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holmestice2015-12-05 03:00 pm
holmesticemods) wrote in holmestice2015-12-05 03:00 pm
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Fic for biswholocked: Buds and Bells and Stars without a Name, Part 1/2
Title: Buds and Bells and Stars without a Name
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
biswholocked
Author:starfishstar
Characters: Greg Lestrade, Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, Sally Donovan, Jim Moriarty (sort of), Redbeard (sort of), Mrs Hudson
Pairing: (eventually) Sherlock/Lestrade
Rating: T (for dangerous mythical beasts, not sexual content)
Words: ca. 11,800
Warnings: playing fast and loose with classical mythology, some swearing, very very brief animal endangerment (resolved with no harm to said animal), Sherlock being himself
Summary: Where Greg could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat.
…In which Greg Lestrade has lunch in a city garden, and gets way more than he bargained for.
Notes: Dearbiswholocked, goodness, this has been fun! You asked for fantasy or magical realism or Sherlock as some kind of supernatural/fae/magical being, emotional exploration between characters, some danger, possibly casefic, and Sherlock/Lestrade… I threw all that together and it went in strange directions. I hope you enjoy this!
Thank you to the wonderfulthesmallhobbit for such a fast, helpful beta at short notice! Phrases you recognise, dear reader, are either drawn from Arthur Conan Doyle himself (namely Holmes’ descriptions of Moriarty in “The Final Problem”) or BBC canon (thank you to arianedevere for your amazing dialogue file).
Story takes place pre-canon in a slightly alternate universe.
Read on Archive of Our Own:
Buds and Bells and Stars without a Name
Read on LJ:
CHAPTER ONE
The day Greg Lestrade thought he saw a tree move – thought he saw, specifically, an unusually slim oak that stood out amidst the plane trees of Christchurch Gardens shift a graceful foot or so to the left – he performed a quick mental run through the relative probability that a) he was going mad or b) he’d had at least two cups more coffee than were really advisable when it was only barely past noon.
The coffee, yes, that explained it. Just another sign that he really ought to cut back.
Greg glanced down and took another bite of his bacon sandwich. He’d allotted himself ten minutes to catch an all too rare whiff of fresh air and sunshine before he needed to be back at his desk to take yet another disheartening pass through the evidence – or lack thereof – in the Regent’s Park Robber case.
Damn that case. Generating so much paperwork and yet so few leads. Or no leads at all, to be precise.
When Greg looked up again, where he could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, with spring sunlight speckling its lithe branches, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat, lounging on the nearest bench as if he’d been there all day.
Greg stared.
“Hello,” the man said. He had an odd way of blinking not at all, then blinking several times in quick succession. The force of that pale-eyed gaze fixed on Greg made him feel as if he were being observed by some alien entity, something not exactly human.
Greg’s mental tally added one tick mark to the “really maybe actually going mad after all” column.
“Hello,” Greg said, because though he might be going mad, still that wasn’t any excuse to be rude.
“It’s a…nice day,” the man said, as if he were dredging the phrase up from a small-talk instructional manual he’d once read. “The…weather. Is nice, isn’t it?” He vaguely waved one elegant hand, as if to encompass all the weather currently existing around them.
“Yeah,” Greg said, because damn it, he was too British not to answer when a question was put to him directly. “Finally a bit of sun. Does a person good.”
“Indeed.” Again, the man blinked in that odd way. “Anyway,” he said, with an air of being able to dispense at last with the necessary but tedious chitchat and arrive at the real point of the conversation. “You’re going about it all wrong with that serial robbery case. You’re looking for a man, yes? And you’ve built up a profile of what you think he must be like: tall enough to attack a person from above and behind, athletic and able to cover open ground quickly, opportunist who strikes when a victim is alone, possible psychological components of thrill-seeking behaviour, etcetera, etcetera. Dull!”
Greg felt his jaw drop further and further as the stranger delivered this extraordinary speech in rapid-fire delivery.
“Hang on!” Greg protested, his sandwich slipping unheeded back into the wax paper wrappings that lay open on his lap, bacon grease spattering his trousers. “How can you possibly know any of that? We haven’t released details to the press, and there’ve been no eyewitnesses. So how could you know any of that?”
The man heaved a long-suffering sigh and muttered something under his breath that sounded very much like, “Oh, tedious.”
Greg tensed, mentally assessing whether or not he could take this man down if he moved fast and used the element of surprise to his advantage. Was this their serial robber himself, upping the adrenalin thrill by confessing to the police and seeing if he could get away with it?
“You should be looking,” the man said, with the pseudo-patient air of a person speaking to a small child, “for an attack from the air. These are crimes of opportunity, not motive. The victims are those careless enough to be walking through the park holding mobile phones or other valuables in such a way that they are visible from above. If you send out an undercover police officer carrying a mobile or some other shiny object above his or her head, I guarantee you will catch your ‘criminal’.”
“That’s…absurd,” Greg said weakly.
The man flowed to his feet in a flouncing of dramatic, dark coat. “Absurd, certainly. It’s up to you whether you decide to take my advice even so. Good day, Detective Inspector.”
And he was gone, in the time it took Greg to blink.
Greg looked down at his half-eaten sandwich, at the tiny splatters of grease dotting the previously pristine grey of his trousers, and said, “Oh, bugger.”
~ ~ ~
Friday at last, and no cases so urgent that they threatened to swallow another weekend whole. Greg just needed to make it through a last hour’s worth of paperwork, then he could call it a night and go home.
First, though, he would step outside for a well-deserved smoke. Just one.
He went out the side entrance, where there was slightly less chance that one of his subordinates would see him and disapprove. Christ, bad enough to have to set a good example for the public; more and more Greg felt the pressure to be a role model for his team as well. Just another fringe benefit of being a DI.
Greg stepped out to the pavement and leaned against the ugly grey barrier that separated the building from the street. He propped a cigarette between his lips, fumbled in his pocket for a lighter, then lit up and took a first grateful drag, relishing the sting as the smoke hit his lungs. Terrible habit and he would quit sooner or later, but for the moment, how satisfying.
He clicked the lighter closed and dropped it back into his jacket pocket. Then snapped his head up, because he wasn’t a cop for nothing – Greg could feel it when someone stepped in near him, just out of his line of sight. He glanced sharply to his right.
It was the same bloke from the gardens the other day. Same long, dark coat, same strange, pale eyes. And Christ, he was tall.
“Inspector,” the man rumbled. Greg was struck now by how deep his voice was, a low baritone, rich and somehow…ancient.
