Chapter Text
There are times when he looks at Iris and she looks so like Klint that Barok feels ashamed that he had not come to the realization on his own.
Her pale eyes and unique hair color, of course, are her mother’s. It would be easy to see only the features she acquired from the Baskerville blood in her veins and stop there without further consideration of her lineage.
But there are stubborn lines in her expression that rival only Klint in his most zealous moments, a light in her eyes so brilliant it feels as though it might burn if one looks into it for too long.
Barok had never known when to stop when it was Klint’s guiding light he was following. He worries now that he is developing the same weakness when it comes to Klint’s daughter.
“I’m telling you, my test isn’t wrong!”
Barok leans back in his seat, away from Iris, who is staring him down, both of her hands planted firmly on the opposite side of his desk. She is nearly the age now, he thinks, that Klint had been when he had first become an intern in the prosecutor’s office. She’s grown from a precocious child into a fierce young woman. She’s always been creative and curious, of course, and this is hardly the first time she’s had something to contribute to an investigation. It’s almost inevitable, given her heritage. Like Klint, she has begun to hone her professional identity at a young age and is already well-respected in the circles of those who make and keep the laws of London.
Like Sholmes, much of her best work is done without the sanction of Scotland Yard.
“So you believe Lord Livingston was killed with the use of a newly discovered poison called - what was it?”
“Curare,” Iris says confidently, crossing her arms in front of her; it should have been reminiscent of Sholmes, but instead looks like nothing so much as Asougi at his most vexing. Behind her, lurking near the door, Lestrade is nodding her support of Iris’s claim. “And it’s not newly discovered, not really. People in South America have been using it for years. But it’s not common here, and we don’t make a habit of testing for it.”
“And how did you come to know of the existence of this rare, deadly substance from South America?”
“Runo told me about it,” Iris says brightly.
“Runo?”
“She means ‘Oddo,” Lestrade states, as though this is helpful.
Barok’s eyes flicker back and forth between the pair for a moment before the pieces slot together in his mind. “Are you perhaps referring to Mr. Naruhodou?” he asks. Iris and Lestrade both nod, as though that had been exceedingly obvious.
Barok sighs.
“And what, pray tell,” he asks, “did Mr. Naruhodou say of this mystery substance that led you to believe that it had been used in the death of Lord Livingston? A death, I might add, that Scotland Yard had not in fact ruled to be a murder at all.”
“Oh,” Iris says, a tiny, dismayed sound. For all her maturity, her cheeks still turn a dusky shade of pink when she’s flustered. She recovers quickly, for the most part, and says, “There was just something about the case, you know. He died so young, and it was hard to believe there wasn’t some sort of foul play involved.”
“And, of all the possibilities, you thought to test for such a little-known poison?”
Iris shrugs delicately. She’s schooled her expression back into a benign smile that doesn’t falter. “I suggested to Maria that she run a few tests. Just got lucky with this one.”
“I see,” Barok says. He knows what has happened. He receives consistent reports about his niece spending far too much time in the morgue. He’s not sure how exaggerated tales of her forensic experiments are by the time they reach his ears, and to be honest, he’s not sure he wants to know. From the moment she’d met Dr. Scythe’s daughter, Iris had had not only a whole new realm of applications of her medical knowledge, but new resources with which she could test her forensic methods. The friendship between the young Drs. Wilson and Gorey can only be described as worrisome, at least for anyone observing their scientific endeavors from the outside. And so Barok hears about them from time to time, and he imagines he will continue to, again and again, until Iris is either hired on with Scotland Yard or permanently banned from the morgue. “So I am to understand that you had this brilliant revelation, based solely on the news of Lord Livingston’s early demise, and thought to request that Dr. Gorey run a small number of tests, including, by chance, the test for this rare poison in particular?”
“It doesn’t sound so unreasonable, does it?”
“And in no way did you just incidentally stumble upon this evidence of foul play because you were using Scotland Yard’s cadavers as your test subjects again?”
“Technically,” Iris says, sidestepping the question, “Scotland Yard had already signed him over to the undertaker because they’d closed their investigation. But no harm done! I have caught their mistake, and there is still plenty of time for you to reopen this case.”
She offers him the neatly penned test results with a flourish, and Barok is reminded, not for the first time, that Iris is still very much Herlock Sholmes’s daughter.
He looks at her for a long moment, and she waits, still smiling, her eyes still alight. Finally, he takes the report from her hands and reads over her initial summary page. Upon finishing, he looks up to see both young women staring at him in eager anticipation. He lays the report down and slides it across his desk, back to Iris.
Years can carry him farther away from his brother’s death, but they have yet to erase the aching guilt Barok feels for this loss, nor the sense of obligation he’s felt toward this child since the moment he’d understood who she was to him. Iris is the only piece left of Klint’s legacy that is untarnished by the Professor’s name. Because of this, Barok has sworn a silent oath of fealty to this girl that he would be hard pressed to break.
But beyond the connection that she offers him to his lost brother, Barok has come to care for Iris in her own right. She is kind and caring, wonderfully creative, and it would be nigh impossible to find someone more clever.
She is also, more often than not, correct in her analyses.
“You have twenty-four hours,” he says finally. “If, in that time, your investigation uncovers no further evidence that Lord Livingston’s death was from anything other than natural causes, the investigation will be closed again. And will stay closed,” he adds pointedly.
Iris claps, and Lestrade raises her fist in her own less than subtle gesture of triumph. “Thank you, Uncle Barry!” Iris says cheerfully. “You won’t regret this!”
He can hear Lestrade cough out a laugh that she fails to hold in completely. He glowers at her over Iris’s shoulder. “Iris, please,” he mutters in protest.
“Right, right, sorry. Thank you, Lord Chief Justice Barry!”
Barok heaves another long-suffering sigh, covering his face with one gloved hand. “Inspector,” he says. Lestrade still snaps to attention when he addresses her directly. “I assume you’ll want to head up this investigation. Please alert Prosecutor Asougi that he’ll be working with you on this case.”
“Right away,” and she paused just long enough without the usual ‘sir’ for him to know it was coming, “Lord Chief Justice Barry.”
Lestrade, wisely, slips out the door before he can respond.