I was pretty knackered at breakfast the next morning.
You can imagine how hard it was to get back to sleep after a visitation from a sleeping countess.
I now felt properly sorry for her. In the bright morning room where we all met for breakfast, I greeted her ladyship more kindly than I’d spoken to her up to now. I still wasn’t sure about Rollo, even though he’d been so nice about ‘Hardy’, but in this I seemed to have more reservations than Shafeen, who was showing every sign of being won over. He and Nel were down before me, and as I helped myself from the silver plates on the sideboard I watched Shafeen munching toast and talking respectfully to her ladyship about her husband’s important duties as a sitting member of the House of Lords. I remembered him, just after Henry’s death, saying that Henry’s mum might be OK but that his dad was an arsehole. Shafeen might have changed his opinion, but I hadn’t. I was definitely Team Caro.
To be fair, she didn’t seem at all fazed by her midnight wanderings. True, there were faint violet shadows under those blue and beautiful eyes, but she was pretty chipper and talking away in a breezy fashion about the day ahead. ‘I do hope you enjoy the House of Lords,’ she said, delicately sipping tea from a china cup. ‘It can be terribly tedious sometimes, but Rollo has something up his ermine sleeve, so to speak. He’s already breakfasted and gone.’
I’d never heard ‘breakfast’ used like this before, like it was a verb, but I assumed if someone as posh as Lady de Warlencourt said it, it was legit. As I took my place between Nel and Shafeen, she busily organised us. ‘You could have a little promenade around the park after breakfast. It’s quite lovely in the snow. And there’s lots to see in town. If you aren’t going to the House until the afternoon session you could see something in the morning.’ She reached for a neat triangle of toast, standing to attention with its identical fellows in a silver rack. ‘Rollo’s taken the car so I’m afraid you’ll have to get a black cab or the Tube.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘So long since I’ve been on the Tube. Henry buzzes about on it all the time.’ Her use of the present tense was as much of a jolt as her husband using the past tense was the night before. ‘Jubilee Line, Bates, if memory serves?’
I hadn’t even clocked that the butler was in the room, so smooth and silent was he.
‘That’s right, m’lady,’ he said with a slight bow. Today he wore a black jacket with no tails and a black tie instead of a white one. I guessed this was casual dress for him. ‘One simply takes the Jubilee Line from Baker Street directly to Westminster.’
‘That’s right. All the Christmas lights are up in the centre of town – quite jolly really.’
But I wanted to back the truck up. ‘Did you say Baker Street?’
Lady de Warlencourt regarded me. ‘Yes. It connects Regent’s Park and Marylebone.’
I wasn’t fussed about the geography. ‘You mean, Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street?’
She looked amused. ‘Well, yes. One can even see his house. Or rather, the house where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his novels – 221b.’
Oh, I knew the number all right. I turned to the other two. ‘Can we go?’
They looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Sure,’ said Shafeen. ‘Might as well if we’re going past it anyway. I never picked you for a Sherlock fan.’
I wasn’t. But I had a particular connection to the Great Detective. And the connection was through Henry. How could I forget that conversation about Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows at the top of Conrad’s Force? Not the best Sherlock Holmes film ever, not even the best Sherlock Holmes film by Guy Ritchie ever. But that had been the last thing we’d ever talked about – Sherlock and Moriarty tipping off the Reichenbach Falls, then Sherlock coming back to Baker Street to type a question mark after ‘THE END’ in Watson’s account of his death.
No, I wasn’t a superfan. I’d seen most of the films and read a few of the stories, but the adventure I knew best was The Empty House, the story I’d read in the library of Alnwick Cottage Hospital, because it was fresh in my mind. It was the story of Sherlock coming back from the dead. And it was the story Henry had referenced when I’d dreamed of him sitting at my bedside. Where did Sherlock Holmes go after he fell? 221b Baker Street. There was no way I was missing that house off today’s tourist trek. I felt, in some weird way, that there would be a message for me there, some piece of the puzzle.