It was blowing hard, a wind that was both fresh and soft, a wind that announced the beginning of a new season, spring. We could hear the birds singing early in the morning, a few cars were driving on the streets of Lyon in the distance. A young boy was sitting on the railings of a stone bridge, just above the train tracks. He was contemplating the sky, the beautiful shades of this creation that he had admired since his early childhood, the same sky that had accompanied him since his first breaths and that he was now about to join.
"There is nothing left for me down here, after all..."
He said to himself, trying to give himself all the reasons in the world to do it, the most tragic and saddest act a man could resort to, suicide. He was both eager to get the peace he had been looking for, but his heart was also fearful. He didn't know what was on the other side, the side of the dead souls. His hands were shaking, his breath was burning his insides, his heart was weighing, and his conscience kept screaming at him the suffering he had endured these past months, all the pain that he had decided to stop this very morning.
"Why am I so afraid to do this? Changing my mind will only prolong my suffering, there's no point..."
He shouted at the part of his brain that wanted to talk him out of taking the step. He was still waiting for the alert, the one that will mark the end of his life, the sound of an approaching train, it was the only thing he wanted to hear. His hands continued to shake, he didn't know if it was because of the slight cold caused by him going out in his T-shirt or because of the most significant fear of his life.
He continued to admire the city, this beautiful and peaceful city that he kept romanticizing morning and night, on each of his trips to the university, this great city that didn't lack anything to do and yet was like a calm river, a river that was rarely disturbed. The young student smiled at the irony of fate, he who enjoyed being a simple citizen of the city, who led his life like everyone else, now became the target of hatred of the city, a target to whom a reputation was given that could hardly be revoked.
The most horrible memories woke up again, of that fateful day that changed the course of his existence forever, of those looks of disgust, of hatred, of that distance, that gap that had been created between him and the rest of the world. He had seen a part of human nature that he did not think he would see, at least not as a prey.
These were the memories of a boy who saw with his own eyes his parents throw him out, his friends insult him, some hit him. This was the boy who saw his mentors, his teachers, give him those looks, looks filled with a desire to make him disappear from their lives. This was the boy who was hated by strangers who only knew his name and face and yet had subjected him to physical and mental abuse from which he could not immediately recover.
The more these events were repeated in his head, the more he was convinced of it, he had no more place, neither here nor elsewhere, simply because he had no more will to live. His image was tarnished and he himself no longer believed in who he was.
At that moment, everything was going through his head, his favorite music, his past moments. He was thinking about the sleepless nights he spent studying, the vacations at many beaches, the skiing sessions during the nicest winters, the pleasant morning visit to the bakery. The sequence of his memories had no head or tail, he was just remembering life, noticing that now there were none of these memories in which he could take comfort because he had lost everything.
The morning wind was pushing on his back, making his hair waltz forward. He could hear the train tracks begin to shake little by little and a noise difficult to distinguish becoming louder and louder. At this time of the day, he knew perfectly well that this noise could only represent one thing, the time had come.
Soon after a train going full speed appeared around a curve in the distance, heading straight for the young boy, its route passing right under the bridge.
"I hope at least that these last moments will be painless."
He said, looking up to the sky and taking a deep breath, he only had one thing to do, push himself forward when the time came, everything else would take care of itself, he had nothing to fear after that, it would all end quickly. His heart was shaking to the point of wanting to explode, the amount of stress was immense and he knew that if he kept thinking about it all he would never take the step. He had to clear his mind and go for it, it was the only way to get the peace he was looking for.
The train was getting closer and closer, the tracks were shaking more, the sirens were sounding, he swallowed his saliva more than once, his eyes fixed on the snake in front of him that was coming at full speed as if it was charging at its prey.
"Sorry I dared to exist... you bastards..."
He said to himself, spitting out his anger at all those people who ruined his life, the life of an innocent soul caught in a scandal the likes of which one rarely saw. He pushed himself forward, realizing that now it was unstoppable, screaming with fear but also with relief, a mixture of hatred, peace, regret, all his emotions were concentrated in one point, his thoughts were running at high speed as his body was now in the void.
But just as there was nothing left to do, two hands reached out and wrapped themselves around the boy's torso, holding him up as the train slid under the bridge like a snake entering a cave. They were the hands of two adults whose bodies were half suspended over the bridge, a few more inches and they would have fallen with the boy.
"You got him Watson?"
