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Her favorite film is My Man Godfrey.
Sherlock discovers this five weeks, two days, and thirty-seven minutes into their nascent relationship, when she makes him suffer through it for the third time in a row.
“I’ll have you know that this here is a classic,” says Irene when he complains, and her accent (south-central New Jersey, affected by just a hint of New York City) is stronger than usual, as it is when she’s pretending to be annoyed with him. “The Library of Congress named it ‘culturally significant.’”
“Americans.” Sherlock scoffs. “They go sentimental about any sort of rubbish. No discriminating taste whatsoever.”
“Mr. Holmes, you say the sweetest things.”
“I’ll say even sweeter ones if it means we can switch the telly off.”
“It was my favorite when I was a kid. Mom used to put it on whenever I was sick, sit me on the couch with a grilled cheese--but that’s not important,” says Irene, dismissing his unspoken questions with a wave of her hand. “What’s important is, can you butle?”
“Can I what?”
“Butle. I’m fresh out of butlers. The one I had left this morning. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in the position?”
Before he can inquire as to what she’s going on about, she reaches for one of his hands and presses something metallic into it: a key to her flat.
He looks down at it for a moment and back at her. “I did,” he says, “come from a family with at least nice table manners.”
(Stay, she means; I will, he replies.)
He meets Irene in the flesh in a loo found within one of London’s ubiquitous nightclubs. She’s touching up her lipstick, a few shades off crimson, a cheap brand found at any cosmetic counter. She doesn’t look away from the mirror, but her movements are erratic: she knows he’s there.
“Miss Adler, I presume?” he says from the doorway. “I’ve been sent by ah, your ex-boyfriend to give you a message.”
“God,” she growls, low and deep in her throat. He takes a step closer without meaning to. “Leo always was a jackass, but this is a new low. What does he want?”
Sherlock explains the situation, baldly but competently enough. It’s something of a filthy job, one he wouldn’t have taken under normal circumstances, but Scotland Yard hadn’t managed to provide with him with anything stimulating enough in weeks, and his client’s description of his clever, untrackable ex-lover had snared his interest. He ought to have known that it was only an aggrieved paramour’s natural tendency towards exaggeration.
She listens in silence, still facing away from him, and then replies, quite calmly, “You can tell him to screw himself.”
“With pleasure,” says Sherlock, who’s been around the unfortunate Leo Fitzroy long enough to realize he has far more money than sense. “But there is the question of a certain video—“
“Oh, that? He hasn’t gotten anything to worry about from me. He’ll be a damn sight happier with his new girl than he could ever be with me.”
“But—“
“But,” and she turns to face him, head held high and expression absolutely serene, “I’m the kind of girl who’s smart enough not to let leverage go when she has it. You can tell him that, too.”
There’s no use trying to reason with her. Irene Adler has made up her mind, and it’ll take more than a persuasive speech to wring Fitzroy’s incriminating video out of her clutches. Better to go home and plan out an alternate plan of attack while he can.
Still, he lingers long enough on the threshold enough to tell her: “Your singing. Tonight. It was—“ Quite adept, he considers, perfectly pitched. Maybe even the best I've ever heard“—beautiful.”
Almost as soon as the words are out of his mouth, he slinks into a retreat.
“Good night, Mr. Holmes,” she calls after him, and it’s only later that he remembers he never told her his name.
“Stand still, Godfrey.” Irene laughs as she smoothens the wrinkles in his jacket. She is sending him, despite his distinct lack of enthusiasm, to have dinner with his father for the first time in a year. (He is, perhaps, not as reluctant as he seems. He's been mulling over the subject of proposing recently, even if they’ve only been together seven months, eleven days, and sixteen hours, and the futile wait for his father to show up will simply give him time to make up his mind in the affirmative.) “It’ll all be over in a minute.”
At breakfast, Irene hums opera as she butters her toast: Madame Butterfly this morning. These are the things that comprise home these days—dreadful films and opera and Irene.
“You were out pretty late last night,” she comments between bites.
“Just a case,” Sherlock says before she can ask anything. Irene knows about the drugs, and hates them. She tells him she’s seen too much of them and what they do, in the women’s shelter where she works between singing gigs. Don’t you dare, she tells him firmly, or I’ll make your life a living hell until you stop.
(He keeps his promise, but he’ll use again after M’s trail goes cold, more and more and more, and Irene, Irene, Irene, won’t you come back to make me stop?
But of course she won’t, and that first terrible morning after will be the first time he can imagine hating her.)
“The M case, if you must know,” he supplies, all the more awkward because Irene didn’t ask. “Ten years in and we’re closing in on him at last.”
