You can say that again. Sherlock Holmes may have been on about a disappeared horse when he uttered the above, but a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis is a pretty spot-on description of what the internet has steadily been filling up with since Sunday night.

The tragedy of Sherlock’s flappy coat seeming to have flapped its last flap in The Reichenbach Fall was of such personal importance to so many people that, unwilling to wait eighteen months or longer for an explanation, the web’s hive mind set about doing some deducing of its own. And by Jove, I think they’ve got it.

This round-up is indebted to the tireless work of the commenters on this site who have sifted through details to provide theories and observations galore. Here goes then, just how did Sherlock pull off the mother of all fake-outs?

Molly