Sherlock spent the rest of the day walking around Oxford and its environs, familiarizing himself with the town. The sun was shining, making the light-coloured stone from which the various colleges were constructed seem to glow in the ruddy afternoon light.
Sherlock never liked being in a place where he didn’t know what was down the street or around the corner. Wherever he went, he had to know the local geography. He even bought a street map from a shop in the town and checked it as he walked, so that he learned the names of the areas through which he was passing.
While he wandered, he turned over and over in his mind the conversation he had engaged in with Charles Dodgson. The man had a very eccentric mind – that much was clear – but he had to be an able mathematician and logician, otherwise the University authorities would not let him lecture. They obviously turned a blind eye to the odder side of his personality. Sherlock wondered how much of that odder side was deliberate affectation.
It occurred to him that there were other things that he wanted to talk to Dodgson about, but that he had forgotten to mention. There was the question of how Dodgson could balance his serious mathematical work with his writing of books for children, for a start. There were a lot of things Sherlock wanted to know about his brother’s early life too, when he was at Oxford. There was also the question of the thefts of body parts that had come up over dinner the previous night. Sherlock remembered Reginald Musgrave saying that Dodgson had been questioned about the matter, and he desperately wanted to get more facts from the man. Why body parts? How had they been stolen? Where had they gone? Sherlock found that, as he walked, his brain was turning more and more to these unanswered questions.
He knew what he was doing, of course. He was looking for a mystery. Over the past two years he had been confronted by several of them, seemingly insoluble ones, and he was getting a taste for thinking his way through a maze of conflicting evidence and impossibilities to find the truth within. Maybe this was another one.
Acting on the thought, Sherlock asked a couple of passing locals where the mortuary was. He wasn’t sure why – he had no actual plans of going there – but he was interested to know. The first two people he asked – ladies doing their shopping – looked at him strangely and just carried on walking. Perhaps they thought it strange that a boy was asking about something as macabre as a place where bodies were stored. The third person – a burly, whiskered man in a waistcoat that was too small for him, muttered, ‘Students!’ and walked away. Fortunately the fourth person – a businessman in bowler hat and suit – told him. It wasn’t far away – part of the local hospital. He filed the location in his brain in case he ever needed it and continued on with his explorations of the town.
At one point he passed by a building that, according to the sign outside, was the place where the local newspaper was compiled, printed and distributed. He had discovered before that local newspapers were valuable resources of information, and equally valuable ways of getting messages out quickly to a large number of people. He had no intention of ever having to do that again, but then, he had never had any intention of doing it before, but that hadn’t stopped it from being necessary in the past.
He grabbed lunch from a stall outside a tavern and kept on going, hitching lifts on hay-wains and carts so that he could get farther out into the surrounding countryside. By dinnertime he had seen outlying villages such as Jericho and Sunnymede, Wolvercote and Cowley, and in his head he had a more or less complete map of the whole area.
Towards dusk, as he was thinking of getting back to Mrs McCrery’s lodging house to be ready for dinner, he found himself walking past a long brick wall. He was somewhere near the canal: he could smell the water and hear the voices of the bargemen as they called to one another. The wall was about ten feet high, and halfway along it was a set of gates. He was walking at this point, waiting for a passing cart that could take him back to the centre of Oxford, and he slowed down momentarily to look through the gates.
He saw something that he had seen before, but from a different direction.
It was the house that he and Matty had seen when they were on Matty’s barge, heading into Oxford. He could only see a corner of it from the gate, but he knew instantly, instinctively, that it was the same place. His heart felt as if it lurched inside his chest as he looked at it, and he had the oddest urge to put his head on one side and squint in order to make sense of the construction of the house.
Even though he could only see a fraction of the place, it still appeared as if the various lines and angles that made it up didn’t make any sense. He was reminded of the conversation he’d had with Charles Dodgson about the elements of Euclid. According to Euclidian geometry the interior angles of a triangle always added up to 180 degrees, but looking at the house Sherlock wondered if there was another kind of geometry entirely, one in which the angles of a triangle added up to less than, or more than, that, and in which parallel lines could actually meet at some distant point. The house gave the impression of being skewed, as if a giant hand had taken it and twisted it slightly, so that everything was out of true.
