Knife Edge

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Dedicated to Gary Howell, Andrew Bird, Keith Solder, Diana Gimber (now Diana Solder), Cliff Shaeffer and Arlene Baxter (now Arlene Harvey), friends in my teenage years and, thanks to Facebook, still friends now. Where did those years go?

My thanks go to Polly Nolan, for yet another sensitive but thorough editing job; to Pedro Albano, for the (in his case unwitting) use of his wonderful name, and to Andrew F. Gulli of the Strand Magazine, for turning down one of the central ideas of the book as a short story and thus allowing me to use it in this novel, but then commissioning me to write something else instead.

Arms wrapped around the taut, sea-dampened ropes, the hemp fibres rough against his cheek, Sherlock Holmes watched from a position high up in the Gloria Scott’s rigging as the ship ploughed through the tumultuous ocean. Above him, seagulls cried like hungry babies. He could taste salt on his lips from the spray that filled the air. He’d lived with that taste for months now. He wondered what life would be like without it, without the constant pitching and tossing of the deck beneath his feet, without the regular crack of the sails suddenly filling with wind, without the constant shouts of the sailors and the orders barked by ship’s First Mate, Mr Larchmont.

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