
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/704773.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/F
  Fandom:
      Sherlock_(TV), Sherlock_Holmes_&_Related_Fandoms
  Relationship:
      Sherlock_Holmes/John(nie)_Watson, Sherlock_Holmes/Victor(ia)_Trevor, John
      (nie)_Watson/OFC
  Character:
      Sherlock_Holmes, John(nie)_Watson, Victor(ia)_Trevor, Sally_Donovan,
      Original_Characters, lots_of_them
  Additional Tags:
      Genderswap, Alternate_Universe_-_1950s, Butch/Femme, Gender_Issues,
      Gender_Roles, Case_Fic, bildungsroman, World_War_II
  Series:
      Part 1 of One_shape_to_another
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-03-02 Chapters: 20/20 Words: 132531
****** How the mouth changes its shape ******
by breathedout
Summary
     Summary: 1955. Under the placid veneer of suburban playparks and
     middle-class conformity churns a hidden London: femmes and butches
     dancing close in basement bars; clandestine love between women. To
     Sherlock Holmes, struggling private detective and mistress of
     disguise, it’s a realm she renounced years before. To Johnnie Watson,
     daredevil ambulance driver turned auto mechanic, it’s become a little
     too familiar. But when someone is murdered in the washroom of the
     city’s most notorious lesbian club, the investigation will lead both
     women to reconsider their assumptions about themselves, each other,
     and the world in which they live.
Notes
     Full acknowledgements in the endnotes to the many, many people who
     helped make this story possible; I am so grateful for you all.
     I added the underage warning because the first few chapters involve
     Sherlock's time at boarding school in 1943, but the one underage sex
     scene is, in my opinion, unlikely to be triggering or offensive to
     most folks. At various times the story engages with racism,
     homophobia, antisemitism and sexism, although I do my utmost to be
     thoughtful and sensitive about all of the above.
See the end of the work for more notes
***** Prologue + Chapter 1 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes

     We look at alien grace,

     unfettered
     by any determined form,
     and we say: balloon, flower,

     heart, condom, opera,
     lampshade, parasol, ballet.
     Hear how the mouth,

     so full
     of longing for the world,
     changes its shape?

     —Mark Doty, “Difference”
Prologue: 1955
Lot’s Road, Chelsea, London
Sherlock started counting when they turned the corner. ‘One,’ she said under
her breath, ‘two,’ and when she reached ten she tightened her one-armed grip
around Johnnie’s waist, tensed her thighs on the bike’s rear seat, and twisted
to look behind her. Scanned the rushing dark of the night, the spaces between
the retreating street lamps.
Their pursuers had shut off their headlamps: she’d caught onto that fifteen
miles back. Their brake lights, though: no time to disable them, not with this
fog and the way Johnnie was laying on the throttle. Sherlock, when she’d
realised about the headlamps, had shouted to keep to a twisting route, and
Johnnie had nodded impatiently, as if cornering were the first lesson she’d
been taught in remedial motorbike evasion training. They’d turned a sharp curve
by the old gas works, around the edge of an open lot about a half a mile back,
and—yes, there it was. A low haze of red as the car’s driver tapped his brakes
before taking the turn. ‘Damn,’ muttered Sherlock, turning forward again as
Johnnie downshifted to take another corner.
It was June. Stubborn London had been decked out in light summer cottons for
weeks. Even so, the wet wind whipped like knives around Sherlock’s throat and
her face. Lot’s Road was oil-slick, and thick with fog, and the sound of the
bike’s engine echoed loud off the stone buildings close on either side.
Johnnie’s body was coiled under Sherlock’s hands, tight with concentration as
she leaned into the turn and rolled the throttle back on.
Sherlock snugged her hips closer to Johnnie’s, hands in Johnnie’s jacket
pockets. She buried her face in the short hair next to Johnnie’s ear—fluttering
straw; clammy, familiar skin—and yelled above the sound of the engine:
‘We haven’t lost them. About a mile back and gaining, but slowly.’
Johnnie’s eyes stayed straight ahead, trained on the road as far as she could
see—which even Sherlock realised could hardly be far enough, not at any speed.
The fog was proving their undoing. It should have been easy to outrun or
outmaneuver a car, but even Johnnie Watson couldn’t lay into a road properly
when it was both wet and invisible.
For a count of seconds it was just the roar of the bike in the narrow space,
and then the shuffle of Johnnie’s leg against Sherlock’s inner thigh, moving
again to downshift. Johnnie turned her head as she took the turn, and as she
leaned into it she yelled back:
‘Get me to a construction site. Someplace with an open pit foundation.’
London maps unfurled, one over the next inside Sherlock’s head. King’s Road was
a straight-away, and Johnnie cursed under her breath as she laid on more
throttle. Sherlock wondered if it were a threat or a prayer. Construction
sites, Sherlock thought. Housing projects, council flats. They were everywhere;
she was always remarking them; London housing capacity still hadn’t recovered
completely from the Blitz. But most were restoration projects—and Johnnie had
said new construction, an open pit foundation. Sherlock’s brain sorted:
adrenaline-fed, a precision instrument. There was one in Brompton; another near
the Chelsea Embankment.
She could feel in the tense line of Johnnie’s shoulders that they couldn’t keep
this up. Her mind flew over streets. Turns, they had to keep turning so that
Sherlock could keep an eye on the brake-lights. One-way streets; alleys;
detours; anything the bike could do faster than a car could; anything to buy
Johnnie — buy them both—a bit more time. Routes; alternates; she would—
‘Sherlock!’ Johnnie yelled back without turning her head. ‘Construction site;
tell me!’
Chelsea then; no more time to think. ’Turn left!’ Sherlock shouted into
Johnnie’s ear, and the bike swung around almost instantly to take the tight
corner. Sherlock could feel the clenching of Johnnie’s abdominal muscles; she
pressed her palms against them, tight, warm, inside Johnnie’s jacket pockets.
‘There’s one near the Embankment. They’re still excavating the foundation. Turn
right, now.’
Johnnie swung the bike right, cutting across lanes in the vacant intersection.
The buildings here were too close to catch a glimpse of the car’s brake lights
behind them. Warehouses and shipping centres; occasional flickering neon in the
dim windows of pubs.
In the rush of wet air and adrenaline Sherlock reminded herself to breathe.
‘Another right at the one-way,’ she yelled.
It was one-way going the wrong direction. ‘Jesus,’ Johnnie said, but she didn’t
hesitate: only slowed infinitesimally and aimed the bike into the loading and
pedestrian area, eyes riveted ahead of her.
‘Left at the next throughway,’ yelled Sherlock, ‘and it’ll be a mile up ahead.’
She felt Johnnie’s exhale as they swung back into a proper two-lane road; the
engine growled between their legs. Sherlock turned again in her seat, and
watched for twenty seconds without spotting the brake lights.
Then the site was to their left. Johnnie slowed. Fenced-off perimeter, but
there was no chain at the entrance gate. Through the fog and the dark Sherlock
could just make out the furled, ghostly necks of sleeping earth-movers. On the
near side, close to the gate, was a sharp drop-off. Beyond it, darkness and
air.
Johnnie turned the bike into an alley across the street from the gate, and cut
the engine. Immediately she was kicking down the stand and swinging around on
the seat, the teeth of metal zips catching on Sherlock’s wrists as her hands
were ripped free of Johnnie’s pockets.
‘Give me your coat,’ Johnnie said, low and urgent. Sherlock stared. She
clutched her black men’s coat tighter around her shoulders.
‘What are you doing?’ Sherlock whispered. She hadn’t felt frightened, not
during any of it, but she was scared now. It was a low whine in her ribcage, a
metal taste in her mouth.
‘Listen,’ said Johnnie, ‘You know all those times you said you didn’t have time
to explain something?’ Sherlock nodded, resisted the urge to edge closer. ‘I
definitelydon’t have time to explain this,’ said Johnnie. ‘Give me your coat.’
Sherlock knew she was being irrational, and she hated it. But she couldn’t make
herself take off her coat. ‘What are you doing?’ she said again, and then: ‘I
won’t be left out of the plans. You’ll probably make an error in judgment.’
There. That sounded like something Sherlock Holmes would say.
Johnnie cursed, and punched the seat. ‘Sherlock, this is not an error in
judgment. If those lunatics,’ she pointed back out the alley, ‘catch us up they
are not going to take us in for a civil fucking q-and-a, all right? They are
gaining on us in town and we’re not going to make it out of city limits before
they close the gap, and I am under no bloody circumstances letting them at
either of us. Now give me your fucking coat, Sherlock Holmes.’
Sherlock felt her eyes widen and her head shake. Her brain was shooting off
sparking, coppery flares of panic, and she couldn’t see past them. A voice
inside her head was telling her to strip off the coat, but her fingers were
clamped tight to the lapels.
Johnnie barreled forward, grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her off the
back of the bike. Sherlock’s brain was so fear-flooded that it didn’t catch up
until Johnnie had pushed her up against the wall of the alley, pinned by her
shoulders. Her breath knocked out of her lungs by the impact of stone against
her back, but breath—she couldn’t care for breath when Johnnie was kissing her.
Hard. Rough lips moving on hers.
Johnnie’s tongue was fierce in Sherlock’s mouth, angry, and Sherlock thought
that ought to have made her more frightened, not less. But somehow, flattened
against the wet wall by Johnnie’s two hands and Johnnie’s mouth, the panic
eased. She curled her tongue around Johnnie’s, wound them together, licked at
Johnnie’s cold lips, at her teeth as they bit at Sherlock. Their skins both wet
with sweat and dirty fog, and everything too cold to taste, but Sherlock was
tasting. Straining forward. Low, pleading sounds into Johnnie’s mouth. Please,
she thought, more. Please don’t leave me.

Johnnie pulled back from the kiss, panting. She took one hand off Sherlock’s
shoulder; tentative for a second, but Sherlock stayed pressed against the wall.
Johnnie moved the hand to Sherlock’s waist and pulled her own body close
against Sherlock, nuzzling her face into Sherlock’s neck and speaking into her
wet hair.
‘Remember when we, what we—’ she swallowed. Sherlock shivered. ‘Remember you
kept telling me I could trust you, I had to trust you?’ Johnnie asked. There
was a long moment before Sherlock nodded. She snaked her arms around Johnnie’s
shoulders, and her back.
‘Well,’ said Johnnie, and swallowed again. A wet, breakable little sound. ‘Now
I need you to trust me.’
No, said a rebellious spark in Sherlock’s gut. Not like this. But she knew it
had lost out. Her arms tightened impossibly around Johnnie for two—three
seconds, thinking scarred - golden - three freckles on her left elbow - never
let go. Then she forced herself to let go.
Johnnie stepped back into the alley and held out her hands, and Sherlock slowly
unbuttoned her overcoat, slipped it off her shoulders, and held it out. She
couldn’t feel the cold, but she was shaking.
Johnnie looked about to collapse from relief as she grabbed the coat. She tore
off her own leather jacket, wadding it into the body of the coat and tying the
coat’s arms around her shoulders. She threw her leg over the seat and restarted
the engine, pulled in the clutch and straddle-walked the bike around so it
pointed out of the alley, headlamps still off and well back from the street.
There was no traffic. The fog muffled all sounds, and the whole scene was dimly
back-lit from across the river, by the hulking floodlights of Battersea
Station. ‘Any time now,’ Johnnie muttered. A second later Sherlock heard it,
then saw it: a black car with darkened lights, creeping past on the street
ahead.
‘Perfect,’ muttered Johnnie. She flicked on the headlamp at the same moment
Sherlock said, ‘Wait here and they might not—’ but Johnnie held up her hand,
silhouetted against the swirling fog in the headlamp glare.
‘Wait til you know they’ve gone, Sherlock,’ she said. ‘I’m not doing this for
nothing.’
And then, before Sherlock could react, Johnnie had rolled the throttle on hard.
The bike roared across the empty street. There was a screech of brakes from the
direction of the blacked-out car. Sherlock saw Johnnie lift herself off the
seat and brace, knees bent, as the bike hit the unchained gate and the entrance
burst open.
Then the fog closed in around motorcycle and rider, but Sherlock could still
hear the brake squeal, could still see the sickening jerk and arc of the
headlamp as the bike spun lengthwise, wheel over wheel into the void. She stood
paralysed and it washed over her: a shattering crunching crash; a rush of hot
sound, and the yellow-orange flicker of flames.

PART_1
Chapter 1: 1943
Castle Howard, North Yorkshire
Wartime location of Queen Margaret’s School for Girls
Headmistress Joyce Brown often thought that there were three kinds of girls at
Queen Margaret’s: the little mothers; the tomboys; and Sherlock Holmes. In the
foyer to her makeshift office, on a Thursday afternoon in early April, sat one
unhappy example of each type.
Joyce shuffled the papers on her desk. She pushed back a pile of books. She was
putting off calling them in.
The office, as usual, was in disarray. Even now, three years after their
evacuation from Scarborough to these palatial yet temporary grounds in the
Yorkshire countryside, the flotsam of school administration still failed to
conform to that halcyon ideal of ‘a place for everything, and everything in its
place’. Joyce looked around at the mess, inflated her cheeks, and let out a
robust sigh. Something, she reflected for the hundredth time, ought to be done.
The records and reference books weren’t the only things out of place, after
all. The accommodations remained haphazard at best, and the very idea of
enforcing standards of uniform dress had been long abandoned. Girls from St.
Aiden’s and Pitlochry Houses were jumbled together in the same wing. Neither
Duncan nor Garry Houses were left with enough players to make up a side of
rounders. Boxes of records lined the corridors, and the filing solutions that
had been devised, filling to overflowing the bookcases and armoires of Howard
Castle, lacked any systematic approach. One might be in a third-floor boudoir
going through a disciplinary record from 1938, and weeks later discover the
file for the student’s 1939 roommate secreted in a ground-floor parlour on the
other end of the building.
Joyce’s head throbbed. Had such a state of affairs really been allowed to
continue for three years? She hefted herself to her feet and stood back from
the desk, her fingers digging into the ache in her lower back.
And yet (so ran Joyce’s train of thought, around and around) who knew how long
this dreadful war would continue? One shouldn’t like to exert all the energy of
organisation unnecessarily. She eyed the teetering stacks of books and
paperwork, balanced on the cushions of the sheeted Georgian settee and piled
around the base of the dusty curio cabinet. With her luck, she thought, she
would have just put the finishing touches on a brilliant organisational scheme,
when the telegram would arrive announcing peace.
She scowled, then shook her head, mildly shocked at her own thoughts. She
would, of course, be thrilled with such a scenario, she reminded herself.
Peace! The mess of the resulting migration back to civilisation, much as it
made her head ache to think of it, would be a small price to pay.
Nonetheless, the office remained disordered.
Joyce sighed again, stood, and opened the door onto the space she called the
‘foyer’—actually a former servant’s hallway abutting the sitting-room-cum-
office, with a few chairs snugged up against the facing wall. She stood and
surveyed the girls before her, as three sets of reluctant eyes rose to meet
hers.
Mary Little, lower sixth form, in a pink-and-cream cardigan with her auburn
hair carefully pinned into a Victory Roll, had returned from Christmas break
and stopped turning in her papers. Joyce heard staff rumours about a boy met at
the big Christmas dance, and a ring Mary sometimes forgot to take off before
coming to lectures. All well enough, thought Joyce grimly, if the future of
young men these days weren’t so tenuous. Best that Mary, dim and benevolent
though she might be, have something to fall back on. Even if she did have a
fiancé in the wings.
In the next chair Victoria Trevor, hockey captain and upper sixth-form, with
all the familiar attitude problems of the nearly graduated, slouched down in
her polo shirt and knee-socks, and shuffled her feet in their black cleats.
Wanted to make a point that she’d been dragged off the field, apparently. But
she must be dragged, thought Joyce. She’d been caught keeping dogs in the
hollow next to her dormitory. Feeding them with kitchen scraps, and it simply
could not be allowed to continue, not when rations were so scarce. Had a staff
member discovered her, perhaps they could have made some allowance, but…no. It
had been another student, and by this time the whole school would have heard.
Joyce turned her gaze to the final chair in her cobbled-together waiting room:
a spindly Queen Anne with an even spindlier student perched on the edge of it,
clutching a thick book on—Joyce squinted—medicinal plants. Best, Joyce thought,
to tackle the prickliest problem first. ‘Miss Holmes,’ she said, and held the
door open. The gawky fifth-former slouched through, one stocking ripped beneath
her shapeless brown dress, her face partially obscured by a long tangle of
black curls.
Sherlock Holmes, if truth be told, made her headmistress a bit nervous—and,
consequently, a bit tetchy. Joyce wasn’t proud of it, but there you were. It
was only that, in her nearly three decades in upper administration, she liked
to think she had encountered most student ‘types,’ and could rise to the
challenges they presented. Certainly, she had met with bright students before,
even exceedingly bright; she had dealt handily with a spate of combative
attitudes and behaviour problems; and had quashed the sense of entitlement in
many a daughter of a moneyed family. She really felt she ought to be equal to
any student who crossed her threshold.
But it was the air Sherlock gave off. The sense that Sherlock Holmes — with no
life experience at all, and none of what the staff called ‘people sense’—knew
things about Joyce that earned the girl’s contempt—or, occasionally, her
amusement.
Joyce was at a loss to think what such things might be. Nevertheless,
Sherlock’s narrowed grey eyes with their translucent lids were so unnerving
that she found herself searching her memories for anything incriminating she
might have forgotten. Such self-possession in a fifteen-year-old: it wasn’t
natural. And anyone who had read Sherlock’s file knew that the girl had the
courage of her convictions: she’d been chucked out of nearly every other
reputable boarding school in the country for insubordination and gross property
damage, and no reputable private tutor would come near her.
Be that as it may, thought Joyce, she had a responsibility to the girl. She
took her seat, heavily, and looked back across the desk. Sherlock had sat down
without asking permission, and was now staring out from behind her black fringe
while her fingers picked absently at the crooked seam of her skirt.
‘Professor Martin would help you, if you asked him,’ Sherlock said, in a bored
voice, and without waiting for Joyce to open the conversation.
Joyce put on her thin-lipped, chin-up mask of disapproval. ‘Students wait to
speak until they are spoken to,’ she rapped out. Sherlock looked unimpressed.
‘What do you have to say?’ Joyce demanded.
‘Yes, Professor,’ said Sherlock, with no outward sign of boredom—no eye-roll,
no sigh, that would be too obvious. She managed to communicate them
nonetheless. And she kept staring at Joyce until Joyce thought back to what
Sherlock had said: Alfie Martin? Help with what? Joyce didn’t understand, but
she wouldn’t be distracted, either.
‘I hear you’ve been messing about with chemicals again,’ she said instead.
‘Despite what we discussed.’
Sherlock snorted. ‘If there were any kind of decent chemistry curriculum at
this school—’ she began, but Joyce put up a hand. She had a hard-won concession
to offer, though no great hopes of its success.
‘The classes on offer at Queen Margaret’s are irrelevant to the point at issue,
Miss Holmes’, she said, in her sniffiest voice. Sherlock looked mutinous. Joyce
waited a moment before continuing. ‘However’, she said, ‘Professor Hill has
agreed to allow you into her upper sixth-form class, provided—’ she waved her
hand to silence Sherlock’s attempt at speech—‘you are on your best behaviour.’
She sat back in her chair and waited.
Sherlock gaped, obviously horrified. ‘That’s appliedchemistry,’ she said. Joyce
was silent. ‘For use in the home,’ Sherlock pressed.
Joyce sighed. ‘I am aware of the class description,’ she said.
‘I don’t know why it’s even offered,’ said Sherlock, with a sneer. ‘What, are
you training us up to go into service, or—’ but Joyce interrupted her, quiet
but stony.
‘Not all the students at this school have had your advantages, Miss Holmes,’
she rapped out. She held Sherlock’s gaze in silence. Eventually the grey eyes
wavered and flicked down to Sherlock’s lap before turning back to meet Joyce’s,
hardened up again if a little wild.
‘Well I don’t want to hand in essays on—on removing wine stains from lace table
runners, or—or how to make mayonnaise from egg emulsion,’ Sherlock spluttered,
an actual note of panic in her voice. Her gesticulating hands convulsed, pale
spiders, nearly catching in her curls. ‘I want to learn the theory of it. I
want to balance equations, and run real experiments—ones meant to discover
things—ones whose results I haven’t already eaten in my—in my pudding course at
supper.’
Joyce stifled an ill-timed chuckle. She always forgot this about Sherlock: that
despite the girl’s hostility she could occasionally be funny. Almost charming,
if one caught her in the right mood. However, it wasn’t Joyce’s place to be
amused just now.
‘Unfortunately for you, Miss Holmes,’ she said, ‘you have been expelled from
the limited number of schools in England which offer such courses to young
women.’ Sherlock started to protest, looking livid, but Joyce cut back in. ‘And
in any case, even boys’ schools don’t teach science courses featuring
experiments with unknown results; only ones that demonstrate accepted
principles. Even university courses seldom do that. One must master the basics
before one can progress.’
Sherlock’s chin went up. Joyce saw with some surprise that the girl’s lip was
trembling. ‘I have mastered the basics,’ she said, a touch too loud.
This claim was, sadly, more than true.
The problem was, that in the privacy of her own mind Joyce couldn’t help
building castles in the sky—or rather, gleaming laboratories in the sky. State-
of-the-art facilities she could extend as if on a platter; a perfect offering
to girls like Sherlock. A proof of her faith in them. For Joyce, imperfect
though she knew she was, believed in the minds of her girls. Almost painful it
was at times, how much she believed in them. In her more grandiose moments, she
dreamt of the girls of Queen Margaret’s going on to great things. First woman
in a full Oxford professorship. First woman heart surgeon. First (when Joyce
had had a few glasses of claret) woman prime minister.
And she would intervene for them, she really would. But after all, only so much
was possible—and these, the lean years of war. She had argued bitterly,
bitterly with the Board of Governors over this very issue, and had come out
much the worse. Old Basil Smythe had made it quite plain, over the course of an
agonising half-hour, that such chemistry and physics curricula only
masculinised the girls. Joyce had been treated to a bravura performance of the
hoary old rants: the next generation of wives and mothers and so on;
encouraging dangerous tendencies et cetera; the ghastly spectacle to male eyes
of an intellectualised woman and so forth; while all the time Harold Townsend-
Farquhar had nodded along in such sententious agreement that Joyce had dug her
nails into her palms to prevent herself causing a scene. She knew, when she saw
one, a battle whose time had not yet come. Besides, she had thought (a tad
hysterically), Townsend-Farquhar would probably publish a highly-coloured
account of any histrionics in the next day’s Chronicle. So she had held her
peace.
And now Joyce took in Sherlock’s wire-taut defiance, the raised yet trembling
chin, and wondered if this truly was her calling: to deliver such girls as
Sherlock Holmes into the bosom of matrimony. She sighed. She had never
particularly yearned to deliver Joyce Brown into it, either.
‘Miss Holmes,’ she began, in a firm but, she hoped, placating tone, ‘I
understand your frustration, but we simply can’t have unsupervised chemical
reactions going on in the school. Particularly not with the blackout
regulations, and the entire south-east wing already destroyed by fire. You must
understand this.’
Sherlock sniffed. Her chin stayed up, but there was a flatness about her voice
as she said, ‘My experiments wouldn’t start a fire. I’m not some—some tipsy
golden-boy down from Eton, playing about with matches.’
Joyce was momentarily derailed. ‘The fire was an accident,’ she said, startled.
‘Set by—by an under-gardener’s capsized lantern.’
Sherlock actually did roll her eyes this time, and finally dropped her chin.
‘So they say,’ she said, with a little shrug of her shoulders.
There was a brief silence. Joyce spent it considering Sherlock, who was now
scuffing her already-worn saddle shoes against the legs of her chair. The
south-east wing had burned in 1940, shortly after Queen Margaret’s had taken
possession, and was now strictly out-of-bounds for all students.
Not that Joyce was a fool, obviously. Even the staff had been known to sneak
off there for one thing and another, not all of it as innocent as Harriet
McAllister’s photography hobby. She narrowed her eyes.
‘Do you have any specific knowledge you’d like to share, Miss Holmes?’ she
asked.
She could actually see Sherlock grinding her teeth as she thought her way
around the question. ‘No,’ she said eventually, scowling at the carpet.
Joyce had scarcely ever heard a clearer ‘yes’ than Sherlock’s ‘no,’ but at this
point there wasn’t much to be done. The gardener in question had been sacked
years ago, and it didn’t do to step on the toes of the Howard family when they
were being, by and large, so accommodating. Joyce nodded and rapped her pencil
against the desk.
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘listen to me, Miss Holmes. You are fifteen years
old. Your exploits have caused property damage, both here and at your previous
schools. I understand that you wish to expand your practical chemical
knowledge, and it’s an instinct I applaud, but for the safety of the house and
the other students I must take a firm line. No more chemical experiments. Do
you understand me?’
Sherlock looked ready to tear into something with her teeth. She said, ‘It’s
not as though I’ve anything else to do in this—bloody place.’
There was a small but noticeable pause before Sherlock spat out that ‘bloody.’
It didn’t yet sit naturally on her lips; she was deliberately playing the
provocateur. Perhaps to distract from the actual content of her statement. A
girl like Sherlock: how ought she to occupy her time? A fifth-former who,
despite her expulsion from numerous other schools, had already exhausted most
of Queen Margaret’s academic offerings—not an athlete, and decidedly not
social. Hardly a wonder she found herself at loose ends.
Joyce sighed again, and looked at her watch. Four o’clock already, and still
Mary and Victoria to see to.
‘Look,’ she said to Sherlock, and the girl glanced up. ‘I will have a few words
with Professor Hill. It’s possible that if you are very accommodating, and
cease immediatelystealing supplies from her laboratory—of which I officially
have no knowledge, so don’t bother to deny it—she will agree to oversee some
advanced studies with you on an individual basis.’ A cautious smile teased at
Sherlock’s mouth.
‘Do you think you can promise those things?’ asked Joyce, stern. Sherlock
nodded, the smile widening.
’No more unauthorised experiments? No more stealing?’
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock. ‘I mean no. None.’
‘No more straying into the burned wing?’ pressed Joyce. Sherlock shook her
head, then added: ‘No, Professor.’
Joyce peered hard at Sherlock. ‘I wish to be understood, Miss Holmes. We are
doing our best to accommodate you, but you must meet us halfway. Another major
breach of the school rules and I shall have no choice but to expel you. Do you
understand?’
Sherlock nodded, looking earnest. ‘Yes, Professor,’ she said.
Joyce gave a brusque nod. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘you are free to go. Please
tell Miss Trevor that I will see her now.’
Sherlock unfolded herself awkwardly from the chair, and brushed her mat of
curls back from her face. She was almost to the door when Joyce remembered, and
the question left her lips before she could think twice.
‘Miss Holmes,’ she said. ‘With what would Professor Martin help me?’
Sherlock turned. She seemed on the verge of smiling again, but now it was in
that peculiar, haughty way of hers. ‘With the office, of course,’ she said,
gesturing around at the mess. ‘With all the records.’
Joyce took her eyes off Sherlock to look around herself in surprise, but she
heard Sherlock’s derisive snort.
‘You were pushing back the piles of papers just before I came in,’ the girl
pointed out, waving a careless hand. ‘It’s obvious from the dust. The mess is
preying on you, and it’s only getting worse. Professor Martin amuses himself on
the weekends by re-cataloguing his rodent skeletons. Boxes of paper probably
aren’t as interesting, but he’s done the skeletons three times already this
term. I’d welcome a diversion, if I were him. And he always sits as near you as
he can, at the staff table.’
Joyce was struck momentarily dumb. She thought of arguing that Alfie Martin
most certainly did not sit near her at the staff table, but such a response was
hardly suitable. After all, perhaps he did. She would have to take note in
future. She shook herself slightly, drew herself up. ‘Thank you, Miss Holmes,’
she said. ‘You may go.’
***
Sherlock Holmes crouched around the corner from Professor Brown’s office, her
heart beating in her chest, her nails digging into the fronts of her thighs.
Vicky Trevor, she thought. In the room next door. Being scolded by Professor
Brown about—Sherlock leaned her ear closer to the office’s side door—something
to do with kitchen scraps. Sherlock felt a drop of sweat make its way down her
neck and settle in the divot of her clavicle. Vicky Trevor.
Pashes were common business at QM’s. Most of the girls—the normal girls,
thought Sherlock—paraded their infatuations freely, egged on by their friends.
They trailed after the older, more glamourous objects of their affection,
clutching their little gifts and offering up their little favours. They glowed
while they were petted by the older girls; hugged by them; drawn close by them.
Giggled as the older girls whispered in their ears.
Sometimes that’s all it was, and sometimes—well. A few months before, when term
had been about to let out for the Christmas holiday, Sherlock had stumbled into
a storage cupboard and found Rosie Bartlett, skirt hiked up, sat back on the
rickety countertop with Justine Digby standing between her legs. Rosie had had
a hand up Justine’s white cashmere pullover and Justine’s tongue down her
throat, and she kept on making helpless little whimpering sounds, even a second
after Sherlock had crashed in and Justine had pulled away. Possibly after
Sherlock had stumbled back out, too.
And four months later, Sherlock thought, scowling, Rosie was still fawning on
Justine. Rosie obviously didn’t care who knew it; she trotted after Justine
like nothing else came naturally. But Sherlock simply couldn’t make herself. It
wouldn’t come to her, those simpering smiles and pleasant little offerings,
though they seemed the easiest things in the world. The injusticeof the
situation rankled.
For it had never happened before, that Sherlock Holmes should want to do a
thing and yet persistently fail.
It was more difficult, after all, without an audience of friends; and through a
combination of thievery, contempt, and clever deductions about their home
lives, Sherlock had managed to alienate most of the QM's girls inside of a
week. They had then settled into the mutual animosity, the uneasy exchange of
barbs for bullying, that had been Sherlock’s accustomed relation to her
classmates at all of her many boarding schools. And that was fine, she told
herself. Shewas fine. Alone had always served Sherlock well. Her natural state,
she thought, must be watching, and keeping out of sight. Learning, and keeping
it to herself. Most of her fellow students were idiots, anyway.
And that was exactly the problem. Because she’d been standing in the library
thinking just that - ‘Idiots, all of them, how can they be so dull?’ - chasing
down a detail in a book on the nervous systems of rats, when she’d heard her
precise thoughts mirrored back to her from behind the bookshelves.
‘I can’t bloody talk to them,’ a girl’s voice said, footsteps sounding in the
corridor.. ‘Brats and beaux and table runners, I could die they're all so
boring.’
Sherlock’s heart had clenched in her chest.
The pair of girls had moved at a brisk walk, their conversation audible only
briefly. The other one had presumably given her friend a look, because the same
speaker said, laughter in her voice, ‘What? It’s only true,’ and her friend had
snorted and said, ‘Vicky. Lord, you’re impossible, what about an—’ and then
they were fading away, out of earshot. Sherlock had stood behind the set of
shelves, fingers frozen and trembling over a diagram of rodent skeletons.
And now Sherlock kept thinking about Vicky Trevor.
Vicky who was apparently just as bored by her fellow students as Sherlock was.
And what would Vicky prefer to talk about, Sherlock wondered, if not the
endless round of schoolgirl domesticity? There were a dizzying number of
possibilities; the key would be choosing correctly. Perhaps the experiment with
using St. John’s Wort to increase photosensitivity in dormice? Or Sherlock’s
attempts, secreted in the old wine cellar, to distill cyanide from leaves of
the wild Cherry Laurel? Vicky looked and smelled, constantly, of the out-of-
doors; perhaps she knew something about the growth habits of chemically
interesting plants. Or—Sherlock leaned closer to the door, behind which
Professor Brown was asking Vicky something about dogs—perhaps they could
discuss the two labradors, run down by a lorry last June, whose decomposition
Sherlock chronicled from start to finish.
What would it be like, then, to talk with another person about the really
interesting things? Sherlock felt a bit giddy. She pressed the side of her head
against the crack between the jamb and the office’s side door, reaching for
strains of conversation just at the moment when doing so became unnecessary.
‘You’re going to drown them?’ shrieked Vicky’s voice in Sherlock’s ear, and
Sherlock’s head snapped back. Professor Brown’s voice was a low murmur; Vicky’s
wail cut back in. ‘I’ve only been taking them bits and bobs, left over when
everyone’s finished their supper,’ she moaned. ‘You can’t, they’re only
babies.’
Sherlock revised her mental image of a Vicky enthralled by the chronicle of the
decaying labradors. She seemed, on the contrary, to have a soft spot for the
things. Pity, Sherlock thought. The fact of the two killed together had been
excellent good luck, from a perspective of experimental controls.
Still, Vicky’s seeming extreme attachment to these endangered puppies—Sherlock
could hear her through the door, sniffling and hiccuping as Professor Brown
said something about self-sufficiency and the school pig trough—presented some
interesting possibilities. Sherlock thought briefly about the promises she’d
just made; then of the conversations she’d imagined.
Chair legs scraped on the stone floor of Professor Brown’s study as Vicky got
up to leave, and Sherlock pictured her. Vicky with her tarnished straw bob,
perpetually windblown, flopping in her sea-glass eyes. Vicky with her dry skin
and her cracked lips. Vicky in hockey clothes; solid, sand-dark calves pounding
down the pitch. Vicky, noisy and rough, banging into their upper-sixth-form
biology class, and Sherlock had always found that annoying but now it seemed
somehow a blast of cold air on hot skin. Vicky beating her cleats against the
delicate legs of a Queen Anne chair, sitting across from Sherlock and not
giving her a second glance.
Vicky Trevor was on the other side of that door, blowing her nose wetly into
Professor Brown’s handkerchief, and Sherlock would save Vicky’s dogs.

Chapter End Notes
        1. Amazed gratitude to Ninette_Aubart for the illustrations of
           Vicky and Sherlock. Good grief, they're beautiful.
        2. Queen Margaret’s School is and was a real, prestigious girls’
           boarding school. In the 1940s its “real” location was in
           Scarborough, but it was relocated to Castle Howard (which,
           incidentally, was the location of the filming for the BBC
           version of Brideshead Revisited) at the beginning of WWII.
           Headmistress Joyce Brown really did serve at the helm from 1938
           to 1960, although everything else about her in this chapter is
           invented from whole cloth. All other characters in this chapter
           are fictional.
        3. Information about the applied nature of the sciences in girls’
           boarding schools at this time is from Rebecca Jennings’s
           Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A lesbian history of post-war
           Britain, which incidentally is a great read.
        4. The real first woman in a full professorship at Oxford was
           Agnes Headlam-Morley, who was appointed Montague Burton
           Professor of International Relations in October 1948. The first
           woman to perform open-heart surgery was American Nina Starr
           Braunwald, who did the first successful human heart valve
           replacement in 1960 (she also designed and fabricated the
           valve). The first female British Prime Minister, elected in
           1979, was, of course, Margaret Thatcher.
        5. The southeast wing of Howard Castle really did burn in 1940,
           though all speculation about the cause is strictly fictional.
           It was open to the sky for two decades, before being rebuilt in
           1960-61.
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes

1943
Castle Howard, North Yorkshire
 Wartime location of Queen Margaret’s School for Girls
‘Trevor!’ Sherlock called. Vicky was hunched over, slouching away from the
headmistress’s office, her hair falling in her eyes. She kept walking.
‘Trevor!’ Sherlock called again, breaking into a little run. Vicky turned with
a huff, and Sherlock saw at once that hers was one of those faces which
recovered slowly from an all-out cry. Eyes puffy and red; normally honeyed
complexion splotched dark. Sherlock had noticed that some children in the
village recovered their looks more quickly than others, after being talked down
from temper tantrums.
Vicky stood, embarrassed but defiant. Sherlock swallowed the sharp certainty of
making a bad first impression. She wished for a moment she’d waited until Vicky
was recovered. Then again, if Professor Brown was sending one of the
groundskeepers after Vicky’s dogs, there was very little time.
‘Trevor,’ she said again, drawing level with Vicky, just as Vicky said ‘Right,
yeah, and who are you?’
‘Sherlock Holmes,’ said Sherlock, feeling she should put out her hand, and
clutching her books to her chest instead. ‘I was in with Professor Brown just
before you.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Vicky. She scuffed her left toe against the floor, looking
down. ‘Old battle axe.’
‘Yes, and I, er,’ said Sherlock. ‘I overheard a bit of what you said in there.’
‘Yeah?’ said Vicky again, narrowing her eyes and raising her chin. ‘How’d you
happen to do that, Holmes?’
This, thought Sherlock, was going more painfully than anticipated. She could
feel her face getting hot. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I was just walking by, all right,
on my way back to my rooms. And I, er, I heard something about—about drowning
some dogs.’
Vicky’s mouth screwed itself into a vicious twist, and her cleat kicked out.
‘Yeah,’ she said again. ‘That’s what Brown said. Bloody—virago.’
‘Er,’ said Sherlock. ‘Yes. I think I may be able to help you with that.’ Vicky
looked blankly at her, but Sherlock, as she reminded herself now, was used to
swimming upstream. ‘Look, we need to hurry, all right?’ she said, and turned
about abruptly, motioning with her head for Vicky to come along. When she saw
that Vicky was following, she sped up further, pausing only to heave open the
heavy back door and lead Vicky through the monumental Georgian pillars and out
through the gardens, toward the lake.
The shortest path, if you knew the way, was through the hedge labyrinth, but
Sherlock glanced at Vicky and knew the time savings wouldn’t be worth the
minutes it would take to convince her. So she let herself be pulled by the
older girl around the edge of the maze, and back toward the Pitlochrie House
lodgings in the west wing.
‘They’re, uh, back at your dormitory then?’ Sherlock panted, close to jogging
as she tried to keep up with Vicky—who was, unsurprisingly, not winded in the
least.
‘Yeah,’ said Vicky. Sherlock was beginning to suspect her hopes of finding a
brilliant conversationalist in Vicky Trevor may have been misplaced.
‘Listen,’ said Vicky, after a time, ‘Why’re you doing this? You what—you really
like dogs?’
‘Er. Something like that,’ Sherlock gasped, thinking of the dead labradors and
how Vicky’s voice had broken when she’d said drown. ‘Listen, have you, er, have
you ever been in the burnt wing?’
Vicky eyed her sideways, and Sherlock rolled her eyes. Most QM’s students had
snuck in at least once, if only because it was out-of-bounds. But it didn’t do
to brag about it, especially if an unknown someone was asking directly. Betty
Donnelly had made that mistake, Sherlock remembered, and been tricked into a
month of after-class detentions.
‘I might’ve done,’ said Vicky, eventually, after sizing Sherlock up. ‘But it’s
not as if—I don’t know it well, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Well,’ said Sherlock, with a certain amount of satisfaction. ‘I do.’
***
It wasn’t a lie. Sherlock knew the burnt wing of Howard Castle very well
indeed.
She regretted bitterly, in fact, that she hadn’t been sacked from Hill Brow
School as a second-form rather than a fourth. That first, crucial spring after
the rooms had burned would have made a fascinating study. As it was, Sherlock
had arrived at QM’s a good year and a half after fire had left the walls of the
wing charred, smoking, and open to the elements. Her observational baseline,
then, had included some impressive colonies of black and slime moulds, which
thrived among the fallen, blackened beams; a carpet of moss developing along
the tops of the walls; starling-nests amongst the roofbeams; dormice inside the
furniture; and a few clumps of broad, ruffled Coriolus mushrooms gathered
around one leg of a ruined chest of drawers. Sherlock spent her first weeks at
QM’s collecting as many samples as she could, then holing up in a corner of the
disused wine cellar with stolen laboratory equipment, running tests.
But the real treasures came with time. For eighteen months now Sherlock had
tucked herself under fallen beams and huddled by partial walls, gathering her
samples and taking notes. Watching. Blackbirds and ground squirrels had carried
beech nuts from the forest behind the school; saplings had sprouted in the
sooty mix of blown-in soil and nitrogen-rich sediment created by the fire.
Sherlock had monitored the growth of the saplings out of the floors and the
window-wells, and even from the split and sodden upholstery of the Queen Anne
lounge chairs. Under them sprouted crops of bright-orange amanita muscaria: fly
agaric toadstools, whose psychotropic fruits were promptly harvested and toted
back to Sherlock’s makeshift laboratory for chemical comparison with forest-
grown specimens. In a darker corner, under a fall of rotting wood in a clump of
leaf debris, was a rarer find: I. patouillardii, deadly fibrecap, from whose
stained pink tops Sherlock duly distilled the poisonous muscarine.
It wasn’t, she told herself, as if there were anybody she would actually
poison. But somehow it was comforting to have the option.
If it hadn’t been for the allure of the burnt wing, Sherlock knew she would
have got herself expelled from QM’s months ago. A year and a half was far and
away the longest she’d lasted at any boarding school. And it wasn’t just the
chemical and biological opportunities that drew her in: she had become a
connoisseur of the wing’s human visitors, as well.
Which is to say—she rarely actually saw another person when she was lurking
amongst the wreckage. But day-to-day observation of every minuscule change in
the burnt rooms meant that she could hardly miss the signs of human activity
there. For one thing, the soaked, soot-covered hardwood floors were almost
better than damp soil for retaining the shape of footprints, and of anything
else a visitor might set on the ground.
Which is how Sherlock knew that Professor McAllister used her free Tuesday
afternoons, regular as clockwork, to come traipse from room to room with her
camera and heavy tripod; but that she only ever ventured as far as the old
Turquoise Drawing Room. And that Professors Hutchins and McCoy snuck off
together after hours on fair nights, with his round-bottomed lantern and her
stock of hand-rolled cigarettes, to one of the most devastated rooms on the far
east side of the wing. Sherlock had at first assumed—the nighttime, the
cigarettes, the relative youth of both professors—that these were sexual
assignations. But based on the footprint patterns and the abandoned cigarette
butts, she had reconsidered. McCoy usually perched on a half-burned wall while
Hutchins paced in front of her, approaching only occasionally and not lingering
for longer than a few moments. Friends, was Sherlock’s tentative conclusion:
close friends, in need of a place for confidential talks. Sherlock assumed it
was credible that close friends might need such a place. Never having had any,
her data was lacking.
There were the students as well, of course, though their actions were generally
less intriguing—not to mention less precisely deducible, since Sherlock had yet
to compile, as she had done for the staff, a shoe-size index for the entire
student body. Most common was after-hours heavy petting in the more protected
of the rooms, the ones far from the other wings but which still retained beds
and partial ceilings. Sherlock kept a desultory eye on the state of the
bedclothes in these rooms, more to cultivate the habit than out of any true
interest. Likewise the abandoned evidence of contraband—beer bottles and fag
ends. Her favourite student-left traces were the trails of smaller, hurried
footsteps, trails that barely breached the wing’s entrance before retreating in
a rush of smudges: first-formers, venturing out-of-bounds on a dare.
In fact Sherlock Holmes, for a few months in 1943, may have been the world’s
expert on the south-east wing of Howard Castle. So that now, having retrieved
six writhing puppies and one long-suffering terrier bitch from the hollow near
the upper-sixth-form Pitlochrie House dormitory, Sherlock couldn’t help noting
the slight changes in her surroundings as she and Vicky carried the hamper
between them into the far south end of the wing.
The wreckage here tended toward collapse. The outer stone walls still remained,
at least to waist height, but inside them it was the area closest to a state of
nature, and that least often visited by anyone besides Sherlock.
She motioned to Vicky with her head, and they set the hamper down. The puppies
squirmed over one another, one of them flopping over the side of the hamper and
snuffling half-blind along the floor. Sherlock mucked about for a minute in the
next room over, and came back with a few long boards, formerly part of a bed,
which were soon hefted over one corner of the exposed walls to form a kind of
den for the animals. Vicky stood back to contemplate it. She nodded
uncertainly, scuffing her cleat again against the blackened floor.
‘This is good, really good, I mean,’ she said at last, turning around to
retrieve the basket with a bit of a stoop to her shoulders, ‘but Brown’ll be
watching the kitchen scraps now.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Sherlock, absently, watching Vicky’s fingers fidget nervously at
the rattan weave of the hamper.
‘Well, I mean to say—what am I supposed to feed them?’ asked Vicky.
Sherlock shrugged, and shifted her eyes. ‘They’re ratters, aren’t they?’ she
said. ‘There’s plenty of mice and rats running about in here.’ Vicky swung the
dogs into the den, looking unconvinced, and stepped back a few feet.
Sherlock pushed on the hamper with her toe, her own breath in her ears. ‘And,
er,’ she said, ‘I suppose Brown won’t be watching my dinner. I could, you know,
sneak some out to them.’
She felt this offer strayed dangerously close to fawning, so she knelt down by
the basket to cover her embarrassment, and reached out to push back a branch.
Vicky was making a disbelieving noise. ‘You couldn’t. Not really.’
‘You were,’ Sherlock pointed out, but Vicky shook her head.
‘I was nicking the leftovers from everybody’s plates. We hardly get enough to
eat as it—Holmes!’
For Sherlock’s wrist had strayed too close to the puppies, and the bitch had
swung her head around and snapped her jaws into the flesh of Sherlock’s
forearm. Sherlock squeaked and scrambled back, her hand clamped over her
injured arm.
‘Hell!’ said Vicky, closing the distance between them and almost-touching
Sherlock’s arm. ‘Are you all right? You’ve got to go to the nurse’s room, you—’
‘No,’ Sherlock was saying over her in a calm voice, peeling her sleeve back
from the blood- and spit-wet bite, ‘I’m fine.’
Vicky laughed at that. ‘No you’re not,’ she said. ‘You’re bleeding all over,
god, look at it all, you need—’
‘It’s fine,’ said Sherlock again, distracted now as she prodded at the wound.
‘I don’t want it covered up by a bandage. There are things I want to see about
it. Tests…’
There was a silence, in which Sherlock was too distracted by the dog bite to
notice Vicky gaping. ‘There are—what you want to do?’ she said at last, and
Sherlock looked up.
‘Tests,’ she said, secretly thrilled at this show of interest. ‘I’ve charted
progress of similar-sized wounds caused by nail punctures and knife abrasions,
but nothing from animal teeth, so naturally I—’
‘You’re mad,’ Vicky said, her voice a bit hysterical. ‘You cut yourself to see
what happens?’
‘Of course not,’ said Sherlock, congratulating herself on her own patience. ‘I
just make use of the opportunities that come along.’
Vicky still looked stubborn. ‘That’ll get infected,’ she said.
Sherlock rolled her eyes, but she was pleased again to be given such an
opening. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you what I want to do. And you can
watch me rinse it off and clean it up.’ And Vicky had little choice but to
follow her back out of the burnt wing, and down into the wine cellar.
***
Hours later, alone in her narrow bed by the window, with Annie snoring away in
the cot across the room, Sherlock ran over and over her interactions with Vicky
Trevor, sorting through them, cataloguing. She was keyed-up, buzzing from the
unaccustomed interaction with another person, another QM’s girl. She felt full
of all those things she didn’t know.
Vicky hadn’t revealed any hidden brilliance in conversation, which might have
been disappointing. Then again, she hadn’t been disgusted with Sherlock over
the removal of various fungi from the dogs’ room, and had seemed really a bit
impressed with the makeshift laboratory in the wine cellar—especially after
Sherlock had shrugged and told her shedidn’t mind, Vicky could help herself to
a bottle of the Bordeaux.
After that, Vicky had seemed happy to sit and watch, taking swigs from the
bottle as Sherlock had disinfected the bite, and even asking the occasional
question. What were those poultices, the red and the white? Was Sherlock sure
what she was doing? Why was she taking measurements of the wound? Did she need
Vicky’s help? Sherlock hadn’t strictly speaking, needed anything of the sort,
so she was a bit surprised with herself for beckoning Vicky over, Vicky’s
chapped fingers holding the calipers firm against Sherlock’s goose-fleshed arm
as Sherlock jotted figures in a notebook.
Close-up Vicky’s skin had been splotchy, and there had been shiny blackheads
all across her chin. Still, she had smelled sweet and dirty like the new-mown
football pitch after a rain.
In her narrow bed by the window, Sherlock thought of Justine and Rosie, tangled
in the cupboard before Christmas. She rolled over and gave a huge yawn,
thinking about Rosie’s hands up Justine’s cashmere pullover, and then about the
compressed curves of Vicky’s chest under her argyle sweater-vest, and the soft-
looking fuzz on her golden calves.
***
Sherlock was proud of the fact that her motivation in refusing dog-bite
treatment actually had been—primarily, at least—the opportunity for
experimentation on the wound. There was, however, an unforeseen benefit, in the
form of a guilt-stricken Vicky Trevor.
Vicky, it seemed, felt obligated to check up on the wound’s healing progress
frequently over the next two weeks, and Sherlock did nothing to discourage the
impulse. She may, in fact, have altered the composition of the white poultice
to be ever-so-slightly more acidic, which she may have already known would
cause an angry rash. Vicky had been properly horrified. Afterward she had
brought Sherlock a wafer from the Upper Sixth Form Tea—and a few days later,
when Cecilia MacIntosh had teased Sherlock about the rash, Vicky had nearly
punched her. Sherlock couldn’t remember ever being defended before.
Continued contact, then, had required little to no fawning on Sherlock’s part.
Vicky was especially amenable since Sherlock, true to her word, had been saving
aside her meat and cheese rations from dinner and supper, and slipping them to
the newly-relocated dogs—which Sherlock scarcely minded. Forcing herself to
swallow the grease and gristle of the third-rate meats had always been more of
a trial than a boon, anyway.
Most evenings, then, as the chilly mists of April gave way to faltering May
sunshine, found Sherlock and Vicky perched on the moss tops of the half-walls
in the south-east wing, while the buff-coloured terrier pups rolled about on
the floor and blinked open their gummy eyes.
Sherlock was beginning to admit to herself, in the privacy of her own mind,
that Vicky Trevor was not, nor ever would be, a brilliant mind. She found
herself surprisingly unfazed by this; Vicky was a girl of action, and Sherlock
was becoming fonder all the time of watching her act. Whenever Vicky touched
Sherlock—glancing touches in the wine cellar and the burnt wing, brushing
fingers as Vicky handed her the gift of the tea wafer—somehow those parts of
Vicky’s body which had come into contact with Sherlock’s, acquired an added
interest in Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock had taken to sitting across the aisle
from Vicky in their shared Biology class, and watching Vicky’s fingers as she
fidgeted with her pencil. The memory of the calipers would come back to her.
‘They touched me once,’ hovered around her unvoiced, and Sherlock would shiver.
So Vicky did have other points of interest. What was more disappointing than
her lack of genius, is that she often seemed uninterested in the topics
Sherlock raised—and Sherlock told herself that she was sure, at least, of her
own brilliance. They had taken a few good walks around the grounds together,
but Vicky had seemed keenest on discussing hockey and rounders. Sherlock found
this discouraging. Vicky had yawned when Sherlock brought up the botanical
curiosities of the beech forest, and had seemed frankly appalled at the barest
hints about the photosensitivity experiment.
So Sherlock was surprised, one evening in early May, when she hit at last upon
a topic that did interest Vicky Trevor.
‘Apparently,’ Sherlock was saying, lounging on the sooty floor in front of
Vicky, ‘Professor Brown has talked to Professor Hill, and I’ll be starting
private lessons with her next year, in chemistry.’ Vicky, sat on the wall with
her heels kicking against the wall, grunted. ‘Non-applied chemistry,’ clarified
Sherlock. Vicky grunted again, and Sherlock sighed. There was a silence, as
Sherlock’s thoughts wandered and Vicky’s heels kicked.
‘It drove me mad, seeing Brown again and her being so—so nice to me,’ mused
Sherlock, after a moment. ‘She asked me again about this place, and I really
did want to tell her, you know? But I’d promised I wouldn’t come here,
so—obviously I couldn’t say.’ Sherlock scowled, pulling up tufts of grass from
between the floor boards.
‘What about this place?’ said Vicky. ‘What could you have to say about it?’
‘Oh,’ Sherlock waved her hand, ‘about the fire. It’s so obvious the Howard boy
was lying; I doubt anyone even called in the police to go over the Orange Room
before they sacked the gardener. But of course students aren’t supposed to come
here. I’ve been a bad influence on y—’
‘How on earth do you know about the fire?’ interrupted Vicky, and Sherlock
thought she noticed a hint of a blush on the other girl’s tanned cheeks. The
next second she questioned the evidence of her own eyes—but still felt a bit
daring, nonetheless.
‘I just looked around, in the room where it started,’ she said, shrugging.
Vicky raised her eyebrows, so Sherlock said, ‘What, you think I’m lying? You
want to see?’
‘Course I do,’ said Vicky, which was the most emphatic statement of interest
Sherlock had managed to prise from her in three weeks of attempted
conversation.
So Vicky raced after Sherlock down the wrecked corridors to the entrance of the
Orange Room. The door here was still on its hinges, though it didn’t latch, and
Sherlock nudged it open with the toe of her shoe. The room behind the door was
blacker than anywhere else in the burnt wing, with no recognisable furniture
remaining—only piles of sooty timber and melted scraps. Sherlock walked
directly to the charred stone of a fireplace and chimney in one corner, and
gestured.
‘So you see,’ she said.
Vicky pulled a face. ‘Do not,’ she said. ‘You’re having me on.’
‘I am not!’ Sherlock exclaimed, incensed. ‘Just look for a minute. They admit
this is where the fire started. But they say it was started by the tipped-over
lantern of an under-gardener.’ She paused; surely after that it would be
obvious?
‘So what?’ Vicky said. Sherlock inflated her cheeks and exhaled through her
mouth.
‘So just look at the way the fire burned. It obviously started in the
fireplace; that’s where the scorch marks are most intense, and you can even see
how it traveled, how the flames slanted, if you look along the walls.’ She
pointed. ‘And first of all, this room is in the interior of the house, on a
side away from the gardens. Why would the under-gardener be here in the first
place?’
Vicky started to speak, but Sherlock cut her off. ‘Second,’ she said, why
should he be using his lantern this far inside the house? It’s been wired for
electricity since sometime in the 20s; I checked. Third, why would he put his
lit lantern down in the fireplace? Fourth, once it was in there, how do you
reckon it would have got tipped over? It’s not like it’s easy to trip and fall
into it, even how the room is now, and back then it was protected by a fire
screen.’
Vicky’s eyebrows were up again, but this time she seemed more impressed than
doubtful. ‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ She stared at the fireplace,
thinking it over.
Sherlock snorted. ‘Course I am,’ she said. ‘I told you.’
‘So how do you know it was the Howard boy who was lying?’ asked Vicky.
Sherlock pointed to the side of the fireplace, where some glass debris had been
gathered into a pile. ‘They didn’t even bother clearing it out,’ she said,
disgusted. ‘They obviously knew nobody would question their story. It hasn’t
been left here since then,’ she added, reacting to the movement of Vicky’s
face. ‘The pieces are charred and some of them are a bit melted. Someone was in
here drinking—cheap liquor, it’s glass from the kind of bottle Mr. Mulligan
from town always wraps up in brown paper.’
Sherlock pointed to the intact threads of a fragment of bottle-neck. Vicky
said, ‘That’s Brown Bear gin,’ and Sherlock couldn’t help her grin; it was
oddly thrilling that Vicky could add something Sherlock hadn’t known. ‘Really?’
she said. ‘You recognise it?’
Vicky shuffled a little, looking much less thrilled. ‘M’dad drinks it,
sometimes,’ she mumbled.
‘Well,’ said Sherlock, slightly awkward herself, ‘the Howards can obviously
afford better than Brown Bear. The servants have their own quarters, on the
other side of the house; they’d have no reason to drink in here. And of the
three Howard children, one was only seven at the time, and the other had
already gone up to Cambridge. Young Ralph was home on Easter holiday from Eton,
so. That’s that. Can’t tell Brown, though, or she’d know for sure I was here.’
Vicky was looking from the glass shards to Sherlock’s face. ‘I don’t reckon,’
she said, quiet. Sherlock was still crouched down, looking at the shards.
‘Say,’ said Vicky, ‘is this what you plan to do, later? You training to, I
dunno, go into that new ladies’ division of the Met? Something like that?’
‘I—hadn’t really thought,’ said Sherlock, distracted halfway through
straightening up next to the blackened wall. It had always been something she
did without questioning, this piecing together of one thing with another, this
solving of the puzzles around her. She felt alive when she was doing it. She
hadn’t thought any further than that. ‘Is this what they do? Those lady Met
officers?’
‘No idea,’ said Vicky, standing too. ‘If it is, you’d be brilliant at it.’
Sherlock felt herself flush.
With Sherlock nearly leaning against the wall and Vicky having stepped over the
glass shards when she stood, they were suddenly close together, closer than
Sherlock had expected. The physicality of Vicky was slightly overwhelming this
close up. Sherlock could hear Vicky’s breathing, and see the shinier rougher
texture of her forehead in the middle, where her skin turned from dry to oily.
Sherlock had been so absorbed in explaining the glass and the lantern—she
hadn’t thought what would happen next. Her mouth was dry.
‘Do you,’ she cleared her throat. ‘Do you know—what you’re doing then?’ Vicky’s
hand came up and pushed Sherlock’s hair back from her face, and then stayed
nestled in Sherlock’s curls. Vicky was licking dry lips. ‘Er,’ said Sherlock,
realising Vicky might think she was referring to the hand, and the closeness.
‘Er. Doing—after you graduate next month, I mean?’
‘I, uh,’ said Vicky, breathy, like she hardly knew what she was saying. She was
leaning even closer to Sherlock. ‘My aunt wants me at home but I thought I
might—’ and Sherlock gave a little squeak as Vicky brushed her lips across
Sherlock’s, hand tightening in Sherlock’s hair.
Sherlock’s wild instinct, for the first moment of the kiss, was to break and
run. The panic of all this new touching, and of not knowing what to do with her
body, were too much. She wanted to be somewhere else, alone like she was used
to, thinking it all out—that’s what would be comfortable, what would be
familiar. But a second later she remembered Rosie and Justine. She remembered
lying in her narrow bed thinking of Rosie and Justine and of Vicky, and she
took a sudden, deep breath through her nose and pushed her lips back against
Vicky’s lips, and lifted her hands up, feeling they ought to come in useful
somehow. After a moment she brought them down again, to rest uncertainly on
Vicky’s curved and compact hips.
Vicky’s other arm went around Sherlock’s middle, blunt fingers exploring her
waist, and the bones of her back. Sherlock could feel the drag of each of
Vicky’s fingertips through her light blouse. Her skin tingled where they
touched. That was nice, she thought. She pushed into the kiss again.
And Vicky’s breath caught, tiny in her throat. Sherlock felt the gentlest touch
of Vicky’s wet tongue lapping against her bottom lip, and she thought:
soft…wet. And then something slid into place inside her. She no longer wanted
to bolt; she wanted more touching, more texture. More sensation of Vicky’s skin
against her skin. Vicky’s solid, curvy little body beating under Sherlock’s
hands, and she wanted to—she wanted—
She opened her mouth blindly around the tip of Vicky’s tongue, pressed her hips
forward into Vicky’s hips—just as Vicky pulled away.
‘Nugh—’ said Sherlock, chasing after Vicky’s mouth, but Vicky turned her head
to the side, panting and not looking at Sherlock. Sherlock was out of breath,
herself.
‘I d-don’t know why—’ stammered Vicky. ‘You’re not—I usually—’
‘I just—’
Vicky looked back at Sherlock’s forehead then, and Sherlock had no idea what
was going on. Had she done something wrong? She had only grasped the appeal of
the kiss in the last few seconds, and now her skin and her lips were tingling
and her chest was tight, and Vicky was petting her hair but refusing to meet
her eyes. Perhaps if she tried again, things would go better? But when she
pushed forward again, Vicky’s hand held her fast by the shoulder as her other
hand raked through Sherlock’s curls.
‘You’re so—odd,’ said Vicky, and kept petting. Sherlock was completely at sea.
Vicky’s eyes were focused so intensely on her hairline; it was unnerving. ‘You
could be pretty, you know,’ said Vicky at last, still petting, ‘if you spruced
yourself up a bit.’
Pardon? thought Sherlock, but she couldn’t form the word. ‘I—’ she said,
stupidly, and stopped.
Vicky didn’t seem to notice. ‘You’ve got the maddest eyes,’ she said. And she
stepped back from Sherlock, looking anywhere else but her face.
After an extremely awkward silence, in which Sherlock boggled at Vicky and
Vicky developed an interest in the burn patterns on the walls, Sherlock cleared
her throat.
‘We should get back,’ she said. ‘It must be getting toward curfew.’
Vicky nodded, and in later years Sherlock wouldn’t be able to remember walking
with Vicky from the burnt wing, or whether they said anything at all, or how
she made her way back to her own room and crawled into her cold bed. The only
thing she would remember, when she thought back to that night, was huddling
under the covers in utter perplexity, remembering the feel of Vicky’s wet
tongue on her lower lip.

Chapter End Notes
     Practically no end-notes on this chapter! Nobody is more surprised
     than I.
     I just wanted to reiterate that, although Castle Howard and the 1940
     fire in its south-east wing are real, all the other circumstances
     surrounding them are purely fictional.
     And also, more huge thanks to Ninette_Aubart for the amaaaazing art.
     <3
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Notes
     Special thanks to Nympheline for her help with the first section of
     this chapter; and, as always, big thanks to Sparcck and Sophiahelix
     for their excellent beta work.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Sherlock Holmes looked in the mirror. Hard.
The room was awash in rumpled, stolen garments. Nicked, despite the stern words
of Professor Brown, from the drama department and the lost and found, they were
now strewn on the bed, on the floor, over the lampshade, between stacks of
books. Distant shouts and whistles filtered through the open window from a
football match on the pitch, and out in the corridor Cassie Rogers was giggling
into the telephone. Sherlock let it all sink quietly into the back surfaces of
her mind as she focused on her reflection.
The clothes were...intriguing. They sat uncomfortably—unnaturally—on her frame.
The dark woolen skirt was more restricting, with its trim lines, than her usual
sack-like frocks; the stiffened ruffles down the front of the cardigan were
fussy and intrusive against the skin of her chest. Strange, too, her feet in
the heeled sandals. The long lines of her calves looked tighter, and her hips,
of their own accord, pushed forward slightly to balance. She’d pulled her mass
of curls up off her neck and away from her face, and the weight of the gathered
ponytail dragged at the back of her head. It didn’t feel natural, certainly.
But it did feel interesting.
It felt a bit, thought Sherlock, turning to examine the effect in profile, like
trying on another person, for size. As if she could step into another’s skin,
live in another’s body. This was the outer casing of a Cassie Rogers, or a
Stasia Hamilton, or any one of Sherlock’s docile, marriage-minded classmates.
Is this what Vicky wanted? You could be pretty, you know, if you spruced
yourself up a bit. You’ve got the maddest eyes. Is this what she’d meant? And
then, Sherlock’s mind charging forward, she wondered: is this what it felt
like, to move through one’s days as one of the normal girls?
It must be a hobbled sort of life, she thought, shifting around to check the
lines up the backs of Annie’s good stockings. So many seams to keep in
alignment, to be thinking of constantly. A limited range of motion. When she
walked in the heels (low as they were) her steps were shorter; she was very
aware of her knees and her hips. She wondered if she would be able to run,
should the opportunity present itself.
She faced forward again, and met her own eyes in the mirror. Grimaced. Her
face, she thought, was all wrong. Too sharp, too demanding. She softened her
features: opened her eyes wider, pursed her lips. No; too much. She smoothed
her features back to their neutral expression; then stopped her lips just short
of a purse, so their edges were soft, and added a hint of a smile. Held the
smile and turned away from the mirror, noting the feel of that facial
expression. It had looked, she thought, slightly wistful. And it
felt...vulnerable.
This was all very interesting.
Sherlock could remember three instances in the last two weeks alone when it
would have been to her advantage to look convincingly wistful. At that thought
her expression broke into a full, involuntary smile, and she turned back to the
mirror, grinning, but—.
But no, she thought, looking through critical eyes at her smiling mouth. That
wouldn’t do at all. Her teeth looked sharp, though she couldn’t see their
edges. She looked hungry. Sherlock couldn’t think of a time she’d ever seen
Cassie Rogers look hungry like that. So she rearranged her features again: a
soft, maternal sort of smile. The kind of smile she’d seen on Cassie’s face
when Cassie’s young man visited with his baby sister during Parents’ Weekend.
Solicitous. Caring. Verging on fawning. Sherlock held it for as long as she
could, trying to feel what might be inside Cassie to produce such a simper.
Then her façade shattered and she dissolved into laughter, collapsing on the
floor in giggles in front of the mirror.
But this was all fantastic, she thought, when her laughing jag had abated.
Bloody fantastic. Her blood was running high in her cheeks and her chest, and
she felt herself grinning. It was like the rush of a first-time success in the
laboratory, like a magic power she hadn’t realised she possessed. Sherlock sat
sprawled on the floor, marveling. If she could learn to sham Cassie
Rogers—Cassie, of all people!—then who couldn’t she put on? She scrambled
breathless to her feet and looked around at the wrecked room, all thoughts of
Vicky Trevor momentarily forgotten.
A stable of potential selves crowded Sherlock’s mind. Whom should she call? Who
would be useful? She thought of the week before, when she’d attempted to win
her way into the greenhouses by persuading the new gardener that she was twelve
instead of fifteen, terribly homesick after her first month at school.
Yes: shamming youth, then. Her bottom lip caught in her teeth, she pawed
through the drama department pile, coming out with a little girl’s green
playsuit. It looked just slightly too small. Then:
Pulling her hair down. Chucking the twinset and skirt. Shimmying into the
playsuit. A little tight, as predicted, but that should work to her advantage,
shouldn’t it, because she wanted to—oh.
No.
She’d turned to face the the mirror again, and made a face. This wouldn’t do at
all. The undersized child’s clothes made her appear older, not younger. She
looked like some kind of grotesque vaudeville child performer kept on the
circuit past her prime. She gave a horrified giggle; reached up and sectioned
her hair on either side of her head, twisting it into schoolgirl plaits. Even
worse. She stuck out her tongue, then let her face collapse back into its
natural impassivity.
Data, she thought. Her longest-lasting tutor had always said, that the
resounding failure of a hypothesis sometimes proved more useful than a success.
Data.
Sherlock could not imagine a scenario in which she would benefit from looking
like an overgrown infant. But if aged-down and undersized produced the
impression of age, then aged-up and oversized…
Throwing the playsuit back on the pile. Climbing into a charcoal-grey skirt
suit. Looking in the mirror and: yes. This was much more the thing. The woolen
fabric, standing out from her slim frame; her neck and arms dwarfed by the
shoulder pads. The skirt just snug enough to stay up. The contours of
Sherlock’s body lost in a sea of material. It was magic: how she seemed,
instantly, smaller yet and younger than she was.
Fascinating, thought Sherlock, breathing hard, staring in the mirror, colour
rising in her cheeks. And she had to school away that shark-like grin.
Fascinating, she reminded herself, but of limited immediate use. Relaxed
clothing rules or no, she could hardly start walking around QM’s dressed like
somebody’s stenographer. She shucked off the jacket and started undoing the
button placket on the skirt. If only the rules on uniforms were still in place,
she thought. It would be so easy to nick a whole set of school uniforms in
varying sizes, to alter them in discreet ways. One slightly too small, for when
she wanted to intimidate the younger girls; one slightly too large, for when
she wanted to plead innocence with the staff.
She was throwing clothes aside now, digging down into the pile. Perhaps a few
old uniforms had been delivered to the lost and found. And yes indeed: here was
one toward the bottom. Mis-matched, which might be why it had escaped salvage:
a smaller skirt paired with a larger blouse and cardigan. She looked at it
critically. Another thing her tutor had told her once: every idiosyncrasy can
be put to use.
Some of the girls, Sherlock knew, let out their tops and padded out their
brassieres with handkerchiefs. It was something to try, she thought
skeptically, looking at the over-large blouse in the mirror, though she had
never seen it look convincing on anyone else.
There was, nonetheless, sometimes a certain appeal. Sherlock had seen Cecilia
McIntosh do it before she’d snuck out one night to meet a boy in the village,
high heels in a shopping bag over her shoulder, to change into outside the pub.
Cecilia had done up her lips with a red lipstick she’d stolen off her married
sister, and had even rouged her cheeks. She hadn’t looked convincingly older,
thought Sherlock, but she had looked convincingly Cecilia. Wild and reckless,
and courting disaster. Sherlock felt that way too, at times. It was
conceivable, wasn’t it, that looking convincingly Cecilia might have its
advantages? Cecilia certainly seemed to think so.
So Sherlock crossed the room; rummaged in Annie’s bedside table for cosmetics.
Her mouth was open; her skin prickling; her tongue between her teeth. A light
pink lipstick and one the colour of wine; black mascara, and a blusher compact.
Sherlock crossed back to the mirror and pursed her lips. Painted them wine-
dark, thinking of Cecilia. Of that boy from St. George’s asking Cecilia ‘Do you
know how to hold the bat, then?’ and the way Cecilia’s mouth moved when she
said ‘You could show me.’ Thinking of Cecilia’s lips, of Cecilia’s feet in
black patent leather heels. Switching to mascara and—she promptly poked herself
in the eye trying to blacken her lashes. When she stepped back to look, she
couldn’t stifle a groan.
There was obviously more to being convincingly Cecilia than met the eye. The
paint looked clownish, laughable. An amateur’s attempt at a forbidden act; of
no conceivable use. She wet a flannel at the basin to scrub it off. Perhaps, if
Sherlock offered to do Annie’s chemistry and biology papers for a spell, Annie
might teach her the trick of putting the stuff on properly. It was so—
Sherlock glanced back up into the mirror and started. Then drew close,
fascinated, her eyes wide.
The flannel had only smeared the mascara, not taken it off. Now she appeared to
have two black eyes. And the one on the left, she thought, getting even closer
to the mirror, was passingly convincing. She remembered Vicky, threatening to
punch Cecilia for teasing Sherlock. Staff reactions to physical fights nearly
always favoured the party with the more serious injuries, regardless of who had
provoked whom. Perhaps a pre-ripped uniform would be worth adding to the
arsenal: a pre-ripped uniform, a mascara tube, and a wet flannel.
Better and better, she thought, raising her eyebrows at her reflection, her
tongue darting out to run over her bottom lip. And she wondered—
She dragged the towel across her mouth. Smeared the paint on one side, staring
at her own lips. Made a fist; punched herself lightly in the mouth on the
opposite side, knocking her lip against her teeth and smearing dark red across
her jawline. Grunted a little, soft and involuntary, deep in her diaphragm as
her knuckles connected with her own mouth.
She regarded the results, breathing hard, frowning in concentration. Neither
side was entirely satisfactory. She was limited by her body’s instinctive
reluctance to split its own lip. Nevertheless, with the proper, dark-rust
colour of paint, the punched side might make a passable imitation of blood.
Perhaps she could lay in some supplies during the next school trip into town,
and—
Town. Going into town. Sherlock sagged against the mirror, gripping the sides
to hold herself up. QM’s girls weren’t allowed there without an escort, but
nobody kept tabs on the village children. Vistas of freedom opened out before
her eyes and she blinked hard, biting her paint-smeared lips. She had seen the
village girls roaming all around the markets and the common squares, and the
boys—
—and here Sherlock’s ruined mouth opened in a perfect O, and she gaped at her
reflection. Her breath punched out of her lungs in a soft moan, standing in
front of the mirror in an oversized white blouse and a uniform skirt.
Theboys.
They could go anywhere.
Sherlock had seen village boys running in and out of shops and market stalls
and even public houses, delivering messages to their fathers there. She turned
to the pile of clothes again, her hands tearing at the zip on the back of the
skirt. This, she thought, stripped and laughing and burrowing into her fabric
hoard, was going to be brilliant.
***
Vicky Trevor sat, ill at ease in a starched blue pinafore dress, her hair
curled for the first time in two years. She lifted her teacup to the drone of
her aunt’s voice.
Ever since Vicky’s mother had died in a boating accident, Emily Trevor had
taken it upon herself to impart to her niece select pieces of motherly wisdom.
Vicky sometimes thought bitterly that, as Aunt Emily’s own children hated the
sight of her and of each other, she was hardly qualified for the position. It
could not have been plainer, however—for the simple reason that she came right
out and said so, loudly and often—that Aunt Emily fancied these lectures to be
indispensable to Vicky’s welfare. Her self-sacrifice in bestowing them was
amongst her favourite subjects on which to remark—along with speculation as to
where Vicky would be without her, and dire pronouncements about young ladies
left to grow up without female role models. Vicky let her gaze wander to the
rounders pitch, where a group of girls had got together a pick-up game. She
sighed.
‘I’m sure,’ Aunt Emily was saying, ‘that the entire family is very proud of
you, my dear, for sticking out your education into your upper sixth year.
Heaven knows it’s more than your mother did.’
She paused here, and Vicky said ‘Mmmm,’ still gazing over at the pitch. It was
encouragement enough, apparently.
‘Not that I would dream of criticising your dear sweet mother,’ Aunt Emily went
on. ‘A lovelier woman I could never hope to meet. And after all, she was
engaged by the time she was sixteen, wasn’t she? No sense in pressing on with
Tennyson and, what have you, trigonometry, when she had a home waiting for her,
was there?’
‘Mm,’ said Vicky again, watching Amy Larson swing wide of a bowl from Tara
Fredericks-Halloway. There was an accompanying groan from the rest of the side
as those previously in line to bat headed out toward the posts. Vicky could
have made that, she was sure. She could almost feel the swing her shoulders
would have taken: the satisfying thwack of the ball connecting with the bat.
‘And the way she doted on your father,’ Aunt Emily was saying. ‘You know, he
was so happy in those days, it was plain how much he loved her…’ She trailed
off, and sighed. Vicky supposed that by ‘happy’ Aunt Emily must mean ’sober.’
In her mind’s eye she ran past the first post, cleats digging into the turf as
she skidded into second and faced Tara’s imaginary back, waiting for the next
ball.
‘And you know, dear, it won’t be much longer before he’s looking to retire, and
he’ll need somewhere to rest, after all the hard work he’s put into paying for
your schooling. A fine strapping young girl like you, you’ll soon have a home
and a family of your own, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty of room for your
sweet old dad, won’t you?’
‘I—’ Vicky said, her tongue seeming to curdle in her mouth at this picture of
domesticity. The imaginary match vanished, and the real one took its place:
Tara off the mound, and Vicky out of the game.
‘But I’m getting ahead of myself,’ said Aunt Emily, seemingly oblivious to
Vicky’s discomfort. ‘You have yet to tell me about your prospects. Have you a
beau in the wings?’ She looked so hopeful that Vicky almost laughed into her
teacup.
‘Not—no, not exactly,’ she stammered.
Aunt Emily tutted. ‘The headmistress assures me that there are opportunities
specially designed to allow you to socialise with the area boys’ schools,’ she
said, stiffly.
Vicky scowled into her teacup. ‘Yeah, but,’ she said, ‘I went to the Christmas
dance with all the hockey girls. It was—you know, we had a laugh. Miss Gower
was visiting; her younger sister’s still here, and—’
She shut her mouth, cursing herself, but it was too late. Aunt Emily had
assumed what Vicky always thought of as “that look”: drawing herself up in her
chair, her eyes slitting toward on Vicky; her mouth screwing down on itself.
‘Anabelle Gower,’ Aunt Emily said. And waited.
‘Yes,’ said Vicky. ‘She came to—er, to see us all. Again.’
‘You know that Miss Gower is engaged,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘You know that she made
the most of her opportunities while she was a student here.’
‘Yes,’ said Vicky, miserably, looking away from her aunt to where the match was
breaking up, and the groundskeeper was dragging a young village boy up the
drive by his ear.
She knew it now, anyway. Anabelle had looked every inch the grown-up lady in
her fitted black evening gown, with the décolletage and the wrap skirt that
teased open at the side. She’d been the only woman at the dance with real
stockings, not just seams painted up the backs of her legs.
Anabelle, Vicky remembered, had always loved to complain; and now she had
complained about how rationing made a proper trousseau impossible; about how
the war would force them to honeymoon in Scotland instead of France. Vicky had
sneaked out back with Tara Fredericks-Halloway and drunk most of a flask of
gin, and when they’d come back in she had imagined to herself that she was
Anabelle’s rich young fiancé; that she was showering lovely, soft Anabelle with
black-market stockings and highland holidays. That it would be Vicky making
Anabelle gasp and squirm on a hotel bed in Edinburgh. She had a vague memory of
trying to kiss Anabelle’s pale neck in the darkened corridor, sloppy and
earnest, and Anabelle laughing and calling her a silly old thing before
returning to the party. Afterward Vicky had thrown up in the WC for most of the
night, thinking of her dad.
Now, sitting across from Aunt Emily, Vicky felt repulsed. Everything about the
scene was wrong: her starched dress, her curled hair, her aunt’s questions. It
wasn’t where Vicky belonged. She thought of Anabelle—and then, with a stab of
discomfort, about kissing odd, grubby little Sherlock Holmes that night last
week in the burnt wing. Flashes of Sherlock’s knobby elbows, and her dirty
knees, and her mad grey eyes—nothing about her like Anabelle at all, and
nothing like Vicky, either.
Desperately confusing. She pushed the memory down. She thought of marriage, and
Anabelle, and her dad getting old and feeble in Beverley, and wanted to lash
out at something, anything. ‘I—I thought I might join up,’ she blurted out,
cutting off Aunt Emily mid-sentence. ‘You know, the ATS, the women’s service.’
Aunt Emily looked shocked at the interruption. Vicky ploughed on. ‘Do my part
for King and Country,’ she said, blindly, feeling she must make headway somehow
against the tide. She had never been good with words. She thought of the
recruitment adverts. ‘We all must all pitch in and do our part, I think,’ she
said. ‘The war effort needs all of us. I believe, that is I’ve—I’ve heard, that
girls like me—do well there.’
Aunt Emily glared at her a moment; then her face softened, grew sad. Not the
response Vicky had anticipated. Horrified, Vicky felt tears start in her eyes.
She looked away again, across the green, to where the groundskeeper seemed to
be giving the village lad a telling-off.
‘You must do as you see fit, Victoria,’ Aunt Emily sighed. ‘But I do hope
you’ll think things over during these next few months. This flirtation
with—well, this tomboy manner you’ve cultivated. It’s all very well for
schoolgirls, but there comes a time to put away childish things. You—you could
be a real lady. You must choose now, before it’s too late.’
Vicky blinked hard and jutted out her chin, still looking away. She started
when her aunt’s weathered hand closed over her arm.
‘Believe me, my dear,’ said Aunt Emily, her voice oddly kind, ‘it will be a
lonely kind of life, otherwise. It’s a kind of—of perpetual childhood. Your
friends will all grow up around you. You’ll be forever left behind.’
Vicky took her eyes from the groundskeeper and stared at her aunt in horror,
but Emily Trevor had an unwonted earnestness in her damp brown eyes. They
looked at each other, woman and girl in the May sunlight. Emily squeezed, then
patted Vicky’s arm.
***
It was a near thing, but Sherlock was reasonably sure that none of her
classmates—and most especially not Vicky, sitting on the terrace with an
elderly harridan, looking incongruous in a baby-blue frock—had recognised the
urchin boy being dragged back onto the QM’s campus by a harassed Groundskeeper
MacNeil. And, though it was an even closer thing, she had eventually managed to
persuade Mr. MacNeil not to report her to the headmistress. That, she supposed,
was all she could have asked for.
He’d been quite livid, after all, when he’d discovered her looking in the back
windows of the High Street pub in the village. Shocking, he’d said: a QM’s girl
dressing up as a boy in order to break school rules. He had talked a blue
streak about the dire punishments in store; and he had only relented when
Sherlock was able to deduce, based on the remnants in its feed bag and the way
it was favouring its left forefoot, the cause of the ongoing problems he’d been
having with his favourite horse. In the end he had let her go with a bruised
ear and a stern telling-off.
The most irksome thing about the whole adventure, Sherlock thought, banging
back into her empty room, was how quickly Mr. MacNeil had recognised her as
female. Apparently, her facility with male disguises still needed significant
work. She threw her cap on the bed and began tearing off the shirt, wondering
how to go about collecting the necessary data. Was it the way she’d moved?
Something about her face, her posture? She could hardly ask Mr. MacNeil what
had tipped him off, not after she’d sworn so earnestly never to attempt such a
thing again. She scowled as she unbuttoned the flies of her trousers.
And now she was cutting things close on her meeting with Vicky. Male village
urchin was definitely not the appearance best calculated to impress on that
particular front. Sherlock pulled on an aubergine shirtwaist dress, glancing at
her wristwatch as she did up the buttons.
Annie had agreed, in the end, to teach Sherlock to ‘do’ her lips and eyes,
although it had been a harder bargain than Sherlock had anticipated. Annie had
been oddly averse to Sherlock’s appropriation of her cosmetics and stockings.
‘My only ones and you’ve stretched them out!’ she’d wailed, ‘You’re so dratted
tall,’ and Sherlock had had to spend most of her remaining term pocket money on
replacing the lipstick whose shape, Annie claimed, Sherlock had forever ruined
with her punching experiment.
Still, Sherlock thought, widening her eyes and tarring her lashes, it had been
worth it. Annie had a sister-in-law who was once on the stage, and she had
showed Sherlock how to create any number of ‘looks.’ She had showed her how to
apply the paint so that nobody would realise it was there, but so that
Sherlock’s face would appear subtly transformed. And she had showed her how to
make herself up for stage-lights, so her face was a mask like those of the
women she’d seen at night in Picadilly. Sherlock had watched version after
version of herself take shape in the mirror, and had nearly kissed Annie on the
lips.
Now there were footsteps trailing up the corridor; she took a last look in the
mirror. The Sherlock who looked back at her, borrowed bits from Rosie Bartlett:
subtle and girlish, with just a touch more daring about the mouth. She arranged
her features, and turned—and Vicky Trevor, changed out of her blue dress and
back into her hockey skirt and dark jacket, stopped so suddenly at the sight of
her that the door swung to and hit Vicky hard on the shoulder.
‘Hello,’ said Sherlock. She smiled a Rosie Bartlett smile, tinged with Stasia
Hamiltion. Vicky just stared.
Sherlock’s run-in with Mr. MacNeil had shaken her confidence. Was Vicky’s
current poleaxed expression one of approval, or horror?
‘Er. Hullo,’ said Vicky. Her eyebrows were drawn together, her eyes wide. ‘You,
er.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You look…’ She took a step forward, and gestured
to Sherlock’s dress, her upswept hair.
Sherlock could feel her eyebrows trying to rise; she kept them in check. Rosie
would keep smiling, she thought, and kept smiling. ‘I, er,’ she said, ‘Annie
thought I could do with some…’
Vicky took another step—another two steps—and Sherlock could see now that she
was barely breathing. Eyes still wide. ‘You look,’ Vicky said again, ‘like a
real lady,’ and Sherlock laughed, because surely even Rosie Bartlett would
laugh if someone told her that.
‘I do not,’ Sherlock said, with a grin hopefully devoid of sharks.
Vicky took another step; reached out a hand and touched Sher lock’s arm, just
below the purple cuff. ‘You’re so pale,’ she said, low in her throat. ‘Your
skin’s soft.’
Inhabiting Rosie was a bit distracting, Sherlock thought, but the softness was
coming easier now. She liked Vicky’s sport-rough hand against her arm.
She’d thought, at night in bed, about the compact curve of Vicky’s hip, so she
reached out and rested her own palm against the place where Vicky’s waist bowed
outward. It was somehow—compelling. She rubbed her hand against the tweed.
Vicky said, quickly, ‘Er,’ and Sherlock stopped rubbing.
‘Er,’ said Vicky again, inching closer to her, ‘I’d like—can I kiss you?’
Sherlock was taken aback. ‘You didn’t ask first, last time,’ she blurted out.
It wasn’t what Rosie would have said.
‘I—it seemed different, last time,’ said Vicky, moving like she might pull
away, so Sherlock closed Rosie-light fingers around Vicky’s wrist and tugged it
back around her own waist. Now they were face-to-face, of a height with one
another, and breathing each other’s air. ‘It’s all right. You know, if you
want—,’ said Sherlock, low and quick, and Vicky’s breath caught, and she leaned
in and touched her lips to Sherlock’s.
It was the same shock, at first, of too-close-too-much and the unwonted
pressure of Vicky, the unaccustomed salty-sharp scent of her. There was so much
more sensation here than in lying in her bed, running back over their kiss in
her head, imagining other, theoretical kisses. It was a sharp shock to her
system, the system of the Sherlock who was always, always alone.
So it was a godsend, being able to slip sideways into Rosie Bartlett. Sherlock
had run over and over Rosie: Rosie in class; Rosie in the dining hall; Rosie in
the storage cupboard sucking on Justine Digby’s tongue. Sherlock thought of
Rosie and let her body soften against Vicky’s body, and opened her mouth
against Vicky’s mouth.
This seemed the thing; Vicky made a soft, approving whine. She tightened her
arm around Sherlock’s middle, pulling her close, opening her mouth to
Sherlock’s open mouth and licking sloppily at her lips, which was somehow both
invasive and intriguing. And her hand, again, at Sherlock’s back like the last
time: Vicky’s clumsy fingers splayed out and holding her steady, curling
against the knobs of Sherlock’s lizard spine.
It was that hand. Sherlock focused on the insistent nervous pressure of that
hand, and Rosie’s eager softness washed through her muscles and her skin. It
was warm and rushing here pressed against Vicky. Sherlock was being held up.
She felt heavy, limp. And she broke the kiss to look around at her narrow bed
by the window just as Vicky tried to steer her in the same direction. The
twisting and pushing together made her stumble; Vicky caught her and half-
hauled her backwards. She came to rest in a sitting position, flustered, her
back against the cast-iron rails of the headboard, looking anywhere but at
Vicky.
‘Annie’s, er, won’t be back,’ said Sherlock, nervous again and losing some of
that heavy hot liquid feeling like Rosie in the storage cupboard. She felt
herself blushing. Vicky didn’t particularly seem to mind it, though; she was
crawling over Sherlock’s lap, knees on either side of Sherlock’s legs as she
cupped Sherlock’s face in her hands, and kissed Sherlock’s cheekbones where
they felt the warmest. Sherlock shut her eyes; Vicky’s hockey skirt was spread
out behind and in front of her on Sherlock’s lap, and Sherlock could feel
Vicky’s pubic bone hitching against her thighs through the thin cotton of her
aubergine dress.
‘You’re pretty when you blush,’ Vicky said, at which Sherlock blushed even
more, and Vicky purred. She mouthed at Sherlock’s upper lip, shuffled one leg
between Sherlock’s, and pushed her body down all along Sherlock’s front. A
lovely soft weight, shifting and pressing, and the warm liquid feeling was back
in earnest now. It pooled in Sherlock’s chest and prickled along her skin, and
leaked from between her legs where Vicky was rocking into her, pressing her
thigh down between Sherlock’s thighs. Sherlock exhaled, her edges soft and
shifting, and arched her hips up into the pressure of Vicky’s leg.
‘Oh,’ said Vicky, sounding surprised, ‘you’re lovely, you’re so lovely,’ which
caused another rush of heat between Sherlock’s legs, so she pushed up again,
and Vicky gasped. Vicky leaned her weight on one arm and blundered the other
hand against the buttons down the front of Sherlock’s shirtwaist dress, still
pressing and shifting her hips.
Vicky’s normally-dry hands were tacky with moisture. Sherlock felt the sticky
traces where Vicky’s fingertips pressed into her collarbone, and her sternum,
and the skin of her ribcage just below the strap of her brassiere. Vicky leaned
down and nosed aside the white cotton. Kissed the small, tender swelling of
Sherlock’s breast just beside her pebbled nipple, and the warm liquid pooled
there as well, under Sherlock’s skin. Sherlock whimpered.
‘What if I got you in—in black lace,’ Vicky panted, eyes glassy. ‘You’re so
pale, so—so delicate—’
The whole surface of Sherlock’s body felt hot, sensitised. She’d sometimes,
alone in her room at home, but this was—so much—. Her lips were dry from
breathing through an open mouth, and her hands were restless on the coverlet.
She reached up under Vicky’s plain blouse, wanting to feel Vicky’s skin, her
skin that made Sherlock think of tea with honey. And what would it be like to
taste it, all the sweetness hidden under Vicky’s blouse and even under her
tight athletic brassiere, what would the soft mounds of her breasts feel like
filling Sherlock’s palms if Sherlock undid the binding, but Vicky’s sweaty
hands came up and pushed Sherlock’s hands back down to rest on Vicky’s hips.
‘I just want to see if I can—can make you—,’ said Vicky, still grinding down
into Sherlock, and Sherlock tried to ask make me? but the liquid heat was
gathering in her gut and her hands, after all, did seem to unable to stop
clutching onto Vicky’s hips. And so what she said as she moved her hands back
to the solid curve of Vicky’s bottom, and dug in her fingers, and dragged Vicky
down hard against her as Sherlock pushed up hard under Vicky’s hockey skirt,
sounded more akin to ‘ung.’
And because the coiling heat between her legs kept building on itself, and her
hips were moving in sharp little spasms against Vicky’s leg, she kept making
that noise, making it and making it helplessly as the heat crested, and Vicky
looked down at her, mouth open, as Sherlock arched her back off the bed and
clenched her thighs around Vicky’s leg, and pulsed and pulsed.
Afterward, as Sherlock was lying flushed and panting on the quilt, Vicky
snuggled up next to her, looking almost smug. Sherlock reached over,
fascinated, and ran her fingers through the spot where wetness had soaked
through Sherlock’s underwear and coated Vicky’s upper thigh. That was—new, she
thought, from any of her previous experiments, few though they had been. Vicky
didn’t pull away, but she didn’t react either, and when Sherlock said ‘Do you
want…’ Vicky shook her head and petted Sherlock’s hair.
‘It’s not for girls like you to do,’ she said. ‘It’s something I can give you.’
Which, despite Sherlock’s curiosity about how Vicky would look, and sound, and
feel had their roles been reversed, seemed to her perfectly acceptable in the
sleepy, contented afterglow.

Chapter End Notes
        1. “Rounders” and hockey were cited as common girls’ school games
           in my reading about this period, so they’re the sports I had
           Vicky play. As far as I can tell, rounders is more or less like
           softball/baseball, if that helps make sense of what’s going on
           in the second scene.
        2. Aunt Emily’s attitude was pretty common at the time: lesbianism
           was regarded as “arrested development” - something fairly
           normal during adolescence, which women were expected to grow
           out of at puberty or remain forever emotionally stunted.
           Rebecca Jennings, in Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, quotes ATS
           director Albertine Winner: "Winner reiterated the emphasis on
           adolescence as the defining moment in the formation of a
           lesbian identity, commenting that:
                In dealing with large numbers of Lesbians one of the
                most striking things is the recurrent traits of
                immaturity, mainly emotional, but showing themselves
                in many unexpected ways, that one meets in women of
                high intellectual or artistic development. This
                certainly bears out the view that the homosexual
                relation is an immature one, an arrest of normal
                sexual development at an adolescent age.

