FIC! Horribly self-indulgent, written-so-I-wouldn't-go-crazy fic, but FIC.
Fic: Downstairs, in Baker Street
Fandoms: ...Ahahahaha, where to start! But I’ll admit to Sherlock, James Bond movieverse, and RED.
Rating: PG
Words: 5254
Warnings: None; assumes knowledge of both series.
Beta: My beloved alas_a_llama.
Notes: I got to write part of this sitting in a café on Baker Street. Because I am a very lucky girl. This makes reference to a total of twenty canons: I will write a ficlet for anyone who gets all twenty! Hints: all but three of the characters are British, although not all their canons are, and all but one are from either TV shows or movies. Second hint: I am a commentfiend. Comments make me the happiest of Bethans.
Summary: Mrs Hudson knows perfectly well that Sherlock isn’t dead, but keeping him that way is going to require a little help from her old friends... Luckily, she isn’t short of influential connections.
“Camilla? It’s Martha Hudson. I’m ever so sorry to bother you, but I’m afraid your girls are going to have to cause a school trip…”
She put the phone down several minutes later, feeling rather light-headed but reasonably assured that a second attempt this fortnight to kidnap Doctor Watson would be averted, even if a substantial anonymous donation to St Bart’s would be required to cover the collateral damage.
“Are you certain marijuana smoke can’t be transmitted down the phone?” she asked the white-haired woman sitting primly at the kitchen table with a cup of tea from her very best paisley-patterned Royal Doulton tea set. “I do always feel a bit funny after a call to that school...”
Barbara Mawdsley snorted. “If it could be, Camilla Fritton would find a way. Is it all in order?”
“Oh, quite definitely,” Martha said, nodding her head and looking like a settled mother hen. She opened her mouth to fill her old friend in on the latest doings of their old school chum when the Blackberry sitting between them on the kitchen table rang, loud and insistent. Barbara picked it up, motioning to her to shush as she did so.
“M here,” she said curtly into the speaker, and silently mouthed the word ‘Mycroft’ to Martha as she listened.
“Adler again? Oh, for heavens’ sake, man, can’t you deal with her properly for once?”
Another litany of crisp explanations from the other end; Barbara rolled her eyes expressively. “Oh, very well. Send someone with the car and I’ll come at once. No, not your Anthea, the other one - Jones, Kelly Jones. Yes, yes, I know. M out.”
She snapped the phone shut with a mildly frustrated expression on her neatly-made-up features. “Honestly, Martha, some days I do envy you your retirement, I must say.”
“Well,” she started, and laughed. “Not retirement in the strictest sense - not really.”
“No, I suppose not,” Barbara admitted. “And - much as it irks me to commit all this time and effort to preserving one mad genius and his boyfriend - we’d never have been able to trust a job like this to anyone else. Mycroft’s baby brother appears to have positively infinite ability and resource when it comes to really pissing violent people off.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, I live with him,” she said with a sigh. “Or rather - I did.”
There was a poignant pause, broken as Dame Barbara Mawdsley (CBE, OBE and DFC) drained her teacup with approximately the least ladylike sound Martha had ever heard.
“That will be Miss Jones with the car,” the head of MI6 remarked, as her mobile buzzed. “Have you met her? She’s quite one of the most accomplished, most amoral little fixers I have ever known - a real credit to Camilla, in fact.”
“No, I can’t say I have,” Martha said, reaching to hand her friend her coat. “Didn’t she organise that job at the National Gallery, though? I remember Sherlock going absolutely potty over it, bless him.”
“Yes, her and her little coterie, by all accounts,” Barbara nodded, taking her coat and beginning to put it on. “I did intend to do something about it, but in the end I just had a quiet word with Camilla about not being so open about bringing down governments next time and had Mycroft hire her instead.”
“Well, it would be such a shame to waste that sort of talent for skulduggery, really,” agreed Martha. “I remember poor dear Sherlock shouting and banging around the flat about it, too - I thought at first he’d taken a dislike to that nice Mr. Fry off the telly, the way he does sometimes, but it turned out he just thought the heist was an inside job, poor boy.”
“Well, I suppose he was half right - not that there’s any need to tell him so,” Barbara chuckled, making for the door. “Coming to meet Miss Jones, then?”
“Ooh, go on, I’ll just have a peep,” Mrs Hudson said, and followed her through the door to where the girl with the sleek black hair waited with the sleek black car.
~*~
“Remind me again how you get me into these things, dear?” Victoria Mayberry enquired over the radio, carefully shifting into a more sustainable position with the RPN sniper rifle. She squinted into the sight at the wild-featured figure on the rocky ledge fifty feet away, wondering if he felt as cold as she did. “Target acquired.”
“You owed me for the tip on that Moldovan job,” she heard crackle back over her earpiece. “And anyway, you enjoy it.”
“I am supposed to be retired, you know.” The damp grass had been soaking into her clothing for the last several hours; it was going to play hell with her burgeoning arthritis, she knew, but she couldn’t in all honesty disagree with Control. “Ready to fire on your word.”
“Aren’t we all?” the voice in her ear sighed. “Not yet, you’re still too vulnerable to returns. Do you have eyes on the prize?”
“Negative,” she reported quietly. “And judging by his position, nor does the target.”
She risked looking away from the sight for long enough to survey her surroundings in the widescreen, as it were. “I must say I’ve had missions in uglier places, though. Your prize has excellent taste in locations to pretend to be dead in.”
“Current intel says he’s posing as a local called Sigerson,” Control explained dryly. “With, I understand, an absolutely atrocious accent.”
“Well, of -” Victoria cut off with an audible snap as a curly black head popped into view below her and her target reacted to it with the frenzied speed normally associated with a greedy child upon beholding his Christmas presents. “Target has the prize in view, repeat: target has the prize in view!”
“Down him!”
Her aim was perfect and her shot was true, but some instinct made her quarry startle barely a hair before she squeezed the trigger and he rolled away into the undergrowth with a muffled cry as her bullet hit, not that sweet spot on the back of the skull, but his shoulder. Victoria hissed a curse under her breath, but the faint commotion was at least enough to alert the tall young man with the black curls who’d been her prey’s intended target and he was off and running like a man possessed - which certain of the wilder local folklore said he was.
“Reinforcements are incoming,” said Control into her ear. “Evac, on the double!”
“Next time,” she snapped back furiously, pushing herself out of the position she’d maintained for the last three hours like a cork from a bottle, “Remind me to just shoot the bastard!”
There was a faint crash, as if someone had just smacked a china cup-laden kitchen table several thousand miles away with frustration, but the next time the voice spoke to her it sounded quite calm, if resigned.
“Just see to it your exit’s clear, dear,” said Mrs Hudson, from downstairs in Baker Street. “Colonel Moran will come around again.”
~*~
“You know,” Margaret Carter said thoughtfully, over a cup of Earl Grey tea, “I really can’t believe that we’ve never done anything like this before. Imagine all the havoc we could have caused!”