Despite the warmth of the day, he suddenly felt cold. He shivered. This was not logical. This was not right. Buildings couldn’t inspire feelings like this, surely. They were just stone and brick and plaster and lathe. They couldn’t inspire dread in the way that this building did. He was obviously hungry, and this was making him dizzy. Either that or the sun had caused a slight case of sunstroke.
A clattering behind him made him turn expectantly. If this was a cart heading for Oxford then he could ask for a ride. He could lie back and rest, and hopefully be more like himself when he got back to Mrs McCrery’s. Once he had some food inside him, he would be fine.
It wasn’t a cart; it was a carriage, constructed from black-painted wood and pulled by two entirely black horses. The driver was dressed in black as well: not just his clothes, but his broad-brimmed hat and the kerchief which was tied over the lower part of his face. Only his eyes could be seen, and in the late-afternoon sun they looked black too.
The carriage slowed as it approached the gates. Sherlock stepped out of the way, on to the grass verge. The gates opened, apparently by themselves, as Sherlock couldn’t see any evidence of anyone pulling them. The horses turned into the gateway, and the carriage began to follow. Sherlock looked up into the window, and froze.
All he could see inside the carriage was a hand, resting on the lower part of the window frame. The hand was large and pale, and a crimson scar ran around its wrist. Other scars, also a livid red, ran around the bases of the fingers, where they joined the palm. A further scar ran up the arm, away from the wrist and into the darkness inside the carriage. All of the scars bore evidence of having been stitched at some time in the past.
And somehow Sherlock knew that he was being watched from inside the carriage by eyes that regarded him with interest but no emotion. Cold, empty eyes.
The whole incident took just a moment to play out, and then the carriage had passed him by and the gates were closing again. Sherlock stared after it, trying to work out what had just happened. The house might cause strange feelings of panic within him, and whoever lived there seemed to have the same effect. The owner and the property were perfectly matched.
He half walked and half ran along the wall to the corner, where the road went one way and the wall went off at a right angle – or maybe something that was close to a right angle but not exact. Sherlock headed away from the house, along the road, and felt a weight gradually lift from his mind.
What was that place?
Twenty minutes later a cart came along, and he hitched a lift back to Oxford with the farmer who was driving. Several times along the way Sherlock tried to ask the man about the house that he must have passed, but each time the words caught in his throat. He just didn’t want to raise the subject.
After twenty minutes of silence, it was the driver himself who spoke first. ‘You ought to be careful, wandering around them woods.’
‘Why is that?’ Sherlock asked, thinking that the man was going to raise the subject of the strange house himself. Instead he said, ‘Folks are saying there’s some kind of creature wandering around. I don’t give it much credence myself, but other people say they’ve seen it – some godless thing that’s been made out of bits of dead bodies, all sewn together. They even wrote to the local newspaper about it, but nothing happened. Like I say, I’ve never seen anything, but I still wouldn’t wander around them woods by myself. You never know.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Sherlock said. He remembered the man he’d seen in the carriage that had driven into the strange house. His wrists had been marked with scars. Had someone glimpsed him in the shadows and drawn the wrong conclusion? ‘Thanks for the warning.’
Back at his lodgings, Sherlock had time for a quick wash and a change of clothes before dinner. Three of the other lodgers were absent – probably eating in college – and Sherlock shared a quiet meal with the theologian, Thomas Millard, and the mathematician, Mathukumal Vijayaraghavan. Nobody had very much to say, and Sherlock went straight to bed afterwards.
Coming out of his bedroom the next morning, he bumped into the lanky Paul Chippenham coming down the stairs.
‘Got anything on today?’ Chippenham asked, pulling on his jacket as he passed Sherlock.
‘Nothing,’ Sherlock admitted. ‘I thought about taking a look around Oxford – maybe going out on the river. What about you?’
‘Lectures,’ Chippenham called over his shoulder. ‘We’re doing gross anatomy – the structure of the skeleton and the arrangement of the internal organs.’
‘I thought you were studying natural science?’
‘Biology is part of that, and anatomy is part of biology. We’re running a book on which of the students gets sick first and has to leave.’
Sherlock’s brain spun for a few moments. Lectures in anatomy? That sounded fascinating.
