Detective Mary

Chapter 56

Surprisingly, it was a letter from Mr. Holmes!

The word surprise no longer describes Mary's feelings at this moment.

Although at the time of parting Sherlock Holmes had promised her a correspondence, Mary did not know where the detective was at the moment, and not wishing to disturb him in his investigations, she put the matter aside for the time being, intending to wait until after Jane's wedding to enquire of Mr. Bentley, now to be called her brother-in-law, as to the progress of the case.

However, I did not expect, not waiting for Mary to write, Mr. Holmes first came to the news.

This made Mary jump up and down, and it was so good! Even Lydia, with her gloomy face, could not dampen her spirits.

On her return to Longbourn, Mary's news was much slower than in London, and she had to take great pains to send letters and parcels. Before she left, therefore, Mary entrusted the sending of magazines to Mr. Holmes to Editor-in-Chief Hall.

After all, Mr. Bentley's friend, the editor-in-chief also knows a little about the case Holmes is investigating at the moment, and when she heard Mary's request, she simply agreed without thinking.

I'm afraid he had contacted the detective beforehand.

Thinking of this, Mary had already guessed the greater part of the contents of Holmes's letter.

She opened the letter, and the detective's stern, decisive handwriting jumped out at her. As Mary had expected, Sherlock Holmes' letter was devoid of any unnecessary verbiage, he greeted Mary briefly as a sign of courtesy, and then went straight to the point.

The detective was now in Paris, and had already located James Moriarty's French agent.

With the help of Mr. Bentley and Mr. Thornton in London, and his acquaintance with the workers in the slums, it was an easy matter to ascertain the whereabouts of Captain Carter.

But it was different in Paris. It was a foreign country.

"With the assistance of my government agents," writes Mr. Holmes, "I have made a breakthrough. It is expected that the list of factory owners who have accepted Moriarty's contract will be available when the letter reaches you."

Which government agent is it again.

When Sherlock Holmes left, he said that in addition to Mr. Bentley, there was a "government agent" who had asked him to go abroad to follow up a lead.

The detective had always scorned the police and other governmental systems, he had always found them useless. Now this government man has been very helpful, and Mr. Holmes reads between the lines to express his approval of him.

Mary felt that even if Mr. Detective had not mentioned who this government man was, she had probably guessed his identity.

But even so, the case was progressing as slowly as she had expected.

Let's hope she can help, Mary muttered mentally, now it's up to Mr. Hamp to see if all that information Mr. Hamp is withholding is of any value, and she doesn't want to make a trip of her own for nothing.

That was the end of the narrative of the case, Sherlock Holmes sketched his adventures while in Paris in a few words, and then with a turn of the pen, and with great efficiency, opened a second subject.

"I read the new issue of the Seaside Magazine." He wrote.

Sure enough.

The fact that the letter had reached Editor Hall was proof that Editor Hall had indeed contacted Mr. Holmes, and naturally, as Mary had wished, had mailed him the new issue of the Seaside Magazine.

Mary instantly tripled her spirits and read down the page.

"It is true that serial killers are not as accurately defined as serial killers," Holmes's handwriting keeled over, "who follow the same motives and similar modus operandi in order to satisfy their own particular psyche, and the term 'serial killer' could not be more aptly serial killers' is a very apt description of such criminals. I'm amazed, Miss Mary, that in a few months of thinking in your study you have done what countless London police officers have failed to do in their entire lives - and that is to define a criminal. You've opened up a field like no other."

Such a compliment made Mary's face flush again, taking credit from the future founder of the BSU, which had actually seemed a little less than ethical to Mary.

In contrast, Mr. Holmes was more impressive. Mary had only thrown out the word "sequence", and he had already linked the mathematical concept to the word "serial killer" in the title, and thus realized Edmund Campbell's motives and operating psychology.

A genius is a genius, and Mary still has a long way to go before she can become like Sherlock Holmes.

"It's easy to foresee the backlash from readers when you explain the term serial killer," the detective affirmed Mary without hesitation, "It's a good thing, miss, a real good thing! The detectives will notice the existence of such murderers, and you have provided me with a good deal of inspiration, but--"

At the sight of that "but," Mary quirked up the corners of her mouth.