Ancient? Where had that fanciful word choice come from? Greg shook his head and chalked it up to the mental effects of overwork. It was Friday, just one more hour to go. He would have his fag, he would make polite and wary conversation with this man and simultaneously use the time to decide whether or not he needed to bring the man in for official questioning, then he would do his paperwork and go home.
The man slid a cigarette from the depths of one of the pockets in that dramatic coat. Automatically, Greg fished his lighter out again and offered it. The man smirked for a fraction of a second, then leaned his head obligingly closer and allowed Greg to light his cigarette for him. Smug bastard.
The man inhaled, and exhaled a plume of smoke in a dramatic arc towards the greyish sky. He commented, “I’m told I ought not to smoke these. They’re bad for my –” He blinked several times, rapidly, as if he couldn’t find the word he was looking for. Then he offered, as if he still weren’t quite certain he’d got the right term, “Lungs?”
Greg laughed despite himself. He was meant to be finding this bloke suspicious, not charming. “Yes, your lungs,” he said. “They’re terrible for your lungs and I’m going to switch to patches just as soon as I get a second free to think, which hasn’t happened yet this year. So, come on, how did you know our robbery suspect would turn out to be a bloody literal bird?”
“Was it a bird?” The man exhaled again, leaning back against the barrier as if he hadn’t a care in the world – as if he weren’t the one who’d tracked Greg down specifically to tip him off about this.
“Oh, come off it, of course it was. Like you said it would be. Bloody great thing flapping down out of the sky and knocking people about with its wings, stealing whatever shiny bits and bobs had caught its eye. We didn’t catch the thing, but we caught a glimpse of it. Of course it was a bird – what else would it be?”
“If you say so.”
All right, so the man intended to be difficult about it. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which was…?”
“How’d you know? There were no witnesses to any of the attacks, so I know you weren’t there to see it.”
“What would you say if I told you that yes, in fact, I was there?”
“Couldn’t’ve been. There were no eyewitnesses. DS Melas made sure of that before she set up the sting – just the way you suggested, I might add.”
“I was there, Detective Inspector. I have ways of not being noticed.”
Greg inhaled wrong at just that moment, and his guffaw of disbelief turned into a hacking cough. The pale-eyed man watched him with faint alarm.
When Greg could breathe again, he snorted, “You are too bloody good to be believed. ‘I have ways of not being noticed’? What are you, straight out of a pulp fiction crime thriller?”
The man narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to assess whether Greg was making fun of him – which, frankly, shouldn’t have been all that difficult to figure out.
“No, I’ve got it,” Greg went on, giving the man a sly, sidelong glance. “You’re some kind of magical being, right? You can turn yourself invisible? Or is it that you’re a superhero and your special ability is being able to fly?”
“None of the above,” the man said, quite huffy now. “I assure you I am corporeal, visible and entirely land-bound.”
Greg’s laughter ended on a last, surprised cough, because the man was serious. Greg was good at reading people, and the man in front of him wasn’t joking. In fact, Greg doubted he even knew how to tell a joke.
“Right, mate, sorry,” he said. “You’re corporeal, visible and land-bound, yeah, got it.”
“Yes,” the man said coolly. “And in any case, you’ve interviewed the wrong suspect, in that fraud case that’s worrying at the back of your mind even now, here on your alleged break. He’s not your man. But he has information on the real culprit, and he’ll crack if you put a little more pressure on him. Start by digging into his alibi.”
All nonchalance, the man dropped his barely-smoked cigarette to the pavement and crushed it neatly under the sole of one sleek black dress shoe.
“I’ll be going,” he said, and then indeed he was gone, disappearing so fast that Greg hardly had time to register which direction he’d taken.
Greg’s own half-finished cigarette dangled forgotten from his fingers. The suspect they’d interviewed today…the suspect who would now have to be re-interrogated, but first Greg was going to need to thoroughly re-research that seemingly airtight alibi. Because the mystery man in the long coat might or might not turn out to be right, but Greg couldn’t chance the possibility of missing out on a lead just because it had been handed to him by a nameless stranger in a posh coat who didn’t mind wasting most of a perfectly good cigarette for the sake of a dramatic exit.
Damn. There went his weekend.
~ ~ ~
Far too late on Saturday evening, exhausted but feeling he ought to celebrate a case finally finished and finished well – the mystery man’s lead had indeed proved invaluable – Greg pushed open the door of a grungy pub that hunkered behind a narrow shop front around the corner from his flat.
The place was grimy, with a bar permanently sticky with spilled beer, but it was close to home and an extremely unlikely place to run into any of his colleagues. Greg liked his colleagues fine, but just at the moment he felt he’d spent enough of his time with them for one weekend.
He ordered a pint and slumped down onto a barstool with a sigh, remembering as always not to let his hands actually touch the grubby, beer-drenched bar. He took a long pull on his drink and closed his eyes for a short, welcome moment. What a week.
When Greg opened his eyes, there was a man sitting on the next barstool.
Bespoke suit in a rich charcoal hue with subtle pinstripes, thinning but painfully correct hair, and the slim line of a black umbrella balanced neatly against his thigh. A very posh man, though not the same posh man as usual. For one incoherent moment, Greg thought, For god’s sake, am I attracting all of them now?
The man cast a brief but thorough glance over Greg, then summoned the barman with a precise flick of his fingers. He ordered the most expensive whisky in the place – no surprise there. Then he turned to Greg.
“What is your interest in Sherlock Holmes?”
“Sorry, who?” Greg demanded, the words coming out more belligerently than he’d intended. It had been a very trying week.
The stranger gave an extraordinarily put-upon sigh, far more than Greg felt his question warranted. The man gazed doubtfully at the whisky glass in his hand, raised it to his lips and took a small exploratory sip. Then he set the glass very precisely back on the bar, grimaced at it and murmured under his breath, “That’s what I get, I suppose.”
Greg politely stifled an incredulous cough and took a sip of his own cheap bitter.
Returning his steely gaze to Greg, the posh man said, “I take it he’s neglected to introduce himself, then. So like him.”
“Sorry, who are we talking about here?” Greg asked, though he thought he could hazard a guess.
The posh man raised his elegant eyebrows. “Surely you’re not that obtuse, Detective Inspector? Dark hair, long coat, an unfortunate tendency towards dramatics.”
“Can think of at least one bloke who fits that bill,” Greg muttered. The stranger’s eyebrows climbed higher.
“Yes, well,” the man said. “I hope we have at least established that you are acquainted with the man of whom I speak.”
