The entire business about the Red-Headed League is full of red herrings. One example is the requirement that you have to be red headed; "it is no use your applying if your hair is light red, or …show more content…
The manager had told him “No excuse will avail,'... ‘neither sickness nor business nor anything else. There you must stay, or you lose your billet” (The Red Headed League, Paragraph 81). This rule is peculiar as the worker may need to go to the bathroom, or have a high fever, and nevertheless still need to work. I then thought that the work is so essential, and therefore the League did not want secrets to spread. The work that Mr. Ross assigned to Mr. Wilson is also bizarre. Copying the Encyclopedia Britannica is not necessary if the inheritance is true, as they could buy one. This detail led me to surmise that the Encyclopedia may have secrets hidden within it, and the League desired to know but were afraid to copy it because it might be copyrighted. They then ordered an assistant to undertake it for them, so if anyone ever found out, the responsibility is the assistants. It turned out that Vincent Spaulding/John Clay made the advertisement to get Mr. Wilson out of the place. Sherlock proved my hypothesis incorrect in the end when he revealed the case