Holmes turned to Eleanor. His gaze was piercing, but not unkind. “The man you are to marry, Miss Vance. The one who ‘comforted’ you after your father’s death. The one who encouraged you to keep the study locked. He is not a suitor. He is a thief. Your father discovered he was selling his blueprints to a foreign power. The ‘heart attack’ was a lie. It was a blow to the head, delivered by a brass candlestick I noticed was misaligned in the drawing-room.”
“My father was the greatest horologist in London,” Eleanor whispered. “He created this in the last month of his life. He called it ‘The Mourner.’ He said… he said it was a confession. And now, every night, I hear a sound in the walls of his study. A ticking that does not belong to any clock.” jeremy brett sherlock holmes episodes
The study was a disaster. Papers strewn, a chair overturned. But Holmes paid no attention to the chaos. He went straight to the far wall, where a large, ornately carved longcase clock stood. It was silent. Dead. Holmes turned to Eleanor
“No,” he said, quietly, to the door. “But he is about to be.” The one who ‘comforted’ you after your father’s death
Holmes knelt before the chemical clock. “We have forty-seven minutes, by my reckoning. The watch’s mourner emerges every thirty seconds. The angle of its arm, the duration of its pause… it is a countdown. When it ceases to mourn, this house, and half the street, will be a crater.”
His hands, those long, artistic hands, became a blur of precise, terrifying action. He disconnected a vial, steadied a piston with a paperclip from my pocket, and used a fragment of his own shoelace to bind a leaking seal.