Your brother in Christ, Jack” I didn’t look around the room any further since I knew there was nothing to find. I went over the man’s body while Watson read Jack’s letter and found nothing even remotely helpful. He had a wallet with money and identification that said his name was Friedrich Stupe from Dresden, a false document I was sure. He had cleaned himself before boarding the train; he had been quite professional. He must have planned for some thing evil, as he had nothing on him that revealed who he really was. He must have left any thing else in his compartment when he went to dinner. He had even left his compartment key in his compartment so I did not know which one it was and could not go to it. I could not ask the conductor either without revealing his corpse. In fact we would have to clean up after ourselves and I would have to ask Watson a most ignoble act. “Watson, as much as this pains me, we must throw this human debris secretly from this train. We can wait until it is dark and toss him from the window with our lights out. We must also throw Christy’s stained garment out after him and clean her body and disguise the fact that she was murdered with a bullet. We can cover the wound with bandages. You are a doctor and we can report her death from some known frailty that abruptly caught up to her. We cannot allow the authorities to question us or think there has been a felony committed tonight. The shot from the air gun alerted no one, and our tussles did not arouse sufficient notice for anyone to come questioning. We can ‘discover’ her death early in the morning before we get to Vienna, alerting the conductor and having him keep a natural death quiet. They would not want to alarm or discomfort the remaining passengers of the tragedy if they can help it. We can make the appropriate calls to contacts here in Europe as soon as we get to Vienna that can help keep the local authorities away from any public investigation. They will have to board the train to get the corps’s belongings left behind, and dampen any questions on why they were left. It is possible he had tickets to continue on and his compartment may not be effectively searched until the train actually reaches Istanbul.” “Damn it Holmes, you had better explain yourself to me right now, and I will decide how much I will follow on with your scheme.” He growled at me as he tenderly folded the tear stained letter, the cause of his wife’s demise and stored it in his wallet. “It started the day after I had told you about my suspicions about the resurrection of Moriarty. The next day your nephew Jack visited me…” I started the long and laborious details of what had brought us to this awful circumstance. I didn’t have as many answers as Watson had questions, but his sorrow soon turned to rage and he wanted dearly to get his hands personally on Moriarty. He wanted revenge for the unjust murder of his beloved, and swore he would go to the ends of the earth and expend all his resources to get his revenge. I know our friendship cooled that day, never to return to our standing prior to this atrocious incident. We would work together again later, but our collaboration would be brief and professional. We then proceeded as I had outlined. We cleaned up and re-dressed the body of Christy; we filled in her small caliber wound with some mustache wax and put a bandage over it. We waited until just after midnight and disposed of the murder’s body while passing through a tunnel. We do not know if the body bounced off the wall and was chewed up under the train wheels or not. We did not put the gun on the body, so when it would be found, there would not be anything to indicate anything other than a tragic accident of someone caught by the train as he foolishly entered the tunnel. Then several miles down track we were able to toss the rolled up stained garments into a river as we rattled over a wooden bridge; we had washed out most of the blood in the sink. The train was going too fast and too noisy to hear the splash of the bundle if we had timed it right, the night too dark to see our outcome. We would have Christy’s body long gone from the country before any link could be even contemplated. I had removed the Parisian labels and tore the dress to make identification more difficult. Just after daybreak, before the breakfast was to begin serving, we discretely notified the conductor of our great tragedy. He comforted us, and casually remarked how healthy she had seemed when we boarded and how tragic it was that her life was taken when she was so young. We had left packing up for after the ‘discovery’. We had some breakfast delivered to my connecting room, as we couldn’t leave the body to possible examination, but we both could not eat before the corpse. Neither of us finished our breakfast, Watson only stirred his food with his silver ware and I took only a few bites and some drink.