I ought to explain, too, why a bow window in a St. James's Street club proved such fertile ground for a trade like mine, since I have found the younger men in the profession now rarely understand it. A man sitting behind glass, in full view of the street, is trusted by passersby in a way a man skulking in a doorway never is, for the simple reason that he appears to have nothing to hide. Anyone walking past could see me, sherry in hand, apparently idle, and it never once occurred to most of them that a deliberate idleness of that kind was the whole of my working method. Servants would stop and exchange a word through the glass on their way to some errand or other. Clubmen would drift in and settle beside me for a quarter hour of conversation they believed entirely social. I would sit and listen and forget nothing, and by teatime I generally knew more about the private business of London than the private secretaries paid handsomely to know it on their masters' behalf.
Holmes came to me first in the spring of 1887, in a case that never made it into any of Watson's published accounts because it resolved itself, in the end, without a crime being committed at all, only a great deal of money nearly changing hands under false pretences. A young heiress had become engaged, rather suddenly, to a foreign nobleman whose title, as far as anyone in London could determine, existed nowhere but on his own visiting cards. The girl's father had come to Holmes in a state of some agitation, having grown suspicious but unable to prove anything, and Holmes, rather than chasing about the Continent verifying registries, came instead to my window and asked me, over a glass of sherry he did not touch, whether I had ever heard the name.
I had. I had heard it twice, in fact, attached on each occasion to a different young lady of fortune in two different countries, both engagements broken off within weeks of the gentleman discovering that the fortune in question was smaller than he had been led to believe. I gave Holmes the names, the dates, and the name of a hotel in Brussels where the man could generally be found between engagements, and within a fortnight the whole business had collapsed without a single word of it reaching a newspaper. It was, I have always thought, a kinder service to the young lady than a public scandal would have been, however much better a copy the scandal would have made for me.
Holmes thanked me with a courtesy I found, at the time, faintly startling. Most men who came to my window wanted something from me and resented wanting it. Holmes never resented anything he found useful. I came, over the years, to recognise this as one of the rarer qualities in a man of his intelligence.
Another time he came was worse, and I have never told anyone the whole of it until now.
There was a woman, whose name I will still not set down even on my deathbed, married into a family old enough that their portraits went back further than their fortune did. It had come to my ears, through a lady's maid I paid a good deal better than her actual employer did, that this woman had once, some years before her marriage, borne a child out of wedlock in a small town in the north, a child given up quietly and never spoken of again.
I had the story sitting in my files for the better part of a year, waiting for the moment when it would be worth the most to print. That is a cold way to describe what I did for a living, but it was an honest one, and I have never seen the use in pretending otherwise to myself even when I pretended it to everyone else.
Holmes came to me not about the woman at all, but about her husband, who had died suddenly and whose family suspected poison, though no doctor would put a name to it and no evidence existed beyond a general unease that Holmes, characteristically, took a good deal more seriously than the family's own physician had. He asked me what I knew of the household, and I told him what I knew, which included, eventually and reluctantly, the matter of the child.
"That is not what killed him," Holmes said, when I had finished, in a tone I remember precisely because it was not the tone I had expected. I had expected interest, perhaps even a certain professional gratitude at so juicy a fact laid so neatly in his lap. Instead he looked at me for a long moment with an expression I can only describe as disappointment, though I could not, at the time, have told you in whom.
He was right, as it happened. The husband had died of a heart weakened by drink and worry over debts that had nothing whatever to do with his wife's long buried secret, and Holmes proved it within the week to the family's satisfaction and the coroner's. But he came back to my window afterward, alone, and said something I have turned over in my mind more times than I care to admit in the thirty years since.
"You had that story sitting ready before I ever asked you a question, Pike. You were waiting for a use for it. I would prefer you found no use for it at all."