It had been three years to the day since this world lost its champion and I my best friend. Surely you have read the many accounts in the papers, and perhaps my own feeble attempt at prose wherein I described the titanic and fateful battle between Professor James Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
As had become my habit on a Sunday, I sat in the cemetery on an iron bench and contemplated the many adventures I was fortunate enough to share with Holmes. Some of those have been committed to paper and thus shared with the public, while others remain unwritten and untold—a few because they revolve so heavily around the person of Sherlock Holmes that I do not have the heart to write them out, and others because I know that Holmes did not want them told. Perhaps he might have agreed in time, but he did not feel that the world was ready to shine a torch into some of the darkest and strangest corners of our world.
I occasionally brought the notes to some of those unwritten papers with me when I came to sit on my bench near the empty grave. It is perhaps a foolish and overly sentimental thing, and a case can be made that grief has to some degree unfastened the hinges of my reason, but I took comfort in being there, reviewing case notes as Holmes and I had done in our chairs on opposite sides of an evening fire. I would read through the notes I had made in pocket diaries, or on any stray sheet of foolscap that came to hand while we were engaged in the hunt. Some of those pages were smeared with ash, others with rainwater, spilled wine—even blood. And so it took some effort to decode my hasty and obscured notes, and in doing so I was with my friend again, and we were on the case.
On a particular Sunday morning I was deeply immersed in a set of extensive notes on a matter Holmes and I had left unfinished. He often had more than one matter in hand, and would advance each a little at a time when one of his experiments yielded reliable results, or the reply to a telegraph arrived, or information came from his network of spies. Even I, his closest friend and confidant, had but an inkling of all of the many problems which occupied Sherlock Holmes. More than once he would tell me that he had solved a crime about which I had no idea he was even considering, and we would while away an evening with wine and pipes while he recounted the details. Many times he would lay out the facts but withhold the solution, then challenge me to properly assess them and deduce the likely outcome. I pride myself on saying that more than a few times I was indeed able to come to the right conclusion, and in such instances Holmes would favor me with a smug smile, and I knew that he took pride in my ability to make sense of it all. And that is fair enough, for was our friendship not in many ways an apprenticeship wherein he attempted to school me on the finer points of observation and investigation? If I was a slow apprentice, in my own defense I say that any student may appear a dullard when the teacher is so exceptional.
Most often, I admit, even when he laid out the facts for me, there was some element, often an apparently trifling detail, that I dismissed and yet which proved crucial. In one such case it was the way rose petals had settled on the surface of spilled wine; in another the paucity of blowflies was the key. At times like those, I felt like a feckless and inexperienced knight seated next to Lancelot at the table.
Thinking about Holmes on that particular Sunday morning created an ache in my chest. Sometimes his absence is most keenly felt. Not merely because of the case notes in hand, but because of the flowers that lay on the green grass of the empty grave.
It was not unusual for someone to lay flowers on the grave of so great a man as Holmes. It was far more uncommon to find no bouquet or token, for there were very many people whose lives he touched. However the usual tribute is a clutch of hothouse flowers tied with ribbon and laid with a degree of ceremony before the marble headstone. Not so on this occasion. This morning, as on one or two other mornings over the last few months, I found a handful of wildflowers thrown haphazardly across the grass. They were of a kind I felt I should know but could not name. White petals surrounding anthers of a singular bright blue.
I bent to gather the flowers and did my best to arrange them into an acceptable bundle, but I am no artist with such things and the result was clumsy and inelegant. Even so, I placed the bouquet on the grass and stood for a moment with my fingers lightly touching the cold marble. Then, with a heavy sigh I turned, intending to reclaim my seat on the bench—only to discover that not only was a new occupant ensconced on my very seat, but he held my sheaf of case notes.