           The dilemma was often put to these women as a choice between
           stifling their same-sex desires and becoming fully emotionally
           mature, or continuing to pursue them and condemning themselves
           to a lifetime of emotional immaturity (not to mention
           loneliness and tragedy).
        3. ATS stood for Auxiliary Territorial Service. It was indeed the
           branch of the Armed Forces that admitted women during WWII,
           although the recruits were confined to supposedly non-combat
           roles (which nonetheless included positions, like ambulance
           drivers and message couriers, which exposed the women to combat
           levels of danger). Vicky’s comments about “girls like me” draws
           on several testimonies in Jennings and Gardiner, from lesbian
           women who joined up because they had heard that the service was
           a haven for “women like them.”
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Looking back, that next week with Vicky would prove the happiest of Sherlock’s
academic career.
Not that her standards were exactly high. She had twice staged explosions she
knew would be traced back to their source, simply to make sure she was expelled
from a school she despised. Even her best days at Hill Brow School had only
been distinguished from her bad days by the absence of outright hostility from
the other girls.
Still, after that first afternoon in her room with Vicky Trevor, she was, for a
few days, almost joyful. It felt weightless and odd, as if there were something
she should be worried about but she couldn’t quite remember what it was. Vicky
made no objection to spending time with Sherlock, and they were together as
much as possible between classes and Vicky’s sport practices.
Whenever she was with Vicky, Sherlock would slip into a persona made up mostly
of Rosie Bartlett, with just a pinch of Cecilia McIntosh for spice. Taking
refuge in Rosie was a relief; the easiest way Sherlock had found to overcome
her initial overstimulation. As Rosie she could soften herself, could sink into
the warm, liquid heaviness brought on by Vicky’s hands, and mouth, and body.
Vicky, for her part, seemed to find the Cecilia-Rosie cocktail both reassuring
and exciting; she had twice dragged Sherlock into the very same storage
cupboard where Rosie and Justine had hidden away at Christmas.
And Vicky’s responsiveness was intoxicating. So much so that Sherlock had put
most of her other trials on hold, had started a whole new laboratory notebook
devoted to Vicky’s reactions. Every night she took it out and recorded her
findings, replacing it carefully inside her mattress – on top of the novel
Vicky had slipped her, giggling, telling her to look at page 153. Vicky didn’t
know about the notebook, precisely. But Sherlock still felt, for the first
time, that she had a teammate: someone almost as invested in her work as she.
It was a giddy sensation.
With Vicky as her silent partner, she had experimented with, for one example,
presenting increased and lowered dosages of Cecilia. The results had been
intriguing. Too much Cecilia in the mix, and Vicky became cold; contemptuous;
quickly losing interest in kissing or even talking to Sherlock, and Sherlock
felt sick. But once, when Sherlock had stolen Cecilia’s black, side-slit wrap
dress and paired it with a smile like Stasia Hamilton, Vicky had turned almost
wild, pushing Sherlock against the wall next to Annie’s bed and shoving a hand
inside the skirt at the slit, grappling between Sherlock’s legs, rutting
against her thigh. It was the closest Vicky had come to letting Sherlock do to
her what Vicky did to Sherlock: Sherlock was sure that if she had held out a
few more minutes she could have felt Vicky clenching and melting against her,
could have heard the sounds Vicky would make when she was helpless with
pleasure.
Sherlock had to admit, if only to herself, that she was extremely curious about
those sounds.
Then, late in the week, Sherlock had tried throwing in a hint of Vicky
herself—nothing overt, just a taste. But Vicky had turned skittish and
irritable; Sherlock’s stomach had clenched. So she had softened herself down
with a quick injection of Cassie Rogers: dimpled and domestic and dim. Sherlock
had noticed that whenever she slipped into Cassie, Vicky was especially gentle
with her: standing between Sherlock and other girls in the corridors, bringing
Sherlock little sweets, carrying Sherlock’s books. And when Vicky kissed a
Cassie-like Sherlock, it was as if Vicky wanted to envelop her completely, keep
her in a cocoon of gentling limbs and sticky-sweet lips.
And that’s how Vicky was kissing Sherlock, trembling with tenderness against a
stone wall in the burnt wing, on the day when it all fell apart. Vicky was
cupping the bulge of Sherlock’s left breast with a tentative palm, barely
pressing her lips to Sherlock’s lips, when Sherlock stiffened and clamped a
hand over Vicky’s wrist. A muffled squelching sound had come from the other
side of the destroyed wall. And if Sherlock could hear another person walking,
then that person could hear Sherlock and Vicky. The girls froze in place, out-
of-bounds and half-undressed, pressed together against the wall.
The soft footsteps made their sodden way across the abandoned room and split
apart from one another, the two visitors standing near the wall perpendicular
to their hidden listeners.
In the absence of a ceiling or even complete walls, Sherlock could hear
everything perfectly. She kept silent as she did up the buttons on the front of
her dress.
There was the flick of a cigarette lighter, the inhale and exhale of a fag
being lit. A pause. Then the voice of—of all people—Headmistress Brown, saying
‘Thank you,’ and, after another pause in which her companion lit up as well:
‘It’s been such a day.’
The answering voice mmm’ed in response. It was male: deep, and no longer young,
but Sherlock couldn’t immediately identify its owner.
‘Heard you had a visit from Henry Godwin today,’ it said, warm and amused, and
Sherlock knew him at once from her sixth-form biology classes.
‘It’s Professor Martin!’ Vicky hissed in Sherlock’s ear. Sherlock nodded,
making a frantic shushing gesture, her finger to Vicky’s mouth. It was odd to
hear his mellow, hesitant voice sounding so informal, verging on joking.
Brown laughed, joylessly. ‘I sometimes feel I spend my every waking hour
appeasing the Board of Governors.’ She sighed. ‘Quite a trick when they all
pull in different directions.’
Martin chuckled. ‘Men at that level forget there’s any work to a thing unless
they do it themselves.’
Brown made a tsking sound against her teeth, and Sherlock heard the carbonated
release of two bottles uncapped. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Brown said. There was a
clink of bottles, one against the other. Then, surprisingly, came a lusty ‘Ahh’
from Professor Martin. It was a sound like men made in bars in American films.
Vicky raised her eyebrows at Sherlock, and Sherlock smirked.
There came the noises of Professor Brown settling down on the remnants of the
wooden chest Sherlock had seen in that room, and of Professor Martin rubbing
his shoulders against the splintered doorjamb on the other side of Sherlock and
Vicky.
‘You must never let on I told you this, Alf,’ said Brown, after a pause, ‘but I
really thought I might wring the man’s neck.’
Martin chuckled again. ‘Mum’s the word,’ he said. ‘What did he want, then?’
Brown groaned, and there was another deep inhale and exhale before she
answered. ‘You’ve read about this Dr. Williams? The one Townsend-Farquhar and
his Chronicle lot are falling all over themselves to praise?’
‘Mmm, name rings a bell. Educational reformer of some kind?’
‘The man’s never been employed by a school in his life,’ replied Brown tartly,
clinking the bottle against her teeth, ‘but yes. He’s convinced he’s developed
the curricula of the future. Scientifically backed recommendations for the best
methods to educate girls. I’d wager my winter coat he doesn’t even have
daughters.’ Vicky’s eyes were wide and bright at such forthrightness from the
headmistress; her mouth fell open. Sherlock slid her hand over it to keep Vicky
quiet, a hint of teeth against Sherlock’s palm.
Martin snorted. ’So Godwin wanted—’
‘He wanted—no, pardon me, he’d already arranged, without bothering to consult
me beforehand I might add, that this Williams should come give a guest lecture
at Queen Margaret’s.’
‘Oh, Joyce,’ Martin said, his voice rich with sympathy and also shaking with
suppressed laughter.
‘Oh Joyce indeed,’ groaned Brown. ‘Joyce Joyce Joyce. Well, what could I do?’
she said, unhappy-sounding chuckles bubbling up behind her words. ‘It’s all
arranged among the governors. Townsend-Farquhar’s even wangled access to the
school calendar, so I can’t claim a conflict. We’ll just have to grin and bear
whatever twaddle the man comes out with.’
There was a muffled movement, and then a creak of the chest again, as Martin
presumably sat himself next to Brown. Sherlock strained to hear his next words,
which were much quieter and spoken away from the girls’ hiding place.
‘Perhaps it won’t be so bad?’ he said. ‘You don’t know what he’s planning.
Perhaps he’ll keep to generalities, you know, eat your porridge—’ Brown was
laughing dully now, ‘—be a good lass. Could happen.’
‘Alf,’ said Brown’s smoke-roughened voice on an exhale, and Sherlock heard what
she guessed was a hand slapping down on a wool-covered knee, and the sizzle of
a cigarette butt being ground into the wet floor, ‘you have no idea what you’re
on about. The man’s a loon. His pet theory at the moment involves the swollen
glands of female lacrosse players, and how the kidney stimulation caused by a
physics curriculum would result in a generation of bitter, irreversibly
masculinised homosexuals.’ Martin choked on his beer.
Sherlock felt Vicky stiffen against her side, and heard Brown tsk again.
Martin was still laughing too hard to reply. ’S-seriously?’ he wheezed at last.
‘Yes!’ said Brown, exasperated but also oddly affectionate. ‘Yes, seriously,’
she repeated, which set Martin off in another round of helpless giggles.
Sherlock was distracted from the events in other room by the fact that Vicky
was still stiff against her and breathing shallowly, all the delighted
incredulity gone from her face. Soon came the sound of Professor Martin rising
from the chest, still chuckling as he gathered up the now-empty bottles.
Sherlock tipped her head in the direction of the other room, grinning. Vicky
moved her lips in a weak smile under Sherlock’s hand, but it never reached her
eyes.
‘The whole thing will be a circus,’ Professor Brown went on, half-angry and
half-laughing. ‘And I shall be sitting there in the front row, at the podium no
less, having to act as if this utter drivel is something I’ve voluntarily
invited into my school. You must not on any account meet my eyes, Alfie Martin,
or I know I shall never manage to keep a—keep a straight face.’
Sherlock’s hand slid off of Vicky’s mouth and her own dropped open; Professor
Brown’s voice had caught, just a bit, on the last word, and not with laughter.
A clink of the bottles on the floor, and then there was a susurrus of wool
against wool: one suited person embracing another.
‘Hush,’ Martin was saying. ‘Joyce.’
‘They’re just such—bullies,’ said Professor Brown, no tears in her voice but
sounding fierce and frustrated in a way Sherlock had never heard. ‘And when I
think of the sixth-form girls, all sitting listening to this—this—’
‘Shh,’ said Professor Martin. ‘The girls will have an hour and a half of
Williams, and seven years of you.’ Professor Brown drew a long, shaky breath,
and there was silence for a time from the other room. Sherlock and Vicky leaned
their ears close to the wall, waiting.
When Brown spoke again, her no-nonsense air had returned. ‘You’re too kind to
me, Alfred Martin,’ she said. ‘What kind of example am I setting, going to
pieces in a burned-out bedroom when there’s work to be done?’ There were two
squelches as she stepped back, and they heard another deep breath. ‘Come along,
we’ll be missed. Wouldn’t want a scandal at Queen Margaret’s on top of
everything else.’
Then the teachers’ footsteps padded out of the room, their voices retreating
down the ruined corridors. Sherlock turned, wide-eyed, to look at Vicky, who
was staring down at her own shuffling feet.
‘What do you reckon?’ asked Sherlock, still in a whisper, although Brown and
Martin were surely out of earshot by now.
‘Dunno,’ said Vicky, stubbing at the sooty floor with her toe.
‘You don’t know?’ said Sherlock, incredulous. ‘That’s all you’ve got to say?
I’ve never heard Brown get so upset. This Williams sounds a complete idiot.’
‘Dunno,’ Vicky said again. ‘School governors seem to like what he’s doing.’
‘Well of course they do,’ said Sherlock, speaking slowly, as if to the mentally
deficient. ‘They like anything that means they don’t have to pay for a proper
physics department.’ She looked harder at Vicky, who still wouldn’t meet her
eyes. ‘What’s got into you, anyway?’ she asked.
Vicky heaved a breath into her lungs. ‘I don’t—I suppose you’re lucky then,
that you’re only a fifth form. You don’t have to go listen to Dr. Williams.
Maybe I’m just—interested to hear what he’s got to say.’
Sherlock was momentarily dumbstruck. ‘You’re interested. To hear what he’s got
to say.’ Her voice was flat as she repeated the words, and she stared intently
at the top of Vicky’s head where it was bent toward the ground. Vicky nodded,
minutely. Sherlock licked her lips, kept watching.
‘You can’t be—worried?’ she said slowly, still looking at Vicky’s part. Vicky
didn’t respond. Sherlock was incredulous. ‘You are. You’re actually worried
that playing hockey has made you—what? Where are you going? Vicky!’
For Vicky had kicked the wall and started walking, fast, in the other
direction, back toward the castle. ‘Vicky, wait!’ Sherlock called, but Vicky
broke into a run, and Sherlock thought she heard a mumbled ‘Leave me alone,
Holmes,’ as Vicky’s blonde head disappeared through the stone doorway.
Well! thought Sherlock, kicking the wall herself.
Apparently Vicky was even slower than she had wanted to admit. Sherlock crossed
her arms, and, though there was no one to see, rolled her eyes. She thought of
Vicky, being stupid about the lecture, yawning when Sherlock talked about
poisons.
Then she thought about Vicky defending Sherlock to Cecilia McIntosh. Calling
Sherlock lovely. Making her cry out, and melt. Telling her she’d make a
brilliant detective. She kicked the wall again.
Well.
It was a problem, and problems could be solved. If Vicky Trevor were silly
enough to believe in so-called ‘science’ so shabby it couldn’t even fool
Professor Brown, then Sherlock would just have to do some research. She would
have to look over Dr. Williams’s data, and present the opposing case.
She nodded to herself, alone against the burnt-out wall. It was a simple
matter, she thought, of reviewing the evidence and presenting a logical
argument; and it was lucky, wasn’t it? that Sherlock was so uniquely suited to
the job. Vicky was worried, which was ridiculous. But Sherlock would set
Vicky’s fears to rest. It was the least she could do.
Sherlock smiled to herself. She kicked the wall again, but in decisiveness this
time, rather than anger. It was, she thought again, the least she could do—and
she knew just the way to make it stick.
***
Vicky Trevor settled into her seat in the lecture hall, surrounded by her
hockey friends, and let out a held breath.
She felt, in fact, like she’d been holding her breath constantly the last two
weeks. What with Aunt Emily’s warnings still echoing in her head—and the heavy
petting with a new, distractingly lovely Sherlock Holmes—and Vicky’s fears
about whether she was already too far down Dr. Williams’s abhorred road to turn
about—and her anxieties about whether she would want to turn about even if she
could—what with all of that, May hadn’t been the easy coast to graduation Vicky
had been expecting.
She felt vaguely guilty admitting it to herself, but it was a relief to be away
from Sherlock. The fifth forms were not invited to Dr. Williams’s lecture, and
so Vicky sat in the down-at-heel splendour of the Castle Howard ballroom in her
baby-blue frock, relieved and awkward, like a sailor who spends his shore leave
at a feud-filled family Christmas.
She felt a kind of—of responsibility, she supposed, to this softer, more
girlish Sherlock, this Sherlock who hardly seemed, anymore, to be odd or off-
putting at all. Vicky sometimes wondered if the strange, grubby kid, the
Sherlock who had run tests on her own dog bites and chattered about poisonous
mushrooms, had been all in Vicky’s head. Around the new Sherlock it was
difficult to think, difficult to understand; Vicky was filled with such sharp
longing—to have her, to keep her—and with a strange sense of duty. It was a
protectiveness incompatible, she thought, with baby-blue frocks and demure
smiles, and with crossing her legs at the knee instead of the ankle. With all
the things, according to Aunt Emily and now Dr. Williams, that could save Vicky
from perpetual disappointment, from a lifetime of abandonment.
Vicky fidgeted in her starched cotton frock; tugged at her white gloves. They
were all the things Vicky hated, anyhow. But it would be so much easier, if she
didn’t.
Professor Brown and a few of the senior staff were moving about on the
makeshift stage, arranging and rearranging the dinner chairs that flanked the
ad hoc podium. Vicky amused herself looking about for Professor Martin. She
spotted him in the second row, head bowed over a book. He’d taken Brown at her
word, then, and was avoiding meeting her eyes. Vicky smiled to herself. Then
she felt anxious, and stopped.
She took a deep breath. She needn’t think of Sherlock all this evening, she
reminded herself. She could just—just blend in with the other girls, and listen
to the lecture. She glanced over at Tara Fredericks-Halloway; Tara pulled a
grotesque face, then grinned. Vicky grinned back.
Brown was standing at the podium now, ringing the bell for quiet. Vicky faced
forward. Despite herself, she noticed how Brown kept her stern glance from
lighting anywhere near Martin, who had now stowed his book and raised his head
attentively. Vicky imagined his look of mild, politely-feigned interest. Brown
started in about the great honour being done to Queen Margaret’s by the visit
of such an eminent et cetera et cetera, and Vicky wondered idly whether Brown,
at this precise moment, was closer to tears or laughter. She turned her head to
roll her eyes at Tara, and then—froze.
Inching around the corner of one of the ballroom’s side doors, and dressed, for
some odd reason, in an old QM’s uniform, was the very person Vicky had been
trying to banish from her thoughts. Vicky blinked, and looked again. The pale
face emerging from the low doorway light persisted stubbornly in being
Sherlock’s. Vicky’s stomach dropped, full of a leaden dread.
So much for her bit of sanctuary. What was Sherlock doing here? Why was she
lurking in the shadows? And why had she got an oversized notebook clutched
under her arm? Sherlock caught Vicky’s panicked eye at that moment, and her
mouth curled into a brilliant smile—one wider, and somehow sharper, than Vicky
had ever seen.
Vicky’s intestines felt gripped by a dreadful squeezing hand. She shook her
head, a minute jerk side to side. Sherlock kept smiling, and put her finger to
her lips. Vicky turned forward. Her face was flushed; her palms damp. This was
all wrong, all dreadfully wrong. Sherlock was dreadfully wrong.
She simply wouldn’t look at Sherlock, Vicky told herself, as the audience
clapped politely for the end of Professor Brown’s speech, and Brown was
replaced at the podium by a slim, balding blond man in a grey suit and a navy
tie. She didn’t have the slightest notion what Sherlock meant by sneaking in
here, but surely no one need suspect any connexion with Vicky. And perhaps, she
thought wildly, as the clapping died down and Dr. Williams flashed the room a
grin full of straight white teeth, nothing would happen at all. Perhaps
Sherlock merely wanted to observe. Perhaps Sherlock—dare Vicky hope it?—had
been swayed by Vicky’s own interest in the lecture, and had decided to come
herself. There was no reason for panic.
Vicky attempted to focus on the stage, where Dr. Williams had launched into his
introductory gambit. Praise to the long and illustrious history of Queen
Margaret’s School, and all the upstanding, hard-working wives and mothers it
had educated; sincere wishes that this tradition continue long into the future.
Vicky thought it would be hard paying attention to such waffle, even if her
guts hadn’t been trying to tie themselves in knots. In her peripheral vision,
Rosie Barlett was ostentatiously stifling a yawn.
‘Well-meaning intellectuals in recent years,’ Dr. Williams was saying, ‘have
lobbied for greater parity—’ and Vicky actively restrained her head from
turning around to look. What was Sherlock doing? What was wrong with her? Had
she moved forward from her spot near the door, since the last time Vicky had
seen her? Vicky stared stubbornly ahead.
‘However,’ Dr. Williams went on, removing the cover on one of several easels
set up next to the podium, ‘the best modern science strongly suggests that
these arguments, while well-meant, are far from serving the best interests of
the girls in question—or indeed, if I may say so—’ he flashed an ingratiating
smirk, ‘—the best interests of the nation. In studies tracking the development
of the suprarenal gland in female students reading English, History, Physics
and Mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge, for example—’
At the mention of physics Vicky could no longer control her head. It whipped
round without her consent, searching out Sherlock. She scanned the crowd for a
few seconds before spotting her: Sherlock had slipped into a seat on the edge
of the room. Vicky couldn’t see the oversized notebook; she supposed it must be
under Sherlock’s seat. Sherlock herself, much to Vicky’s surprised relief, was
leaning back in her chair, head tipped to the side and fingers steepled in
front of her mouth, seemingly deeply absorbed in Dr. Williams’s speech.
Vicky faced forward again, feeling her eyebrows go up. Perhaps, after all,
Sherlock had only wanted to listen to the lecture. The fist around Vicky’s
intestines unclenched ever so slightly. She wondered, as Dr. Williams droned on
about glandular development in laboratory rats, what Sherlock must be making of
it all. The lecture was so far failing to answer many of Vicky’s questions—but
then, her attention had been compromised. She cleared her throat, attempted to
put Sherlock out of her mind, and wrenched her thoughts back to the stage.
‘All of which goes to show,’ Dr. Williams was saying, gesturing emphatically
with his pointer at the third easel, ‘That you cannot confine the desire and
aptitude for combat to cricket and football, nor the overdevelopment of
intellectualism to the study of physics and mathematics.’ Vicky noticed that
Professor Brown, at this point, seemed to be biting the inside of her own lips,
her mouth contorting, her eyes fixed on Professor Martin. ‘These qualities,’
Dr. Williams went on, ‘inevitably appear in the whole character, and what was
originally a gentle, feminine girl becomes harsh and bellicose in all relations
to life, and deluded as to her own strengths and weaknesses.’
Deluded, thought Vicky, dully. Harsh and bellicose. Was this her future, then?
Dr. Williams’s words melded in her mind with others: a perpetual childhood,
Aunt Emily had said, and you will always be left behind. It was true that Vicky
could hardly imagine herself turning out correctly, not ‘gentle’ or ‘feminine’
like Anabelle or Cassie or even, these days, Sherlo—
‘Pardon me, Dr. Williams,’ said a high voice, lifting itself from the shuffling
of the audience to interrupt Vicky’s thoughts. Heads all throughout the
ballroom snapped around. A chorus of tittering laughter went up from the little
group of hockey girls across the way, and Vicky’s surprise turned to sheer
dread as she recognised Sherlock’s voice. She turned her head slowly, feeling
she was caught in a nightmare.
‘Pardon me,’ said Sherlock again, ‘but have there, by any chance, been long-
term studies on the glandular changes experienced by rats and university
students removed from habitual physical and mental stimulation?’
Williams shaded his eyes, peering peevishly into the crowd. Sherlock was
getting to her feet, one hand still in the air, the other clutching the
oversized notebook. Tara Fredericks-Halloway and Caitlin Pierce were giggling
behind their hands; Tara caught Vicky’s gaze. ‘Holmes,’ Tara mouthed, and
rolled her eyes. Vicky tried to smile back.
‘Only I’ve been looking into it,’ Sherlock continued, seemingly oblivious to
all the gaping she was receiving, ‘and I can’t find—well, any. Nor have I been
able to uncover evidence of a link between oversized ductless glands and
aggressive behaviour in humans, only in rats. While the two organisms are
sufficiently similar to suggest a connexion, there have been medical trials
which showed promise in rats but failed in humans—those involving bacterial
digestion in the upper intestine, for example, or functionality after certain
kinds of brain damage. That should certainly bring into question an across-the-
board analogy between the two.’
Vicky’s mouth was dry with panic. Caitlin and Tara were doubled up now,
gripping each others’ shoulders and laughing. What was Sherlock thinking?
Couldn’t she see that she was proving Dr. Williams’s point? She was a living
demonstration of the—the harsh, the bellicose traits of women allowed to study
these—physics, and—and mathematics. She was giving all of them at QM’s a bad
name. And what of the smiling, girlish Sherlock, whom Vicky had wanted to
protect? The look Sherlock was giving Dr. Williams was brash, verging on smug.
Vicky felt repulsed.
Dr. Williams was coming out of his shocked trance, and gesturing impatiently.
‘Miss—’ he said, waving his hand.
‘Holmes,’ said Sherlock, glancing down at her notebook and then briefly over at
Vicky, who cringed down in her seat, heart trying to hold to something that was
fast slipping away. ‘And I also seem to have missed the portion of the report
in which your team outlined their laboratory controls. For example, while there
does seem to be a correlation between oversized glands and combative behaviour
in rats, there is little discussion of breeding, environment, or other
secondary causes which might lead to either condition.’
Dr. Williams and Professor Brown seemed to snap back to themselves at the same
moment. ‘That will be quite enough, Miss Holmes,’ barked out Brown, just as
Williams was flashing another toothy smile and saying ‘I regret to inform the
young lady that this is not the approved question-and-answer period—’.
What would Dr. Williams think of this? Wondered Vicky wildly. And Tara and
Caitlin had seen Vicky with Sherlock, had seen her defend Sherlock. (But that
had been a different Sherlock, a different Sherlock altogether.)Who would they
tell? What might Aunt Emily think? Vicky was sure she was about to be sick.
‘But Professor,’ Sherlock said, looking wide-eyed toward Brown. ‘You must see
that in the absence of a differential analysis, or long-term studies on the
reversibility of these effects, Dr. Williams’s conclusions are deeply—’
Then three things happened simultaneously, and only later could Vicky separate
them in her mind.
One was that Groundskeeper MacNeil, who had been hovering near the ballroom
door, moved up and hooked his arms into Sherlock’s elbows, tugging her backward
toward the exit and throwing her off-balance. She looked ridiculous in her too-
tight uniform, kicking and fighting him as he dragged her back toward the door.
Caitlin Pierce lost all semblance of control, literally rolling on the floor
laughing.
Another was that Professor Brown, looking unaccountably stricken and still
biting the inside of her mouth, called out: ‘We will discuss this in my office,
Miss Holmes,’ sounding almost stricken. As if she were speaking to herself.
And the third was that Vicky Trevor felt herself rise up from her seat
snarling, her hands balled into fists, ready to drum Sherlock Holmes out of
Queen Margaret’s herself.
***
The train’s wheels pushed and pulled, faster and faster. The whistle blew, and
the station receded, and Sherlock hunkered down in her seat, a dirty knot of
sandy-hot eyes and mismatched clothes.
Since the evening after the lecture (just repulsive can’t believe you’ll be
lonely for) she had refused to brush her hair, or to clothe herself in anything
but khaki trousers and a stolen drama-department smock. Three days later that’s
what she was wearing still, slouched in the seat of the first-class
compartment, on her way back to the family estate. There hadn’t been much
anyone could do to dissuade her, after all, once they had told her she was
expelled.
Not that she could be surprised to be chucked out. Brown had warned her, hadn’t
she, that she would have to expel Sherlock if Sherlock broke any more school
rules? And Sherlock, alight with fury and indignation, had delivered up the
evidence herself. The stolen clothes she was wearing. The outing into the
(don’t you touch me you’ll be lonely for) burnt wing. Eavesdropping on
Professor Brown’s private conversations. All on top of Sherlock’s
insubordination at the lecture. Brown’s mouth had become grimmer and paler the
longer Sherlock talked, and soon the headmistress had been pushing her knuckles
into her eye sockets every few minutes, just giving Sherlock enough rope.
In the end it had hardly mattered that Sherlock had avoided mention of (just
the kind of miserable never want to see you)Vicky Trevor. Brown had assumed
Sherlock had been in the burnt wing to gather specimens for more forbidden
experiments; Sherlock hadn’t argued. A few hours later she hadn’t particularly
wanted to think about Vicky, anyway.
The train slowed, its brakes screeching as they entered a village station. The
outer door of Sherlock’s car clanged. A man and woman lurched into her
compartment. Sherlock’s brain supplied information without conscious effort on
her part: both in their mid-twenties. Strangers to one another, the woman
better-off than the man. The man invalided home from the war with a foot
injury, the woman having lost her fiancé. They sat on opposite sides of the
aisle, as far from Sherlock as they could get. She supposed that she probably
smelled as foul as she (repulsive mortified childish) looked, and felt a rush
of vindictive pleasure.
It wasn’t that Queen Margeret’s was any great loss, she thought bitterly, with
a twinge of regret for the slime mould colonies in the burnt wing. It was only
that she had thought, after Brown herself had spoken of Dr. Williams with such
frustration and disdain—but no matter. She had the measure of the woman now.
Just as she had the measure of Vicky Trevor. Sherlock inched further down in
her seat, scowling and thinking of Vicky’s contorted face, the curl of her
upper lip as she’d told Sherlock—well. All the tedious (disgust me such a
selfish childish never been so mortified you’re just the kind of miserable
bitter dyke hope they chuck you never want to speak to you again) uncivilised
things she’d said. Sherlock yawned, ostentatiously, trying to feel bored.
It was all so dreary, after all. Just another trip back to Mummy and Mycroft,
another round of tutors and condescension and stern disappointment. Nothing
tremendously different, was there, from all the other expulsions? So Sherlock
had thought she could comfort Vicky, that they could fly in the face of it
together. That Sherlock would be clever and Vicky would be fond, and they would
laugh together as they’d done at first, that day in the burnt wing.
So Sherlock had been wrong.
And she should have known, really, that such an idea was (miserable kind of
never speak to you) ridiculous. The evidence had all been there: the times
Vicky’d been gentle, the times she’d been bored. That first kiss, Sherlock
realised now, the one that followed on her deductions about the fire, was an
outlier. An irrelevancy. With romance, with girls like Vicky, it would always
be about control, about someone building themselves up by diminishing Sherlock
into normalcy. Mediocrity. Controlling Sherlock’s body: how it looked, what it
felt, what it…felt.
But it was one thing, thought Sherlock, to try on Cassie Rogers or Rosie
Bartlett when convenient. That had been of interest, even exhilarating. It was
quite another to contemplate (unnatural repulsive hope they chuck you) never
being anyone else. If that was the condition of romance, it was unacceptable.
Never, never again. Never again.
The towns came closer and faster as the train approached London. Sherlock
wondered dully if someone would be waiting for her. It was too much to hope,
surely, that she would have any time alone in the city. The weather was clement
enough; she could sleep outside, or break into an evacuated flat. The remainder
of her term pocket money would buy her a few meals, enough for two or three
days. In her filthy, mismatched clothes she could try, again, passing for a
boy—could determine where she’d gone wrong last week in the village.
She sat up a bit straighter, turning to the side of the compartment to count
the coins in her bag. It wasn’t impossible, was it? Even if Mummy or Mycroft
had sent a servant, she might sneak past unnoticed. To think of London’s myriad
transformations of the past eighteen months, all waiting in beloved squares and
avenues to be discovered. To think of the wide, wild city, with all its
abandoned spaces opened by the Blitz to the night sky. Sherlock hugged herself
suddenly with a fierce, angry joy.
For there was one thing precious, Sherlock thought, about her time with Vicky
Trevor at (repulsive don’t touch) Queen Margaret’s School. Somewhere between
Groundskeeper MacNeil boxing her ears and Vicky saying she’d be brilliant at
the Met; between Cassie Rogers’s sticky smile and Cecilia McIntosh’s wrap
dress; between breaking her first promise to Professor Brown and slamming the
front door behind herself for the last time; right in the middle of it all
there she was: holding herself up on a dormitory mirror, breathless, with the
freedom to be anyone she chose.
***
End Part 1
Chapter End Notes
        1. Dr. Williams was a real person, working around this time period
           in Britain. His theories, sadly, were more or less as
           described.
        2. All of the troublesome schoolboard members are fictional, as is
           the Tory Chronicle newspaper. Professor Martin is also
           invented, and the only thing historical about Joyce Brown is
           her name and her profession.
        3. 3. Part of Dr. Williams’s lecture here is taken verbatim from a
           paper of his quoted in Rebecca Jennings’s Tomboys and Bachelor
           Girls:
                the effect on the temperament of the ductless glands,
                and said that games such as hockey and lacrosse
                develop that part of the suprarenal gland which
                presides over the combative element of a person’s
                character. ‘You cannot confine the desire and
                aptitude for combat to cricket and football,’ he
                said. ‘They inevitably appear in the whole character,
                and what was originally a gentle, feminine girl
                becomes harsh and bellicose in all relations to life.
                The women who have the responsibility of teaching
                these girls are, many of them themselves embittered,
                sexless or homosexual hoydens who try to mould the
                girls into their own pattern.
        4. Since I apparently just can’t restrain myself when it comes to
           Bloomsbury, Girton College, Cambridge, is an all-women’s
           college referenced obliquely in Virginia Woolf’s famous A Room
           of One’s Own essay. It seems apropos to include it here. 5. I
           suspect Sherlock’s specific citations re: the differences
           between rats and humans might not actually have been accessible
           in 1943, especially the one about recovery from brain damage.
           (However, for her first point see page 44 of this_document; for
           her second point see this_one.) She’s a bit magic, though; so
           shh, let’s roll with it.
***** Chapter 5 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes

PART 2
August, 1954
Stamford’s Auto Repair, Euston Road, St. Pancras
London, England
Johnnie Watson was waist-deep under the bonnet of a Mercedes 170, spanner in
her hand.
‘Right, try now?’ she called. The engine attempted to say ‘room’; managed only
‘uou.’ ‘Uou’ it said, once—twice—three times before sputtering out.
‘Damn,’ said Johnnie.
She chewed the inside of her cheek, her lips twisting. One grease-smeared hand
scratched absently at her grease-smeared cheekbone.
A shadow came up on her left, round and maternal and trailing the scent of
coffee. ‘Reckon the whole cylinder is shot, Mick,’ she said, gesturing with the
hand not holding the spanner. ‘Replaced the gasket, but I’m still not getting a
seal.’
The shadow grunted. Leaned over to look. ‘Looks like,’ Mickey said, and Johnnie
nodded.
They both stood in silence, contemplating the aged engine like surgeons in a
sombre post-op. At last Mickey grunted again.
‘Doubt it’ll come to that,’ she said.
‘Ramsay won’t lay out for a new cylinder?’ asked Johnnie.
Mickey chuckled. The dimples looked more at home on her ruddy face than the
wistfulness she’d just been trying on.
‘I’d put money on it he won’t. Rabbiting on to Roger McAllister about buying a
Cadillac, a few nights ago.’
Johnnie snorted. ‘Buying American,’ she said, and spat on the packed dirt
floor.
Mickey’s smile widened, and she looked from the engine to Johnnie. ‘A Mercedes-
Benz isn’t a British car either,’ she said, her voice teasing. ‘You might say
buying German is worse, even.’
Johnnie groaned, and made a face. Always having a laugh, she thought. Then she
looked back at the engine, and her expression softened. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but
it’s a beautiful old thing, anyway.’ Her free hand reached out to snug the
spark plugs against their contacts.
Mickey’s smile faltered. ‘Oi there,’ she said, raising a cautionary finger,
‘don’t even think about it, John. No, I’m serious—’ as Johnnie groaned again,
‘—you don’t have space for a monster like this, you don’t even have a proper
place for that gorgeous bike you’ve got. Don’t be—’
‘I know, I know, Mick,’ said Johnnie, but it was no good. Mickey’d got herself
started.
‘It’s only I don’t employ vagrants from off the street, Johnnie,’ she said.
‘Hell, you haven’t even got a place for yourself for long. When’s Margrit due
back, end of next week? I told you, take a day off and look at some flats.’
Johnnie fiddled with the spanner. ‘I’m looking, I just—it’s not easy, you know,
there’s still not a lot out there. It’s not as if I can kip on the sofa of some
married dear with two wee ones and a semi-detached in New Town Bugger-All.’
Mickey let out a bark of a laugh, and Johnnie’s lip twitched. She spit over the
side again and tried to look offended.
‘Yeah, you laugh. I’ll be huddled behind the rubbish bins of some starving
artist in a godforsaken garret in the godforsaken East End. Can’t afford much
more on my own.’
Mickey looked indulgent. ‘You don’t have to keep living in North Kensington,’
she pointed out. Johnnie glared daggers.
‘I’m not. I plan to get as far from those posh Kensington and Chelsea bints as
I possibly can, thanks very much.’.
‘No, you don’t,’ Mickey said, reasonably. ‘How will you meet someone new?’
Johnnie spluttered, actually looked over at her. ‘Mickey Stamford,’ she said.
‘Are you playing matchmaker?’
Mickey shrugged, in what Johnnie considered an unnecessarily provoking way.
Johnnie tried to kick her without turning away from the engine, jabbing her
foot out behind her. ‘What do you know about Chelsea, Stamford? You know all
about it out there? Yeah?’
Mickey chuckled, and dodged easily out of her way. Mickey wasn’t on the scene,
was married to a man and quite happy, but she had her opinions, anyway. Johnnie
drew her foot back in.
‘Seriously though, I’m off the scene for a while,’ she said, reaching back into
the car’s guts. ‘More trouble than it’s worth. What? I’m serious,’ she
continued, as Mickey’s laughter redoubled.
‘Right,’ Mickey said, her face schooling itself into submission. ‘Johanna
Watson, born-again celibate. I can see it now. Sworn off the fairer sex for the
rest of her days. Devoted herself to good works.’ Johnnie was starting to
snicker despite herself, leaning over to check for cracks in the cylinder.
‘All I can say is,’ said Mickey, ‘you’d best find yourself an unsuspecting
career girl willing to room with you, and you’d best do it yesterday. Margrit
O’Brian will flay you alive if she comes home to find you still sleeping on her
sofa when she told you months ago to get out.’
‘Yeah,’ Johnnie said, distracted now as she bent over to check the other side
of the faulty cylinder. ‘’Magine she will. And that’s if I’d stuck to the sofa.
Look, I’d like to try something, you want to get back behind the wheel?’
Mickey looked doubtful, but set her now-cold cup of coffee on the counter by
the wall, and hauled herself back into the driver’s seat. ‘Say when,’ she
called, and Johnnie called out ‘When!’
The next moment Johnnie leapt back, clutching at her head.
‘Bollocks!’ she yelled. ‘Mickey! Keep off the bloody horn, can’t you?’
‘Sorry, sorry!’ came a harassed voice from behind the windscreen, and the
scuffling noises of Mickey getting back down. ‘Sorry Johnnie,’ she said again,
more sincerely, taking in the gash on Johnnie’s scalp, dripping red where she’d
straightened into the underside of the open bonnet.
‘I’ll get you a bandage,’ Mickey said, and headed in the back.
‘Fuck,’ said Johnnie.
Which is how Johnnie Watson came to be doubled halfway over and making a sound
like a prolonged grunt, the heel of one hand digging engine grease into her
bloodied scalp and the ball of one booted foot kicking against the dirt, when
Sherlock Holmes wheeled a bicycle into the garage.
Johnnie, at first, didn’t hear the clicking of the wheel spokes over the sounds
of her own breath and cursing, and so she was surprised to look up and see the
kid’s amused grey eyes taking her in.
Because Sherlock struck her so, that first August day: a scruffy kid, dark
curls piled haphazardly on her head and trailing down her temples and over her
eyes. She was all angles and too thin for her clothes, which were an odd
mixture of the type Johnnie had seen on the young East Enders hanging about in
the smoke billowing from holes in the walls. Dark, cuffed denim trousers; a
ladies’ blouse with a high Edwardian collar and frayed lace on the yoke;
scuffed black mens’ brogues and a tailored riding habit probably made for a
woman of Johnnie’s mother’s generation. Not that Martha Watson had ever had
call to wear such a thing.
Johnnie just stood there, clutching at her head like an idiot, even after she’d
seen the girl waiting to be helped. Kid must be all of seventeen, but she did
have eyes. Mad grey eyes, and they ought to have been cold. They were hard and
sharp, all right, but also somehow burning, and Johnnie Watson, who had once
talked the legendary Diana Dors out of her £200 cocktail dress in the washroom
of the Gateways for a barroom bet, felt suddenly ill-at-ease in front of a
gawky sixth-former.
Or at least self-conscious, anyway. Of her grimy blue coveralls. Of the black
oil in her hair. Of her grease-streaked face.
Hell, Johnnie thought. No more of that.
So she scrubbed at her hands with a rag from the counter, and ambled over to
the girl with her best serving-the-public expression firmly in place. ‘Bent
your brake rotor disk,’ she said, gesturing with the rag to the bicycle’s front
wheel. ‘We’ll get you sorted.’
Johnnie didn’t feel bad for grinning. Ten years now serving customers and she
knew what made her seem approachable, trustworthy. Mickey called it her boyish
charm; the clients all liked her. But she could feel a hint of self-
satisfaction in her smile at making such a quick diagnosis. One of the brake
pads was resting against the disk, though the girl’s hands were off the
handbrakes.
The grey eyes blinked once. ‘I see you served in the north during the war,’ the
girl said, in a voice surprisingly deep for one so young, and surprisingly
plummy for one so dressed. ‘Was it Germany, or Poland? Must have driven an
ambulance for a few years, but not the full four. Injured in the shoulder,
either in battle or through many repetitions of a task, or…yes, both, I think.
You’re staying in North Kensington with a—ah.’ The girl’s fingers went to her
mouth, and she paused a moment. ‘No parents living,’ she finished up.
Johnnie was no longer grinning; her mouth was hanging open. ‘Bloody—I
mean—pardon my language, but you can’t even be old enough to remember the war.’
‘Can’t I?’ the girl said, smirking.
‘I—well, it’s none of my business, but that was—remarkable. Unless—have you
been, I don’t know, reading up on me?’ She squinted at her. ‘You’re not a
Watson cousin, are you?'
‘I should hope not,’ said the girl, the plumminess bleeding through a bit more
into her voice. ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ she said, holding out her hand and tilting
her head. ‘And I’m not afraid of a bit of engine grease.’
Johnnie looked ruefully down at her grimy hands, but reached out with the right
to take long, slender fingers in her own. She hated to smudge them, they were
so pale and delicate-looking, but Sherlock’s handshake was firm enough to belie
any impression of fragility.
‘Johnnie Watson,’ she said, and took her hand back, massaging it absently with
her left as she contemplated the strange girl. Thinking about the things
Sherlock had known. Johnnie’s family? Her military service? Was the girl old
enough to remember the war? Johnnie looked at Sherlock’s nails, which were
rough-bitten, and her hairline, which had the roughness and spots of the
recently pubescent. Damned if Johnnie could reckon it.
‘How did you—’ she began, but Sherlock cut in with a more formal air than
before, sounding slightly bored.
‘I’m owed a favour by Max Ewing of Sloane Street,’ she said, ‘and I believe Mr.
Ewing is owed a favour by one Mickey Stamford. All debts are cancelled if Mrs.
Stamford consents to—’ she gestured at the bicycle.
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie vaguely, still raking her gaze over Sherlock. Then, ‘yes,’
she said, snapping her mind back to the bicycle. ‘Well, I told you we can get
you fixed easy enough. Just,’ with a gesture of her head toward the storage
room, ‘let me gather up a few things.’
Minutes later Johnnie, her head bandaged, was crouching on the gear side of the
bike, a piece of wire wrapped around the front fork next to the bent disk and
clipped to a centimetre’s length. She was spinning the wheel and watching the
disk’s rotation, and feeling Sherlock’s eyes on her kneeling back.
‘You going to say, then? How you knew all that about me?’ Johnnie asked,
adjusting the spanner in her hand and flicking a glance back at the strange
kid, who looked like she was considering the question.
‘Maybe I should wait until you fix my brakes,’ Sherlock said. ‘Sometimes people
don’t like hearing about it.’
‘I’ve got to fix your bike,’ Johnnie pointed out. ‘My guv’ll have my head
otherwise.’
‘All right then,’ said Sherlock. Johnnie glanced over again to where she was
standing, and saw Sherlock’s grey eyes narrow. Christ, they were unnerving.
Slanted and almond-shaped and x-raying Johnnie with that cold heat. Johnnie
looked back at the bike, and Sherlock started talking.
‘Ambulance driver is surely obvious from your profession,’ she said. ‘A female
mechanic in her early thirties; the odds are astronomical you learned those
skills in the War. I was watching for a few minutes before you hit your head;
you were working on a German car but you never hesitated when reaching into the
engine, as a mechanic would whose primary experience was with British-made
machines. Spent time in one of the Germanic countries then, probably helping
with clean-up after liberation.’
Johnnie let out a low whistle. She was working slowly, methodically, using the
spanner to adjust the disk gradually closer to true. Tweak the disk, spin the
wheel, watch the disk. Tweak the disk, spin the wheel, watch the disk.
Sherlock’s surprisingly deep voice, in combination with the repetitive work,
was almost hypnotic.
‘But nearly all the land girls who dedicated themselves to ambulance-driving
and still needed to make a living, went into nursing after the War,’ Sherlock
went on. ‘Either that, or stayed in the service. You’re presumably not the
nursing type, since here you are in a garage, making lower wages than you
might. Likely, then, that you spent time on other assignments as well during
the war.’
Sherlock paused; Johnnie was still spinning the wheel; she realised her mouth
was open again. ‘Er,’ she said, ‘yeah, you—you’re right so far,’ and Sherlock
made an ‘Mmm’ing noise.
‘Not to mention your shoulder,’ the girl went on. ‘You’ve been rolling it as if
it aches close to your neck, but just before you hit your head you also
clutched your upper arm on the other side, as if in sudden pain. The two kinds
of pain could conceivably follow from the same injury, but more likely you
suffered both a sudden trauma and a repetitive injury over time. Possibly, the
latter exacerbated the initial injury from the former.’
‘Oh come on, you—really?’ said Johnnie, sliding her eyes for a moment from the
wheel, to Sherlock’s face. She had brought the disk nearly back to true by now;
it only kissed the cut end of the wire for the briefest span of the wheel’s
rotation. Sherlock was unreadable. ‘What about where I live?’ Johnnie demanded,
as the wheel spun unseen under her fingers.
‘Tube ticket sticking out of your coverall pocket,’ said Sherlock, dismissive.
She obviously considered that a freebie. Johnnie snorted and turned back to the
wheel, shaking her head to get the grin off her face.
‘And given the housing shortage, and the common expectation that unmarried
daughters will stay at home to care for aging mothers and fathers, it’s obvious
you don’t have any living family.'
‘Maybe m’mum lives in Kensington,’ said Johnnie, straightening up, the rotor
disk restored to itself. She turned to find ice-grey eyes still trained on her
shoulders, and felt vaguely guilty for the heat in her gut. Probably not even
of age, she reminded herself. Probably all agog over boys. Eighteen-year-old
boys.Johnnie gripped the handlebars of Sherlock’s bike with what may have been
unnecessary force.
‘Speaking the way you do?’ scoffed Sherlock, recalling Johnnie to herself. Ah
yes, Kensington. ‘Not likely. Besides, you would never wear your hair like that
if you had parents still living.’ Johnnie’s hand went up to her hair,
automatically, and the extra grease in the short, already-stiffening spikes
could only have proved Sherlock’s point.
‘But considering your chosen profession,’ Sherlock went on, ‘it’s extremely
unlikely you can afford to live alone, especially in Kensington. So: a, er, a
friend.’ Sherlock looked up at the ceiling for the briefest moment before
spreading her hands, then reaching them over and laying them half on top of
Johnnie’s, reclaiming the handlebars of her bike. Her eyes bored into
Johnnie’s, and she didn’t smile. Johnnie didn’t look away.
‘That’s…bloody amazing,’ breathed Johnnie, and the corner of Sherlock’s
lip—full, thought Johnnie, full and pink—quirked up, her head tilting a tiny
bit as if in surprise. But she kept looking into Johnnie’s eyes, and: Shit,
Johnnie thought. Maybe Mickey’s right about me. Maybe I should get back on the
scene.
Mickey had appeared in the door from the back, sipping another cup of coffee
and smiling at Sherlock. ‘Right you are, Miss,’ she said, nodding. ‘And Miss
Watson’s ‘er, friend’ will be right livid if she finds Miss Watson still in
residence on her return. So if Mr. Ewing knows of any available flat-shares
going for under forty pounds a month, you can tell him I would still owe him.’
Johnnie blinked at last, and looked away from Sherlock’s ice-burnt eyes.
‘Mickey,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘it’s not on to harass the customers with
my personal troubles.’
Mickey was unconcerned. ‘Huddled behind dust bins,’ she reminded Johnnie, with
a wave of her coffee cup.
Johnnie turned back to Sherlock, hand ruffling her own hair, and smiled
ruefully. ‘Never mind her,’ she said.
But Sherlock Holmes said nothing in response. She cocked her head and pursed
her lips, and looked merely thoughtful as she wheeled her bicycle through the
open garage door, flexing her fingers now and then over the newly-repaired
handbrakes.
***
Five days later Mickey was out for dinner, and Johnnie was finishing up
switching out a fuel pump on an Austin-Healey. She liked the quiet of the shop
when she had it to herself. Unselfconscious, she’d put the hi-fi on loud, and
was singing along to ‘Mess Around.’ She was tightening the last bolt,
jitterbugging her feet and exaggerating the rhotic r’s in a parody of Ray
Charles’s accent, when a grey-haired crone staggered into the garage.
The woman was clutching at her side, bleeding all over her light-blue gloves,
through a rent in the waistband of her tweed skirt. She shuffled along the
floor, the flesh of her feet and ankles swollen over the tops of her brogues,
her lined face screwed up in pain. Johnnie glanced up, frozen in her ridiculous
position for a moment before dropping the bolt and rushing over to the door.
‘Ma’am!’ Johnnie said, grasping the dowager’s elbow and guiding her toward a
seat. ‘You’re hurt; sit down and I’ll call you an ambulance.’ The woman’s back
was hunched and she bared her yellowed teeth a bit, clutching at her side.
‘Oh heavens no, no ambulance,’ the woman croaked, as Johnnie lowered her into
the straight-backed chair. ‘You can fix me up, dearie, I’m sure.’
‘Ma’am?’ said Johnnie. Perhaps the woman was hard of hearing, or a bit dim. She
raised her voice. ‘This is only an auto-repair shop, ma’am. You’ll be needing a
doctor.’ She gave a reassuring elbow pat as the woman settled on the seat.
‘Gracious, there’s no need to shout, my dear,’ said the old woman placidly,
though her crabbed hands in their gloves were clenched on the wooden seat. She
was obviously in pain. ‘You’ve training enough, I can tell by looking at you.
No doctors today.’
Johnnie wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, but bit it back out
of respect. ‘I don’t think you understand, ma’am,’ she said instead,
enunciating each word. ‘Only, I’m a mechanic, and you’ll be needing—well. A
nurse, at least.’ From what she could tell it seemed unlikely the woman was
seriously hurt, but even a relatively minor injury, at her age—
‘Miss Watson,’ the woman snapped. Johnnie started at her own name, even as she
noticed vaguely that some of the thready croak had gone out of the woman’s
voice. ‘I loathe repeating myself, and I am sure you are more than capable.
It’s hardly more than a scratch. I wish to avoid—’ she grunted slightly as she
closed her eyes, ‘—awkward questions.’
Johnnie was entirely nonplussed. ‘I don’t—have we—’ she said, and then, ‘do I
know you, ma’am?’
The woman didn’t speak immediately, but opened her eyes again just as she
turned her head to look straight at Johnnie. Odd, intense, slanted grey eyes
sought out hers, and Johnnie’s hand came up to cover her mouth. ‘You’re—are you
related to Miss Holmes, then?’
The woman smiled a slow, lazy smile, utterly at odds with both the blood at her
ribs, and her dithering of a few moments previous. Johnnie felt like a rodent,
hypnotised by a snake.
‘Closely,’ the woman said, her voice gone deep and vibrant, her odd eyes still
trained on Johnnie’s. ‘Care to fetch the bandages now?’
Johnnie started, suddenly guilty. What was she on about? She couldn’t simply
let this elderly woman sit bleeding on Mickey’s waiting room chair. She turned
toward the office, speaking over her shoulder.
‘Yes, of course, sorry, ma’am, Mrs.—is it Mrs. Holmes, then? I do have a bit of
medical training, only it’s been so long since I’ve made any use of it, I was
surprised you would, er—’ ferreting around for the first aid kit, in amongst
Mickey’s papers, ‘—Miss Holmes must have told you about my ambulance-driving
days, then?’
Johnnie heard a surprisingly deep laugh from the other room, and turned to look
through the office door just in time to see the woman rock back in laughter,
then clutch her side in pain at the motion. She grimaced, then smiled again,
wryly, and looked back up to where Johnnie stood, clutching the first aid kid
in one hand.
‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘Come here, come and patch me up. I think
you’ll be surprised.’
Johnnie walked back toward the chair, slowly, looking hard at the old woman.
Mrs. Holmes had been stooped, with a decided hump to her back when she had
staggered into the garage; but Johnnie noticed, with a creeping feeling up her
neck, that her spine was now perfectly straight.
It was that creeping feeling, gooseflesh down the skin of her back, that made
Johnnie hesitate. She stood above the woman for a few charged moments, just
looking, and for some unaccountable reason Mrs. Holmes’s shrivelled mouth
looked poised for laughter. Johnnie crouched by her side, unbuttoned her tweed
suit jacket, lifted up the hem of the white blouse underneath it, and—
‘What in—’ she gasped, falling backward off her heels and landing hard on her
tailbone. Above her, the injured woman was shaking with silent laughter. ‘I did
warn you,’ she said.
‘That’s impossible,’ breathed Johnnie, scrambling back up into her crouch for
another look. The wound wasn’t much: a long, shallow gash from what looked to
be a knife blade. Plenty of open skin from which to bleed, but no damage to
anything vital.
But around the wound. Around the wound—despite the papery, spotted texture of
the skin on the woman’s face—was the taut, unblemished torso of a young woman.
Johnnie stared at this impossible skin for a solid five seconds before shaking
herself out of her reverie, opening a prepackaged moist flannel from the kit,
and beginning to clean the wound. While she worked she glanced up occasionally
at the odd eyes, the smirking mouth. Even now, with this creamy midriff for
comparison, the texture and spotting on the woman's face looked absolutely
convincing. Only, if Johnnie looked very carefully at the skin around her eyes,
could she detect the smooth plump texture of youth.
‘You…are Miss Holmes,’ said Johnnie, and although it wasn’t exactly a question,
she felt she would still welcome the confirmation.
‘Sherlock, please,’ said Sherlock. ‘And you can see now that hospital staff may
have asked some very awkward questions, had I turned up like this demanding
treatment.'
‘How did you—no, hold on, why are you got up like somebody’s dowager aunt?’
said Johnnie, throwing aside the flannel and tearing open a bandage. ‘And how
did you come to be slashed across the ribs?’
‘Occupational hazard,’ said Sherlock. ‘I was recovering a bit
of—misappropriated property, for a client. I thought this,’ she gestured at her
ensemble, ‘would be an inconspicuous persona for the job. It worked, too, but
they—they caught on at the end.’ She chuckled, then winced.
‘So you’re—what? You work for the Met?’ asked Johnnie. ‘I know a few of the
MWPP girls. Have you ever worked with Sally—’
‘I do not work for the police,’ interrupted Sherlock. ‘I’m a—that is, I’m
building a practice as a private investigator.’
‘Really?’ said Johnnie, taping the bandage to the flawless white skin covering
Sherlock’s ribs. Her fingertips smoothed the join between skin and fabric tape.
‘That does sound more interesting than rousting the working girls on
Picadilly.’
When Sherlock snickered, Johnnie could see, for a moment, the face of the young
girl she had first met, behind Sherlock’s mask of age. ‘Exactly how old are
you, anyway?’ Johnnie said, at the same moment Sherlock waved her hand and
muttered ‘It does, theoretically.’
Then Sherlock smiled, teasing. When she smiled like that it was hard to imagine
how she’d fooled Johnnie at all. Even with all the makeup and
prosthetics—Johnnie assumed, at least, that’s what they were—it was a dazzling
smile.
‘Old enough,’ Sherlock announced, full of youthful energy, ‘to have found and
rented us a flat. All your housing difficulties are solved.’
Johnnie spluttered up at her patient. ‘Pardon?’ she said. ‘I barely know you.
Anyway, how do you know I haven’t found a flat, since last Thursday?’
Sherlock raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you?’ she asked, as if in no doubt about the
answer, and Johnnie was just about to lie out of spite, to tell this stranger
that she had indeed, thanks awfully, but a voice from the garage door cut
across her indignant thoughts.
‘She hasn’t even looked, don’t let her tell you different.’ Mickey Stamford was
leaning against the garage-door tracks, grinning all across her ruddy face.
‘Mickey, dammit, stay out of my personal business,’ snapped Johnnie, colouring
up.
‘Dustbins,’ said Mickey, placidly. ‘In the East End,’ she added.
Sherlock was looking at Johnnie intently, eyes narrowed. ‘Interesting that you
remember so exactly which day we met,’ she said, almost under her breath, and
emphasising the final t with relish.
Johnnie, exasperated, threw the tape and bandages back in the first aid kit and
rose to her feet. ‘You’re impossible, both of you,’ she said, looking from one
to the other before she stormed back into the office to put the kit away.
‘Bloody impossible,’ she repeated, moving piles of paper back into their
original locations. She didn’t know why she was bothering, except to buy a
little time. Outside, she could hear Sherlock explaining her identity to an
impressed Mickey.
The truth is that Johnnie’s flat situation was getting desperate. Margrit would
be back in three days, and Johnnie did not fancy the row that would ensue if
they met again. Johnnie wasn’t even sure why she had put off so long the search
for a new place, except that she fully expected it to be demoralising. Nearly
all her mates had had their turns moaning about the flat shortage, about the
way the housing boards favoured families and young men over single women. On
her wages she truly dreaded the flatmates she might end up with. And Sherlock
Holmes seemed mad, indeed, but mad in a way that was—different.
Johnnie cleared her throat, staring down at Mickey’s piles of paper. In any
case Sherlock could hardly be worse than some of the alternatives, even leaving
aside Johnnie’s unlooked-for thoughts about the girl’s hipbones under her
shifting knife-scarred skin. Johnnie sighed, steeled herself, and turned to
leave the office.
‘Right,’ she said, ignoring Mickey’s smirking face and walking right up to
Sherlock, still seated on the straight-backed chair. ‘Where is this flat you’ve
picked out for us?’
‘Central location,’ said Sherlock, with a straight face that looked like it was
costing her. ‘Baker Street, not a ten minutes’ walk from here.’
‘Convenient,’ piped up Mickey. ‘It’d get you away from those, what was it,
John? “Kensington and Chelsea bints”?’
Johnnie glared at her, then turned back to Sherlock. ‘Does this convenient,
centrally-located flat have any covered parking nearby?’ she asked, and was
perversely pleased to see a look of surprise flash across Sherlock’s weirdly
age-ambiguous face.
‘I’m—not sure,’ she said, looking thoughtful.
‘Johnnie has her baby to think about,’ said Mickey, gesturing toward the back
corner of the shop. Sherlock’s look of bemusement turned to outright alarm for
a split-second, until she realised Mickey was referring, not to a human infant,
but to a tarpaulin-covered mass against the far wall. Johnnie saw the relief on
her face, and chuckled.
Sherlock got up, nimble now and light-limbed despite the trappings of age, and
moved toward the corner. Johnnie rushed ahead of her. She removed the tarpaulin
herself, careful and precise.
Underneath was a motorbike. Johnnie saw it again with fresh eyes whenever she
showed it off to someone for the first time: black and shining, its chrome
polished clean. The line of the thing was low, sleek. Powerful. Johnnie ran a
hand over the seat and the gas tank with a reverent familiarity, and thought
she heard Sherlock make a noise in her throat.
‘Vincent Black Lightning,’ said Johnnie, and she could feel the proud grin
spreading across her face. ‘It’s a ’49. Bike like this set the Land Speed
Record this year. I’d never’ve been able to afford it, but this bastard bought
it new and damn near wrecked it. Would have sold it for scrap. Still cost most
of my discharge money.’
Mickey stood with crossed arms, looking at Johnnie like a proud parent. ‘John’s
rebuilt that bike from the ground up,’ she said, when Johnnie showed no signs
of singing her own praises. ‘Wouldn’t have thought it was possible, the shape
it was in when she picked it up. Told her she was crazy. But, three years later
and it runs like a dream.’
Johnnie hmm’ed in her throat, feeling the weight of Sherlock’s eyes on the bike
as if on Johnnie’s own body. She rubbed her hands up and down the sides of her
coveralls. ‘Still needs a few tweaks,’ she said, looking at the bike rather
than either Mickey or Sherlock. ‘But she goes all right.’
Mickey snorted. ‘She goes all right,’ she parroted. ‘John Watson, you’ve picked
up half the girls in Chelsea on that motorbike, and don’t you deny it.’
Johnnie felt gut-punched. Not how she’d have chosen to suss out this strange
girl’s feelings; but what if Sherlock—? Johnnie’s eyes slid sideways; her
breath held.
Sherlock was watching closely, looking between Mickey and Johnnie as if piecing
something together. Mickey seemed to remember her presence, and said ‘She’ll
let you on the back of it if you ask nicely, I don’t doubt.’
‘Stamford!’ Johnnie growled, at the same moment Sherlock shook herself, taking
her eyes off Johnnie and looking back at the bike.
‘I, um,’ she said. ‘I appreciate the thought but I know I’m not—’ She took a
deep breath, drew herself up. Looked steadily over at Johnnie. Johnnie felt her
chest clench.
‘I think you should know I consider myself married to my work,’ Sherlock said,
her tones plummy again. ‘And this idea of rooming together, you mustn’t
think—it’s only that we share an urgent need for a flat-share. And you seem
less tiresome than most of the idiots I come across. So.’ Johnnie could see the
girl’s jaw working, underneath the artificial wrinkles and age spots.
So much for dreams of creamy white skin, thought Johnnie. But really, what had
she expected? Things were probably better this way. She knew (thinking of
Margrit and her sneering pink lips) about moving in with girlfriends from
bitter experience. At the very least Sherlock, thanks to Mickey Stamford’s
perpetual allergy to the concept of discretion, already knew what she was
getting into. She didn’t seem disgusted by the idea of living with an invert;
that would simplify things, anyway.
Johnnie coughed, and swung the tarpaulin back over the bike. ‘Point taken,’ she
said. ‘So. Covered car park?’
Mickey clapped a hand on her shoulder. ‘You know you can leave it here for as
long as you need, Johnnie. Just get yourself out of Kensington and I’ll sleep
easier.’
Johnnie looked back at Sherlock, sheepish and resigned, her hands in her
coverall pockets. ‘Tell me when,’ she said. ‘When and where.’ And Sherlock
beamed.
Chapter End Notes
        1. Huge thanks to Katya for the beautiful art at the beginning of
           this chapter!
        2. I tried to do my research here, but I am really, really not a
           car person. Please forgive any ridiculous mistakes on the car-
           repair sections.
        3. Johnnie is lucky, given the time period, to be in a situation
           where she’s pretty much 100% out to her employer and larger
           social circle. From what I can gather, this was unusual but not
           unheard-of. It was more common among working-class butches,
           who, like Johnnie, did manual labor. Many middle-class women
           who presented as butch on the nights and weekends, were forced
           by their office jobs to be closeted and present as feminine at
           work. (Again, lesbianism was never outlawed in Britain like
           sodomy/male homosexuality was, but social stigma and loss of
           livelihood were real threats.)
        4. New Town Bugger-All: “New Town” was the prefix of the names of
           the new suburbs constructed from the ground up in the wake of
           WWII. There was a mass exodus from the scarce, blitzed-out
           accommodations in London proper, to these brand new towns. In
           many cases they were dirty, unfinished and lonely at first, but
           people still flocked to them for their modern conveniences -
           like running water and indoor plumbing - which many flats in
           London still didn’t have in the 1950s.
        5. Kensington at mid-century was a haven for middle-class and
           upper-middle-class lesbians. Chelsea (more so between the Wars
           but also post-WWII) was a generally permissive, artistic,
           “bohemian” neighborhood, and a destination for queer folks for
           both housing and entertainment. Social mores were more relaxed,
           although, as Jill Gardiner writes in From the Closet to the
           Screen: Women at the Gateways:
                This famous broad-mindedness bad its limits as
                Quentin Crisp recalled: ‘In Chelsea eating houses I
                was there on sufferance and was warned not to sit
                near the window.' Sheila and her girlfriend ‘would
                walk arm in arm, but we wouldn’t walk hand in hand,
                even in Chelsea.’
        6. Sherlock’s look in this and a few other scenes is based on this
           photoshoot of the working-class “teddy girl” youth culture in
           1950s London, by Ken Russell.
        7. On Diana Dors: Jill Gardiner writes, in From the Closet to the
           Screen: Women at the Gateways Club 1945-85: “Diana Dors, an
           actress famous for her blonde and busty sex appeal, had
           gravitated to Chelsea in 1948 when she first moved away from
           home.” Dors became a regular at the Gateways, the most famous
           lesbian club in London at that time.
        8. Women in the British armed forces in WWII were not allowed to
           fire guns or serve in actual battle, but members of the ATS
           (Auxiliary Territorial Service, which was the women’s division
           of the forces), also known as land girls, did serve as radar
           operators, ambulance drivers, dispatch drivers, and so on. It
           would have been very common, if not universal, for ATS members
           to be trained in basic vehicle repair. Those driving ambulances
           or working as messengers or mechanics would have had more in-
           depth training.
        9. The expectation that unmarried daughters would stay at home to
           care for ageing relatives was a BIG theme in the oral histories
           of London lesbians from this era. It was an obstacle for many
           couples who would otherwise have set up house together
           (officially as “flatmates” since marriage was obviously
           impossible for same-sex couples). An unmarried woman with a
           living parent would be seen as scandalous if she chose not to
           live with that parent.
       10. Ray Charles’s “Mess Around” came out in 1953; British radio was
           still dominated by American acts at this point.
       11. MWPP: Metropolitan Women’s Police Patrol. The female division
           of the Met, which was generally restricted to cases pertaining
           to women and children. From Rebecca Jennings’s Tomboys and
           Bachelor Girls:
                Women police were still largely expected to
                specialise in areas involving women and children.
                They arrested or moved on prostitutes, picked up
                missing girls and approved school absconders, as well
                as occasionally intervening in domestic disputes.
           The services and the MWPP attracted a relatively large
           percentage of lesbians, although there was a strong push,
           during the 50s, to re-“feminize” the MWPP’s image - which
           entailed making sure queer members of the force were fully
           closeted.
       12. A visual aid for Johnnie’s motorbike, the 1948 Vincent Black
           Lightning: [Vincent Black Lightning]

***** Chapter 6 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
August, 1954
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
London, England
The next few months felt to Johnnie like the battlefield she’d forgotten she
loved.
Everything sped up; everything brightened. That lukewarm sameness she had known
since the War’s end—the drab London of butter rations, and cold-water flats,
and forced optimism over future play-parks in future suburbs—was all forgotten.
Instead there was urgency. Motion. A shock to the system that Johnnie hadn’t
felt since she’d gone against orders in 1944, loading heavy artillery in the
Margate night while doodlebugs detonated overhead.
And the odd thing was, that it wasn’t even dire or life-threatening. Not at
first. It was just…Sherlock, and so strange and fast and giddy that it beat
Johnnie’s heart.
She thought, looking back, that in the last static moment she was alone at the
flat.
221B Baker Street was, as promised, conveniently located. It was also tiny, and
sweltering, and smelled of fish from the cafe downstairs. Its every available
surface, from doorway to washroom, was heaped with clothing and laboratory
equipment, and the muck caked on to the one stovetop burner was an inexplicable
blue-green colour. The elderly landlady hadn’t been able to suppress a startled
wince as she’d led Johnnie through, and Johnnie discovered soon enough that the
burner had nothing on the state of the washbasin in the WC.
Miraculously, though, 221B was also equipped with functional indoor plumbing.
Johnnie would put up with stranger than Sherlock Holmes, she thought; would in
fact cheerfully strip to her skivvies and do a full-scale decontamination of
the flat, if it meant not having to traipse outside for a piss come the frigid
nights of January. Poisonous as Margrit had been toward the end, heated WCs
were an aspect of Kensington life to which Johnnie had become accustomed.
And so she had out her pocket knife, and was chipping away determinedly at the
blue-green residue. The door creaked. She started: a thin, pale man in a
charcoal suit stepped neatly through the door.
All his looks were fastidious: trimmed moustache, polished spectacles; shined
shoes. Like he commuted from the suburbs; like he supervised his children’s
dental hygiene. Like he was here in this filthy flat to assess and measure, and
probably, thought Johnnie, to penalise.
She straightened up, starting to explain herself. But the man raised his
eyebrow and opened his mouth, and out came ‘Really, Miss Watson, I’d have
thought the third time would be lucky,’ in Sherlock’s contralto drawl, and the
world whirled into another gear.
The next thing she knew, Johnnie was shoving Sherlock’s suited shoulder, and
Sherlock was smirking. And then Johnnie was gesturing at the blue-green gunk,
and Sherlock was shrugging. And then a tiny, rat-faced woman was barging in,
breathless, at the top of the stairs, and Sherlock was chivvying her to a seat
and asking her to tell all about her son, and this girl with whom he had been
seen. And then Johnnie and Sherlock were running through neighbourhood alleys,
dodging into shops and behind parked cabs as Johnnie panted ‘This is normal for
you, then, is it?’; and then they were crouching together behind some bins in
St. Pancras Station, watching a young girl throw a bundle of ten-pound notes in
the face of a young man; and it wasn’t until late that night, or more
accurately early the next morning, as they were sitting together in Mrs.
Fitzpatrick’s parlour, eating mutton stew and listening to her fret about the
arrival of her first (and bastard) grandchild, that Johnnie realised Sherlock
had spent the whole mad evening disguised as a City banker, and had never
offered the smallest explanation as to why.
Johnnie was punchy and sleep-starved. She had to fight back the giggles.
Sherlock’s alter-ego now looked like he’d been through a very rough budget
meeting indeed: suit stained with street grime and engine grease, trousers
rumpled and creased. Nothing could be more out of place. When he suggested to
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, grave and authoritative as he picked at his stew, that the
best layette prices in the neighbourhood were to be found in a little shop at
the far end of Wyndham Mews, Johnnie couldn’t help it: she burst into open
laughter, apologising with upheld hand. The look of consternation on Sherlock’s
face was oddly dear.
And later they were laughing still, back in 221B in the pale light of dawn,
both backed against the wall with their payment at their feet in the form of
more mutton stew than they could possibly fit in the ice-box.
‘Sherlock,’ Johnnie gasped, and Sherlock looked up at the ceiling, grinning,
and said, ‘Johnnie.’
‘What on earth were—why were you—’ Johnnie still couldn’t get enough breath
through her laughter, so was gesturing at Sherlock’s ruined suit, ‘—why were
you dressed like this, in the first place?’
‘Hm,’ said Sherlock, looking down at the smears and creases, ‘well.’ And then,
looking straight at Johnnie, ‘Perhaps I thought it might make you feel more
comfortable.’ She held her serious face for a second and a half before they
were both doubled up, sinking to the floor with laughter.
‘You ridiculous—why would you think it—might make me—’ gasped Johnnie, but she
couldn’t finish, and Sherlock said, ‘Yes, you know, doing business with a
bloke,’ and Johnnie pounded the floor with the flat of her hand as tears ran
down her face. When they were both sprawled panting on the floor Sherlock said,
rueful, lifting her head to glance at the suit, ‘I suppose I can always use it
in future to infiltrate the bread line.’ Johnnie said, ‘We’ll need the bread to
soak up all this stew,’ and they giggled weakly and shook their heads as the
sun rose over London.
                                      ***
Four hours later, Johnnie was due at the garage. When she got off work that
afternoon she toted her few possessions from Margrit’s place to Baker Street.
It only needed two trips on the Vincent, there was so little to take.
Even so, she hadn’t time to find places for all of it before a newly bohemian
Sherlock was whirling in, got up in a striped knit top, capris and espadrilles,
with her hair in a false shingle and brightly-coloured scarves knotted at her
neck and her wrists.
She banged into Johnnie’s room; sat on the bed. Lit a cigarette, and unloosed a
torrent of words. Johnnie glanced up from organising her dresser drawer,
annoyed, ready to tell Sherlock off for being about to burn a hole in the
coverlet, and—there. There was one of those rare moments of stillness.
Sherlock had knotted a blue kerchief at her throat, and it thawed the icy grey
of her eyes; her face was alive with excitement. She was saying something about
embezzlement, and painting, and American-style speakeasies, but Johnnie heard
none of it because Sherlock’s vicious crooked teeth showed behind her naked
lips, and her hands danced around each other in her lap, and Christ was she
strange and beautiful.
And not interested, Johnnie remembered, as she shook herself back into time.
Everything sped up again, then, and didn’t hitch until two in the morning.
Johnnie had slept three hours in the past forty. Sherlock was smoking clove
cigarettes and chatting up a pair of painters in an unlicensed garret bar,
while Johnnie watched the door for either: a man of a certain description, or
the Met officers who might any minute be by to shut the place down. The younger
painter shifted closer to Sherlock: one hand on her knee, the other hovering
worryingly above her gin and tonic. And was there something held close in the
palm of his hand? Johnnie’s gut clenched; she thought she saw his fingers move.
Her hand twitched toward the knife hidden in her jacket lining, but Sherlock
caught her eye, warning her off.
A few minutes later Johnnie got to work out her aggression via her fist to the
face and her knee to the kidney of the reedy man she’d been waiting for. She
turned from his prone body, which lay unconscious on the floor, to find the
painters gaping at her and Sherlock, supremely unruffled, tipping the last of
her cocktail down her long white throat.
‘Be a bit less obvious next time, can’t you?’ Sherlock had muttered, hopping
off the barstool. She’d plucked the man’s wallet out of his jacket before
slipping down the side stairs, Johnnie following.
Another two hours—unnecessary amount of time, Johnnie thought, but Sherlock had
flatly refused to ride out on the bike, and they couldn’t afford a cab—saw them
back at Baker Street, still un-slept and unwashed, with their payment in face-
paint and future favours and the thief’s identity revealed.
‘What “favours” could a couple of avant-garde painters possibly do us?’
grumbled Johnnie, rubbing at her own shoulder as Sherlock filed the paints into
their proper compartments in the disguise kit.
Sherlock smiled to herself. It was a private, pleased little smile. But all she
said was, ‘It never hurts to cultivate a wide range of investments.’
‘Hm,’ said Johnnie. ‘What are you so pleased about, then?’
Sherlock started a bit, as if caught out. ‘I,’ she said. ‘Er.’ Then her
expression became something more like a smirk. ‘I switched out the cocktails
while you were distracting our client.’
‘You—’ said Johnnie, smiling slow. ‘I thought he might try something.’
‘Yes, you nearly gave us away, you thought it so loudly. Does it give you peace
of mind? Knowing he’ll be unconscious for another six hours? Barbital, I
believe. Not very original but what can you expect? He can hardly complain; it
was his own to begin with.’
Johnnie snorted. ‘Investing widely?’ she asked.
‘He ought to feel indebted,’ said Sherlock. ‘I’ll neither blackmail nor
prosecute.’
‘Well,’ Johnnie said, rubbing her eyes, ‘believe me when I say that right now I
am cultivating the spirit of choking down another bowl of stew, and turning in
for a good—’ she looked at her watch, and groaned, ‘—two hours of sleep.’
When she finally made it upstairs, she found three separate cigarette burns in
her coverlet. She couldn’t bring herself to care.
                                      ***
February, 1955
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
London, England
The last few months had felt, to Sherlock, like drowning in an ocean she
refused to chart on the map.
Even at the time, as she had searched out the Baker Street flat and made her
plans, there had been a niggling voice at the back of her mind. But she’d been
caught in a paradox. Johnnie Watson was in rather desperate need of a
flatshare. And she, Sherlock, did require some amount of cash income to make up
her rent. And it was undeniable that Johnnie’s responses to Sherlock were
unusually positive, unusually receptive. Had anyone challenged Sherlock on that
point, she could have presented quantifiable data, charted or graphed. (This,
even before the months of accompaniment—almost collaboration—on Sherlock’s
cases.) So that when her brain had sent up small, persistent pulses of doubt
about the logic of her own motivations, it seemed illogical to credit them.
She was better, Sherlock thought, her jaw clenched tight at two o’clock one
stormy February morning, than those fools who repeated old mistakes.
Thunder and lightning exploded in tandem, and above her head, from Johnnie’s
room, came a most un-Johnnie-like squeal. Then a low, sleepy murmur; a chuckle.
Then a silence, and the faintest suggestion of a moan. Behind Sherlock’s eyes
flashed memories of a pink lace party dress; glossed lips; a mass of chestnut
curls. Now, alone in her room, her hand clenched around her letter-opener.
She crossed to the dresser, quick and jerky, her legs poorly aligned pistons.
Pulled out the bottom drawer. At the back, behind her bedroom slippers and
extending halfway across the width of the dresser, sat a neat row of metal
cylinders. There were indentations in Sherlock’s socks and empty space cleared
behind, where the rest of the tubes had been removed.
Sherlock sat and looked at the cylinders. She thought about Johnnie, now on her
second round with the girl upstairs. Siobhan, was it? She’d been from
Ballyshannon, whoever she was, near Lough Gill and the famous Lake Isle.
Sherlock had known it from her voice when they’d stumbled in. Had known that
Johnnie, like every other person the girl had ever met, would try to quote that
awful poem at her if Sherlock mentioned Innisfree. Mentioned it.
They’d gone to bed together anyway. Tedious.
Sherlock shifted on her heels, closed her eyes.
An afternoon months previous; one of the last fine autumn days. She’d walked to
the garage, still in her karate whites. Grease-smeared Johnnie, in khakis and a
man’s white undershirt, had been stretched on her side next to the Vincent,
propped up on one bare shoulder, reaching into the open housing of the gearbox.
Her legs had tangled together on the packed dirt.
Sherlock had watched, and Johnnie had reached out for a different-sized
spanner. She hadn’t taken her eyes off her work. Her fingers had been broad,
and sure; had moved on the inner surfaces of the gearbox with a kind of
utilitarian grace.
Johnnie’s hands weren’t precious, like those of a watchmaker; or precise in the
way of Sherlock’s when she played her violin. But they were frank. Familiar.
Johnnie touched the Vincent, Sherlock had thought, with the same rough, tender
carelessness she showed her own skin. And Johnnie trusted so casually to her
body, even after—after the war.
A silverfish had scuttled over Johnnie’s ankle then. Johnnie’s leg had
twitched. Sherlock had shuddered, oddly disturbed.
Her eyes blinked open. Her mouth was painfully dry and her jaw clenched
convulsively.
Sherlock pulled out two cylinders and straightened up. Screwed them open. One,
and two: precise knocks against the top of the dresser, then agile twists of
her fingers and thumb. She probed in an open tube with the blade of the letter
opener. Brought the soaked paper up to her mouth, licking it off on the
delicate silver point. She liked to do it without her fingers touching. She
chewed and swallowed and scowled.
She was being stubborn. But this was the ritual, after all; she’d always
enjoyed staying up late nights when it stormed. Hard rain and benzedrine
smoothed out everything extra. She would be light and empty, floating behind
her own hands as they moved, measured, recorded. That direct line, clean and
simple, from fingers to conclusions. She’d spent winters this way since the
Armistice.
Tonight, she insisted to herself, was just the same.
‘You’re down amongst the groundlings now, Holmes,’ Johnnie had said that day,
when Sherlock had commented on the silverfish. ‘We poor sods haven’t maids to
air out the damp.’
‘You think I come from money?’ Sherlock had asked, and ‘No,’ Johnnie had said,
casually, neither hesitating nor turning around. ‘I know you come from money.’
Sherlock had raised an eyebrow, unaccountably nervous. ‘I’m—no longer in touch
with my family,’ she had said in a rush. Johnnie hadn’t looked surprised.
Lightning laid open the room. The glass gleamed on Sherlock’s shelves. The
thunder rumbled in.
Sherlock’s heart kicked, a full-body shiver; and upstairs Johnnie’s headboard
hit—hit hit—hit the wall. Sherlock skewered her fourth amphetamine strip of the
evening on the tip of her silver knife, and set it to soak in her tea.
Sometimes, when the drug was just kicking in, sounds would distort around her,
as if heard through waves of water. But now, coming down off the first round,
it felt raw in her head. Enhanced. The scrape of metal against wood
(headboard), wood against wood (foot of the bed), wood against glass (window),
metal against—ah.
The sound had changed, muffled: someone had stuffed a cushion of fabric between
the headboard and the wall. Sherlock pictured Siobhan’s pink party dress,
wadded up like rubbish, streaked with grime from the iron supports.
And yet Siobhan would probably leave smiling tomorrow, thought Sherlock. Even
laughing. Sherlock caught herself thinking about that, though it could hardly
be of interest: the strange good humour of Johnnie Watson’s lace-clad women. It
must be so easy in their little minds. As if they were made for this. As if
nothing were at risk.
‘…I’ve known how for ages,’ Sherlock had said, ‘and I hardly learnt that at—’
Then, too late, she had shut her mouth.
‘At where?’ Johnnie had asked, sharp and delighted, swinging her legs around to
face Sherlock. Sherlock had bitten out ‘Nowhere,’ which was idiotic.
Johnnie’s grin had widened. ‘Where did you go toschool, Sherlock,’ she had
asked, her voice teasing and sing-song and fond. She’d been leaning back on her
palms then, freckled shoulders jutting forward. Deltoid muscles sharp under
burnished gold skin. There were fewer freckles, Sherlock had thought, than at
the height of summer.
‘Come on, tell me,’ Johnnie had wheedled. ‘Tell you what, we can both go, we’ll
take the bike. A regular ride down memory lane.’ Sherlock had glanced over at
the motorbike, covetous, but her stomach had churned. ‘Where was it, then?’
Johnnie had said. ‘Hill Brow School? Westminster? Queen Mar—’
‘I’ll not ride anywhere on that thing,’ Sherlock had snapped. ‘I’m not one of
your—I’ve no wish for an early death.’ And they had stared at each other as the
teasing grin slid from Johnnie’s face.
Sherlock’s jaw was spasming again; she made an effort to relax the muscles.
Well, she thought, it was true. Sherlock was nothing so prosaic. It was
different for the others.
Five minutes with this Siobhan, and Sherlock could recite the catechism of her
mediocrity. Siobhan lived in Croydon. She wrote to her Irish aunts about the
weather. She went into the city on Fridays, in a pink lace dress. She listened
to Mrs Dale’s Diary, and hated Mrs. Mountbank. She was apprenticed in the
hosiery department of a women’s clothing store. She had a secret life, yet was
idiot enough to wish she hadn’t. She rode on the back of Johnnie Watson’s
motorbike. She had failed out of secondary school after algebra. She visited
her Gran on Sunday mornings, and when she smiled at the old lady it would be
the same smile she would use on Johnnie at breakfast tomorrow. The same smile,
even after Johnnie had knelt over her and pushed a knee between her legs and
rocked her down into the mattress, hard, so hard that Sherlock could hear it
downstairs in her—.
Pedestrian.
Sherlock took a deep breath, unclenched her jaw.
But Sherlock—Sherlock had a stable of selves. Only a fool would give up the
choice among them, would agree to be whittled down, in exchange for a few
involuntary muscle contractions in a rented bed. She slid three fingers under
the neckline of her dressing gown; trailed the tips over her own collarbone and
couldn’t hardly breathe.
Sherlock had said something ridiculous, something like—‘How did you know about
my family? Do you find my Cockney unconvincing?’ It was one of the few accents
Johnnie could also put on; they’d spent a frigid few days in November, camped
out as beggars in the churchyard of St. Ethelreda’s.
Johnnie had laughed.
‘Do I “find your Cockney unconvincing”?’ she had mimicked. ‘No, idiot, I’m not
insulting any of your—characters, or disguises, or whatever you want to call
them. It’s just your sense of bloody entitlement, isn’t it? Screams “public
school” a mile off.’
A sudden rush of fondness, Sherlock remembered. ‘I—are you using my own methods
against me?’ she had asked. Trying not to smile.
Johnnie had given an amused little shake of her head, eyes lingering a moment
on Sherlock’s. ‘Don’t need to, do I?’ Johnnie had said. ‘I know a posh git when
I see one. The things you know how towear, for Christ’s sake.’
The things you know how to.
(So when Johnnie Watson had said to her, weeks later, that night before they’d
infiltrated the Carruthers’s ball, ‘You don’t reckon it would be less
suspicious to go as a couple? I think Jeanette is about your size,’ holding out
a swathe of lace-trimmed, bias-cut black silk, Sherlock had torn the dress to
shreds, teeth bared and snarling like a hunted thing.
Johnnie had been frightened. Sherlock told herself that was good, and
necessary. Sherlock was not to be confused with one of those.)
There were panting cries from upstairs now. The foot of the bed was dragging
again over the floor. Sherlock threw her cooling tea down her throat, along
with its sodden paper garnish.
                                      ***
Next morning the storm had blown itself out. Sherlock hadn’t slept; her focus
was crystalline. She eased another drop of titrate into the flask. Siobhan and
Johnnie came downstairs. Johnnie was saying ‘Mrs. Mountbank, really? But she’s
impossible,’ and Siobhan protesting, giggling: ‘No, she’s saucy. I’d be a bit
snappish, too, if I had to put up with that lot.’ They shut the door, quietly
laughing; nothing seemed so irrelevant.
A few hours later Sherlock and Johnnie were perched on top of an omnibus,
huddled together against the icy fog as they trailed Mr. Butler’s niece to her
service job in Mayfair. Johnnie bent her sandy head and breathed on her hands,
and in the flowerbeds she rolled her bad shoulder. But she gave Sherlock a look
like revelation when Sherlock laid out the cause and effect of the case, and
rolled her eyes back in her head when she tasted the French cheese Mr. Butler
gave them in payment, and Sherlock couldn’t help but forget about the Siobhans
of the world.
So it wasn’t until days later, as Sherlock was stuffing her butcher’s smock
into the hamper for the wash, that she noticed the stains on Johnnie’s work
coveralls: rusty smudges where the fabric had been stuffed behind an iron
headboard.
                                      ***
April, 1955
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
London, England
And that, Johnnie found, was simply life with Sherlock Holmes. Mad; baffling;
always in motion. Never sensical. Never dull.
In some ways, she thought, standing at the kitchen sink and finishing off the
dregs of the lasagne from Mrs. Del Ponte down the street, it was a bit like
being part of a secret society. Sherlock’s ‘investments’ had been cultivated
very thoroughly indeed; while she had, as far as Johnnie had ever been able to
ascertain, no source of cash income whatsoever, there was a constant stream of
heterogeneous food and consumer goods filtering into Baker Street, augmented by
standing favours.
So that, while she had little money for pubs, and scarcely ate in the first
place, Sherlock did have a monthly stipend at Mr. Butler the greengrocer’s
adequate to keep them in tea, bread, milk, and beans. And though, NHS be
damned, she’d made Johnnie stitch up five deep cuts, bandage a sprained ankle,
and relocate Sherlock’s shoulder in the first three months of their
acquaintance, she was supplied with a steady stream of bronchial inhalers from
Mr. Phipps the chemist down the road. And after their first row, over
Sherlock’s casual appropriation of Johnnie’s work coveralls for an experiment
with acids, Sherlock was able to secure a serviceable replacement from Mr.
Hutchinson at the Army Surplus shop two corners down—although she complained
for days after that it cut into her trade budget for disguises.
But oh, the disguises. They continued to be—what? thought Johnnie, relieved to
be rinsing the last of the lasagne out of her bowl. Disconcerting? Confusing?
Oddly compelling, at times?
By the end of the first three months Johnnie was almost always able to
recognise Sherlock, as long as they met in the flat. Not that that made
everything comfortable. She still had the bruise from the night Sherlock had
burst into her bedroom in the guise of a prison warden, while Johnnie had had
her head between the thighs of a lovely dark-haired French girl. Therèse had
screamed and screamed, and kneed Johnnie hard in her bad shoulder, and
Johnnie’s attempts to explain that Therèse could quiet down, this was Johnnie’s
flatmate, proved woefully inadequate. The girl had grabbed her dress and edged
out of the room, wide eyes on the gaping warden.
‘Jesus wept, Sherlock,’ Johnnie had groaned, rolling her shoulder and wincing
as she re-buttoned her shirt. ‘You couldn’t have waited ten minutes? That was
bloody locked.’ But she had followed an oddly quiet Sherlock into the chilly
March night.
Out in the wilds of London, on the other hand, Sherlock could still trick
Johnnie, and seemed to delight in it. Last Saturday Johnnie had spent fifteen
minutes in heated debate with a corpulent Castilian ticket vendor, only to
realise, as her intended train left the station and the cursed old witch
grinned at her gap-toothed, that this was Sherlock. Wanting company on a case,
and amusing herself getting it.
‘Goddammit,’ Johnnie had muttered, slapping her palm on the ticket counter and
watching her train steam away from the station. But she hadn’t been able to
quell a twinge of relief. She’d have spent the day in the suburbs, with her
dolt of a brother.
‘Ah,’ the ticket vendor had said, ducking out of her ticket booth with alarming
speed. ‘Ahh, por fin, dath cuento. Entonthes, ¿vámonos?’ and Johnnie had
muttered ‘Sí, mocosa,’ mouth quirking up and hand going compulsively to check
her jacket lining for her knife.
‘What?’ she had said, in response to the woman’s surprised look, but Sherlock
had just turned, eyebrows raised, and inquired ‘Castilian “er friend”?’ over
her shoulder. Johnnie hadn’t responded. Ana had been Chilean.
                                      ***
But it wasn’t so much the surprise revelations that threw her. Those were
familiar, chaste: the spike of adrenaline; the shock of recognition; the slide
into brotherly, shoulder-punching annoyance. No, it was what happened
afterward. What happened once Johnnie knew that the young slicked-back Teddy
boy, or the frowzy middle-aged shopkeeper, or the young boy in sweat-soaked
karate whites, was actually Sherlock.
Johnnie mulled over the problem in pubs; in lulls at the garage; while doing
the washing up. She tried desperately to avoid thinking about it at night, when
she was alone or—god forbid—not alone, in her bed.
That she was drawn to Sherlock was no great surprise, and no great problem
either. Johnnie Watson had loved, and lived with, enough women to respect a
clear disavowal of interest. But this was—with Sherlock she felt, constantly,
on the wrong foot. As if she were resisting an entire army, instead of just one
person.
For one thing, Johnnie had never (they joked about gold stars down at the
Gates) had the remotest desire to go to bed with a man. But when she and
Sherlock spent the week undercover as Evan and Michael, out-of-town executives
at Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s brother’s advertising firm, she could hardly think for
staring at the tailored navy wool suiting taut across Sherlock’s backside.
Couldn’t stop herself picturing Sherlock, waking up in the morning and binding
her breasts close to her body. Was she rough about it, impatient of her own
flesh? Or gentle and clumsy with sleep? Did she—and hell, Johnnie cut off that
train of thought five, ten times a day.
In any case, Sherlock was utterly convincing as a man; Johnnie expected the job
to be a respite. But all that week her lips were dry from constant licking, and
she had to ask Sherlock to repeat herself on three separate occasions.
The odd thing was, that at least one of those times, Sherlock had seemed almost
pleased.
It was hell to puzzle out, thought Johnnie, two nights after the ad job wrapped
up. She was sitting at the Boar and Badger behind her third pint, taking a
strange satisfaction in ordering whatever she liked, and in paying the barkeep
in cash. Why the appeal of Evan, at whom Johnnie might have sneered in the
street had she not known his real identity? What was the appeal of Michelle the
Hackney housewife, or old Mrs. Holmes? Was it their unreality that appealed? Or
precisely how real they seemed? Or simply the childish satisfaction of knowing
a secret?
Even when Sherlock went out as a man, it wasn’t as if she were like Johnnie
herself, or the other butches down at the Robin Hood or the Gateways.
Sherlock’s disguises were all—pragmatic, Johnnie supposed. Suited to the
purposes of the case, and Sherlock turned them on and off like breathing.
(Though—there hadbeen the incident before they infiltrated the Carruthers’s
ball, when Johnnie had suggested—.
And Sherlock had been so angry. White-lipped and frightening, ripping the seams
out of the black lace dress Jeanette had left at the flat. Johnnie didn’t
understand; didn’t like to think about it.)
But it didn’t matter, really, whether Sherlock was got up as a fishmonger, or a
fortune-teller, or an Oxford don. At the oddest moments she would glance at
Johnnie, and a look would flash out in her eyes, and—there she would be.
Something essentially Sherlock beneath it all.
And every time it happened, all Johnnie wanted in the world was to see that
look again.
Chapter End Notes
        1. Doodlebugs were rocket bombs, the precursor of cruise missiles.
           They were developed by the German Luftwaffe during WWII, and
           were used heavily in the bombardment of south-east England
           during the latter half of the war.
        2. Even in London, a shockingly large percentage of housing in
           1945 was still without “conveniences” like indoor toilets.
           That, combined with the housing shortage created by the Blitz,
           made the soulless, newly-constructed suburbs more attractive,
           especially to young families.
        3. Army and Navy Surplus shops were actually one of the only
           sources of casual butch clothing for women after the war—a
           number of the oral histories quoted in Jennings mention buying
           clothes there.
        4. Sherlock’s comments to Johnnie (in a central Spanish accent):
           “Ah, you’ve caught on at last. Ready then?” Johnnie’s retort to
           Sherlock: “Yes, you brat.”
        5. “That awful poem”: Not actually awful! But very sentimental for
           Sherlock’s taste: Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Also
           very famous at the time; quoting it at poor Siobhan might be
           like meeting a woman from the Ipanema neighborhood of Rio de
           Janeiro, and singing “The Girl from Ipanema” at her.
        6. Mrs. Dale’s Diary was a BBC radio show beloved of British
           housewives at the time, and epitomising mainstream, middle-
           class values. Mrs. Mountbank was the token villain of the
           piece; hatred toward her would be the expected reaction and
           would, to Sherlock’s mind, show a lack of originality. A modern
           equivalent might be reading JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books and
           feeling no sympathy whatsoever for Severus Snape.
        7. Recreational Benzedrine use, either in pill form or via
           modified inhaler as depicted here, was big among the Beats, and
           in pill form even spread to polite suburban society in the 50s
           and 60s. It’s an amphetamine, similar to Dexedrine in modern
           parlance. It was more readily available and less socially
           stigmatised during this period than cocaine, morphine and
           heroin, which were all very taboo indeed (much more so than in
           Victorian or even WWI-era England, and more so than they are
           today). So bennies seemed like a likely equivalent for Sherlock
           Holmes’s canonical drug use.

           Effects of stimulant use varies a lot depending on the extant
           brain chemistry of the user. Sherlock’s experience of it as
           smoothing, focusing, and somewhat calming, as well as damping
           down her thoughts somewhat, might indicate that she’s somewhere
           on the ADHD/autism spectrum. The depictions of both her
           experiences on the high of the drug, as well as coming down off
           one dose and waiting for the next to kick in, are informed by
           an amalgam of personal testimonies on Erowid.org. In
           particular, the convulsive jaw clenching, dry mouth, sensitised
           sound perceptions (and muted/“underwater” sound perceptions);
           and the feelings of being empty/mechanical, and floating above
           whatever task you are accomplishing, are all sensations
           mentioned by ADHD-spectrum users of di-amphetamine.