‘Could I come along?’ he called after the student. The sound of the words coming out of his mouth surprised him, but a moment’s thought confirmed his split-second decision. Why limit his subjects just to logic and mathematics, and why limit his teachers just to Charles Dodgson? Why not take advantage of all the teaching that Oxford had to offer?
Chippenham looked back up the stairs, frowning. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said finally. ‘There’s usually spaces at the back. Just don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t ask any questions and don’t, really don’t, be sick.’
‘I promise,’ Sherlock replied.
‘We need to get a move on though. I’m late as it is.’
Sherlock followed Chippenham down the stairs and out of the house. The older student ran down the street, round the corner and towards the imposing facade of the college, with Sherlock doing his best to keep up. He waved at the Head Porter, Mutchinson, as he passed, and the man saluted smartly back. Chippenham ran around the edge of the lawn and ducked through a side-arch, with Sherlock on his heels. They were both panting by this time. Sherlock glanced up to where he remembered Dodgson’s rooms as being, but there was no sign of the man at his window. Another two archways, and diagonally across a paved quadrangle, and then Chippenham was rushing into a narrow doorway and up some stairs.
At the top of the stairway, a door opened on to a lecture theatre. Sherlock had been expecting something like one of the classrooms back at Deepdene School for Boys, where he had initially been educated – desks lined up in rows with a teacher in front at a blackboard – but the room he found himself in was more like the theatre where he had seen the violinist, Pablo Sarasate, a few weeks before. The stage was smaller, and the slope downward from the top row of the audience to the bottom was much steeper, but the general feeling was similar. Except, he noticed, that there were no seats. Instead, the students were lined up – in some places crowded up – against a series of railings that ran around the edge of their balconies.
The noise was very much the same as in the theatre, with all of the students apparently talking at once to their neighbours, or yelling across from one side of the lecture theatre to the other.
Sherlock and Chippenham had come out on the top balcony. Chippenham quickly wriggled through the crowd, moving down the nearest set of steps to where a group of his friends were based. Sherlock stayed on the top row and found himself a gap in the crowd where he could stand against the railing and look downward.
They were just in time. The lecture hadn’t started yet, but the lecturer himself was in position. Beside him was a table, covered with a white cloth. On the table, covered by the cloth, was a lumpy object that Sherlock, with a slight chill, realized was probably a dead body.
The lecturer was a tall man with bushy eyebrows and a bald spot on top of his head that shone in the glare of the flickering gaslights that were placed around the lecture theatre. Sherlock could smell the press of all of the students’ bodies, as well as their various shaving lotions and hair tonics. Beneath that smell was the smell of the burning gas, and beneath that was a sharp smell, like disinfectant.
The lecturer stepped forward. Immediate silence fell. He was obviously highly respected, or a strict disciplinarian, or both.
‘A word before we start, gentlemen,’ he said in a deep voice that carried to every nook and cranny of the tall room. ‘Shortly you will watch me as I take a body apart, piece by piece, demonstrating to you at every stage what the various bits do and how they are connected to the rest. Next year you will, if you are allowed to return to this college, take a body apart yourselves. These are important – even vital – parts of your education. If we go back in history, people have believed all kinds of odd things about the human body that have turned out not to be true, and that have only been proved false by direct observation of the insides.’ He paused, gazing around with his penetrating eyes. ‘Please remember two things, however. Firstly, bear in mind that students in your situation are fortunate enough to be living in an enlightened time, when students who wish to become doctors or surgeons are able to see how the human body works by examining an actual human body. There have been times, not that many years ago, when such things were forbidden, for religious or for ethical reasons. Secondly, these bodies, which we so casually dismember, were once living people, and that they have donated their body voluntarily for your education. Treat them with the respect they deserve.’ He placed his hand on the sheeted body beside him. ‘This is Mr Adam Bagshawe, lately of this parish. We are indebted to Mrs Rachel Bagshawe for donating her husband’s body for the purposes of medical research, as per the wishes expressed in his will. I may inadvertently refer to Mr Bagshawe’s body as “it” later, as if I was referring to a piece of machinery, or a block of wood, but try to keep in mind, as I will try, that there was once a man’s soul inhabiting this machine, this block, and that he had loves and hates and desires similar to yours.’
The students were mesmerized by this introduction. Glancing around, Sherlock could see that the lecturer’s words had hit home. A few of the students were swallowing nervously, presumably imagining that one day it might be them lying on a table in a lecture theatre, rather than the unfortunate Mr Bagshawe.
