Fic: Life in a Glasshouse [Prologue + 1/?]
Title: Life in a Glasshouse
Category: Doctor Who/Sherlock (2010)
Genre: Mystery-based gen
Primary Characters: Sally Sparrow, Sherlock Holmes
Rating: PG
Setting: four years post-"Blink", a year or so post-"The Great Game"
Summary: When an acquaintance of Sally's is murdered she calls in the help of Sherlock Holmes.
Life in a Glasshouse
Prologue
I own an antique book shop now, with a large window; when it rains, the water hangs against the glass in hard, round drops like the high notes on a piano. I love the rain, in all its distortions: the long, coloured streaks which make the world run; the perfect spheres which contain an entire scene, bulbous and inverted, shrunken and multiplied - grey, and blue, and red - and cast a thousand rings of shadow on the floor. I love the rain, but the boiler had broken that day and (it was a Saturday) I had been told that it could not be fixed until Monday; so I sat dripping behind the counter with a small space heater for company and tapping out the minutes on the counter-top in arrhythmic sympathy with the rain on the window.
It was almost eleven when a tall man entered in a long black coat; the drops of water which clung to the wool were not like the high notes on a piano - they were like something else, something more fleeting. His breath steamed in the frigid air and I thought he might turn and walk back out, jangling the door behind him (bells, they were like tinkling bells, or perhaps-); but he stayed. He turned directly to a stack of books and, disrobing one gloved hand, ran his fingertips lightly over the cover of the topmost book. Then he addressed me without looking at me:
"I wonder if you could help me;" he said, "I'm trying to track down a rare old book."
"What kind of book?" I said. He opened the book he was fingering and ran his fingers across the first page.
"The particular book I am looking for is called 'The Ship That Sailed to Mars'," he said, and now he glanced at me sidelong, "by a William M. Timlin. I had heard that a copy might have fallen into your hands."
"Oh," I said with a wry smile, "where had you heard that?"
"I've been trying to trace this book for quite some time;" he said, "I'm a collector."
"In other words," I said, "you found my website and saw that I had listed it under acquisitions." He said nothing, so I continued: "I'm afraid I no longer have it. I already sold it to another collector. But I have a list of phone numbers - of other book sellers and auction houses. You could ask around; I'm sure you'll find a copy."
He slammed the book he had been examining shut and approached the counter. "No," he said, "it has to be your book."
"Why?"
"The copy you had possessed - albeit briefly - had an entirely unique feature which makes it of utmost value to me."
I was taken aback here; I had examined the book myself and found nothing 'unique' about it aside from its idiosyncratic pattern of wear and tear. "You're not a book collector," I said. "There was nothing special about that book which would interest a collector. You're something else entirely."
He tilted his head as if to examine me. "You're clever," he said, "I can tell. Well, then: what am I if not a collector?"
I paused. Then I looked him in the eye and said, "A stalker."
"Excuse me?"
"You followed me home last night," I said - and I watched him; I couldn't quantify what it was which made me feel that the man who had followed me the night before was the same as the one standing before me, but somehow I was almost sure of it. It was something to do with the way he had walked over to the counter, there was something reminiscent of the figure I had glimpsed behind me in the shadows.
He opened his mouth, and then closed it again. Then he said, "You needn't flatter yourself; I have no romantic interest in you."
"It's hardly flattery," I said; I was burning inside but I took pains to keep my voice cool. "It makes no difference whether a man sees his behaviour as romantic or not."
"It's the book," he continued, as if I had said nothing. "That's what I am interested in, and I know you haven't sold it. It's very important that I see that book."
"Why is it so important?" I asked, leaning over on the counter. "What's in that book worth frightening a young woman half to death over?"
