This is a short story, and also when Sherlock explains to Watson about how Mycroft IS the British government, not in name by any means, but he put himself in a position as to be indispensable. He knows everything about everything, he’s many specialists in one person.
It starts with a note by Mycroft saying he’s coming to visit him in regard to a recent death. Watson reads about it in the paper, and Holmes is surprised because it seems to him quite a common death, a very ordinary one, but Mycroft’s note suggests otherwise.
Mycroft here is described as “heavily built and massive”, and it also says that “after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind”.
The massive body can explain why he came to Sherlock, he likes to have the facts and ponder on them from his comfortable chair, he doesn’t like to move around in search for clues. So he wants Sherlock to investigate the matter of this junior clerk who took some important documents, ten pages of the plans for a new submarine, highly secretive, but on his body only seven pages were found.
Sherlock investigates a little and puts clues together the way he does, and finds the spy that wanted the plans, and through his empty apartment he finds enough clues to lure out the man who actually took the plan, the indebted brother of a government man who took his own life after suspecting his involvement.
The guy is arrested of course, but not before he lures in the spy so he is caught too and the plans rescued.
(The dead young man supposedly fell off the train of was pushed out, but he had no ticket, so Holmes thought he was on the roof and not inside the train, so he asks for a list of spies that could be involved and Mycroft gave him three names, and Holmes chose the one with an apartment with a window slightly above where the train stops, and there was such a thick fog nobody could see anything…
Well, SH stories looked so brilliant at first, of course, but now if you think about it they are quite farfetched. Not all the details fit together, he just says that something is one way and since he’s right nobody questions that, but he really had no way of knowing certain things, like they didn’t explain to me how Holmes knew where - exactly - the thief and the spy used to meet each other… well, that might be considered a common thing in old spy stories, though, where spies always knew things they shouldn’t know. Still, whatever, that’s how these books are.)
In this short story there is also the phrase:
“we must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail,, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
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