“He has never been very well off, if that is what you mean. Neither of us has. But it did not appear to be causing him any particular anxiety. On the contrary, he seemed more cheery than I had seen him before.”

“His health?”

“First rate.”

“He is not married?”

Our visitor shook his head. “He lives alone in a little house just off Camberwell High Street. It was to there I went to look him up when I returned to England last week. We have never corresponded with any great regularity, but during the last three months he has not replied to any of my letters, and I wished to know why. If he was in difficulty of some kind, I wished to help him if I could. I have a key to the front door of his house, so I was able to let myself in. Inside, the apartment resembled the Marie Celeste: everything was in perfect order, the table in the dining room neatly laid for a meal, but of my brother there was no sign. The only circumstance that gave indication that Simon had not simply stepped out of the house five minutes before my arrival was the large number of letters lying in a disordered heap upon the doormat. All the letters I had sent in the previous three months were there, together with dozens of others. I quickly sifted through them and established that Simon had not been in the house since the third week in January.”

“Your brother kept no domestic staff?”

“He lived very simply. A local woman came in once a day to attend to cleaning and similar duties.”

“Did she have her own key?”

“No. My brother always admitted her himself in the morning before he left for town, and when she had finished her work she would lock the door with a spare key, which she then posted through the letter-box. I found that key on the doormat.”

“No doubt you have interviewed her?”

“I have tried to, but without success. It appears she left the area some time in February, and no one there could tell me her present address. They did tell me, however, that she had been more annoyed than puzzled by my brother’s disappearance. She presumed that he had simply gone away on business and forgotten to inform her of the fact, and he had left owing her a little money, according to the local sources.”

“You say you found the table laid for a meal,” interrupted Holmes. “Could you tell, from the disposition of the cutlery and so on, what sort of meal this was likely to be?”

“I am afraid I did not notice,” returned Boldero, his features expressing surprise at the question.

“That is a pity,” remarked Holmes, shaking his head.

“I cannot see that the point is of any significance.”

“Nevertheless, it is. It might, for instance, have indicated whether your brother’s housekeeper had expected him to return that day, or to stay away for the night. Were you able to establish more precisely the date of his disappearance?”

Boldero nodded. “In his study was a copy of the Daily Telegraph, dated Thursday, 17 January, which had clearly been read; and on his desk was a note he had written to remind himself to do certain jobs on Friday, 18 January. Simon often left himself such aides-memoires. When he had done the jobs in question, he would cross off the items on the list. None of the items on the note I found had been crossed off. I take it, then, that he was last in the house on the seventeenth.”

“Excellent!” cried Holmes. “Your observation is commendable! Were everyone so thorough in their attention to detail I should soon find myself without work!”

“I have the note here,” said Boldero, producing a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. He passed it across to Holmes, who studied it for a few moments, then handed it to me. The items listed were all of a domestic nature and unexceptional: “Baker – see again. Pay wine merchant – enquire about sherry. Settle butcher’s bill for the month”.

“I have spoken to all the tradesmen mentioned in the note,” Boldero continued. “None of them could recall seeing Simon on the day in question, which confirms what I thought.”

“That may be interesting,” remarked Holmes in a thoughtful voice.

“I should hardly have called it ‘interesting’,” responded Boldero in a tone of surprise, “except that it indicates that my brother had the same mundane concerns as everyone else at the time of his disappearance.”

“That was not my meaning,” said Holmes. “Pray continue. You have made enquiries, I take it, at your brother’s professional chambers?”

“Indeed. There I learned that he had informed his colleagues he would be taking two weeks’ leave of absence from 14 January. He did not say why he required this, but they understood that he was engaged upon some legal research. They could shed no light whatever on his prolonged disappearance, and had all the time been expecting to hear from him with an explanation. I subsequently made thorough enquiries at the police station and at all the hospitals, in case Simon had met with an accident, but learned nothing. It appeared that my brother had simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Then Beatrice – that is to say, Miss Underwood, my fiancée – suggested that I try my cousin Silas, to see if he had any information on the matter. I thought it unlikely, as Silas is practically a recluse, going out very little and receiving visitors even less, and I was not aware that my brother had had anything to do with him for years; but in the absence of any other direction for my enquiries, I agreed to take myself off to Hill House, at Richmond upon Thames, which is where Silas lives.

“I perhaps ought to tell you a little about Cousin Silas, and about the family in general, so you will understand the situation. You may have heard of my great-grandfather, Samuel Boldero. He was one of the last of the great eighteenth-century merchants, and made a fortune in trade. Indeed, he was reputed at the time to be the second wealthiest commoner in the country. At his death, all his wealth passed equally to his two surviving sons, Daniel and Jonathan. Each of these two had, in turn, one son, Enoch and Silas respectively. Enoch Boldero was my father.

“Unfortunately, my father and grandfather quarrelled and became estranged, and when my grandfather died, when I was an infant, it was found that he had virtually cut my father out of his will altogether, and had left almost all he possessed to his nephew – his late brother’s only son, and thus my father’s cousin, Silas.

“Cousin Silas, as you will therefore appreciate, is very wealthy, having inherited the entire Boldero fortune, half from his own father and half from his uncle, my grandfather. My brother and I hoped, without being at all avaricious, that a little, at least, of this enormous wealth might perhaps find its way to us, especially after my father’s sadly premature death, which left us in some difficulty. By the time we had established my mother and my sister, Rachel, in a small house at Tunbridge Wells, near to my mother’s relations, we were left with practically nothing. Simon was endeavouring to pursue a career in law, and was attached to Nethercott and Cropley, a firm of solicitors in Holborn, but he was finding his lack of money a distinct handicap. Recalling that Silas had himself followed a similar career for a time in his younger years, Simon thought that his cousin might feel some sympathy for his position. He therefore appealed to Cousin Silas’s generosity. Unfortunately, Silas does not have any. Every excuse one could conceive was brought in to explain why he was unable to help. The best he felt able to offer my brother was a small, inadequate loan, offered for an inadequate period of time and at such an extortionate rate of interest that one could easily arrange a more favourable loan any day of the week in the City. Needless to say, Simon did not take up the offer. That was about four years ago, since which time, so far as I am aware, there has been no communication between them. I have myself seen Silas but once in that period. Last August I took Miss Underwood and her mother boating on the Thames, and knowing that our way would take us past Richmond, I proposed to Silas that we pay him a call. He received us into his house for an hour, but I cannot honestly say that he made us welcome. Miss Underwood formed a very poor impression of him, and the whole episode was an acute embarrassment to me. I had wanted her to meet Silas, as he is the senior member of the Boldero family, but my chief concern afterwards was whether, having seen what my relations were like, Miss Underwood would be permanently prejudiced against me.”