“Well, we’ve all of us got a fair amount of mileage out of the Old Saints Network over the years,” said her old school friend. “Even I - and I was only there for a year. But we never accomplished anything this big or this co-ordinated, no. I blame Martha, myself - we didn’t call her the Fixer for nothing, after all.”
“I never did understand why you attended at all, given where you went on to afterwards,” Martha Hudson said with superb serenity, passing her a china dish loaded with biscuits (Marks & Spencers’ finest). “Custard cream, Minerva?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said the witch, selecting one and taking the dish. “Father wanted me to have some experience of Muggle society in a place where uncontrolled bursts of chaos would go unnoticed - and to be fair, it certainly was an experience. Biscuit, Peggy?”
“Thank you,” the eldest woman said primly, accepting the plate in turn and choosing a coffee-chocolate cream. “But to bring us kicking and screaming back on topic for a moment: why exactly are we going to all this effort for a rather obnoxious loose cannon and his best friend, anyway? Not that I’m still annoyed over the fine mess he left me with, the first and only time I had occasion to call upon his services, of course.”
“Oh, obviously,” Minerva murmured archly, snagging the last chocolate bourbon from the plate.
“Oh, my Sherlock’s a lovely boy, really,” Martha said placidly, adding a lump of white sugar to her tea and stirring. “He just wants a bit of looking after - and he’d do the same for me, I know.”
She thought back again to the almost-scandal, and Sherlock throwing that utterly unpleasant bastard out of her window over and over again with a face like the devil carved in stone.
“And Doctor Watson’s such a sweet boy. Besides, ladies, you can’t possibly tell me you aren’t enjoying all this.”
“No-one’s found the, er, courage to take a pot-shot at me in years,” Minerva said, looking nostalgic. “I seem to have acquired rather too much reputation for it - and yet I’m certain I was followed by at least two men and one woman on my way here. It was quite like old times, really.”
“Do you have any idea how long it’s been since anyone tried to kill me?” demanded Peggy. “A mafia hit squad actually knocked my door down last week, and as I told the survivor, I’d almost forgotten who shoots first!”
The other two women snorted. “Almost, I note,” Martha remarked to the room at large. “What on earth have you been doing to annoy the Mafia, anyway? They never used to be your department.”
“Oh, Lord knows,” Peggy answered, shaking her head. “I did ask, but all I received in response was profanity. Feminine wiles don’t seem to work as well when you’re in your eighties -- and unfortunately, neither did a large spanner. I did wonder if it was anything to do with this little affair, actually; the timing of it seemed rather suspicious.”
“Mmm, yes,” nodded Minerva genteelly, draining the last of her tea with an air of refined gentility which would have shocked anyone else who had known her in school - or at any rate, in her first school. “You’re still along for the, ah, ride, though?”
“Oh, God yes,” Peggy said briskly. “I haven’t had this much fun since the Cold War. What about you, Min? Don’t tell me you’ve lost your sense of adventure, not after all this time.”
“Merlin’s beard, no,” the witch demurred. “I wouldn’t miss this for all the dragons in China. Besides, my mother would hit the roof if I didn’t pitch in - the doctor is family, apparently, though how she remembers we have a Muggle cousin three times removed is entirely beyond me.”
“And that being the case,” Martha cut in, seizing the opportunity to once again drag their little tête-a-tête back on topic, “I have some tiny little favours to ask of you both.”
“Here it comes,” Peggy murmured, leaning forward enjoyably. “Go on, Martha, do your worst.”
“Oh, it really is only a few small things,” she said sweetly, and permitted herself a truly wicked smile as she leaned down to fuss and fiddle with her notes. Bunty Mawdsley had been right: she really had forgotten just how much she’d missed all this. “Peggy, love, I’m afraid I need you to have a chat with your friends in the States and see if you can borrow me a computer hacker from the FBI - one of the good ones, not one of the posturing little boys. I’m sure that nice Penelope with the pretty hair would help out if I asked - she owes our Toshiko for a few favours last year that I arranged and I really do need to find out how poor Sherlock is being tracked so easily. He’s a smart boy, bless him - he shouldn’t be getting shot at nearly so often as this.”
“Oh, I see how it is now,” Peggy said, trying and sadly failing to look mournful. “You just want me for my connections.”
“Only for the moment, dear. Victoria’s still having difficulties with Colonel Moran and I might need your professional input if he keeps being... awkward.”
“I could set SHIELD on it if required, I suppose,” Peggy mused. “Colonel Fury isn’t famous for his fondness for people trying to kill someone whom he would dearly like to think of as a sweet little old lady, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Besides, they could always do with the exercise.”
“Mycroft will have twenty kinds of conniption.” Martha considered the prospect, mildly amused. Bunty wouldn’t thank her for it, of course, but she personally considered that Mycroft’s smugness could do with a good healthy shaking up every now and then. Besides, and on a more visceral note, she still hadn’t forgiven him for making this dreadful charade necessary in the first place. The nine days and five hours in which she’d believed her Sherlock to be dead - before her old professional instincts took over and she started to make more sceptical enquiries into the entire implausible chain of events - had been horrible, utterly horrible. She had always been terribly fond of - if exasperated by - her mad, unpredictably kind lodger, with his mood-swings and music and exasperatingly persistent need to do the right thing the wrong way, and 221 was hauntingly quiet in his absence, like a fairground ghost house bereft of visitors. “It won’t hurt him.”
“What’s all this about ‘my Sherlock’ and ‘poor dear Sherlock’ and ‘he’s ever such a nice boy’, anyway?” Minerva demanded suddenly, breaking in on her thoughts. “I haven’t heard you talk like that since the Sixties; I do believe you’ve gone soft.”
“She’s right, you know,” added Peggy. “What on earth’s so special this time?”
“He needs looking after,” Martha repeated, mildly defensive. “Besides, he’s necessary - and his mother was a complete one-woman nightmare, absolutely horrific. Anyway, I still owe him for that business with Tom in the Nineties.”
“A likely story,” Peggy said, sounding deeply amused; Martha was certain she could hear Minerva murmur “Sherlock and Marty, sitting in a tree...” just on the edge of hearing, and felt herself rapidly turning pink.
“Ladies, ladies!” she interrupted hastily. “You girls may have nothing else to do today, but some of us have a meeting with the Prime Minister in a little under two hours, so we really do need to crack on.”
“Ooh, get you,” Peggy teased, but finally relented. “Go on, then, let’s all hear the master-plan.”
Martha laughed. “Oh, I haven’t got quite that far yet,” she said, though ‘yet’ was, of course, the operative word. “Anyway, Min, do you think you could find the time to look after Doctor Watson for me, please? That mess we cleared up yesterday was the third kidnap and the fourth murder attempt in the last three months, and it very nearly worked; if Sandra hadn’t happened to be there I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Sandra?” asked Peggy, leaning forward with curiosity. “As in May Pullman’s niece Sandra? With the Met?”