The lecturer plucked at the sheet covering Mr Bagshawe’s body, bunching the material up, and then paused. He glanced around the lecture theatre again, frowning.
‘You may have heard talk around the town,’ he added, ‘or perhaps seen reports in the local newspapers, that parts of human bodies have been stolen from the local mortuary in recent months. It may have occurred to you that these thefts have been, in some way, connected to this course of lectures – either to obtain fresh specimens for us to use here in front of you or, perhaps, by more mature students undertaking some form of grotesque homework. I can assure you that the former is not true – every body that we dissect here has been provided whole, by the family of the unfortunate deceased. I can also assure you that if any students were found to be obtaining body parts illegally, by theft or other means, so that they can conduct their own research after hours, they would be immediately dismissed from the college, and prosecuted to the full extent that the law allows. We do not – I repeat, do not – countenance that sort of activity. Do I make myself clear?’
He was silent then, staring around and meeting every set of eyes that was fixed on him, until a murmur of assent rippled around the room.
‘Very well,’ he continued eventually. ‘Now, let us meet Mr Adam Bagshawe.’
He pulled the sheet off the body. A hushed silence fell around the room. Sherlock found himself thinking, bizarrely, of the deaths he had witnessed. He had probably seen more death than anybody else in that room, save the lecturer, but he still leaned forward, hushed in reverence, as the lecture continued.
After the body of the late, unfortunate Mr Bagshawe had been comprehensively sliced up and his various internal organs displayed for public appreciation, and after no less than five of the students in the audience had been suddenly taken ill and had to run for the door, the lecture finished. As the remaining students clapped politely the lecturer covered the remains of Mr Bagshawe with a sheet – which immediately began to stain with the seepage of blood from the corpse – and two assistants wheeled it away. Sherlock stood there for a while, as the students filed past him, thinking about what he had seen. Thinking about the fact that the miracles of the human body could be treated in much the same way as the cogs, wheels and springs within a clock – disassembled and laid out on a table for inspection. The difference being, of course, that the various components of the body couldn’t be reassembled, whereas a clock could. Life, once gone, could not be regained. So what, he thought to himself, did that make life? Was it the same as the soul? Was it the same as consciousness? What exactly was it?
Big questions. Perhaps that was what University was for, in the end. Not answering the big questions, necessarily, but asking them.
Eventually he left the auditorium. The sun was shining outside, and Matty was waiting for him.
‘’Avin’ fun?’ Matty asked.
‘I’ve been looking at a dead body,’ Sherlock confided.
Matty thought for a moment. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’ He looked at Sherlock, then shook his head. ‘Never mind. I’m assumin’ it’s a “yes” in your case. You love all that kind of stuff.’
Sherlock was about to reply, pointing out that he also liked all kinds of things that people might consider normal, when he saw Chippenham across the other side of the paved area, talking to some friends. He was about to suggest to Matty that they head across to join Chippenham when he saw two men in blue serge uniforms and helmets walking over as well. He held back, watching.
One of the men took hold of Chippenham’s elbow. ‘Mr Paul Chippenham?’ he asked.
The student look puzzled, and concerned. ‘Yes. Who are you?’
‘I am Sergeant Clitherow, of the Oxford Constabulary. This is my colleague, Constable Harries. We’d like to ask you a few questions.’
‘Oh. All right then – what do you want to know?’
‘Not here, sir. Down at the police station, if you’d be so kind.’
‘I’ve got a tutorial!’ Chippenham protested.
‘Don’t worry, sir – this won’t take long, and there’ll be other tutorials, I’m sure.’
One of Chippenham’s friends stepped forward. ‘I’m studying law,’ he said, trying to sound officious but just sounding pretentious. ‘I demand that you tell us why you want to talk to Mr Chippenham.’
‘Inquiries in connection with a series of recent thefts,’ the sergeant replied.
‘Thefts of bodies,’ the constable confided. ‘Well, bits of bodies.’
The sergeant stared at him, frowning, and the constable subsided.
‘Is Mr Chippenham a suspect?’ the law student asked.
The sergeant shrugged. ‘Let’s say he’s helping us with our inquiries,’ he said. He turned to Chippenham. ‘Aren’t you, sir? Might look suspicious if you refused. Might look like you had something to hide, like.’
