Rain had been falling heavily all night, and the morning brought no respite. It was a bad storm even by London's standards, slowing traffic to a crawl and swelling the banks of the River Thames by nearly a metre. Nobody went outside unless absolutely necessary, and so it wasn't until the rain died down that someone called the police, reporting what appeared to be a body in a blanket floating down the turbulent river.
By the time the police found the corpse, the tide had fallen and left its macabre cargo behind on the banks. It must have looked like a strange sort of funeral: a dozen hunched figures in giant Wellington boots and bright yellow raincoats with bold letters spelling out "Metropolitan Police" on their backs, ambling slowly around a human-shaped bundle of sodden rags on the banks of the river in the late afternoon. "Must've fallen in the river," commented one to his peer.
"No," came the dismissive reply. The speaker didn't look up or elaborate, he was quite focused on running his hands gently along the torn edge of the blanket in which the body was wrapped.
"Well it could've been," protested the first speaker, clearly affronted by the response.
"Yeah," chimed in another woman, "might've had too much to drink."
"He wasn't drunk," said the one feeling the blanket. He had moved on to examining the soles of the shoes of the deceased with a small magnifying glass.
"It's more likely than not," retorted the woman impatiently, allowing frustration into her voice. She sneered down at her contrarian colleague's efforts. "And poking at his shoes won't help."
"Oh, but it will," he replied serenely. He circled around the corpse, carefully fished its left arm out of the soggy blanket, and peered through his glass at each fingernail. The woman scoffed and opened her mouth, but the sound of an approaching siren stopped her. She looked up to see an ambulance pulling over on the side of the road next to them. "Come on," she said, pointing at the body. "We need to get him out of sight before we draw a crowd. The autopsy will wait."
The man studying the corpse looked up sharply. "Why would you care about drawing a crowd?" he demanded.
"You know what I mean," she snapped. "Let's get him on the stretcher."
"I know exactly what you mean," he said shrewdly, rising to help her and several others move the body onto the stretcher provided by the ambulance. Then he turned back to her, holding out an ID card. "I don't think you look like a Joseph," he said, glancing from the card back to her. "But I do think you already know this boy wasn't drunk when he died."
Her face went white as she clutched at the pocket where the card had been moments before. She began to slowly back away. "You'll never catch me," she breathed. Then she turned and ran.
Sherlock Holmes smiled wryly. "We'll see about that."