Chapter Text
Part One
Madame Sherlock Holmes
Before I tell you once more the story of how I met the now famous and illustrious woman whom you are most likely very well familiar with, I must confess to something that I feel the need to expose now that you all know what happened that day with Moriarty and my dear Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Although it is true that much of the friendship you read about in my previous accounts of our adventures is unedited and candid, there is a… different side of our relationship that I left out because it was confusing for me, and would invite a kind of speculation and scandal that I did not want to bring upon myself, and I did not want to be a mark on the already tenuous reputation of my friend. And I still do not, but since the events of The Final Problem and the press around it, I feel it is important to show a more honest side of both myself and my friend.
Even as I write this I feel as if I should put my pen down and let it be. I don’t know why I am compelled to do this. I shouldn’t. It isn’t proper. It is speaking ill of the dead, or at the very least giving the public the opportunity to. Sherlock Holmes was not a bad woman. She was the most extraordinary, thoughtful, insightful, clever, and delightfully weird woman I have ever met. As you know, she could be blunt, and antisocial, and rude at times, but she never meant ill on anyone who did not deserve it, and many of her struggles were symptoms of what I now believe to be ASD, or a combination of that and Attention Deficit Disorder, neither of which are things that can be helped, and neither of which makes anyone a horrible person by default. But nevertheless, I confess that I left many of my friend’s worst days out of my narratives in hopes that she may not be taken out of context and twisted to seem far more unpleasant than she actually was when you got to know her habits and mannerisms like I did.
And the last thing, which I will not go into any detail right now as the narrative of the following stories reveals it, is that Sherlock was a lesbian, and though I think most would not be phased to learn that about her, it does recontextualize some of my own feelings towards her, and I think knowing that was the nail in the coffin of my now quite dead marriage, and the thing that is making me decide to write such an account as this. I can never know for sure anything that she did not tell me, but included in this volume will be the complete letter she left for me at Reichenbach Falls, and the confession she made to me before.
The following are the first, almost unedited drafts of our adventures, before I removed from them my more personal thoughts, and a few of my own diary entries from the times that the adventures took place. I will also be including part of one writing from my friend which I found addressed to myself in a drawer in her room after she had gone, which I think from the age of the paper was written years ago, perhaps the very year we first met. Please, try to not read them with a judgmental heart. Try to understand, as well as you can, the nature of our situation, and understand that given the chance, I would do many things differently, but none of those things involve making life worse for my good friend, who I loved and love more than any other human being in the whole of the world. This is the unedited adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
A Study In Lavender
Chapter 1
The Marvelous Detective of Baker Street
From the diary of Doctor. Johanna Watson, Dec. 14, 1979
I have just met the most curious woman I think I have ever known. Her name is Sherlock Holmes, a strange name for a woman, to be sure, but an attractive one in an odd way. I like her enough. It’s strange though. When she saw me, she took one look and asked how long I had been away from Iran. When I asked how she had known I had been at at all, she said “Well, it’s your wrists, you see. You’re tan is leaving you in this British winter, but you have a considerable amount of sun damage. And you have that straight-backed manner that you only see in veterans. You’re a doctor, I reckon.”
When I moved into 221B Baker Street, I had no idea the full extent of the eccentricity of my roommate. It’s been a few months now since the curious first adventure, and there have been so many that even if the magazine does not accept my application for a spot it’s worth writing down just so I don’t forget them all. How did it start? How did it start indeed?
(I think I will alter that first paragraph. It doesn’t seem proper for a publication, does it?)
I used to be an army nurse, and I was working in the British Embassy in Iran until the war made it so I suffered a shot in the leg and was taken out to recover. It’s a wonder I did; if the bullet had entered in any other way I might have lost the leg, or gone septic. I supposed I should put the usual Screw Margaret Thatcher in there, and say that it was stupid I was there at all. Since leaving the military, I have found I am not the most patriotic of people.
When I got my health back, I was restless and jumpy, and although I love my parents dearly, their constant doting and anxious questions were wearing on me, and I swore I should regain my independence. I was twenty-eight years old, not some child who needed to be waited upon. So I packed my things up and headed to London to live in the only flat I could afford on my pension.
I think the first time I met Sherlock I was on the bus on my way to the first day of my job. She was sitting in the crowded bus wearing an old, well made trench coat and reading a newspaper. This does not make her significant, but I do remember she had a pencil and was marking the paper at seemingly random points. She had her curly black hair tied up in a messy bun, delicate curls falling out of it and framing her thin, severe face. Her skin was an olive brown, her nose large and curved, her eyes framed with thick black lashes. To me, she seemed the most gorgeous woman in the whole world.
