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starfishstarBUDS AND BELLS AND STARS WITHOUT A NAME
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Summary: Where Greg could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat.
…In which Greg Lestrade has lunch in a city garden, and gets way more than he bargained for.
Characters: Greg Lestrade, Sherlock, cameos from Mycroft, Mrs Hudson, Donovan, Moriarty (sort of) and Redbeard (sort of); eventual Sherlock/Lestrade, but can also be read as mostly gen
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
CHAPTER TWO
“Oh, damn,” said Sergeant Sally Donovan, then looked chagrined when Greg glanced up at her from his desk. She was flipping through the pages of a printout she held in one hand and had halted just inside his doorway as something in the pages caught her attention. “Sorry, sir. It’s just, there’s been another pet disappearance in Hampstead Heath.”
“A missing pet? And this is our division why?”
Donovan bit her lip. She was newly promoted to sergeant and eager to prove herself, torn between wanting to please her superiors and wanting to follow her own generally solid instincts. “It’s not, exactly. But, see, if you’ll look here –”
She hurried over to his desk and set the pages neatly in front of him, pointing out specific sentences and flipping pages as she spoke.
“See, it’s been a regular pattern, every couple of weeks. A dog that got out from a back garden. A pair of housecats that wandered off from a residential street nearby and never returned. Another dog that was let off the lead to play, ran after a stick and never came back. Then yesterday, a dog disappeared as the owner was walking it, she turned her back for a moment and it was gone. And these were all in or around Hampstead Heath.”
Greg followed her pointing finger, and ruffled a distracted hand through his hair. “And why does this qualify as a crime?”
“You’re going to laugh, sir – don’t laugh – but the pattern, the timing of it, doesn’t seem like chance. It seems like – like something more sinister might be going on.” She pressed her lips together and averted her eyes, like she expected him to burst out laughing.
Greg didn’t laugh, but he did give Donovan’s concerned face thoughtful consideration. All logic said he should gently but firmly remind her that they were here to solve major crimes, that this was by no stretch of the imagination a major crime, and that there were half a dozen more important things she could be doing with her time right this very minute.
Why, then, was something in his gut firmly insisting that this sounded like a case his mysterious pale-eyed acquaintance might have something to say about?
“All right,” he sighed, giving in to gut feeling rather than sense. Because Greg, too, knew himself to have instincts that generally proved to be solid. “I’ll pop over there after work and have a look around.”
“You – you will?” Even though she’d been the one to suggest it, Donovan looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Yeah. Can’t promise to turn anything up, but I’ll have a look.”
It was absurd, of course, to think he was going to discover any evidence of this theorised dog-napper just by taking a brief evening jaunt through some small subsection of a park that stretched across 320 hectares. But then, how much of his life lately had made sense? It would do him good to stretch his legs, if nothing else. He spent too much time these days behind a desk.
Greg nodded at Donovan, kept the file she’d brought him, and shooed her back to work.
~ ~ ~
Greg parked his car and strolled into the park, feeling faintly ridiculous. Thanks to the long daylight hours of early summer, the sun was still bright behind the trees, and ambling couples were enjoying the evening light as Greg crossed a wide grassy area near the park’s southernmost edge. What exactly was he expecting to find here, aside from picnickers and, from the sound of it, a casual game of cricket taking place beyond the next stand of trees?
Shaking his head at himself but unable to set aside the dogged need to run down every hunch, no matter how mundane or bizarre, Greg started along an alley of lime trees. The evening light filtered gently through the green canopy overhead. Peaceful, certainly. Not the sort of place you would expect pets to go tragically missing.
Once again, Greg ran through the possibilities in his head, as he made his way along the gravel path.
Possibility number one: These were simple instances of lost pets, and Donovan was reading in a correlation where there wasn’t one. Happened all the time; the human brain sought pattern and meaning as a way of making a chaotic world make sense.
Or the other possibility, that there was a pattern, which meant – what? A nefarious dog-napper, lurking amongst the trees, stealing away people’s beloved pets to some unknown ends? Or could it be an animal, something big enough to eat a medium-sized dog? Right, Greg, the old ‘lion escaped from the zoo’. That sounds like a likely first hypothesis. He snorted aloud.
A leaf dropped from the trees above, straight down in front of Greg’s nose – not a gentle drift downwards, but a determined fall. Greg blinked and stopped walking. Curiosity getting the better of him, he bent and picked up the leaf, which was a lovely bright green. It was a perfectly formed specimen, round at the sides but tapering to a gentle point, with serrated edges and symmetrical veins highly visible as the slanting light shone through its semi-opaque shape.
There was also writing on it.
