Sherlock Holmes leaned casually over the counter as two people entered The Sign of Four. New customers. Time for the party trick.
“Soy cappuccino for her,” Sherlock told the barista. “See the T-shirt? ‘100% Herbivore.’ Could drink black, but see her canvas bag? Several froth spots over the flap. You don’t get that from the cream on a long black. She’ll ask for no sugar, but she’ll slip a half teaspoon in when the boyfriend’s not looking.”
The barista, John Watson, gave his friend a sidelong glance, mouth tilted in a veiled smile under his well-groomed moustache. “And him?”
“Short black. The single origin. Don’t be offended when he only drinks half of it. He prefers a flat white, but flat white doesn’t go with the image he’s projecting. They’ll be takeaway. They’ve been arguing, and they’re in a hurry now.”
By the time the new customers reached the counter, John had poured the single origin short black and was steaming the soy milk for the cappuccino. The newbies had hardly finished voicing their orders when John served them up with a flourish.
“Short black, single origin—we’ve got the Guatemalan today—and soy cap for the lady.”
The bloke arched an eyebrow. “So it’s true. You guys predict coffee. Not the super power I’d ask for.” He sneered a bit.
“Russ,” hissed the girlfriend, “Don’t be a dick.”
Sherlock smiled benignly at Russ the Dick. “Faint red welts around your jaw under your ears where you scratch at the beard—you don’t like the facial hair but you won’t consider shaving it yet, you know you have a weak chin; the bow tie is a clip-on, which might be just ironic except you’ve made such an expensive effort with the shoes and braces. So you just don’t know how to tie it, and you can’t be bothered with a YouTube tutorial because it’s just for show. Your glasses are plain glass. You don’t need them for anything but window dressing, either. We’re getting past irony and into farce now, all because you decided this is how to get into your girlfriend’s pants. It’s not charming, by the way, pretending to be something you’re not to get a leg over. Ordering coffee you don’t like because you think it fits the persona won’t render you any more authentic, which reminds me…” This Sherlock addressed to Russ’s increasingly irritated girlfriend. “He ate bacon for breakfast—that’s bacon grease above the third button of his waistcoat—so I can assure you the ‘Meat is Murder’ badge on his Crumpler bag is more for your benefit than a personal political statement.”
“Bacon?”
“Janie…”
“That’s it, Russ. The last bloody straw. First that business with Karen and now this.” Janie reached for the demerara sugar on the counter and defiantly plonked a teaspoon of it in her coffee. “You know what?” she asked her boyfriend in a tone of voice that essentially said, “you’re fired,” “You’re a liar and a perv, I don’t need to watch my bloody weight, and you need to have a good, hard think about yourself. While you’re moving your crap out of my flat. I bet you’re not even studying film. Is he?” She turned her ferocious glare onto the man at the counter.
“No,” Sherlock assured her.
“Thought not.” She shoved a lid onto the paper cup and stormed out, leaving Russ alone at the till.
Russ spared a filthy look for the lanky mongrel at the counter, took off his unnecessary glasses, and retreated, leaving his undrunk, unwanted coffee behind.
“Shame to waste it,” said Sherlock, sipping the abandoned espresso.
“Could’ve waited till they’d paid, Lockie,” complained John mildly.
“They’ll tell their friends what happened, and we’ll get at least a dozen more coming in to see if I can predict their coffee order,” Sherlock said. “She’ll be right.” He took the coffee to his corner table where he was working on an essay.
John flicked a rubber band at his friend, housemate, and business partner, then resumed his barista duties.
• • •
At the corner opposite Sherlock’s claim at The Sign of Four, one of John’s regulars made the place her own. Kylie Mitchell had worked there six hours a day, every day, including lunch, for two months so far. An ancient leather-bound diary was at her left hand; a fresh new Moleskine, in which she wrote furiously, on the right. Propped invariably in front of her was an iPad showing an image of the page she was presently studying.
