Archive of Our Own

Above the inky water, the day dawned, grey and still. Fog wreathed the river’s banks and shrouded the shores of its island. Clouds obscured the setting of the moon and the rising of the sun. Out of the mist, a swan as dark as the water glided into the open. He dipped his head, then stretched it skyward, black eyes scanning the clouds. He snorted, spread his raven-dark wings and beat them against the twilit air. They lifted him until he stood upon the water’s surface and their sound echoed across the river. With each wingbeat, he declared the watery domain to be his and invited a mate to come and rule it with him. His wingbeats slowed; he sank back into the water. With wings still half-raised, he listened for an answer.

Each morning and evening, he had done the same. The days had rolled by. The seasons had taken their turns, and yet no whirring flight broke the silence. No graceful silhouette emerged from the clouds.

The swan clacked his beak and stared upwards, waiting. The fog drew closer, glowing above the glassy water. He lowered his wings and drifted with the current towards his island. He climbed its reedy bank, paused at the top and took one last, long look at the empty sky, then disappeared amongst the trees.

***

John stared out the window. The day was grey and still. He felt a twinge of what Sherlock felt when London was too quiet. John teased Sherlock about his boredom, but knew he probably shouldn’t, because he, too, felt the restlessness creep under his skin on quiet days. He attempted to hide it behind a book or a long walk ending in a glass of whiskey when he returned home. It never worked; Sherlock always knew. Fortunately for London, it rarely afflicted them both at the same time.

***

Outside the nursery windows, the day is grey and still. Inside, a toddler sits amidst a semicircle of discarded toys, one last plaything clutched in his clenched fist, his face above it scrunched into a rictus of displeasure.

His cheeks grow red, his mouth opens with the wail of frustration he is about to let loose. He raises his hand to send the toy flying as he has done with all the others. He throws it farther though. It lands at the corner of the carpet, tips off the edge with a clatter and rolls along the wooden floor, jingling. He watches to see how far it will go, wail still in reserve, when he sees a dog’s nose, then one long ear and a single bright eye peeping around the corner of the playroom door. The wail becomes a gurgle of glee.

The dog runs to the child, ears flopping, mouth agape. His nose touches the child’s cheek, his tongue licks the child’s face. His back legs dance, hindquarters swinging from side to side.

The toddler’s arms encircle the dog’s neck, face pressed against the silky fur, and giggle after giggle mingles with the dog’s soft woofs.

***

The swan barely left his island. At dawn and dusk, he would walk to the shore and stretch his long neck down into the water to drink, then return to what was left of the nest in which he had been hatched. He ate what was within reach of the nest and a bit on the way to take his morning and evening drink. He hardly preened, his neck grew thin, his feathers ragged. He slept with both eyes closed, and dreamt of the whirr of midnight wings.

***

John had finished his tea and was ready to abandon his vigil at the window when he saw a woman - tall, dressed completely in black, mask to match. She crossed the road diagonally, against the light, pausing in the middle for a motorcycle to roar past. The motor and foot traffic were greater than they had been for months, yet nowhere near what they usually were on Baker Street. John thought the woman might live in the neighbourhood, crossing like that. He made a small wager with himself that she was headed for 221b rather than one of the outdoor tables at Speedy’s.

***

The little boy scampers about the nursery, pulling a string of wooden swans behind him. The toy’s wings whirr and their bills clack and the toddler claps his hands. The boy jumps up on the bed and bounces. The wooden swans bounce beside him.

The toddler gets up and walks on his unsteady feet to the bed and grabs one of the little boy’s legs. He tugs with all his might and the little boy slides off the bed, landing neatly on his feet. The toddler hugs the boy tight and rubs his cheek against the russet knit of the little boy’s jumper.

“Rebbid,” the toddler says and the little boy nods and hugs him back.

***

Thirst awakened the swan. He raised his head and peered in the direction he usually took to the water. It seemed too far that night. The dead twigs and dried leaves beneath him were warm. The feathers along his back where he rested his head were soft. He let his neck sink back onto them. A memory of the soft space between his mother’s wings drifted through his mind and he stretched and curved his neck until he found a similar place on his own back and closed his eyes.

***

The woman halted by the front steps. John glanced at Sherlock stretched out on the sofa, eyes closed, laptop open on his chest – John’s laptop - paused on an advert for a veterinary surgery.

“I do believe we have a client,” John said, setting his cup down and pulling a mask from the box on the desk.

Sherlock opened one eye. “Oscillating?”

“Not a bit. Standing still as a statue,” John replied as he walked through the door to the hallway.

The doorbell rang as he descended the stairs.

John was, indeed, restless.

“Doctor Watson?”

John had to look up to take the visitor in. “That would be me,” he replied, gesturing for her to come in and stepping away from the doorway. “We’re one flight up.”

She entered with a grace that felt familiar to John.

He stood, hand upon the open door, and regarded her.

She paused at the bottom of the stairs, her expression solemn. “I apologise for not making an appointment. I have been thinking about consulting you and Mr Holmes for over a week, but when I saw the man again today as I left the zoo, I felt I mustn’t delay any longer and came straight here, in hopes that you might be in.”

John didn’t ask the obvious question. He raised a forefinger. “Tell us both upstairs, Ms…”

“Oh, of course, excuse me. Swann, Madeleine Swann.” She took a step towards John, hand half extended then pulled it back to her side. “Not used to this yet.”

“Not sure anyone is…yet.” John gestured towards the stairs again.

She nodded and started up.

John stuck his head out the door to check whether anyone seemed to be loitering in the vicinity, even though a pronoun wasn’t much of a description to be going on with. Seeing no one lingering who fit the description, he shut the door firmly and waited a moment before following Ms Swann.

When she turned at the first landing, the music began.

John recognised the melody from Swan Lake. Sherlock must have been listening from the top of the stairs.

***

A thread of sound wafted through the mist. The swan didn’t lift his head, but he opened one eye. It wasn’t the sound of wings for which he had waited so long. It was the sound of song. He knew song. The small birds sang, and the creatures who had come out to the island in their hollow tree trunk had sung as they wielded their sticks and when they had finished eating their food in the long grass under the trees.

The sound stopped and the swan closed his eye.

He recalled the first time he had seen them. He had still been grey and fluffy, but no longer small enough to ride on his mother’s back. He had been surprised that his parents had not hissed at the creatures, who were large, nor had they chased them away as they did with any other creatures who set foot on their island. His mother had explained that they were called ‘boys’ and that these boys were cousins and that was why they were welcome. The swan had been surprised that these ‘boys’ were birds because they only had feathers on their heads, so they couldn’t fly at all. They could swim though. He had seen them do it near the river bank. They were not very fast and they splashed all the time, not only when they were busking. His mother warned him that there were others who looked very similar to the boys, but were not cousins. These boys could not come to the river banks or their island, but if he went exploring, he would see such creatures and he should avoid them.

The swan rubbed his head against his feathers. He missed the days when he and his parents swam the waters around the island to all the places where the best plants grew. It was here that they had taught him how to fly when his wings were large and strong enough. And here, he had risen out of the water and thrashed his wings just like his parents to warn off other swans who tried to land on their part of the river. Such interlopers had always left in haste, sometimes without a few of their feathers. His parents were large birds and he had been pleased that he was getting to be nearly as big as they were and could help chase intruders away. But, he wasn't to chase the boy with the red feathers on his head nor the one with the black feathers who came with him. They were his cousins.

It was a visit from the boys one day that had sparked the conversation when his mother told him that she and his father would become like the boys one day. When they became too old to lay eggs and defend their territory, they would still be young for the boys’ kind. And then, the river between the misty banks and the island in the middle would be his, and he would have to be strong enough to defend it all alone until a mate saw him from the sky and came flying down to join him on the water.

He had been sad when his parents flew away, but excited about being found by a mate. He had patrolled his territory assiduously, eaten plentifully, preened carefully and kept a hopeful eye on the sky.

But no mate came. And even the cousins had not come to visit for many, many seasons.

The song resumed.

The swan opened both eyes and lifted his head. It was not like the song of any bird he knew nor like the songs of his cousins. It was very sweet, like fresh leaves and fish eggs.

With an effort, he got to his feet and walked to the shore of his island. The music grew louder. He drank and drank; he hadn’t drunk for days, and the water was very sweet, like music. He slipped into the water and swam towards the sound.

***

“Ms Madeleine Swann.”

Sherlock pivoted from the window, bow suspended above the strings of his violin.

John stepped farther into the room. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said, turning back to where Ms Swann stood in the doorway.

They remained contemplating one another, a pair of willowy figures illuminated by the grey light from the windows. Then, slowly, Sherlock lowered his violin and set it and his bow aside.

John looked from the one to the other. He had witnessed numerous techniques Sherlock used for putting clients at ease or on edge, but the music was a new one to him. John watched for his cue in whatever approach Sherlock had chosen.

“Which parent is the devoté of Proust?” Sherlock asked in lieu of a greeting.

“My mother. Father simply likes the cakes.”

There was a slight crinkling at the corners of Sherlock’s eyes.

They nodded at one another.

John concluded that Sherlock was inclined to take her case, and not only to relieve the tedium. He doubted Sherlock would let Ms Swann know that right away though and John was right.

“Please, have a seat,” John said and pulled his armchair a little further away from Sherlock’s.

Ms Swann obliged.

Sherlock glided over to his seat, and John arranged himself by the desk with notebook and pencil to hand.

“Start from the beginning,” Sherlock said over his steepled fingers when the stage was set.

“I am born?” Ms Swann said.

John didn’t quite succeed in suppressing a snort. Behind Sherlock’s mask, a smile flickered and went out.

Nerves, John wrote in his notebook next to Ms Swann’s name and the date. He and Sherlock had seen nerves manifest themselves in a wide variety of ways. They had not encountered literary quotes up to that point, but they knew well the hesitation that preceded a client committing themselves to actually doing what they had come to do.

“A little more recently,” Sherlock urged, but his tone was not sharp.

The client took a deep breath. “Recently, I’ve completed a project for which I had been studying swans.”

Sherlock tilted his head. She hadn’t lost him yet.

“It was for an online game my company has been developing, a fantasy role-playing game. The virtual launch was three days ago. Industrial espionage is not unknown in the video game industry, so if the man who had seemed to be following me for several weeks had been hoping to glean advance information about the content or the release date of our new title before we made it public, I assumed his motivation would be gone after the launch. I…” She drew a silver case from her jacket pocket, extracted a business card and held it out towards Sherlock.

He waved a few fingers airily in John’s direction.

John leaned forward from his seat and took it from her, set it on the desk above his notebook.

“This project had been five years in development and I had been involved since its inception. The story was inspired by the mythology surrounding swans, the folktales, the music, other art froms…”

“Like Swan Lake,” Sherlock interjected.

“Exactly.”

John heard the smile in her voice. He drew a smiley face in his notes next to the words, Swan Lake,

“The Wild Swans.”

“Yes.”

John jotted down the title.

“Leda and the Swan.”

“Yes. And the European myth of the black swan, how that developed into an idiom about seemingly impossible things coming to pass as well as the modern term for unexpected events…”

John caught the hint of breathlessness as the words came tumbling out. He made a note next to the title.

“And the creatures themselves,” Sherlock supplied.

Ms Swann’s eyes lit up. “Yes. At the centre of it all, the creatures themselves.”

John smiled. He had heard plenty of people speak of their pets in similar tones.

“I wrote the story for the game, the dialogue, created the character designs.” She shook her head. “I don’t do the finished art, there’s a team for that, just the preliminary sketches, to go with the descriptions of the characters in the narrative. I researched, in print and in the field. More, perhaps, than was strictly necessary. I’ve been fascinated by swans since I was a child. Everyone who writes about them seems at least a little bit in love with them. Their very name has a sort of mythic resonance and I have been immersed in it for several years now…the characters feel very real after a certain point...”

John drew a small heart in the margins of his notes. He knew about getting lost in a story one was writing.

Ms Swann paused. In her lap, her fingers intertwined. She stared down at them and pulled them apart, glanced at Sherlock, then away, took a breath. “…there’s a slight possibility that I’ve moved beyond avid interest into obsession, I suppose. I have wondered whether I am going a little mad.” She paused again.

John wrote ‘therapist?’ in his notes. He tapped his pencil on the paper, then wrote ‘Sherlock + video games’. He shook his head, crossed out video games and added ‘swans?’’

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at Ms Swann.

She resumed. “I understand from your website, starting with its very title, that you’ve made a science of discovering the truth of things. If you would take my case, I would ask that you determine whether there is another explanation for what has been happening to me the past few weeks, other than some sort of hallucination on my part.”

Sherlock tapped his forefingers against his chin. “Every detail, Ms Swann.”

“You’re not showing me the door then?”

“Not yet,” Sherlock replied, his voice dropping into a lower register. “Continue.”

John’s eyes widened at that. He kept them carefully trained on his notebook until he had schooled his expression into a professionally neutral one.

Ms Swann had closed her eyes. She took several deep breaths and let them out slowly.

John checked Sherlock, anticipating some waspish remark, but none came. Sherlock was studying Ms Swann. His gaze flitted over the visible part of her face, her body - the hands especially, although the black gloves were not easy to see against the black clothing, but he seemed to be seeing enough to hold his attention.

With one more deep breath, Ms Swann opened her eyes and fixed them on a point mid-way between Sherlock and John. “With a name like mine, I suppose it was very natural to have an interest in the birds. Family lore has it that one of my many times great-grandfathers was the Queen’s Swan Keeper and that that is the origin of our surname. Whether there’s any truth to it or not, the tale appealed to my childish fancy and I started making up stories about them and illustrating them when I was very young.”

“And now that’s part of your professional life,” Sherlock said.

Her eyes flicked to Sherlock. “Exactly. Rather ideal.” She looked down at her hands for a moment, then back at Sherlock. “There’s a chance of a sequel if sales are strong.”

Sherlock and John both nodded, although John didn’t think she noticed him.

Sherlock was holding her gaze. It had a strong effect on some people when he did that, almost hypnotic. John knew. And time had not diminished it.