***** Chapter 7 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
May 8, 1955
11:30pm
King’s Road, Chelsea
London, England
The thing was, first of all, that they had to make sure everyone was out of Mr.
Rivers’s brother’s office for the night. Then there were the complications
involved in picking the lock; and in locating Mrs. Rivers’s necklace (so
awkward, a thief in the family, the Riverses hadn’t wanted the police
involved); and in putting the office back to rights before they left. What with
all of that, it was half eleven before Sherlock and Johnnie were finally making
their way, grinning and jostling against each other, down King’s Street,
another case resolved.
Sherlock was especially giddy over the Rivers case because Mrs. Rivers had
agreed to pay them in actual cash, rather than in trade. Thus Sherlock and
Johnnie were now embroiled in a discussion of how best to spend their unlooked-
for windfall. Should it go, as Sherlock suggested, to the selection of new
acids, beakers and reagents she’d been wanting in order to finish her formula
for inducing temporary fever? Or might it be better spent, as Johnnie insisted,
on branching out from the dull foodstuffs available at Mr. Butler’s?
Sherlock was bent over, tying her laces: she’d on black-on-black saddle shoes
to go with her black trousers and old-fashioned black ladies’ blouse. She was
rolling her eyes, saying ‘You would fly directly to food, you’re so
predictable,’ and Johnnie was speaking over her, crooning ‘quiche and pastry,
Sherlock. Fettucini alfredo and a bottle of real claret.’ Sherlock was just
thinking that the cream sauce sounded ghastly but perhaps the claret, in any
case, was decent idea, when she stood up into a world that wobbled dangerously
and tipped to the side.
Then there was a firm arm holding her up. Johnnie’s voice, as if from a great
distance and down a metal tube, called ‘Sherlock! Are you all right? Sherlock!’
Sherlock’s vision had restricted, suddenly, to a fuzzy circle surrounded by
black. Her arm was flung out against the building to steady herself, but her
fingertips tingled and she couldn’t feel it where they touched the dirty stone.
‘A’right,’ she said, her tongue thick in her mouth. ‘Might…pass out.’
‘Sherlock, Christ. Warbledeetplast?’ said Johnnie, but no, that couldn’t be
right.
‘Hng?’ said Sherlock, shaking her head experimentally.
‘When did you last eat, Sherlock,’ Johnnie repeated, the sense making it
through this time to Sherlock’s brain.
‘Nnn,’ Sherlock said, her vision clearing a bit but her limbs still shaky. ‘Er.
I’m sure it was—yesterday? Or—Wednesday?’
‘Jesus.’ Sherlock felt her arm being hoisted over Johnnie’s shoulders, her
weight supported by Johnnie’s warm solidity as Johnnie moved her off down the
street. Strong shoulders, Sherlock thought. Compact, strong—and Johnnie’s hair
smelt almost overwhelmingly sweet, and Sherlock—Sherlock shook her head again,
trying to clear it.
‘Where’re we going?’ she heard herself slur into the back of Johnnie’s head. An
empty taxi had just crawled by, and she remembered: they were still all the way
out in Chelsea. ‘We can get a cab home, pay for it out of the Rivers money.’
‘We’ve nothing in the kitchen at home,’ Johnnie said. ‘Besides, I know a place.
Just around this corner.’
***
It was a green door, unmarked, on a side street just off King’s Road. Johnnie
leaned Sherlock against the wall before reaching out to open it. Sherlock tried
to protest that she was fine now, she was perfectly able to stand up on her
own, but her head was suddenly pounding and she still felt nauseated from
almost fainting.
Then Johnnie was supporting her again. They were descending a long flight of
stairs into a basement room. The air looked hazy to Sherlock, and dim. She
wondered if it were cigarette smoke, or her own blurred vision, or a
combination of the two. Everything felt a bit surreal. She put out her foot
into the smoky darkness, leaning on Johnnie. She put out the other one.
And so they clattered through the smoke haze to the bottom of the stairs.
Sherlock squinted ahead. Perched on a stool by the entrance to the larger room
was—well, the woman seemed an apparition. Her dark hair was arranged into a
perfect chignon at her nape and she was smoking out of an old-fashioned
cigarette holder, her full scarlet lips pursing around the black bone and her
eyes narrowing over rounded cheeks. Her skin was a dark, Mediterranean olive;
against it a single strand of pearls glowed at her throat. Her black cocktail
dress was couture-long and wasp-waisted, and her black patent pumps had four-
inch heels. The woman looked like a film star. She struck Sherlock as utterly
unlikely to inhabit any basement bar that Johnnie Watson would frequent.
Sherlock realised suddenly that her eyes were dry from not blinking. And she
registered, at a delay, that the woman was speaking to Johnnie in a deep,
lightly accented voice, gesturing toward Sherlock with her lengthened
cigarette.
‘Of course I am glad to see you again, John!’ she said. ‘Always, you know,
always! But I am surprised you would—it is Saturday evening, after all, and you
know we have requirements regarding dress…’
‘Listen Gina,’ Johnnie said, hitching Sherlock’s arm across her shoulders again
as Sherlock blinked her eyes, hard, ‘I know it’s unusual, but my friend here is
having a medical problem. I just need to get her some orange juice, maybe a
sandwich, and then we’ll be on our way, all right?’
Gina raised one perfectly-penciled eyebrow, sliding her eyes toward Sherlock.
‘You are sure she is not simply drunk?’
Gina’s accent thickened along with her bluntness. Sherlock deduced a childhood
in Milan, or possibly Turin, and an adolescence in Wales. She felt Johnnie’s
arm tighten around her waist; realised that her body had sagged.
’No. Look,’ said Johnnie, ‘we’ve been on a case. Sherlock here, she’s a private
detective.’ Gina looked, if anything, even more skeptical at this. ‘She is,’
insisted Johnnie, licking her lips, ‘and we’ve been working on a stakeout all
day today and haven’t been able to leave our posts to eat.’
‘Johnnie,’ chided Gina, rolling her eyes, ‘I go to the films. Is this not why
there are two of you? So that she—’ gesturing to Sherlock, ‘can stay, and you
can run and fetch the coffee and biscuits?’
Johnnie shook her head in mock disappointment; pasted on a secret-telling grin.
‘Gina Ware, you believe everything you see at the cinema? You telling me Andie
Levinson never comes in here ready to eat you out of house and home? Yeah?’
Gina laughed, throwing her head back, pearls at her throat and the smoke
curling out from between her lacquered lips. Then, at last, she nodded,
gesturing them both through. ‘For no one else, John Watson, would I allow such
a thing,’ she said. And then, her voice raised, as an afterthought: ‘And you
will deal, yourself, with the femmes!’
Sherlock spared a moment of puzzlement for this last statement, and caught a
glimpse of Johnnie’s eye-roll as she steered Sherlock through the doorway. ‘I
owe you, Gina,’ she called back over her shoulder.
The explosion of noise as they turned the corner into the club proper did
nothing to alleviate Sherlock’s pounding headache. A wall of sound at first,
which only gradually broke apart into its component parts as Johnnie steered
her through the crush. The din of shouted conversation crested as they passed
the bar. Women in mens’ suits, hair slicked back and money in hand, stood four
deep awaiting drinks. Some of them had their arms around other women got up
like Gina, in cocktail dresses and stilettos.
Johnnie and Sherlock inched between the crowd at the bar and that on the small,
packed dance floor, where couples writhed against each other front-to-front and
front-to-back, unusually close. The static thrum of many conversations was
layered over with the strains of a three-piece orchestra.
Pain beat in Sherlock’s head against impressionistic images. The ordered chaos
of moving bodies. Pinstripes glimpsed through the slit of a satin skirt. A red
gash against the sea of dark limbs as a suited dancer bent her partner
backwards into a deep dip and the others moved around them. Cigarettes and
lipsticked lips. Smiles and glares directed toward Johnnie, and herself.
For they were stopped often, on the way across the room, by exclamations, hands
outreached to shake Johnnie’s, delighted smiles of recognition. The suited,
slicked-back women reached for Johnnie’s hand and slapped her back, yelling
hearty queries about repairs on the Vincent, and venturing surprised glances at
Sherlock.
Johnnie shook them off with grins and nods. They were easily dislodged, unlike
the others: the buxom women in cashmere pullovers, and the willowy women in
plunging silk, the tiny Frenchwomen with painted-on faces, who emerged out of
the dark, one after the other, curling their lips at Sherlock and their bodies
toward Johnnie, asking to be introduced and looking as if they wanted nothing
less.
‘This is Sherlock Holmes,’ shouted Johnnie, over and over again as they inched
across the crowded space. ‘Sherlock, this is…’
Mindy. Lana. Connie. Alicia. Barbara. Mireille. Astrid. Sam. The pain in
Sherlock’s head was leeching down her spine in high, sharp pulses.
Johnnie had reached out and grabbed the sleeve of a tall woman with night-dark
skin, who was wearing a blazer and a loosened tie and carrying a drinks tray.
Johnnie spoke into her ear, pointing at an empty booth against the wall. The
woman nodded seriously, her shorn head austere, her hand gripping Johnnie’s
shoulder. And then Astrid—Sherlock thought it was Astrid, or maybe it was
Sam—leaned over with a look like they’d all had, cat-eye liner and dark pink
lips, and said into her ear ‘What are you?’ sounding disgusted.
Pulse against Sherlock’s skull and down her back. ‘Private detective,’ she
said, as if from a distance, looking around for Johnnie.
Astrid blew smoke in her face. Paradoxically, it settled Sherlock’s nerves; she
breathed deep. ‘Butch or femme?’ said Astrid, and when Sherlock looked blank:
‘You’re not dressed. You’re what—trying to have it both ways? That doesn’t fly
in here.’
Pulse high and sharp at the back of Sherlock’s head. She looked down at her
tatty black trousers and lacy black blouse. Astrid sneered. Sherlock drew
herself up, trying to look haughty.
‘We some of us—’ Sherlock began, ‘have better—’ and felt the ground sway, and a
hand come out of the darkness at her side to hold her up. Johnnie’s voice cut
Astrid’s smirking expression off her face.
‘My friend needs to sit down,’ Sherlock heard, in firm, almost angry tones.
But Johnnie’s voice was back in the long metal pipe and Sherlock’s vision was
starting to narrow again. She let herself cling a bit as Johnnie shouldered
through the last few feet and lowered Sherlock onto the upholstery of a booth.
Then Johnnie’s hands were in her hair and cradling her forehead, pushing gently
downward until Sherlock’s head was resting on her own arms on the tabletop. The
dizziness retreated a fraction.
‘Just breathe, Sherlock,’ said Johnnie, her voice slightly lower now, soft
against Sherlock’s ear. ‘Breathe, all right?’
Sherlock nodded. Johnnie’s hand was still petting her hair and her neck.
Sherlock thought the nausea and dizziness might be worthwhile for a few minutes
of this: no questions, no demands, just Johnnie’s blunt, calloused fingers
raking through Sherlock’s curls, her thumb at the nape of Sherlock’s neck.
Then Johnnie’s hand was reaching up, and Johnnie’s voice was thanking someone.
A cool, smooth surface pressed against the side of Sherlock’s face. Johnnie
said ‘Orange juice, Sherlock, drink up. Your blood sugar got too low; this
will—’
‘I’m aware,’ Sherlock snapped. But she raised her head, took the glass and
sipped at it, the bright liquid impossibly tart against the dull tobacco
flavour in the air. Johnnie’s hand was still rubbing lightly along Sherlock’s
upper back.
‘I’m sorry it’s so mobbed,’ Johnnie said into Sherlock’s ear. ‘I forgot it was
Saturday, that’s the most crowded day. Most formal, too; I like Wednesdays
better. Everybody comes on Saturdays.’
Sherlock sipped her orange juice. It felt good on her head; rough on her
stomach. She took it slow and it brought her brain back into focus.
She looked out over the crowd, now even denser than when they’d arrived. The
orchestra was moving on to faster, more modern material, and the dance floor
was so packed that it was a wonder anyone could move. Astrid-or-possibly-Sam
was draped against a dark-haired woman in a black suit, her back curved to show
off her décolletage.
Sherlock looked away; spotted Gina exchanging a businesslike word with the tall
dark woman in the blazer and tie, who was now moving to and fro behind the bar.
The woman nodded, no-nonsense but pleasant. Gina gave her a quick, glowing
smile as she turned back to the door.
Sherlock thought vaguely, sipping her orange juice, that there was something
hypnotic about the precision of the bartender’s movements. Nothing was hurried,
and nothing was wasted; she moved with utter economy. Now her long, purpled
hand reached out to gather up two martini glasses. Her shoulders and hips
twisted through; she deposited the glasses in the sink for washing-up. Her
other hand reached above her to pick up a pint glass. Half a turn of her feet
and hips and she was balancing it at forty-five degrees, tipping foam off the
top of the beer as her left hand reached into the cupboard for serviettes.
Another half-turn and the beer was on the bar on top of the first serviette,
next to the second. Her loosened tie flying, her collar bright-white against
the rich dark of her neck, her precise hands pouring the shaken shots over the
lemon twist—it was like some mixture of ballet and clockwork.
It was like the feeling, thought Sherlock, of timing a pursuit just right, of
arriving ahead of her quarry. Or like coming into the garage to find Johnnie on
her back next to the raised Vincent, her knees bent and her legs straddling the
back wheel, her tools spread out around her and her grease-smeared hands
knowing exactly where to reach in order to—but no. Mustn’t think about that.
Sherlock jumped, guilty, as lips brushed the hair next to her ear. Johnnie had
apparently followed her gaze. She said ‘That’s Smithy. American, ex-Airforce.
She lives above the bar, with Gina and Ted. They—the Wares, I mean—they own
this place, and Smithy manages it. Don’t see Ted around tonight.’
Sherlock tore her eyes from Smithy’s quick, measured movements and looked back
around at Johnnie, who motioned to Sherlock’s forgotten orange juice. She took
another sip.
‘You, er,’ she said, cringing at the line before she said it, ‘you come here
often, then.’
Johnnie smiled, pained. ‘I have spent—unhealthy amounts of time here, yes.’
Sherlock remembered something Mickey Stamford had said. Her stomach dropped;
she was almost sure she didn’t show it. ‘Half the girls in Chelsea?’ she asked,
raising an eyebrow, and Johnnie chuckled. ‘Can’t say nobody warned you.’
It was true, thought Sherlock, which made this hot flash of—what?—of anger?
jealousy? even more ridiculous. It was all too apparent exactly which half of
the girls present had departed the club on the back of Johnnie Watson’s sleek
black motorbike. The same half who had scoffed at Sherlock’s nude face and
indeterminate clothing. The same half who looked as if they wanted to rip her
from Johnnie’s side. Astrid, in her low-cut green wiggle dress; Mireille, tiny
bones and pursed red lips and huge, liquid black-lashed eyes. Mindy, with her
curls and her peasant blouse. Not graceful blue-dark Smithy, or awkward Andie
with her slaps on the shoulder—certainly nobody like Sherlock, aggressively odd
and unclassifiable.
And aggressively, yes, she was—because all that had been decided years ago, she
told herself sternly. It was good, what they had now, she and Johnnie. They
worked well together; they protected each other. And Sherlock’s body and mind
remained her own.
So it was utterly irrational to feel like—like snarling at the idea of Johnnie
riding off with Astrid or Mireille or any of them. Utterly irrational to
imagine Sherlock herself, snugged up behind Johnnie on the bike, when it wasn’t
on offer—not like that—and when Sherlock would refuse it in any case. Pointless
to picture her own legs spread on either side of Johnnie’s hips, hugging the
growling engine, her arms round Johnnie’s waist, her nose in Johnnie’s hair and
how it would feel to press her hips forward in little—little thrusting
movements against Johnnie’s—
Sherlock cleared her throat, hard, and looked back over at the bar. Smithy
moved back and forth, pouring and shaking, and looking severe except when she
flashed an occasional brilliant bright-white smile. ‘Smithy and Gina, then?’
Sherlock said, gesturing with her orange juice. It seemed the obvious
conclusion. And as good a distraction as any.
Johnnie chuckled again. ‘Wouldn’t everyone here like to know,’ she said. ‘The
gossip in this place, it’s—’
‘Mmm, I can imagine,’ said Sherlock, with a wry smile.
‘Well, Gina’s married to Ted, they’ve got a little daughter together. Though
Ted’s a lot older and, er, not glamourous at all, like you might expect looking
at Gina. Bit pudgy, you know, and one leg shorter than the other. But Ted’s a
solid bloke. He and Smithy seem to honestly like each other. Most people assume
there’s something between Smithy and Gina, but…’ Johnnie shrugged. ‘Might just
be the butches’ wishful thinking, Gina’s so good-looking.’
‘Smithy’s nothing to complain about, either.’ The words left Sherlock’s mouth
before she realised what she was saying; she snapped her jaw shut, but too
late.
‘You—are you serious?’ said Johnnie, her voice suddenly sharp.
Sherlock shrugged, flushing, making herself meet Johnnie’s eyes and glad for
the dark of the bar. She put her chin up. ‘Hypothetically.’
Johnnie’s eyebrows went up and stayed up; Johnnie was staring at her unabashed,
almost fierce. ‘I thought you didn’t…’
Sherlock looked away, feigning unconcern. ‘Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it,’
she said.
There was a long silence, in which Johnnie stared at Sherlock and Sherlock
stared stubbornly at the wall.
It wasn’t as ridiculous a pretence as it could have been, staring at the wall.
An elaborate mural stretched along the tops of the booths. It looked unplanned,
she thought, layered as it was with hundreds of separate portraits, at
different angles and on different scales, in shades of red and sepia.
Sherlock could feel Johnnie’s gaze on the side of her face. She craned her
neck, focusing ostentatiously on the portraits.
Most of them were women; some were men. Their poses were casual, candid: arms
around one another; dancing by the piano; one woman asleep, head down on the
bar. Some of the portraits looked fresh, with scribbled names and dates still
legible next to them, but many were covered over with so much smoke residue
that Sherlock could barely make them out. Larger than the rest and freshly
painted, across from the bar, Sherlock recognised a likeness of Gina.
‘Wellll,’ said Johnnie, eventually, into the charged silence, ‘None of my
business, what Smithy and the Wares get up to. Works out fine for the three of
them.’
Sherlock nodded, finishing off her orange juice, relieved. She looked around
and gave Johnnie a weak smile; Johnnie smiled back.
‘You feeling a bit better?’ asked Johnnie. ‘Think you could eat?’ Sherlock
shrugged, so Johnnie said ‘Wait here,’ and threaded her way through the crowd
toward the bar to put in the order with Smithy.
***
The crowd was starting to thin now. Sherlock could catch glimpses, through the
gaps between couples on the dance floor, of the orchestra, set up against the
far wall. A snare, bass drum and hi-hat were wedged into the corner, and behind
them a gawky ginger man, head tilted to one side, was dragging a whisk across
the snare like he was meditating on the merits of an argument. On the right a
curvaceous, oak-skinned woman in a neat blue tweed skirt suit plucked an
upright bass, and to the left was an upright piano. Sherlock couldn’t see the
pianist properly, because a ring of butches was standing around the instrument,
clutching pints of beer and wailing the lyrics as if they were entrants in a
shouting competition. Like a lazy ocean hugs the shore, wailed the would-be
singers. It was a mambo tune, something American. The unseen pianoplayer,
thought Sherlock, was certainly much more accomplished than his motley
vocalists. Stay with me, sway with me.
Johnnie slid back into the booth, grinning and holding a pint. She pushed a
cold ham and cheese sandwich across the table. ‘Would’ve had her heat it up,
but I thought I remembered you preferred cold.’
Sherlock nodded, picked up the sandwich. The women at the piano were howling
something about the sound of violins. Sherlock took a bite. The firm textures
of the sandwich felt good between her teeth; she was suddenly encouraged. She
chewed; swallowed; took another bite and felt she was getting somewhere.
Johnnie was looking absently out at the dance floor as Sherlock ate. She
gestured suddenly at the ring of women standing around the piano, who had moved
on to an attempt at ‘In the Still of the Night,’ complete with botched
harmonies. Sherlock, seeing her movement, snapped her head around as well.
‘See the one femme standing with all the butches at the piano?’ Johnnie asked.
‘Sally Donovan. She’s the one, when I first met you I thought—’
Sherlock grabbed Johnnie’s wrist, startling her into silence. ‘Let me,’ she
said. She could feel her own smile.
Johnnie grinned. She sat back and turned her palms out, inviting Sherlock’s
deductions.
Sherlock took another bite of her ham and cheese, turning back around to take
in her subject. The woman was partially obscured by the dancers (now sparse on
the floor) and the other singers at the piano, but Sherlock could make out her
flat-footed, hip-cocked stance, and a simple blouse and skirt that looked oddly
utilitarian next to the wiggle dresses and satin trains on most of the femmes.
She was standing next to the butch Johnnie had introduced earlier as Andie; as
Sherlock watched, Andie leaned over to say something into her ear, and the
woman put up a hand to maintain distance between their bodies.
Sherlock turned back around and smirked at Johnnie’s expectant look. ‘Met
officer, not a recent recruit despite her feminine appearance and the Met’s
concerted effort to de-masculinise the MWPP, but nor has she been promoted
beyond the standard—’ she curled her lip, ‘—ladies’ beat: returning delinquent
children to their mothers’ waiting arms and breaking up the occasional
domestic. Your friend Andie is her partner and her sometimes…partner, though it
looks to be off-again tonight.’
One side of Johnnie’s mouth was quirking up, and she was shaking her head. ‘As
always,’ she said, raising her beer in mock-salute. ‘Though I wouldn’t say
friend, exactly.’
Sherlock narrowed her eyes, taking another bite of her ham and cheese. She was
surprised to note that the sandwich was nearly gone. ‘You were saying that when
you first met me…you thought she and I would know each other? Because of my
work?’ She snorted, rolled her eyes. ‘Really, John. The Met? The MWPP? Dull.’
Johnnie’s mouth was still quirked at the side. Sherlock had the sudden urge to
lick that curling corner of lip, and only belatedly heard that she’d used the
shortened form of Johnnie’s name: uncomfortable. She stuffed the rest of her
sandwich into her mouth. Johnnie looked a little taken aback.
‘Uwhelf?’ said Sherlock, around the mouthful of sandwich, then swallowed with a
great effort. ‘Who else?’ She made an expansive gesture around the bar. Johnnie
gave a reluctant grin, looking over her shoulder.
‘Mmm…femme in the peasant blouse, dancing by the piano.’
Sherlock looked over, making a show of how desultory her glance could be. She
turned back. ‘Secretary in the City. Chronic pain in her left hip, likely from
a childhood fever, but she’s stubborn about not letting it slow her down. Lives
with her mother; that hair style can look very different while she’s on the
clock. Uncomfortable situation with her boss; he’s wooing her with expensive
gifts and she doesn’t know how to turn him down.’
‘Jesus,’ said Johnnie, looking a little unnerved.
Sherlock grinned. ‘I could’ve just made all that up,’ she pointed out.
‘You couldn’t,’ said Johnnie, shaking her head. Sliding her eyes to the side;
swigging her beer.
Oh. Sherlock’s stomach dropped again, hard. Johnnie knew Sherlock was right
because Johnnie knew the woman in the peasant blouse. Sherlock couldn’t stop
something swooping in her chest, hard and aggressive.
‘I’ll have something, too,’ she said, nodding toward Johnnie’s beer and peeling
herself out of the booth, not looking back.
Ridiculous. She was being ridiculous. It would be a bad trade, she reminded
herself sternly, catching Smithy’s eye. Johnnie could have any femme in this
club, and apparently had had most, and Sherlock was, most decidedly, not in
competition. Not even playing the same game.
She approached the bar and leaned over to yell over the noise. Smithy nodded;
pivoted in her fluid way, and lined up two shots and a pint. Sherlock downed
the first shot in one.
Smithy had, for once, halted her constant articulated motion to watch Sherlock
through narrowed eyes. ‘You’re here with Johnnie,’ she said, in a voice like
something in a cowboy film, melted and served in a bowl.
It wasn’t a question, but Sherlock nodded.
‘She’s a class act,’ Smithy said, picking up the empty shot glass. She raised
her chin, eyes locked onto Sherlock over high cheekbones, stern under her
unadorned brow. ‘I have a great fondness for John Watson.’
Sherlock drew herself up in turn, wrongfooted and defensive against what
sounded like a warning. But surely there was ample evidence—Sherlock glanced
back at the table to see Sam-or-Astrid chatting to Johnnie, rubbing her hip
against the table—that Johnnie could take care of herself. If anyone needed to
be be warned off, it certainly wasn’t Sherlock.
So she nodded at Smithy; said only ‘As do I.’ Then she picked up the other two
glasses to carry them back to her seat, whisky prickling under her skin.
Astrid was tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, and Sherlock ducked under
her up-raised arm, dislodging the strand again. She sipped her beer into
Astrid’s disgruntled face, smiling up at her.
‘You know those are dipped,’ she said, taking out a cigarette and gesturing
with her lighter to Astrid’s pearls. ‘Her interest—or is it his—seems to be on
the wane.’
Astrid looked affronted, and Johnnie turned a bark of laughter into a cough.
For a split second Astrid’s eyes got huge, and her hand went to her throat
before she mustered a sneer. Sherlock sipped her beer, unperturbed, until
Astrid had turned on her heel and strode off, at which point Sherlock turned to
Johnnie with a bright, unabashed smile.
Johnnie was trying to hide amusement with a scowl. ‘That’s not on, Sherlock,’
she said, but Sherlock only smiled wider, then tipped up her chin to exhale
smoke toward the ceiling.
‘Who else?’ she asked, genuinely warming to the game.
Johnnie was staring at the table. ‘You’re supposed to drop the shot into the
pint,’ she pointed out.
‘Rubbish,’ said Sherlock. ‘Who else? Which of your many conquests? The femme
near the door in the pink pullover has chlamydia, did you know?’
‘Sherlock, I don’t think…no. No, I didn’t,’ Johnnie said, taking another sip.
‘The butch in the green suit has a twin brother,’ said Sherlock.
‘Mm, she does,’ Johnnie agreed, that curving smile back on her lips. Delicious.
‘And the bass player will go home with the woman who’s been cleaning tables,
though they’re not living together.’
‘How can you possibly—’
‘Am I right?’ interrupted Sherlock, downing her second shot. It burned on the
way down. She felt giddy.
‘Yeah, but how—’ said Johnnie, openly laughing now—oh! glorious—and Sherlock
cut her off again.
‘And the older butch nearly passed out at the bar—’
‘Don’t,’ said Johnnie, her tone suddenly flat. But Sherlock presse d on,
wanting more of Johnnie’s laughter, sure she could impress.
‘She’s intriguing. Ex-military but didn’t serve during the war—’
‘Leave it, Sherlock,’ Johnnie said, more forceful. Still Sherlock ignored her.
‘She’s been coming here for ages, there’s an ancient portrait of her on the
wall above the booth—’
Johnnie slammed her empty pint glass back on the table. ‘She’s a bloody fascist
traitor, all right?’ she said, low and venomous, and Sherlock’s elation
evaporated at once. She sat touching her beer, staring at Johnnie, shocked into
silence. Johnnie scrubbed at her own forehead with the heel of her hand.
‘Look,’ Johnnie said, ‘she just—that’s Mary Allen. She founded the Women’s
Police Service before the Met allowed women in. Fought for suffrage, the whole
nine yards, but when the MWPP edged out the WPS in Britain and Mussolini took
over in Italy, she just—I fucking hate talking about it.’
‘Why?’ Sherlock asked. She had never seen Johnnie so affected. Suddenly, here
before her was Johnnie Watson the soldier. Johnnie Watson the patriot. She was
equal parts surprised and enthralled.
‘Because,’ said Johnnie, almost shouting now, ‘I can’t believe Gina and Smithy
and Ted still allow her in here. I put my life on the line, and so did half the
women in here, and so did Smithy, and now she just stands there,’ Johnny
gestured, breathing hard, ‘serving Allen drinks.’
Sherlock narrowed her eyes, forced a shrug. ‘Politics,’ she said, dismissive,
and watched for the effect. Sure enough.
‘How can you be so—the woman met and idolised Adolph Hitler, Sherlock. Jesus.’
Johnnie drained her glass, turned away. A muscle in her neck was twitching.
Sherlock’s mouth watered.
‘And you believe that means she should be banned from this club?’ Sherlock
asked. ‘For—for feelings she had over ten years ago?’
That muscle in Johnnie’s neck jumped faster. ‘Yes, I bloody well—’ she said,
but at that moment there was a commotion from the dance floor, and their heads
both jerked around.
The crowd parted as they watched. Into the breach staggered the butch in the
green suit—the one with the twin brother, thought Sherlock—with her elbow
around the neck of another butch, choking her, dragging her toward the floor.
The woman in the headlock was older than her opponent, in her late 50s as
compared to early 30s for the butch in green, but she was putting up a good
fight, kicking out with her feet and tangling up the feet of the other woman.
The green-suited woman looked to be yelling in her ear, although they were too
far away for Sherlock to make out words.
Sherlock settled in with interest, calculating odds on the outcome. It was all
rather thrilling, she thought, a welcome distraction from Johnnie’s fury. But
then she heard a soft ‘Oh b loody hell’ exhaled in her ear.
The next moment Johnnie was leaping out from behind the table and running flat-
out toward the fight, and Sherlock was following.
Chapter End Notes
        1. The Gateways Club, at 239 King’s Road, was the most famous
           lesbian club in London during the 40s, 50s and 60s. All
           information about it is taken from Jill Gardiner’s From the
           Closet to the Screen: Women at the Gateways Club 1945-85. Gina
           and Ted Ware were the real owners; their characterisations here
           are historically based, although they do fictional things. Gina
           was born in Turino, Italy and moved to Cardiff, Wales as an
           adolescent. She worked as an actress before marrying the un-
           glamourous, but apparently politically awesome, Ted Ware. Ted
           was a lapsed Catholic and a patron of the arts, and just seems
           like a legitimately stand-up guy. Here’s one story about him:
                After Ted Ware took over the club in 1943 — he told
                one woman that he won the club from two Jewish
                businessmen in a poker game at the Dorchester hotel —
                it was always welcoming to lesbians. Ted’s daughter
                explains: His story of how the women came to be at
                the Gateways was that two girls were sitting at the
                bar. This guy was hassling them, getting nowhere. He
                came to father and said, ‘Those two women, you know
                they’re lesbians.’ Father said, ‘I’ll have a club
                full if I want. Now, out!’ and had him slung. So the
                girls felt it was a place where they weren’t just
                tolerated, they were welcome. It was difficult for
                women to find a place where they could drink without
                being asked to leave, because the landlord could be
                done for keeping an immoral house to have women
                drinking alone. That was the reason for the Gateways
                having a club license, because a members’ club could
                do practically anything.”
           Smithy is based on a real person as well, although I changed
           more about her than about the Wares (including her race;
           historically, she was white). Everything included here about
           her personal history will be fictional. I also monkeyed with
           the chronology of the Wares’ marriage and Smithy’s arrival; she
           didn’t actually move in and start working at the Gates until
           the 1960s. However, the rampant speculation about a
           relationship between Gina and Smithy is very much historical.
           One Gateways patron said:
                I assumed Gina and Smithy were together. Partly
                because they [looked] butch and femme, and they
                worked together and they seemed to communicate very
                well. You didn’t have the feeling that Smithy was
                Gina’s employee. I don’t remember Gina giving her
                orders. You knew Gina was the boss but you assumed
                that was because Ted owned it. We all assumed they
                were a duo though we knew they denied it if they were
                actually asked. We knew Gina had a daughter and we
                assumed that she didn’t want anyone to know.
           The Wares’ daughter was raised thinking of Smithy as a third
           parent, equally important as Ted and Gina. Smithy would even
           don a dress, makeup and stockings to attend little Luigina’s
           school functions, which was the only time she ever remembers
           seeing Smithy in femme attire.
        2. Butch/femme dynamics at the Gateways were very rigid. Several
           respondents interviewed in Jennings and Gardiner were
           (initially or permanently) turned off of the club by the
           expectation of conformity to one side or the other of the
           butch/femme divide. Others found it liberating, or simply an
           easy short-hand. Gardiner quotes one woman:
                I identified as a hippy at the time. I had long hair,
                jeans and purple boots with Cuban heels: slightly
                more ‘unisex’ than most people there. […] Someone
                came up to me and said that blonde Archie had sent
                her over. Archie was very good-looking, but a bit
                frightening. She’d sent over to find out if I was
                butch or femme. I said I didn’t know and I got a
                message back saying, that I ought to make up my mind
                soon or I might find myself in a bit of trouble.
           Several women also talked about the expectation that, if one
           butch wanted to dance with a femme who was there with someone
           else, she was expected to ask the butch, not the femme, for
           permission.
        3. Ted Ware was reluctant to purchase a juke box for the club, so
           well into the rock & roll era there were still live musicians,
           usually a three-piece orchestra, playing a mix of contemporary
           American music and jazz standards. Dean Martin’s ‘Sway’ and the
           Five Satins’s ‘In the Still of the Night’ are from the former
           category: both came out in 1954.
        4. Mary Allen was also a real person, although again in this story
           she will do fictional things. Her history is much as Johnnie
           describes: she founded a women-only police force (the WPS)
           before the Met allowed women, and (independently of the WPS)
           campaigned for women’s rights throughout the 1920s. The WPS was
           edged out of prominence when the Met started a women’s corps in
           the 1930s, and Allen was seduced by the allure of fascism. She
           really did meet and admire Hitler, and there was talk of
           confining her to an internment camp during WWII.
***** Chapter 8 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
May 9, 1955
1:30am
The Gateways Club, 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
London, England
Johnnie should have realised she needn’t rush into the fray. By the time she
made it to the dance floor, four other butches and Sally Donovan had also
hurled themselves toward the fight, and two of the others soon wrenched the
combatants apart. After all, nobody wanted Gina to—ah. Here she was, after all.
And, as always, she was thunderous.
Gina’s penciled brows drew together, her shoulders went back, and her whole
sleek frame vibrated with rage. She jabbed a manicured fingernail into the
chest of the butch in green and gestured with her other hand toward the club’s
door as she hissed low vitriol into the woman’s face: ‘—will not listen to any
of your nonsense, Leslie Matthews’ and ‘I should ban you from setting foot
again—’
Johnnie edged back from the confrontation, looking around the room for Sherlock
and seeing—bloody hell, Johnnie thought. Look who it was.
Husky-blue eyes twinkled back at her when she made eye contact over Gina’s
shoulder. Johnnie grinned.
Meanwhile, nobody was standing up for the fighters, and nobody was going to.
Gina kept hissing and crowding into Leslie’s space, while Smithy scowled down
at them from in front of the bar.
Johnnie inched around the periphery, angling for the other side of the room. By
the time she’d made it halfway around, Leslie was muttering ‘Sorry, Gina’ at
her own feet. Johnnie paused to watch.
Gina glared for another few seconds; then she stepped back and stuck out her
lovely hand. Leslie shot her cuffs and shook it.
There was a round of whistling, jeering and applause from the gathered
bystanders. Johnnie wolf whistled, and turned, and broke into an open stride.
***
‘Cass Thorsson you dog,’ said Johnnie, descending on the tall blonde for a
crushing hug. ‘Were you going to mention you were in town? All you three,
Haley, Lou,’ shaking hands all around, grinning. ‘I can’t—but hold on, I want
you to meet—’
She pulled back, away from Cass’s too-pale eyes and her goofy grin, scanning
the crowd for Sherlock.
Tiny old Chester Davies, wizened like a brown nut, had launched into another
stride number at the piano. Some of the butches were returning to their singing
posts, while other bar patrons gathered up their things to leave. Through the
thinning crowd Johnnie spotted Sherlock, already looking right at them with her
eyes like iron. Seeing her in the midst of the Gates, surrounded by the
Saturday-night crowd: it was strange, but somehow warming. Sally Donovan was
next to her, curling her lip as she leaned up to shout something into
Sherlock’s ear. Sherlock tossed her head, brushed her off. Headed over toward
Cass and the rest.
Johnnie had the vertiginous sensation, as Sherlock approached, of seeing four
of her intimates—mutual strangers—as they must appear to each other. Sherlock,
who normally loomed so large in her mind’s eye, looked oddly fragile compared
to Johnnie’s old army mates, all dressed to the nines for a night at the Gates.
She could see Sherlock standing up straighter as she approached; blanking her
face; drawing her hauteur around her like a winter coat. So Johnnie grinned at
her, welcoming, and rushed forward to steer her into the group.
‘Sherlock, you’ll never believe—’ she said.
Sherlock hummed, disbelieving.
‘Don’t be a prat,’ said Johnnie. ‘What do you reckon? I was in the Service with
these bastards. Haven’t seen them since we were all demobbed. Everyone, this is
my flatmate, Sherlock Holmes.’
‘Ah, flatmate,’ said Haley, freckles bunching around brown eyes. ‘Have the
mighty fallen? John Watson finally settling down?’
Johnnie felt herself colour up.
‘No, she’s just—Sherlock really is my flatmate,’ she said, glancing over
nervously. Sherlock had her inscrutable mask in place. Haley made an mmm’ing
noise in the back of her throat, and Cass rolled her eyes.
‘We’d have written ahead,’ said Lou, ‘but we had a little flutter on how quick
we’d find you if we just looked in at the Gates.’
‘Did you now?’ Johnnie said. ‘And who won?’
‘That’d be Cass,’ said Lou, with a suave little bow to the white-blonde butch
to her side.
Johnnie laughed; mimed clapping in Cass’s direction. ‘Sherlock,’ she said,
‘meet Cass Thorsson, former height-finder in the 568 HAA Battery, Margate.’
Cass stuck out a hand; Sherlock shook it.
Sherlock looked unaccustomed to tilting her head upward to shake hands. But
Cass had always been a giant. Skinnier than she was slender, even after all
these years, and so pale she made Sherlock look tan. Her skin appeared tender,
like it offered no protection to the dark-pink veins pulsing beneath its
surface. The blue of her eyes was so washed out that they looked almost white.
Johnnie had always wondered if it was painful, opening them into the sun.
‘Height-finder and perpetual thorn in the side of Johnnie, here,’ Cass said, in
her shockingly hearty voice. Warmth spread in Johnnie’s stomach, hearing that
voice again. Thinking how Cass had spooned porridge into Johnnie’s bed for a
prank, and laughed at Johnnie’s curses; how Haley had plotted for weeks to get
revenge for that incident with the stinging nettles. The constant practical
jokes might have become obnoxious, except that during those months when morale
was so low Cass had been…something dependable, Johnnie supposed. Something to
rely on.
‘My congratulations on the inheritance, Miss Thorsson,’ Sherlock said, her lip
quirking up at Cass’s dumfounded expression. ‘Ah…thanks,’ said Cass, looking to
Johnnie, and Johnnie grimaced and said ‘Sherlock’s a private detective.’
Cass looked impressed, her hand forgotten in Sherlock’s grasp. ‘Yeah?’ she
said. ‘Like in the cinema?’
‘I—suppose,’ said Sherlock, but Cass was already speaking over her, saying
‘You’re just the one I want, then, mate, fancy running into a private eye here
at the Gates. I’ve got a cousin, right? Always said he was—’
Johnnie looked at them together, and her chest filled with something bright,
and uncomplicated. Cass was still rattling off questions in her scatterbrained
way, and Sherlock was looking mildly amused. Probably compiling Cass’s life
history from the way she elided her vowels. Without thinking, Johnnie put her
hand on Sherlock’s back, at the waist.
Sherlock’s smile stayed.
Johnnie’s fingers flexed a bit, without her thinking about it, and Sherlock
took it as a signal to move down the line. Johnnie drew a breath. She had
almost forgotten about Lou.
‘Lou McGuire, range-finder extraordinaire,’ Johnnie said, voice only a little
tight. Lou glided forward, bloody distinguished as she’d always been, to take
Sherlock’s outstretched hand in both of hers. She raised it to her mouth in one
fluid motion and kissed it. Johnnie’s hand tightened, involuntary, on
Sherlock’s waist. Sherlock made a tiny gasping noise, and Lou smirked.
It was strange, thought Johnnie, what a person forgot with time. Lou heavier
than she had been in ’45, but she had that same oddly monochromatic quality.
Her hair and skin were so close to the same shade of warm light-brown, that it
was as if she’d been dyed in one piece. Removed from the horrible ATS-issue kit
Johnnie remembered, Lou appeared to belong in her pinstriped suit in a way
Johnnie never had. Her tailoring was impeccable, the lines sharp and the drape
rich. Lou’s eyes crinkled at the corners, looking up at Sherlock as she kissed
her hand. Johnnie had forgotten how very green they were.
Preoccupied, Johnnie was startled to hear Sherlock’s scornful drawl. ‘I’m
honoured, Miss McGuire,’ she said. ‘Always interested to meet Johnnie’s
competition.’
‘Er,’ said Lou and Johnnie in unison. Sherlock smirked. Haley threw back her
curly head, and spilled over with laughter.
‘Oh love,’ she said, holding out a bangled wrist to shake Sherlock’s hand,
‘We’ll all have to watch out for you.’ Looking on the happy side of
uncomfortable, Sherlock shook it.
Laughing with Haley was always the easy part of anything, Johnnie thought, with
a quick flash o f crouching underground as the doodlebugs sounded, Haley all
gallows humour. ‘I can’t face another morning hauling shells, chaps,’ she’d
said. ‘I’m headed upstairs. With any luck the Boche will get me before the
morning.’ She’d been slender then, and girlish, with that same cascade of
ginger curls down her back when she’d let it down. Ten years had put three
times as many pounds on her; it was like they’d flocked to her in droves for
the opportunity to be poured into that chocolate silk dress.
‘Haley Murray,’ Haley was saying, still smiling wide at Sherlock. ‘I was the
transmitter in our little gang, though I don’t suppose that means much to you.
I never could leave it to these clods to—’
The lights came up then, sudden and glaring.
‘Just like the old days,’ said Lou. ‘We’ve shut them down.’
‘Oh, but we can’t say goodnight now, we’ve just started catching up,’ said
Cass, looking at her watch. ‘Listen, I don’t want to keep you up if you need to
get to bed, but—’
‘Oh nonsense you don’t,’ said Haley, and Johnnie said, ‘Sherlock and I don’t
exactly make a point of—regular sleep,’ and could feel the giddy hopefulness on
her face when she looked over at Sherlock, and saw her roll her eyes and nod.
***
May 10, 1955
2:30am
Sutton Lodge, Flood Street, Chelsea
 London, England
‘And then Johnnie here—’
‘Pass the gin, won’t you, Lou?’
‘—Johnnie here, she’d buddied up with this gunner, yeah? She’s over on the
range every day, and he’s teaching her how the guns are loaded, where the
shells are kept, the chain of command once orders come through, none of this
she’s supposed to know, right? And she wasn’t fussed, she just—
‘That rule was rubbish, though,’ said Johnnie, drawing on her cigarette. ‘It
only made sense to know what happened after our signals were received. Helped
us do our jobs.’
‘What’ve you got in return?’ said Lou, tipping her chin at Haley.
‘You want me to come over there and convince you?’
‘By all means, Haley,’ said Lou. ‘Come on, love, whisper in my ear.’
‘Ooh, Lou never turned you down, Haley,’ teased Cass, distracted from her
story, as Lou handed over the gin. But Johnnie said, ‘Haley’s not offering what
Lou thinks she is.’
‘I’m usually not, no,’ said Haley, grinning, swigging from the bottle. ‘She’ll
keep trying, though.’
‘Were ATS recruits generally obligated to follow only those regulations they
agreed with?’ asked Sherlock, laconically. Johnnie snorted.
‘I like this one, Watson!’ yelled Haley; then remembered the time and clapped a
hand over her own mouth. She threw herself on the couch next to Sherlock,
clutching the bottle of gin, and leaned in, conspiratorial. ‘You sure you’re
just flatmates, love?’ she said. ‘You can tell me.’
‘Just flatmates,’ Sherlock confirmed, with an odd tensing of her jaw. Johnnie
let her eyes linger a moment on that tensing muscle, until she sensed Lou
watching her, watching Sherlock.
‘Well I only think,’ said Haley, listing toward Sherlock, ‘I think you de-
deserve each other, I mean,’ laying a manicured hand on Sherlock’s thigh, ‘you
seem like a peach. And she is just fantasticin bed, you know, from one girl
to—’
Johnnie choked loudly on her gin.
‘I knew it, I bloody knew you two—’ shouted Lou, at the same moment Sherlock
said ’I had gathered as much,’ between gritted teeth.
‘Think you’re overstepping, Hales,’ laughed Cass. ‘Now come over here and give
me that bottle.’
‘I just want people to be happy,’ Haley said, sorrowfully, taking her hand off
Sherlock’s leg and slumping over to Cass on the loveseat. ‘Are you happy,
Cassie?’
‘I am now,’ said Cass, an arm around Haley’s waist, tipping the bottle up.
‘Well anyway,’ said Haley, still pouting a bit and looking earnestly over at
Sherlock, ‘it wasn’t as bad as you’re making out, Johnnie going against orders.
She was used to being right in the line of fire, you know; being an ambulance
driver.’
‘No need to dredge up ancient history, Haley,’ Johnnie said, with a glance in
Sherlock’s direction.
‘Your, er, flatmate here might like to hear about it,’ said Cass. ‘Sherlock,
d’you know Johnnie’s missions had one of the lowest mortality rates going, in
the three years before she got shot and sent to Margate?’
‘Did they indeed,’ murmured Sherlock, taking a sip of her gin. She glanced up
over the rim. Johnnie’s face felt hot. She brazened it out, not looking away.
‘Yeah,’ said Cass, ‘and she was right in the heart of the action, too. The
French retreat, and then London in the heaviest part of the Blitz.’
‘Come on Cass,’ Johnnie said, looking into her empty glass and feeling oddly
exposed. ‘Sherlock deduced my whole life history within five minutes of meeting
me, just from the way I replaced an engine cylinder. You’ll bore her with all
this—’
‘Nonsense,’ said Sherlock, with a tsking noise. ‘Not your whole history, don’t
exaggerate.’
‘Bloody well felt like that,’ said Johnnie, forgetting for a moment and looking
up into probing sea-grey eyes. ‘Felt like you’d—like you’d seen right through
me.’
Johnnie gave an awkward laugh, not looking away. She was suddenly a trifle
dizzy from the gin and the pints at the bar. Sherlock’s eyes were liquid, the
way they sometimes got on a case. Seconds passed.
Cass whistled low: under her breath, but only just. ‘Remind me to sleep over at
your flat if that’s what you call just mates,’ she muttered. Lou laughed aloud.
Sherlock looked away, flushing; drained the rest of her gin. Johnnie felt a
stab of unease.
‘Er, so,’ said Cass, clearing her throat, ‘so. So, Hales interrupted me before
the best part of the story.’ Lou groaned, but Cass hurried on. ‘I was saying,
Johnnie here, she’s out at the gunners’ posts all the time, right, and waved us
off when we tried to tell her she’d be disciplined. No women supposed to go
anywhere near the guns. Somehow nobody ever did catch on.’
‘Because Johnnie pilfered a mens’ uniform from the laundry,’ chipped in Lou,
taking a silver case from her inside jacket-pocket, and extracting a hand-
rolled cigarette.
‘Lou should know,’ said Johnnie, unable to resist getting some of her own back.
‘She pilfered it back from me at least twice.’
‘Suited me better,’ said Lou, lighting up. “I’d have made a more convincing
infantryman any day.’ She inhaled deep and held the sweet, resinous smoke in
her lungs. Not tobacco; Johnnie had thought as much.
‘Too bad you didn’t have the balls to try it, then,’ retorted Haley, reaching
out to take the joint from Lou’s outstretched fingers. There was a round of
‘ooooh’s from Cass and Johnnie.
‘Don’t believe her,’ Haley said to Sherlock. ‘Johnnie made a dashing young
gunner.’
‘I. Hm. Can imagine,’ said Sherlock faintly. Haley raised her eyebrows,
inhaling, then blew smoke at the ceiling.
‘I’m sure you can,’ grinned Cass. Haley elbowed her in the ribs, and she wiped
her smile.
‘Er. Anyway,’ Cass went on, ‘this gunner friend of Johnnie’s, he drinks on the
sly, yeah? Sneaking off base and so on, lots of them did. But this one, he
starts getting the shakes. And of course he can’t set shells with the DT’s, and
it’ll be bad for him if anyone finds out. So what I was saying is, Johnniehere,
she sneaks him into the radar cabin in her place, and she goes and sets the
shells herself. All that winter. Probably the only woman in the whole war who
fired the heavy guns, our John.’
Cass shook her head, impressed with her own story. She took a long drag on the
joint for emphasis, still shaking her head, and passed it to Sherlock, who
passed it on to Johnnie without comment. There was a faint brush of her cold
fingers as Johnnie took it from her and sat back, feeling too sober by half.
‘They make it out more thrilling than it was,’ said Johnnie, looking down at
her hands.
Cass spluttered. ‘That was God’s truth, Johnnie, I—’
‘I just’, said Johnnie, ‘the poor kid. Sixteen years old and lost his parents
in the Blitz. Bellyful was the only way he could sleep at night, it was
all—pathetic, to tell the truth.’
She dragged on the joint, and closed her eyes, and waited. All around the room
there was a solemn lull.
‘You can’t say there weren’t good times, though,’ said Cass, getting up and
filling glasses from the gin bottle, passing them around. ‘’Least none of us
were stuck away in an office somewhere, not like now.’ She chuckled. ‘Remember
Mary MacElhaney? Up on the table, singing that song about the camel?’
‘Tha carrrrnal desirrrres of tha camel,’ sang Haley, putting on a scowl and a
thick Scottish accent, and Cass joined in: ‘arrrre grrrreater than anyone
thinks!’
Johnnie burst out laughing, coughing the smoke out of her lungs. Her eyes
watered.
‘Ahnd when tha feeling steals o’errrr him,’ Cass and Haley crooned, ‘he makes
at once ta tha Sphinx!’
From her seat near the door Lou was grinning, pretending to conduct the song.
Her hands seemed occupied, so Johnnie took another drag.
'—But tha Sphinx’s posterrriorrr prrroporrrtions,’ Cass shouted, waving her
glass in the air like the lord of a hunting party, and bringing home the rolled
r’s egregiously, ‘arrrre burrried in tha sand of tha Niiiiile!’
Haley was still trying to sing along, but she was laughing too hard to breathe.
Johnnie’s throat was on fire from reefer smoke, coughing and laughter. Even
Sherlock was giggling.
Cass, however, didn’t even crack a smile as she sang, grave and pedantic, with
a long retard at the end, ‘Which ac-counts forrr the camel’s perrrrpetual
‘ump…ahnd the Sphinx’s incrrrrutable smiiiiiile!’
Johnnie finally stopped coughing. It had been years: it hit her hard, all her
muscles gone suddenly softer. Cassie and Haley, now giggling in a heap with
their arms round each others’ shoulders, seemed almost the dearest sight she
could imagine.
‘Christ, I thought we’d never talk her down from that,’ Johnnie said, wiping
her eyes. ‘Or the time we all snuck off base, and Lou left her stockings in the
washroom of the Four Ducks?’
‘Oh lord!’ squealed Haley, detaching herself from Cass’s arms. ‘You were in
such trouble for that, Lou. They searched all our things,’ she told Sherlock,
‘and Lou’s stockings were the only ones missing.’
‘The pride of Britain,’ murmured Sherlock, but when Johnnie looked over her
smile was warm behind her gin glass.
Johnnie grinned back at her, stupidly. She was flooded, in that moment, with
such gratitude to Sherlock. For being here, smiling at her like that. She
wanted so bloody much to touch her.
‘Or the time they had us on call for forty-eight hours straight and nothing
happened,’ came Lou’s voice. ‘And by the end we were playing parlour games,
finishing each other’s limericks to stay awake.’
‘Or that little Ana with the motorcycle,’ said Haley. ‘She was a gas.’
Johnnie’s stomach chest restricted.
‘Who was Ana?’ said Sherlock, still smiling. Johnnie dragged her eyes from
Sherlock’s curious face.
‘She, uh, was the one who taught me to ride,’ she said, gathering her wits
before Lou could speak. ‘She worked as a motorcycle dispatch rider. You know,
because the bikes were more manoeuvrable, quicker than armoured cars. Better
chance of getting messages through enemy territory.’ Johnnie cleared her
throat.
‘Johnnie was head over heels for her,’ said Lou, with a teasing smile. ‘You
should’ve seen her swoon.’
Sherlock tipped her glass up of a sudden, ice clacking against her teeth.
‘But there was no knowing when Ana’d be through our camp,’ said Haley. ‘Or how
long she’d stay.’
‘Made her visits all feel like surprise holidays, didn’t it, John?’ said Cass.
‘Sometimes she’d have to turn right around, only time for a quick meal in the
mess. Other times she’d have two, even five days.’
‘Mmm,’ said Johnnie, her drink to her mouth. She glanced surreptitiously over
at Sherlock, whose face was once again impassive.
‘When Ana could stay,’ said Haley, exhaling at the ceiling again and handing
the joint to Sherlock, ‘there was this empty field about a mile from our camp.
We’d all walk out there together, we’d—how did we?—I suppose we took turns
pushing the bike.’
‘Ana and Johnnie and I took turns at it,’ Lou said. ‘I don’t recall you two
helping.’
Haley stuck out her tongue. Sherlock took a long drag off the joint, held it in
and tipped her head back against the back of the couch, regarding Johnnie
through long black lashes. Her cheekbones made Johnnie’s stomach ache.
‘Well,’ said Haley, ‘that was only fair, since you three were the only ones who
rode it.’ She looked at Sherlock, struggling a bit to focus. ‘I couldn’t even
watchsome of the stunts they pulled,’ she told her. ‘I would—I would cover my
eyes,’ she covered her eyes, ‘and Cassie would tell me when it was over.’
Sherlock raised one eyebrow, exhaling in Haley’s direction without lifting her
head.
‘To be fair,’ said Cass, peeling Haley’s hands away from her face and holding
one between her own, ‘you could usually tell when it was over by when the
screeches and crashes stopped.’
Johnnie sighed, watching Sherlock roll the joint over in her fingers. She heard
her own voice as if from far away. ‘Yeah, that little Royal Enfield of hers
could take abuse and keep right on going,’ it said. ‘Course it weighed almost
nothing. That was a help on rough terrain.’
‘It weighed enough,’ said Cass. ‘You were the only one who could lift it out of
the gully, that time Lou dared you and you tried to launch over it.’
‘Oh come on,’ said Lou, looking grumpy, ‘Ana herself almost certainly could’ve
done it. She just refused, on principle.’
‘She was right to,’ said Johnnie, vaguely. ‘I’m the one who dropped it.’
Sherlock rolled her head on the couch back, took another drag and held it.
‘Give me that,’ said Johnnie, pushing herself up and taking the last of the
joint from Sherlock’s long, white fingers.
‘Johnnie was always so strong,’ said Haley dreamily, to nobody in particular.
‘Getting the bike back, and—and I’d’ve died if I had to spend twelve hours
moving the radar cabin around. Predictor, you know?’
This last was directed to Sherlock, who looked as if she’d been thinking about
other things, and was nonplussed to be dragged back into the conversation.
‘Pardon?’ she said to Haley, sounding bored, her head still resting on the back
of the couch.
‘Predictor,’ said Lou, with narrowed eyes. Sherlock looked blank. ‘Johnnie
never explain to you what she did in the war?’
‘No,’ drawled Sherlock, rolling her head back to look at Johnnie. ‘She never
has.’
‘You never asked!’ protested Johnnie, wrongfooted, but Lou was unfolding
herself from her chair and making her way across the room. Sherlock sat up at
her approach and Lou sat down next to her, very close.
‘There were four of us, right?’ she told Sherlock. Sherlock nodded. ‘And we
were all together in this tiny little cabin, right? And it was our job to let
the boys in the field know where to point the heavy guns.’
‘Sherlock is, you know, a certifiable genius,’ cut in Johnnie, unaccountably
angry at Lou’s condescension. And that Sherlock hadn’t pointed that out
herself. She hadn’t even rolled her eyes.
Johnnie took the last drag off the reefer cigarette. She ground out the stub in
the ashtray by her elbow, feeling livid.
Lou, however, continued unfazed. ‘Now imagine I’m where Haley is sitting, so
Cass and I are together.’
Sherlock twisted to look at Cass and Haley, and Lou moved so she was flush
against Sherlock’s back, speaking right into Sherlock’s ear. ‘We’ve got these
special instruments, Cass and me. I’m calculating how high the bombs are in the
sky, and Cass there is figuring their position side to side.’ Sherlock made an
interested hmm’ing noise, as if enthralled.
‘Sherlock understands the term “range,”’ Johnnie bit out. Everyone ignored her.
‘And Haley’s sitting over where Johnnie is—’ Lou put an arm around Sherlock’s
waist, lifting her hand under Sherlock’s arm to point toward Johnnie’s chair,
and Johnnie felt herself springing to her feet.
‘Fuck off, Lou,’ she heard herself yell, standing over them both, no smile in
her voice at all. ‘She’s not just some femme you can sweet-talk into bed.’
‘Oi!’ yelled Haley, suddenly on her feet as well. ‘What the hell are you trying
to say?’
‘I—’ said Johnnie. She took a deep breath, still staring at Lou and at
Sherlock, whose face was illegible as ever. She could feel Haley crowding up on
one side. She tried to relax her hands out of fists.
‘Just—leave her alone,’ said Johnnie to Lou. ‘She’s—not like—most. Have some
respect.’
‘And what’re all the other femmes you’ve ever taken to bed?’ demanded Haley.
‘Pet labradors? We don’t rate respect?’
‘You know she didn’t mean it like that,’ said Cass, tugging on Haley’s hand.
Haley shook it off, crowded closer to Johnnie. Johnnie breathed deep. She
couldn’t quite stop staring at Sherlock and Lou.
‘No,’ she mumbled, ‘she’s right, I shouldn’t—I’m sorry, Haley, I just—I’m
really sorry,’ which barely made sense. Her head was reeling with anger and
reefer, gin and twisted tenderness. She dragged her gaze away from Sherlock to
meet Haley’s eyes. ‘Really, I am.’
Haley nodded, stiffly. The silence was awkward indeed.
Then Sherlock spoke, and for a moment Johnnie couldn’t process the words.
‘Why don’t you show me?’ Sherlock said, or at least it sounded like that.
Johnnie swung her head back around.
Sherlock was standing up. Disengaging herself from Lou and stepping forward,
which put her close to where Johnnie was still standing.
Pardon?thought Johnnie. What?Her skin felt tingly and tight.
‘P-pardon?’ she said, raising her eyes to Sherlock’s face.
‘You could show me what you all used to do,’ Sherlock said.
Johnnie noted, in some obscure area of her brain dedicated to cursing Sherlock
Holmes, that despite lack of sleep, an evening of heavy drinking, and two
strong drags on a reefer cigarette, Sherlock seemed as sober and collected as
usual.
‘You don’t—you don’t care about any of that,’ mumbled Johnnie.
‘Nonsense,’ said Sherlock, looking down at Johnnie’s face with her maddening
smirk. ‘I’m finding this whole evening most illuminating.’
And then—there it was. That flash of something genuine, something Sherlock. A
curtain drawn aside on the wire-taut heart of her. Johnnie almost cried out
with it. And it was like every single bloody time: all she wanted on earth was
to share that look, over and over and over.
‘Right, yeah,’ Johnnie gasped, trying not to seem too breathless. She ran a
hand through her hair to clear her head.
Sherlock stood in front of her, looking pleasantly expectant, her mouth curling
as if at an inside joke.
‘Okay.’ Johnnie said. ‘Right.’ She stood still. She could feel four sets of
eyes fastened onto her.
Sherlock smirked.
‘Well,’ said Johnnie, stepping forward, ‘er. Haley would’ve been sitting there,
where I just was, like Lou said, ready to transmit the coordinates to the
gunners on the field.’
‘By telegraph, was it?’ asked Sherlock. Johnnie gave her a puzzled look, not
quite understanding the game they were playing.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Long-range cable.’
‘Mmm,’ said Sherlock, stepping further forward. ‘And what were you doing?’ They
were less than a foot from each other now. Johnnie could swear she felt the
heat coming off Sherlock through her own sensitised skin.
‘Er. I was, er, over here,’ she said, moving away from Sherlock to the wall
near the door, ‘moving the cabin, right? So Cass and Lou could get a proper
reading.’
‘Moving the cabin,’ repeated Sherlock. She slid in front of Johnnie and peered
out the window, as if envisioning the long-ago scene. ‘And what did that
involve?’
‘Well, it’s like—like moving your television aerial around, you know, to get
the best signal,’ said Johnnie. God, she could see the trail of sweat down the
back of Sherlock’s black blouse, where the fabric was sticking to the delicate
line of her spine.
‘It’s a damn sight harder than moving a bloody TV aerial about,’ put in Cass.
Johnnie jumped at the interruption.
‘It, er, it wasn’t much, really,’ she said. Sherlock turned to raise an eyebrow
at her, like she did when Johnnie wasn’t pulling her weight on a case. There
was a tiny raised birthmark halfway up her long neck.
‘It was definitely the hardest job of the four,’ said Haley, grudgingly.
‘Show me,’ said Sherlock, and Christ.
Christ.
Johnnie reached out, sliding her arms under Sherlock’s arms to circle
Sherlock’s waist on either side. She tilted her head so she was looking around
Sherlock’s shoulder, through the imaginary window of the imaginary radar cabin.
She shook her head slightly. She tried not to think about everyone watching.
Her arms caged the narrow span of Sherlock’s ribs. Thin, too thin, but
maddening; the curve of her lovely little arse pressed into Johnnie’s stomach.
One of Johnnie’s bare upper arms just brushed the swelling of Sherlock’s breast
through the light cotton fabric, and the give of it—how it would feel against
her face, her palm—how Sherlock’s sweat would taste, skin under her lips—.
Johnnie bit down hard on her own tongue. Sherlock started, and Johnnie realised
that a grunting noise had left her throat. She cleared it. There was a snicker
from behind them.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘er. There was a control here,’ laying her hand over Sherlock’s
hand, ‘and one—this way, and when I moved them like—like this—’
‘Mmm,’ said Sherlock, her voice sounding unnaturally deep, vibrating against
Johnnie’s chest.
Johnnie couldn’t track on what she was saying. She breathed in the smell of
smoke and sweat and skin, and god but she wanted.
‘—the whole cabin would, er, shift about, you know, and we could—’
‘Get a reading on the position of the bombs,’ agreed Sherlock, low and breathy.
‘Humng,’ said Johnnie, or something like it. ‘It was all, er, mechanical, er,
of course, so, that’s what, why Haley said just now that it was, er—difficult—’
Sherlock’s wrist shifted, impossibly fine and complex under Johnnie’s hand. The
pads of Johnnie’s fingertips were so sensitised that she thought she could feel
every bone, every tendon; every pore of Sherlock’s white, stretched-tight skin.
She looked down around Sherlock’s shoulder and realised she was rubbing, index
and middle fingers together, rubbing compulsive, shivery little circles onto
the underside of Sherlock’s right wrist, like she would do if—
Christ. Stop. Had to—fuck. Had to stop. Behind them the room had gone
preternaturally quiet.
Johnnie looked down at her rubbing hand, willing it to stop. It kept on.
Sherlock turned her head a fraction toward Johnnie’s, where Johnnie was
watching their nested hands. Then Johnnie saw Sherlock’s right-hand fingers
curl, and tremble so minutely. Barely perceptible; a tiny uncontrolled spasm.
The sight made Johnnie ache between her legs, which was—she mustn’t—she
couldn’t.
It was impossible, but she had to. She bit down on the string of curses in her
throat and wrenched herself backward, away from from Sherlock, letting go
Sherlock’s wrists and stumbling when she backed up against the armchair. She
fell into the chair, breathing like she’d run a race, and Sherlock turned
slowly, her back propped against the window. Johnnie realised, dimly, that
Sherlock was silhouetted: the sun was well up.
‘I—we need to,’ Johnnie heard her voice say, and Sherlock said ‘Yes, hm, back
at the flat,’ gesturing distractedly at the door.
Johnnie snuck a look at the other three. Lou looked sour, and half-asleep; Cass
and Haley were staring, incredulous, obviously trying not to laugh.
A few minutes later and all three were standing at the door, waving, as Johnnie
and Sherlock slid at last into the back seat of a cab.

Chapter End Notes
        1. Gina Ware really did rule the Gates with an iron fist, and
           wielded the dreaded power of expulsion from the club for those
           who acted poorly. It was generally understood that butches had
           to take their fights (which happened frequently) outside, on
           pain of being banned - which, given the Gates’s centrality to
           the lesbian social scene, was a heavy punishment indeed.
        2. ATS_Remembered was tremendously helpful in researching the
           teams of radar operators on ack-ack sites in WWII. In
           particular, the descriptions in this chapter were drawn from
           the recorded histories of Esther_May_Girdlestone and Jane_Hard
           (for the operations of the radar cabin and the fact that
           Johnnie had the most physically demanding job), and Marjorie
           Allebone (for a descriptions of Ana’s work as a motorcycle
           dispatch rider). The camel song was remembered by ATS predictor
           Dorothy_Birchall.
        3. It’s true that ATS radar operators would have been kept away
           from the sites of the heavy guns, and forbidden to fire guns in
           combat (though their training did include instruction on how to
           fire rifles). The stories of sneaking off-base and going to
           bars are based on oral histories quoted in Rebecca Jennings’s
           Tomboys and Bachelor Girls.

***** Chapter 9 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
May 10, 1955
6:30am
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
London, England
All the girls in the Gateways, and Johnnie had to fall for Sherlock Holmes.
It had been six in the morning by the time they’d got home. Johnnie had spent
the whole cab ride biting the inside of her cheek, cursing herself and avoiding
Sherlock’s eyes. She couldn’t even remember now, locked in her room on her back
on her bed, how they had taken their leave of Cass and the rest; or who had
paid the cabbie; or what she had said to Sherlock or Sherlock to her, before
Sherlock had disappeared behind her own door and Johnnie had bolted up the
stairs.
She was shifting on the coverlet now, each touch of her clothes against her
skin incendiary. This fixation on Sherlock, it had to be—had to be put away,
locked down. But Johnnie felt split apart. She almost moaned, just undoing her
own trousers and shucking them to the floor. In the frigid room, she was
sweating.
It might have been the gin; or the reefer; or having pressed the entire long
length of Sherlock’s body against hers; but she couldn’t remember the last time
she’d felt like this. Desperate. Flayed open.
Unbuttoning her button-down, the cool air slipped against her and she had to
stop to touch her own skin. Again, and—fuck, again. She couldn’t stop the
barrage of sense-memory. The smoky, salty smell of Sherlock’s nape. Johnnie’s
face, buried in the weight of Sherlock’s curls.
The guilt of it, because Sherlock had asked but she hadn’t meant it like that,
and this would never, never happen. But Johnnie had pulled back, she had got
them home, and that was all she could, all she could—.
Sense-memory: the span of Sherlock’s ribcage cradled between Johnnie’s arms.
Rail-thin, but so—god, so strong. She imagined Sherlock in karate whites,
pinning Johnnie to the floor, her face over Johnnie’s face, her hair all
tumbled down.
A hot wash of shame; for thinking that. Butches didn’t; shouldn’t. But she was
leaking like a faucet between her legs. She turned onto her stomach, shirt
still half-undone.
Against the bare skin of her thighs the scratchy green coverlet; just under her
hips, the burns from Sherlock’s cigarettes. She gasped, grunted at the thought,
pushed her hips down hard into the singed fabric. It was almost like touching,
almost. Traces of Sherlock in this room, this room where Johnnie was rutting,
was—
She shoved a hand down between herself and the mattress, curled her fingers
against the top of her pubic bone and thrust her hips. Her briefs were still on
and wet through,and she couldn’t even stop to get her hand under the waistband
and inside before her whole body convulsed. Jackknifed into the mattress.
She was panting; dripping sweat; skin still humming. It had barely taken the
edge off. Jesus.
She turned back on her back, an arm over her eyes. Breathing, shaky.
Something had to be enough. She had to take care of this herself, this insane,
too-much thing. Johnnie thought again of Sherlock in whites, wiry limbs holding
Johnnie to her—and then of the box under her bed.
Shame. Heat.
The things Johnnie sometimes wanted, she knew they weren’t—done. She thought of
the look of disgust on Margrit’s face, the one time Johnnie had asked to
reverse their positions. Margrit, curling her lip, saying ‘I didn’t realise,
Johnnie. Shall I lend you my lipstick, as well?’
Johnnie tried not to think. (Shame, heat.)
She ran a hand up inside her own undershirt and the cotton pulled against her
flat chest, her pebbled nipples. So tight they hurt. Sense-memory: her inner
arm, brushing up against the giving curve of Sherlock’s breast. God it would
feel lovely, overflowing her palm. Filling her mouth. A hard seed against her
tongue, in a sea of curving flesh.
Sherlock was so thin, too thin; how could she still overflow Johnnie’s palms?
Johnnie cupped her hollowed hands over her own nipples, her hips twitching.
Thinking: it was lucky Sherlock had destroyed Jeanette’s black dress, when
Johnnie had offered it. Johnnie imagined herself at the Carruthers’s ball,
trying to stay focused while Sherlock moved through the crowd in black silk.
Angular but for the mounded curves of her bust and her arse, nipples hard under
black silk, arse under black silk pressed against Johnnie’s front in the
vestibule where they’d awaited Mr. Mortimer, and then Sherlock kicking out with
that joyful look in her eyes and Mortimer crumpling, his knee knocked sideways
while Johnnie—
Johnnie groaned; cursed; slid off the bed. The box top left dust on her
fingers.
(Shame. Heat. Margrit’s mouth, snide like a snake.).
The thing inside was hard black rubber, bought off a working girl at the Gates.
‘You get a lot of use for gear like this?’ Johnnie had asked, and Mariah had
rolled her eyes and said, ‘You wouldn’t believe.’ She tucked it against her
side, warming the cool rubber.
Johnnie’d had to be careful, though. Some thought a thing like that was a kind
of betrayal; that it went against the whole point of being with a woman. Others
were all in favour. Smithy had been all in favour. Margrit had been all in
favour, until Johnnie had wanted to switch.
There was petroleum jelly in the box, but it had never been more unnecessary.
Whole inches of her inner thighs were soaked, and that was through her briefs.
She moaned around her bitten lip when she eased them down her hips and thighs
and kicked them off after her trousers.
She was breathing hard. It wasn’t just longing for Sherlock; she hadn’t done
this since the row with Margrit, not even alone. But nobody would know, she
reminded herself; nobody at the Gates, and certainly not Sherlock, never
Sherlock. Johnnie just needed to—fuck. She needed to.
She closed her eyes, tried to slow her breath. Kicked her heel against the
mattress.
Sherlock would never know. But if she did, said a voice in Johnnie’s head, as
she lay back against the pillows. (Shame, heat.) If she found out, and maybe
she would—maybe she would want to.
It was just imaginary, thought Johnnie, desperately, rubbing the tip of the
warm rubber down against herself where she was swollen, and aching, and wet.
The shaft brushed against the tongue of her and she shivered through her whole
skin.
She would do this, thought Johnnie, and then she would put it all away. Nothing
like that damned demonstration tonight could happen again, it wasn’t—she teased
at her opening with the blunt head of the thing—it wasn’t right, Sherlock
didn’t mean it, Johnnie knew she didn’t. But just for now, for—for now—oh.
She closed her eyes and was two hours back in her mind’s eye, peering again
around Sherlock’s shoulder and down at her own fingers rubbing compulsive
little circles onto the underside of Sherlock’s wrist. And now that same hand
was sunk between Johnnie’s legs, rubbing the same shivery circuits with the
first two fingers of her left hand.
But what if it—what if it wasn’t her own body, she thought, gasping, right hand
nudging the thick wet rubber against herself beneath her circling fingers, over
and over, just nudging, not pushing inside. What if it were Sherlock laid out
on her back on Johnnie’s bed, stripped and sweating, yes, with Johnnie’s hand
burrowed in the curls between her pale legs—?
Yes, she thought (circling so lightly, trembling), yes, and Sherlock had hardly
ever done this, she would be so—fuck, so touch-starved, god, and she would be
staring up at Johnnie with her beautiful pink mouth open, making—yes, making
ragged little sounds in her long throat, and Johnnie would—oh—have to help her,
take care of her, yes, and Johnnie would do, she would; but she’d want to make
sure that after all this time Sherlock felt it in her whole body like Johnnie
felt it in hers, and so Sherlock would be—yes—she would have—yes—would have
lost her words, and be jerking up with her hips where Johnnie’s fingers were
(shuddering now, shaking) circling and circling against the hard wet centre of
her, and all Sherlock would be able to do with the blunt black shaft in her
hand would be to lock her fist hard around it, arm outstretched against the bed
so it—yes—so the tip of it where it jutted out from the mattress by Sherlock’s
hip would nudge—nudge—tease Johnnie when she shifted her hips, and
then—oh—Sherlock’s chin would tip back when she started to shake, gasping open-
mouthed, and Johnnie would feel the—yes—feel the shaking all along the length
of her own frame and press in with her shuddering circling fingers, yes, and
Sherlock was always so strange and beautiful and now she would be breaking
apart around Johnnie’s hands and Johnnie would feel like sobbing because she
wanted to be there with Sherlock, not distant or controlled but, yes, twinned
and shaking in her own—fuck, in her own skin and she would shove forward with
her hips onto, fuck, onto, fuck, and she’d be, yes, so full and, yes, split
open, and keening and, yes, grinding herself—down—onto—Sherlock’s—quaking— —
—fist—.
Minutes later, Johnnie’s hands and her breath were steady enough to sit back
up. She drew the thing out of herself; wiped it down with the damp face-cloth
from the washbasin. Back in the box; the box back under the bed. She sat naked
on the mattress’s edge with her head in her hands, and thought: all right then,
and now you have to leave it. Leave it, Watson. Leave it alone.
***
May 15, 1955
10:05pm
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
London, England
A truly challenging case, thought Sherlock, had never been more welcome. They
were two days in, and she was arrow-focused and unencumbered in that way
composed of hunger and adrenaline. It was almost like she knew herself again.
She’d thought she was going mad with it, circling round Johnnie inside her own
head in the aftermath of that night in Chelsea. She could hardly believe she’d
allowed herself such a lapse; You could show me, she had said, and she hadn’t
used that phrase in that voice since she’d heard it purred by Cecilia McIntosh
one afternoon at Queen Mar—well.
She’d been softened around the edges by the chemicals, after all. And something
had risen up in her when Johnnie had said Sherlock wasn’t like ordinary people.
Johnnie had yelled it, really: furious, her hand clenching and unclenching. And
Sherlock had suddenly wanted to feel that they were together, in that way they
had when Johnnie said ‘brilliant’ and they ran off together into the London
night.
But it had gotten—out of control, she recognised that now. She’d almost cried
out, room full of strangers or no, when Johnnie had stepped back from her.
She’d had to prop herself against the cool of the window just to stay standing.
And every single night, since then, when she closed her eyes, there had been
the feel of Johnnie’s blunt fingers on her wrist, making circles and soft
circles on her skin. She’d felt adrift, panicky. Like she was losing her grasp
of her own character.
But now she was forty hours into her first-ever blackmail investigation and her
blood was her own again, swift and singing. She had tailed the Klein daughter
to a lunch meeting and out to the pub after her office job, and Johnnie had
gone to the hall of records and come back with pages of notes on certain of Mr.
Klein’s business associates, and then they had met up on the street half by
chance, and grinned at each other, and Johnnie had come with her to break into
Miss Klein’s after-hours office block. And now here they were, back in Baker
Street: Johnnie sprawled on the floor in her undershirt with pages of notes
spread out all around her; Sherlock pacing, electrified, back and forth in
front of the hearth.
She was still got up as Bill, the promising young Trinity College alumnus Mr.
Klein had hired. But her jacket was off, her sleeves rolled up. She hooked her
thumbs under the braces as she paced.
‘From ’46 to ’48,’ Johnnie was saying, rifling through papers, ‘almost all the
records are devoted to this business with the Normandy beef.’
‘Irrelevant,’ Sherlock said, waving a hand, turning in her circuit back toward
Johnnie. ‘It’s the period from ’50 to ’51 that intrigues me.’
Johnnie’s eyes flicked up to Sherlock’s, her brow creased. ‘There are barely
any records at all for those years.’
‘Yes, exactly,’ said Sherlock.
‘You think that’s suspicious?’ Johnnie sounded dubious. ‘There’s a letter here,
says his daughter had a series of surgeries during that time. Maybe he took
time away from work, you know, to be with her.’
Sherlock snorted. ‘You’ll notice that his wife of twenty years actually died in
’48, and he seems to have conducted several transactions the same day as her
funeral.’
‘Could’ve seen the error of his ways?’ said Johnnie.
‘No, no,’ said Sherlock. ‘It’s plain from the phrasing of the December ’51
letter, that he was arrested for something. Most probably spent those two years
in prison. Thought it would be in his best interests to keep it a secret and
rekindle old ties on his release, rather than having to explain to all his
associates why he was incarcerated.’
‘You think?’ said Johnnie. Impressed, but unconvinced.
‘Obvious,’ said Sherlock. ‘Just look at the change in his penmanship from ’49
to ’52, not to mention that highly significant use of the word “away.” But…’
‘But?’ Johnnie was sitting forward now. The summer freckles were starting to
return to her shoulders. Sherlock wheeled the other way.
‘I wish I knew what he was picked up for,’ she said, frustrated, kicking a toe
at the hearth. ‘What I wouldn’t give for five minutes with his police file.’
There was a brief pause. ‘Does it matter?’ said Johnnie then. ‘I mean—do you
think it’s important, knowing why he was picked up?’
Sherlock spun back around. ‘Well, let’s think,’ she said, biting. ‘If his
conviction was for blackmail or theft, then we have a history of the type of
crime currently being perpetrated against Mr. Klein. Not to mention, the
identity of the victim would provide a starting point from which to extrapolate
patterns in his method of locating and targeting his marks. I should say it
would very probably take two days’ time off our investigation. Which, given
that the blackmailer is scheduled to make contact with Mr. Klein in only twenty
hours, could be quite significant, yes.’ She left off, breathing hard.
‘Yes,' said Johnnie, pursing her lips. ‘I can see that.’
But Sherlock groaned. ‘Oh, it’s all academic,’ she sighed, sinking down into
her armchair. ‘The only one of my contacts who might possibly help us is on
holiday in Devon. Read me that Chronicle article from August ’53, again?’
She closed her eyes, fingers steepled, but Johnnie’s voice didn’t come.
Instead, Sherlock felt the newspaper clipping brush her bare arm, and flutter
into her lap.
‘Read it yourself,’ said Johnnie, in, however, a cheerful voice. ‘You can glean
whatever hard information Townsend-Farquhar and his Tory yes-men might have to
offer, and much good it’ll do us. Tell me all about it while I’m gone.’
Sherlock opened her eyes. Johnnie was slinging on her button-down, then her
leather jacket.
‘Where are you—’ Sherlock said.
‘I’m just popping out for a bit,’ said Johnnie, still in that same pleasant
voice.
‘But the case, the—’ Sherlock gestured at the papers strewn about the floor.
‘Yeah, this is actually—might be related,’ said Johnnie. ‘Don’t want to say too
much. You never do, after all.’ She clapped Sherlock on the shoulder on the way
to the door, which Sherlock realised, dimly, was the first physical contact
they had had since that night in Chelsea.
‘Remember to eat something,’ said Johnnie, and then she was shutting the door
behind her, her boots clomping down the stairs.
Sherlock, as she turned back to the clipping from the Chronicle,felt vaguely
put out.
***
By three in the morning Johnnie hadn’t returned, and Sherlock was very put out
indeed.
For four hours her focus had held. She’d sifted through the paltry records
surrounding the suspect’s imprisonment, and the rather more overwhelming
evidence of his return. She’d cleared the wall across from the hearth and
tacked up the key pieces, arranging and rearranging, looking for connections.
Tunnelling down into causes and effects. Nudging with her mental spade against
deep-dug roots; then rising, sudden, back to the surface, to surprise an old
fact in a compromising new position.
Darting forward, crying out. Moving this bit across to there; standing, swaying
for minutes on end, with a low stream of words falling from her mouth. Darting
forward again, at last, to pluck from the wall a bill of sale—which was the key
revealed, she saw now, hiding in plain sight, because if Johnnie would only
consider the probable state of the man’s bed linens upon returning from—
And she turned, grinning—and the flat was empty. The silence had that
resonating quality created by the sudden cessation of sound.
Well of course Johnnie wasn’t there, thought Sherlock, shutting her mouth with
a click.
She looked down at the bill of sale, scowling, and sank back into her armchair.
Johnnie had gone out—what? Three, four hours ago, now? And how long had
Sherlock been speaking to her? Well, it hadn’t mattered, in the end. She’d
connected up the chain of events in her own head. It was the belief in a
listener, really, that helped her thoughts flow.
It was only that Johnnie had said This is actually—might be related. And so it
was stupid, wasn’t it, that Johnnie was still gone.
Because Sherlock had solved it, had it all wrapped up, and knew what to tell
Mr. Klein when she phoned him first thing in the morning.
And what could Johnnie possibly be doing, in any case, at three o’clock in the
morning, that would be of more help to the case than sitting comfortingly on
the floor, listening to Sherlock’s deductions? Sherlock had said five minutes
with his police file. But even Sherlock didn’t have access; it wasn’t as if
Johnnie had some kind of personal ‘in’ to the—
Met officer,Sherlock’s memory supplied. That damnable night at Johnnie’s club,
replaying in her head. Not a recent recruit, despite her feminine appearance
and the Met’s concerted effort to de-masculinise the MWPP—
But, ‘feminine appearance,’ thought Sherlock, springing up and pacing again,
restless. These things were relative. By Gateways standards this—what had her
name been? Delaney? Donovan?—had hardly been dressed at all. She had hissed in
Sherlock’s ear, ‘Think she’s a bit out of your league, little girl,’ and her
shoes and skirt had both been almost practical.
And surely that glamour, that femininity was a marker of desirability for
Johnnie. Johnnie had had Astrid, and Mireille, and Siobhan, and that little
blonde woman in the peasant blouse who had danced by the piano. Surely her
standards were higher than this Donovan, who was, Sherlock thought with an odd
contempt, hardly more of a so-called ‘femme’ than the bohemian version of
Sherlock herself.
And anyway, she remembered her own voice saying:
—nor has she been promoted beyond the standard ladies’ beat: returning
delinquent children to their mothers’ waiting arms and breaking up the
occasional domestic—
and so that couldn’t be where Johnnie had gone, since what good would it do
them? Johnnie might lower her sexual standards as a favour to
Sherlock—Sherlock’s gut twisted horribly at this thought, and she threw herself
full length on the couch—but in this case that was decidedly not what had
happened, since there would be absolutely no point.
Johnnie’s cigarette packet and lighter were on the side-table. Sherlock felt a
vindictive pleasure in the idea that Johnnie might be wanting one right now,
having forgotten them in Baker Street. She grabbed the packet, drew out a fag,
lit up.
No, she thought again, inhaling and glaring at the ceiling, there would be no
point. Sherlock had asked for a file, not a third-hand account from a beat cop
on the ladies’ squad.
Except, she remembered, that some of the women’s accommodations abutted the
hall of records. Sherlock had seen them, while visiting her own police contact
over a year ago. And for a person who sometimes worked late, someone with a
key—or someone sleeping in the same room as someone with a key—Sherlock’s five
minutes with the police file would be easy enough to obtain.
Sherlock shut her eyes and images swam to the surface of her mind: Johnnie
standing behind Donovan as she’d stood behind Sherlock; her breath warm through
Donovan’s curls as Johnnie had breathed warm on the back of Sherlock’s neck;
Johnnie’s hand reaching around to circle Donovan’s wrist, and then Donovan
would turn as Sherlock hadn’t turned, and press her laughing mouth to
Johnnie’s—
No, Sherlock thought, her eyes flying back open. No, surely not, because
Sherlock had said:
Your friend Andie is her partner and her sometimes…partner,
and Johnnie had nodded. She had agreed. Johnnie was promiscuous but unfailingly
honourable, and she would never; she might abandon Sherlock and go seduce a
piece of evidence out from under a member of the Metropolitan Women’s Police
Patrol but she wouldn’t move in on the woman of a friend, and this Donovan was
just that, but—
But then Johnnie had looked at Sherlock and replied: I wouldn’t say friend,
exactly.
***
By five in the morning Sherlock had achieved a sick dizziness. When Johnnie was
at home for these late-night sessions, she force-fed Sherlock odd spoonfuls of
soup or savoury pie. Sherlock always scoffed; she thought now, in retrospect,
that she might have been wrong.
Or perhaps it was only that, immediately upon solving the case, Sherlock was
right back where she started: sprawled on the couch and thinking of Johnnie
Watson. Thinking of whom Johnnie might be touching; and how that person might
be touching her; and whether Johnnie might be touching Sherlock, if only
Sherlock were willing to be a bit…different.
But no, she wasn’t. She wouldn’t. It was impossible, but—
But why impossible? She felt it was, yet: why should it be? She’d caught
herself, trying to bargain: what if it was just for a night? Just for a little
while?
She was woozy and disgusted now, spread out on the couch. The disgust should
have been for Johnnie, but somehow it was for Sherlock herself. Why not put on
a cocktail dress and a pair of stilettos, after all? It was no different from
putting on Evan the accountant, or Lourdes the Galician ticket collector, or
Betty Conway from the typing pool.
Why was it different? How could it be different? She ground out her cigarette
angrily, into the ashtray on the floor.
Sherlock thought, predictably, of the Carruthers’s ball. These days she was
furious every time she thought about the Carruthers’s ball: because Johnnie had
been right. It would have attracted less attention to go as a couple, with
Johnnie in her suit and Sherlock in Jeanette’s black lace dress.
And Sherlock had refused, and compromised them, and done a mediocre job when
she could have been outstanding. Since when did Sherlock Holmes ever choose
mediocrity?
She kicked the armrest on the couch; her foot slipped. It knocked the china
lamp off the side table. The lamp hit the floor, and bounced, and the lack of a
shattering sound was profoundly unsatisfying.
The most galling part was, that Sherlock hadn’t even seen the possibility,
until Johnnie had held out Jeanette’s dress and suggested Sherlock put it on.
Had she developed some kind of—of selective blindness, then? Was she so
accustomed to thinking around the possibility of satin, and heels, and lace,
that they no longer entered her mind? How else could a persona—the correct
persona, she admitted to herself, with another kick of her heel—how could that
possibility occur to Johnnie Watson of all people, but not to Sherlock herself?
It was humiliating.
She took a deep breath; cleared her mind. She would not think of hands of any
kind. Nor Johnnie’s mouth, nor the solid line of her freckled shou lders. She
closed her eyes and imagined, carefully, cautiously, herself at the
Carruthers’s ball, in Jeanette’s black dress.
Sherlock and Johnnie could have impersonated a pair of invited guests, rather
than sneaking in the back way. She thought of the charmed smiles on the faces
of the host and hostess; imagined glancing through her eyelashes at the
bartender, and his flushed face as he leaned over to tell her where Mr.
Mortimer was. They could have located their quarry hours earlier.
She prodded at the edges of her own imagination. Nothing…nothing terrible, she
thought. If anything, it could all have gone more smoothly. She breathed, slow
and deep.
Gingerly, then, she imagined herself back in the vestibule. There was Johnnie,
breathing short breaths on Sherlock’s neck, her hard knife pressed into
Sherlock’s back. Even with Sherlock made up as Evan, it had been—distracting.
Now Sherlock held her breath, and shifted her memory until she was clothed in
black silk, and—waited.
All quiet. Johnnie breathing against her naked nape.
And then: Johnnie spinning her; pinning her to the wood-panelled wall. Sherlock
keening, needing, and Johnnie’s teeth on her bare clavicle, oh—. In the
vestibule Sherlock’s head fell back hard against the wall, and alone on the
couch she gasped, and arched her back, and in the vestibule oh god Johnnie’s
lips, mouthing through silk at the outward curve of Sherlock’s breast. And
Johnnie rutting against Sherlock’s thigh, and her honeyed hands shoving aside
the wrap of Sherlock’s black wrap skirt, grappling between Sherlock’s legs,
pinning her with her hips and her hands and Sherlock fisting her fingers in
Johnnie’s hair, drawing Johnnie’s mouth up toward Sherlock’s ear to hear
Johnnie’s ragged voice saying
disgust me such a silly ordinary girl never been so disappointed you’re just
the kind of ridiculous pathetic dyke hope they laugh you out of London never
want to speak to you and—HUNH—
And her back hit the floor, the air pressed from her lungs.
Scrabbling hands; spasming throat; eyes stretched open; she was clutching the
side of the couch, gasping for breath, and no, no, couldn’t think of that,
mustn’t, wasn’t Johnnie, it hadn’t happened, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, those
weren’t even the right words.
She staggered up, one hand on the arm of the couch while her head spun and her
vision prickled. The case, she thought, the case, things of interest: safe
things, like danger. She thought of going out, of London. Gradually her breath
returned. By the time she reached the door, she could feel her feet. She threw
on Bill’s springtime blazer, and headed down the stairs.
There would be workingmen’s cafes opening now, stewed tea for the breakfast
crowd. And Sherlock had nothing to say, anyway, when Johnnie got home.
***
She returned to the flat at eight-thirty, fed and watered, having given Mr.
Klein her instructions in exchange for a sizeable credit with his dressmaker
wife. Johnnie was out at the garage, but there was a note pinned to the ice-
box.
Blackmail, it said. Pentonville Prison, June 50 - Sept. 51. Victim Reginald
Miller. I’m at the garage until 4. Hope this helps. JW
Sherlock crumpled the note in her palm.
A confirmed hypothesis had always felt like acceleration: like shedding a
burden, rather than shouldering a weight.
She resolved, standing in the pale shafts of light filtering through the
kitchen window, to hold it up.
***
May 23rd, 1955
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
London, England

But some structures, it turned out, are built to impress, and others are built
to endure.
It was seeing Lou, finally, that broke her. Lou, Johnnie’s old friend,
or—Sherlock saw Lou across the street and the word that sprang to mind was
‘nemesis,’ though Johnnie would laugh at her, would say real people didn’t have
such things.
They were running an errand, that afternoon, for the Riverses, which put them
in Chelsea for the first time since the Gateways club and the party afterward.
They’d been making their way down the pavement, Johnnie scanning for street
addresses while Sherlock talked. It was almost easy between them; close enough
that she almost forgot to remark it. Then Johnnie’s jaw tightened, and Sherlock
looked over, following Johnnie’s line of sight; and Lou McGuire, in Army
Surplus khakis and a green pullover, was just across the way.
Johnnie pasted on a smile, though Sherlock could tell by her jaw and the set of
her shoulders that she wasn’t pleased to see Lou any more than Sherlock was.
Lou smiled her green-eyed smile; motioned for them to wait. The whole thing was
exhausting.
Sherlock felt Johnnie’s fingers spasm, for just an instant, against the back of
her wrist, too quick for Sherlock to react. Johnnie slowed, but refused to stop
moving entirely. Sherlock took an obscure satisfaction from Lou’s windedness
when she finally caught them up.
‘Johnnie!’ Lou cried, walking backward in front of them, and then forcing them
to stop by stopping herself. She shook Johnnie’s hand, hearty and smiling.
‘And the lovely Miss Holmes,’ she added. Sherlock stepped around Johnnie and
stuck out her own hand, pointedly perpendicular rather than parallel to the
ground. Lou hesitated a moment, then shook it as well.
‘All right, Lou?’ Johnnie said. Pleasant, but cool.
‘Oh, well, can’t complain,’ Lou said. The three of them looked at one another.
‘Cass and Haley still—’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lou.
Sherlock fidgeted. Her feet hurt, suddenly, and small talk made her skin itch.
‘How long are you all in London, then?’ said Johnnie.
‘Supposed to be two months,’ said Lou, ‘but I’ve my doubts. We’re having a
ball, but it’s bloody expensive up here.’
Johnnie snickered. ‘It is, yeah, if you spend all four regular nights, out.’
Sherlock felt a swell of affection at the way, when Johnnie said out, anyone
with a set of ears could hear: at the Gates, buying drinks for anyone who’ll
let you. She smirked. Lou saw, but Sherlock couldn’t bring herself to stop.
‘Well,’ Lou said, voice like satin, ‘we can’t all have your connections,
Johnnie.’
‘Sorry?’ said Johnnie, glancing at her watch. ‘Connections?’
‘Mmm,’ said Lou. ‘Who’s the lucky officer, then?’
‘What are you on about?’ Johnnie said, slightly impatient. ‘Officer?’
Sherlock fidgeted again. Her feet felt bruised from the weight of her
motionless body. ‘We really need to be—’ she started, thrusting a shoulder
forward, but Lou cut back in, and Sherlock subsided. She dropped back, heavy on
her heels.
‘Don’t give me that,’ Lou said. ‘I saw you just the other morning. Four, five
days ago, was it? Coming out of Peto House.’
‘Coming out of—’ Johnnie said. Sherlock shut her eyes.
‘Yeees,’ said Lou, drawing out the word, eyes narrowing. ‘Convenient
accommodations they’ve got, the ladies of the Met. I seem to recall that Nancy
Harrow had a room all to herself at Peto House. She can’t be the only one.’
Four, five days ago, thought Sherlock. She had flashes of balling up a
scribbled note in her hand. Of her own voice: What I wouldn’t give for five
minutes with his police file.She felt blank, heavy.
‘Still,’ said Lou, when Johnnie didn’t respond. ‘A roommate can be got round. I
hear Sally Donovan was sharing with a girl who only just left the force to get
married.’
Sherlock blinked, hard, then turned her head. Johnnie wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Sherlock just kept staring at the side of Johnnie’s face.
She realised, dimly, that Johnnie was still talking, was curling her lip and
saying, in a disgusted voice, ‘Didn’t your father ever tell you, McGuire, a
gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell?’ But it was as if Sherlock were hearing it all
from a great distance, through the heavy air compressing her head.
Inside her the weight tipped, sickening and vertiginous.
‘You weren’t so fastidious when it came to Ana Vilaseca,’ Lou was saying.
Sherlock stood on the pavement and felt it happen. The weight tipped, and
slipped from her. Johnnie said something about ten years ago, and Sherlock
stared at the side of Johnnie’s face, numb with thought.
She thought of continuing on as they were. Sherlock unresting, always vigilant
over her inviolate citadel of selves, while Johnnie brought home Siobhan, and
Sally, and Mireille, and Astrid, and all of them slept through the night:
ordinary people, having nothing to defend.
‘…think you can tell me about Ana,’ Johnnie was saying. Sherlock stared at the
side of Johnnie’s face, and was tired in her bones.
She thought of facing an endless string of Johnnie’s earnest queries, and of
making herself insist, again and again, on the logic of claims she knew were
flawed. Because Sherlock wasn’t being logical when she tore up a stranger’s
dress at an innocent suggestion. The weight had become too much to support. Her
foundations were shot through, already, with cracks.
And Johnnie was inside the gates. She worked with Sherlock; and between the
work and the citadel there was nothing to distinguish.
Lou was sneering, murmuring something like ‘…living with, practically another
butch, Johnnie, it’s disturbing,’ and it snaked its way into Sherlock’s brain.
She felt a moment of sadness; a moment of anger; and another; and anger for one
moment more. And then she felt herself just—giving up.
She would do what she had to, she thought, as Johnnie turned and strode off,
leaving Lou sputtering on the pavement. She was compromised; she was crumbling.
Defence had become impossible.
Silks, satins, smiling, stilettos: it had to be easier than this.

Chapter End Notes
        1. Let me tell you, my friends: it is extremely difficult
           researching the appearance and availability of dildos circa
           1954 in Britain. “Hard black rubber” is about all I could
           deduce from the one 50s-era (and endearingly silly) porn film I
           was able to find involving masturbation. As far as procurement,
           Jill Gardiner writes:

                Lesley had a similar experience at a party given by a
                bisexual woman.

                We went to her house at Islington, and her husband
                was cooking a huge curry, with three children running
                about. A party was going on in one room, and she was
                dealing in a line we now call sex toys, which were
                difficult to locate in those days, dildos,
                photographs, books and whips. One of the tall girls
                took a dildo and did a disgusting dance with it.
                Quite a lot of lesbians of my era were disgusted by
                it. Their idea was that if you didn’t like men, you
                didn’t want that sort of thing around either. Whereas
                I’m all for them. Lesley (57)


           So, they were around but very niche. An habituée of the
           Gateways, many of whose patrons were sex workers, would be in a
           better position than most to locate dildos or other sex toys if
           they so desired. As Lesley’s story implies, the opinion about
           them in the 50s lesbian community was split.
        2. It’s, um, REALLY SHAMEFULLY OBVIOUS if you’ve read it, but a
           debt of gratitude is owed to Joyce’s Molly Bloom for the style
           and all the yeses in the penultimate paragraph of the first
           scene.
        3. Given the housing shortage during these years, the stigma on
           single women living alone, and how recently both services had
           been opened to women, both female service members and female
           Met officers were provided with housing by their employers.
           Rebecca Jennings, in Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, writes:

                In the majority of women’s police section houses, the
                accommodation seems to have been based on two women
                sharing a room and as such provided an
                unintentionally favourable environment in which to
                conduct a lesbian relationship. One of the most
                popular London section houses, Peto House, in
                Pembridge Square, had formerly functioned as a hotel,
                and therefore comprised self-contained single or twin
                bedrooms, possibly with locking doors.


