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One: Jessica
John's phone rang as Mrs Hudson came by to drop off some of their post that had been delivered to her flat by mistake. He was up to his elbows in a sink that has been blocked by a combination of agar and congealed vegetable soup.
"Sherlock, could you get that for me?" Sherlock was lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. The phone rang again. He did not stir an inch. John sighed.
"Mrs Hudson, would you mind?"
"I'm your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper," she chided, gently. Nevertheless, she picked the phone up from the kitchen table. The screen showed a number but no name. It rang again, insistently. Mrs Hudson pressed the answer button. "Hello?"
"Oh, er, hello." The voice on the other end was young and tinkling, but sounded slightly put out by the unexpected nature of the voice that had answered her call. "Is that… er… is that John's phone?"
"No, dear, I don't think so," Mrs Hudson said, very clearly.
"I'm sure this was the number he gave me. It's Jessica." Now she sounded even more anxious, there was a tremble in her voice. Mrs Hudson did feel sorry for the poor girl, but you couldn't avoid casualties in a campaign like this one. "You're sure this isn't John's phone?"
"Perfectly sure."
"Oh, well, I'm sorry to have disturbed you." She hung up without waiting to here Mrs Hudson say goodbye. Doubtless, she would spend a good part of her evening wondering why the handsome man who had started the conversation with her in the park, or on the tube, or wherever they had crossed paths had decided to give her a fake number. In any case, she'd be far too embarrassed to try the number again. Quickly and discreetly, Mrs Hudson deleted the number from the phone's call list. It was sometimes useful to have the boys think that she didn't know anything about modern technology.
"Who was it?" John called, as the sink made a particularly disgusting sound.
"Oh, no one, dear. Some man trying to sell you something, I think." John looked a little disappointed. "I'll just leave the post on the table here."
"Thanks, Mrs Hudson." After she had closed the door behind her, John looked over to Sherlock. "That girl I told you about – the one I met at the Chinese takeaway. Jessica. She still hasn't called. I knew I should have got her number too."
Two: Roberta
"Wallet." Standing at the bottom of the stairwell, John Watson patted all of his pockets in a charmingly absent minded fashion as the woman with the dark hair watched him with a shy smile. This one was pretty in an unthreatening sort of way. She wore a wrap dress and her boots had a very low heel. She looked, Mrs Hudson thought as she peered around her door, like she would be good with horses, dogs and children. "Damn, I've forgotten it. Could you just wait here while I…?"
"Of course." The smile became reassuring; she was also good with nervous first dates. It was at this moment that Mrs Hudson came out from behind the door and into the hallway, fiddling with her handbag.
"Hello John, dear. I'm just going to the corner shop – did you and Sherlock need anything?"
"Oh, Mrs Hudson. No, I think we're all right, thanks. This is Roberta, by the way." The woman extended her hand and Mrs Hudson took it. On closer inspection, the unthreatening prettiness was augmented by a rather spectacular bosom. He may not yet have come around to precisely Mrs Hudson's way of thinking regarding his love life, but John seemed to have decent taste in women. "Roberta, this is Mrs Hudson, my landlady. I'll be back in a minute." He disappeared up the stairs. Mrs Hudson's gaze followed him, and then she turned back to Roberta.
"He's a lovely man, isn't he?" she said, smiling.
"I hope so," Roberta said, glancing meaningfully up the stairs. "I usually pick the worst men, but I think he might be different. I've always wanted to go out with a doctor."
"I'm sure he will be dear. He reminds me so much of my late husband."
"How so?"
"Oh, you don't want to hear me go on about that…"
"No, please do. I'm interested." There was that encouraging smile again. Maybe she was a primary school teacher. That would explain the sensible shoes.
"Well, my husband was such a charmer too you see. He had those twinkling eyes just like John's. I'll always remember those eyes. They twinkled as they put the lethal injection right into his arm." The smile was suddenly gone from Roberta's face.
"Lethal injection? Your husband, he… I mean, he was a….?"