“So, your field research hasn’t ended,” Sherlock added.

Her eyes brightened again; she shook her head. “No, it hasn’t.” She glanced over at the framed bat specimen on the mantle. “After years, it’s not surprising that I’ve grown rather fond of them. As individuals, not just zoological specimens to study to see how their wings fold or their tails wag.”

“Do they, wag?” John interjected.

“Like dogs, almost. It’s such a contrast to their stately grace as celebrated in song and story.” Her eyes flitted to John for a moment as she answered, then returned to Sherlock.

Steel to a magnet.

“And these individuals made their way into your story,” Sherlock stated in his inimical way.

Her posture relaxed. She let her hands go free. “Yes. They definitely helped me write…and sketch.” She traced a curve in the air. “I dragged the principal animators out to watch them with me. I told them videos were not enough.”

“But you made some of your own.”

“Yes, especially when they come out of the water. Sometimes, when people feed them on the shore, they are nearly as tall as they are. Holding food over one’s head is not a good strategy. They have a long reach. One doesn’t think about that scale in a bird. At least, not one that can fly. I have a video of that.”

Her answers were flowing now. She was sitting back in the chair, one arm on the armrest.

John’s pencil scraped across his notebook. He flipped to a new page.

“You have it on your phone,” Sherlock said and held out his hand.

Initially, she was startled, then she was tapping on her phone and handing it across to him.

John got up to lean over Sherlock’s shoulder to watch. He retained his pencil in one hand, resting his other on Sherlock’s shoulder as though to steady himself.

Ms Swann noticed.

John looked up and saw her notice. “Is that an unusually large one?” he asked.

“Towards the higher end of the size range. He’s a mature male, monarch of the Regent’s Park boating lake,” she replied. “But I’ve encountered an even larger one in Kensington Gardens.”

Sherlock grew still.

John had heard it in her voice, too. She was coming to the core of her saga now.

“And that’s not his only unusual quality. I contacted a friend from uni, who is an ornithologist at the zoo, about him. I sent her a photo to see if he was as unusual as I thought. She was interested, but it wasn’t until today that I had time, with the launch over, to have lunch with her and show her my notes and all the photos and videos I’ve taken.” Ms Swann leaned forward in her chair.

A confidence.

“There’s a chance that he’s a mutation, or…” She paused.

The habit of the story-teller. John smiled.

“…a distinct species.” She straightened her shoulders. “I have a few of his feathers, they catch on the grass, when they groom themselves there. I gave my friend a couple. She’s going to get a DNA test done.”

She glanced down at her hands.

“I have a wing feather from the moulting in July, but I couldn’t part with that,” she added.

Sherlock handed back her phone. “Show us the clips.”

Her eyes sparkled as she tapped through the options on her phone. “Here’s one, where he’s flying across the Round Pond towards me.” She handed over her phone. Her cheeks were beginning to flush.

Sherlock hit play.

From the video, it was hard to judge his size while the swan was in the air or even after he landed in the water and swam to the edge of the pond and bowed to her, but when he flapped his wings to step onto the paving, it was clear. The phone had had to be tilted up. Ms Swann must have taken a few steps back and several nearby onlookers were captured in the frame with the bird. He appeared to be as tall as most of them, nearly of a height with Ms Swann judging by the level of her arm as she reached out to stroke his neck. The swan bowed again. A dog barked. The swan rounded on it and hissed, opening his wings. The phone was knocked to the ground and there was a dizzying view of treetops and sky before Ms Swann had retrieved it. By then, her swan had returned to the water and, along with dozens of other wildfowl, was swimming away from the shore.

“A couple other people caught this incident and put it on YouTube,” Ms Swann said. “The dog was a large one, an Irish Setter, I think, and he was off his lead, which he shouldn’t have been so near the Pond. There are signs all over the area warning against it.”

“The dog ran back to his owner,” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann nodded. “I don’t think it had ever seen an angry bird that large either.”

“Is he an Australian swan?” John asked. He had seen black swans there.

“A mutation of that species perhaps, or a hybrid,” Ms Swann conceded politely, but she’d drawn back when John posed his question as if he had said something offensive.

“Their bills are reddish-orange and almost white at the tip. As you can see his is black and his feathers are sleek like the mute swan, whereas Cygnus atractus, the Australian black swan, has somewhat ruffled dark feathers with flight feathers of white on the wings. The sheen of his feathers is more like a raven’s. Where the sunlight reflects off him, there are hints of blue.”

“Have you named him?” Sherlock asked.

“I wouldn’t pres…” Ms Swann began.

“Rothbart, perhaps?”

Her eyebrows lowered. “Definitely, not Rothbart!”

“Siegfried, then,” Sherlock said.

Her brow smoothed.

“You danced Odette?” Sherlock asked.

John was surprised that Sherlock phrased it as a question, knowing that even when he was playing the balance-of-probability card, Sherlock delivered his surmises as statements.

“I was too young when I convinced my parents to let me stop ballet lessons. Danse des petits cygnes was what I danced for my last recital.”

Sherlock cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.

“I was getting too tall according to my teacher.”

Sherlock scowled

“I felt my talents lay elsewhere.”

He didn’t change his expression.

“I wanted to dance Siegfried…but I wanted to change him…make him less a superficial fool.” Ms Swann heaved a big sigh. “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that. How do you do it?”

It was Sherlock’s turn to smile. “That’s one of my secrets.” He picked up his phone and checked something. “In other times, we could have paused for tea now, but…” He gestured at his mask and then the room in general. “So, you put that into the narrative of the game.”

“You’ve read about it?”

Sherlock shook his head and glanced over his shoulder at John. “Living with a writer, one learns a few things about the creation of fiction.”

John flushed.

Ms Swann continued, addressing John. “I looked up your website, too, after my friend recommended you both. A few years ago, Mr Holmes solved a problem at the zoo, a confidential matter, but Robin did divulge that he was brilliant.”

John chortled.

She sighed. “Yes, she gets a lot of teasing about her name, too. For her professional writing, she uses her first initials. At uni, our friends thought we ought to start a band or a law firm.”

The case must have been before John met Sherlock, because he was sure he would have remembered an ornithologist named Robin, and he would have hated to change the name if it was a case that could have been written up.

“I enjoyed your style of presenting the cases,” she said and hesitated.

“I change names and details, of course,” John assured her. “And some just can’t be made public, of course.”

She nodded. “Good…because I haven’t told you the strange bits yet.”

“Pray, continue, Ms Swann,” Sherlock said.

John resumed his seat.

“I live near Westbourne Park Station, on the canal, across from Meanwhile Gardens…do you know them?”

Sherlock hummed his assent.

John didn’t. Fortunately, he knew there was an A-Z on the desk somewhere. He spotted the eagle crest of the Royal College of Surgeons peeking out from beneath a newspaper and recalled that he’d set a couple volumes of the Annals down on the A-Z the day before. He eased the book of maps out from under the stack and found the map around Westbourne Park Station.

“It’s an old warehouse that’s been converted to flats. I’m on the raised ground floor. I have a balcony that’s right over the canal. It’s a nice place to sit and feed the ducks and geese and coots. Those were the birds on the canal when I moved in five years ago, and gulls, of course.”

When she paused this time, John thought it was more than a story-teller’s instinctive rhythm.

“A few months ago, the black swan appeared below my balcony.”

John’s eyebrows went up, but Sherlock didn’t change his expression.

“How do you know it was the same one?” he asked.

“Initially, I thought it couldn’t be. I mean there are black swans in lots of places in London, St James’ Park has a group of them and Regent’s Park used to have a pair on the little lake near the Rose Garden, but they are all the Australian variety, whereas this bird was raven-winged and black-beaked like the one at the Round Pond and big, like that one, too, although that’s harder to judge when he’s in the water.

“When he first appeared on the canal, I hadn’t been to the Round Pond in a couple weeks and I had been stopping by every two or three days for several months prior to that.”

John looked up from the A-Z. “There’s no water access between Kensington Gardens and the Grand Union Canal. If it was the same bird, it would have had to do some scouting to get there.”

“That was what I thought. It was twilight, so I couldn’t get a good photo from the balcony and I didn’t want to go out on the water in the dark to get a closer look. I decided that if he was still there the next day, I’d ask my neighbour if I could borrow his row boat and go investigate. If there was more than one of this possibly new species, that would be exciting, too.”

“And was he there in the morning?” John asked.

Ms Swann shook her head. “I was rather disappointed, but I told myself it might have been a nearly-grown cygnet, most of their feathers are still grey and in the dwindling light and the shadows on the water, I could have mistaken the one for the other.”

“But you said the bird you saw on the canal had feathers like a raven’s wing,” Sherlock pointed out.

“It’s what I thought I saw, but people were putting lights on in their flats, which illuminated some parts of the water and made the shadowed portions darker, altogether poor conditions for making accurate observations.” She spread her black-gloved hands. “The more I thought about it, the more I thought it simply couldn’t be, and so I went to bed, although I didn’t sleep well.”

“You were theorising ahead of the facts,” Sherlock remarked.

“I was,” Ms Swann agreed, “and I didn’t want to make that mistake. Your admonition about that is very clear on your website.”

John saw the crinkles at the corners of Sherlock’s eyes. If Ms Swann’s intent had been to flatter Sherlock, she was doing a good job.

“The next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I had back-to-back meetings and couldn’t get to the park before dusk to check if he was there where he ought to be.” She leaned forward. “But he wasn’t, or if he had been, he hadn’t stayed there, because he was on the canal when I got home, gliding through the dark water, wings half-raised, like a sentinel beneath my balcony.” She shook her head. “The light was still rubbish for a photograph though.”

The corners of her eyes were crinkling as she remembered.

John drew another smiley face in his notes.

“I fed him the bread I’d bought on the way home – brown with lots of seeds, the kind he likes best. I slept better that night.”

“You expected him to be there.”

I glanced at Sherlock. He was watching Ms Swann intently.

“I like that kind of bread, too,” she said, then met Sherlock’s gaze. “Talking to you is like talking to a therapist, isn’t it? It doesn’t work, if one isn’t truthful.”

Sherlock didn’t move a muscle.

“I had been hoping he’d be there,” she admitted.

Sherlock stood up.

Ms Swann looked startled and stood up as well.

“We will come to your flat. I should see the area.”

“But I haven’t told you all of it yet,” Ms. Swann protested.

“You’ll tell us the rest there. You’ll be more at ease in your own home,” he said. “Go ahead, John and I will join you in an hour. John, you’ll see Ms Swann out.”

“Ah, yeah, of course.” John put his notebook aside and tried to catch Sherlock’s eye, but he was avoiding John’s.

John walked to the sitting room door and opened it.

Sherlock and Ms Swann were still standing regarding one another.

“I believe this is where one might customarily shake hands, but that’s out these days.” He shrugged. “Do whatever organising you want to do before our arrival and we will see you…” He glanced at his phone. “…at five.”

She didn’t answer immediately. “Have you decided then? To take my case?”

“I’ll decide at the end of our visit to your premises,” Sherlock replied.

“Oh,” she said, circumventing the chair and stepping past John into the hall.

“After you,” John said with a cordial wave at the stairs. It was a polite thing to say, but it was a practical habit considering the sorts who sometimes dropped by Baker Street.

On the step outside, Ms Swann turned to John. “Did I say something wrong?”

John shook his head. “You must have said something right for Sherlock to want to explore your situation further.”

She nodded. “I need someone else’s point of view on this.”

“Sherlock is rarely shy about letting people know what his deductions are.”

“Good. That’s good.” She stepped down to the pavement. “My mobile number’s on my card, if you have trouble finding the entrance to the building.”

John took the card out of his pocket and noted the number. “Great. Excellent.”

“’Til five, then,” she said and turned to face the street. She crossed it diagonally again, heading straight for the Tube station. She didn’t look back.

This time John saw a man detach himself from the shadows of an entryway and proceed towards the station several steps behind Ms Swann.

He shut the door and crossed the road, making the third in a strange parade.

When the Hammersmith & City line emerged into the murky daylight at Edgware Road, John got a signal on his phone.

Someone followed Ms Swann to the Tube. I followed them both. At Edgware now.

Explains why you weren’t answering me. Has she seen you? SH

No, I’ve been hiding behind an Evening Standard like in a James Bond film.

Keeping it that way will be harder at Westbourne Park. I’ll be at the entrance to her building at five. SH

Sherlock sauntered up at ten minutes before five with his violin case in hand.

“It hasn’t been easy being inconspicuous on this street for nearly half an hour.”

“But you succeeded,” Sherlock said.

“Well, the police haven’t turned up.”

“Good. What became of the person following Ms Swann?” Sherlock asked.

“He disappeared on the bridge,” John explained.

“You lost sight of him on the bridge,” Sherlock amended.

“No, he disappeared. He’d stopped right in the middle and was looking over the railing at what turned out to be this building,” John said. “I was across the road by the pub and between one blink of my eyes and the next, he was gone.”

Sherlock stared at John. “What did you do?”

“I scanned up and down the road in case he’d somehow sprinted off, but the number of pedestrians would have made that difficult. There were more folks about than we’ve been seeing lately and no one was shoving people out of the way or weaving around them. I crossed the road the second I could, which was fairly fast, and looked over the side because that was the only explanation that would seem to account for his sudden absence.” John pursed his lips and sighed. “Then I noticed the stairway down to the towpath.”

“He wasn’t there?”

“Not that I could see, but there was a swan in the water, swimming west.”

“Black swan?”

“I knew you’d figure that out.” John shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Did you follow him?”

John shook his head. “I came round here to see if the bloke had somehow gone in this direction without my seeing him, even though I didn’t think it likely. When I didn’t see him around here, I called Ms Swann to check whether she got home safely. Happily, she answered. I asked her to phone me if anything unusual happened before five, otherwise we’d see her then.”

“How did she sound?” Sherlock asked, glancing along the street, then turning and striding towards a slip off the canal at the side of the building.