           The detail about Peto House abutting the Hall of Records is
           fictional. But convenient!
        4. Pentonville Prison is a shout-out to the BBC Sherlock series,
           but as far as I can tell it’s perfectly plausible that someone
           convicted for blackmail in 1950 would have been imprisoned
           there. Twelve to fifteen months hard labour seems to be about
           an average sentence from the time, as well.
***** Chapter 10 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
May 28, 1955
4:45pm
Stamford’s Auto Repair, Euston Road, St. Pancras
 London, England
Johnnie was vague and distracted, all that Saturday. She moved nervously, and
moved a great deal; there were things about which she wasn’t thinking.
About not having seen Sherlock all week, for example. Or about Sherlock’s mad
behaviour when she had seen her. Or about Sherlock’s bath-wet curls clinging
down her back. Or about Sherlock.
In the end Johnnie needed so badly to get out of the flat that she went round
the garage for some extra hours. Mickey was there, too, catching up on work,
but somehow chatting with her was more of an irritation than a reassurance. The
third time she had to ask Mickey to repeat something, Johnnie kicked the wall
and held up a hand.
‘I know! Listen, don’t say it,’ she said. ‘I'm leaving. You should—just, send
me home without pay.’
‘You’re already here on your day off,’ Mickey pointed out, mild, but with a
crease between her eyebrows.
‘Come off it, I’m completely useless today,’ said Johnnie. ‘I’m sorry, Mick.’
She jammed her spanner back into the bundle of tools, and made to wash up.
‘What is it, then?’ Mickey asked, leaning up against the utility sink as
Johnnie scrubbed the grease off her hands. ‘No, wait, let me guess: something
to do with Sherlock?’
Johnnie grunted.
‘Up all night again, were we?’ Mickey’s tone was elaborately casual. When
Johnnie slid her eyes sideways, Mickey was staring straight ahead, smirking.
‘You don’t know what you’re on about,’ Johnnie said, feeling a bit raw. She
didn’t know either, particularly.
‘Oh no?’ said Mickey. ‘I’ll eat my gran’s last Christmas jumper if you got any
sleep before your shifts this past Thursday. Or the Tuesday before.’
‘Those were for a case!’ said Johnnie, wheeling around so fast that she sprayed
droplets on Mickey’s coveralls.
‘And that’s never a look of more-than-professional interest you get whenever
she comes around,’ said Mickey, waving off Johnnie’s offer of the towel.
Johnnie blew air out of her cheeks; ran her wet hands through her wet hair. She
glared up at Mickey through her lashes, and didn’t say anything. Mickey looked
back at her, considering.
‘This current thing for a case?’ she asked. ‘When do you reckon Sherlock might
have it solved? Only Mr. Haroldson may want to know if his carburettor’s about
to be delayed.’
‘Look, honestly I—I don’t even know myself,’ Johnnie said, hands still in her
hair. ‘She doesn’t always, er, volunteer as much information as I might —’
‘Oh, you noticed that, did you? I didn’t like to criticise your—’
‘Mick—’
‘Entirely professional business partner and flatmate, since you’ve occasionally
been known to be somewhat—’
‘Mickey, I know, I—’
‘—touchy about her, for reasons completely unrelated to anything—’
‘Mickey,’ Johnnie yelled, but she was also starting to laugh. ‘Let me get a
bleeding word in edgewise, yeah?’
Mickey made an extravagant gesture of permission, leaning back against the
sink.
Johnnie rubbed her face with her newly-clean hands. ’This isn’t going to make
you any easier to live with,’ she said, glaring out from between her own
fingers, ‘but I’m telling you, it must be for a case. She sort of—of cornered
me last night, and—’
‘I knew it!’ yelled Mickey. ‘You lying, avoiding—’
‘—and nothing happened! I mean, not nothing, she just—she asked to go back to
Chelsea.’
Mickey leaned back again, trying not to smile, though her dimples gave her
away. ‘Anywhere specific in Chelsea?’ she said.
‘Yeah, er. Actually,’ said Johnnie, cringing a bit. ‘The Gateways. She—she
wants to go to the Gates. We were there once before, you know, as a kind of
emergency. I reckoned she hated it, a bit. But yesterday she, er, demanded,
really. That I, er, take her back there tonight.’
Mickey almost clapped her hands together. It was an oddly schoolgirlish gesture
on such a large woman. ‘She said she wanted you to take her there?’
‘Yeah, but you’re making it sound—it was all a bit confused. I mean, she was—’
She’d had an odd flat grimness about her. It’d been unnerving. Johnnie had been
just home from work, and Sherlock just out of the bath; and she had crowded
Johnnie back against Johnnie’s bedroom door wearing nothing but her silky blue
bathrobe, wet-black curls all down her back. She’d smelled of rose soap and
sweet, secret skin.
Sherlock had said ‘you will’ and ‘Gateways’ and ‘tomorrow,’ and Johnnie had
only been able to nod. She hadn’t asked about the case, hadn’t asked anything.
She’d just kept nodding, too many times, an awkward number of times. And
Sherlock had nodded once, and slid off downstairs without a backward glance.
Johnnie scowled now, remembering.
‘I’d have thought you’d be damn well overjoyed,’ said Mickey, taking in the
scowl with narrowed eyes.
‘It’s not a date, Mick.’
‘Johnnie Watson, you are the stubbornest, most bloody-minded—’
‘She doesn’t have any interest!’
‘My left foot!’ exclaimed Mickey, very indignant.
‘Look,’ said Johnnie, her hands in the air, ‘I have no bloody idea what’s going
on, but she’s made herself perfectly clear. We were all standing right here,
weren’t we? “I’m married to my work,” and all that.’
Mickey made to wave the words away. ‘That was eight months ago at least, and
I’ve never heard such a load of rot in all my—’ but Johnnie spoke over her:
‘I’m telling you, she must want to investigate someone, and she’s using this as
cover.’
They looked at each other, Mickey shaking her head. Johnnie tried for a joke,
saying ‘I only hope it’s not any friend of mine.’ She felt her grin come out as
a grimace.
‘Mm,’ Mickey said, obviously unconvinced. She turned to the tool bench,
straightening the shims and spanners. Johnnie guessed she thought she was
hiding her amusement.
‘I suppose,’ Mickey said, over her shoulder, ‘you’ve given no thought at all to
what you might be wearing on this utterly unromantic trip to the Gateways with
your uninterested flatmate.’
‘Well, I,’ said Johnnie, and couldn’t in all honesty continue.
‘Yes?’ Mickey’s tone was deliberately bland but her eyebrows were up, her
dimples on full display when she turned her head.
‘Well, it’s—it’s Saturday night, isn’t it,’ said Johnnie, not looking at
Mickey, crossing to pick up her bag where it hung on the wall. ’Got to be
suited and booted, Saturdays at the Gates.’
***
May 28, 1955
6:18pm
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
 London, England
Suited and booted, she thought, back home and out of the bath, pulling her suit
from the back of her closet.
She generally stuck to Wednesdays and Fridays out: khakis and pullovers, less
buttoned-up. Nonetheless, she could manage Saturdays without embarrassing
herself. The suit was a little worn, and almost a decade out of date. But it
had come complete with waistcoat for only ten pounds, and her friend Maureen
had tailored it specially, in exchange for Johnnie fixing up Maureen’s old army
Beetle.
Maureen had insisted, too, that the pinstriped navy brought out Johnnie’s eyes,
and broadened her shoulders. Though standing in front of her mirror now,
debating between a half and a full Windsor, she felt a bit ridiculous.
She cleared her throat; slicked her hair; made a face. She had cowlicks, she
thought, groaning, that would endure when she was dust in the ground. She blew
air out of her cheeks; turned to descend the stairs.
And what on earth, she thought, were they even doing tonight? She had hardly
seen Sherlock since that fight with Lou, not even to talk to. And now this. Was
she mad, agreeing to go back to the Gates with Sherlock when the last—
—time—
—Sherlock—
Sherlock.
Johnnie stumbled; grabbed the bannister; stood and gaped on the bottom step.
And Sherlock, her mass of dark curls twisted high up on her head, her eyes
rimmed in black, stood by the unlit hearth and stared right back.
She was standing half-turned to the window. Sun glanced along her bare
shoulder, and her throat, and the dip of her clavicle. Draped across the other
shoulder, and floating and slipping over breasts and back and narrow hips, was
a mass of shirred aubergine silk, shot through at the hip with a fall of black.
The fabric was matte; each single layer transparent. It was the kind of thing
that in a different colour or style might look childish.
But Sherlock looked—Christ, she looked like some Greek goddess, come to life.
Skin statue-white under gathers of purple silk; bones fine and long. Johnnie
stared at the rise and the fall of Sherlock’s half-uncovered breastbone. She
ached in her tongue, and her fingers, and her chest.
‘Er,’ she said, unhelpfully, from the stairs.
Grey eyes flicked up to Johnnie’s face from whatever they’d been looking at
below it, and Johnnie almost stumbled again.
Sherlock’s gaze was utterly opaque, utterly cold: statue-like just as much as
her clothes. Johnnie looked at her face, and told herself she was looking at
Sherlock, and felt a cold trickle of dread.
‘Yes. So,’ Sherlock said, her voice clipped. ‘Ready, then? Will I do?’ She
stepped away from the hearth, turning about.
Johnnie pushed down hard on the protest rising in her chest. What could she do?
‘I. Ah. Suppose,’ she said. ‘Are you—trying to get noticed?’
‘Obviously.’
Johnnie’s chest tightened further. ‘By, er, anyone in particular?’ she asked,
finally leaving her perch on the stairs, walking toward the rack of coats and
hats, not stumbling.
‘That,’ said Sherlock, flat-voiced as she swept out the front door, ‘remains to
be seen.’
***
May 28, 1955
7:20pm
The Gateways Club, 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
 London, England
Sherlock went ahead of Johnnie down the Gateway stairs. At the bottom was Gina
Ware—and Gina gasped, and stood up, and put out her hands.
Which was more of a reaction than Johnnie herself had ever merited in ten years
of steady drinking at the Gates, not to mention that time she’d relocated
Gina’s shoulder.
She shifted uncomfortably next to Sherlock, while Gina stared, then breathed
something that sounded like ‘Madame Gray!’ Her manicured nails were
outstretched, almost touching aubergine silk.
Johnnie glanced at Sherlock in time to catch her wide, foreign smile; in time
to see her lean forward, and murmur ‘Not quite,’ as if she were imparting a
secret with which Gina alone could be trusted.
Gina looked up, questioning. ‘But I have seen photographs,’ she said, ‘this
exact dress—’ and Sherlock said, ‘To tell you the truth, there’s a local woman
I use.’
Gina caught her shiny cherry bottom lip in straight white teeth, and her eyes
went dark. Johnnie almost choked on her own tongue thinking about how any of
the regular butches would react to seeing that look on Gina Ware’s face. She
wondered if even Smithy had ever seen it. She wondered if Ted had.
‘Her workmanship is quite fine,’ went on Sherlock, in her new, falsely intimate
voice, running a hand below the fall at her hip and holding it out to Gina,
black against her pale white arm. ‘And silks straight from Paris, feel. One
simply can’t find the like in London.’
Gina slid the backs of her fingers up and up the black piece, until her palm
pressed against purple at Sherlock’s hip. Johnnie blinked hard, braced against
the bannister. Unattainable Gina Ware, and untouchable Sherlock Holmes. It
should have been a fantasy come to life. Somehow, she thought, it wasn’t.
Sherlock leaned even closer to Gina, and Gina leaned to meet her.
‘I’ll give you her name, shall I?’ Sherlock purred in Gina’s ear, and Gina
breathed ‘Would you?’ and left her mouth slightly open, and Sherlock’s hand
slid along Gina’s arm as she drew away, smiling with her mouth alone.
‘Well of course,’ Sherlock said, warm and strange. ‘I haven’t forgotten, you
know, the way you came to my assistance that evening when I was…indisposed.’
She gave Gina’s hand a squeeze, and then looked around at Johnnie while Johnnie
was still watching Gina piece together who Sherlock must be: the underdressed,
apparently dead-drunk young girl she had almost expelled from the bar. Gina’s
expression hovered between offence and amazement, and then amusement snuck up
on her and she grinned. The smile was so genuinethat Johnnie kept looking at
Gina, rather than at Sherlock.
‘Yes, well done, well played,’ Gina said from behind Sherlock, still grinning,
almost laughing. ‘I believe it now, that you are a detective.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock drawled, without turning. ‘I thought you might appreciate
that.’ She spoke in something closer to her normal tone. Johnnie tried to feel
reassured.
‘I played a similar joke once myself,’ mused Gina, taking a drag from her
cigarette holder. ‘On a society woman in Cardiff. She had called me a Dago.’
‘She wouldn’t have done so again, I think,’ said Sherlock, turning back to
Gina, and smiling with her mouth again. ‘Would she?’
Gina exhaled smoke at the ceiling, shook her head, and extended her hand.
Sherlock shook it with her right, and with her left extended a calling card.
‘Mrs. Judith Klein,’ she said. ‘Fine dressmaker, Maiden Road. Compliments of
Sherlock Holmes.’ Gina bowed her head, took the card, and waved them through
together.
The noise from the bar and the band hit them in a wave. Johnnie could feel
heads turning as they walked in: Sally Donovan caught her eye from her spot by
the piano, where she stood next to Andie Levinson, and tipped her chin up.
Johnnie nodded at her. Then she leaned up to shout in Sherlock’s ear, which
excused her hand on the silky small of Sherlock’s back.
‘You had a three-hundred-pound dress made up in four days just to get your own
back on Gina Ware?’ she yelled, and Sherlock raised an eyebrow, unimpressed.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said, her face shuttered. ‘I got it made up for a social
call. We’re here socially.’
‘We’re—’
‘Be a dear and get us some drinks?’ Sherlock said, cutting her off.
‘“Be a dear?” repeated Johnnie, disbelieving. ‘And what’ll you be having, then,
a strawberry bloody daiquiri?’
Sherlock winced, then tried to cover it up with a false smile. It made a sick
flame in the pit of Johnnie’s stomach.
‘Look, what are you—’ she started, but Sherlock smiled saccharine-sweet and
said ‘You know best, I’m sure,’ and strode over to a table near the dance
floor. Johnnie stared after her for two seconds, cursed, and hurried off toward
the bar.
‘Who’s your new girl?’ Smithy asked in her deep voice, angling Johnnie’s pint
under the tap.
‘She’s not my—she’s my flatmate,’ Johnnie said. She turned to check on
Sherlock, who was sitting smoking at her table. ‘You’ve met her,’ she added,
turning back. ‘We came in together a couple of weeks ago.’
Smithy thought for a moment, serious, then broke into her sudden smile. ‘Oh
yeah,’ she said, reaching up for the whisky. ‘Odd kid, kind of rag-tag, right?
Looks a hell of a lot sharper tonight.’
Johnnie shook off a stab of anger. ‘Mmm,’ she said. She turned to check again;
Sherlock was still there.
‘I thought she seemed like she could take care of herself, though,’ said
Smithy, with a pointed look up from the shots she was pouring.
‘Hm?’ said Johnnie. ‘Yeah, she—can, what do you—’
Smithy set the shots down on a tray in front of Johnnie with a decisive click.
‘Seeing you so nervous, man,’ she said, ‘gives me the creeps. What’re you
worried about? We’re like your home here, you know that. Nothing’ll happen to
your girl.’
‘Right,’ said Johnnie, fishing cash from her inside jacket pocket, ‘Well. She’s
not been around as much lately. And she normally doesn’t like this kind of
thing and I’m just—concerned.’
Smithy took Johnnie’s coins, raising her eyebrows and shutting her mouth.
When Johnnie got back to the table with pints and shots, Sherlock was smiling
her soft, sickening new smile up at, of all people, Lou McGuire. Johnnie didn’t
groan aloud, but it was a close thing.
‘Come on now, what’s your favourite?’ Lou wheedled. Johnnie shouldered past her
to set the drinks on the table. ‘I’ve gotten right chummy with old Chester at
the piano there,’ continued Lou. ‘I reckon I could get him to play whatever you
wanted.’
‘Could you really?’ said Sherlock, leaning forward with her elbows together in
front of her. Predictable Lou took the hint and looked down her dress. Johnnie
waited for jealousy; felt only panicked disbelief.
‘No trouble at all,’ said Lou. ‘What’ll it be? You like old stuff? He plays
stride like you won’t believe.’
‘Oh, I do love old music,’ said Sherlock, and she was actually fluttering her
lashes now. ‘Do you think he knows Gaspard de la nuit?’
‘I, er,’ said Lou, taken aback for a moment, ‘I’m not sure I—’
‘Oh, no matter at all,’ Sherlock purred. Johnnie ground her teeth. ‘I’m sure
I’ll adore whatever you choose.’
Lou looked about to burst from self-satisfaction. ‘I reckon you won’t mind if I
have a dance with your flatmate, then, John?’ she said, hearty and perfunctory.
‘I don’t know, Louise,’ Johnnie gritted out. ‘Why don’t you ask her?’
Sherlock’s head whipped around to look at Johnnie, her mouth slightly open. Lou
snickered. ‘I just did,’ she said. ‘Weren’t you listening, then?’
‘No,’ said Johnnie, still speaking slow through her teeth. ‘You didn’t ask her
to dance. You asked her whether she likes stride piano. The one question has
nothing to do with the other.’
Lou scoffed. ‘Don’t be like—’ she started, but Sherlock interrupted, still
looking at Johnnie.
‘Isn’t that how dancing works, here?’ she asked. ‘If a butch wants to dance
with someone else’s femme, she asks the butch for permission?’
Part of Johnnie wanted to scream, to throw something against the wall. But raw
fury flipped a switch in her. It was sometimes steadying; had been, since the
war.
She turned toward Sherlock, feeling herself straighten up. Shoulders back;
breath even.
‘But that’s complete rot,’ she said, with a passable imitation of nonchalance,
and a little smile. ‘I’ve never met a femme who didn’t know her own mind about
when to dance and who to do it with. And Sherlock here,’ she added, turning
from a frustrated-looking Sherlock back to Lou, ‘is even more capable than
most. I suggest you take the matter up with her.’
Sherlock was still staring at Johnnie. Something stirred behind her blank eyes.
Lou made noise of disgust, but she turned to Sherlock. ‘Miss Holmes,’ she said,
‘would you honour me with the next dance?’ She extended her hand in a parody of
courtliness.
Sherlock pressed her lips together. ‘No,’ she said, peevishly.
‘Pardon?’ said Lou and Johnnie, in unison. Which was fairly comical, but
Sherlock didn’t smile.
‘No,’ she repeated, and threw a shot down her throat. ‘I will not dance with
you, Miss McGuire.’
Sherlock glared up at Lou, and Lou, spluttering about ‘mad slags,’ stormed off
to a table on the other side of the dance floor. It was just next to one where
Mary Sophia Allen was slumped over, seemingly passed out drunk. Fascists,
thought Johnnie. This evening just got better and better.
She looked back at Sherlock, who was gazing vaguely in the direction Lou had
gone. Her pink mouth was twisted up. It would have been ugly if it weren’t the
most sincere-seeming thing she’d done all night. It gave Johnnie courage and
she leaned over the table, lowering her voice.
‘Would you mind,’ she hissed, ‘telling me what’s going on here, Sherlock?’
But by the time she’d finished, Sherlock had resumed her mask. ‘What do you
mean?’ she said, dropping her second shot into her pint. ‘I told you, we’re
here on a social engagement.’
‘All right, and what kind of social engagement needs you to flirt with, and
then reject, Lou McGuire?’
‘Bit of amusement,’ said Sherlock, ostentatiously casual, with flint behind her
eyes and a blank smile.
Johnnie had a flash, then, of being here weeks before; of Sherlock sitting
across the bar from their current table, deducing all Johnnie’s former flames;
of the look of wild genuineness in Sherlock’s expression. And she missed it,
suddenly, with a wild mixture of impotence and desperation. Like the time on
the Serpentine as a child, when she’d filled Harry’s toy boat with sticks, and
it had bobbed and floated, gentle beneath her fingertips. She had turned away
for a moment only, and a gust of wind had come, and she had watched it
drifting, drifting away from her reaching arms.
She shut her eyes tight against the image, and drew herself up.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Good. You’re amusing yourself, then? Having fun?’
‘Mmm,’ said Sherlock, with another flash of her false smile.
‘I notice you sat us next to the dance floor.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Are you…planning to dance, then?’
‘Does it matter to you?’ asked Sherlock, sipping her boilermaker.
‘No,’ said Johnnie, lying through her teeth. ‘Only I reckon if you’re not going
to, other girls might like this seat.’
Sherlock made an impatient tsking noise, looking away.
‘Anyone in particular you’d accept, if Lou’s not to your liking?’ Johnnie felt
she’d prefer to peel off her own skin than continue this conversation, yet
somehow her mouth kept moving. ‘Smithy gets a half-hour at ten-thirty, if I
recall rightly.’
‘I didn’t come to dance with Smithy,’ said Sherlock, gazing out into the crowd.
‘Who then?’ snarled Johnnie, her voice rough. ‘Who’re you after? You could pull
any—’ and she was horrified to hear her voice almost break on the words, ‘—any
butch in this bar, looking like that.’ Her mouth tasted bitter.
Sherlock’s pint glass clattered hard down onto the glass tabletop. For a moment
only, Johnnie saw her fully present behind her eyes. She turned them on Johnnie
and spat out ’Looking like what, exactly?’ and Johnnie’s nails dug into her
palms.
‘Looking how, looking—good enough to fucking devour, Sherlock, you know exactly
how. I don’t—’
‘Why don’t you ask me, then?’ said Sherlock.
‘—understand what you’re—what?’
‘You,’ repeated Sherlock, sitting back again, sounding almost resigned,
almost—almost, thought Johnnie, disappointed. Johnnie’s mouth hung open.
‘Does the famous Johnnie Watson count herself apart from the other, as you say,
“butches in the bar”?’ Sherlock was sneering, but oddly without heat.
‘Of course not, I just—’
‘Ah,’ said Sherlock, her tone blank and polite. ‘So perhaps the problem is that
you’ve seen a bit too much of me? Suits and dressing gowns all a bit
overwhelming for you? One night in black silk doesn’t count, you expect the
whole—'
‘Sherlock, I have no idea what you’re—’
‘If it would help, I can tell you a few habits that might surprise you about
the lovely Siobhan and S—’
‘Fine!’ yelled Johnnie, much too loud, and her chair crashed to the floor
behind her as she stood. Couples around them were turning to look. Sherlock
appeared utterly unimpressed. ‘Fine,’ Johnnie said again, making an effort to
lower her voice. ‘You want to dance? Let’s go.’
She put out her hand. Sherlock, chin up and with a glaring grimacing smile, put
out her own and took it. It was she who jerked on Johnnie’s arm to raise
herself from her seat, and she who pulled Johnnie toward the dance floor.
Johnnie stumbled on after.
Sherlock pulled Johnnie’s arm around her slim, silk-clad waist just as Chester
was finishing up ‘Cry Me A River.’ The butches around the piano let out an
approving roar when he upped the tempo and started in on 'Ain’t Misbehavin’.’
In a final attempt at normalcy, Johnnie held Sherlock well out from her own
body, like she was back in the school gymnasium learning an awkward fox-trot
with Peg Miller. But Sherlock tightened her arms, angry, pulling Johnnie’s
front against her own and undulating against her, and through the thin chiffon
Johnnie’s hands were suddenly full of Sherlock’s warm, curving, writhing skin.
‘Oh my god,’ Johnnie heard herself say, keeping her feet fox-trotting with an
effort, and then, in a strangled whisper: ‘bloody hell, what are you doing?’
‘I should think that would be obvious,’ said Sherlock, speaking at full volume,
no intonation, long legs bracketed around one of Johnnie’s thighs. She draped
one arm behind her and leant back into Johnnie’s encircling arm, so that the
line of her chest and her throat were stretched out in a long backward arch.
Johnnie couldn’t think; couldn’t breathe; couldn’t look away.
‘Where did you learn to—’ Johnnie panted, as Sherlock snaked herself back into
an upright position, and leaned in to breathe into Johnnie’s ear.
‘Simple observation,’ murmured Sherlock, hitching herself against Johnnie’s
hip, ‘of the typical behaviour at this club, followed by modification of my
boarding school training—and yes,’ she said, voice pitched low and
expressionless, pressing her wine-clad breasts up against Johnnie’s front until
Johnnie could feel the soft warm weight of them through pinstriped wool, ‘I
learned to dance at boarding school. Add it to your file.’
Johnnie groaned, almost panicked. Sherlock’s whipcord body was trying to fuck
her thigh through layers of wool and gathered silk, and her voice and her face
were a stranger’s, and it was like some grotesque parody of Johnnie’s favourite
dreams.
Johnnie pulled back, far enough to look up into Sherlock’s face. It was masked
with an imitation of voluptuousness, seeming to enjoy the dancing the way she’d
seemed to enjoy the bacon samie Mrs. Patrick had given them after they solved
the case on Thursday, and—and Johnnie gasped, and drew back in the middle of
the dance floor, realising.
Thursday. The Patricks. The whole week.
Johnnie had been thinking—all night she’d been telling people—that she hadn’t
seen Sherlock, that Sherlock hadn’t been around as much as usual. But it wasn’t
true, she realised, as she stumbled back against a dancing couple, and the
butch yelled for her to watch her step. It wasn’t true: she and Sherlock had
been together all Monday, on the Fitzroy case, and Wednesday and Thursday
tailing a suspect for Mr. Patrick.
It wasn’t that Sherlock had been physically elsewhere, away from Baker Street.
She’d been with Johnnie, all the time, but only strange, and blank, and—and
Johnnie hadn’t felt her there.
Sherlock was saying ‘Johnnie, what—what’s the matter?’ at first worried, and
then angry, but it barely penetrated. Johnnie turned, stumbling, her hand to
her mouth, and all she could think was to get out of the Gateways as fast as
possible.
***
May 28, 1955
9:50pm
Back alley off 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
London, England
Later, it would seem the pinnacle of clarity (action, reaction), overlaid with
a furious haze.
All Sherlock could think was that she had done perfectly. She had done
everything required; had given up years, and her citadel, and performed beyond
any other femme at the Gates. And still, Johnnie Watson was walking away from
her.
The side door swung to on Johnnie’s back. Sherlock’s vision tunnelled, and she
was almost running, pushing aside bystanders to get there herself.
Johnnie’s back was to her when she burst through the side door into the alley;
Johnnie was braced with one hand against the brick wall, the other holding her
head. Sherlock didn’t even slow down. Her heels made a sharp, alien sound on
the cement. She heard the plumminess in her own furious voice as she clicked
across the yard.
‘I think you ought to tell me,’ it said, and a hand went out to grip Johnnie’s
shoulder, ‘just for future reference,’ and Johnnie tried to shrug it off, ‘what
exactly is so objectionable about me that you can’t even finish a dance.’
Johnnie wouldn’t look around. Sherlock tightened her grip, hard as her hand
could grasp. She wanted to feel Johnnie’s bones creak together under her
pinstriped jacket.
But Johnnie spun under her hand, Johnnie’s hand locked on Sherlock’s hand on
her shoulder, and then she’d twisted Sherlock’s wrist and her arm so Sherlock
was forced forward, bent in two. In a hundred sparring sessions her leg had
swept sideways, and without thought it swept sideways now, and forward, and
Johnnie’s legs were knocked out from under her. She landed on her tailbone on
the concrete, and Sherlock fell forward onto her knees.
They sat panting in the dirty alley, glaring, gasping.
‘Too much to ask?’ spat Sherlock. ‘I’m very particular about my personae, you
know. It’s somewhat mortifying to have done Gateways Femme below the standard
of every other girl in Chelsea.’
Johnnie looked like she’d been slapped. The colour beat up on her cheeks; she
fumbled up onto her feet.
‘You can fuck right off, Sherlock,’ she said, but it was quiet, defeated. Not
at all the incandescence Sherlock wanted.
‘Can I?’ said Sherlock, shifting forward on her skinned knees. With her weight
off her arse she toed off her heeled sandals behind her, under cover of her
skirt. ‘And how do you recommend we arrive at that portion of the evening,
given that a simple dance seems beyond our abilities?’
‘Jesus,’ Johnnie said. She rubbed her face with her hand, breathed deep behind
it. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about, but you’re the worst tease in London,
and a spoiled brat, and I’m bloody well done.’
‘Are you,’ said Sherlock.
‘I’ll kip tonight in Mickey’s back room,’ Johnnie said, which wasn’t anything
like what she was meant to be saying.
Sherlock was composed of cold fury. All these months to have resisted as hard
as she could; and now to be offering herself up a prize and to be left useless
in a dirty alley, got up like a doll. Humiliation, a fist to her stomach. She
wanted to use her own.
She put out her hand to be helped up, just as Johnnie made to move past her
toward the club door.
Johnnie hesitated a moment. Then she reached to take it, and Sherlock lunged
forward, locked her hands to Johnnie’s wrist and kneeled up, twisting on her
knees and the balls of her feet and pulling, so that Johnnie was thrown off-
balance.
Forearms pressed together, she wrenched Johnnie’s weight sideways and down.
Johnnie’s back hit the ground, hard, and Sherlock was stretched over her,
bloodied knee digging into Johnnie’s suit jacket, one hand pinning Johnnie’s
wrist above her head. She felt it on her face when all Johnnie’s breath was
knocked from her lungs.
‘Fuck off,’ Johnnie choked, gasping, coughing, finally looking livid like
Sherlock wanted her.
Johnnie brought her knee up hard into Sherlock’s side, and Sherlock grunted,
and they grappled on the ground. Johnnie struck out at Sherlock’s face and
chest with her unpinned elbow, and Sherlock twisted so that Johnnie twisted and
Sherlock’s skirt tore all up the side.
Triumph, she felt. Furious rage at the sound, and triumph; and savage
satisfaction. She pulled back, and tore another swathe of it, staring down at
Johnnie, and Johnnie rolled away and got up on her feet. Sherlock turned and
got to hers, now bare on the cold cement of the alley.
‘I don’t know what you call teasing,’ said Sherlock, heaving breath, ‘but
somehow I think my behaviour would’ve gone by a different name, on anyone
else.’
‘It is different!’ Johnnie said, low, wiping at her dirty mouth with her
sleeve. The sleeve was equally filthy; it only smeared the dirt around. ‘You
know it’s different.’
Sherlock yelled, wordless, balling her fists.
‘I know absolutely no such thing,’ she said. She was stalking toward Johnnie,
her toes gripping the ground.
‘It’s not—not natural on you,’ Johnnie said. She didn’t step back.
Sherlock came even with her, right in the centre of the alley. She leaned in
toward Johnnie and breathed, ‘It’s not naturalon any—’ she circled Johnnie’s
wrist with her fingers, ‘—bloody—’ she stepped back, ‘—one.’
And she pivoted sideways, kicking out, and tugging, then releasing Johnnie’s
wrist. Johnnie stumbled back, knocked off balance. Sherlock stepped forward and
struck her again: elbow to the chest; so that Johnnie’s shoulders hit the alley
wall.
‘You’re wrong,’ Johnnie growled, swinging forward again from the hip and the
shoulder. Her fist connected with Sherlock’s face just below her cheekbone;
Sherlock felt the skin split.
‘That’s how some girls feel at home, Sherlock,’ Johnnie said, as Sherlock
staggered back. ‘And Christ, you think I don’t know natural when I see it on
you? I’ve seen it on you as almost—’ Sherlock stepped forward again, and
Johnnie grabbed a folding chair propped against the bricks, held it out before
her ‘—as almost everything else.’
Sherlock’s mouth made a grimace, the cut on her cheek stretched tight. ‘You’d
like me to believe,’ she said, ‘that all the—I don’t know, possibly hundreds of
girls you’ve been—’
‘You dramatic little—’ said Johnnie, feinting forward, the chair’s legs
thrusting out from her body. Sherlock dodged her, bending back from the waist.
‘—that they all happened to find it natural dressing in garters and corsets and
four-inch heels?’
‘They weren’t—all—femmes,’ said Johnnie, lunging forward with the chair,
catching Sherlock’s torso between the two sets of folding legs. It was
ridiculous; Sherlock almost laughed; but Johnnie pushed her back, and back, and
was so fast that she stayed one step ahead of Sherlock as Sherlock stumbled
further back, until Sherlock’s back slammed against the opposite wall.
‘Hungh,’ said Sherlock, pinned between the sets of chair legs. Johnnie kicked
the seat, and the joints dug into Sherlock’s solar plexus.
‘Liar,’ Sherlock grunted, kicking out at Johnnie’s knee, but Johnnie dodged to
the side. ‘I’ve noticed how you solve problems.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ said Johnnie, kicking the seat again
so that Sherlock squirmed. ‘You don’t believe me? Ask your new friend Smithy.’
Sherlock mouthed for a second, suspended against the wall. And then: ‘Seducing
police evidence,’ she grunted, sweeping and jabbing her bare foo t toward the
knee section of Johnnie’s ripped suit-trousers, ‘out from under the one
single—’
‘Hold up, hold on a minute, I didn’t—’
‘—tarted up—’
‘Would you listen, I only called in a favour, I—’
‘—member of the MW—’
Johnnie kicked hard at the chair bottom. Sherlock felt the wood splinter,
sudden, and the whole structure twist apart. For a split second Johnnie had
half the seat in one fist, struts and legs in the other; but she must have
opened both hands as her weight fell forward against Sherlock, because they
were empty when she threw them up for balance. She stumbled and grabbed, and
ripped the silk at Sherlock’s shoulder, and then the only thing holding up
Sherlock’s dress was Johnnie pressed hard against her front, her forearms and
her breath hard on Sherlock’s bare shoulders.
Sherlock’s hands had half-pushed up under Johnnie’s hands to free herself, but
she looked down at Johnnie’s shoulder and faltered. All the layers were ripped
right through: suit jacket, and button-down, and there was a spotted, speckled
abrasion on the skin underneath. Flecks of red mixed with golden freckles and
Sherlock was light-headed.
She heard the sound she made, low in her throat. Then her hands were on
Johnnie’s waist and her mouth was hard on Johnnie’s skinned shoulder, and she
was sucking and biting at bleeding skin, holdingJohnnie to her like life.
Johnnie gasped ‘Jesus god,’ and wrenched back out of Sherlock’s grip.
Sherlock’s mouth tried to follow Johnnie’s skin, teeth snapping together around
the taste of copper, but Johnnie’s held her back by the shoulders. And though
the top of Sherlock’s dress slipped down around her waist without Johnnie’s
weight to keep it up, Johnnie kept looking desperately into her face.
Sherlock breathed, and felt like begging, and didn’t know what Johnnie saw. But
she stared back into Johnnie’s eyes, naked and wanting, and Johnnie whispered
‘There,’ and the next moment was pushing forward again, pressing up against
Sherlock against the wall.
Johnnie’s hair pomade smelt sharp, and herbal. Sherlock was dizzy with it. She
was dizzy with it, and with Johnnie’s thigh pressed between her legs, and with
Johnnie’s hands shaking on Sherlock’s shoulders.
Johnnie bit at Sherlock’s cheekbones and her mouth. She said ‘God I missed you,
I missed you, Sherlock, stay with me, please, please—’
‘You—’ said Sherlock, and it sounded like a question. She moved her face like a
blind bird toward Johnnie’s mouth. Johnnie made a helpless sound and then her
tongue was wet and pleading in Sherlock’s mouth, hands still trembling on
either side of Sherlock’s face.
‘You—’ Sherlock tried again, breaking away, gasping against the wall; and then
just gasped against the wall and couldn’t speak.
‘Christ, I want you stripped,’ Johnnie growled. ‘Out of this—this goddamned
thing,’ plucking at the dress, yanking at it. A ripping sound, and the black
fall came away in her hand. Sherlock stared down at it. She was molten; and
freezing; her heart kicked in her chest.
Johnnie had bent her sandy head and was mouthing at Sherlock’s collarbone and
her neck, cupping Sherlock’s left breast, Sherlock’s nipple peaked against
Johnnie’s calloused palm in the cold air.
‘I er—I wore it because of—of you,’ Sherlock stammered, her voice tinny as if
from a long distance away.
‘God, don’t,’ said Johnnie. ‘Please, just. I don’t care if you’re dressed as
Evan from accounting or, fuck—’ and she cut herself off, leaning in, her throat
convulsing a moment with Sherlock’s nipple in her suckling mouth before pulling
away panting, looking up with Sherlock’s hand in her hair, ‘or that ancient
ticket collector crone, I don’t give a damn, just keep, keep looking at me like
that, Sherlock, please.’
‘I,’ said Sherlock, ‘yes,’ because she could hardly stop looking at Johnnie
however she was looking at Johnnie.
Not when Johnnie had slid to her knees with her hands up Sherlock’s torn skirt,
rough shaking palms on the backs of Sherlock’s thighs, and was mouthing through
the silk at Sherlock’s pubic bone, wetting the silk with her eyes closed, like
she was starving.
Sherlock’s breath moved rough in her throat and her thoughts were like icebox
honey, and every time Johnnie’s bottom teeth grazed between her legs the blood
surged under her skin. So it was seconds—minutes, possibly, swathes of rough-
breathed time—before she pieced together that when she had said I wore it
because of you then Johnnie had said—
Johnnie pulled Sherlock’s hips against her own face. Johnnie moaned in her
throat. The vibrations set Sherlock shaking and—and god, leaking, and Johnnie’s
mouth was desperate, and sloppy, and hot. When Johnnie pulled back there was a
patch of darker purple on the front of Sherlock’s dress. Johnnie’s lips were
swollen and shining, her cheekbones smeared with dirt, and now Johnnie—
—Johnnie had said I don’t care if you’re dressed as Evan from accounting—
—Johnnie had said I want you stripped—
—and now Johnnie was panting on her knees at Sherlock’s feet, staring up at
Sherlock saying ‘I—I can stop but Christ I can taste you through your dress,
can I—’ and Sherlock said ‘Yes,’ though she couldn’t think, and Johnnie
breathed out and steadied herself against the wall like she was dizzy.
Then she stared up at Sherlock and Sherlock stared down, and Johnnie said ‘Keep
looking at me, god, keep—just like that, keep—’ as she shuffled forward on her
knees, and—
—Johnnie had said I missed youthough Sherlock had never left—
—and now Johnnie’s thighs were locked on either side of Sherlock’s calves. The
whole front of her body pressed up against Sherlock’s legs, one hand working
Sherlock’s knickers down around her knees.
Johnnie pushed purple silk up Sherlock’s stomach with her free arm. There were
so many, too many layers. They floated around Johnnie’s head and her face. She
tried to trap them; she balled them up in her fist, but one more layer escaped
to cover her head. And Johnnie pulled back, and batted at her head and said
‘Bloody goddamn—Christ,’ and—
And some hard object inside Sherlock just seemed to liquify.
She was smiling, giggling suddenly, and then laughing, weightless, looking down
at her bloody-minded dress. Johnnie looked up for a moment, surprised,
uncertain. Then she was giggling too, her shoulders shaking, her forehead
resting against Sherlock’s pubic bone through two layers of stubborn chiffon,
until she raised her eyes to Sherlock’s laughing face and suddenly wasn’t
laughing at all.
‘There you are,’ she breathed. ‘Let me see you.’
And she leaned in and put her mouth again between Sherlock’s legs, suckling,
tender, through a double layer of purple silk, her eyes never leaving
Sherlock’s. Sherlock’s giggles choked off into a moan.
The chiffon was so thin, and soaked through. Maybe it was better than nothing
at all. She felt each flicker of Johnnie’s tongue, each exhaled breath. But she
felt them through a veil, and it rubbed, and fretted at her so, so slightly: so
light, god, maddening against her skin. Her hips moved into it—into it—and she
could feel the silk shifting infinitesimally against the very tip of her, not
quite—not quite, oh—almost enough, please, after so long, almost enough.
Johnnie made her mouth to be eloquent, and teasing. She was suckling at
Sherlock in beating waves, lapping just above, just below, circling the centre
of the sharp building ache between Sherlock’s legs. At each brush of Johnnie’s
crooked bottom teeth, Sherlock swore she could count them. She wanted them to
bite, to drag over her flesh. The thought made her cry out, wordless. But they
only teased, and brushed, and grazed, impossible.
‘Oh,’ said Sherlock, hands scrabbling against the brick wall. Those teeth
again, and the barest rub of silk, and ‘oh.’ Her breath loud in her lungs.
Light, sucking, swallowing pressure just there, just perfect, and then gone,
and then back, and then gone and oh.
Somehow her eyes had slid shut. Johnnie’s hand squeezed her wrist; she got them
open again. Johnnie smiled up at her with her eyes. Sherlock said again ‘oh,’
with her breathing a mess through her open mouth. And finally, finally Johnnie
sucked hardat the heart of her, throat working in throbbing swallows, tongue
still moving through the silk, pressed up hard against something blood-sharp
and aching in her, and Sherlock said ‘oh…oh’ and pulsed, and pulsed, pressing
herself into Johnnie’s teeth, hands fisted in Johnnie’s hair.
Then she was on her knees, kissing Johnnie. Limp. Listening to Johnnie whimper
into Sherlock’s mouth. There was a faint salty flavour to the kiss. Sherlock
pulled back to say ‘I can taste—’ at the same moment Johnnie said ‘Sherlock,
please, I—’ at the same moment as a loud crash from the direction of the door.
Sherlock and Johnnie sprang apart. Sherlock bent to pick up the black fall from
the ground, and made a passable bow, tying up the ripped shoulder of her dress.
That done, still boneless and breathless, she looked across the alley.
A couple of empty bins had been hurled against the door during the fight. Now
someone was shoving at it from inside, calling out muffled curses, scooting the
bins a few screeching inches along the concrete with each shove.
Johnnie darted forward to clear them away. At the same moment, Smithy finally
appeared, climbing over the stubborn bins and then kicking at them with her
long legs, saying ‘What the—fuck is,‘ which is when she actually caught sight
of Sherlock and Johnnie: standing in the alley, their clothes half-torn off,
covered in dirt and blood.
‘Johnnie,’ said Smithy. ‘What the hell is going—were you fighting with a
femme?’
‘Er,’ Johnnie said.
Sherlock could still taste taste blood, and dirt, and herself as she’d tasted
in Johnnie’s mouth. Johnnie scratched the back of her own neck, and didn’t
answer.
‘Not in the least,’ said Sherlock, mustering as much dignity as she could. She
straightened her spine.
‘Um,’ said Smithy. ‘Okay, well. Something’s happened.’
‘Does it have to be right now?’ came Johnnie’s voice, from behind Sherlock, and
Sherlock said ‘Never mind, it’s all right’ at the same time as Smithy said
‘Yeah, actually,’ and everyone stopped and looked at each other.
Smithy turned to Sherlock and said, ‘Gina wants you, Miss Holmes. There’s been
a—well. Someone’s turned up in the washroom, dead.’
***
End Part 2
Chapter End Notes
        1. Huge thanks to Dee-Light_(DraloreShimare) for the illustration
           of suited-up Johnnie adjusting her tie! I love it!
        2. Hopefully the meaning of “suited and booted” is pretty clear in
           context: it was the phrase used by the butches in the London
           scene to describe their full “dressed” look. Saturday nights as
           the busiest, most formal evenings at the Gateways is
           historically true; like Johnnie says, Wednesdays and Fridays
           were less formal. The other days of the week weren’t mentioned
           specifically in the materials I read - I’m not sure if this is
           because the Gateways was closed for late-night business on
           certain days.
        3. Army-issue Beetle: The Kübelwagen factory in what is now
           Wolfsburg, Germany, was wrested from Nazi control and occupied
           by the British in April 1945. Existing Beetles were painted
           green and appropriated for use by the British Army. When the
           War was over, some British army personnel were allowed to bring
           their Beetles home with them. Johnnie’s friend Maureen was
           presumably one of these. Kübelwagen changed its name to
           Volkswagen in 1946.
        4. Since this chapter was my blatantly selfish opportunity to
           indulge my clothing kink, here are some visual references for
           Johnnie’s suit. The coloration might be similar to this, but
           with the styling closer to the middle woman in this_picture.
           For reference, I think of these_ladies as a good approximation
           of Johnnie’s more casual, Wednesdays-and-Fridays style.
           Especially the one on the left! What a cutie.
        5. Visual references for Sherlock’s_dress, all 1950s evening
           dresses by French designer Madame Grès. Sherlock’s version is,
           as explained, a London-made, custom-fit knockoff, but if you
           imagine the first, two-tone dress in aubergine and black rather
           than beige and yellow, you’re pretty close. Damn, these
           imaginary clothes are so pretty I almost feel bad about what
           I’ve done to them. :-)
        6. Gaspard de la nuit is an extremely difficult, showy, and
           completely un-danceable 1908 composition by Maurice Ravel. And
           thanks to Emma_de_los_Nardos for the classical music consult!).
           “Cry Me a River” is a torch song that first came out in 1953,
           and “Ain’t Misbehavin’” is a 1929 tune first popularised by
           Fats Waller.
        7. I was going to try to keep to karate moves for the fight scene,
           but this turned out to be a more hybrid martial-arts-and-
           street-fighting style deal. Reference videos here, here, and
           here.
***** Chapter 11 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
PART 3
May 28, 1955
The Gateways Club
239 King’s Road, Chelsea
London, England
Johnnie could feel a difference as soon as they walked back through the door.
The Gates on a Saturday night was always loud, always tumultuous, and she
couldn’t have pointed to any one thing tonight out of the ordinary. But now,
under the din of the dancing and drinking, there was a kind of anxious hum; a
wildness in the eyes of the staff rushing past; that lent the whole scene an
unreal cast.
Back in the alley, she’d slipped Sherlock her own suit jacket when it looked
like there was no chance of getting away.
‘You don’t want to call the police?’ Johnnie had asked, trying to hold Sherlock
back from running inside at the first mention of a death.
But Smithy had shrugged, and pointed at Sherlock, and said ‘Gina wants her,’ as
if that were the end of the argument—which, for Smithy, it obviously was. So
Johnnie had peeled out of her blazer, and Sherlock had shrugged it on over her
ruined dress, and had almost run into Smithy in her rush to get to the door.
‘Why does she want me?’ Sherlock asked, stepping back, motioning for Smithy to
lead the way.
Smithy gave Sherlock an eloquent up-and-down glance, and said, without
intonation, ‘I really couldn’t say.’ And she led, through the outside door and
down the back stairs.
***
‘Mother of God,’ Gina said, as soon as they were inside. ‘Johnnie Watson, I
think I’ve never come across worse timing than yours.’ Johnnie tried to
interrupt, but the onslaught of Gina’s speech continued. ‘Smithy, you take my
place at the washroom door. Nobody in or out, yes? Anyone with an emergency may
use the mens’; it’s always empty in any case. You two,’ gesturing to Johnnie
and Sherlock, ‘cannot examine a body like this. We must clean you up.’
So: back through the kitchen, skirting waitstaff who stared, and bustled, and
whispered ‘that’s that Shirley Horne.’ Gina pushed aside a red curtain and
charged up a narrow curving staircase only slightly wider than her shoulders,
one hand on the ancient bannister.
In fact, between Gina’s famous hips shifting under her tight black skirt, and
flashes of Sherlock’s impossibly long white legs through ripped purple chiffon,
Johnnie reckoned it was best to keep her eyes on her own feet. She thought,
stubbornly and with great effort, of the mysterious dead body in the women’s
washroom; and of her surprise that Ted Ware, not a small man nor a young one,
had to manage these creaking stairs on his bad leg every time he wanted to
leave home.
She most resolutely did not think about eating out a bruised and Christ,
keeningSherlock Holmes through a £300 evening dress in the Gates alleyway. Nor
about being interrupted before she could get off herself. Nor about the
probable reactions of the other Gateways butches, should any of them realise
that Johnnie was about to be invited into Gina Ware’s flat. Possibly into Gina
Ware’s bedroom.
Under these conditions, Johnnie thought it was excusable that she took a minute
to realise Gina and Sherlock were speaking.
‘…how you even thought to check,’ Sherlock was saying, when Johnnie came back
to herself. Gina laughed, a little grim.
‘I was, ah, flustered,’ she admitted. Her tone implied some embarrassment at
having met the discovery of a dead body in her washroom with less than complete
equanimity. ‘And I don’t know why it came into my head. But Smithy: when she
was a girl she liked to read, ah, the pulps, you know. Mr. Chandler, Mr. Himes.
Mr. Hammett. You know them?’
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock. ‘I’ve read them, as well.’
It had, in fact, been one of the more surprising discoveries of Johnnie’s first
few months in Baker Street: Sherlock’s collection of American pulp and
Victorian sensation fiction was out of all proportion to the size of the tiny
flat.
‘So, I don’t know,’ said Gina, ‘I suppose I thought of one of those books, and
I was kneeling down already to feel her pulse, and so I, ah, I smelled her
breath. Or, well, her mouth, since she, ah, wasn’t. Breathing.’
They had arrived at the top of the stairs. Johnnie squinted into the murk for a
second or two; then Gina flipped a switch, and the flat flickered dimly to
life.
It wasn’t much, not for three adults and a baby. The stairs opened out onto a
short hallway, which gave on what Johnnie guessed were two bedrooms on the
right, with a washroom and tiny kitchenette on the left. Sherlock disappeared
into the washroom almost as soon as the lights came up. Johnnie stared around,
blinking.
The kitchenette countertops were covered with books and papers, and there was a
basket of blankets and toys propped up against the the door to the icebox. The
only clear spot was the single gas burner, next to a neat row of mismatched
mugs.
‘We eat downstairs in the bar,’ said Gina, a little out of breath, bustling
across to the second bedroom door and pushing it open. ‘More room, and all the
food out already for the members. Only, Ted uses this burner for a cup of tea
in the mornings.’
Gina was banging around in the bedroom now. She’d left the door open, but
Johnnie couldn’t quite move her feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ came Gina’s voice, ‘I—don’t
know why I’m telling you all this about our meals, I—’
‘It’s all right,’ said Johnnie, raising her voice from the landing. ‘You’ve had
a shock.’
The washroom door swung back open. Sherlock, her face clean of makeup and
blood, flashed Johnnie a quick smile before following Gina, fearlessly, through
the bedroom door. Johnnie was still shuffling at the floor.
‘Ah yes, that is better,’ came Gina’s voice, and then, in a lower tone: ‘Is it
true, then? It was very clear, the smell of bitter almonds. Is it true what it
means?’
‘It could be cyanide poisoning,’ said Sherlock, slowly. ‘Though it could also
be something less dramatic. Almond liqueur, for example.’
There came a rummaging sound, and a dissatisfied noise from Gina. ‘But we do
not serve almond liqueur,’ she said, her voice somehow muffled.
Johnnie’s curiosity got the better of her. She sidled to the doorway and looked
in, just as Gina was holding up one of her black sheath dresses to Sherlock’s
front. Johnnie’s mouth went a bit dry. Gina was so much shorter; it was obvious
the hem wouldn’t reach even to Sherlock’s knees.
‘You are so very tall,’ Gina clucked, like a disappointed parent with a naughty
child. ‘Like Smithy.’
‘To be frank,’ said Sherlock, letting out her breath a little too quickly,
‘Smithy’s clothes would be more suitable, in any case.’
Gina opened her mouth. She glanced from Sherlock to Johnnie, and shut her mouth
again. It was, Johnnie thought, the first moment of indecision she’d shown all
night.
‘Sherlock’s got a point,’ said Johnnie. ‘Trousers, you know, easier to bend
down in.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Gina said, looking relieved at Johnnie’s attitude. ‘I suppose you’re
right. And I am sure Smithy will forgive the loan.’ She ducked past them back
out the door. Sherlock moved to follow, and shot Johnnie a brilliant smile over
the top of Gina’s head.
‘Johnnie,’ came Gina’s voice, ‘I am afraid you are, ah, somewhat broader than
Smithy in the shoulder and the chest. Take your pick of Ted’s suits, if you
would like. Only, the brown wool is for special occasions.’
‘I’ll just keep my own, thanks,’ said Johnnie, wandering back out to the
landing. She scowled a little. imagine the clown-like figure she would cut
capering about in Ted’s baggy, oversized trousers and elbow-patched jackets.
She wasn’t sure Gina had heard her, however. Gina and Sherlock were discussing
poison again.
‘…no liqueurs at all,’ Gina was saying. ‘Some of the artists ask for them, but
Ted believes in keeping things simple. Fare for the working people, he says.’
‘What about…almond cakes, or marzipan candies?’ said Sherlock. ‘Or mixed nuts
on the bar?’ Johnnie had thought Sherlock seemed a bit dazed, when they had
first come back into the bar from the alley, but now her voice had that
familiar cadence it got when she was warming to a puzzle.
‘No,’ said Gina. ‘None of it. And I don’t believe Sylvia would eat them, if we
had offered. You can ask Smithy, but I only ever saw her drink, when she came
in.’ She muttered something else, which Johnnie thought might have been, Only
ever saw herdrunk.
‘You knew the victim, then?’ came Sherlock’s voice, turned away now from
Johnnie.
Gina came out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind her and looking
thoughtful. ‘Not well,’ she said, raising her voice to be heard through the
door. ‘But she is—was—a regular. She started coming in, oh, a few years ago.
Never saw her before then. Sylvia Cohen. Hard drinker. Sometimes,’ and here
Gina scowled briefly, ‘started fights.’
‘Mmm,’ came Sherlock’s voice, and then silence. There was a wordless stretch,
filled with soft sounds of shifting fabric and shuffling limbs from behind the
latched door.
Johnnie stood on the landing; Gina stood with her chin tipped up and her back
to the wall beside the door, and gave Johnnie a look. Her cherry-slick lips
quirked up; her eyebrows raised a fraction; and she inclined her head half
toward Johnnie, half toward the hidden Sherlock. It was as demonstrative an
expression of approbation as Johnnie had ever seen on Gina, and communicated
quite clearly, silent as it was, ‘You would do well, Johnnie Watson, to keep
hold of this one.’
Johnnie felt her blush and sloppy grin. She looked away from Gina’s amusement,
smoothing out her features with a hand over her mouth. There was a body
downstairs, she thought sternly. This was not the time. But oh, came a little
voice before she could stop it, oh how Sherlock had—
The latch rattled and the door creaked, and there was Sherlock, looking crisp
and only slightly bruised, in a pair of Smithy’s pressed black trousers and an
un-tucked white button-down shirt. Johnnie felt the grin work its way back onto
her mouth.
‘All right,’ said Sherlock, rubbing her hands together, ‘enough playing dress-
up. Let’s get a look at Miss Cohen.’
Gina crossed the room and started back down the steps. Johnnie turned to
follow, the traces of a smile still working their way off her mouth. She was so
surprised, at the quick brush of Sherlock’s lips at her nape as Sherlock slid
ahead of her on the stairs, that she hadn’t time to respond before Sherlock was
well up ahead, questioning Gina.
***
‘If it turns out that Cohen actually was poisoned,’ Sherlock said, on the
stairs, ‘do you know of anyone at the club tonight who disliked her?’
Gina snorted.
Sherlock asked, ‘Unpopular?’
‘I was only thinking,’ said Gina, ‘that I myself did not like her, much. And
she fought. I should have banned her from the club; then none of this would
have happened.’
Johnnie smiled, unseen in the dark. Gina sounded, not so much wracked by guilt,
as deeply annoyed with her own lapse in professional judgment.
‘These fights; were they with anyone in particular?’ Sherlock asked.
Gina made a hand gesture whose expansiveness was impressive given the
dimensions of the stairway.
‘Take your pick,’ she said. ‘Butches, employees. Even the entertainment. I saw
her fight with Chester Davis a few weeks ago.’
‘The pianoplayer?’ asked Johnnie, startled out of her thoughts on her tingling
nape. ‘Why would she do that?’
Chester had to be pushing seventy, and looked ten years older. He’d always
struck Johnnie as all business. Ninety-nine percent of the fights in the Gates
were started by butches defending their claim on a femme, and Johnnie just
couldn’t feature Chester making a play for anyone’s girl.
Gina shrugged, pushing aside the red curtain so that Sherlock and Johnnie could
pass back under. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘You can ask him. But honestly, I’m
telling you, she fought with everyone. Maybe she was, ah, finishing her
collection.’
Johnnie chuckled. ‘Wanted to be the first on her block to complete the set?’
Gina shook her head. Johnnie could sense her smile even from the back. Then
Gina said, ‘She fought with your friend Cass.'
‘You mean Lou,’ said Johnnie, unsurprised.
‘I don’t think so,’ Gina said, leading them back through the kitchen. ‘Tall,
blonde butch? Skin looks too thin? Like it hurts?’
‘Huh,’ said Johnnie. ‘Right, that’s Cass. But—she never fights with anyone.’
Gina spread her hands again, so Johnnie felt the need to clarify. ‘I mean she’s
actually not supposed to. I think she has some kind of blood disorder. ’S how
she got to be so funny, avoiding fights.’
‘Perhaps Miss Cohen was particularly provoking,’ suggested Sherlock, in a tone
that made Johnnie suspect the statement of a larger significance inside
Sherlock’s head.
‘Er, right,’ Johnnie said. ‘So, er, she fought with Chester, and Cass, and—'
She broke off, suddenly distracted. In front of the door to the ladies’
washroom Smithy was biting off words into the face of Andie Levinson. Andie was
squared up in front of her, pointing at the door and shouting.
‘You have two members of the Metropolitan Police Force here, present, who are
club members,’ Andie was shouting. ‘Where do you get off—’ while Smithy, rigid
with cold dignity, said: ‘Gina Ware has every right to handle a disturbance in
her place of business however she sees fit.’
‘This isn’t tossing someone out for fighting,’ Andie argued. ‘That woman’s
deadin there; there are procedures, you can’t just—’
Johnnie saw Smithy glance up for a moment only; saw her exchange a split-second
glance with Gina. Then Smithy moved forward, knocking Andie neatly out of the
way. Gina simply swept through the washroom door, no hair disarranged, Sherlock
and Johnnie in her wake.
‘Chester, and Cass, and, I believe she also fought with Smithy,’ Gina
continued, as if there had been no interruption at all. ‘Miss Cohen made a pass
at me, a few months after she started coming here, and Smithy—took exception.’
Johnnie snorted. Gina gave her a challenging look, and she wiped her face.
Sherlock, however, seemed to be absorbed in circling Sylvia Cohen’s body, which
was propped against the washroom tile at the far end of the room, next to one
of the two toilet stalls. In the accumulated muddy footprints from a night of
Gateways members, there were two wide, clear trails where Cohen’s legs had
dragged when someone manhandled her into position. Her mouth and eyes were
gaping; there were trails of saliva down her front.
‘You didn’t move her?’ Sherlock asked.
Gina shook her head. ‘She was just like this. At, ah, ten-thirty? Only, I
touched her to check for her heartbeat.’
Sherlock bent and studied Cohen’s shoes, and her trouser-legs, damp all up the
backs; she leaned forward and sniffed at her mouth; pulled down her collar to
check her neck. She pushed gently at Cohen’s face, turning it into the light.
Johnnie and Gina watched Sherlock work.
Johnnie thought Cohen was probably in her late fifties or early sixties: her
short hair almost entirely grey, her figure muscular running to stocky. Elderly
by the standards of the Gateways crowd, especially as Cohen apparently went out
of her way to pick fistfights with people thirty, even forty years her junior.
Then again, Johnnie thought, looking at the woman’s pockmarked complexion and
the dark stains under her eyes, she might look older than her years. A
dedicated drinker and presumably, given her surname, a Jew: might be, she’d had
a bad war. As if reading Johnnie’s mind, Sherlock rolled up the sleeves on one
and then the other arm. Johnnie winced, bracing for black marks: she’d heard
dark rumours about the camps. But Cohen’s arms looked clean: no scars, no
markings. Sherlock rolled the sleeves back down and tipped Cohen’s head up;
Johnnie thought she noticed some faint scarring around the face and under the
chin.
Eventually, Sherlock sat back on her heels. ‘We know someone else Miss Cohen
fought with,’ she said.
‘We do?’ Johnnie asked, but then Sherlock glanced up with a quirked eyebrow and
Johnnie remembered. ‘We do!’ she said. ‘The night—the first night we were here
together. This woman fought with Leslie Matthews, right on the dance floor.
Gina, you threatened Leslie with a ban.’
‘Evidently,’ said Gina, laconic, ‘I picked the wrong butch.’
There was a crash, then, and they all three looked around to see Andie Levinson
and Sally Donovan fall through the door, panting, followed by a seething
Smithy.
‘I told you both,’ Smithy said, voice grinding the words between her teeth,
‘that you could wait your—’ but Sally cut across her words and her path.
‘Gina,’ she said, her tone more urgent than Johnnie had ever heard her use,
‘I’m sure you feel you’re acting for the best, but you may not understand,
there are procedures. It’s going to look very bad if you let this—this woman
destroy evidence, and when the Met arrives—’
Gina turned her head a fraction, raised an eyebrow, and Sally stopped talking.
Andie talked over the look they exchanged.
‘She’s right,’ Andie said. ‘Think how it looks that you let some amateur into
the scene of the crime, when two Met officers were right here in your—’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gina, very low, still looking at Sally, ‘were you two
planning to stay on here, once the police arrive? Were you planning to make
statements? Head the investigation?’
The silence was thick, and sudden. Johnnie looked from Sally and Andie,
suddenly abashed, to Smithy, leaning in the doorway curling her lip. Sherlock
straightened up by the body, slowly removing her leather driving gloves.
‘It’s not that we wouldn’t—’ Sally muttered at last, at the same time Andie
said, ‘You know we’ll help any way we can.’
A muscle tensed in Gina’s jaw.
Sally looked pleadingly over at Johnnie, who said, quiet, ‘Come on, Gina, you
know they’d lose their positions if the Met found them here. They won’t care,
they won’t be sympathetic.’
‘No,’ Gina said, ‘I do not imagine the Met will be very sympathetic to any of
the people they find here, once they are called. I’m sure we are all thinking
about that. Miss Holmes seems to be the one person simply does not care.’
‘Well, we won’t be much use to you sacked!’ yelled Andie.
From the direction of the body came the sound of leather smacking decisively
against a wool-clad thigh.
‘Not to worry, Miss Ware,’ Sherlock said, crisp and unconcerned. Heads turned
in her direction. ‘Donovan and Levinson wouldn’t be much use to you regardless
of whether or not they’re sacked.’ She smiled brightly at Gina and moved toward
Johnnie. ‘I think I have all I need here, if we want to—’
‘And what exactly do you know about it?’ Sally said, stepping into Sherlock’s
space. ‘Any of it?’
‘Women’s Police Patrol?’ sneered Sherlock. ‘They have you investigating murders
now, do they? Taken note of your ten—no, twelve—distinguished years of service
and made you Inspector? Detective Inspector? No? Still rounding up lost kiddies
and issuing warnings to ladies of the evening, then? Oh yes, you’re
overwhelmingly well-qualified for the job, I don’t know why I didn’t see it
before. If only I could aspire so high.’
‘Sergeant Levinson and I,’ said Sally, with painstaking enunciation, ‘have more
experience conducting investigations than some posh freakwho can’t even make up
her mind which way to get off.’
Sherlock stepped back as if hit, and Johnnie started forward with balled fists,
but Sally was speaking again, saying: ‘Not to mention, that Sergeant Cohen
happens to be a colleague of ours.’
Nobody spoke. All eyes were suddenly on Sally, except for Andie’s, which were
settling triumphantly on each of the other four in turn.
‘Oh, that comes as a surprise, does it?’ Andie crowed. ‘Suddenly the MWPP has
something to contribute? The great private detective didn’t think to check the
corpse’s pockets, then?’
‘Levinson, I will toss you into the goddamn alley myself,’ Smithy started, but
Sherlock cleared her throat.
‘Her pockets are empty,’ she said. ‘I thought—a parking attendant, or a
security guard. I was under the impression the Met’s health standards were
somewhat higher than this.’
Sally let out a breath. ‘You’re not wrong,’ she muttered.
‘Cohen was held to special standards, then?’ asked Sherlock, looking up
sharply. ‘Why?’
Sally rolled her eyes, didn’t answer.
‘You didn’t like her,’ Sherlock said, narrowing her eyes at Sally. It was
somewhere between a statement and a question.
Sally rolled her shoulders, hands on her hips. Then she looked into Sherlock’s
face, her mouth still tight.
‘I don’t think anyone liked her. Truth is, I don’t know why she wasn’t sacked
ages ago. It’s not like she has seniority; she was only hired a few years after
the War. It’s a mystery to me how she got the job in the first place, unless
she knew someone who knew someone.’
‘Does that seem likely?’ Johnnie asked. Certainly the woman’s near-ragged
clothes didn’t suggest impressive connections.
Sally considered, her posture relaxing slightly as she turned toward Johnnie.
Sherlock caught Johnnie’s eye for a moment over Sally’s shoulder, and stepped
back unobtrusively.
‘She was a piss-poor cop,’ Sally said at last. ‘But I could never tell if it
was laziness, or something else.’
‘Something—like what?’ asked Johnnie
‘I don’t know, I—it’s not like I walk around giving her a lot of thought,’ said
Sally, her hand in her hair. ‘There was just always—something. Something, I
don’t know, offabout her.’
Sherlock snorted from the shadows; Johnnie shot her a warning look.
‘Can you think of an example?’ Johnnie asked Sally.
‘The Baker case,’ Andie said. ‘You remember, last Christmas. That was a proper
cock-up.’
‘Right, yeah,’ Sally said, groaning a little. ‘Andie and I were working
overtime. Like we do every year, you know, covering for officers with families
at home. A call came in on something a little bit more—’ she shot a look in
Sherlock’s direction, but continued, ‘—a little bit more interesting than the
women’s division usually gets assigned. I mean, it was still—it was a series of
thefts, but from a dressmaker’s shop, so there was still a kind of tenuous
connection with “women’s affairs.” It would have gone to the men’s division,
normally, but with so few officers at the station, it went to Andie and me. And
well, we snapped it up, didn’t we? The kind of thing that could have got us
promoted.’
‘Should have done,’ Andie cut in.
‘Yes, well,’ said Sally. ‘We worked day and night on that case. Before New
Years we’d found the thief, and worked out a kind of sting, so the evidence
would be flawless and the prosecution airtight. Our plan needed a third, and
Sergeant Cohen was one of the only other officers at the station, so we pulled
her in.’
‘Only she sold us out,’ said Andie.
Sally looked at her partner for a moment, biting at her own thumb, thinking. ‘I
don’t know,’ she said at last, the words slow. ‘I’ve never been sure. She was
either both incompetent and lucky, or else a scheming bitch, and I’m still not
sure which.’
‘’S no secret she was a bitch,’ muttered Smithy from the doorway, but Sally
ignored her.
‘She more or less followed our plan, is the problem,’ Sally said. ‘But she
just—she changed the timing just enough to make me wonder. It should have gone
off quietly, without any outside interference, and with plenty of time to
gather all the necessary evidence. As it turned out, Cohen delayed just long
enough that we had Chronicle reporters swarming all over us on the way out, and
a much less airtight case than we should have done.’
‘Funny coincidence,’ added Andie, checking her watch, ‘Cohen was the one who
happened to be on hand when the reporters started asking questions. In the
press, she got all the credit for our hard work, and a commendation from the
Force. Even though lack of evidence meant they had to convict on a lesser
charge.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Sally, sighing. ‘Happy Christmas to Andie and me, wasn’t it.
Things like that happened quite a bit, though. None of the officers I know ever
wanted to partner her.’
Sherlock moved out of the shadows, staring down at the dead woman.
‘She wasn’t grandfathered in,’ she repeated, thoughtfully. ‘You were already on
the force when she joined?’
Sally nodded. ‘I joined in ’45, right after I was demobbed. I—if I remember
rightly, Cohen came on a year or two afterward.’ She looked to Andie for
confirmation, and Andie nodded.
‘Overweight, jaundiced and possibly cirrhotic,’ Sherlock said, still staring
down at the corpse, ‘but even taking that into account, she can’t be younger
than fifty. That puts her around forty when she joined the MWPP in ’47 or ’48.
What was she doing before that?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Sally.
‘We weren’t exactly bosom friends,’ Andie chipped in.
‘No,’ agreed Sherlock. ‘I don’t suppose you were. And did she have any, on the
force? Bosom friends, that is?’
Sally gave an eloquent shrug. ‘She was a bad cop and a nasty drunk. I think
everyone more or less disliked her.’
‘Anyone in particular belong on the “more” side of that equation?’ asked
Sherlock. ‘Where were you two between nine and ten, by the way?’
Sally slid her eyes toward Andie, but aloud she just said ‘We were dancing
right up next to the piano, up until Smithy came out and started looking for
you two. You need to call the cops. And we need to be gone before they arrive.’
***
‘Fucking Levinson,’ Smithy said, shaking her head, leading Sherlock and Johnnie
back out into the crowd, away from the washroom. Gina, having actually
discovered the body, was staying with it to play that role when the police
arrived. ‘You know what that jackass said to me?’
Smithy hardly ever swore around femmes. Johnnie wasn’t sure what this meant
about her attitude toward Sherlock, but somehow she felt encouraged.
’Something idiotic, no doubt,’ said Sherlock, preoccupied. ‘Why on earth didn’t
she mention right off that she worked with Cohen?’
‘No big dramatic finish,’ said Smithy, and Johnnie laughed.
‘What did she say to you, Smithy?’ she asked, so Smithy rolled her eyes, and
put on a frankly awful imitation of Andie’s Birmingham accent.
‘Get this. She says, “Poison, eh? Well I can tell you, that’s a woman’s murder
method.” And then just stands there, like she expects me to pat her on the
goddamn back. So I say, “Well, that’s a stroke of genius, Levinson! A woman’s
murder method. That really narrows it down, since in case you didn’t notice, we
are standing in a lesbian bar.”’
Johnnie and Sherlock laughed, and didn’t stop. It was sharp-edged, right on the
verge of shocky, but still it cut the tension. Johnnie felt a little drunk.
Smithy fought off a smile and lit a cigarette and said, her voice shaking
slightly, ‘Jesus Christ, man. A woman’s murder method. There’s maybe eight men
been in all night.’
‘Used to be more than that, on a Saturday,’ said Johnnie, heaving air into her
lungs, drying her eyes on her jacket sleeve. ‘Blokes who came in wanting to
wank to women dancing together. You’re not getting as many of those, these
days?’
‘Nah,’ said Smithy, exhaling and sounding steadier. ‘You didn’t hear? Ted’s
gotten to be a real hard-ass with those guys. Says the girls deserve a place to
drink and dance without worrying, and he doesn’t want any perverts coming in
and hassling them. He hardly ever comes down himself, anymore, but he started
making an exception. Came in and bellied right up to some of those guys, made
eyes at them, you know, touching their legs, and their hands and everything.
They left in a hurry.’
‘He didn’t really,’ said Johnnie, giggles threatening again. She tried to
imagine burly, lumpish Ted Ware making a pass at another man. With Gina and
Smithy looking on, no less.
‘Yeah, he sure did,’ Smithy said, grinning. ‘I started hoping we’d get some of
those bastards in, just so I could watch it happen.’ Then her grin faded, and
she nodded. ‘Ted’s a good man,’ she said, as if to herself, quiet and firm.
Nobody present wanted to follow up on that.
So Sherlock cleared her throat. ‘Gina said you fought with Cohen, back when she
first started coming in.’
Smithy waved a hand. ‘Yeah, I knocked her around a little,’ she said. ‘Honestly
I would’ve hit her harder if I’d known how much trouble she’d end up making for
us, Jesus. But plenty of the regular butches have made a play for Gina over the
years. She can take care of most of ‘em, but I’ll step in if they annoy her too
much. Cohen was just barely bad enough for me to bother.’
‘But she got more annoying as time went on?’ asked Sherlock.
‘Annoying just about covers it,’ agreed Smithy. ‘Man, I think she fought with
every butch in this place. I don’t know why Gina didn’t ban her, but it was
like Cohen had a sixth sense about how far she could push it and still get away
with murder.
‘Um.’ Smithy looked sheepish for a moment. ‘Figure of speech.’ Sherlock nodded,
waving away Smithy’s embarrassment, but Johnnie had seen something else.
‘Hey,’ she said, nudging Sherlock’s elbow. ‘Looks like Cass and them haven’t
left yet; you want to talk to her?’
And indeed: Cass, Lou, and Haley were still ensconced at their same table
of—had it only been earlier tonight? Johnnie wondered. It seemed weeks ago, but
it must have been only hours: there was the fascist Mary Sophia Allen, still
passed out drunk at the next table over, just as she had been when Johnnie had
been sitting fighting with Sherlock over whether to dance.
Now Cass and Haley were whispering together, and Lou was listening; all three
looked engaged, but not alarmed. Sherlock turned to Smithy.
‘No announcement has been made?’ she asked.
‘Nope,’ said Smithy. ‘Gina wanted to wait until we were ready to call the cops.
Looks like—’ she motioned with her head at the side door, where Sally and Andie
were slipping out, ‘we can probably do that now.’
This, however, seemed to remind Sherlock of something. ‘Say, Gina signs
everyone in when they arrive?’ she asked.
Smithy nodded. ‘She usually signs people out, too. She had Ted take over
tonight, after she found Cohen in the washroom, but there could still have been
some time between the time she left and the time he took over, when nobody was
at the register.’
Sherlock mulled this over, glancing toward the door, where a broad male
backside was indeed perched on Gina’s usual stool.
‘We’ll have a look at the log-book later, then. Is Leslie Mathews here
tonight?’
Johnnie glanced around automatically at the thinning crowd, but Smithy was
already shaking her head. ‘She was here, earlier, but she left. I saw her go.
‘Bout ten-forty-five, I think. It was when I was running around looking for you
two.’
Her withering glance was cut with a smirk. Johnnie felt herself colour up.
Sherlock looked blithely unaffected.
‘Right, then,’ Sherlock said, brisk and businesslike. ‘The band is still
playing their set. Smithy, if you go call the police now, then hopefully
Johnnie and I can get to Cass and then Chester Davis, before they arrive.’
Smithy nodded.
‘I—’ Sherlock paused a moment, looking uncharacteristically uncertain.
‘Johnnie, I think it might be better, if you led off with Cass.’
Johnnie grinned. ‘You’re regretting that little show you put on for Lou
earlier.’
Sherlock sighed, rolled her eyes. She put her arm around Johnnie’s shoulder,
steering her away from Smithy, toward Cass’s table.
‘All things considered,’ she murmured, when they were a few paces off, ‘I can’t
bring myself to regret anything about this evening.’
‘Oh god, really? You er—you can’t?’ said Johnnie, a little too fast, her face
heating again.
And Sherlock bent down so that Johnnie could feel her breath moving on
Johnnie’s ear, and said ‘The way you felt’; and Johnnie groaned in her throat
and her fingers spasmed hard on Sherlock’s waist, and then neither of them
could say anything more, as they were standing in front of a table with Lou and
Cass and Haley looking up at them.
***
The talk with Cass was surprisingly short-lived.
‘I didn’t know the woman from Adam,’ Cass said. ‘It was our first night here,
and I wasn’t even dancing with anyone. She was dead set on starting a fight.’
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock, who had lost her reticence in a hurry. ‘But what did she
do?
‘Punched me in the stomach,’ Cass said, matter-of-fact, swigging her pint.
‘Oh, quit having a laugh,’ said Johnnie. ‘You know what she means: how did it
start?’
‘That’s what I’m telling you,’ Cass said. ‘It just came out of nowhere. I was
chatting to Haley, and this—Cohen? I don’t know, this older butch. She walked
up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned around she
punched me in the stomach.'
Johnnie’s blank disbelief must have shown on her face, because Lou said ‘It’s
true, I was there. Cass is such a delicate flower; she probably still has the
bruise.’
‘Even after that,’ said Cass, ignoring the jibe, ‘I wasn’t going to fight back,
I was just so surprised. But I stumble, and she follows me back, hits me again.
It was like I had to hit her back, just to buy myself some breathing space
while I thought what to do. So I kicked her a few times, seemed like that’s
what she wanted. We tussled for maybe thirty seconds. And then sudden as she
started, she kind of turned around and walked away. I was so shocked I didn’t
follow. We never even exchanged a word.’
Haley nodded. ‘It was a weird fucking night,’ she said.
Lou and Johnnie snapped their heads around in surprise.
‘What?’ Haley snapped. ‘I’m not supposed to say “fuck”? Is that along the same
lines as pretending there’s not a dead body in the ladies’ washroom?’
Sherlock’s lip quirked, and Haley looked up at her, dragging on her cigarette,
and winked. Sherlock laughed, pure and giddy.
‘Officially,’ Sherlock said, ‘it’s quite suspicious that you should know about
that.’
‘Please,’ said Haley, blowing smoke at the ceiling. ‘I snuck a look through the
swinging door when Smithy and that Andie Levinson were having at each other.
They were yelling about it loud enough, anyway. She is dead, then? Not just
passed out? Lou said I was being overly dramatic.’
‘She’s dead,’ said Sherlock. ‘The police should be here shortly, if you need
to—’
Haley brushed away the suggestion. ‘We’ve probably the least to lose of anyone
here,’ she said, ‘being from out of town and all, and each others’ alibis.’
‘Alibis?’ giggled Cass. ‘Who are you, Miss Marple?’
‘We are,’ said Haley, with great dignity. ‘The three of us have been sitting
together constantly, all evening, except for a few minutes when Lou went over
there to—’
‘—to say hello to this lot,’ interrupted Lou, shifting in her seat and
pointedly not looking at either Johnnie or Sherlock.
‘Yes, well. There you are. Even then, we all watched her go, and all she did
was talk to Sherlock for a while.’ Johnnie’s hand tightened involuntarily on
Sherlock’s waist. Haley smirked. ‘So obviously, none of us could have sneaked
off and—er—what would we have done, anyway? Shot her? Strangled her?’
‘Some Miss Marple you are,’ said Cass, rolling her eyes. ‘You think some poor
woman gets shot in the ladies’, and nobody hears the noise?’
‘I go to the pictures,’ said Haley, very dignified. ‘Maybe the murderer had
a—you know, something to put on their gun, like a—’
‘A silencer,’ said Lou.
‘Exactly,’ Haley said, with a gesture of aggrieved gratitude, and Johnnie
smiled, but then she noticed that Sherlock’s attention was wandering.
The band was finishing up their current tune; there was a long, snaky hiss from
the hi-hat, and a flourish of keys. Chatter rose to fill the space left by the
music, and tiny, wizened Chester Davis pulled the dust cover back down over the
piano keys. Sherlock nodded minutely.
‘We should—’ she said.
Johnnie said, ‘Yeah. Thanks, you lot. We have one more stop,’ and pressed her
hand into the small of Sherlock’s back to lead her over toward the band.
‘Mr. Davis?’ Sherlock asked, as they drew level. The drummer was drawing sheets
over his kit, and the bassist was zipping her instrument into a bag.
‘Who wants to know?’ said Chester, raising an eyebrow half-skeptically and
half-jokingly, which Johnnie thought was proof enough that he didn’t know what
was coming. That, and the fact that he’d been playing the last four hours
straight through without a break, unless he’d taken one during the—half hour?
forty-five minutes?—that she and Sherlock had been outside in the alley.
‘I’m Sherlock Holmes,’ Sherlock said, putting out a hand.
Chester looked her over and turned back to his instrument. ‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘You want music at some garden party, or something? You should know, I never
wake up before noon.’
For a bare moment, Sherlock’s consternation showed on her face. Johnnie hid a
smirk behind her hand: Sally Donovan and now Chester Davis, both calling
Sherlock posh on the same night. It had to rankle, being so transparent when
she hadn’t been putting on a moneyed persona. Johnnie remembered Sherlock
asking her once, aggrieved, Do you find my Cockney unconvincing?, and she had
to stifle a rush of fondness, and a wholly inappropriate bark of laughter.
‘No, I’m not trying to engage your services, Mr. Davis,’ Sherlock was saying.
‘I was wondering what you could tell me about a Sylvia Cohen.’
Chester was impassive. ‘Name don’t ring a bell,’ he said, sweeping the contents
of his tip jar into a leather purse.
‘She was a club regular,’ said Sherlock. ‘Older butch woman. Grey hair,
stocky.’
‘Plenty of ladies by that description,’ Chester said, his face unmoving.
‘Gina Ware told me,’ said Sherlock, licking her lips, ‘that she saw you have a
physical fight with Cohen, a few weeks ago. Do you often brawl with the
regulars?’
The suspicion in Chester’s look deepened; he scowled. ‘You with the police?’ he
said.
‘Why would you assume I’m with the police?’ Sherlock countered.
‘Only other time anybody asked me about fighting with a white woman,’ Chester
said, ‘I ended up in jail.’
‘Oh for god’s sake,’ said Sherlock, losing patience, ‘no, we’re not—we don’t
care about the fight like that.’
‘That’s what they said, too,’ Chester said, unimpressed. Sherlock rolled her
eyes, sneaking a look at her wristwatch.
‘Look, Mr. Davis,’ Johnnie said, stepping forward. ‘From what we hear, Sylvia
Cohen picked fights with almost everyone in this bar at one time or another.’
Chester said nothing, but he looked unlikely to argue this point. Johnnie
pressed on: ‘We really aren’t looking to get you arrested, and we’re not the
police, but the police are coming. And Miss Cohen is dead in the ladies’
washroom.’
Chester Davis started, and stared.
‘Oh yes,’ said Sherlock, falsely bright. ‘Did I forget to mention that bit?
Yes, she’s dead. Looks as if it may be murder. I expect the police will be here
shortly.’
‘If you think I—,’ Chester started, but Sherlock cut him off.
‘We don’t,’ she said. ‘For one thing, you’ve been at the piano, playing without
a break for the past, what?’
‘Four hours,’ Chester supplied. Sherlock nodded.
‘But Miss Ware doesn’t think the police are likely to look very carefully into
the matter. So I am trying to establish as many of the facts as I can, before
they arrive.’ She looked at her watch again, to make the point.
Chester nodded, considering in silence for an uncomfortably long time. Then he
shrugged. ‘Isn’t much to tell,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know her, or anything.’
‘How did you end up fighting with her?’ Johnnie asked.
‘She started it, didn’t she?’ he said. ‘I only met her that same night. I don’t
know what gave her the idea. She was probably pretty drunk, but she sure did
want a fight. She crowds me up against the wall back in the hallway to the
washrooms. I make to leave and she starts running her mouth off.’
‘Running her mouth off, how?’ asked Johnnie. Chester rolled his eyes.
‘Asked me—questions,’ he said.
‘What sort of—’ Sherlock pressed, and Chester made a frustrated noise.
‘Oh, I don’t—all about, what did I think of all this in the States?’ Chester
said. ‘She put on an accent, like Smithy’s. But making fun. And she wouldn’t
have said that kind of thing to someone young and strong as Smithy. Things
like, “Looks like Negroes over there gettin’ too big for they britches, wanting
to ride up front with the white folks, what did I think of all that?” and she
was keeping me pinned to the wall, just waiting for me to throw a punch.’
‘And what did you do?’ Sherlock asked.
‘I twisted out from under her arms,’ Chester said. ‘Started walking away. But
she reached out and grabbed my shoulder, and I turned around and saw she was
about to try to punch me. So I ducked again, and tripped her with my foot. She
fell on the floor, twisted her ankle.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I damn well ran out on her,’ he said, ‘before she could get back up
and follow me. Never said a word to her, myself.’
‘Hm,’ said Sherlock. ‘Tell me, tonight…’ and she trailed off, then spoke up
again. ‘Do you normally take note of the crowd around the piano?’
Chester was taken off-guard. ‘Yeah, I—suppose. The ones singing, anyway.’
‘And tonight, during this last set. Whom did you notice?'
‘I—well, let’s see, there was…I don’t know all the girls’ names. There was that
Leslie Matthews, who gets in so many fights. I always keep an eye on her; she
was right up next to the piano most of the night. And uh, Georgie, I think her
name is, big butch girl in a blue suit, she was there, you can’t miss her
voice, man, she really belts it out. A few other butches I only see on the
weekends…and that mixed couple, you know the ones.’
‘No,’ said Sherlock, though Johnnie was pretty sure she did. ‘Who do you mean?’
‘Don’t give me that,’ said Chester, with a sneer. ‘I saw you with ‘em. Light-
skinned black girl with a skinny Jewish butch. She’s the only feminine one who
comes over to drink and sing with the rest at the piano.’
‘And they were here all evening?’
‘Near as I can recall,’ Chester said.
Sherlock had an odd look about her, the kind of thoughtful that often led to
other things; but just then Ted Ware walked into the club with two uniformed
Met officers.
Pandemonium ensued. Club patrons dove out of sight and slipped around the three
men to make their ways up the stairs, both back and front.
Ted was trying to keep the constables on track, headed straight back past the
rapidly-emptying dance floor toward the washrooms. But the sight of so many
people unabashedly fleeing, affected them like cats after rats: truncheons out,
stopping the butches with an arm across the chest, and the femmes with a hand
on the shoulder, ‘what’s all this’ing at all and sundry. Sherlock made a
disgusted grimace.
‘I don’t see much point in remaining to witness this,’ she said, and Johnnie
nodded. They both turned round to thank Chester Davis for his time, but
sometime in the interim he had already disappeared.
***
In the back of the taxi, trundling away from Chelsea and back toward
Marylebone, Johnnie tried to get her breath. She was giddy, and on edge, and
every time she closed her eyes her head seemed to spin, halfway to sleep. She
felt she’d been awake for a week, and yet wasn’t exactly sleepy. Sherlock was
unnecessarily close to her on the taxi seat, and Johnnie could feel her
vibrating all down the side of her body. It made Johnnie vibrate, too.
‘Christ,’ Johnnie said, eyes springing open. ‘When was the last time you ate
anything?’
‘Hm?’ said Sherlock, staring through the back of the cabbie’s head with her
fingers to her mouth.
‘I think—I think I’m starving,’ said Johnnie, with a kind of a wild giggle.
Sherlock said nothing, so she rapped on the glass and redirected the cabbie.
They hadn’t anything in, back at the flat.
They gorged on fish and chips, in an all-night shop in Soho. Or rather Johnnie
gorged. Across the greasy table, Sherlock still vibrated quietly, lost in
thought.
She looked—just the same, Johnnie thought, with a mad feeling of alarm. Three
hours of interrogation and Johnnie was no longer aching, and desperate as she’d
been in the alley; but the whole night felt so like a dream, or a nightmare,
that her brain set itself to cataloguing every scratch and bruise coming up on
Sherlock’s skin. If only to prove them real.
By the time they’d hailed another cab and made it back to Baker Street,
Johnnie’s eyes would barely stay open long enough to climb the seventeen stairs
to their flat. She stumbled forward, and Sherlock caught her, and led her into
Sherlock’s own room, which mercifully did not require any more stairs, and
stripped her with calm efficiency. Johnnie had hoped…but now she hadn’t even
the energy to be disappointed. Her whole body cried out for sleep.
Her eyes fell shut again on Sherlock’s face above her: strangely open,
strangely fond.
‘Y’coming to bed, then?’ Johnnie mumbled, turning over, already mostly
sleeping, and Sherlock said, ‘I’ll be in in a bit,’ and even that was more than
Johnnie would remember later, with any clarity.
The next morning she woke up impossibly warm, her face buried in Sherlock’s
smoke-smelling curls, her hand resting on the curve of Sherlock’s hip, and
disbelieving joy washed and washed over her. Sherlock, pressed against her.
Waking up near-naked next to Sherlock, in Sherlock’s bed. She almost lost her
breath, the warmth welled up so lovely in her chest and her belly.
And it lasted; it wasn’t a dream. It lasted through the realisation of the
ringing phone, and through Sherlock’s gorgeous early-morning stirrings. It
lasted through Sherlock levering herself up out of bed, and kissing Johnnie’s
shoulder distractedly as she threw on a dressing gown and padded out of the
room, hips moving maddening under the silk. It even lasted through Sherlock’s
first, sleep-roughened words: through the click of the receiver, and Sherlock’s
‘Yes, good morning, Miss Ware,’ and her ‘Gina, all right, yes,’ and her ‘Of
course, I would be glad to,’ and it lasted right up until Sherlock set the
receiver down again, came back to the bedroom door, and told her that Smithy
had been arrested.

Chapter End Notes
     Very limited endnotes this time!
        1. Random note: Cass’s near-albinism and unspecified “blood
           disorder” might point to Hermansky-Pudlak_syndrome.
        2. The detail about queer Met officers being having the most to
           lose when clubs like the Gateways were raided, and not being
           able to admit to frequenting said clubs, is very much drawn
           from life. During this period, professions like the women's
           divisions of the Armed Services and the MWPP were involved in
           an active campaign to change their images, and wipe out their
           reputations as havens of lesbianism. Uniforms were feminized,
           extracurricular activities were monitored, and women officers
           who were seen as presenting as too "butch" were told to femme
           up or pack their bags. This, in traditionally masculine,
           athletic professions.

