Patients are dying in the hospital ward, and to Mrs. Hudson, they seem sinisterly connected. Mary Watson knows just how she feels, though her focus is less on sick women than on missing boys—the poor ones that nobody wanted in the first place. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have more important puzzles to solve, so it is left to Mary and Mrs. Hudson to draw lines between the dying women and the disappearing boys, and to follow those lines to their grim conclusion.