John darted after him. “Similar to when she was at Baker Street. I heard papers rustling and things being moved about. Sounded like she was tidying up.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed her this much time,” Sherlock muttered and hopped over the fence, which was supposed to keep people off the narrow patio that ran along the side of the neighbouring building.

“I doubt she’s realised how much you can read into the most ordinary things,” John said, following, albeit a bit less nimbly. “After she rang off, I went back to the bridge, to check on Suspect No. 2.”

Sherlock stopped. John would have bumped into him but for his waving his arm behind him. “We’ll have to go back over the bridge to the towpath to walk west. Anyone trying to access her building from the east would either have to swim or jump across the three houseboats moored in the slip.” Sherlock narrowed his eyes at the boats. “Doable, but awkward and risky. Judging by the water line, someone’s home on the middle one.”

John leaned over the patio railing and peered around the corner of Ms Swann’s building. It squatted at the edge of the water, a long building whose ground floor must have been a loading dock for the warehouse in the past. Some of its considerable length had been converted to apartments, but most left as open-air storage. He had peeked in from the street side and been able to see the trees of the gardens across the canal through the metal slats.

John heard the gentle thump of Sherlock landing on the other side of the patio fence and dashed after him.

“So, what did you learn about Suspect No. 2?” Sherlock asked as they approached the Great Western Road.

“He hadn’t gone too far. He was swimming in leisurely circles in front of Ms Swann’s building. Someone on one of the balconies overlooking the water tossed what looked like bread in his direction. He ignored it. The geese were keen though. A few people snapped pictures of him. One woman held out half a sandwich. Mr Swan wasn’t interested in that either. The gulls saw their chance and went for it. After a few minutes, I returned to Hormead Road and waited for you.”

John looked pointedly at the violin case Sherlock was carrying. “So, what have you been up to and why do you have your violin with you? I’ve never seen you take it out of the flat.”

“A little internet research about Ms Swann’s company and their newly released game - a synopsis, a few reviews, a trailer,” Sherlock said.

“Anything noteworthy?” John asked.

They halted in the middle of the bridge and stared westward. The black swan was not among the birds on the water.

“Ms Swann was listed among the composers for the game’s score, thus the violin. I believe it may evoke further confidences.”

“More than those planned,” John concluded.

Behind them, church bells began to toll. Sherlock checked his phone. “The hour has struck,” he said and turned back towards Ms Swann’s flat.

On Hormead Road, everything still appeared calm. Sherlock rang the bell with Swann printed next to it. The person who picked up the answerphone did indeed sound like Ms Swann.

The door buzzed.

As Ms Swann had said, the building was odd. An uneasy merger of modern and Victorian aesthetics, the preservation of the historical elements almost surely mandated because the warehouse was a listed building or the neighbourhood a conservation area. The architect appeared to have resented it.

John followed Sherlock down the corridor which followed the eastern wall of the building. Its patterned yellow and red brickwork was exposed; its row of high, round windows dotted the smooth, modern wall opposite it with circles of pearly light. Sherlock stopped before a door at the end of the hall that was painted a fashionable light grey. He lifted the brushed steel door-knocker and paused.

John wondered what Sherlock had spied on the door or felt on the knocker. He waited.

***

The corridor is long, its wooden floor polished to a glossy shine. Innumerable doors open off the passage. The child turns when he hears the click of the dog’s nails on the parquet. He holds his arms open. The animal skids into him with a thud and an enthusiastic bark. The boy closes his arms around the silky head, fingers digging into the warm fur.

The older boy flings his arm around the younger child’s shoulders. “What shall we play today?” he asks.

The younger child smiles. “Pirates!” he declares.

***

Sherlock let the knocker fall. The resulting sound was surprisingly loud.

“That must annoy the neighbours,” John remarked.

Sherlock was staring at the keyhole. John thought Sherlock must be deducing Ms Swann’s drinking habits from the scratches on it. Maybe John was.

She opened the door a moment later, mobile to her ear and stood back, motioning John and Sherlock in.

“Yes, I’ll bring the sketches to the meeting,” she said into it, then paused. “Yes. Yes, sure. Listen, my guests just arrived. We’ll talk more on Monday before the meeting. Yes. No worries. Enjoy the weekend. Yeah, you, too. Bye.”

Sherlock ambled past her as though he had no particular destination in mind and John followed. Beyond a short wall with a mirror and a little table underneath with keys and gloves on it, of which Sherlock took note, the room opened up. Most of one wall was bi-fold doors, letting in a remarkable amount of light for an overcast afternoon on an autumn day. Beyond the doors, the metal railing of a balcony was visible, cutting through the vista of trees beginning to turn colours in the gardens across the canal. The canal itself wasn’t wide enough to show itself at that height, but the openness of the view and a certain shimmer to the air gave its presence away.

John walked towards the windows until the tops of the houseboats moored along the southern edge of the canal came into view. He cast his eyes along what he could see of the towpath and into the area beneath the trees bordering it. His mystery man did not appear to be among the people seated on the benches near the path or strolling along it. He was either long gone or taking care not to be seen or, just some bloke who needed to take the Tube from Baker Street to Westbourne Park at the same time as Ms Swann. John shook his head. It hadn’t felt like a coincidence to him.

Behind him, Sherlock was perambulating around the room. John didn’t need to look to know how Sherlock would be glancing here and there with an absent-minded look that proclaimed to any onlooker that he was just passing the time whilst he waited for Ms Swann to be free. Anyone who knew Sherlock would know better though.

John chuckled softly. It didn’t matter how many times he’d seen Sherlock do it, it was always a treat. If people knew what he could see, they would never let him into their homes. John was looking forward to hearing on the way home what Sherlock had gleaned, unless his findings were of a sufficiently delicate nature that he would indicate with a certain tilt of his head that they needed to wait until they were back at Baker Street.

What John could see was a fairly new flat of the open-plan variety, littered with books and papers, photographs and art supplies. There was a keyboard along the western wall near a half-open door revealing a smaller room equally bright with late afternoon light. The only thing keeping the flat from having the cluttered appearance of Baker Street was the size of the space and the sparser and less eclectic nature of the furnishings.

“I’m so sorry,” Ms Swann declared as she joined John. “One of my colleagues, anxious about our next project getting started in earnest. It can take over one’s life. One has to turn it off sometimes.”

“Do you?” Sherlock asked from across the room. He was holding a large, hard-bound book with the photograph of a swan on the cover.

Ms Swann let out a small puff of laughter. “I try.”

“But you rarely succeed,” Sherlock concluded, setting the book back on the glass coffee table nestled in the angle of a large ell-shaped sofa.

John noticed the mug with a black feather sticking out of it and the image of two courting swans on its side. The mug was holding down a stack of paper next to the closed laptop sharing the table with the book of photographs and three or four other volumes.

Sherlock nudged the mug aside. “You compose?”

Ms Swann hurried over to him. “No, no, not really, just some ideas, a little melody.”

Sherlock had already set down his violin case on the sofa and unlatched it. “Would you mind if I tried it?” he asked as he lifted his violin to his chin. “I had the bow re-haired and wanted to test it before taking it away from the shop, but the luthier was in a hurry to close and I didn’t have the chance.”

That was the kind of lying detail Sherlock always talked about. John wondered why Sherlock was doing it.

He set the bow to the strings, paused to adjust the pegs after the first notes, then played.

Ms Swann had stopped a couple paces away from Sherlock, caught between her wish not to offend him and her desire not to have her creation aired before strangers.

Sherlock had balanced the score on the back of the sofa, and had turned away from both Ms Swann and John to play. There were several pages of it.

The melody was high at first, light and pretty. John thought Ms Swann shouldn’t have been shy to share it, but then he wondered if it wasn’t the quality of the music about which she was reticent. John knew he was no expert, but he knew what pleased him and the piece was pleasing.

The outstretched hands with which Ms Swann had approached Sherlock drifted down to her sides.

As Sherlock played on, the melody dipped lower and John shivered. It was the same reaction he had when Sherlock lowered his voice. The initial pleasantries over, the song had become one of seduction. Now, he understood Ms Swann’s reluctance to have it played.

She was quiet for a moment more when Sherlock finished, head tilted as though she were still listening to something. “It sounds well on the violin.”

Sherlock nestled the instrument back in its case. “But lacking the sound of rippling water in the bass clef. I’d enjoy hearing you play it on the piano.”

John shifted his gaze to the keyboard over which there were two framed pictures: a line drawing of three animals merging together and a black and white photograph of a child in a feathery ballet costume. John guessed that the latter was Ms Swann as a little ballerina.

“Although there are references to your playing the violin on Doctor Watson’s blog, I had no idea that you were such an accomplished musician,” Ms Swann said.

Sherlock still had his back to her, taking his time tucking his bow away and closing the violin case.

John wondered if Sherlock could see any of Ms Swann’s expression in his peripheral vision. It wouldn’t matter. Her voice was full of admiration, which Sherlock had surely been hoping to elicit. If John didn’t know better, he might have thought Sherlock was genuinely flirting. Stepping out on the balcony and giving Sherlock some space for whatever stratagem he had in mind seemed a good idea. He unlatched the doors and began to pull them aside.

“No!” Ms Swann exclaimed, whirling away from Sherlock and towards John.

John looked over his shoulder, startled.

“No,” she repeated in a quieter tone, already at John’s side. “Don’t go out. He might attack if he sees you and hurt himself on the railings.”

John lifted both hands in surrender and Ms Swann slid the door back into place and locked it.

“Your swan has attacked someone before,” Sherlock said.

John and Ms Swann both turned to him.

Sherlock had draped his coat over the back of the sofa and seated himself upon it. “That incident would be a good place to resume your story, Ms Swann.”

Her hand fell away from the door. “Yes. Yes, it would,” she agreed.

They arranged themselves around the sofa, Sherlock in the centre angle of it.

John looked at how they were seated and smiled.

Sherlock extracted a notebook from his jacket pocket and tossed it in John’s direction.

John caught it.

“After that first evening, I would find the swan on the canal every day when I came home. I didn’t usually see him from the bridge, but by the time I had come inside and opened up the balcony doors, he would be there. This went on for more than a week and I made a point of bringing home the bread he liked and a bag of lettuce and I would feed him from the balcony. Then one day, he wasn’t there. I’d come home early, so I waited, checking every so often, but there was no swan.”

John jotted a few words in the notebook. He recognised the wistfulness in her voice. That was how he felt when he got back to Baker Street and Sherlock was out.

“So, I called my neighbour, Alan. He keeps a boat down in my storage space, his flat doesn’t have storage on the canal. In return, I get to use the boat. Of course, I check with him first. That day, he was preparing to go rowing and I asked if I could come along. I’ve told Alan a bit about my research and had mentioned that I’d seen a swan on the canal recently. We rowed west to the footbridge to Harrow Road and turned around. We were almost back here when we heard the sound of wings.”

From her perch on the far right corner of the sofa, she looked at Sherlock, then John. “Have you ever heard mute swans in flight?” She lifted her hands from her lap with her fingers spread.

John shook his head. Sherlock raised an eyebrow expectantly.

“It sounds like a sword cutting through the air.” Her left hand sliced through the air. “That’s thought to be why mute swans don’t call to one another as they fly as other swans do, because they can hear the sound of each other’s wings.”

Her hand went to her ear.

“I heard that sound and turned just as the swan began his landing in the water beside the boat. He never settled into the water, just kept running over the surface alongside us, wings extended, and neck stretched so his head reached into the boat. He bit Alan on the arm and hit him with one of his wings. Alan raised an oar, but the swan wouldn’t stop. Alan was trying to fend him off without hurting him, but it wasn’t working. The swan was hissing and thwacking. I told Alan to duck under the seat and I threw a tarpaulin over him, all the time talking to Prince.”

John turned and caught Sherlock’s slight nod.

“I said all sorts of nonsense as one does when soothing an animal, and he finally settled onto the water and allowed me to feed him. I’m not sure what he thought had happened to Alan, but he seemed to consider himself the victor in the encounter.” She paused and glanced out the doors. “When I felt he was completely calm…” Her hand made a stroking motion through the air. “…and still talking to him, I managed to row the boat under the bridge, shipped the oars and offered the swan more bread. Alan managed to slip out of the boat and jog down the path. I tied the mooring rope to the end of the fence and got out a couple minutes later, hurried up the stairs to the bridge and left Alan to reclaim the boat when it seemed safe. I got back here as quickly as I could, and came out onto the balcony. The swan was swimming near the other side of the canal, his wings up, but he didn’t come to me when I called, just kept swimming back and forth across the water.”

“And that’s when you wrote the song,” Sherlock said, nodding at the papers back on the table.

Brow furrowed, Ms Swann glanced at John before she answered, “Yes.”

“And did he like it?” Sherlock asked.

“I don’t know,” Ms Swann replied. “I haven’t seen him since.”

“But you play it when you come home with the balcony doors open,” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann’s eyebrows were up. “Yes. How could you know that?”

“That, Ms Swann, is what Sherlock does,” John said.

“Well, yes, you describe it on your blog, but it’s a little different in person,” Ms Swann murmured.

“It is,” John agreed, nodding at her. He couldn’t help thinking of Mike Stamford’s grin that first day in the lab at Bart’s.

She swallowed and looked back at Sherlock.

John was sure she was beginning to appreciate what a bold step it was to lay her problems before Sherlock Holmes. John stared down at his notebook, waiting for her to steady her nerves, and wondered what Sherlock had made of his notes of the case so far, because, of course, he would have read them before tucking them into his coat pocket to bring them along.

“And that’s when you began seeing the man,” Sherlock began, “no…you’d seen him elsewhere before, hadn’t you, Ms Swann?”

John glanced between them, saw the narrow focus of Sherlock’s gaze. Sometimes John wondered whether Sherlock saw the shift in chemicals in people’s bloodstreams when he stared at them like that.

Ms Swann was beginning to flush.

That’s as good as a declaration, John thought.

“At the Round Pond, several times,” she whispered.

“And you liked what you saw,” Sherlock continued, “you would look about for him when you went to the pond, just like you searched for the swan when you didn’t see him at first.”

