Detective Story By Karina C-A
When people say the word Holmes, they’re talking about the most famous detective that ever lived, Sherlock Holmes.
My role model.
My hero.
The world knows him as a legend — the man who could solve a crime before the police had even found the body. The newspapers call him brilliant. Scotland Yard calls him impossible. Criminals call him a nightmare.
I just call him Sherlock.
I, Rose Holmes, am the sister of Sherlock Holmes and a great detective. Or I soon will be.
At seventeen, most girls are thinking about dances, universities, or what dress to wear to some pointless gathering. I’m thinking about blood spatter patterns and alibis. I’m thinking about how a genius vanishes without leaving a single footprint behind.
My first case is to find my brother.
Sherlock went missing a week ago, we-or rather, I-had been eating biscuits in his living room while he was busy muttering about some murder case, so secret even the police kept their mouths shut, and waving his violin stick around as if he were conducting an orchestra.
“Rosie,” he said distractedly, “when a man lies, he always leaves something behind. Pride, usually.”
I asked if that had to do with the case. He didn’t answer. He never does when something is so important.
The next day? Gone.
No note. No struggle. No sign of a break in.
Sherlock Holmes doesn’t disappear by accident. Something happened. And if the greatest detective in the world has vanished…
Then whoever took him is more dangerous than I ever imagined.
For six days I searched every inch of 221B. I dusted for prints. I examined the window latches. I measured the distance between his desk and the door, looking for signs of interruption. I even checked the violin strings for unusual tension — Sherlock once hid a microfilm inside a hollowed bridge.
I found the first clue this morning, it was hidden deep, deep inside his violin case. Sherlock guards the violin case more closely than government secrets, which is exactly why I knew to look here.
I ran my fingers along the velvet lining and felt it — a ridge where the fabric shouldn’t have been raised. I slid a penknife beneath it and gently lifted.
There, folded tightly and tucked out of sight, was a piece of paper. It wasn’t a letter. It was a symbol.
A spiral intersected by three jagged lines. I’d seen it before once; on a file he wouldn’t even let me look at. I had a look at it anyway and all there was, was the same symbol.
At the bottom of the page Sherlock had written:
Trust no one, they are watching…
My brother does not frighten easily. Which means this case frightened him.
It’s warning.
I stood very still in the middle of the sitting room, the note trembling slightly between my fingers. Everything looked ordinary. The armchair by the fire. The chemical set on the side table. The stack of newspapers he hadn’t finished annotating.
Nothing disturbed.
Nothing stolen.
Nothing broken.
And that was the problem. Sherlock would have fought. He would have overturned furniture, shattered glass, left some sign — a scratch, a code, a message hidden in chaos. Unless…
Unless he hadn’t been taken by force.
My eyes slowly moved around the room. The teacup on the table. One cup.
Not two.
But I had been here that evening. We had tea together. I remember it clearly. Two cups. I walked to the table. There was no ring from a second cup. No indentation in the carpet where an extra chair had been pulled forward. No crumbs from the biscuits I had eaten. Nothing.
It was as if I had never been there at all. As if that last evening had been… erased.
My throat tightened.
Sherlock told me once that the most terrifying crimes are not the violent ones. They’re the precise ones.
The ones where someone has enough control to remove even memory from the scene.
I looked back at the note in my hand.
Trust no one.
Very slowly, a new thought formed — colder than fear.
If someone could erase evidence this carefully…
How do I know they haven’t erased something else? Something from me?
And for the first time since Sherlock vanished—
I wasn’t entirely sure what I actually remembered.