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Echo Hood – Yeah! We put your name in this to say well done. If you don't want it there, review and we'll take it out.
"A desperate letter!" cried Watson, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice.
"Not exactly, Watson," Holmes informed him, his brow furrowed.
"You don't agree that this Alice Tulerove seems desperate for our help?" the doctor replied, uncertain what to make of his friend's reaction.
"Watson, please do not allow your love of adjectives to cloud the matter at hand. It was not the mood of the letter writer that I was referring to, but rather the object itself."
"Must you always talk in riddles, Holmes?" demanded Watson in frustration.
"Not a letter, my dear Watson, but a simple code."
"Code?"
"Why, yes. The letter is very similar to the one we received in connection with the Echo Hood case."
"Ah?" Watson was intrigued, "Then in order to decipher this code I would take the first letters of any words incorrectly capitalised and…" - he screwed his face up in concentration – "TRUE LOVE? Then this is a matter of the heart!" he finished, flushed with pleasure at both his achievement and the romance of it all.
"Perhaps," Holmes was uncertain, "but if that was the case, why did Miss. Tulerove feel the need to use code?"
"A secret affair, perhaps?"
"Watson, I fear you have been reading too many of your wife's novels." Holmes frowned. Something was nagging at the back of his mind. A memory, half remembered. Half-forgotten, then. But Holmes never forgot anything! His curiosity inflamed, Holmes quickly came to a decision. "We should leave at once for Little Turrets."
"Then you'll take the case?"
"Indeed, Watson! The game is afoot!"
And so the letter, as its writer had intended, lured Sherlock Holmes to Upton. But its writer had also intended the letter to spark a memory. Sherlock Holmes, the writer knew, forgot nothing. And indeed, he did not forget this.
But he did not remember it in time.