As usual, I was up at 6.30 am to savor my morning coffee made by my husband and scan the letters…

I hadn’t received such requests for ages… But that morning I was blown off! 6 requests from strangers who wanted me to help them solve different crimes that had taken place in shops.. All handwritten and in traditional envelopes… weird.. At this day and age… Why didn’t they send me a FB friend request? ) They could have twitted me at least! That’d become popular in no time above all else!

All the letters were interesting, however, one of them caught my eye and intrigued me most of all… and since my time was very limited, I decided to help that lady…

This is what she wrote:

In fact the interior of the store was quite impressive… peculiar smell of shrimps, butter and crème (I concurred at once that there was going to be a stand-up party…Elementary, my dear Watson! ) The laughter of the children I overheard pointed to the fact that there was a clown on site, while the agitated voices of grown-ups and the camera flash sound indicated that people were having fun and wanted to have photos in memory of the evening.

At last my “stranger” took out her envelope from the pile and screamed! She had won! She knew she would when she was writing to me! But how? According to the theory of probability … the chances were very low…

At that very moment the lights went out! Screams and cries everywhere… in a couple of minutes we were back to normal, the halls were brightly lit again and people went on laughing and consuming the goodies on the tables… .

I rushed to the dressing rooms, as this is where usually things happen … People are strangled, stabbed… the door was wide open and when I looked at it from the inside I noticed crevices… someone was evidently desperate to open the door and get out…

I looked for her everywhere… the halls looked empty.. Everyone was gone… in 5 minutes??? And the clothes were so neatly arranged on the racks… And suddenly, when I was passing by a recurrent stand, something caught my eye and attention…

The image of the letter ran across my mind… the yellow letters! I hadn’t paid attention to them! And here they were, scattered in the letter, but side by side on the board in this hall! Behind the mannequin! St.George! Of course! The money was here, I could feel that…

to think about the incident and confess to myself that I had been blind as a mole. However, it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all!

The “stranger” as we found out later was the aunt of a fellow whom I had sent to prison for murder… She wanted to take her revenge on me and trip me up…

You want to know the moral of the story? Pay attention to the tiniest details!!! And have a good memory!

That will save you lots of money, time and frustration!

Elementary, my dear Watson!

I would like to extend words of gratitude to myself for being horribly busy during the week and working 20 hours a day, hence leaving my assignment for the last possible second and then doing it in an hour, while listening to a webinar I couldn’t miss…

Way to go, Lilit the Holmes… And you had such great ideas you wanted to implement… oh…