Martha nodded. “She’s a real chip off the old block, too - broke one man’s jaw and arrested a second. Of course, I gather she thinks she gets it from her father, the Official Secrets Act being what it is. Anyway, neither of them are talking -”
“I’m not surprised,” Minerva cut in, “If she gets her right hook from May, too. They’ll be lucky if they ever talk again, quite frankly.”
“- Yes, well, anyway,” she wound up, “I still don’t know how he’s being tracked so easily, and I really need some breathing space in which to find out.”
The witch nodded. “It’s the Easter holidays at present,” she said, “So I should be able to give you at least ten days before I shall be required back at the school. After that, matters will be a little trickier - Filius would cover the lower years’ classes for me, I’m sure, but I really do need to teach the advanced classes in person. Although I may be able to find you a replacement bodyguard, if Miss Weasley has some spare time on her hands...”
“Ten days should be ample, I think,” Martha said, refilling their three teacups from a fat china teapot covered with the bedraggled woollen teacosy that had been the sad result of her earliest attempts at knitting. “If I can’t track down and break up a criminal network with ten days’ full concentration, after all, then I’m sure I don’t deserve even half the reputation I’ve built up over the years.”
“Yes, you always did have quite the reputation, as I recall,” Peggy teased, and was entirely too slow to duck the chocolate hobnob Martha threw at her head.
“Now, now,” Minerva remonstrated, very nearly successfully impersonating the kind of sensible elderly lady who was entirely too well-behaved and respectable for such childish pursuits as food fights. “Martha, did you say you were meeting the Muggle Prime Minister in two hours?”
“Oh, yes - Bunty Mawdsley should be here soon with the car,” Martha said, and smiled into her teacup as she sipped. “You two do remember dear old Harriet, of course?”
~*~
The things we do, Victoria Mayberry thought wryly, and not for the first time, For Queen, country and old friends from school.
She was sat alone in what the tiny airline laughably referred to as first class, having been served what the (thoroughly over-cheerful) steward had insisted on referring to as ‘a nice cup of tea’ - rather optimistically, if she was any judge. Oh, Lord - the boy was coming back, and there was only so much hyper-enthusiasm she could stand over the course of an eight-hour flight...
“Arthur, Arthur, my beloved only child, please for the love of MJN go and be somewhere else?”
Her rescuer was a stern-faced elderly woman in an unflattering dress-suit who had previously introduced herself as the airline’s CEO and who apparently knew Martha Hudson from an old business venture or a scandal or something; she hadn’t asked.
“Oh, dear,” the woman said, eyeing Victoria’s teacup with a jaundiced eye. “Has Arthur been attempting to be a barista again?”
“Not to worry,” Victoria said kindly, “I’ve had far worse cups of tea in my time.”
This was entirely true, although the cups in question had generally been made whilst under rebel fire in Mozambique or several months into an anti-insurgency campaign in South Ossetia rather than four hours into a transatlantic passenger flight to Los Angeles.
“I must also apologise,” the woman - Knapp-Shappey, that was her name, Carolyn Knapp-Shappey - went on doggedly, through teeth she was clearly making a valiant effort not to grit, “for the exceedingly unprofessional cabin address earlier. MJN’s captain, despite having every appearance of being a skinny ginger ball of neuroticism, is in fact a very competent pilot - no matter what his first officer may try to do in order to prove otherwise.”
She had rather wondered about that, but smiled politely nonetheless. “Oh, that’s fine. I think I dozed through most of it - I’ve had rather a week.”
“Probably for the best,” Carolyn muttered darkly, then clearly seemed to feel she ought to be making proper conversation and noticeably brightened. “So, where do you know Martha Hudson from? I gathered you were friends.”
“Oh, we went to school together,” Victoria explained. “Funny how old school ties linger, isn’t it? This little jaunt is on a favour for her, actually.”
Carolyn nodded. “Well, we do all hope you’ll consider using MJN Air again in the future - despite my pilots’ ... idiosyncrasies.”
“I’ll certainly consider it, I’m sure,” she said politely, and hastily changed the subject before she felt too compelled to use the addendum ‘if I really have no other options’. “Actually, I don’t suppose you’re related to a woman called Trent, are you? You really do remind me of someone I met in Vietnam in the Seventies.”
“Oh, Diana? The photographer? Yes, we’re... cousins.” For some reason, family didn’t seem to be a good topic with MJN Air’s CEO, who promptly seized Victoria’s teacup as if in self-defence.
“I’ll go and get you a tea that’s a bit less... experimental,” she said firmly, and marched off with it before Victoria could demur. “No, no, not to worry, shan’t be a moment!”
She eyed the woman’s retreating back and sighed, settling down for a well-deserved nap. She’d been right: clearly, this was going to be one of those trips...
LAX, when at last she disembarked, turned out to be as crowded as possible and continued to remind Victoria of a minimalist Seventies mansion where the grime had been hastily kicked under the furniture for the sake of the guests. She strolled around arrivals, sniper-rifle safely disguised as a set of golf-clubs and slung against her back, and having collected her small suitcase she paused to await the friend of Martha’s who (she had been assured) would see her safely through customs without any of the awkward little questions that carrying around an RPN tended to engender. Mildly bored, a widescreen television showing British news caught her eye and she paused in front of the screen to watch as footage played of two female detectives - one young and brunette, the other blonde and middle-aged - escorting two handcuffed, scowling men to a police van. Greater Manchester and Northumbria Major Incident Teams smash vast criminal network she read scroll across the bottom of the screen, before the shot changed to two DCIs - one skinny and nervous-looking, the other older, heavier, hawkish-looking and more dour; both of them clearly in need of a large alcoholic beverage if she was any judge - giving a press conference. DCI Gill Murray described the network as ‘a vast spider’s web of crime' read the moving text, before the older of the two women took her turn to answer reporters’ questions in a grumpy Geordie accent. She smiled to herself: Martha Hudson’s work had lost none of its trademarks, even now.
“Victoria Green?”
At the sound of her current pseudonym Victoria turned, unperturbed, to smile easily at the tiny woman Martha had arranged to be her guide. The woman was flanked by two enormous, very American-looking hulks in the manner of bodyguards, but she felt quite certain that they were no such thing: her new friend wore her fierceness as comfortably as she wore her old-fashioned twinset.
“Hetty Lange,” the woman said, holding out a bony hand for Victoria to shake. “I must say, I’ve been curious to meet you for years.”
“And I you,” Victoria said truthfully, grateful to let go of her hand: Hetty had a grip like a vice. “You’ll be getting me through customs, I take it?”
Hetty Lange, US Intelligence Services legend, waved a careless hand and trotted away, Victoria and the boys trailing like ducklings in her wake. “Oh, that will be the least of it. Our friends in Washington say they have a bead on your target: Miss Sciuto seemed supremely confident that we could practically walk you to him, and I have no reason to disbelieve her.”