"Murderer? Oh yes, dear. Murders are always quietly charming. That's what Sherlock says anyway – that's John's flatmate dear, and he's a detective so he should know. It's the quiet one's you have to watch out for." Mrs Hudson heard the door open above them and looked up to see John coming down the stairs.
"I'm so sorry. I couldn't find it, but then it turned out I'd left it under… Are you all right?" he asked, looking at Roberta's now ashen face.
"I'll leave you two young people to it," Mrs Hudson said, brightly. "Have fun now." With that, she was out of the front door of 221 Baker Street. With the two of them behind in the hallway, Roberta was now staring intently at a mark on the bottom left hand side of John's cream sweater.
"John," she said, taking a deep breath. "What is that mark on your jumper?" With a trembling hand, she pointed to the stain. Puzzled, John looked down and examined it closely for a second.
"That is…" he began, and then looked up with a smile. "Blood. It's just blood." Sensible, capable and unflappable Roberta let out a heart-stopping scream, before turning on the low heel of her boots and running to the door. "Wait! It's just from one of my flatmate's experiments! Roberta! Wait!" But, as Mrs Hudson could see from across the road, Roberta was already inside the nearest black cab, which had been instructed to take her as far away from the mad man as possible, leaving John to wonder what on earth he had done wrong this time.
Three: Lucy
"Is Dr Watson not in this evening?" Mrs Hudson asked, as she bustled around the messy flat, picking the less deadly-looking objects off the floor and placing old newspapers that had already been scoured for cuttings into the recycling box. She had come into the flat on the pretence of reading the gas meter.
"No." Sherlock Holmes did not look up. He continued to type at a furious pace on the laptop that was resting on his outstretched legs. "He's on a date." The final word was endowed with particular venom. Mrs Hudson smiled to herself.
"A date, dear?"
"Yes, Mrs Hudson. When two people who like each other decide to spend time together. They go for dinner or such like, John reliably informs me." The typing began to sound more violent. Mrs Hudson put on her best confused-old-lady expression.
"Just like you two boys do, then." The rattle of fingers of the keyboard suddenly ceased. Sherlock looked over the top of the computer screen. He gave the landlady a rather hard stare for some moments. Then his eyes softened and he sighed.
"No, Mrs Hudson," he said, more softly this time. "I fear it is not like John and I do at all." There was silence for a moment before the typing began again. Mrs Hudson began to stack clean Petri dishes in the drying rack.
"Is he nice dear?" she asked, over the clatter of industrial glassware. Sherlock gave a cold chuckle.
"Wrong gender. I believe that her name is Lucy. John thinks she is very nice. His pupils dilated the moment that she walked into the room, and he mirrored her posture as he was talking to her before they left. He probably didn't notice the fact that her brand new bag is much more expensive than the rest of her clothes; she couldn't afford it if she really is a secretary. Too expensive for a friend or relative, so it must be a lover. He bought her a bag which suggests he doesn't know her dress size, because men usually buy things they want to see women in, so they haven't been together long. The bag is so new that she had trouble undoing the clasp of it to reveal that Booker short-listed novel – the unbroken spine of which shows that she hasn't read it and probably never will – so it's a recent gift. That means she's probably still seeing this other rich man." Throughout this speech, the typing had got faster and harder, finishing with a particularly savage flourish. "John. Watson. Is. An. Idiot."
"If you say so, dear," she replied, filling the washing up bowl with warm soapy water. Mugs and plates clinked together as she placed them into the suds of Fairy Liquid. "Still, I'm not sure," she continued. "I think he's just like that nice Mr Reynolds who rented the flat when my husband was still alive. He always had lots of ladies coming over. He was always taking them shopping and to the theatre. Mr Hudson was sure that he was going to marry one of them, but then he ran off with this lovely young man called Justin. They sent me a postcard from San Francisco. Very nice it was.
"Oh yes, dear, he does remind me of Dr Watson. Exactly the same manner, the both of them. "
Sherlock's fingers still clattered away on the keys, and his eyes were fixed on the screen. He looked as though he was not listening to a word of to the rather odd tale of Mrs Hudson's closeted tenant. Mrs Hudson, of course, knew better than that.
