About this story
An old friend takes you to a hospital laboratory to meet a man who has just perfected a test for old bloodstains and needs someone to split the rent on rooms in Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes reads your history from your bearing, and within a day a telegram arrives: a dead American in Brixton, no wound, one word written in blood. Six chapters follow the case to a caller in a shawl and a second wall with the same word on it.
How it opens
The Afghan campaign had returned you to England thinner, wounded, and alone.
Eleven shillings and sixpence a day vanished rapidly in a private London hotel.
StamfordDoctor? I thought the surgeons had buried you somewhere beyond Peshawar.
StamfordThen lunch is the least civilized remedy I can offer.
Choose
I need rooms cheaper than this hotel.
I need quiet more than company.
I need work my strength can manage.