She glanced up, and saw me staring, and I glanced looked away, embarrassed.
A week later, my friend Stephanie and I got a drink at a bar. At this point I had realized that my flat was quite disgusting, and I could not live alone much longer. I told Stephanie that I would need to find a flatmate, and she laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Oh, really it’s nothing. It’s just, you’re the second person to tell me that today.”
And before I knew it I was at 221B Baker Street to meet Sherlock Holmes, and what a meeting it was. Stephanie rang the buzzer, and I heard a scramble as someone came down the stairs very quickly, and the door was flung open to reveal the same woman I had seen on the bus. We made very brief eye contact in which she looked quite puzzled, before focusing on Stephanie.
“You could have rang before you came to my door.”
Stephanie chuckled. “Sorry old mate, I just thought you might be interested. You see, I think I found you a flatmate.”
Sherlock looked at me once more. “Doctor. We meet again, I see. How long have you been back?”
“Sorry?”
“From Iran. No more than three months, I would say, but I could be wrong. How long have you been back?”
“I— Did Steph tell you about that?”
“I did not,” said Stephanie.
“I am right then? Three months?”
“Well, yes, but how did you know?”
“You’re coming off from a tan, which means that you were somewhere hot. Look at the sun damage at the top of your wrists. You have those strange and exact movements that you only see in military veterans, but you can’t have been primarily a fighter since on the bus the other day you had scrubs in your bag. A doctor. You favor your left leg, which is made even more unusual considering you are right handed. An injury, no doubt, but it has had time to heal, and to match up with that sun damage it would have to be three or four months old. Probably three. Which means, Iran. Or Iraq. You must have left because of that injury, spent a month and a half recovering, came to London, and now you are at my doorstep. I’m sorry, I’m being rude. I should invite you inside, shouldn’t I?”
And before I could even say a word, she opened the door fully and turned back up the stairs, leaving me and Stephanie at the doorstep. I looked over at Steph in shock, and she looked apologetic.
“I should have warned you. She’s a bit… eccentric. A genius, mind you, but a bit rough around the edges.”
“Are you joking? That was incredible!” I said in a hushed voice lest Sherlock hear. Feeling a strange fluttering of excitement in my heart, I quickly followed the woman up the stairs and into the flat.
“If I’d known you were coming I would have cleaned up,” said Sherlock when I entered. The flat was cluttered, but not oppressively so, with random books left open on chairs and the coffee table, papers strewn on every available surface, and forgotten mugs of cold tea sitting here and there. A violin was left abandoned on the couch as if it had been hastily put down when she went to answer the door. In the corner, a spiral staircase led up to a second floor. It was all rather cozy.
“I don’t mind. Do you play?” I asked, gesturing towards the violin.
“Why else would I have it?” She was hastily piling papers to clear space on the chairs and couches.
“Fair enough. Are you any good?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you been playing?”
She stopped, and thought for a second. “About fifteen years.”
I laughed. “You must be very good, then.”
Steph came into the room, smiling. “Well, I do hope you won’t mind, but I have an appointment at three and I need to get going, but I hope you two work it out okay.”
Sherlock made a face that might have been a glare towards Steph, who very expertly ignored it.
“Well, Johanna, this is Sherlock, Sherlock, this is Johanna. I hope I see you both soon!” And almost as if she were avoiding a bomb going off, Stephanie left.
“Have a seat,” said Sherlock, gesturing towards a chair by the mantle. I took it, and she sat by the violin, sitting straight and slightly awkwardly, silent for several second. I opened my mouth to break the ice, but before I could she blurted:
“Coffee or tea?”
“Tea,” I said, surprised.
She did not move to the kitchen, instead nodded, and wrote something down on a small scrap of paper. “Fifth person I’ve asked. They all say tea. Except for that American. But anyway,” she set the paper down, “I suppose we must address the details. I am Sherlock Holmes, I am very untidy, I have a tendency to stay up far later than I should, I keep very strict routine that I will adapt for a roommate, I do not eat most foods, and people come over quite often to speak to me. I play violin, and often I just mess about with it rather than play any particular music because it helps me think. People have told me I can be rude, moody, and oppressive, but I do try my best to not be. I also smoke.”