It took Greg a moment to realise that had been a question. He slurped another slug of his beer, wondering if getting drunker would make this conversation more or less surreal. “Yeah, all right, I know – Sherlock. If you can call it ‘knowing’ a person when he turns up out of the blue, blurts out alarmingly accurate information about cases I’m working that incidentally there should be no possible way for him to know, then bloody disappears before I can find out where he’s getting his information from.”
“You needn’t worry about that, Detective Inspector Lestrade. He has his ways, but they are in no way criminal, so you may set your mind to rest on that point.”
“And I should believe that just because you said so?” Greg demanded incredulously. “You, the man who’s tracked me down to where I live, knows my name and rank, and seems to possess some mysterious yet unexplained connection to some other mysterious and unexplained bloke, who’s also stalking me and whose name I didn’t even know until just now?”
The man, who was gaining Greg’s grudging respect for unflappability if nothing else, ignored this entirely. “Returning to the salient point,” he said. “What is your interest in Sherlock Holmes?”
“I don’t have an interest in him!” Greg burst out. The barman’s head snapped up from where he was serving a trio of young women at the other end of the bar, and Greg grimaced in apology. More quietly, he repeated, “I don’t have an interest in him. How can I have an interest in someone I only know because he shows up outside my workplace at random intervals like some very bizarre overgrown cat?”
“Hm,” the man said, which wasn’t an answer. “It’s true, he isn’t very good yet at the social niceties. You must forgive him, he's only been alive several hundred years, he's not really got ‘the hang of it’ yet, as I believe people are wont to say.”
Greg stared at him. Staring seemed like a good response. “Sorry, did you just say –”
“Oh, has he not explained that either?” the man sighed. “Well, not my secret to reveal. All in good time, I suppose. Do forget I said anything, Detective Inspector.” He frowned down at the glass of stupidly expensive whisky in front of him, then lifted it and downed it in one go. The frown deepened as he set the glass neatly back on the bar. “Still, I would be grateful if you would keep an eye on him, should your paths cross again in the course of your duties. He’s not nearly as invincible as he likes to think, and I worry about him a great deal.”
“What –” Greg began, not even sure yet what he was going to ask. This man’s mere presence gave rise to so many questions.
Before he could get another word out, the man had risen in a swirl of tailored suit and posh umbrella, and was out the door of the pub and gone.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Greg muttered, as the barman cast him an extremely curious glance. “Didn’t get that one’s name either.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Oh, damn,” said Sergeant Sally Donovan, then looked chagrined when Greg glanced up at her from his desk. She was flipping through the pages of a printout she held in one hand and had halted just inside his doorway as something in the pages caught her attention. “Sorry, sir. It’s just, there’s been another pet disappearance in Hampstead Heath.”
“A missing pet? And this is our division why?”
Donovan bit her lip. She was newly promoted to sergeant and eager to prove herself, torn between wanting to please her superiors and wanting to follow her own generally solid instincts. “It’s not, exactly. But, see, if you’ll look here –”
She hurried over to his desk and set the pages neatly in front of him, pointing out specific sentences and flipping pages as she spoke.
“See, it’s been a regular pattern, every couple of weeks. A dog that got out from a back garden. A pair of housecats that wandered off from a residential street nearby and never returned. Another dog that was let off the lead to play, ran after a stick and never came back. Then yesterday, a dog disappeared as the owner was walking it, she turned her back for a moment and it was gone. And these were all in or around Hampstead Heath.”
Greg followed her pointing finger, and ruffled a distracted hand through his hair. “And why does this qualify as a crime?”
“You’re going to laugh, sir – don’t laugh – but the pattern, the timing of it, doesn’t seem like chance. It seems like – like something more sinister might be going on.” She pressed her lips together and averted her eyes, like she expected him to burst out laughing.
Greg didn’t laugh, but he did give Donovan’s concerned face thoughtful consideration. All logic said he should gently but firmly remind her that they were here to solve major crimes, that this was by no stretch of the imagination a major crime, and that there were half a dozen more important things she could be doing with her time right this very minute.
Why, then, was something in his gut firmly insisting that this sounded like a case his mysterious pale-eyed acquaintance might have something to say about?
“All right,” he sighed, giving in to gut feeling rather than sense. Because Greg, too, knew himself to have instincts that generally proved to be solid. “I’ll pop over there after work and have a look around.”
“You – you will?” Even though she’d been the one to suggest it, Donovan looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Yeah. Can’t promise to turn anything up, but I’ll have a look.”
It was absurd, of course, to think he was going to discover any evidence of this theorised dog-napper just by taking a brief evening jaunt through some small subsection of a park that stretched across 320 hectares. But then, how much of his life lately had made sense? It would do him good to stretch his legs, if nothing else. He spent too much time these days behind a desk.
Greg nodded at Donovan, kept the file she’d brought him, and shooed her back to work.
~ ~ ~
Greg parked his car and strolled into the park, feeling faintly ridiculous. Thanks to the long daylight hours of early summer, the sun was still bright behind the trees, and ambling couples were enjoying the evening light as Greg crossed a wide grassy area near the park’s southernmost edge. What exactly was he expecting to find here, aside from picnickers and, from the sound of it, a casual game of cricket taking place beyond the next stand of trees?
Shaking his head at himself but unable to set aside the dogged need to run down every hunch, no matter how mundane or bizarre, Greg started along an alley of lime trees. The evening light filtered gently through the green canopy overhead. Peaceful, certainly. Not the sort of place you would expect pets to go tragically missing.
Once again, Greg ran through the possibilities in his head, as he made his way along the gravel path.
Possibility number one: These were simple instances of lost pets, and Donovan was reading in a correlation where there wasn’t one. Happened all the time; the human brain sought pattern and meaning as a way of making a chaotic world make sense.
Or the other possibility, that there was a pattern, which meant – what? A nefarious dog-napper, lurking amongst the trees, stealing away people’s beloved pets to some unknown ends? Or could it be an animal, something big enough to eat a medium-sized dog? Right, Greg, the old ‘lion escaped from the zoo’. That sounds like a likely first hypothesis. He snorted aloud.
A leaf dropped from the trees above, straight down in front of Greg’s nose – not a gentle drift downwards, but a determined fall. Greg blinked and stopped walking. Curiosity getting the better of him, he bent and picked up the leaf, which was a lovely bright green. It was a perfectly formed specimen, round at the sides but tapering to a gentle point, with serrated edges and symmetrical veins highly visible as the slanting light shone through its semi-opaque shape.
There was also writing on it.
Some pale liquid had been used to scratch out words in an uneven hand on the leaf’s surface. The substance wasn’t anything Greg recognised, and appeared to still be wet. It read:
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Greg stared at the thing in his hand, then looked hard at the canopy of green above him. No one there of course, just tree branches swaying gently in the breeze.
