Holmes looked at me for a moment in a way I had come to recognise by then, the look he gave a fact that had landed somewhere it was not expected to land.
"That is your sister's husband," he said. It was not a question. I have never worked out how he knew, and I never asked, since I did not, that evening, trust my own voice to ask him anything at all.
"It is," I said.
"You have known this for some time."
"I have."
He did not press me on why I had said nothing. I have thought since that this was, in its way, the kindest thing he ever did for me, kinder than solving the case, kinder even than catching my brother in law before the whole thing collapsed on my sister's head with no warning at all. He simply went and did what he would have done regardless, unwound the fraud with the same cold thoroughness he brought to every case, and arranged, in the quiet way he had a real gift for arranging things, that Coombe should be given the chance to resign his position and disappear to the Continent rather than face the prosecution the law would otherwise have entitled him to, on the single condition that he sign over what remained of the family's assets to my sister before he went.
She never knew Holmes's part in it. She believes to this day, so far as I am aware, that her husband simply lost his nerve and fled a scandal of his own making, which is true as far as it goes. I have never corrected the impression, since the alternative would have required explaining to her that her own brother had known for a year and said nothing, and I did not have the courage for that conversation, dying or not, then or since.
I have wondered, over the years, what it was that made Holmes willing to deal with a man like me at all, since he was famous, even in my own circle, for a certain fastidiousness about the company he kept, and I was never, by any reasonable account, respectable company. I asked him once, directly, over the last glass of sherry I believe he ever accepted from me, some years before his retirement.
"You gather information the way I gather it, Pike," he said. "The only difference between us is what we do with it afterward, and I have never found that a very interesting difference to hold against a man, provided he is honest with me about what he intends to do on any given occasion."
I asked him whether he considered himself, in that sense, my equal or my better, since I had always privately suspected the second and wondered whether he shared the suspicion.
He smiled. He did that rarely enough that I remember every instance of it with more clarity than I remember most conversations I have had in my life. "Neither, I think. You have built your whole trade on knowing what people wish to hide, and so have I. But you sell what you know to whoever will pay for it, and I sell mine only to whoever, in my own judgment, deserves the truth. That is not a moral difference, Pike, whatever the vicars would have you believe. It is only a difference in customers."
I have chewed on that sentence for the better part of two decades since, and I confess I am no closer to deciding whether he meant it as a compliment, an insult, or simply the plain fact he generally intended his sentences to be, since Holmes was rarely a man who dressed his meaning up in more than it required.
There were other cases. The affair of the Belgian consul's missing nephew turned out to concern nothing more sinister than an elopement with an actress the family considered beneath them, and it resolved simply because I knew which theatre the actress was currently engaged at, a piece of knowledge that cost Holmes considerably less legwork than watching every railway station in London. The matter of Lord Finsbury's forged letters very nearly ruined a marriage. It was settled once Holmes traced the forger to a disgruntled former secretary who had, through channels I will not now explain, recently taken rooms well above his evident means off the Tottenham Court Road. The business of the missing regimental colours was not, strictly speaking, a society matter at all, but it touched enough old military families that word of the theft reached my window before it reached Scotland Yard, a fact Holmes found, I think, quietly instructive about the true speed of information in a city as thoroughly wired together as London had become by the end of the old Queen's reign.
I mention these not because any one of them was, on its own, remarkable, but because taken together they amount to something I never quite let myself add up while I was living it. For the better part of thirty years, one of the sharpest minds London has ever produced came, again and again, not to Scotland Yard, not to his own brother in the government, but to a lazy, well fed gossip in a bow window who had never solved a single case in his life and never wanted to, because I could tell him, faster than any official channel in England, exactly what human beings actually did when they thought no one of consequence was watching.