I blinked in surprise at the second time this woman had thrown a paragraph of information in my face without hardly stopping to breath. After another few seconds of bewildered silence, she said:
“I thought we’d get all the bad things out of the way before you made a decision. It’s best if we get the unpleasant bits out of the way beforehand so we aren’t surprised if we do decide to live together.”
“That’s.. rather smart, actually. If I had had that conversation with my college roommate we might still be friends.” I chuckled politely, and she looked at me expectantly. “Yes, well. I have nightmares, sometimes, and may wake up rather loudly I suppose. And I procrastinate the dishes sometimes, but I’ll do my best. I’ve just taken a job at a UTC and sometimes they call me in late at night. But other than that I think I’m a pretty tame person.”
“Not a problem for me,” she said.
“And your’s were not an issue for me.”
“Jolly good,” she said, and got up. “The room isn’t clean yet, but it will be in a week. Do you want to see it?”
“Sure,” I said, following her thought the small kitchen and past it into a short hall with a door at the end. In it was a bedroom with a bookshelf that looked like until very recently it had been being used as a large storage closet. It was cosy, and quaint, and I could see that once it had been cleaned and furniture had been added, it would be quite nice indeed.
“How long have you been living alone here?” I asked.
“A year or so.” She shrugged. “I lose track. What’s the date?”
“December 14th.”
“Oh. A year exactly, then.”
The rest of our time was spent discussing rent and the landlady and things too boring for any narrative. But in the end it was decided that I would move in a week from then. As I caught the bus back to my dismal temporary apartment, I felt a strange excitement that I hadn’t felt in months.
***
If I had been any other person, I think that my first couple of weeks staying at 221B with Sherlock would have been my last. She was extraordinary at the violin, but would play odd melodies of her own creation at unseemly times of the night. Several times I came home from work to see the living room to find Sherlock deep in conversation with someone or other, or poring over a manner of odd objects that seemed unrelated, or smoking either normal cigarettes, or a curious old wooden pipe that when I asked her about she said she had found at a charity shop and thought it was funny. It gave her a strange, pensive quality, a timeless and almost statuesque appearance that (once a window was propped open and the smoke was let out) was quite enchanting to look at.
It wasn’t until the morning of Christmas Eve, when I used a day off to go and visit my family for the holidays when I was eating breakfast across from Holmes at the kitchen dining table. As was custom, she had at least three magazines and newspapers laid out in front of her and was reading from one of them. She got up from the table to clear her plate, and I glanced at what she was reading.
“…as opposed to the more fluffy ashes of the Lites. A Camel leaves a grittier ash that is flecked with white from the paper. The butts of these cigarettes…”
I chuckled at the absurdity of the article as Sherlock sat back down at the table. “What are you laughing at?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, just that article about the different kinds of cigarette ash. It seems silly, doesn’t it?”
“Why?” All of her questions, I was beginning to notice, were asked with the utmost sincerity.
“Well, that someone would spend all that time on something that doesn’t matter like that, and then write a whole article about it.”
Sherlock smiled. “It’s not silly at all. Why, what if you were on a case and you found cigarette ash on the site and the difference between solving a murder and not is figuring if belonged to the suspect who liked Marlboros or the one who liked Camels?”
“What idiot would smoke at their crime scene?”
Sherlock shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.” She sipped her coffee. “As it happens, I wrote that article.”
“You did?” I asked in apprehension, pulling the magazine towards me.
“I did,” she said, “it was quite an interesting study.”
“What do you… do for a living?” I furrowed my brow as I realized that I had never asked. I had assumed some kind of academic from her late hours, strange mannerisms, and endless reading, but the subject had never come up.
“That’s… a bit of a complicated answer. On tax forms I am self-employed, but I like to call myself a consulting detective.”
“A detective?” I asked. “So you do find murderers in cigarette ash?”
“Well, not exactly. Mostly what my job entails is helping private detectives and the police when they get stuck. I’m very good at noticing things they do not.” She took another sip of coffee and topped off my own mug. “Sometimes they just need a fresh pair of eyes.”
I remembered our introduction and laughed. “Holmes, if your detective skills are anything like what you did when we met, I think you might do a bit more than help them along.”
“You think so?” She said, and I noticed she flushed slightly at the compliment. Even in the early morning winter light coming from the window, I noticed once more how beautiful she was.
“Yes! You practically got my life story just from a glance! If you can do that, I can’t imagine what you’re like at a crime scene.”
She tut tutted. “Watson, that was easy. All the signs were there, if one only paid attention to them.”
“Well then,” I said, “what can you deduce about that man walking down the street right there?”