Sherlock Holmes knew at least a dozen things about this resident coffee addict. He enumerated them that evening with John.
“Victorian born and bred,” Sherlock insisted while John whipped up smashed avocado and feta on a black seed bagel for supper. “She owns a chocolate-point Siamese cat, is allergic to nuts, and thinks she can sing like Jessica Mauboy. She can’t, by the way.”
John nodded, used to the way Sherlock effortlessly read their customers. John could see where some of the conclusions came from, though mostly he confined himself to remembering their coffee orders. Doc Caffeine, the staff sometimes called him: he could fix what ailed you with the best-poured shots in Melbourne. Kylie Mitchell, for example, habitually started with a double-shot espresso and a latte chaser, paced herself with two more flat whites, and finished with a chai latte. She left vibrating like a bloody mosquito.
Sherlock was still talking. “…a Melbourne University graduate in nanotechnology…”
“See her in class, did you?” John deftly squeezed lemon juice over the open bagel, then flung on a bit of homegrown mint.
“It’s a deduction, John. I haven’t studied nanotechnology, or been to the attendant electives.”
“Yet.”
“Yet. Let me finish pharmacology first, and I’ll see if nanobots are interesting by then. Do you want to hear the rest of this?”
“Sorry, mate. Go on.”
“The handwritten journals she’s scrutinizing are over a hundred years old…”
“Historian?” John plonked the plates, then a bottle of Sriracha sauce, on the table.
“Family historian. She has a family tree at the back of the Moleskine she periodically unfolds to check. Her name is at the bottom.”
“A great-grand-uncle’s scandalous memoirs, then?” Two glasses of Tasmanian Pagan pear cider joined the food and condiments.
“Grand-aunt more likely, judging from the handwriting. She’s comparing the source documents with scans of the matching pages, looking for discrepancies and hidden elements.”
John dropped into a chair beside Sherlock. “Maybe she’s looking for a code,” he suggested in melodramatic sotto voce. He twisted the end of his well-groomed moustache to add a bit more dramatic flair to the pronouncement.
Sherlock sighed. “She’s found the code, John. She’s trying to decipher it.”
John looked surprised at having got one right for a change. “You going to help her with that?”
“Maybe,” Sherlock hedged. “I want to see how far she gets.”
“Fair enough. It’s sometimes better to wait until you’re asked. We know what happened last time you tried to finish Mrs. H’s crossword puzzle for her, don’t we?”
“Our chef has surprisingly sharp skills as a tea towel snapper.”
“Worst bosses in Melbourne, she called us. Lumping me in with you, I might add.” John clicked his tongue and his dog, a blue heeler named Gough Whitlam, trotted over for a treat of bacon rind.
“You’ll make him fat as a wombat,” Sherlock complained.
“As befits a great statesman,” John countered. “And don’t go fat-shaming the dog.”
Later, while John wasn’t looking, Sherlock sneaked another piece of bacon to the canine prime minister. It never hurt to keep on his good side.
• • •
John had chosen the location for The Sign of Four carefully, wanting to avoid the cliché of the common Melbourne laneway locale. As a result, the café wasn’t Melbourne’s most obscurely located coffee house. It overlooked a main thoroughfare from the first floor, although the entrance was via seventeen steps from an alley full of camping shops.
The reason for the odd name (not even the oddest in this city) was contained in the coffee molecule painted in sepia tones on the back wall, and its four components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. That was a nod to Sherlock’s interests. John’s were represented along the opposite wall, where a series of framed digital images each told a story, if you knew their history.
Photography had been a hobby, even in the army. John loved exploring new ways to look at the unruly world, and to find objects of curiosity and beauty amid the anarchy of it. One of the things he’d loved about being a combat paramedic was his capacity to bring order out of chaos. God knew the rest of it was a shambles.