Holding the leaf very carefully by its edges so the writing wouldn’t smudge, Greg searched the area, working outwards in concentric circles from the place where the leaf had fallen, but he found nothing, no human presence. No animal presence either, not even a mouse or squirrel scrabbling in the underbrush. In fact, now that he thought about it, this bit of the park seemed unnaturally still, as if it were holding its breath in the face of some malevolent presence.
Greg shook his head, annoyed at himself for indulging in another absurd flight of fancy. There was a rational explanation here, there had to be – he just hadn’t hit upon yet. The leaf had shaken loose from…a nearby art installation, perhaps. Yes, it had blown in from somewhere and got caught in the trees, only to be shaken loose again as Greg happened to be passing underneath. Or something.
The fact that the words on the leaf referenced a missing dog, precisely the thing he’d come here to investigate, was surely coincidence.
Still, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Greg to show the thing to his mysteriously appearing and disappearing acquaintance, the man who’d proved himself eerily knowledgeable about strange happenings in parks. The man had somehow held the key to solving the case of the Regent’s Park Robber, so perhaps he would have similar insight about this.
If, that is, Greg could track him down.
~ ~ ~
“All right,” Greg said, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear him, though he didn’t see anyone around. It was cooler today and overcast, and there weren’t many people about.
He was back in Christchurch Gardens and had spread his lunch out beside him on one of the benches, all the while feeling bizarrely as though he were setting out a decoy for a skittish wild creature.
“All right,” Greg said again. “I know you like lurking about and surprising me with how you come out of nowhere, so I’m going to focus on eating my lunch here, and if you feel like turning up for a chat, well, you’re welcome to.”
He busied himself with his sandwich and crisps – then looked up again to find the pale-eyed man sitting next to him on the bench.
“Holy CHRIST!” Greg shouted, dropping his sandwich to the ground.
The man turned his head and blinked at him. He was still in that same posh coat he seemed to wear no matter the weather. “Oh,” he said. “Did I startle you?”
“Bloody – yes, you startled me.” Greg bent to retrieve his sandwich, grimacing as he brushed bits of gravel from the bread. The slice of tomato had fallen out entirely when the thing had hit the ground and was probably a lost cause.
“I’m…sorry?” The man said it in a quizzical tone, as if he didn’t know what it meant. Hell, he probably didn’t.
“‘S fine,” Greg said, his heart still going a mile a minute. He’d been the one who asked the man to show up, but he’d still startled the hell out of Greg when he did. Greg set the sandwich aside, more important things on his mind. “Look, apparently I trust you, God knows why, and I want you to have a look at something and tell me what you think, all right?”
The man nodded his assent, aloof as always, but Greg was getting to know him a little better and thought he detected eagerness in the man’s posture. Was that why he kept turning up around the Met, because he liked solving mysteries? Or did Greg have it backwards and the man was more dangerous than he looked, someone who liked creating mysteries and making others dance about trying to solve them?
Greg had been reaching for the scrawled-on leaf, where he had it safely stowed inside an evidence bag in his inside jacket pocket, but he paused. “By the way – you’re called Sherlock, is that right?”
The man tensed slightly, hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Sherlock Holmes?”
The change was instantaneous, from cool, collected control to petulant rage. The man’s whole body radiated it, livid where until now he’d always been cold. “Who have you been talking to?” he demanded. And then, before Greg could answer, “Mycroft.”
“Posh bloke with an umbrella?” Greg offered.
“Oh, how tedious,” the man sighed, his eyes fluttering closed as if in great pain. “Interfering git. As if running the entire nation from the comfortable safety of its woodlands weren’t enough, he has to go sticking his stupid long nose into my life as well.”
“Er, right,” Greg said. Woodlands? The bloke in the pub had looked like the last person who would want to go camping or even for a walk in the woods. “Anyway,” he said, trying to bring this conversation back on track. “I looked you up and – you don’t exist. No record anywhere. So, is that really your name?”
“It’s a name,” the man murmured.
“An alias? What’s your real name, then, if you don’t mind me asking?” Greg said it with heavy irony, but of course that sailed clear over the man’s head.
“No, I don’t mind. But it isn’t as straightforward a question as you presume, Detective Inspector. This is the name I currently use and you’ll have to make do with that, for I’m not able to provide anything more satisfactory.”
“Bloody hell,” Greg muttered, but he knew he’d let himself in for this. This was what he got for not only accepting but actually seeking out the opinion of some oddball he’d met in Christchurch Gardens on his lunch break. “Fine,” he said, and reached for the evidence bag, drawing it carefully from his pocket. “Sherlock – if I can call you Sherlock. Have a look at this, would you? I went to Hampstead Heath to investigate a series of pet disappearances, and instead I found this.”
The man’s eyes widened and he took the clear plastic evidence bag from Greg with unexpected gentleness, turning it over delicately with deft fingers. “May I open the bag?”
Greg nodded. “Careful, though, hold it by the edges. Can’t be having you getting fingerprints on it.”
The man – Sherlock – slid the leaf gingerly from the bag and held it up to the light. It had dried out slightly since the previous evening, but it was still a luminous green and the words scratched on it were clearer than ever, now that the nearly translucent liquid they were written in had dried.
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Sherlock brought the leaf up under his nose and sniffed it.
“Hey –” Greg began to protest, but Sherlock was already sliding the leaf back into the evidence bag and handing it to Greg, who slipped it away to safety in his jacket pocket.
“Spider venom,” Sherlock breathed.
“Say what?” said Greg.
“Spider venom! A message – a message intended for me – written in the venom of a spider. Oh, it’s Christmas!”
“Hang on, a message for you? How do you know it’s meant for you?”
The man gave him a withering glance. “You brought it to me, did you not? Why else would you do that, unless you knew it was for me?”
“I thought you could – could help figure out what it meant, or something!” Greg protested. “Was I supposed to assume that a message that dropped out of a tree in a park and landed in front of my feet was meant for you?”
“It dropped out of a tree?” Sherlock asked, completely diverted to this new train of thought.
“Yeah – I was walking along under one of those long rows of lime trees, and it fell right down in front of me.”
“Oh, how nefarious,” Sherlock murmured, but he looked delighted. “He’s using double agents now! Oh, it’s Christmas and Yuletide and Haloa at once.” He turned to Greg suddenly, the full force of that otherworldly gaze pinning him to the bench. “Meet me at Hampstead Heath tonight at midnight.”
“But –!”
