Fic for sanguinity: let my name be not forgotten
Title: let my name be not forgotten
Recipient: sanguinity
Author:: k_e_p
’Verse: Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
Character/Pairings: Beth Lestrade
Word Count: 6157
Rating: Teen and Up
Warnings: Mention of human trafficking
Summary: Lestrade has something to prove.
When Beth is four, her grandmother sits down and tells her a bedtime story, one that she never really forgets. Her grandmother tells her the story of the greatest detective in the world, in all of history.
He was clever, and compassionate. He was tenacious, and charming. He never once hesitated in the face of danger, and he always saved the day. He had few friends, but those he did have were friends for life. He wasn’t always liked, or understood, but he strove to do right in the world. He was a believer in justice, and in the law, and above everything else, he was good.
His name was Geoffrey Lestrade, and he was her many times great-grandfather.
*
When Beth is seven, her father explains the Lestrade family legacy, taking her into his study full of real books, things she had never seen before except in holovids.
“These are John Watson’s journals,” her father explains, handing her a musty-smelling book. The cover is soft and worn in her small hands. Beth gently opens the book and looks at the scrawling, distracted handwriting inside. She can’t read it- it is too messy- but she can see the care put into the words. “They are our family’s to keep,” her father continues, “and we have kept them faithfully for hundreds of years.”
“Will they be mine someday?” she asks as her father carefully takes the journal back from her, putting it back with the others. She studies the row of journals, mismatched in color and size, that takes up three shelves on the wall.
Her father nods. “They will, when you’re old enough.”
She bites her lip, thinking back to the stories that Grandmother Lestrade tells her whenever she visits. “Will the Lestrade journals become mine, too?”
Her father stares at her blankly. “What Lestrade journals?”
“The Lestrade journals,” she repeats. “The ones that Geoffrey Lestrade wrote. Where he talks about his adventures, and his cases, and his work with Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes.”
Her father sighs and sits her down in a large armchair by the window. Outside, Beth can see cars flying by. They don’t live in a big house, her family, but they live up high, and she loves watching the cars go by at night. She dreams of the day she will get to fly a car, just like her father does, just like her mother. “There are no Lestrade journals, Elizabeth.”
She frowns. “But Grandmother Lestrade tells me all about Geoffrey Lestrade, and everything he did, and how he was the best detective in the world.”
“Grandmother Lestrade,” her father replies tightly, his face strained like it always is when he talks about his mother, “is making up stories. Geoffrey Lestrade kept some small records, it’s true, but the man was barely literate, and most of his notebooks are simple recordkeeping.”
“Will I get them?” Beth asks again.
“Elizabeth-”
“Will I get them?”
He gives her a look, one that she knows quite well. It is the look she gets when she is being “obstinate,” whatever that means. Her mother and father both call her that a lot, but usually under their breath, so she’s never asked what it meant.
“Yes,” he says. “You’ll get his records.”
She nods, satisfied. “Good.” She considers for a moment, then nods again. “Will you tell me a Geoffrey Lestrade story, Daddy?”
The look he gives her this time is different than the “obstinate” look. This one is considering, and heavy, and Beth squirms beneath it. Her father sometimes looks like that at her brother, but he rarely looks at her that way. She doesn’t like it.
“I’ll read you a better story,” he says finally, and pulls another book off one of his shelves, this one just below the shelves of Dr. Watson’s journals. “This is a story that Dr. Watson wrote, when he was living with the greatest detective of all time.”
She perks up. “When did Dr. Watson live with Geoffrey Lestrade?”
“He didn’t, sweetheart,” her father says tenderly, stroking her hair as he sits down in the chair next to her. “He lived with Sherlock Holmes.”
When Beth is seven, her father explains the Lestrade family legacy, as he reads to her “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and dashes her love of Geoffrey Lestrade upon the rocks.
*
When Beth is eight, she is sent to the principal’s office for punching stupid Billy Dozier in his stupid, stupid face.
She sinks low in her seat, kicking the leg of the chair and crossing her arms over her chest. Principal Hunter regards her mildly, pulling up the vid of what happened from the school security scans. Beth pretends not to watch, but she can’t help admiring her form a little, when she clocks him in the recording.
Principal Hunter closes the vid with a sigh. “You know we don’t condone fighting in school, Beth,” she says, sounding disappointed. Beth scowls.
“He deserved it,” she says.
“Oh?” Principal Hunter says, and opens the vid again, swiveling the view to different angles, hmming and hahing every now and then. She closes it again. “It looks to me like the two of you were whispering quite a bit, and then you all of a sudden stood up and punched him. What happened?”
She sighs and crosses her arms tighter over her chest. “He said that I wasn’t a good detective, because I’m a Lestrade,” she mumbles.
“You’re mumbling, Beth; I didn’t hear that.”
“I said,” she says, louder and with a sigh, “that he said I wasn’t a good detective, because I’m a Lestrade.”
“I see,” says Principal Hunter, clearly not seeing.
Beth sighs again. “Someone took Mr. Jeavons’ new markers. I knew it was Billy, and I told him to give them back. He said that I was wrong, and that I wasn’t a good detective because I’m a Lestrade, and everyone knows that Lestrades are always wrong, that all the holofilms say so.”
Principal Hunter looks at her, and Beth has the sinking sensation that she is trying very hard not to laugh. She doesn’t think that’s fair. He was mean, and he was mean about her family, and he deserved to get hit.
“When people tell lies about us,” Principal Hunter says, “we do not hit them.” Beth starts to roll her eyes, but Principal Hunter forges ahead, ignoring her. “When people tell lies about us, we prove them wrong.”
The words stick with Beth for quite a while, long after Principal Hunter has dismissed her with an after school detention. She thinks about it all through maths and English and history, and then all through her detention.
She thinks about it all night long, and over breakfast the next morning, and on her way to school. She thinks about it as she sneaks into the classroom early and makes her way to Billy’s cubby, and thinks about it as she pulls out a brown paper bag that is wedged behind his gym shoes, and thinks about it some more when the brown paper bag yields up Mr. Jeavons’ new markers.
She thinks about it when she writes the note, and she thinks about it when Mr. Jeavons opens the note to read after morning attendance, while they do their morning worksheet, and she thinks about it with a broad smile as Mr. Jeavons calls Billy up to his desk and Billy’s head swings around to look at her with wide, frightened eyes.
Billy never calls her a bad detective again.
*
Beth is nine when she solves her first real mystery.
It still isn’t grand, not like the ones that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson- and yes, Inspector Lestrade, because she still refuses to accept the stories and the holofilms and the other books and the plays and the radio dramas as the full truth- solved. But going to the Yard and explaining that the vandal they’ve been keeping an eye out for is Jemima Trinkle (because Beth spotted splatters of paint on her school uniform and heard the telltale sound of spray cans in her locker when she was shoving her bag in) is extremely satisfying. The constable writes down the information she gives her carefully, warns her against snooping around too much lest she come upon trouble, and sends her home.
“I solved a mystery,” she tells her mother, father, and brother that night. Her brother wiggles his ears and sticks out his tongue at her. She does the same back. Little brothers are so annoying. Her mother smiles at her, and then looks over at her father. Beth can tell that she thinks she’s being subtle, but she catches the slight rolling of her eyes, affectionate though it is.
“That’s nice, Elizabeth. How was school today?” her father asks.
She grinds her teeth in response, and stares down at her plate.
