"While this grisly string of attacks may appear almost haphazard to the untrained eye, lying just beneath the surface there's an explanation that renders it all sensible. You see, Miss Irene Sheppington, the children's maid, is really Gerta Schoenfeld, long-lost daughter of Harold Schoenfeld, a German Jew who was murdered by the Third Reich after they confiscated his priceless collection of French impressionist paintings. Years later, when a teenage Miss Schoenfeld toured Castle Howard as part of a Belgian church choir, she spotted the paintings, flashed back on the theft, and instantly knew what she had to do. She started working for the Collier family under an assumed name with the sole purpose of getting the paintings back and extracting her revenge."
The accused woman's eyes dart furtively across the room before settling on a pair of gilded French doors. "You'll never catch me alive!" she shouts, racing toward the doors, only to be stopped midway by a pair of uniformed gendarmes hidden in the alcove.
Dr. Watson stared at his esteemed companion with furrowed brow. "My goodness, my dear Mr. Holmes! You confound me once again! How on earth did you deduce this?"
Holmes leans against the hand-carved mantel, a practiced humility spreading across his face. "I've trained myself to tell when people are lying and when they're telling the truth. I notice the very smallest behaviors that everyone else overlooks: the furtive glance, the nervous stammer, the twitch of a hesitant hand."
"Oh," says one of the policemen. "That's cool."
"Yeah," says the other policeman. "Who'd a guessed?"
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