Some pale liquid had been used to scratch out words in an uneven hand on the leaf’s surface. The substance wasn’t anything Greg recognised, and appeared to still be wet. It read:
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Greg stared at the thing in his hand, then looked hard at the canopy of green above him. No one there of course, just tree branches swaying gently in the breeze.
Holding the leaf very carefully by its edges so the writing wouldn’t smudge, Greg searched the area, working outwards in concentric circles from the place where the leaf had fallen, but he found nothing, no human presence. No animal presence either, not even a mouse or squirrel scrabbling in the underbrush. In fact, now that he thought about it, this bit of the park seemed unnaturally still, as if it were holding its breath in the face of some malevolent presence.
Greg shook his head, annoyed at himself for indulging in another absurd flight of fancy. There was a rational explanation here, there had to be – he just hadn’t hit upon yet. The leaf had shaken loose from…a nearby art installation, perhaps. Yes, it had blown in from somewhere and got caught in the trees, only to be shaken loose again as Greg happened to be passing underneath. Or something.
The fact that the words on the leaf referenced a missing dog, precisely the thing he’d come here to investigate, was surely coincidence.
Still, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Greg to show the thing to his mysteriously appearing and disappearing acquaintance, the man who’d proved himself eerily knowledgeable about strange happenings in parks. The man had somehow held the key to solving the case of the Regent’s Park Robber, so perhaps he would have similar insight about this.
If, that is, Greg could track him down.
~ ~ ~
“All right,” Greg said, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear him, though he didn’t see anyone around. It was cooler today and overcast, and there weren’t many people about.
He was back in Christchurch Gardens and had spread his lunch out beside him on one of the benches, all the while feeling bizarrely as though he were setting out a decoy for a skittish wild creature.
“All right,” Greg said again. “I know you like lurking about and surprising me with how you come out of nowhere, so I’m going to focus on eating my lunch here, and if you feel like turning up for a chat, well, you’re welcome to.”
He busied himself with his sandwich and crisps – then looked up again to find the pale-eyed man sitting next to him on the bench.
“Holy CHRIST!” Greg shouted, dropping his sandwich to the ground.
The man turned his head and blinked at him. He was still in that same posh coat he seemed to wear no matter the weather. “Oh,” he said. “Did I startle you?”
“Bloody – yes, you startled me.” Greg bent to retrieve his sandwich, grimacing as he brushed bits of gravel from the bread. The slice of tomato had fallen out entirely when the thing had hit the ground and was probably a lost cause.
“I’m…sorry?” The man said it in a quizzical tone, as if he didn’t know what it meant. Hell, he probably didn’t.
“‘S fine,” Greg said, his heart still going a mile a minute. He’d been the one who asked the man to show up, but he’d still startled the hell out of Greg when he did. Greg set the sandwich aside, more important things on his mind. “Look, apparently I trust you, God knows why, and I want you to have a look at something and tell me what you think, all right?”
The man nodded his assent, aloof as always, but Greg was getting to know him a little better and thought he detected eagerness in the man’s posture. Was that why he kept turning up around the Met, because he liked solving mysteries? Or did Greg have it backwards and the man was more dangerous than he looked, someone who liked creating mysteries and making others dance about trying to solve them?
Greg had been reaching for the scrawled-on leaf, where he had it safely stowed inside an evidence bag in his inside jacket pocket, but he paused. “By the way – you’re called Sherlock, is that right?”
The man tensed slightly, hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Sherlock Holmes?”
The change was instantaneous, from cool, collected control to petulant rage. The man’s whole body radiated it, livid where until now he’d always been cold. “Who have you been talking to?” he demanded. And then, before Greg could answer, “Mycroft.”
“Posh bloke with an umbrella?” Greg offered.
“Oh, how tedious,” the man sighed, his eyes fluttering closed as if in great pain. “Interfering git. As if running the entire nation from the comfortable safety of its woodlands weren’t enough, he has to go sticking his stupid long nose into my life as well.”
“Er, right,” Greg said. Woodlands? The bloke in the pub had looked like the last person who would want to go camping or even for a walk in the woods. “Anyway,” he said, trying to bring this conversation back on track. “I looked you up and – you don’t exist. No record anywhere. So, is that really your name?”
“It’s a name,” the man murmured.
“An alias? What’s your real name, then, if you don’t mind me asking?” Greg said it with heavy irony, but of course that sailed clear over the man’s head.
“No, I don’t mind. But it isn’t as straightforward a question as you presume, Detective Inspector. This is the name I currently use and you’ll have to make do with that, for I’m not able to provide anything more satisfactory.”