Well, Mary admitted that it was the "but" that she was actually expecting.

"In a town where neighbors know each other and know each other well, it's mind-boggling that no one has suspected the whereabouts of the murderer's mother nor dug up the bones in an entire year."

Complimentary as he is, the critical Holmes is equally unflinching: "You yourself grew up in a countryside with limited foot traffic, Miss Mary, and you know the social structure of a small town well. I just can't think of a township scenario that can portray unseen motives and detection methods, or even the living conditions of the workers, that you can't rationalize, such a low-level mistake is really intolerable."

Even if Mary had only been reading the letter, she could clearly feel the emotions of the detective by the last word raised in his handwriting.

If he had been speaking face to face, I am afraid Mr. Holmes himself would have been dancing around and repeating the words "low" and "low as low can be" like a big child.

Mary laughed out loud at the thought.

"This was his first offense," the detective reemphasized, "and according to your description of the crime, the murderer killed his mother in an extremely sloppy manner, leaving behind a great deal of evidence - and yet he was not suspected? How he handled the blood, how he carried the body, you omitted all of them. This omission of clues, while it may emphasize the murderer's skillfulness and thus please the reader, is grossly implausible."

Mary couldn't help but shake her head.

The desperately spiteful Mr. Holmes was adorable, but his advice made perfect sense.

Let's just say it's worthy of being a detective. Even putting aside the IQ gap, in terms of experience alone, the gulf between Holmes and Mary was far from something she could catch up with in three or two days.

She did intentionally omit the clues for no other reason than the fact that the first time the real Edmund Campbell committed a crime, the person he killed was not his mother.

Instead, his mother was the last of all the dead.

Edmund Campbell killed his grandparents when he was fifteen years old, and he entered a mental institution as a result. After regaining his freedom he killed five innocent young girls one after another until, finally, he killed his mother.

The reality is that the devil has a growth trajectory, and he goes step by step into the abyss, each step possessing logic.

Mary, on the other hand, reverses the order of the crimes and erases Edmund's previous convictions, thus disrupting the logic of factual development. She omits clues precisely to cover up the holes created by adjusting the setting and character development.

The genre of detective fiction was just beginning to develop in the nineteenth century. Just as Conan Doyle's basic deductive method seems thin in real cases to today's professional criminal investigators, readers were limited by the technology and vision of the time and were less rigorous in their approach to story logic.

So Mary this set of tactics, deal with ordinary readers enough, but can not escape the experienced Sherlock Holmes himself ...... not to mention Holmes, experienced police officers will also read the problem.

In the final analysis, or their own lack of rigor.

"The first time you put pen to paper, it's still forgivable," the detective concluded, "but don't make a cheap mistake like that again."

That's a bit too much to ask ...... Mary sweated.

But it did point out Mary's shortcomings, and Mary was still glad to have a professional who had no problem offering advice - knowing that in the twenty-first century, a lot of writers begged for it. After all, not all suspense writers, like Thomas Harris, who wrote The Silence of the Lambs, can take their material from the founder of BSU, John E. Douglas himself.

The detective's letters then probably end there.

He ends with a few perfunctory pleasantries, "If you need to contact me, you can send the letter to Editor-in-Chief Hall, who knows who to give it to. As well as if you can, please feel free to go forward to Milton; judging by the situation in Paris, Hamp definitely has more information than he has uttered."

This was the end of the letter, and it was not until after it had been addressed that Mr. Holmes added, as if suddenly remembering, "By the way, congratulations on your sister's marriage with Mr. Bentley."

To write a whole letter, and then think of congratulations at the end of it, is very much in the style of Mr. Holmes himself.

Mary cried and laughed, but was inexplicably relieved.

With such "trifles" as Mr. Bingley's marriage to be attended to, it seemed that progress in Paris was slow, but Holmes himself was safe.

Mary was touched that Mr. Detective had written, and that she was welcome to write back. But she thought about it and realized that she had nothing to write in reply.

