Dinning with Frogs

3. Do You Want To Hear About The Deal

It looks like a printing press has thrown up over her flat. Sherlock Holmes sits cross legged on her coffee table (why on the coffee table, when she has a sofa and two armchairs to chose from?) surrounded by bundles of paper, smudged inky documents stacked in heaps, overflowing onto the floor in front of them. Sherlock Holmes has been here one day, and her neat anonymous apartment is starting to resemble a landfill. John Watson must be a very patient man.

"She's a gambling addict." Sherlock says as she enters.

"I'm sorry?"

"Mrs Milliver. That's where she goes when she leaves you in charge of the shop. Bookies on Brigadier Street."

Ah. Irene might have known Sherlock Holmes would have mapped out her new life already.

"You followed me to work?"

Sherlock throws her a contemptuous glance. "Please. I have more important things to concentrate on. Though I'd start looking for new work, if I were you. If Mrs M continues at her current rate she'll lose her business – its only a matter of time. Addicts are all the same."

"You should know." Irene says sweetly, and goes to the fridge. Wine, she thinks, a nice big glass of it. "How did you know about Mrs Milliver?"

"Bags, in your closet." Sherlock has returned his attention back to the pile of papers, fingers tracing lines of text. "Several with the Milliver's logo – not a very professional job, so it's a small business. There are too many for them to be a reflection of your normal shopping habits, and Milliver's is clearly not the kind of establishment you would patronise voluntarily. So, a place of employment, and very liberally run judging by the number of freebies you've brought home. You are stealing from them. You don't need to steal, you do it because you are alone, bored, and because you can. Conclusion: your employer is more than usually incompetent. Such a dunderheaded individual would never have been able to have started her own business from scratch, therefore her stupidity is a recent development, result of emotional turmoil, ill health or a newly acquired addiction. You'd know if it was either of the former, therefore she is an addict - and gambling is the most likely candidate, at her age."

"Seems like rather a long shot."

"Check her internet history. You'll see I'm correct. And I'll have a cup of tea, if you're making one."

Irene clearly isn't, and what's more, has no intention of doing so. Since the sofas are out of commission she sits in the kitchen and sips her wine, watching Sherlock sorts through his papers, his brow furrowed, eyes moving ceaselessly. She feels rather like a naturalist, given the chance to watch some rare species in its own habitat for the first time. Although honestly he seems more like a creature from another planet, somehow managing to be completely detached from, and yet passionately absorbed in, everything. One can't help wondering what he would be like in the bedroom. Would be apply that same unrelenting focus, that utterly ruthless determination to whatever hapless individual should happen to fall in with him? Or would he be nervous and unsure, venturing into an arena so far from his area of expertise, likely to unlock so much inconvenient emotion, so much sentiment? She remembered the stillness that came over him when Irene touched him, the carefully veiled confusion. Jim Moriarty had called him a virgin, but then dear Jim was rather prone to exaggeration.

"You really do have a one track mind, don't you?" Sherlock says, without looking up from the papers in front of him.

Irene doesn't ask how he knew what she was thinking.

"It was my job, you know. You must have noticed, living with John - when a doctor meets a new person, he'll start trying to diagnose all their unknown ailments. You probably start trying to figure out what crimes they have been committing. I like to figure out what people like."