56. THE CASE OF THE LAST TWIN

Old men die ... it's got to happen, and worlds must change...

“It’s been a good few years,” said Annabelle to her husband, Sherlock Holmes. “I genuinely believe I’m a really lucky woman, maybe even the luckiest ever, with a man like you by my side.”

“What man wouldn’t choose you above everything?” asked Holmes with no sense of pretended gallantry but a great deal of obvious honesty. “And to think I once believed that our kind of happiness would never be for me,” he added.

“You’re too sweet,” she smiled, and then: “so we come to what might well be your final case,” she said, nervously. He looked at her, surprised. He’d pursued very few cases during the years he’d spent with Annabelle, largely because he decided that along with all working men he should retire. A man of my age, he told himself, can't go gallivanting around the country like he did in his youth, not for ever…

Of course he couldn’t!

“So what is this final case?” he asked.

“One that demands you’re brave,” she whispered, “one that demands you show no sign of weakness and don’t flinch, because what I’m going to tell you is inevitable. I saw Doctor Watson this morning.”

“You did? He rang me and told me he was back from Rome at last, but asked me not to call on him yet. I assume he’s out and about and reacquainting himself with friends and colleagues in the medical world. He must have quite a lot to tell them after spending so long in the research institute.”

“He was wounded in the Afghan war,” reminded Annabelle. “It’s that old injury that has been causing him trouble lately. A piece of shrapnel, long buried inside him, has stirred in its sleep. At least, that’s how he put it.”

“Poor fellow. What’s he going to do about it?” asked Holmes.

“There’s only one thing he can do. Which is what brings us to a final case for you.”

“Which is?” Holmes was frowning, fearful of what his beloved Annabelle was going to tell him.

“He’s dying, Sherlock. He knows it for sure, and is perfectly content about it. He knows that the one sure thing at the moment we’re all born is that sooner or later we all die. There’s no way he would think any other way … you know what a practical man he is! But he wants you and him to share one last case.”

“Oh dear,” frowned Holmes. “Would he know what case that is?”

“Oh yes. His sister...”

“I wasn’t aware that he had a sister,” murmured Sherlock. “A brother, yes, he told me about a brother once, but never a sister.”

“He hasn’t, but he had one. Once. She died years ago, as a child.”

“That’s why she wouldn’t have entered any conversation, then,” said Holmes. “But why should she now? Let me see: Watson is seventy something and any sister of his must have been born around that long ago, give or take a decade! So how can someone buried in the last century have anything to do with a case today?”

“She was born as long ago as was Doctor Watson,” smiled Annabelle. “She was his twin sister. But whereas he made it and lived a fruitful life, she withered and fell from the branch, so to speak.”

“I see,” murmured Holmes.

“And he wants to be buried with her,” said Annabelle. “He wants you and him to reform as a duo fighting for the rights of mankind, and investigate something that happened above seventy years ago. He wants you to research her brief life, locate her final resting place and make what arrangements you can for the twins to spend eternity together in stark contrast to how they’ve spent their lives.”

“I think I’d better see him,” sighed Holmes.

“I’ll come with you. He’s expecting you, but let me warn you. He’s changed over the few years he spent working in Italy. Those years haven’t been too kind to him I’m afraid. And he’s in pain for much of the time. But he is determined that what he likes to call a last case will help him on his way out of this world. As you know, he has no religious faith. The wars that took half a century to kill him stole that from him way back when he was a doctor on a battlefield. No, his faith is in the present and the past, and that sister of his was the very first part of his past.”

“Did she have a name?” asked Sherlock, curiously.

“Jane. She was called Jane,” said Annabelle.

And so it was that husband and Wife, Sherlock and Annabelle, made their way to the old home of John Watson. Although he’d spent several years working abroad, he had kept his house on afraid that should he return with no home he’d end up in Baker Street again, with Holmes. Much as he respected the elderly detective he knew he’d left those years firmly behind him. They had been both fun and dangerous, and his recording of them had earned him both respect and an additional income, but those days must be kept in the past.

“Well, Holmes, you find me reduced,” he coughed. “I trust your lovely lady wife told you what’s afoot?”

“I never knew about Jane,” replied Holmes. “But then, why should I?”

“She sacrificed her life so that I could have mine,” Watson told him, “and now we must find her. It will be my last case. I don’t expect to last the month.”

“But surely...” Sherlock said, trying to find the words to tell a lie about life ending and death arriving.

“I’m a doctor, Holmes. I know what’s going on. I could go any time, but would be shocked if I was still alive four weeks from today!”

“Then we must be at work!” ejaculated Holmes, “but where do we look first?”

“We go to Rugby,” said Watson, “and I would go alone but ill health prevents me. I need help, Sherlock, for I lack a great deal of the strength I had in my rugby playing days.”

“You were young then,” sighed Holmes, “a Rugby lad playing rugby! There’s something poetic about it.”

“It’s not like you … you … you to understand the poetic, Holmes,” spluttered Watson, coughing red into a white handkerchief.

“But are you well enough for any kind of journey?” asked Holmes, “why not take a rest, have a drop of the Italian wine you so raved about in your letters to me and trust me to see that your wishes are fulfilled? And you can have no doubt about it. I will move Heaven and Earth if you predecease me, and make sure you become reunited with Jane.”

“I have your word on that?” coughed the doctor. “You will do all you can along those lines?”

“You know me, Watson,” replied Sherlock Holmes firmly, “I am now and always have been a man of my word.”

“And I’m behind him to push him along,” confirmed Annabelle.

“Then so be it … I don’t feel well, to tell the truth, I feel … I need to sit down. Forgive me, Holmes...”

And those were the last words to be spoken by the good Doctor John Watson as a sliver of shrapnel after so many years moved remorselessly towards his heart and, in a moment, the merest of moments, stopped it from its toil.

oo0oo

A few days later Holmes and his lovely Annabelle stood by a simple grave in a largely disused cemetery outside the small Midlands town of Rugby and cast a handful of soil onto the shining wooden coffin that had just been lowered into it. There was a weathered stone, simple and cheap, by it, proclaiming that this was the last and only resting place of Jane Watson who had been taken by her Lord before the world had a chance to soil the innocence of her heart.

It would be replaced, soon enough, with the simple announcement that her twin had joined her.

Sherlock Holmes took Annabelle by one hand and gazed into her face.

“Well, that’s about that,” he murmured. “He was a good man, the very best and I’ll always be sorry that he’s gone. Sod it, I’ll miss him! But that has always been the way of things, I’m afraid.”

“It has,” agreed Annabelle, meaningfully.

© Peter Rogerson 03.10.17