Sherlock Holmes In Montague Street Volume 3 by Arthur Morrison

Author:Arthur Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sherlock Holmes, mystery, crime, british crime, sherlock holmes short fiction, sherlock holmes fiction
ISBN: 9781780926841
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2014
Published: 2014-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Case of the Lever Key

I.

In some of the cases which we now know to have been connected with the Red Triangle, there was nothing, in the first place, to show any such association. In some of these cases the connection has become apparent only since the final clearing up of the whole mystery, and with these cases we have no present concern; but in others it revealed itself during the investigation of the case. It was to this second category that the next case belonged - the next at all connectible, that is, after that of the mysterious death of Mr. Jacob Mason and the flight of Everard Myatt.

The case was remarkable in other respects also; first, because in one of its features it had a resemblance to the case of Samuel’s diamonds, which first brought the Red Triangle to Holmes’s notice; next, because in its course Holmes encountered what he declared to be the most ingenious and baffling cryptogram that he had ever seen in the length of his strange experience; and thirdly, because I was the means of placing that cryptogram in his hands, owing to one of those odd chances that arise again and again in real life - are, indeed, so common as to pass almost unregarded - and yet might be thought improbable if offered in the guise of a mere story. Holmes has often alluded to the curious persistence of such chances in his experience. I think I have elsewhere mentioned a certain police officer’s prolonged search after a criminal for whose arrest he held a warrant, ending in the discovery - because of a misdirected call - that the man had been living all the time next door to himself; and I have also told of the other detective inspector, who, being sent in search of a criminal of whom he had but the meagerest and most unsatisfactory particulars, and whom he scarcely hoped ever to run down, actually fell over the man as he was leaving the office where he had received his information, in the doorway of which the fellow had stooped to tie his shoe-lace! But, as Holmes would say, nothing but the exceptional nature of the surrounding circumstances makes these things seem extraordinary. What more ordinary experience, for example, than to meet a friend in some London street - perhaps one friend of the only dozen or so you have among the four millions of people about you? The odds against you two, of all the millions, choosing the one street of the thousands in London to walk down at the same minute of time, would seem incalculable; and yet the chance comes off so often as to be a matter of the most ordinary experience.

On this occasion I was expecting orders from my editor to produce certain articles on the subject of the London hospitals. It will be remembered that the matter was very much in the air then, and as nothing is professionally more uncomfortable than

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