For someone noticeably under five feet tall, she was unbelievably fast: Victoria had to put in a surprising amount of effort to keep up with her. “This is all entirely off the record, I assume?”
All three agents smiled regulation sharks’ smiles. “Entirely.”
~*~
“Was that Sarah on the phone?” enquired Barbara Mawdsley from her habitual seat at Martha Hudson’s kitchen table, as Martha put the phone down and nodded.
“Yes - she’s had a message from an old friend, just letting us know that Sherlock will be getting home rather later than planned,” she said. “Or possibly earlier... Something about the Mona Lisa, apparently. Oh, and she wanted to know if you’d be coming to tea at her new little house in Ealing with me next week.”
Barbara nodded back. “No can do, unfortunately - I’ve got a peace conference in Berne all week. I’ll have to let her know.”
Martha raised her eyebrows. “I haven’t heard anything about a peace conference on the news.”
“Well, no - I’ve only just let 007 off the leash.” Politely, Barbara refrained from smirking too noticeably. “But the Belarusian ambassador should be requesting a peace conference in... Hmm, let’s be generous and say four days from now, and then I’ll be spending the entire weekend arranging the security details with Mycroft.”
Martha had no such ladylike concerns, and let her own smirk show. “I just hope Victoria gets in contact soon,” she said, changing the subject. “If this hunt goes on for much longer, I’m ever so afraid I’ll have to have a serious word with Stacie about securing some more funds.”
“Which would be embarrassing,” Barbara agreed. “Have you heard from Minerva, by the way?”
“Yes - she says she had no idea a doctor and war veteran, even a Muggle one, could be so unbelievably boring.” Martha smiled faintly. “Poor old John has been moping rather, bless him: he’s even bought himself a bulldog puppy - which I imagine did not improve his standing with Minerva - but the poor little thing hasn’t been as much help as he thought, I think. Once or twice I did wonder if I should let him know what was going on, just to buck him up a bit, but I was terribly afraid he’d only get in the way.”
“Yes - better to let the old network get on with it,” her old friend said. “If there’s one thing running MI6 has taught me, I have to say, it’s that there’s nothing men can do half so well as royally bugger things up. Incidentally, have you told Molly she probably doesn’t need a bodyguard any more? It’s only Colonel Moran we’re missing now, after all.”
“Well, I was, er, going to - but she seemed to be having so much fun with Camilla’s niece that I hadn’t the heart to break them up just yet,” Martha admitted. “Annabelle seems like such a sweet girl, too - I was in the morgue last week and they were all over each other - they reminded me of Camilla and Emma at school, they really did.”
She still wondered what had ever become of Emma, who’d been such a lovely girl and so notorious in her time as head girl and afterwards, when she’d continued that grand tradition of old Saints in working for the information services. The rumour mills had got an awful lot of mileage out of her relationship with that very well-dressed gentleman friend of hers over the years - admittedly, however, never as much mileage as they got out of her relationship with Camilla herself...
A rather startling thought occurred; she could feel herself turning pink, not helped by the uncomfortably knowing look Barbara was shooting her.
Thankfully, at that moment the computer in the corner beeped self-importantly and she pounced on it, grateful. It was a message from Victoria, sounding confident this time, and she silently turned the screen to show it to Barbara. “I just wish I was out there myself,” she confessed. “We used to have such fun... If it weren’t for this dodgy hip I would go, honestly I would.”
“Yes, well, if you will insist on getting shot in the line of duty,” Barbara said, with a complete lack of sympathy. “Still, we really should have a good get-together when all this is sorted.”
“Ooh, yes,” she said enthusiastically, beginning to calculate dates, times and international flight-plans in her head. “Do you think you could have your Ros clear our usual place for security for, say... Mmm, let’s see. Maybe a fortnight’s time?”
Barbara considered. “I think that should be do-able, yes - always assuming Victoria clears US airspace in time, of course. Myers did seem to be getting on rather well with your DI Lestrade, so I’m sure there will be only a moderate amount of grumbling at the overtime.”
“Consider it a plan, then.” Martha raised her teacup in a toast.
~*~
She lay flat on her stomach on the precipice, the muzzle of her gun all that was visible to anyone who should look up from below. It was surprisingly warm up here, she considered, given that she was in the middle of the Swiss alps - an extremely welcome change, given that LA had actually managed to hail on her, of all things - and she still hadn’t managed to finish her target.
“Remind me again who trained this one?” she murmured into her radio. “Oh, wait, let me guess - it was us, wasn’t it?”
“Afraid so,” said Martha’s voice in her ear. “SAS, then MI6, as far as Bunty and Harriet can discover. He got kicked out of there for brutalising prisoners of war six years ago, and then after that we lost track of him entirely until my Sherlock spotted him socialising with Jim Moriarty -”
“Shortly before all hell broke loose,” Victoria completed.
“More or less, yes,” admitted Martha. “Do you have visuals?”
She peered into the sight, lined up again on Moriarty’s head, and smiled. “Oh, yes. I just want a guaranteed clear shot - the Colonel has been rather embarrassing and I’m damned if I’m just winging him again.”
She heard Martha chuckle dryly. “Just so long as you do kill him this time, dear.”
“Oh, no fear. Not this time.”
She could see Moran at bay in three-quarter profile, his handsome wild features now marred by bandaging as a result of having had his left ear shot off in one of her previous attempts on his life. The hallmark of her creed was to never be seen by a mark, but somehow she almost wanted to be seen by this little bastard, just for the look on his face as he realised he’d been liquidated by a woman drawing a bus-pass. He was talking to a man who she was fairly certain was Sherlock Holmes - he’d gone ginger (not the most subtle nor flattering of shades: he now resembled an anaemic carrot) and if she was any judge he’d given himself a new nose with that most versatile of tools, face-putty - and looked like a tiger forcibly overriding every instinct to spring. Sherlock himself, of course, merely looked bored - although she suspected that that was merely his habitual expression. Probable!Sherlock said something apparently obnoxious and Moran, seemingly tried beyond patience with him, snatched for the gun she knew he had hidden on his hip.
There was nothing for it: she squeezed the trigger, Moran’s skull blossomed with red and he dropped like a stone.
Gotcha! was what she thought, albeit rather unprofessionally; what she said, however, was “Put the kettle on, dear, I’ll make the Eurotunnel in two hours.”
She could hear cheering in her right ear as she hastily packed up her equipment: Martha had friends over, by the sound of it. Young Mr Holmes, meanwhile, was looking startled, but he was no longer any concern of hers; all she had to do now was to get herself out of the country before the Swiss spooks noticed the Englishman’s death bore all the hallmarks of a trade hit. Business as usual, then...
“This,” she remarked gleefully, peering down the sheer cliff-face that was about to provide her exit route, “Is one hell of a way to spend your retirement!”
