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"I found something curious on Ms Adler's phone, Anthea," Mycroft announces, and she freezes, wondering if any of her friends might have been involved with Irene. Jenny or Pat perhaps? Not Ella; Ella would have had more sense. Then Mycroft goes on: "The text of a Victorian biography. Did you know my great-great-granduncle also fancied himself as a detective?"
"No, sir," she says easily. She knows a lot more about her employer than she lets on, but his ancestry has always seemed irrelevant.
"Sherlock is named after him. I doubt the original Sherlock Holmes was really anything much of a detective, of course, certainly nothing like my brother. But he was a minor sensation in his own time, I believe."
He pauses and Anthea wonders why this book bothers him, after all the photos and videos and e-mails on Irene's phone that haven't.
"Perhaps Irene Googled 'Sherlock Holmes'," she suggests, "and just downloaded everything she could find."
"Ms Adler renamed herself several years ago after a woman mentioned in one of the cases," Mycroft says. "She has therefore been interested in my brother for a considerable time. And the book is not easy to get hold of. Great-grandfather bought up most of the copies and had them pulped; he hardly wanted his more eccentric relatives remembered."
"Do you want me to take a look at it?" Anthea asks casually. "See if I can find out where Irene Adler got hold of it, what she might be playing at?" Her curiosity is normally better concealed than Mycroft's, but why else do you become a spy other than to poke your nose into other people's secrets?
Mycroft smiles knowingly at her, as he says: "I'll send you the file and see what you make of it."
***
It's odd reading something from a hundred years ago on a BlackBerry, as if time itself has been compressed. And the book itself is a curious mix, from its casual references to the Ku Klux Klan to the furtive-looking Scotland Yard detective wandering round Herefordshire in his leather leggings. But it's the chapter called "A Scandal in Bohemia" that really bothers Anthea. It's a story about male vanity that seems to have a hole at the centre of it. A hole where the character of Irene Adler is.
It's probably inevitable that the anonymous author – a married doctor – can't describe Irene properly. He watches her, but never meets her, after all, and from the rest of the book, he's happiest with women he can portray as domestic angels or helpless victims. Even though you can see him unable to fit some of the women he encounters into those tidy boxes, faced with their real complexities.
But Anthea can't understand Irene Adler either. Oh, not her tactics, but her strategy. You need to be a smart woman if you're going to live off stupid men, but there's something about Irene's behaviour that doesn't add up. Or at least not to her. She needs a second opinion.
***
It's Saturday when she next sees Ella. It's one of those days of cultural overload that Anthea carefully devises for them. Lunchtime jazz at the National Theatre, the afternoon at Tate Modern, maybe squeeze in a film in the evening. Anthea always finds it handy to have something to talk about with Ella: a film, a play, a book. It avoids her having to talk about herself, let alone them. She's not sure yet that she's ready for them, even though Ella's surprisingly fun in bed, beneath that sober exterior.
"I think I need to sit down for a bit, get my strength up for the exhibition," Ella says, as they walk along the riverbank after the jazz. "And it seems a shame to spend all day indoors. Maybe we could go to Bernie Spain Gardens?"
When they get there, Ella flops onto a bench, drinking thirstily from her water bottle. She looks happier now, Anthea thinks: she's smiling at a squirrel racing across the grass. Anthea wonders if it's the simplicity of squirrels that appeals to Ella, the fact that their biggest psychological trauma is probably if they can remember where they've hidden their nuts. She sits down beside Ella; Ella's warm arm comes round her shoulders, and Anthea almost automatically starts stroking teasing patterns on the other woman's sturdy thigh. But now Irene Adler – the adventuress – is nagging at her mind again.
"You know a lot about people's behaviour," she says, and Ella looks round at her. "I read something recently about a woman who had a secret affair with a powerful man and when he decided to marry someone else, she was so jealous that she threatened to tell his fiancée about them. But a couple of days later she was willing to marry another man. Does that seem plausible to you?"
"Is this the plot of some new romcom?" Ella asks, smiling. And then she stops and thinks, in that careful way she has, as if everything people say to her matters, and adds: "I know love at first sight is a cliché, but it can happen. It's a disaster, pretty often, but that doesn't mean the feelings aren't desperately potent at the time."
"She'd known the second man for some while," Anthea replies.
Ella frowns. "I should point out that I'm not a psychological profiler. Particularly not one working on the cheap for Mycroft Holmes."
"It's a story," Anthea explains. "A story that's the wrong shape, that doesn't fit together."
"Is it important?" Ella asks, sitting up. Anthea can't explain how wonderful it is to have Ella ask that and not: What is Mycroft up to now?
