Dust and Shadow Read Free Page B

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:
    Mr. Holmes,
    You are a clever one. Arent you? No matter that you may be devillish clever you may be the very devil, but not so clever that Mr. Nobody doesn’t see you. Yes, I see you clear enough, and I may also
    See you in Hell
    Sooner than you think, Mr. Holmes.
    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