She glanced out the window at the fellow who was walking his dog outside our house who had stopped to let his dog do its business. “Single. Works at a bank, most likely. Recovering from a hangover. Oh, and he doesn’t have a clothes dryer.”
“Walk me through the though process.”
“Well, it’s simple. He has that awful posture you only get from a desk job, and he’s wearing a windbreaker with a bad logo on the lapel. Probably a free handout from his job. He’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s as cloudy as can be, and he walks with that uncoordinated gait that hungover people have. He doesn’t have a dryer because his sweatpants are still damp despite being clean. He’s single because it is Christmas Eve, and if he is not preparing to see his family, then he is also not preparing to see a partner’s family. It’s simple enough, if you know the cues.”
I was dumbfounded once more at her remarkable abilities, and also how simple they seemed once she explained her reasoning. It is an ability that I have now seen her perform time and time again, and it never ceases to amaze me. She was truly incredible, and for almost all of my vacation with my family I could not get my mind off of the strange woman with whom I now shared a flat.
The day after Christmas I arrived back at 221B Baker Street quite exhausted from the usual holiday awkwardness, only to open the door to a flurry of activity I had never before seen in the apartment.
“Oh, good, Watson, you’re here.” Sherlock stopped her pacing and paper-fluttering to hurry me to a seat in front of a cork board that had several photographs of a quite dead man pinned up to it, as well as a bullet casing. “Now, tell me how this sounds to you. A rich man hosts a Christmas dinner party, and after it is done he goes to his study. All the guests have supposedly left the house, but that doesn’t mean anything. Five minutes after the last guest leaves, a gunshot goes off and he is found dead in his study. It is his own gun, but not a suicide, to be sure. Written in permanent marker onto the windowsill are the letters R-A-C-H-E. His wife is named Rachel, but she is adamant that it was not her.”
“Well… I said, quite bewildered. “It sounds to me as if Rachel murdered her husband. Or had him killed at the least.”
“Yes, that is what the police think,” said Holmes, tapping her pipe pensively on her teeth. “But I don’t believe it. It makes no sense to sign off your bullets.” She shooks her head. “The police are idiots.”
The phone rang, and Sherlock ran to answer it. “221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes speaking. Really? Oh yes, we can be there in an hour. Thank you. Yes. Me and my roommate. She’s helping. No, she’s a doctor! Dr. Watson. Yes. Thank you.” And she hung up the phone.
“Now Watson,” she said, a twinkle in her eyes, “how would you like to see a crime scene?”
The home of the late Mister Drebbler was marked up with yellow tape and police cars, and yet the first thing I noticed was its size. It was one of those old, rich London houses that you just know the owner spends almost no time in during the summer. The victim was rich, and he was old money, and with that knowledge I thought it quite impossible to narrow down the suspects to just one person. I mean, nearly everyone in England had a motive.
Upon stepping out of the cab, Sherlock inhaled deeply as if she were stepping out of a plane into a bright spring’s day. A smile creeped at the corners of her mouth, and despite the dismal scene before us I couldn’t help but be amused by the sudden vigor that filled her.
“‘Scuse me! ‘Scuse me, miss! You can’t be here!” A policeman ran up to her from one of the cars parked in front. “This is a crime scene, you can’t be here without the proper clearance.”
“I am Sherlock Holmes, the detective that Detective Lestrade sent to investigate the scene,” said my friend, bristling at the man’s closeness. “And this is my friend, Doctor Johanna Watson, who will be assisting. Is that clearance enough?”
The man looked suddenly embarrassed. “Oh, yes. They told us a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would be coming. Yes. Well. That’s all right then. Uhm. Yes, come this way.”
He led us past the tape into the house, and into a room on the first floor which was well furnished with shelves of expensive looking abstract sculptures, modern looking business books, and little toys that looked quite intellectual. On the floor, white tape in the shape of a body was sprawled on the floor.
“We have a copy of the word on the windowsill if you would like to examine--”
“Oh I have no use for that,” said Sherlock, “I figured that bit out on the ride here. It is German. Rache. Revenge.”
“Oh.” Once more the policeman looked embarrassed.
“Which by itself tells us nothing,” continued the detective. “Drebbler was a landlord, wasn’t he? Yes, that really doesn’t narrow it down. Not a bit.” Sherlock chewed on her lip. “Right then. Let’s get to work.”