“Don’t ask questions, Detective Inspector! No time for that!” He rose from the bench in one fluid movement, that damn gorgeous coat swirling about his legs. “Meet me at the park at midnight, Inspector. The game is on!”
Recipient:
biswholockedAuthor:
starfishstarCharacters: Greg Lestrade, Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, Sally Donovan, Jim Moriarty (sort of), Redbeard (sort of), Mrs Hudson
Pairing: (eventually) Sherlock/Lestrade
Rating: T (for dangerous mythical beasts, not sexual content)
Words: ca. 11,800
Warnings: playing fast and loose with classical mythology, some swearing, very very brief animal endangerment (resolved with no harm to said animal), Sherlock being himself
Summary: Where Greg could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat.
…In which Greg Lestrade has lunch in a city garden, and gets way more than he bargained for.
Notes: Dear
biswholocked, goodness, this has been fun! You asked for fantasy or magical realism or Sherlock as some kind of supernatural/fae/magical being, emotional exploration between characters, some danger, possibly casefic, and Sherlock/Lestrade… I threw all that together and it went in strange directions. I hope you enjoy this! Thank you to the wonderful
thesmallhobbit for such a fast, helpful beta at short notice! Phrases you recognise, dear reader, are either drawn from Arthur Conan Doyle himself (namely Holmes’ descriptions of Moriarty in “The Final Problem”) or BBC canon (thank you to arianedevere for your amazing dialogue file).Story takes place pre-canon in a slightly alternate universe.
Read on Archive of Our Own:
Buds and Bells and Stars without a Name
Read on LJ:
CHAPTER ONE
The day Greg Lestrade thought he saw a tree move – thought he saw, specifically, an unusually slim oak that stood out amidst the plane trees of Christchurch Gardens shift a graceful foot or so to the left – he performed a quick mental run through the relative probability that a) he was going mad or b) he’d had at least two cups more coffee than were really advisable when it was only barely past noon.
The coffee, yes, that explained it. Just another sign that he really ought to cut back.
Greg glanced down and took another bite of his bacon sandwich. He’d allotted himself ten minutes to catch an all too rare whiff of fresh air and sunshine before he needed to be back at his desk to take yet another disheartening pass through the evidence – or lack thereof – in the Regent’s Park Robber case.
Damn that case. Generating so much paperwork and yet so few leads. Or no leads at all, to be precise.
When Greg looked up again, where he could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, with spring sunlight speckling its lithe branches, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat, lounging on the nearest bench as if he’d been there all day.
Greg stared.
“Hello,” the man said. He had an odd way of blinking not at all, then blinking several times in quick succession. The force of that pale-eyed gaze fixed on Greg made him feel as if he were being observed by some alien entity, something not exactly human.
Greg’s mental tally added one tick mark to the “really maybe actually going mad after all” column.
“Hello,” Greg said, because though he might be going mad, still that wasn’t any excuse to be rude.
“It’s a…nice day,” the man said, as if he were dredging the phrase up from a small-talk instructional manual he’d once read. “The…weather. Is nice, isn’t it?” He vaguely waved one elegant hand, as if to encompass all the weather currently existing around them.
“Yeah,” Greg said, because damn it, he was too British not to answer when a question was put to him directly. “Finally a bit of sun. Does a person good.”
“Indeed.” Again, the man blinked in that odd way. “Anyway,” he said, with an air of being able to dispense at last with the necessary but tedious chitchat and arrive at the real point of the conversation. “You’re going about it all wrong with that serial robbery case. You’re looking for a man, yes? And you’ve built up a profile of what you think he must be like: tall enough to attack a person from above and behind, athletic and able to cover open ground quickly, opportunist who strikes when a victim is alone, possible psychological components of thrill-seeking behaviour, etcetera, etcetera. Dull!”
Greg felt his jaw drop further and further as the stranger delivered this extraordinary speech in rapid-fire delivery.
“Hang on!” Greg protested, his sandwich slipping unheeded back into the wax paper wrappings that lay open on his lap, bacon grease spattering his trousers. “How can you possibly know any of that? We haven’t released details to the press, and there’ve been no eyewitnesses. So how could you know any of that?”
The man heaved a long-suffering sigh and muttered something under his breath that sounded very much like, “Oh, tedious.”
Greg tensed, mentally assessing whether or not he could take this man down if he moved fast and used the element of surprise to his advantage. Was this their serial robber himself, upping the adrenalin thrill by confessing to the police and seeing if he could get away with it?
“You should be looking,” the man said, with the pseudo-patient air of a person speaking to a small child, “for an attack from the air. These are crimes of opportunity, not motive. The victims are those careless enough to be walking through the park holding mobile phones or other valuables in such a way that they are visible from above. If you send out an undercover police officer carrying a mobile or some other shiny object above his or her head, I guarantee you will catch your ‘criminal’.”
“That’s…absurd,” Greg said weakly.
The man flowed to his feet in a flouncing of dramatic, dark coat. “Absurd, certainly. It’s up to you whether you decide to take my advice even so. Good day, Detective Inspector.”
And he was gone, in the time it took Greg to blink.
Greg looked down at his half-eaten sandwich, at the tiny splatters of grease dotting the previously pristine grey of his trousers, and said, “Oh, bugger.”
~ ~ ~
Friday at last, and no cases so urgent that they threatened to swallow another weekend whole. Greg just needed to make it through a last hour’s worth of paperwork, then he could call it a night and go home.
First, though, he would step outside for a well-deserved smoke. Just one.
He went out the side entrance, where there was slightly less chance that one of his subordinates would see him and disapprove. Christ, bad enough to have to set a good example for the public; more and more Greg felt the pressure to be a role model for his team as well. Just another fringe benefit of being a DI.
Greg stepped out to the pavement and leaned against the ugly grey barrier that separated the building from the street. He propped a cigarette between his lips, fumbled in his pocket for a lighter, then lit up and took a first grateful drag, relishing the sting as the smoke hit his lungs. Terrible habit and he would quit sooner or later, but for the moment, how satisfying.
He clicked the lighter closed and dropped it back into his jacket pocket. Then snapped his head up, because he wasn’t a cop for nothing – Greg could feel it when someone stepped in near him, just out of his line of sight. He glanced sharply to his right.
It was the same bloke from the gardens the other day. Same long, dark coat, same strange, pale eyes. And Christ, he was tall.
“Inspector,” the man rumbled. Greg was struck now by how deep his voice was, a low baritone, rich and somehow…ancient.
Ancient? Where had that fanciful word choice come from? Greg shook his head and chalked it up to the mental effects of overwork. It was Friday, just one more hour to go. He would have his fag, he would make polite and wary conversation with this man and simultaneously use the time to decide whether or not he needed to bring the man in for official questioning, then he would do his paperwork and go home.
