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I had quite forgotten about the affair when, one month later, I called upon my friend and found him at home. He showed me to the fire and urged to help myself to a snifter of brandy.

At length he gestured with a long, languid hand to a letter lying open on the table beside his chair.

“Do you recall that upon your last visit I mentioned a small affair at Trincomalee, Ceylon, and the injunction placed upon my mentioning the case by the Royal Ceylonese Tea Company?”

I sat up, quite excited. “Of course,” said I. “But what of it?”

“It appears that the injunction no longer pertains, Watson,” Holmes said casually. “Three weeks ago I received a letter from my friend out there, informing me that the Company has fallen upon bad times and gone bankrupt – and so the last obstacle to my telling of the tale is no more.”

He proceeded to fill his pipe with tobacco from the battered slipper he kept wedged down the side of his armchair. Soon we were enveloped in a pungent blue fug; I took a sip of brandy and made myself an audience, as I had on many an occasion before, to my friend’s oratorical skills.

“You recall the extraordinary case of the Gloria Scott, wherein I was called to the aid of my university friend, Victor Trevor?”

“I most certainly do,” I said. It had been one of the cases I had written up during Holmes’s long absence from these shores.

“For many years,” he said, “I lost contact with Trevor. At length I heard through a mutual friend that he had set sail for Ceylon, with the idea of managing a tea plantation or some such. Whatever, I heard no more … No more, that is, until the year of ‘88, when I received a letter from my old friend, couched in such terms that made it obvious he was in need of my assistance. Indeed, he almost begged my presence on that far away island, and even went so far as to include a return ticket on a cutter of the East India Line and promise of payment for my troubles upon my arrival. He went on to outline the details of a case that had baffled himself and his employers, the Royal Ceylonese Tea Company, for a good three months.”

“Those details I found curious enough, and the pleas of my friend sufficient to warrant a trip to those tropical latitudes. You probably never missed me, my dear Watson, being too occupied with other things at the time: it was shortly after your marriage that I put my affairs in order, packed my bags and set sail aboard the Eastern Empress.For the duration of the voyage I absorbed myself in the analysis of the details of the case presented to me in Trevor’s somewhat hasty missive.”

“The brothers Atkinson, Bruce and William, were neighbours of Victor Trevor in Ceylon. They had left England some ten years before, and set sail for the Far East with the intention of making their fortunes. For a decade they worked for the Royal Ceylonese Tea Company at various locations around the island, for the last two years managing an estate of some one hundred native workers near Trincomalee. They were by all accounts gentlemen of upstanding and personable character, well liked by both the Ceylonese and the expatriate community of fellow planters and other businessmen. My friend Victor Trevor was a regular social visitor to the plantation; in his own words the brothers were the salt of the earth”. They never married – a situation not uncommon among those of their chosen vocation – and lived for their work. They had no enemies.”

“Their disappearance was as sudden as it was mysterious. It occurred presumably in the early hours of 1 February: suffice to say, they were seen by their house-boy prior to turning in the night before, but in the morning they were gone. They did not appear for breakfast at six, nor show up to do their rounds of the plantation at seven. Their absence was reported to the Colonial Police at Trincomalee at nine o’clock that morning, and it was not until noon that my friend Trevor heard of their disappearance. He headed over to the plantation and arrived