His penchant for dapper dressing when on leave—and didn’t his army mates like taking the piss out of him over that—translated naturally into the vintage suits, bespoke leather shoes, waxed moustache, and dedication to the single origin coffee beans he favored these days. Hell, as hipsters went, in this city famous for the breed, he was hardly alone or even the most hip.
John daily thanked his early posting to East Timor for teaching him about coffee, which had previously been merely a hot beverage. Whatever the Australian Army’s Operation Astute had achieved for the people of Timor-Leste, it had introduced John to the local coffee farmers and the nuanced joys of a proper brew.
For a while, John had also daily cursed his filthy luck in being deployed to Afghanistan. A double-car bomb in Kabul had ended his military career, and almost his life, when shrapnel from the second bomb cut him down while he was helping victims of the first explosion.
Good had come from his medical discharge, but only after John had endured long bouts of surgery, therapy, and misery. His brother, Henry, got sick of him hanging around the spare room of his Brisbane house like a bad smell.
“You’ve got a face like a wet week,” Henry said, gruff-loving, “and you know you hate the humidity here. Stop moping, move back to Melbourne, and go open that café you kept talking about when you were in Dili.”
Henry’s advice was rare and rarely good, but there was a first time for everything. Back to Melbourne John gladly went, to find somewhere to live and a business partner for his dream café.
He found both in Sherlock ‘Lockie’ Holmes—mercurial genius and perpetual science student—via their mutual friend, Jay Stamford. John’s first sight of Sherlock was of a slender man with keen features, making himself a cup of coffee with lab equipment on campus.
“A homemade syphon set-up,” John had commented admiringly. “Though you’d get a better result with a lighter roast.”
“All I could get on short notice.” Sherlock stood up, smoothing his hair back behind his ears and staring piercingly at John. “You were an army medic in Afghanistan, I see,” he continued finally. “That’s turned into a dog’s breakfast, hasn’t it?”
John, amazed, agreed, and two days later they were sharing a two-bedroom, nineteenth-century terrace house in Richmond, a ten-minute tram ride from the city. A month later, they set up The Sign of Four, funded by their savings, John’s meager pension, and Sherlock’s regular income from a patented diagnostic algorithm that rendered blood type identification both faster and more accurately.
Neither had bargained on making a best friend at the same time, but they got on like a house on fire from the start. Sherlock was something of a cocky beggar, but John had enough larrikin tendencies of his own to find that mostly appealing.
So John settled into being a café co-owner and barista, and extracting simple joys from life out of gratitude for still having one.
“Doc Caffeine” made The Sign of Four a Mecca for coffee lovers, but what made it famous was Sherlock Holmes, its resident smartarse. He dressed as snappily as his friend and colleague, except for those days he lounged around in jeans and a band T-shirt, usually featuring Devil’s Foot, the alternative indie band in which he played violin.
John loved that Sherlock could tell anyone six things about themselves upon meeting them—one of which might be new even to the listener. Only one person had ever tried to punch Sherlock in reaction; only one had ever cried. Australian coffee drinkers were a hardy lot, willing to put up with a lot of smartarsery if the coffee was good enough, and if the smartarse in question was willing to help them out with weird problems.
Sherlock, enthusiastically aided by John where necessary, had uncovered a full range of scandals, from stepdads pretending to be boyfriends to prospective employers whose businesses didn’t actually exist. He’d thwarted attempted blackmail by recovering incriminating video footage, and proven that a family “ghost hound” was just a joker at the farm next door tying a sheepskin onto his Labrador and smearing the poor mutt with glow-in-the-dark paint.
Kylie Mitchell might have asked the two of them for help, if she’d gotten the chance.
Instead, two days after Sherlock had deduced her to John, Kylie failed to arrive at her usual table.
Sherlock noticed. (He noticed everything.) But he was busy in his own corner, making notes for an essay for his current (and fourth) degree. (“I’m avoiding getting a proper job,” he always claimed.)