"Yeah it' good, come on let's get him up slowly on 3. 1...2...3!"
Suddenly the two adults applied all their strength to the boy and pulled him up halfway. Once they were back on the ground, they used both arms to pull him up completely.
"That was a close one!
"Well, that was close."
"Fortunately you were able to find out where he was in time."
"It was elementary, my dear Watson, even if luck smiled on me too."
"You, who do not believe in luck, I am surprised to hear you say that."
"I don't believe in luck when it comes to deducing my dear Watson, on the other hand, when it comes to verifying each of my theories, it is appreciated, it saves us time, which here was crucial."
The two men were talking to each other while the boy was confused, his mind was convinced that nothing more could be done and that he would die for sure. To find himself back on the other side of the bridge was a miracle for him, a feeling of tiredness and anger rose in him.
"What happened?"
Watson, who was still in the middle of a discussion, interrupted it to turn to the young boy. He put a hand on his shoulder and placed his gaze at the same height to show that he was not hostile.
"We are glad we came in time, my boy. You are now saved."
He didn't understand who these people were and what they were doing here, but that didn't stop him from getting angry at those words.
"Save me? Who are you kidding here! You call that saving me?! All you've done is drag me back into this hell! Do you know me?! Do you know what I'm going through?! Do you know the courage I had to muster to hope for peace?! Did you think about me at all or did you do this just to satisfy your little moral compass?! Tell me!"
He shouted into the ears of these gentlemen he didn't know, frustrated that he couldn't put a stop to it, still finding himself on the streets of this city that had robbed him of the pleasure of life.
One of the two men, with a Fedora on his head, a beautiful mustache worthy of a gentleman from another era wearing a long jacket reaching down to his legs and a high fashion suit, was the one talking to him, one knee on the ground, his hand on the boy's shoulder. He was of medium height, strongly built.
Further away, a tall man stood watching the young boy. He had a neutral expression on his face, wore a modest white shirt with a sleeveless vest over it and a long coat hanging over his shoulders.
Whether it was their shoes, their clothes, or the way they looked, these two men were very distinguished, one would almost think they were from another time.
"Please be a little nicer to my friend. He almost lost his hat that he cherished so much to save you."
Said the man standing in an eloquent tone, as if he were reciting a play.
"Holmes, this is not the time."
"I think a young man who was on the brink would take a little bit of fun in his life."
"Yes, but still..."
Watson lowered his head, throwing a few glances at the young boy, feeling bad to see him in such a situation. The boy was still confused and frustrated, but a certain calmness was settling over him. For the first time in several weeks, he felt as if two men were looking at him without judging him.
"Who are you? Did you see me by chance? I should have chosen a more discreet place..."
"My name is Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. And my dear friend is Dr. John Watson.
"Consulting detective? Are you from the police?"
"Not quite, we assist the police usually but are independent and help other guests too."
The man who was standing answered his questions, no hesitation or emotion coming through his voice.
"If you are with the police then...you must know me..."
"Yes, we know you well, that's how we found you."
The little calm that had settled in his mind evaporated immediately, these men knew him and not just a little, if they were with the police then they knew everything about him. Those looks that seemed once neutral seemed to be filled with judgment again.
"You were chasing me then...? Why did you bother to save me, you know what I did right? Wouldn't you have liked to see me leave your world?!"
Holmes withdrew his hand from his pocket and leaned back against the bridge barriers, his gaze focused on the beautiful sky that was getting brighter by the minute.
"We didn't chase you. We didn't even know you the night before last, if I found you at all it was by deduction."
"By... deduction?"
"You're a student accused of killing his teacher, witnesses saw you being in her room and according to the security cameras no one else but the two of you were in the corridors around. Everyone understood that it could only be you, but... the trial took place and no material evidence outside of this combination of circumstances could determine that there was a direct connection between you and the murder, so you were cleared. Cleared in the eyes of the justice at least, for the society it is another story, you are the only one guilty in their eyes, people do not know how you did it but they know that you did it. As a result your reputation has been completely destroyed and this newsworthy case has made you one of the most popular people in this town, but not in the way you would have preferred."
The young boy clenched his hands around his chest, he didn't need another person to remind him of all those events again, they were already running on a loop in his head.
"What does that have to do with me being here?"