If it takes her forever, she’s going to prove herself.
*
When she’s eleven, Beth and her English class take a field trip to the Sherlock Holmes museum.
It’s mostly defunct these days, slowly sagging and falling apart despite the continual love of Sherlock Holmes by the media- another new holofilm was released last week. Beth thinks it’s because people love the myth of Sherlock Holmes, what he’s become (in the newest holofilm he’s an alien, and Dr. Watson is the human he’s chosen to study) while the museum focuses on who he actually was: a drug addict, likely mentally ill, obsessive and messy and far, far too human to be anyone’s hero.
Beth wanders through the museum, looking at the collection of pipes and the artfully hidden-yet-not syringes and the old photographs and the disguises behind glass cases. She stops in front of one newspaper, mounted to the wall, and squints at the miniscule text. It’s a story about a burglary back in 1896. According to the newspaper, Inspector Lestrade located the thief and brought him to justice. At the very end, there is one sentence that simply says “Scotland Yard was aided by Sherlock Holmes, amateur detective”.
Next to the newspaper, there is a placard, which she reads equally carefully. It explains that the theft the newspaper is talking about was actually on a member of the House of Lords, and that the item stolen was a family heirloom. The Lord insisted that Sherlock Holmes be brought in, and within three days Holmes had solved the mystery, although he refused to have his name associated with the case.
Beth stares at that placard for a long time, not noticing her classmates shoving past her.
She wonders- is the newspaper telling the truth? Did her ancestor really locate the thief and bring him to justice? Or is it like the placard says: that Sherlock Holmes did all the work while Inspector Lestrade was a fool, and in the end he gave Lestrade all the credit? Beth reaches out and traces the words of the newspaper with her finger, a force field preventing her from smearing the ink.
She badly wants to smear the ink.
The rest of the museum is predictable, half ridiculous recreations (is she really supposed to believe that the wax bust displayed is THE wax bust from Mazarin? is she really supposed to believe that Holmes kept the harpoon mounted in his sitting room at all times, or that Dr. Watson would have nothing to say about that? is she supposed to believe that the patriotic bullet holes are the originals and not terrible facsimiles made with an ice pick?) and half honest artifact (the faded photographs of criminals in Holmes’ bedroom are real, she’d swear on it, as is the Persian slipper and one of the dressing gowns). Beth wanders through the rooms, feeling like someone is looking over her shoulder, but also feeling like something is missing. She listens to her friends jabber excitedly about the old-fashioned chemistry set, and wraps her arms around herself.
On the way back to school, she realizes what bothered her so badly in the museum.
It wasn’t just the casual dismissal of Inspector Lestrade, something that Beth has grown resigned to over the years. It was the absence of Dr. Watson in the rooms, so carefully decorated and assembled to represent the real 221B Baker Street, but without even a desk for Watson, let alone a bedroom. It was the absence of Mrs. Hudson, who owned 221B Baker Street. The museum was exactly what it claimed to be: the Sherlock Holmes museum. And no one else. It is like everyone else never existed.
It disturbs Beth, in a way that the usual sneers about Inspector Lestrade don’t anymore.
When she gets home from school, she surprises her mother by asking if they can go see the newest Sherlock Holmes holofilm.
“Are you sure, Elizabeth?” her mother asks, already grabbing her coat. “You usually don’t want to see the holofilms. You know that Inspector Lestrade isn’t the hero.”
“I’m sure,” she says quietly, and her mother frowns with concern, but takes her to the cinema, buys the tickets and even splurges on getting them popcorn, something that her health-conscious father would never allow them to have. Her mother puts a finger to her lips and winks when she hands over her card, and Beth can’t help but smile a little.
They watch the holofilm, people surrounding them. Her mother giggles, gasps, groans in exactly the right moments, along with the rest of the audience.
Beth watches in silence.
When it’s over, her mother scoops up their things and leads her back to their car. “Did you enjoy yourself, dear?” she asks, getting in behind the wheel.
Beth stares down at her lap. She isn’t sure what to say. Finally, she settles on, “Yes.”
She didn’t, not really. It was ridiculous and over the top, with too many twists and turns and utterly ridiculous plot lines. But it reassured her, in a way. Because Dr. Watson was there, always a step behind Holmes, but there. And Mrs. Hudson was there, forever exasperated and forever forgiving her tenant’s strange ways, but there. And Inspector Lestrade was there, and yes, he was a fool, and no, he didn’t come close to solving any of the mysteries in the holofilm, but he was there.
Beth wishes, viciously, for the Sherlock Holmes museum to finally close, for it to fall in on itself. Because while the films are wrong, while they tell lies, at least they don’t pretend that Sherlock Holmes was all alone in the world.
Beth would rather everyone be thought a fool than for everyone to be forgotten entirely.
Being erased from existence terrifies her.
*
At thirteen, her grandmother dies.
Her father is solemn and silent. Her mother cries a bit, here and there. Her brother shakes with sobs.
Beth locks herself in her room and stares at a picture of her grandmother and her from when she was a baby.
She takes after her Grandmother Lestrade, in a lot of ways. They have the same eyes, similar bone structure. The personality of a bulldog, as her Aunt Meg always said. When the family got together, no one ever exclaimed about how much she looked like her mother or father; it was always how much she was like Grandmother Lestrade.
They were close. She’s going to miss her quite a bit.
After the cremation, her Grandmother Lestrade’s solicitor calls them all together to discuss the will she left behind. Beth sits in a large armchair and stares down at her shiny shoes, bought especially for the funeral. She thinks that her Grandmother Lestrade would have been happy if she had showed up in her scuffed boots, but her father wouldn’t hear of it.
Most of the stuff being divided up by the will is of no interest to Beth. She doesn’t care who gets her Grandmother Lestrade’s house or money or stuff. She just wants her Grandmother Lestrade back.
“Elizabeth Lestrade… is that you?” the solicitor- she thinks his name is Mr. Jeffords, but she wasn’t paying much attention- asks, and Beth looks up, nodding.
“Well, Elizabeth, Mrs. Lestrade left you her Geoffrey Lestrade collection. It’s set aside in her house, so you should be able to locate it fairly easily when we head over to settle the estate.”
Her father lets out a gusty sigh, but her mother gives him a sharp rap on the hand and smiles waterily at Beth. Beth just nods again and goes back to staring at her shiny shoes. She can’t run in these, not easily. She doesn’t like to wear shoes where she can’t run.
A few days later, Beth locks herself in her bedroom again and looks down at the box her grandmother left her.
It’s small, with scraps of what most would call rubbish in it. Beth knows better. She carefully lifts out a scrap of paper and finds that it’s a newspaper article held suspended between a variable force field. It’s old- similar to the one that Beth saw in the Sherlock Holmes Museum years ago, before it was finally shut down due to lack of funds. When she skims it, she smiles. It’s an article about the efforts of Scotland Yard in 1882, with a quote from Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade.
Beth digs further into the box, pulls out a few more newspaper articles carefully preserved, and an antiquated police badge. There are one or two old notebooks, filled with Geoffrey Lestrade’s meticulous and pained handwriting, more expansive than the ledgers her father showed her when she asked about Geoffrey Lestrade’s records. There’s a set of antique cufflinks, clearly cheap but carefully cared for. There’s a tie tack, of much higher quality. A cigarette case, of such a quality that Beth assumes that it must have been a gift. There are some letters, and a photograph of Geoffrey Lestrade in his uniform, looking stiff and rigid and unbearably small.