***** Chapter 12 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes

May 29, 1955
7:15am
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
 London, England
‘They arrestedwho?’ Johnnie yelled, just as Sherlock ran back into the room,
vibrating with excitement.
It was shocking, a bit, how her heart beat. Real murder! And Sherlock hired
straight: cash for services, like an honest tradesman, and no dressing up like
Bill the Trinity alumnus to win over stuffy barristers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
She’d fairly flown upstairs. Corridor, door, clothes for Johnnie; and back
downstairs, past the phone now replaced on its cradle, back into her bedroom
and her—oh! yes, occupied—bed.
She realised she must be grinning a second after she pushed open the door, when
she tossed over Johnnie’s bundle of fresh clothes and Johnnie didn’t catch them
because she was staring, shocked, at Sherlock’s face. Sherlock cleared her
throat; schooled her features into false sobriety and turned to the chest of
drawers so she could grin again.
‘Smithy,’ she said , trying to keep the jubilation from her voice, ferreting
about for a set of underwear. ‘They arrested Smithy. I expected something of
the kind.’
Her dressing gown was slipping off one shoulder. She shrugged, impatient,
happy; and then, staring into her underwear drawer, the bottom dropped out of
both.
Engaged on her own merits, yes. But: who was she to be, setting out for the
Gateways in the middle of the morning with Johnnie Watson? She had
somehow—forgotten to consider it.
Right, then, right, think back: Gina and the ruined evening dress; the loan of
Smithy’s clothes. This would be an investigation, a proper investigation: so,
trousers, button-down. But she would be doing it with Johnnie Watson: so,
skirt, blouse; or: three-piece day suit; or: Christ I want you stripped—god,
but that was—unfeasible, thought Sherlock; she had to wear something. What had
been agreed to, last night in the Gateways alley? And why should this come as a
surprise, when every investigation for the last eight months had taken place
with Johnnie at her side? Sherlock stared into her socks and knickers,
forgetting to breathe.
‘You expected them to arrest Smithy?’ said Johnnie, from behind her.
It snapped her back out of her panic; she almost laughed. The bohemian persona,
she decided. Trousers, but only just. Too artistic for the police, neither
explicitly feminine nor masculine. Not presuming too much on the confidence of
any one party. She knew what Johnnie had said, but she wouldn’t presume on what
she’d meant. There was a black turtleneck in the next drawer down.
‘You expected it?’ Johnnie was saying. ‘Why didn’t we stay, then? Try to talk
them out of it?’ Sherlock glanced over her shoulder, and Johnnie said ‘Well all
right, we couldn’t have done much, but the whole thing’s—’
‘Preposterous,’ agreed Sherlock, exchanging her dressing gown for knickers, and
then a camisole. ‘She’d have had to leave the bar unattended, for one thing.
And she would hardly have been going out of her way to call the victim a bitch
and a nuisance while standing over her dead body, if she were trying to deflect
suspicion.’
‘Well, and it’s Smithy,’ Johnnie said. ‘She wouldn’t—she would never—’
Sherlock turned around and opened her mouth and—there was Johnnie Watson, in
Sherlock’s bedroom. Bare and sleep-tousled, her mouth opening and shutting like
a fish, her fist still clutching a corner of blanket though she stood barefoot
on the floor boards. Her hair was stuck up on one side and puffed out on the
other. Her freckled shoulders were golden in the grey morning light.
There was Johnnie Watson, and Sherlock engaged on a murder case on her own
merits; and the hon eyed glow of Johnnie’s skin; and the guilty relief of being
free when another person wasn’t; and she darted forward, breath held and
daring, and wrapped an arm around Johnnie’s waist, and kissed her, deep and
sliding-wet.
Johnnie made a little yelp of surprise, stiff in Sherlock’s arms, terrifying,
but—. But then she just folded against her. God, whimpering. Suckling so
heartbreak-lightly on the very tip of Sherlock’s tongue, she was—. She was
pushing her face up toward Sherlock’s face, blind like a plant toward the sun.
Sherlock hummed. Overcome. Arms full. Her whole skin singing.
But in a moment Johnnie would remember to be stern, to be scandalised. And so
Sherlock broke away before Johnnie could, and turned back to the dresser.
‘Yes,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘“It’s Smithy” was Gina Ware’s primary
argument, as well. I don’t think it would play too well with the Met, though,
do you?’
‘Well, but I,’ said Johnnie, and stopped, and took a shaky breath, the ghost of
a moan. Then she said: ’But. Smithy would never just leave a body in the loo of
the Gateways. I mean. Right where Gina was bound to come across it? She would
never do that to Gina. That’s about the first thing anyone who’s ever met
Smithy, would tell you.’
‘Again,’ said Sherlock, half-turning as she climbed into her capris, ‘Not the
most convincing argument in the eyes of the police.’
‘But,’ said Johnnie, and stopped again, rubbing the heel of her hand into her
sleep-sandy eyes.
‘She is the bartender,’ Sherlock said. ‘And the police have confirmed that
Cohen was killed by a massive cyanide overdose in her cocktail. Whoever did it
either wasn’t an expert, or wasn’t trying to conceal what they’d done. Or
both.’
‘Which is another argument against it being Smithy!’ said Johnnie. ‘I mean,
even supposing she wanted to kill someone, which I don’t—’ (Sherlock put up her
hands in surrender, holding her turtleneck over her head like a flag) ‘—even
supposing that,’ continued Johnnie, ‘why on earth would she do it right in her
own place of business, where she was bound to be a suspect? And why would she
make it look obvious?’
‘I have a shrewd suspicion,’ said Sherlock, dryly, tugging the turtleneck down
over her head, ‘that your estimate of her intelligence and capabilities are
rather higher than that of the average Met officer. A foreigner, and a
masculine woman? And on top of all that not even white? She must seem just next
door to a caveman.’
‘I know you’re—Goddammit,’ Johnnie said, kicking the bed and stubbing her toe.
The curse seemed to take in her foot, and Smithy, and the whole of the Met.
‘Even a bloody dog doesn’t want to foul up his bed.’
‘Based on what I could gather from Gina,’ Sherlock said, ‘the running theory
among the officers was that Smithy wanted to hide in plain sight—camouflage her
act amongst a crowd of people who might also want Cohen dead.’ She gave Johnnie
a ‘hurry up’ gesture, waving a hand at the pile of clothes still lying
abandoned on the floor.
‘Yeah,’ Johnnie said, tugging at her hair. ‘Right, sorry,’ and reached down to
grab the undershirt off the floor. ‘Why is she supposed to have offed Cohen in
the first place?’
‘Presumably, the same reason anyone else would have. Both Gina and Smithy admit
that Cohen had made a play for Gina, and that Smithy didn’t like it.’
Johnnie snorted from inside her shirt, which was distractingly endearing. When
it was over her head she said, stepping into her trousers for emphasis, ‘Cohen
never had any more chance with Gina, than any of the other butches who’ve hit
on her over the years. Which, in case that isn’t clear, amounts to exactly
none.’
Sherlock, tying up her hair in the mirror above the dresser, told herself not
to ask; but she still opened her mouth and cursed herself and said: ’Did you?
Make a play for her?’
Johnnie’s head stayed down, but her eyes flicked up a moment from her hands on
her trouser-flies. She shook her head no, looking back down. ‘I know a lost
cause when I see one,’ she said. ‘Or at least. I thought I did. Anyway, my
record at not getting hung up on them is, er.’ She straightened up with a
crooked grin. ‘Very nearly perfect.’
Uncertain warmth, pooling in Sherlock’s face and her chest. She cleared her
throat, looking down at the floor, shuffling into espadrilles.
‘Well, in any case,’ she said, ‘Gina and Ted posted bail, so Smithy is back at
the Gateways, at least for no w. And Gina has—’ (her voice felt tight when she
said it) ‘—Gina has engaged me—us—to investigate.’
Sherlock didn’t turn around, though it wasn’t—Johnnie would surely be
preoccupied with concern over Smithy, after all, and so it was only to be
expected that she would take a more practical point of view toward this news,
would take it all as a matter of course, probably; and indeed it was
ridiculous, this giddy, nervous pride fluttering about in Sherlock’s chest. It
was all fine, there was nothing she wanted, exactly; she just wouldn’t turn
around, and then—
—and then Johnnie’s face was nuzzling against her back, her arms hugging tight
around Sherlock’s waist, and Sherlock breathed.
‘Bright woman, Gina Ware,’ said Johnnie, gravelly into Sherlock’s nape.
Sherlock could feel Johnnie smile against her skin, through her cotton shirt:
gooseflesh all down Sherlock’s spine. ‘You’re who I’d have called, too, in her
place.’
‘I—’ said Sherlock, and stopped because there was something in her chest
threatening to escape, and she couldn’t tell if it was going to be a sob, or a
giggle, or a sigh. Instead she just breathed, and put her hands on Johnnie’s
hands on Sherlock’s front, to hug her back the best she could.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well! We should go, then,’ and Johnnie gave her one last
squeeze before she stepped back, still smiling.
***
Down in the cab, though, Johnnie’s look was all anxious worry.
‘They’re right about one thing,’ Sherlock said, coming back to herself and
looking away from the window. ‘There were an uncommon number of people with
motive and opportunity, all packed together in a tiny space. You would think it
would provide the perfect camouflage, which makes—’ She broke off, and chewed
on her gloved finger.
‘Which makes what?’ demanded Johnnie.
‘Well,’ said Sherlock, and then paused again. ‘You have to admit it stretches
the limits of credulity.’
‘Good,’ said Johnnie, tugging at her hair, ‘fine. If you feel like sharing with
the rest of us, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
Sherlock shifted her vision from the facts of the case to the inside of the
cab. It was an effort. She sighed, but also smiled. Point out the obvious,
then. Sometimes it even helped.
‘Look at all the potential suspects,’ she said. ‘And these are just the ones we
know about. The pianoplayer Chester Davis was seen fighting with Cohen just a
few weeks ago. He says she provoked the fight out of the blue, although we have
only his word for that. There’s a history of animosity, anyway. However, he
can’t have poisoned Cohen, since he was playing with the band all evening, not
even a washroom break during the relevant window.’
‘Yes, and I—’ said Johnnie, still frustrated, so Sherlock cut back in.
‘Then there’s your friend Cass Thorssen. No, don’t say anything, it’s almost
exactly the same situation. Cohen provoked her into a fight a month or so ago,
seemingly without any provocation, and this time we have Haley and Lou backing
that story up. Still, it’s a record of hostility between Cass and the victim.’
‘But it can’t have been Cass,’ Johnnie scoffed. ‘First of all, that’s asinine.
Really, Sherlock. And secondly, she was with Haley and Lou all night.’
‘Exactly!’ said Sherlock, looking at Johnnie encouragingly, but Johnnie just
stared back. Sherlock sighed.
‘Then,’ she went on, ‘we have a rather more compelling motive in the shape of
Andie Levinson and Sally Donovan, who worked with Cohen and had suffered at her
hands. Missed a promotion either because Cohen was incompetent, or because she
was intentionally undermining them. They both admit to an active and long-
standing dislike of the woman. But they claim, and Chester at least partially
confirms, that they were both dancing by the piano for the majority of the
crucial window of, say, nine to ten-fifteen.’
‘Right,’ said Johnnie.
‘That doesn’t strike you as suggestive?’ asked Sherlock.
‘Strikes me we’re back where we started,’ Johnnie said. Sherlock rolled her
eyes, but continued on.
‘Chester likewise confirms that Leslie Matthews, whom you and I witnessed
fighting with Cohen, was also singing by the piano during the time in
question,’ she said. ‘We don’t know yet why they fought, and she potentially
could have slipped away for a few minutes without Chester noticing, but that’s
at least a partial alibi for yet another suspect.
‘Then there’s Gina herself,’ Sherlock went on, and Johnnie said ‘Oh, you
can’tbe serious,’ so Sherlock raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t see why not. I
would have lain even odds on the Met arresting Gina versus Smithy, especially
as they’re rumoured to be…involved.’
Johnnie snorted, chewing on her lip. ‘Both foreign, both queer, neither white,’
she spat. ‘It was probably a rough choice, between the two.’
‘More importantly,’ Sherlock said, ‘the same motive might apply to them both.
Gina could, just as easily as Smithy, want to get rid of an obnoxiously
attentive suitor, who has also been fighting with her clientele. Come to think
of it, the same could be said of her husband.’
‘But Gina couldn’t have done,’ Johnnie pointed out. ‘She was at the door all
night. She’s always at the door all night.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said. ‘And do you see now? What are the odds of all that?’
‘I…what are the odds of all what?’
‘What are the odds of seven distinct suspects, and I say again that these are
only the ones we know about, all present on the night in question, in a very
small space with a plethora of chaotic action, and that all but one of them
would have a verifiable alibi for several whole hours of the evening?’
‘What are you—you think—what?’ said Johnnie. ‘You think Smithy is being set
up?'
Sherlock beamed, which Johnnie seemed to think inappropriate. Somehow Sherlock
couldn’t seem to stop. So she looked back out the window instead, drumming her
gloved fingers on the arm-rest.
‘The thought had occurred,’ she said.
‘But who would want—’ Johnnie started, and cut herself off.
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, 'that is the question.’
***
May 29, 1955
8:35am
The Gateways Club, 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
 London, England
The Gateways was shut on Sundays, but Ted met them at the top of the stairs and
let them in. If he was surprised at the sex or personal appearance of the
private detective his wife had hired, he made no sign. He just put out his hand
to shake Sherlock’s, and clapped Johnnie gravely on the shoulder. Then he led
the way down the stairs, taking one stair at a time, ginger with his short left
leg.
It was disconcerting to be descending the dim basement stairs while outside the
sun shone bright on the pavement. Gina’s stool stood empty at the bottom, and
the main room, when they turned the corner with the lights full up, felt eerily
small, and dingy. Their footsteps echoed in the quiet. The band’s instruments
were all sheeted in the corner; the long stretch of the bar was deserted.
Ted turned to look at them, all big basset-hound eyes.
‘Smithy’s just back in a booth,’ he said. ‘I—look, is there anything I can—I
mean to say.’ He cleared his throat, rubbed one liver-spotted knuckle. ‘She’s a
good sort,’ he said, looking away.
‘Smithy had you take over Gina’s duties at the door,’ said Sherlock, ‘after
Gina found the body.’
Ted nodded.
‘Where were you before that?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Smithy said you don’t normally
come down to the club during evening hours.’
‘Yes, that’s—that’s right,’ said Ted. Sherlock thought he looked and sounded
more distraught than either Gina on the phone or Smithy over the body. ‘I, er,’
Ted went on, ‘I usually see to Luigina—that’s our daughter, you know, eight
months old. But last night Gina’s mother had her.’
‘So you were—’ Sherlock prompted.
‘I have a poker game,’ said Ted. ‘At a friend’s pub, just a few doors down.
Thursdays and Saturdays, Jimmy Halloran’s place.’
‘Remarkable,’ Sherlock muttered, under her breath. Johnnie looked over, sharp,
but Ted hadn’t heard it. Raising her voice, Sherlock said, ‘And I suppose you
were there all evening, in the company of other poker players?’
‘Er, yes,’ said Ted. ‘Yes, I was, from about six on. Smithy called over to
Jimmy’s when she, er, needed me, and I came right back. Reckon that was about
ten-thirty.’ He punched the palm of one hand with the other. ‘I just feel sick
about this,’ he said. ‘Smithy just. She’s a good kid.’ His eyes were bright.
Sherlock shifted from foot to foot.
‘I know, Ted,’ Johnnie said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘Sherlock’s good
at this, you know. We’ll do all we can.’
Ted looked at Johnnie, gratitude like Sherlock’s all over his face. Sherlock
cleared her throat.
‘Well then,’ she said, ‘we had better talk to the woman herself.’
‘Of course,’ Ted nodded, ‘of course.’ He squeezed Johnnie’s hand on his
shoulder, and gave it an awkward pat, and turned to lead them back.
Gina and Smithy were sitting in the booth farthest back on the entrance side of
the club. Smithy’s button-down was rumpled, and smudged, and she was holding
Gina’s hands over the top of the table. Sherlock nodded to them as she
approached. Gina tipped her chin up in a fierce little nod of her own.
‘Miss Ware, Miss—what is your surname?’ Sherlock asked, sliding into the booth
next to Gina and across from Smithy. Johnnie slid in next to Smithy, and Ted
pulled up a chair from against the wall.
Smithy smiled, wry and tired. ‘Don’t spread it around,’ she said, ‘but Mabel
Smith’s the name on my papers. For God’s sake, though, just call me Smithy.’
Sherlock smiled, and nodded, and reached over the table. ‘Sherlock,’ she said,
and Gina said ‘Gina,’ and they shook all round and sat back in their seats.
‘I take it,’ said Sherlock, fixing Smithy in her sights, ‘that you did have to
leave the bar at some point last night between nine and ten-thirty.’
‘Yeah,’ Smithy said. ‘Customer had a bad spill at the bar, food and drink all
over the place, and somehow the whole kitchen was out of rags. That kind of
thing always happens at rush times. I had to run and unlock the storage closet;
Gina and I are the only ones with keys. That was around nine-thirty. I couldn’t
have been gone more than ten minutes.’
‘Who was it?’ said Sherlock, fingers steepled.
‘Who was—who? Smithy said.
‘Who is the customer who had the spill?’ Sherlock clarified.
‘I—I’m not sure, to be honest. It was somebody sitting right around here,’
Smithy gestured to the side of the bar facing their booths. ‘But it was so
crowded, you know? I was turned around, serving someone on the other side, and
then there was this crash, and—’ she shrugged. ‘When I turned back around,
everyone was just backing away from the mess.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Sherlock, grim. ‘But. Leaving that aside for a moment. Gina
tells me the working police hypothesis is that you drugged Cohen’s cocktail
just prior to nine-thirty, then used those ten minutes to lure her out of
sight, then drag her body into the ladies’, yes?’
‘I suppose,’ Smithy said, ‘Yeah.’
‘The poison would have acted very quickly, even if she sipped at her drink,’
Sherlock said. ‘I assume no other employees saw you getting the supplies from
the storage cabinet.’
Smithy’s mouth gave a feeble quirk. ‘Yeah, you assume correctly,’ she said,
rubbing at her eyes. ‘We were slammed, no time and no reason for anyone to
babysit my trip to the rag cupboard.’
Sherlock nodded; then looked around, at Gina and Ted. ‘Did any of you have more
interaction with Cohen than you told us about last night?’
The Wares and Smithy all exchanged baffled glances, shaking their heads.
‘She started coming into the club, oh, a few years ago,’ said Gina. ‘Smithy
fought her once, she and I broke up her fights any number of times. Otherwise,
I know nothing about her. I did not even know that she worked at the Met, with
Sally and Andie.’
Gina looked to Ted, who added, ‘I, er. I bought the bar after the War. Won it
in a poker game as a matter of fact, though not Jimmy’s. Don’t know what the
members might have been like before then, though some of these,’ he gestured
around at the portraits on the walls, ‘the old ones, are left over from then.
But all that’s to say, I only ever saw this Sylvia Cohen in the last year or
two.’
‘So you don’t have any idea what Cohen was doing before, say, 1953?’ asked
Sherlock.
‘No idea,’ said Smithy.
‘That seems to be a pattern,’ Sherlock said, and was quiet for a minute. Then
she glanced sideways at Gina, and then across the table.
‘Johnnie,’ she said, ‘speaking of this Jimmy Halloran. Why don’t you go take a
look at his pub? Get a general lay of the land. Floor plan, distance from the
Gateways, and so on. Gina, Ted: tell her what you can, as well.’
Gina and Johnnie both looked surprised, and Ted was impassive, but Gina said
‘Yes, I—I will, of course, if you think it will help,’ squeezing Smithy’s hand
as Johnnie slid out of the booth. Ted cleared his throat, and stood aside, and
Sherlock slid out too, to let Gina past her.
‘I’ll—see you in a bit, then,’ said Johnnie. Sherlock nodded, and watched the
trio make their slow way across the bar and up the stairs: Gina’s arm around
Ted’s waist, Johnnie’s elbow held unobtrusively convenient in case he needed
more support.
Sherlock thought how Ted and Gina, climbing the stairs, fitted so easily
together; and of Gina’s hands and Smithy’s hands, intertwined on the table. And
then of Sally Donovan, saying: some posh freak who can’t even make up her mind
which way to get off. All the hard shells and soft bellies of people who loved
each other: was Johnnie expecting to coddle Sherlock, now? To shield her? To
soften her down? Something tight clenched in her chest, like an engagement
forgotten, and only remembered the next day.
She pushed it aside. Smithy. The case.
‘I thought we might speak more frankly,’ she said, lighting a cigarette and
offering one over the table, ‘without Gina and Ted here.’
Smithy took it, lighting up and exhaling. ‘Okay,’ she said, stretching her legs
under the table, looking cautious.
‘I assume the police case against you is that you are sleeping with Gina Ware,
and that Sylvia Cohen was threatening that relationship. I don’t—’ she said,
holding up her hand as Smithy started to speak, ‘I’m not asking whether you and
Gina are sleeping together,’ at which Smithy’s expression relaxed a hair. ‘But
you do protect her from unwanted advances, yes?’
‘I—’ Smithy took a deep drag on her cigarette, and stared up at the ceiling.
She thought so long that Sherlock was opening her mouth to prod her, but then
Smithy said: ‘I know it looks that way. And okay, yeah, I fight someone
sometimes, but — you’ve got to understand, she’s—she doesn’t need, I mean,
anything, from me.’
Sherlock must have looked unconvinced. The statement was unconvincing.
‘Look,’ Smithy said, leaning forward over the table. ‘I know folks look at me
and Gina and think—whatever they think, that she’s weak and I’m strong, or
she’s—using me, or I’m using her, but the truth is I’m just lucky to be along
for the ride. She doesn’t need me, or Ted, or anyone. She could run this club
with her eyes closed, all by herself if she needed to.’
‘But she doesn’t need to,’ Sherlock said.
‘Not exactly,’ said Smithy. ‘Sometimes I think she’d have less to take care of
if she did.’
Sherlock’s eyebrow rose, involuntary, that apprehension clenching again in her
chest. Smithy dug her fingers into her scalp, with a smoky sigh.
‘Listen,’ she said, looking up. ‘I guess Johnnie told you I was in the
airforce?’
Sherlock blinked. ‘Er,’ she said, ‘yes. Yes she did.’
‘Well, that was great of her,’ said Smithy, ‘but it’s not exactly true. US
Airforce barely allows blacks, and it barely allows women, and if you’re both
you’re shit out of luck. I flew in the War as a Civil Air Patrol pilot. Ran
search and rescue, and courier missions. I hit all the allied countries at
least once; after a while it was mostly Moscow and Leningrad. For, um. One
reason or another.’
Sherlock narrowed her eyes. Smithy waved a hand, begging her patience.
‘The point is,’ she said, ‘it was never a government position. My brother was
an Airforce pilot—we trained together in Alabama—but I never was. It was still
a lot like flying in the Airforce. I was making trips on government business,
transporting government documents. But it was never above-board, and that
always—got me, somehow.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, thinking of Bill the Trinity alum.
‘So a few months ago,’ Smithy said, ‘there was this dinner, put on by the US
embassy, to honour all the US military pilots living in England. And the thing
was, it included Civil Air pilots, too. It was—you know, in a way I still
thought it was bullshit. I still don’t get a pension, I don’t get listed in the
rolls. I don’t get any medals or whatnot. But Gina, she got all quiet when she
saw the invitation, and she said I should go. Got pretty damn insistent about
it, actually. Said she and Ted would cover for me at the bar, and wouldn’t take
no. There’s, um, there’s no real arguing with Gina when she gets like that.’
‘I saw her break up a fight,’ said Sherlock, ‘the first night I was here. She
was—uncompromising.’
‘Yeah,’ said Smithy, grinning, looking for a moment like a schoolgirl, making
eyes at her older pash across the dining hall. ‘She’s something.’
The thing in Sherlock’s chest spasmed, and fluttered, that Smithy in her tie
and trousers could think of Gina’s fierceness and look so young. Not like she
looked down on Gina, at all. (Though Sherlock also remembered her with her arms
crossed, glaring down at the fight from her post in front of the bar.)
Smithy cleared her throat. ‘Yeah, so,’ she said. ‘So I went. And I still think
a lot of it was bullshit. Folks from all the papers, talking up how great the
States and Britain are, and the long history of brotherhood between the
countries. Not mentioning the Soviets were our ally then, too, or how many of
the people at the dinner had no war pension. But…some of it was better than
that.’
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock again.
‘And anyway,’ said Smithy, crushing out her cigarette in the ashtray, ‘I saw
people I hadn’t seen in years. Had a ball, actually, reliving old times. Stayed
longer than I’d thought I would. Drank more than I should’ve. I guess there
were state secrets talked up that night that the government wouldn’t much
like.’ She grinned a little, then looked down at the table.
‘The point is,’ she said, looking up again and into Sherlock’s eyes, ‘My cab
drops me back off at the club, right? And I walk in, and the whole place is
torn apart. I mean, tables turned over, upholstery ripped out of the booths,
the whole nine yards. It’s a Wednesday night, so not one of our busier times,
but that night it was almost empty, and the few members left are just staring
at Gina. And there she is, right in the middle of it all, going around and
lifting tables and chairs back upright, not even breaking a nail. This glare in
her eyes.’
Smithy shivered, remembering. Sherlock had a sudden vision of it: Gina Ware,
furious, incandescent, bending and bending and straightening in her black
sheath dress and her heels.
‘And the thing of it was,’ Smithy went on, ‘she wasn’t even going to tell me. I
think if there hadn’t been twenty people still in the club who’d seen the whole
thing, she wouldn’t have even filled me in. But there they were, and I was
scared and mad, you know, and. Um. Seeing her in the middle of all that
wreckage, it. Ah, hell.’
She cleared her throat, rubbed her eyes. Sherlock’s lungs ached, somehow. She
didn’t look away.
‘So it turns out,’ Smithy said, taking a deep breath and letting it out, ‘there
was this group of neighbourhood toughs. Formed what they called a protection
gang, like they were trying to be from, I don’t know, Chicago or something.
Going around the area terrorising local businesses for protection money. They
got in here and Ted was out at his poker game, I’m off at this dinner. It’s
just Gina, alone in the whole place, with six full-grown men on her. And
they’re not asking for all that much, really; she could’ve just given it to
them. But she stands her ground, she told me she was shaking, but she says
“What are you gonna do, hit a woman?”’ Smithy laughed, unsteady. ‘I wished I
could’ve seen it.’
‘And they left her alone?’
‘Well,’ said Smithy, ‘if by “alone” you mean a hundred pounds’ worth of damage
and a terrifying night. But yeah, they didn’t hit her. And the funny thing is,
if I’d have been there, they’d sure as hell have hit me. Six guys. Shit. I’d
have been nothing but bruises and broken bones.’
The thing in Sherlock’s chest was making her warm; was making her eyes water.
‘But she’s—she’s tough as nails, is what I’m saying,’ finished Smithy, looking
down at her fingers making shapes on the table wood. ‘Gina looks out for me and
Ted every bit as much as we do her, and she would never—I would never feel I
had to protect her like that. Let alone, fuck, I don’t know, stake my claim on
her, or anything like that. ’S just not how things are.'
‘I believe you,’ whispered Sherlock, her voice buckling. The thing in her chest
was coming to rest. So sweet it hurt.
Smithy glanced up, sharp. She stared into Sherlock’s face for a solid space of
time, and Sherlock stared back.
***
Johnnie and the Wares weren’t back when Sherlock was done questioning Smithy,
and Smithy admitted she was near to dropping dead from forty hours without
sleep. So Sherlock shook her hand, and Smithy loped up to her room, the back
stairs creaking loud in the abandoned club. Sherlock was left to her own
devices.
A feeling of revelation still smouldered bright in her chest, to the shape of
She’s tough as nailsin Smithy’s proud, sad voice. She paced the floor of the
club, fixing her mind on the shape of the case. Letting hope glow softly, just
out of sight.
The odd things were, she thought, four-fold.
Firstly (as she walked out from behind the bar, toward the empty dance floor):
that so many potential suspects should be furnished with an alibi when the
murder had taken place in such crowded and chaotic environs.
Secondly (as she passed the apex of the bar’s U-shape, where it jutted out into
the room): that Smithy herself, whose very occupation should naturally provide
her with an alibi, was so conveniently called away from her post just as the
murder was probably being committed.
Thirdly (as she crossed the dance floor, and passed over the spot where she had
stood while Johnnie rushed to break up the fight): that Sylvia Cohen, decades
older than most of the Gateways patrons, should apparently be in the habit of
picking fights with complete strangers.
And fourthly (as she ran her fingers over the cover on the keys of Chester
Davis’s piano): that despite so many of the Gateways patrons having disliked
and fought with Cohen, relatively few of them had any knowledge at all about
her life or character before the last few years.
Sherlock herself was hardly a demonstrative, outgoing person; yet surely the
patrons of her normal haunts, even the ones who disliked her, could tell more
about Sherlock Holmes than the information that she fought, and had been coming
in for two years. Combined with the scarring under Cohen’s chin, thought
Sherlock, it was all extremely—
A tug, at the very edge of her attention. She paused, and turned slowly back,
but nothing suggested itself. She slowed; stopped; retraced her steps.
She had been thinking, she remembered, stepping slowly and keeping her mind
deliberately unfocused, about Sylvia Cohen. She had thought of being a regular
in a place, and Cohen’s mysterious history, and she had looked over there just
as she thought—and there it was again, a prick of recognition. But she couldn’t
see it, not at first.
She stepped back again, blanking her mind, and thought the scarring under
Cohen’s chin, it was all extremely—
There.
It was dark, smudged with decades of smoke-grime and overshadowed by fresher,
more recent portraits that had been layered next to it in the years since. And
when Sherlock looked directly at it, it didn’t spark anything within her. But
when she caught a glimpse of the forehead and cheekbone, out of the corner of
her eye—could it be? There was certainly no reason it should be impossible.
The three exiles clomped back down the stairs while Sherlock was returning with
a vinegar-soaked dishrag and a bottle of furniture polish, her hands quick with
excitement.
‘Ted,’ she said, hearing his uneven descent, ‘has the Gateways always been a
membership-based club? Since before you won it, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ came Ted’s voice, faint around the corner and then huffing into clarity
as he turned into the club proper. ‘I inherited the log-books, and all.’
‘My question precisely,’ Sherlock said, beaming at him before she crouched to
dab at the ancient painting. ‘Gina, do you know where—what am I saying, of
course you do. Could you fetch them?’
Gina nodded, and hurried off. Ted limped over to where Sherlock was dabbing at
the wall.
‘Curious about an old member, then?’ he asked, looking over her right shoulder.
Johnnie came up to look over the other one, and the skin all along Sherlock’s
left side prickled with her nearness.
She sat back on her heels. ‘Do you recognise this woman?’ she asked.
Ted squinted, hand on his chin, then shook his head. ‘Can’t say as I do,’ he
said. ‘But it’s so dark. Definitely before my time.’
Sherlock snuck a look to her other side, where Johnnie was standing, hands in
pockets, eyes narrowed at the portrait. Her pale lashes were almost touching,
top to bottom.
Gina bustled back into the room, then, out of breath, a pile of dusty log books
piled in her hands. Their spines were labeled with spans of years.
‘We can split them up among us,’ Sherlock said. ‘We’re looking for any record
of Sylvia Cohen owning a membership to this club prior to Ted taking it over in
1946. With the log books split among four of us, it shouldn’t take long.’
‘You believe that is a picture of Sylvia Cohen?’ said Gina, taking her turn to
look over Sherlock’s right shoulder as Ted picked up the log book from 1931-
1932 and Johnnie grabbed the one from 1933-1934. ‘It doesn’t look like her.'
‘Cohen had scarring under her chin and around her nose,’ Sherlock said,
carefully wiping furniture oil off the wall, ‘characteristic of having had
plastic surgery. If you cover the lines of the nose and the chin…’ she
demonstrated, leaving only the forehead, eyes, and cheekbones of the portrait
exposed.
‘I—suppose,’ Gina said, backing away and squinting at the portrait.
‘I think—I think you may be right,’ said Ted, slowly, sounding surprised as he
looked up from 1931-1932. ‘I wouldn’t have seen it, but—I think that may be
her.’
‘You have to look at the bone structure,’ Sherlock said, tilting her own head.
‘The face itself, and not the trimmings.’
‘You’re bloody brilliant,’ Johnnie said, under her breath, and her tone was so
fervent that Sherlock’s face heated, and she thought, nonsensically, of Smithy
saying tough as nails.
‘Yes, well,’ she said, ‘the bad news is, that if she went to all the trouble to
change her appearance, she’s probably not using the same name, either.’
Johnnie looked down at 1935-36, the grin slipping off her face so quickly that
Sherlock chuckled. ‘What are we on about, then?’ Johnnie asked, and Sherlock
went back to daubing the smoke-damaged portrait as she said ‘Best to exhaust
the simplest avenues first.’
But Gina was coming up behind them, two coffees in each hand. ‘It looks as
if—as if the artist wrote the woman’s name next to her portrait,’ she said.
Johnnie took one coffee, and Gina put the other on the floor next to Sherlock.
‘But it’s not even close to legible,’ Sherlock said. ‘And the damage is just
too old. Nothing’s making any difference at all.’
‘Hm,’ Gina said, ‘I don’t suppose—’ and stopped.
‘What is it?’ Ted prompted, so Gina said, ‘Well. If the artist wrote her name
next to her portrait, he might remember who she is, mightn’t he?’
Sherlock looked up at Ted, whose eyes were widening. ‘Are the portraitists
generally regulars here, then?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ Ted said, excited, getting to his feet. ‘Yeah, they always have been as
long as I’ve owned the bar. Some of ‘em have gone on to become well-known,
or—that’s what I’ve heard, anyway.’ He was limping into the back now, raising
his voice to be heard. ‘But when I took over, this painting thing was already
going on. Blokes told me the previous owner had spotted them free drinks for
decorating the walls. So they did—where is that blasted book?—they did
portraiture, of the regulars they saw around the place.’
Johnnie and Sherlock were looking at each other, grinning, Sherlock rising to
her feet.
‘Here it is!’ came Ted’s voice from the other room. ‘I knew it was somewhere
about.’
He came limping back into the main room, carrying a black file-box under one
arm, with a Polaroid instant camera balanced on top of it. Gina rushed forward
to rescue the camera.
‘This is where I shoved all the records and what-not,’ Ted said. He sat down at
a table, huffing a bit with the exertion and tearing the cover off the box. ‘To
tell you the shameful truth I’ve never looked through it what you might call
properly, being so busy with the club and then getting married to Gina, but—’
He trailed off, rummaging through receipts and deeds, and there was a tense
silence while Gina snapped images of the wall, and the other two watched Ted
work. Sherlock counted a long four minutes before he let out an ‘ahhh,’ and
held up a half-sheet of paper, complete with a scribbled name. Sherlock bounded
forward to take it.
‘This is the artist?’ she asked.
‘No guarantees,’ Ted said. ‘But the note says he did “most of the north wall
before the War,” so the odds are good.’
Johnnie crowded up behind Sherlock, peering around her shoulder and reaching
around from behind her to steady the note in Sherlock’s hand, and—Sherlock had
a sudden sense memory of the same position in a hotel room blocks and weeks
away. Her breath caught in her throat. She could tell Johnnie had heard it,
because Johnnie’s hand spasmed, quick on Sherlock’s wrist, pressing a moment
into the pulse point there.
Sherlock exhaled, slow and careful, as Johnnie read ‘Benjamin Hepworth,
Portloe, Cornwall. I, er, reckon there’s no phone number hidden away in that
box of yours?’
Ted shook his head. Gina got on the line with the operator, but to no effect.
Mr. Hepworth, It seemed, wasn’t on the telephone, although the operator in the
nearby town of Veryan Green did confirm his continued residence at the address
given. Gina rang off, chewing on her lip.
‘Well,’ said Johnnie. ‘What d’you reckon?’
Sherlock stood in front of the portrait, looking down. ‘I reckon,’ she said,
slowly, a smile creeping onto her face, ‘that you should call in at the garage,
and we should take a trip to Cornwall.’
Johnnie stared. ‘Via what?’ she said, ‘the train? I’ve never even heard of this
village; it’s not as if we’re headed to St. Ives.’
Sherlock bent, retrieved her scarf from the floor, and wrapped it around her
neck as she pivoted to face Johnnie.
‘On your bike, of course,’ she said, speaking past her heart beating in her
chest next to the hope that had glowed there, faintly, all morning; brushing
past Gina’s bemused and Johnnie’s wide-open eyes. ‘It only makes sense to take
the Vincent.’

Chapter End Notes
        1. Things that are historically true: Ted Ware claimed to have won
           the Gateways Club in a poker game ‘with a Jewish businessman.’
           He and Gina had a daughter named Luigina. Smithy was a skilled
           American pilot who flew during the War.
        2. Things that are not historically true: Smithy’s first name was
           probably not Mabel. In fact, I never encountered a record of
           her full name. She was also not a Civil Air Patrol pilot;
           historically, Smithy was white, and therefore eligible for the
           official women’s division of the US Airforce. She was stationed
           in Ruislip during the war, which is when she first started
           coming to the Gateways. However:
        3. The details surrounding Smithy’s aviation history are based in
           fact. In WWII black women were not admitted into either the
           embryonic women’s division or WASP (see Mildred_Carter’s
           story), or the newly-formed African-American division of the US
           Airforce, known as the Tuskegee_Airmen. However, women students
           were accepted for civilian aviation training at the Tuskegee
           University in Alabama, which is apparently where both
           (fictional) Smithy and her brother trained. Having earned their
           licenses at that or a few other similar programs throughout the
           country in the late 30s or early 40s, a few African-American
           women did go on to serve the War Effort by joining the Civil
           Air Patrol. See, for example, the story of Willa_Beatrice_Brown
           Chappell.

           Flyers in the Civil Air Patrol were not officially military,
           but they performed a variety of war-related missions, including
           search and rescue, reconnaissance, coastal and border patrols,
           courier and cargo transport, and cadet and pilot training.
        4. The story about Gina Ware standing up to a gang of toughs all
           on her own is true. Jill Gardiner recounts her daughter
           Luigina’s words (in From the Closet to the Screen):
                [Gina] stood her ground through hell and high
                water–including the protection gangs that terrorised
                so many licensed businesses in the late ‘50s and
                early ‘60s. And she did once stand alone against a
                group of men who came down to attempt to take the
                Gateways into a racket. They roughed the place up a
                bit. She told me she was terrified but furious and
                faced them with the question, ‘What are you going to
                do? Hit a woman?’ They were, it seems, embarrassed
                and left her in peace. She told me after the incident
                she seemed to gain some kind of reputation and
                respect and was left alone.
***** Chapter 13 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes

May 29, 1955
11:50am
The Gateways Club, 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
London, England

Gina fixed them all a meal in the Gateways kitchen: cold roast beef on rye and
a half-pint each of something bitter. They sat, eating, places set next to each
other at the bar.

Johnnie bolted hers without hardly tasting it, staring over at Sherlock staring
into space.

Sherlock, she thought, was investigating a murder. Sherlock had ground her hips
hard into Johnnie’s teeth in the Gateways alley. Sherlock had been hired to
clear Smithy’s name—which was, bizarrely, Mabel. Sherlock wanted to ride to
Cornwall, one-up on Johnnie’s motorbike after eight months of insisting flat-
out on walking across London, exhausted at three in the morning, rather than
climbing on the back. It was all a bit much to take in.

Maybe something, maybe everything, was different, now, Johnnie thought. Or
maybe three hundred miles was simply too far to walk, even for feet as stubborn
as Sherlock Holmes’s.
***
May 29, 1955
1:10pm
Stamford’s Auto Repair, Euston Road, St. Pancras
London, England

Sherlock would barely allow a stop at Baker Street to load Johnnie’s duffel
with a change of clothes, and whatever dribs and drabs of foodstuffs they could
scrape together. So it was only a few minutes past one when Johnnie straddle-
walked the Vincent out the big double doors of Stamford’s Auto Repair,
apologising again and again to Mickey for missing more work. Mickey waved it
off, grinning, saying ‘Mr. Nicholson always trusted me better with his
carburettor, anyway’; and Johnnie glared at her with a grin behind it while
Sherlock fidgeted just outside the garage door in her Bohemian ensemble and the
too-large American cowboy boots which were, against all logic, the only
suitable riding footwear she possessed.

Johnnie kicked the stand down and turned around on the seat, letting the engine
idle. Sherlock’s chin was up. She looked like she didn’t want to, after all;
but when Johnnie motioned her over she came easily.

Johnnie took a deep breath and was then all business: showed Sherlock where to
rest her right boot, and how to swing her left one up and over the seat. Told
her to hold to Johnnie’s waist, or the back of the seat; and ‘Don’t lean too
much into the curves,’ she said, while Sherlock nodded, not meeting her eyes,
‘just relax and try to stay in line with my, er, my body,’ and then Johnnie
faced forward again and eased into gear, and they were off into the honk and
bustle of the Euston Road.

Sherlock perched precariously, at first, tentative about getting a firm grip on
Johnnie’s waist. Johnnie couldn’t tell whether she had a better hold on the
bike itself, and a few times at a stop, she felt Sherlock’s shoulders collide
sharply with her own back. It made Johnnie nervous about stopping quickly; it
distracted her on the curves. It made her wish she’d borrowed the half-helmets
Mickey kept in storage in the back of the garage, though they normally never
occurred to her.

But by the time they left London proper, criss-crossing the Thames between
Richmond and Kingston, Sherlock was solid against her back. Arms tight about
Johnnie’s waist; hands in the pockets of Johnnie’s leather jacket; head tucked
next to Johnnie’s over Johnnie’s shoulder.

They sped together through villages and by-ways. The road opened up as they cut
south, past Basingstoke and Winchester and into Southampton, headed toward the
shore. It had been years—years, Johnnie thought, surprised, watching the fields
and hedge-rows unfold in front of her—since she’d been out this way.

Back then she’d been alone on the Vincent, though not on the road. It had been
three complicated, knotted-up days in ’51, when Ana Vilaseca had sold off her
Barcelona flat and come back to England before sailing out on the Queen Mary,
back to New York and thence to Santiago.

Johnnie had imagined, maybe, in the back of her mind, some kind of grand
passion rekindled. She had just got the Vincent running that year; Ana had
borrowed a Royal Enfield off a friend. and they’d raced each other grimly down
the southern highways, their engines coughing and thready. They had ridden late
into the damp darkness, long past the hour when it stopped being enjoyable or
even safe: fleeing the spectre of being squeezed together in a booth in a
wayside pub, downing their pints too fast and talking of anything but that
unfashionable and vaguely shameful subject, the War.

Johnnie had brought the Vincent back to London, and had never left it since.

But now, today, roaring down a long slope near Bournemouth, rounding a corner
and catching a first glimpse of the froth-grey Channel, the bike felt hungry
for the road.

Sherlock’s weight changed the balance, changed the quality of the steering.
That was true with any passenger; but Johnnie had forgotten how it was
different, riding with a girl one-up in the country rather than in town. In
traffic the extra weight felt clumsy; unwieldy. And Gateways femmes in their
party dresses perched daintily and waited to arrive.

But at speed, on the open highway, now that Sherlock’s front was fairly moulded
to Johnnie’s back, the extra weight smoothed them out. It made the bike more
committed, wrapping around the curves at the slightest touch, an extra grip to
the tires as they bit into the road.

Between Weymouth and Bridgport they skirted close to the coastline. The sun
broke from its cloud-cover and gilded the green fields sloping down and down
and down to endless water; and the smooth weight of their motion in the midst
of all that beauty felt rich, and fine, and precious.

For a few hours it just—was, and Johnnie didn’t have to think about what it all
might mean. They cut inland at Sidmouth and made for the moors.

A little after six Johnnie pulled the bike off the road by a broken-down gate.
She slung the duffel over her shoulder and Sherlock pulled her winter coat from
the side-luggage, and they scaled the gate and traipsed half a mile across
undulating green land. Johnnie snuck glances at Sherlock, her boots and her
flyaway curls.

They laid out Sherlock’s coat on the top of a tor, and sat on it cross-legged
eating almonds and day-old bacon, and wheat bread with honey, all in the lee of
a weathered granite cross.

The breaks in the clouds were more frequent now. Sherlock stretched out on her
back, eyes closed in the dappled light. Johnnie sliced up an apple with her
pocketknife and fed Sherlock two slices to every one she ate herself, pressing
the fruit-flesh to Sherlock’s lips. Sherlock opened her mouth; felt blind for
it with her slippery pink tongue.

When the apple was gone Johnnie looked down at all Sherlock’s skin. Her fingers
were laced on her stomach, near granite-still. She was probably thinking about
evidence, Johnnie reckoned. About timelines and motives and opportunity. She
thought how Sherlock’s voice had trembled in her throat, telling Johnnie she’d
been engaged on her first murder investigation. Now again, the muscles moved
under the skin of her long neck. Johnnie’s heart beat. She wanted so to touch.

She leaned down, awkward and slow in her leathers, not wanting to startle, and
kissed Sherlock’s sticky-sweet mouth.

She was gentle, expecting gentle. But Sherlock’s hand came up and grabbed her
jacket and pulled her in, and Sherlock’s mouth opened under her, fierce and
wanting. Johnnie was knocked off-balance. She fell sideways on top of Sherlock
stretched out on the granite. Sherlock’s legs were tangled up with Johnnie’s,
and her hand not grabbing Johnnie’s jacket was hard in Johnnie’s hair, and oh,
Johnnie thought. Oh.

Minutes in, Johnnie pulled up and panted. ‘I thought,’ she said, lifting
herself up on her elbows, ‘I thought I might be disturbing you. If you
were—busy thinking about the case.’

Sherlock looked up through dark dark lashes, eyes like the choppy Channel
waters. ‘I was thinking,’ she said, oddly grim, ‘about riding with you. About
how it.’ She closed her eyes again, grimaced. ‘It was better than I’d thought.’

Johnnie brushed a curl off Sherlock’s forehead. ‘You’ve thought about it? I
thought you’d, what was it?’ She paused, and mimicked Sherlock’s poshest tones.
‘No wish for an early death.’

For her trouble she got a look so distinctively Sherlock—mouth pulled down,
eyebrow up, personal offence at the collective stupidity of the world—that
Johnnie laughed, wheezed. Winded with fondness.

‘Yes,’ Sherlock snapped, rearranging her face, lying back. ‘I thought about
it.’

‘Why didn’t you, then?’ said Johnnie. ‘I never understood why you didn’t want
to.’

‘Oh for goodness’s sake, because it.’ Sherlock licked her lips, bit her tongue.
She still held Johnnie to her with her gaze and her hands, chin up, mouth a
little open. Breathing like it pressed against the back of her mouth. ‘Because
it makes me want to. To f—fuck you, Christ, Johnnie, even thinking about it.’

‘You.’ Johnnie swallowed, hard and sudden. ‘It does?’ She was still stretched
out on top of Sherlock, hips to boots.

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. ‘Walking home after cases,’ she said, sounding almost
angry. ‘My feet would hurt, and that was something, anyway. Thinking about how
it might feel to be pressed up against your—your arse, and your shoulders, with
the—the same huge engine throbbing between our legs—’ and she arched up on the
rock, and Johnnie gasped ‘Oh Christ! Oh Christ, the mouth on you,’ eyes wide,
mouth dry, hands digging into Sherlock’s sides under her black cotton
turtleneck.

Sherlock was saying something else, somewhere far away: ‘You don’t—I didn’t
mean,’ it sounded like, but all Johnnie could say was again ‘Oh my god.’
Needing, sudden and needing, hips pressing down, tongue numb, no air in her
lungs.

But then—no, no, Sherlock was squirming out from under her. Then: Sherlock
clearing her throat, drawn up tall. Saying ‘It’s. It’ll be sunset in a bit. We
have—important business, you know.’

‘But—!’ said Johnnie, laughing, half-horrified, gesturing down at the arching
after-image of Sherlock’s body beneath her on the sun-warmed rock.

But the real Sherlock locked her crossed arms. Her jaw was set, trembling, and
her legs were spindly-fragile in her too-large American boots. ‘We haven’t any
time to waste on trivialities,’ she said, so Johnnie packed up the duffel,
dazed, and they walked back to the bike in the gloaming.

It was different, after that, riding with Sherlock. The light was shading into
gold and crimson, soft on the water in Saltash as they crossed, pinking the
vast piers of the Royal Albert Bridge. Then it was dusky, and then it was dark,
and the air was clean and salty-cold. But the perfect sufficiency of the
afternoon had gone.

Now, instead, Johnnie was restless. Her skin shivered wherever Sherlock put her
hands. Now she just bloody wanted, at every point of contact: Sherlock behind
her, touching her all along her back, hips against Johnnie’s arse and breath on
her neck. And Johnnie with her gloved hands clenched on the handlebars and her
face forward, unable to touch back. All the time torn, and tender. Thinking of
Sherlock’s angry, fragile limbs, and the way her teeth bit into her lower lip
on the first sound of fuck.

All the time thinking: Sherlock had imagined all that, and then said It was
better than I’d thought.

By the time they pulled into the car park of the one motor lodge in Portloe,
Johnnie’s lungs and her head ached, and her skin was so sensitised that the
hard seams of her leathers almost hurt.
***
May 29, 1955
9:32pm
Gull’s Nest Motor Lodge
Portloe, Cornwall

In the shack labeled ‘office’ they spent twenty minutes shuffling from foot to
foot while a toothless octogenarian complained about his local council,
consenting at last to exchange their five pounds for a set of room keys.
Johnnie toted their duffel inside. Sherlock locked the door behind them. They
stood and looked at one another, oddly shy.

There was nothing to the room but an ice bucket and a lamp, on a nightstand
between two narrow beds. Absurdly, the separation of the beds made Johnnie
awkward. Would they push them together? Sherlock had looked so unsure, hunched
over on the tor. It was just…the thought of hurting her.

So Johnnie said, ‘I’m going to just—bathe, then,’ wrong-footed by her own
cowardice, and closed the door to the en-suite.

The bath was small, and clean; the water unexpectedly hot. Johnnie breathed
steam in through her mouth, hearing Sherlock like a stuck gramophone record: I
wore it for you….because it makes me want…waste on trivialities. God. How to
make it come right. Breathing around the knot in her gut.

When she’d stood up and was towelling off, Sherlock knocked on the door, and
didn’t wait before opening it. She came in wrapped in her own towel, arms
crossed. Johnnie pulled her pyjama bottoms up, still dripping a bit on the
bathmat.

‘The bath then,’ Johnnie said. ‘It’s. Decent-sized, so,’ moving to squeeze
through the doorway and into the main room, but Sherlock caught her wrist.
Johnnie froze, breath bated.

‘About earlier,’ Sherlock said, raising her face, voice cold if halting. The
knot rose up in Johnnie’s throat. ‘I admit to getting flustered. I. Shouldn’t
have told you all those—things. I hope you aren’t now labouring under the
delusion that I’m—’

‘Don’t,’ Johnnie burst out, and swallowed. ‘Please don’t take it back. It was.’
She laughed, sharp, rotating her arm so her thumb was rubbing gentle circles on
Sherlock’s wrist. ‘It was one of the sexiest bloody things that’s ever happened
to me, so only—please don’t say that it, I don’t know, wasn’t true, or. Or that
you don’t.’ She stared down at her thumb, rubbing Sherlock’s wrist in the
silence.

‘It,’ Sherlock said at last, quiet. She licked her lips. ‘It, er. It was
certainly true.’

‘God,’ Johnnie murmured. Shivering in the heat. Circles on skin.

‘It couldn’t—really,’ Sherlock said, in a rush, turning half-away, gesturing
with her free hand, ‘You’re trying to make me feel better but I—I know it
couldn’t possibly have been one of the—.’

Johnnie gaped at her. Then leant in, growling ‘Christ, Sherlock,’ fastening her
mouth to Sherlock’s collarbone, fierce and biting for a bare moment before
pulling back. Sherlock just let her, her breath quick and harsh, not moving.

‘You have no idea,’ Johnnie said, muffled against the mark of her teeth on
Sherlock’s skin. ‘That’s at least two of the top, I don’t know, ten times in my
life, and I’ve never even.’ She swallowed. Sherlock still didn’t move. ‘Never
even got off with you myself,’ Johnnie finished.

And then—then—Sherlock shuddered with a great breath and: ‘Oh,’ she said, her
voice abruptly ragged in Johnnie’s ear. Which was mystifying. Fucking gorgeous,
and mystifying.

‘Oh,’ Sherlock said, again, and swallowed, and gave her head a little shake,
mouth open. ‘But that’s not something you.’ Her hands were clutching uselessly
at her sides, clenching onto air.

‘I bloody do,’ said Johnnie.

‘I hear you with them,’ said Sherlock, which Johnnie ought to have found
mortifying, and didn’t. ‘Through the floor, and you don’t—’

Johnnie looked up at the ceiling, laughing through shaky breath, hands on
Sherlock’s shoulders. ‘Did you think I was stone? Or just, I don’t know,
remarkably unselfish?’

‘You never—,’

‘I tried to be quiet but I think I—I think by now I’d crawl to you on my knees
if you only let me rut against some tiny part of you, god Sherlock,’ and she
practically was, already, standing in her flannels in the damp motor-lodge
washroom while Sherlock made soft overwhelmed ohs in her throat, ‘I don’t want
to do anything you don’t want to do but I’m bloody mad for you, you have to
know, I—,’

‘Oh,’ Sherlock said again, mouth panting wide as if shocked open. ‘I want,’ she
said, almost to herself. ‘Oh. I want you to.’

‘You,’ said Johnnie. ‘This is—god.’

She would have pushed Sherlock backwards, quick and rough, but the knot in her
gut was unspooling and her hands were shaking and it was all she could do to
just touch her backwards. To touch her hip, unsteady; touch her waist and step
forward; touch and touch fingertips to her shoulder, and neck, and wide-eyed
face, walking her back until Sherlock’s knees hit the mattress. And Sherlock
sat, sudden, still in her towel.

Johnnie had to close her eyes for a space of breaths. Her hand trembling in the
air halfway to Sherlock’s towel-tucked chest.

‘I was going to—to bathe, as well,’ Sherlock gasped, like she still couldn’t
get her breath. She was fluttering her arms close to her sides: broken wings,
keeping the towel up. Johnnie’s throat felt swollen.

‘The dust and the. Er,’ Sherlock said.

Johnnie reached forward, hand a little steadier and not steady at all. She just
brushed against terrycloth. The towel fell open to either side of Sherlock’s
waist and her breasts, which were—Johnnie remembered the warm weight teasing
her inner arm in a hotel room in Chelsea: how she’d been swollen between her
legs, wet and aching with it—and heard herself moan, deep in her chest.

‘And the, er, walk. On the moor, I think,’ Sherlock was saying. Johnnie closed
her eyes again. She could—she could just flex her thighs together and come,
God, so close. Electric. She brushed folded-up knuckle-backs to curving night-
cool skin. Sherlock was rambling: ‘I may still smell of—of.’

‘I bloody love how you smell,’ Johnnie whispered, and nudged her back, and
back: flat on her back on the narrow, straightened bed. ‘You gorgeous,’ she
said, or something like it, she wasn’t sure, crawling up Sherlock’s body; ‘all
the bloody time,’ as she sucked hot kisses onto Sherlock’s cool navel, and her
rib, and her armpit, and all the beautiful haphazard bits of Sherlock’s naked
body.

So naked. Johnnie was quivering. Stripped, Sherlock was—fuck, Sherlock
was—bare, stripped and—

Sherlock crooked her leg, tucked between Johnnie’s kneeling thighs, and that
would be—she would shatter apart if she just pushed with her hips.

Panting; humiliating; too soon. She locked her knees around Sherlock’s leg to
stop her. Sherlock’s eyes, impossibly wide; staring up at Johnnie like every
time she blinked she had to make herself. Johnnie’s stomach muscles quaking
with the effort of resisting, just this side of the edge, so close, keep back,
fuck, back, all her concentration just to keep back, and then: Sherlock,
pushing, sudden, up off the mattress. Lips hard on lips, Christ, Sherlock’s
artless tongue in Johnnie’s mouth and Sherlock’s leg shoved up hard between
Johnnie’s legs and Johnnie was shouting, shaking, hands full of Sherlock’s
arse, hips jerking down into skin, down, and down, and down.

Johnnie was curled into herself, half on top of Sherlock’s chest. When she
opened her eyes again, it was to Sherlock staring up at the ceiling, strangely
still.

‘You really did,’ Sherlock said, wondering. ‘You let me—see you.’

Johnnie laughed, dazed and creaky.

‘Not that I’d have put up an argument, but you didn’t give me much choice.
God,’ she added, like an afterthought. ‘I feel like I can breathe again.’

‘But I didn’t,’ said Sherlock, biting her lip. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

Johnnie drew back, propped up on an elbow. ‘You do realise that I spent the
entire two hours from Dartmoor to here, thinking about nothing but what you
said to me, and how you said it.’

Sherlock looked up at her. ‘Did you,’ she said.

‘I did,’ Johnnie said, a smile threatening. She leaned down and bit again,
gently, at the mark on Sherlock’s collarbone.

‘And that was—intriguing,’ said Sherlock. She was a bit breathless now, but
Johnnie could see her still doubtful, working it out. ‘Just hearing me, er.
Talk.’

‘It was,’ Johnnie confirmed, nuzzling her shoulder.

‘I thought you might be derisive.’

‘I’m not.’ She’d slipped down Sherlock’s body and was nosing against the heavy
swell of her breast. The give of it against her cheek. Christ. Lovely.

‘It’s just, I realise it’s not a very, er. Practicable. Set of connections to
make, and I.’

Johnnie swallowed a laugh, rolling her eyes against Sherlock’s skin. ‘Well,’
she said, sitting up with her mock-serious face, hands tucked on either side of
Sherlock’s waist, ‘that’s really the part that got me—,’

‘Oh,’ Sherlock said, too quick.

‘—thinking,’ Johnnie went on. Sanctimonious little nod. Affectedly casual.
Don’t soothe. Don’t giggle.

‘I just couldn’t stop wondering about the practicalities of what you’d, er,
envisioned.’ Johnnie said, and bent her head, Sherlock’s nipple peaking between
her lips. ‘You know, when you were walking home, imagining riding with me.’ She
bit down, quick and gentle, and Sherlock gasped above her while Johnnie spoke
against her skin, cracking the words on the backs of her teeth. ‘How it made
you want to fuck.’

‘Oh!’ Sherlock said. Immediate, like she couldn’t help it. Johnnie allowed just
a flash of a grin.

‘Then I wondered,’ Johnnie said, with her serious face back on, ‘for example,’
leaning up to lay light kisses at the side of Sherlock’s mouth, following them
with her thumb, ‘if you walked down the Euston Road after the Klein case, still
in your men’s suit. You said your feet hurt but I wondered if it hurt to walk
for other reasons. If under your pressed Harrod’s trousers you were soft and
dripping.’

Sherlock moaned, shocked, wanting. Johnnie could feel the vibration in her
thumb, gentle on Sherlock’s bottom lip. She was leaning down, speaking low into
Sherlock’s ear, so she was surprised when Sherlock’s mouth opened and took her
thumb into warm—wet—tongue and Johnnie had to fight to keep her voice steady.

‘Looking to all the world like a clean-cut young law clark,’ she rasped, ‘and
all the time you were imagining being snugged up behind me, with your gorgeous
hands on me, holding for balance. Rutting yourself desperate against my—ungh,’
for Sherlock had sucked, hard, on her thumb, ‘—against my hips until you’d come
off shouting, still in all your clothes.’

‘Nhmm,’ Sherlock said, around Johnnie’s thumb. Oh, there, Johnnie thought: like
that, like that, arching up like she had on the tor, fuck, beautiful. Her thumb
slipped out of Sherlock’s mouth; trailed wetly down over her chin, down her
working throat.

‘Intriguing?’ Johnnie asked.

‘Very,’ Sherlock said, voice tight, airless. Eyes wide. Johnnie trailed her
thumb down Sherlock’s sternum, nail blade digging just a hair into the skin.

‘More?’ she whispered, and ‘Yes,’ Sherlock gasped, so Johnnie gentled her
fingers down Sherlock’s stomach, soft scratching of nails in dark rough curls
of pubic hair.

‘The thrill of having it that way,’ Johnnie said, fighting to make her voice
casual again, ‘would be in the motion of it, like. And maybe—,’ watching
Sherlock closely now, ‘—maybe that I’d be occupied? Yes? Oh Christ, you—I’d
have to keep us on the road. I’d be helpless to stop you, or help you. I’d just
have to—fuck,’ Sherlock’s hips were twitching up now, tiny restless motions,
‘I’d have to keep my eyes on the road and just let you, let you use me to get
yourself off.’

‘Oh, tuh—tuh—,’ Sherlock was saying, ‘touch—,’ eyes squeezed shut looking
almost in pain. Johnnie bent down and stole a kiss, hard, fast, tongues, with
Sherlock keening into it and heat twining again up Johnnie’s spine.

‘But then I thought,’ Johnnie panted, leaning back up, curling her fingers
quick between Sherlock’s legs where—oh she was—hard, and soaking, and it
sparked Johnnie’s blood. Two fingers fluttering against Sherlock’s clit. She
made herself keep speaking.

‘Maybe you’d rather I be more active, like: maybe you’d make me drive us out in
the country somewhere, and pull up under a tree and,’ two quick fingers dipping
just inside so she writhed, fuck, gorgeous, ‘I’d leave it in neutral with the
stand down, engine still running between your legs.’

‘Our legs,’ Sherlock panted, ‘both of us,’ arching again, reaching for
Johnnie’s hand, and Johnnie groaned out ‘Yeah,’ and hooked two fingers inside
her, thumb now tapping, erratic, against her clit. Johnnie realised dimly that
her own hips were dragging against Sherlock’s thigh again.

‘Yeah, both of us, both of us,’ she panted, curling her beckoning fingers,
pressing with her thumb, ‘you in your peasant skirt with—with no knickers, sat
back against your hands, leaking all over the leather, and—,’ god, the noises
Sherlock was making, ‘me turned round straddling the seat up against the tank,
with my—my hands, one hand holding you up, one hand—,’ one hand inside
Sherlock’s body, clenching around Johnnie’s hand, ‘—one hand twisted against
the seat so I could fuck into you while you sat there sweating and panting and
oh,’ she said, as Sherlock shoved down onto her fingers and she curled them
forward, hard, ‘oh god you’re beautiful, come for me, Sherlock, please, now,’
and she kept just enough consciousness, as her vision tunneled and she pressed
down into Sherlock’s thigh again, again, again, to keep slight, steady movement
in her fingers, to keep feeling Sherlock’s body beating against her hand.
Â
***
May 30, 1955
8:31am
Gull’s Nest Motor Lodge
Portloe, Cornwall

They heard later, from the ancient innkeeper, that the next day dawned dark and
grey, but neither of them were awake to see it. By the time Johnnie cracked her
eyes at half eight, the sun was a visible glow behind the clouds, and all the
cars and buildings cast blurred but discernible shadows on the ground. She
lifted the blind and took it in, shivering a bit in the cool morning air. Then
the latch was slipped and the door shouldered open, and she leaped for a wrap.

It was, of course, only Sherlock. Who rolled her eyes at Johnnie’s startled
expression.

‘I’m still starkers,’ Johnnie said. ‘You could’ve knocked.’

‘Actually, you never quite achieved nudity,’ Sherlock said, nodding to
Johnnie’s flannel pyjama-bottoms.

Johnnie looked down. They were, indeed, still hanging off her hips: threadbare
pink-and-green tartan, garish and cosy. She blushed, suddenly, remembering all
the things she’d said the night before.

‘In addition,’ Sherlock said, holding up the black-plastic diamond, ‘As I
assumed you would remember, I am the one with the key.’

Johnnie cleared her throat, sheepish. ‘You brought tea,’ she said, reaching out
a hand.

‘I brought bergamot-flavoured bilge,’ Sherlock corrected, handing over a
chipped floral cup. ‘The Ancient Mariner wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

Johnnie chuckled. ‘More surprisingly,’ she said, taking a sip, ‘you’ve let me
sleep the day away. Cor, you’re right, this is bloody awful.’ It was so awful,
in fact, that she momentarily forgot where the sink and bins were, and spun
around, looking for a way to get rid of the stuff.

‘Hepworth sleeps until noon,’ Sherlock said, taking Johnnie’s cup back.

‘How do you know?’ said Johnnie. ‘Lord, that aftertaste is even worse.’

‘Ancient Mariner,’ Sherlock said again. ‘Knows everyone in the village.’

‘But then—how long have you been talking to him? You can’t have known about
Hepworth, before.’

‘Artists, Johnnie!’ Sherlock said, waving an impatient hand. ‘Late to bed and
late to rise, makes a—,’

‘You didn’t want to wake me up,’ Johnnie said, smiling slow around the bitter
taste of stewed tea. ‘Don’t bother denying it, I don’t need your admissions of
undying devotion, I’ll just—Oi,’ she said, because Sherlock had turned and
grabbed her around the waist, Johnnie’s naked skin against the rough woolen
weave of Sherlock’s winter coat, and then Sherlock was kissing her, awkward and
messy, trying gracelessly to shut her up, and Johnnie was laughing into the
kiss.

When Sherlock pulled away Johnnie could feel herself still grinning. ‘I like
you saucy,’ she said.

‘Fine, fine,’ Sherlock said, rolling her eyes. ‘Just, let’s all like me in the
village, with some decent tea and a side of gossip.’

Johnnie dug through her duffel, hiding her smile and her raised eyebrows until
she heard Sherlock say: ‘And maybe a fry-up. I don’t think I’ve been so starved
in my life.’
***
May 30, 1955
12:33pm
Barth House
Portloe, Cornwall

Benjamin Hepworth was an elderly, thin-haired man, hard of hearing and slow of
foot, but seemingly, to Johnnie’s initial surprise, still very much agile of
mind. He had declared brightly at the door that they must have the wrong house,
he didn’t get visitors; and only after Sherlock spent three minutes talking
fast and loud about her admiration for the mural art at the Gateways Club in
Chelsea, had he invited them inside. Now he shuffled from teacup to teacup at a
pace that made Sherlock twitch visibly with impatience, perched on his white-
painted garden chair amidst a riot of faded bluebells.

‘I don’t get visitors anymore,’ he said again, grinning, pouring out Sherlock’s
tea. ‘You mustn’t think I’m complaining. I quite detest other people as a
regular thing. It’s why…I moved to the country!’ He shouted the last few words
right into her face, as if delivering the punchline to an uproarious joke, and
snickered wheezily to himself as he shuffled over to fill Johnnie’s cup. The
women exchanged a nonplussed glance over his stooped shoulder.

‘Mr. Hepworth,’ Sherlock said, raising her voice, and taking Gina’s Polaroid
out of her blazer pocket, ‘do you recognise this painting?’

‘Eh? What’ve you got there?’ Hepworth said, turning and shuffling back in her
direction. He took the Polaroid and glared at it, confrontationally, just as
Johnnie took a sip of her tea.

She almost spit it out again. ‘It’s not even one in the afternoon!’ she
sputtered.

‘Ahh, a little lunchtime pick-me-up never hurt anyone,’ he said, waving a hand,
not looking over. ‘Though thanks are always welcome. That’s the last of my
Christmas brandy.’ Then he waved the Polaroid in Sherlock’s face. ‘Course I
know it!’ he shouted. ‘I painted the damn thing, didn’t I.’

‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, flashing a smile. ‘We suspect you did.’

Hepworth harumphed, and shuffled over to his seat on the other side of
Sherlock’s table. ‘No suspicion about it,’ he said. ‘Turns my stomach. Can’t
stand m’style from those years. Sloppy brushwork, and the palette Boaz insisted
on, my god. Man thought it gave the place “unity.” Looked like somebody shit on
the walls.’ His laugh was sudden, bark-like, shockingly not wheezy at all.
Johnnie sipped her brandy-laced tea, wrong-footed.

‘Course,’ he said, slurping from his own cup, suddenly jovial, ‘I was dead
drunk most of those years. What d’you want to know about that one?’

‘Do you remember the woman it depicts?’ Sherlock asked.

‘Sure I do,’ Hepworth said, swaying a little forward and back. Johnnie wondered
if being asked to tell a story brought out his desire for a rocking chair.
‘That was the policewoman,’ he said, ‘The one who went bad, in the war, what
was her name?’ Allen something?’

‘Mary Sophia Allen?’ Johnnie said.

Hepworth banged his fist on the table. The teacup rattled. ’No, wait a mo,’ he
said, ‘no, I’m wrong, I mean yes, you’ve got the right name, but that wasn’t
her, it wasn’t her. That was her friend.’

‘This woman was friends with Mary Sophia Allen?’ said Sherlock.

‘Well,’ Hepworth said. ‘That’s what we called it in polite company.’ Johnnie
choked on her steeped brandy.

‘This woman was the lover of Mary Sophia Allen?’ Sherlock asked, while Johnnie
tried her best to clean tea-and-brandy off the front of her shirt with only a
limp doilie.

Hepworth was grinning now, chuckling. ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘I can’t say
positively one way or the other. Never followed ‘em home, or peeked in the
windows of their flats. But there’d be nothing to be surprised at, in it. I’m
not sure if you’re aware,’ he added, peering from Sherlock to Johnnie, ‘but
even in those days, the Gateways had rather a reputation for that kind of
thing.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Sherlock said, making a face. ‘We’re aware.’

‘Among others,' Hepworth went on, 'that were more my line. One way or the
other, though, they were close all right. Thick as thieves, and drunk as a
whole den of ‘em. Erins!’ he said, slapping the table again and rocking
forward. ‘Ellen Erins.’

Sherlock sat back, looking at the picture in her hands. ‘Ellen Erins,’ she
repeated, thoughtful, staring down.

‘No, but look,’ Johnnie said, giving up her shirt as a bad job. ‘You’re talking
about the fascist Mary Sophia Allen, yeah? Hitler’s pen-friend? I mean.’ She
gestured into thin air with a kind of desperation, feeling she’d more than
proved her point.

‘Aye,’ Hepworth said, getting up to refill Johnnie’s cup. ‘But this was before
all that. And before that ladies’ division of the London police. Mary Allen,
she’d set up a separate ladies’ force, during the Great War. Hear her tell it,
she did it single-handed with no help from nobody, and fought every man jack of
a copper in the city to stop it getting broken up, after the boys were
demobbed. She would come into the club in her uniform, her back straight as a
martinet’s, and start barkin’ orders. Spine didn’t relax ’til she passed out,
and that wasn’t too often; she could really hold her liquor.’

‘And this Ellen Erins,’ Sherlock cut in, ‘she would meet Allen at the club?’

‘Ayyyye,’ Hepworth said, a chuckle in his throat. His voice seemed to get
younger, more limber, as he talked. ‘Almost everybody there was bloody
terrified of ‘em both. I tell you, I was quaking in my boots, they were that
severe. Allen with her military manners and Erins was a—a reporter, that’s what
it was. She was one of the first lady reporters at, er—one of the big papers.’

‘The Observer?’ Sherlock suggested, shrewd.

‘No, no,’ Hepworth said, closing his eyes into the sun to remember. ‘Not the
Observer. Not the Guardian. It was a Tory paper, I remember, because she would
complain about the censorship board, and how they’d cut her pieces down so far
there was nothing left. I think it—the Chronicle? Or maybe the Telegraph.’

Sherlock made a note, and after a moment Hepworth opened his eyes and went on.

‘Well, you can imagine what kind of a cutthroat bitch you’d have to be in that
line of work, pardon my language, but it’s true. She told stories! She told ‘em
loud enough for the whole bar to hear, and nobody dared complain about it. Men
reporters tryin’ to scoop her, or steal her copy, or make out they’d put
together a pitch that was really hers. I can tell you now, in their place I’d
never’ve had the bollocks. The way she’d look at you, like she’d gouge out your
intestines with a broken scotch bottle, only it’d be a waste of good liquor.
And Allen leaning on her shoulder, looking like she was thinking about doing it
anyway.’

It was bizarre, Johnnie thought, hearing about the Gateways in the years before
Ted and Gina; after one War but before Johnnie’s own. The club had always
seemed hers, somehow: inevitable, like an act of God. But there had been a
time, hadn’t there? when nobody in the Gates had heard of Johnnie Watson, and
nobody in England had heard of Adolph Hitler. And apparently Mary Sophia Allen
had spent those days in Chelsea, drinking with a Jew.

Or—if Cohen was really Erins, was she a Jew? She hadn’t particularly looked
like a Jew, either painted on the wall or dead on the washroom floor. But then,
Johnnie thought, neither did Cass.

‘They were hard, all right,’ Hepworth was saying, ‘bloody mean. But they were
the only ones for each other, you could see that right off. Whenever one of ‘em
was drinking at the bar, and would turn round and see the other come in—it was
like she’d look—lighter, somehow, like a weight had lifted off her, just for a
minute. ’S the sort of expression a portraitist’s always on the watch for,
that—genuineness.’

He cleared his throat, and Johnnie said ‘Yes,’ perhaps a bit too fervently,
because Hepworth and Sherlock both looked over at her, sharp. She took a swig
of tea-and-brandy to cover the silence.

‘Well,’ Hepworth said, ‘they shut the place down, six days a week. Hanging off
each others’ necks, shouting and carrying on. I’d wager it’s thanks to them the
club stayed open all through the early thirties. The Depression, you know.’ He
trailed off, pensive, trailing a thumb to dry lips.

‘What happened a few years later?’ Sherlock asked. ‘In the middle thirties, the
late thirties?’

‘Hmph!’ Hepworth said, seeming to jerk back into consciousness. He rose again,
shuffling over to refill Sherlock’s tea-and-brandy, and then Johnnie’s. ‘I
moved down here, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘Back in ’35. Couldn’t stomach it any
more, in the city, when the wars started up again on the Continent. Too many
people, too much rush and bustle, and people got—ugly. I detest them, you
know!’ he added, smiling, bright and off-kilter.

‘So you never knew what happened between Allen and Erins?’ Sherlock said.

Hepworth shook his head. ‘I needed a bit of salt, sea air. Stopped taking the
papers, and just. Never started up again. Twenty years ago, now! I can hardly
believe it.’

They all sat in the silence, drinking their tea-and-brandy, looking out over
the rippling mass of grass and bluebells, toward the grey band of the Channel.

Sherlock stirred, and said, ‘Interesting, isn’t it? That nobody currently at
the Gateways mentioned Allen interacting with Cohen. You would think they’d at
least acknowledge one another.’

‘Maybe she didn’t recognise her,’ Johnnie said. ‘What with the surgery, and
all.’

‘I was able to recognise her from a twenty-year-old wall portrait, after twenty
minutes with her corpse,’ Sherlock said. ‘A long-time friend and possibly lover
would hardly be dumbfounded by a new nose and an altered chin.’ She thought for
a moment. ‘Not to mention, if Cohen was going around yelling and brawling,
Allen would undoubtedly have heard her voice.’

Johnnie put down her teacup, and rubbed her fingers through her hair. ‘I
suppose at least the two never fought each other. That we know of.’

Hepworth sighed, still gazing out at the Channel. ‘Other sea-cities have
faltered,’ he intoned, quiet and slow, ‘and striven with the tide. Other sea-
cities have struggled, and died.’

He looked suddenly so mournful, in the dappled afternoon light. Nobody spoke.
The salt breeze came up on their faces.

Then he waved a hand. ‘My apologies,’ he said, blinking. ‘Just something a
friend of mine wrote. But, friendships: they falter, too, in the fullness of
time.’

There seemed little answer to this. Johnnie sighed. She sat chewing on her lip,
thinking. Hepworth had refilled her tea-and-brandy, without her realising.

‘I still think the whole thing is mad,’ she said, breaking a long silence,
‘It’s all backward, isn’t it?’

‘It certainly seems so,’ Sherlock said, but Hepworth said, ‘How do you mean,
then?’

‘Well,’ said Johnnie. ‘It makes no sense. If this woman, if her name were
really Ellen Erins, and her presumably Irish, why would she choose the middle
of the War, or just after the War, to assume a Jewish name? I mean. You would
think it would be the other way ‘round, wouldn’t you? A Jew passing herself off
as a Gentile, that makes sense, in the face of Hitler and all. But an
Irishwoman posing as a Jew? Just when it was most dangerous? And when her best
friend or possibly lover was an anti-Semite?’

Sherlock was slumped in her chair, chewing lightly on the fingers of her
gloves, like she sometimes did when she was refraining from comment. Johnnie
stopped, obliging, but Sherlock waved a hand: ‘Keep going,’ she said. ‘It’s
helpful, hearing you work away at it.’

Hepworth chuckled. Johnnie rolled her eyes, starting to feel the brandy. But
she said: ‘Well. And what if she was actually Sylvia Cohen? That means
that—years before the Fascist threat—she was for some reason living under an
assumed name. Probably listening to Allen hold forth on the Jewish Problem, and
that can’t have been a laugh a minute. What sort of a—what sort of a person
would do that?’

Sherlock shifted sharply at that, fidgeting in her chair, but Hepworth was
chuckling again. ‘Joined up at seventeen, did you?’ he said, pushing himself to
his feet.

‘What do you—’ Johnnie began, but Hepworth held up a hand.

‘I don’t mean to—to shatter your illusions, young lady,’ he said, slightly
winded, mostly kind. ‘But Hitler hardly invented hatred. In those years…well,
she wouldn’t have been the first person to pass as something she wasn’t, in
order to live.’

They stood, and looked at one another. Sherlock was nodding, so Johnnie did, as
well, and held out her hand.

‘It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Hepworth,’ she said. ‘Thank you, for the, er. Tea.’

‘No trouble, no trouble at all,’ he said, vaguely. ‘I would apologise for
booting you off the manor, but. Well. Conversations with other people, these
days. They’re quite taxing. Think I’ll just finish my tea, and have a lie-down
before supper. The sunsets over the Channel at this time of year are a
treasure.’

Hands shaken, thanks given, and Sherlock and Johnnie made their way back to the
gate separating Mr. Hepworth’s cottage garden from the lane out front.

‘We’re going to have to, I don’t know,’ Johnnie said, ‘walk about for a little
bit, before we get back on the bike. That brandy was—,’ and Sherlock laughed
and nodded, and said, ‘Strong.’

Johnnie looked behind, and in front, and there was nobody in the lane. She slid
her arm around Sherlock’s waist, and buried her nose for just a moment in
Sherlock’s curls.

‘Back to London?’ she said into Sherlock’s ear. ‘Off to interrogate the terror,
then, when we’ve sobered up? See what she has to say about this Cohen
charlatan?’

Sherlock nodded, thoughtful, chewing on her glove again, and pushed herself
gently away from Johnnie’s body.

Chapter End Notes
        1. Visual inspiration: the coastal_road from Weymouth to Bridgport
           (and again); a temptingly_broken-down_gate in Devon; the tors
           of_Dartmoor under a shifting sky; another_tor topped with a
           granite cross; Royal_Albert_Bridge over the inlet at Saltash,
           Cornwall.
        2. I feel obliged to say that you should always ride with a
           helmet! Even though they weren’t too popular in the 50s, and
           definitely not legislated. Also, any and all motorcycle-related
           sex fantasies in this chapter should not be acted out, holy
           shit, do not try this at home, kids.
        3. I’d also like to say that I hope this chapter doesn’t come
           across as villainizing people who identify as stone. Many
           butches interviewed in Jennings and Gardiner did identify that
           way: they took pride in giving their partners sexual (orgasmic)
           pleasure, but did not want to, or allow themselves to, be
           touched in return. In some of the testimonials, this worked to
           the satisfaction of both parties; in other cases, one or more
           of the partners found it a source of frustration or sadness.
           However, most real-world relationships do have sources of
           frustration and sadness; none of this is meant to denigrate the
           experiences of stone folks, butch or femme, now or then.

           In this specific story, Sherlock has an early history with
           Vicky Trevor, in which she felt coerced into a femme role,
           (including being the passive recipient but not the active giver
           of sexual pleasure), and then punished for not conforming well
           enough to that femme-ness. As a result, the passive recipient/
           active stone dynamic is one Sherlock dreads, and not one in
           which she is probably going to thrive. But that doesn’t mean
           the same is true for everyone.
        4. Benjamin Hepworth is a portmanteau of two real-life Cornwall
           artists working around this time: Benjamin Nicholson, a
           portrait painter in the St. Ives School, and Barbara Hepworth,
           a Modernist sculptor. St. Ives, where both these artists were
           based, also happens to be the location of Talland House, the
           vacation home of Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) and her family
           during her childhood, and the latter-day setting of her novel
           To the Lighthouse.
        5. The lines Hepworth quotes are from HD’s exquisite poem “Other
           Sea Cities.” Lucky him, to have known Miss Doolittle in their
           mutual youth.

***** Chapter 14 *****
Chapter Notes
     Trigger warnings on this chapter for antisemitism, racism and
     sexuality shaming by a secondary character. If you don't want to read
     it, feel free to message me and I'll be happy to provide salient plot
     points.
     Also know that all this takes place in the first, long scene. With a
     bit of close reading, you can skip directly to the second scene and
     piece together most of what happens in the first scene from context.
     Though you'll obviously miss a few clues. :-)
See the end of the chapter for more notes

May 31, 1955
9:34am
15 Seymour Walk, Chelsea
London, England
The bell just rang and rang.
They’d phoned ahead, Allen’s landlady assuring Sherlock in soft burred Belfast
tones that yes, her tenant was in, hadn’t left the flat in a day and a half.
And so Sherlock stood back on the stoop, watching Johnnie press forward,
shoulders military-tense. Already hating Allen, her finger on the bell.
When Allen at last jerked open the door, she was obvious. Snarling into the
light, blinking at nothing, reeking of Gordon’s. She would be dull, Sherlock
thought, but easy. Perhaps even amusing. Her type could never stand it if they
failed to impress.
‘Sherlock Holmes,’ she said, extending her hand to remain unshaken in mid-air
as Allen curled her lip.
Sherlock felt the shift and rustle, beside her, as Johnnie’s hands curled into
fists in the pockets of her black leather jacket. It was a novelty: knowing
that for once she, and not Johnnie, would naturally assume the more civil
demeanour.
‘We have some questions—,’ Sherlock began. Allen didn’t wait to hear the rest;
she moved to shut the door in Sherlock’s face, but Sherlock continued ‘—for you
about Ellen Erins,’ and shoved her boot into the crack of the door. Allen
stopped, her face bare shock for just a moment. Sherlock fought down her glee
with difficulty.
‘You’ll be inviting us in,’ Sherlock prompted, foot still outstretched. Allen
let go the door, and turned around to climb the stairs. Sherlock and Johnnie
followed.
While they were still on the stairs, Allen yelled down: ‘You think you’re
clever for having worked out her old name.’ Plainly not concerned about what
the neighbours thought, then, which was only confirmed when her rough voice
continued: ‘but call a yid a yid: she was a Cohen, all right.’
‘Do you believe Miss Cohen’s Judaism is relevant to her murder, then?’ asked
Sherlock, getting to the top of the stairs.
Allen’s flat was neat by virtue of being almost completely empty. Occasional
dusty cans were ranged on the kitchen shelves; bookshelves stood bare but for a
few mildewed guidebooks and ancient newspapers. A solid three weeks’ dust
blanketed every surface.
‘She was a liar,’ Allen said, collapsing on the mouldering couch. ‘And
grasping, as they are. I suppose somebody had enough. Did us all a favour.’ She
moved her mouth, like chewing something sour.
Sherlock was describing a slow circuit of the room, making a show of poking
languidly into corners. The spectacle would have carried more weight, she
thought, if Johnnie hadn’t been following so close at Sherlock’s elbow that she
was afraid to change direction.
‘Well,’ Sherlock said, draping herself into the only other chair in the room to
survey Allen. Johnnie perched next to the chair, arms crossed like someone from
an American gangster film.
‘Since you appear so pleased with the end result,’ Sherlock continued, ‘you
won’t object to enlightening us on all Miss Cohen’s past crimes.’
She must have overdone it: Allen answered her tone, not her question.
‘You think you’ve got one up on me, don’t you?’ Allen sneered. ‘You think
because you’re young, and you’ve won over Ted Ware’s Dago wife and her hopped-
up Negro lover, and because you’re Johnnie Watson’s flavour of the week, you
think you—,’ after which Sherlock only had time to swallow once, hard, before
Johnnie was on top of Allen with her knee in Allen’s stomach, the bone of her
forearm pressed into Allen’s throat.
‘Apologise to her,’ Johnnie growled, at the same time Sherlock rose to her feet
and said ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
Neither Johnnie nor Allen moved from their eye-lock on the sofa. Sherlock
strode across the room and pulled Johnnie up, still fuming, by the back of her
jacket.
‘Enough of this,’ Sherlock said. ‘Johnnie, your sentiments are—,’ she squeezed
the back of Johnnie’s neck, then released her, ‘—appreciated. But unnecessary.
Miss Allen, if you think Miss Watson and I have the wrong idea, by all means.’
She sat back in the chair, spreading her hands in invitation, and gave Allen
her mildest curious glance. ‘Convince us otherwise.’
Johnnie stood next to Sherlock, bristling. Heat poured off her, and Sherlock’s
annoyance fought with something else. She’d never seen Johnnie like this, and
she—but there was no time, now, to name it.
Allen sat up, jaw set, jerking her clothing back into position.
‘All right,’ Allen said. ‘Fine. That kike bitch ruined twenty years’ work for
me, is that enough for you? She cosied up to me for a decade and then used what
she knew to make a few quid. At the expense of her—her best friend, and the
women of London.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Sherlock, feigning mild interest.
‘Yes,’ said Allen. ‘I don’t suppose a child like you has heard of the WPS? The
Women’s Police Service?’
Sherlock felt the stirring from beside her, but she held up a hand, and Johnnie
fell back.
‘Enlighten us,’ Sherlock drawled.
‘You’ve heard there was a war before yours?’ said Allen, lighting a cigarette.
‘Well, believe it or not, kids, there was a time even before that war. And I
spent it establishing the WPS.’
‘All by yourself, no doubt,’ Johnnie blurted out. Sherlock gripped Johnnie’s
wrist; Johnnie shut up, though she didn’t look happy about it.
‘May as well have been!’ Allen said. ‘Nobody else was stepping up to do it.
Just me. First women’s police force in England. I built it from the ground up:
recruitment, training, uniforms, protocol development, and I fought the very
ugly battles with the Met over jurisdiction and so-called cooperation. What a
bloody joke. They wanted nothing to do with me, or my girls.
‘But I knew there were women meant to do that work, and I trained them. It
wasn’t any of this cock-and-bull the Met has their women doing now. We
investigated real crime, and defended the suffragists rioting for the vote. You
can bet nobody at the Met thanked us for that.’
Johnnie scoffed. Sherlock rubbed the inside of her wrist and she subsided.
‘Then the Great War came,’ Allen went on, ‘and all the young Met officers went
off and fought. And for a few years people found us useful. But it was like
every war, wasn’t it? Once the dregs of the forces came back, we were out of
fashion. I was on the attack every bloody day to keep us funded and running,
those days after the Great War.’
‘And this is when you got to know Ellen Erins?’ Sherlock cut in, still
affecting boredom.
‘Sylvia Sheeny Cohen,’ Allen corrected.
‘Do you have information confirming Cohen to be her real name, then?’ Sherlock
said, with the air of the mildly intrigued. She let her stomach clench a bit in
secret laughter, to see how Allen’s mouth twisted. She squeezed Johnnie’s wrist
again, laughing secretly. Hoping Johnnie might, as well.
At last Allen said, ‘Yeah, that’s when I got to know her. Back in ’22 or around
then, when I was still fighting like a mad thing to keep my girls in uniforms
and jobs. And she was—she was making the rounds of the big papers, fighting
like mad, too. Trying to break in as a crime reporter.’
‘And you succeeded,’ Sherlock said. ‘How jolly for you both.’
Allen narrowed her eyes, but nodded her head. ‘Tooth and nail, with me, it was
always tooth and nail and the skin of my teeth,’ she said. ‘And Ell—Sylvia got
taken on at the Chronicle.’
Sherlock raised her eyebrows. She took her hand off Johnnie’s wrist to write
‘Chronicle’ in her notebook, though she was hardly in danger of forgetting.
Allen watched her do it, and rose to the bait.
‘You probably think that’s—the Chronicle was a lot smaller in those days,’ she
snapped. ‘Sylvia was nothing special in the writing department, if that’s what
you’re thinking. I doubt she’d have landed the job at all, but everything was
so jumbled, then. That old windbag Townshend-Farquhar, who runs it now? He’d
just taken it over. Sackings left and right, taking on his own people. Somehow
Sylvia impressed him. Actually got him to put her on the crime beat, which
was—unusual.’
Closer to ‘unprecedented’ than merely ‘unusual,’ Sherlock gathered, from
Allen’s intonation. She didn’t press the issue.
‘Do you know how she—,’ she said instead. Allen grimaced and spoke over her:
‘She never told me the details.’
Sherlock made another mark in her notebook. Allen glared. Johnnie shifted her
feet.
‘So,’ Sherlock said. ‘You delivered the WPS heroically on the other side of the
post-War years, and Sylvia Cohen, then known as Ellen Erins, worked the crime
beat at the Chronicle. And in-between times, you drank together at the
Gateways.’
‘Where she fattened me up like a lamb to the slaughter,’ Allen said. ‘Making up
to me like that, like we were—were friends. Shameless yid slut.’
Johnnie hissed next to her, but Sherlock hmmm’ed over the top of it, not
rising. ‘And to what did all this tend?’ she said.
‘What are you on about?’
’To what slaughter the fattening?’ said Sherlock. And then, with a spectacular
show of boredom: ‘What did she get out of it?’
‘You’re joking,’ Allen said. ‘Didn’t do your schoolwork on this one, did you?’
Johnnie’s hands were clenching and un-clenching at her sides. Sherlock shot her
a warning glance, then looked back at Allen.
‘Why don’t you tell us about it?’ Sherlock said, actually smiling a little.
Allen gave a dry laugh, levering herself to her feet. From the bottom drawer of
the gunmetal desk in the corner, she drew out a manila envelope, fat to
bursting. She walked across the room toward them, and Johnnie put out a hand to
take the envelope, but at the last minute Allen changed trajectory, flipping it
upside-down so that a cascade of yellowed newspaper clippings fell out and onto
Sherlock’s lap. Allen flicked the envelope after its contents, and resumed her
seat.
Sherlock picked the clippings up at random from the pile. They were all cut
precisely, smooth edges ruled along the dividing lines between LONDON JUNIOR
LEAGUE SUPPORTS ‘WHOLESOME’ NEW MET DIVISION and whatever once came next to it;
between WPS ALLEN’S CORRUPT UNDERWORLD PAST and its erstwhile neighbour.
Sherlock flipped a page up and read: ‘…the wisdom of entrusting our children’s
safety…,’ and, turning to another newsprint square: ‘…in an impressive
demonstration of the patience and virtue of English womanhood.’
‘She got a pay rise, and a prize for journalism,’ Allen said. ‘I got a tireless
smear campaign, and twenty years of hard work thrown on the flames. By ’38,
she’d wiped us out.’
Johnnie exhaled, hard. ‘Are you actually,’ she said, and licked her lips.
Sherlock took hold of her wrist again, rubbing circles. ‘Are you actually
trying to claim that the success of the MWPP is all the fault of a single
reporter?’
‘The MWPP could have succeeded perfectly well without shutting down the WPS,’
Allen snapped. ‘We weren’t in competition. The Met has their so-called lady
officers running around after stray puppies, and chatting with whores in
Picadilly of an evening. It’s the men’s division we were competing with. The
MWPP was set up as a distraction, so they could pretend my girls were
redundant. As well as being unfashionably virile compared to the pretty little
homemakers on the Met’s payroll.’
Sherlock snorted before she thought better of it. She looked up at Johnnie
and—and Johnnie was looking down at her with a kind of fury in her eyes.
Sherlock started; it was—unsettling. She looked away. Allen, who seemed to have
gathered a head of steam, ploughed on.
‘And yes, since you asked, I am saying that Ell—Sylvia’s stories went a long
way toward convincing the public of that line. Before the Chroniclestarted up
this bollocks, the majority were on the side of the WPS. We had twenty years
behind us. People felt that counted for something. But Sylvia came along, and
made out I was going to, I don’t know, break into peoples’ homes and corrupt
their daughters. Using all the things I’d told her over the years, twisting
them, making them ugly. Like she shat violets, like she hadn’t been sitting
right next to me at the Gateways, matching me drink for drink.’ She snorted.
‘Underworld fucking corruption, my arse. Grasping Jew ambition, that’s what it
was.’
‘Oh, and grasping ambition had nothing to do with it, did it,’ Johnnie said,
twisting her wrist hard out of Sherlock’s grip, ‘when you were mooning about
like a schoolgirl over autographed photos of Adolph—’
‘Just because a given side lost the war,’ Allen spoke over her, curling her
mouth up, ugly, ‘doesn’t mean they got everything wrong.’
Johnnie was actually shaking with rage. She stood between Sherlock and Allen,
furious and silent, giving no ground at all.
Sherlock stowed her notebook in her inside jacket pocket. She stood. Johnnie
crowded closer in front of her, absurd and protective. Sherlock put a hand on
her shoulder, and moved her two steps to the right.
‘Leaving politics aside, Miss Allen,’ she said, ‘we’ve just a few more
questions. Miss Cohen altered her appearance sometime during or after the War,
did she not? Do you know exactly when that was?’
‘As if I have time or inclination to track the personal history of the
Wandering Jew,’ Allen scoffed.
‘Fine, good,’ Sherlock said. ‘Could you at least tell us, when was the last
time you saw Cohen before her transformation?’
‘She stopped coming in to the Gates when the really nasty stories started
coming out,’ Allen said. ‘’36, ’37? She was still the same old Ell—woman,
then.’
Disappointingly early. But Sherlock nodded. ‘And—correct me if I’m wrong, but
you kept patronising the Gateways all along?’
‘And why shouldn’t I have done?’ Allen asked. Puffing up her feathers.
Johnnie crowded forward again. Sherlock put her hand back on her shoulder, but
Johnnie shook it off, so Sherlock moved to the side.
‘Why indeed,’ said Sherlock. ‘Why indeed. And when was your first realisation
that Cohen had resumed drinking there? With her altered appearance, I mean.
After the War.’
‘If you’re trying to suggest,’ Allen said, ‘that that ridiculous nose job threw
me off for a second, then you’re an idiot.’
‘Mmm,’ Sherlock said, leaning heavy on the boredom in her tone. She thought she
might be overdoing it again, but she was—disquieted, by Johnnie’s anger.
‘Well,’ she said, anyway, trying for an off-hand manner, ‘we have a number of
corroborating witnesses to the date of her return; I doubt your account could
help us pin down specifics.’
‘March thirtieth, 1953,’ Allen spat, immediate. Sherlock stopped herself
grinning. ‘That specific enough for you? Do you want the time and place, as
well? It was just before ten-thirty, last round before that Smithy’s break. She
called for drink orders, and somebody yelled for a scotch and soda, just behind
my ear. I’d’ve known that voice anywhere.’
‘Oh,’ Sherlock said, in the driest tone she could muster, ‘that is early, yes.
But then, if you don’t mind my asking, why didn’t you make contact? Did you
speak with her at all? Acknowledge who she was?’
Allen stared down at her extinguished cigarette butt, grinding it into the
mottled green glass of her ash-tray. She didn’t answer. Sherlock thought she
looked small, and dirty.
‘You needn’t prevaricate,’ she said, to the top of Allen’s bent head. ‘I saw
you, and smelled you, passed out on a central table by the dance floor from
about eight o’clock onward the night of the murder. I don’t believe you were
shamming.’
Allen straightened up, and stood up, and Johnnie bullied forward so Sherlock
pulled her back, and Johnnie glared at her.
Then Allen just sagged, and turned her back.
‘As if I would bother with her,’ Allen said, to the wall above the couch. ‘Only
thing that would have come out of speaking up would be a broken jaw or two.’
Sherlock regarded her for a moment, and Allen jerked her head.
‘Sleeping dogs,’ she said. ‘Now get out of my house.’
***
‘What a fucking pair,’ Johnnie said, striding so furiously back out to Fulham
Road from Seymour Walk, that Sherlock had to stretch her long legs to keep up
with her. Sherlock’s chest felt stretched, too, sharp and dreadful, watching
Johnnie's back.
‘You think so?’ she said.
‘Christ, Sherlock, even you have to admit they deserved each other,’ Johnnie
said. ‘What a pair of harpies. I’m surprised Cohen didn’t manage to finish
Allen off while Allen was doing her in. Like those sisters. You know who I
mean, poisoned each other over some lover while their father was wandering
around in a storm.’
‘Regan and Goneril,’ murmured Sherlock. Tight, her skin felt painfully tight.
‘That’s them,’ Johnnie said. ‘About the closest thing I’ve ever seen to this
damned story. I mean. Cohen! Did you ever hear of anyone so two-faced? Either
she was playing this mad long game, going under an assumed name and spending a
decade and a half cosying up to someone just so she’d be able to make a quid
off her secrets; or—which, I don’t know, might be even worse—she was genuinely
friendly with Allen and still didn’t hesitate to throw her under a train when
the opportunity came up.’
‘Those are the only options that occur to you, then?’ asked Sherlock. Cold.
Distant, and cold. ‘You can’t think a bit creatively?’ Two-faced, Johnnie had
said; and how many faces did Sherlock have?
‘I don’t bloody need to think creatively, Sherlock. I’m not even sure I can
decide which option is more sickening. I mean to say. Why the hell would a
trustworthy person assume a false identity, in peacetime?’
Cold. Lurching panic in her stomach.
‘It must be so comfortable for you,’ Sherlock said, chilly as anything, ‘living
in a world where only the murders of nice, respectable people deserve to be
solved.’
‘What are you—you’ve got the wrong end!’ Johnnie spluttered. ‘Allen’s even
worse; she’s a menace. The sooner we can get to Scotland Yard and back with
some arresting officers, the better, in my book. God,’ she said, kicking out at
a post box as they passed, ‘I hate it, I hate that dykes like them exist.
They’re the frightening bedtime stories parents tell their kids about people
like us, that we’ll end up drunk and alone in some bedsit in Chelsea, or mad
and homicidal, or, hell, in Allen’s case, all of the fucking above.’
‘You think Allen’s the murderer, then?’
‘What? I—of course I do!’ She laughed a little, and turned to Sherlock, whose
face felt set in concrete, still weighed down by sickening, by two-faced. ‘Come
on,' said Johnnie. 'Are you telling me you don’t think she did it?’
‘I am,’ Sherlock said. Johnnie breathed hard.
‘Quite a large coincidence, then, that to nobody at the Gates did she ever
mention the presence of her estranged lover, against whom she’d obviously held
a grudge for over ten years. Quite a large coincidence that she’s an
unrepentant Fascist, and the murder happened to take place in such a way that a
Black woman was set up to take the fall for the murder of a Jew.’
Johnnie was breathing hard, and her voice was rising. It was distantly
satisfying, to Sherlock, that her own breathing stayed just the same. So cold,
though, the air in her lungs.
‘Think, Johnnie,’ Sherlock said. ‘We saw Allen, passed out drooling on the
table next to your three friends, both before and after the murder.’
‘She was obviously shamming!’ Johnnie yelled, then laughed, incredulous. ‘It's
not as if we were watching her the whole time. Right?’
‘She was doing a very convincing job of it, if that’s the case,’ Sherlock said,
cool and even. ‘Her face was nearly blue. She was sleeping in a pool of her own
saliva.’
‘Well, she had good reason to put on a show! Are you seriously discounting the
possibility of that—that woman’s guilt, based on her seeming to be drunk? What
more obvious false alibi could there be?’
‘Not discounting,’ said Sherlock, ‘merely pursuing the logical train of
thought. The orchestration of alibis for all other likely suspects in the club
is far too exact to have been engineered by a woman bent over a table all
evening with her eyes closed, even if she wasn’t properly drunk. We can ask
Cass, and Haley, but—,’
‘No, you know what,’ Johnnie said, stopping on the streetcorner in the cold May
morning, just in front of Sherlock so that Sherlock had to stop as well. ‘We
don’t need to ask Cass or Haley. How does this not bother you, Sherlock? How
were you sitting there, just—. You can barely be civil to old Mrs. Patrick down
the shops, for God’s sake, for the amount of time it takes to pay for your
shopping, but you sat there, perfectly calm, and talked to this—monster, do
you—’
‘I hate to disillusion you,’ Sherlock said, trying to push past Johnnie’s
shoulder, ‘but Mary Sophia Allen is not rendered guilty of the murder of Sylvia
Cohen merely because her politics disagree with yours.’
Johnnie blocked her, shoved her back.
‘Her…politics,’ Johnnie said, licking her lips. ‘Do you even—do you care about
any of these things, just. Out of curiosity. Does it actually matter to you. As
more than, I don’t know, another amusing little game of dress-up.’
Tight, panic tight in her chest. Caring. Dress-up. Sickening. Game.Was this
because of what they’d—? Did Johnnie want—? Was there some kind of horrible,
horrible mistake and Sherlock had—?
‘Does it make a difference?’ Sherlock said. She thought her voice would be
squeezed off, but it only shook a little, a very little.
‘It does to me,’ Johnnie said, like she was trying not to yell. ‘Only, all
right, I risked my life fighting against everything that woman stands for. And
it would be, you know, lovely to think that my—that you cared about that in a
way more involved than as a sort of—of mental exercise.’
‘The world’s not so simple as Queen and Country versus all the darkness of the
world,’ Sherlock snapped.
‘And I shouldn’t complain,’ Johnnie shot back. ‘Mental exercise is where you
really shine, isn’t it.’
Before Sherlock could react, Johnnie had spun, sharp, and was storming away,
down the cold, sunny pavement of Fulham Road.
***
Breathe, thought Sherlock. Breathe. The case. Breathe. The cold air. Breathe.
She couldn’t—she’d thought it was all right, that Johnnie understood how
different characters didn’t mean wrong intentions; and how ballet flats didn’t
mean—soft, but she’d obviously been wrong and she couldn’t—she couldn’t think
about that right now.
She would think about the case. She would think about Mary Sophia Allen, and
Sylvia Cohen, and Smithy—no, best not Smithy. She would think about Sylvia
Cohen. She paced the pavement, and the narrow strip of mud and grass it
bordered.
She would think about Sylvia Cohen, once known as Ellen Erins. Once known as
Ellen Erins, who drank at the Gateways and worked at the Chronicle. A reporter
at the Chronicle.
And then: the War had come, and Ellen Erins had disappeared. She had reappeared
in 1953, as Sylvia Cohen, and Johnnie would—Johnnie would say that was
sinister, that it said nothing good about Cohen’s character, because what kind
of person disappears for five years and reappears with a different identity,
and—
And Johnnie was probably right, Sherlock thought, drawing her coat around her,
cold in her bones. What kind of a person does?
But before the War, she thought. Before the War.
Before the War, Sylvia Cohen had been Ellen Erins, Chronicle reporter. Hired on
specially by Harold Townsend-Farquhar, young Tory owner of said paper, who was
about to make it into one of the most influential rags in London, at least for
the next ten or fifteen years. Ellen Erins, working the crime beat at the
Chronicle, and something—something about that sparked in the back of Sherlock’s
mind.
She kept thinking of—of Sally Donovan, for some reason, and of Johnnie saying
Mental exercise is where you really shine. It was probably so obvious! But she
couldn’t think properly.
Ironic, Sherlock reflected. Prove Johnnie right, then. Think.
Think about Ellen Erins, leaving the Chronicle for some unspecified reason
before or during the War (doesn’t matter why, not now, no Johnnie, doesn’t
matter now). So. Erins had left during the War, and when she’d come back she
hadn’t resumed her position at the paper. That was strange, wasn’t it? She’d
been Townsend-Farquhar’s pet appointee; she’d helped him smear his enemies in
the public eye. But when she’d come back from the War, she’d not only avoided
the Chronicle; she hadn’t taken any reporting job. She’d been hired on,
instead, by the MWPP, and that—
—And that, thought Sherlock, turning on her heel on Fulham Road and—to hell
with it—putting up her hand for a cab, that was why she’d kept thinking of
Sally Donovan. Not for any of Sally’s jibes or insults, but because of what
Sally had told them, standing over the woman's dead body. As it turned out,
Cohen delayed just long enough that we had Chronicle reporters swarming all
over us on the way out.
Not just any reporters, Sherlock thought. Chronicle reporters.
The cab pulled out into traffic. A left, a right, another left, Sherlock had
the window down, cool air on her face, no longer fixated, unless she thought of
it, on the image of Johnnie’s retreating back. Cohen hadn’t gone back to the
Chronicle, after the War. It could have been down to a row with Townsend-
Farquhar, or a change of heart.
Or it could have been because she’d never left.
The taxi was skirting the Park, now, the Serpentine to Sherlock’s right. She
drummed her fingers on the armrest, chewing the tips of her gloves, thinking.
What if Cohen hadn’t changed her loyalties when she’d changed her name? What if
she’d been using her position at the Met as a mole, reporting back to someone
at the Chronicle? How would that look?
It might look like…untraceable bits of information afforded the Chroniclebut
not other papers. But all reporters had their sources, thought Sherlock. All
editors had their inside lines. No, what Sally had described—Chronicle
reporters swarming all over us—that sounded like a break. Like Cohen had played
the incompetent copper, in order to engineer an early break for the Chronicle.
Early access; first on the scene. Access to evidence the police hadn’t yet
bagged up or organised away. The opportunity to put the first spin on a story.
The opportunity, up to a point, to hush things up.
Regent’s Park; Great Portland Street. There was traffic in the Euston Road.
Sherlock fidgeted in her seat.
It was investigable, at least. If not her first choice of ways to spend a
morning when her composure was already so—so compromised. She swallowed. (No,
don’t think of it. Mental exercise is where you shine. One mustn’t—one must—one
mustn’t go to pieces now.)
Breathe.
It was investigable. Perhaps even demonstrable. All she would need, she
thought, as the taxi drew to a stop and she looked out at the courtyard
entrance of the British Library—all she would need was a truly massive
newspaper archive.

