***

We were seated in front of a roaring coal fire back at Baker Street, cheered further by a glass of hot toddy and a stacked plate of sliced beef sandwiches, when at last I turned to Holmes and put to him the question I had wanted to ask a good half an hour before.

“So, was it the Danish King who told you about Archibald Cartwright’s business affairs?”

Holmes rolled his whisky glass between his palms and looked across at me with a sly grin. “I did not think for a moment that you would leave the matter to rest, Watson. And the straight answer to your question is ‘Yes’. The king is clearly a man who likes to keep abreast of current affairs, both at home and abroad. In a quiet moment, he asked me what cases I was working on. Without giving it much thought, I mentioned that I was assisting Scotland Yard on a murder case in one of London’s most prestigious new office buildings. ‘That must be the strange occurrence at Ravensmere Towers,’ he said, before going on to say that he had read the piece in the Daily Telegraph.

“I could not deny that they were one and the same, to which the king added: ‘You may not be aware of this, Mr Holmes, but my son knows Archibald Cartwright, the owner of the building. In fact, the two of them were at Eton together and it was he who first encouraged Valdemar to begin investing in some of these perilous financial schemes in Canada. Cartwright has recently been ruined by his own property investments in Newfoundland. Clearly, I do not know the circumstances surrounding the death, but would not be at all surprised if the man had a hand in it.’ It seems he was not wrong, Watson.”

“No, and a very timely and useful piece of information, I’d say. That ceremonial luncheon wasn’t such a waste of your time, after all,” I quipped.

He looked up to the small presentation box on the mantelpiece and grinned again. “As ever, you are right, my friend.”

3. A Study in Verse

While Sherlock Holmes was a prodigious reader of books on a wide variety of subjects, it would be fair to say that he was rarely interested in anything of a fictional or romantic nature. While professionally he revelled in the unusual, the unknown and the generally inexplicable, his taste in literature was categorically prosaic. It therefore came as something of a surprise to find him reading a book of poetry when I called in to Baker Street one afternoon in the September of 1895.

“Now, there is a sight I have rarely witnessed,” said I, entering the upstairs room and noting the small volume of Japanese Style Short-Form Poetry he held in his long thin fingers. I was tickled at the notion that Holmes should be reading something so avant-garde. I took a chair close to the fireplace and waited for an explanation.

“Watson! A pleasure to see you on this bright, autumnal day. Your eyes have not deceived you, my friend. I am indeed reading, and enjoying, this fine collection of verse. Ordinarily, I cannot see any virtue in the rambling and meandering lines which pass for poetry in our literary culture. Our best known writers seem to take great delight in saying in a few hundred disorderly words what a dictionary compiler might neatly summarise in a dozen. I read to get the nub of an issue, to be told all that I need to know in as few words as possible. Poetry is anathema to my ordered and focused mind.”

“Come then - what is this collection you seem so thoroughly engrossed in? I have never heard of Japanese style short-form poetry.”

“We have much to learn about ancient Japanese culture, my friend. And the Asian approach to poetry has much to commend it. For centuries, the Japanese have perfected the art of stand-alone hokku verse, which sometimes serves as a prequel to a much longer composition. More recently, some writers have begun to adapt hokku poetry into a more concentrated, shorter form of poetry, which may typically juxtapose two distinct refrains, usually on a theme of nature. Masaoka Shiki, a young writer in his twenties, uses the term haiku to describe this new approach.”

I was still not sure I fully understood what was so different about this haiku poetry, so asked him to elaborate further.

“I first came across the literary form while reading Hendrik Doeff’s Recollections of Japan. You may remember that he was a former Commissioner for the Dejima trading post in Nagasaki, which the Dutch East India Company held on to in the early part of this century despite our British claims to the territory. Doeff was the author of a Dutch-Japanese dictionary and was the first westerner to pen some of this short-form poetry.

“A haiku poem strips away all but the bare essentials of the verse and follows a rigid, highly-structured, layout. Perhaps the best known form is a verse of three lines which contains exactly seventeen syllables. The first and last lines have five syllables apiece, while the middle line contains no more and no less than seven. The art is in presenting a poem which conforms precisely to the accepted arrangement, with no superfluous words or syllables. Short, specific and to the point, a form of poetry I can appreciate.”

“And is this a collection written by Mr Doeff?” I asked.

“No, his early attempts were, at best, experimental. The adoption of haiku poetry in Europe has moved the art on significantly beyond his stanzas. What I am particularly interested in, within this slim volume, is a section on crime-related haiku, written by a young poet called Edwin Halvergate. He manages to describe a fictional murder and within the same verse provides clues to the identity of the killer. Let me give you an example.”

Holmes then read aloud:

“Man shot for money.

Robber - Daniel, Tim or Kyle?

Killer in denial.”

I looked at him bemused. “Well, it is certainly a short poem Holmes! Let me look at it on the page.”

He got up from his seat and came across to me with the book, holding it up and pointing to the relevant verse. I read it to myself and then said: “So, the man is killed during a robbery and we have three suspects, each of which claims to be innocent of the crime. The poem then invites us to guess who the killer is.”

Holmes chuckled. “That’s it, Watson. You have it. See how the short-form does not obscure the key facts. But the verse is not inviting you to guess who committed the crime - it tells you. Look at the last line: ‘killer in denial’. Yes, it’s telling us that the suspect denies murder, but ‘denial’ is also an anagram of Daniel. He is the guilty man.”

“Very clever, Holmes,” I mused. “Let me have another, now that I’ve got the gist.”

Holmes flicked on a couple of pages and picked out another poem:

“Jane dead - knew killer.

Initial clues point to him.

Mark, Kane, Fred or Jim?”

This time I worked through the logic of the key facts. “We have another murder. This time, of a lady called Jane, who evidently knew the person who killed her. The poem again gives us a number of suspects, based on some early clues. But I’m guessing in this case that ‘initial clues’ has a double meaning. If we look at the initial letters which begin each line, they spell out the name of our murderer - JIM. How’s that, Holmes?”

“Perfect! Of course, these are but introductory examples of Halvergate’s craft. His haiku get more intricate and complex as one progresses through the book. But then I would expect no less, given that Edwin Halvergate is not only a talented poet, but also a gifted logician who once studied under Professor Moriarty.”

I recoiled at the name. “Then your poetry reading is not for idle pleasure. Has this Edwin Halvergate followed Moriarty into a life of criminality?”

Holmes returned to his chair, closed the book and placed it on a pile of other manuscripts and papers to his left. “I am afraid so. He is fast becoming a major player in the criminal underworld of the capital. I have heard it said that he is trying to emulate his one-time academic mentor and resurrect the evil empire that Moriarty once led. It is my personal mission to prevent that from happening.”