Beth goes through each item carefully, familiar with her grandmother’s sense of humor and love of puzzles. She knows there will be something hidden among Geoffrey Lestrade’s belongings that will be her grandmother’s. She opens every envelope, checks the binding of the notebooks, searches the newspaper clippings for discrete markings indicating a code, and finally finds what she’s looking for behind the photograph, pressed between it and the back of the frame. It’s a single scrap of paper, with her grandmother’s handwriting on it.
She doesn’t read it. She goes to school, laughs with her friends, gets into a few fights with the bullies that insist on picking on the younger kids, turns in two papers that she isn’t especially proud of, takes a maths test. She babysits her younger brother, who proclaims that he’s old enough to stay home alone when their mother and father go out. She goes to the Holocade and beats her best friend Tonya, as well as her own high score. She reads her books, all mysteries and sci-fi novels, and bites back the bitter taste in her mouth when one detective is compared to “that Inspector Lestrade fellow” after he fails to find an important clue.
Almost a month after her grandmother dies, Beth reads the scrap her grandmother left behind.
It’s short, and not necessarily the loving message that most granddaughters would receive, but it’s so obviously from her grandmother, and so obviously meant for her, that Beth smiles and wipes tears from her eyes.
Being a Lestrade is about having faith.
*
When she’s fifteen, there are a series of muggings in the area where she lives. Beth follows the investigations in the news at first, interested to see what Scotland Yard is saying about the attacks that seem to target no one in particular. They don’t have much to say, really, just that it’s the work of a gang of kids.
She’s skeptical, so she goes looking.
It isn’t hard to talk with the rougher set of people at school- Beth has never quite gotten out of her habit of getting into fights, much to her teacher’s despair (“you’re such a good student, why do you do this?” as if being smart and being a troublemaker are mutually exclusive), and so she’s known to them as much as she knows them. She sidles up to Johnny Miles, established king of petty school crimes, and says, “Know anything about the muggings on the south side?”
Johnny gives her a look, cracks his knuckles, and says, “Know the police are looking into my crew for it.”
“Take it it wasn’t your crew, then?” she asks.
“No,” he says flatly.
“Want me to prove it?”
Her offer gets him asking. He asks his girlfriend Lupe, who talks to her cousin Lorenzo, who checks in with zir brother Jared. The word spreads, and soon Johnny tells her that none of the gangs are owning up to mugging anyone, especially not lately, with the Yardies watching them so carefully.
Beth thinks about it some more, and then goes back to the news reports, tracking down the names of all the mugging victims. She writes them down, and starts looking into them.
It doesn’t take her long to find the pattern that no one else bothered to see. All the mugging victims are related, albeit in a convoluted sort of way that takes lots of paper to figure out. She doubts the victims even know each other. Once she figures out that they’re all family, it isn’t hard to find the one distant relative that hasn’t been mugged, the one who is so distant that he is barely considered family, the one who seems to begrudge the fact that all of his relatives have a line on the family fortune while he isn’t even acknowledged.
She goes to Scotland Yard and presents her evidence carefully, making sure to line it up neatly, so they can follow her train of reasoning.
“It’s suspicious,” she concludes, looking at the constable. “I’m not saying he’s the one doing it, but I do think he’s worth looking into.”
The constable looks at the documents she uploaded to his ‘pad, and then looks back her, scowling. “What did you say your name was, again?”
She didn’t give him a name, and she hesitates but finally says, “Elizabeth Lestrade.”
The constable purses his lips. “Well, Ms. Lestrade, we here at Scotland Yard certainly appreciate tips from the public. I’ll be certain to have one of our people look into it.”
The way he says it doesn’t give Beth much faith.
She goes home, and she does her homework, and she calls Johnny to let him know that she did her best, and to tell the gangs to keep their heads down for now.
Almost two months later, Beth is watching the news when it’s announced that Mortimer Tregennis has been arrested for mugging members of his own family in the hopes of acquiring wealth that he had been denied access to.
“It was only a matter of time before Scotland Yard’s hardworking inspectors found the culprit,” the newscaster concludes the story. Beth stares at the screen for quite a while, wondering how far down the pile her tip ended up that it took them two months to arrest the man.
She wonders if it was her name, her age, or her sex that put it so far down in the pile.
*
At sixteen, Beth and all of her friends are trying to figure out what they want to do next with their lives. There are aptitude tests and tests to determine whether or not they go to University, and tests that tell them what they absolutely should not do, and Beth can’t help but think it’s all bullshit.
“What do you want to do?” she interrupts Tonya in the middle of her worried tirade about how all the aptitude tests tell her she should be a doctor, while her scholastic results are urging her towards something more mechanically based.
“Well, the tests-” Tonya begins, but Beth interrupts her with an impatient wave of her hand.
“Forget the tests,” Beth growls. She hates the tests. “What do you want to do?”
Tonya chews on her lip for a moment, and then straightens her spine and tosses her hair over her shoulder. “I want to be a fashion designer,” she says. “I like fashion, I have great taste, and I think it would be fun.”
“Then do that,” she replies.
Tonya, Dominique, and Layla all frown at her. “But Beth,” Layla says patiently, “the tests are all geared towards helping us realize our fullest potential.”
She grinds her teeth. “Your fullest potential isn’t much good if you’re miserable while doing it.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” Dominique challenges her.
She doesn’t have to think about it for very long. “I want to be an inspector for Scotland Yard,” she says.
To her dismay, her friends burst into laughter. She glares at them until they finally subside, and Tonya looks at her apologetically. “Sorry, Bethy. But- why would you want to be an inspector? You’re a Lestrade. Just going to be history repeating itself, yeah?”
Beth looks at Tonya, who has been her best friend since she was nine and she found her crying in the bathroom because her pet cat had run away. Beth found her cat for her, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Dominique and Layla came later- she can understand their laughter. But not Tonya’s, who has been with her every step of the way.
“Because,” she says, voice steel, “when people tell lies about us, we prove them wrong. And I’m going to prove them all wrong.”
She doesn’t tell them the second part, because that part is just for her. Being a Lestrade is about having faith, and Beth has faith that she’s going to show the world what being a Lestrade is all about.
*
She goes to University, gets her degree, and then studies for her certificate in knowledge of policing. After she takes the test and passes it (with no mistakes, she’s pleased to note, counting it as one more step in redeeming the Lestrade name), she applies to Scotland Yard.
Within a month, she’s in training to become a new constable.
Beth goes to bed each night grinning.
*
On the training course, a voice comes on over the comms.
“Lestrade! Stop kicking down all the doors!”
Beth laughs and kicks down another one, swinging up her blaster in front of her as she enters.
Her name means one thing in the textbooks (fool, phony, pathetic), but here, in the place where it really matters? Her name means something different, something uniquely Beth.
“Lestrade!”
*
Her first week on the job is boring. Being a constable isn’t all chasing bad guys and solving crimes. But she pushes through it, ignores the niggling sense of disappointment as she pulls over people who apparently should never have been issued a flying license.
(She made her driving instructor throw up once. She takes no small amount of pride in that.)
She grinds through her second, third, fourth week of boring traffic duty. She slogs through two, three, four months of work that she knows she needs to get through in order to complete her probationary period, so that she can specialize in criminal investigations.
