ring had been found. Not only was the household’s joy at the ring’s return buried under their misfortune, but to my friend’s evident satisfaction, so was their curiosity at its initial disappearance. Gregson’s case thus remained regrettably inconclusive, but once the ring had safely arrived via Scotland Yard escort from London at Blackheath House, the good inspector’s spirits had risen enough to compliment the private detective on his “extraordinary luck.”
Stretched upon the settee two weeks later, I was engaged in a medical journal when I heard Holmes’s familiar step bounding up the stairs and into the sitting room. He held a letter to the lamp bemusedly, then with a motion of indifference tossed it onto a formidable stack of documents near the bookshelf.
“Holmes, I do believe you’ve Irregulars* who are shorter than that monstrous pile,” I observed.
“Mmm?” he queried distractedly. “Oh, I hardly think so. Little Graves has had an extraordinary bout of growth since you saw him last.”
I smiled. “What was it, then?”
“The letter?” Holmes stretched his sinewy arm to retrieve it, paused over it for a moment longer, and passed it to me. It was written in vivid red ink in an oddly erratic script, and it read:
I looked up in chagrin. “Holmes, this letter is an outright threat!”
“The tone is rather unfriendly,” he conceded, digging for tobacco in the depths of his Persian slipper.
“What do you intend to do?”
“Do? Nothing. Your correspondence is not, perhaps, quite as vivid as is my own. When I inspect the mail, desperate for a case worthy of my time and my talent, I all too often find instead the ramblings of the fanciful spinster or the lyricism of the bored newlywed. I’d a priceless example from Brighton last week which I must show you—”
“You have not the slightest interest in this bizarre missive?”
“To my deep discredit, I’ve known far too many criminals not to expect this sort of thing occasionally,” Holmes countered irritably. “It is written on cheap foolscap, posted in the East-end of London, no marks of fingers or other identifying features. What am I to do with it? Queer enough hand, though. I’ve hardly seen one like it.” He scrutinized the page.
“What steps can you take?” I asked once more.
“The best of all steps, my dear Watson—to throw it in the dustbin.” He tossed the paper in the general direction of his desk and forcefully steered the conversation to Richard Owen’s work in the realm of philosophical anatomy.
It was only the next afternoon, when I noticed Holmes’s commonplace book open on his desk, that I realized the letter had not been discarded but pasted carefully under “Miscellaneous Posts.” I meant to inquire of Holmes whether he had discovered any clue to the matter, but my fellow lodger’s abrupt arrival with an urgent appeal from Camberwell drove the matter from my mind entirely.
CHAPTER ONE Two Crimes
It has been argued by those who have so far flattered my attempts to chronicle the life and career of Mr. Sherlock Holmes as to approach them in a scholarly manner that I have often been remiss in the arena of precise chronology. While nodding to kindly meant excuses made for me in regards to hasty handwriting or careless literary agents, I must begin by confessing that my errors, however egregious, were entirely intentional. Holmes’s insistence, not to mention my own natural discretion, often prevented me from maintaining that exactitude so highly prized in a biographer; I have been forced to change the dates of marginal cases to disguise great ones, alter names and circumstances, all the while diligently preserving the core truth of the events, without which there would have been no object in writing anything at all. In this instance, however, any obfuscation would be absurd, as the facts are known not only to the people of London but to the world. I shall therefore set down the entire truth, as it happened to Holmes and to myself, omitting nothing that pertains to the most harrowing series of crimes my illustrious friend and I were ever called upon to solve.
The year of 1888 had already proven significant for Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for it was in that twelvemonth that he performed valuable services for one of the reigning houses of Europe and continued forestalling the activities of Professor James Moriarty, whose hold over London’s underworld grew ever more apparent to my friend. Several highly publicized investigations that year displayed Holmes’s remarkable skills to the public, including the appalling affair of the faulty oil lamp, and the matter of Mrs. Victoria Mendosa’s mysteriously vanishing thimble and its consequences. My friend’s talents, which had once languished in obscure specialism, in that year flamed into the most gratifying notoriety.
Despite the busyness that accompanied Holmes’s ever-increasing reputation for omniscience, we found ourselves at home on that evening in early August, the day after Bank Holiday, Holmes performing chemical analyses of an American snake venom which had recently proven itself a nearly untraceable poison, and I engaged in a perusal of the day’s papers. To my delight, the skies above the buildings burned with that most elusive of all elements, the London sun, and a brisk breeze fluttered about the windows (one of which I’d opened as a safeguard against Holmes’s chemical efforts), when an item in the late edition of the
“I cannot begin to understand,” I said to no one in particular, “what could drive a murderer to such total desecration of the human body.”
Holmes, without looking up from his work, remarked, “An argument could be made that the ultimate desecration of the human body is to end its earthly usefulness, which would imply that all murderers share equally that specific charge.”
“This is rather beyond the pale. It states here that some poor woman, as yet unidentified, was found stabbed to death in Whitechapel.”
“A deplorable, though hardly baffling occurrence. I imagine that she worked the area for food, drink, and daily shelter. Such pitiable unfortunates are particularly likely to inspire crimes of passion in the men with whom they associate.”
“She was stabbed twenty times, Holmes.”
“And your unassailable medical assessment is that once would have been enough.”
“Well, yes,” I faltered. “Apparently the villain continued to slash at her long after she was dead, or so the pattern of blood indicates.”
The detective smiled. “You are a gentleman of the most sympathetic character, my dear Watson. While you would possibly—for I have seen you do it—condone a crime of passion committed in the throes of despair or of vengeance, you can see nothing permissible about such morbid abuse.”
“I suppose that expresses it.”
“I confess I cannot imagine myself in such a rage as to batter my victim beyond all sense either,” he admitted. “Is there anything further?”
“The police know nothing yet.”
Holmes sighed and pushed aside his scientific materials. “Would you and I had the power to make all of London safe, my good man, but for the moment, let us leave our musings upon the depths to which our fellow citizens can sink and instead explore whether or not we have time to make a seven-thirty curtain for Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E Minor at the Royal Albert Hall. My attention was directed to the second-chair cellist by my brother Mycroft, and I should be grateful for your company while I observe the gentleman in his natural habitat.”
