grief, no. With the kitchen still empty and the bathroom that dirty? I had my things delivered the day before yesterday, hooked up the wifi, did some work, played the violin to check the acoustics – pointless, really, what with the furniture missing and all – and stayed over at Mycroft’s.’
‘Your what?’
‘What do you mean, my what?’
‘You said you were staying over at your–?’
‘At my – oh!’ He grinned. ‘Mycroft. My brother.’
‘That’s an unusual name.’
‘How many Sherlocks do you know?’
‘The Jew in that Shakespeare play?’
‘That’s Shylock.’
‘Oh. Right. So, you’re going to stay at your brother’s tonight, too?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He looked around the bathroom. ‘There’s nothing left to be done in here.’
‘You could have left a note. I had no idea you have a cleaning squad at your disposal.’
‘I do not. I borrowed Mycroft’s staff.’
‘His… staff?’ I echoed. ‘What is he, a lord or something?’
Sherlock snorted. ‘He’s not. Although, sometimes I’m not so sure he knows that. Anyway, let me ring them up and cancel. Now that we’re both here, we should be done in no time, right?’
‘Well, I’m almost done in here.’
‘I see that. When you’re finished, you can help me unpack, yes?’
And he was out of the bathroom. I looked after him, shaking my head. If his brother had misgivings about being a lord, then what did that make Sherlock? Little Lord Fauntleroy? When you’re finished help me unpack indeed.
But I did, in the end. Help him unpack. Watching him take his things out of the boxes one by one and look at them as he wandered around the living room got me all fidgety. Had he never moved house before?
‘Mainly into partly furnished apartments,’ he said when I asked him. ‘Mycroft takes care of organisational stuff, you know, has my things packed and unpacked.’
‘I see. And did he arrange for you to look at this flat, too?’
‘He didn’t. I’d been thinking about moving out of my last apartment for a while – they didn’t like me playing my violin, you see – and when I mentioned as much to Tony, he said a friend of his mother’s was renting out a flat on Baker Street, and here we are.’
He looked rather pleased with himself and for a brief moment I wondered whether I’d just moved in with somebody who’d lived under professional supervision until very recently. I shooed that thought aside because Tony would certainly have dropped a hint, but all he had said was “eccentric” and “a bit of a loner.” Besides, Sherlock had signed the lease himself, with only Mrs Hudson and me around and no supervisor in sight. Maybe that lordly brother of his had merely exaggerated the pampering.
‘Here we are,’ I said in reply to his last remark. ‘Let’s get the rest of your boxes unpacked, shall we?’
Turned out a nudge was all he needed to get going – not a princeling after all – and when we had moved the sideboard against one wall and the shelves against the other and all of Sherlock’s boxes were finally unpacked, our living room looked like a real living room and it wouldn’t be long before it looked homey, too.
‘Are you all set in your bedroom?’ I asked. ‘Or do you need help with anything up there?’
‘No, I’m done. I put my suits and some of my shirts into your wardrobe, like we said.’
‘I saw that.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No, it’s okay. I just hadn’t taken you to be a suit kind of person.’
‘I’m not. But I find them useful in my line of work.’
‘And what is that?’
‘I’m a consultant,’ he replied, a little evasively.
So I hadn’t been all wrong. ‘Really? A consultant for what?’
‘For people in need of a consultant. Really, John, it’s a lot less intriguing than it may sound. Do you want to see my room?’
‘Sure.’
His room was bigger than I remembered, only a little smaller than mine but offered a lot less storage space because of the slanting roof. The queen-size bed was made but had obviously not been slept in. On it lay a couple of folders and what looked like martial arts equipment, and two boxes stood on the side of the bed facing the wall. One box was open and seemed to contain more folders.
The low wardrobe stood half open and showed the rest of Sherlock’s clothes – jeans, trousers, shirts, jumpers. And shoes. Lots of shoes. More shoes than I had owned in my entire life.
‘Wow,’ I said, impressed. ‘That’s a lot of clothes.’
‘You think so?’ He shrugged. ‘Clothes maketh man.’
‘I thought it was ‘manners maketh man’.’
‘That, too.’ He closed his wardrobe. ‘May I see your room?’
‘Of course.’
He followed me downstairs. ‘Now that’s what I call a very neatly made bed. If I flip a coin on it, will it spring up again?’
‘Probably.’
‘How long have you been in the military?’ He opened my wardrobe and inspected its contents. ‘Did you use a ruler to arrange your stuff like that?’
‘I don’t need one. Years of training, I guess. And I served for nine years.’
He gave a low whistle and closed the wardrobe. ‘Nine years. That’s a long time.’
I shrugged. ‘Didn’t seem like a long time. I liked it.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘Got injured.’
‘That’s right, your knee. I remember.’
‘And lower leg. Not fit for active duty any longer.’
‘Do you miss it?’
‘Sometimes, yeah.’
‘Are those the guinea pigs?’ He walked over to the corner where the cage stood and crouched down. ‘Where are they?’
‘In hiding.’ I crouched down next to him and opened the cage. ‘Hey you two,