It pays off. In her fifth month, she notices something unusual on her regular beat.
There’s an apartment building on her beat, one of many, but Beth has always paid particular attention to it because it is oddly well maintained in a neighborhood that is uniformly rundown and largely abandoned. She asked her sergeant about it once, and he told her it was owned by one person, who bought it out and kept it up in order to keep the slow urban decay from eating it up. Whenever she walks by it, it’s dark.
Tonight, there are lights on in three different windows.
Beth pauses in her beat, stares at it for a minute. It could be nothing, technically. The man who owns it could simply be checking in, making some repairs. It’s possible he sold the building, and the new owners are inspecting it. The lights could have been bumped by an animal that got in. There is a rising raccoon epidemic in New London, and one of them could have eaten some of the wires.
None of that reassures Beth, though. There are lots of little things niggling at her, like the pat answer from her sergeant about the building, the strange assortments of people she’s seen hanging around the building before, the fact that the building isn’t far from both an Underground entrance and the wharf, the memos circulating around her office about the human trafficking ring that they think might exist, but haven’t been able to definitively prove.
It’s above her pay grade. She should hand her suspicions over to an inspector, or at least to someone who isn’t a probationary constable. She should.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she calls into the borough and reports that she’s going to investigate suspicious activity in the building, and then goes in before she can hear a response back from dispatch.
Two hours later, they’ve busted the human trafficking ring wide open, rescued forty-two people from captivity, discovered a corrupt sergeant, and arrested fifteen people.
When they whisper Beth’s name around the borough command center the next day, it’s with respect, rather than an air of derision and sarcasm.
*
Four years later, when she’s a detective sergeant, the University asks her to come in and give a lecture on modern policing to their criminology students.
At the end of her lecture, a student raises zir hand. Beth calls on them, and the student says, “Are you related to the Inspector Lestrade from the Sherlock Holmes stories?”
Beth smiles politely. “I am, yes.”
The student purses their lips. “Isn’t that hard? Being a Lestrade in the CID? Do they laugh at you?”
Beth thinks about it. She doesn’t want to tell this student about the struggle to get people to take her seriously. She doesn’t want to tell them about how new constables laugh themselves sick when they learn her full name, how she’s had constables completely disregard her orders because she’s a Lestrade. She wants to tell them something positive, because this is a University lecture, and these kids are potentially going to be her constables someday, or her forensics team, or her expert witnesses.
“They laugh, yes, but let me tell you something about being a Lestrade,” she says evenly. “Did you know there has pretty much always been a Lestrade in the force? That’s right- Geoffrey Lestrade of the original stories had a son that continued on his work. And a great-grandson that also went into the police force. There was a Lestrade on the French police at one point, and in the early twenty-first century, there was Lestrade that started in Scotland Yard, then became a private detective who worked all over the world- his assistant wrote about his adventures, you can look them up.
“There was more than just one Lestrade in Scotland Yard, with a variety of success. Some were excellent detectives; some were less so.”
She thinks about it for a moment, trying to put into words all the thoughts and feelings she’s had over the years. “There’s a lot to live up to, being a Lestrade,” she settles on. “But I intend to live up to my ancestors. Personally,” she says, grinning at the student who asked the question, “I intend to be the best Lestrade who has ever worked for the Yard. They won’t find much to laugh about for long.”
After the class is over, Lestrade looks at the roster and the seating assignment and discovers that the student that asked her the question is listed as I. Adler.
It’s a coincidence, she knows- she’s done the research, and Irene Norton née Adler never had children- but she imagines that the name alone must be a heavy burden to carry.
She wonders which is easier- to be taken as a fool, or to be taken as all that things that Irene Adler has become synonymous with.
*
The day she is promoted to Detective Inspector, her father sends her Watson’s journals with a note saying that she’s earned them.
Beth sets them up in her home, proudly on display, next to the small records that Geoffrey Lestrade left behind that she has displayed as an act of defiance since she first joined Scotland Yard.
*
She calls the CompuDroid Watson because he is the perfect “helpmeet,” as Holmes described him, and because he’s good at helping her stop crime, and Beth has always believed that Watson wrote himself far more stupid than reality in order to give Holmes all the glory.
But she also calls him Watson so she can laugh at people’s reactions when they see “Lestrade-Watson” listed on the duty roster.
She loves to defy what people expect from her.
*
Despite what people will say later on, she doesn’t resurrect Holmes because she needs him.
Beth knows, without a doubt, that she could stop Moriarty, given enough time and energy and focus. She’s good at her job, an excellent detective. She doesn’t have any doubts about her competence, and when the occasional constable giggles at her name, she rolls her eyes at them and casually talks about that one murder she solved, the one with all the grisly details that inevitably makes green constables literally green.
But the key words there are time and energy and focus, and Beth doesn’t want to see the rest of New London suffer because her Yardies are fixated on one criminal only.
Beth resurrects Holmes because having him work on Moriarty means she’ll have the ability to keep her concentration on crime as a whole.
It doesn’t quite work out like that, she discovers the first time that Holmes noses his way onto one of her regular cases. She feels a great deal of sympathy for her ancestor as Holmes stands there and rattles on about eyes and brains, as though she had neither.
She grits her teeth and reminds herself it’s worth it, for the sake of New London.
*
“You know, he wasn’t at all like the holofilms make him out to be,” Holmes says apropos to nothing while at a crime scene. Beth looks up from the body and frowns.
“I don’t think William Kirwan spent much time in the holofilms,” she says.
Holmes shakes his head. “Not William Kirwan. Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade.”
Beth’s heart begins to pound, almost painfully. “Oh?” she says, trying to sound lighthearted as she moves around the body. She looks over at Watson. “Watson, can you do a scan of his body? Anything unusual?”
Holmes ignores Watson as he clunks past them. “In the holofilms, Lestrade is always made out to be an imbecile. I’ve watched a good number of them now, curious about my legacy, and it’s the same in almost everyone. A good enough man, but a terrible inspector.”
“I know,” she says, scowling. She looks over at Watson, but he’s still scanning away, apparently oblivious to the conversation.
“It wasn’t true, you know. He was a good man, yes, but he was also, in my opinion, an excellent police officer. Lacking in imagination, perhaps, but tireless in his pursuit of justice.”
Beth folds her arms over her chest. “Why are you telling me this?”
Holmes gives her a puzzled look. “I imagine it’s been a source of distress to you, having people laugh because you’re a Lestrade. I hear them, at the Yard,” he confides.
“When people tell lies about you, you prove them wrong,” she says lightly. “They might laugh at my name, but they don’t laugh at me.” She doesn’t want to talk about this with him. She doesn’t want to know who Geoffrey Lestrade really was or wasn’t. She’s spent years trying to muddle through the records, looking for the truth. As a child, it tore her up, her family being a joke. As a teenager, it drove her.
As an adult, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s good at her job. And if there is one thing Beth knows, it’s that she’s a good inspector. She helps people. She stops crime. She kicks down doors. Who Geoffrey Lestrade was or wasn’t isn’t important. Beth knows who Beth Lestrade is. That’s what is important.
“Would you like to know about him? Who he really was, I mean, not the lies Watson published to keep us all safe?” Holmes asks.
She considers, just for a moment. But she finds she doesn’t need Holmes to tell her anything.
“Maybe someday,” she says, “but for now, we have a murderer to find.”
Being a Lestrade is about having faith.
