Chapter Text
PART ONE
BEING A RECOLLECTION OF THE REMINISCENCES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M.D., LATE OF THE ARMY MEDICAL DEPARTMENT
CHAPTER ONE
MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES
London, May 1981. The sky was the colour of a smudged photocopy, and the rain hadn’t stopped in three days.
I was back.
Not that anyone noticed.
The city greeted me the same way war had sent me off—with indifference. I stepped off the coach from Portsmouth and onto streets I used to know, boots hitting cracked concrete like I had something to prove. I didn’t. I was broke. I was thirty-six. I was… not fine, exactly. But surviving.
I spent the last of my per diem on a cigarette and a pint at The Barrow’s Head, a dive tucked behind King’s Cross that hadn’t changed since the ’60s and never would. The place reeked of mildew, old lager, and something faintly chemical. Like despair left too long in the fridge.
I sat in a corner with the mirror behind the bar angled just enough to let me pretend I wasn’t alone. And that’s where Stamford found me. Or—Stam’o, as we used to call him in med school, before he traded cadavers for pharmaceuticals and a leather briefcase.
“Watson?” he said, and it was both a question and a laugh. “Bloody hell, so you are alive.”
“Somehow,” I muttered, forcing a smile. “Come sit before I drink your half.”
We shared a pint like no time had passed, though it had. Years, wars, wives—we glossed over the lot. He filled the air with chatter. I was too tired to return. I let him. Listening was easier than speaking anyways, and besides, my throat still ached from smoke and a lot of screaming from those… recurrent nightmares.
Then he asked it—the question people love asking returning soldiers.
“So where are you staying?”
I shrugged. “Agh, nowhere yet. The Army's done with me. Can’t afford much unless I want to live with six students in a squat with no heating.”
He laughed. “You’re the second person to say that to me today.”
“What, exactly?”
“‘Bout looking for a little lodging arrangement,” he said, finishing his pint. “You might just be in luck, Johnny.”
We didn’t go far. A few stops on the Northern Line, then a walk down a rain-slick street where the sodium lights buzzed and the puddles shimmered like oil slicks. He said the place wasn’t much. “But it’s got character,” he said to me, like that meant anything.
221B Baker Street was wedged between a shuttered bookstore and a newsagent with dusty papers in the window. Three storeys of weathered brick and a “TO LET” sign that looked older than I was. I could practically hear the mould growing inside.
The front door was open. Inside, the place was warm—but it smelled of burnt hair and bleach and something sharp beneath it. Like a lab left untended. Upstairs, something thudded. Then a man’s voice called out, clipped and nasal: “Don’t touch anything!”
Stamford didn’t even flinch. “He does this.”
We climbed the stairs. The second floor landing looked like a bomb shelter disguised as a living room—papers everywhere, record player disassembled on the coffee table, half-melted candle stuck into a beer bottle, the faint buzz of a portable space heater struggling in the corner.
Sherlock Holmes was hunched over what looked like a row of pork chops nailed to a board. He wore a paint-splattered lab coat, thick rubber gloves, and the kind of tinted goggles that just screamed ‘do not approach.’ Behind him, a blackboard scrawled in white chalk:
‘rigor onset chart / 6°C / inner thigh / animal proxy?’
He turned before we could speak—like he’d sensed the silence behind him shift—and fixed me with that stare. You know the kind. The one that makes you feel like someone’s rifled through your wallet and your soul.
“Limp’s real,” he said, peeling his gloves off. “Old injury, left side. You still get nerve flickers when it’s cold, don’t you?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
He cocked his head. “Northern Ireland?”
My hand twitched at my coat, instinctively.
“Rather close to home, isn’t it?” he added, tone dry. “Tricky one. Fog of war. Still classified in places.”
“Christ,” I muttered. “Is—is this a trick of some kind?”
“Nope. Just… observation.”
He stepped closer and pushed his goggles onto his forehead. “You don’t happen to talk in your sleep, do you?”
“I—I don’t… think so?”
“Good. I need quiet for thinking. Chemical reactions don’t argue back, but radiators sure do, don’t they?”
I looked at Stamford, who just gave me a “don’t look at me” face.
Sherlock extended a gloved hand. “Sherlock Holmes. Consulting detective.” I took it.
“You may move in tomorrow. If you don’t mind the occasional bloodstain, I think we’ll get along famously.”