The flush was getting very deep. Ms Swann began to fiddle with the elastic around her left ear.

John thought her mask must be feeling uncomfortably warm at that point.

“Did he introduce himself?” Sherlock asked.

“Beauty needs no introduction,” she murmured. “It was hard to turn my eyes away from him. The birds would nip impatiently at my legs or tug at my bags because I would stop feeding them.”

“But not your black swan,” Sherlock said, his stare unwavering.

John figured Sherlock was counting the red blood cells in her bone marrow by that point.

His stare unsettled people. It was unsettling Ms Swann.

“He was never there when the man was,” she whispered.

“Never?” Sherlock probed.

She shook her head. “Once he had been there just before I noticed the man, but the loaf of bread I’d been sharing out was finished and I was fussing in my bag to open a packet of bird seed and answering some questions a woman taking photos of the birds had asked me and he swam away. I looked up and he was all the way to the other side of the pond and then I lost sight of him amidst another group of birds. I’d hoped he would come back when he saw I was still handing out food, but he didn’t.”

“That was the first time you observed the man?” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann nodded.

“How would you describe him?” Sherlock asked, “other than beautiful?”

The flush, which had begun to fade, returned to her brow.

John wrote down ‘beautiful’. It was not a word commonly used to describe an attractive man, but it had been the one that had popped into his mind that first day at Bart’s. Presumptuous and intriguing and mad had been a few of the others. He glanced at Sherlock, who was looking at Ms Swann. Such a fine profile. Sherlock had extended one arm along the back of the sofa. It stretched the front of his shirt across his chest. John let his gaze linger a moment. Since Ms Swann appreciated beauty, he was certain she was enjoying the view as much as he was.

“To a police sketch artist, for example,” Sherlock clarified, “clothing and all.” He crossed his legs then, settled more comfortably into the plush sofa.

John considered how relaxed and open the pose was and wondered what Sherlock was playing at. The stillness of intense scrutiny, the restlessness of impatience, the languor of profound boredom – John was accustomed to all of those responses to recitals of clients’ woes, but not this studied caricature of ease. It would make her expansive. Sherlock never wanted that. Details, yes, but relevant ones only and usually as rapidly disclosed as possible.

John looked back at Ms Swann.

She was gazing towards the twilit windows and she didn’t turn towards them when she spoke. “Dark,” she whispered, “like a shadow on the sunlit pavement.” She remembered her guests and turned their way. “It was hot in the sun that day, and there’s no shade near the pond. I was annoyed at myself for not thinking to bring a hat and at the swan for sailing off. There was a slight breeze that kept blowing my hair into my face, which annoyed me further, but I didn’t want to leave before using up the food I’d brought. I’d raised my hand to block the sun and was scanning the circumference of the pond for my wayward bird, when I saw the man, standing at the water’s edge like a cool shadow. As I watched, he turned towards me and smiled.” Her voice had trailed off.

The first sight. John drew a square and a rectangle in the margin of his notes. They were meant to represent a computer. Sherlock had been surrounded by them when he had glanced away from his typing towards Mike that day at Barts. John’s eyes flicked to Sherlock and back to his notebook.

“And then?” John said to Ms Swann.

She cleared her throat. “One of the geese gave me a good nip on the leg and I turned to chide him. When I looked back the cool shadow was gone.”

“What will the artist draw?” Sherlock prompted.

Ms Swann refocussed on him, held her hand a little above her head. “Someone around my height, a slim figure, all in black.”

John tilted his head and wrote, “All in black, of course.” Why had no one sent him the memo about the dress code.

“Sketch artists need details,” Sherlock said.

“Yes, of course. Black denim, black long-sleeved shirt open at the collar, black shoes, a black cap, it shaded the top of his face that day.”

“Sensible fellow,” John added.

“Yes, I envied him his cap, but I was annoyed that I couldn’t see his face clearly. Generally, I was annoyed that day.”

“But you saw him more clearly on later occasions,” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann nodded.

“Show me your drawings.”

She drew in a sharp breath.

“You want my help,” Sherlock stated.

Ms Swann got up, went into the other room and came back with a large sketch book. She handed it to Sherlock and returned to her seat.

Sherlock turned the pages slowly, then handed the sketch book to John.

“He was never seated when you saw him,” he said.

“Never,” Ms Swann confirmed.

“Walking?”

“Not by the pond, but here…” She gestured towards the windows. “…I saw him walking along the towpath on the other side, east towards the bridge and then back, but never far beyond here to the west.”

“He never stopped to sit on the benches,” Sherlock asked.

“Not that I saw,” she replied.

Sherlock stood, reached for his coat. “What time can you go to the Round Pond tomorrow?”

Ms Swann stood, too. “Ah, I…”

“Half four, then. It will still be light. No rain forecast for the afternoon. John and I won’t approach you. We’ll observe from a distance.” Sherlock’s coat was on, his scarf still wound tightly about his lower face and neck. “We can meet up later to discuss.”

“Neither of them may be there,” Ms Swann cautioned.

“I believe we saw your black swan on the canal earlier,” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann’s eyes brightened.

“So, we just need the man to show up.” Sherlock gathered his violin case and headed for the door.

John set the sketchbook aside and did the same.

Ms Swann followed them to the door. “You will take my case?”

Sherlock turned and stared at her.

She stood very still and looked back at him.

“Yes,” he replied after a moment. “We will.”

Sherlock strode down the corridor, exiting the building at speed. He didn’t stop at the corner to conjure a taxi, but continued on to the bridge, stopping at the top of its arch.

John caught up.

“The man whom you followed from Baker Street was the same as the one in Ms Swann’s drawings.”

“Yup.”

“Good instincts,” Sherlock said.

“Yup.” John smiled. “I noticed that you didn’t mention that to her.”

“Too soon. She was startled enough that we’d seen the swan.”

“Pleased though.”

“Hmm.”

Sherlock raced down the stairs and started walking west on the towpath, John a few steps behind him.

The lighted windows on the north side of the canal threw rectangles of light on the dark water. The silhouette of a swan glided in and out of them.

The door to Ms Swann’s balcony opened. A moment later, the sound of her piano spilled out into the night.

Two buses grumbled over the bridge.

John walked closer to the edge of the canal when they had gone. “That’s the song you played.”

“Hmm. Look.”

Below the balcony, the swan flapped his wings, rising out of the water, stretching his neck.

“Tall buggers, aren’t they?” John remarked. The tip of the swan’s beak was higher than the floor of the balcony.

“That one particularly,” Sherlock said.

John tilted his head. “I can hear his wings.”

“It’s a warning,” Sherlock explained. “To scare off interlopers in their territory.”

“Swans were relevant to a case before?” John asked.

“As a young child, I thought the swans on the river were sea dragons. The bane of the oceans. Clever pirates learned how to appease them.”

“Not defeat them?”

“Have you ever heard them hiss, John?”

“You know, I haven’t. They hiss?”

“As a sea serpent should.” Sherlock glanced at John. “A creature best not aggravated, but a formidable ally.”

John chucked. “Did you pay tribute?”

“Fresh baked rye bread full of caraway seeds.”

John nodded. His grin sounded in his voice. “What did you get in return?”

“Safe passage through their waters for my ship.”

“Nostalgia? Is that why you’re taking the case? I wouldn’t have thought it merited even a five. No murder, not even a kidnapping.”

“Yet,” Sherlock said.

John sobered. “You think…”

“Look.”

The music had stopped. Ms Swann appeared on her balcony, several items in her arms.

“Juliet arrives.”

“Wrong direction,” Sherlock corrected.

She put her bundles down, unfurled the roll under her arm and sat down on the floor of her balcony. Her arm appeared through the railing.

The swan reared up and took whatever she was holding.

The arm disappeared, then reappeared. The swan rose up again, neck stretched to its fullest extent.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just go down to the canal side?” John asked.

“Maybe she’s worried the mystery man might be lurking about.”

“The beautiful one?”

“The possible honeytrap.”

“You think so?”

Sherlock slipped his arm through John’s and tugged him away from the railing. “Something is not as it seems. We need to find proof, one way or another.”

John pushed his chair back from his laptop and stretched, arms clasped above his head. The chair creaked. The late afternoon traffic murmured through the closed sitting room windows. He stared out. A dazzling blue sky arched over Baker Street. John rubbed his eyes and glanced around the room. Sherlock’s computer screen glowed in the interior gloom.

“I know way more about swan lore than I ever imagined I would,” John said to the recumbent form on the sofa with the laptop open on his chest. “Want tea before we go?” He ambled across the room. “I know I need some.” He clicked on the kettle and carried on to the loo. “We should be heading out soon.”

***

The sky over the river is a brilliant blue. With the ease of long practice, the boy rows the boat towards the island. Seated opposite him, an older boy, russet hair tossed by the breeze, shields his eyes from the sun. “I don’t see a place to land on this side. We’ll have to go round."

The younger boy lifts an oar from the water and changes course. “You’ve got the map?”

The older lad pats his jacket pocket. “Right here.”

The younger boy smiles.

“Sherlock,” Mycroft calls from the riverbank. “You should head back now. Redbeard can’t run as fast as he used to and Mummy said she’ll be very cross if you’re late to dinner again.”

The boy rowing looks at his companion. “What does he know?”

The older boy looks back towards the bank.

“It’s Mycroft that can’t run as fast as he used to,” the younger boy says.

“Now, Sherlock!” Mycroft shouts.

***

“Sherlock.” John set the mugs of tea on the table and took the laptop off Sherlock. “Wake up. We need to leave soon.”

The taxi stopped across from Lancaster Gate Underground Station. Sherlock climbed out and John followed.

“Why here?” John asked as they crossed the road.

“I want to walk down to the bridge over the Long Water. Have a look at the waterfowl there before we meet Ms Swann at the Round Pond.”

They strolled past the people soaking up the autumn sunshine by the fountains of the Italian Gardens. A single heron graced one of the pools.

Sherlock glanced from side to side, taking in the picnickers, the dog-walkers, the joggers and the readers at a glance.

“You think this fellow might loiter about there, too?” John asked. “While you were napping, I read about what a big deal it is to identify a new species. Is it possible that that’s what this bloke is interested in rather than gaming industry secrets?”

“I wasn’t napping,” Sherlock protested as they passed the statue of Peter Pan. He looked to the other side of the path where people were feeding the waterfowl and the pigeons.

“Fine, while you were off in your mind palace thinking…” John began. “What’s that lot up to?”

“Ah, those would be the parakeet feeders.”

John and Sherlock skirted the folks standing perfectly still and holding out apples whilst green-feathered birds perched on their arms and their heads and swarms of pigeons milled about their feet alert to any morsels that dropped.

“Our fellow isn’t here,” John murmured.

They took the left-hand fork in the path, down the hill and under the bridge.

“I’ve never been this way,” John remarked.

“No playing fields nearby,” Sherlock said.

“Hey,” John said. “No crimes either.”

“Not lately, no.”

“What was your last case here about?”

“Someone stealing swans’ eggs.”

“That’s a criminal offense,” John said. “One of the many things I’ve learned today.”

“It is.”

Sherlock squeezed John’s arm. “On the bridge. Is that the fellow you followed?”

Without turning his head, John looked up. “From here, I’d say yeah.”

A child’s wail pierced the air. The pigeons on the bridge took flight. A silver balloon trailing a long red ribbon floated away from the bridge.

The man John and Sherlock were watching turned at the sound, his long ponytail flaring out with the movement.

“That clinches it. Not too many blokes with hair as glorious as that,” John said.

Sherlock’s eyes slid towards John.

Without even glancing at Sherlock, John added, “Of course, I prefer curls.”

The man moved away from the edge of the bridge.

“Keep watching here. I’m going to check the other side,” Sherlock said and dashed under the bridge.

A minute later, John’s phone chirped. Eyes still riveted upward, John fished his mobile out of his pocket.

“Can you see him?”

“No,” John replied, eyes sweeping along the line of the bridge. “Nowhere in sight.”

“Come join me.” Sherlock rang off.

John jogged through the arched tunnel beneath the bridge.

Sherlock tilted his head at the water. “That bird look familiar?”

A large, black swan was swimming away from them in the middle of the river.

“From this distance, he looks identical.”

As they watched, the swan opened his wings, rising out of the water far enough that his feet slapped at its surface as he ran forward and then took to the air. Once aloft, he circled back over the bridge and flew west.

“Pond,” Sherlock said and took off up the path. With one more glance back at the bridge, John followed.

It was not wise to let Sherlock get a head start. John was always amazed at how much distance Sherlock covered in a short time and never thought his long legs could account for all of it. He wondered sometimes if Mercury had lost his sandals and whether he ought to have a look around the flat to see where Sherlock kept them.

As he strode along the path, John scanned the grass between the trees for the tall form, never for a minute thinking Sherlock would be on a path unless it happened to be part of the straightest line between where he was and where he wanted to be. John didn’t spot him at first. He was looking too high above the ground. Sherlock was bent over. Examining something, John presumed. He corrected his course and marched through the long grass.

Sherlock fell to his knees.

John ran.

He was still several strides away when he saw the red tail over the top of the grass. John slowed to a jog and reached the place where Sherlock knelt in front of the big dog he was petting.

“What a good boy you are,” Sherlock said. “Fast, too, but you weren’t ever going to catch that squirrel.”

The dog wagged his tail and pushed his nose against Sherlock’s face.

“New friend?” John asked.

“His winded owner is making her way towards us as we speak,” Sherlock replied, scratching behind the dog’s ear. “Sirocco, here, was giving chase and I don’t think she would have ever caught up with him.”

John looked about and saw a grey-haired woman holding a lead looped around her hand heading through the tall grass in their direction. “You’re making up that name.”

Sherlock grimaced at John and jingled the tags on the dog’s collar.

John glanced down at the sound. “Right. OK, what did you do to distract him from his prey?”

“I got in the way and the squirrel made his escape up the tree over there, then I knelt down, opened my arms and told him he was a good boy. With his quarry gone, a new friend was an appealing consolation prize.” Sherlock replied, scratching behind the dog’s other ear.