“Bloody hell,” Greg muttered, but he knew he’d let himself in for this. This was what he got for not only accepting but actually seeking out the opinion of some oddball he’d met in Christchurch Gardens on his lunch break. “Fine,” he said, and reached for the evidence bag, drawing it carefully from his pocket. “Sherlock – if I can call you Sherlock. Have a look at this, would you? I went to Hampstead Heath to investigate a series of pet disappearances, and instead I found this.”
The man’s eyes widened and he took the clear plastic evidence bag from Greg with unexpected gentleness, turning it over delicately with deft fingers. “May I open the bag?”
Greg nodded. “Careful, though, hold it by the edges. Can’t be having you getting fingerprints on it.”
The man – Sherlock – slid the leaf gingerly from the bag and held it up to the light. It had dried out slightly since the previous evening, but it was still a luminous green and the words scratched on it were clearer than ever, now that the nearly translucent liquid they were written in had dried.
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Sherlock brought the leaf up under his nose and sniffed it.
“Hey –” Greg began to protest, but Sherlock was already sliding the leaf back into the evidence bag and handing it to Greg, who slipped it away to safety in his jacket pocket.
“Spider venom,” Sherlock breathed.
“Say what?” said Greg.
“Spider venom! A message – a message intended for me – written in the venom of a spider. Oh, it’s Christmas!”
“Hang on, a message for you? How do you know it’s meant for you?”
The man gave him a withering glance. “You brought it to me, did you not? Why else would you do that, unless you knew it was for me?”
“I thought you could – could help figure out what it meant, or something!” Greg protested. “Was I supposed to assume that a message that dropped out of a tree in a park and landed in front of my feet was meant for you?”
“It dropped out of a tree?” Sherlock asked, completely diverted to this new train of thought.
“Yeah – I was walking along under one of those long rows of lime trees, and it fell right down in front of me.”
“Oh, how nefarious,” Sherlock murmured, but he looked delighted. “He’s using double agents now! Oh, it’s Christmas and Yuletide and Haloa at once.” He turned to Greg suddenly, the full force of that otherworldly gaze pinning him to the bench. “Meet me at Hampstead Heath tonight at midnight.”
“But –!”
“Don’t ask questions, Detective Inspector! No time for that!” He rose from the bench in one fluid movement, that damn gorgeous coat swirling about his legs. “Meet me at the park at midnight, Inspector. The game is on!”
(continue to CHAPTER THREE)
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Summary: Where Greg could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat.
…In which Greg Lestrade has lunch in a city garden, and gets way more than he bargained for.
Characters: Greg Lestrade, Sherlock, cameos from Mycroft, Mrs Hudson, Donovan, Moriarty (sort of) and Redbeard (sort of); eventual Sherlock/Lestrade, but can also be read as mostly gen
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
CHAPTER TWO
“Oh, damn,” said Sergeant Sally Donovan, then looked chagrined when Greg glanced up at her from his desk. She was flipping through the pages of a printout she held in one hand and had halted just inside his doorway as something in the pages caught her attention. “Sorry, sir. It’s just, there’s been another pet disappearance in Hampstead Heath.”
“A missing pet? And this is our division why?”
Donovan bit her lip. She was newly promoted to sergeant and eager to prove herself, torn between wanting to please her superiors and wanting to follow her own generally solid instincts. “It’s not, exactly. But, see, if you’ll look here –”
She hurried over to his desk and set the pages neatly in front of him, pointing out specific sentences and flipping pages as she spoke.
“See, it’s been a regular pattern, every couple of weeks. A dog that got out from a back garden. A pair of housecats that wandered off from a residential street nearby and never returned. Another dog that was let off the lead to play, ran after a stick and never came back. Then yesterday, a dog disappeared as the owner was walking it, she turned her back for a moment and it was gone. And these were all in or around Hampstead Heath.”
Greg followed her pointing finger, and ruffled a distracted hand through his hair. “And why does this qualify as a crime?”
“You’re going to laugh, sir – don’t laugh – but the pattern, the timing of it, doesn’t seem like chance. It seems like – like something more sinister might be going on.” She pressed her lips together and averted her eyes, like she expected him to burst out laughing.
Greg didn’t laugh, but he did give Donovan’s concerned face thoughtful consideration. All logic said he should gently but firmly remind her that they were here to solve major crimes, that this was by no stretch of the imagination a major crime, and that there were half a dozen more important things she could be doing with her time right this very minute.
Why, then, was something in his gut firmly insisting that this sounded like a case his mysterious pale-eyed acquaintance might have something to say about?
“All right,” he sighed, giving in to gut feeling rather than sense. Because Greg, too, knew himself to have instincts that generally proved to be solid. “I’ll pop over there after work and have a look around.”