The man slid a cigarette from the depths of one of the pockets in that dramatic coat. Automatically, Greg fished his lighter out again and offered it. The man smirked for a fraction of a second, then leaned his head obligingly closer and allowed Greg to light his cigarette for him. Smug bastard.
The man inhaled, and exhaled a plume of smoke in a dramatic arc towards the greyish sky. He commented, “I’m told I ought not to smoke these. They’re bad for my –” He blinked several times, rapidly, as if he couldn’t find the word he was looking for. Then he offered, as if he still weren’t quite certain he’d got the right term, “Lungs?”
Greg laughed despite himself. He was meant to be finding this bloke suspicious, not charming. “Yes, your lungs,” he said. “They’re terrible for your lungs and I’m going to switch to patches just as soon as I get a second free to think, which hasn’t happened yet this year. So, come on, how did you know our robbery suspect would turn out to be a bloody literal bird?”
“Was it a bird?” The man exhaled again, leaning back against the barrier as if he hadn’t a care in the world – as if he weren’t the one who’d tracked Greg down specifically to tip him off about this.
“Oh, come off it, of course it was. Like you said it would be. Bloody great thing flapping down out of the sky and knocking people about with its wings, stealing whatever shiny bits and bobs had caught its eye. We didn’t catch the thing, but we caught a glimpse of it. Of course it was a bird – what else would it be?”
“If you say so.”
All right, so the man intended to be difficult about it. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which was…?”
“How’d you know? There were no witnesses to any of the attacks, so I know you weren’t there to see it.”
“What would you say if I told you that yes, in fact, I was there?”
“Couldn’t’ve been. There were no eyewitnesses. DS Melas made sure of that before she set up the sting – just the way you suggested, I might add.”
“I was there, Detective Inspector. I have ways of not being noticed.”
Greg inhaled wrong at just that moment, and his guffaw of disbelief turned into a hacking cough. The pale-eyed man watched him with faint alarm.
When Greg could breathe again, he snorted, “You are too bloody good to be believed. ‘I have ways of not being noticed’? What are you, straight out of a pulp fiction crime thriller?”
The man narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to assess whether Greg was making fun of him – which, frankly, shouldn’t have been all that difficult to figure out.
“No, I’ve got it,” Greg went on, giving the man a sly, sidelong glance. “You’re some kind of magical being, right? You can turn yourself invisible? Or is it that you’re a superhero and your special ability is being able to fly?”
“None of the above,” the man said, quite huffy now. “I assure you I am corporeal, visible and entirely land-bound.”
Greg’s laughter ended on a last, surprised cough, because the man was serious. Greg was good at reading people, and the man in front of him wasn’t joking. In fact, Greg doubted he even knew how to tell a joke.
“Right, mate, sorry,” he said. “You’re corporeal, visible and land-bound, yeah, got it.”
“Yes,” the man said coolly. “And in any case, you’ve interviewed the wrong suspect, in that fraud case that’s worrying at the back of your mind even now, here on your alleged break. He’s not your man. But he has information on the real culprit, and he’ll crack if you put a little more pressure on him. Start by digging into his alibi.”
All nonchalance, the man dropped his barely-smoked cigarette to the pavement and crushed it neatly under the sole of one sleek black dress shoe.
“I’ll be going,” he said, and then indeed he was gone, disappearing so fast that Greg hardly had time to register which direction he’d taken.
Greg’s own half-finished cigarette dangled forgotten from his fingers. The suspect they’d interviewed today…the suspect who would now have to be re-interrogated, but first Greg was going to need to thoroughly re-research that seemingly airtight alibi. Because the mystery man in the long coat might or might not turn out to be right, but Greg couldn’t chance the possibility of missing out on a lead just because it had been handed to him by a nameless stranger in a posh coat who didn’t mind wasting most of a perfectly good cigarette for the sake of a dramatic exit.
Damn. There went his weekend.
~ ~ ~
Far too late on Saturday evening, exhausted but feeling he ought to celebrate a case finally finished and finished well – the mystery man’s lead had indeed proved invaluable – Greg pushed open the door of a grungy pub that hunkered behind a narrow shop front around the corner from his flat.
The place was grimy, with a bar permanently sticky with spilled beer, but it was close to home and an extremely unlikely place to run into any of his colleagues. Greg liked his colleagues fine, but just at the moment he felt he’d spent enough of his time with them for one weekend.
He ordered a pint and slumped down onto a barstool with a sigh, remembering as always not to let his hands actually touch the grubby, beer-drenched bar. He took a long pull on his drink and closed his eyes for a short, welcome moment. What a week.
When Greg opened his eyes, there was a man sitting on the next barstool.
Bespoke suit in a rich charcoal hue with subtle pinstripes, thinning but painfully correct hair, and the slim line of a black umbrella balanced neatly against his thigh. A very posh man, though not the same posh man as usual. For one incoherent moment, Greg thought, For god’s sake, am I attracting all of them now?
The man cast a brief but thorough glance over Greg, then summoned the barman with a precise flick of his fingers. He ordered the most expensive whisky in the place – no surprise there. Then he turned to Greg.
“What is your interest in Sherlock Holmes?”
“Sorry, who?” Greg demanded, the words coming out more belligerently than he’d intended. It had been a very trying week.
The stranger gave an extraordinarily put-upon sigh, far more than Greg felt his question warranted. The man gazed doubtfully at the whisky glass in his hand, raised it to his lips and took a small exploratory sip. Then he set the glass very precisely back on the bar, grimaced at it and murmured under his breath, “That’s what I get, I suppose.”
Greg politely stifled an incredulous cough and took a sip of his own cheap bitter.
Returning his steely gaze to Greg, the posh man said, “I take it he’s neglected to introduce himself, then. So like him.”
“Sorry, who are we talking about here?” Greg asked, though he thought he could hazard a guess.
The posh man raised his elegant eyebrows. “Surely you’re not that obtuse, Detective Inspector? Dark hair, long coat, an unfortunate tendency towards dramatics.”
“Can think of at least one bloke who fits that bill,” Greg muttered. The stranger’s eyebrows climbed higher.
“Yes, well,” the man said. “I hope we have at least established that you are acquainted with the man of whom I speak.”
It took Greg a moment to realise that had been a question. He slurped another slug of his beer, wondering if getting drunker would make this conversation more or less surreal. “Yeah, all right, I know – Sherlock. If you can call it ‘knowing’ a person when he turns up out of the blue, blurts out alarmingly accurate information about cases I’m working that incidentally there should be no possible way for him to know, then bloody disappears before I can find out where he’s getting his information from.”
