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The Red-Headed League

22 illustrations · 3 chapters

Chapter 1Wilson's tale of the dissolved League

  1. A high, wide view down onto a soot-dark Baker Street terrace on a smoky autumn morning, with a hansom at the kerb and a single amber window glowing on the first floor.
  2. A close detail of a stout client's wrist and waistcoat: a pink-scaled fish tattoo above the cuff and a square-holed Chinese coin on a brass watch-chain, the last clues in a detective's deduction.
  3. Dr. Watson, newspaper flattened in both hands, stares at the absurd Red-Headed League advertisement, baffled.
  4. From a high vantage, a sea of red-headed men packs Fleet Street and the stair of Pope's Court, while stout Jabez Wilson and his assistant shoulder their way toward the League's doorway.
  5. A top-down insert of Jabez Wilson's thick fingers holding up the curt white card that announces the end of the Red-headed League.
  6. In Holmes's Baker Street sitting room, the detective and the doctor collapse in laughter at the curt card announcing the dissolved League, while the red-headed pawnbroker sits stiff and rueful, holding it up.
  7. At the mention of Spaulding's acid-splashed forehead, Holmes snaps upright in his armchair and asks about the pierced ears.

Chapter 2Reconnaissance, music and the night party

  1. Saxe-Coburg Square seen from high above: a small, sooty, forgotten pocket of quiet sunk in the smoke of the City, with the roaring main road just behind it.
  2. A tight, eye-level insert on the knees of the pawnbroker's assistant's dark trousers, creased and stained with clay.
  3. A quiet, soot-stained plan of the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, towering over the little newspaper shop, with its dark side passage beside it.
  4. Lost in the music at St. James's Hall, Holmes sits in profile with a gentle smile and half-lowered eyes while his fingertips drift in time to the melody.
  5. By the mantelpiece in the gaslit Baker Street sitting room, Holmes holds his hunting crop and tells the banker and the detective, with a dry smile, that tonight's play is for £30,000 and for the man Jones has hunted for years.
  6. In Holmes's lamplit sitting room, Peter Jones names John Clay with a stabbing forefinger while the once-sceptical Mr. Merryweather bends to listen.

Chapter 3The bank cellar ambush and Holmes's explanation

  1. From three storeys up, a lamp-lit City street at night, where four tiny silhouettes file into the dark passage beside the shuttered bank.
  2. Four small figures stand in the beam of a single lantern at the threshold of the bank's vast cellar.
  3. In the pitch-black bank vault, a single lurid yellow spark flares in a flagstone joint, the first sign that the tunnel below is opening.
  4. A white, almost womanly hand pushes up through a gash between the vault's flagstones, groping in a small pool of lurid yellow lantern light.
  5. In the black bank vault, John Clay's lantern-lit face rises over the edge of the tipped flagstone and scans the dark.
  6. In the lantern-lit bank vault, Sherlock Holmes bursts from the dark, seizes John Clay by the collar and raises his hunting crop over the gun hand.
  7. In the lantern-lit bank vault, the cuffed John Clay bows low to Holmes, Watson and Merryweather like a prince leaving court.
  8. A close, evidence-like study of the shop assistant's earth-stained, threadbare trouser knees, the clue that told Holmes of months of burrowing.
  9. At dawn in the Baker Street sitting room, the weary detective shrugs off his friend's praise while the doctor listens with a fond smile over their whisky and soda.