Chapter End Notes
        1. The stories surrounding Mary Sophia Allen and the formation of
           the WPS (Women’s Police Service) and MWPP (Metropolitan Women’s
           Police Patrol) are a mixture of fact and fiction. Allen was a
           real person who really did found the WPS in 1914, really was a
           militant lesbian, and really did turn to fascism and become an
           ardent admirer of Hitler during WWII. Her heavy drinking is
           also historical. It’s also historically true that, after the
           founding of the MWPP in the 1920s, the WPS was increasingly
           associated with sexual deviance and political radicalism, and
           lost favour with the public as a result. From Rebecca
           Jennings’s Tomboys and Bachelor Girls:
                Under the leadership of Margaret Damer Dawson and
                Mary Allen, both of whom were lesbians, the WPS made
                an important contribution to women’s policing during
                the First World War. However, Doan has argued, their
                former connections with the militant suffrage
                movement, and their unconventional gender and sexual
                identities meant that, when the Metropolitan Police
                decided to establish their own women’s police service
                [the Metropolitan Women Police Patrols], the WPS were
                largely excluded and increasingly came into conflict
                with the Met during the 1920s.

                The final irony perhaps is that a predominantly
                lesbian WPS leadership … who wanted the power to
                police heterosexual behaviour—patrolling parks to
                disrupt activities of heterosexual couples, assisting
                in raids on brothels, preventing loitering and
                solicitation by prostitutes, and aiding women and
                children who had been indecently assaulted—were, as a
                result of the Met’s campaign, constituted as the
                impure. While in the public sphere WPS were
                ‘enforcing norms of sexual morality’, in their
                private lives they rejected the dominant culture’s
                valorization of femininity and family and preferred
                not to marry or take up conventionally feminine
                occupations.
           The fictional part of the story is the role of the (fictional)
           Chronicle newspaper’s smear campaign, and its role in helping
           to run down the WPS in the public eye. It seems conceivable
           that such a thing might have happened, but I have no particular
           reason to believe that it did. I also monkeyed with the
           chronology a bit: historically, the WPS was dead in the water
           by the late 20s, rather than the late 30s.
        2. Regan and Goneril are the snake-like elder sisters from
           Shakespeare’s King Lear, who betray their father and sister,
           and then die by a combination of murder and suicide. Johnnie's
           memory of them is a bit mixed up, but correct in essentials.

***** Chapter 15 *****
Chapter Notes
     Warnings for specific sex acts in the endnotes_section: it's a bit
     spoiler-y, but also a possible squick for some folks. So: choose your
     poison. :-)
See the end of the chapter for more notes

May 31, 1955
5:56pm
Metropolitan Police Headquarters
3 Broadway, City of Westminster
London, England
The MWPP headquarters were tucked away in the basement of New Scotland Yard,
amidst concrete and dying pot plants, and a dearth of natural light. Sherlock
had to ask twice for directions on the way down. She thought about Sally
Donovan’s story of last Christmas, and reflected that any real crime making its
way down this concrete labyrinth must be an unusual occurrence indeed.
Tonight, Sherlock’s eyes ached with newsprint. When they slid closed, tiny
typeset letters swam against her lids.
Transitions were always the weak point in an investigation, from a physical
point of view. Seven hours behind an archive desk in the British Library,
cross-referencing two years’ worth of issues of the Chronicle, the Guardian,
and the Times, and it hadn’t even occurred to her to think of fatigue, or
hunger pangs. But when she’d stood up at last, clutching in her hand a dated,
numbered list, she’d had to sit down again, hard, on the straight-backed chair
she was holding to.
Stars had swum in front of her eyes. She had shaken her head, and got to her
feet, and made herself stop at a newsstand for cigarettes and a packet of mixed
nuts before flagging down another cab for the ride to New Scotland Yard.
Johnnie would throttle her for so many cab rides in a day, but—but she wasn’t
thinking about Johnnie, right now.
Sally Donovan and Andie Levinson, it turned out, shared an office toward the
end of an east-facing corridor. It might have had a view of Big Ben, if only it
hadn’t been underground. Sherlock reached around to knock on the open door;
when she turned the corner, Andie was standing by the hat-rack, shrugging on
her jacket.
‘Holmes,’ Sally said, looking up from locking her desk drawer. ‘What are you
doing here?’
Sherlock held up her list: neat columns of dates, ranged against locations,
victims, major incident features.
‘I need your help,’ she said.
Sally tipped her chin up. ‘What makes you think—,’ she began, but Sherlock cut
across her.
‘Because I may have the explanation for your former co-worker’s seeming
incompetence,’ Sherlock said. Andie stood, arms crossed by the hatrack,
watching Sally, who leaned back in her chair.
‘Yeah?’ Sally said. Sherlock nodded.
‘But I need a look at your records to be sure. Between 1952 and 1955.’
There was a spluttering from the direction of the door. ‘Are you mad?’ Andie
said. ‘I mean, are you actually—we can’t just—we barely have sufficient access
ourselves, we can’t just let a civilian into the records room.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Sherlock, waving the folded pieces of paper in Andie’s
direction. ‘But you could run along and check on it yourself.’
The modulation was off in her voice, Sherlock thought. Her whole body felt like
it was swaying, right along with the paper in her hands. She wasn’t thinking
about it, wasn’t thinking about Johnnie or any of it. She was demanding. She
was pursuing. She was turning to Sally, who was clearing her throat.
‘All right,’ Sally said, ‘Convince me why either Andie or I should stay here
even later than we already are, in order to track down some damn thing for some
freak from Gina’s, on top of the caseload we already have. And I’m going to
need a damn sight more than vague references to Sergeant Cohen’s incompetence.’
Sherlock nodded, tried to steady the swaying in her limbs. Sally gestured to
the chair in front of her desk. Sherlock sat.
‘All right,’ Sherlock said, ‘all right. You told me about how Cohen sabotaged
you that time last Christmas, and when you came out there were all those
reporters?’
‘As if we could forget it,’ said Andie, from the corner.
‘You didn’t say just any reporters, did you?’ Sherlock pressed. ‘You said they
were from a particular paper, do you remember that?’
‘I don’t—,’ said Sally, but Andie said ‘I think they were from the Chronicle.
Why? Is that important?’
‘No,’ Sherlock snapped, running a hand over her face, bent over in Sally’s
chair. ‘I’m just here, making conversation with my two chums from the MWPP, of
course it’s important.’
Sally raised her eyebrows, and Sherlock held up a hand. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ve
spent the last two days finding out what Cohen did before the War. Interested
yet? She worked as a reporter at the Chronicle. She was hand-picked when Harold
Townsend-Farquhar took over there in 1922. Now, you didn’t know this, and
nobody at the Gateways knew this, and I’d be willing to bet that she didn’t
tell anybody about it when she was hired here, but this,’ she held up the
folded paper again, ‘is a list of crime stories, in the Chronicle, that were
broken at least one edition early as compared to three other London papers. I
need you to—,’
‘—to see how many of them Sergeant Cohen was assigned to,’ Sally said, nodding,
grudging. She looked over at Andie, who shrugged her shoulders.
‘It can’t hurt,’ Andie said.
‘More accurately,’ said Sally, ‘it most certainly could hurt, and would hurt,
if Lestrade or anyone else found out that we followed up a tip outside our
purview on a case not assigned to us, without alerting any superiors or
questioning the qualifications of the—what do you even call yourself?’
‘Consultant,’ Sherlock said.
‘Of the consultant who brought us the lead,’ Sally finished. She narrowed her
eyes.
‘Will you do it anyway?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Yes,’ said Sally.
She beckoned Andie over to take the paper from Sherlock’s outstretched hand,
and Andie did, looking down the list with interest.
‘You understand the theory of the thing,’ Sherlock said, not at all sure that
Andie did. ‘You just need to mark which of these cases Cohen was assigned to.
Mark the specific incidents rather than just keeping a tally; it might be
relevant later on.’
‘Yeah, all right,’ Andie said, taking a breath and looking at Sally. ‘I see
three I know she worked, already. I’ll be back in a bit,’ she told Sherlock.
‘Should take twenty minutes, half an hour.’
Sherlock and Sally sat listening to Andie’s footsteps fade away in the concrete
hallway. The world was still swaying, slightly. Sherlock took the second packet
of mixed nuts from her inside jacket pocket, and opened them up. A carriage
clock ticked on Sally’s desk.
‘A thank-you would be nice,’ Sally said.
‘Pardon?’ said Sherlock.
‘A thank-you. For helping you out when we have no possible reason for thinking
we can trust you.’
‘Ah,’ Sherlock said. Her head was pounding. ‘Nuts?’
‘No, that’s…not what I said,’ said Sally.
Sherlock sighed. ‘You said you had no reason to trust me. Though Gina Ware
seems to have no such reservations; nor does Smithy, nor does J—,’ but her
throat closed up, and she simply coughed.
‘Nor does Johnnie Watson,’ Sally finished, despite Sherlock. ‘And you think
that ought to have some kind of—significance, for me and Andie.’
‘You do, er. Know her,’ said Sherlock, chewing on a cashew.
‘Yeah,’ said Sally. ‘Longer than you have, anyway. You know what happened, the
first night I met her?’
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me,’ Sherlock said.
‘She was sat up at the bar,’ Sally said, ‘chatting with that Smithy. And we
were sitting right next to her. That was before Gina got Chester Davis in to
play piano, so there wasn’t as much singing. Andie and I introduced ourselves,
the three of us were just chatting, you know. And who should walk in? But Diana
Dors.’
She paused, plainly expecting a reaction, but Sherlock just popped a walnut in
her mouth.
‘Diana Dors,’ repeated Sally. ‘You—how can you not know who she is?’
‘Irrelevant, obviously,’ Sherlock said.
‘The Cat and the Canary?’ Sally said. ‘Diamond City? Ring any bells?’
‘Plainly not,’ said Sherlock, through gritted teeth, ‘so you’ll just have to
tell me.’
‘She’s an actress. A real, film-star actress. She’d come into the club a couple
of times before, and of course, everybody noticed her. You really don’t—well.
She’s spectactular. I mean, you’ve never seen such a figure. Long, shining
blonde hair, and she can dance all night and it just falls back into place. And
gowns? Well, the studios pay for them all, of course.’
Sherlock’s head ached. ‘Sounds lovely,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you all had a
wonderful time.’
‘We did,’ Sally said. ‘That’s what I’m telling you. Miss Dors had come in
before, like I said, and of course every butch in the place was on her like
that. Andie and I had broken up for a few months that year, so she tried her
luck, and Marijane tried hers, and Mitch and Pat and every glamourous butch in
the place. And Diana would laugh, and dance, and let them buy her drinks, but
never anything more, not even a kiss. She was—I guess you could say aptly
named. She liked to come and look, but she didn’t let anyone touch.’
‘Indeed,’ said Sherlock. She tried for the bored, superior demeanour she’d put
on earlier with Allen, but she still felt a bit like the room was swaying.
‘Indeed,’ Sally mimicked her. ‘So Andie starts,’ and here Sally stopped,
brought up short by something. Sherlock was resting her forehead in her hands,
but she thought she still managed a smirk.
‘Remembered something less than flattering, have you?’ she said. Sally rolled
her eyes.
‘Nothing important,' she said. ‘Like I said, Andie and I weren’t together then.
So Andie starts telling all about what a tease this Diana Dors is, how she
leads all the butches on, how she’s a gold-digger and all. And your Johnnie
takes quite an interest in what she’s saying, doesn’t she? How did Andie know
this? Maybe Miss Dors just hadn’t liked her, and what else did she know about
her to be talking like that? So sooner or later, Andie says, I bet you five
quid, she won’t let you kiss her.’
Sherlock looked toward the door, scrubbing at her face again, but there was no
sign of Andie returning. ‘And then?’ she said, trying again for the bored
voice.
‘And then Johnnie says, “You’re on.” And she straightens up, and throws back
her drink, and goes and asks Diana to dance. Well,’ Sally said, gesturing with
one hand, ‘you know how it is, dancing with Johnnie.’
Sherlock considered this. The only time she and Johnnie had properly danced,
she recalled that she had flung herself at Johnnie’s neck, and Johnnie had
attempted to hold her awkwardly at arms-length like a fifth-form schoolboy. But
surely, she thought, that didn’t mean—it was hardly a representative sample—she
closed her eyes. Her head throbbed.
‘So I needn’t explain to you,’ Sally went on, ‘that before the song was over,
Johnnie had that Diana draped over her leg in her gold lamé gown, and ten
seconds went by where you could see all the way up that woman’s suspenders.
They were gold, Miss Holmes.’ Sally leaned forward. ‘And her skin was gold. It
shimmered. She was like some shining piece of art. She matched—,’
‘Johnnie’s hair,’ said Sherlock, under her breath, and then cursed herself that
she’d said it out loud.
Sally smiled, slow, watching Sherlock across the top of her desk. ‘Yeah,’ she
said. ‘They were quite a pair.’
Sherlock drew a breath. Let it out. Said, ‘I assume there’s more to this
fascinating rehearsal, Miss Donovan.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sally. ‘They danced three songs together, and Johnnie leaned
over and whispered something in her ear. And Diana laughed, and nodded, and
Johnnie gave her a peck on the cheek, and then stepped back and kissed her
hand. Andie took out her wallet, then, because it looked like Johnnie was
saying her goodbyes.’
‘But she wasn’t,’ Sherlock said.
‘She was,’ Sally said, looking like she was thoroughly enjoying herself. ‘But
Diana wasn’t. She leaned back in and said something to Johnnie, and when I say
“said something,” I mean it looked like she was pouring honey into that butch’s
ear. And Johnnie gets this slow smile on her face, it was like—well. I’m sure
you’ve seen the smile I mean.’
And Sherlock had seen that smile: wide, and incredulous, and slow to form. It
was one of the first expressions she’d seen on Johnnie, as a matter of fact,
and she’d thought of it as…hers. But that was absurd, she thought. Johnnie had
never met her when she’d danced with a b-list movie star in the Gateways. Sally
was only trying to wind Sherlock up.
‘I can see you have,’ Sally was saying. ‘Well, needless to say, we were all
three very interested in what was going on. Smithy even stopped work for a
minute or so, to watch. And then beautiful, cold-fish Diana Dors takes Johnnie
Watson by the hand, and leads her back to the ladies’.’
Sherlock couldn’t help it; she drew in a breath. Sally gloated.
‘We didn’t see a golden hair on either of their heads for a good few hours,’
Sally said.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t intentionally interrupt them,’ Sherlock snapped,
glancing again toward the empty doorway. It was a throwaway line, but Sally’s
mouth twisted. Sherlock almost laughed. ‘They locked the door, didn’t they?'
she said. ‘Or you actually would have done.’
‘All I’m saying,’ Sally said, leaning forward and stabbing her blotter
decisively with a letter-opener, ‘is, Johnnie had the most beautiful femme in
the Gateways, begging her to slip off somewhere private. She’s had—’
‘I’ll be damned,’ came Andie’s voice then, around the corner, ‘all but two of
these, she was assigned—’
But Sally kept right on, talking over her partner, saying, ‘—she’s gone out
with pearls-and-taffeta femmes, but in case you hadn’t noticed there are also
plenty of girls at the Gateways who get a little—,’ she curled her lip at
Sherlock, ‘—bohemian, a little brainy, and still know how to do themselves up.
They’re still not likely to show up on a Saturday night looking like a—like a
banker, or some kind of—some kind of hobo. They’re also not likely to walk
around insulting Johnnie’s friends, or to shoulder in at a murder investigation
like it’s more interesting than their date. Like they can do better than the
police.’
Sherlock found she was standing, without realising she’d stood. She was
gripping the chair back, shaking, and there seemed to be cashews rolling about
the office floor. Sally was breathing hard, looking a little surprised herself.
Andie was staring between them, holding the paper halfway up like she’d started
to offer and then forgotten what she was about. Sherlock drew herself up.
‘You’re telling me she has options,’ Sherlock said, ‘and I don’t. All true, all
true.’
She breathed, and breathed, and spun around, and plucked the paper from Andie’s
suspended hand, and swept to the door. Then she turned around, hand on the
doorjamb.
‘Thank you,’ she said, formal and austere, looking right at Andie, ‘for all
your help and encouragement. I shall sleep better in the knowledge, that while
I may be making one mistake, I am not, at least, in the habit of making the
same one, over and over again.’ And with a pointed glance at Sally, she swept
from the room.
But as she hurried back up the concrete labyrinth under the glare of
fluorescent light, looking down at Andie’s notations against Sherlock’s own
rows and columns, even the memory of Sally’s shocked face wasn’t much of a
comfort.
***
May 31, 1955
9:35pm
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
London, England
It was Johnnie, for once, who was pacing the floors of Baker Street.
She realised dimly that there was a certain irony about that, but she couldn’t
be fussed to care. Maybe they could even laugh about it, she and Sherlock, when
Sherlock got—when Sherlock came—
She kicked the sofa, and hurt her toe.
It wasn’t as if she’d spent the whole evening worried, she told herself. There
were the few hours she’d been livid, drinking tea and then beer in an
overpriced tourist pub in the Brompton Road, spending more money than she could
spare because she hadn’t wanted to go back to the Gateways and offer up any
explanations about what they’d been doing, or why Sherlock wasn’t with her now.
She had ordered Earl Grey and wished for Mr. Hepworth’s brandy; and she had
cursed Sherlock for a machine, and an ice queen, and a condescending git and
anything else she could think of.
Sherlock. Rabbiting on about Allen’s drinking and the need for ‘creative
thinking,’ when the solution was staring her in the face. But Sherlock could
never take the path of least resistance, Johnnie had thought, fidgeting in her
white-painted chair. Things always had to be complex with Sherlock; difficult.
She’d spend eight months giving the evil eye to the white-haired baker on the
corner on account of some rubbish about the leather of his belt, but dismiss
the guilt of a Fascist and her chameleon traitor lover after a scant half-
hour’s unpleasant interview. Allen and Cohen were a snake, Johnnie thought; and
Sherlock a blind fool for not letting it eat its own awful, stinking tail.
Johnnie’s McAllister granny had always said that it took until tea-time for the
Watson temper to simmer down. She had always delivered it like a joke, but it
was eerie, anyway, how often it turned out true. Johnnie had sipped her weak,
overpriced tea, and sat stewing amongst tourists, and gradually the film loop
of Sherlock’s indifference had run down in her brain, and Johnnie had stared
into her chipped commemorative plate and remembered things she’d said.
Did you ever hear of anyone so two-faced? I mean to say. Why would a
trustworthy person assume a false identity, in peacetime?
And Sherlock, her mind helpfully supplied, in three different false identities
every week.
Johnnie had groaned. An American woman in a striped t-shirt had turned around
to glare at her, over the head of a child sticky with ice-cream. Johnnie closed
her eyes, and threw some bills on the table, and hurried out the front.
And she’d hurried all the way home, was the absurd thing. She’d hurried home on
foot, not sure now whether she was right or wrong, making the walk back to
Baker Street from Chelsea in under an hour. And then she’d just sat, and
waited, and stared at the walls and at the carriage clock on the mantel.
Anxious and resentful by turns, and stupider by the minute.
But Sherlock’s characters weren’t identities, anyway, Johnnie thought, for the
fourth or fifth or seventh time. And this whole thing was just—it was asinine.
How could Sherlock think—whatever it was she thought? Did Johnnie take offence
when Sherlock ran off her mouth about—whomever? Auto mechanics, say? Or idiots
who went to nightclubs and chatted each other up? Or good grief, people who
fell in l—
Oh hell, Johnnie thought.
She certainly would take offense, at that.
She groaned. Her scalp felt oddly tender, and she realised, after a moment,
that she was tugging again on her hair. She’d probably been doing it all
evening. She probably, she thought, looked mad: most likely far madder than
Sherlock, unless Sherlock had for some reason transformed into Lourdes, or the
sinister station master, in the eleven—no—twelve hours, now, since Johnnie’s
outburst.
And then: a key in the lock, and steps on the stairs. Johnnie was up and
starting toward the door as Sherlock opened it, looking nearly as mad, after
all, as Johnnie felt, and they both started speaking at once.
‘I’ve been having a lovely chat with your friend—,’
‘Look, when I said that about Cohen I obviously didn’t mean—,’
They stopped.
‘You didn’t mean what?’ said Sherlock. Chin raised. Speaking on a deep, shaky
breath.
The one benefit of the Watson temper was a good deal of practice with
apologies. Johnnie straightened up, took a breath.
‘I should have thought how it would sound,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Sherlock, I’m
not saying I agree with you about Allen, but it was—of course I didn’t mean
you, but I—,’ she shut her eyes, then opened them again, startled, when she
felt Sherlock’s shaking breath, sudden on her face.
Her tongue ticked back a click.
‘I, er, should have thought,’ she repeated, licking her lips. ‘And I—god, I
very much hope you’re not about to—to kick me out of bed for being a stupid
clod, it was just—.’ And then she couldn’t speak, could hardly breathe, because
Sherlock’s lips were hard hard hard on hers.
‘Mwhait?’ Johnnie managed. Then her mouth was full of Sherlock’s twisting
tongue.
Johnnie stepped back. Stepped back. Stumbled, her foot reaching back. She threw
out a hand, and only then realised that Sherlock had backed them up against the
stairs, was pushing and urging at Johnnie with the stairs at Johnnie’s back, so
that she would climb.
Up, she thought, strained and breathless. What was this—Up.
Up, stumbling, the rest of her apology thick in her throat, bashing her hands
and her elbows on the hard stairs. She’d had things to say; and now Sherlock on
top of her pushing her up and up; and Sherlock’s hands seemed everywhere with
Johnnie’s brain shocked and sluggish and the stairs biting into her back.
She shook her head halfway up, when Sherlock let go her mouth to move down her
body. Johnnie blinked hard and shook a little, like a dog after the rain.
Sherlock bit at her neck, and oh. With a gasp Johnnie abandoned the last bits
of her plan, and caught herself up.
Here, yes, here, she thought. Brain and body and blood, here on the stairs of
Baker Street, being—Jesus, being unexpectedly savaged by Sherlock Holmes.
‘All right,’ she said, shaky, putting up a hand to touch Sherlock’s hair but
Sherlock had twisted up, already, so that Johnnie’s palm slipped against her
ribcage instead and Sherlock whined. ‘All—god,’ said Johnnie, ‘yeah, yes, yes.’
But where had this come from, good Christ, Sherlock already had Johnnie’s shirt
unbuttoned, and her trousers undone, and had herself naked to the waist with
her ridiculous boots still on her feet, banging their empty toes on the wooden
stairs as she banged her bare shoulder on the bannister. She rucked up
Johnnie’s undershirt, fingers cold and frantic. She bent her hot mouth without
seeming to think or aim, just sucking hard haphazard bruises into the skin of
Johnnie’s chest and shoulders and stomach until Johnnie’s breath came in gasps.
In Portloe Sherlock had been tentative to the point of terrified, and now. Now
she was incendiary. Bloody growling. Flushed, and pushing. Biting at Johnnie’s
skin, bullying them up the stairs with her knee between Johnnie’s legs and her
arms under Johnnie’s arms.
It was—Sherlock was on top of her, wanting her so. She couldn’t—couldn’t get
enough air.
‘Bed, then,’ she gasped, ‘we should—bed,’ and Sherlock said against her
collarbone ‘What do you think I’ve been trying—,’ and bit her again like she
was shutting herself up, and Johnnie didn’t answer because she was aching and
winded and honestly had no idea.
But it seemed to have gotten through, anyway. Sherlock climbed over her and up
the last few steps. She pushed upright just as Johnnie had got herself up on
her knees, holding her trousers up with one hand, scrambling to her feet and
running after Sherlock into Johnnie’s bedroom.
By the time she turned the corner, Sherlock was shucking off her trousers. She
turned around to face Johnnie in just her white bra and blue knickers and wide,
wide eyes.
‘God, you look—,’ Johnnie said. Her throat closed.
Sherlock looked like a cataclysm. Hair wild; breathing through her mouth.
Scabbed-over lip; yellowing bruises on her torso from their fight in the alley,
which was—Christ, could it be only three days gone? Face and arms dirt-smeared
at mad angles; new rubbed-red scrapes on her forearm and her hip from twisting
around Johnnie on the stairs, and one on her right shoulder that was
actually—Johnnie’s hand clenched, protective—actually bleeding in a narrow
trickle halfway down to her nipple, and that shouldn’t—it shouldn’t, but god,
it did.
‘I look like a disaster,’ Sherlock said, laughing a little, nervous.
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie.
‘Do you.’ Sherlock licked the smile off her own mouth. ‘Do you.’
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie, and let go her trousers to pull her undershirt over her
head, and stepped over the whole mess to wrap herself up in limbs and skin.
Johnnie moved forward even after they were already together; got her arm
tighter around Sherlock’s waist. It unbalanced them, and they stumbled over the
edge of the footboard, and landed sprawled on the bed with their legs dangling
over the edge. Johnnie fell forward as Sherlock fell backward, with a little
sound like triumph that Johnnie had never heard.
‘I want—I want,’ Sherlock was panting, staring up at Johnnie, so Johnnie
slithered up her front and licked and sucked away the blood from her breast.
She kissed the side of her jaw, hard, and said, ‘Do you? God, do you?’ and
Sherlock arched up like that day on the tor, and said ‘More.’
She was like—like some wild bird, thought Johnnie, and they mustn’t both be
frantic, they mustn’t both be wild. She pushed herself up on her arms and
forced her eyes shut on the sight of Sherlock’s trembling limbs and her open
mouth and just—
Breathe, she thought. A count of seconds. Breathe.
‘Look at me,’ she said, opening her eyes again and taking Sherlock’s chin in
one hand. Sherlock kept eye contact like doing it shocked her with raw current,
but she didn’t look away.
‘Anything,’ Johnnie said, looking at her, ‘god, anything you want,’ and
Sherlock drew in a great breath and used her feet on the floorboards to push
her hips up into Johnnie, and said ‘More.’
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie, so softly.
Her eyes were fixed on Sherlock’s eyes, and Johnnie’d never—she would normally
be laughing, kidding with a girl as she trailed blunt nail-tips backwards down
her stomach. Sometimes putting her at ease, sometimes waiting for her to kid
back, to give Johnnie a challenge, show her how she liked it. But this, Johnnie
thought: this was nothing like normal. She felt she might break something in
Sherlock with just a single finger wrongly placed, and she wasn’t sure—even if
laughter could fix it, she wasn’t sure she could find it within herself,
looking down at Sherlock’s frail, ferocious body. She was only touching
Sherlock with her very fingertips, but Johnnie moaned with the weight of it.
‘More,’ Sherlock breathed. Johnnie hardened her fingertips on Sherlock’s
stomach, and then reached between her legs, two fingers among the folds of her.
Like they’d done in Portloe, she told herself, and Sherlock hadn’t broken then.
She’d been soaked wet, like now; and warm, like now; and arching beautiful off
the sheets, like now; only now she was saying ‘More, please, Johnnie, more.’
‘Right,’ Johnnie said, ‘god, you’re lovely, you’re so lovely,’ and Sherlock
whined, high in her chest.
Johnnie closed her eyes again to steady herself as she pushed two fingers
inside Sherlock to the knuckles, wet, god, gorgeous, the smell of her. As if
the smell of Sherlock laughing over a case in the kitchen or the corridor were
a green shoot, and here was the soil from which it grew.
Johnnie’s mouth watered; her teeth ached. She had to—she had to taste, so she
slid back down over the edge of the mattress, her knees on the floor, and
tongued at the base of her own fingers hard against Sherlock’s flesh.
‘Christ, Christ, oh, more,’ Sherlock said, hands spasming into fists in the
coverlet, so Johnnie kept moving her tongue and her jaw but she pulled her hand
back, and then thought for a second only and pushed back in with all four
fingers, tight and aching, and sucked.
Sherlock wailed and pushed her hips up again, which was—god. She’d been with no
one at all for years, thought Johnnie, if ever, yet now she was pushing up, and
up, hard onto Johnnie’s teeth and clenching around Johnnie’s fingers, which
were crushed together and twisting a little, curling a very little back toward
Johnnie’s mouth.
Johnnie was dizzy with it. Sherlock ground herself down on Johnnie’s goddamn
knuckles and still said ‘More.’
Johnnie was dizzy. She had to remember to breathe. Lifting herself up onto her
right elbow with her left hand still pushing and pushing and her kneecaps hard
on the floor. Gasping, looking down at Sherlock, dewy with sweat,
actually—actually begging. It was, it must be, a dream.
‘I’ll—I don’t want to hurt you,’ Johnnie said. Dazed.
‘Please,’ Sherlock said. Johnnie waited for more, but none came: just imploring
eyes cast down the length of Sherlock’s body like she had no other words.
‘Please, please,’ she said again, and for a flash Johnnie saw herself open to
Sherlock like Sherlock was open to her, trusting and desperate and full of her.
Something like tears welled up in Johnnie’s chest.
‘All right,’ she said, gentling Sherlock with her free hand like Johnnie would
want in her place, ‘all right, just. Just wait a—’
Sherlock moaned in protest, so Johnnie said, her voice high and pleading,
‘—just a few seconds, just a few—,’ with the last of her breath. She pulled
back so she wasn’t inside Sherlock anymore but was still touching her with the
tips of her fingers.
She slid her other hand under the bed. Box. Lid. Petroleum jelly. And then she
was back above Sherlock who was Christ still moaning—whining—jerking up with
her hips into the air.
‘More,’ Sherlock said. Johnnie thought she might go blind with wanting.
Breathe, she thought. Breathe.
Cool jelly on her fingers and her knuckles and she bent her head again,
nuzzling, sucking at Sherlock, twisting her slick hand inside her, four fingers
up to the knuckle with her thumb tucked down into her palm.
‘Yes, oh,’ Sherlock said, with almost a sob of relief to be filled again.
Wanting to—. Wanting.
But Johnnie pushed down the thought as Sherlock pushed down, and down, and down
on her hand. She straightened back up so she could ride out Sherlock’s motion,
but: ‘More,’ said Sherlock, ‘more,’ like a grunted chant now with every frantic
push of her hips, ‘oh, more.’
‘Oh Christ, I want to—,’ Johnnie said, and Sherlock said ‘more,’ and Johnnie
cursed, and then held her breath so she wouldn’t speak, and twisted her four
top knuckles past Sherlock’s pubic bone and Sherlock said ‘Hunnnh’ and pushed
into her hand.
‘Oh. god,’ Johnnie panted, around her hot-bitten lip. ‘God, Sherlock, look what
I’m—look what I’m doing to you.’
She stared, and twisted her knuckles the little bit she could, and stared,
fuck, and then dipped her head again, kissing, tonguing at Sherlock’s hot skin
stretched tight around her hand.
‘Look what you—look what you asked me, what you asked me to do to you.’ She had
to bite her lip again to stop herself talking just at the moment when Sherlock
said, ‘More.’
You’ll hurt her, you’ll hurt her, get inside her, Johnnie thought, but
Sherlock’s whole body was shaking and her eyes were pleading and her mouth was
open; and so Johnnie twisted her hand just a little more, and her thumb knuckle
slipped inside, and no, god, Sherlock made a noise like she was ripping apart,
like she was in agony.
‘Sorry! Oh, I’m sorry,’ Johnnie said, tears starting in her eyes, going to pull
back. But Sherlock clamped her hand over Johnnie’s wrist, still just vibrating,
and wouldn’t let her.
‘I’m hurting you,’ Johnnie said.
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock, voice wrecked, and held Johnnie’s wrist, and moved her
hips in tiny shivery circles with Johnnie’s whole fist inside her, face screwed
up like she was splitting apart.
‘Sherlock, don’t, you don’t—we don’t have to, you don’t—have to—,’ Johnnie
said, feeling, god. Feeling dragged under by waves.
‘Push, just a—little—,’ said Sherlock. She sounded drugged.
‘Are you.’ Johnnie’s voice broke. ‘Are you sure,’ she said, but she pushed,
just a little, and Sherlock shivered harder, and Johnnie twitched her hand
forward again, the tiniest amount, and said ‘Are you—oh Christ. Oh, fucking
Christ’ as Sherlock’s eyes rolled up and her body started clamping down on
Johnnie’s fist.
Johnnie bit her own mouth bloody but still she whined.
She knelt up, and petted compulsively at Sherlock’s sides and chest, as
Sherlock shook.
It was—too much, far too much, Johnnie thought, as Sherlock went limp on the
mattress with her eyes closed. But that was—was wrong. It shouldn’t be too much
for her and not for Sherlock, for God’s sake. Unsure, near-virginal Sherlock,
who was lying heaving breaths on Johnnie’s bed, body still filled to breaking
with Johnnie’s god god god with Johnnie’s fist.
It was, but it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.
Johnnie started to ease her hand back, but Sherlock’s hazy voice said ‘Stay.’
‘No, I—have to—,’ Johnnie said, not breathing, breathing too fast.
‘Please,’ said Sherlock. She rolled her head from side to side on Johnnie’s
pillow, breathing in like she was feasting on the smell.
‘More, please, please,’ she said. Johnnie closed her eyes and pushed
infinitesimally with her fist, and Sherlock gasped and said ‘Yes,’ and said
‘Put your mouth on me,’ so Johnnie did, pushing her front into the mattress,
words boiling up in her chest; tears pricking at her eyes.
No, she thought, it’s too much, it’s too much. Sherlock hitched her hips in
heartbreaking tiny movements against Johnnie’s teeth. And she couldn’t still be
saying ‘More,’ it wasn’t—Johnnie couldn’t—
‘More,’ Sherlock said, and Johnnie—
Johnnie pulled up her head, and gasped a breath, and said ‘Fuck, fuck,
Sherlock, fuck, will you do it to me?’ and then said ‘Fuck’ in cold, panicked
horror as Sherlock went still beneath her hands, trying to lift up her head.
‘No,’ Johnnie said, ‘No, nothing, I—nothing. You want more, you want—’
Sherlock said ‘Johnnie, what—,’ and Johnnie could see her starting to think
again, which was—inevitable.
But still Johnnie reached her free hand into the petroleum jelly and smeared
her fingers messily and reached down under her wrist disappearing into
Sherlock’s body and stroked over the cleft of Sherlock’s arse. Sherlock made a
shocked, bitten-off noise in her chest. Her head slammed back into the pillow
and she and twitched away from Johnnie’s hand, and then groaned and pushed back
against it.
Sherlock was panting. Wide eyes, trying to speak. Johnnie was cold with dread,
and didn’t want to hear.
So she pushed with her fist. Sherlock’s mouth opened wider. She moaned, and
formed an almost-word, and Johnnie held her breath; and since Sherlock would
already think Johnnie was broken she might as well be filthy on top of it, so
she slid a slicked finger into the warm grasping heat of Sherlock’s arse.
And Christ, Sherlock was panting under her. Such beauty, and Johnnie hadn’t
been strong enough to stay quiet.
She lowered her head again, staying quiet, and licked, sucked at Sherlock’s
clit as Sherlock gasped out ‘Do you,’ and then ‘oh do you oh do you want me
to?’
Johnnie didn’t answer, only pushed up with her right-hand finger, feeling
through the thin wall of tissue where Sherlock’s body was stretched with
Johnnie’s fist.
Sherlock said ‘Hnnnnh,’ and then, ‘Do you?’ still breathless but fierce behind
it, lifting up her head.
Johnnie stilled. She rested her forehead on Sherlock’s pubic bone, and breathed
deep. Just tiny pushes with her fist, and deep breaths. And at last she said,
‘Yeah,’ and closed her eyes.
‘Then I want to,’ Sherlock said, twitching her hips just a tiny bit faster than
Johnnie’s fist was twitching, before Johnnie stopped altogether and her head
came up to stare.
‘You what,’ Johnnie breathed.
‘I want to, I want to do, oh,’ as Johnnie pushed back and then forward,
wondering, with two fingers in Sherlock’s arse now and her knuckles twisting in
Sherlock’s cunt.
‘I want to do, do everything, I want to fill you with parts of me, Johnnie, I
want to—,’
‘Jesus,’ Johnnie said. ‘Oh Jesus, you impossible—’
‘I—Johnnie, I want—I—oh,’ and Johnnie was going without breath now, pushing
with her hips against Sherlock’s leg against the mattress, watching Sherlock
twist and pant and try to speak whole words as her body squeezed down and down
and down on both of Johnnie’s shaking hands.
‘You should have told me,’ Sherlock said, managing to sound accusing at the
same time as she sounded seconds from passing out, head cushioned on Johnnie’s
chest.
‘It’s not—usually done,’ Johnnie said, feeling her face flush up.
‘You just did it to—,’ Sherlock started, gesturing indignantly, so Johnnie
said, ‘I mean. Most of the femmes I’ve been with didn’t like—.’
Sherlock sat up so fast it startled. Johnnie was surprised she had the
coordination. Johnnie still felt sloppy and loose-limbed.
‘Who?’ Sherlock demanded.
‘Pardon?’
‘Who? Which person didn’t like you to ask that?’
‘Well, I—it’s not impor—’
‘The idiots,’ Sherlock said, ‘the bloody stupid fools,’ and Johnnie laughed,
uncomfortably flayed-open as Sherlock collapsed onto her chest and held on
tight.
Within minutes Sherlock's breath had evened out, and she'd gone warm and pliant
on Johnnie's chest. Johnnie waited another five minutes before slithering out
from under Sherlock's sleeping body, her skin itching with too-close, too-much,
her breath short with disbelief, to curl up tight on the other side of the bed.

Chapter End Notes
        1. Be advised that the second section of this chapter (the long
           sex scene) involves fisting. If you'll be squicked out, you
           might want to give it a pass.
        2. I must admit that all information about the headquarters of the
           women’s division of the Met in 1955 is completely fabricated. I
           was unable to find any specific information about it, so I used
           my imagination. :-)
        3. Diana_Dors was a real movie star, billed as England’s answer to
           Marilyn Monroe. She really did patronize the Gateways in the
           50s.

***** Chapter 16 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes

June 1, 1955
1:45pm
Cab outside Baker Street, Marylebone
 London, England
‘Tell me you didn’t rip those out of the archive copies at the British
Library,’ Johnnie said, eyeing the newsprint sticking up out of Sherlock’s coat
pocket.
Sherlock took a deep breath and, obnoxiously and as if by rote, said: ‘I didn’t
rip these out of the archive copies at the—,’ so Johnnie whacked the back of
her head, gentle with the flat of her hand. Sherlock smiled a bit. She rubbed
at her scalp. She glanced over at Johnnie, quick and tentative, and Johnnie was
already looking, and Sherlock glanced away with a flushed face. Heart beating
double in her chest.
‘Really,’ she said, to cover the silence. ‘What ought I to have done? It was
necessary to our investigation that Smithy’s memory be jogged. I’d wager Mary
Sophia Allen would have noticed, had I nicked one of her collection.’
‘Smithy’s already seen the portrait of Erins,’ Johnnie pointed out. But she
gestured for Sherlock to hand her the clipped newsprint squares.
Sherlock did, and shrugged, and said ‘Photographs are more precise.’ Her hand
brushed Johnnie’s hand, which jerked back a little, away from the contact. To
pretend she didn’t notice, Sherlock added ‘At least, we can hope they are.’
Johnnie nodded, looking over the clippings.
Sherlock felt it was to her credit that she had, at least, been selective.
There were only four articles. Three were written by Erins, exposés of the
criminal underworld penned in lurid tones between 1936 and 1939. All three
featured a by-line photograph of a sturdy, commanding-looking woman in her
early to middle thirties, with Cohen’s severe eyes and protruding forehead, but
with a squarer jaw line and a larger, less snubbed nose. The overall effect was
even more hawkish than, by all accounts, the living Cohen at the Gateways after
the War.
The fourth article had been a find: a self-promotional piece from 1939 in which
the newspaper filled inches by covering its own honours and awards. There was a
full-length picture of Erins, turned three-quarters to the camera and shaking
hands with a reedy man identified in the caption as “HC Vickery, Chairman of
the London Press Club.” A woman in the background clapped grainily in opera-
gloves and pearls; Vickery himself was wearing a suit; and Erins, the guest of
honour, was in a dark skirt and light-coloured blazer. She looked awkward in
it, her body a collection of blocks and jowls better suited to coveralls or
labouring clothes, as she leaned forward to grimace into Vickery’s face. The
headline read, CHRONICLE REPORTER ERINS SNARES PRESTIGIOUS JOURNALISM PRIZE.
‘I’m not saying she deserved what she got,’ Johnnie mumbled, reading over this
last clipping, ‘but the quotes in here don’t make me want to jump in bed with
her, that’s for sure.’
Sherlock made a vague noise of assent. Erins seemed to have gone out of her
way, in the quoted snippets, to run down her competition. She’d even claimed
that she would be ‘endeavouring to improve the standards of this journalistic
body,’ which, even to Sherlock, smacked of looking a gift horse in the mouth.
‘But I suppose,’ Johnnie said, coughing awkwardly, ‘there’s no law against
being a git.’
‘No,’ Sherlock agreed. ‘And whether or not Ellen Erins was, as you say, “a
git,” is largely irrelevant. What is relevant are, I think, two sets of
questions. First, we know, in broad strokes, what Ellen Erins was doing before
1940, and what Sylvia Cohen was doing after 1953. But who was this woman during
the War? And why, when she got back, did she need not just a different name but
a different face?’
Sherlock looked out the window of the cab as it turned into Hyde Park Corner.
Beside her, Johnnie shuffled the clippings; shuffled her feet. Sherlock chewed
the fingers of her gloves, thinking about the War.
‘Was she doing reportage during the War?’ she said, thinking out loud. ‘If so,
she must have been doing it under another name; and why would she? Not six
months after winning this so-called “prestigious journalism prize,” I could
find neither hide nor hair of anything she’d written. She would hardly have
switched papers after being so lauded. So: what was she up to?’
‘Law enforcement?’ said Johnnie. Sherlock shook her head.
‘Why wouldn’t she have put it on her CV when she applied to the Met?’ she
asked. ‘A woman like Erins, or Cohen, hardly seems likely to keep quiet about
her own accomplishments. More like the type to sing her own praises to the
rafters. That’s certainly what she did in that Press Club interview. Yet nobody
at her current position had any idea what she was doing during the War. No, it
was something…something else.’
‘Mmm,’ Johnnie agreed, distracted. Chewing on the inside of her mouth in that
way she had when her mind was far away.
Johnnie’s hand reached down to fidget with a tear in the upholstery of the cab
seat. It brushed Sherlock’s skin where her hand curled around the side of her
knee, and then it withdrew, a little too quickly. Sherlock felt a momentary
flare of heat, and frustration. The membrane preserving her focus was so
tender, today; unfamiliarly paper-thin. She kept thinking of the way Johnnie’s
voice had shaken when she’d said Will you do it to me? and Most of the femmes
I’ve been with didn’t like—, and when the thought occurred it got mixed up,
somehow, with a gold lamé dress and the careful six inches of distance Johnnie
had preserved between them all morning, but all that was—later, she thought. To
be put away for later.
‘What’s the other question?’ Johnnie asked. Sherlock started.
‘Hm?’ she said, digging her fingertips into the muscle at her shoulder.
‘The other question,’ Johnnie repeated.
‘Ah, yes, the, er. The other question. Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’
Johnnie rolled her eyes. Sherlock cleared her throat, and said, ‘It’s the other
half of the problem. The timing of the alibis for the other suspects present at
the Gateways is too tidy to be a coincidence; someone was setting Smithy up.
Presuming Cohen wasn’t selected randomly as the victim, there must be some link
between the two of them. Some reason the murderer would want to take them both
down at once.’
‘Hm,’ said Johnnie, very dry. ‘I wonder who might want to do that.’
Sherlock ignored her for three blocks. Eventually Johnnie sighed, resigned.
‘So you’re hoping when Smithy sees these—,’ Johnnie said. Sherlock nodded.
‘At present,’ she said, putting them back in her pocket, ‘they’re the best
we’ve got.’
***

June 1, 1955
2:05pm
The Gateways Club, 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
 London, England
‘What do you know about Ellen Erins?’ Sherlock asked. She and Johnnie were
tucked into one side of the far booth next to the bar, finally touching all
along their sides, though Johnnie was tense. Smithy, slouching on the other
side, raised her eyebrows.
‘I—remember the name a little,’ she said. ‘But nothing very specific. Why, who
was she?’
Sherlock passed the clippings over the tabletop, and Smithy looked from one to
the next with an unhurried concentration.
‘Yeah,’ she said at least, ‘right. That—reporter, was she, who…damn, it was all
so long ago now.’
‘How long ago?’ Sherlock said.
Smithy scrubbed at her face, hard. ‘Sorry,’ she groaned through her fingers.
‘God, I can’t remember. Haven’t been sleeping for shit.’
‘Do you have any sort of—of vague associations?’ Johnnie asked, sitting
forward, distracted, some of the tension going out of her. ‘Ana—I mean a, er,
friend—taught me this trick of just—thinking a name, and then saying the first
few things that came to mind, without trying to think why I was linking them.
Sometimes I could think back from there.’
Smithy looked dubious, but she shrugged. She closed her eyes, and took a few
deep breaths, and then opened them again and stared down at the clippings, at
the photos heading them, and at the name Ellen Erins. Then she closed her eyes
again, and said in a rush, ‘The War. Liverpool, I think in the spring?
Leningrad, definitely in the winter. Coldest fucking place I’ve ever been.
Nadya Ivanova.’
‘Nadya…’ Sherlock said.
Smithy screwed up her mouth.’ That part probably doesn’t mean much,’ she said.
‘I usually think of Nadya, when I think of the War.’
Johnnie smirked, slid her eyes toward Sherlock, then back to Smithy. ‘You met
her on a flying mission, right?’ she said.
Smithy nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said, looking like she was fighting the slow grin
spreading over her face, and then: ‘Yeah, it was—I was on a recon mission
outside Potsdam, and she was just. Well. It doesn’t matter.’
‘No,’ Sherlock said. ‘No, go on.’
Smithy made a frustrated motion with her hand. Sherlock said: ‘It may elucidate
the connections with the other items on your list.’
‘I guess,’ Smithy said, looking doubtful. She didn’t go on until Sherlock
gestured impatiently across the table.
‘Well,’ she said, at last, ‘I was supposed to stay in the air and just bring
back what intel I could, but the visibility wasn’t for shit. I couldn’t fly all
that way and come back with nothing useful, so I’d landed in a field, a half
mile or so from this supply depot I was supposed to be observing. You sure this
is relevant?’
‘Go on,’ said Sherlock, ‘go on,’ so Smithy went on.
‘I landed in the afternoon, so I figured I could sneak around, watch the
comings and goings, and get back to my plane before dark. I found a hiding
place up on a bluff; I could see plenty, and they weren’t going to spot me.
Problem was, the Germans started doing drills. Right in the field between me
and my plane. So I was stuck there until they cleared out, which turned out to
be just about twilight. And then,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette and
leaning forward, ‘they brought out the flak guns.’
‘Flak guns,’ repeated Johnnie, sounding surprised.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Smithy. ‘This depot was camouflaged. I was there
to confirm for the States and England that it really existed, so it was a
little surprising that they’d already be hauling out flak guns. And
searchlights, too. They brought them out after the guns. I had my binoculars,
and and my rain gear, and this was in June, so it was pretty warm. So I figured
I would just stay put and see what happened.
‘So I did,’ she went on. ‘It got dark, and I huddled down in my rain stuff,
with my binoculars. It was so quiet. Surprisingly quiet, with how many people
I’d just seen doing drills in the field. And then, around one in the morning,
there was this faint noise of planes.’
‘Russians, I take it,’ Sherlock said. Smithy nodded.
‘Yeah, and I figured as much as soon as I heard them. But by the time I did,
they were already practically on top of me. Their planes were tiny. I mean. I
found out later, just a hundred horsepower, those things, to get all the way
from Moscow. They were so small, and flying so low, I could hear each of their
engines separately. Two of them, and like I said, right on top of me by the
time I realised they were there. They flew so close I thought they were gonna
graze my head.’
‘But the spotlights—,’ Johnnie started, and Smithy grinned, and held up her
hand.
‘Yeah, I know. But listen, these tiny planes, the spotlights track on them
right away, of course, and the gunners swing the guns around. But as soon as
the spotlights start tracking on these two planes, they split off in opposite
directions, right? And start dipping, and manoeuvring from side to side, just
crazy. I mean, they were slow, but they were so light, and they could get right
next to the ground, where they were next to impossible to see in the dark. I
tell you, my knuckles on the binoculars! I was holding my breath the whole
time.’
‘It was a diversion,’ Sherlock breathed, not sure until a moment later that
she’d spoken the words aloud.
‘Yeah,’ Smithy said, her eyebrows raised, impressed. ‘Yeah, it sure was,’ she
said. ‘Those two planes out front got the attention of the searchlights.
Dragged them off to the left and the right. But there was a third plane behind
them, and I almost sat up right into the propeller, it was that quiet. The
pilot had cut his engine, and he just glided through the darkness between the
spotlights, as they were pointed away. And he dropped his bombs, and turned
around even before I’d worked out for sure what was happening.’
‘So the pilot got away?’ Johnnie asked.
Smithy grinned, eyes shining. Her manner was the easiest Sherlock had seen it
since before the murder. A born storyteller, Sherlock thought.
‘You can believe,’ Smithy said, ‘that I lost track of the plane when the bombs
hit. I ducked back behind my shelter, and protected my head, and felt the top
of the heat blast hit the cliff and roll over the top of my head. But I’d shut
my eyes as soon as I realised what the pilot was trying to do, you know? So
once I could feel the cool air again, I sat up and looked around, with the
binoculars, for that plane. I knew it’d manoeuvre out of a direct path with the
blast, and eventually I spotted it over to one side, turning back to face the
cliff.
‘Course, the gunners had the same thought I did. I don’t think I breathed for
five minutes straight, but I could still see where it might go, and I was up
and running back toward my plane. If one of those guns nicked that little tiny
plane, the pilot would either be dead on contact, or shortly after, or, best-
case scenario, would have to crash-land. And he was headed straight for the
field where I’d landed a few hours earlier. And that’s—'
’No!’ Johnnie said. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah,’ said Smithy. ‘Believe it or not, it went down just like that. They
clipped the little plane’s wing, and the pilot had to put down in the field.
Amazingly smooth about it, considering. Anyway, by that time I had my own
engine primed. I knew the Germans would be sending troops up the bluff as soon
as they could, to see if the pilot had escaped alive, and so I ran up to the
plane as soon as it stopped moving, pointing at mine, and pulling at the
pilot’s furs and leather jacket, and um.’
She laughed, shaking her head.
‘I may have lost a minute,’ she said, ‘when I saw the pilot I was trying to
save wasn’t a man at all. She was the most beautiful Russian woman I’ve ever
laid eyes on. Even in the dark, in just the light from the burning supply
depot, she was—well. That was Nadya. I got her out of her plane, and she
started my prop, and we took off toward Ramsgate before the first German
cleared the top of the bluff.’
Johnnie sat back in the booth, letting out a breath. Sherlock realised, mildly
surprised, that she was sitting on the edge of her seat. She scooted back just
as Johnnie started talking.
‘Whew,’ Johnnie said, appreciative. ‘With a how-you-met story like that, you
two should’ve set up house together after the War.’
Smithy’s smile faltered. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Well. You know how it goes with
wartime romances.’
There was a silence. Then Johnnie said, uncommonly quiet, ‘I do,’ and for a
moment Sherlock’s heart beat wrong, like it had skittered over to one side.
Smithy and Sherlock both stared at Johnnie, and Johnnie stared at the table.
At last Sherlock wrenched her eyes away. ’You kept in contact with this—Nadya
Ivanova through the end of the War, at least?’ she asked. ‘Were you together at
any point, in the winter in Leningrad?’
‘Um,’ said Smithy, thinking back. ‘We were, yeah. Right, we were. I was with
Nadya in Leningrad for a few days in, um. Had to have been January of ’45.’
She nodded a few times, quick but far-away. Sherlock passed her a cigarette,
and she lit up, and leaned back in her booth.
‘Right,’ Smithy said. ‘So, the Siege was over. Obviously. Though there was one
time in ’43 when I—but anyway, this was after the Germans were routed from
Leningrad. But the city was still practically a ghost-town. Felt like half the
population was dead, starved to death, and all the buildings all bombed-out or
rotting away.
‘And fucking hell, it was cold. Growing up in Alabama, it’s cold if it gets
down to forty degrees. I thought I’d toughened up since then, but I’d never
felt anything like that. All I wanted to do was huddle next to Nadya under her
down comforters and—.’
She smiled, and cleared her throat, and shook her head. Sherlock’s face heated,
a little.
‘Yeah,’ Smithy went on. ‘Well, um. I guess you should know, I’d flown a courier
mission into Leningrad, dropped off this package with my contact and was
supposed to wait there for an answer. I’d thought it would be too much to hope
that Nadya would be in Leningrad at the same time. The 588th was almost always
flying missions. But it was like a—like a Christmas miracle, a month late. We
had four days together, in this tiny, cold-water flat. The fucking window was
broken, Jesus it was cold.’
But a brilliant wide grin spread across Smithy’s face, like the ones Sherlock
had noticed her first night at the Gateways. A scene unfolded, palpably, behind
Smithy’s eyes: one Sherlock couldn’t see but which she could almost deduce. The
grimy city, post-siege, the bitter cold; trudging through the snow-packed
streets to knock hard on the carved wood of a city door; the delighted
intermingling of frosty breath in the January air as Nadya opened the door to
her unexpected lover. And presumably, thought Sherlock, visions of everything
after.
‘She was a crackerjack, that Nadya,’ Smithy said, far-away and fond.
Sherlock cleared her throat.
‘Yeah,’ Smithy said, ‘right. So. So, we were just—huddled in bed, really,
between the freezing cold and not having seen each other in months, we really
weren’t too tempted to leave, if you follow me.’
Johnnie snorted; even Sherlock smiled.
‘But you did leave?’ Sherlock prodded. ‘Eventually?’
Smithy thought for a minute. ‘I guess I did,’ she said. ‘Right, I—well. There
still wasn’t all that much food, in the city. But there was this delicious
sausage, you know? Sold from this cart down the street. And we’d—,’ her smile
was small, private. ‘We’d brewed up some of her special black tea, that she
saved for holidays. And we wrapped up in her blankets together drinking this
tea and eating this sausage, and looking out over the city together through her
broken window. And I ate at least half of it, without realising she didn’t have
any more, and it was—right, it was still rationed. Yeah, I’m remembering now.’
‘So you went out to get more,’ Sherlock said.
‘Yeah,’ said Smithy. ‘She told me there was no point, that she didn’t have
another ration coupon until after I left. But I was, you know. Young, and
cocky, and I felt bad for eating all Nadya’s food. And I thought I could
convince this guy, being a brave American pilot and all that. And so I bundled
up, and kissed her, and she gave me directions to his place.
‘It wasn’t far, but I remember the neighbourhood really changed, on the way
there. Got fancy, you know, all of a sudden, or as fancy as you could find, in
Leningrad in 1945. I think Nadya lived on the outer edge of the diplomatic
area. I was walking as fast as I could, to warm up, and—,’ and Smithy stopped
dead, staring ahead of her.
‘What is it?’ Sherlock asked.
Smithy drew the clippings to her, slowly, over the top of the table, staring at
each in turn. She didn’t answer.
‘Smithy?’ Johnnie said, leaning forward to look in Smithy’s face.
‘I saw her,’ Smithy said, vacantly, still gazing at the clippings. ‘And I—I
remember why I thought—Liverpool.’
‘Well?’ Sherlock said, sitting forward again in her seat. ‘What was it? Why did
you think of Liverpool?’
‘Because I saw her,’ Smithy said, poking at the full-body picture of Erins. ‘I
saw this one. She was walking down the street just ahead of me, with a big old
duffel bag slung over one shoulder. And there was a minute where she turned to
look at an address number, and. And I recognised her.'
‘From where?’ Johnnie asked.
‘From two years before,’ Smithy said. She sounded now like she was drifting,
afraid the memories would take flight if she focused too hard.
‘I was on leave,’ she said, ‘in Liverpool, in, let’s see. May of 1943. The
thing was, see, my leaves were…not exactly paid. They weren’t so much
vacations, as, uh, periods when I didn't have a job.’ She chuckled, darkly. ‘So
anyway, I was washed up in Liverpool, waiting for news about whether I should
fly back to New York, or whether there was something for me to do on the
Continent. But I was, um.’ She laughed again. ‘Stone fucking broke, to tell you
the truth.’
Johnnie picked up her water glass, and made a motion like toasting Smithy’s
health. Smithy returned the gesture.
‘So I had no idea how long I would be in Liverpool,’ Smithy went on. ‘And I was
trying to find things to do cheap, you know? So every morning I would go to
this tea shop, where they got all the papers delivered. And I would order a cup
of coffee and a bun, and I’d sit there all morning, reading through every
single paper. Every day.
‘God, it was dull,’ she said. ‘And nerve-wracking. For a person used to flying
missions, rather than sitting by herself and reading about what everybody else
was doing. But I remembered,’ and she poked at the clipping again with her
finger, ‘all those years later, I remembered a story about this woman, about
how she’d been some kind of hot-shot English reporter, and how it’d come out
that she’d defected; she was working for the Germans.’
‘But she was—she was Jewish, wasn’t she?’ said Johnnie.
‘Erins?’ Smithy said, holding up the paper. ‘Name doesn’t look Jewish. Was
she?’
‘Do you really not realise—,’ Johnnie started, but Sherlock put a hand on her
arm, and she stopped. Smithy looked from the clipping, up at them, and back
toward the clipping. She looked at it hard.
‘This is—,’ she said, ‘Ellen Erins is Sylvia Cohen?’
‘We believe so,’ Sherlock said, and Smithy whistled, long and high. She stared
down, a bit more, at the clippings.
‘That makes, just. You know that makes no sense at all, right?’ Smithy said, at
last. Johnnie chuckled.
‘We’re missing information,’ Sherlock said.
‘There’s a fucking understatement,’ said Smithy.
‘Look, it only seems nonsensical because we haven’t all the facts,’ Sherlock
insisted, a little shortly. ‘The seeming contradictions here will either
resolve themselves as we learn more to explain them, or remain contradictions
and by their very existence illuminate the nature of our problem. So please,
tell us: Erins was working for the Germans. Doing what?’
‘No idea,’ Smithy said, slowly, working past Sherlock’s fit of temper. ‘But I
read about her in about four different papers, that day. All of ‘em ran
different pictures, but in all of them it struck me that she looked like—like
family, if you know what I mean.’
‘A friend of Dorothy,’ Johnnie chipped in, with a smirk.
Sherlock nodded. 'Stocky, mannish, brash, with short hair, and a few of the
articles may have even mentioned that she used to drink here. Oh yes,’ she
said, seeing Smithy’s look of surprise. ‘Ellen Erins was a regular here, before
the War. But go on. She struck you as one of your own.’
‘Right,’ Smithy said. ‘Which was—that much more revolting, you know? I think
that’s why I remembered it, two years later. We hadn’t heard—,’ she cleared her
throat. ‘We hadn’t heard details yet, of what they were doing at the camps. But
people like us—it was pretty common knowledge, among travellers especially,
what happened to life for people like us in Berlin after ’33. So why the hell
would—,’ she gestured to the clippings, shaking her head.
‘A question that still bears asking,’ Sherlock mused. ‘If nothing else, Ellen
Erins was hardly averse to bearding the lion’s den.’
‘Yeah, but why?’ said Johnnie. ‘Why would she want to? Some kind of, I don’t
know, thumbing her nose at them? Proving she could work for the Fascists when
they were putting people like her to death? It’s a bolloxed-up way to go about
spiting someone.’
Smithy raised her glass again.
‘There’s that,’ Sherlock said, slowly, toying with the clippings on the table.
‘But also—Germany wasn’t the only lion’s den she ventured into. If she were
working for the Fascists, it would be just as dangerous for her to show her
face in newly-liberated Leningrad, surely.’
‘Exactly!’ Smithy said, waving her glass in Sherlock’s direction, as Johnnie
sat back and whistled, low. ‘I mean, that’s what really got my attention. She
turned, that day in Leningrad, and I recognised her. And I—I didn’t remember
her name, or anything, but I remembered those newspaper stories and I was
just—I thought it couldn’t possibly be the same person. I mean, why would she
be there? Of all places?’
‘Why, indeed,’ said Sherlock.
‘So I followed her,’ Smithy said. ‘I couldn’t believe I was doing it, I still
just wanted to get this damned sausage and be back in bed with Nadya. But I
followed behind this woman, away from the baker’s shop and down an even
fancier-looking street. Like I said, she had this big duffel over one shoulder,
but she still went pretty fast. You had to, you know? Or you’d freeze. She
turned one more time, and then she knocked on the door of this high-toned
looking building, and the door opened and she went in. And then I was—'
‘Cold,’ supplied Johnnie. Smithy and Sherlock both laughed.
‘Hell, yes I was,’ Smithy said. ‘And I knew Nadya would be wondering about me
if I didn’t turn around soon, and maybe be mad at me if I didn’t get the
sausage like I’d said I was going to do. But if I didn’t wait long enough to
see what happened, then what was the point of following this woman all the way
from Tashkentskaya Street?’
‘So you stayed and waited,’ said Sherlock.
‘Yeah,’ Smithy said. ‘And it wasn’t easy, believe me, staying back in the
shadows and trying to jump up and down at the same time, keeping warm. I
thought about whether I should run and get the sausage, but then what if she
came out in the meantime? Or what if she didn’t come out for hours, and the
thing would be frozen solid by the time I got back to Nadya? And then I really
just—what was I doing, anyway? I was giving up maybe hoursof time with Nadya,
to watch this house? It was completely—,’ she laughed, shaking her head. ‘I
felt like an idiot. Some spy I was. I felt even stupider ten minutes later,
when she came back out.’
‘She was only in the building for ten minutes?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Around that,’ said Smithy. ‘And after she came out, she just wandered back the
direction she’d come. Much slower now, smoking, seeming—thoughtful, maybe, I
don’t know. And she walked to the train station, and caught the very next train
out. Which—I can’t believe she had a burning need to go to Riga, of all places.
My money’s on her just taking the first train that came along. I watched her
go, and then I turned around, ran to the sausage cart, and was back with Nadya
in half an hour.’
‘So that was it?’ Johnnie said, sounding incredulous. ‘She visited this
building for ten minutes, then left town?’
‘There was one more thing,’ said Smithy. She sat back in the booth, looking
from Johnnie to Sherlock and back. ‘When she came back out of the building,
after? That big duffel she’d been carrying: it was gone.’
They all sat in silence for a minute, absorbing this. Smithy took out another
cigarette, and lit it.
‘And you don’t—,’ Sherlock started. She frowned. ‘You don’t know what was in
the bag. Obviously. What was the building? You said it was in a diplomatic
neighbourhood; was it an embassy?’
Smithy toyed with the ashtray.
‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘it wasn’t an embassy. But Nadya said later—I told her
this whole story, later that night—she said that she thought my description
sounded like where one of the higher-ups at the British Embassy actually lived.
You know, their private home. I never, um. Never confirmed that, though.’
Sherlock nodded, staring ahead of her at the table and the clippings and
Johnnie’s hands. She could feel Johnnie’s eyes on the side of her face.
‘Jews in the German army, and Nazis in the home of the British ambassador,’ she
muttered. ‘Reporters at the Met, and coppers in the city’s dens of iniquity.
Curiouser and curiouser.’
‘But was she actually—?’ said Johnnie, at the same moment Smithy put up a hand
and said, ‘Dens of iniquity, I don’t know about that.’ Johnnie laughed.
‘To be fair,’ Johnnie said, smirking, ‘it did get a lot more iniquitous around
here when Sylvia Cohen was starting fights left and right.’ Smithy snickered.
Sherlock stared in front of her, half-listening. ‘But was she actually…?’ she
said, thoughtful, repeating Johnnie’s words.
She unfocused her eyes. Images swam before them: newsprint phrases, and
imagined scenes narrated in Smithy’s deep American drawl.
‘Was she actually,’ she said again, nodding to herself. ‘Was she actually
starting fights? Or was there some other motivation? Was she actually a Jew? If
so, why the pre-War Irish alias and the undercover work for Germany? But then,
was she actually working for the Germans? If so, why travel to Leningrad in
1945, and visit, of all people, the British ambassador? Was she actually
friends with Mary Sophia Allen? Was she ever, really, a copper? It seems
there’s very little we truly know about Sylvia Cohen.’
There was a silence, before Johnnie licked her lips. ‘She was—she definitely
was a reporter,’ she said.
‘Exactly!’ said Sherlock. She slapped the table with the flats of her hands so
that the silverware rattled. Smithy looked marginally offended, but mostly just
confused.
‘A reporter?’ she asked.
‘She was definitely a reporter,’ Sherlock confirmed. ‘A prize-winning reporter.
The first female crime reporter on the Chronicle, and one of the first in
England. And she seems to have continued on as a reporter, even when she had
ostensibly joined law enforcement.’
‘And….?’ Smithy said, but Johnnie was already groaning. The sound made Sherlock
grin.
‘And reporters leave records,’ Sherlock announced, with great satisfaction.
Johnnie’s groaning increased. ‘You just came from there,’ she said.
‘Which makes a set of fresh eyes that much more valuable, doesn’t it?’ Sherlock
said, and when Johnnie still made no move to shift her position: ‘Don’t be that
way; we’re lucky. If Erins were England’s first female long-distance sprinter,
we wouldn’t have any archives to go through.’
‘There’d be a tragedy,’ Johnnie muttered, but she was rummaging around on the
bench beside her, getting her leather jacket together. Sherlock beamed, and
swung herself out of the seat.
‘Not to worry,’ she told Smithy, who now looked utterly perplexed.
Sherlock could feel her mind shifting, moving toward the newspaper archives and
how she would—she would give Johnnie the editions of the most incendiary
papers, she was thinking to herself; Johnnie was less likely than Sherlock to
catch a subtle clue. But amidst these thoughts her mouth was still moving,
using a corner of her brain to reassure Smithy.
‘Yes, you’ve been a great help,’ she heard herself say, moving toward the door.
‘Having seen Erins, or—Cohen, in Leningrad all those years ago when she was a
known German collaborator, certainly points to a further avenue of
investigation. You’ve been inva—,’ and then she stopped, halfway across the
Gateways’s empty dance floor.
Before her eyes swam, not chairs flipped neatly on tops of tables, but tables
upset, stuffing ripped out of upholstery. Gina Ware, standing up to six grown
men on a night when Smithy had been off at a—.
‘Oh of course,’ Sherlock breathed, eyes wide, turning on her heel.
‘Who did you tell?’ she demanded, crossing back to the seat where Smithy was
still only half-standing. She fell back on the bench.
‘What?’ Smithy said. ‘Who did I tell what?’
‘This story,’ Sherlock said. ‘It’s not the first time you’ve relived that
particular Leningrad holiday in the last few months, am I right? You told it to
somebody at that dinner, didn’t you?’
‘Dinner?’ Smithy said, plainly not tracking. ‘When?’
Sherlock very nearly stamped her foot. ‘When you drank too much,’ she said,
‘and got your picture taken despite your—your lack of a pension, and secrets
were discussed that nobody in the government would want bandied about.’
‘The press dinner?’ said Smithy, and Sherlock made a mock-gracious
acknowledgement with her hands.
Smithy’s eyes went wide. Her jaw dropped. ‘The press dinner,’ she said again,
which Sherlock thought was really slower than necessary. ‘The night the place
got torn apart! You don’t think—you don’t think something I said—.’ She stopped
and rubbed at her face. ‘Dammit, that night cost Ted and Gina more than a
grand.’
‘Oh for—,’ Sherlock started, impatient, but stopped speaking when she saw the
warning look on Johnnie’s face. This was a time for sensitivity, apparently.
She took a deep breath. ‘I’m honestly not sure whether there could have been
any connection between the two events,’ she said. ‘If local toughs had been
watching the bar for some time, waiting for you to take the night off, it could
have been contingent merely on your absence, rather than on your specific
behaviour once you were gone.
‘However,’ she added, managing not to grind her teeth in impatience, ‘you did
speak with someone about this story that night, didn’t you? Who was it?’
Smithy closed her eyes, rubbed some more at her face. ‘I drank—kind of a lot,’
she mumbled.
Johnnie said ‘Anything you can remember, anything at all.’ Smithy groaned.
‘I—yeah, I think I talked about that weekend in Leningrad,’ she said, ‘but just
with people who already knew me, or Nadya, or both of us together. Jesus, I
don’t remember. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a locked interrogation room, you
know? Little round tables all around a busy ballroom, people coming and going
with drinks, politicians shaking hands, photographers snapping pictures.’
‘Because the press was there,’ Sherlock said, nodding.
‘Well—yeah,’ said Smithy. ‘That was…pretty much the point of the whole
evening.’
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock. ‘Yes, I can see that.’ A silence, and then she nodded,
brusque and final, and leaned over to shake Smithy’s bewildered hand.
‘Good then,’ she said. ‘Thank you again. We’ll be in touch.’
And dragging after her a newly-groaning Johnnie, she headed for the stairs back
up to King’s Road, a cab, and the British Library.
***
June 1, 1955
8:45pm
221B Baker Street, Marylebone
 London, England
But by the time they’d spent another forty-five minutes corralled in the
entranceway reassuring an anxious Gina, and made their way across town in the
lengthening afternoon shadows, the Library had only been open for another hour
and a half.
Sherlock had set her jaw when she realised; she could have sworn Johnnie looked
almost gleeful.
The glee was short-lived, however. It had gone entirely a minute later, when
Sherlock dumped a pile of ten-year-old Guardian editions on the table with a
satisfied thwack. Johnnie had rubbed her eyes, and Sherlock had sat across from
her and opened a copy of the Observer, and had settled in for an hour of
silence just as Johnnie said ‘Well, I reckon that’s why next to nobody
remembers Erins’s name, anyway.’
Sherlock looked up from her paper. ‘What’s why?’
Johnnie had arranged her hands on the front of the paper, then turned it around
to face Sherlock. One hand pointed to the headline VICTORY IN NORTH AFRICA:
AXIS POWERS DEFEATED. The other fingers were curled around the top to point to
the date: May 12, 1943.
‘Would have been something like the day after the scandal broke over Erins’s
betrayal,’ Johnnie said. ‘I’d wondered, a bit, why it didn’t make more of a
stir.’ And she’d grinned, wide and open, and Sherlock had beamed at her.
After that, though, nothing more had surfaced. The papers all reported
gleefully on Erins’s defection, but the reports were all based on the same two
photos and one stolen telegram, and none of them offered any specifics of the
woman’s wartime activities. It had occurred to Sherlock briefly, when the clark
came by and whispered about ten minutes to close, that they might hide out in
the washrooms until the clean-up crew had passed, and then sneak out to
continue their researches. But one look at Johnnie had put paid to the idea.
Johnnie wouldn’t stand for it, and Sherlock found she didn’t much want to,
anyway.
So she’d let herself be manhandled back outside by Johnnie and the librarian.
Then Johnnie had been so enthusiastic about stopping for soup at Mr. Finnegan’s
corner café, that Sherlock hadn’t found it in herself to complain. There was an
appeal, she’d thought, sipping her coffee by the twilit window, in watching the
soup-steam curl around Johnnie’s lowered face. Johnnie’s eyelids had fluttered
shut as her mouth closed around the first spoonful; she’d hummed in her throat
with pleasure, and Sherlock’s stomach had clenched.
And now, an hour, perhaps, after they’d left the café, Johnnie was making that
sound again, head tipped back on the sofa back so Sherlock could feel with her
lips the vibrations of Johnnie’s throat. She was making that noise, and then
she was making one similar, and then the foundation of contentment slipped from
her voice and was replaced by need. It made Sherlock feel greedy, and brave.
‘Tell me,’ she said, knees straddling Johnnie’s lap on the Baker Street sofa,
mouth at her ear.
‘Tell you—ung,’ Johnnie said, and bared her neck for Sherlock’s exploring
tongue, ‘tell you what?’
‘You must have thought about it,’ Sherlock said. She nipped Johnnie’s ear, and
said, ‘You were holding back on asking me; you must have thought about it often
enough, already.’
Johnnie stiffened under her, breath halting for a count of seconds.
‘Tell me how,’ Sherlock said again, into Johnnie’s neck. ‘What did you think
about? What did you think about, when you thought about…me, doing it to you?’
‘I,’ said Johnnie, and licked her lips, and shook her head. ‘We don’t have to,
Sherlock, I shouldn’t have—’
‘Please,’ Sherlock said. ‘I wantto.’
‘Oh,’ Johnnie said. Her head fell back again on the couch back. ‘God.’
‘I do, I want to,’ said Sherlock, ‘I—very much want to—,’
‘Jesus,’ Johnnie said.
‘—but I’m not—‘
Fear, uncertainty in waves. But she bit them down, thinking about Diana Dors in
her gold suspenders, and Margrit O’Brien with her Kensington flat, and
mysterious Ana Vilaseca from the War, all three of whom had apparently,
unbelievably, not wanted to, at all. ‘I want to,’ she said again, hiding her
face in the couch cushions just above Johnnie’s shoulder, ‘but I don’t know
how.’
Johnnie was still worryingly stiff underneath her. When Sherlock pulled her
head back, Johnnie’s face was flushed bright red. She wouldn’t meet Sherlock’s
eyes, though Sherlock was bent in half over her lap and very close indeed.
It was wrong, Sherlock thought, that Johnnie Watson should try to avoid
anything.
‘Please,’ Sherlock breathed, into Johnnie’s ear, trying to think through the
wanting. Petting over Johnnie’s shoulders so that they might unbend. ‘Please,
you. You know how I hate not knowing things,’ she said, and her delivery was a
little too quick, a little too breathy, but Johnnie laughed anyway. Her
shoulders relaxed a very little bit, under Sherlock’s fingers. Sherlock felt
herself glow with it.
‘You’re a slave to your scientific curiosity, then?’ said Johnnie, voice still
tight but laughing a little bit, in the back of her throat. She ran her hands
up under Sherlock’s blouse. Blunt, squared-off fingers. Sherlock shivered.
‘You know I can never let a thing go,’ she agreed, tipping back her head. ‘You
may as well tell me now.’
‘Well, I don’t know’ said Johnnie, mock-concerned. ‘I’m not convinced of the,
er, methodology of this study.’ She leaned her head into the exposed vee of
skin at Sherlock’s throat. She inhaled, then bit, quick, at Sherlock’s
collarbone. ‘Your interest is purely impartial?’ she added, and tongued at the
place where she’d bitten.
‘Oh Christ not remotely,’ said Sherlock, ‘Oh, oh.’ Her voice came out notes
deeper than she’d expected.
Johnnie laughed again, and worried at that place on Sherlock’s collarbone
again, and Sherlock felt herself vibrating, unraveling.
She shook her head and said ‘Come on, what did you—did you think about me doing
it like you did to me, with my—my fingers, my hand in you, did you—’
Johnnie was holding her close, hands on Sherlock’s back, head pillowed on
Sherlock’s shoulder, and Sherlock was imagining Johnnie imagining that. She was
having trouble getting enough breath.
‘I have a—thing,’ Johnnie said, after a minute, face hidden in Sherlock’s
shoulder. ‘I—but your hands, your hands are so lovely, I—‘
‘Wait, you have a—a what?’ Sherlock said, genuinely puzzled. She heard her
voice return to level, to skeptical, at the same time Johnnie’s shoulders
tensed back up, anxious beneath the skin.
They were so close; that was the problem. The thin thread of Johnnie’s panic
coiled into Sherlock, up through Johnnie’s shoulders into Sherlock’s hands and
Sherlock’s spine and the space behind Sherlock’s eyes. She had to
erase—erase—fix, but she couldn’t think, so she leaned forward and kissed
Johnnie soft on the mouth, for a break in talking. She made her lips soft, and
pleading, and her mouth wet and open like a little creature’s crying out to be
fed.
She felt it was cheating, but it was the only thing she could think to do. And
kissing Johnnie was always—was always—
Christ, Sherlock thought. To crawl inside and keep her, if she could.
The panic eased back, after minutes. They were so close; she felt it seep away.
Sherlock’s hands in the spikes of Johnnie’s hair, and Johnnie’s hands back
under Sherlock’s blouse, one at her waistband drawing her close and one slipped
up under the strap of her bra, and Johnnie was kissing her now, sloppy and
urgent and more, god, more.
And Sherlock could feel how easy it would be. Because she didn’t want to stop.
She wanted to kiss and kiss and have Johnnie make those noises into her mouth,
and let Johnnie’s blunt fingers run all over her, let Johnnie flip her onto her
back on the couch like she was trying to do, let Johnnie put her mouth all over
Sherlock’s skin. She wanted to just let it happen, delicious as it would be.
But she thought of Diana Dors and Ana Vilaseca, and wanted, even more, to
happen to Johnnie, as much as Johnnie was happening to her.
‘Show me,’ she said, breaking away from Johnnie’s mouth, gasping. ‘Please,
I—show me and I will. I want to, I want—.’ She didn’t know another way to say
it.
But it seemed as though Johnnie could feel it, anyway. She ran gentle touches
down the curve of Sherlock’s spine, though Johnnie herself was still red-faced
and she was biting her mouth.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘All right, it’s all right, Sherlock. It’s all right.’
And she nudged Sherlock’s shoulders so Sherlock stood back on her feet, and
kissed her backwards, gentle, all the way up the stairs, her hand at the small
of Sherlock’s back to guide her, as if Sherlock couldn’t feel behind her with
her foot to keep from tripping on the stairs. Which was—absurd, and so
endearing that Sherlock hurt in her bones.
‘All right,’ Johnnie was still saying, as the backs of Sherlock’s knees hit the
mattress. ‘It’s all right,’ as she gentled her back on her back, scooting her
up the bed, stretching out over her, propped up on her hands with one of
Sherlock’s legs between hers.
‘Show me,’ Sherlock said to her. Deep breaths. ‘Show me, I want to be in—inside
you, show me how,’ and Johnnie bit down a moan and her eyes slid shut, her
forehead falling forward onto Sherlock’s shoulder.
It was heady, Sherlock thought, doing that with just her voice.
So she swallowed, and levered herself up on one elbow to work at the buttons of
Johnnie’s shirt. She said ‘Were you—were you thinking about it the whole time
you were f—fucking me?’
Johnnie’s hips hitched forward against Sherlock’s leg and she breathed out
‘Yeah.’
‘You were—were thinking about me putting my fingers inside you, and—,’
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie, ‘yes,’ and then bit her lip and tugged at Sherlock’s
blouse until it came off over her head.
There was starting to be a mark on her collarbone from where Johnnie had sucked
and bitten. Johnnie made a noise when she saw it, and kissed Sherlock hard,
first on the bruise, and then on the mouth, before diving off the bed and onto
the floor. There was a muddle of limbs and movement.
Sherlock sat up, confused. Then Johnnie was back on the bed with both her hands
full of—. Of something Sherlock couldn’t make out.
She peered around to look, but Johnnie got her knees on either side of
Sherlock’s hips, and wrapped her arms around her with her hands behind
Sherlock’s back, and didn’t let her see. Johnnie’s face was flushed. Her hair
stuck up all over her head. She was straddling Sherlock’s lap and refusing to
meet her eyes.
But she brushed her licked-dry lips over Sherlock’s. Sherlock tried to lean
forward into the kiss, but Johnnie moved back just slightly, just out of reach.
She sat back again and Johnnie’s mouth returned, teasing her, touching feather-
light at her cheekbone and the tip of her nose and the fullness of her lower
lip. Sherlock closed her eyes and forgot about anything but warm and light and
maddeningand then she whimpered and felt Johnnie smile.
‘Yeah,’ Johnnie whispered. ‘Yeah, I thought about your,’ she swallowed,
kneeling up over Sherlock’s lap with her hands on her trouser zip, ‘I thought
about your gorgeous hands in me, all right?’
Sherlock tried to scoot closer, to bend enough to get her mouth on the skin of
Johnnie’s chest or her belly. But Johnnie smiled again, and moved off her lap
and over to the side, to suckle at Sherlock’s neck as she tugged, clumsy, at
the waistband of her capris. Sherlock angled her hips to help, leveraged up on
her hands. She kicked capris and knickers to the floor. Johnnie knelt back and
looked down at her pale thighs and her hips; sucked in a breath.
‘Oh,’ Johnnie said, staring. ‘Oh, god.’
Johnnie only closed her eyes for the second when her shirt came off over her
head. She left her trousers on. She moved forward again, knees on either side
of Sherlock’s hips where Sherlock was sitting back up. Sherlock let her own
hands run greedy, one around Johnnie’s waist and the other hard up the inseam
of her trousers. Johnnie’s moan was shocked, and sudden.
‘You think they’re gorgeous?’ Sherlock asked, digging her fingers in. One hand
full of Johnnie’s arse and the other of Johnnie’s inner thigh. Johnnie’s breath
caught.
‘God, almost more than I can—,’ said Johnnie, but her voice bit off when
Sherlock’s hands clenched again, without her even deciding they should.
Johnnie let her breath out, slow and shaky, with her head tipped back. Then she
unfolded her legs and wrapped them around Sherlock’s hips. Sherlock tilted her
chin up and let Johnnie kiss and kiss at her mouth.
She still held Johnnie’s waist in her hands. She felt—a little frightened.
Impossibly fond.
Arms down around Sherlock’s waist, now, and Johnnie’s hands were fumbling with
something at Sherlock's back. Sherlock didn’t try to look. She felt Johnnie’s
muscles tense again, but this time quivering, thrumming, not like earlier on
the sofa but more like just before she—.
Johnnie was saying ‘That time at the. At the hotel, in Chelsea. You put up your
hand to—to pull back the curtains and I couldn’t think.’
Sherlock couldn’t think now. It was difficult just breathing and sitting up at
the same time.
‘You were telling me about,’ she said. ‘About moving the cabin, yes?’
‘Jesus,’ Johnnie said, and kissed her. Sherlock’s mouth felt raw and open,
hungry. ‘Did I?’ said Johnnie. ‘Did my mouth keep—keep making words? I really
couldn’t—god,Sherlock,’ and she ran a hand up Sherlock’s spine to the back of
her neck, and let her down gentle onto her back on the pillows.
‘You were—you could oh,’ said Sherlock, squirming against Johnnie, biting at
her lips. ‘Haley said you were strong enough to—to move the cabin around all
night, but you shook a little, when you. Took my wrist, you had to—oh, oh,’
because Johnnie had sucked in a breath again, and made a noise rough in her
throat, and pushed something cold and hard and wet just against Sherlock’s
skin, between her legs.
Which was—unexpected. She felt her eyes go wide, surprised, the cool sensation
slick against her. It was unexpected but it made her restless, too; she wanted
to understand and at the same time to bear down, to rut and take. Johnnie was
braced over her on one arm, looking down with something almost like pleading,
almost like—almost like fear.
‘You had to—think. About the cabin,’ Sherlock stuttered. Johnnie’s eyes closed;
her moan sounded like relief strung tight, so Sherlock—Sherlock kept talking.
‘You must have done it hundreds of nights but you—oh Christ,’ as Johnnie’s
thumb moved against her, above the cool, hard surface, so sensitive, all the
nerves in Sherlock’s body. ‘Christ, oh. Christ. You had to think about it.’
‘I couldn’t,’ Johnnie said, breathless, ‘I couldn’t think, I looked at your
hands on the curtain and I wanted—I wanted you to just shovethose fingers into
me, bloody hard.’
‘Oh,’ said Sherlock, and her hips twitched up into the shaft that was just
barely breaching her, gentle and foreign, mismatched to Johnnie’s rough and
snarling voice. Johnnie’s whole body was taut, tensed along Sherlock’s side
where she was stretched out, still in her trousers. She was trembling with
restraint; a compressed spring. All but in her gentle, patient hands where she
rubbed and rubbed and rubbed at Sherlock. Heartbreaking gentle pushes deeper
into Sherlock’s body. Quivering, and so quiet, so still, and Sherlock
wanted—she wanted motion like Johnnie’s voice, she wanted—
She moved her hips up, restless; and Johnnie growled even as her hand soothed
Sherlock. Careful. Too careful, tracing the flesh where Sherlock was stretched,
wide and hot and wanting.
‘The curtain was—,’ gasped Johnnie, stroking gentle with her thumb, ‘was that
horrible dark turquoise colour, and your fingers were so pale against it, so—so
fucking long, Sherlock, Jesus, I wanted you to—,’
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock, restless on the sheets, ‘yes,’ and she shifted closer
against Johnnie’s side, to feel the spring-coiled tension of her seeping
through Sherlock’s skin. It meant Johnnie’s hand wasn’t reaching as far, and
the thing between her legs nudged further inside, just a little, a very little,
nowhere near enough, and she whined.
Johnnie heard it, and groaned, and said ‘God, oh god.’ She moved up over her,
Sherlock’s right leg between Johnnie’s thighs and Johnnie’s right thigh
nudging, gentle still, at the hard shaft nudging into Sherlock’s body. A little
bit, and a little bit, and Sherlock felt greedy with it, and Johnnie said, ‘You
made a fist in the curtains, and I. I wanted you to split me open, I wanted
your joints and your fingertips and your knuckles just fucking me open, I—.’
‘Oh god, Johnnie, yes,’ she said. ‘I will, Christ.’
Panting into Johnnie’s mouth when Johnnie bent and tried to kiss her. Still
gentle, gentle, the gentleness was driving her mad, and she got Johnnie’s
bottom lip between her lips and tugged, hard. Johnnie snarled, but her thigh
was still soft between Sherlock’s legs. Sherlock shifted, and keened, and then
breathed deep to steady herself, and put her hands on either side of Johnnie’s
hips.
‘I will,’ she said again, staring up into Johnnie’s eyes.
Sherlock thought it shouldn’t be possible, but when she said that Johnnie’s
legs and shoulders tensed even further, and she broke contact with Sherlock’s
eyes.
Sherlock breathed again, and again, and said ‘I’d never felt—never, Johnnie, I
was holding to the curtains so I wouldn’t—so I wouldn’t make a noise when you
touched me, I—oh, god, more, please, more,’ for Johnnie’s hips had twitched
forward and her hand between their bodies had hardened for a moment, digging
into Sherlock’s hungry swollen straining skin. All the nerves in her body felt
concentrated under Johnnie’s rubbing thumb.
And the hard material was warmer, now, inside her. She twisted her head to the
side; the pillows smelled of Johnnie’s hair oil and Johnnie’s scent and
Johnnie’s skin.
She bucked her hips up, but Johnnie drew back slightly, her hand sealing the
base of it against her own thigh so she pulled the thing out a bit instead of
pushing it further in. Sherlock cried out at the feeling of movement against
the inside skin of her.
She fell back, panting. Johnnie looked down at her and panted and said ‘I want
you in me up to the wrist, I want you to—I want it so hard the windows rattle,
I—fuck, fuck,’ and Sherlock wailed, and Johnnie pushed the thing so
incongruously gently back inside Sherlock’s body, but she made a broken noise
and her thumb hardened down on every nerve in Sherlock’s body and Sherlock felt
herself contracting and expanding all at once, arching up under Johnnie’s hands
and her wondering gaze.
And far away, above her, the tension coiled in Johnnie’s arms and her hips and
her thighs was making her shake. Far away she was saying ‘Sherlock, oh, god,
you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful,’ and Sherlock groaned, slamming her hips up
into Johnnie’s thigh, and said, ‘Hard, let me—hard, hard,’ so Johnnie pushed,
finally, hard into Sherlock’s body with her own thighs clenching hard around
Sherlock’s leg, and they shook and shook together.
Johnnie was gentle again, immediately after, pulling the black rubber thing
from Sherlock’s body and soothing her when she sighed, one of Johnnie’s hands
on her shoulder and the other on her hip.
Sherlock was floating. A little woozy. She put her hand up to Johnnie’s neck,
just under her ear, and Johnnie’s heart was still going like mad, and Sherlock
said ‘I will, you know. If you want me to,’ and Johnnie closed her eyes, and
turned her head, and laid a gentle kiss on Sherlock’s palm, the expression on
her face looking strangely unmoored.
Sherlock tried to turn over and kiss Johnnie back, to smooth over the rawness
in her expression. But she was sleepy and sated, and when Johnnie shook her
head, eyes still closed, and spooned up close behind her instead, it didn’t
occur to Sherlock until the next day that it was because Johnnie didn’t want to
meet her eyes.
***
June 2, 1955
9:45am
Cab outside 221B Baker Street, Marylebone
 London, England
‘Tell me as soon as you find anything,’ Sherlock called, but Johnnie had
already slammed the door of the cab, midway through pronouncing ‘239 King’s
Road, Chelsea.’ Sherlock stood on the pavement, watching after it as it pulled
into traffic, but Johnnie didn’t turn round.
She hadn’t wanted to meet Sherlock’s eyes, in fact, all morning. Sherlock
thought about it, impatient, as she turned back into the flat for her coat and
her notebook.
June, now, and under her window passed stubborn young girls shivering in their
summer frocks, and clerks in their shirtsleeves walking off the chill,
determined to bring on summer through the very force of their wills. But
Sherlock still took her coat, and thought about Johnnie, not meeting her eyes.
She thought of Johnnie all the way along the familiar route down the Marylebone
Road toward the British Library: of Johnnie panting, thrusting too gently
inside her (as Sherlock passed Great Portland Street); of Johnnie (as Sherlock
turned into the entranceway of the Library), turning away from her, looking
gutted in a way strangely different from how she’d looked in Portloe; of
Johnnie (as Sherlock looked up Guardian archives from 1944) going all the way
through breakfast refusing to look at Sherlock, when normally it was Sherlock,
always Sherlock who had to be reminded to chat and look over and smile.
She felt, somewhere in the pit of her stomach, that it was scandalous to be so
distracted; that she ought to be furious with herself; and yet the concern
remained theoretical. She paged through ten-year-old newsprint, and her gloves
got smeared and soiled; and she saw almost nothing for thinking about the nape
of Johnnie’s neck as she’d faced away from Sherlock on the bed; and she heard
nothing except two-faced, two-faced, two-faced, repeating inside her head.
It was only by accident, really, that she caught it, tucked away in the
periphery of a yellowed photograph.
Sherlock squinted at it for a span of seconds, then turned back to the first
page of the article to read the headline. BEHIND ENEMY LINES!, it read, and in
a sub-heading: First-Hand Reports: Looting and Godlessness in the Nazi Ranks!
The photo, aged but clear, showed a city street captioned Marszalkowska,
Warsaw, and a trio of young blond soldiers clustered around a tank. Two stood
on the ground, looking up, bulging satchels of goods slung over their
shoulders. The third soldier stood up above, hands raised high in an effort to
manoeuvre what looked like a an antique broadsword down through the hatch.
It was, thought Sherlock, a brilliant piece of propaganda. Even in her own
distraction it had arrested her attention: the exhilaration on the soldiers’
faces; the framing and dynamic pose of the uppermost man, holding fast to a
symbol of obsolete warcraft; and the contrast between their golden opportunism,
and the rubble and devastation surrounding them on all sides. Encapsulated in
one frame was an eloquent condemnation of callousness, and of profiting via the
misery of others, and its emotionalism triggered the viewer’s disgust without
needing to provide much actual information.
Even Sherlock, involved as she had been in the interaction captured among the
three men, had almost overlooked the woman.
She was undeniably Erins, though the photograph was aged and yellow. It was the
posture that gave her away: the bullish stance and the short hair, seemingly
grey even then, and the prominent bones of her forehead above her hollowed
eyes. She stood with her arms crossed, feet braced apart, looking straight at
the tank with her mouth twisted open, as if—
—as if giving orders, Sherlock realised. As if supervising.
War profiteering. A kind of supervisor of somebody’s wartime profits: that was
the secret identity Erins had wanted to keep safe.
Sherlock’s stomach sank through her seat. She sank her head in her hands.
She hadn’t realised, until Johnnie’s reaction was the first thing in her
thoughts, how much she had hoped to discover something different.