John set a long macchiato next to his housemate then straddled a stool beside him.
“Kylie’s not in.”
“I noticed.”
“Sick, you reckon?”
“Possibly. Or she’s cracked the code.”
“Maybe.”
Sherlock looked straight at John. “Are you having one of your ‘gut feelings’?”
“Could be,” John reluctantly admitted.
“I’ve told you before, what you call gut instinct is just experience and knowledge giving you a conclusion without your brain consciously taking the intervening steps. Deconstruct.”
John deconstructed. “She left early yesterday. Seemed excited about something to do with the three diaries she’s been working on.”
“She had all three on the table?” Sherlock closed his laptop lid and sipped at his coffee. “Unusual.”
“She kept putting them side by side, then slipping the page of one underneath the page of another. Interleaving them, you know? I thought she might be comparing the handwriting on the right hand pages by getting similar words close together.”
“Not a bad hypothesis,” said Sherlock.
“Really?”
“Wrong, though. She could compare individual words more effectively from the scans on her computer. To compare the physical document indicates there was something about the primary source itself that drew her attention. And she left after that?”
“She had all three interleaved, with one left page underneath one right page. Then she said ‘you little beauty,’ put her stuff into her satchel, and took off, about an hour ahead of her usual schedule.”
Sherlock finished his coffee. “There’s probably nothing in it,” he said. “Ask her about it tomorrow.”
John brushed a knuckle beneath his moustache to hide his frown and returned to refill the hopper, clean the steam wand and resume pouring perfect shots.
John’s faith in his instincts was justified an hour later when a woman strode into The Sign of Four. She was clutching an iPad close to her chest like it gave her life. Her greying hair was in wild disarray, her pale face free of makeup. Two blotches of red on her cheeks were the final evidence of her agitation.
“Is Lockie Holmes here?”
John nodded at Sherlock in his corner. The woman strode straight towards him. John handed barista duties over to Jess, his bean-apprentice, and followed the woman to where the interesting stuff was about to happen.
“Lockie?”
Sherlock pushed his essay aside. “You’re Kylie’s mother,” he said calmly. “That’s her iPad, isn’t it?”
Kylie’s mother blinked at him, nodded vigorously, then thrust the iPad towards him. “Lorraine Mitchell. Kylie’s talked about you. She’s said you’re like a detective and you know things about people just by looking at them.”
“I observe, and deduce from my observations.” He took the iPad from her white-knuckled grip. “You found this in a garden. Any bougainvillea nearby?”
Lorraine stared at him as though he had two heads and was made of miracles. “Under the bougainvillea in our front yard. How did you know?”
Sherlock pointed at smudges of dirt and fragments of bark, grass, and purple blossom clinging to the cover. Then he folded the cover back and examined the tablet, from the small crack across the corner of the screen to the power and headphone sockets. He sniffed at it and dabbed the tip of his tongue against the cover.
“On the ground less than four hours,” he declared.
“You can tell that from licking it?”
Sherlock arched an eyebrow at her. “It rained last night. The cover is dry on both sides. The bougainvillea canopy might have protected it from rainfall, but the ground water would’ve marked the back of it if it’d lain there all night. When did you last see your daughter?”
“She came home yesterday afternoon, worked up about something in those journals she’s been poking into. She looked up something in a book at home and took off again.”
“She took her satchel with her?”
“I told her not to,” Lorraine said, half-distressed, half-exasperated.
Sherlock leaned keenly towards the woman. “And why would you tell her that?”
Lorraine’s mouth snapped shut and she stared, round-eyed, at Sherlock.
“Mrs. Mitchell, you believe your daughter to be missing after less than half a day. She had those family journals and her iPad with her in her satchel, and yet here’s the iPad, which has been dropped in your yard some time this morning. So Kylie didn’t lose it last night. It’s much more likely that after being out all night, she was coming home and something happened when she was nearly to safety. What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“I told her to leave those journals be,” Lorraine snapped back at him. “It’s old news and nothing good can come of it.”