‘I’ll come along and answer any questions you’ve got,’ Chippenham said firmly, but Sherlock could detect a slight tremor in his voice. Chippenham turned to his friends. ‘Tell my tutor,’ he said. ‘Let him know what’s happened. He might be able to . . . intercede with the police, or something.’
The policemen guided Chippenham away by the elbow. He cast a last, despairing glance over his shoulder before they vanished around a corner.
‘I’m glad I’m not ’im,’ Matty said darkly. ‘The Oxford police have a reputation. They don’t like cheek, or anyone talking back to them. ’E’d better cooperate, otherwise ’e’ll find ’imself trippin’ up every time ’e walks down a flight of stairs. Man could do ’imself some nasty injuries that way.’
‘I can’t see him being guilty,’ Sherlock said.
‘Why’s that then?’
‘He seems too normal, too ordinary. And when he talked about the thefts, the other night at Mrs McCrery’s, he was completely open.’ Sherlock shrugged. ‘I suppose you can’t tell what’s in people’s minds, but I’d like to know if there’s any evidence against him. I’m not convinced that the police actually care that much about evidence, just as long as they have someone in the cells.’
‘Surely,’ Matty reasoned, ‘if there keep on bein’ thefts, then they’ll have to let him go.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Sherlock said bleakly. ‘The thief might stop for other reasons. Or, if I were them and someone had been arrested for the crimes I was committing, I might move to a different area, a different mortuary, and start again.’
‘You’ve got a cunnin’ mind,’ Matty pointed out. ‘Ever thought of becomin’ a criminal yourself?’
It was much later in the evening, after dinner, that Paul Chippenham returned to Mrs McCrery’s boarding house. He was pale, and his hands shook as he sipped at the sherry that Reginald Musgrave poured him. There was a fresh bruise on his forehead.
‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked.
‘They asked me a lot of questions about the Oxford hospital mortuary, and why I had been visiting it. I tried to persuade them that it was nothing suspicious, but they were fixated on the idea that I was the one who had stolen those body parts that have been in the newspaper, and that the lecturer mentioned this morning.’ He raised a hand to the bruise on his forehead. ‘Things got a bit . . . physical . . . and the constable belted me across the head when he thought I was being cheeky.’
‘What did you tell them?’ Thomas Millard wanted to know.
‘The truth.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘It was going to be a jape – a joke. A small group of us were going to steal a body from the mortuary, dress it up like a student and prop it up in the lecture theatre for the anatomy lecture. We thought it would be funny, knowing that there was a dead body in the audience as well as on the table.’
‘Sacrilege, treating God’s creation like that,’ Millard murmured, shaking his head sadly, but he didn’t sound surprised. Presumably it was the kind of thing that students regularly got up to.
‘I’m guessing that you didn’t manage to get hold of a body,’ Sherlock said.
Chippenham shook his head. ‘The pathologist – Doctor Lukather by name – was too fly. He wouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone a look at a body. I told the police that. They said they’d check with Lukather, but they seemed to believe me. I won’t say they were satisfied, but they let me go.’
The conversation moved on to famous jokes and japes that had been played by students on each other, and on the lecturers, over the years. Sherlock slipped out after a while and went up to his room. He had a lot to think about.
The next morning he rose early, had breakfast and went straight out into the town. Something had occurred to him overnight, and he wanted to try it out.
He went straight to the offices of the Oxford Post. At the reception, he asked to see whichever reporter was on desk duty that day. He knew that most reporters would be out researching stories, but there was always one left behind just in case anyone wandered in with something.
The one left behind today was Ainsley Dunbard, a man not that much older than Sherlock with a sparse moustache and beard and an expression that suggested he’d seen too much of life and didn’t like what he had seen.
‘What can I do for ya?’ he asked when Sherlock was shown to his ‘office’ – actually a room barely larger than a broom cupboard with a desk, a typewriter and no window.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ Sherlock started, ‘but I’m interested in becoming a reporter myself when I leave school. I wondered if there are any tips you can give me?’
‘Just what I need,’ the man muttered; ‘competition.’ He stared at his desk, then at the wall. ‘There’s only a couple of things you need to know,’ he said eventually, sighing. ‘First is, always check your facts. Make sure that if you print something, at least two people have told you about it, and check that the first person didn’t tell the second one.’
