Jefferson Hope asked for a glass of water. After one was produced, he continued:

“Once, er, John Smith was in my cab,” he said after taking a sip, “I took him to the abandoned house.”

“I would think,” I said, “that he would be surprised to draw up in front of somewhere other than his requested destination, which I presume to have been the boardinghouse where he was staying. I further think his sense of surprise would not be a happy one.”

I also thought: Why is the dog letting me ask all, or at least most, of the questions?

“You would think that,” the prisoner said, “as most people would, and usually you’d be right. But, er, John Smith was always a greedy man – even his inheritance upon the deaths of the Furs was not enough for him. All I had to do was concoct a story about there being a bag of gold stored in the abandoned house, a bag of gold so big it was too heavy for just one man to carry. I offered to share half with him if he would help me get it all away.”

I shook my head at this. “Greed,” I said. “It always gets greedy people in the end, doesn’t it?”

“It does indeed,” he said. “Of course, once I’d led him far inside the abandoned house, I whipped out the wedding ring and waved it in his face so that he’d finally know who I was. And then I waved something else.”

We waited.

And waited.

His cliffhangers were even worse than Bones’s! And in his case and condition, was that really wise? If he let the cliff hang too long, he might be dead before he finished his story.

“Now,” he said, “about that something else I waved. Here’s something I perhaps should have mentioned earlier. I had obtained – again, I won’t tell you from who – a certain amount of poison. Then I got some regular pills. I put the poison in two of the pills and left the other pills alone. Then I got two little boxes. In each box I put one of the poisoned pills and a bunch of regular pills. Are you with me so far?”

How could I not be? It was not exactly rocket science.

“I then compelled, er, John Smith to select one of the pills,” he said.

I did wonder what form that compelling had taken.

“Just to be fair,” he said, “I told him I would take one too. I can be as sportsmanlike as the next guy. Maybe he’d die. Maybe I would. Maybe no one would die.”

In that moment, he seemed so cold-blooded.

“As it turned out,” he said with a shrug, “he died. And very quickly I might add. Unfortunately, in my excitement and haste to get away, I accidentally dropped the ring, Lucy’s ring.”

“And you returned to the scene of the crime in an effort to get it back,” I said, “but you couldn’t because the police – not to mention Bones and myself – were already there.”

“That’s right. Although, as you know, I did get it back later. In the meantime, having gotten rid of, er, Mr. Smith, I went to the boardinghouse where I knew only the Secretary was now staying on the second floor. Although even I’m not tall enough to reach into a second-story window, there was a handy ladder nearby. Once inside, I gave the Secretary the same choice I’d given, er, John Smith, only using the second box of pills this time because the first box no longer contained any poison.”

He made it all sound so matter of fact.

“Sadly,” he said, “or perhaps not so sadly, the Secretary refused to go along with the you-choose-a-pill-first routine and he physically attacked me. I was therefore forced to do away with him in a different way which I can’t say I minded that much, given he’d been the one responsible for the death of my beloved Lucy’s adopted father. I stabbed him.”

There was something about his next pause that made it clear he was coming close to the end, in more ways than one.

“Later,” he said, “after both of the villains were dead, I thought I’d get away. But then a group of puppies came along. Their leader, a pup who introduced himself as Waggins, asked if I was Jefferson Hope and, when I said that I was, he told me a cab was required at 221B Baker Street. I thought it might look too odd, a cabdriver refusing a fare, so I came. And there you had me.”

Yes. There we had him.

“But there’s still one thing I don’t understand,” I said.

“And that is?” Mr. Hope said.

“You have given decades of your life, even sacrificing your health, and for what? Revenge?”

“You know, Dr. Catson,” he said, his gaze moving to a corner of the room, a faraway look in his eyes as though he might catch one last glimpse of the past there, “before the day I met Lucy, I didn’t believe in love, let alone at first sight. I didn’t believe in it until it happened to me. But that day when I came upon her in trouble on her horse, and our eyes met? I knew I would never want to be without her again, and that she felt the same way about me. And then to lose her, before we could even be married? It was like I died then myself.”

A part of me, having heard his tale, felt profound sympathy for the man. What would it be like to love someone like he had loved Lucy? What would it be like to hold on to that love for decades, over time and great distance, keeping only her in his mind as he sought to avenge her?

As I say, a part of me felt pity. And yet another, bigger part, remembered what Mr. Javier had said as we left the house earlier to come to the station:

“No matter how good his reasons, you cannot just go around killing for revenge. No one should be allowed to do this.”

The turtle was right.