"It was one of the many obvious facts. You are a young boy in one of the most difficult situations anyone could be in, you have lost everything and you have nothing to live for as the investigation is at a standstill, no new leads have been found and your reputation continues to be the same. It is even going to get worse since the absence of new elements increases the probability that you are really the culprit. All of this is pushing you over the edge, it would be natural to think that a person like you, who no longer leaves his room and only eats junk food from the grocery store next door, doesn't really want to know what the next day is made of. So I deduced that you wanted to end your life sooner or later."
"How would you know that if you weren't following me?"
"I deduced everything this morning when I looked at your apartment. Nothing was cleaned, everything was on the floor, traces of fat, salt, sugar, spilled juice, papers thrown to the side, it was as if the whole apartment was a trash can. I had noticed some pills out of a box, they were sleeping pills. Considering the amount out of the box, it was clear that you wanted to consume them all at once, it would be a peaceful way to end it but you hadn't."
"You broke into my apartment?! How?"
"I have to say, students don't live in luxury so your doors are pretty easy to crack. Anyway, the actual question to ask is: why hadn't you taken those pills and where had you gone?"
"The fact that I didn't take them didn't mean that I had given up, I could have simply delayed my attempt."
"That's true. But you had bought those pills that morning, it was written on the bill that was inside the bag. Why would you suddenly, in the middle of the morning, give up and leave your house? Surely it wasn't to go and admire the beautiful view one last time, someone in your state of mind wouldn't be capable of that in such a desperate situation. That was when I found it, on the table."
The boy thought for a few seconds before realizing it.
"The letter..."
"Yes, a letter under a box, a letter in which you had written all your feelings, all your disgust for this society that had not tried to elucidate this case and had been happy to follow what they were told. It was at that moment that an idea came into my head: you still wanted to end it, but you wanted your farewell to leave a legacy. You wanted society to remember their mistake. Thus, you wanted to kill yourself near an iconic place. There were several options: the university where it all began, the police station, or in front of a city institution like a town hall."
" ... "
"Our first instinct had been to move to the town hall, which was closer to your apartment, except that there was no trace of you and you certainly weren't going to kill yourself inside, the detectors wouldn't have let any knives through and you couldn't have taken your pills because someone would have contacted the emergency services right away and your attempt would have failed."
"You've gone that far in your reasoning..."
"This is all just a logical progression of things to tell the truth. That left us with two other potential locations, at least according to our hypothesis. We knew we were running out of time so we had to make a choice between the police buildings and your university."
"And so? I was saved by a fluke? That's what you said earlier, that you were lucky."
"Not quite. Our choice of the University was not random. As I pondered which destination to choose, a new logical reasoning had formed. You had several ways to kill yourself at home, like knives, but you had preferred to take pills. You didn't want to suffer, you had already suffered enough, so that meant you couldn't really kill yourself in front of a police station, you didn't have any peaceful means to do it with you, all the pills you had bought were at home, I counted them, so what means were you going to use? It was then that I understood. The train path that went by the university. It was a logical choice, it was quick and painless, plus everyone on the train was going to witness the tragedy, it would be an affair that could not be hushed up. You wanted people to talk about it, you wanted the students who arrived at the university this morning to have your suicide engraved in their memories, they who had abandoned you."
The boy couldn't believe it, his entire thought pattern had been traced in detail through simple clues, nothing had been left to chance. He didn't know that such thinking was even possible. Swallowing his saliva a little, not quite convinced yet, he insisted on the chance factor.
"All it would have taken was one mistake, one misunderstood detail for all this to go wrong, what would you have done in that case?"
"I was lucky in the sense that my first hypothesis turned out to be right because time was against us. If I was wrong then I would have still insisted on thinking about other hypotheses. This is the whole point of the art of deduction, when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, is necessarily the truth. That doesn't mean that the first hypothesis will necessarily be the right one, but that's one of the most important qualities for an investigator: persistence."
The boy gritted his teeth, hearing him talk that way about investigators was almost comical, persistence? If it was one of their qualities then how could it be that the real culprit of this investigation in which he was accused had not yet been found?
"You're right to think that, and that's the reason I'm here."
"Huh? I didn't say anything."
"No but you are showing it, the body has a language of its own. You hate justice, the police, investigations, this system has failed you."
" ... "
"As I was saying, that's the reason I'm here. I read the investigation file and I believe you. I'm certain you're not guilty and the reason I stopped you from killing yourself is because I'm going to find him, the real murderer."
