Patients are dying in the hospital ward. Surely this isn’t news. But to Mrs. Hudson, ill and dizzy from medication, the deaths—one patient, then another, and all of them women!—seem sinisterly connected. Even if she’s the only person who sees the connection.
Mary Watson knows just how she feels, though her focus is less on sick women than on missing boys—the skinny, grubby, poor ones that nobody wanted in the first place. Sherlock Holmes isn’t interested in either issue; he and Dr. Watson have more important puzzles to solve. So once again, it is left to Mary and Mrs. Hudson to help the truly vulnerable, to draw lines between the dying women and the disappearing boys, and to follow those lines to their grim conclusion.