Summary: In extreme old age, with his powers of deduction and memory failing, Sherlock Holmes potters around his Sussex farmhouse, teaching the art of keeping bees to a young protegé, the son of his housekeeper, and regretting the deaths of his friends and the decline of his mental acuity. At the invitation of a Japanese admirer of his apiary work, he travels to postwar Japan, learning about the local herbs and trying to grasp the enormity of the bombing of Hiroshima. As a boy, Holmes's host was abandoned by his father, a scholar and statesman who may have consulted Holmes in England. Holmes is able to reassure his host that his father had a good reason for disappearing and that he died honorably in the service of his country. In order to provide this reassurance, however, Holmes must falsify his own memory of the encounter, substituting a contrived image of the father into a context that he initially recalls differently.

Back in England, Holmes also completes his account of a case from near the end of his career as a detective, in which he demystified the behavior and refuted the apparent infidelity of a young wife, only to be baffled by the character and outcome of his one meeting with her: He fell instantly in love with her, but, at the end of their conversation, she vanished, “dissolving within a cloud of whitest ether.” Immediately afterwards, she was reported to have been killed while walking along a railway track, directly in the path of an oncoming train. Her disappearance and apparent suicide left Holmes with a feeling of “incomprehensible emptiness within myself,” a sense of isolation that prefigured his state of mind in retirement.