As expected, once The Gamekeeper’s Folly moves to the Gamekeeper’s village, the pace increases.  Immediately on leaving the train, Holmes & Watson encounter the author friend of Jim Hinderclay’s daughter who’s giving an impassioned lecture on her recent lively book, a book that features a woman that Holmes believes is the wayward daughter.

THE GAMEKEEPER’S FOLLY

On arriving at the house, Watson recognises a strange blue flower that increases in density as they approach.  This flower is one that he’s seen only once before – in the camp of Christopher Thrale, the dying Englishman in Afghanistan.

Inside the house, they meet Eliza Hinderclay and Holmes makes a quick deduction on the daughter based almost entirely on her appearance.  He resolves that she’s lived a life of abuse in London, where she was then abandoned by someone she cared for, and it’s for him that she now pines.  He takes this as the reason for her wild attitude and he assures the Gamekeeper that she’ll settle down in time.

Watson holds his tongue but he believes that, although she’s 15 years older, the woman is the very same person he delivered the package to on his arrival in London.  He admits to taking a look in the package and it contained nothing more than some harmless-looking seeds.

In the carriage on the way back to the station, Watson tells Holmes all that he recalls about the flower, the package, and the young woman.  These pieces of information overturn the conclusions Holmes derived from his deductions, and they race back to the house.  They’re delayed by the author who steps out in front of them, crazy and manic, screaming, shouting, and stabbing out with a knife.  She manages to cripple the horse before she’s subdued, leaving Holmes and Watson to race on foot back to the Gamekeeper’s house.

They arrive to find Eliza, having tied her father to a chair, trying to force feed him a concentrated concoction derived from the flowers.  She’s driven by revenge, believing her father had abandoned her in London when he gave up on the search for return to his position.

When she believes that Holmes will defeat her, she takes the concoction herself, transforming into a wildness they’d previously experienced earlier on the road.  She becomes uncontrollable, with an irrational desire only to kill.  Before the bound Gamekeeper’s agitated gaze, Watson is forced to shoot and kill his daughter.

In the weeks that follow, Watson blames himself for delivering the package all those years ago, whilst Holmes tries to make up for his erroneous quick deductions that he made about Eliza when he hadn’t been in possession of all of the facts.

A depressed and sombre Jim Hinderclay visits, on receipt of a correspondence from Holmes.  Holmes has spent the weeks, in various disguises and using up a lot of credit with his brother and fellows at the Home Office, in his attempt to shut down the trade in the flower and their deadly addictive poison.  The organisation to which the seeds were delivered are made to make reparations, and it turns out that they’d dismissed the Eliza due to concerns over her motives.  She left, but not before secreting a number of the seeds, which she cultivated around her father’s house on her return.

Holmes tells Hinderclay that he’s done all that he could do, but the Gamekeeper quite naturally blames the death of his daughter on Holmes’ arrogance and over-confidence of his own abilities.  Had Holmes arrived earlier, and not delayed his visit to the following day, the outcome may have been different.  Had he not been so quick in his deductions and so confident in the conclusions he’d made, the outcome may have been different.  Hinderclay warns Holmes that he’s not so infallible, and that there will be a personal price to pay.

Once again, there are few deductions to be made by Holmes (really – the “wedding band” clue again?) and the deductions that are made are hampered again by the audio medium.  One of the delights of Sherlock Holmes, particularly when watching an episode or a film, are that we can see the same clues that Holmes sees and we (the viewer) have the opportunity to observe and deduce in the same way as Holmes.  This adds to rewatch value in that what we missed the first time around, we have the chance to pick up on the second time around.

THE ORDEALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

In these audio adventures, however, the deductions suffer from the same affliction as the last few feature-length episodes of TV’s Poirot – the ones which lacked any observable clues and, instead, relied on eleventh hour knowledge gleaned by Poirot and denied to the viewer.  That’s how the deductions on these audios feel.  Holmes rattles off the clues behind his deductions without the listener being privy to those clues.  We have to take Holmes’ conclusion based on his rapid-fire deductions without any opportunity for possible alternatives.

If it seems that I’m making a big thing out of this, it’s because I like the deductive nature of Sherlock Holmes.  It’s also because there’s little else to fault about these audio adventures and to not highlight the weaknesses would leave all reviews and opinions as a casual “yay, that was fantastic wasn’t it?”.  After all, the positives are as they were before.  The characters are played extremely well, the atmosphere feels like a Conan Doyle story, the two leads are as captivating as always and, despite a feeling of stretching out a rather short piece of Holmes-deduction and action to a story that fits the hour-long duration, it’s a great second instalment in the set.

The adventure is followed by a 15-minute set of interviews with the cast and director in which it becomes apparent that this adventure was really about showing how Holmes could be fallible, even during the period that he was at the height of his powers.  It sows the seeds of doubt in his mind, which will no doubt be expanded upon in the next adventure set some years later, culminating in the final adventure – at which point I expect Holmes will be in his retirement.  This may even feed into The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner, in which Watson found the retired Holmes hiding away in Sussex due to some past incident.

Next up, The Adventure of the Bermondsey Cutthroats…