Beth has faith in herself.
That faith is enough.
Recipient: sanguinity
Author:: k_e_p
’Verse: Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
Character/Pairings: Beth Lestrade
Word Count: 6157
Rating: Teen and Up
Warnings: Mention of human trafficking
Summary: Lestrade has something to prove.
When Beth is four, her grandmother sits down and tells her a bedtime story, one that she never really forgets. Her grandmother tells her the story of the greatest detective in the world, in all of history.
He was clever, and compassionate. He was tenacious, and charming. He never once hesitated in the face of danger, and he always saved the day. He had few friends, but those he did have were friends for life. He wasn’t always liked, or understood, but he strove to do right in the world. He was a believer in justice, and in the law, and above everything else, he was good.
His name was Geoffrey Lestrade, and he was her many times great-grandfather.
*
When Beth is seven, her father explains the Lestrade family legacy, taking her into his study full of real books, things she had never seen before except in holovids.
“These are John Watson’s journals,” her father explains, handing her a musty-smelling book. The cover is soft and worn in her small hands. Beth gently opens the book and looks at the scrawling, distracted handwriting inside. She can’t read it- it is too messy- but she can see the care put into the words. “They are our family’s to keep,” her father continues, “and we have kept them faithfully for hundreds of years.”
“Will they be mine someday?” she asks as her father carefully takes the journal back from her, putting it back with the others. She studies the row of journals, mismatched in color and size, that takes up three shelves on the wall.
Her father nods. “They will, when you’re old enough.”
She bites her lip, thinking back to the stories that Grandmother Lestrade tells her whenever she visits. “Will the Lestrade journals become mine, too?”
Her father stares at her blankly. “What Lestrade journals?”
“The Lestrade journals,” she repeats. “The ones that Geoffrey Lestrade wrote. Where he talks about his adventures, and his cases, and his work with Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes.”
Her father sighs and sits her down in a large armchair by the window. Outside, Beth can see cars flying by. They don’t live in a big house, her family, but they live up high, and she loves watching the cars go by at night. She dreams of the day she will get to fly a car, just like her father does, just like her mother. “There are no Lestrade journals, Elizabeth.”
She frowns. “But Grandmother Lestrade tells me all about Geoffrey Lestrade, and everything he did, and how he was the best detective in the world.”
“Grandmother Lestrade,” her father replies tightly, his face strained like it always is when he talks about his mother, “is making up stories. Geoffrey Lestrade kept some small records, it’s true, but the man was barely literate, and most of his notebooks are simple recordkeeping.”
“Will I get them?” Beth asks again.
“Elizabeth-”
“Will I get them?”
He gives her a look, one that she knows quite well. It is the look she gets when she is being “obstinate,” whatever that means. Her mother and father both call her that a lot, but usually under their breath, so she’s never asked what it meant.
“Yes,” he says. “You’ll get his records.”
She nods, satisfied. “Good.” She considers for a moment, then nods again. “Will you tell me a Geoffrey Lestrade story, Daddy?”
The look he gives her this time is different than the “obstinate” look. This one is considering, and heavy, and Beth squirms beneath it. Her father sometimes looks like that at her brother, but he rarely looks at her that way. She doesn’t like it.
“I’ll read you a better story,” he says finally, and pulls another book off one of his shelves, this one just below the shelves of Dr. Watson’s journals. “This is a story that Dr. Watson wrote, when he was living with the greatest detective of all time.”
She perks up. “When did Dr. Watson live with Geoffrey Lestrade?”
“He didn’t, sweetheart,” her father says tenderly, stroking her hair as he sits down in the chair next to her. “He lived with Sherlock Holmes.”
When Beth is seven, her father explains the Lestrade family legacy, as he reads to her “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and dashes her love of Geoffrey Lestrade upon the rocks.
*
When Beth is eight, she is sent to the principal’s office for punching stupid Billy Dozier in his stupid, stupid face.
She sinks low in her seat, kicking the leg of the chair and crossing her arms over her chest. Principal Hunter regards her mildly, pulling up the vid of what happened from the school security scans. Beth pretends not to watch, but she can’t help admiring her form a little, when she clocks him in the recording.
Principal Hunter closes the vid with a sigh. “You know we don’t condone fighting in school, Beth,” she says, sounding disappointed. Beth scowls.
“He deserved it,” she says.
“Oh?” Principal Hunter says, and opens the vid again, swiveling the view to different angles, hmming and hahing every now and then. She closes it again. “It looks to me like the two of you were whispering quite a bit, and then you all of a sudden stood up and punched him. What happened?”
She sighs and crosses her arms tighter over her chest. “He said that I wasn’t a good detective, because I’m a Lestrade,” she mumbles.
“You’re mumbling, Beth; I didn’t hear that.”
“I said,” she says, louder and with a sigh, “that he said I wasn’t a good detective, because I’m a Lestrade.”
“I see,” says Principal Hunter, clearly not seeing.
Beth sighs again. “Someone took Mr. Jeavons’ new markers. I knew it was Billy, and I told him to give them back. He said that I was wrong, and that I wasn’t a good detective because I’m a Lestrade, and everyone knows that Lestrades are always wrong, that all the holofilms say so.”
Principal Hunter looks at her, and Beth has the sinking sensation that she is trying very hard not to laugh. She doesn’t think that’s fair. He was mean, and he was mean about her family, and he deserved to get hit.
“When people tell lies about us,” Principal Hunter says, “we do not hit them.” Beth starts to roll her eyes, but Principal Hunter forges ahead, ignoring her. “When people tell lies about us, we prove them wrong.”
The words stick with Beth for quite a while, long after Principal Hunter has dismissed her with an after school detention. She thinks about it all through maths and English and history, and then all through her detention.
She thinks about it all night long, and over breakfast the next morning, and on her way to school. She thinks about it as she sneaks into the classroom early and makes her way to Billy’s cubby, and thinks about it as she pulls out a brown paper bag that is wedged behind his gym shoes, and thinks about it some more when the brown paper bag yields up Mr. Jeavons’ new markers.
She thinks about it when she writes the note, and she thinks about it when Mr. Jeavons opens the note to read after morning attendance, while they do their morning worksheet, and she thinks about it with a broad smile as Mr. Jeavons calls Billy up to his desk and Billy’s head swings around to look at her with wide, frightened eyes.
Billy never calls her a bad detective again.
*
Beth is nine when she solves her first real mystery.
It still isn’t grand, not like the ones that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson- and yes, Inspector Lestrade, because she still refuses to accept the stories and the holofilms and the other books and the plays and the radio dramas as the full truth- solved. But going to the Yard and explaining that the vandal they’ve been keeping an eye out for is Jemima Trinkle (because Beth spotted splatters of paint on her school uniform and heard the telltale sound of spray cans in her locker when she was shoving her bag in) is extremely satisfying. The constable writes down the information she gives her carefully, warns her against snooping around too much lest she come upon trouble, and sends her home.
“I solved a mystery,” she tells her mother, father, and brother that night. Her brother wiggles his ears and sticks out his tongue at her. She does the same back. Little brothers are so annoying. Her mother smiles at her, and then looks over at her father. Beth can tell that she thinks she’s being subtle, but she catches the slight rolling of her eyes, affectionate though it is.
“That’s nice, Elizabeth. How was school today?” her father asks.
She grinds her teeth in response, and stares down at her plate.
If it takes her forever, she’s going to prove herself.