Chapter End Notes
        1. The London Press Club was established in 1882, and HC Vickery
           really was the Chairman in 1939. I’m fudging on the chronology
           of the Press Club Awards, though; as far as I can tell, they
           didn’t start up until 1970.
        2. I’d have loved to have read a whole book about the Night
           Witches (or Nachthexen, which sounds even more badass), but
           alas, I had neither time nor resources. Most of my information
           comes from the Wikipedia_entry and from this_site. They were a
           real regiment of night-flying Russian female pilots, and the
           tactics described in this chapter were their forte.
        3. The Siege of Leningrad was the deadliest siege in history.
           There were over a million civilian casualties, most of them
           from starvation. The population of Leningrad was decimated.
           What I’m not sure about, is how accurate a lack of food would
           still have been by year after the lifting of the blockade. But
           with such severely compromised resources throughout the whole
           of the Soviet Union, especially given the reduced population
           and the ongoing war effort, it doesn’t seem like too much of a
           stretch. Particularly if Nadya is hardly ever home, and so
           wouldn’t know quirky or black-market tricks to securing
           rations.

***** Chapter 17 *****
October 15, 1944
11:45pm
Margate Beach
 Kent, England
It was because they’d thought, that night, they would most likely die.
Later they had a name for the new bombs; a disarmingly silly name and a set
procedure, and Haley Murray’s gallows humour to see them through. That night
the word ‘doodlebug’ would have seemed cute; not like the angry night creatures
tearing the roofs off all around them.
A woman asked questions, caught in the dark with her lover away from her base,
on the night when the sound of the bombs went frighteningly wrong. Johnnie
Watson and Ana Vilaseca, sandwiched between hay bales in a farm outbuilding,
keeping their voices to a whisper, asked each other questions. And it had
seemed the war would never end, so Johnnie had whispered ‘How will it be, then?
After the war?’
She hadn’t really thought about that, before; but now she’d expected—what?
We’ll go to Lambeth, perhaps. We’ll open a bike shop.Or We can live in your
auntie’s old pensione. Or we’ll have to save for a few years before we can
afford America. But:
‘There’s a beautiful cabaña in Santa Sofia,’ Ana whispered. ‘Up in the
mountains above Santiago. It is a little bit away from everyone. For years it
has been standing empty.’
The cadence of Ana’s voice was always so lovely. Even in a whisper, Johnnie
felt the Latin softness around the edges ease the corners of her mind. She
imagined herself, as the sky fell around them: buying lumber and bolts in her
broken Spanish, and driving them back up the mountain in a borrowed truck;
fixing up a cabin in the sun in the thin mountain air.
‘My mother is dead, now,’ Ana said, ‘and my father will not live much longer.
With my pension and what they leave me I can buy it, and a new motorbike. I can
ride into the city to work, and no one will know who cooks my supper.’
A crash, hard by the barn where they sheltered. They both jumped. They both
breathed.
‘Going to keep a maid, then?’ Johnnie asked, because the one time she’d made
stew for them at the base it had all burnt horribly to the bottom of the pan.
‘Not at first,’ Ana said. ‘But my mother never minded, when she was young,
doing the house and food on her own. It is a beautiful little house. At night
the city shines out from the darkness down the mountain. But if you turn away,
you can also see the stars. My girl will be glad.’
Johnnie was quiet. She watched, quiet, as two images broke apart inside her:
Johnnie Watson, after the war; and Ana Vilaseca’s girl. She observed them
diverge with a kind of removed surprise, rather than with pain. She felt she
would most likely die tonight. There was an eerie silence, outside.
Johnnie cleared her throat and breathed into the darkness.
‘You will go back to London?’ Ana said. ‘You will fix cars?’
Johnnie saw in her mind’s eye, clear in the darkness, Ana’s Chilean sweetheart,
waiting in their cabaña on the green cliffside, long black hair tied up behind
her head. Ana wouldn’t be able to come home for siesta, living so far outside
the city, so the girl would know to expect her early, as early as half six.
‘My dad was a veterinarian,’ Johnnie whispered, licking her lips. ‘Animal
doctor.’
The girl would bake bread. She would give Ana careful orders about what to buy,
in the valley. She would stand at her window and look out at the city below,
and at twenty past six she might untie her apron, and hang it on a peg, and
wander outside to watch the road for Ana’s motorbike, flashing up the twisting
mountain road.
‘You have no training at animal doctoring,’ Ana whispered. ‘You will drive an
ambulance, perhaps? As you did in France?’
Johnnie blinked into the night. She saw the girl’s wide smile as she spotted
Ana’s bike; and her house-proud welcome, and her stern reprimands about how Ana
should wipe her shoes and sit right down to supper before it got cold. She saw
Ana laughing with her sweetheart over fish stew and bread, and the special red-
pepper cheese Ana had told Johnnie about. She saw the girl’s bashful look after
she’d cleared the table, and how Ana would smile and whisper in her ear.
‘No,’ Johnnie said. ‘Nah, I won’t. Won’t want to work the nights away, once all
this is over with. No ambulance driving for me.’
The girl would flush all down her chestnut neck, as Ana whispered. Johnnie knew
the way Ana would smile into the girl’s hair. She wondered, in the ominous dark
wartime quiet, if Ana had longed for that long hair when she’d smiled against
Johnnie’s neck, or for that toasted chestnut skin when she’d stripped off
Johnnie’s ATS-issue kit. Johnnie saw in her mind’s eye the lovely nut-brown
girl, sweeping Ana's floors; taking her needle to Ana’s shirts; spread out on
Ana’s ticking mattress with Ana licking into her as she’d licked into Johnnie,
as she’d thrust into Johnnie for the first time. Johnnie felt shorn, and pale,
staring into the blackness of the barn and seeing the full hips and the silky
black hair of Ana’s beautiful wife. She realised, dimly, that an English butch
with eccentric preferences in bed would be a good enough substitute for exactly
as long as the war lasted.
‘No,’ Johnnie said again. ‘Best I stick to doctoring cars, and bikes. Get a
flat in Chelsea; that’s where most of the girls like us live. I know a—the
owner of a garage.’
‘Yes,’ said Ana. ‘You will meet a pretty blonde English girl, after the war.’
Johnnie drifted further away in her mind. She thought of living in a flat, in
Chelsea, with an English rose who made spotted dick and cried listening to
royal funerals on the BBC. Another weird, buzzing bomb screamed overhead. They
were probably going to die.
***
June 2, 1955
11:20am
The Gateways Club
239 King’s Road, Chelsea
 London, England
The cab pulled away from the pavement at Baker Street, and Johnnie slumped in
the seat, half in relief, and half in defeat. She could swear she felt
Sherlock’s eyes on the back of her head as the cab trundled off, though she did
not look round.
Her breath shivered in her lungs. She couldn’t smooth it out. All night, and
all morning, she’d felt she was on some uncontrollable descent down a steep
incline. She was gathering speed all the time, and hadn’t any brakes besides
turning away, getting away, putting distance between her body and Sherlock’s
body, and Sherlock asking her for things that she—.
Between herself, and Sherlock asking her for things.
She went to roll down the window, but it stuck. There was an odd satisfaction
in bullying the hand-crank down past the resistance, and then even more in
feeling the cool air rushing past her face.
It wasn’t that she regretted the night before, not exactly. It was only that
Sherlock’s stridency, her insistence, had chafed away all Johnnie’s protection.
And what did that mean? she wondered. Sherlock wasn’t exactly—well, she wasn’t
exactly like anyone Johnnie had known before. She was ever spinning around some
central point that Johnnie could recognise when she saw it, but never quite
describe. And Sherlock said she—she said she wanted to, and God knew Johnnie
wanted to believe her.
The cab skirted Picadilly. Johnnie looked out across the Park, her forehead to
the cool metal of the window-frame, and breathed in the rushing air.
Sherlock lived in the motion of becoming one thing, and then becoming another.
Johnnie had told herself that every day for months. But Johnnie had always been
well-settled in her skin, on the battlefield and on the dance floor of the
Gates, and it wasn’t—disposable. If there was a time when she’d been shown up
as a stand-in for another butch’s wife, and another when she’d been ridiculed
for failing her girl, she wasn’t signing up to repeat the experiences, however
much she lusted after Sherlock’s lovely hands.
Especially not if.
In the Brompton Road, she closed her eyes. They’d slowed in traffic. On her
face, now, there was hardly a breeze.
Especially not if Sherlock would be disappointed in her, after. If she didn’t
know what she was getting into. (And how could she?) Not if it was up to
Johnnie to protect her.
Johnnie sighed, as the cab pulled up in front of the Gateways’s familiar green
door. She wasn’t sure, getting out and paying the driver, whether walking down
the long staircase in her current mood would reassure her, or disconcert her
even more.
Either way, she squared her shoulders.
Thursdays weren’t officially open nights at the Gates, but there were sometimes
private parties. Gina had phoned that morning to say the band had been engaged
to play that night. It meant that both Leslie Matthews, who had fought with
Cohen that first night with Sherlock, and her girl Bess, the bassist in the
band, would be present setting up for the show.
And there they were, as soon as Johnnie rounded the corner at the bottom of the
stairs. Neither the Wares nor Smithy were around, so Johnnie just walked up and
shook hands with Leslie. Leslie was happy enough to see her even if she was
surprised.
‘Johnnie Watson,’ she said, raising unkempt eyebrows. Leslie had a pale-skinned
complexion that turned splotchy at the slightest bit of physical exertion.
Toting Bess’s bass and bits of the drummer’s kit down the stairs, meant that
her face and neck clashed brazenly with her orange suit. Horrible clothes,
thought Johnnie, with a shudder. And they had to be bad, she reflected, if even
shenoticed.
‘Leslie,’ Johnnie said, nodding. ‘I’m here asking after that butch found
murdered, last Saturday.’
Leslie gave a low whistle, mopping her brow. A curvy, oak-skinned woman in a
sky-blue skirt suit and matching hat, came up behind her and put a hand on
Leslie’s shoulder. Leslie started, then turned her head and quickly smiled.
‘Johnnie,’ she said again, ‘do you know my Bess? Bess, this is—,’ but Bess had
already put out her hand.
‘I’d have to be quite unobservant not to know Johnnie Watson,’ she said,
raising her eyebrows. ‘Pleased to meet you personally, at last.’
Johnnie hadn’t realised, before this past week, quite the extent of her own
reputation at the Gates. She shook Bess’s hand and smiled, sheepish, into the
femme’s deep, twinkling eyes. She could feel Bess’s finger-picking callouses
against her palm as she pulled back her hand.
‘So,’ Bess said, her smile fading. ‘You’re here about that Sylvia Cohen.'
‘I am,’ said Johnnie. She turned to Leslie. ‘My—,’ she drew up short; cleared
her throat. Her what? How to describe the shifting miasma that was Sherlock? ‘I
happened to be here the night of the ninth,’ she said, instead. ‘I saw you
fighting with her.’
‘She was hardly the first one,’ Bess said, stepping closer to Leslie with a
scowl. Johnnie smiled.
‘No,’ she said. ‘She certainly wasn’t. I know Cohen picked fights with almost
everyone in here. I’m surprised she never picked one with me, to be honest. And
I’m, er, I really don’t think Leslie was responsible for Cohen’s death. I’m
just trying to get a sense of why, and how, Cohen got into it with people.’
Bess still looked skeptical, but Leslie was nodding. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was
about like you’d expect.’
She didn’t say any more, so Johnnie said: ‘Try me.’ Leslie sighed.
‘Bess and the group were on their set break that night, and this Cohen tried to
make a pass at her. The bad part is, she had to walk right past me to do it,
and I was headed straight back to Bess’s seat with two drinks in my hands.’
Bess nodded. ‘And we’ve been together for ages. Everyone knows I’m Leslie’s
girl.’
‘Yes,’ said Johnnie, who did in fact know this, as well. ‘So all signs were
that she knew Bess was your girl, and she moved in anyway. And so you fought.’
‘Well,’ said Leslie, shrugging. ‘Yeah.’
‘Do you think,’ said Johnnie, pulling on her hair a bit, ‘that Cohen could have
been picking a fight on purpose? I mean to say, she punched Cass Thorssen in
the stomach without so much as a by-your-leave.
‘She what?’ said Bess, her eyes going wide.
‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie. ‘Didn’t even say hello first, and Cass with her bad
health and all. And Chester, too,’ she said, gesturing toward the piano. ‘She
walked up to him, started calling him names, provoking him about being a Negro:
he’d never seen the woman before in his life.’
‘Er,’ said Bess, at the same time Leslie blurted out ‘Course he had.’
‘Pardon?’ said Johnnie, completely derailed.
Leslie and Bess looked at each other; for a minute they didn’t speak. Then they
seemed to reach some kind of unspoken agreement; Bess nodded, and Leslie rubbed
a hand over her mouth.
‘I know the fight you mean,’ Bess said, slowly, still looking at Leslie rather
than at Johnnie, ‘and Chester had known that Cohen at least a couple of months
before it happened. We, er.’ She looked away from Leslie at last, meeting
Johnnie’s eyes. ‘We saw them, together.’
‘Really?’ Johnnie said, all amazement. ‘Where? When? Did they talk together
here?’
Bess and Leslie both shifted their feet, looking around.
‘No,’ Leslie said, at last, ‘they were always careful not to, when they were
here. We noticed that, of course, once we’d seen them so cosy together at
the—,’ and she broke off, her neck going all splotchy again over her green
collar.
Johnnie looked, puzzled, from Leslie to Bess, and back. ‘At the where?’ she
said, when neither of them spoke up.
Bess sighed. ‘This is all confidential, right?’ she said. ‘And it’s, you know.
Important. For catching the killer.’
‘Well, right,’ said Johnnie. ‘I mean to say, I’ll have to tell my—Sherlock
about it, but it sounds bloody fishy to me.’
Bess nodded, and sighed again. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘The truth is, there’s
this bisexual girl we know.’ She paused, and looked significantly at Johnnie,
and Johnnie raised her eyebrows.
‘Party house?’ she said.
Bess nodded, not quite meeting Johnnie’s eyes. ‘Yeah, she’s got—she lives above
her shop, yeah, and the parties happen after closing. So it’s—sort of a meeting
place, if you know what I mean.’
‘Yeah,’ Johnnie said, hand on her mouth to cover up her smirk. ‘I think I do.
Though I have to say, Leslie, I never figured you for the type to swing a cat.
Or tie anyone up come to that.’
Leslie’s face coloured up so fast that it skipped splotchy and went straight to
solid red.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, and coughed, and Bess said ‘You don’t have
to—,’ but Leslie put a hand on her arm and she stilled.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she said again, voice quavering but meeting Johnnie’s
eyes, ‘Bess is the one. Who, er. Who does the tying. So.’
Johnnie was frozen to the spot. Bess stepped in front of Leslie, and nothing
about her was quavering at all. Her eyes flashed and her stance said Johnnie
should think about next words. A small, detached part of Johnnie’s brain found
it funny, Bess thinking Johnnie inclined, in that moment, to do anything
besides thank her, and thank her, and thank her.
‘Is she,’ she heard herself say. ‘And that’s—well. No, I mean to say, that’s
lovely, I—I’m glad you said.’
The words felt dull, and lame, in the face of the wonder rising in her. Bess
and Leslie were one of the longest-lasting couples at the Gates. Leslie fought
other butches for Bess, and bought her drinks, and toted her stand-up bass down
the steep Gateways stairs, and then Bess—.
‘I’m glad you said,’ Johnnie repeated. She nodded, quick and sure, looking
Leslie in the eyes.
Leslie was taking deep breaths, smiling a little. Bess was relaxing back into a
position at her side, reversing her puffed-up mother-hen routine and looking
conciliatory.
‘Well,’ Leslie said, her voice mostly back to normal. ‘This girl’s business is
just a normal tea-shop. Middle-class, respectable place, so you can see why we
all might try to keep a low profile if we get there early for the parties after
hours. There’s a separate entrance, even, through the back. Bess and I wear
hats, and different, er.’ She blushed a little, again, but soldiered on with a
little cough. ‘Different clothes. And we come in through the back way, and keep
to one of the booths kind of back a bit, in the shadows, until Linda closes up
for the night. Which is why they didn’t recognise us.’
Johnnie had almost forgotten the original point of this recital. Leslie
stopped, expectantly, and it took her a moment to muster a response.
‘Er,’ she said. ‘Chester, you mean?’
‘Chester and Cohen both,’ Bess cut in. ‘We noticed them, of course, since I
play in the group with Chester, but I never expected to see him at Linda’s
place, of all the shops in London.’
‘Wait,’ Johnnie said. ‘Do you mean to say that Chester Davis and Sylvia Cohen
were—were involved? They were waiting for the party?’
‘Oh Christ no!’ said Bess, covering her mouth and giggling in a horrified way.
‘Oh my god. Why would you even suggest a thing like that?’
‘I thought it’s what you meant!’ Johnnie protested, starting to chuckle
herself.
‘He’s about eighty years old,’ Bess gasped, on the edge of hysteria, putting
out her hand to steady herself against Leslie. ‘And I work for him! Oh god,
I’ll be imagining it all through our set tonight, I won’t be able to stop
myself.'
‘Let’s just forget this whole part of the conversation happened,’ agreed
Leslie, straight-faced. ‘Cohen wasn’t exactly a peach, either.’
Bess shrieked, and doubled over, one hand coming up to keep her hat from
falling on the floor. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh lord, Lee! Imagine Chester on the St.
Andrew’s Cross!’
‘You lack all human decency,’ Leslie said, deadpan.
‘All right,’ said Johnnie, laughing, her hand in the air. Secretly grateful for
the moment of levity. ’Okay, so the last two minutes never happened, right? And
you’re telling me about spotting Chester and Cohen, talking together in Linda’s
tea shop.’
Bess nodded, eyes still wide, and gasped herself back into silence. She took a
deep breath, and nodded.
‘They were in a booth in the middle of the main wall,’ she said, ‘sitting
across from each other. A couple of different times, mind you, so I assumed it
was their regular spot. The first time we saw them was maybe, what would you
say, Lee? Six months ago?’
Leslie nodded.
‘And they definitely knew each other,’ Bess went on. ‘I mean. We couldn’t hear
what they were talking about, and we didn’t want to be noticed, so we didn’t
get any closer. But they were leaning toward each other, and both talking
very—very intensely, you know?’
‘They kept at it for a good twenty minutes one time about a month ago,’ Leslie
put in. ‘They seemed surprised, when Linda came over to tell them the shop was
about to close.’
Johnnie nodded, thinking, her hand in her hair again.
If this was true, it meant that Chester had been meeting Sylvia Cohen in
secret. That he’d been doing it for months, at least, prior to her murder,
despite having told Sherlock and Johnnie that he’d never exchanged a word with
her before she picked the fight with him in the corridor of the Gateways a few
weeks before. But if they hadn’t gone up to the after-hours party, then why
lie? There was nothing wrong, was there, in meeting for a cup of tea in a
public place, even if the companionship of a middle-aged white martinet with an
elderly black pianoplayer was, admittedly, unexpected.
For some reason, thought Johnnie, Chester Davis didn’t want a private
investigator to know that he knew Sylvia Cohen.
An obvious explanation suggested itself. But Johnnie saw Mary Sophia Allen in
her mind’s eye, and shied away from drawing conclusions. There were other
reasons, surely, that a person would want to hide a connection. Perhaps they
really were involved, and—well, there was the age difference, for one thing.
And the difference in skin colour, though both the Gates and Linda’s place
seemed friendly to Bess and Leslie.
Johnnie looked from one to the other.
‘I know you said they didn’t,’ she said, slowly, ‘but there’s no way you could
have missed it if Cohen and Chester really hadbeen at Linda’s parties, is
there? I mean. How large is the space?’
But Leslie was already snorting.
‘There’s no way at all,’ she said. 'A couple of those times, Bess was even
giving a demonstration. If Chester had been watching, we certainly would have
seen; and if anyone hadn’t been watching, we would have noticed that, too.’
Johnnie felt her eyebrows go up, despite her best intentions. ‘You were giving
a demonstration?’ she repeated.
Bess shrugged. ‘I’m good with fibre,’ she said, dismissively. ‘Silks, woolens.
Ropes. Wires. I trained as a milliner, you know.’
‘I—,’ Johnnie said, and licked her lips. ‘I didn’t know that, no.’
‘She’s an excellent knitter,’ Leslie chipped in.
Bess made a face. ‘Lee always wants to wear the most awful colours,’ she said.
‘Makes me look bad.’ She punched Leslie on the orange-clad arm. Leslie smiled
down at her, proud and fond, and Johnnie looked between them, smiling.
’No,’ she said, so quiet she wasn’t sure if they could hear. ‘I really don’t
think she does.’
***
November 14, 1944
2:15pm
Holmes Mansion, Mayfair
 London, England
‘But you don’t need to enroll me anywhere else,’ Sherlock was saying, for what
felt like the hundredth time. ‘I’m perfectly capable of continuing my studies
on my own.’
‘As ever,’ said Mycroft, in his shiny new Oxford drawl, ‘you overlook the point
of the discussion.’
Sherlock curled her hands into fists in her lap on the brocade Queen Anne sofa
in the high-ceilinged drawing room. She knew he’d only wanted to talk to her in
here in order to make her feel small, and she fought it like a wild beast. She
felt small anyway, but at least she was fighting.
‘If you’re so awfully concerned about my education, Mycroft,’ she said, ‘if you
really think I’m not to be trusted, hire me some tutors. You are, for lack of a
better word, the patriarch, now. I’ve no doubt you could afford it.’
Mycroft leaned back in his desk chair, slow smile curling his lips. Patriarch
perhaps, but the baby fat still showed at his cheeks and his chin, and the
moustache he’d tried to grow last Christmas had come in wispy. Newly come down
from Oxford, and his educated worldliness stretched over his face like an
expensive new skin. He lifted his chin. That smirk, thought Sherlock, cost a
thousand pounds.
‘You mistake me,’ he said. ‘My concern is not for your mastery of mathematics
and German.’
Sherlock let out a frustrated breath. She slumped back against the hard sofa
back, and brought up one leg in front of her chest for protection. No sooner
was it done than Mycroft barked ‘Sherlock Holmes, put your foot down.'
She rolled her eyes, and kept her leg where it was. Mycroft’s glare made her
skin tingle, all along her knee and the outward-facing edge of her calf.
‘This is precisely why I’m concerned,’ Mycroft said, gesturing to her pose.
‘None of the young ladies I met with in Oxford would have made such a mistake,
and some of them were only a few years older than you.’
‘They sound fascinating minds, these young ladies you met at Oxford.’ Sherlock
said, half to herself.
‘Some of them,’ snapped Mycroft He tightened his mouth into a hard line.
‘Regardless of what you might think, Sherlock, there is no direct correlation
between intellectual integrity and a disregard for social mores. You’re shaping
up to be unfit for polite society, at the rate you’re going, and I won’t have
that on my conscience.’
Sherlock’s foot came down, at that: both of them, hard, on the floor. She sat
forward, breath like yelling in her throat.
‘And what do you expect I’ll be doing in polite society, Mycroft? Coming out?
Being presented to the Queen? Dancing a cotillion at a—,’
‘You could do,’ Mycroft said. ‘You do realise, most young women would lie,
cheat, and steal for your connexions.’
‘Would you? Would you live like that?’ Sherlock spat, and Mycroft narrowed his
eyes and said ‘I do,’ and Sherlock scoffed.
‘I did and do,’ he said again. ‘I fulfilled the actions and expectations
marking the transition from adolescence to adulthood, as dictated by my class
and my sex. Just as you must do.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, ‘only those transitions, as dictated by your class and
sex, dictate the hardship of three years of Classics and Law at the most
prestigious university in the world, followed by a voyage through Greece and
Italy with a few of your best mates. You would never—you would never, Mycroft.’
Tears started in her eyes, which was horrifying.
‘Oh don’t feel so put-upon,’ he said, rising behind the desk, looking disgusted
with her. She blinked, disgusted with herself, though differently. ‘You could
be a pauper selling hyacinths in Picadilly,’ he went on, strolling to the
window. ‘You could be an East End whore in a garret. I’d say you could be a
chambermaid, but frankly I doubt the establishment that would hire you, with
those manners.’
‘You would never make asinine conversation over a punch bowl,’ said Sherlock,
humiliated, starting to cry. ‘You would never—never give up your office, and
your g—government contacts, to go flouncing about after a middle-aged barrister
husband, for god’s sake.’
‘Where do you think my government contacts come from, Sherlock?’ he asked,
laughing without humour. ‘Thin air? Of course I endure uncomfortable social
events, in order to maintain them.’
‘It’s different!’ she shouted, standing too, but still feeling the disadvantage
of his height, and his composure. ‘You know it is! For you it’s—it’s something
you have to do, in order to finesse all the rest of it. There’s a reward, for
you. But for me it’s—that deadly dull nonsense is supposed be all there is.
It’s supposed to satisfy me.’
Mycroft sniffed, looking down at the gardens, between the mullions of the
floor-to-ceiling window. ‘It doesn’t much matter whether it satisfies you or
not,’ he said. ‘Or whether it satisfies me. We have a duty to this family, a
duty to our country.’
Sherlock laughed. Something hardened in her. ‘A duty to my country,’ she said.
‘To sit up in my seat, and husband-hunt.’
‘The empire is built of all its subjects together,’ he said, waving a hand.
‘Use him as he uses thee, as the poet says. You’re a gifted dissembler, if
prone to dramatics. Find a limp-wristed first son with an extra wing to his
house, and a willingness to order in a thousand pounds of beakers and a
bohemian serving girl. For heaven’s sake, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done
before.’
It felt like a slap, but she nodded. For a moment he looked pleased. She
crossed the room, and shook his hand, and looked in his eyes.
‘I’d rather be a whore selling hyacinths in Picadilly,’ she said, and she
turned her back and closed the door behind her.
***
June 2, 1955
7:33pm
Baker Street, Marylebone
 London, England
Use him as he uses thee, Sherlock thought, trailing down the pavement back
toward 221B.
Overlapping images filled the space behind her eyes, all of the same woman.
Erins, laughing with Mary Allen in the Gateways bar. Erins, accepting with poor
grace a journalism prize. Cohen, taking a swing at Chester Davis in the back
corridor of the Gates. Cohen, dead on the floor of the washroom.
And some other nameless woman, an indeterminate shade between Erins and Cohen,
standing by a tank in a grainy photograph, a bureaucrat of war profiteering.
Perhaps it was a side effect, she thought, in one of her more egregious flights
of fancy, of going to bed with Johnnie Watson: the ability to see events
through Johnnie’s eyes. She thought the callousness of Erins would not have
touched her, if it weren’t for Johnnie; would not have made her drag her feet,
and turn an unnecessary corner off Chiltern Street, and put off for another few
minutes the moment when she would push the flat door open and explain to
Johnnie what she’d found.
How Cohen’s two-faced-ness had shown itself for what it was, in the end. How
Johnnie had been right.
For Sherlock, back in the archives, had caught glimpses of Cohen—Erins—again.
And again. And again, once she knew which kinds of stories to search out. It
was always in reports of sacking and looting, of the German attachments
following on the heels of the shouting, invading regiments who ran riot over
city streets. Erins stood quietly on the edges of image after image:
unassuming, stalwart, diverting the best of the plunder to parts unknown.
Erins was never named; never mentioned; and sometimes Sherlock wondered at her
own growing ability to spot the woman’s tell-tale ramrod spine, or the corner
of a shoulder held just so. Erins seemed not to avoid the camera, but simply to
blend into the background of image after image. Chameleon-like. Her business,
it seemed, was dull, and constant, and so banal that she caught nobody’s eye:
transforming the impulsive smash-and-grab into someone’s empire. Yet she had
returned to England with a different name, and a cut-up face.
Sherlock had cut herself loose at sixteen, and never much thought of herself an
idealist. But neither had she thought of her disguises as—she scuffed at the
pavement with her toe. Use him as he uses thee, Mycroft had said. Perhaps
that’s what Ellen Erins had done. Profiting from the hatred of a friend, and
profiting from the desolation wrought by hatred, and profiting by the
combination of a clean slate and old connections: it was all, thought Sherlock,
turning into Baker Street at last: it was all profit.
And had Sherlock, turning up her lip at Mrs. Patrick down the shops, been doing
the same? And, in any case, would Johnnie Watson say she had? She found she
couldn’t hate herself for caring about the answer.
It was just her luck that Johnnie was already ensconced in her armchair when
Sherlock came through the door, still shuffling. Her joints felt sore. She took
her coat off like it hurt to do, as Johnnie turned around to look at her and
Sherlock looked away.
‘It’s getting pretty warm for that,’ Johnnie said, her voice so gentle that
Sherlock looked up, surprised.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It, er. It comes in useful. At times.’
She didn’t quite know what to do with her hands. Johnnie was looking at her
oddly.
‘You’re afraid to tell me something,’ Johnnie said.
Sherlock breathed in, nodded.
‘What is it?’ asked Johnnie, levering herself up. It seemed to Sherlock, even
through her anxious haze, that Johnnie, too, moved gingerly.
‘Erins was a war profiteer,’ Sherlock said in a rush. ‘You were right, she
was—certainly not admirable, if you want to break down the world into, into
admirable and not admirable, she definitely wasn’t, she was, er. Diverting the
spoils of German occupation into, er. Somebody’s hands.’
Johnnie took her by the elbows, so gently that Sherlock flinched. She bit her
lip and looked over Johnnie’s shoulder. There was a spider building a web in
the crook of the doorjamb, and a trail of mouse-droppings near the door, and
Sherlock had thought she had cleaned the ceiling of the last stains from that
experiment with corrosives, but apparently—and Johnnie put up a gentle hand,
and turned Sherlock’s head.
Her eyes were so, so blue.
Blue, and strangely bright.
‘Cohen knew Chester Davis, too,’ Johnnie said, very quietly, very gently.
‘Leslie Matthews and her—and her femme, saw them talking regularly together in
a café owned by a friend. But I—,’ she cleared her throat. ‘I don’t. Chester is
performing tonight and we obviously can’t talk with Cohen, and I.’
Her hands on Sherlock’s shoulders were trembling. Sherlock could feel it
through the knit cotton of her shirt. She stepped closer, catching her shoe on
a divot in the floorboard. Feeling that all her angles were so unnecessary. But
Johnnie made a tiny noise at her motion, and folded Sherlock into her arms like
something precious, and broken. Sherlock bent her spine, so that Johnnie was
breathing into her hair.
‘I don’t want to talk about Cohen and Chester Davis,’ Johnnie said.
‘All right,’ said Sherlock.
‘I want to take you to bed,’ said Johnnie, ‘and just—not do anything, just—be
close to you, is that. Is that all right?’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, her throat tight. Tears starting in her eyes. ‘Mine’s
closer,’ she said, and Johnnie nodded against her neck, and for a moment they
just stood there, swaying into each others’ warmth.
Sherlock’s back was starting to hurt, but she didn’t want to move. Finally she
shifted some tiny amount, and Johnnie moved around her to the side, until
suddenly Johnnie was tucked neatly under Sherlock’s arm, her arm around
Sherlock’s waist, and their swaying was motion, and they were walking together
toward Sherlock’s bedroom.
She’d stayed up all night once, trying to match the buoyancy of a fluid sample.
She had run test after test, floating lighter liquids across the stretched-taut
surfaces of heavier ones, angling them light and careful so they skimmed across
the top of water. Sherlock felt like that now, like she was floating together
with Johnnie in a delicate suspension. Any sudden movement and she would break
through the soft liquid cushion, be drowned.
They swayed into her room. They undressed silently, slow and close together, to
only the light of the streetlamp across the way.
And they slid together, silent, into Sherlock’s bed. Skin on skin on cotton
sheets; it felt fragile. Sherlock breathed, and Johnnie twined their bare legs
together. She held Sherlock warm, and safe, and was close to her. Sherlock
burrowed against her skin.
In the end, of course, it wasn’t only closeness. Not quite.
Nor was it quite not doing anything, because Johnnie’s hip was warm and solid
between Sherlock’s legs, and her fingertips in the dark stroked obsessively
from the beauty mark on Sherlock’s neck to the rough spot just behind her ear,
like the path between them was some connection secret and vital to preserve.
And Sherlock tried, she tried to float poised on the surface of things, to keep
her breathing even as her skin got hot, as her nerves sharpened under the slow,
warm drag of Johnnie’s skin.
She tried to keep herself steady, and hold—and hold—and hold herself still, as
long as she could, but in the end she had to push just a tiny bit with her hip
into Johnnie’s skin, her lips parted so her breathing could be quiet. Johnnie
felt it and made a tiny sound like ‘oh,’ deep in her chest, and shifted against
Sherlock, who pushed up again—and again, as little as she could, breathing
quiet quiet quiet through her mouth. She tried to stay still, suspended on the
surface of things, but all in a rush it felt as if her whole skin gathered into
a sharp, hot point, and her throat drew taut in the silence and she said
‘Johnnie,’ as the gathered edge of her pierced the surface of stretched-hot
liquid and she tumbled down, and down, and down.
It wasn’t that the spell was broken, after that. But the silence felt more
flexible, more familiar. Like a warm and muddy pool, thought Sherlock, muzzily.
Or a leather strap with a crease. Johnnie collapsed against her, breathing
hard.
‘I have,’ said Johnnie, clearing her throat into Sherlock’s neck, ‘I have.
Things you should probably know. About. About the War, and Ana, and. And
things.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said. ‘I was thinking earlier about—about family—things, that
you should maybe—.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘You first.’
And they opened their mouths to each other in the quiet of Baker Street, and
started to speak.

***** Chapter 18 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
June 3, 1955
1:46pm
22 Bromley Street, Stepney
 London, England
By the time they stepped forward at last to ring Chester Davis’s doorbell, it
was almost two in the afternoon.
It had taken all of an unexpectedly aggravating morning, bleeding into an
equally exasperating afternoon, to track down Chester’s place of residence.
Gina had mentioned that the group generally arrived at ten sharp to collect
their week’s pay. But this morning, despite Sherlock donning her best bohemian
chic—peasant blouse and wrap skirt and chivvying Johnnie out of Baker Street by
9:15, they’d ended up whiling away hours to no avail. Ted Ware had fed them
coffee and leftover biscuits, looking progressively more apologetic the longer
they sat at the bar.
At half eleven Gina had come downstairs in a fury, which was not alleviated
when Sherlock had pronounced the name of Chester Davis. On the contrary. Her
eyebrows had drawn together, and her manicured talons had dug into the fabric
of her black dress where it stretched over her hips, and she had treated them
all to a lengthy diatribe about certain pianoplayers abandoning their paying
engagements without a word of warning to certain hard-working club owners.
She’d gone on for several minutes before Sherlock had been able to slow her
down enough to start asking questions, such as ‘Davis hasn’t been coming in?’
and ‘When did this begin?’
Gina had glared, but Sherlock made her face a mask, and stared back.
‘It has been nearly a week,’ Gina said at last, waving a hand. ‘We have not
seen him since Saturday. As if we hadn’t enough to worry about, with Smithy out
on bail and the whole club thrown into confusion. He was not here on Sunday, or
on Wednesday. We had a special engagement yesterday, and he was not even here
for that.’
‘But—,’ said Johnnie, thinking back, though yesterday seemed improbably long
ago. ‘But Bess and Leslie were here, and they didn’t—,’
‘Yes!’ said Gina, eyes flashing. ‘And it was lucky Bess Taylor was here. She
saved the whole evening. Pat took over for her on bass, and Bess sang along
with her own piano. Not as good as Chester, mind you, but good enough. If she
hadn’t stepped in, the Lanleys might have wanted their money back.’
‘So Davis,’ said Sherlock, ‘Davis hasn’t been back to work since…the murder,
then?’
Gina took a step back, looking stricken.
‘I,’ she said, and stared, mouth working like a fish’s. ‘No, that’s precisely
when he—why didn’t I think—?’
‘You’ve a lot on your plate,’ said Johnnie, stretching out a hand to pat Gina’s
elbow, but Gina shook it off. She looked disgusted with herself.
‘I should have realised,’ Gina said. ‘He was never so much as late to work,
before. Never a day ill.’ She looked up, from Sherlock to Johnnie and back to
Sherlock. ‘You came looking for him,’ she said. ‘Already, even before you knew
he was missing.’
‘Yes,’ said Sherlock. Gina put a hand to her mouth, though Sherlock noted she
was careful, even in her shock, not to smudge her cherry lipstick.
‘I ought to have told you,’ Gina breathed. ‘What if he has escaped? What if he
killed Sylvia Cohen, and framed our Smithy, and now he has escaped because I
was too stupid to—,’
‘I don’t believe Davis killed Cohen,’ Sherlock interrupted her.
Johnnie gaped at her.
‘You what,’ she said. Not even a question.
‘I don’t believe Davis killed Cohen,’ Sherlock said, her tone making it
apparent that she begrudged the repetition. ‘But we do need to talk with him.
Where is he?’
Gina stared, and Johnnie stared, and nobody said anything.
‘I—am not sure,’ Gina said at last, curling her fingers down so she wasn’t
speaking around them. And then, a little defensively in response to Sherlock’s
incredulous look, ‘He comes here to collect his pay. I never knew his home
address.’
The next two hours were spent in following up infuriatingly paltry leads in
order to track down the residence of a single missing pianoplayer. Johnnie kept
asking whether they weren’t on the wrong track, bothering to look for Davis’s
home at all; and Sherlock kept having to reassure her, even while knocking up
the members of Davis’s group, that she didn’t believe he would have run.
‘Simplest by far to check first at his known residence,’ she said, for what
felt the hundredth time, just before Leslie Matthews opened Bess Taylor’s door
with a surprised look on her face. Soon after that, at last, Bess was writing
out a Stepney address on a scrap of newsprint, and Johnnie was thanking her,
more profusely than Sherlock could really account for.
Bess gave her a weird, overly understanding smile as she showed Sherlock and
Johnnie out. Sherlock looked to Johnnie for an explanation, but Johnnie’s gaze
was fixed resolutely in the opposite direction, a puzzling little skip in her
step.
Thus it was that the sun was already starting its decline, when Sherlock put
out her hand and knocked three times on Chester Davis’s weathered door.
There was no answer. Johnnie cleared her throat.
An aeroplane flew past, far overhead, and Sherlock let her mind flit to Smithy
and Nadya, that winter in Leningrad. Johnnie cleared her throat again. Sherlock
stepped forward, hand raised to knock again, just as the door opened a crack
with the sound of a sliding chain behind it, and a slitted, red-rimmed eye
looked out at them.
‘You’re that detective,’ Davis said. ‘I’m not home, I told you everything I
know.’
‘Just a few questions, Mr. Davis,’ Sherlock said, sticking her foot into the
cracked door as she had done to Mary Sophia Allen. Davis huffed, and swung the
door slightly further open, then slammed it back again hard on Sherlock’s toe.
Her eyes watered. She didn’t remove her foot.
‘Mr. Davis,’ Johnnie said, ‘Gina Ware sent us to ask you some questions
about—,’
‘I told you, I got nothing more to say,’ Davis said. He swung the door into
Sherlock’s toes again, and she couldn’t repress a grunt of pain.
‘Mr. Davis,’ Sherlock said, pushing forward so her whole calf was wedged into
the open door, ‘we know that you knew Sylvia Cohen. We know that you—ouch—that
you lied to us about not having spoken to her before your altercation, and we
know that—bloody hell!—we know that you didn’t kill her, so would you please
open the door and tell us just exactly what you were doing.’
Her nose was running now, and the pains were shooting up to her hip, but Davis
seemed to have stopped slamming the door on parts of her body. He glared at
her, a single bloodshot brown eye through the crack in the door, and she glared
back at him until he nodded, just slightly.
’Get back out of my door,’ he said.
Sherlock tilted her head in warning. ‘I’ve identified four different ways to
break into your flat, in case you’re considering—,’
‘I just need to unbolt the bloody door, don’t I?’ he said.
She squared her shoulders, and stepped back, and the door went almost shut
before it opened again, wider and without a chain. Davis himself stood behind
it, so that Sherlock stepped into a darkened, empty-feeling corridor, the air
close, and stale. She could sense Johnnie following behind her, from the rubber
treads of Johnnie’s boat shoes on the creaking boards and the heavy feeling of
Johnnie’s eyes behind her, scanning the hall. They moved together halfway down
the short passage, and then Davis swung the door to and bolted it again. They
were encased together in gloom.
Sherlock kept her eyes straight ahead and walked, pursued by the sound of
Davis’s shuffling slippers on the hardwoods. When she was almost to the end of
the corridor, he grumbled ‘On your left’; she turned into a sitting room
equally dark and stuffy as the entranceway. Or—she peered into the shadows,
making out a large wood panel forming the majority of the near wall. Not a
sitting room, she realised. A bedroom, with a Murphy bed. And there, against
the far wall, was a single stovetop burner. She supposed that the only thing
across the corridor must be the washroom.
‘So, what?’ Davis said, pushing past them both where they’d stopped in the
doorway. ‘What’s so important that you came hunting me down?’
‘What’s so important,’ countered Sherlock, ‘that you passed up three days of
work and your week’s pay, to hide out in this godforsaken hole?’
‘This is my home,’ Davis said, very cold.
Johnnie looked over at Sherlock with caution in her eyes.
Sherlock huffed, and grumbled, and, when she saw no way around it, said ‘My
apologies.’ She held out her hand. Davis shook it. The three of them stood
awkwardly in the darkened room until Johnnie cleared her throat and Davis
muttered, gesturing at the sofa, ‘You may as well sit down.’
They sat. The sofa was dusty, and too soft, and some indeterminate shade of
brown. Johnnie turned her head to the side and sneezed.
‘Mr. Davis,’ Sherlock said, ‘Bess Taylor and Leslie Matthews saw you, multiple
times, at the tea shop known as The Raven’s Nest, in deep discussion with
Sylvia Cohen. Your meetings apparently took place over the course of several
months. Would you care to—.’ At this Davis snorted again. Sherlock revised her
wording to: ‘Please explain to us what the two of you were discussing.’
Davis turned his head, and spat into a dish in the fireplace.
‘I guess you would appreciate that,’ Davis said.
‘Oh come now, Mr. Davis,’ Sherlock said, losing patience. ‘I know you didn’t
kill Sylvia Cohen, but a jury full of white greengrocers who weren’t there that
night will hardly find it difficult to imagine you up a set break which didn’t
exist. You lied to us the night of the murder, and you probably lied to the
police as well—’
‘I didn’t,’ Davis said, and Sherlock snapped ‘Only because you scarpered before
they got a chance to ask you, no doubt.’
Davis didn’t reply. Johnnie sniffled, sitting next to Sherlock on the sofa.
‘Look,’ Johnnie said, ‘we’re just trying to understand, yeah? What would you
think, Mr. Davis, if you heard about a murder happening in a place one night,
and then one of the employees picks that night to take off and not show his
face again? And then he doesn’t come back for his only pay-cheque? I mean, what
would you think?’
‘Wasn’t my only pay-cheque,’ mumbled Davis, seemingly unable to stop himself
correcting misinformation.
‘You have another position,’ Sherlock said, sitting forward on the sofa. Davis
chewed at his cheek, looking furious. Then he nodded. Then he shook his head.
‘Did have,’ he said. ‘Doubt I do anymore.’
‘You stopped showing at that job, too?’ Johnnie asked. Davis nodded again, like
he couldn’t help it. Johnnie opened her mouth again, but Sherlock heard it and
put a hand on her arm. They sat there in silence, watching Davis chew at the
inside of his cheek.
At last he sighed, and twisted his mouth into a sour shape. ‘’S not like I can
afford it,’ he said, ‘but I was—I was. I can’t be sure he doesn’t know I was in
on it.’
‘In on—,’ said Johnnie. Sherlock dug her fingers into Johnnie’s arm.
‘I was on the night cleanup crew at the Chronicle,’ Davis said at last, like he
was doing his best to speak without moving his lips. ‘It’s how I met Sylvia
Cohen.’ He looked across at them through baleful eyes, gauging their
unsurprised reactions, and added ‘I guess you know about how she was the
Chronicle’s mole on the force, then.’
Sherlock nodded. ‘And we know about her reporting work from before the War, and
what she got up to during it.’ She stared back at Davis. ‘Did you?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said. There was something so bitter in the word. ‘But she told me
that not too long ago.’
He sighed again, then turned to face them.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, here it is.’
He gathered his thoughts a moment, then began.
‘I work,’ Davis started, and then moved his mouth in that sour way again, and
corrected himself: ‘I worked, for ten years, on the graveyard cleanup crew at
the Chronicle.Playing the piano is what I love to do, but the pay’s for shit.
Even paying for a place like this,’ and he gestured around at the darkened,
dusty room, ‘I couldn’t make ends meet. So I took this second job, three times
a week on nights I wasn’t playing. It was cleaning toilets and sweeping floors,
you know, and mucking out the rubbish bins in the reporters’ offices.
‘It had to have been maybe, I don’t know, six years ago, I started seeing this
lady copper around. I didn’t really notice at first. Lots of strange people
come and go, at a paper. Some guys, their offices never got clean because they
were always still there at two, three in the morning, working on stories, and I
could never get in. But this lady cop, she was very—very striking, if you know
what I mean. God knows she wasn’t pretty, not what you might call attractive,
but she was—she was intense, somehow.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, drily. ‘I imagine she must have been.’ Davis shot her a
glance, then nodded and kept talking.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Well, I noticed her. Just in passing, you know. She was
usually hanging around outside the big governor’s office, that Townsend-
Farquhar.’
Johnnie shifted by Sherlock’s side, and Sherlock thought it, too: Townsend-
Farquhar’s hand-picked star reporter, still feeding him secrets after the War.
And if she’d done his bidding before the War, and sold out the police for him
after the War, it only made sense that her crimes during the War—
‘Well, it wasn’t any of my business,’ said Davis, ‘but I had this—this weird
feeling. Well, I don’t know if it was only looking back, you know, how you make
yourself smarter than you maybe really were at the time. But I had this weird
fucking feeling about her, that she noticed me too. Which is—,’ he looked at
Sherlock, and then at Johnnie, and shook his head.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said. ‘You’ve only seen me at the Gates, with all
those girls standing around buying me drinks, singing along. That’s why I
like—why I liked it so much. Because at the paper it was like being invisible,
right. Nobody notices an old black man who comes in to empty the bins. It
was—it gave me the creeps, a little bit, that she seemed like she might. But I
reckoned I was just imagining things.’
‘Mmm,’ Sherlock said, sitting forward. ‘Reckon you weren’t.’
‘No,’ said Davis. ‘But I’m trying to tell in order. And I didn’t know that
right away.’ He chewed on his mouth, and Sherlock waited, and then gestured for
him to continue.
‘There was this one night,’ Davis said. ‘I’m out in the corridor, outside his
office. The door opens, sudden, like someone’s about to come out, and I see
it’s this lady cop. Then she turns back, like she remembered something else she
wanted to say. She closed the door again a little bit, but not all the way, so
I could still hear what was going inside. And she starts talking to him about
an idea for a story, right, because she and some other coppers had been down in
Brixton, putting down that riot got up by all the West Indian kids down there.
And she said, they were living rough, practically on the street, and that might
make an interesting story.
‘And he says “Interesting story?” in this voice like she’d, I don’t know, grown
another head. “Those Negro kids’re stealing good British jobs,” he says.
“That’s the story. Loss of law and civilisation, in the face of the encroaching
savage.”
‘“Savage,” she says, “well I don’t know about that, Harry. They looked like
just regular kids, to me.”
‘And he says, making up nice to her now, “Come on, Sylvia, what is this all of
a sudden? You know how it is. Just like in the War. You want a pay rise. Met’s
gonna be better funded with an enemy to fight against. The paper’s gonna sell
better, too. West Indian fuzzies were never going to amount to shit, anyway,
you know that. Just out for what they can get from any white woman they meet.”
‘“I don’t know, Harry,” she says again, slow. “Some of those kids looked real
hungry.”
‘And there’s this bang, almost a crash, like he’s put something down hard, and
he says “You’re talking to me about hungry kids? Why the sudden scruples,
Sylvia?”
‘“Well, Harry,” she says, in a voice like she’s keeping herself from saying
something else, “We’ll have to agree to disagree.” And she opens the door back
up the rest of the way, and walks away from me in the other direction, didn’t
say a word. That was so normal, to have her do that. I should’ve seen it
coming.’
‘She approached you,’ Sherlock said, steepling her fingers in front of her
lips. ‘Later on.’
Davis nodded. ‘Waited about a week,’ he said, ‘and it was just the right amount
of time, I’ll give her that. It’s not like it was anything new, hearing that
kind of thing whispered behind my back, or even two white people talking when
they thought I wasn’t listening. Like I said, near nobody notices me, at the
paper.
‘But—you should know that my mother was West Indian, right. And I never had any
kids, but my sisters did, and their kids did, so I have grand-nieces and
nephews now, right there in Brixton. And when I was growing up, there wasn’t so
many of us, there sure wasn’t a whole neighbourhood of angry West Indian kids
tearing up the streets. But hearing how it is now, how it’s starting to be, how
even this white woman cop can see it’s starting to be, and then hearing her
shot down about it, and then having to go in half an hour later to empty his
rubbish bins, I don’t know. Something snapped in me.’
Sherlock nodded. ‘So Cohen approached you,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘and I was ready to listen. She said she had a grudge against
Townsend-Farquhar, too. I thought she had a funny way of showing it, calling
him Harry and hanging around in his office at one in the morning, but she said
it was all part of the plan. “The plan?” I said, and she said yes, she had a
plan to disgrace him, to take him down. And she told me—’
Davis shifted in his chair, and sighed. ‘She told me some of it.’
‘What’d she say?’ asked Johnnie, in a surprisingly congested voice.
Sherlock glanced over; Johnnie was on the edge of her seat, following Davis’s
every word, but breathing through her mouth, and with puffed-red eyes. The
dust, Sherlock supposed. And all in a rush she felt so fond of Johnnie,
wheezing there on the sofa with her wide-open face while Davis told them about
Cohen’s plan.
But there was nothing to be done with the feeling, not just then. So she smiled
a very little, and put it away.
‘She said this Townsend-Farquhar had something on her,’ Davis said, ‘and that
she had something on him too, but she couldn’t use it unless she could prove
it. She’d worked for him all through the War, she said, doing…things. She
wouldn’t tell me about the things, not then. But she said they made him rich,
and made her hunted, and she wanted it to be other way round. Or at least, she
said, she wanted to bring him down to her level.’
‘Seems like they were both pretty low to the ground,’ Johnnie mumbled. Sherlock
elbowed her, but lightly.
‘How was she planning to do that?’ she asked.
‘Two different ways,’ Davis said. ‘She said something about, he took her down
in two different ways, and she was going to do the same to him. Full of
herself, she was,’ he added, and spit again in the dish in the fireplace.
‘Anyway, she said, for one thing, there were records of what he’d got up to in
the War. Evidence, of where his money’d come from. And she’d been hanging round
with him in his office so much, she’d got a pretty good idea of where he was
keeping them. Her idea was, that since I was in there cleaning anyway, and he
was usually gone after about four in the morning, that I could take a look
around while I was cleaning. And I could find these records and sort of copy
them over, and then put the originals back. Then, when they were all copied,
we’d be able to take them to a different paper, or to her contacts at the Met,
and prove what he’d been up to.’
‘So that’s what you’ve been doing?’ Sherlock said. ‘Copying out records?’
Davis nodded. ‘I said I’d give it a try. Like I said, she timed it just right.
Sounded good to me to get some of my own back on this Townsend-Farquhar, and it
wasn’t too hard to find the records she meant. Sylvia’d reckoned more or less
where he’d put them, and once I knew where to look it was pretty obvious which
ones he’d wanted to hide.
‘Was the kind of shit people with a grain of sense would never keep,’ he added,
rolling his eyes. ‘Sales records and certificates of authenticity and whatnot
for all this expensive loot he’d picked up in Poland and Norway and Greece
during the War. I know some blokes, hell, he could’ve gotten plenty for that
stuff without those pieces of paper, but Sylvia said people are magpies. I said
people are idiots.’
Sherlock couldn’t help a snort of laughter. Davis didn’t smile, but his eyes
looked like he thought about it.
‘But I went through it all,’ he said, ‘piece by piece. And I copied out
anything with a date, or a serial number, or names or locations or anything
that might be useful.
‘The thing was, I could only work for about twenty minutes at a time. Because I
already had a full night’s work, right, and people would notice if I stopped
doing it. And there were reams of the stuff to go through. So it took months.
I’d been working on it three months, and then—then I stopped.’
He cleared his throat. Sherlock raised her eyebrows, listening to Johnnie
wheezing next to her.
Chester spit in the dish again. The silence mounted.
At last Sherlock said, ‘This would have been, oh, about a month ago?’
Davis looked up at her. ‘Yeah,’ he said. Then his face cleared as he realised
the connection. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. ‘You’re right; you’re smart; you heard
about the fight. That’s the why of it. I’d heard her, drunk at the bar one
night. Sometimes she made like she was drunk when she wasn’t. Sometimes she
started fights for distractions, so everyone would remember the fight, and
wouldn’t remember her and me having a talk in a corner just before. But this
night she really was pissed. And she was talking to some poor kid down from the
country, and I heard her say—.’
He screwed up his mouth again, biting at the inside. ‘Let’s just say her real
thoughts on Brixton, were a lot closer to her pal Harry’s than she’d let on
that day in his office.
‘Hell, I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out, that she’d been
winding me up on purpose. Staged the whole damn thing, all that talk about the
West Indian kids and whatnot. With all her talk about pulling old Harry’s
strings, I should have thought that she’d be pulling mine too. But I didn’t
think of it until that night, and then I was just. Finished with her. Just. Why
should I bother? She was a stone bitch. She was just as bad as old Harry, and
the two of them could go hang.’
He spit in the fireplace again, his mouth twisted up bitter and ugly.
‘But you started up again,’ Sherlock said, quiet. ‘You didn’t stay away for
good.’
‘No,’ Davis bit out. ‘She found out I’d stopped copying out the records, and
she came to the Gateways and threatened me about it. I told her she was a liar
and a bitch, that she was no better than her old friend Harry. She punched me
in the shoulder and I said it again, and she pinned me up against the wall and
told me to meet her at the Raven the next night, and she’d explain. I wasn’t
gonna go,’ he added, and then stayed silent for a minute and a half.
Sherlock and Johnnie waited.
‘I wasn’t gonna go,’ he said again, at last. ‘But for some goddamned reason I
did. I can’t tell you why. Maybe I just wanted to cuss her out some more. I met
her at the Raven, and she told me—enough. Enough that I went back to her
Harry’s file cabinet the next night, when I was cleaning up his office.’
‘She told you enough of what?’ said Johnnie, sounding very stuffed-up indeed.
Sherlock had the unexpected urge to fetch her a cup of tea.
Davis sighed. ‘Said she was a liar,’ he said. ‘Said she was a bitch. Admitted
it right out, and didn’t apologise. But said she still wasn’t anywhere near as
bad as Harold Townsend-Farquhar.
‘She said she didn’t give a shit what happened to her, as long as in the end
she got to take him down. Told me—told me a story. About coming with her dad,
from Poland, as a little kid.
‘Her dad died, but all his family was still there. She told me she’d always
been ashamed of them. That she took a fake name and worked to get rid of her
accent, and worked to get herself higher up, always higher up. She never liked
old Harry, she said, but she had no problem scratching his back if he wanted to
scratch hers. She was out for number one, she said. She never wanted anyone
dragging her down.
‘But you know, she was a reporter, she heard things. Rumours. And when she
heard what was happening, in Poland in ’39, she didn’t want—. It was one thing
pretending they hadn’t existed, but she didn’t want them slaughtered like
swine, she said. And that Harry was so well-connected. She said he was going on
and on about all the money to be made, and that he just needed an agent on
occupied ground, to shift goods around so it wouldn’t be noticed. And she said
she’d do it, if he’d agree to use his clout to protect her family. And he said
he would.’
Johnnie sucked in a breath. Sherlock hummed.
‘I infer,’ she said, sitting forward in her chair, ‘that he did not.’
‘No,’ echoed Davis. ‘He did not. That’s what she told me. And she found out
about it—,’
‘In January of 1945,’ breathed Sherlock. Davis looked a little disconcerted,
but he pressed on.
‘—sometime in 1945, anyway. When her little unit was ordered to the same
village she’d told old Harry about, four years before. She said she didn’t even
worry, on the way there. She said she’d made a rough bargain, made herself into
a monster, all the people she’d beaten and killed and stolen from, but she knew
she’d bought something for someone by it. She said she took a nap on the train
on the way there. She said she knew for sure her family was safe, right up
until she walked into their house and saw it gutted.’
‘So she deserted,’ said Johnnie, leaning so far forward that she might as well
be squatting on the floor. ‘She grabbed as many things from her own family as
she could, and put them in a duffel, didn’t she? And she took a train to
Leningrad.’
‘That, I don’t know,’ said Davis, looking over at her, ‘But she said she swore
revenge that day, and it sounds like something from a penny dreadful, but
believe me. If you’d have seen her face, you’d have bought it too.’
Sherlock thought of Ellen Erins, throwing her lover to the wolves in order to
further her own career; of the hawkish lines of her body as she stood rooted,
barking orders up at golden-haired pillagers; of her choked, scarred face on
the washroom floor, and how she’d punched a cripple in the solar plexus as a
convenient diversion. Sherlock could well imagine the woman’s declaration of
revenge.
‘So we agreed,’ Davis said. ‘We agreed that she was a hard, cold bitch, and
headed straight for Hell. But that Harry Townsend-Farquhar was worse.’
Johnnie gave a whistle, quiet in Sherlock’s ear. Sherlock exhaled at last.
‘The next time I was at the paper,’ Davis said, ‘I went back to copying out the
records of all the things he took. I was almost done, too, by the time—well.’
He coughed, and chewed at his mouth. ‘I was just about done.’
‘And you still have these copied records?’ Sherlock said, trying to keep the
glee out of her voice.
Davis looked at her out the corner of his eye. After seconds he nodded, slow
and wary.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘’S the reason I haven’t been back to work, since. Or even to
the Gates.’
‘But I thought you said,’ Johnnie piped up, ‘that nobody ever noticed you, at
the paper. Why would they, now?’
Davis snorted. ‘Sylvia didn’t think he was on to her, either,’ he said. ‘Didn’t
stop her ending up cold on the floor by the Gateways toilet.’
Sherlock sat back, fingertips at her mouth. ‘But nobody’s come looking for
you?’ she asked at last. ‘Before Johnnie and me, obviously.’
‘No,’ Davis said. ‘Not yet.’
‘So Townsend-Farquhar might not know of your involvement.’
‘Or he might just not know where I live,’ Davis said. ‘I ain’t too eager to
test which it is, to be frank.’
Johnnie gave a kind of snuffling laugh through her stuffed-up nose, and
Sherlock looked over at her again, her lips drawing up into a smile. Then she
looked back at Davis.
‘You said Cohen had two plans to bring down Townsend-Farquhar,’ she said.
‘Could it be that he discovered one, but not the other?’
‘Yep,’ Davis said, in the tone of someone who had spent the last four days
doing nothing but considering the possibility. ‘Sure is. But I don’t even
reckon there’s a way to know which plan he’s onto and which he’s not.’
‘Whad whas te odder ode?’ said Johnnie. Davis, for the first time that
afternoon, cracked a smile.
‘You wanna switch places?’ he asked. ‘You’re not breathing too well.’
‘Thadk you,’ said Johnnie. She stood up to cross to the straight-backed wooden
chair as Davis crossed to the sofa. Sherlock turned her back to the armrest, to
face him.
‘So,’ she said. ‘What was the second prong of the attack?’
‘Sylvia thought,’ Davis said, ‘that the things he’d done, that she’d done,
during the War, were the worst. That’s what she really wanted people to know.
But she said she thought nothing that bad would happen to him, even if they
came out. She told me, “Nobody likes to think about the War, anymore.”
‘And I reckon she was right,’ Davis added, looking down at the floor, nodding.
‘People don’t like to think about it. Seems like it was all a bad dream, and
easier to believe that way.’ He shook himself, staring down at his knees.
‘Anyway,’ he went on. ‘She said we needed something about the present day.
Something that would make people mad in the here and now. Something that would
affect them, right? And she’s been working all this time as her Harry’s ace in
the hole, his mole in the police force. She’d been doing that for four, five
years already, plus what she’d done for him in the War.
‘So she said, her idea was to start feeding him bad leads, on top of the good.
Lead him on a false trail, and get him so far along that he’d have the
Chronicle running a big, front-cover story, only we’d be able to prove it was
flat-out wrong. He’d think he was getting this big scoop on all the other
papers in town, but he’d really be tying the noose around his own neck. Ruin
his reputation.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, nodding. ‘And once he was professionally disgraced, it
would be easier to prosecute for his war profiteering, as well. Much simpler to
pursue a known reprobate, than a model citizen. The public would already be
after his blood.’
‘Yep,’ Davis said. ‘That’s what Sylvia said. So the whole time I was copying
out these records, she was slipping him leads. Most of them still good; some of
them bad.’
‘The bad leads were concerning…?’ Sherlock prodded. Davis waved a hand.
‘Concerning Sylvia’s own DI at the Met,’ he said. ‘Lestrade, is his name. The
way she figured, if the Chronicle ran a muckraker piece about corruption on the
part of a high-ranking police officer, which then turned out to be false, there
would be one officer at least guaranteed to be gunning for old Harry once it
all came to light. And given that this Lestrade is a bit of a darling of the
Met in general, the rest of the force wouldn’t look too kindly on him, either.
‘We were set to finish up around the same time,’ Davis added. ‘I’d copied out
almost all the records, and Sylvia—she had the whole fake story ready to go.
Only thing left, was to give old Harry the signal to run it.’
There was a few minutes’ silence. Then Sherlock said, ‘Signal?’ and Davis, very
slowly, reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a thin envelope, and held
it up. From her perch on the straight-backed chair, Johnnie gaped.
There was a thrum of excitement under her skin, but Sherlock made herself sort
through it all in her mind, thinking: in amongst the wreckage of two plans,
there might be the salvageable remains of one.
‘Tell me more,’ she said at last, leaning forward on the sofa. ‘Tell me
everything.’
***
June 3, 1955
10:33pm
Baker Street, Marylebone
 London, England
They’d made Davis run through the details of it, over and over until his
threats had moved from reporting them to the police, to walking out of his own
home, and finally to braining them both if they didn’t leave him to get some
rest. Johnnie had laughed, but Davis’s nostrils had flared and there had been a
gleam in his eyes, and Sherlock had thought it really might be best to be
going.
She was sure, anyway, that she had most everything she needed.
They walked home in the misty June evening under the yellow street lamps of
London, because they were both too transported to shut themselves back up in a
cab.
‘How does it feel,’ Johnnie said, crowding up next to her and smiling, ‘to have
solved your first murder investigation?’
And despite the illogic of it—because she had solved it, and now all that was
left was to put her plan into operation—Sherlock hadn’t wanted to say. It had
seemed bad luck, somehow. So she just grinned, and spread her arms, looking up
at the sky with her neck stretched out and the slight drizzle on her face, and
let out a wordless yell.
Johnnie had laughed. She had tackled her around the middle, and Sherlock had
gasped and drawn in her arms to grip at Johnnie’s canvas-clad shoulders, and
they’d tussled to one side of the pavement in the light rain. And as it was a
side street, with no one else about, Sherlock hadn’t pulled away when they
ended up backed against the wet brick of a run-down townhouse, but had pressed
her mist-damp face to Johnnie’s and sucked the dew from her lips until Johnnie
was panting hard, and pressing Sherlock back into the wall like their first
time in the Gateways alley.
Heels, then, clicking down the pavement. Johnnie had peeled herself off
Sherlock’s front with a little groan, and only after her hand had gone did
Sherlock realise that it had snaked its way under the white cotton of her
peasant blouse, to cool her sweat-damp skin. And they had run on.
The night just felt that way. Bursting at the seams. She couldn’t help it. It
was better, she thought: better than the time would be after everything was all
neatly tied up, because now her brain still hummed; and skittered; and parsed
through all the multifarious contingencies of tomorrow.
And layered on top of that was the sheen of success; of having delved into the
knots and tangles of the world, and understood their sequence. Within every
shape, and every surface, there seemed a deep warmth of meaning, a vibrating
hum that went all the way down to the atoms. And within herself, too, she felt
it; and it made her hungry to move, and touch.
‘Let’s—let’s go out for a drink,’ she said, spinning on the ball of her foot
and walking backwards, in front of Johnnie, so she could look at Johnnie
laughing at her. ‘Let’s—Oh, let’s not go home. What should we do, then? Supper?
A show?’ and Johnnie shook her head and glanced side to side, and leaned in to
growl ‘I want to kiss every inch of you, Sherlock Holmes,’ and Sherlock threw
her head back again and yelled up at the sky.
So in the end they were drunk enough, without ever setting foot in a pub. They
passed an alley off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Sherlock pulled Johnnie to her
and kissed her once, hard against the stone, and then bolted off down the
twisting passage. Johnnie chased her, cursing all along it, and kept up over
fire escapes and back stairways, and when she finally caught her up on a
rooftop off George Street, she tackled her to the slate, one hand in her wet
hair, and kissed the breath from her lungs.
Gasping, they half-walked, half-crawled to the edge of the rooftop. Sherlock
thought, with the thrill of a gift well given, that Johnnie seemed surprised to
be looking down on the windows of Baker Street.
Fire escape; back alley; and they were crowding together through the inside
door of 221B, laughing against each others’ bodies as Johnnie at Sherlock’s
neck under the collar of her heavy winter coat. Sherlock pushed Johnnie’s
canvas jacket off her shoulders. Johnnie kicked her loafers off her feet so one
hit the wall, and Sherlock jumped, and Johnnie laughed and bit at her ear.
‘Christ,’ she said, into Sherlock’s hair, ‘The flush on you when you’ve been
running in the cold. I think it has to be in the—mmmm—in the top ten reasons I
thought I’d go mad, these last eight months.’
Sherlock laughed. Delighted. Skin singing.
‘Do you have a list, then?’ she said.
She thought everything in the world felt good. It felt good when the back of
her head hit the wall behind her. It felt good not to get enough breath.
‘You’re damn right I do,’ said Johnnie, and then: ‘Yeah, pull,’ because
Sherlock’s fingers were petting through her hair. Sherlock made a fist, and
pulled. ‘God,’ Johnnie said, pressing up against her. ‘That’s, mmm, number
eighteen.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Sherlock giggled. Giggling so hard she had to stop
pulling on Johnnie’s hair.
‘You don’t believe I like it when you yank on my hair?’ Johnnie said, amused,
eyes shining up into Sherlock’s face, leaning close to her ear again, dropping
her voice. ‘You should, you know,’ she said. ‘I really fucking like it,
Sherlock.’
And ever since Portloe the crisp, brutal shape of Johnnie’s mouth around the
word fuck had stopped Sherlock’s breath; and it did it again now. So even
though she suspected Johnnie knew that and had done it on purpose, she still
fastened down hard, and twisted her fist, hard, and Johnnie still moaned and
ground their hips together and said ‘Christ, yeah, Sherlock, I really fucking
do.’
‘Number eighteen, is it?’ Sherlock said, but her words came out uneven. She was
grinning, gasping, up against the door.
She yanked again, a little more. Johnnie twisted down a quarter-turn, her knees
bending so her head was at a level with Sherlock’s chest. She ground out
‘Something like that, fuck, fuck’; Sherlock’s nerves sparked. Hot, and
protective, and joyful through all her limbs. She laughed again. She let go.
She grabbed at Johnnie’s shirt; hauled her up for another kiss.
And oh: smarting blood; and rushing, humming brain; and Johnnie’s dear rough
lapping tongue at her lips and her teeth and the inside of her mouth. And all
that meaning still vibrating beneath the surface of things. She wanted to feel
everything. She grabbed harder to the front of Johnnie’s shirt. She slammed her
own back up against the wall, for the sensation, and felt how the impact echoed
through Johnnie’s body, too.
Johnnie broke away. She was panting; smiling; wiping her mouth. Sherlock
schooled her face to be mock-serious. Lifted her chin.
‘I believe you like it when I pull your hair,’ she said, grave.
‘Yeah, well,’ Johnnie panted. ‘You should.’
‘I don’t believe you have a numbered list,’ Sherlock clarified.
‘Ohhh,’ said Johnnie, grinning, leaning up against her. ‘The genius detective,’
and she nipped at Sherlock’s mouth, ‘doesn’t believe,’ and nipped again, ‘that
I have a numbered list.’ And she sucked Sherlock’s bottom lip into her mouth.
Sherlock felt her whole skin might shiver off her frame.
She couldn’t stay still. She shivered, and her coat slid to the floor, and she
pushed Johnnie by the shoulders back and back and back until they hit the wall
next to Sherlock’s bedroom and it was Johnnie’s back up against it. She caged
Johnnie, her arms on either side of Johnnie’s head.
Johnnie bit back a grin and said, ‘Hmm, number thirty-one,’ and Sherlock
laughed, and kissed her rough and kissed her rough and kissed her gentle.
Then she pulled back, feeling spread across her face the shark-smile she’d seen
in a long-ago mirror. ‘Your mouth on every inch of me,’ she murmured.
‘Christ,’ said Johnnie. ‘Er, nine, number nine.’ She yanked Sherlock’s peasant
blouse up over her head. Pulled Sherlock to her, sternum to Johnnie’s mouth
while Sherlock giggled, still shaking the shirt down one arm. Johnnie scraped
her teeth into the hollow just below Sherlock’s shoulder, Sherlock’s bra strap
slipping down her arm, and said again ‘Christ,’ and Sherlock gasped.
‘As high as that,’ she said then, breathless. One hand still bracing her on the
wall and one undoing the buttons of Johnnie’s button-down; unbuttoning and
unbuttoning all the way down until the flies were open on Johnnie’s trousers
and Sherlock’s hand had nowhere else to go. She watched Johnnie staring down at
Sherlock’s long fingers hovering in front of her open trousers, so close
Sherlock could feel the heat coming off her. Not touching.
‘Oh,’ Johnnie said. ‘Fuck. Fuck, your.’ Her hips twitched toward Sherlock’s
hand, not quite close enough, but Sherlock felt the potential for it along all
her nerves. Sensation.
‘My hands,’ she said. Johnnie moaned. Needles down Sherlock’s spine; she
laughed.
‘Touch me, fuck,’ Johnnie said. She rolled her head back and forth, on the wall
behind her.
‘My hands,’ Sherlock repeated, grinning, her fingertips half an inch from the
white cotton of Johnnie’s briefs. ‘Give me a number and I will.’
Johnnie laughed, high up in her throat, wild and unbelieving. Then she breathed
deep. Sherlock waited. Johnnie’s shoulders went pliant at last, against the
wall.
Then: ’Three,’ she said, and in the same instant Sherlock’s fingers slid past
her flies, under her briefs. Cupped her between the legs, fingerprints to
feverish wet skin.
‘Oh,’ Sherlock said, surprised. More surprised than Johnnie, who was cursing
again, her head twisted to one side on the flocked wallpaper. ‘Oh,’ Sherlock
said again, and moved her fingers, and shivered.
It must be down to that deep vibration, she thought: that sympathy through all
things in the world. Because nobody was—nobody was touching Sherlock. But
touching Johnnie where she was wet, and swollen, and hitching her hips into
Sherlock’s palm, was making Sherlock’s blood sting all through her veins.
‘God, you. You feel so good,’ Sherlock panted. Panting, which was—was stupid,
but she was. She was panting, just from standing still in the Baker Street
sitting room, moving her fingers. ‘It feels so. So good, to touch you.’
‘Oh Christ,’ Johnnie said. She put out her hands, suddenly, one palm flat
against the wall and the other forearm braced on Sherlock’s shoulder. Johnnie
said, ‘I need to, I can’t stand up anymore, Sherlock,’ which was—heaven, bloody
heaven. Too much.
So she crushed Johnnie back against the wall, holding her up while she sucked
hard on Johnnie’s tongue, one hand still twisted awkwardly inside Johnnie’s
trousers and the other one, trembling, pulling on her hair.
Sherlock had solved a murder. She held the solution sharp on her tongue, the
proof of it a waiting feast. And now Johnnie Watson was actually shuddering,
with Sherlock’s hand down her trousers and Sherlock holding her up. Of all the
days, Sherlock thought, with Johnnie arching into her hand, this must be the
best.
‘Oh,’ Sherlock said, breaking away, trying to breathe, ‘that’s on my list, I
think.’
Still holding Johnnie up. Her face an inch from Johnnie’s face, and she could
see Johnnie pulling her brain back into focus. Grinning like she’d been hit
over the head.
‘What number?’ Johnnie slurred. Sherlock laughed outright, and forgot to keep
hold of Johnnie’s front, and Johnnie stumbled to the side a bit and sat down
hard on the floor.
‘God,’ she said, her legs all tangled, leaning back against the wall and
looking up at Sherlock. ‘Get me into your bed.’
Get me into your bed.‘Mmmm,’ said Sherlock, looking down, hand on the wall,
ears ringing with it. ‘Well, that’s…twenty-one, I’d say.’
Johnnie straightened her legs out, feet flat on the floor. She put her head in
her hands, and scrubbed at her face, and laughed.
Sherlock stepped over to her with her hand out, meaning to help Johnnie up, but
somehow when Johnnie took it she pulled Sherlock down on top of her instead.
The folds of Sherlock’s wrap skirt tented around Johnnie’s knees; Sherlock’s
knees hit the floor on either side of Johnnie’s legs. The tie on her skirt was
coming undone. The air was cool on her left thigh, where the fabric parted and
her skin showed through. Johnnie ran one hand up the exposed skin, between the
flaps of cotton and up to Sherlock’s hip. Staring into her face. Sherlock felt
hungry all over her skin.
‘Get me. Into your bed,’ Johnnie said again, brushing a curl out of Sherlock’s
eyes with a wondering look at whatever she saw in her face. Sherlock shivering,
probably. The skin of Sherlock’s face and her arse coming up all gooseflesh
where Johnnie was touching her.
Sherlock shifted, restless. Restless against Johnnie’s knees. She rubbed
herself against her own damp cotton knickers, against the khaki fabric covering
Johnnie’s legs. Just a little friction; maddening. Johnnie’s knees were pressed
more against her arse than anything. She wanted more, she wanted—.
She made a little whimpering sound. Johnnie made it back; and Sherlock’s whole
skin, her whole skin, she couldn’t—.
She wanted to touch. Johnnie’s button-down still hung off her, unbuttoned, so
Sherlock pushed it down over her honeyed shoulders and her biceps and her
tensing forearms and her wrists. And she leaned forward in Johnnie’s lap and
put her mouth on Johnnie’s skin.
‘Your freckles,’ she said. ‘The freckles, on your shoulders, they. They
disappear in the winter and then come back in the spring, I.’ They were hot,
salty under her tongue. ‘I want to live on them, John.’
‘You calling me John,’ Johnnie gasped, fingers digging into Sherlock’s arse
under her skirt, pulling her closer, ‘has to be—fuck, twelve, call it twelve,
get me into your bed, Sherlock Holmes.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, and sucked, and kissed, and: ‘yes.’
So she made herself kneel up, away from Johnnie’s body. Her skirt flopped
limply down her waist. She undid the tie, impatient, and tossed it away.
Johnnie lifted herself off the floor, weight on her hands. It forced her hips
up. Just for a moment, but Sherlock looked down in that moment and saw
Johnnie’s body arching to fill the space between her legs, and she groaned and
blinked and still wanted to touch; and she reached down and slid her thumbs
under the waistband of Johnnie’s briefs. Warm, so warm, and dusted in light-
gold hair, and Sherlock scuffled back on her knees on the hardwoods to pull
briefs and trousers down together over Johnnie’s hipbones and Johnnie’s thighs
and Johnnie’s knees and Johnnie’s lovely curling toes.
‘Oh Sherlock,’ Johnnie said. ‘Christ.’
Johnnie’s neck was at an odd angle. Sherlock could hear her swallow. She’d slid
down the wall as Sherlock had pulled at her trousers, and was splayed out on
the floor now with only her head propped up on the wall, looking down the full
length of her own body at Sherlock, in just her own bra and knickers, looking
up it. Johnnie grabbed her discarded trousers and bunched them up beneath her
neck, propping her head up without ever looking away from Sherlock’s face.
Sherlock blinked. Blinked. Johnnie’s breathing was loud, ragged in the empty
room.
‘Bed?’ Johnnie said, just as Sherlock said, too fast, blinking again, ‘I want
to taste you,’ and opened her eyes again. Johnnie’s were rolling up. There was
Sherlock, kneeling between Johnnie’s legs, gripping her calves, skin so tender
she thought she could distinguish each soft gold hair beneath each fingertip.
‘Just a,’ said Sherlock, and swallowed, and Johnnie stared down at her. Her
skin prickled. The vibration, still; the meaning; but much of the lightness had
gone.
‘I think it’s, er,’ she said. She tried to laugh. ‘Something like fourteen,
just. Tasting you, just a. Just a little bit.’
‘Jesus,’ said Johnnie.
Which meant yes, so Sherlock crawled up Johnnie’s body, curls falling all in
her face.
She sucked at the sandy-rough skin of Johnnie’s knee. Johnnie made her hands
into fists by her sides. Johnnie cursed, and Sherlock crawled up to suck on the
softer skin of Johnnie’s thigh; Johnnie moaned. The wet place on her knee
caught at Sherlock’s nipple through the thin slick fabric of her cheap bra.
Sherlock pressed harder with her chest into Johnnie’s knee, quivering. She bit,
just a little, at Johnnie’s inner thigh.
Johnnie’s hand came up to push Sherlock’s curls away from her eyes. It was
shaking so much that a lock slipped free over her forehead just as she crawled
up another step. She put out a hand then, not thinking. Just wanting to feel,
again, where Johnnie was hot, and leaking, and swollen for her.
‘Fucking Christ, Sherlock, Jesus fucking Christ,’ Johnnie said. And she bucked,
and gasped, and was God, everything; so Sherlock bent her head and replaced her
hand with her wet and hungry mouth.
She had no idea—no idea what she was doing; but in a way, that made it better.
Like walking out over a precipice, she thought, and she suckled at Johnnie,
moving her tongue against the tip of her like Johnnie had done to Sherlock. It
was like walking out over a precipice, to the very edge, and spreading out your
arms in the stinging raging air, and with your eyes open into the wind, taking
one more step.
And she couldn’t—she couldn’t stop herself.Her blood was on fire with Johnnie
letting her, letting her; and the taste of her, light and briny and like the
earth.
Sherlock got lost in it, a bit. Thinking not of her own body, humming and
aching and positioned ridiculously with her arse in the air and her knees rough
on the bare floor; or even of Johnnie’s drawn-tight and desperate noises; but
of the simple sensory wealth of it all. The feel of Johnnie’s wiry-soft hair
against her lips and her cheek, and how mad, how different to the smooth
slickness just inside her. The way Johnnie’s skin at the outer folds of her was
ever so slightly cool, so that Sherlock could warm it with her suckling mouth;
but how, by contrast, when she tongued back the skin at the peak of her, and
licked at Johnnie where she was hard and straining beneath, it was hot, hot, so
hot that Sherlock’s mouth felt chill. She wanted to—she wanted to devour her,
to make a space inside and stay.
She licked, and licked, and sucked at Johnnie where she was so unbearably hot.
Johnnie was restless, under her tongue. Saying words Sherlock didn’t hear
through all the wet-slick vibrations of Johnnie’s muscles and her own brain.
And then she could—she could feel her get harder right against her tongue.
Sherlock moaned and Johnnie was moaning too, continuously in her chest. Johnnie
said ‘Oh God oh God Sherlock your voice,’ and Sherlock felt wetness actually
trickle down her chin, and she had to—. She had to. She couldn’t stop suckling
with her mouth and so without thinking she shifted her weight onto her left
elbow, and with her right hand reached down between her face and Johnnie’s hot
skin where she was leaking against Sherlock, just to feel how wet she was, how
open, and she nudged into Johnnie’s body with two cool fingers and everything—
Everything stopped.
Johnnie had frozen up under her with held breath, her eyes squeezed shut.
Sherlock pulled back, gasping. She was nothing—nothing but clouds of cold
horror. But she said ‘I’m. I. Did I do something wrong, I—.’
Johnnie shook her head, fast, side to side on the pillowed trousers. She
breathed very deep.
Sherlock’s fingers were still petting between her legs.
‘Do you want me to stop?’ Sherlock whispered. Johnnie whined. She didn’t
answer. Sherlock’s chest felt like it was squeezing down on her heart.
‘I want—,’ Sherlock said. Her voice broke. ‘If you wanted,’ she tried again,
‘if you wanted me to feel inside you, what you—,’ and Johnnie was panting now,
still squeezing her eyes hard shut, with Sherlock petting compulsively along
the outside of her body.
‘I’d very much—I think it might be something like—.’
Sherlock felt like she was about to pass out, but she kept
touching—touching—talking. ‘I think it might be number, er, seven or—or eight,
if you—,’ and finally Johnnie’s eyes came open, and she laughed. It was high,
and tight in her throat, but she was laughing, looking into Sherlock’s wide
open eyes.
‘That high,’ Johnnie whispered. Sherlock nodded, too quick, too many times. Her
hand stilling between Johnnie’s legs.
‘It’s only—since you said. I’ve thought about how it would be if I.’ She
swallowed. ‘Only if you want to.’ A whisper so quiet even she could hardly
hear.
Slowly, staring into Sherlock’s open eyes, Johnnie nodded.
And Sherlock, kneeling untouched on the sitting room floor, moaned aloud.
‘All right,’ she said then, gulping air, shuffling forward again on her knees.
And she pushed with the flats of two fingertips, so they pressed just inside
Johnnie’s body, the insides of her knuckle-joints still bracketing the blood-
hot nub she’d been suckling. The same transition, now, on her fingers, that
she’d mapped with her lips and her tongue: looser and rougher skin parting into
oh, hot-slick and tensing.
And Johnnie’s breath changed, too, the moment Sherlock felt that give. It
turned from deep and laboured to outright gasping, staring down her body at
Sherlock’s arm and her wrist, and Sherlock herself could hardly breathe.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. Her voice cracked, high in her chest. She
swallowed. She curled her wrist and her two fingers so she could press deeper
inside and still keep her line of contact.
‘You can—Johnnie, you can trust me, you have to—,’ and Johnnie’s inside muscles
clenched around her fingers, and Sherlock felt her eyes go wide.
‘I want to,’ Sherlock said, and shook her head, and scissored her fingers like
Johnnie had done to her. Johnnie writhed. She banged her head gently against
the wall behind her, through the makeshift trouser pillow. Sherlock did it
again, and again, and Johnnie hit her head again, so Sherlock crawled forward
with her fingers still moving gently inside Johnnie’s body, and cradled her
skull in her other hand, and kissed Johnnie’s mouth until Johnnie twisted her
head away, making desperate whining noises.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Johnnie panted. ‘Christ, do you really want—are you
really—?’ and Sherlock said ‘Yes,’ almost panicking, and pushed with her thigh
against her own wrist, so her fingers went deeper, with the ball of her palm
pressed up against Johnnie’s pubic bone. Johnnie said ‘Fuck’ in a lovely,
ragged voice, so Sherlock pulled back and pushed forward again, and bit at
Johnnie’s mouth, and pulled back, and did it again.
‘Sherlock,’ Johnnie said. God, she sounded like she was dying. Sherlock pulled
back again. Johnnie said ‘Sherlock, stop, stop,’ and Sherlock pushed forward
before she could process the words, and then she stilled completely, panting,
flushed with disbelief and arousal and shame.
‘Sherlock, I don’t—know if I. If I can,’ Johnnie said. Her hands were fists to
either side of her legs. She wasn’t meeting Sherlock’s eyes.
‘We can stop,’ said Sherlock, though she felt it would be easier to peel off
her own skin. Her voice came out choked. She sat back, her fingers still buried
inside Johnnie but still, waiting.
Johnnie chewed the inside of her mouth. Her breathing levelled out a tiny bit.
Sherlock wanted to—she wanted to just push, just a little, just a—.
But she waited, hardly breathing.
‘Is it really all right, you’re not—,’ Johnnie said. She cleared her throat.
‘You’re not just doing this to, er. Because Sally Donovan told you tall tales
about me, or—.’
Sherlock could tell she’d made a face, because Johnnie gave a weak giggle,
looking up at her. She felt the movement from inside Johnnie’s body, and bit
her own tongue, hard, to keep still.
‘I’ll thank you not to bring up any officers of the Met while we’re less than
fully clothed,’ Sherlock said.
Johnnie giggled a little more, which was worth the revulsion. And when she
stopped giggling Sherlock hadn’t room in her body for the intensity of the
fondness in Johnnie’s eyes.
‘Move,’ Johnnie whispered.
Sherlock was afraid she’d misheard, so she stayed still. Johnnie breathed, and
un-fisted her hands, and reached out to dig her fingers into Sherlock’s hips.
‘C’mon,’ she said. ‘Move in me.’
And a hungry noise came from Sherlock’s chest. She pressed forward with her
hand and her hips, and Johnnie pulled Sherlock down harder against her, and
cried out.
‘Oh, curl. Your fingers,’ Johnnie panted. Sherlock curled her fingers. She
watched Johnnie arch up. Her eyes felt like she hadn’t blinked for about half
an hour.
‘And press up, like—like—,’ Johnnie said.
Sherlock tried, but Johnnie made a breathless little dissatisfied noise in her
throat, so Sherlock tried again, but she didn’t know, she was at sea, but she
had to—
And then Johnnie was saying ‘It’s all right, look, I’ll. I’ll show you, just,
stay.’
Sherlock stayed. Still. Breathing hard. Balanced, leaning over Johnnie’s body
with one hand on the floor by Johnnie’s shoulder keeping her up, and the other
barely scissoring between Johnnie’s legs.
Johnnie took one hand off Sherlock’s hip, and wet her own fingers in her mouth,
and reached down and down Sherlock’s body, inside her cotton knickers, two
fingers pressed into Sherlock like her two fingers pressed into Johnnie.
‘Oh,’ Sherlock said. Harder now, to keep still. Breath faster. Twitching into
Johnnie’s hand.
But Johnnie smiled. She scissored her two fingers in an imitation of how
Sherlock was scissoring her two fingers, and Sherlock said it again, ‘Oh,’ and
again. She couldn’t help pressing forward just a little bit, pressing with her
hip so her hand nudged deeper, and when she did Johnnie’s hand nudged deeper
too.
‘Oh god,’ Sherlock whispered. ‘Yes, oh, god, it’s—.’
‘Can you just. Follow me.’ Johnnie said, watching Sherlock blinking the sparks
out of her eyes.
‘I think. I. Yes,’ Sherlock said.
So Johnnie curled her fingers inside Sherlock, and Sherlock moaned but she
somehow remembered, too, to curl her fingers inside Johnnie.
‘Fuck,’ Johnnie said. ‘Yeah, all right, like. Like that, and then.’
And she twisted her thumb into the palm of her hand, and pulled Sherlock down
into it with her other hand still on Sherlock’s hip.
‘Hnnnnh,’ Sherlock said, panting—panting, but she still managed to get her own
thumb wedged under her hand so that Johnnie could push up into it.
Johnnie pushed up, and up, and groaned.
Sherlock was breathing so hard she was dizzy. She pulled back a little, and
Johnnie pulled back a little, and Sherlock angled her wrist and pushed back in
so her thumb slid against Johnnie’s stretched wet skin, and Johnnie pushed back
in, sliding against Sherlock, and Sherlock bucked her hips forward without
thinking and Johnnie bucked her hips forward and Sherlock’s vision tunnelled.
‘I just,’ Sherlock said, her voice sounding far away to her own ears. ‘I want
to make you, I want to—,’
‘Fuck,’ Johnnie said, and crooked her fingers again, hard, and Sherlock crooked
her fingers.
‘—Yes,’ Sherlock said. ‘I want to—to see you, please, you can—oh,’ because
Johnnie had twisted her hand out, and in, so Sherlock had to twist her hand
out, and in, and she could feel Johnnie’s body start to spasm around her
fingers.
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said, ‘You can—Johnnie, you can trust me, I want—.’ Johnnie
clenched her hand, panting, fingers toward palm, so Sherlock did the same and
said ‘you’re essential, I want—,’ and Johnnie’s back came up off the floor and
her mouth came open and she beat, and beat, and beat around Sherlock’s
clenching hand.
Then Johnnie melted. She was breathing hard, her head still pillowed on the
trousers, which had slid down the wall and onto the floor. Sherlock moved to
pull her hand out, but Johnnie took her hand off Sherlock’s hip and reached
down to stop her wrist. Sherlock stopped, waiting, only half-realising she was
still fretting her hips ever so slightly against Johnnie’s hand.
‘I do, you know,’ Johnnie said.
‘Mmmh?’ said Sherlock, rocking against Johnnie’s fingers, and Johnnie squeezed
her hand again: sparking pressure, inside, outside; Sherlock rocked, and
rocked.
‘Trust you,’ Johnnie said.
Sherlock panted. Sherlock nudged her hand forward and Johnnie said ‘Mmmm,’ slow
and luxuriant, and nudged her hand forward. Sherlock gasped.
‘You can,’ Sherlock said, not sure that even made sense, but she nudged her
hand back, and forward, so that Johnnie would do the same, smiling up at her
slow and lazy.
‘I do,’ Johnnie said.
Sherlock held her breath. Her vision was going black again; she nudged-nudged-
nudged with her hand, quicker, quicker, so Johnnie did it back to her quicker,
and quicker, and Johnnie did it quicker, and then she couldn’t anymore, she
couldn’t, she grabbed with her free hand onto Johnnie’s shoulder and thrust
with her hips into Johnnie’s hand, over and over as Johnnie said ‘Oh Sherlock,’
and her blood just sang and she shook and shook and collapsed shaking onto
Johnnie’s chest.
When the rushing stopped in her ears she still couldn’t be sure, for seconds on
end, that she wasn’t shaking. Then it seemed Johnnie was shaking instead, so
she opened her eyes, and levered herself up, and Johnnie was—was laughing.
‘Christ,’ Johnnie said. ‘I thought—I’d hoped we’d make it up to my bed, with
the—the box, and all, but. Forget the stairs; we never even made it to yours.’
Sherlock giggled, exhausted. She pulled her hand free at last, and knelt up
herself, and flexed her sore wrist.
‘I’m sorry about your—your neck might be sore, tomorrow,’ she said. But Johnnie
pulled her back down, and held her close to her chest, hands around Sherlock’s
shoulders, breathing into Sherlock’s hair.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Sherlock started in her arms, but she held tighter.
‘Thank you; and I do, you know. I do.’