“You needn’t worry about that, Detective Inspector Lestrade. He has his ways, but they are in no way criminal, so you may set your mind to rest on that point.”
“And I should believe that just because you said so?” Greg demanded incredulously. “You, the man who’s tracked me down to where I live, knows my name and rank, and seems to possess some mysterious yet unexplained connection to some other mysterious and unexplained bloke, who’s also stalking me and whose name I didn’t even know until just now?”
The man, who was gaining Greg’s grudging respect for unflappability if nothing else, ignored this entirely. “Returning to the salient point,” he said. “What is your interest in Sherlock Holmes?”
“I don’t have an interest in him!” Greg burst out. The barman’s head snapped up from where he was serving a trio of young women at the other end of the bar, and Greg grimaced in apology. More quietly, he repeated, “I don’t have an interest in him. How can I have an interest in someone I only know because he shows up outside my workplace at random intervals like some very bizarre overgrown cat?”
“Hm,” the man said, which wasn’t an answer. “It’s true, he isn’t very good yet at the social niceties. You must forgive him, he's only been alive several hundred years, he's not really got ‘the hang of it’ yet, as I believe people are wont to say.”
Greg stared at him. Staring seemed like a good response. “Sorry, did you just say –”
“Oh, has he not explained that either?” the man sighed. “Well, not my secret to reveal. All in good time, I suppose. Do forget I said anything, Detective Inspector.” He frowned down at the glass of stupidly expensive whisky in front of him, then lifted it and downed it in one go. The frown deepened as he set the glass neatly back on the bar. “Still, I would be grateful if you would keep an eye on him, should your paths cross again in the course of your duties. He’s not nearly as invincible as he likes to think, and I worry about him a great deal.”
“What –” Greg began, not even sure yet what he was going to ask. This man’s mere presence gave rise to so many questions.
Before he could get another word out, the man had risen in a swirl of tailored suit and posh umbrella, and was out the door of the pub and gone.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Greg muttered, as the barman cast him an extremely curious glance. “Didn’t get that one’s name either.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Oh, damn,” said Sergeant Sally Donovan, then looked chagrined when Greg glanced up at her from his desk. She was flipping through the pages of a printout she held in one hand and had halted just inside his doorway as something in the pages caught her attention. “Sorry, sir. It’s just, there’s been another pet disappearance in Hampstead Heath.”
“A missing pet? And this is our division why?”
Donovan bit her lip. She was newly promoted to sergeant and eager to prove herself, torn between wanting to please her superiors and wanting to follow her own generally solid instincts. “It’s not, exactly. But, see, if you’ll look here –”
She hurried over to his desk and set the pages neatly in front of him, pointing out specific sentences and flipping pages as she spoke.
“See, it’s been a regular pattern, every couple of weeks. A dog that got out from a back garden. A pair of housecats that wandered off from a residential street nearby and never returned. Another dog that was let off the lead to play, ran after a stick and never came back. Then yesterday, a dog disappeared as the owner was walking it, she turned her back for a moment and it was gone. And these were all in or around Hampstead Heath.”
Greg followed her pointing finger, and ruffled a distracted hand through his hair. “And why does this qualify as a crime?”
“You’re going to laugh, sir – don’t laugh – but the pattern, the timing of it, doesn’t seem like chance. It seems like – like something more sinister might be going on.” She pressed her lips together and averted her eyes, like she expected him to burst out laughing.
Greg didn’t laugh, but he did give Donovan’s concerned face thoughtful consideration. All logic said he should gently but firmly remind her that they were here to solve major crimes, that this was by no stretch of the imagination a major crime, and that there were half a dozen more important things she could be doing with her time right this very minute.
Why, then, was something in his gut firmly insisting that this sounded like a case his mysterious pale-eyed acquaintance might have something to say about?
“All right,” he sighed, giving in to gut feeling rather than sense. Because Greg, too, knew himself to have instincts that generally proved to be solid. “I’ll pop over there after work and have a look around.”
“You – you will?” Even though she’d been the one to suggest it, Donovan looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Yeah. Can’t promise to turn anything up, but I’ll have a look.”
It was absurd, of course, to think he was going to discover any evidence of this theorised dog-napper just by taking a brief evening jaunt through some small subsection of a park that stretched across 320 hectares. But then, how much of his life lately had made sense? It would do him good to stretch his legs, if nothing else. He spent too much time these days behind a desk.
Greg nodded at Donovan, kept the file she’d brought him, and shooed her back to work.
~ ~ ~
Greg parked his car and strolled into the park, feeling faintly ridiculous. Thanks to the long daylight hours of early summer, the sun was still bright behind the trees, and ambling couples were enjoying the evening light as Greg crossed a wide grassy area near the park’s southernmost edge. What exactly was he expecting to find here, aside from picnickers and, from the sound of it, a casual game of cricket taking place beyond the next stand of trees?
Shaking his head at himself but unable to set aside the dogged need to run down every hunch, no matter how mundane or bizarre, Greg started along an alley of lime trees. The evening light filtered gently through the green canopy overhead. Peaceful, certainly. Not the sort of place you would expect pets to go tragically missing.
Once again, Greg ran through the possibilities in his head, as he made his way along the gravel path.
Possibility number one: These were simple instances of lost pets, and Donovan was reading in a correlation where there wasn’t one. Happened all the time; the human brain sought pattern and meaning as a way of making a chaotic world make sense.
Or the other possibility, that there was a pattern, which meant – what? A nefarious dog-napper, lurking amongst the trees, stealing away people’s beloved pets to some unknown ends? Or could it be an animal, something big enough to eat a medium-sized dog? Right, Greg, the old ‘lion escaped from the zoo’. That sounds like a likely first hypothesis. He snorted aloud.
A leaf dropped from the trees above, straight down in front of Greg’s nose – not a gentle drift downwards, but a determined fall. Greg blinked and stopped walking. Curiosity getting the better of him, he bent and picked up the leaf, which was a lovely bright green. It was a perfectly formed specimen, round at the sides but tapering to a gentle point, with serrated edges and symmetrical veins highly visible as the slanting light shone through its semi-opaque shape.
There was also writing on it.
Some pale liquid had been used to scratch out words in an uneven hand on the leaf’s surface. The substance wasn’t anything Greg recognised, and appeared to still be wet. It read:
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Greg stared at the thing in his hand, then looked hard at the canopy of green above him. No one there of course, just tree branches swaying gently in the breeze.
