It was about now that the two genius detectives, Mr. Jeb of the Star and Professor Dare of the University of London, made an interesting discovery. They hadn’t the slightest idea what to do next! The actual detecting part of detective work was utterly beyond them!
We looked at each other, almost daft with disbelief. Did we follow the suspects? Did we hire professional investigators? Did we attempt to burglarize their home quarters? Did we interview their neighbors? Did we hire thugees to knock them down and rifle through their wallets and any other personal papers while they were unconscious? Did we research them at the British Museum? Did we . . . At that point, we more or less ran out of possibilities.
“You’re the practical one,” said Professor Dare—the site was his study, we were drinking some foul tea his Scots maid had assembled for us from terrier piss, he was smoking, and I was not.
“Sherlock Holmes would hire boys to watch each man,” I said. “He is a great believer in the skill of urchins as opposed to coppers in matters of observation.”
“That name again! Who the devil is he? Must find out.”
“You would find it interesting, as in so many ways you resemble him. As for this here and now, I do believe the more people we involve, the more difficult the thing will be to manage, much less keep secret. For that reason, I would also avoid private inquiry specialists. One cannot control whom others speak to and what gets known generally.”
“Well-made point,” allowed the professor.
“All right, I would say as follows. In the morning, you station yourself at the MacNeese house, and when he leaves for work, you follow him at a discreet distance. Perhaps you could address your wardrobe accordingly, as such fine tweed so well tailored is rather conspicuous.”
“I’m rather a dandy,” he said. “I hate to give up on it. Dressing well is its own deep pleasure. But if you insist.”
“I shall never insist, only suggest.”
“Excellent policy,” he said.
“You stay with him, determine what kind of employment he’s found, and if it’s open to the public, enter and discreetly observe. In the meantime, I shall go to the Hall of Records, find a clerk to run his name through various municipal filings, see what can be learned of his financial situation—I would infer that from taxes paid—and make other determinations, such as police records, birth records, marriage certificates, and so on, all traces of him recorded by the government. Then I shall go home and nap for several hours. You, meanwhile, stay with him through his return home.”
“Seems amenable,” he said.
“I will rendezvous with you at a spot outside his place at nine P.M. You will then be off and, well rested, I will remain on station until, say, two A.M., following him anywhere he goes.”
“Yes, I have it. I will work one long day at the detective’s trade; you will work two half long days with a break in between.”
“On the following day,” I said, “we’ll exchange schedules.”
“No, no,” he said. “Since you’re so damned good at fetching records, you might as well return to the municipal seats and do similar searches on the other two. At a certain point, say three days hence, we’ll meet and consider next moves. Does that feel efficient? And if Major MacNeese proves uninteresting, we’ll quickly move on to Major Pullham, time being an element in our urgency.”
“Very good. If there’s any ‘promising’ behavior, we’ll mark it and make a determination then.”
“Yes, remember that Jack, by my theory, is a scout first and foremost. If he has a plot running, he’ll reconnoiter first. That should be behavior easy to recognize and give us ample preparation time. He never improvises; he’s got it all well thought out in advance.”
Excellent plan. However, in practice it was not nearly so neat. What we hadn’t figured on was the utter boredom of detective work, and for highly cognitive men with playful imaginations always on the lookout for spontaneous wit, unusual images, irrational occurrences of moment, the odd cloud formation, a beautiful face, a well-cut suit, a particular shade of color on the hubcap of a cabriolet, a tone in the air that reminded one of a particularly thrilling passage in Wagner, all the little irrelevancies that life regularly throws up to the overbusy of mind, the ordeal was degrading, exhausting, and excruciating. Detectives we might be playing at, but detectives we were not. We were either too intelligent or too silly.
Major MacNeese was married with two small children. His wife was a beauty but of a class that probably would have prevented a further rise in the army or society even had he not gone off on s/ID. He had secured, through connections, a fine job as assistant supervisor of the shipping department of the East India Company and therefore worked in their extensive rooms located immediate to Canary Wharf. It was such a fine job, surely a thousand a year, and it came to him so quickly that we quickly concluded it was part of some larger arrangement. We believed that his true employer, using his contacts, was an intelligence department attached to some governmental concern, army, foreign office, some tiny room in a Whitehall cellar, and he was possibly in charge of shipping men of low repute or criminal intent, purloined military documents, currency for payroll of spies, perhaps guns and powder, even dynamite, into or out of Britain under the guise of his civilian career. That made sense but was not terribly interesting, for a shipping executive of secret dynamite is still first and foremost a shipping executive. Ho-hum, and pardon me for nap time.
Major Pullham was more interesting. His employment, again gotten no doubt through contacts, was with the manufacturing concern of Jacoby, Meyers & Devlin, which specialized in selling various metal accoutrements to the army, such as mess-kit items, lanyards, belt buckles, and water bottles. Since he was the cavalryman of high renown—8th Irish Hussar, recall, with all those initials scattered in his name’s wake—he knew all the generals of horse and all the procurement processes and was able to maintain his firm’s contracts for horse-related metal implements, such as bits, spurs, cinch buckles, and so forth, that kept the British hussar and light or heavy horseman firmly in saddle as he galloped through waves of Pathan, whisking them down with the sharp edge of his Wilkinson. Pullham had married above station to a wealthy and connected woman and was a sort of smooth charmer, being a handsome man with good manners, a courtly fashion, a ready wit, and a comfort that eased his way among the betters of society with whom he mingled on a daily basis.
The third fellow, Colonel Woodruff, was probably the bravest but also evidently the most severe. He lived alone, a dull little man in black, mainly, and had no true employ except his own intellectual curiosity. He spent his days in the British Library reading rooms (I had never noticed him, nor he me), where he was quite happily compiling the first English-Pashto dictionary and grammar, a document that was needed desperately by at least four other human beings on the planet. As I say, drab, with a clerk’s mien. However, he was an old hand, having been east since 1856, survived the siege of Lucknow during the Great Mutiny, and commanded a battalion of foot of the 66th at Maiwand, which stood off several separate horse charges; when our positions were broken, he was able, by shrewd land navigation and language skills, to get all his survivors back to Kandahar. Not satisfied with that accomplishment, he went back into the field in mufti and, for a week after the battle, brought stragglers back in. Then he and he alone made the desperately dangerous journey to Kabul, where he became Fred Roberts’s head scout and led the Roberts relief column back to raise the siege at Kandahar. It was he, on the night before the battle, who scouted the Khan’s positions and made Roberts understand how to attack. After the rout, he was awarded the VC for that, although he could have been awarded it for any of the actions of the previous week. After all of that, he went s/ID for the next full five years, doing God knows what in the high Khyber Mountain passes. To look at him, you’d have thought he owned a teashop or was a third-grade railway clerk.