“Tell me about it,” said Mrs Hudson, from Baker Street.
Fandoms: ...Ahahahaha, where to start! But I’ll admit to Sherlock, James Bond movieverse, and RED.
Rating: PG
Words: 5254
Warnings: None; assumes knowledge of both series.
Beta: My beloved alas_a_llama.
Notes: I got to write part of this sitting in a café on Baker Street. Because I am a very lucky girl. This makes reference to a total of twenty canons: I will write a ficlet for anyone who gets all twenty! Hints: all but three of the characters are British, although not all their canons are, and all but one are from either TV shows or movies. Second hint: I am a commentfiend. Comments make me the happiest of Bethans.
Summary: Mrs Hudson knows perfectly well that Sherlock isn’t dead, but keeping him that way is going to require a little help from her old friends... Luckily, she isn’t short of influential connections.
“Camilla? It’s Martha Hudson. I’m ever so sorry to bother you, but I’m afraid your girls are going to have to cause a school trip…”
She put the phone down several minutes later, feeling rather light-headed but reasonably assured that a second attempt this fortnight to kidnap Doctor Watson would be averted, even if a substantial anonymous donation to St Bart’s would be required to cover the collateral damage.
“Are you certain marijuana smoke can’t be transmitted down the phone?” she asked the white-haired woman sitting primly at the kitchen table with a cup of tea from her very best paisley-patterned Royal Doulton tea set. “I do always feel a bit funny after a call to that school...”
Barbara Mawdsley snorted. “If it could be, Camilla Fritton would find a way. Is it all in order?”
“Oh, quite definitely,” Martha said, nodding her head and looking like a settled mother hen. She opened her mouth to fill her old friend in on the latest doings of their old school chum when the Blackberry sitting between them on the kitchen table rang, loud and insistent. Barbara picked it up, motioning to her to shush as she did so.
“M here,” she said curtly into the speaker, and silently mouthed the word ‘Mycroft’ to Martha as she listened.
“Adler again? Oh, for heavens’ sake, man, can’t you deal with her properly for once?”
Another litany of crisp explanations from the other end; Barbara rolled her eyes expressively. “Oh, very well. Send someone with the car and I’ll come at once. No, not your Anthea, the other one - Jones, Kelly Jones. Yes, yes, I know. M out.”
She snapped the phone shut with a mildly frustrated expression on her neatly-made-up features. “Honestly, Martha, some days I do envy you your retirement, I must say.”
“Well,” she started, and laughed. “Not retirement in the strictest sense - not really.”
“No, I suppose not,” Barbara admitted. “And - much as it irks me to commit all this time and effort to preserving one mad genius and his boyfriend - we’d never have been able to trust a job like this to anyone else. Mycroft’s baby brother appears to have positively infinite ability and resource when it comes to really pissing violent people off.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, I live with him,” she said with a sigh. “Or rather - I did.”
There was a poignant pause, broken as Dame Barbara Mawdsley (CBE, OBE and DFC) drained her teacup with approximately the least ladylike sound Martha had ever heard.
“That will be Miss Jones with the car,” the head of MI6 remarked, as her mobile buzzed. “Have you met her? She’s quite one of the most accomplished, most amoral little fixers I have ever known - a real credit to Camilla, in fact.”
“No, I can’t say I have,” Martha said, reaching to hand her friend her coat. “Didn’t she organise that job at the National Gallery, though? I remember Sherlock going absolutely potty over it, bless him.”
“Yes, her and her little coterie, by all accounts,” Barbara nodded, taking her coat and beginning to put it on. “I did intend to do something about it, but in the end I just had a quiet word with Camilla about not being so open about bringing down governments next time and had Mycroft hire her instead.”
“Well, it would be such a shame to waste that sort of talent for skulduggery, really,” agreed Martha. “I remember poor dear Sherlock shouting and banging around the flat about it, too - I thought at first he’d taken a dislike to that nice Mr. Fry off the telly, the way he does sometimes, but it turned out he just thought the heist was an inside job, poor boy.”
“Well, I suppose he was half right - not that there’s any need to tell him so,” Barbara chuckled, making for the door. “Coming to meet Miss Jones, then?”
“Ooh, go on, I’ll just have a peep,” Mrs Hudson said, and followed her through the door to where the girl with the sleek black hair waited with the sleek black car.
~*~
“Remind me again how you get me into these things, dear?” Victoria Mayberry enquired over the radio, carefully shifting into a more sustainable position with the RPN sniper rifle. She squinted into the sight at the wild-featured figure on the rocky ledge fifty feet away, wondering if he felt as cold as she did. “Target acquired.”
“You owed me for the tip on that Moldovan job,” she heard crackle back over her earpiece. “And anyway, you enjoy it.”
“I am supposed to be retired, you know.” The damp grass had been soaking into her clothing for the last several hours; it was going to play hell with her burgeoning arthritis, she knew, but she couldn’t in all honesty disagree with Control. “Ready to fire on your word.”
“Aren’t we all?” the voice in her ear sighed. “Not yet, you’re still too vulnerable to returns. Do you have eyes on the prize?”
“Negative,” she reported quietly. “And judging by his position, nor does the target.”
She risked looking away from the sight for long enough to survey her surroundings in the widescreen, as it were. “I must say I’ve had missions in uglier places, though. Your prize has excellent taste in locations to pretend to be dead in.”
“Current intel says he’s posing as a local called Sigerson,” Control explained dryly. “With, I understand, an absolutely atrocious accent.”
“Well, of -” Victoria cut off with an audible snap as a curly black head popped into view below her and her target reacted to it with the frenzied speed normally associated with a greedy child upon beholding his Christmas presents. “Target has the prize in view, repeat: target has the prize in view!”
“Down him!”
Her aim was perfect and her shot was true, but some instinct made her quarry startle barely a hair before she squeezed the trigger and he rolled away into the undergrowth with a muffled cry as her bullet hit, not that sweet spot on the back of the skull, but his shoulder. Victoria hissed a curse under her breath, but the faint commotion was at least enough to alert the tall young man with the black curls who’d been her prey’s intended target and he was off and running like a man possessed - which certain of the wilder local folklore said he was.
“Reinforcements are incoming,” said Control into her ear. “Evac, on the double!”
“Next time,” she snapped back furiously, pushing herself out of the position she’d maintained for the last three hours like a cork from a bottle, “Remind me to just shoot the bastard!”
There was a faint crash, as if someone had just smacked a china cup-laden kitchen table several thousand miles away with frustration, but the next time the voice spoke to her it sounded quite calm, if resigned.
“Just see to it your exit’s clear, dear,” said Mrs Hudson, from downstairs in Baker Street. “Colonel Moran will come around again.”
~*~
“You know,” Margaret Carter said thoughtfully, over a cup of Earl Grey tea, “I really can’t believe that we’ve never done anything like this before. Imagine all the havoc we could have caused!”