*
When she’s eleven, Beth and her English class take a field trip to the Sherlock Holmes museum.
It’s mostly defunct these days, slowly sagging and falling apart despite the continual love of Sherlock Holmes by the media- another new holofilm was released last week. Beth thinks it’s because people love the myth of Sherlock Holmes, what he’s become (in the newest holofilm he’s an alien, and Dr. Watson is the human he’s chosen to study) while the museum focuses on who he actually was: a drug addict, likely mentally ill, obsessive and messy and far, far too human to be anyone’s hero.
Beth wanders through the museum, looking at the collection of pipes and the artfully hidden-yet-not syringes and the old photographs and the disguises behind glass cases. She stops in front of one newspaper, mounted to the wall, and squints at the miniscule text. It’s a story about a burglary back in 1896. According to the newspaper, Inspector Lestrade located the thief and brought him to justice. At the very end, there is one sentence that simply says “Scotland Yard was aided by Sherlock Holmes, amateur detective”.
Next to the newspaper, there is a placard, which she reads equally carefully. It explains that the theft the newspaper is talking about was actually on a member of the House of Lords, and that the item stolen was a family heirloom. The Lord insisted that Sherlock Holmes be brought in, and within three days Holmes had solved the mystery, although he refused to have his name associated with the case.
Beth stares at that placard for a long time, not noticing her classmates shoving past her.
She wonders- is the newspaper telling the truth? Did her ancestor really locate the thief and bring him to justice? Or is it like the placard says: that Sherlock Holmes did all the work while Inspector Lestrade was a fool, and in the end he gave Lestrade all the credit? Beth reaches out and traces the words of the newspaper with her finger, a force field preventing her from smearing the ink.
She badly wants to smear the ink.
The rest of the museum is predictable, half ridiculous recreations (is she really supposed to believe that the wax bust displayed is THE wax bust from Mazarin? is she really supposed to believe that Holmes kept the harpoon mounted in his sitting room at all times, or that Dr. Watson would have nothing to say about that? is she supposed to believe that the patriotic bullet holes are the originals and not terrible facsimiles made with an ice pick?) and half honest artifact (the faded photographs of criminals in Holmes’ bedroom are real, she’d swear on it, as is the Persian slipper and one of the dressing gowns). Beth wanders through the rooms, feeling like someone is looking over her shoulder, but also feeling like something is missing. She listens to her friends jabber excitedly about the old-fashioned chemistry set, and wraps her arms around herself.
On the way back to school, she realizes what bothered her so badly in the museum.
It wasn’t just the casual dismissal of Inspector Lestrade, something that Beth has grown resigned to over the years. It was the absence of Dr. Watson in the rooms, so carefully decorated and assembled to represent the real 221B Baker Street, but without even a desk for Watson, let alone a bedroom. It was the absence of Mrs. Hudson, who owned 221B Baker Street. The museum was exactly what it claimed to be: the Sherlock Holmes museum. And no one else. It is like everyone else never existed.
It disturbs Beth, in a way that the usual sneers about Inspector Lestrade don’t anymore.
When she gets home from school, she surprises her mother by asking if they can go see the newest Sherlock Holmes holofilm.
“Are you sure, Elizabeth?” her mother asks, already grabbing her coat. “You usually don’t want to see the holofilms. You know that Inspector Lestrade isn’t the hero.”
“I’m sure,” she says quietly, and her mother frowns with concern, but takes her to the cinema, buys the tickets and even splurges on getting them popcorn, something that her health-conscious father would never allow them to have. Her mother puts a finger to her lips and winks when she hands over her card, and Beth can’t help but smile a little.
They watch the holofilm, people surrounding them. Her mother giggles, gasps, groans in exactly the right moments, along with the rest of the audience.
Beth watches in silence.
When it’s over, her mother scoops up their things and leads her back to their car. “Did you enjoy yourself, dear?” she asks, getting in behind the wheel.
Beth stares down at her lap. She isn’t sure what to say. Finally, she settles on, “Yes.”
She didn’t, not really. It was ridiculous and over the top, with too many twists and turns and utterly ridiculous plot lines. But it reassured her, in a way. Because Dr. Watson was there, always a step behind Holmes, but there. And Mrs. Hudson was there, forever exasperated and forever forgiving her tenant’s strange ways, but there. And Inspector Lestrade was there, and yes, he was a fool, and no, he didn’t come close to solving any of the mysteries in the holofilm, but he was there.
Beth wishes, viciously, for the Sherlock Holmes museum to finally close, for it to fall in on itself. Because while the films are wrong, while they tell lies, at least they don’t pretend that Sherlock Holmes was all alone in the world.
Beth would rather everyone be thought a fool than for everyone to be forgotten entirely.
Being erased from existence terrifies her.
*
At thirteen, her grandmother dies.
Her father is solemn and silent. Her mother cries a bit, here and there. Her brother shakes with sobs.
Beth locks herself in her room and stares at a picture of her grandmother and her from when she was a baby.
She takes after her Grandmother Lestrade, in a lot of ways. They have the same eyes, similar bone structure. The personality of a bulldog, as her Aunt Meg always said. When the family got together, no one ever exclaimed about how much she looked like her mother or father; it was always how much she was like Grandmother Lestrade.
They were close. She’s going to miss her quite a bit.
After the cremation, her Grandmother Lestrade’s solicitor calls them all together to discuss the will she left behind. Beth sits in a large armchair and stares down at her shiny shoes, bought especially for the funeral. She thinks that her Grandmother Lestrade would have been happy if she had showed up in her scuffed boots, but her father wouldn’t hear of it.
Most of the stuff being divided up by the will is of no interest to Beth. She doesn’t care who gets her Grandmother Lestrade’s house or money or stuff. She just wants her Grandmother Lestrade back.
“Elizabeth Lestrade… is that you?” the solicitor- she thinks his name is Mr. Jeffords, but she wasn’t paying much attention- asks, and Beth looks up, nodding.
“Well, Elizabeth, Mrs. Lestrade left you her Geoffrey Lestrade collection. It’s set aside in her house, so you should be able to locate it fairly easily when we head over to settle the estate.”
Her father lets out a gusty sigh, but her mother gives him a sharp rap on the hand and smiles waterily at Beth. Beth just nods again and goes back to staring at her shiny shoes. She can’t run in these, not easily. She doesn’t like to wear shoes where she can’t run.
A few days later, Beth locks herself in her bedroom again and looks down at the box her grandmother left her.
It’s small, with scraps of what most would call rubbish in it. Beth knows better. She carefully lifts out a scrap of paper and finds that it’s a newspaper article held suspended between a variable force field. It’s old- similar to the one that Beth saw in the Sherlock Holmes Museum years ago, before it was finally shut down due to lack of funds. When she skims it, she smiles. It’s an article about the efforts of Scotland Yard in 1882, with a quote from Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade.
Beth digs further into the box, pulls out a few more newspaper articles carefully preserved, and an antiquated police badge. There are one or two old notebooks, filled with Geoffrey Lestrade’s meticulous and pained handwriting, more expansive than the ledgers her father showed her when she asked about Geoffrey Lestrade’s records. There’s a set of antique cufflinks, clearly cheap but carefully cared for. There’s a tie tack, of much higher quality. A cigarette case, of such a quality that Beth assumes that it must have been a gift. There are some letters, and a photograph of Geoffrey Lestrade in his uniform, looking stiff and rigid and unbearably small.