He looked at me for a long minute, cold and slow. Then he said, "My name is Sherlock Holmes. I am a consulting detective investigating a murder. I need to examine the book because I know the victim handled it on the day of his murder, and I expect it to have picked up chemical traces which will narrow my field of investigation." He added, after a moment and with a touch of irritation, "I followed you yesterday because I had hoped to take it, test it, and return it without having to go through all this," he waved his hand, "preamble."
"That's all?" I said. "That's why you followed me? You put in all that effort rather than ask to see it?"
"Ordinarily," he said, "it would have been less effort that way."
"I see," I said. I tapped my fingers on the desk and appraised him. There was something haughty about him, something about his manner which seemed eager to impress a sense of indifference: it is not that I am interested in you, merely that I must deal with you. I'm not sure that I believed he was telling the truth - or at least the whole truth - but I felt cavalier; I always feel a little cavalier: that spark, that over-willingness to do something interesting always burns in the recesses of me, and when it moves within me it sends me into broken houses or provokes me into-
"Wait here," I said. I slipped into the back of the shop. The book he wanted to see was the most expensive I had bought to date and I kept it in the safe, which itself was hidden behind a false panel in the wall. I took it out and ran my fingers over the cover; in fact, it had been an ambition of mine to own a copy of this book for several years - ever since I encountered one at one of the first book auctions I had attended. Then I put it back inside its box.
"Here," I said, walking back into the front of the shop and placing the box on the counter. He moved to take it, but I put my hand over it.
"You were here last night too, weren't you?" I said. "You came for the book then, and you found the safe."
He paused, and then said slowly - I thought grudgingly - "I wasn't sure of the combination."
"Because it's not my birthday or something like that," I said, with a sense of triumph. "It's meaningless." I took my hand off the box and indicated that he take it. He gave me a peculiar look before he did, as if for a moment he was interested in me. Then he swept out of the shop.
- - -
I found the book locked in my safe the next morning. To this day, I have never asked him how he divined the combination.
- - -
I.
It was several weeks before I saw Sherlock Holmes again. The rain-soaked September days had shrunken in on themselves, curling up against the cold brought by October and November in succession. I never sold the book, truth be told; I am something of a collector myself. Nor did my thoughts wander that often to the strange man who had enlisted my help in a murder case: I have met stranger creatures in my life than Sherlock Holmes; although-.
I measure my life in emotional sensations. There is a great frozen river inside me: there was a time when it carried the silver fish of my thoughts down complex emotional undercurrents; now it is glassy-clear. But sometimes when I climb over half-rusted wrought-iron gates into graveyards or tilt my head before a van Gogh I feel my heart buckle - and the ice begins to crack; and one time the entire river melted in a single day, and a single turn of events. So, I periodically thought of Sherlock Holmes and how he showed me that nothing I thought was quite locked away from him - but then he seemed almost small and mundane, and I pined away for a different kind of adventure.
Then one evening, as I was curled up with a book on the window seat in my flat over the book shop, came a rattling on the front door, and a "Sally Sparrow? Sally Sparrow?" I only vaguely recognised the voice, but something in its tone drew me downstairs, and when I had opened the door I managed to place the face of Mr Arthur Rutherford, one of my semi-regular customers. His hand was trembling.
I gave him a cup of tea with a slice of lemon and asked him why he had called on me.
"You're the only one I can call on," he said. "Something has happened to me -" He pushed the cup away. "I've heard things about you."
"Excuse me?" I said.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I mean that - you seem to be the only person who can help me with this." He took a deep breath and steadied his hands on the table. "You know that my daughter, Lisa, passed away three years ago."
I hadn't known that, and I told him. He stared at me, and then said, "Well, she was a climber. She was caught in an avalanche in the Alps."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.
"- But she came back," he said. "Tonight. I saw her at the window."
I don't know why, except that it seemed the thing to do, but I put my hand over his.
"I feel as if I'm going mad," he said. "They never retrieved her body. But being stuck on a mountain after an avalanche, separated from her team and her equipment, supplies - I don't see how she could have survived. The odds of survival were nil, I was told. But then three years later and she shows up at the house. What am I to make of that? - was I hallucinating?"