Four: Sophie
John waited until he had been out with Sophie four times before he invited her back to 221b. It wasn't that he was embarrassed about the flat, or even about Sherlock (he had realised that potential girlfriends would have to deal with his eccentric flatmate), but that things hadn't seemed to be going so well in his love life recently. Lots of women hadn't called back. Just as many had arrived back at his flat with him, apparently eager for a night of passion, and then had suddenly made excuses to leave. If John didn't know that Sherlock would have turned his nose up at interfering with anything as inconsequential as John Watson's love life, he would have suspected his flatmate of foul play. Even so, John thought it best to make his first impressions away from his place of residence.
Sophie was great. She was the best looking girl he's been out with for ages. She was probably the best looking girl he'd even been out with. Tall, slender, with dark curls cut short so that they framed her angular features. The sort of girl that made other men stare, and shake their heads, and wonder how he, John Watson, got so lucky. They'd met at a press conference that Lestrade was holding to reveal how the police, or rather how Sherlock, had caught the gang behind three high-profile bank robberies. Sherlock liked to sit in on those things to make sure Lestrade got the story right. Sophie had been sitting next to John, who was taking notes for his blog, and she had asked him about a detail of the story that she had missed. She was a crime reporter; they'd discovered they had a lot to talk about.
Now, she was here, in the flat and she wasn't making excuses to leave or screaming and running away (he was still slightly haunted by the incident with Roberta and had made very sure to wear spotlessly clean clothes). This was probably helped by the fact that Sherlock was nowhere to be seen. He'd probably had some call from Lestrade; John wasn't in any hurry to enquire about his whereabouts right now.
"Would you like something to eat?" he asked, have seated her in the (unusually tidy) sitting room with a glass of red wine.
"Yes, please," she replied with an oddly familiar smile. John had noticed that her smile kept reminding him of someone; a face that was just out of reach. Old girlfriend maybe, he thought as he opened the fridge.
He and Sherlock were not particularly good at making sure the fridge was well stocked, so John had taken the precaution of tucking some cheese in the back of it and some crackers in one of the cupboards. Enough to be impressive, but not to look like he'd prepared anything in advance. Only now he came to look for the cheese, all he could find was an empty plastic bag with a note inside.
Sorry – needed something with lactose in for an experiment. Will replace.
SH
P.S. We're also out of milk.
If Sherlock Holmes had walked into the flat now, it would have taken every ounce of John's self-restraint not to kill him. What was he supposed to do? Admit that he was the kind of man that didn't keep anything except deadly poisons and body parts in his fridge? Just as he was beginning to really panic, there came a knock at the door. Frantically wracking his brains for a solution, John opened it to find Mrs Hudson standing there in a dressing gown, holding a plate that was covered with a tea towel.
"I thought you might need some help, dear," she whispered, handing it over.
"Mrs Hudson, you do not charge nearly enough rent," John muttered. "I am so, so grateful for this."
"Well, it isn't much. Just a few things I've thrown together…"
"Could you lend me some milk as well?"
"I'll put some on the doorstep for you, but I'm not your housekeeper, dear." She went back down the stairs. Pulling off the tea towel, John discovered two plates of pate on toast. One looked slightly neater, and had a sprig of parsley on it. Great, that would be Sophie's; it looked like he'd made an effort. Waiting until she was distracted by a noise out of the window, John threw the tea towel into a corner of the room and carried the tray over. Sophie's eyes grew wide with delight.
"Oh, John, that looks delicious!" she exclaimed as he handed her the prettier plate of food. She eagerly took a bite. "Mmmm, that's really good. It must be homemade, right?"
"Oh, absolutely," John lied, as he tucked into his own. The pate was really was excellent – thank you, Mrs Hudson.
"You're so clever, John. Most men I know can't even boil an egg. You must be very talented with your hands."
God, this was going to be a good night.
Three and a half hours later, and holding back Sophie's curls as she vomited into his toilet for the third time, John felt that his initial assessment of the evening had been too hasty. Saying that, it had all been going wonderfully until Sophie clutched her stomach, leapt up from the sofa and ran for the bathroom. From then, it had all been going terribly. Sophie flushed the toilet and turned around to face John. Against her pallid cheeks, her dark eyes flashed him a glare of pure anger. At this precise moment, she did not look quite so devastatingly attractive.