“Oh, thank you!” the woman called as she drew near. “I would never have caught up with him.”

“Doesn’t come when he’s called?” John asked, thinking that he knew what that was like.

“I didn’t give enough time to training him when he was younger,” she said, “and now he’s set in his ways. He’s such a sweet dog though, so friendly.”

“Yes,” John agreed, “I can see.”

“He had a fright over by the Pond and ran off a bit to wait for me, but then he saw a squirrel and the chase was on.” She hooked the lead to his collar and stroked the dog’s back. “Poor boy. That’s the second time that bird gave you a shock.”

“Oh?” John said, realising that the dog was the breed and size of the one in the video clip Ms Swann had shown them.

“Yes, there’s some very territorial swan over there this year. Usually, the birds just swim away when we’re walking round the Pond, but not that one. He got right out of the water, hissing and flapping his wings. A very big bird. It could have hurt Sirocco, if he hadn’t been smart enough to scarper off.”

John nodded. “Glad we could help,” he said.

Sherlock glanced at John and got up, dusting off the knees of his trousers. “Well, if that swan’s taken up residence at the Pond, it might be best to give it a wide berth.”

“Yes, I suppose we could walk beside the Long Water instead,” the woman said. “Thank you again. Come on, Sirocco.”

Sherlock slipped his arm through John’s and resumed his journey west. “I believe you are irate, Doctor Watson.”

“It’s a big park, lots of space for a dog to run without being near the waterbirds,” John grumbled.

“You’re taking the swan’s part,” Sherlock observed.

“The dog’s, too. He’s only doing what he’s been bred to do. Best not to bring him near wildfowl, especially off his lead.” John looked up at Sherlock. “OK, fine. Rant over. You were in such a hurry to get over to the Pond, I’m surprised you stopped for the dog.”

“He reminded me of our dog - when we were young,” Sherlock said, "plus I recognised him from the video and concluded that the swan we observed had already arrived at the Pond.”

“You and Mycroft had a dog, an Irish Setter?” John asked, intrigued that Sherlock voluntarily paired himself with Mycroft in using the possessive pronoun.

“Redbeard,” Sherlock replied. “Best dog that ever sailed the seven seas or the Thames, or the Serpentine, as the case might be.”

“You gave your dog a pirate name,” John exclaimed, grinning.

“Actually, Mycroft named him. He was his dog before I was born.”

“Mycroft gave his dog a pirate name!”

“He was studying the Vikings at the time. Erik Thorvaldsson, Erik the Red, was Redbeard’s namesake,” Sherlock explained.

“All right. That makes it seem almost plausible. How old was he when he did that?”

“Four,” Sherlock replied.

“Ah.”

Between the trees, the pond glimmered with the reflected blue of the cloudless sky.

“Ms Swann will be approaching from the north. Let’s aim for the southern side and observe her from across the water.”

John heard the faintest catch in Sherlock’s voice and glanced sideways at him, but he was turned away.

The bandstand was set back from the Pond where the trees began.

“I thought you’d rather be closer,” John said as they mounted the steps.

Sherlock handed John what looked like a cigarette case.

John snapped it open and looked through the opera glass-sized lenses. He whistled. “These are powerful.”

“Deigning to aid Mycroft has its perks,” Sherlock replied.

John chuckled and scanned the Pond. “Well, I see Ms Swann feeding a drift of swans and a lone goose that’s waiting patiently on the pavement by her side. Ah, she gave him some bread. Poor bloke.”

Sherlock turned to John with a quizzical expression. “You’re identifying with the goose?”

“Well, look at the poor sod. He doesn’t stand a chance against those grand birds. They give him a good nip if he tries to get in the water.”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows and finished adjusting the lens on his camera.

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Sherlock replied.

“You’re not the only one that can hear people thinking, you know,” John said.

Sherlock smiled. “It must be catching.”

“Ah, there’s our sleek, black fellow joining the fray. His wings are up. Oh, someone’s given him a nip. They’re sorry for that now.”

Sherlock’s camera clicked. “He’s rather magnificent rearing up like that. The ones on the river near our house would do that if anyone came close to their nest.”

“I imagine Redbeard made them rather tense,” John said.

“It was all right. When we went out on the water, he was always a b… Look!”

“That other swan must be sorry he tangled with…what did you say Ms Swann called him?”

“She’d entitled her music, ‘Prince’. Appears she doesn’t care for Prince Siegfried’s given name and went with his title.”

“Or she liked the singer,” John replied.

“What?”

“Never mind,” John replied. “Her Prince has some good moves. We could have used that walking-on-water trick on some of our chases. I don’t see any sign of the guy from the bridge and the Tube though.”

“You’re sure they’re the same person?” Sherlock asked.

“Pretty sure. Maybe he doesn’t walk as fast as we do or he had to stop at the gents.”

Sherlock continued peering through the camera. “Or he’s already here,” he murmured.

The hair on the back of John’s neck prickled. He turned around and scanned the area behind the bandstand. No one was visible beneath the old trees. Slowly, he scrutinised the circumference of the Pond, the path, the lawn and as far as he could see under the trees. None of the people dotted around the area resembled the man from the bridge.

A shadow flitted over the lawn between the bandstand and the Pond.

“What was that?” John asked.

“Look at Ms Swann.”

John trained his field glasses on the curve of the Pond directly across from their perch. “She’s talking to a woman with a camera hung around her neck,” John observed.

“And Prince?”

John peered through his glasses at the birds on the water. “He’s not there.”

“I believe that was his shadow we saw on the grass,” Sherlock said.

“What? He was vexed that Ms Swann wasn’t paying attention to him?” John asked.

“Animals have been known to be angry or sad when their humans ignore them,” Sherlock remarked.

“True, but he didn’t just swim to the side or start diving for pondweed; you’re concluding that he took off,” John said.

“If you had wings, John, how many times would you have taken flight from the sitting room window?” Sherlock asked.

John huffed. “Yeah, OK. I imagine that soaring over the park would have soothed my nerves more than stomping down to the pub.”

“Well, Prince has wings.”

“But he’s a wild bird, not a pet.”

Sherlock lifted his camera up and squinted through the lens. “Wild things form attachments, too,” he murmured.

John considered the riot of curls framing the studiously neutral expression on Sherlock’s face. Wild thing.

Sherlock smiled.

“There,” John whispered, although he wasn’t quite sure why, “under the oak tree at two o’clock. I think that’s him.”

Sherlock turned his camera where John directed, adjusted the telescopic lens.

“What’s he checking in his pocket?” John asked. “Do you think he’s armed?”

“I think he’s preening,” Sherlock murmured.

The man took off his cap, smoothed his hair back, set the cap back on his head and stepped onto the lawn. The hair that hung down his back was heavy and thick, but the breeze had picked up. It ruffled the edges.

“Hard to be unobtrusive with a head of hair like that,” John said. “Not ideal for shadowing someone.”

“Fine for courting though.” Sherlock clicked the shutter on his camera.

John stopped looking through his field glasses and checked Sherlock’s expression. “You’re not joking, are you?”

“It’s another possible explanation. Mustn’t rule anything out yet.”

John resumed his surveillance. “Damn, the tree’s blocking my view now.”

“Patience, John.”

John drew his face back from the eyepieces and stared at Sherlock. “Since when are you patient?”

“Experiments require patience, sifting through evidence requires patience, surveillance requires patience…” Sherlock replied. And you, John, require a great deal of patience, Sherlock added silently.

John tilted his head. “Fair enough,” he said, eyes once again looking though his field glasses. “It’s just not obvious.”

Sherlock snorted.

“Whoa,” John said. “Our man is making his move.”

Sherlock raised his camera.

As the man came abreast of the women, the honking of the geese sounded across the water. The pigeons rose in a cloud from around the women’s feet and the swans began flapping their long, white wings and rising out of the water.

“What the hell’s going on?” John exclaimed.

The woman with the camera had covered her head. Ms Swann had dropped her loaf of bread to assist her. The birds, even the pigeons, ignored the windfall.

Sherlock left his camera to dangle about his neck. “Quick, John. It’s time we introduced ourselves.”

“No, wait. Look!”

Sherlock had one leg over the railing around the bandstand, but he stopped and lifted the camera again. “Oh,” he whispered.

“That’s not a coincidence, is it?” John asked, eyes glued to his field glasses.

“I don’t think so,” Sherlock replied and his smile was audible in his voice.

“How’s he doing it?” John asked. “He douse himself in eau de Great Dane or something?”

Sherlock glanced back at John for a second. “That would be one possible explanation,” he said, returning to look through his camera.

The pigeons flew away. The geese fell silent. The swans settled back into the water. The man stooped to pick up the loaf of bread, handed it to Ms Swann and appeared to be introducing himself.

“That’s quite the pick-up gambit,” John murmured.

“You think all the birds are his wingmen?” Sherlock asked, laughing.

“Hey!” John said. “It’s not any stranger than some of the other stuff we’ve seen.”

Sherlock flicked his eyes to John and back to his camera. “You never cease to amaze me, John Watson.”

John nodded, glasses still before his eyes. “I await your rational explanation, Mr Holmes.”

“Oh, I don’t think you do,” Sherlock replied, pulling his leg back over the railing, and straightening his jacket. “But I do wish we’d given Ms Swann a microphone.”

“Look!”

Sherlock turned back to the water. “He’s leaving.”

“With a bow, no less,” John remarked. “Speaking of listening devices, do you think he planted something on her?”

“It’s a possibility,” Sherlock agreed.

“Or maybe he is flirting, but not just after getting a leg over tonight, but playing a longer game,” John suggested, field glasses still before his eyes. “He’s heading back under the big, old trees. Ms Swann is gazing after him.”

“Whereas Ms Camera Lady is gazing at Ms Swann,” Sherlock said.

“A rival for Ms Swann’s affections?” John asked.

“Possibly,” Sherlock said, “or she could be a competing industrial spy.”

“He had to up his game. Smiling from a distance just wasn’t going to cut it,” John said.

“Are you always thinking about mating strategies?”

“Pretty much,” John replied, "besides, you're the one that brought up courting."

Sherlock was suddenly standing next to him, shoulders touching, eyes still looking through his camera.

“Never had to play such a long game as I did with you though,” John added.

“Fast results or you don’t play?” Sherlock asked.

“Pretty much.”

“You didn’t get immediate results with me,” Sherlock pointed out.

John looked away from the field glasses and up at Sherlock. “You, Mr Married-to-my-Work, were worth a longer game.” He kept watching as the crinkles appeared at the corner of Sherlock’s eyes. “And you didn't keep me waiting all that long,” John added.

“Look who’s coming out from under the trees,” Sherlock said.

John peered through his glasses.

From the shadows beneath the oaks, the black swan emerged and headed with ponderous gait towards the water. Ms Swann was turned away and did not see. The bird slipped into the pond and swam away from the shore, then he stretched his wings, rose out of the water and began to run over the rippling surface, taking off just before reaching the opposite shore. He flew straight at the bandstand and then over it.

Sherlock and John ran to the other side of the platform and scanned the sky, but the swan was gone.

“I thought he was going to fly right into us,” John said.

“He wouldn’t be able to take off again from in here, and I’m not sure the posts are far enough apart for his wings in any event,” Sherlock mused, “and swans don’t engage in combat that often. Their displays of power are usually sufficiently intimidating to scare other creatures off.”

“Well, that was a rather good display of power,” John said.

“Yes, it was,” Sherlock agreed.

Ms Swann arrived on the stroke of six, just as Sherlock had suggested in the text he sent as he and John were leaving the park. She seemed flustered more than nervous this time.

“How much did you see?” she asked as she crossed to John’s chair and sat.

Sherlock handed his laptop to her. The photograph on the screen was a wide-angled shot of the Pond with her bent forward to feed the swans.

She clicked on the arrow to access the next photograph and her eyebrows rose.

The second photo was from several minutes later. Ms Swann was ripping bread from the loaf she held, two swans stretching their necks forward, beaks open for the next morsel. Past her left shoulder, the woman with the camera could be seen approaching, her grin wide.

Ms Swann clicked again and her eyebrows went up further.

The third photograph was taken just after the mystery man arrived and picked up the loaf of bread Ms Swann had dropped. The woman with the camera was scowling as she glared at the newcomer. Ms Swann did not see. Her eyes were on the newcomer, a small smile visible in profile. The man’s head was tilted downwards, his cap obscuring all but his chin.

John watched her reactions. He and Sherlock had chosen the order of the photographs downloaded from his camera over the dinner that Angelo had delivered within minutes of their arriving home. They had debated the sequence of several. The order of the first three had been John’s idea. After that, Sherlock had built his case.

Ms Swann was blushing. She handed the laptop back to Sherlock.

“I’ve been having unusual dreams,” she said suddenly, looking down at her hands that were clasped in her lap. “I’m sorry, I know you’re a detective, not a psychologist.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about, Ms Swann. Our dreams sometimes inform us of things we’ve observed unconsciously while awake. They are worth examining. Please proceed,” Sherlock replied.

John looked up from his notebook so quickly, he almost swept it off the table. A variation on the hackneyed line of ‘who are you and what have you done with my…’ Sherlock, flashed through his mind.

“I’m dancing alone on a stage with a black floor polished until it shines like glass.”

Or water, John adds to his notes.

“My costume is all black, tights, shoes, headdress, everything,” Ms Swann continues.

“Odile,” Sherlock suggested.

Ms Swann tilts her head. “It doesn’t feel like her though, and there are no others on stage, no guests at the ball, no Rothbart, no scenery either, only fog coming from all sides.” She laughed a little. “That would make it hard for an audience to see…and, it is silent.”

“Have you seen the ballet in the past year?” Sherlock asked.

John raised an eyebrow, but kept his eyes on his notebook. He thought Sherlock was really embracing this role, but then, Sherlock liked role-playing.

“Last week, I watched a video of the Matthew Bourne version. It was a present. I get a lot of presents with a swan theme.”

“Unimaginative friends.”