“Well, we’ve all of us got a fair amount of mileage out of the Old Saints Network over the years,” said her old school friend. “Even I - and I was only there for a year. But we never accomplished anything this big or this co-ordinated, no. I blame Martha, myself - we didn’t call her the Fixer for nothing, after all.”
“I never did understand why you attended at all, given where you went on to afterwards,” Martha Hudson said with superb serenity, passing her a china dish loaded with biscuits (Marks & Spencers’ finest). “Custard cream, Minerva?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said the witch, selecting one and taking the dish. “Father wanted me to have some experience of Muggle society in a place where uncontrolled bursts of chaos would go unnoticed - and to be fair, it certainly was an experience. Biscuit, Peggy?”
“Thank you,” the eldest woman said primly, accepting the plate in turn and choosing a coffee-chocolate cream. “But to bring us kicking and screaming back on topic for a moment: why exactly are we going to all this effort for a rather obnoxious loose cannon and his best friend, anyway? Not that I’m still annoyed over the fine mess he left me with, the first and only time I had occasion to call upon his services, of course.”
“Oh, obviously,” Minerva murmured archly, snagging the last chocolate bourbon from the plate.
“Oh, my Sherlock’s a lovely boy, really,” Martha said placidly, adding a lump of white sugar to her tea and stirring. “He just wants a bit of looking after - and he’d do the same for me, I know.”
She thought back again to the almost-scandal, and Sherlock throwing that utterly unpleasant bastard out of her window over and over again with a face like the devil carved in stone.
“And Doctor Watson’s such a sweet boy. Besides, ladies, you can’t possibly tell me you aren’t enjoying all this.”
“No-one’s found the, er, courage to take a pot-shot at me in years,” Minerva said, looking nostalgic. “I seem to have acquired rather too much reputation for it - and yet I’m certain I was followed by at least two men and one woman on my way here. It was quite like old times, really.”
“Do you have any idea how long it’s been since anyone tried to kill me?” demanded Peggy. “A mafia hit squad actually knocked my door down last week, and as I told the survivor, I’d almost forgotten who shoots first!”
The other two women snorted. “Almost, I note,” Martha remarked to the room at large. “What on earth have you been doing to annoy the Mafia, anyway? They never used to be your department.”
“Oh, Lord knows,” Peggy answered, shaking her head. “I did ask, but all I received in response was profanity. Feminine wiles don’t seem to work as well when you’re in your eighties -- and unfortunately, neither did a large spanner. I did wonder if it was anything to do with this little affair, actually; the timing of it seemed rather suspicious.”
“Mmm, yes,” nodded Minerva genteelly, draining the last of her tea with an air of refined gentility which would have shocked anyone else who had known her in school - or at any rate, in her first school. “You’re still along for the, ah, ride, though?”
“Oh, God yes,” Peggy said briskly. “I haven’t had this much fun since the Cold War. What about you, Min? Don’t tell me you’ve lost your sense of adventure, not after all this time.”
“Merlin’s beard, no,” the witch demurred. “I wouldn’t miss this for all the dragons in China. Besides, my mother would hit the roof if I didn’t pitch in - the doctor is family, apparently, though how she remembers we have a Muggle cousin three times removed is entirely beyond me.”
“And that being the case,” Martha cut in, seizing the opportunity to once again drag their little tête-a-tête back on topic, “I have some tiny little favours to ask of you both.”
“Here it comes,” Peggy murmured, leaning forward enjoyably. “Go on, Martha, do your worst.”
“Oh, it really is only a few small things,” she said sweetly, and permitted herself a truly wicked smile as she leaned down to fuss and fiddle with her notes. Bunty Mawdsley had been right: she really had forgotten just how much she’d missed all this. “Peggy, love, I’m afraid I need you to have a chat with your friends in the States and see if you can borrow me a computer hacker from the FBI - one of the good ones, not one of the posturing little boys. I’m sure that nice Penelope with the pretty hair would help out if I asked - she owes our Toshiko for a few favours last year that I arranged and I really do need to find out how poor Sherlock is being tracked so easily. He’s a smart boy, bless him - he shouldn’t be getting shot at nearly so often as this.”
“Oh, I see how it is now,” Peggy said, trying and sadly failing to look mournful. “You just want me for my connections.”
“Only for the moment, dear. Victoria’s still having difficulties with Colonel Moran and I might need your professional input if he keeps being... awkward.”
“I could set SHIELD on it if required, I suppose,” Peggy mused. “Colonel Fury isn’t famous for his fondness for people trying to kill someone whom he would dearly like to think of as a sweet little old lady, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Besides, they could always do with the exercise.”
“Mycroft will have twenty kinds of conniption.” Martha considered the prospect, mildly amused. Bunty wouldn’t thank her for it, of course, but she personally considered that Mycroft’s smugness could do with a good healthy shaking up every now and then. Besides, and on a more visceral note, she still hadn’t forgiven him for making this dreadful charade necessary in the first place. The nine days and five hours in which she’d believed her Sherlock to be dead - before her old professional instincts took over and she started to make more sceptical enquiries into the entire implausible chain of events - had been horrible, utterly horrible. She had always been terribly fond of - if exasperated by - her mad, unpredictably kind lodger, with his mood-swings and music and exasperatingly persistent need to do the right thing the wrong way, and 221 was hauntingly quiet in his absence, like a fairground ghost house bereft of visitors. “It won’t hurt him.”
“What’s all this about ‘my Sherlock’ and ‘poor dear Sherlock’ and ‘he’s ever such a nice boy’, anyway?” Minerva demanded suddenly, breaking in on her thoughts. “I haven’t heard you talk like that since the Sixties; I do believe you’ve gone soft.”
“She’s right, you know,” added Peggy. “What on earth’s so special this time?”
“He needs looking after,” Martha repeated, mildly defensive. “Besides, he’s necessary - and his mother was a complete one-woman nightmare, absolutely horrific. Anyway, I still owe him for that business with Tom in the Nineties.”
“A likely story,” Peggy said, sounding deeply amused; Martha was certain she could hear Minerva murmur “Sherlock and Marty, sitting in a tree...” just on the edge of hearing, and felt herself rapidly turning pink.
“Ladies, ladies!” she interrupted hastily. “You girls may have nothing else to do today, but some of us have a meeting with the Prime Minister in a little under two hours, so we really do need to crack on.”
“Ooh, get you,” Peggy teased, but finally relented. “Go on, then, let’s all hear the master-plan.”
Martha laughed. “Oh, I haven’t got quite that far yet,” she said, though ‘yet’ was, of course, the operative word. “Anyway, Min, do you think you could find the time to look after Doctor Watson for me, please? That mess we cleared up yesterday was the third kidnap and the fourth murder attempt in the last three months, and it very nearly worked; if Sandra hadn’t happened to be there I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Sandra?” asked Peggy, leaning forward with curiosity. “As in May Pullman’s niece Sandra? With the Met?”