“Nothing has,” Sherlock assured her.
“But why would anyone kidnap her?”
“If that’s what you think this is, why haven’t you gone to the police?”
“I did, but they say it’s too soon to do anything.”
“Instead, you think it might be too late.”
“No. Of course it’s not. It’s not…nobody would hurt her. Would they?”
“Tell me everything,” said Sherlock, “and we’ll make sure they don’t. John. I think this might be a three-espresso problem.”
John took his place back on the Strada and poured the shots. Three espressos for Sherlock; long macchiato for himself. Skim latte for Lorraine Mitchell, who looked like a skim latte kind of person. He took the lot into Sherlock’s corner on a tray and listened while Lorraine confessed to the family skeleton.
“My family are descendants of Irene Hodgson, adopted daughter of Caroline Hodgson,” she began, as though that meant something.
“Who?” asked John.
Lorraine’s face grew pinched, clearly hating to make the next admission. “Madame Brussels.”
“Oh!” John was immediately impressed. “The Victorian-era brothel keeper. There’s a fantastic rooftop bar named after her. I guess you know that.” He pulled at the tip of his moustache.
Lorraine’s furious expression proved that while Australians were generally delighted to find convicts in their ancestry, this Australian was not amused by brothel owners in the family tree.
Sherlock, on his second espresso, merely smiled. “One of my favorite unsolved mysteries is the disappearance of the Speaker’s mace from the Victorian Parliament in 1891,” he said. “It wasn’t especially valuable, and the most persistent theory is that a parliamentarian took it to a brothel in Little Lonsdale Street, used it for unparliamentary purposes, and then left it there.” He turned his keen gray eyes onto Lorraine Mitchell. “One of Madame Brussels’s brothels, it’s posited, or that of her rival, Annie Wilson.”
Purse-lipped, Lorraine said, “The family legend is that it was stolen from Caroline’s brothel and that Caroline wrote about it in her journals. She doesn’t mention it by name, or any Ministers, but there’s a note about being unfairly blamed for the scandal.”
“An Inquiry in 1893 found it had never been taken to a brothel,” said Sherlock. “Though they could be expected to say that to save face.”
“It never stopped people blaming her,” Lorraine said, then added, “and then she wrote a journal entry saying she knew the truth.”
“Interesting.”
“She never said what the truth was but, on the last page of the final journal, she said that the facts were there for Irene to decide what to do about it. We’ve always taken it to mean she’d left some hint in the diary.”
“Your family never investigated?”
“Irene Hodgson sealed the journals in a strongbox and they’ve been locked up ever since. We only found them last year when Dad died and we were cleaning up to sell the house. Kylie’s got a bee in her bonnet about it. She made it a project to solve the mystery.” Lorraine made a scoffing sound.
“But yesterday she made a breakthrough,” said Sherlock, “and today she’s missing. Let’s see what we can find out, hmm?” He powered up the iPad and was confronted with a password screen. He downed the third of his espressos.
“Password?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s been studying this problem for months. A compulsion like that tends to bleed into everything, including passwords. Let’s see. The mace vanished in October 1891. Soooo: 1-0-1-8-9-1. And we’re in. Too easy.”
A double click of the home button spread out an array of active apps. Sherlock went straight to the image from the journals that Kylie had been poring over for so many weeks. He pinched and expanded it, peering intently, then held the screen up to John.
“What do you see?”
“Shocking handwriting,” said John instantly.
“And?”
John squinted. “She’s writing about someone called George…”
“Her first husband,” supplied Lorraine, “He died at her property in St. Kilda.”
“What else?” prompted Sherlock. “Come on, John. This is the last image she was looking at on this screen, which led her to interleaving the diaries. Something must be there.”
John took the tablet into his hands and peered more closely still, knowing that Sherlock had already found what he was looking for.
