Sherlock Holmes and the Last Recall (Paperback)

Paperback. 3,826 characters of the 4,000. Here it is to read: He kept bees for eleven years. Then a letter came.July 1914. Dr John Watson has not seen Sherlock Holmes in more than a decade - not from any quarrel, but from that slow attrition by which two men who were once inseparable become correspondents, and then acquaintances who mean to write. The summons, when it arrives, is three lines long and admits no refusal: come to Sussex, at once, because Holmes needs something that no other man in England can supply.Watson does not know he possesses it.In September 1902 a retired naval commander was found dead in a bolted study at Dover, a revolver on the floor beside him, and the inquest occupied a single afternoon. His sister was not called. His physician was not called. A naval surgeon who had known him eleven years wrote to the coroner and received no reply. Holmes has known for twelve years that it was not suicide, and he has known something worse: that the man who arranged it sat in the Baker Street sitting-room on the evening it was set in motion, three yards from Watson's chair, while Holmes gave his whole attention to somebody else.Holmes looked at him twice, and both times as an interruption.Watson, bored behind an evening newspaper, looked at him for twenty minutes.What follows is not a chase, and there is very little detection in it. It is four days in which two elderly men go round to the people who have been carrying pieces of this for years without knowing what they were, and ask them to put it down.A seventy-two-year-old average adjuster in a City office lined with four hundred deed-boxes, who was recruited in 1876 by a man who paid his debts and asked him for nothing, and who has eaten thirty times at the table of someone he cannot describe.A kindly official at the Board of Trade who has given away nothing whatever for five years - sailing lists, who handles what, who has gone up and who has come down - and who understands, far too late, that a man who has collected five years of nothing knows more about how the country works than he does.A widow in Dover who has lived since 1900 on forty pounds a quarter from a firm of solicitors, and who saw her drowned husband step out of a bank in Cannon Street in 1907, and told two people, and was believed by neither.Not one of them is the better for having helped.And at the centre of it stands Watson himself. For eight years he has been the physician of a man with no name, no face and a crushed left hand - a patient he has liked, dined with, and proposed for his own club. Consultation by consultation, in his own careful clinical hand, he has kept an eight-year record of that man's travels, his sleepless nights and his distresses, and never once suspected what he was keeping.The recognition, when it comes, is not Holmes's. It is Watson's, and it costs him everything he thought he understood about the way he does his work.Set against the last days before the declaration of war, The Last Recall is a story about obligation rather than villainy: about how ordinary decent people are recruited not by money or treachery but by kindness they cannot repay, and about what it means to discover that the very faculty which makes a man good at his profession is the one that was used against him.It is the tenth of the Watson Manuscripts - narratives recovered from a sea-chest held in the vaults of a firm of solicitors in the City of London, presented as Watson set them down. The chest holds some forty years of paper in no order whatever; this is simply the latest in event of those so far edited, and by a distance the most unsparing. Watson wrote it for nobody, kept it back from publication, and made no attempt in it to protect himself, or Holmes, or the reader.A c Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…