A postcard reached me this morning from Hamburg, in Holmes’s economical hand. He is following a thread that begins — as the strangest ones do — with a family of excellent reputation and a fortune nobody can quite account for.
There is an island, cut off from the world for good reason. A manor collapsing into ruin upon it, inhabited by a family who have made an art of saying nothing. And there is a name that appears exactly once in the public record, in a newspaper from 1995, before vanishing as completely as the man who bore it: Andrew Grey.
Thirty years ago, Grey threatened to expose what the fortune was built on. Thirty years ago, he was last seen taking the boat out to the island. No boat returned. No body was found. No questions were asked — silence, it seems, was part of the inheritance.
Holmes writes that he will need my journal, the newspaper, and — this is underlined twice — patience with the family. I confess the underlining worries me more than the vanishing.
This is the darkest of the three matters currently before the Society, and I do not use the word lightly. The island keeps its secrets. We shall see how well.