It couldn't be written that Lydia had failed in her confession. In the countryside of the South, that would have been a stab in the dark, but what was it in London, in Holmes' eyes.

Mary put the letter away solemnly and turned her head to look out of the train window. She decided it would be better to wait until she had traced a useful clue before writing a reply to Mr. Holmes.

The train made its way north, carrying the three Bennet sisters, and finally arrived in Milton.

Although Mary politely declined Mr. Thornton's offer of a personal reception, the upright factory owner did his best to send a carriage, as the case was being investigated.

The coachman was waiting at the station when Mary and the girls alighted. He took over the luggage of the three ladies and guided them out of the station.

"Is it the first time for the three young ladies to come to the north?" Seeing Mary's curious look, the coachman asked.

"Yes."

Mary said as she looked around the townscape of Milton.

Unlike the cozy and lively Meryton, everything in Milton looked gray and dusty, much like London in that respect, and much more desolate than London because it was a small town.

But Milton was industrial, and the station was full of people coming and going. Mary followed the coachman as he squeezed out of the station, and before she could see where the carriage was, she heard a loud crash in the street.

--An ox-cart loaded with goods fell over, just missing the unloader next to it.

Catherine screamed at the sight. The unloader's wail attracted countless passers-by, and the driver hurried forward, and several strong men grabbed the oxcart and lifted the goods.

"Quickly pull him out!"

Mary hurried forward with the hem of her skirt and instructed a rather powerful looking man to pull the unloader out from under the load.

Luckily it only hit his left leg, not the vitals, but it was serious enough. When the unloader pulled his left leg out his eyes were filled with crimson, the tip of the load had dug into the flesh and blood gushed out almost immediately.

The sight took Mary's breath away.

Without hesitation, she crouched down, and her movement brought the two remaining Miss Bennet back to her senses, even Lydia, who had been sulking, was stunned and subconsciously tried to move forward to help.

"Stay back!"

Mary bellowed, causing both sisters to stand their ground.

Don't let them come over to add to the chaos, this kind of bloody scene must call them nightmares.

Look at this amount of bleeding ...... Mary s heart is shocked, she did not say anything, looked up to the car driver: "Give me the belt!"

The coachman froze, "The belt?"

Mary: "Give it to me, he needs to stop the bleeding!"

The coachman, seeing her look of certainty, no longer dared to ask, but untied the waist cord.

Mary immediately tied the waist cord in a proximal position above the unloader's wound, and with a hard pull, the blood flow was suddenly much smaller.

"We need a doctor here," she continued as she pressed on the unloader's wound, "who knows a doctor?"

"--I am."

A strong palm reached over Mary's shoulder.

Mary looked up in dismay to see a young but earnest gentleman squeezing his way through the crowd, who didn't mind the blood and dirt filth of the floor at all, crouching down beside the unloader and pressing his wound in Mary's place.

"I'm the doctor," he quickly examined the unloader's wound before inquiring, "Is there a clean place here, please?"

"There is."

The coachman responded immediately, "I can take you there."

The gentleman nodded.

He took over from Mary and helped the unloader stop the bleeding urgently before ordering a few good samaritans to lift the unloader. The youth followed suit and stood up as he turned his head to Mary, "And you, miss ......?"

Mary: "Don't mind us, it's okay!"

"That's fine."

Without further hesitation, the young man who called himself a doctor removed his hat and spoke politely, "You handled that well, young lady. You and I are both outsiders, but fortunately I am a doctor, so please teach me next."

Thank goodness.

Mary breathed a sigh of relief.

"And how do I contact you, sir?"

She asked, "Right now I have to take my two sisters to visit their relatives, so when I have time I can contact you about this worker's injuries."

"You can find me at the local doctor's house," he replied, "If anything comes up, please come and see John Watson.

"

"......"

Watson?

Dr. Watson?

He's even in Milton?

Author's Note: Mary: I can't believe I met Watson before the detective, can I arrange for them to share a room together and solve a crime together together ......[slams down small cross and bible hard.jpg]

Watson: ?????

Mrs. Watson: ?????