As we left the house after breakfast, all wrapped up against the cold, I told Shafeen and Nel about Lady de Warlencourt sleepwalking into my room speaking a word salad.
They listened soberly. ‘I feel sorry for her,’ said Nel.
‘Me too,’ agreed Shafeen.
‘Me three,’ I said.
We did have a wander through Regent’s Park on the way to Baker Street. Maybe it was the power of suggestion – Lady de Warlencourt had mentioned it last night and this morning, and we felt sorry for her, so we went. It was really beautiful in the snow. We half-heartedly chucked a couple of snowballs, but since we were dressed semi-smartly because of the whole House of Lords thing, we didn’t want to get too messed up. We did see a frozen lake with a bunch of very pissed-off geese shuffling about moodily on the ice, a little cafe among the trailing willows and bored yellow pedaloes stacked up until a warmer season. We also saw something else. In the midst of some naked trees, sitting there (literally) chilling, were two statues. One was of a crouching girl.
The other was of a fox.
We went right up close. They weren’t actually statues as I’d first thought, but sculptures made of wood. They were in a rough, slightly childish style, with bold lines and chisel marks. The fox was sitting and the girl crouching, and the two figures regarded each other; just a girl and a fox sitting together as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I brushed the snow off the head of the girl.
‘She looks like Ty,’ said Nel.
‘So she does,’ I agreed. ‘And it was Ty who said to find out about foxes.’ I remembered with a pang that she still hadn’t responded to my Instagram message from last night. ‘Could this have something to do with that?’
‘Well, if not,’ said Shafeen, patting the fox on his snowy head in a friendly manner, ‘that’s one hell of a coincidence. She obviously meant us to see them.’
‘Who? Ty?’
‘No, you muppet,’ he said fondly. ‘Lady de Warlencourt. She seemed pretty keen that we come into the park. She mentioned it last night and this morning.’
‘Hmm. It’s a big place though. She couldn’t know we’d necessarily find these guys. They are a bit out of the way.’
‘Besides, why would she be trying to tell us something?’ added Nel.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Trapped in a loveless marriage to a child-killing tyrant?’
‘Again, he didn’t actually –’ began Shafeen.
‘I know, I know,’ I shut him down. ‘Also, what could these two possibly tell us? They’re just sculptures.’
‘That we’re on the right track?’ mused Shafeen.
Nel said, ‘The track of what?’
‘The foxes. Whatever and wherever they are.’
I looked at the fox’s pointy face, and the girl’s blunt one. ‘Come on, I’m freezing. Bye, Ty. Bye, Foxy.’
We left and wandered over two little blue bridges that looked like they’d come off a Chinese willow-pattern plate, then past a vast gold-domed mosque and a twin-towered white palace that would have looked more at home in Rajasthan. ‘Bit eclectic this park, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Shafeen. ‘The theme is the British Empire. So it’s utterly consistent. Steal from the best.’
We wound our way down to Baker Street, to find the famous address. When we got there, 221b – chez Sherlock – wasn’t at all what I’d expected.
It was a modest townhouse with ivy growing up it, a discreet round blue plaque on the wall and a small queue of tourists outside speaking in a babel of languages. I thought it would be some horrible theme park, but it really wasn’t. Sure, there was an element of tourist bait. There was the gift shop where you bought your tickets crammed with merch of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock. There was a British Bobby on the door (who spoke with a Spanish accent) and lots of Victorian hats to try on while you were waiting. I brandished a deerstalker at Nel. ‘Wanna selfie?’
Nel grabbed her extensions protectively. ‘Free head lice?’ she said. ‘No, thanks.’
Perhaps because of the shop, I expected the house to be tacky, but it was actually really tasteful. Entering the hallway, it genuinely felt like you were going back in time – from Dr Watson’s little brass door plate with his medical credentials, to the friends’ two distinctive hats hanging on a wall-mounted hook. Then I choked. Below the two hats hung a black-and-white illustration from The Strand magazine. It was of Holmes and Moriarty in hand-to-hand combat at the top of the Reichenbach Falls. I looked at the scratchy print of the two men teetering on the brink, just as Henry and I had done. I swallowed.
Nel pulled at my sleeve. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘There’s a traffic jam.’
Conscious suddenly of the crush of Japanese students behind me, I followed Shafeen up the stairs.
On the first floor the study (in Scarlet) was pretty authentic too – someone had scoured the Sherlock Holmes books for every little detail of the friends’ lives; every mention of the study and the bedrooms had been replicated. Hats, swords, medicines, medals from Afghanistan, the inevitable opium, the mandatory violin.
But I was just as interested in the view from the window. There was only a blank twentieth-century office block opposite, but it had great significance to me. I remembered reading The Empty House when I was recovering in hospital, especially the bit where Holmes had watched his own study from the empty house across the street, hour after hour, day after day, before deciding it was time to reveal himself as being still alive. I peered at the blank grey building. That was it – that was where the Empty House of the story would have stood. Today there were no twitching curtains, no twin flashes of binocular lenses, but I had an overwhelming feeling that I was being watched.