“Hmm,” says Irene. “You know—one of the girls I was working with, she said…She knew a man, one of her clients. Something about his phone….”
“What?” says Sherlock, heart racing. The M case is the one black spot on his record. If he makes headway on that, he’ll have cemented his legend for good.
Irene shrugs. “It’s probably nothing. I’ll look into it myself first. Besides, I doubt Sally’ll be too pleased about being dragged all the way up to Scotland Yard if I don’t have a good reason for it.”
Sherlock wants, very much to inquire further; but if there is one thing he trusts, it is Irene’s intelligence. If ever he trusted anyone other than himself to tease out a lead, it’s her, only her. After all, she is the only one who’s ever beaten him in a game of wits.
“See that you do,” he says, leaving his tone as pompous as possible because it makes Irene smile. “The day you crack that case before me, I’ll watch that film of yours, all the way through, and won’t complain about it once.”
Irene throws her head back
(To Watson, to everyone else, Irene matters because she died. To Sherlock, Irene matters because she lived.)
and laughs. “Is that a challenge, Mr. Holmes?”
“It is, Miss Adler.”
“All right, then.” Irene’s lovely dark eyes sparkle. “You’re on.”
He ignores the niggling at his back as long as he can, and then he pulls out his mobile and dials the number Fitzroy gave him upon additional questioning that morning.
As soon as she picks up: “You’re following me,” he accuses.
“You followed me,” she points out, and she’s not irritated or frightened or angry at all, is she? It’s amusement he hears in her voice.
“That was different.”
“Was it?”
“That was an unavoidable consequence of my employment, Miss Adler, for which I don’t feel obligated to apologize to you. On which note, have you reconsidered returning the video about which we spoke last night to Mr. Fitzroy?”
“Employment or not, that doesn’t seem to stop you from looking guilty, Mr. Holmes.”
Sherlock stills. There are three women alongside this street on their mobiles and with a reasonable view of his face: a nun loudly discussing a homeless man reeling beside her, a young student who’s combed her long dark bangs into her face, and a delivery girl struggling to balance five boxes with one hand.
”I begin to suspect,” he tells her to stall for time, “that you’re not all you pretend to be.”
There’s a choke of laughter on the line, and her voice. “I haven’t pretended to be anything yet. You haven’t given me the chance.”
The line goes dead; he half-expected that. He approaches the nun, clearly the most likely suspect, but she has a disproportionately violent reaction to Sherlock’s examining her habit for accuracy. The encounter with the harried young student is similarly disastrous, and the delivery girl makes some rather wild accusations before she lets him go—but the homeless man meets Sherlock’s eyes a second before disappearing into a tube station and winks, tapping at the Bluetooth device in his—her ear.
Damn the woman. She’s more trouble than she’s worth.
“I’m not certain you understand.” Sherlock bites back his frustration and tries, one last time, speaking slowly and with appropriate enunciation. “My work for Scotland Yard involves hunting down criminals. The most dangerous and depraved minds in all England.”
“Well, Irene ought to qualify!” bursts the young man. “Well—maybe not the depraved part, but she can be a bloody witch when she wants to be.”
If Fitzroy’s always this way, Sherlock can’t quite blame her. He’s already halfway to feeling more sympathetic towards her than he should: rising young talent in the Royal Opera, before she fell in love with the wrong man and found herself sacked. And her boyfriend, far from supporting her, is sitting in the office on Baker Street, demanding she be hunted down.
“Fascinating information, that, but I really think you’d be better served going to—“
But luck is smiling on Fitzroy that day, because he stumbles into the one argument that can get him what he wants. “She’s cleverer than anyone else I know—hell, probably even cleverer than you. I bet she is. I bet even you couldn’t track her down.”
“I see.” He does, or thinks he does—and even if he doesn’t, his pride won’t let that challenge stand. In the absence of any other way to prove it to himself, he must demonstrate that he can outwit the elusive Miss Irene Adler. “ Very well, then. I accept, Mr. Fitzroy.”
Imagine this scene, if you will. He is at a cafe, half-listening to Watson drone on about his sponsors and his meetings; he is catching Watson up on what Gregson has told him on their way to a crime scene; he is on a bench in Central Park, watching Watson stretch in her ridiculous jogging ensemble. The exact circumstance doesn’t matter. What does is this:
A girl (so like Irene) passes by; pretty, with long curling hair. She stops to look at his hangdog expression, laughs a little to herself, and he imagines her quoting to him, intending to be kind: “Opportunity is just around the corner.”
Sherlock just wishes he knew which one.