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In looking over my notes of the many unpublished cases undertaken by my friend Basil of Baker Street one, in particular, stands out – not for any perplexing nature of the case, not for the illustriousness of the clients, but for the very nature of the clients themselves. At the time I was terrified for him, and angry at him as well; but I had cause afterward to be very glad that my friend offers his sharp intellect and discerning eye to any creature of Great Britain who seeks his aid.
We had just concluded some business on the docks involving the dissolution of a smuggling ring (the clue that had brought the downfall of the wharf-rats running it, a solitary shoot of Russian rye-grass growing between two cobbles). As the police hauled away the thieves, Basil and I made our way along the pier to the purveyor of what he assured me were the best fish-and-chips in London – an investigation I was happy to make, as it was nearly noon and we had been lying in wait for the blackguards since before sunup.
When we emerged from between the rough wooden boards of the pier walkway to reach the shop (and its tantalizingly clumsy human patrons), a gull-screech froze me for a moment, then set every nerve at battle stations – for this was not the tedious, perpetually-hungry gull-squawk of “Mine! Mine! Mine!” but a direct address that was getting louder.
“Mouse! Mouse! Mouse!”
Basil, of course, looked up to see who was coming – and squawked himself in surprise when I furiously bundled him and myself back into the pier-crack just as two gulls landed outside our sanctuary. “Dawson!” he hissed at being squashed behind me.
“Back! Now!” I roared out at the birds in my ‘soldier’ voice, my revolver out and ready as their great white heads loomed over me, their deadly yellow bills a short peck away from running me through. “Or you lose an eye!”
“Ooh Alice, they’re brave little bites aren’t they?” squawked the gull nearest me.
The other gull pecked – at the back of first gull’s head, eliciting a short screech. “Gertie! Wot I told you about calling em that?” she snapped flapping her wings – they were both hens, seemingly. “Bites is the mice we eats, not the ones we wants helping us!”
“Dwsphn,” a muffled voice behind me – sounding like a very squashed and very cross consulting detective, “mm durr fulww, yr insphtinx are amurrble, but you have the wrong end of the stick,” Basil concluded as I eased up in front enough to let him move a bit. “I believe these ladies wish to consult our firm.”
Ladies? I stared in disbelief at the deadly creatures looming just outside, who’d as good as admitted that they ate mice. But Basil’s observational abilities are beyond exemplary. “Is this true…ladies?” I said, lowering my revolver.
Basil simply wriggled out past me, and with an oath I scrambled after him. If my friend was going to walk straight into those deadly beaks, he wasn’t going alone.
Well, even a dullard such as David Q. Dawson can observe when something is out of the ordinary – such as two black-backed gulls who stood and faced us instead of the wealth of spilled chips and bits of fried fish, clams, and oysters on the ground and in a nearby rubbish tip being heartily contested by all the rest of their screaming fellows.
“You’re the bi – the mice what finds things, yeah?” the first gull, Gertie, said to us. “Heard of you.”
“That is often an accurate description of my work, madame,” Basil said, removing his hat and sketching a head-tip. Only I saw that the fine hairs all along his tail stood on end, a sign of how very frightened he was at that moment. “Basil of Baker Street, and my esteemed companion Dr. Dawson, at your service.”
“Then you’re the ones we want all right,” said the other gull, Alice, while Gertie preened Alice’s wing-feathers into place. “It’s this way, yeah.” But she looked around, at Gertie and the ground and up and around. “Well, a hen wants a family, don’t she?”
“Chicks,” Basil said. “You wish me to find either orphaned gull chicks, or preferably a fertile egg or two, for the pair of you to hatch and raise as your own.”
Gertie squawked.
Alice ruffled her neck feathers – “Ooh, yer even cleverer than that ship-rat said you was!”
“Almost sorry we ate her now,” Gertie added, clacking her beak. I shuddered.
“Simplicity itself, ladies.” Basil’s tail still bristled, but a little less than before; he did so love to explain how he knew something others did not that he enjoyed doing so even to such voracious predators. “It is clear that you two are paired as surely as are a mated male and female pair – a gull grooms only its own wings or those of its mate. However, the one thing you two cannot do together is lay eggs that become chicks. You have run into difficulty hunting for your own eggs and wish for my assistance.”
I bit back my smile. Let Basil tell them anything they wanted to hear and we would be free of this nonsense. Ridiculous creatures! As if a mouse, even one as brave and clever as Basil, would simply go looking for eggs amid the ravenous nesting gulls in a laying site! Eggs for a creature nearly as murderous to Rodentia as hawks!
“Yeh.” Alice looked at the ground between her clawed web-feet. “It’s…hard, yeah. Seein’ everyone else coughing up fish for their nestful, and all Gert and I got’s a couple eggs that just lie there and rot.”
“We try.” Gert’s neck-feathers ruffled as well. “We keep – trying. We lay eggs, but they’re dead as stones inside.”