Holding the leaf very carefully by its edges so the writing wouldn’t smudge, Greg searched the area, working outwards in concentric circles from the place where the leaf had fallen, but he found nothing, no human presence. No animal presence either, not even a mouse or squirrel scrabbling in the underbrush. In fact, now that he thought about it, this bit of the park seemed unnaturally still, as if it were holding its breath in the face of some malevolent presence.
Greg shook his head, annoyed at himself for indulging in another absurd flight of fancy. There was a rational explanation here, there had to be – he just hadn’t hit upon yet. The leaf had shaken loose from…a nearby art installation, perhaps. Yes, it had blown in from somewhere and got caught in the trees, only to be shaken loose again as Greg happened to be passing underneath. Or something.
The fact that the words on the leaf referenced a missing dog, precisely the thing he’d come here to investigate, was surely coincidence.
Still, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Greg to show the thing to his mysteriously appearing and disappearing acquaintance, the man who’d proved himself eerily knowledgeable about strange happenings in parks. The man had somehow held the key to solving the case of the Regent’s Park Robber, so perhaps he would have similar insight about this.
If, that is, Greg could track him down.
~ ~ ~
“All right,” Greg said, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear him, though he didn’t see anyone around. It was cooler today and overcast, and there weren’t many people about.
He was back in Christchurch Gardens and had spread his lunch out beside him on one of the benches, all the while feeling bizarrely as though he were setting out a decoy for a skittish wild creature.
“All right,” Greg said again. “I know you like lurking about and surprising me with how you come out of nowhere, so I’m going to focus on eating my lunch here, and if you feel like turning up for a chat, well, you’re welcome to.”
He busied himself with his sandwich and crisps – then looked up again to find the pale-eyed man sitting next to him on the bench.
“Holy CHRIST!” Greg shouted, dropping his sandwich to the ground.
The man turned his head and blinked at him. He was still in that same posh coat he seemed to wear no matter the weather. “Oh,” he said. “Did I startle you?”
“Bloody – yes, you startled me.” Greg bent to retrieve his sandwich, grimacing as he brushed bits of gravel from the bread. The slice of tomato had fallen out entirely when the thing had hit the ground and was probably a lost cause.
“I’m…sorry?” The man said it in a quizzical tone, as if he didn’t know what it meant. Hell, he probably didn’t.
“‘S fine,” Greg said, his heart still going a mile a minute. He’d been the one who asked the man to show up, but he’d still startled the hell out of Greg when he did. Greg set the sandwich aside, more important things on his mind. “Look, apparently I trust you, God knows why, and I want you to have a look at something and tell me what you think, all right?”
The man nodded his assent, aloof as always, but Greg was getting to know him a little better and thought he detected eagerness in the man’s posture. Was that why he kept turning up around the Met, because he liked solving mysteries? Or did Greg have it backwards and the man was more dangerous than he looked, someone who liked creating mysteries and making others dance about trying to solve them?
Greg had been reaching for the scrawled-on leaf, where he had it safely stowed inside an evidence bag in his inside jacket pocket, but he paused. “By the way – you’re called Sherlock, is that right?”
The man tensed slightly, hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Sherlock Holmes?”
The change was instantaneous, from cool, collected control to petulant rage. The man’s whole body radiated it, livid where until now he’d always been cold. “Who have you been talking to?” he demanded. And then, before Greg could answer, “Mycroft.”
“Posh bloke with an umbrella?” Greg offered.
“Oh, how tedious,” the man sighed, his eyes fluttering closed as if in great pain. “Interfering git. As if running the entire nation from the comfortable safety of its woodlands weren’t enough, he has to go sticking his stupid long nose into my life as well.”
“Er, right,” Greg said. Woodlands? The bloke in the pub had looked like the last person who would want to go camping or even for a walk in the woods. “Anyway,” he said, trying to bring this conversation back on track. “I looked you up and – you don’t exist. No record anywhere. So, is that really your name?”
“It’s a name,” the man murmured.
“An alias? What’s your real name, then, if you don’t mind me asking?” Greg said it with heavy irony, but of course that sailed clear over the man’s head.
“No, I don’t mind. But it isn’t as straightforward a question as you presume, Detective Inspector. This is the name I currently use and you’ll have to make do with that, for I’m not able to provide anything more satisfactory.”
“Bloody hell,” Greg muttered, but he knew he’d let himself in for this. This was what he got for not only accepting but actually seeking out the opinion of some oddball he’d met in Christchurch Gardens on his lunch break. “Fine,” he said, and reached for the evidence bag, drawing it carefully from his pocket. “Sherlock – if I can call you Sherlock. Have a look at this, would you? I went to Hampstead Heath to investigate a series of pet disappearances, and instead I found this.”
The man’s eyes widened and he took the clear plastic evidence bag from Greg with unexpected gentleness, turning it over delicately with deft fingers. “May I open the bag?”
Greg nodded. “Careful, though, hold it by the edges. Can’t be having you getting fingerprints on it.”
The man – Sherlock – slid the leaf gingerly from the bag and held it up to the light. It had dried out slightly since the previous evening, but it was still a luminous green and the words scratched on it were clearer than ever, now that the nearly translucent liquid they were written in had dried.
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Sherlock brought the leaf up under his nose and sniffed it.
“Hey –” Greg began to protest, but Sherlock was already sliding the leaf back into the evidence bag and handing it to Greg, who slipped it away to safety in his jacket pocket.
“Spider venom,” Sherlock breathed.
“Say what?” said Greg.
“Spider venom! A message – a message intended for me – written in the venom of a spider. Oh, it’s Christmas!”
“Hang on, a message for you? How do you know it’s meant for you?”
The man gave him a withering glance. “You brought it to me, did you not? Why else would you do that, unless you knew it was for me?”
“I thought you could – could help figure out what it meant, or something!” Greg protested. “Was I supposed to assume that a message that dropped out of a tree in a park and landed in front of my feet was meant for you?”
“It dropped out of a tree?” Sherlock asked, completely diverted to this new train of thought.
“Yeah – I was walking along under one of those long rows of lime trees, and it fell right down in front of me.”
“Oh, how nefarious,” Sherlock murmured, but he looked delighted. “He’s using double agents now! Oh, it’s Christmas and Yuletide and Haloa at once.” He turned to Greg suddenly, the full force of that otherworldly gaze pinning him to the bench. “Meet me at Hampstead Heath tonight at midnight.”
“But –!”
“Don’t ask questions, Detective Inspector! No time for that!” He rose from the bench in one fluid movement, that damn gorgeous coat swirling about his legs. “Meet me at the park at midnight, Inspector. The game is on!”
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Hurries to part two.