"It might be," she says. "I've got a copy of it here." She pulls out her BlackBerry from her pocket, brings up the file and then hands the phone to Ella, and if that isn't pure, naked trust, what is?
Ella's a slow reader. No, she's a careful reader. She scrolls up and down through the story, and Anthea tries to be patient, not start reading over her shoulder, asking her what she thinks. Ella's brow is furrowing now, but she smiles at the end, where Holmes gets his comeuppance. Then she turns to Anthea and asks:
"Is this some kind of joke? Given the names?"
"You've heard of Irene Adler?"
"The modern one, yes. She's always turning up in the newspapers. Has someone now decided that the world needs historical fiction about her? At least I presume she's not a time-traveller. Now if you want to tell me Sherlock Holmes is actually a thousand-year old vampire, I might be more prepared to believe it."
"Sherlock is a family name," Anthea tells her. "The man in this book is an ancestor of the one you know. And the modern 'Irene Adler' is an alias. One of many that Mary Morstan has assumed over the years."
"I suppose you can't really be a dominatrix called Mary," Ella replies, smiling. "Well, not a glamorous dominatrix, anyhow. So you're saying this is Victorian fact, not modern fiction?"
"As far as I know. And if it was fiction, wouldn't the story make more sense?"
Ella looks at her calmly. "What do you think doesn't make sense?"
Anthea's used to clever men who want to prove how clever they are, who always have all the answers. The unusual thing about Ella is that she's far happier asking questions than answering them. It makes it easy to underestimate her.
"Irene provides a service to powerful men, whether it's sleeping with them or singing to them. Why is she being so unprofessional, threatening a former client like that?"
"You think she shouldn't let her personal feelings get in the way of her ambitions?" Ella asks softly, gazing into Anthea's eyes, and Anthea's stomach tightens, because she's given herself away, hasn't she? And then Ella smiles reassuringly and starts to recite:
Liaisons, what happened to them?
Liaisons, today.
Liaisons, indiscriminate women, it pains more than I can say.
The lack of taste that they display.
Madame Armfeldt from A Little Night Music; they went to a performance a few weeks ago.
" 'It's just a pleasurable means to a measurable end,' " Anthea quotes back; the uncomfortable truth wrapped up in a joke. You don't get far in most walks of life if you lose your temper with the man paying the bills. And the ability to flatter male egos always comes in handy.
"It's hard not to fall for people sometimes," Ella replies. "Even if you shouldn't, even if it's not sensible."
Is Ella still talking about Irene Adler? Best to pretend she is, to stick to the safe ground of someone else's mistakes.
"The King of Bohemia was an idiot!" Anthea protests. "Why would a clever woman like Irene fall for him?"
"He was tall and dark. Maybe he was handsome as well, some kind of animal magnetism? Or perhaps Irene really, really liked men in silk cloaks?" Ella's grin lights up her face for a moment, before her face falls back into its serious therapist mode.
"But why change her mind, then?" Anthea asks. "One moment, she's so insanely jealous of him marrying someone else she's going to wreck all his plans. The next, she loses interest in him."
"What makes you say Irene's jealous about the marriage?"
"The King of Bohemia certainly reckons so."
"But, as you say, he's an idiot," Ella replies, and then she adds thoughtfully, "Everybody's different, of course, but in my experience, sexual jealousy and possessiveness is normally associated with a very strong desire for physical closeness. Stalking, spying on someone, barely letting them out of your sight. That doesn't seem to be the case here. Irene's keeping well away from her ex-lover."
"Then why does she threaten the king with exposure?"
"Anger, perhaps," Ella says, and she smiles a wise smile at Anthea. "The urge to hurt someone, to make them suffer as you yourself have suffered, can be overwhelming."
Anthea never understands that kind of behaviour. There's an art to taking revenge while protecting your own interests, and she's learnt it from a master.
"One of the things that does intrigue me," Ella goes on, her hands fiddling with Anthea's Blackberry, "is the other woman. The princess the King's supposed to marry. What's her name?" She searches for the passage, a look of concentration coming over her strong face. "She's called Clotilde, poor thing."
"What about her?" Anthea hadn't bothered to think about the princess: just another helpless upper-class woman. But maybe Ella's spotted something.
"The King says she won't marry him if she finds out about Irene. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"
"I don't see why."
"A woman like that would have been trained in her role," Ella says slowly. "Mistresses were pretty much a standard part of royal life; think of Lillie Langtry. Clotilde being willing to break off her engagement because her big, handsome idiot of a fiancé had been involved with someone five years ago – that seems odd, however strict her principles might be."
"What are you suggesting?"
