The Red Circle

Fog slithers through Baker Street like a serpent of soot, lamplight bleeding ochre on wet flagstones when a dove-grey gloved woman raps on 221B. Her nerves are piano-wire: she has leased her prim Bloomsbury attic to a soft-spoken stranger who paid in crisp gold sovereigns, demanded absolute silence, then vanished—perhaps. Newspapers still appear, plates are emptied, yet the keyhole exhales only darkness. Holmes, ascetic as a scalpel, hears in her tale the faint click of an invisible lock; Watson’s loyal pulse drums counterpoint. Thus begins a dance of absences: a name signed in register, a valise never unpacked, a silhouette that melts behind lace. Is the tenant a man, a memory, or a mirror? The answer coils inside a red circle chalked on a warehouse floor where gunmetal moonlight reveals a smuggler’s ballet of forged passports, anarchist bombs and a woman’s face erased by acid. In the finale, Holmes lifts the mask to expose not one impersonation but a Russian-doll stack of them—landlady, lodger, even the detective’s own reflection—until identity itself gasps like a fish on the dock.