Beth goes through each item carefully, familiar with her grandmother’s sense of humor and love of puzzles. She knows there will be something hidden among Geoffrey Lestrade’s belongings that will be her grandmother’s. She opens every envelope, checks the binding of the notebooks, searches the newspaper clippings for discrete markings indicating a code, and finally finds what she’s looking for behind the photograph, pressed between it and the back of the frame. It’s a single scrap of paper, with her grandmother’s handwriting on it.
She doesn’t read it. She goes to school, laughs with her friends, gets into a few fights with the bullies that insist on picking on the younger kids, turns in two papers that she isn’t especially proud of, takes a maths test. She babysits her younger brother, who proclaims that he’s old enough to stay home alone when their mother and father go out. She goes to the Holocade and beats her best friend Tonya, as well as her own high score. She reads her books, all mysteries and sci-fi novels, and bites back the bitter taste in her mouth when one detective is compared to “that Inspector Lestrade fellow” after he fails to find an important clue.
Almost a month after her grandmother dies, Beth reads the scrap her grandmother left behind.
It’s short, and not necessarily the loving message that most granddaughters would receive, but it’s so obviously from her grandmother, and so obviously meant for her, that Beth smiles and wipes tears from her eyes.
Being a Lestrade is about having faith.
*
When she’s fifteen, there are a series of muggings in the area where she lives. Beth follows the investigations in the news at first, interested to see what Scotland Yard is saying about the attacks that seem to target no one in particular. They don’t have much to say, really, just that it’s the work of a gang of kids.
She’s skeptical, so she goes looking.
It isn’t hard to talk with the rougher set of people at school- Beth has never quite gotten out of her habit of getting into fights, much to her teacher’s despair (“you’re such a good student, why do you do this?” as if being smart and being a troublemaker are mutually exclusive), and so she’s known to them as much as she knows them. She sidles up to Johnny Miles, established king of petty school crimes, and says, “Know anything about the muggings on the south side?”
Johnny gives her a look, cracks his knuckles, and says, “Know the police are looking into my crew for it.”
“Take it it wasn’t your crew, then?” she asks.
“No,” he says flatly.
“Want me to prove it?”
Her offer gets him asking. He asks his girlfriend Lupe, who talks to her cousin Lorenzo, who checks in with zir brother Jared. The word spreads, and soon Johnny tells her that none of the gangs are owning up to mugging anyone, especially not lately, with the Yardies watching them so carefully.
Beth thinks about it some more, and then goes back to the news reports, tracking down the names of all the mugging victims. She writes them down, and starts looking into them.
It doesn’t take her long to find the pattern that no one else bothered to see. All the mugging victims are related, albeit in a convoluted sort of way that takes lots of paper to figure out. She doubts the victims even know each other. Once she figures out that they’re all family, it isn’t hard to find the one distant relative that hasn’t been mugged, the one who is so distant that he is barely considered family, the one who seems to begrudge the fact that all of his relatives have a line on the family fortune while he isn’t even acknowledged.
She goes to Scotland Yard and presents her evidence carefully, making sure to line it up neatly, so they can follow her train of reasoning.
“It’s suspicious,” she concludes, looking at the constable. “I’m not saying he’s the one doing it, but I do think he’s worth looking into.”
The constable looks at the documents she uploaded to his ‘pad, and then looks back her, scowling. “What did you say your name was, again?”
She didn’t give him a name, and she hesitates but finally says, “Elizabeth Lestrade.”
The constable purses his lips. “Well, Ms. Lestrade, we here at Scotland Yard certainly appreciate tips from the public. I’ll be certain to have one of our people look into it.”
The way he says it doesn’t give Beth much faith.
She goes home, and she does her homework, and she calls Johnny to let him know that she did her best, and to tell the gangs to keep their heads down for now.
Almost two months later, Beth is watching the news when it’s announced that Mortimer Tregennis has been arrested for mugging members of his own family in the hopes of acquiring wealth that he had been denied access to.
“It was only a matter of time before Scotland Yard’s hardworking inspectors found the culprit,” the newscaster concludes the story. Beth stares at the screen for quite a while, wondering how far down the pile her tip ended up that it took them two months to arrest the man.
She wonders if it was her name, her age, or her sex that put it so far down in the pile.
*
At sixteen, Beth and all of her friends are trying to figure out what they want to do next with their lives. There are aptitude tests and tests to determine whether or not they go to University, and tests that tell them what they absolutely should not do, and Beth can’t help but think it’s all bullshit.
“What do you want to do?” she interrupts Tonya in the middle of her worried tirade about how all the aptitude tests tell her she should be a doctor, while her scholastic results are urging her towards something more mechanically based.
“Well, the tests-” Tonya begins, but Beth interrupts her with an impatient wave of her hand.
“Forget the tests,” Beth growls. She hates the tests. “What do you want to do?”
Tonya chews on her lip for a moment, and then straightens her spine and tosses her hair over her shoulder. “I want to be a fashion designer,” she says. “I like fashion, I have great taste, and I think it would be fun.”
“Then do that,” she replies.
Tonya, Dominique, and Layla all frown at her. “But Beth,” Layla says patiently, “the tests are all geared towards helping us realize our fullest potential.”
She grinds her teeth. “Your fullest potential isn’t much good if you’re miserable while doing it.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” Dominique challenges her.
She doesn’t have to think about it for very long. “I want to be an inspector for Scotland Yard,” she says.
To her dismay, her friends burst into laughter. She glares at them until they finally subside, and Tonya looks at her apologetically. “Sorry, Bethy. But- why would you want to be an inspector? You’re a Lestrade. Just going to be history repeating itself, yeah?”
Beth looks at Tonya, who has been her best friend since she was nine and she found her crying in the bathroom because her pet cat had run away. Beth found her cat for her, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Dominique and Layla came later- she can understand their laughter. But not Tonya’s, who has been with her every step of the way.
“Because,” she says, voice steel, “when people tell lies about us, we prove them wrong. And I’m going to prove them all wrong.”
She doesn’t tell them the second part, because that part is just for her. Being a Lestrade is about having faith, and Beth has faith that she’s going to show the world what being a Lestrade is all about.
*
She goes to University, gets her degree, and then studies for her certificate in knowledge of policing. After she takes the test and passes it (with no mistakes, she’s pleased to note, counting it as one more step in redeeming the Lestrade name), she applies to Scotland Yard.
Within a month, she’s in training to become a new constable.
Beth goes to bed each night grinning.
*
On the training course, a voice comes on over the comms.
“Lestrade! Stop kicking down all the doors!”
Beth laughs and kicks down another one, swinging up her blaster in front of her as she enters.
Her name means one thing in the textbooks (fool, phony, pathetic), but here, in the place where it really matters? Her name means something different, something uniquely Beth.
“Lestrade!”
*
Her first week on the job is boring. Being a constable isn’t all chasing bad guys and solving crimes. But she pushes through it, ignores the niggling sense of disappointment as she pulls over people who apparently should never have been issued a flying license.
(She made her driving instructor throw up once. She takes no small amount of pride in that.)
She grinds through her second, third, fourth week of boring traffic duty. She slogs through two, three, four months of work that she knows she needs to get through in order to complete her probationary period, so that she can specialize in criminal investigations.
It pays off. In her fifth month, she notices something unusual on her regular beat.