Sherlock dutifully wrote this down in a notebook he had bought from a stationer’s just a few minutes before.
‘Second thing is, people don’t talk in a way that makes good newspaper reporting, so you got to tidy it up. Take out the “um”s an’ the “ah”s an’ the “oh, I say”s, an’ put the events in the right order, cos people tend to remember things out of order an’ keep correctin’ themselves. When it all gets printed they’ll remember it the way you wrote it, not the way they said it. Third –’ and he glanced sideways at Sherlock through eyes that were bloodshot and tired – ‘remember that if a dog bites a man then it ain’t news, but if a man bites a dog then it is. People want stories that are out of the ordinary, maybe a bit grotesque.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Take this story I worked on last year,’ he continued. ‘Some people wrote to me from one of the local villages. It was like a petition – they all signed the letter. They told me that there’s this creature that lives in the woods near them who’s not actually a real man, with a mother an’ all that, but ’e’s been made by sewing bits of dead bodies together. Now that’s macabre. Would’ve made a great story, except that it sounds just like that book Frankenstein by the poet’s wife – Mary Shelley. I reckon someone’d read the book, or seen the play, an’ ’ad a nightmare about it. Too much cheese for supper, I ’spect.’ He sighed. ‘I did do a bit of digging around, just in case, but I couldn’t find any corroboration. There was nothing to the story.’
This story sounded like the one he’d heard from the farmer who had given him a lift back to Oxford – about the strange creature living in the woods near that strange house. It suddenly gave Sherlock an opportunity that he had thought he might have to manufacture himself. ‘Talking of bits of bodies,’ he said, deliberately roughening his tone a bit to match the journalist’s, ‘what ’appened at the mortuary then? I hear there was some thefts there. Nothin’ to do with this creature then?’
Dunbard nodded. ‘’S right. Strangest thing I ever heard of. Couldn’t make it up, if you know what I mean. ’Parently it’s been ’appening for a while – someone dies, their body is brought into the mortuary for an autopsy, an’ then they’re sent off for burial, but it turns out that there’s less of the bodies bein’ buried than there was at the autopsy. Always different bits missin’ – eyes, ears, hands, feet, anythin’. I did wonder if it was connected to that monster story, but I reckon it’s just students muckin’ around.’
‘Bodysnatchers?’ Sherlock ventured, remembering the lecturer at Christ College.’
‘Nah – they’d’ve taken the whole body. That’s where the money is. Bits of bodies aren’t worth anything.’
‘How did it get discovered?’
He laughed – a bitter sound, like a barking dog. ‘Gent buried ’is wife, then realized she’d been interred along with ’er weddin’ ring, some earrings an’ a pearl necklace, so he ’ad her disinterred. Trouble is, the ears was missin’. Cue big rumpus an’ lots of runnin’ around.’
‘And nobody knows where these body parts have gone, or who took them?’
Dunbard shook his head. ‘Not a clue. The police’re stumped. We’ve run out of different ways of reportin’ the case, so we’ve stopped runnin’ the story.’
‘Didn’t I read that the police questioned a lecturer from Christ Church College?’
‘That’s right,’ Dunbard confirmed. ‘We never actually named ’im, because it turned out ’e had an alibi for all the dates on which things went missin’.’
‘And did you ever talk to the pathologist in the mortuary?’ Sherlock asked. It was an important question, as the answer would dictate what he did next, but he tried to make his tone as innocent as possible.
‘Nah. Tried to, but ’e wouldn’t see me.’ He shrugged. ‘Okay, is that it? Cos I’ve got an important story about silt in the canal to type up.’
‘Yes. Thanks.’ Sherlock started to move away, then turned back. ‘Sorry, but do you have a business card, or a visiting card or something? Just in case I have any more questions?’
Dunbard reached into his shirt pocket and took out a slip of cardboard. ‘’Ere’s me details, but you can find me in this place most days.’ As Sherlock was walking away he heard the man saying, more to himself than to Sherlock, ‘an’ to think I left the London Gazette for this. Supposed to be more responsibility, but the office cat gets out more than I do!’
Sherlock tucked the business card into a pocket of his jacket. He had plans for it, and didn’t want it to get lost.