mayfair, none the wiser. The matter of Lady Verrall's Italian singing master, which nearly cost a man his life, cost another man his marriage, and never reached a single newspaper because I made certain, myself, that it never would. There was a smaller matter too, hardly worth the name of a case, concerning a bishop's nephew and a gambling house in Shepherd Market. Holmes settled that one in a single afternoon and never mentioned it again. I have thought of it often anyway, mostly because the bishop himself sent me, some weeks later and quite without explanation, a case of very fine port, and I drank it slowly over the better part of a year and enjoyed a good deal more than the circumstances of its arrival strictly warranted.
I know these cases because I supplied the thread that let a cleverer man than myself follow them to their end. My name is Langdale Pike. For the better part of thirty years I have sat in the same bow window of the same club in St. James's Street, watching London pass beneath me and knowing, generally within the hour, everything worth knowing about everyone worth knowing it about. Sherlock Holmes called on me a great many more times than the world will ever learn of. I am dying now, of a complaint my own doctor describes with more Latin than comfort, and I have decided that before I go I will set down, for the first time and the last, exactly what that arrangement between us was worth.
A young man from my own paper is sitting across from me as I dictate this, taking it down in a shorthand I cannot read and do not trust. I have asked him to take my words verbatim, and told him plainly that if he changes a word of it after I am gone I will find some way to haunt him that will make his professional life considerably shorter than mine has been. He assures me he will not. I do not entirely believe him, but a dying man's threats carry less weight than a living man's promises, and I have made my peace with that unfairness along with several others.
His name is Anstey. He has the look of a man who has been sent to sit with an invalid and is trying very hard not to glance at the clock. He is not, I think, especially interested in me, which is fair enough, since I was never especially interested in the last three dying men my own paper sent me to sit with either, back when that was the sort of assignment a junior man got handed because no one senior wanted it. I have told him he may print this exactly as I give it to him, or burn it, and that both choices will cost him roughly the same trouble from his editor, though for different reasons. He stopped glancing at the clock about a quarter hour ago. I take that as a small professional victory of my own, possibly the last one I will manage. He has a habit of biting the end of his pencil when he is thinking of a question rather than simply transcribing, a habit I recognise from my own younger self, and it has made me fonder of him over the course of this evening than I expected to become of any man his editor sent to watch an old gossip die.
My rooms are smaller than they once were, though I do not mean this literally. I have lived in the same set above the club for eleven years and the walls have not moved an inch. I mean that a man dying of what I am dying of finds a room shrinking around him by degrees, the far corners growing less and less worth the effort of looking at, until his whole world is roughly the size of a bed and a window. Fortunately for me the window happens to still be the bow window I made my living from for thirty years, though I can no longer sit in it properly and must content myself with what I can see of St. James's Street from a chair set a few feet back from the glass.
I should explain, for anyone who has only ever known me as a name in one of Watson's stories, mentioned and gone in a sentence, exactly what my trade was.
I did not investigate anything, in the sense that word is generally used. I never followed a man down an alley or examined his footprints or worked out from the mud on his boots where he had dined the night before. I sat still, mostly, and let London come to me. Every marriage, every debt, every scandal a family had spent good money burying, found its way eventually to my window, carried by servants who talked, by clubmen who drank a glass too many, by women who told their dressmakers things they would never have told their husbands. I turned what I heard into paragraphs, and the paragraphs into money, and I never once, in thirty years, felt the smallest twinge of shame about it, though I have met a great many respectable people who felt entitled to feel that shame on my behalf.