“I have no idea,” I confessed. “Do you believe me?”
He gestured to the clothes. “I have known you too long to believe that you are a prankster, Doctor. And we have these.”
We sat and wrangled over it for hours, but we got nowhere. Our final conclusion was that I had been the victim of a particularly elaborate and cruel joke. I felt like a fool, and in low spirits I left his office and headed to my empty house.
It was only when I reached my own door that the last and strangest thing occurred, for there, tucked into the knocker of my front door, was yet another example of that strange, delicate, and enigmatic flower, Leontopodium alpinum Reichenbachium.
There was no note and I was left to interpret it however I would like. I nearly crushed the cursed blossom and snatched it up to do that very thing, but in the act of commission I paused and then relented. Instead I bore it inside with me and put it in a teacup of water. My mail had been delivered and I sorted through the various bills, notices, letters, and magazines in an attempt to distract my troubled mind. There, half buried by the detritus delivered by the postman, was a small envelope addressed in a familiar hand. I opened it quickly to confirm that Mycroft Holmes had sent it and it was an invitation to attend a lecture at a club in the city. I frowned, for it was not Mycroft’s custom to seek out my company. Nor was I in the habit of attending any events with him, lectures on travel the least of all. The invitation had been to hear of the recent travels of a Norwegian by name of Sigerson.
Mycroft’s addendum to the advertisement was a hastily scrawled, “You might find this of particular interest.”
He was wrong. I did not, and I threw the invitation onto my desk and promptly forgot about it. Full dark had come upon the city and I retired to my sitting room with a cold piece of meat pie and a tall bottle of whiskey. I built a fire and placed the teacup with the flower on a table so that I could see it in the firelight.
What did it mean?
Who was the man who pretended to be Auguste Dupin?
In hopes of discovering some clue to my mystery I read again “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as well as the other two Dupin stories from a book I purchased that evening from a tiny bookshop at the corner of Church Street. However if there were answers to be found in Poe’s writing it was beyond the reach of my perception. So, I closed my eyes and thought of Sherlock Holmes, dead these three years. Gone with so much left undone. Gone, with so much wreckage left behind. The recent murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair was but the latest of the matters which I feared the police were mishandling and which Holmes would have attacked with great zeal and singular insight.
“Why have you left me here to do this alone?” I asked aloud. As if he could hear me. As if his ghost would even care.
In the silence, I drank my whiskey and watched the firelight trace the edges of the flower.
The house around me felt as dark and immense as the night.
LIMITED RESOURCES
by Denise Mina
Three hundred alcoholics clinging to a rock. That’s what our neighbors call our island. It’s only partly true. There is drinking, there’s no getting away from that, and we can be a bit wild, but the good side of island life is how close we are. People here look after each other. If you’re a native, like me and Margie, your fates are forever intertwined. We support each other, an insult to one is an insult to all, one person’s win is everyone’s win. Outsiders are outside. Incomers, well, that depends on the person. Shirley is an incomer.
We are the northern-most habitable island in the UK. Maps show us in a wee box in the corner, an addendum to the main map, because they’d have to show miles and miles of sea to include us. We are a meeting place for two seas and an ocean: the North Atlantic, the Norwegian Sea, and the North Sea. It’s windy. You know where you live is quite extreme when people visit on a dare.
They arrived on New Year’s Eve. Three of them. Head to foot in all-weather clothing, driving from the ferry with a Range Rover full of equipment. They walked into the baker’s shop when it was full of us locals. Everything shuts down for three days when the year turns and we were all giggly and excited. They looked like spacemen. You could hardly see a patch of skin on them. Hoods up, hands double-gloved, trouser legs tucked into ￡300 all-weather boots.