“You – you will?” Even though she’d been the one to suggest it, Donovan looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Yeah. Can’t promise to turn anything up, but I’ll have a look.”
It was absurd, of course, to think he was going to discover any evidence of this theorised dog-napper just by taking a brief evening jaunt through some small subsection of a park that stretched across 320 hectares. But then, how much of his life lately had made sense? It would do him good to stretch his legs, if nothing else. He spent too much time these days behind a desk.
Greg nodded at Donovan, kept the file she’d brought him, and shooed her back to work.
~ ~ ~
Greg parked his car and strolled into the park, feeling faintly ridiculous. Thanks to the long daylight hours of early summer, the sun was still bright behind the trees, and ambling couples were enjoying the evening light as Greg crossed a wide grassy area near the park’s southernmost edge. What exactly was he expecting to find here, aside from picnickers and, from the sound of it, a casual game of cricket taking place beyond the next stand of trees?
Shaking his head at himself but unable to set aside the dogged need to run down every hunch, no matter how mundane or bizarre, Greg started along an alley of lime trees. The evening light filtered gently through the green canopy overhead. Peaceful, certainly. Not the sort of place you would expect pets to go tragically missing.
Once again, Greg ran through the possibilities in his head, as he made his way along the gravel path.
Possibility number one: These were simple instances of lost pets, and Donovan was reading in a correlation where there wasn’t one. Happened all the time; the human brain sought pattern and meaning as a way of making a chaotic world make sense.
Or the other possibility, that there was a pattern, which meant – what? A nefarious dog-napper, lurking amongst the trees, stealing away people’s beloved pets to some unknown ends? Or could it be an animal, something big enough to eat a medium-sized dog? Right, Greg, the old ‘lion escaped from the zoo’. That sounds like a likely first hypothesis. He snorted aloud.
A leaf dropped from the trees above, straight down in front of Greg’s nose – not a gentle drift downwards, but a determined fall. Greg blinked and stopped walking. Curiosity getting the better of him, he bent and picked up the leaf, which was a lovely bright green. It was a perfectly formed specimen, round at the sides but tapering to a gentle point, with serrated edges and symmetrical veins highly visible as the slanting light shone through its semi-opaque shape.
There was also writing on it.
Some pale liquid had been used to scratch out words in an uneven hand on the leaf’s surface. The substance wasn’t anything Greg recognised, and appeared to still be wet. It read:
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Greg stared at the thing in his hand, then looked hard at the canopy of green above him. No one there of course, just tree branches swaying gently in the breeze.
Holding the leaf very carefully by its edges so the writing wouldn’t smudge, Greg searched the area, working outwards in concentric circles from the place where the leaf had fallen, but he found nothing, no human presence. No animal presence either, not even a mouse or squirrel scrabbling in the underbrush. In fact, now that he thought about it, this bit of the park seemed unnaturally still, as if it were holding its breath in the face of some malevolent presence.
Greg shook his head, annoyed at himself for indulging in another absurd flight of fancy. There was a rational explanation here, there had to be – he just hadn’t hit upon yet. The leaf had shaken loose from…a nearby art installation, perhaps. Yes, it had blown in from somewhere and got caught in the trees, only to be shaken loose again as Greg happened to be passing underneath. Or something.
The fact that the words on the leaf referenced a missing dog, precisely the thing he’d come here to investigate, was surely coincidence.
Still, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Greg to show the thing to his mysteriously appearing and disappearing acquaintance, the man who’d proved himself eerily knowledgeable about strange happenings in parks. The man had somehow held the key to solving the case of the Regent’s Park Robber, so perhaps he would have similar insight about this.
If, that is, Greg could track him down.
~ ~ ~
“All right,” Greg said, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear him, though he didn’t see anyone around. It was cooler today and overcast, and there weren’t many people about.
He was back in Christchurch Gardens and had spread his lunch out beside him on one of the benches, all the while feeling bizarrely as though he were setting out a decoy for a skittish wild creature.
“All right,” Greg said again. “I know you like lurking about and surprising me with how you come out of nowhere, so I’m going to focus on eating my lunch here, and if you feel like turning up for a chat, well, you’re welcome to.”
He busied himself with his sandwich and crisps – then looked up again to find the pale-eyed man sitting next to him on the bench.
“Holy CHRIST!” Greg shouted, dropping his sandwich to the ground.
The man turned his head and blinked at him. He was still in that same posh coat he seemed to wear no matter the weather. “Oh,” he said. “Did I startle you?”
“Bloody – yes, you startled me.” Greg bent to retrieve his sandwich, grimacing as he brushed bits of gravel from the bread. The slice of tomato had fallen out entirely when the thing had hit the ground and was probably a lost cause.