There’s an apartment building on her beat, one of many, but Beth has always paid particular attention to it because it is oddly well maintained in a neighborhood that is uniformly rundown and largely abandoned. She asked her sergeant about it once, and he told her it was owned by one person, who bought it out and kept it up in order to keep the slow urban decay from eating it up. Whenever she walks by it, it’s dark.
Tonight, there are lights on in three different windows.
Beth pauses in her beat, stares at it for a minute. It could be nothing, technically. The man who owns it could simply be checking in, making some repairs. It’s possible he sold the building, and the new owners are inspecting it. The lights could have been bumped by an animal that got in. There is a rising raccoon epidemic in New London, and one of them could have eaten some of the wires.
None of that reassures Beth, though. There are lots of little things niggling at her, like the pat answer from her sergeant about the building, the strange assortments of people she’s seen hanging around the building before, the fact that the building isn’t far from both an Underground entrance and the wharf, the memos circulating around her office about the human trafficking ring that they think might exist, but haven’t been able to definitively prove.
It’s above her pay grade. She should hand her suspicions over to an inspector, or at least to someone who isn’t a probationary constable. She should.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she calls into the borough and reports that she’s going to investigate suspicious activity in the building, and then goes in before she can hear a response back from dispatch.
Two hours later, they’ve busted the human trafficking ring wide open, rescued forty-two people from captivity, discovered a corrupt sergeant, and arrested fifteen people.
When they whisper Beth’s name around the borough command center the next day, it’s with respect, rather than an air of derision and sarcasm.
*
Four years later, when she’s a detective sergeant, the University asks her to come in and give a lecture on modern policing to their criminology students.
At the end of her lecture, a student raises zir hand. Beth calls on them, and the student says, “Are you related to the Inspector Lestrade from the Sherlock Holmes stories?”
Beth smiles politely. “I am, yes.”
The student purses their lips. “Isn’t that hard? Being a Lestrade in the CID? Do they laugh at you?”
Beth thinks about it. She doesn’t want to tell this student about the struggle to get people to take her seriously. She doesn’t want to tell them about how new constables laugh themselves sick when they learn her full name, how she’s had constables completely disregard her orders because she’s a Lestrade. She wants to tell them something positive, because this is a University lecture, and these kids are potentially going to be her constables someday, or her forensics team, or her expert witnesses.
“They laugh, yes, but let me tell you something about being a Lestrade,” she says evenly. “Did you know there has pretty much always been a Lestrade in the force? That’s right- Geoffrey Lestrade of the original stories had a son that continued on his work. And a great-grandson that also went into the police force. There was a Lestrade on the French police at one point, and in the early twenty-first century, there was Lestrade that started in Scotland Yard, then became a private detective who worked all over the world- his assistant wrote about his adventures, you can look them up.
“There was more than just one Lestrade in Scotland Yard, with a variety of success. Some were excellent detectives; some were less so.”
She thinks about it for a moment, trying to put into words all the thoughts and feelings she’s had over the years. “There’s a lot to live up to, being a Lestrade,” she settles on. “But I intend to live up to my ancestors. Personally,” she says, grinning at the student who asked the question, “I intend to be the best Lestrade who has ever worked for the Yard. They won’t find much to laugh about for long.”
After the class is over, Lestrade looks at the roster and the seating assignment and discovers that the student that asked her the question is listed as I. Adler.
It’s a coincidence, she knows- she’s done the research, and Irene Norton née Adler never had children- but she imagines that the name alone must be a heavy burden to carry.
She wonders which is easier- to be taken as a fool, or to be taken as all that things that Irene Adler has become synonymous with.
*
The day she is promoted to Detective Inspector, her father sends her Watson’s journals with a note saying that she’s earned them.
Beth sets them up in her home, proudly on display, next to the small records that Geoffrey Lestrade left behind that she has displayed as an act of defiance since she first joined Scotland Yard.
*
She calls the CompuDroid Watson because he is the perfect “helpmeet,” as Holmes described him, and because he’s good at helping her stop crime, and Beth has always believed that Watson wrote himself far more stupid than reality in order to give Holmes all the glory.
But she also calls him Watson so she can laugh at people’s reactions when they see “Lestrade-Watson” listed on the duty roster.
She loves to defy what people expect from her.
*
Despite what people will say later on, she doesn’t resurrect Holmes because she needs him.
Beth knows, without a doubt, that she could stop Moriarty, given enough time and energy and focus. She’s good at her job, an excellent detective. She doesn’t have any doubts about her competence, and when the occasional constable giggles at her name, she rolls her eyes at them and casually talks about that one murder she solved, the one with all the grisly details that inevitably makes green constables literally green.
But the key words there are time and energy and focus, and Beth doesn’t want to see the rest of New London suffer because her Yardies are fixated on one criminal only.
Beth resurrects Holmes because having him work on Moriarty means she’ll have the ability to keep her concentration on crime as a whole.
It doesn’t quite work out like that, she discovers the first time that Holmes noses his way onto one of her regular cases. She feels a great deal of sympathy for her ancestor as Holmes stands there and rattles on about eyes and brains, as though she had neither.
She grits her teeth and reminds herself it’s worth it, for the sake of New London.
*
“You know, he wasn’t at all like the holofilms make him out to be,” Holmes says apropos to nothing while at a crime scene. Beth looks up from the body and frowns.
“I don’t think William Kirwan spent much time in the holofilms,” she says.
Holmes shakes his head. “Not William Kirwan. Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade.”
Beth’s heart begins to pound, almost painfully. “Oh?” she says, trying to sound lighthearted as she moves around the body. She looks over at Watson. “Watson, can you do a scan of his body? Anything unusual?”
Holmes ignores Watson as he clunks past them. “In the holofilms, Lestrade is always made out to be an imbecile. I’ve watched a good number of them now, curious about my legacy, and it’s the same in almost everyone. A good enough man, but a terrible inspector.”
“I know,” she says, scowling. She looks over at Watson, but he’s still scanning away, apparently oblivious to the conversation.
“It wasn’t true, you know. He was a good man, yes, but he was also, in my opinion, an excellent police officer. Lacking in imagination, perhaps, but tireless in his pursuit of justice.”
Beth folds her arms over her chest. “Why are you telling me this?”
Holmes gives her a puzzled look. “I imagine it’s been a source of distress to you, having people laugh because you’re a Lestrade. I hear them, at the Yard,” he confides.
“When people tell lies about you, you prove them wrong,” she says lightly. “They might laugh at my name, but they don’t laugh at me.” She doesn’t want to talk about this with him. She doesn’t want to know who Geoffrey Lestrade really was or wasn’t. She’s spent years trying to muddle through the records, looking for the truth. As a child, it tore her up, her family being a joke. As a teenager, it drove her.
As an adult, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s good at her job. And if there is one thing Beth knows, it’s that she’s a good inspector. She helps people. She stops crime. She kicks down doors. Who Geoffrey Lestrade was or wasn’t isn’t important. Beth knows who Beth Lestrade is. That’s what is important.
“Would you like to know about him? Who he really was, I mean, not the lies Watson published to keep us all safe?” Holmes asks.
She considers, just for a moment. But she finds she doesn’t need Holmes to tell her anything.
“Maybe someday,” she says, “but for now, we have a murderer to find.”
Being a Lestrade is about having faith.
Beth has faith in herself.
That faith is enough.