The retired paint dealer
The retired paint dealer is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories by the British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and it is also one of the 12 stories from the collected series Sherlock Holmes' Book of Cases .
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Sherlock Holmes has been hired by a retired paint dealer, Josiah Amberley of Lewisham , to investigate his wife's disappearance. She met him with a neighbor, Dr. Ernest Ray, and a considerable amount of money and stocks left. Amberley demands that Holmes track them down.
Since Holmes is too busy with another case at the moment, he sends Dr. Watson to Lewisham to watch as much as he can, although Watson is well aware that this is more of a Holmes area. He does his best to see Amberley busy painting his house, which even Watson finds a little strange. He also sees Amberley's wife's unused theater ticket. The fact is that Mrs. Amberley and her young boyfriend disappeared while Amberley went to the theater alone after his wife complained of a headache. Watson makes a note of the seat number.
Watson also sees Amberley's vault, from which his wife stole the valuables. The room reminds Watson of a bank vault. Apparently she had had her own key copied. He meets a lazy man with a more military appearance in the street, and later Watson sees him running late to a train at Blackheath Station while Watson himself is on his way to 221b Baker Street . Holmes recognizes the man from Watson's description. It's Holmes' crime-fighting comrade: Barker. It later emerges that Ray Ernest's family hired Barker to find the missing doctor.
A number of other things about Amberley are obvious. First, Amberley is a curmudgeon and, as such, is very jealous. Second, he's an avid chess player (just like Ernest, because that's how they met), from which Holmes concludes that he's also a clever man.
Holmes suspects something, so he uselessly sends Watson and Amberley to a small village in Essex to get Amberley out of the way of his investigation, while he breaks into Amberley's house to investigate. He is "caught" by Barker, but the two agree to work together.
Together they come to a solution. On this basis, Holmes later confronts Amberley with the dramatic question: “What did you do with the corpses?” Holmes succeeds in stopping Amberley from taking a poison capsule just in time. Obviously Amberley is guilty.
Holmes gives his conclusions. Amberley's alibi fell apart the moment Holmes discovered that his seat at the Haymarket Theater was unoccupied on the night in question, the seat number he derived from Watson's information about Mrs. Amberley's ticket. In addition, the painting was a guide. Holmes knew Amberley was brushing to mask another smell and he soon discovered what that smell was: gas. He found a gas pipe that leads into the vault and that has a tap on the outside of the room. Holmes concludes that Amberley lured his wife and her lover, Amberley thought Doctor Ernest was one of them, into the vault, locked them up, and turned on the gas. He killed both of them out of jealousy. He had simply hidden the "stolen" valuables somewhere. In pen and ink, one of the victims wrote, "We were ...", perhaps about to write, "We were murdered."
The bodies are found in a disused well in the garden that is hidden under a dog house. Where Holmes had advised the police to look.
Amberley, apparently believing that Holmes was "a pure show-off," believed that no one but himself could ever find the dead.
Holmes believes Amberley is likely to find his end on Broadmoor rather than on the scaffold .