On the upper floors of 221b, taste left the building. There were creepy waxworks which looked like they dated from the 1960s, recreating Holmes’s greatest moments. But then, in ‘Mrs Hudson’s room’, I got a shock. There were collected props from the best-known Sherlock stories, and one of them was the head of a huge black dog on the wall.
And underneath, the legend The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Nel saw it first. ‘My God, that looks like …’
‘… Brutus,’ I finished.
The face of the snarling black dog took me right back to that night in the subterranean tunnel to Longcross church, when Gamekeeper Perfect’s scary hound had chased us down.
‘Well, he can’t hurt you now,’ said Shafeen drily.
The joke helped me calm down. This was just a stupid prop. And The Hound of the Baskervilles was a story. It wasn’t real. None of it was real. This was the house of someone who didn’t exist.
Except.
Something nagged at my memory. I scanned the rest of the room silently, inviting the recollection to reveal itself. And while I read the synopsis of the story underneath that glowering hound’s head, a name jumped out at me.
Henry
It was enough to make me read on.
Henry Baskerville, the duo finds out, has arrived in London to take up his post at Baskerville Hall, but he has already been intimidated by an anonymous note of warning and, strangely enough, the theft of a shoe.
And, just like that, the memory unlocked.
Something must have shown in my face or my posture, because both Shafeen and Nel said, ‘What?’
I pointed. They both read the label.
‘Which bit?’ said Shafeen. ‘The anonymous note of warning?’
‘No,’ I breathed. ‘The shoe,’ I said. ‘She lost a shoe.’
‘Who did?’ quipped Nel. ‘Cinderella?’
‘No, Ty. And he lost one too.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Henry.’
‘De Warlencourt?’
‘No,’ I said again and pointed. ‘Henry Baskerville.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Shafeen.
I didn’t want to talk there, with all the tourists gawping. I jerked my head at the door and we clattered downstairs, much to the disgust of the Cumberbitches, who clearly thought we weren’t showing enough reverence for their idol. We swept past the Spanish-cockney policeman and out into the cold air.
‘OK.’ I pulled them both past the now-much-longer queue, and stopped outside a deli called, inevitably, the Holmes Cafe.
‘You remember that first night at Longcross?’
‘Which time?’ asked Shafeen.
‘This year, not last. We were all wearing our fancy-pants stuff, and Ty had this amazing white satin dress on, and she teamed it with trainers?’
‘Yes,’ said Nel. Shafeen said nothing, probably because he wouldn’t have noticed if she’d been wearing a bin bag. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I told her they looked great, and she said a weird thing. She said she hadn’t planned to wear them, but that she’d lost one of her evening shoes. Not both. Just one.’
‘With you so far.’
‘OK, backstory: in the film of The Hound of the Baskervilles – got to admit, I’ve never read the book – Henry Baskerville, the American heir to Baskerville Hall, stays in London before going to the country to collect his inheritance. He stays in a hotel, and those were the days when you used to put your shoes outside the door at night to be cleaned. You know?’
They both nodded.
‘So the shoe completely vanishes. Not both, but one. Anyway – spoiler alert – it turns out much later that the shoe has been given to the Hound of the Baskervilles to smell so the dog can hunt Sir Henry to his death. Same thing happened with Ty. They didn’t use seeds in her pockets, like they did with you, Nel. She wasn’t a drag hunt. She was a human hunt.’
‘Who am I, RuPaul?’ protested Nel saltily. ‘I wasn’t a drag race. I was a human hunt too.’
‘You know what I mean. They stole her shoe, so that the hounds could smell it and learn her actual scent. The game is – literally – a foot.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that Ty is in more danger than she thinks she is. I think this is all somehow about her.’
They both considered this in silence, as we watched the tourists filing in to the shop for their Holmes-pressos and Watson-cinos. It was not until we’d started wandering towards the Tube that Shafeen spoke.
‘Supposing you’re right. And I’m not saying you’re not – God knows I’ve learned that lesson by now. But that was at the beginning of the stay. Now she’s with Louis. She might be pretending, but he’s not. He likes her, and he’s Lord de Warlencourt. I think he’ll protect her.’
‘She never struck me as someone who needs protecting anyway,’ said Nel comfortingly.
I remembered Ty, when she'd visited me in hospital, saying: I'm coming for them, Greer. I'm gonna let slip the dogs of war. But then Shafeen said, ‘Everybody needs protecting,’ glancing at me.
‘I’m going to call her,’ I said decidedly.
‘That will get her into trouble,’ said Nel.
‘Text then. Gimme your phone.’
After a year at STAGS I’d got out of the habit of bringing my phone out with me, but Nel, as ever, had hers. She handed it over. I signed in to Instagram and messaged mrs_de_warlencourt.
She still hadn’t replied to my messages of the previous evening, about the Reynard fox heads. This made me even more uneasy, but I tapped in a new message anyway.
Hey – did you ever find your evening shoe? The one that went missing before our first dinner at Longcross?
I hoped against hope for an instant reply, but there was nothing. ‘Check back later,’ said Nel, and then we were at the Tube and Ty was forgotten in the palaver of tickets and trains.