And she pulled a magnifying glass from her pocket and began to skirt around the edges of the room with it, in some places laying on her stomach while inspecting a part of the carpet that looked just like the rest of it. She looked quite ridiculous, sort of like a giant daddy longlegs in a trench coat. I chuckled for a moment before glancing at the officer who had a look of utter bewilderment plastered on his face.
After a few minutes of this, Sherlock stood up and brushed her clothes with an aura of finality. “The killer was most likely a woman who wore boots with a slight heel. There was another person in the room who left through the window, but I will have to see if there is anything in the flower bed outside to confirm anything about them. The killer was likely no more than five foot three give or take a few centimeters, and either she or her accomplice had long red hair. The killer and the accomplice left through the window. Now, I’m going to check for prints outside.”
And she breezed through the door, leaving me with a silly grin on my face and the officer with his mouth open in shock. He looked at me questioningly and I just shrugged.
“Isn’t she remarkable?”
When he didn’t answer, I just followed Sherlock down the hall.
I found her as she stepped carefully over a decorative hedge by the driveway and began walking towards the office window. I hopped over and ran to catch up with her.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“There were still a couple of intact footprint indentations in the carpet, especially by the desk. Somebody stood there for quite a long time. They had a very pronounced heel, so most likely women’s shoes. And there was a red hair caught in the locking mechanism on the window, and a smudge that could have only come from a shoe on the windowsill. But it wasn’t the kind that can be made by women’s boots, so it must have been an accomplice. That, and the fact that it was dirty enough to leave a mark, while the killer’s boots were more of the dress variety. Careful here, we don’t want to destroy any prints.” She kneeled in the muddy grass at the edge of the flowerbed, looking closely at the dirt.
“Thank goodness it didn’t rain last night. It might have washed these away. See?” She pointed at a barely perceptible outline of a shoe in the grass. “Remarkable.”
I watched as she carefully stepped around the bushes in the flowerbed, crouching once more.
“Hiking boots! To be sure! Look, Watson. The heaviness of the prints, the squareness of the toe, the thin ridges of the tread that is left so nicely in this good soil. They must have left in a hurry if they did not try and destroy these prints behind them.” She chuckled warmly. “And look here! A handprint! Not good enough to get a fingerprint from it, but you can see where they must have fallen out of the window and gotten back up! Oh! The culprit was wearing gloves! The kind that you get in bargain bins for nearly nothing. See the shape of the fingers?” She was smiling like a schoolgirl, her cheeks flushed from excitement. “Watson, we have quite the case on our hands here.”
She stood up and wiped her hands on a handkerchief that she pulled from her pocket.
I smiled amusedly at my friend as we made our way back to the driveway. “Sherlock, a man has been murdered.”
“Indeed he has!” She clapped her hands and rubbed them together.
“Have you ladies found what you need to?” The police officer asked as we stepped over the hedge into the driveway once more.
“I will have them both in no time at all,” said Sherlock, now popping each of her knuckles absentmindedly. “Do you think we could see the body of the deceased?”
“Well, I don’t know, you’d have to ask Lestrade.”
“Where is he?” It shocked me how many times she could pop each knuckle.
“Scotland Yard, I think. He left and hour or two before you got here?”
“Which is it? An hour, or two?”
“I… Don’t know?”
“Well that’s no use then. Come, Watson. To Scotland Yard we go!”
And she brisked past the officer and into the waiting cab.
Going to a morgue is a very chilling experience. Oh god. Oh no. That was a pun. Never mind, I’m restarting.
A morgue is a strange place. Before you can even take in the clinical and harsh lighting, you can smell the sharp, unnatural chemical odor that is only smelt when in the presence of death. Some try to mask it, at least outside of the rooms where the bodies are kept, but the one where the body of Mr. Drebbler was being stored was just as dismal and quieting as ever.
There is an instinct, for most, to whisper in a morgue. No music plays, no employees chatter. Voices, if you hear them at all, are hushed and urgent. The hum of the refrigerators fills your ears until you can only think of who is behind those claustrophobic and darkened cell doors. A morgue is a place you cannot wait to forget.
Sherlock was the only one who appeared unaffected by the gloomy atmosphere, except to briefly remark at the brightness of the fluorescent lights.
“Sherlock, this is a place for dead people, and you’re complaining about the lights?” I hissed as we were led down a hall by a depressed looking man.
“Well, they don’t care what the lights are like. They’re dead. No need for it to be so gloomy and harsh.”
“It’s a morgue.”
“Yes, it is.”
The sincerity of her tone was hard to argue with. And I had to admit she had a point.
