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“He began to pick them up.” My friend shook his head. “Drake knew the police were coming to clap the darbies on him, but he put every one of those spilled grapes back into the basket one by one, counting them as he did so – and they caught him. Watson, it was one of the easiest endings of a case I had ever seen.”
I stroked my moustache. “As if he were a leprechaun.” At Holmes’ blank look, I added a page to his lumber room. “In Irish folklore the way to catch a leprechaun is to spill salt in front of him, because they can’t bear not to stay and count each grain.”
Holmes gave me a narrow-eyed look.
I sighed in exasperation. “No, Holmes, I don’t believe Drake was a leprechaun. I don’t believe in leprechauns.” Ridiculous! Fairies were real, but leprechauns were just superstitious nonsense.
“Still, Watson, there’s often a grain of truth in each legend, like the grit in a pearl’s centre.” Holmes tapped his lips with a forefinger. “It could be that a slight anomaly of the brain causes some people to behave in this way. Nothing so fierce as madness, a bit more than an eccentricity.”
“An idee fixe?”
Holmes’ thin lips twisted with amusement. I groaned; those blasted Napoleons. “Speaking of pearls, old boy…”