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    invention, of course) and begin this great labour, I know that
    I am likely to fall short of the standards of accuracy and
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    entertainment that he maintained to the end. But I have to
    ask myself – how could he have got it so wrong? How could
    he have failed to notice inconsistencies that would have struck
    even the most obtuse police commissioner as glaringly obvi-
    ous? Robert Pinkerton used to say that a lie was like a dead
    coyote. The longer you leave it, the more it smells. He’d have
    been the first to say that everything about the Reichenbach
    Fal s stank.
    You must forgive me if I seem a touch overemphatic but
    my story – this story – begins with Reichenbach and what
    follows will make no sense without a close examination of the
    facts. And who am I? So that you may know whose company
    you keep, let me tell you that my name is Frederick Chase,
    that I am a senior investigator with the Pinkerton Detective
    Agency in New York and that I was in Europe for the first –
    and quite possibly the last – time in my life. My appearance?
    Well, it’s never easy for any man to describe himself but I
    will be honest and say that I could not call myself handsome.
    My hair was black, my eyes an indifferent shade of brown. I
    was slender and though only in my forties, I was already too
    put-upon by the chal enges life had thrown my way. I was
    unmarried and sometimes I worried that it showed in my
    wardrobe, which was perhaps a little too wel worn. If there
    were a dozen men in the room I would be the last to speak.
    That was my nature.
    I was at Reichenbach five days after the confrontation that
    the world has come to know as ‘The Final Problem’. Well,
    there was nothing final about it, as we now know, and I guess
    that just leaves us with the problem.
    So. Let’s take it from the start.
    Sherlock Holmes, the greatest consulting detective who ever
    lived, flees England in fear of his life. Dr Watson, who knows
    the man better than anyone and who would never hear a word
    said against him, is forced to admit that at this time Holmes
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    is at less than his best, utterly worn out by the predicament in
    which he finds himself and which he cannot control. Can we
    blame him? He has been attacked no fewer than three times
    in the space of just one morning. He has come within an inch
    of being crushed by a two-horse van that rushes past him on
    Welbeck Street; he has almost been hit by a brick that falls
    or is thrown from a roof on Vere Street – and, right outside
    Watson’s front door, he finds himself attacked by some good
    fellow who’s been waiting with a bludgeon. Does he have any
    choice but to flee?
    Well, yes. There are so many other choices available to him
    that I have to wonder what exactly was in Mr Holmes’s mind.
    Not, of course, that he’s particularly forthcoming in the stories,
    all of which I’ve read (without ever once guessing the solution,
    for what it’s worth). To begin with, what makes him think he
    will be safer on the Continent than he will be closer to home?
    London itself is a densely knit, teeming city, which he knows
    intimately and, as he once confided, he has many rooms (‘five
    small refuges’, Watson says) scattered around the place, which
    are known only to him.
    He could disguise himself. In fact he does disguise himself.
    Only the next day, after Watson has arrived at Victoria Station,
    he notices an aged Italian priest in discussion with a porter
    and even goes so far as to offer him his assistance. Later, the
    priest enters his carriage and the two of them sit together
    face to face for several minutes before Watson recognises his
    friend. Holmes’s disguises were so brilliant that he could have
    spent the next three years as a Catholic priest without anyone
    being the wiser. He could have entered an Italian monastery.
    Padre Sherlock … that would have thrown his