"What exactly happened?" I said. I took my hand from his and reached for the tea he had rejected.
"Tonight?" he said. "I was working, in my study. I happened to look up at the window - and there she was, my Lisa. I stood up in a fright, and I knocked the lamp over. When I looked back at the window she was gone. I ran all around the house to try to find her but she had disappeared."
I leaned back in my seat. "What exactly do you want me to do?"
Again, he fixed me in a desperate stare. "Well, I was hoping you would come and have a look."
"Because you've heard things about me."
"Well, yes," he said. "I've heard that you have experience - with the supernatural."
I supposed you could put it that way; it had never occurred to me before. I half-wondered where he might have heard that; the fact of it unsettled me, because I had half an idea about it. I glanced at the clock: it was almost a quarter past nine. Finally, I said, "I'll take a look."
As far as I knew at that time, Mr Rutherford was a businessman and a widower. He worked in the City but lived out in Finchley - and he was a genuine collector of rare and antique books. He drove me out to his house now, and I sat silent in the passenger seat of his car as we drove through the leafy backstreets. I wondered what I expected to find at his house and why I had bothered to come; surely he had nodded off over his work and his half-sleeping brain had conjured up a vision of his dead daughter for him which vanished into the night air as he regained his faculties. But the spark had moved inside me - the one which had taken me out to a house named Wester Drumlins on a fateful night almost four years ago, and which had provoked me to hand over my most valuable possession to a man I hardly knew. I have heard that curiosity is a terrible disease; I don't know that that has been my experience.
He showed me into the study where he had been working and pointed to a large bay window looking out onto the garden. "That's where I saw her," he said. I walked up to the window and peered through it: there was nothing out there now, of course. I left him in the study and walked around the house with a torch to look at the garden alone.
There were no fingerprints on the window - as far as I could tell. The ground looked as if it had been disturbed but there were no discernible footprints and the garden was not well-kept enough for me to tell whether the disturbance was recent or just a feature of the lawn. I stepped lightly across the lawn to the wall at the end of the garden and examined the trees (deciding that if anybody had been in the garden this might have been a likely escape route). Here I saw that several small branches had been broken on one of the holly trees and part of the trunk had been scuffed. I climbed carefully up an adjacent tree and peered over the wall; using the torch I saw dirt on the pavement which must have been deposited there recently - as it had rained that afternoon, and the water should have washed the pavement clean of any soil.
"Well?" said Mr Rutherford as I walked back into the house. "Did you - sense anything?"
I stared at him. "Who do you think I am?" He looked away, and I felt a pang of guilt for my shortness. "I didn't 'sense' anything," I said, "and I don't know what you saw, but I do think someone was in your garden tonight and climbed over the wall to escape."
He sat down in the study chair. There was a long silence, and then he said , "I must seem so foolish to you, to think my daughter had come back to me."
"Not foolish," I said, overcome with sadness for him - this man who had been a husband and a father, who had lost his wife and then his daughter. I knelt beside him and put my hand over his for the second time that night. "Not foolish."
He turned to look at me. "It was good of you to come out here tonight, Sally." I looked away; I knew inside I hadn't come out of any kindness.
"You should report this to the police," I said.
"No," he said. "No, I think I've troubled enough people with this business. Better just to let it alone now, I think." And he drove me back to my little flat above the book shop in contemplative silence.
- - -
Arthur Rutherford was killed in his home that night.
Category: Doctor Who/Sherlock (2010)
Genre: Mystery-based gen
Primary Characters: Sally Sparrow, Sherlock Holmes
Rating: PG
Setting: four years post-"Blink", a year or so post-"The Great Game"
Summary: When an acquaintance of Sally's is murdered she calls in the help of Sherlock Holmes.