"Could there have been something more that Irene might have revealed?" Ella's still holding Anthea's phone and Anthea feels her hands itching for its keys. Don't distract her, she thinks, forcing herself to wait. But Ella shakes her head after a while, as if the thought's eluded her. Maybe some prompting might help, Anthea decides.
"Irene wants to kick the king where it hurts," she says and Ella nods. "But then she changes her mind."
"And instead she marries Godfrey Norton," Ella replies. "A switch from destruction to creating something new, away from hatred to love. It's what you hope for so often with a client."
"But it happens too quickly."
"How long does it take to realise that you love someone?" Ella asks quietly, and the problem with Ella's questions is that sometimes they're impossible to answer.
Instead, Anthea reaches silently out for her BlackBerry and Ella, after a moment, hands it back. Anthea stares at the screen again, at Irene's letter proclaiming: I love and am loved by a better man than he, and she knows there's something more, something she still hasn't seen.
"It's not the falling in love that's too quick," she says at last. "It's everything else. Why do Godfrey and Irene get married in such a hurry? Why don't they just run away together and get married later? They risked the marriage not being legal, if Holmes hadn't been there to be a witness."
"Perhaps Irene was holding out for marriage?" Ella suggests, frowning, and suddenly Anthea sees it. The obvious solution, of course. But she needs proof.
"Thank goodness for the Mormons," she mutters, as she loads the first of the websites she needs. The sites that may tell her the truth about Irene Adler's little secret.
***
The problem is, she's not sure where the Nortons would have gone to. "The Continent" is a vague location, and even ignoring Scandinavia and Spain leaves her a lot of places to check. Nothing from France or Italy. Should she try Germany or the Austro-Hungarian empire next? A sophisticated woman like Irene Adler would feel at home there, but how would Godfrey Norton cope in Warsaw or Vienna? Probably a monoglot, legal training of no use in a civil law system...
There's something else, she knows, some twist of Irene's thought she's missed. If she was in Irene's position, having to start from scratch again, abandon everything she had, where would she go? How would she evade the detectives and the King of Bohemia's agents, make a new life for herself and her lover? Who would she be able to count on for help?
Old connections, of course. Not Warsaw, where Irene had met the King, where his influence might threaten her, but older connections than that. The oldest ones of all. Irene Adler would have gone back to the beginning. Back to her home in – where was it? – New Jersey.
It doesn't take long to check through the records there, since there's a fairly narrow time frame. And sure enough, after a few false positives she brings its up. The birth certificate of Arthur Ignatius Norton.
"Got you!" she yells and looks up. And sees Ella looking up at her from the worn paperback that's somehow appeared in her hands. Oh help. Anthea looks surreptitiously down at her phone. It's nearly an hour since she started her search.
"You've found what you were looking for now, have you?" Ella asks. Anthea nods, unsure what to say.
"Do you want to show me?" Ella says, carefully putting her book back in her shoulder bag. Anthea hands over the BlackBerry again.
"Details of the birth certificate of Irene and Godfrey's first child," she explains, and Ella looks at it in puzzlement.
"I don't see–" she begins.
"Look at the date," Anthea breaks in. "The events of the memoir are set in March 1888."
Ella stares at the screen again. "And the boy was born in August 1888. I see. So Irene was several months pregnant at the time of her encounter with Holmes."
"That was why she said that the king had "cruelly wronged" her. That was what she was going to tell his future wife. And that was why Godfrey married her so quickly. So her child wouldn't be a bastard, but could be passed off as his. The son of another tall dark, good-looking man."
"Then why all this business about Irene's photo?" Ella says, frowning. "Why was the King so concerned about that? Am I missing something?"
"The King doesn't say when the picture was from, does he?" Anthea replies, wondering if there's any possibility of it still surviving, because there must be experts who can date such things. "If he'd told Clotilde that he'd finished with Irene and there's proof that he hadn't, that would land him in hot water. But if Irene uses the photo, Arthur's labelled for life as a bastard, and Godfrey looks a fool. So once she's married, the King of Bohemia doesn't have anything more to fear from her, if he just leaves her and her family alone."
"You can't be sure Arthur was the king's child, rather than Godfrey's," Ella points out quietly.
Anthea's mind is racing: DNA samples from descendants, if there are any? Photos of Arthur? Some hideous congenital disease? She reaches to take the phone back, and then stops. Ella's looking at her very steadily now, and there's a set to her jaw that she probably doesn't let her patients see.
"It can wait," Anthea says, "It's not urgent." Ella smiles at her, and hands over the phone.