“Here he is,” said the man, opening one of the coffin-like refrigerators and sliding out the moving table with the corpse of Mr. Drebbler laid on it.
“Excellent,” said Sherlock, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves.
“If you damage the corpse in any way you face many criminal charges which I do not have the energy to list. I do not understand why either of you are qualified to handle human remains, but considering this is not the first time miss Holmes has come in I no longer question it.”
“I’m a doctor,” I said.
“Mhm,” said the woman, and she left the room.
Holmes instantly began to probe the body with alert curiosity. I watched sort of dissonantly as she examined the bullet wound with a magnifying glass, clucked her tongue, and probed through his hair like an ape.
It was all rather surreal.
I took a moment to take in the fact that I was actually here, actually watching my weird roommate inspect the body of a murdered man on the day after Christmas. There’s not really a moment in your life where you ever think something like that is going to happen.
“Watson, come look at this,” she said suddenly, calling me over to a spot on the victims leg. I peered carefully over Sherlock’s arm at the large, slightly brown bruise that was on the corpse’s leg.
“How long before he died do you think he got it?” She asked.
“Oh, uhm,” I took a closer look, trying to remember if this had ever been covered in medical school. “Well, it’s not very faded. It wouldn’t have faded very much at all after death, so I would say… maybe a day? Two days at the most?”
“Excellent, Watson.” She clapped her gloved hands with satisfaction. “This is an important revelation.”
With the fluidity of someone who had someplace to be, she pushed the shelf back into the refrigerator, shut the door, used her pinky finger to strip off the latex gloves, and discarded them in the bin by the door. I followed her outside, once again feeling a surreal sense of excitement. Sherlock had a kind of earth-shifting confidence to her, a kind of charisma that was hard to get close to but harder not to follow. When she was on the case, there was nothing she could say to me that didn’t excite me.
Back outside, she hailed a taxi and almost pulled me in after her.
“A man like Mr. Drebbler doesn’t get up to very many activities that would put him at risk for a bruise like that,” said Sherlock with the cadence of somebody thinking out loud. “There would have had to have been quite an accident in the days before his death, the day before if I am right about my assumptions (which it’s possible I’m not). Watson, this is quite a case!”
The glee in her voice was infectious. “Indeed,” I replied, “although I must admit my frame of reference isn’t as wide as your’s.”
“Well, it’s not everyday they send a bona-fide murder my way,” said Sherlock. “I apologize for making you come, I needed your expertise.”
“Don’t apologize, please. This is the most fun I’ve had in years.”
“Really?” Sherlock looked both surprised and delighted. “Well, that’s good. I like having you along.” And then she seemed to hit a wall, and we sat in slightly awkward but companionable silence for the rest of the ride.
The taxi driver dropped us off at Scotland Yard, and soon I found myself following the detective’s coattails around the corners of the station until she opened the door to an office with a shiny plaque that read HEAD DETECTIVE LESTRADE.
“Lestrade! I need to interview the family of the late Mr. Drebbler about his recent murder.” Sherlock didn’t skip a beat.
Detective Lestrade looked up, surprised, a pile of files open in front of him and a mug of coffee halfway to his lips. He glanced at me, and Sherlock, noticing but misreading the cue, spoke again.
“This is my assistant Doctor Johanna Watson, she has been helping me with her expertise on this case as well as taking notes.”
“Hullo.” I waved meekly.
Detective Lestrade set his coffee down. “Miss Holmes.”
“Detective Holmes,” Sherlock corrected.
“Fine. Detective Holmes. Do you have an appointment with me?”
“No,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Anyway, the trail is quite hot, and I think if I could just talk to one of them, specifically his wife or his daughter, I could—,”
“Detective Holmes,” Lestrade interrupted, “we’ve been over this. If you want to talk to me, you need to schedule an appointment.”
“The last time I tried that you didn’t have any space and I had to break into the scene myself before they cleaned it up.”
Detective Lestrade pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am going to ignore the fact that you just said that to me. Listen, Holmes, you can talk to people yourself. You don’t need to have a permit to ask someone for an interview.”
“I don’t know where they are,” replied Sherlock simply, “I need you to give me a phone number or something.”
Lestrade rolled his eyes but scribbled a number down on a pice of paper and handed it to her. “If anyone asks, I didn’t give you this.”
“Got it,” said Sherlock turning to go. Then, as if remembering herself, she turned around. “Thank you.”
“Get out of my office,” replied Lestrade, and we did.