John glanced at Ms Swann to gauge her reaction. He smiled to himself. The potency of Sherlock’s charm appeared undiminished.

“Some of them, yes,” she said. “This one was a good present though. I wish I could see it live.”

“John and I did a couple years ago.”

Ms Swann looked from Sherlock to John and back and sighed. “You were wise. I’m always putting things off, thinking I’ll be able to do it another day. Now look where we are.”

“It’ll come back,” John said, “eventually. Meanwhile, thank heavens for video and streaming.”

“Yes, indeed. And the parks. And the swans.” She fell quiet.

“Your dream,” Sherlock prompted softly.

“Last night’s was the one about which I remembered the most when I woke up. Before, there were only fragments in the morning, like the one I just described, or even briefer. Cool water rippling in front of me. Tree tops beneath me. A warmth by my side. But this morning when I woke, I could still see the place I had been and hear the sounds, as though they were just outside my windows. I only needed to open them to return and then I could stay there forever.” She had turned towards the window as she spoke, but her gaze wasn’t focussed on it.

“Describe it,” Sherlock urged.

“I was dancing alone again, on a black surface, but this time I knew it was water.”

John put an asterisk by his earlier note.

“It was cool against my feet. It rippled as I moved. I could see no shore, just dark glimmers as the ripples spread across the surface and disappeared. At first, there was no sound but that of the water and then a light breeze began to blow, ruffling the surface even more than my steps. Beneath my feet, I could feel the water thrumming. I leapt and spun and I wanted to sing.”

“Did you?” Sherlock asked.

She shook her head. “I was listening for something, something more than the sound of the wind and the water. I threw my head back as I whirled. Above me, the clouds glowed grey, their edges bright with the light of the moon they were hiding. I stopped dancing, stood very still, watching the clouds drift, and then I stretched out upon the water, on my back, and drifted with them, between the dark air and the dark water.”

She glanced at Sherlock and he nodded at her.

She bit her lip before continuing.

“The clouds grew darker. There was a distant rumble, like hooves, like drums. I glanced from side to side. I could discern nothing. Wherever the shore was, it seemed far away. I closed my eyes, stretched my fingers out and continued to float. The water rippled gently, cool, soothing.” Ms Swann paused.

“Have you ever been in a sensory deprivation tank?” Sherlock asked.

She shook her head. “But I’ve read descriptions of them. This was nothing like that. This was vast, open, the air fresh, alive with its own currents, fragrant with green things that must have been growing on those invisible shores, and then the sky roared. My eyes flew open. Lightning sizzled across the sky – beautiful and deadly.” She took a deep breath.

John drew a lightning bolt in his notes and waited for her to go on.

She resumed with a rush. “I knew I should swim for the shore, but I didn’t know which one was closer. I tensed and began to sink…then something brushed against my back, beneath the water. Something soft. And then something nipped one of my fingers and then another. It roused me from inaction. I turned and began to swim.

“The sky flashed white. The breeze had turned to a wind, dispelling much of the fog. I could see the shore with the trees along it bending down towards the water, but the wind was blowing me away from them. Then the darkness flowed back and the sky growled. I turned in the opposite direction, hoping the next bolt would show me a closer bank, but it didn’t. The flash revealed a silver expanse of rippling water that seemed to have no end.

“Then, the something beneath me pushed upwards, lifting me out of the water with a mighty splash. The sky roared. My throat felt as though I shouted, but I could not hear my voice. There was a flash. For an instant, I saw what buoyed me up. When the darkness returned, the afterimage of the lightning was a faint red ghost upon it. I could see nothing else, but I could feel the feathered beast beneath me and I locked my arms around its broad chest and pulled my legs from the water. Its wings rose halfway on either side of me and the red-tinged darkness disappeared. I felt the heat rising through the feathers, the muscles working the legs and the wide, webbed feet. The sky bellowed. I held my breath, waiting for the lightning, hoping it would not hit the water through which we sped. And then I woke up. Rain was beating against my windows. The seagulls were screeching on the canal.”

John nodded his head and wrote ‘A*’ next to the lightning bolt on his notebook.

“You’re a member of the Serpentine Swimming Club,” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann’s eyes widened.

John knew the question that was on her lips, whether he could see them or not.

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. “Since university.”

She nodded. “I joined soon after I came up to study.”

“Because you wanted to swim with…” Sherlock left the sentence unfinished.

John squinted at him. Sherlock usually loved to show off what he had deduced.

“…the swans,” Ms Swann finished. “Although they stay at a distance when a lot of people are swimming. I used to think they were judging our style.”

Sherlock’s smile reached his eyes for an instant. “You were used to swimming with them.”

Ms Swann’s eyes widened further. “How do you know these things?”

“You’ve been on my website. It’s all set out there,” he replied. “Where?”

“In Leeds. My parents went abroad for work the year before I was to take my GCSEs, so I stayed with my grandparents on the grounds of Leeds Castle. They both had jobs there.” The smile in her voice was clear. “I even worked there the summer before university. In the gift shop.”

“They are renowned for their black swans,” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann nodded and looked at John. “But they are the Australian variety.” She patted the bridge of her nose. “With the red beaks.”

John nodded back at her.

“I guess I’ve had a lot of swans in my life.”

Sherlock tapped his fingers against his chin. “Yes,” he said.

John set down his plate and leaned back on the sofa, hand on his full belly. He regarded Sherlock who had taken his plate to the desk and was eating while scrolling through something on his laptop.

“Ask before you explode,” Sherlock said after a minute.

“I didn’t eat quite that much,” John replied, knowing full well that the size of his dinner was not what Sherlock was referring to.

“Your stomach is in no danger, but I can’t say the same for your head if you don’t let out what’s been banging around in there ever since Ms Swann left. Before actually.”

“If I wasn’t fairly sure I knew better, I’d say you fancied her,” John stated.

Sherlock stopped scrolling and looked at John. “You work hard at hiding that jealous streak of yours.”

“Thank you. I do,” John agreed.

“But this one was too intense to suppress?” Sherlock asked, raising an eyebrow.

John leaned forward, elbow on the sofa’s armrest. “At first, I chalked it up to your relief at having a diversion from the dearth of Met cases, but it’s gone well beyond that. I’ve never seen you so…so empathetic…” John held up a hand. “You know I know how genuinely considerate you can be to those you feel have earned it, but that’s just it, you were considerate of Madeleine Swann from the minute you laid eyes on her and it hasn’t abated.” John pursed his lips. “More than fancied. Like an old flame that circumstances took from you, and whose loss you still feel.” John sat back again, propped his head up on his hand and contemplated Sherlock. “Yeah, more like that.”

Sherlock got up and came to sit on the sofa.

John turned his head, keeping Sherlock in view as he moved.

“I tease you, John, about being unobservant, but you really aren’t. Well, you are about a lot of things, but there are other times when you have great clarity of insight.”

“You did know her? Is that really how she knew to come here for help?”

Sherlock shook his head. “The day we met, you thought Mike had told me about you, but he hadn’t. It was the same with Madeleine Swann. It’s not that I knew; I saw. What she related supported my initial deduction, but my giving her story credence won’t be enough for her. We need to go deeper, to find evidence for her, because if what I think is happening to her, is indeed happening to her, then it is something that would make any adult question their sanity.” Sherlock’s voice dropped. “And make other people question it, too.”

John had turned more fully, drawn a leg up on the sofa. “Like something you experienced as a child.”

“There. You’re following.”

“You can tell me,” John said quietly.

“It’s something I have always meant to tell you…” Sherlock began.

“I’m listening,” John said softly and understood that he had not always been as patient as one needed to be with wild things.

Sherlock nodded, folded his legs underneath himself and looked at John. “You remember I told you of my dog, well, Mycroft’s and my dog, Redbeard?”

John nodded.

Sherlock reached for a serviette from the coffee table and began unfolding it. “Most of my earliest memories include Redbeard. When I first heard the adage about a dog being a man’s best friend, it made complete sense to me, because Redbeard had always been my best friend. We played together, we slept together, I shared all my secrets with him. I assumed that was how it was with everyone who had a dog. My father always referred to him as part of the family and I considered him to be the younger of my two older brothers – the one who was more fun.” Sherlock looked up at John.

He looked back, taking in the faint smile on the lips, the small creases between the eyebrows.

Sherlock looked down at the serviette, smoothing it over his knee. “We’d go hunting for treasure together and he was always interested in what I found as much as in what he found. He’d turn the rock or snail shell or bird’s feather over and sometimes see things I’d missed, like a streak of quartz under some mud or the beetle in the snail shell. He taught me how to observe carefully, with all the senses. He had the most wonderful sense of smell.

“When we were older, our pirate games included going out in the rowboat to the small island in the river. He wasn’t much for rowing, left that to me.”

John smiled, but Sherlock didn’t see. He was busy refolding the napkin into some complex shape.

“Except the one time when I fell out of a tree on the island and injured my arm. He had to row the whole way back that day.”

John scowled, but Sherlock didn’t see.

“And so, we grew. I read to him from my books and showed him things through my microscope. When I started having tutors, Redbeard would sit through the lessons with me, although he did sometimes fall asleep. I did wonder that the tutors never scolded him for that, because they certainly scolded me when I was inattentive.”

“You didn’t go to a school?” John asked.

“Not until university,” Sherlock replied. “Of course, Redbeard was no more by then.”

John shook his head. “It’s the saddest thing about having a dog or a cat; their lives are so much shorter than ours.”

Sherlock heaved a sigh. “Clever as I was, I hadn’t really understood that as a child. He only looked to be a couple years older than me.” Sherlock unravelled the napkin and smoothed it out on the sofa cushion. “And when a car took a corner near our friend’s house too fast and swerved into their front garden, right through a low brick wall, Redbeard didn’t jump out of the way fast enough and the bricks crushed one of his back legs.” A shiver ran through Sherlock. “The yelp of pain…I will never forget it.

“My parents ran out of the house. The driver stumbled out of his car, trying to apologise, but my father had no time for his slurred remorse. He eased a flattened box under Redbeard and carried him to our car and we drove him to the vet. I sat in the backseat with Redbeard, stroking his head and telling him again and again it would be all right, but it wasn’t. The vet said the bones in his leg were shattered and he probably wouldn’t survive an operation to amputate it and considering his age, the kindest thing would be to put him to sleep.

“My father was angry that the vet said that in front of me. I was tall for my age and he probably thought I was older than twelve. I remember going cold, and leaning over Redbeard and whispering in his ear, ‘Change. Change now!’ And he looked up at me, with sad, sad eyes and I realised that he couldn’t. Because of the pain or the painkillers, I don’t know, but he couldn’t. Right then, I realised that for a dog he was old, but for a boy he wasn’t. They needed to do surgery, or if they had to amputate the leg, he would heal with care. We would care for him. I would care for him. I’d seen three-legged animals occasionally and I begged my father to have the vet try to save him, assured him that Redbeard was stronger, and younger, than they realised. Barely older than me, I told them. And I was crying and ready to carry him out of the surgery to a kinder vet who would fix my best friend, but they wouldn’t let me. They said I was hurting him by trying to move him and my father dragged me away and Redbeard was ‘put to sleep’.”

Sherlock crumpled the napkin. “I never forgave any of them for that or for what they did next.”

John felt queasy. “What did they do next?” he whispered.

“Well, I was raving, wasn’t I? About my dog being my best friend and ascribing all sorts of human traits to him as though I really believed he was a boy. Oh, there was a psychologist, and then a psychiatrist, but by the time I saw him I realised I had to play their game and admit that I didn’t really think that Redbeard was a boy, it was just that he had been my companion since I was a baby and he was even more of a brother to me than Mycroft, but, of course, he was just an animal…” Sherlock spit the word out with derision and started pulling the napkin to bits.

There were tears in John’s eyes and he thought of all the ways over the years he had seen Sherlock help and protect the wronged and the weak and the misunderstood.

“It’s the worst part about being a child,” John said, “not having the power to help those you love.”

Sherlock didn’t look up, but he nodded. A tear fell and was absorbed by the napkin.

“The worst part about being an adult, too, sometimes,” John added.

John opened one eye. The afternoon light framing the bedroom curtains was white. Another overcast day waited beyond their walls.

He glanced at the other side of the bed. There, barely distinguishable from the mounds of duvets, was Sherlock, a few dark tresses and a low susurration betraying his location. John eased himself closer, curled around the warm curve of Sherlock’s back.

Sherlock murmured in his sleep.

John wrapped a leg around Sherlock’s hip, an arm round Sherlock's chest and buried his nose in the wild curls at the base of Sherlock's neck. Sherlock, his wild thing.

“What do you think we’ll see?” John asked, shifting the bag of video equipment from one shoulder to another.

Sherlock raised his arm in that imperious gesture which summoned cabs out of thin air. “Best not to speculate. Whatever it is, I want to catch in on film,” Sherlock replied and opened the door of the cab that had obligingly pulled up to the kerb in front of Baker Street.

“Humph.” John slid into the taxi after Sherlock. John found he had no patience for hailing a cab himself anymore.

Great Western Road was quiet when the taxi came to a halt before the bridge over the canal. The nearby pubs were dark. The metal gates of the tube station were locked for the night.

A few steps from the street corner where they alit, an open archway in the wrought iron fence separating the gardens from the footpath beckoned pedestrians in. Through it, they slipped into Meanwhile Gardens, two more shadows amidst the gloom beneath the trees.

In the streetlight that filtered down from the bridge, they coalesced by a bench off the towpath that afforded a view of Ms Swann’s apartment. A dim light was still on in her sitting room. Through the half-open balcony doors, the sound of a piano being played floated across the water. Below her balcony, a swan-shaped shadow glided to and fro.

John slid along the bench until he had could see between two moored houseboats and eased the video camera from its case. He found a comfortable position in which he could hold the camera steady and focussed. They might be there all night.

The music ceased. The door slid closed and the sitting room light went out. A moment later, the shade over the bedroom window began to glow.