“We tried taking one or two from others.” Alice bowed her head to show a red wound on the top of her head, tiny feathers sticking up around it and stiff with black blood. Gert craned her neck to show similar beak-wounds there.
“But then that big bite swore you could do anything, think of anything.” Alice dropped her head so low that Basil could have put his arms around that beak – or be snapped up and gulped down in an eye-blink. I was still as stone. “Can you get us eggs? Eggs that will hatch?”
Basil was silent for a long moment. “I will take your case, ladies.” His face was solemn. Good mouse – tell them anything you have to, to escape with your life. We’ll have a laugh about this back home. “May I find you on this selfsame pier on a regular basis?”
“We’ll be here!” “We will, we will!” Both hopped up and down, flapping in excitement, and I only just kept myself from seizing Basil by the collar and dragging him back into our pier-crack.
“Then at the end of three days I will return here, at this same time, and let you know how your case fares.” Again Basil sketched a quick head-bob and tipped hat.
They screeched and hopped some more before rejoining their mates over the rubbish-tip.
Basil exhaled, and his entire body slumped; his tail-hairs lowered. “If I was not famished before, I am now, David.”
“My thoughts as well.”
“Away from the tip, I think.”
Fortunately another spot, further down the pier and under some wooden tables, provided a trove of discarded sustenance; we tore ravenously into everything for a long stretch of time. My relief at our escaping the mad gulls sharpened my already-keen appetite, and everything was delicious.
Finally Basil straightened and fastidiously wiped his whiskers free of grease with his pocket-handkerchief. “This will be an interesting case, Doctor.”
I was downing part of a fried oyster and nearly choked.
My friend pounded my back until I could breathe again. When I could breathe I could speak. “You’re not serious? They’re gulls! They eat mice, they don’t make friends with us!”
“They are not interested in befriending us, Doctor. They have asked me for my professional help.” So serious. He was serious. “I have every intention of honouring my word to them as an English gentlemouse.”
I stared at Basil, uncomprehending. He met my goggle-eyed stare with his own level look. “But…why?”
“For several reasons, Doctor Dawson.” Basil patted about himself, frowning a bit, until I took pity and offered him a cigarette from my own case. “Thank you. The first is that I find the challenges inherent in both client and request undeniably alluring. It’s not merely dangerous – this requires thought, and a good deal of learning about another species, and a bird species at that. This may require brute force or subterfuge; I have no idea which. Its very nature is so unpredictable that I had rather do this than take a dozen tediously-predictable missing-jewelry cases from rodential nobility.” He lit up, as did I; the prosaic ritual of the after-meal smoke calmed me and seemed to set him a bit more at ease. “Another reason is that a favour given and a truce made, however temporary, with powerful flying omnivores may also prove beneficial in the future. One must always have a few extra arrows in one’s quiver.” He exhaled a puff of smoke.
A diversion. A possible powerful ally. “Any other reason?” I demanded.
Basil looked at me. But he did not look at me the way he did a hundred times a day, when we were out and about in the city, talking to Inspector Gervaise, tracking a villain or even just strolling the streets of London after supper; he gazed at me with the eyes I only saw when he was lying with me in our bedroom, our unclad bodies entwined to our very tails. I coughed, blushed hard, and looked down at a pool of tomato ketchup. Basil had never done that before, and it was positively indecent for him to give me that look in public, even if we were currently safe from all prying eyes.
The words that followed were not in his bedroom voice, thank Providence – I would not have been able to resist kissing him in public in that case – but it was soft and sad. “Who better than we, David, understand the difficulties of sustaining a pairing outside the bounds of normal society?”
Oh. Damn him. Because I’d seen and heard the misery emanating from those gulls too – and Basil knew it. I’d treated mice couples heartbroken that they could not have their own pups, and that pain was the same even in those great white killers. Their language was coarse, but their feeling for each other was genuine – as surely a wedded pair as were Basil and I.
“I will not ask you to aid me in this venture, Doctor.” His ‘business’ voice – the one he always used when he tried to dissuade me from coming along. “Not only is this case an extremely dangerous one, but I have a strong suspicion that my failure will result in my clients attempting to eat me.” He stressed “attempt.”
For once, I was tempted to take him up on the offer. What was our reward for this folly? To NOT be eaten by our clients? To see another nest of voracious birds born?
To bring a little more joy into the world. For the happiness of a couple whose love for each other defied all the tenets of natural biology.
I stroked my moustache to hide a smile. To see the light in my beloved’s eyes at the challenge of a brand-new case, one of the strangest ever taken by him, at a time when he normally would sink into lethargy and melancholia at the close of the previous case.
I lifted my head and looked into Basil’s eyes, the same naked gaze he saw in the bedroom. If he could be as bold in public, so could I.
He smiled. “I knew my Dawson.”
I stood and dusted the crumbs off with my handkerchief; Basil donned his cap once more. “Then it’s best we return home, dear fellow. There is a good deal we both need to learn about gulls.”