“There are some weird marks on the page,” he said at last. “Random lines in the margin and across the top and bottom. It looks like she half-erased that top line with the date and down here where she’d scribbled a few sums and then tested the ink of her fountain pen on them.”
“A form of palimpsest,” Sherlock noted gleefully, taking the tablet back. “Your ancestor was a very clever woman.”
“Palimpsest?” Lorraine was bewildered.
“An old document that’s had text scraped off and the paper reused,” John explained. “Sherlock’s got a bit of a thing for them. He’s got a collection at home.”
“A collection of reused documents?”
John shrugged. “He’s easily bored.”
Sherlock, who had been flicking back and forth among the photographs, clicked his fingers in the air. “Paper! Pen!”
John fetched both from beneath the counter, and Sherlock immediately began to scribble odd marks across the page. It became clear that he was spacing the lines across and down the page in a reflection of the marks he’d found in the journal image. Then he added the lines he’d located on images from the other two journals, four pages in all. As he added the lines from the salient page of the third journal, Caroline Hodgson’s 120-year-old message to Irene took shape.
Irene. Tom left the mace in Lt Lon. Took by Jack and hid in Golgotha Club chimney. Serves the pollies right. Do as you like when I’m dead.
Lorraine blinked at the message. “Well,” she said at last, “Caroline was very angry with them after they changed the laws in 1907 and forced her to close down. She was very sick at the time.”
“Which is all beside the point now,” said Sherlock, on his feet and heading for the door. “Coming, Johnno?”
John had already snagged his tweed coat from the hook, pulling it on over his cream shirt and red suspenders to complete an aptly Victorian appearance for this nineteenth-century mystery. His limp hardly showed as he threw the keys to their chef, Mrs. Hudson—“Lock up if I’m late back”—and followed Sherlock into the alley.
“Where are we going?” Lorraine Mitchell demanded at their heels.
“The Golgotha Club.” Sherlock was tapping away at an app on his smartphone.
“That closed down in the sixties!”
“Correction,” Sherlock told her as their Uber pulled up on Little Bourke Street. “It moved in with a friend.”
The car took them up Little Bourke Street, left on Queen, right on Collins, and up the hill to the pedestrian-only Bank Place. They alighted, Sherlock in the lead and John in the rear, with Lorraine Mitchell shielded in between. A few steps down the paving stones, they came to a grey nineteenth-century mansion with a portico of eight blocky pillars flanking a red door set in a white frame. Only the street number appeared in the window above the door. The building was otherwise unmarked.
“The Rivers Club,” said Sherlock, reaching up to rap on the door. “Established 1894, fashioned after London’s Bohemian Savage Club, as was the Golgotha. Doesn’t surprise me in the least that one of that lot nicked the mace for a laugh and hid it. Then the Golgotha ran out of money and amalgamated with their more successful rival.”
He knocked on the door again.
“Men’s only club, isn’t it?” John asked. “Is your brother a member of this one?”
“No,” said Sherlock, “that’s the Melbourne Club.”
The door opened. Sherlock shouldered past the doorman, who shouted for him to stop but had to turn to block John and Lorraine’s egress as well. When John tried to push past, the doorman grabbed the collar of his jacket.
John, well-used to Sherlock’s shenanigans and how to play along with them, shrugged out of the garment, grabbed Lorraine by the hand, and ran after Sherlock into the vast hall beyond the foyer.
The cavernous length of the hall was dimly lit, the dark-paneled walls decorated with hunting trophies and weaponry seeming to suck in all the light. Large fireplaces were set at either end of the hall, but John’s attention was on the southern end, where a very angry and fairly sooty Kylie Mitchell stood brandishing a silver-plated, ornately engraved five-foot mace. Two men stood warily in front of her, reluctant to either grapple with her or let her leave.
“Come on, give it back,” one of the men urged.