The night grew quieter. The halos of the streetlamps on the bridge seemed farther away as the lighted windows and portholes along the canal winked out. A faint breeze tumbled dried leaves along the towpath, whispering as they went. A fox rustled through the bushes. A cat jumped down to the path from one of the boats and trotted away.

The swan broadened his circuit, swimming close to the boats moored on the southern edge of the canal where John and Sherlock sat, proceeding west a few boat-lengths and circling back near the buildings on the north side.

Sherlock was so still John couldn’t hear him breathing behind him.

John tensed as the swan glided by, grateful that they had thought to put three layers of masking tape over the filming light on the camera.

The swan circled once, twice more, so close his half-raised wings must have brushed against the hulls of the houseboats. John thought the bird might spread those wings and flutter up onto one of the boats’ decks. He had an image of the swan rushing them from such a vantage, seizing the camera by its strap and dropping it into the water.

It didn’t happen. But after the third circuit, Sherlock leaned so close to John his lips touched his ear and whispered, “Focus on the balcony.”

The swan swam into view, clear as day, albeit in greyscale, to the east of the balcony. He fluttered up onto one of the posts that jutted up from the water along the building’s frontage. The image blurred.

“Shit,” John muttered under his breath. He hadn’t read the instructions on how to manually adjust the focus. The blur resolved. A man in a cap and knee-length coat balanced on the top of one of the posts for an instant, before climbing onto the low balcony.

John started to stand up.

“Wait,” Sherlock whispered, his hand landing on John’s shoulder and pushing him back down. “Keep filming. I think this will be our evidence.” He patted John’s jacket pocket where his gun was stowed. “You could shoot from here, if necessary.”

John’s muscles relaxed fractionally.

The man stood before the balcony doors. The camera image blurred.

“Rubbish camera,” John muttered.

The image cleared. The swan stood on the balcony.

“Are you seeing this, Sherlock?” John whispered.

“Yes,” Sherlock said.

The bird rapped on the glass with his beak, the sharp sound clear across the water.

A moment later, the door opened a little. Ms Swann reached out and stroked the swan’s neck. He stretched his neck up until his head could curl about her neck. The door opened wider. The swan walked inside.

John made an odd noise.

Sherlock gripped his shoulder.

The door closed.

“Shift focus to the left,” Sherlock whispered.

Two silhouettes appeared on the shades over Ms Swann’s bedroom windows, the man still with his cap on. Ms Swann pushed it up and back until it fell down his back. Her hand dropped to his shoulder. She raised her other hand and rested it on his cheek. They stood like that for a moment or two, then slowly leaned towards one another. Ms Swann's arms folded around the man’s neck. She kissed him.

“Guess we won’t be needing the gun,” John said.

“Home,” Sherlock replied. “Let’s see if the audio pick-up is as good as the light sensitivity.”

***

The swan rubbed his beak through his mate’s dark feathers as he curved his neck around her head. She turned her head into the curve of his neck and called softly in her sleep. The sound was new to him and he liked it. He arched a wing over her back and let it settle on her bare skin. Without feathers on most of her body, she needed other coverings to keep the cold away, but the coverings had fallen off in the night. They were warm and soft, her coverings, but his feathers were softer and warmer. He curved his wing more tightly over her, felt it rising and falling with her breaths. He pressed his side against hers and closed one of his eyes.

A loud chirping made him open it again. His mate groaned. He lifted his head and surveyed every angle of the room for the interloping bird making the sound.

Her arm darted out from beneath his wing and grabbed something small near her nest. She must have strangled it, because it made no further sounds. She was an able defender; he had thought she was asleep. He rubbed the underside of his beak through her feathers in appreciation.

“Come walk with me.”

Madeleine didn’t open her eyes. The dream was the most vivid she had ever had. She didn’t want it to end.

“The sun will be up soon. The river is beautiful early in the morning. I know you know that.”

Something tickled Madeleine’s shoulder. She tried to brush it away. It was very soft.

With a sigh of resignation, she turned over. Morning would come. Dreams would go. She opened her eyes.

Two dark eyes peered back at her. They came closer.

Perhaps the dream wouldn’t go.

She brushed the hair back that fell over the dark eyes.

“Are you real?”

“As an early morning swim. Come, walk with me.”

When they passed through the Lancaster Gate, the fountains were just being turned on. Startled, a heron took flight out over the Long Water.

Madeleine shaded her eyes and watched the bird until it disappeared beyond the trees. “It’s so peaceful here this early.”

“Come. I will show you an even more peaceful place.” He held out his hand, his smile bright beneath the shadow of his cap.

“Oh? I thought I knew every corner of this park,” Madeleine replied. She took the proffered hand, careful of the curved bluish nails. She had a few scratches from those.

“You came very close,” he replied as they crested the hill. “I could hear your song. I followed it.”

“My song?”

“You were singing it as you came out of the water and sat by the river bank shaking the water from your feathers." He reached out a hand and stroked her hair. "Such a beautiful song."

Two streaks of green flew across the path in front of them.

Madeleine stopped walking, brow furrowed. “I remember that morning. There was fog among the trees. It rolled out over the water and we had to stop swimming; we could hardly see.”

“Yes,” he said. “The mist was thick and bright the day I heard you. I had nearly given up hope that you would come.” He tugged on her hand. “Come, let me show you.”

“You knew I was coming?”

“I’d always been told you would come for me, but I waited a very long time.”

Madeleine let go of his hand, slipped her arm through his and pulled him closer.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” she said.

“It’s harder to search on the ground,” he said and looked down at his legs. “But easier with these. They are good for walking.” He glanced at her. “And not so bad for swimming.”

“Oh?”

“After I found where you preened, I came to watch you swim with your flock. They do well, but it’s so cold for them with so few feathers.”

“Yes, many of our friends think we are quite mad to be swimming in all seasons.”

“To move through the water is very wonderful,” he agreed. “And then there is the freedom of the air.” He started walking faster. “Come.”

The voices of several swimmers carried across the water as they drew nearer the lido.

“I’m afraid it won’t be so quiet with that lot swimming,” Madeleine said.

He smiled. “They can’t follow where we’re going.” He took off his cap and tucked it in his coat pocket. “Do you wish to take these off?” he asked, his hand brushing along her sleeve.

Madeleine looked down at her trousers and boots and laughed. “I have a spare suit in my locker, but it’s too early for non-club members to swim.” She put her hand to her forehead, feeling more than a little ridiculous saying that to him.

“Come,” he urged.

She heard a splash and looked towards the river. The black swan bowed to her from where he floated on the water.

She stared for a moment. “Wait for me.”

The swan snorted.

“Wait for me a little more,” she amended and dashed to the changing room.

***

John set a mug of tea next to Sherlock’s laptop and peered at the screen over his shoulder. He watched a minute or two of the balcony scene, sipping his tea.

Sherlock was progressing through the film slowly, almost frame by frame. The audio had picked up little other than their own conversation, the occasional noise of traffic and the lapping of the water.

John went to sit on the sofa. He put his feet up on the coffee table and took another sip of tea. “I’m rather disappointed.” He rested the cup on the arm of the sofa. “Drink while the tea’s still hot.”

Sherlock did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the monitor, his hand poised above the touch pad.

John let his head fall back onto the cushions and stared at the ceiling. From Sherlock, he heard the occasional click. His eyes closed.

“John!”

John’s eyes flew open. His grip tightened on his mug. He sat up, eyes shifting from side to side checking that he was indeed still in the sitting room, although the sun had risen.

“Come look.”

John took a drink of the tepid tea and got to his feet. Some swaying was involved in circumventing the coffee table. He stopped behind Sherlock. “What?” he mumbled.

Sherlock tapped the touch pad a few times and hit pause. “Here. Watch from here.”

John leaned forward, resting his head against the side of Sherlock’s. On the screen, in shades of black and grey, were the windows and the balcony of Ms Swann’s flat with the canal in front of it.

The swan swam into view.

“Watch,” Sherlock whispered.

John leaned even closer to the screen.

There was the swan, unfolding his wings and fluttering up to the post in the water by Ms Swann’s balcony. And there was the swan standing with one foot on the top of the post, one half-open wing appearing to touch the side of the building, the other touching the railing of the balcony. Then his head and neck seemed to grow wider and the wing touching the railing appeared to have a hand amidst the feathers.

Sherlock paused the video.

“When I was watching that through the viewfinder, I was telling myself the camera was malfunctioning,” John said.

“It happens too fast live. It's little more than a blur,” Sherlock said. “Watch.” He clicked play.

The swan’s feathers seemed to be folding in against the wing bones. The swan appeared broader with each passing second. One hand grasped the top of the railing, another was splayed against the brick of the building’s wall. A leg clothed in feathery trousers was raised, a shod foot wedged between the bottom strut of the railing and the floor of the balcony.

“I was so annoyed I didn’t know how to adjust the camera focus manually,” John explained. “I was sure the auto-focus was malfunctioning.”

Sherlock hit pause. “Note how sharp the other objects in the field are. The auto-focus was working perfectly.”

“Then why are the images of the man and the swan superimposed on one another?” John asked. “The metalwork of the railing is clear. I can see the door handle on the balcony door.”

“Because the swan is changing into a man and you caught it on film, John. I’ve not read of that ever having been done before.”

“A lot of research on shape-shifters?” John asked. “Scientific literature?”

“Literature, yes. Of the fanciful sort. The occasional wild claim in the tabloid press. If there’s ever been any secret research, I suppose Mycroft would know, but I wasn’t able to find any and I’m not going to ask him.”

“Nothing new there,” John said, straightening up and stretching. “Can we magnify each of the frames in that sequence?”

Sherlock glanced at John. “You’re not ridiculing me.”

John laid his hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. “I ridicule your grocery shopping and your knowledge of the solar system. I’d be an idiot to ridicule your investigative technique.”

“Quite right,” Sherlock said and returned his attention to the laptop.

He minimised the video and opened another window. It was a slide show of frames from the video. Slowly, Sherlock clicked through them. They were all side views until the subject was on the balcony and then the view was from the back.

“A front view would have been ideal, but this is more than adequate for our purposes.”

John reached over Sherlock’s shoulder and clicked back through the images and then forwards again.

“There’s no way the man approached the balcony from the west somehow and we missed that?” John clicked back and forth between the several images from the middle of the sequence.

Sherlock looked up from under his brows. “Highly unlikely the camera and both of us would have missed that. What explanation do you have for these images?” he asked, shooing John’s finger away from the touch pad and clicking through several of the indeterminate images, all of which were blurry compared with the surroundings.

John pulled another desk chair next to Sherlock and sat down. “No one would believe this film wasn’t tampered with. And why is the subject blurry anyway. I thought this was about the highest speed camera there is?”

“Whatever process was happening, was happening at a speed faster than that,” Sherlock said. “It always seemed instantaneous to me as a child.”

“It just isn’t clear enough to serve as evidence.”

“Not in a court, no. Fortunately, for this case, we do not have to convince a judge or a jury. Ms Swann simply wants to be reassured that she hasn’t taken leave of her senses,” Sherlock replied.

“But is it enough for that?” John asked.

Sherlock zoomed in on the head in one of the images and squinted at the screen. “Combined with the evidence Ms Swann gathered for herself after we departed the scene, I would say yes. That means that we don’t have to try for daylight footage of a transformation.”

John started giggling.

“John?”

“That’s good, because I think he made us in the park yesterday.” John rubbed his hand across his face. “I can’t believe what I’m saying.”

“It’s a good point. I was thinking several cameras hidden in the trees around the pond might catch us clearer images.”

“Zoologists sometimes wait months to catch elusive species on film.”

Sherlock turned to John, puzzled.

“Wildlife documentaries,” John explained.

“Ah.”

“I had been thinking in terms of days,” Sherlock said.

“Of course, you were,” John replied. “Also, I think it’s against park rules to affix things to the trees.”

Sherlock’s phone vibrated. He ignored it.

John picked it up. “It’s a text from Ms Swann.”

“Read it.” Sherlock enhanced the resolution on a frame of the video.

“How soon could you meet me by the boating lake in Regent’s Park? Genetic results in.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said, sliding from his seat. “Possibly one more reason why we won’t need video from the Round Pond.” He plucked his scarf from the table, his coat from his chair.

John stared at him. “Shouldn’t I text her first?”

“Text while we walk. She did, and it won’t take her long to get there from the zoo.”

John’s brow furrowed. “You didn’t even see her text.”

Sherlock half-smiled as he swung his coat over his shoulders. “Grab some bread. We can feed the birds while we wait.”

“Planning on taking witness statements?” John asked, slipping Sherlock’s phone into his back pocket and pulling his jacket off the desk chair.

Sherlock paused in the doorway and raised an eyebrow. “Surely, you are keen to cast your medically-trained eye over the lab results as soon as possible.”

John smiled as he shoved his arms into his jacket and grabbed his phone and his keys from the coffee table. “Who could sleep when that possibility was on offer,” he muttered, patting his pockets for his mask.

“Exactly,” Sherlock called from the landing. “Bread!”

John listened to Sherlock’s footsteps recede. “Right,” he muttered to himself and snatched the half-empty bag of Warburton’s seeded loaf from the kitchen table on his way out.

“There she is,” Sherlock said.

John looked up from the open mouths of the waterfowl he was feeding and saw Ms Swann hurrying along the path on the other side of the boating lake. The rest of the slice of bread he was holding was pulled out of his hand.

“Hey!” John glanced down. The Greylag goose with part of a bread crust dangling from the side of his beak looked up innocently before he swallowed the bread down. “So, you’re really going to ask her if she wishes to withdraw her case? Regardless of what’s in the lab report?”

Sherlock nodded. “After last night, I think she knows she isn’t imagining the connection between ‘her’ swan, and the man who's been shadowing her.”

John upended the bread wrapper for the pigeons crowded around them. “We both saw what we saw last night and we even have it on film, and I’m doubting both my eyes and my sanity this morning,” John said.

Sherlock considered John. “You think she’ll still want corroboration?”

“Who hasn’t had an erotic dream?” John asked, bunching up the wrapper and shoving it into his pocket. The waterbirds continued to look at him expectantly.

