LEGAL DISCLAIMER
As publication of the following document is likely to result in extensive press coverage, my client has instructed me, in the interests of historical accuracy, to record fully the circumstances pertaining to its first public appearance.
In early 1997 I was contacted by my client to ascertain the legal standing and financial worth (if any) of some shares that had recently come into her possession after the death of a distant relative. Although such a request was outside my normal legal purview, as a long-standing friend of her family I felt obliged to help in this matter pro bono. At this point I must stress that my client was prompted to make her request through simple curiosity and not from a wish to profit financially from the legacy. The inheritance consisted of one hundred full shares in the firm of Cox and Company (Limited). However, after an investigation of some days at Company House I discovered that Cox and Co. was a middling banking institution that had ceased trading in 1973. The one hundred shares were thus rendered worthless.
My excitement may be imagined, therefore, when in 1999 I received a call from Company House informing me that renovation work at the former head office of Cox and Co. in Charing Cross had discovered some materials which seemed to belong to the firm. A workman, in installing under-floor heating, had uncovered a battered tin box bearing the legend "John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army". Wishful thinking though it may have been on my part, I hoped that the box (later identified as a Victorian dispatch-box) contained the good doctor's accounts of Sherlock Holmes's unpublished cases. My anticipation was followed by keen disappointment once the box was shown to be empty.
I took possession of the box, now little more than a historical curiosity, and personally delivered it to my client as the sole proceeds from her shares in the defunct Cox and Co. My client, though of sound mind, is unfortunately not as dexterous as in her younger days and allowed the box to fall from her lap and onto the floor. At first, the blow seemed to have done nothing more than add to the box's collection of dents and scratches, but on closer inspection I perceived a hairline crack along the inner face of the lid. The crack proved to be the edge of a secret compartment that contained a typewritten manuscript wrapped in waxed paper. To our amazement, the document appeared to be a previously unknown work by Ian Fleming documenting the career of the intelligence agent James Bond. Textual scholars and historians are free to disagree, but after reading the papers it seems to me that no-one but Fleming could have written such an account; any imitator of his breezy style would surely commit numerous literary faux pas, for such is the fate of second-rate hacks everywhere.
It seems that for reasons known only to Ian Fleming, employed as Bond's ghost-writer and executor of his literary estate, the manuscript was not forwarded to his regular publishers but instead was deposited in the offices of Cox and Co. at Charing Cross. One possible explanation may lie in the long-standing rumour that James Bond was a descendant of Sherlock Holmes. Speculation among Holmesian scholars follows two schools of thought; that Bond's father, the Scotsman Andrew Bond, was the offspring of a liaison between Holmes and the adventuress Irene Adler (whom Holmes always referred to as "the woman"), or that he was conceived during Holmes's three-year withdrawal from public life, commonly known as the Great Hiatus. Although pointing to nothing conclusive, the discovery of a Bond document in a box belonging to Holmes's closest friend does give food for thought. I have been unable to establish more than a circumstantial link between the two men, but the possibility of a blood link has not yet been discredited.
The only documentary evidence is the brown folder, labelled "Head of Archives: For Information Only", which contained the loose-leafed pages. It is marked with a red star (significance unknown), below which appears the prefix, "To Whom It May Concern" written in freehand. The phrase "For Your Eyes Only" is stamped, rather carelessly, across the first page of the text. The text itself is unsigned and undated, but reading between the lines it is safe to assume that it was written some time in the late 1950s. It may be supposed that the story was thought too sensitive for publication, or that Sir Richard White, the then head of MI6, suppressed the file.
On contacting SIS (formerly MI6), I was told that the relevant files regarding Bond had been lost in the move from Regent's Park to the organisation's new headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. If that is the case, one can only hope that more files from the Double-O Section are extant, wherever they may be, and that future researchers and academics might unearth more information about this shadowy figure of Cold War Britain. The full implementation of the Freedom of Information (UK) Act by January 2005 should further the cause of those seeking to bring to light previously classified information.
To her credit, my client took the brave decision to publish the text, feeling that the public had the right to know what was contained within. Despite numerous rebuffs from the British establishment and, I must record, a quite disgraceful attempt to discredit her good name, she has remained resolute in her decision. So tortuous has been the legal process since the discovery of the manuscript that there have been times when I wished that I had never heard the name of Cox and Co. Despite favourable legal rulings in both the High Court and the European Court of Human Rights, publication was continually blocked by the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence, who claimed that any publicity involving SIS jeopardised national security. Fortunately, this year's phased commencement of the Freedom of Information Act tipped the balance decisively in my client's favour.
Whether the alarming events in the following narrative ever actually took place must again be a matter for conjecture. One must remember that Sherlock Holmes frequently complained about Dr Watson's embellishment of what he saw as academic treatises; it is for the reader to decide whether Ian Fleming (a former member of the intelligence services who specialised in misleading the enemy during the Second World War) was guilty of the same offence with regard to Mr Bond.
William Makepeace Q.C.
December 2004
(Revised October 2005)
Cayman Islands