"You gave me food poisoning," she panted. "You absolute bastard."
"Sophie, I'm so sorry…"
"You're a fucking doctor, and you gave me food poisoning! Surely you should know enough about hygiene not to do that!"
"Please, it's not my fault…"
"Of course it's your fault! You made the bloody pate yourself, so you can't even blame the supermarket." John tried to stroke her back in a comforting manner, but she swatted his hand away. "I want to go home. Can you just call me a cab?"
"I really think you should stay," John said. "You're ill. I can look after you. I'm a doctor."
"Which has served us well so far in the matter of not getting sick." She could certainly match Sherlock for sarcasm. God, why was he thinking of Sherlock?
"Look it can't have been the pate; otherwise I'd be ill too. It must just be a bug you've caught."
"So you're blaming me now? You're saying this is my own fault?"
"No! No, I just meant that…"
"Look, John. Will you just call me a fucking taxi before I start throwing up again?"
Mrs Hudson was awoken by the sound of a taxi pulling up outside her house at two-thirty in the morning. It was followed by the sound of the door to 221b opening, and two sets of feet stumbling down the stairs and a good amount of groaning in a female voice. The front door having been opened too, she heard John Watson shout a rather pathetic 'Call me!' that received no response. Poor lamb, Mrs Hudson thought as she rearranged her pillows, he'll be moping for days. Until he gets distracted by Sherlock and another case.
She did feel sorry for his lady-friend as well; this one more than any of the others. But Sherlock labelled his experiments so carefully that Mrs Hudson was sure that the young woman had only ingested enough salmonella to make her ill for around twenty-four hours. In a few more days, she'd be right as rain, but probably not in any great hurry to let John know that. Of course, she'd taken a chance that John would give her the plate that had been decorated with more than just a sprig of parsley. But nice men did that sort of thing, and she'd known from the moment that John Watson walked into her flat that he was a nice man.
He reminded her so much of her husband in that way, she decided, as she settled back to sleep.
Five: Sherlock
Sherlock and John climbed the stairs that led up to 221b tired but triumphant. They had arrived home late after successfully recovering the First Folio of Shakespeare that had gone missing from the British Library and learning from Lestrade that the culprits had been apprehended at Heathrow airport.
"I think this calls for a celebration," John said, as he pulled off his jacket. Sherlock didn't bother to remove his before depositing himself into an armchair and opening a laptop to post about his latest victory on 'The Science of Deduction'. I've got half of a six-pack left in the fridge. Just let me put this in my room, and then I'll call that Thai place we went to last week and see if they deliver."
Sherlock listened to John's footsteps bound up the stairs to the second bedroom, and then pause without opening the door. There was a shout of exasperation and the loud crash of stamping footsteps back down the stairs.
"Is something this matter?" Sherlock asked, vaguely amused at how grumpy John looked. John brandished a scrap of paper at him.
"This. This is the matter." He opened the front door and yelled down the stairs. "Mrs Hudson!"
"John, what has Mrs Hudson done?" Sherlock asked. "Did she fold your clothes wrongly? Did she redecorate?" The landlady appeared in the doorway.
"What's the matter, boys? Did you run out of bread again? Because I've only got two loaves left and Joan is coming over for lunch tomorrow, and she does like her sandwiches."
"No, Mrs Hudson, this note," John said, thrusting it into her hands. "It says that, as of midday today, I can't go into my bedroom for 24 hours!"
"Oh, did I forget to tell you that the moth men were coming today?" Mrs Hudson said, wandering into the flat and pulling out her reading glasses to scan the note. "I'm sure I told you they were coming, Sherlock, dear," she added. The man in the armchair shrugged his shoulders. John gave an exasperated exhalation.
"The moth men? Who are the moth men?" he asked desperately.