Chapter End Notes
        1. The hysteria about the influx of West Indian immigrants to
           Brixton and other London-area neighborhoods around this time is
           sadly historical. Some of Townsend-Farquhar’s language is taken
           from actual opinions of Met officers and other officials. Davis
           Kynaston, in Family Britain, writes:
                Police attitudes seem to have been mixed. Officers in
                the Met, to judge by their reports, were generally
                hostile toward West Indian immigrants, described as
                ‘loathsome creatures’ and as ‘cunning unprincipled
                crooks living on women and their wits’. The Chief
                Constable of Sheffield described to the Home Office
                how the Jamaicans in his city ‘use face cream,
                perfume etc. to make themselves attractive to the
                females they meet at dances, cafés, etc.’ but his
                counterpart in Middlesbrough, also reporting in
                October 1952, was adamant that ‘on the whole the
                coloured population are as well behaved as many local
                citizens’, with no evidence of unduly high rates of
                criminal activity.”

***** Chapter 19 *****
June 3, 1955
10:26pm
Offices of the Daily Chronicle
16 Francis Street, Westminster
 London, England
Johnnie stood in the gathering fog outside the Chronicle offices, clenching and
un-clenching her hands.
Hour three into their surveillance, and she probably ought to have been running
over proposed events; ought to have been reviewing floor plans and schedules;
ought to have been listening to Chester Davis’s voice in her head, rehearsing
her and Sherlock on what and how and when. But in the event all she was
thinking, when Harold Townsend-Farquhar finally emerged out the carved double
doors, was how the hell it could still be this cold three days into bloody
June. She actually spared a moment to worry whether the Vincent would start
back up again, hidden as it was in the chillest dark corner of the back alley.
And how Sherlock wasn’t shivering all to pieces, in the ridiculous getup she
had on—Johnnie hadn’t even known she owned such clothes. Johnnie had seen her
go out in less—once, she thought, only once—but she’d still choked on her
coffee when Sherlock had come downstairs looking three shades too disreputable
for anyplace but Picadilly.
She’d been hours about it; Johnnie had to admit it was a production. Her hair
was over-curled; then snarled, piled on top of her head, and pulled half down
again. Her flimsy rummage-sale dress was leagues too young; too short, yet too
roomy, the red rayon torn on one side and mended with thread just a shade too
orange. Her lipstick, on the other hand, was slightly too blue for either the
dress or the thread, and her shadow and rouge made her eyes and cheeks into
ghastly hollows.
She looked consumptive, and all of fifteen years old. Johnnie had swallowed the
impulsive ‘No’ that had sprung up in her throat, but the look Sherlock gave her
was a reply to it, anyway.
‘Really, Johnnie,’ she’d said, standing at the bottom of the stairs. It was
Sherlock’s same old arch tone, which destroyed the illusion of fragile youth to
some degree. Though Johnnie was still left with the incongruous desire to
spoon-feed her porridge and cradle her in her arms ’til morning light.
‘Did you expect me to carry out Davis’s plan while dressed in ermine and
pearls?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Or perhaps as Gonzalo the station master?’
‘I—. Never knew the station master had a name,’ Johnnie said, caught off-guard.
Sherlock gave her a pointed look.
‘You don’t think you’ve overdone it a bit?’ Johnnie said. ‘Christ, you’re about
to freeze.’
‘Because ladies of the evening are known for their well-insulated raiments.’
‘Subtle, Sherlock,’ Johnnie had said, sighing, shrugging on her leather jacket.
‘Very subtle. I’m surprised you didn’t smear your lipstick halfway across your
face, make yourself even more pathetic.’
She’d looked down at herself for a moment then, adjusting the lay of her
jacket. The next thing she knew, Sherlock was slithering up her front.
‘I was hoping you could do it for me,’ Sherlock cooed, with her whole demeanour
transformed. This was Sherlock no longer, but every inch the simpering, abused
young girl making up to her evening’s bread ticket. This girl was hard, and
broken, and doing everything in her power to break herself more thoroughly yet.
It was like something out of a nightmare, a vision of a Sherlock gone horribly,
horribly wrong.
Johnnie shoved her off, backed off a step before she could think. She felt ill.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t, Sherlock, I’m. I can do it when we’re out in
public, but don’t. Just. Don’t, please.’
She stood there in their entryway. Hot and ashamed, staring at her boots, the
weight of Sherlock’s eyes on her.
‘Just,’ Johnnie said. She didn’t continue.
Then Sherlock’s fingers were on her cheek. The touch was matter-of-fact.
Johnnie could feel that it no longer belonged to the wastrel Sherlock had been,
which is why she could stand it. But she still didn’t lift her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sherlock said. It startled Johnnie so much that she did, at last,
look up into Sherlock’s face.
‘I know it’s not really you, I just. Can’t,’ Johnnie said, lamely.
‘I know,’ said Sherlock, very steady behind her eyes. ‘It’s why I can, because
you don’t want to.’
And Johnnie wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly. But she noticed that when
they left the flat, Sherlock took, after all, her second-best heavy winter
coat.
***
Still, she must have been cold. Johnnie was shivering in a jacket, trousers,
scarf, and hat; and Sherlock was in high strappy heels and her ragged dress,
letting one side of the coat hang off her shoulder as she giggled and squirmed
against Johnnie’s front for the benefit of the passers-by. Pedestrians were few
and far between at this hour, but Sherlock had still made good on her threat to
have Johnnie smear her lipstick halfway across her face. Johnnie suspected,
uneasily, that she was now sporting strategic blue-red smears on her jaw and
her collar.
Anything got easier, though, with hours of practice. Johnnie’s acute moral
discomfort had given way during the first hour to uneasy intrigue, and in the
second hour to increasing recognition of the real Sherlock underneath the
vulnerable young facade. Halfway into the third hour she had to admit that her
feelings verged on unalloyed boredom. Townsend-Farquhar’s appearance was,
therefore, welcome indeed.
‘That’s him,’ Johnnie murmured into Sherlock’s ear. She felt Sherlock’s hand
tighten on her waist, vibrating with excitement.
Townsend-Farquhar paused just outside the circle of one of the street lamps.
The fog was starting to gather in earnest now, but Johnnie could still make out
the scene across the street: the large newsman in his camel overcoat and his
gloves, lighting a cigarette, and the two shadowy shapes Davis had told them
about, taking up positions on either side of the front door.
‘Do you see his guards?’ Sherlock murmured into Johnnie’s ear, reaching up to
twirl a spike of Johnnie’s hair between her fingers. Johnnie turned her face
into Sherlock’s hand to disguise her mouth moving.
‘Both of them, yeah,’ she said. ‘Pepper and salt, just like he said. Or one
like a devil, and the other some kind of fairy-prince gone wrong. Now Townsend-
Farquhar’s headed this way.’
Sherlock giggled, and squirmed, and actually—overdoing it, thought
Johnnie—kicked up one heel. Johnnie buried her face in the crook of Sherlock’s
neck, one eye on the camel-coated figure now crossing the street. Just before
he stepped up onto the pavement, his eyes flicked over to their alcove, and he
smiled a little.
‘He’s noticed us,’ Johnnie said into Sherlock’s hair.
‘Grab my arse,’ Sherlock whispered. So Johnnie grabbed her arse, feeling equal
parts awkward and guilty, and Sherlock wiggled closer.
‘Take it inside, son,’ Townsend-Farquhar said, passing them by, his cigarette
bright in the mist. ‘Beat copper’ll be by in a mo.’ And he continued on by.
‘Interesting, him knowing that,’ Sherlock murmured into Johnnie’s ear. ‘Another
minute and you’ll be up.’
Johnnie pulled away. She straightened her jacket; but Sherlock, with a critical
eye, reached out and jerked it halfway back out of alignment, then looked
mildly affronted when Johnnie rolled her eyes. She took a flask from her coat
pocket, and uncapped it.
‘Oi,’ Johnnie said. ‘I wouldn’t have said no to some of that while we were
standing in the freezing cold for three hours.’ But Sherlock just squirmed up
next to her and tipped the flask into Johnnie’s mouth and over her lapel,
before doing the same to herself.
Then Townsend-Farquhar was turning the corner; then he was gone. Johnnie
stepped out of the shadows, fervently hoping that she was, for all the world,
the picture of an inebriated young late-reporter, pulling his giggling conquest
behind him.
They made their way, stumbling for show, around the side of the building. Davis
had said Old Harry kept a pair of his personal henchmen at the front doors of
the Chronicle whenever he wasn’t there himself; that would be the glowering
dark Pepper and his vacant blond companion. But the young ginger at the north
entrance, was, according to Davis, very new, and very simple, and very much
besotted with the romance of working at a famous paper. His name was Danny, and
in the month he’d been with the paper he’d let Davis in twice when he’d been
late from a special engagement at the Gates. Now Johnnie made for Danny’s door,
lurching a little, her hand around Sherlock’s wrist.
‘Robbie, no!’ Sherlock screeched, as Johnnie pulled her into Danny’s range of
sight. ‘No, we mustn’t,’ she said, and hiccuped, and executed an impressive
little move that must have looked, to the boy watching, as if ‘Robbie’ had
pulled his girl sideways so that her back came to rest neatly against the
lamppost. Johnnie reflected that the next time they danced, she was dispensing
with all pretence and letting Sherlock lead.
‘I’ve just got to go in for a minute, Livvy love,’ Robbie wheedled, trying to
get in a kiss. ‘Got to turn in my papers, you know, Livvy.’
Livvy turned her head to the side, pouting, but Johnnie caught a gleam of
Sherlock’s mischief in the curl of her mouth, and didn’t feel quite as sullied
as she might have done.
‘You wouldn’t want your young man to get in trouble, would you?’ she said, in
Robbie’s deeper voice, her hand on Sherlock’s chin.
Livvy started smiling a little, reluctant and coy on top of Sherlock’s smirk.
It was a frankly disconcerting visual effect, but Johnnie didn’t have too much
time to think about it. Sherlock had subtly rearranged them both for greater
appeal to Danny’s line of sight; Livvy hooked her leg around Robbie’s leg, and
drew him in for a thoroughly cinematic kiss. She was warm, and wiry. Livvy’s
tongue went halfway down Robbie’s throat for show, but on the side faced away
from Danny, Sherlock ran her nails up Johnnie’s side under her leather jacket.
Johnnie and Robbie were both breathing hard when she released them.
‘Okay, Robbie,’ Livvy said, in her best baby-doll manner, pillowing her lips.
‘I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.
‘Jesus,’ Johnnie muttered, too quiet for Danny to hear. Livvy’s face was wide
open, miming childlike innocence, and under that she was scheming visibly about
rolling Robbie for a few pounds later, and under that Sherlock’s shining eyes
were absolutely delighted. Johnnie cleared her throat. She felt a little dizzy.
‘Right-o,’ Robbie said. His jacket was falling off one shoulder, but Johnnie
let it. It was the opposite shoulder Livvy was showing, so Johnnie put her arm
around Sherlock’s waist and imagined they must be picturesque, staggering
together toward the door. Danny seemed riveted enough.
‘Oi,’ Robbie said, loud, ostentatiously spotting Danny at the distance of a few
dozen feet. ‘Hullo there, listen, I. I did a stupid thing. I was supposed to
drop this copy off with my governor, and I utterly forgot ’til now. Let me in,
yeah?’
At his side, Livvy giggled, and nibbled on Robbie’s ear. Danny stared at her.
‘I’m not, er. Not supposed to let anyone in,’ the kid mumbled.
‘Come on, mate,’ Robbie said. ‘You know how it is. They’ll report me if I try
to get in the front way.’
Livvy nipped at Robbie’s neck, and Sherlock tickled Johnnie’s side under cover
of both their coats, with the result that Johnnie started away from her,
laughing quite convincingly. Sherlock let go of Johnnie’s arm, a hair late and
timed perfectly, surreptitiously pushing her hand down in a neat little
manoeuvre that made Robbie smack Livvy smartly on the arse. Livvy squealed,
shrill, and said ‘Robbie!’ as she twisted away from him, giggling.
Johnnie wasn’t sure whether to be impressed, or queasy.
She looked down. Somehow the flask had ended up in Robbie’s hand. Johnnie
decided to be impressed.
‘Look, er. What’s your name, anyway?’ said Robbie, tousling his own hair in
what Johnnie hoped was an abashed yet public-school manner. He uncapped the
flask, and handed it to Danny, and the kid reached out hesitantly and took it,
but didn’t drink.
‘Daniel,’ he said, holding the flask. ‘Danny.’
‘Listen, Danny,’ Robbie said, making a bottoms-up gesture, ‘This is an
important story I’m working on. You seem like the kind of bloke who understands
that, you know? I think—well, I shouldn’t tell you this, Dan, but I think it
just might be my big break. Yeah,’ Robbie added, ‘that’s the good stuff,’
because the kid was sputtering and choking a bit around his first mouthful.
Livvy sidled over to Danny. She plucked the flask from his hand, making her
eyes big and round as she took a swallow. She winked as she put it back in his
hand.
‘The good stuff,’ she repeated, in her candy-floss voice. Johnnie made her eye-
roll into a moment of jealousy, as Robbie reached out to haul the giggling girl
back to his side.
Anyone with a modicum of sense, thought Johnnie, could spot trouble like that a
mile away. ‘Livvy’ was the last kind of person anyone should be letting in
through a side door at eleven o’clock in the evening.
Luckily, sense was one thing young Danny seemed to be without.
‘As big a story as that?’ the kid was saying, fiddling with the keys on his
heavy ring.
Robbie nodded gravely. ‘It’ll blow the lid right off this town,’ he said,
making Johnnie feel like a badly scripted character from an American cops-and-
robbers film.
Danny’s eyes were almost as wide as Livvy’s had been.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I really shouldn’t, but. Just this once, right?’
‘Oh right,’ Robbie said, nodding his head seriously. ‘Definitely. Scout’s
honour, Dan, really.’
And as Danny fiddled with his keys in the lock, Livvy turned to Johnnie and
gave her such a delighted and Sherlockian smirk that Johnnie couldn’t help but
smile back. By the time Danny turned back round, Livvy was leaning up to giggle
something in Robbie’s ear, and Robbie was blushing because Sherlock’s tongue
was in Johnnie’s ear and she was whispering ‘Ask who’s on cleaning duty
tonight.’
‘Ta, mate,’ Robbie said, his arm round Livvy’s waist, pulling her through the
now-open door with Danny gaping after them.
‘Oh, by the by,’ Robbie added, turning about too suddenly. He stumbled, his
balance compromised by the drink he’d been at all afternoon as simulated by a
push on Johnnie’s back by Sherlock’s hidden elbow. He righted himself, hand
against the wall. Livvy giggled, lifting her skirt slightly to adjust her
suspender.
‘By the by, who’s on cleaning duty tonight, on six?’ Robbie said. ‘Only I’d
like to know where to send the consolation card after I disturb his hard work.’
‘That’s, er, Mr. Pinkas,’ Danny said. His voice had a distant quality; he was
watching the hem of Livvy’s skirt, where she was still fussing with her
stocking. ‘August Pinkas, big bloke with a—’
‘Oh yes,’ said Robbie, elaborately casual, gathering Livvy to his wing. ‘I know
the man. Thanks ever so, Danny boy.’ And he tipped a wink at Danny and set off
down the hall, shushing Livvy as she broke out spontaneously into a chorus of
'Danny Boy,' '’Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,’ she hollered,
arfully off-key. He put his finger on her lips, and hugged her to his side, and
Sherlock smiled and snickered and bit the tip of Johnnie’s fingers as they
rounded the corner.
***
As soon as they were out of sight of Danny’s outpost, though, she shed Livvy’s
wobbly strut like shaking off a cloak.
‘Right,’ she whispered. ‘Employee cloakroom first, then. You can keep watch
while I search the lockers.’
Johnnie could only thank her lucky stars that Sherlock had so much practice
engraving maps and building blueprints directly onto her brain. She never
hesitated on the way down to the locker room Davis had told them about; she
turned corners and took stairwells with the confidence of the long-time
reporter. It occurred to Johnnie to wonder how many lady reporters were on
staff now, and whether Livvy and Robbie could manage a convincing reversal of
roles. She was preoccupied enough that it took her a moment to notice Sherlock
putting out a hand to stop her.
‘Wait here,’ Sherlock hissed. ‘Start, I don’t know, weaving about and singing
“Danny Boy” if someone’s coming.’
Johnnie smiled; rolled her eyes. She was caught off-guard when Sherlock darted
in for a single quick, hard kiss. By the time Johnnie put her fingers up to
touch her own tingling lips, Sherlock was gone.
It was really remarkable, Johnnie thought, waiting in the dank basement
corridor of the Chronicle offices, trying to look like a half-drunk cub
reporter recovering his sea-legs, what a difference context made. Back in Baker
Street, with Sherlock in costume and out of character, Johnnie had almost
refused to go along. Sherlock had looked so fragile, so ready to be broken. But
having spotted the hard shining steel of Sherlock’s eyes under the fluttering
of Livvy’s lashes, Johnnie’d become more or less comfortable even playing along
with her mad game; and now, by contrast, with Sherlock returned to her
customary affect, Johnnie hardly noticed the flimsy dress, or the meticulously
mussed paint on her face.
And that had only been what? Johnnie pulled up her cuff to glance at her
wristwatch. Four hours? Four hours of play-acting, and it was like a second
skin.
What must it have been like, Johnnie thought then, for Ellen Erins? She’d
played one game, and another, and yet another, and had kept it up for years.
What had been left, Johnnie wondered, of the woman, the girl she’d been before
it all began?
Thus Johnnie Watson was lost in thought. Sherlock rolled her eyes when she came
out of the cloakroom and spotted her. Johnnie could only assume she had looked
a good deal more melancholy than Robbie had any propensity for. So she
straightened up, and said ‘Got what you were after?’ and Sherlock nodded, and
headed off down the corridor.
‘I think,’ Sherlock whispered, stopping Johnnie on the landing of a concrete
stairwell, and handing her her winter coat. ‘I think it’s best if you stay in
the shadows, this time.'
Johnnie opened her mouth to mutiny, but Sherlock gripped her wrist, hard.
‘It seems Mr. Pinkas is the eldest of several children,’ she said, ‘and has two
young daughters at home. Stay close, by all means, but I believe I—well. I
believe Livvy will be most effective on her own.’
Johnnie let out a long breath. Then she nodded, slow.
Sherlock smiled, and kissed her again before she sprinted off. Johnnie followed
on, half a flight behind, keeping back as Sherlock had asked, as they came out
onto the shadowed corridors of the sixth floor.
For a Friday night, and still just shy of midnight, it was surprisingly dark,
and silent. Green-glass shades of bankers’ lamps shone on desks here and there,
where stubbly greying men sat punching copy into clacking typewriters. But the
typing sounds felt oddly muffled to Johnnie, as she moved along the corridor in
Sherlock’s wake. And the pools of light cast by the bankers’ lamps made a
negligible dent in the larger blackness surrounding them.
Sherlock slunk past the large common floor, toward the west wall of the
building where the senior editors and bureaucrats had their offices. Johnnie
followed behind her, the light getting inkier all the while. The dark muffled
quiet spread out around them.
And then Sherlock’s hand went up like a railroad signal. Johnnie stopped; slid
herself into a niche formed by the corner of an office and a drinking fountain.
A second later she heard it, too: the repetitious husk of a broom on hardwood.
Sherlock moved forward. Even from Johnnie’s niche, and in the darkness, she
could make out Livvy’s sidling strut, Livvy’s nervous birdlike way of holding
her arms. For a breathless moment those arms overwhelmed Johnnie with the
memory of Sherlock, nervous and overwhelmed on the bed in Portloe, and it was
almost impossible not to run after her.
But she blinked, hard. When she opened her eyes again Sherlock was gone, and
the stranger Livvy was making her way with naive daring down the deserted
passage.
Johnnie shifted from one niche to the next, keeping out of sight. A solid,
middle-aged man hove into view, sweeping the detritus of the day into a
weighted receptacle.
‘P-pardon me, sir,’ said Livvy, with a little quaver in her voice.
Johnnie, tucked back by the drinking fountain, dug her bitten nails into her
palms and wondered how Sherlock managed to make herself look so fucking
frailjust by changing her voice and her posture. Not that the torn glad-rags
hurt her cause.
‘Yeah?’ said the man whom Sherlock had presumably identified as Mr. Pinkas.
‘Yes? Can I help you…?’
‘Yes, I.’ Sherlock’s voice was barely less than steady. ‘I do hope so. Are you
the man in charge of the night cleaning for Mr. Townsend-Farquhar’s office?’
Johnnie had to hand it to Sherlock: the whole performance was at once maudlin
and subtle. East-ender Livvy, still smelling of gin, was elevating her diction
just slightly; had Johnnie met the girl on the street, she would have called it
nerves, unintentional.
‘Well,’ said Mr. Pinkas, stopping his sweeping to look the girl over. Livvy
stood and tried not to wring her hands. You could tell by they way she was
worrying, just slightly, at the torn place on her skirt. ‘Well,’ Mr. Pinkas
said again, ‘I’m just filling in, really. Until the regular man gets back.’
Johnnie thought this was overly optimistic of Pinkas, assuming he was implying
Davis might still have a job.
‘Oh, that’s not important,’ Livvy said, all in a rush. ‘I just, er. I just need
the man on duty tonight.’
‘Do you,’ Mr. Pinkas said, after an awkward pause. Johnnie didn’t even have to
look; she could hear him eyeing Livvy. ‘I can’t let you in there, you know. May
as well just go back the way you’ve come.’
‘Oh no!’ she said. She giggled a little bit, then seemed to realise how
inappropriate it was, and got even more flustered.
‘No no, nothing like that, I saw quite enough of—that is. I wouldn’t want to,
anyway.’
Johnnie chanced a glance around the edge of her sheltering niche. Pinkas was
looking taken aback. Livvy, in a testament to Sherlock’s physiological control,
was blushing furiously, chewing a hang-nail on the side of one thumb. In her
thin red dress, the bruises all up her arm and shoulder from the Baker Street
stairs and the alley fight, stood out dark and ugly.
‘I only need you to slip a bit of a letter onto his desk,’ Livvy said, taking
her thumbnail out of her mouth and rubbing her shoulder, not meeting his eyes.
The position showed off the scrapes from the stairs. ‘It’s nothing bad, I
swear, I would do it myself, only—,’
Mr. Pinkas, as if mesmerised, reached out to almost-touch Livvy’s blue-black
shoulder.
‘Did he—did he get you in trouble?’ he said.
Livvy rolled her eyes. ‘That’s all done with,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t matter,
anyway, ’s not like I’m a blushing schoolgirl, is it?’
She laughed, hard and casual and dismissive. Johnnie twisted at the fabric of
Sherlock’s coat, gripped hard in her hands. She could only hope Mr. Pinkas was
thinking of his daughters.
‘It’s only,’ Livvy went on, ‘It’s my little brother, see. Brian. He’s a good
boy, sir, he’s just. A bit high-spirited, if you see what I mean. It’s
only—he’s been picked up once already, and—’
Pinkas grunted. A note of panic entered Livvy’s voice as she went on: ’Well,
all right, a few times, but not for anything very bad. It’s only, once they
know to watch for you, it’s like a black cloud, isn’t it? Follows you around
for the rest of your life. I don't want that for Brian. He only thought he was
striking a blow for my honour, you know, silly as that sounds. I know too many
blokes as made a mistake or two as lads and are still paying for it now, paying
and paying. I don't know if you've seen it, sir, but it's—'
''M brother,' Pinkas said, as if unplanned and unintended. 'I had a younger
brother, once.'
'Oh,’ said Livvy. She chewed her mouth, taking a half-step forward. It was,
thought Johnnie, masterfully done. 'I'm so sorry.'
'Well,' Pinkas said, after a moment of thought. 'Like you said, isn't it. Water
under the bridge.'
'Yes,' said Livvy, taking back her tentative forward step. 'Yes, for me it is,
but—but not for Brian, not yet. But I'm afraid, sir, if this Townsend-Farquhar
man finds these papers missing, I'm afraid for what will happen to my brother,
and I—it wouldn't be stealing, would it, just to put the envelope back where
Brian found it?'
Pinkas took a long look at her. They had shifted about during the exchange so
that Johnnie had a near-perfect profile of them both: Pinkas with his hands
folded on the top of his broom, and Sherlock making Livvy try her damnedest not
to fidget. She was twisting Cohen's envelope between the fingers of her left
hand.
'And were was that?' Pinkas said at last. Livvy's shoulders lost a bit of their
tension.
'On Townsend-Farquhar’s desk,' she said. 'Just right on his desk, only—only,
the thing I've been thinking of is, what if Townsend-Farquhar has—has realised
already, that the papers have gone?’
Livvy still twisted the envelope, worrying it back and forth between her hands.
Johnnie was getting nervous she would tear or mark it; that Townsend-Farquhar
would be able to tell. Livvy didn't exactly inspire confidence; Johnnie had to
remind herself that Sherlock most emphatically did.
And just as that thought occurred, Pinkas at last reached out to rescue the
abused envelope from Livvy's twisting hands.
'Well,' he repeated, in his plodding voice, 'things do fall behind the desks,
sometimes.'
'You mean—you mean he would think you'd just, I don't know. Found it under his
desk?' said Livvy. She chewed on her lip. The picture of hopeful skepticism.
'He will if I write him a note,' Pinkas said. 'Telling him that's what
happened.'
'Oh!' Livvy gasped. 'Oh sir, would you?' Johnnie smothered her mouth in her
sleeve, trying not to laugh in relief. She resisted the urge to check her
wristwatch; surely it was a record, planting an idea in someone's head in five
minutes flat.
'Oh I can't tell you how grateful I am,' Livvy was saying, and Mr. Pinkas was
hushing her, and getting out his ring of keys, and they were walking together
back toward Townsend-Farquhar's office as Johnnie listened. There was a sound
of a lock clicking. Two sets of feet sounded on the floorboards, and (was
Johnnie only imagining the faint scratching?) a pen on paper on wood.
Minutes later, Sherlock came back out of Townsend-Farquhar’s office. Pinkas had
plainly stayed behind to tidy up the room, because Sherlock had shed all the
trappings of Livvy: her defiant shoulders, and swishing, swaggering gait. She
clicked down the corridor with her usual long strides, headed back toward
Johnnie’s hiding place, and the wild shark grin on her face lasted just shy of
the moment when the Salt and Pepper henchmen emerged from the stairwell ahead
of them.
***
It was a narrow thing. Sherlock must have heard something out of the ordinary,
because by the time Johnnie turned her head and saw the two men coming into
view, Livvy had turned about and was sashaying back toward Townsend-Farquhar’s
office. Halfway there, she ducked into the ladies’ washroom, where the guards,
hopefully, would not follow.
Johnnie, of course, got up as Robbie the fresh-faced cub reporter, could hardly
join her, either. She shrank back against the dark wall of the niche, listening
to the pace of the guards’ footsteps, fingering the knife in the lining of her
jacket.
Their paces slowed and then stopped in front of the ladies’.
They’d plainly spotted Livvy, then, but probably not Robbie. The niche was
shallow, though; they could still look around. Johnnie tried not to breathe.
Even with a knife, she didn’t fancy her chances against two muscled guards,
were she set upon by both at once while backed into a tight corner.
And what, she wondered, were they about, lounging in front of the sixth-floor
ladies’ washroom without exchanging a word? Had they been alerted to the
presence of intruders in the building? Did they know who Livvy and Robbie
really were? She thought back, desperately, to the memory of groping Sherlock
in the frigid June alley as Townsend-Farquhar strolled by; had he given any
sign that he knew them? Had he exchanged words with Salt and Pepper as he was
leaving the building? Johnnie cursed herself for her poor memory.
Townsend-Farquhar had said—had said that the beat cop would be round in another
few minutes, and Sherlock had said it was—it was interesting that he knew that.
Was that significant? Was it some kind of code? Johnnie’s brain just spun,
blank and useless.
Sherlock’s was undoubtedly working, though. Johnnie pressed her back up against
the solid wall separating her niche from Sherlock’s washroom, wishing futilely
for a doorway to open up, like something out of a fantastical children’s story.
From her hiding place she could just make out Salt and Pepper, leaning against
the wall. Salt slouched down a bit further, like his back itched. Faint sounds
of objects on hard surfaces filtered down the corridor from Townsend-Farquhar’s
office, where Mr. Pinkas was carrying on with the cleaning. Pepper scuffled his
feet.
Then, from inside the washroom, came a bang and a crash of shattering glass.
Johnnie jumped about a foot. She was sure she would have been spotted, had
Salt's and Pepper’s attention not been riveted on the closed washroom door. She
drew back into the niche, her heart beating in her throat, and watched both men
hesitate a few blank seconds before storming the washroom. They both moved at
once; Johnnie had a weird moment of hilarity, imagining that their shoulders
would block each other getting through the door.
The next second there was cursing from inside the washroom, in which the words
bloody and airshaft featured prominently. The second after that, Johnnie
realised that Sherlock had just as good as screamed at her to run.
She bolted.
The corner. The stairwell. Her empty panicked brain was still spinning and
spinning. She retraced their steps back toward Danny’s entrance, then secreted
herself in a broom closet hard by the door. She felt like screaming, but she
stayed quiet.
Quiet.
Quiet.
And then: low whistling and almost inaudible footsteps, coming toward her from
the centre of the building. And it was—Johnnie’s knees almost went out from
under her in relief—it was ‘Danny Boy.’ She took huge breaths, once, twice, and
gathered her wits, then stepped out of the broom closet just as Sherlock was
about to come level with it.
‘Jesus, what did you—,’ she said, at the same moment Sherlock’s face broke into
a wide grin and she whispered ‘I knew you’d know to bolt; there was a ledge in
the airshaft and I managed to—,’ but she didn’t get any further, because
somewhere along the corridor a door slammed, and running footsteps pounded down
the hardwood. Johnnie looked at Sherlock as her eyes went wide. She took
Sherlock’s hand, and ran: out the door, back past Danny and the streetlamp and
the corner of the Chroniclebuilding, and back into the alley where the Vincent
was waiting, praying all the while please God please God let it start.
***
June 3, 1955
11:30pm
Lot’s Road, Chelsea
 London, England
It did.
And so Johnnie squinted into the night, body held tense on the bike as it took
another corner at speed. She tried not to think about the black car following
hard on their tail.
The fog was heavy, too heavy—she was overriding her visibility by leagues. Her
heart was in her throat. A solid grey blanket over everything; a white rushing
cloud before her headlight; and only a narrow strip of tarmac directly in front
of her tire. Out of the unchanging grey-black her brain invented a host of
obstacles: a concrete barrier; a stray dog; a stumbling drunk. They reared up
out of the mist, fast, too fast, faster than Johnnie could avoid them. Her
hands tensed on the bike’s handlebars, itching to swerve or brake. Phantoms,
each one, vanishing back into the mist; but the next one might be real.
And there was Sherlock behind her, twisting about like a bloody eel. Johnnie
thanked God for Portloe; without those long stretches on the curves, she’d have
been sure Sherlock was about to fall off and break her skull. As it was, she
still gritted her teeth every time she felt Sherlock’s right arm leave her
waist; every time she felt Sherlock twist to look behind her.
‘We haven’t lost them,’ she heard now, in her ear, as Sherlock turned back
around. ‘About a mile back and gaining, but slowly.’
Johnnie bit her tongue. She stared into the grey, feeling hounded, her fingers
aching. Trying to think.
She couldn’t go any faster, it was—even during the War, even under fire, it
would have been suicidal in conditions like these. It was already suicidal,
said a voice in her head, but she didn’t roll off the throttle.
It was also infuriating. How could it possibly be that the Vincent, with any
decent rider, could fail to outmanoeuvre a bloody four-door family vehicle?
An old woman swirled up before her, a black huddled shape in a hollow of mist,
and Johnnie rode right through her before she had time to react. Christ, she
thought to herself. The next one could be real. And the car behind them,
gaining. She swallowed hard.
They weren’t going to make it out of London.
Not without being caught up, or without Johnnie killing them or making them
guilty of manslaughter. There was no way. The whine of panic intensified in her
chest, like a swarm of insects, like bees.
They weren’t going to make it out; they were going to be caught. But she’d
heard stories. From Pat, and Eddie, and that butch Mireille used to see. About
what happened to their kind when they were brought in for questioning, and
those salt and pepper goons weren’t even—they weren’t Met officers, surely? The
whine increased. Johnnie didn’t know if she hoped they were, or weren’t. She
saw in her mind’s eye Pat’s purpled eye socket; the way Eddie limped for weeks
though neither of her legs had been damaged.
And Sherlock, Johnnie thought. Sherlock on the back of the bike.
Johnnie couldn’t—she couldn’t let them be caught up. She downshifted, turned
hard into King’s Road. She used the turn and the lowered speed to yell over her
shoulder to Sherlock:
‘Get me to a construction site. Someplace with an open pit foundation.’
She was thinking back, furiously. Thinking back to the War, to walking out with
Ana and Cass, pushing that old Royal Enfield through the mud to the open
Margate field. Ana laughing down at her, making Johnnie lift the bike back up
out of the ditch, covered in mud. Doing it again, and again. Jesus, but it
seemed lifetimes ago.
Johnnie’s throat was so tight, and she was hardly breathing anyway. She sped
through a phantom cat, hardly even registering her own vision. Sherlock hadn’t
said a thing.
‘Sherlock!’ she yelled back, fighting the urge to swerve around the cat even
after the fact. ‘Construction site; tell me!’
And Sherlock’s voice came thin and tight over the wind: ‘Turn left!’ so Johnnie
turned left, tight into a narrow side-street. Sherlock’s arms tightened around
her middle, secure. She had to keep Sherlock that way, she thought. Safe, and
whole. She had to—.
‘There’s one near the Embankment,’ she heard Sherlock say. ‘They’re still
excavating the foundation. Turn right, now.’
The turn was wide, and there were no other cars. Johnnie hardly slowed. She
felt Sherlock start to loosen her arm again, to look around, and she bit her
mouth, staring into the fog and laying on as much throttle as she dared. She
was trying to think, trying to remember, was it—Johnnie’s problem had always
been kicking out at the right moment; the Margate mud in April had been soft
and slimy, but a concrete pit foundation—
‘Another right at the one-way,’ Sherlock yelled in her ear, and ‘Jesus,’
Johnnie said, a second later. It was one way in the wrong direction.
Johnnie made the turn anyway. A narrow space, with crates and boxes piled high
on the sides, but Johnnie got the bike up on the pavement and went as fast as
she could, and trusted Sherlock would get them there. Sherlock had maps and
routes and intricate plans in her head; there was no space in Johnnie’s for
anything but fixation on the road (the pavement! she thought wildly, the please
God deserted empty pedestrian pavement) and the fog, and a single tiny corner
of her mind that was held in reserve, that was rehearsing, that was listening
to a long-ago voice in her ear.
‘Left at the next throughway,’ yelled Sherlock, ‘and it’ll be a mile up ahead.’
Johnnie breathed out, first time in ages. She took the turn; felt Sherlock
shift again to look behind them. Sherlock didn’t report back, and Johnnie, at
this point, hardly wanted to know. Back on a two-way street she rolled the
throttle on, and minutes later the site loomed up, black and eerie on their
right.
It would do, she thought, brain still buzzing. It would do. Earth-moving
equipment, but only at the far end. The entrance chained, but it should break.
(It must, she thought. It must.) She slowed as much as she dared, thinking back
and back: a ditch in Margate, a hole in the ground on the Chelsea Embankment.
It was their best shot, anyway.
She pulled the bike into the alley across the way from the chained entrance.
She would have to—the henchmen have to be close enough, she thought, to see
something more specific than just lights in the fog. Which meant they had to
see—Sherlock. On the bike.
Johnnie took a breath. Kickstand down, and she turned on the seat.
‘Give me your coat,’ she said. But Sherlock was impossible. She sat there
staring, and Johnnie couldn’t believe—there was no time.The insect swarm was
loud, loud in her ears.
She had known Sherlock blank and immovable like this, and Johnnie had never
been able to sway her. The thought sent her throat completely dry. To see
Sherlock trapped like a dog in this alley by those murderers; to have Sherlock
watch while Johnnie was beaten or—. It couldn’t happen, Johnnie thought, it
couldn’t. She was saying words, but still Sherlock just sat there, immutable,
refusing to give up her coat.
‘They are not going to take us in for a civil fucking q-and-a, all right?’
Johnnie heard herself shout, and ‘I am under no bloody circumstances letting
them at either of us.’
But she realised, as Sherlock just sat there, uncompromising, that she didn’t
understand. Sherlock knew about the purity of the puzzle, and about wanting to
win, but she had no conception of what could actually happen were they to get
caught.
It wasn’t the kind of thing that could be explained.
The insects were swarming still, louder and higher in Johnnie’s ears, and she
could think of nothing else to do. So she pushed Sherlock off the end of the
bike by her shoulders, and caught her when she stumbled, and pressed her back
against the alley bricks and kissed her, hard enough to break.
She thought frantically, as she kissed her, that there had to be a better way
through Sherlock’s panic, but she needed—she needed in, and goddamn being
Johnnie Watson anyway, since this is the shit way she knew to get there.
So she bit at Sherlock’s stone-cold lips, and thrust her shoulders against the
bricks, and after a few shocked seconds Sherlock came to life under her hands,
suddenly warm, suddenly twisting and whimpering, sucking pleadingly on
Johnnie’s tongue, arching up against Johnnie’s body. Johnnie felt her heart
might stop, Sherlock was so essential to her.
Essential to her. Her brain skipped back a day.
She pulled back, panting, though Sherlock’s mouth followed her like a hungry
blind bird. Johnnie’s chest ached with it.
‘Remember when we, what we—,’ she said, and swallowed.
Flashing back to the sitting room area rug, herself nodding and struggling to
breathe, neck crooked against the wall, and Sherlock’s beautiful bird-bright
chest, heaving like she was dying, saying You can trust me. You have to trust
me. Now, in the alley, she could see a mirror image behind Sherlock’s eyes.
‘Remember you kept telling me I could trust you?’ Johnnie asked, and Sherlock,
unwilling but like she couldn’t help it, nodded her head.
A vast something shifted in Johnnie’s chest, and she thought: thank God. Out
loud she said, ‘Now I need you to trust me.’
And she could see in Sherlock’s face that she still thought she was making up
her mind; that she felt only her arms tightening around Johnnie’s waist as she
rebelled against the idea, and not the way they’d already loosened, half a
minute before. Johnnie knew the decision was made but still she held her
breath; feeling at her back like a tangible force the black car drawing closer.
Sherlock nodded. She let go Johnnie’s waist, and there wasn’t a moment, not a
moment. Johnnie was back on the bike, kicking up the stand, getting her lighter
out of her jacket pocket and then stuffing her jacket inside Sherlock’s coat.
Tying the coat-arms around her waist, to look like Sherlock from a distance.
But not too much of a distance, she thought, breathing hard.
Flipping the engine switch, walking the bike back out to the alley entrance
with the lights off. Unscrewing the gas cap. She would have one chance, one
chance. Her tongue felt huge in her mouth.
She couldn’t start too soon. She had to wait, and wait, and then: perfect on
the first try. Things like this worked best when you could manage not to think
about them. That seemed, in the present case, vanishingly unlikely.
‘Any time,’ she muttered to herself, imagining legion black shapes moving in
the eddies of the swirling fog before she finally spotted the real one. A
great, hulking thing, creeping along the street in their direction. Obligingly
slow. Perfect, she thought—or she may have said it out loud, but in that moment
her mind was already shifting over, channeling into muscle memory. Sherlock was
saying something behind her, but it hardly registered.
‘Wait til you knowthey’ve gone, Sherlock,’ she said, eyes still fixed on the
approaching car, her voice sounding distant in her own ears. ‘I’m not doing
this for nothing.’
And then it was there, the perfect distance gauged in some long-abandoned
partition of her brain, and she blinked, once, and shot her headlight on, and
let her muscles take over.
She rolled the throttle on hard and the tires screeched on the wet tarmac, and
Johnnie was dimly aware of the car braking; they’d seen her; it had registered.
Faster, and faster, and she put her head down and raised her weight off the
suspension as she hit the gated entrance at speed, the rusty chain flying up,
hitting her hard in the bad shoulder. She hardly noticed.
Two seconds, and she felt her muscles remember. The black pit was rushing up,
up—
Leg over the right side, balanced back on the peg, and—
Hand hard on the hand-break, and she felt the back tire kick up, and—
And dammit, she thought, as the Vincent spun back-over-front and she tried to
kick out and felt her foot connect with nothing, it was always getting the kick
right, it was always—
She tried to ball herself up in the air, away from the bike, but a spinning
handlebar came down on her shin and she swore she heard a crack.
It didn’t hurt, though; and then her back hit the ground with a thud, and that
didn’t hurt yet either; and a split-second later was a crunch and screech of
horrible twisting shattering glass and metal, and that hurt like hell but it
was yards away and hadn’t touched her.
‘Jesus,’ she heard herself mutter. Everything was black, black, but she could
feel the ground and so the sky was in the other direction. When she looked up
she could make out the diffuse double beams of headlights over the edge of the
pit.
She cursed, and scrabbled in her trouser pocket, and thanked God again to feel
the cool metal rectangle under her fingers. She hobbled back away from the
bike, ignoring the shooting pains in her leg, and forced herself to look
straight at the wreckage and not think about it. She heard a car door open,
overhead. Then she flicked the lighter on, tossed the little flame onto the
heap of twisted parts, and dove toward the wall of the pit as the open gas tank
exploded.
***
June 4, 1955
12:10am
Construction site, Chelsea Embankment
 London, England
In the years that followed, Sherlock berated herself for the simple fact that
her own will power would have failed her. Johnnie had told her to wait; she
herself could see that the black car was still idling on the brink of the
construction pit, silhouetted by a faint orange glow through the fog. Yet if
her legs had been capable of carrying her across the tarmac, none of it would
have mattered. She couldn’t deny to herself, even after the memory had mellowed
with time, that she would have run gasping across the road like the dimmest
village child faced with the loss of its home.
Her legs, though, could not carry her. Would not even hold her. Her throat
worked, and would not make a sound.
So instead of making a fool of herself, getting herself picked up by Townsend-
Farquhar’s hired muscle, she watched silently, gripping onto alley stone, as
faint sounds filtered across the way.
One overcoated man had been nearing the edge of the pit. The other had his door
open, calling his partner back. But when the ball of yellow flame shot up over
the pit’s edge, the man nearest leaped back.
‘Shit!’ he said. His scrabbling footfalls came to Sherlock muffled over the
street, and something about getting out of there, and a slamming car door.
Sherlock opened her eyes again to the surreal vision of the black car,
headlights blazing now, pulling back past the broken, unchained gate, and
speeding off through the midnight fog.
Her eyelids slid closed again. She swallowed, hard, so as not to vomit, and she
wrenched them back open.
It seemed ages, before she could make herself move. Ages. And that would be
another source of reproach, in years to come, because those age-like minutes
might easily have been the crucial ones. But the orange glow was burning
through the mist, and Sherlock couldn’t quite—. She couldn’t—.
From a purely logistical standpoint, every time she let go the wall, her knees
buckled and her stomach heaved. From every other standpoint, it was too much
even to consider.
But she had to, in the end. She turned aside and vomited quietly on the orange
crates stacked by the alley wall. All that came up was a trickle of the gin
she’d shared with Danny the night watchman; and she felt briefly vindicated,
because she always said there were benefits to not eating on cases, and Johnnie
always—
She vomited again. She rested for a moment with her forehead against the rough
brick. Then she rose to her feet, and they held her, and she walked unsteadily
out of the alley and across the street, toward the eerie glow of a burning
motorbike, and the distant floodlights of Battersea Station.
Her footsteps slowed as she approached the pit, but she forced herself, forced
herself to keep walking. She had to be sure, she reminded herself. Sherlock
Holmes would want to be sure. And if there were anything she could do—.
She stopped for a minute. Drew a breath. Walked on.
She paused, just inside the gate, to look for the way down into the pit. There
must be a ramp, or a—or a ladder, the workmen had to have driven the earth-
movers in somehow. And yes, just there, halfway along the pit’s edge where she
could make out the wild veering tire-tracks of the bike, she thought she could
see the twin endcaps of a ladder bolted to the concrete. She walked over,
shivering more than the cold could account for, carefully not thinking about
the twisting swerving tracks, or why she could so easily see the ladder, or why
she was no longer wearing her coat.
She backed down the ladder and shivered even more in the warmth from the fire.
She couldn’t, she just couldn’t bring herself to walk any further; she thought
of golden freckled arms in the auto repair shop, smoothing proudly over
polished metal, and squinted into the flames at the twisted chrome, and
couldn’t move. It would be the third point of self-reproach: that she stood
frozen and might have turned, might have climbed back up the ladder and walked
away from the Embankment, and gone God knows where, back to the Chronicle
offices; or to some bolt-hole in some hotel somewhere in the City; or to sleep
under a bridge or in the back room of Mr. Patrick’s corner shop; or to live
with goatherds in Tibet, even; anywhere but Baker Street—she might have
wandered off like an idiot and a coward if she hadn’t heard—
‘Sherlock,’ came the voice. It was halfway between a moan and a hiss, and the
rushing of the fire made her think she was imagining it. Her foot carried her a
step forward. Then stopped again.
‘Sherlock, goddamn it,’ the voice came again, and this time it was so
exasperated and impatient and familiar that Sherlock’s insides thawed at once,
and she was running past the fire, almost through the fire, chasing the sound
of it.
‘Sherlock, what the Christ were you doing,’ Johnnie said, when Sherlock hove
into view around the flames. ‘I know I told you to wait until they were gone,
but I didn’t mean “until they’ve arrived in Yorkshire,” bloody h—,’ but she
didn’t say any more, because Sherlock had thrown herself against Johnnie’s
chest, and was holding her and holding her and never letting her go. She
thought she must be weeping, though when she pulled her head back at last and
felt Johnnie’s dirty fingers stroking down her cheeks, they were unaccountably
dry.
‘I know,’ Sherlock said, ‘it must have been difficult for you, what we did the
other day, but if trusting me made you feel like that—,’ and Johnnie let out a
bark of laughter, so Sherlock, too close for anything else and suddenly
furious, caught her on the side of the head with a hard swipe of her elbow.
‘Ow!’ Johnnie said. ‘What the bloody—‘ She looked closer; moved Sherlock to the
side so that her face was half-illuminated by the burning bike. ‘You didn’t
reckon I knew what I was about?’ she said at last, with a look that was half-
grimace, half-smile.
Sherlock gritted her teeth. ‘You don’t think you’ve overdone it a bit?’ she
asked, gesturing at the wreckage of the Vincent.
Johnnie laughed. It was a spontaneous burst of relief and recognition, and she
sobered in a few seconds, following Sherlock’s gaze.
The remains of the Vincent was still being consumed by the roaring orange
blaze. Johnnie sat under Sherlock, the tips of her fingers running up and down
the bony ridge of Sherlock’s spine, watching herself in her mind’s eye:
rescuing the bike from the junkyard; working on it into the wee hours. That
grim ride with Ana down the coast. Kissing Sherlock on a tor in Dartmoor. It
had been, she thought, a good run. At last she sighed.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘You may have a point. I’ve destroyed our transport home and
managed to break my leg in the process, which is a record even you’d have a
hard time—,’ at which Sherlock leapt off her lap, yelling ‘You did what.’
‘I think it’s broken,’ said Johnnie, nodding. ‘Though I’m not feeling it too
much, yet, because I was just so worried about keeping us away from those
goons. I think I can get up the ladder, though; just don’t stand directly
beneath me, in case I—,’ at which point Sherlock rolled her eyes, and swore,
and dove for Johnnie with her shoulder down and her arm around Johnnie’s waist.
Johnnie, as it turned out, wasn’t the only one riding an overwhelming current
of adrenaline. Months later they would try the stunt again, and be unable to
replicate it. But that night Sherlock hadn’t the slightest trouble making her
way up a construction ladder, one hand on the slick metal hand-rail and Johnnie
Watson slung over the other shoulder.

***** Chapter 20 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes

June 4, 1955
4:30pm
Metropolitan Police Headquarters
3 Broadway, City of Westminster
 London, England
‘Are you literally insane?’ Johnnie said, at the same moment the rumpled man
behind the desk kneaded his forehead with his fingertips and said ‘No. Just—no.
Absolutely not.’
Sherlock sighed, deep and put-upon. Against her will, Johnnie felt the edge of
her lip twitch up.
‘Look,’ Sherlock said, ‘shall we go over the facts again? I have single-
handedly gathered—’
‘Oi,’ Johnnie said, moving suddenly in her seat so that her new leg-cast
clacked against the floor of DI Lestrade’s office. Sherlock rolled her eyes,
but, with a look at the cast, fidgeted in her seat.
‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘My partner and I—’
‘Not just me,’ Johnnie interrupted. ‘We wouldn’t have any of these papers if it
weren’t for Chester Davis, don’t forget.’
Sherlock drummed her fingers peevishly on the arm of her chair, pursing her
lips. Her leg bounced, too, where it was crossed over the other knee under the
grey tweed of her straight skirt. The DI looked out from between his fingers at
the pair of them, half-disbelieving, half-amused. Johnnie, unrepentant,
shuffled her cast-plaster against the floor again; Sherlock’s eyes flicked over
to it, and the hard line of her mouth relaxed just a bit.
‘All right, yes,’ she said, at last. ‘But the fact remains that due to the
diligent efforts of myself, my partner, and Mr. Davis, the Met now has enough
evidence to convict Mr. Townsend-Farquhar of wartime collaboration and dealing
in the black market. This is all material of whose existence the Met would
otherwise remain ignorant, never mind having it in your possession. There are
strong—'
‘Now wait just a—,’ the DI began, but Sherlock talked over him.
‘—there are strong circumstantial indications that Townsend-Farquhar was also
responsible for the death of Sylvia Cohen, previously known as Ellen Erins, a
week ago Saturday, at the Gateways Club in King’s Road. All I—’
‘Indications we have every intention of pursuing,’ Lestrade interrupted again,
but Sherlock was not to be dissuaded.
‘—all I am requesting,’ she continued, ‘is the opportunity to complete the
investigation Miss Watson and I began, and with regard to which we have
delivered remarkable progress in a short span of time.’
‘You’re a pair of unqualified civilians,’ Lestrade said, the trace of a smile
on his mouth, sitting back in his office chair. ‘You think I’m—what? I’m going
to deputise a couple of—of girls off the street?’
‘I have no desire whatsoever to be…deputised,’ Sherlock said, with a dramatic
little shudder. ‘I’ve as much experience as any private investigator in the
city. References upon request, should you desire them, although I have it on
good authority that such requests are not part of the normal procedure.’
Lestrade steepled his hands in front of his face, and stared out at them both,
not speaking. Sherlock looked back at him, chin up.
Johnnie, despite her own reservations about Sherlock’s plan, let her good knee
jiggle slightly. It moved Davis’s manila file of copied-out records, which
she’d been holding it on her lap. She saw Lestrade’s eyes dart to it, briefly;
she emphatically didn’t smile.
‘You said yourself,’ Lestrade said at last, slow and would-be patient, ‘that
we’ve already got him dead to rights on treason, and as soon as this
supposed...newspaper story goes to print, we’ll have him on libel as well.
We’ll bring him in, question him here. You can’t seriously think you’ll have
better luck getting the truth out of him, than trained police investigators.’
‘He’s got a point,’ said Johnnie.
Sherlock’s look spoke of praying for patience. Johnnie bit the inside of her
mouth to keep her expression stern. Sherlock was manifestly impossible to talk
out of anything, but she reckoned she’d be remiss not to try.
‘The evidence against him on the murder charge,’ Sherlock snapped, ‘is
currently nothing more than a series of suspicious coincidences. And he knows
it. If he’s already been dragged in by one of your lot, he’ll simply deny all
accusations; there’s no possible way you can convict on the evidence.’
‘He’s up for life in prison, anyway,’ Lestrade said. ‘Treason.’
Johnnie cleared her throat. ‘That won’t clear our client’s name,’ she said.
‘Your—client,’ said Lestrade. Deadpan and disbelieving. ‘This—club owner,
this,’ he checked his notepad. ‘Gina Ware?’
‘Mrs. Ware,’ said Sherlock, ‘as you well know, has hired us to clear her
employee. Mabel Smith.’
Johnnie started; she couldn’t help it. Mabel. Jesus. She’d forgotten.
‘Well,’ Lestrade said. ‘Assuming your client isn’t guilty, how exactly will it
be to, er, her advantage, if we send you two into the lion’s den?’
Sherlock stifled a sigh; Johnnie still heard it.
‘You wouldn’t be sending us anywhere, Detective Inspector,’ she said. ‘The idea
is simply to present Mr. Townsend-Farquhar with a resource ripe for
exploitation, someone unlikely to be believed and easily silenced in the event,
and to give him enough rope.’
‘Then we’ll—we’ll send someone in undercover,’ Lestrade said, gesturing with
his hand, exasperated. ‘You’re not some kind of—of magical disappearing girl;
it’s not as if you invented disguise, you—why are you giving me that look?’
Johnnie didn’t need to glance over, to know the look in question. She would
have put money on Sherlock in fact believing, somehow, that she had invented
disguise.
‘I believe we bring certain advantages to the table,’ Sherlock said,
incongruously prim.
She said nothing more.
When Lestrade looked over at Johnnie in surprise, Johnnie jiggled her knee
again, and drummed her fingers casually on the cover of Chester’s manila
folder.
Comprehension dawned on Lestrade’s face. It was gradual, and unwelcome, like a
bad aftertaste to an accustomed dish. There was a silence in the room.
‘I can have a court subpoena those, you know,’ he said at last.
Sherlock hummed, noncommittally.
‘No,’ he repeated, then. ‘Absolutely not.’
But he sounded a very great deal less certain. Sherlock smiled.
***
June 5, 1955
2:30pm
Offices of the Daily Chronicle
16 Francis Street, Westminster
 London, England
Which is how Johnnie Watson came to be packed into a storage cupboard, her cast
propped up on some boxes of cleaning supplies, peering into Harold Townsend-
Farquhar’s office through the slats of the louvred doors while Sally Donovan
breathed in her ear. At their feet one tape reel bled into another, and a
little red light blinked and blinked.
The timing had been of the utmost importance. Both Sherlock and Lestrade had
known it, and so the argument, such as it was, had been shorter than it might
have been. According to a source of Lestrade’s at the Chronicle, Cohen’s
carefully-seeded story was going to press that afternoon; after that, there
would be no stopping the dominoes from tumbling. Somebody needed to get to
Townsend-Farquhar while his defences were still relaxed, before the counter-
exposés and the Met’s rebuttals came down upon his head. And that someone, on
pain of making Lestrade’s life a good deal more difficult vis-a-vis Chester
Davis’s file, was Sherlock.
Or, more accurately, thought Johnnie: that someone was Livvy.
She was seated already as his 1:30 staff meeting was wrapping up: perched in
the spindly chair in front of his massive desk, exuding fragility, and
defiance, with a duffel bag at her feet.
There was a symmetry about it, Johnnie thought, staring at
Sherlock’s—Livvy’s—face, in profile from behind the slatted door.
Johnnie’s commanding officer at Margate had been a bullish, bullying woman, a
Major Bertha Fox. She’d harrumphed, and tugged at the bottom of her jacket like
braces, and smoked a fag from her hoard every time a new recruit had cried in
front of her. And Major Fox had dug a pit in the dirt in order to achieve this
same exact placement of furniture in her field tent: the large, high desk,
looking down on the supplicant beneath her. Johnnie felt she understood, in the
face of that looming mahogany, what kind of man they were dealing with. And
here was Livvy, tiny in her oversized dress, perching on the edge of the chair
with her trembling chin in the air and her hair braided crooked like she hadn’t
a proper mirror at home. Major Fox would have almost purred at the chance to
take a girl like that apart.
Johnnie shifted at the thought, uncomfortable. Her cast scraped against the
cardboard supporting it, and Sally shot her a warning glance. Neither Sherlock
nor Livvy looked round. Johnnie apologised with her eyes; Sally rolled hers.
There were shufflings just outside; then the door opened. Johnnie, still
thinking of Bertha Fox, was surprised at what she could see of Harold Townsend-
Farquhar: he was slight, and spry, with a rosy nose and a cloud of unruly white
hair, like an elf that had grown old in the service of Father Christmas. He
looked like someone’s favourite grandfather. He had a pencil between his teeth,
and was looking down at a pile of papers, and it took him a minute to register
the presence of another person in his office. When he did, he stopped short,
his hand still on the latch of the door. Livvy had risen to her feet, squared
her shoulders. Johnnie held her breath.
‘Can I…help you?’ Townsend-Farquhar said. He’d reached up to take the pencil
from his mouth, but otherwise didn’t move from the doorway.
‘I know some things,’ Livvy said. Voice determined but shaky.
‘Do you,’ he said. Johnnie could practically hear him categorising the
encounter. Shutters were slipping down over his face; but his voice, too, was
full of recognition. Ah yes, it said, one of you, and Johnnie let out her held
breath, slowly and carefully. He thought she was a blackmailer. He thought he
knew all about her.
He thought she hadn’t a chance.
‘I know—know about what you did,’ said Livvy. Johnnie saw through the slats how
hard she swallowed, like she could barely believe her own daring.
Townsend-Farquhar’s face was considering.
He sat; gestured for her to sit. She visibly thought about it; stayed standing
a moment too long before sitting again on the very edge of the seat. It was
painful to watch.
‘And what exactly is it,’ Townsend-Farquhar inquired, settling himself further
into his overstuffed chair while Livvy squirmed on her straight-backed wooden
one, ‘that you think you know, my dear?’
‘I could tell the p—police,’ Livvy stuttered. Townsend-Farquhar’s smile grew
wider. ‘I knew her, you know, I knew Miss—Miss Cohen.’
‘Miss Cohen!’ he exclaimed. ‘My, my. You make her sound like quite the virtuous
maid.’
‘She was vird—virt—,’ Livvy said. ‘She was good to me.’
‘It’s better than the cinema,’ he said, under his breath, so that Johnnie could
barely make it out. Then, louder, he said: ‘Good to you, was she? Kindly took
you home from the pub? Generously allowed you to sleep in her bed?’
Livvy blushed scarlet. Johnnie slid her eyes sideways, and caught Sally, for
the briefest moment, with an open look of admiration on her face for Sherlock’s
ability to flush on command.
‘She—she was always—,’ Livvy was saying, as the flush spread.
‘Look, child,’ said Townsend-Farquhar, leaning forward. ‘Sylvia Cohen had a way
with words and a strong right hook, but let’s be frank with one another, you
and I. She wasn’t winning any awards for humanitarianism, now was she?’
His smile was overdone, ugly. Johnnie strongly suspected him of using the word
‘humanitarianism’ solely because Livvy was unlikely to know it. Sure enough,
she squirmed uncertainly in her seat, and Johnnie took a deep breath and
reminded herself of Sherlock in Lestrade’s office, saying give him enough rope.
‘I saw her, you know,’ Livvy went on. ‘The night before she died.’
‘Oh, pray, tell me all about it,’ Townsend-Farquhar said, with a wave of his
hand.
‘She knew,’ Livvy said. ‘She—she knew something was about to happen, and she
knew it would be you.’
‘Oh?’ Townsend-Farquhar said. ‘And that’s what you plan to take to the police,
do you? “Oh I swear, sir, the victim had a vague feeling of animosity the night
before the murder, toward a man she’d scarcely met. She told me all about it
when she was sodomising me on her filthy flea-market sofa.” Yes, I’m sure
they’ll be flocking over here on the double.’
Livvy’s chin trembled.
‘She’d met you,’ she said. ‘She’d been playing you false for years.’
‘Not that I’d put it past her,’ he said, drily. ‘But I happen to know I had the
best going rate.’
Livvy made a sound like a petulant child being denied a biscuit. Her hands were
shaking. She let out a breath, and reached down into the duffel bag at her
feet, bending her head over so Townsend-Farquhar could see her crooked braid.
When she straightened up, she had Chester Davis’s manila folder in her hand.
‘Needed help with your school essay, did you?’ he said.
Livvy reached out a trembling arm, and set the folder on the edge of his desk.
Her lips were pursed like she was holding her breath. She shook her head.
‘No,’ he said, musingly, dragging the folder to him over the desk. ‘I suppose
it’s been a good long while since you left school.’
Livvy got a look like a dog used to being kicked. She held it steady even after
Townsend-Farquhar opened the folder, when the smirk faded from his face.
He leaned forward, thumbing from paper to paper. His expression, for the first
time since she’d entered the room, was held carefully neutral. His eyes flicked
sideways once, toward the open office door; but his head didn’t move.
At last he closed the folder and pushed it back at her.
‘Five hundred pounds and I’ll leave,’ Livvy said, her head high and
challenging, as if she were naming the price of a Swiss villa instead of a few
months’ rent at 221b.
Townsend-Farquhar laughed out loud.
‘Oh, very ambitious. And very loyal, aren’t we?’ His mouth twisted. ‘About what
Sylvia Cohen could expect, if I’m honest.’
Livvy raised her head higher.
‘I know you’ve got it,’ she said, her voice trembling, starting to cry. ‘And
you can’t talk, you b-b-betrayed her.’
‘Oh come now,’ said Townsend-Farquhar, losing patience at last and rising
halfway out of his chair as Johnnie tried hard to keep still. ‘You ridiculous
little girl, who let you in here? I could tell you things about Sylvia Cohen
that would give you nightmares for a month.’
‘She was the best woman I’ve ever met,’ Livvy said, sobbing into her hands.
Townsend-Farquhar threw up his hands, eyes raised to the heavens. Then he sank
back into his chair. He watched Livvy crying.
‘She was a third-rate copper,’ he said at last, exasperated, ‘and an execrable
person. Look, we both know I’m giving you nothing, and no one will believe your
story. But Sylvia Cohen, she’s—mourning for a woman like that, it’s absurd. Did
you know it was her suggestion? All of this, all this—this pilfering of dirty
goods, she came into my office and laid out the whole plan, ready-made. All I
had to do was go along with it.’
Livvy whimpered; shook her head hard.
‘Well, all right,’ he said. ‘She had a few stipulations, but it was all in the
service of making herself look good to me, don’t you see? Listen, she probably
sold you some sob story about her family, but the truth is she couldn’t have
cared less. Did you know she sold out her oldest friend, when I asked her to?
Did you know she lied every day just by showing up to work? Pledges and oaths,
my god. A feral dog has more honour than that grasping bulldagger.’
‘She h-h-hated you,’ sobbed Livvy, her breathing getting thready. Townsend-
Farquhar laughed again, gently.
‘My girl,’ he said, ‘I doubt there was a soul alive she didn’t hate. You should
have heard the things she told me, before the war. Practically begging to sell
her virtue cheap.’
‘So you—you did,’ Livvy choked out. ‘You could have helped her, but you used
her and then you k-k-killed her.’
‘It’s not my job to assist troubled young harpies regain the path of virtue,’
Townsend-Farquhar spat. No denial; Johnnie’s breath stopped in her lungs. ‘And
Ellen Erins,’ he went on, ‘was beyond the reach of any help of mine.’
Livvy just cried harder. Johnnie’s stomach flopped like a fish in her throat.
Townsend-Farquhar sighed, and glanced out the door at the deserted corridor.
‘Isn’t your, your job,’ Livvy said into her hands, after a minute, ‘to spread
knowledge and, and make people better, how could—’
‘My job is to sell my wares,’ he snapped. ‘As, I believe, is yours. Don’t take
a high line with me, child; you understand me better than you want to admit.
Cry all you want, but ask yourself: what would you have done? For a long time
Ellen Erins was my shining star. Then she was an unpleasant, but sometimes
convenient, member of my staff. Eventually she turned to dead weight, and still
I kept her on, but—look, she got herself seen, didn’t she? She got herself
seen, in a place she definitely shouldn’t have been, when she could have been
linked to me. And then there were people talking about it in public, just as we
at the paper were courting potential buyers. Take my word, my dear, you would
have cut her loose long before I did. I can tell just by the lookof you.’
Johnnie expected him to lick his lips. He was leaning forward, smiling,
watching Livvy dissolve into hysterics.
‘I was—was there that night, you know,’ Livvy said, raising her tear-streaked
face from her hands. ‘At the—the club. Sylvia had asked me to meet her there so
I did, and then I—got a little sick so I. Went out for some fresh air. And when
I came, came back—.’
She was crying too hard to keep talking. There was a long silence. Johnnie kept
glancing obsessively at the blinking red light of the reel-to-reel.
Townsend-Farquhar rose at last. He went to the door, and closed it, then came
around to the front of his desk, looming over Livvy, who was gasping wetly into
her own hands.
‘When you came back, she was dead,’ he murmured down at her. She nodded,
helplessly, without raising her head. 'Mmm,' he confirmed. ‘She was in great
pain while you were outside vomiting into the rubbish bins, but that was all
over long before you had a chance to notice. Cyanide poisoning is awful, you
know. I wouldn’t take it personally that she never mentioned you. She wasn’t
one to linger over her cocktails, and the dosage was strong.’
Johnnie dug her nails into the palms of her hands. Livvy kept on crying.
The movement of Livvy's thin shoulders was shaking her hair looser, and looser.
Johnnie wondered if she would be able to pin-point, later, the moment when
Sherlock had freed it from its fastener. Townsend-Farquhar took a step forward.
Then another. Livvy cringed into herself when he brushed a dark curl from the
side of her cheek; he gave Bertha Fox’s vulpine smile and grabbed her
unraveling plait, yanking her head back. She made a shocked, pathetic noise.
‘Unlike you, of course,’ he went on, sounding conversational as he wrenched at
her hair, twisting her neck around, ‘I was there the whole time. So I can
assure you that there were no touching deathbed confessions, no professions of
love or regret. I—,’ and Johnnie’s chest was expanding and contracting at once,
‘I had to step back into the shadows, after I fixed her drink, and broke that
glass to distract the bartender. But I—,’ and Livvy was looking up at him with
wide, terrified eyes, and he was smiling, ‘I stayed close. I watched her the
whole time, took her with me into the storage cupboard while she frothed and
convulsed. Then to the ladies’ when it was safe to do it. She moaned about her
tedious Polish family, and that old battle-axe Allen. Not a gasp of your name,
at all.’
Johnnie was sure she would pass out, but she didn’t. Sally had her cuffs out.
When she kicked the door open Townsend-Farquhar seemed to freeze in place, his
smile a shocked grimace, his arms gone limp.
‘Well,’ said Sherlock, straightening up, and slipping otterlike out from under
his hand to face him where he stood, her limbs steady, her face stony, her
smiling mouth set. ‘That’s very interesting, Mr. Townsend-Farquhar.’
***
June 7, 1955
6:35pm
The Gateways Club, 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
 London, England
A person would have had to know the usual schedule of open nights at the Gates,
to realise anything was different. Ted had suggested, and Gina had agreed, to
put up a notice: Club closed for private event. But Sherlock had pointed out
that the only people not welcome at a party celebrating Smithy’s exoneration,
would be anyone who hadn’t met her. So all Gateways members were invited, and
the club opened specially on the Tuesday after Harold Townsend-Farquhar was
taken into custody on a triple charge of treason, libel, and murder.
And Johnnie, surveying the club from her place of honour at the bar, could
swear she had never seen the place so full.
The press of bodies would have seemed overwhelming, had not the high spirits
been tangible. Private, mid-week events were generally casual, like a Wednesday
or a Sunday; but tonight couples had outdone themselves. From down in the pit
of smoke haze on the dance floor, the roar of rough female voices almost
eclipsed Chester Davis’s hell-for-leather ragtime. Bess Taylor, pressed against
her bass in an orange dress with a boned bodice, was visibly sweating to keep
up with him. Earlier the drummer had broken a stick, flipped it about, and kept
right on playing.
Johnnie felt Sherlock stir behind her, her arm moving from around Johnnie’s
waist to wave at someone just arrived. Johnnie turned round herself in time to
spot Cass Thorssen’s tender-pale face emerging from the press of bodies,
followed by Haley Murray and Lou McGuire. Cass and Haley were holding hands.
‘Oh look at this,’ Johnnie shouted, when they were near enough to hear. ‘You
three bloody well went shopping!’
Haley dimpled up; Johnnie thought she might have even blushed. Her freckles got
less prominent, anyway. She was draped in something very fluid and very pink,
with no back and extremely little front, and she bullied past Johnnie to wrap
Sherlock in a bear hug that went on and on and on.
‘Couldn’t arrive at an event like this underdressed,’ said Lou, to Johnnie. ‘I
took them both to my tailor. As you’ve no doubt guessed.’
‘Oi,’ said Cass, tearing her eyes off Haley and Sherlock to mock-glare at Lou.
‘And whose money did we spend at your tailor, anyway?’
Lou grinned. She put up her hands, conceding the point, and Cass grinned too.
Cass was in black-tie; one of only two or three full-formal butches present.
Johnnie had never seen Cass in clothes that played to her lankiness, rather
than trying to hide it. Her legs went on forever, Johnnie thought: she was
nipped seams and angles to Haley’s ludicrous curves. Improbably, they put Lou
in the shade.
Haley drew back from Sherlock at last. If Johnnie hadn’t been watching with
unwavering attention, she would have missed the split-second as Haley pulled
away, before Sherlock wrenched her eyes back up to Haley’s face.
Johnnie almost laughed aloud. Someone, she thought, should stand Haley Murray a
few rounds: a décolletage capable of distracting Sherlock Holmes was remarkable
indeed.
Sherlock cleared her throat, flushed but defiant. ‘Cass,’ she said, putting out
a hand. ‘Lou.’
Johnnie’s chest tightened the smallest bit when Lou took Sherlock’s hand and
lowered her lips to kiss it. She was halfway braced for a seduction attempt, or
a comment about Sherlock mixing trousers and lace. But Lou only gave a chaste
bow of her head and a murmur of ‘Miss Holmes,’ and let her go.
It was, Johnnie realised, the first time she’d set eyes on Lou since the night
of the alley fight and the murder. The past week seemed a month, she thought;
so much had happened. Sherlock, and the case; Gina and Smithy and Sherlock and
Townsend-Farquhar. The day of their argument on the pavement seemed simply ages
ago. And Lou, after one bland brush of her lips to Sherlock’s knuckles, was now
carefully avoiding dwelling on her face longer than dictated by the basic rules
of politeness.
Johnnie looked so long at Lou out of the corner of her eye, trying to work out
just how to feel about her, that she almost missed Sherlock twisting behind her
to motion to Smithy. When Haley put a hand to her hip, though, and scowled hard
at someone over the bar, Johnnie turned round as well.
‘Smithy,’ Haley said, very stern. ‘Why on earth are you working? It’s your
night!’
And Smithy, who must have been asked that exact question a hundred times
already this evening, had the grace to smile, and take it in her stride. She
grinned, standing behind the bar with her shirt-tails untucked and her blazer
askew.
‘No rest for the wicked,’ Smithy said. ‘What can I get for you, Haley?’
‘I refuse to let you,’ Haley said, making an elaborate show of a pout. ‘I’ll
come back there myself and get my gin and tonic. You should be out on the dance
floor, celebrating.’
‘I reckon the Wares told her exactly that,’ said Johnnie, who was in fact not
reckoning at all but had been present for the conversation herself.
‘Gin and tonic, is it,’ said Smithy, moving away, but Cass leapt halfway over
the bar and grabbed her wrist.
‘Really, Smith,’ she said. ‘Any of us could tend bar. Go on, have a dance or
two. You’re a hero now, you know; any femme in the place would dance with you.’
‘Nah,’ Smithy said. She tugged her wrist free, gentle but firm. ‘The lady of
the manor is hard at work; I guess I can be, too.’
‘The lady of the manor,’ came a voice from behind Smithy’s shoulder, ‘is no
such thing.’
Smithy jerked back, startled. She twisted to the side, and behind her, red
mouth quirked at the corner, arms crossed over her breasts and red-lacquered
nails drumming on one arm, stood Gina Ware. Her posture was hard, but her face
was oddly soft. Smithy’s mouth fell open.
‘I was simply overwhelmed with volunteers to man the door,’ Gina said. ‘They
seemed to think I ought to be dancing.’
‘Yeah?’ Smithy said. ‘You got that too?’
It was something to see, thought Johnnie, the way their eyes met. She could
count on one hand the number of times she’d seen them together for more than a
minute or so without one or the other rushing off somewhere, in all the years
she’d been coming to the Gateways. Still. When one of their looks lasted longer
than a few seconds, however stony Gina’s expression, however harried Smithy’s,
it was like they would lock together, and grow. Their smirks turned to smiles
and bubbled up into grins, and the air turned joyful between them. Just at her
left ear, Johnnie heard Lou whistle, long and low.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Gina, eyes rolling to the heavens and arms un-
crossing. ‘Dance with me.’
So Smithy raised her eyebrows and put out her hand, and Cass whooped, and
vaulted the rest of the way over the bar though there was a perfectly
serviceable swinging door entrance, and Johnnie felt herself grinning from ear
to ear as the crowd parted to let Gina Ware drag Smithy onto the dance floor.
Gina had danced before in her own club. Johnnie had seen her: once with Smithy
and once with Ted, and once with Gina’s Milanese cousin. But that was three
times in ten years; and during one of them the club had been almost empty.
Johnnie heard the hush descend. Couples were clearing off to the sides of the
floor, to let them onto it. Over on the bandstand, Bess’s fingers were held
silent over the fingerboard of her bass; even Chester’s piano faltered, and
quieted.
Such a concentrated stare Johnnie had never felt. Smithy and Gina came to rest
together in the centre of the floor. Smithy splayed her hand at the small of
Gina’s back. She cleared her throat. Feet shuffled, around the room.
‘Chester,’ called Smithy, gesturing with her head, not taking her eyes off
Gina’s face. ‘Taint Nobody’s Business, all right?’
‘Yes indeed,’ Chester said, almost under his breath, and ran an arpeggio up and
down the keys, but Bess, with one hand, signalled to him to wait. She signalled
with the other to a tiny blonde femme to her right, who nodded, and made her
way up and behind Bess’s bass. The blonde looked so small she’d barely be able
to hold the thing up, but she somehow managed to get her arms around it. Bess
stepped out in front. Chester grinned, and ran his fingers up and down the
keyboard again. Johnnie looked back at Smithy and Gina, to find them still
staring into each others’ eyes, faces still, waiting.
Bess counted them down extra slow. On four the tiny blonde started up a steady
line. Chester’s arpeggios settled into an even stride just as Bess opened her
mouth.
There ain’t nothing, she sang, I can do, or nothin’ I can say, and Smithy
tightened her arm around Gina’s waist, and they moved in synchrony. That folks
don’t criticise me, growled Bess, drawing out the long notes.
The song was slower than Johnnie had ever heard it, but fiercer, too. Not
gentle at all. There was no microphone, but Bess filled the club with her
voice, custom-fit it to the room, and wrapped it round all the tables and the
chairs, and the still and moving breathing bodies. But I’m gonna do just what I
want to, anyway, she sang. Over by the entrance, Ted Ware stood propped against
the dividing wall, smiling to himself. Johnnie felt Sherlock’s arm snake back
around her waist; she put her hand over Sherlock’s hand on her stomach, and
squeezed.
If I should take a notion, sang Bess, as the hi-hat rattled and Chester’s
stride lengthened, to jump into the ocean, as Gina pressed closer against
Smithy's chest, ain’t nobody’s business, if I do.
There was sweat pouring in rivulets down Bess’s face and her neck by the time
she’d got halfway through. Nobody joined Smithy and Gina on the dance floor,
but couples all around the periphery were touching each other, were swaying
with the rhythm. Cigarettes burnt out in peoples’ hands; condensation trickled
down glasses and pooled on tables. Ain't nobody’s business, sang Bess, if I do.
As the song neared its end, Chester forced the rhythm even slower. The tendons
stood out in Bess’s neck as she ground out the last low phrases. When Chester’s
rhythm broke up, cascading haphazard into the lower registers, and the little
blonde let her fingers creep upward to hit the resolve, the air was so thick
with feeling that everyone in the place breathed heavy.
There was absolute quiet, for a long moment. Gina and Smithy stood in the
middle of the floor, panting, still touching, seeming to converse without
words. Nobody so much as shuffled a foot.
And then Chester cleared his throat, and dove full-bore into a raunchy,
determined stomp of a number, and Bess laughed aloud, and sang out. A
collective breath released. Gina and Smithy moved further apart, looking down
at their feet as they fumbled over the old-fashioned moves.
Around the room, other couples were offering each other their hands, relaxing
into it. A few butches near the piano, Leslie Matthews among them, even shouted
out along with Bess the first time the chorus came around, Give me a pigfoot,
and Bess pointed over at them and winked.
The joy, the relief of the thing were contagious. People were laughing, and
jitterbugging; Gina left Smithy doing a stumbling Charleston with Ted, and
headed back toward the bar.
And made straight for Sherlock and Johnnie. Johnnie took her hand off
Sherlock’s hand to shake Gina’s; she expected another round of gratitude,
perhaps a few minutes in which Gina would allow herself to slide onto a
barstool, take the weight off her feet.
What Gina actually did, though, was to shake Johnnie’s hand, and then
Sherlock’s, and then stand back on her heels and clear her throat, leaving her
hand outstretched and turning up her palm.
‘Miss Holmes,’ she said, unexpectedly formal. ‘Would you do me the honour?’
Johnnie gaped at her. Then she turned awkwardly on her barstool, lowering her
cast from its propped-up position on the next stool over, to gape instead at
Sherlock.
‘I,’ Sherlock said. ‘You’ve already—I’m not—.’
Which was all true, thought Johnny. Gina Ware had danced three dances in
Johnnie’s presence, in the ten years previous: none of them on the same night,
and none with anyone other than men or butches. But Gina just stood there,
holding out her hand. Johnnie squeezed Sherlock’s side through her blouse.
Sherlock took a deep breath, and smiled, and reached out for Gina’s hand.
Johnnie watched them go: one glamourous and polished in her black sheath dress
with her red lips and her red stilettos, and one windswept and boyish-looking,
tonight, in khaki capris and ballet flats and an oversized black button-down
blouse, with her face bare and her hair piled up on her head. Sherlock looked
back over her shoulder at Johnnie as Gina pulled her away, raising her eyebrows
comically. Johnnie remembered that second night at the Gates: Sherlock in her
off-the-shoulder purple silk, breathing false seductive pleasantries against
Gina’s skin. Now, out on the dance floor, Gina leant over to speak into
Sherlock’s ear, and Sherlock laughed, sudden, with that goofy little shake of
her shoulders that she did when she was genuinely amused and not thinking about
how she looked.
Johnnie felt dizzy with gratitude.
The song had ended. Ted had stepped back, was laughing with Smithy. Chester was
playing a tinkling little bridge piece, to allow Bess the time to take her bass
back from the tiny blonde. Then Bess swung her instrument into place and let
her fingers start walking, and Chester broke into a mid-tempo country and
western number. The couples around the floor were pulling each other closer,
and starting to lean and rub up against each other, when the ones nearest the
bar started noticing Gina and Sherlock.
Then people were pulling back, whispering among themselves. Johnnie balled up
her hands. Sherlock pulled her chin up in that prideful, nervous way she had.
But Bess and Chester kept right on playing, and Gina smiled at Sherlock, and
Sherlock, in her cropped trousers and her lace-trimmed blouse, smiled back.
And then, for the second time that night, Gina Ware and her partner were
dancing alone on the floor of the Gateways, this time to a tougher crowd. Gone
was the reverent silence of earler; in its place was whispering and fidgeting,
and glancing sidelong. Johnnie couldn’t be sure, but from somewhere in the back
of the room she thought she heard a low hiss.
Gina seemed to care not a whit. Sherlock spun her, and Gina did a complicated
little double-time flounce at the end of the spin, and came back to centre
looking lovely and at ease, and only the tiniest bit defiant. From off to the
other side of the room, Johnnie recognised Smithy’s giddy laugh.
And soon it was more than her laugh: Smithy had golden Diana Dors by the hand,
and was pulling her out onto the floor, smiling. A murmur went up. Then, from
the other side of the room, Haley and Cass twirled out of the crowd. They were
already so far into a spin when they caught Johnnie’s eye, that she couldn’t
tell who had started it; but she did see it, a minute later, when Cass caught
Lou’s attention over the top of Haley’s head. Lou rolled her eyes, and put out
her hand to the tiny blonde femme who had taken over from Bess on bass, and
they sidled together onto the floor too.
Chester started in on a Vera Lynn number. Sherlock transitioned Gina into waltz
time. The floor wasn’t empty but it wasn’t full. Johnnie bit the inside of her
mouth.
Over by the piano, Leslie Matthews and Andie Levinson were staring, their pints
forgotten in their hands, but behind the bass Bess was glaring at them. She
took her hands off the strings completely for a measure; Leslie’s head whipped
around, and Bess widened her eyes, and Leslie toasted her with her pint and put
it down on the piano. Then she put out a hand to Mireille, standing nearby.
And then—Johnnie felt her eyebrows approach her hairline—Sally Donovan, of all
people, took Andie Levinson by the hand and led her out onto the floor, too.
Sally gave Johnnie an arch look as she passed, but she moved closer to Andie
and ground against her, and Johnnie found she could forgive her an awful lot.
After Sally and Andie, Johnnie couldn't keep track. Couples were sliding onto
the floor from all sides; there were people Johnnie didn't even know. Chester
launched into another number, medley-style, after Vera Lynn, and then into
another. He sped things up a bit as more and more couples stepped out, and soon
the floor was thick with grinding bodies, Gina and Sherlock unnoticed among
them. It was, thought Johnnie, like any night of any week of any year, at the
Gates.
***
June 7, 1955
10:44pm
The Gateways Club, 239 King’s Road, Chelsea
London, England
It seemed like ages. Ages of shaking hands, and smiling; ages of laughing at
peoples’ increasingly-drunken jokes; ages of accepting a surprising amount of
gratitude—before Sherlock was able to corner Johnnie by the door to the
ladies’, and lean down to whisper in her ear.
The party was—it wasn’t terrible, Sherlock thought, with some shock. Especially
after the dances with Gina. Sherlock’s whole body had seized up stiff when Gina
had taken her hand; but Gina had pulled Sherlock out on the floor and planted
her own hand firmly on Sherlock’s shoulder, and leaned over to whisper in her
ear ‘Johnnie tells me I ought to let you lead.’ Sherlock had been surprised
into laughter, glancing over her shoulder to where Johnnie sat at the bar. It
had been easier, after that. And once the floor had filled back up, and Gina
had returned to her post by the door, Sherlock had danced with Cass; and then
Haley; and then a butch Sherlock had never met before; and then, to her great
astonishment, the same femme Astrid (or was it Sam?) who had been so horrible
to Sherlock on her first night here, and who tonight had made her laugh despite
herself with her hand on Sherlock’s hip, teaching her a new dance she called
the cha-cha-cha.
Sherlock had been too exhausted to dance anymore, after that. Two more butches
and another femme had asked her, on her way back over to the bar, but she’d had
an image in her mind of sitting back down on the stool behind Johnnie; of
putting her arms around Johnnie’s waist and nuzzling behind her ear and
inviting her—.
But when she’d arrived back at the bar, Johnnie had been gone.
Which made Sherlock cross. She’d wanted to go find her at once. But when she’d
asked Smithy, Smithy had just smiled and held up a finger, and started making
Sherlock something she called a ‘Corpse Reviver,’ so Sherlock had felt
obligated to wait for her to finish. And in the meantime, as the group was on a
set break, Chester Davis had come by and shook her hand, and then Bess Taylor
had buttonholed her, and thanked her, and asked if it were true what she’d
heard from Cass about Sherlock detaining a thief in a neighbour’s sitting room
with only the contents of the victim’s knitting basket, which Sherlock had had
to admit was true, actually, after which Bess had asked such surprisingly
astute questions about the probable fibre content of the available materials,
and how Sherlock had accommodated for the elasticity of the wool, that it was a
good half an hour before she had made her escape.
And then Leslie had found her, and shaken her hand, and neither of them had
said anything much at all. But they'd taken long enough about it that Sherlock
was still standing about when Ted came up holding the hand of a tiny black-
haired girl in a blue cotton nightie, who thanked Sherlock, sleepily but very
earnestly, for saving her auntie Smithy from prison. Sherlock had shaken the
girl’s hand, smiling awkwardly. She had spotted Johnnie leaning up against the
wall in the corridor just as Ted picked up his daughter and started up the
stairs, with her looking back at Sherlock over his shoulder.
Infuriatingly, Sherlock almost missed Johnnie againafter that; because by the
time she made her way through the crush of bodies around the far end of the
bar, Johnnie was leaning up on her crutches, easing out of her conversation
with Lou by the ladies’. Johnnie had her hand on Lou’s arm. It looked, thought
Sherlock, coming up behind Johnnie and wrapping an arm around her waist, as if
they were patching things up.
‘Oh, hullo,’ Johnnie said, a little blurrily, nuzzling her head back against
Sherlock’s shoulder.
Lou tipped her hat, and went into the washroom. Sherlock bent her head to
Johnnie’s ear-at last, at last-and murmured ‘Come out back with me.’
‘Out back,’ Johnnie said, eyebrows up. ‘You want Smithy to barge in on us again
while we’re half-naked, do you?’
‘Actually,’ Sherlock said, pretending to consider; so that Johnnie laughed, and
shuffled herself around in Sherlock’s arms to punch her awkwardly on the side.
Johnnie really was a little tipsy, Sherlock thought. She smelled of Armignac,
which to Sherlock’s knowledge wasn’t officially for sale at the Gateways.
Sherlock suspected that Smithy was slipping them both liquor from her private
store.
‘Might be a little awkward, with these damned things,’ Johnnie said, into the
crook of Sherlock’s neck.
‘No, really,’ Sherlock said, as Johnnie leaned up to nibble at her
neck—distracting. ‘Come out with me. There’s something I—Johnnie. There’s
something I want you to see.’
That got Johnnie’s attention, at last. She pulled her head back from nuzzling
at Sherlock’s collarbone through her blouse, and hobbled a half-step back, a
questioning look on her face. But Sherlock wasn’t giving anything away.
‘Lead on,’ Johnnie said at last. ‘By all means.’
So they slipped out the back way, together this time, and Sherlock couldn’t
help feeling—as she walked backward up the stairs in front of Johnnie, up and
up the narrow wooden staircase, and stopped them both on the landing because
she was giddy and tipsy and she wanted to ease Johnnie up against the concrete
wall and kiss the brandy off her tongue—she couldn’t help feeling that this way
was a thousand times better than the last time they’d come, even accounting for
Johnnie’s broken leg.
The kiss went on—went on longer, a bit longer than Sherlock had planned. It was
just that Johnnie was so—god, delicious, and her shirt was all rumpled and her
skin was warm and her hands were in Sherlock’s hair.
But Sherlock was too wrought up to linger long in the back stairwell of the
Gates. Her brain felt waterlogged with talk and alcohol, but her skin was
vibrating on her bones, and she kept thinking of what was waiting, what was—
‘Hurry up,’ she said, drawing back from Johnnie without letting go of Johnnie’s
pinned shoulders. Johnnie laughed. She didn’t point out who had been holding
them up.
‘What’s the hurry, then?’ she asked instead. Sherlock tugged at her untucked
shirt, since both Johnnie's hands were occupied: up and up and up. Johnnie
grumbled in a laughing way. Sherlock held the door open with her foot, and
grabbed Johnnie’s lapels to shuffle her around and more or less lift her
through it backwards, and then drag her around side-to-side with Sherlock so
that Sherlock could see her face when she—
‘Sherlock,’ Johnnie whispered.
Darkness had fallen, almost completely. But Smithy had helped Sherlock earlier
with setting up extra lighting in the alleyway, and clearing away the detritus,
and putting an extra padlock on the wire-topped gate so that there was very
little danger, really, of anyone succumbing to temptation and attempting to
steal the motorcycle that stood illuminated there, gleaming silver-blue against
the red alley brick.
‘How did you—,’ Johnnie said, swallowing, her hand clenching and unclenching on
the grip of her crutch. Sherlock may have bounced on her toes, a little. ‘Did
you have to go to your brother for this? Because after what you told me I don’t
want his—’
‘No,’ Sherlock said. Her voice came out higher than usual, almost a squeak.
‘No, nothing like that. Go on then, look it over.’
Johnnie swung forward, tentative, crutches and then leg. She reached out a hand
to touch the lacquer of the petrol tank, but she still looked hesitant.
‘Then how—Sherlock, this bike is brand new, it’s a brand-new Triumph, you don’t
even have money for food down the shops, how did you—’
‘I called in a few favours,’ Sherlock said. Johnnie just looked at her.
‘Well,’ Sherlock amended, feeling oddly nervous all of a sudden. ‘Rather a
large number, actually. We’ll need to be careful not to break anything
important for the next, er, year or two, really. And we may be dining on tinned
beans even more than usual, although from the way Gina was talking I won’t be
surprised if she shows up at Baker Street with hot meals; the woman seems to
think we starve. Smithy was good, though, she and I talked the bloke down to
quite a fair price in the end. And Mickey, of course, she helped me to assess
the condition, since I have to admit it’s not really my area of exper—’
But she couldn’t finish about Mickey; or about bartering goods into pounds
sterling across the length and breadth of Marylebone at odd hours of the
morning; or the vast array of conflicting advice bestowed upon her by Lee and
Pat and Cass and Smithy; because Johnnie had shifted forward on her good leg,
and let her crutches fall away from the Triumph, and was wrapped around
Sherlock, electric, kissing the words from her lips.

Chapter End Notes
        1. (T)Ain't Nobody's Business is a classic 20s blues song
           originally written by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins,
           although at this point everyone and their sister has recorded
           it; the most famous version is (I think?) Billie_Holiday's. I
           dithered over using this song for Gina and Smithy's dance,
           because of the lines about how it's better to get hit by your
           man than to get left alone; I hope it goes without saying that
           we here at breathedout, inc. do not condone violence between
           sexual partners unless said violence is fully consensual.

           I opted for it anyway because I have strong feelings about the
           way this particular song is used in storytelling contexts,
           where it's usually made to illustrate an individual's
           justifications of their self-destructive behavior. (Exhibit A
           on this is the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues,
           where Ain't Nobody's Business is cast as Holiday's anthem for
           justifying her drug habit.) The song can certainly be read that
           way, but I think that to do so exclusively is to ignore the
           larger cultural context of the blues. In particular, that it's
           a form which came directly out of black Americans facing
           bigotry and systematic racial oppression day after day,
           generation after generation. Lines like "Ain't nothing I can
           do, or nothing I can say / folks don't criticize me" read very
           differently if you take them in the context of a history of
           slavery, segregation, housing discrimination, lynching,
           systematically maintained black poverty, and just white
           assholes being as sholes, than if you use those same lyrics to
           look at one individual's personal choices. In particular the
           lines become less about an ill-advised alienation of one's
           support system, and more about a very brave and healthy
           response to being treated abusively, which is to distance
           oneself as much as possible from the abuse, and to try to
           rebuild one's own sense of self.

           Since I've gone on this long about this one song, I should also
           mention that no two oppressions are the same, and I hope I
           don't come across as making an exact equation between
           oppression of black Americans in the 20s, and oppression of
           queer Londoners in the 50s. I do think there are some
           resonances there, though, that would be powerful for the
           characters in that scene, particularly given Smithy's Alabama
           roots and Chester Davis's long-time familiarity with ragtime
           and the blues.

           Okay, SORRY FOR THE TANGENT; I just have a lot of thinky
           thoughts about Ain't Nobody's Business, apparently!
        2. On a hopefully much shorter note, please enjoy Bessie Smith's
           excellent 1933 recording of Gimme_a_Pigfoot_and_a_Bottle_of
           Beer. It's highly enjoyable! The song was written around the
           time of Smith's recording, by the husband/wife team of Coot
           Grant and Wesley Wilson.
        3. And here you have a visual reference for Johnnie's new bike: a
           1955 Triumph T110 Tiger. This would have been, if my
           understanding is correct, not quite as sexy an option as the
           Vincent, but still brand-new and quite powerful enough to be
           getting on with. The first T110s were released in 1954, so it's
           not only a brand-new bike but a brand-new line. And of course,
           as is all-important: British-made. :-) Poor thing, though;
           she'll miss the first six weeks of riding season with her leg
           in the cast.

           [Triumph motorcycle]

End Notes
     Good lord, it's done. I'm kind of in shock. There is a $40 bottle of
     champagne waiting for me in the fridge.
     There is no way I can properly express my gratitude to all the many,
     many people who helped out on this massive undertaking. Sophiahelix
     and Sparcck for their eagle-eyed beta work; Roane for her early
     feedback; David for his pinch-hitting beta work and incredible
     ongoing support; Nympheline for her advice on Chapter 3 and Corinna
     for hers on Chapter 6; Emma for helping me make a classical music
     joke in Chapter 10; Gins/Greywash for listening to me bitch and moan
     about this project on a near-daily basis for months, as well as
     constantly upping
     my game through conversation and example; the entire Antidiogenes
     Group for the word wars and the constant support and encouragement.
     THANK YOU SO MUCH, MY BEAUTIFUL FRIENDS.
     AND THE ILLUSTRATORS! Oh my goodness, I am overwhelmed that so many
     people made beautiful pictures for this story. Thank you to Ninette
     Aubart for the gorgeous motorcycle frontispiece, and the image of wee
     Sherlock and Vicky Trevor; Against-Stars/Katya for adorable Sherlock
     and Johnnie at the garage at the opening of Part 2; and Dee for the
     wonderful drawing of Johnnie adjusting her tie, from Chapter 10. I AM
     SO LUCKY. You are all AMAZING. (And should anyone else feel inspired
     to add to this list, please consider this blanket permission to do
     so.)
     To everyone who commented on this, especially people who said i
     t touched them in some meaningful way, I am totally serious when I
     say I never would have made it through this process without you. It
     means SO much to me, thank you thank you thank you. Thanks to all of
     you, and in particular to Otter, whose comments have been of a scale
     and complexity to match the story itself, and who is contemplating a
     HTMCIS-related project of her own that makes me jump up and down
     every time I think about it.
     Basically, it's been a scene, man.
     Thank you all.
     I love you.
     Good night.
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