“Surely, she couldn’t think it was a dream?” Sherlock replied, studying John’s expression.

“I’ve had a bit of experience with not being able to tell nightmare from reality,” John said. He dusted off his hands. “Shall we go meet her?”

“No,” Sherlock said, with a quick glance at Ms Swann’s progress over the bridge. “I’m still going to ask her if she’d like to withdraw…but after we see the lab report.”

John took his mask out of his pocket and put it on. “Fair enough.”

“Mr Holmes, Dr Watson,” Ms Swann said as she drew near. “Thank you for meeting me at such short notice and at this early hour.”

Sherlock finished tightening his scarf over his mouth and nose.

John gestured towards the empty park bench behind them. “Shall we?”

“A pity that shed feathers are not suitable for testing,” Sherlock said, handing the lab report to John. “It was game of them to try.”

Ms Swann was staring across the lake at the waterbirds. “Robin had explained that plucked feathers were best, but not easy to get from a wild bird, so she thought it was worth a go. You know I have a wing feather, but I didn’t want to give that one away.”

John took out his mobile and photographed both pages of the report before handing it back to Ms Swann. “And the genetic material was contaminated in the testing process as well, they write.”

Ms Swann avoided John’s eyes.

“You haven’t collected any new feathers, by any chance?” Sherlock asked. “You could try testing those.”

John noted the colour creeping past the edges of Ms Swann’s mask.

She shook her head.

“Would you like to withdraw your case?” Sherlock asked.

Ms Swann’s eyes were wide when she turned to Sherlock. “No! I…my reasons haven’t changed.” She took a breath and looked back at the water. “Whether the swan is a previously unrecorded mutation or hybrid or…” She waved her hand. “…doesn’t matter. I’d thought it might be a possible explanation for…” She fell silent.

“But you don’t think the ornithological aspect is relevant now?”

A pigeon pecking around her feet had become the focus of Ms Swann’s gaze. “No,” she said softly.

“And your friend’s interest wasn’t piqued?” Sherlock persisted.

“She asked to see the photos on my phone again. I never got around to forwarding the rest to her and the one I had sent wasn’t as clear as the later ones I took.”

“But you didn’t,” Sherlock said.

She scowled at him. “It’s unnerving, what you do.”

“Yes, I’ve been told,” Sherlock replied.

“I didn’t. I said I’d deleted them accidentally.”

“But there are ones online,” John interjected.

“True, but the quality isn’t great – I mean for scientific purposes.” She huffed. “Robin thinks I’ve been working too hard. She’d been excited about the possibility of a unique specimen, but our evidence seemed to be melting away.” She moved her foot for the pigeon. “The zoo has some new birds from Australia that have just laid eggs, which no one was expecting, so she’s rushed off her feet right now with that. I don’t think my amateur birding will be uppermost in her mind for some time.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” Sherlock said.

Ms Swann nodded.

Sherlock shed his coat and dropped his scarf on the desk next to his computer. He stroked the touch pad and the screen brightened.

“What do you make of the lab results?”

John draped his jacket over the back of a desk chair and headed for the kitchen. “I’m far from an expert.” He dropped his mask into the bin and put the kettle on.

“But you’ve been reading up on it,” Sherlock replied. “Are there any biscuits?”

“Yes and yes,” John replied. “I’ll have to do more research. I’ve been reading about human genetic medicine not veterinary medicine.”

“I can hear the but, John, spit it out!” Sherlock said. “What kind of biscuits?”

“Regular digestives and the dark chocolate kind. You want both, I know,” John answered before Sherlock said anything. “But even at the most preliminary glance, I think the folks out at Baskerville would be interested.”

“Yes,” Sherlock murmured, freezing a frame of their video showing Ms Swann’s balcony. “We need to avoid that.”

John inhaled. Half a smile could be seen on the part of his face that wasn’t buried in his pillow. He smelt toast. The smell grew stronger.

A mug landed with a thump on the night table, a plate landed more gently next to it.

John opened an eye. “Is this heaven?” he mumbled into the pillow.

The mattress dipped as Sherlock sat down on the edge of it. “I hope that your vision of an afterlife holds more pleasures than hot tea and freshly-buttered toast.”

“Are there greater pleasures than that?” John asked, his grin growing.

Sherlock ruffled John’s hair then slid his hand down his back to his bum and squeezed. “I can think of a few.”

John turned over. Sherlock’s hand landed on John’s thigh.

“You’re right,” John said and watched Sherlock smile. “There is at least one more.”

“That certainly, but I can think of at least one other,” Sherlock amended as he took his hand away and retrieved the plate of toast and set it on John’s chest.

“Oh?”

“Why didn’t you call some psychiatric hospital when I told you about Redbeard?”

“Because you were confiding in me,” John said, steadying the plate and sliding up into a sitting position.

“Even though what I was confiding made me sound like a madman?” Sherlock asked.

“I knew you were a madman the day I met you. I wrote about it on my blog,” John replied and took a piece of toast. “Yet here we are.”

“Yes. Well.” Sherlock took a sip of tea.

John swallowed his toast and reached for his mug. “Physiologically though, I can’t wrap my head around the process. I mean there’re all sorts of metamorphoses in nature. Simply growing up is a metamorphosis, but it’s a gradual one over years. Or, caterpillars to butterflies, that’s more radical and faster, but even that takes a couple weeks more or less. How could a bird turn into a human, or the reverse, almost instantaneously? Where’s the extra mass coming from or going to? What mechanism would be at work? I have no idea.”

“Nor I,” Sherlock said. “I’ve been puzzling about it since Redbeard died. Before that though, it just was. It was a fact that I had seen demonstrated several times a day, every day, since I was born, like the flip of a switch bringing light or voices coming from a radio.”

John finished swallowing another piece of toast and dusted the crumbs from his fingers over the plate. “But later, we could find out how those things worked, although I don’t claim to have a clear grasp of either electricity or radio waves.”

Sherlock nodded. “But, we know there are people who do.” He reached for the last piece of toast, held it over his mug. “I’ve never found anyone who wrote about this though and I’ve looked. Ms Swann walking through our front door was quite the surprise.”

“What did you see that day? I’ve been meaning to ask.”

“I didn’t see anything when I looked over the bannister. I only heard the two of you talking, but when she stepped into the sitting room, I thought her coat was trimmed in feathers. When she moved her hands, there seemed to be feathers waving about her cuffs.”

Sherlock ate the toast he was holding.

“There weren’t,” John said. “It was a black raincoat. Nicely tailored, but no trim at all.”

“With Redbeard, it was the colour. His clothes were always russet. A thick, knitted jumper with corduroy trousers for winter and oxblood shoes, and for the summer a brushed cotton shirt and denim trousers, brown denim, a rusty brown, and leather sandals. He preferred to be barefoot most of the time though.” Sherlock rubbed his fingertips against his palm. “I can still feel the textures.” His brow furrowed. “Maybe his clothes weren’t really that colour. Maybe they just looked that way to me.”

John nodded thoughtfully, then took another drink of his tea. “So, you took her case because of the feathers.”

“Yup.”

***

Above the river, the sky grew pale. In the east, the air began to blush.

On the dark water, two swans swam. The ripples following in their wake caught the light, pink and white and gold.

One swan curved his neck low and dipped his head beneath the water. The other did the same. The larger swan swam close to his mate, stretched his neck across hers and dipped his head again. After he’d raised his head to swallow, he bent it once more and his mate stretched her neck across his and into the water. Having drunk their fill, they bowed to one another, breast to breast and forehead to forehead.

The sky grew brighter.

“A race?”

“You’ll win. I can’t swim as fast as you. Yet.”

“Not swimming,” he replied and gestured with his head away from their island towards the open water.

She looked that way, too. “You think?”

“Your wings are strong.” He rubbed his head against her chest. “Your muscles are strong. All those morning swims.”

She lifted her head high.

“It is the morning for it.”

A distant cloud was gilt around its edges.

She dipped her head in the water then stretched her neck high.

“All right.”

“When you’re ready, spread your wings and busk as loud as you can. Then, I will.” He swam off a short way to allow room.

She opened her wings. Wide, wide they were and far blacker than a London night. She brought them forward, drew them back, then forward again and again. The sound echoed across the river. She rose from the water.”

“Stretch your neck forward and run,” he said.

She did, her feet slapping against the water, the tips of her wings skimming through it.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mate doing the same.

“Faster,” he urged, the word loud in her head.

And she beat her wings faster, the slap of each foot farther apart on the water over which she ran.

“Faster,” he insisted and she went faster, the whirr of their wings loud in the morning stillness.

“Stronger beats,” he said and her wide, wide wings pushed the air down.

“Lift your legs now,” he thought at her and she did.

The tips of her wings were still touching the water on the downstroke.

“Stronger,” he said.

She breathed in, her chest expanding, and pushed down as hard as she could and rose higher and higher above the river and the trees and far past where the fountains should have been. To the east of her, he followed, his wings singing and the sky outlining him in gold.

***

“You have a text from a Robin E. D’Arborea on your phone,” John said from the desk.

Sherlock didn’t look up from his microscope. “What does she write?”

“She would like a consultation about a friend who hasn’t been in touch for weeks.”

“Seriously? Someone’s friend, or lover, loses interest and we’re supposed to help? Delete it.”

John tapped at his keyboard. “Ah. Don’t think it’s that,” he said. “Just looked her up. Ornithologist at the Zoological Society of London. Robin, the bird scientist, I believe.”

“Ah,” Sherlock said, getting up from the kitchen table. “Let’s see if we can reassure her about Ms Swann, so she doesn’t contact any authorities about her concerns. Suggest a meeting in Avenue Gardens. That’s close to the zoo.” He looked out the window. The light was almost gone. “It will have to be tomorrow. Say, one or two in the afternoon. Let her pick.”

The fall of the steel doorknocker echoed through the flat.

John glanced at Sherlock, who inclined his head towards the door.

John crossed the room to open it.

“Oh, um, hello.” The man standing in the hall peered around John into the apartment. “Is Madeleine back?”

Sherlock looked up from the bundle of post he was checking. “You must be Alan, the neighbour with the row boat.”

Alan’s eyes widened. “And you’re Sherlock Holmes!” He turned back to John. “And you must be Dr Watson. It’s a pleasure,” he said, extending his arm a little before drawing it back. “Sorry.”

“Won’t you come in?” Sherlock said.

John glanced at Sherlock, then moved aside.

Alan hesitated before taking a couple steps inside. “I don’t want to keep you. I saw the lights on when I was rowing home and I thought Madeleine was in. Do you know when she’ll be back for good?” He looked from Sherlock to John and back. “I miss our boat rides.”

Sherlock shook his head. “For good? No.” His eyes flicked to John. “We agreed to look after a few things while she’s away, but the timeframe is quite open-ended.” He gestured with the stack of letters he was holding. “There’s not much to do though.”

“No, I imagine there wouldn’t be. Madeleine is very organised. I’m sure she had everything that could be arranged in advance all sorted out before she left. I hope research for the new game is worth uprooting herself like this.”

“Yes, hopefully,” Sherlock said.

“Of course, her gorgeous research assistant must be a great help.”

John and Sherlock exchanged glances.

Sherlock raised his eyebrows and tilted his head inquiringly at their visitor.

“You know, the guy with the jet black hair down to here,” Alan said, touching his hand to his waist.” I saw them from the towpath one day when they were out on the balcony. It was too far for introductions. We just waved. Later, Madeleine told me he was her new assistant.” Alan looked out the balcony doors. “It’s lovely to face the water. My flat overlooks the road.” He grimaced. “Not the same at all.”

“No,” John agreed.

“I’ve a bottle of champagne set aside for when she does settle back in,” he said.

“That’s thoughtful of you,” John said.

“We’ve been neighbours for years. It’s not the same now.” He half-turned to the door. “Anyway, I’ll let you get back to your tasks. It was nice meeting you.” Alan stepped into the doorway.

John rested his hand on the side of the open door. “Same here.”

From the hall, Alan looked back at John. “At least I see her swan and his mate now and then on the canal. They always remind me of Madeleine.” He raised his hand. “Take care,” he added and headed down the corridor.

John watched until Alan had turned into the stairwell, then closed the door and leaned back against it. “He couldn’t know, could he?”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed, then he shook his head. “Who’d believe him?”

***

The rain was pelting against the window panes.

John rolled closer to Sherlock and curled an arm about his shoulders.

Sherlock mumbled into his bunched-up pillow.

“I’m not going to suddenly turn into a dog, am I?”

Sherlock opened his eyes and peered at John. “What gave you that idea?”

“Well, Madeleine wasn’t like Redbeard, shifting shapes since childhood. She didn’t find out she could change until she was in her thirties…”

“And in what way does this pertain to you?” Sherlock enquired, all vestiges of drowsiness disappearing from his voice.

“You knew when you first looked at her. You were interested and decided to take her case, even if you didn’t tell her right away,” John said, eyes fixed on Sherlock's.

“My question stands.”

“It was like the way you looked at me that day at Bart’s and two minutes later you offered to share a flat with me,” John said. “It might have been less than two minutes.”

Sherlock cleared his throat. “Yes, well.”

“Did my jacket appear furry to you? Did I have a translucent tail?”

“If you did, would it have been wagging?” Sherlock asked.

John edged closer. “Yes.”

“And when I went to leave, you began to snarl,” Sherlock said.

“So, am I going to wake up as a dog one morning?”

Sherlock reached out, pulling John to him. “Not as far as I can tell. But if you did, I’d love you still and take you for runs in the park.”

John twisted his hips and rolled Sherlock onto his back. “I’d bite your leg if you didn’t,” he said.

“Would you now?” Sherlock replied, tipping his head back and exposing his neck.

“Maybe not your leg,” John murmured, mouthing the taut skin beneath Sherlock’s ear. His hand slipped down to Sherlock’s hip. “Although I happen to know that your leg is tasty, too.”

Sherlock tipped his head further back as a sharp hook scratched lightly from his ear to his chest. He sighed and dug his fingers into John’s back and for the first time he could actually feel the feathers there.