"The men who came to kill the moths. It's quite straightforward, dear; do try to keep up," Mrs Hudson continued, peering at John over her reading glasses. "Whilst I was cleaning your windows – I won't keep doing it, dear, but they were so dirty - I found some moths in the curtains. So I called some men in to deal with them. They came this morning and sprayed their chemicals…"
"Cypermethrin," Sherlock interjected helpfully, flicking down the lid of a laptop that John now recognised as his own.
"… and they said that no one could go into the room for twenty-four hours," Mrs Hudson finished, handing the note back to John. She turned back to Sherlock. "I definitely told you they were coming."
"But what am I supposed to do?" John asked. "All my stuff is in that room. Where am I supposed to sleep?"
"I am sorry, dear. I could give you the key to the basement flat. But it's very damp, and I think the bed might be broken, and the electric isn't on, and…"
"No, it's fine, Mrs Hudson," John muttered. "I'll sort something out. And I'm sorry for shouting."
"That's all right, dear. No harm done," Mrs Hudson said, giving John a gentle pat on the shoulder on her way out of the door. John hung his head and threw himself despondently into the couch. Nonchalantly, Sherlock appropriated the note from his hand. "I guess that means I'm sleeping on the couch tonight. And all my pyjamas are in that room." He learnt forwards, elbows on knees and head in his hands. "God, I really need a beer."
It was just as Sherlock had expected. The four that came after the two in the note was clearly in a different handwriting to the rest of the lettering, and even more clearly in a different black biro. It had obviously been added by someone else at a later date. Additionally, Sherlock was confident that in order to get rid of the moths properly, the pest control company would have sprayed all the rooms in the flat; the fact that the bookcase had been moved away from the wall and then put back suggested that they had done this. He was, furthermore, certain that the concentration of cypermethrin that was used in industrial pest control wouldn't have harmed a human after two hours, and that was erring on the side of caution.
He could have told John all of this. It would have earned him one of those trademark John Watson dazzled looks of wonderment that made Sherlock's heart do things of which he'd always assumed it to be incapable. Then John would be able to get his pyjamas and sleep in his own bed, just like he wanted to. But Sherlock was sure that whoever had altered the note (and, as always, he had a pretty good idea of the perpetrator) didn't want him to do that.
"I have some old things that might just about fit you," Sherlock said. "And my bed is far more comfortable than the couch, and plenty big enough for two."
Epilogue
In the ten days after the incident with the moth-spray, 221b Baker Street had been unusually quiet. There had been no young men in hoodies turning up with scraps of information for Sherlock. There had been no young women turning up in high heels to see John. Even Detective Inspector Lestrade had been curiously absent. Neither John nor Sherlock had come to knock on her door asking to borrow a pint of milk, a cup of sugar or a bottle of bleach (the latter has been becoming increasingly common up to this point). Her curiosity getting the better of her, Mrs Hudson decided to bake some ginger biscuits. Officially, they were for the cake stand at the jumble sale for the local hospice. If she accidentally made far too many, and had to give the spares to Sherlock and John, well, that couldn't be helped now, could it?
An hour and ten minutes later, Mrs Hudson was at the threshold of the flat shared by the two men, a plate of not-yet-cool biscuits in her hands. She was about to knock on the door, when a noise made her stop for a moment. It was a noise that she had not heard coming from the flat before. Someone who was less blunt might have referred to the noise as a chuckle, but Mrs Hudson called a spade a spade. That noise was definitely giggling.
Silently, Mrs Hudson placed one ear against the door and listened.
"No… No… You have to let me go… We have to get dressed…" More giggling. This time it was louder, less restrained.
"I don't have to do anything at all." A different voice, lower this time. Languid, almost. Definitely the one in control.
"Please… Lestrade texted you twenty minutes ago. And he said it was urg- " The end of the word was smothered; something had cut it off.
There were a few second of silence, and then the second voice mumbled, "Lestrade can wait."
"Mmm… mmm… But what if it's a body?"
"Then I can assure you, John, that it isn't going anywhere. And it's not a body. Lestrade would have told me if it was; he knows how much I like murders. Almost as much as I… like… this…"
The sounds and the giggling stopped, replaced by soft moans that were barely audible through the door. Mrs Hudson placed the plate of biscuits on the doorstep and retreated, victorious, back to her flat.