Life in a Glasshouse
Prologue
I own an antique book shop now, with a large window; when it rains, the water hangs against the glass in hard, round drops like the high notes on a piano. I love the rain, in all its distortions: the long, coloured streaks which make the world run; the perfect spheres which contain an entire scene, bulbous and inverted, shrunken and multiplied - grey, and blue, and red - and cast a thousand rings of shadow on the floor. I love the rain, but the boiler had broken that day and (it was a Saturday) I had been told that it could not be fixed until Monday; so I sat dripping behind the counter with a small space heater for company and tapping out the minutes on the counter-top in arrhythmic sympathy with the rain on the window.
It was almost eleven when a tall man entered in a long black coat; the drops of water which clung to the wool were not like the high notes on a piano - they were like something else, something more fleeting. His breath steamed in the frigid air and I thought he might turn and walk back out, jangling the door behind him (bells, they were like tinkling bells, or perhaps-); but he stayed. He turned directly to a stack of books and, disrobing one gloved hand, ran his fingertips lightly over the cover of the topmost book. Then he addressed me without looking at me:
"I wonder if you could help me;" he said, "I'm trying to track down a rare old book."
"What kind of book?" I said. He opened the book he was fingering and ran his fingers across the first page.
"The particular book I am looking for is called 'The Ship That Sailed to Mars'," he said, and now he glanced at me sidelong, "by a William M. Timlin. I had heard that a copy might have fallen into your hands."
"Oh," I said with a wry smile, "where had you heard that?"
"I've been trying to trace this book for quite some time;" he said, "I'm a collector."
"In other words," I said, "you found my website and saw that I had listed it under acquisitions." He said nothing, so I continued: "I'm afraid I no longer have it. I already sold it to another collector. But I have a list of phone numbers - of other book sellers and auction houses. You could ask around; I'm sure you'll find a copy."
He slammed the book he had been examining shut and approached the counter. "No," he said, "it has to be your book."
"Why?"
"The copy you had possessed - albeit briefly - had an entirely unique feature which makes it of utmost value to me."
I was taken aback here; I had examined the book myself and found nothing 'unique' about it aside from its idiosyncratic pattern of wear and tear. "You're not a book collector," I said. "There was nothing special about that book which would interest a collector. You're something else entirely."
He tilted his head as if to examine me. "You're clever," he said, "I can tell. Well, then: what am I if not a collector?"
I paused. Then I looked him in the eye and said, "A stalker."
"Excuse me?"
"You followed me home last night," I said - and I watched him; I couldn't quantify what it was which made me feel that the man who had followed me the night before was the same as the one standing before me, but somehow I was almost sure of it. It was something to do with the way he had walked over to the counter, there was something reminiscent of the figure I had glimpsed behind me in the shadows.
He opened his mouth, and then closed it again. Then he said, "You needn't flatter yourself; I have no romantic interest in you."
"It's hardly flattery," I said; I was burning inside but I took pains to keep my voice cool. "It makes no difference whether a man sees his behaviour as romantic or not."
"It's the book," he continued, as if I had said nothing. "That's what I am interested in, and I know you haven't sold it. It's very important that I see that book."
"Why is it so important?" I asked, leaning over on the counter. "What's in that book worth frightening a young woman half to death over?"
He looked at me for a long minute, cold and slow. Then he said, "My name is Sherlock Holmes. I am a consulting detective investigating a murder. I need to examine the book because I know the victim handled it on the day of his murder, and I expect it to have picked up chemical traces which will narrow my field of investigation." He added, after a moment and with a touch of irritation, "I followed you yesterday because I had hoped to take it, test it, and return it without having to go through all this," he waved his hand, "preamble."
"That's all?" I said. "That's why you followed me? You put in all that effort rather than ask to see it?"
"Ordinarily," he said, "it would have been less effort that way."
