Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rise unusually early one morning to meet a young woman named Helen Stoner. Helen fears that her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Dr Grimesby Roylott, a doctor who practiced in India and was married to Helen’s late mother there years earlier. Dr. Roylott is the impoverished last survivor of what was a wealthy but violent, ill-tempered and amoral Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family of Surrey, and has already served a jail sentence in the past for killing his Indian butler in a rage. Helen’s twin sister had died almost two years earlier, shortly before she was to be married. Helen had heard her sister’s dying words, "The speckled band!" but was unable to decode their meaning. Helen, herself is now engaged, and she has begun to hear strange noises and to observe strange activities around Stoke Moran, the impoverished and heavily mortgaged estate where she and her stepfather live.