"Maybe best to let it go," Ella says. "Irene's long dead and little Arthur. Godfrey would have been his father legally. Probably emotionally as well. A genetic link on its own often doesn't count for that much." She pauses and then adds: "Unless there's something more? Something that still matters?"
It's Ella's very gentle way of being nosy and she deserves some kind of answer after having her afternoon wrecked.
"It's the modern day Irene Adler whom I'm really interested in," Anthea says. "Though I don't see quite why she admires this woman."
"Why shouldn't she?"
"Settling down for a life of married respectability?"
"Irene Norton had a husband who cared for her. She had a son. Even in 1888, if she hadn't wanted the baby, there would have been alternatives: abortion, adoption or simple abandonment. What do you think would give her more comfort in the long run: that she'd once had a king at her beck and call, or that she'd found somebody worthwhile to love?"
The contact details of seventeen presidents are stored in Anthea's BlackBerry; Irene's phone looks like an adult version of Who's Who. It's an uncomfortable feeling that they may both have got their priorities wrong.
"I suppose what the current Irene admires is that she fooled a clever man," Anthea says hastily. "That Sherlock Holmes didn't spot Irene's pregnancy."
"You think he didn't?" Ella asks, leaning forward into what Anthea thinks of as her counselling posture, interested but unthreatening.
"At the start of the story, he calls his friend unobservant, because he hasn't counted the number of steps up to his flat. He shows off to him all the time. Do you think he wouldn't have announced it to him if he'd spotted Irene's secret?"
Anthea smiles, because it makes sense now: why Irene so relished the story that she kept it among her many secrets. Beneath the obvious way that the original Irene fooled Holmes, the one that he acknowledges, there's a deeper victory, one that he's oblivious to. She won't put the parallels into her report to Mycroft, but he'll still spot them. Bamboozle a man with a locked phone and he won't then ask why you need him to decode a message. Multiple layers of trickery.
She's conscious that Ella's frowning, and hastily switches her attention back to her.
"You're probably right about Holmes," Ella says slowly. "I can believe him not spotting Irene's condition; it doesn't sound like he knew that much about women. But what about the other man? The author of the story?"
"Whoever he is."
"A married doctor, we know that much. Isn't that the man most likely to spot the symptoms of pregnancy?"
Anthea stares open-mouthed at her, trying to figure out the implications. She's prepared to bet that Mycroft Holmes and 'Irene Adler' never thought of that possibility. There's always some angle you overlook, however clever you are. No, some person. Irene dismissing Sherlock after Bond Air, till he brought her down and saved the day...
"But if the man did know, why didn't he say?" she asks Ella, because that surely doesn't make sense.
"Because he didn't want to show up his friend's blind spots as a detective?" Ella smiles. "Or even because he wanted to protect Irene's reputation? He said he felt ashamed about what he was doing to her as it was. Not everyone simply thinks about themselves all the time. Godfrey Norton didn't."
"I don't imagine the modern Irene Adler worries about anyone but herself," Anthea replies, remembering the tape of her last meeting with Mycroft. She still finds it hard to forgive Irene for how she was prepared to harm her country – and destroy her boss, who spends his life protecting it.
"Then she's a fool," Ella says, her voice suddenly harsh, "No, worse than that. Lack of empathy is one of the hallmarks of personality disorder. One of the most important ones, I'd say. If you don't care about others, if they're all just pawns in your game, you cease to be truly human."
She stops and holds out her hands, and smiles a depreciating smile. "I'm sorry, I don't want to bore you with a lecture. Or depress you unnecessarily. Because most people, really, whatever their problems, are capable of showing love to others."
Anthea abruptly hears Sherlock's triumphant voice in her head saying: Love is a dangerous disadvantage. "You think so?"
"Yes. It's a basic human instinct to respond positively to love in others. I hope – I expect – that's how Irene Norton came to feel about Godfrey. And their child, as well. She had a chance for a fresh start; I'd like to think she made the most of it."
Anthea finds it hard to imagine anyone really changing. But maybe that's just a handy excuse for her own behaviour.
"What do you want to do now?" she asks, and she's sure that – as usual – she sounds politely insincere.
"I thought we were going to the Tate," Ella replies, smiling. "That is, if MI5 can survive without you for Saturday afternoon."
"Is that what you really want?" It's not a question Anthea often asks.
There's a sudden spark in Ella's dark eyes. "What I'd like to do is go home and spend the afternoon in bed with you. Just relax, enjoy your company." She smiles. "Very boring, I know."
"I'd like that too," Anthea says, standing up, and holding out her hand to Ella. Maybe now is the right time to start thinking about them, she decides. Because after all, as Godfrey Norton realised, when you've found the woman, everything else takes second place.