Martha nodded. “She’s a real chip off the old block, too - broke one man’s jaw and arrested a second. Of course, I gather she thinks she gets it from her father, the Official Secrets Act being what it is. Anyway, neither of them are talking -”
“I’m not surprised,” Minerva cut in, “If she gets her right hook from May, too. They’ll be lucky if they ever talk again, quite frankly.”
“- Yes, well, anyway,” she wound up, “I still don’t know how he’s being tracked so easily, and I really need some breathing space in which to find out.”
The witch nodded. “It’s the Easter holidays at present,” she said, “So I should be able to give you at least ten days before I shall be required back at the school. After that, matters will be a little trickier - Filius would cover the lower years’ classes for me, I’m sure, but I really do need to teach the advanced classes in person. Although I may be able to find you a replacement bodyguard, if Miss Weasley has some spare time on her hands...”
“Ten days should be ample, I think,” Martha said, refilling their three teacups from a fat china teapot covered with the bedraggled woollen teacosy that had been the sad result of her earliest attempts at knitting. “If I can’t track down and break up a criminal network with ten days’ full concentration, after all, then I’m sure I don’t deserve even half the reputation I’ve built up over the years.”
“Yes, you always did have quite the reputation, as I recall,” Peggy teased, and was entirely too slow to duck the chocolate hobnob Martha threw at her head.
“Now, now,” Minerva remonstrated, very nearly successfully impersonating the kind of sensible elderly lady who was entirely too well-behaved and respectable for such childish pursuits as food fights. “Martha, did you say you were meeting the Muggle Prime Minister in two hours?”
“Oh, yes - Bunty Mawdsley should be here soon with the car,” Martha said, and smiled into her teacup as she sipped. “You two do remember dear old Harriet, of course?”
~*~
The things we do, Victoria Mayberry thought wryly, and not for the first time, For Queen, country and old friends from school.
She was sat alone in what the tiny airline laughably referred to as first class, having been served what the (thoroughly over-cheerful) steward had insisted on referring to as ‘a nice cup of tea’ - rather optimistically, if she was any judge. Oh, Lord - the boy was coming back, and there was only so much hyper-enthusiasm she could stand over the course of an eight-hour flight...
“Arthur, Arthur, my beloved only child, please for the love of MJN go and be somewhere else?”
Her rescuer was a stern-faced elderly woman in an unflattering dress-suit who had previously introduced herself as the airline’s CEO and who apparently knew Martha Hudson from an old business venture or a scandal or something; she hadn’t asked.
“Oh, dear,” the woman said, eyeing Victoria’s teacup with a jaundiced eye. “Has Arthur been attempting to be a barista again?”
“Not to worry,” Victoria said kindly, “I’ve had far worse cups of tea in my time.”
This was entirely true, although the cups in question had generally been made whilst under rebel fire in Mozambique or several months into an anti-insurgency campaign in South Ossetia rather than four hours into a transatlantic passenger flight to Los Angeles.
“I must also apologise,” the woman - Knapp-Shappey, that was her name, Carolyn Knapp-Shappey - went on doggedly, through teeth she was clearly making a valiant effort not to grit, “for the exceedingly unprofessional cabin address earlier. MJN’s captain, despite having every appearance of being a skinny ginger ball of neuroticism, is in fact a very competent pilot - no matter what his first officer may try to do in order to prove otherwise.”
She had rather wondered about that, but smiled politely nonetheless. “Oh, that’s fine. I think I dozed through most of it - I’ve had rather a week.”
“Probably for the best,” Carolyn muttered darkly, then clearly seemed to feel she ought to be making proper conversation and noticeably brightened. “So, where do you know Martha Hudson from? I gathered you were friends.”
“Oh, we went to school together,” Victoria explained. “Funny how old school ties linger, isn’t it? This little jaunt is on a favour for her, actually.”
Carolyn nodded. “Well, we do all hope you’ll consider using MJN Air again in the future - despite my pilots’ ... idiosyncrasies.”
“I’ll certainly consider it, I’m sure,” she said politely, and hastily changed the subject before she felt too compelled to use the addendum ‘if I really have no other options’. “Actually, I don’t suppose you’re related to a woman called Trent, are you? You really do remind me of someone I met in Vietnam in the Seventies.”
“Oh, Diana? The photographer? Yes, we’re... cousins.” For some reason, family didn’t seem to be a good topic with MJN Air’s CEO, who promptly seized Victoria’s teacup as if in self-defence.
“I’ll go and get you a tea that’s a bit less... experimental,” she said firmly, and marched off with it before Victoria could demur. “No, no, not to worry, shan’t be a moment!”
She eyed the woman’s retreating back and sighed, settling down for a well-deserved nap. She’d been right: clearly, this was going to be one of those trips...
LAX, when at last she disembarked, turned out to be as crowded as possible and continued to remind Victoria of a minimalist Seventies mansion where the grime had been hastily kicked under the furniture for the sake of the guests. She strolled around arrivals, sniper-rifle safely disguised as a set of golf-clubs and slung against her back, and having collected her small suitcase she paused to await the friend of Martha’s who (she had been assured) would see her safely through customs without any of the awkward little questions that carrying around an RPN tended to engender. Mildly bored, a widescreen television showing British news caught her eye and she paused in front of the screen to watch as footage played of two female detectives - one young and brunette, the other blonde and middle-aged - escorting two handcuffed, scowling men to a police van. Greater Manchester and Northumbria Major Incident Teams smash vast criminal network she read scroll across the bottom of the screen, before the shot changed to two DCIs - one skinny and nervous-looking, the other older, heavier, hawkish-looking and more dour; both of them clearly in need of a large alcoholic beverage if she was any judge - giving a press conference. DCI Gill Murray described the network as ‘a vast spider’s web of crime' read the moving text, before the older of the two women took her turn to answer reporters’ questions in a grumpy Geordie accent. She smiled to herself: Martha Hudson’s work had lost none of its trademarks, even now.
“Victoria Green?”
At the sound of her current pseudonym Victoria turned, unperturbed, to smile easily at the tiny woman Martha had arranged to be her guide. The woman was flanked by two enormous, very American-looking hulks in the manner of bodyguards, but she felt quite certain that they were no such thing: her new friend wore her fierceness as comfortably as she wore her old-fashioned twinset.
“Hetty Lange,” the woman said, holding out a bony hand for Victoria to shake. “I must say, I’ve been curious to meet you for years.”
“And I you,” Victoria said truthfully, grateful to let go of her hand: Hetty had a grip like a vice. “You’ll be getting me through customs, I take it?”
Hetty Lange, US Intelligence Services legend, waved a careless hand and trotted away, Victoria and the boys trailing like ducklings in her wake. “Oh, that will be the least of it. Our friends in Washington say they have a bead on your target: Miss Sciuto seemed supremely confident that we could practically walk you to him, and I have no reason to disbelieve her.”
