John Watsons Blog #2 - A Study In Pink

7th February - A Study in Pink

I've blacked out a few names and places because of legal matters but, other than that, this is what happened on the night I moved in with Sherlock Holmes.

When I first met Sherlock, he told me my life story. He could tell so much about me from my limp, my tan and my mobile phone. And that's the thing with him. It's no use trying to hide what you are because Sherlock sees right through everyone and everything in seconds. What's incredible, though, is how spectacularly ignorant he is about some things.

This morning, for example, he asked me who the Prime Minister was. Last week he seemed to genuinely not know the Earth goes round the Sun. Seriously. He didn't know. He didn't think the Sun went round the Earth or anything. He just didn't care. I still can't quite believe it. In so many ways, he's the cleverest person I've ever met but there are these blank spots that are almost terrifying. At least I've got used to him now. Well, I say that, I suspect I'll never really get used to him. It's just, on that first night, I literally had no idea of what was to come. I mean, how could I?

I was looking at the flat, surprised at the state it was already in, when DI â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“from Scotland Yard burst in. Sherlock, of course, already knew why he was there. There'd been another death - this time, in â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“. Sherlock asked me to join him and I went along, intrigued. In the taxi, he explained how he'd deduced everything about me the previous day - how he'd picked up on every word I said, every action, tiny little things about my phone. It was extraordinary. I'd try to explain it here but I don't think I'd be able to do him justice. Go to his site, The Science of Deduction and see for yourself how his mind works.

I was still surprised that, even being the genius he clearly is, the police would come to him for help. He said he was a 'consulting detective'. Naturally, being the arrogant so-and-so he is, he'd had to give himself his own unique job title.

We arrived in â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“ where, to my surprise, he introduced me as his colleague. The police seemed surprised by this as well I get the impression he'd not had 'colleagues' before. It was a body of a woman, dressed in pink. And she'd been poisoned. Again, Sherlock just looked at her and he knew everything about her. The way she was dressed. Splatters of mud on her leg. What was there and, more importantly, what was missing. Her suitcase. And it was that which excited him. The missing pink suitcase.

He left the body and ran outside to searched for it, naturally leaving me behind. I spoke to a policewoman and she summed Sherlock up. She said 'he gets off on it.' And he does. He didn't care about the dead woman or any of the other victims. I suspect if he came back and found me and our landlady lying here with our throats cut, he'd just see it as an intellectual exercise. 'Fantastic' he'd exclaim, rubbing his hands together. 'But the door was locked so how did they kill each other?' The policewoman, she called him a psychopath. That seems harsh and it was hardly a professional diagnosis but I look back at what I wrote about him when I first met him. I called him the madman.

So I went back to Baker Street and Sherlock asked me to send a text message. He'd found her suitcase and discovered that the victim's phone was missing. He knew the killer would have it, so there I was, texting a serial killer.

He'd found the woman's missing suitcase because he'd known it would be pink, like the woman's clothes. It hadn't even crossed my mind and when I said this, he told me I was an idiot. He didn't mean to be offensive, he just said what he thought. I've been called worse things but his bluntness was still a bit of a surprise. He just didn't care about being polite or anything like that. I was starting to understand why he didn't seem to have many 'colleagues'.

After that, we went on a stakeout. We waited in a restaurant to see if the killer would visit the address I'd texted him. Across the road, we saw a taxi pull up. We ran out, but it drove off. Sherlock insisted on chasing it and luckily he seemed to have an intimate knowledge of London's backstreets. Of course, as I realised afterwards, he's probably memorised the London A-Z. We ran down street after street and we managed to catch up with the taxi - only to discover that the passenger wasn't our killer. He'd only just arrived in the UK. It was the most ridiculous night of my life - I mean, an actual chase through London. People don't do that, not really. But we did.