He had not reckoned on a dog. I take a certain pride in that even now, an old dog by the stove with nothing much left to be proud of. He had laid his false trail by the fish market with real cleverness, having read, Dr. Watson said, an account of my finding Jonathan Small three years before, and having concluded, reasonably enough from a man's point of view, that if a strong scent had thrown me off once it might do so again. He had not understood the difference between a smell that moves and a smell that sits, because he was not a dog, and no amount of cleverness can entirely make up for that gap.
They brought him out at last, between them, a thin young man with the specific miserable slump of someone who has spent a great deal of energy on a plan and watched it come to nothing in under two hours. He did not look at me as they passed, which most men do not, but I noticed him all the same, the way you notice, walking past a butcher's window, the one cut of meat you would have chosen if choosing had been any part of your evening's business.
Miss Ellery was brought down to the warehouse before they took him away. I never learned quite why, though I suspect Mr. Holmes had his reasons for wanting her to see the thing through to its end rather than hear it secondhand over breakfast. She did not weep, which I had expected from the lavender fear of earlier in the evening, but stood very still, and said something to the young man I could not hear, and he said something back that made her turn away before he had finished saying it. The necklace was found wrapped in a handkerchief inside his coat, and Dr. Watson gave it back to her with a small bow that struck me as a kindness rather than a formality. He held it out to her as though it might still be warm from wherever it had spent the evening.
We walked home rather than took a cab, which suited me better in every particular, my legs being made for walking and not for the shaking floor of a hansom. Mr. Holmes talked the whole way to Dr. Watson about the false trail by the fish market, turning the man's cleverness over in his mind the way I turn over a bone I have already finished with, out of habit more than hunger.
"He very nearly had him, Watson. If Toby had been a lesser dog, or a more impatient one, that false trail would have carried him clean to the bridge, and the man would have had the whole night to get himself onto a boat."
"But he isn't a lesser dog," Dr. Watson said, and reached down, without breaking his stride, to give me exactly the sort of scratch behind the ear that a dog remembers for a very long time afterward, longer than he remembers most of the meat that has ever been put in front of him.
I went home to Mr. Sherman's that night smelling of tar and river mud, tired in the particular way that comes from four hours of real work rather than the ordinary business of a dog's day, which is mostly waiting. I slept the whole of the following day, I am told, without stirring once even when the cat walked directly across my paws, which she has never let me forget.
I think about that false trail more than I think about Small and his creosote, though Small was by far the more famous case and got me into the doctor's stories while this one never did. Small never tried to fool me. He ran, and I followed, and there was nothing between us but distance and time, which a dog understands the way he understands weather, a thing to be endured rather than outwitted. The young man by the fish market tried something else. He tried to make me believe a lie with my own nose, the one sense I had always trusted absolutely.
I do not know what it says about a dog that he can feel proud of catching a lie, or ashamed of nearly believing one, but I felt both those things exactly once in my life, on the same night, within perhaps twenty minutes of each other, and I have never forgotten either.
Mr. Holmes came round some weeks later, not for work this time, only to see Mr. Sherman about some other matter entirely, and he stopped by the stove where I was lying and crouched down the way he always did, and looked at me for rather longer than the occasion strictly required.
"You very nearly had him fooled," he said, "and then you didn't, which is a better trick than most men manage in a lifetime, Toby, whatever they may think of their own noses."
I understood the sentiments an appreciation, and the hand that stayed a while longer than usual on my head before he stood and went in to talk to Mr. Sherman about whatever business had actually brought him. I have been content, in all the years since, to let that stand as the whole of my reward.
I am heard the young man went to prison for a term of six years and that Miss Ellery married someone else within the year, a solicitor's clerk who Dr. Watson said smelled of ink and nothing worse. I never met him. I have no opinion of him one way or the other. But I like to think, on the evenings when the fire burns low and the cat has finally left me in peace, that somewhere in that house the necklace still sits in its box, and that it smells, if anyone still cared to notice, of nothing sweeter or more foreign than the ordinary dust of an ordinary home, which is exactly as it ought to be.