For someone noticeably under five feet tall, she was unbelievably fast: Victoria had to put in a surprising amount of effort to keep up with her. “This is all entirely off the record, I assume?”
All three agents smiled regulation sharks’ smiles. “Entirely.”
~*~
“Was that Sarah on the phone?” enquired Barbara Mawdsley from her habitual seat at Martha Hudson’s kitchen table, as Martha put the phone down and nodded.
“Yes - she’s had a message from an old friend, just letting us know that Sherlock will be getting home rather later than planned,” she said. “Or possibly earlier... Something about the Mona Lisa, apparently. Oh, and she wanted to know if you’d be coming to tea at her new little house in Ealing with me next week.”
Barbara nodded back. “No can do, unfortunately - I’ve got a peace conference in Berne all week. I’ll have to let her know.”
Martha raised her eyebrows. “I haven’t heard anything about a peace conference on the news.”
“Well, no - I’ve only just let 007 off the leash.” Politely, Barbara refrained from smirking too noticeably. “But the Belarusian ambassador should be requesting a peace conference in... Hmm, let’s be generous and say four days from now, and then I’ll be spending the entire weekend arranging the security details with Mycroft.”
Martha had no such ladylike concerns, and let her own smirk show. “I just hope Victoria gets in contact soon,” she said, changing the subject. “If this hunt goes on for much longer, I’m ever so afraid I’ll have to have a serious word with Stacie about securing some more funds.”
“Which would be embarrassing,” Barbara agreed. “Have you heard from Minerva, by the way?”
“Yes - she says she had no idea a doctor and war veteran, even a Muggle one, could be so unbelievably boring.” Martha smiled faintly. “Poor old John has been moping rather, bless him: he’s even bought himself a bulldog puppy - which I imagine did not improve his standing with Minerva - but the poor little thing hasn’t been as much help as he thought, I think. Once or twice I did wonder if I should let him know what was going on, just to buck him up a bit, but I was terribly afraid he’d only get in the way.”
“Yes - better to let the old network get on with it,” her old friend said. “If there’s one thing running MI6 has taught me, I have to say, it’s that there’s nothing men can do half so well as royally bugger things up. Incidentally, have you told Molly she probably doesn’t need a bodyguard any more? It’s only Colonel Moran we’re missing now, after all.”
“Well, I was, er, going to - but she seemed to be having so much fun with Camilla’s niece that I hadn’t the heart to break them up just yet,” Martha admitted. “Annabelle seems like such a sweet girl, too - I was in the morgue last week and they were all over each other - they reminded me of Camilla and Emma at school, they really did.”
She still wondered what had ever become of Emma, who’d been such a lovely girl and so notorious in her time as head girl and afterwards, when she’d continued that grand tradition of old Saints in working for the information services. The rumour mills had got an awful lot of mileage out of her relationship with that very well-dressed gentleman friend of hers over the years - admittedly, however, never as much mileage as they got out of her relationship with Camilla herself...
A rather startling thought occurred; she could feel herself turning pink, not helped by the uncomfortably knowing look Barbara was shooting her.
Thankfully, at that moment the computer in the corner beeped self-importantly and she pounced on it, grateful. It was a message from Victoria, sounding confident this time, and she silently turned the screen to show it to Barbara. “I just wish I was out there myself,” she confessed. “We used to have such fun... If it weren’t for this dodgy hip I would go, honestly I would.”
“Yes, well, if you will insist on getting shot in the line of duty,” Barbara said, with a complete lack of sympathy. “Still, we really should have a good get-together when all this is sorted.”
“Ooh, yes,” she said enthusiastically, beginning to calculate dates, times and international flight-plans in her head. “Do you think you could have your Ros clear our usual place for security for, say... Mmm, let’s see. Maybe a fortnight’s time?”
Barbara considered. “I think that should be do-able, yes - always assuming Victoria clears US airspace in time, of course. Myers did seem to be getting on rather well with your DI Lestrade, so I’m sure there will be only a moderate amount of grumbling at the overtime.”
“Consider it a plan, then.” Martha raised her teacup in a toast.
~*~
She lay flat on her stomach on the precipice, the muzzle of her gun all that was visible to anyone who should look up from below. It was surprisingly warm up here, she considered, given that she was in the middle of the Swiss alps - an extremely welcome change, given that LA had actually managed to hail on her, of all things - and she still hadn’t managed to finish her target.
“Remind me again who trained this one?” she murmured into her radio. “Oh, wait, let me guess - it was us, wasn’t it?”
“Afraid so,” said Martha’s voice in her ear. “SAS, then MI6, as far as Bunty and Harriet can discover. He got kicked out of there for brutalising prisoners of war six years ago, and then after that we lost track of him entirely until my Sherlock spotted him socialising with Jim Moriarty -”
“Shortly before all hell broke loose,” Victoria completed.
“More or less, yes,” admitted Martha. “Do you have visuals?”
She peered into the sight, lined up again on Moriarty’s head, and smiled. “Oh, yes. I just want a guaranteed clear shot - the Colonel has been rather embarrassing and I’m damned if I’m just winging him again.”
She heard Martha chuckle dryly. “Just so long as you do kill him this time, dear.”
“Oh, no fear. Not this time.”
She could see Moran at bay in three-quarter profile, his handsome wild features now marred by bandaging as a result of having had his left ear shot off in one of her previous attempts on his life. The hallmark of her creed was to never be seen by a mark, but somehow she almost wanted to be seen by this little bastard, just for the look on his face as he realised he’d been liquidated by a woman drawing a bus-pass. He was talking to a man who she was fairly certain was Sherlock Holmes - he’d gone ginger (not the most subtle nor flattering of shades: he now resembled an anaemic carrot) and if she was any judge he’d given himself a new nose with that most versatile of tools, face-putty - and looked like a tiger forcibly overriding every instinct to spring. Sherlock himself, of course, merely looked bored - although she suspected that that was merely his habitual expression. Probable!Sherlock said something apparently obnoxious and Moran, seemingly tried beyond patience with him, snatched for the gun she knew he had hidden on his hip.
There was nothing for it: she squeezed the trigger, Moran’s skull blossomed with red and he dropped like a stone.
Gotcha! was what she thought, albeit rather unprofessionally; what she said, however, was “Put the kettle on, dear, I’ll make the Eurotunnel in two hours.”
She could hear cheering in her right ear as she hastily packed up her equipment: Martha had friends over, by the sound of it. Young Mr Holmes, meanwhile, was looking startled, but he was no longer any concern of hers; all she had to do now was to get herself out of the country before the Swiss spooks noticed the Englishman’s death bore all the hallmarks of a trade hit. Business as usual, then...
“This,” she remarked gleefully, peering down the sheer cliff-face that was about to provide her exit route, “Is one hell of a way to spend your retirement!”
“Tell me about it,” said Mrs Hudson, from Baker Street.