Continuing The Adventure of the Bermondsey Cutthroats, Watson awakes in delirium, bound to his favourite chair, unable to move or to speak.  A blonde-haired man that laughs a lot at his predicament is watching the door, his back to Watson.  The woman who drugged him, goads him, torturing him with poetry before taunting him about his documented war injuries.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BEMONDSEY CUTTHROATS

Playing with a gun, the woman shoots Watson twice as a message to the “Great Detective” and, before he succumbs, Watson notices that the woman has filed her teeth into sharp daggers.

When next he awakes, a frantic Holmes is releasing him and trying to staunch the loss of blood but all Watson can feel is pain.  The parallising drugs are wearing off.  He loses consciousness again.

Waking up over a day later, Watson finds himself in the safety of his own bed.  The pain is barely tolerable, but his wounds have been treated by the best doctor Holmes could find.  For his own part, Holmes has been keeping constant vigil on his old friend.  Watson is worried that the delay will let the murderous duo commit further acts, but Holmes reassures him that, though inactive, he hasn’t been idle.

Both interlopers left a peculiar concoction of mud from their shoes on Holmes’ carpet.  Analysis points to a particular abandoned building in Bermondsey.  Inspectors Lestrade and Wherry have taken a dozen men to the location to apprehend the killers.

Watson recalls all that he can from the incident, through his pain and foggy thoughts.  When he tells Holmes of the woman’s sharpened teeth, it sparks a memory of some quarter-century earlier.  His thoughts lead him to believe that the clue on his carpet was a trap and, he fears for the life of Lestrade.  Despite his infliction, Watson urges Holmes to go to the old warehouse with Watson accompanying him.  They arrive just too late.  The building is engulfed in flames and only one man staggers out – Inspector Wherry.

Infuriated by the way in which he’s been so easily manipulated, mixed with his own sense of grief for the loss of Lestrade and so many men sent to their deaths by his deductions, Holmes insists on a showdown with the woman and her blonde-hair accomplice.  They meet in a busy cafe, with her accomplice watching over them from a distance in case Holmes tries anything.

Watson confirms it’s the same woman, and Holmes asks what it will take for the murderous streak to end.  Only Holmes’ own life will be enough for that.

Holmes admits to having identified who the woman is – her teeth being a pointer to her father who Holmes and Lestrade had found washed up and killed by multiple knife wounds so many years ago (in The Guttering Candle).  Tess Dorno is the dead man’s daughter.  Only 3 years old at the time, she since learned what she believes to have been a cover-up by Holmes.  A cover-up that allowed the man responsible for her father’s death, whether it was suicide or not, to get away scott free.  Holmes attempts to protest her belief with the facts of the time, but this isn’t enough to sway her.

Knowing that the only way out is Holmes’ death, Tess reveals her accomplice’s identity through poetry but, before she can reach the end, she’s shot by that very same accomplice.  Holmes takes flight after the escaping killer, with the wounded Watson hobbling after them.

Holmes corners the man in a dead end alley and he turns, revealing himself as Inspector Wherry.  Taunting Holmes with his unknown motives, Wherry kills himself before Holmes can know more.

The betrayal by the Inspector, that led to the death of Lestrade and the police officers. The death of so many people due to the coincidence of their surnames.  The insanity of Tess Dorno caused by an incident at the start of his career.  Being manipulated into sending good men to their deaths.  All of this, and more, shocks Holmes to his core.  Holmes feels that it is time to retire from his career and depart from the social world, to a place he can do no further harm.  His train disappears towards the Sussex countryside and his awaiting bees, watched on by a sad Watson in the company of his second wife.

The Ordeals of Sherlock Holmes in general, and The Adventure of the Bermondsey Cutthroats in particular, is benefitted by first having listened to The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner.  One of the more infuriating aspects of that earlier story, being set as it was after Holmes had retired to keep bees and after the death of Watson’s second wife, was that they acknowledged some past incident that had caused Holmes to remove himself from polite society.

THE ORDEALS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner did not explore that further and there was a real danger of leaving the question of that incident unanswered.  Sometimes that might be a good thing, as I’m sure many listeners would have come up with their own ideas of what would have been so bad for Holmes to hide himself away.  There was always the danger that, on revealing that incident, it turns out to be something quite disappointing.  It needed to be something big.

Here we have the answer to that question and, in Sherlock Holmes terms, it is something big.  Not only the death of Lestrade (even if the writer did leave himself a “get-out” for the possibility that he could come back), but also the ease at which Holmes was manipulated through the chronicling of his career.  Personally, I hope that they don’t activate the writer’s “get-out” option because it will be some kind of cheat for Holmes to have effectively “run away” due, in no small part, to the death of Lestrade at the hands of his own deductions, only for him to have not really been dead after all.  I’ve no doubt that they could use John Banks as Lestrade again in a story set prior to this one in 1905.

As in other adventures, there continues to be precious little deductive work going on for Holmes to be involved in.  The mud on the shoes being the only one of any significance.  We are indirectly aware of his famous deductions through the motives of Tess Dorno, inspired as she was by the chronicles of Watson, but we don’t experience much in that way during The Adventure of the Bermondsey Cutthroats.  That is, perhaps, the only downfall of these Sherlock Holmes adventures – they live off Holmes’ reputation for deduction rather than by the deductions themselves.  Nevertheless, the writer Jonathan Barnes, has created a nicely linked set of stories here that feel, the more you listen, like an epic that spans Holmes’ career.  Given that this is their purpose, the lack of anything new being brought to the table in terms of individual deductions and mystery solving is, perhaps, forgiveable.

There is, of course, one further adventure in this set of four, The Sowers of Despair, which undoubtedly takes place some years later by which time Holmes will be firmly set in his retirement.  How it fits in with The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner remains to be seen, but I’ve not doubt that it’ll make for an excellent resolution to this four-part adventure.

The Adventure of the Bermondsey Cutthroats ends with an 8-minute behind-the-scenes set of interviews.  These don’t particularly add much to the experience, but it is good to hear the actors when not in character.