Evaluating Sherlock Holmes turned out to be somewhat more... involved business than I'd expected, even after all the warnings. Without doubt, he was a singularly dedicated man.
'Ow.'
I was used to the sight of body fluids, even my own, and to experimentation, even somebody else's, but there were limits.
'It's for science!'
And for someone who purportedly hated repeating himself, Holmes surely had his own favourite sayings.
'How can it be for science if you are doing the same thing for the umpteenth time!'
'I'm replicating.'
'I'm replicating the results.'
'I can see that.'
'You were suspiciously silent for a second there,' he observed, carefully counting out drops of my blood into the test-tubes filled with water. After that, he reached out in my general direction, and I handed him the iron filings that would (or would not) doom the Haemoglobin Test.
The filings occupied a matchbox ('Why can't I use the envelope? It is so much more efficient.' 'It's my envelope.' 'But science -'), and the matchbox was almost full. Seeing him gently separate a few of them with a feather, I tried to estimate how many tests he was going to run.
Now, I might not invent steam engines in my leisure hours, but quite suddenly, an interesting idea popped into my head.
'Holmes?'
'Ye-es?' He added the final reagent and timed the reaction.
'Do you know how much blood a body contains?'
'Certainly. Aha! It works! In this range of dilutions, at least. Let us see if the colour dis-ap-pears...'
Valiantly, I struggled on through the previously undisturbed - even by the 'great mind' - area of doubt and uncertainty.
'Maybe, um, it works, but not, er, how you want it to.'
'What?'
Holmes straightened out, staring at me in a bemused fashion.
'Maybe it can show you, well, any blood, not just human?' Not just mine and yours, I was tempted to add. Mostly mine. 'It would be evidence, but evidence of what?'
There was a moment of silence. There was a moment of his eyes widening, and then narrowing, and then widening again.
There was a moment when I wondered if staying at Baker Street really was a good decision.
'Why... that's a great suggestion, Watson.'
'Huh?'
He spared a glance at the rack of cloudy test-tubes, licked his lips, turned on the spot and was gone in a blink, and I heard him run down the stairs and out into the street.
I put the filings away, sat down to my journal and tried to ban the visions of a ravaged London Zoo.
Science demanded sacrifices. Sometimes, it rewarded them with knowledge.
Holmescience, well, it simply never disappointed.