“Piss off,” snarled Kylie.
“Kylie!”
“Mum!” One of the men moved towards Kylie, and she threatened them with the mace again. John admired her brisk reflexes.
“Oh, excellent!” Sherlock exclaimed at the tableau. “Nice to see a self-rescuing princess at work. Need a hand?”
The two Riverians whirled to face the incoming party as the doorman ran in behind them. “I’m sorry, Mr. Driscoll, they just…”
Mr. Driscoll, the elder of the two men, took a menacing step towards them.
John Watson had faced drill sergeants, East Timorese paramilitaries, Taliban snipers, and once, while on holiday in the Grampians, a bad-tempered tiger snake. Mr. Driscoll held no terror for Doc Caffeine.
“I wouldn’t, mate,” he said drily. “I may be trespassing, but you can be done for kidnapping.” He nodded towards Kylie.
“We didn’t kidnap her,” Driscoll protested. “She broke in here last night and stole the mace.”
“I didn’t break in,” Kylie replied hotly. “I dressed like a tradie and told you I was here to fix the lights, and your doorbitch let me in.”
“Clever,” said Sherlock approvingly. “Like Caroline Hodgson. How did you know they’d let you in?”
“These old places always have wiring somewhere that’s cactus,” said Kylie. “Seemed a good bet. Then I checked the chimney to see if they’d just hidden it in the same place as they did at the old Golgotha Club.” She brandished the mace again. “And here it is.”
“That’s ours,” said the younger man.
“It’s really not,” Sherlock said, “and the kidnapping charge still stands. Ms. Mitchell there had gotten the mace all the way home before you two snuck up on her, snatched her, and brought her back here. Why you didn’t just take the mace…”
“We panicked,” mumbled the younger man, and he nodded at the doorman. “Me and Wayne. We just snatched her and brought her back here for Bruce to sort out.”
Bruce Driscoll gave both Wayne and the young idiot a glare that could bubble asphalt. Then he sighed. “Perhaps we can arrange something, Ms. Mitchell. We won’t press charges if you won’t, and if you give us back the mace. The Rivers Club board can announce to the press that we discovered it, in due course.”
Ms. Kylie Mitchell suggested some very unparliamentary things Bruce Driscoll and the Rivers Club board could do with that mace.
John whipped out his smartphone and took a couple of photos of the scene.
“Bloody women,” muttered the young Riverian. “Wrecking the joint. Ruining everything.”
“Shut up, Gavin,” said Driscoll in a weary tone tinged with disgust, “and call your lawyer. This has all gone completely pear-shaped and it’s your fault. Kidnapping? Jeez.”
In the end, as John recorded in his personal diary, Kylie Mitchell didn’t press the kidnapping charge. Instead, she took great delight in restoring the mace to Parliament and getting a book deal to present, with added commentary, the diaries of Madame Brussels, naming historical names.
“Her mum’s not happy about it,” John noted, back at his Strada.
A new picture hung on the wall opposite the coffee molecule motif: the scene from the Rivers Club. John had made the colors hyper-real, and judicious editing of the faces protected the guilty-as-hell. Outraged postures, rich browns and golds, light glinting off the mace held by Kylie Mitchell, looking like a warrior queen. The picture was surmounted with text reading The Problem of the Three Journals in elegant cursive. This title made it part of a set with John’s other digital art, all bearing similar script—The Case of, The Mystery of, The Problem of—as testament to their adventures.
(John, it must be said, knew he had a bit of a theatrical bent.)
“She’s not,” said Sherlock, “but she’s a prude.”
“Kylie sent something for you, though. A thank you present for coming to get her.”
Sherlock tore the wrapping off the parcel John handed him. In it was a T-shirt that Kylie had had made especially for him. It read:
Sherlock Holmes. Bloody Legend.
Sherlock laughed, put it beside his laptop, and whistled one of his band’s tunes as he returned to his pharmacology essay.