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Inspector Lastrade of Scotland Yard informs Holmes that someone is robbing people’s houses of their busts of Napoleon and smashing them to bits in situ or a little distance away. What can be the meaning of this? Lastrade only really becomes interested when the affair is entangled in murder–the burglar knifed an Italian on his way out of a burgled house, and the dead man had a photo of the likely murdered in his pocket. Holmes continues to center his attention on the busts, not the dead man, a fact that Lastrade considers mad. As usual, Holmes is proven right in the denouement, a fact which can only be made clear by Holmes’s dazzlingly ingenious methods, as is revealed at the conclusion of the story.