First published in the December 1891 issue of The Strand Magazine

First published in a collection in 1892 in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

 

Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson, Hugh Boone, Neville St. Clair, Isa Whitney, Mrs Neville St. Clair

Case Date: June 1889

 

Storyline:

While retrieving Isa Whitney from a lost mid-week in the Bar of Gold opium den near the London docks, Watson encounters Holmes, who bears him off to Kent, to the house of another missing person, Neville St. Clair, a business-man who has not returned home for four days. Mrs. St. Clair tells them of passing the Bar of Gold on the day after her husband’s disappearance and momentarily glimpsing his face at the window. The police have found that: a window-sill overlooking the river bears traces of blood. Portions of St. Clair’s clothing, hidden behind a curtain, and a box of bricks which he had promised to bring home for his little boy, have been found on the same unsavoury premises. The occupant of the room in which these discoveries have been made-Hugh Boone, a sinister cripple, well known as a beggar in the City-is under arrest on suspicion of having murdered the missing man, whose coat has since been found on a river mud-bank, weighted with the contents of its pockets: 421 pennies and 70 halfpennies.
The solution to this bizarre mystery, Holmes finds, lies not in the river, but in the St. Clair’s bathroom, a conclusion which it takes him an ounce of shag tobacco and an all-night sitting on five cushions to reach.