“I’m…sorry?” The man said it in a quizzical tone, as if he didn’t know what it meant. Hell, he probably didn’t.
“‘S fine,” Greg said, his heart still going a mile a minute. He’d been the one who asked the man to show up, but he’d still startled the hell out of Greg when he did. Greg set the sandwich aside, more important things on his mind. “Look, apparently I trust you, God knows why, and I want you to have a look at something and tell me what you think, all right?”
The man nodded his assent, aloof as always, but Greg was getting to know him a little better and thought he detected eagerness in the man’s posture. Was that why he kept turning up around the Met, because he liked solving mysteries? Or did Greg have it backwards and the man was more dangerous than he looked, someone who liked creating mysteries and making others dance about trying to solve them?
Greg had been reaching for the scrawled-on leaf, where he had it safely stowed inside an evidence bag in his inside jacket pocket, but he paused. “By the way – you’re called Sherlock, is that right?”
The man tensed slightly, hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Sherlock Holmes?”
The change was instantaneous, from cool, collected control to petulant rage. The man’s whole body radiated it, livid where until now he’d always been cold. “Who have you been talking to?” he demanded. And then, before Greg could answer, “Mycroft.”
“Posh bloke with an umbrella?” Greg offered.
“Oh, how tedious,” the man sighed, his eyes fluttering closed as if in great pain. “Interfering git. As if running the entire nation from the comfortable safety of its woodlands weren’t enough, he has to go sticking his stupid long nose into my life as well.”
“Er, right,” Greg said. Woodlands? The bloke in the pub had looked like the last person who would want to go camping or even for a walk in the woods. “Anyway,” he said, trying to bring this conversation back on track. “I looked you up and – you don’t exist. No record anywhere. So, is that really your name?”
“It’s a name,” the man murmured.
“An alias? What’s your real name, then, if you don’t mind me asking?” Greg said it with heavy irony, but of course that sailed clear over the man’s head.
“No, I don’t mind. But it isn’t as straightforward a question as you presume, Detective Inspector. This is the name I currently use and you’ll have to make do with that, for I’m not able to provide anything more satisfactory.”
“Bloody hell,” Greg muttered, but he knew he’d let himself in for this. This was what he got for not only accepting but actually seeking out the opinion of some oddball he’d met in Christchurch Gardens on his lunch break. “Fine,” he said, and reached for the evidence bag, drawing it carefully from his pocket. “Sherlock – if I can call you Sherlock. Have a look at this, would you? I went to Hampstead Heath to investigate a series of pet disappearances, and instead I found this.”
The man’s eyes widened and he took the clear plastic evidence bag from Greg with unexpected gentleness, turning it over delicately with deft fingers. “May I open the bag?”
Greg nodded. “Careful, though, hold it by the edges. Can’t be having you getting fingerprints on it.”
The man – Sherlock – slid the leaf gingerly from the bag and held it up to the light. It had dried out slightly since the previous evening, but it was still a luminous green and the words scratched on it were clearer than ever, now that the nearly translucent liquid they were written in had dried.
Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why.
Sherlock brought the leaf up under his nose and sniffed it.
“Hey –” Greg began to protest, but Sherlock was already sliding the leaf back into the evidence bag and handing it to Greg, who slipped it away to safety in his jacket pocket.
“Spider venom,” Sherlock breathed.
“Say what?” said Greg.
“Spider venom! A message – a message intended for me – written in the venom of a spider. Oh, it’s Christmas!”
“Hang on, a message for you? How do you know it’s meant for you?”
The man gave him a withering glance. “You brought it to me, did you not? Why else would you do that, unless you knew it was for me?”
“I thought you could – could help figure out what it meant, or something!” Greg protested. “Was I supposed to assume that a message that dropped out of a tree in a park and landed in front of my feet was meant for you?”
“It dropped out of a tree?” Sherlock asked, completely diverted to this new train of thought.
“Yeah – I was walking along under one of those long rows of lime trees, and it fell right down in front of me.”
“Oh, how nefarious,” Sherlock murmured, but he looked delighted. “He’s using double agents now! Oh, it’s Christmas and Yuletide and Haloa at once.” He turned to Greg suddenly, the full force of that otherworldly gaze pinning him to the bench. “Meet me at Hampstead Heath tonight at midnight.”
“But –!”
“Don’t ask questions, Detective Inspector! No time for that!” He rose from the bench in one fluid movement, that damn gorgeous coat swirling about his legs. “Meet me at the park at midnight, Inspector. The game is on!”
(continue to CHAPTER THREE)
