Sherlock Holmes and the Engineer's Thumb 1 | Page 12

Eve Donnelly
Dull and gloomy, the house sat on the foggy, grey night at Baker’s Street. Me and
Sherlock were sitting peacefully in his living room, in front of the burning flames in his
large fireplace. It had been a long and tiring day of hard investigation and we were
not planning on staying up much longer. Suddenly, there was a powerful knock on
the wooden front door. Except it wasn’t just the knock the person also opened up the
letter box and and shouted through it to see if anybody was home. As he did this a
strong gust of wind flurried through, making a slight breeze and caused the fire to
flicker around frantically.
Cautiously, sherlock stood and I followed after him. Slowly, he opened the door and
it creaked loudly, as if to tell us we shouldn’t have. Who could it have been on this
dark, frosty night? To our surprise, a man was stood there, with a facial expression
as if he had seen a ghost.
“What brings you here tonight?” Sherlock questioned.
“It is a very long story, you don’t think I could come in do you?” the strange man
asked. We both hesitated slightly, but invited him in.
He was taller than both of us, which was worrying and slim like someone had
stretched out his body. His skin was ghostly white and the most important part, he
was wearing a thick, black pair of leather gloves. Any normal person would would
think these gloves were to simply keep warm, but it wasn’t especially a cold night.
Something about these gloves just did not appear normal to me, and i was correct.
As he sat in the empty chair in the corner of the room, he began to remove the
gloves. I soon scanned his bare hands and I realised that my prediction was right.
His left thumb seemed to be missing. Myself and Sherlock immediately made eye
contact as we both discovered this.
“Yes, you have probably noticed my thumb, this is actually what I am here to talk
about today. I will start from the beginning. You see I work for an engineering
company and one of our machines had stopped working, my boss told me I could
easily fix it with an elastic band, which sounded ridiculous at the time, however it did
work. I then had a spare elastic band, which I decided to wrap tightly around my
thumb. After a matter of minutes, I had forgot it was there, went home, and went
straight to bed. Horror struck my face in the morning when I noticed it must have lost
circulation and fallen off. The first thing I did was look around for it, but I could not
find it anywhere, so decided to just rush straight to the hospital. They then told me
there was unfortunately nothing they could do unless they had the real thumb to be
stitched back on. However, I went home and it was nowhere to be seen. This is the
part that startles me the most, because I live alone, and therefore I have no clue