"I see," I said. I tapped my fingers on the desk and appraised him. There was something haughty about him, something about his manner which seemed eager to impress a sense of indifference: it is not that I am interested in you, merely that I must deal with you. I'm not sure that I believed he was telling the truth - or at least the whole truth - but I felt cavalier; I always feel a little cavalier: that spark, that over-willingness to do something interesting always burns in the recesses of me, and when it moves within me it sends me into broken houses or provokes me into-
"Wait here," I said. I slipped into the back of the shop. The book he wanted to see was the most expensive I had bought to date and I kept it in the safe, which itself was hidden behind a false panel in the wall. I took it out and ran my fingers over the cover; in fact, it had been an ambition of mine to own a copy of this book for several years - ever since I encountered one at one of the first book auctions I had attended. Then I put it back inside its box.
"Here," I said, walking back into the front of the shop and placing the box on the counter. He moved to take it, but I put my hand over it.
"You were here last night too, weren't you?" I said. "You came for the book then, and you found the safe."
He paused, and then said slowly - I thought grudgingly - "I wasn't sure of the combination."
"Because it's not my birthday or something like that," I said, with a sense of triumph. "It's meaningless." I took my hand off the box and indicated that he take it. He gave me a peculiar look before he did, as if for a moment he was interested in me. Then he swept out of the shop.
- - -
I found the book locked in my safe the next morning. To this day, I have never asked him how he divined the combination.
- - -
I.
It was several weeks before I saw Sherlock Holmes again. The rain-soaked September days had shrunken in on themselves, curling up against the cold brought by October and November in succession. I never sold the book, truth be told; I am something of a collector myself. Nor did my thoughts wander that often to the strange man who had enlisted my help in a murder case: I have met stranger creatures in my life than Sherlock Holmes; although-.
I measure my life in emotional sensations. There is a great frozen river inside me: there was a time when it carried the silver fish of my thoughts down complex emotional undercurrents; now it is glassy-clear. But sometimes when I climb over half-rusted wrought-iron gates into graveyards or tilt my head before a van Gogh I feel my heart buckle - and the ice begins to crack; and one time the entire river melted in a single day, and a single turn of events. So, I periodically thought of Sherlock Holmes and how he showed me that nothing I thought was quite locked away from him - but then he seemed almost small and mundane, and I pined away for a different kind of adventure.
Then one evening, as I was curled up with a book on the window seat in my flat over the book shop, came a rattling on the front door, and a "Sally Sparrow? Sally Sparrow?" I only vaguely recognised the voice, but something in its tone drew me downstairs, and when I had opened the door I managed to place the face of Mr Arthur Rutherford, one of my semi-regular customers. His hand was trembling.
I gave him a cup of tea with a slice of lemon and asked him why he had called on me.
"You're the only one I can call on," he said. "Something has happened to me -" He pushed the cup away. "I've heard things about you."
"Excuse me?" I said.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I mean that - you seem to be the only person who can help me with this." He took a deep breath and steadied his hands on the table. "You know that my daughter, Lisa, passed away three years ago."
I hadn't known that, and I told him. He stared at me, and then said, "Well, she was a climber. She was caught in an avalanche in the Alps."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.
"- But she came back," he said. "Tonight. I saw her at the window."
I don't know why, except that it seemed the thing to do, but I put my hand over his.
"I feel as if I'm going mad," he said. "They never retrieved her body. But being stuck on a mountain after an avalanche, separated from her team and her equipment, supplies - I don't see how she could have survived. The odds of survival were nil, I was told. But then three years later and she shows up at the house. What am I to make of that? - was I hallucinating?"
"What exactly happened?" I said. I took my hand from his and reached for the tea he had rejected.
"Tonight?" he said. "I was working, in my study. I happened to look up at the window - and there she was, my Lisa. I stood up in a fright, and I knocked the lamp over. When I looked back at the window she was gone. I ran all around the house to try to find her but she had disappeared."
I leaned back in my seat. "What exactly do you want me to do?"
Again, he fixed me in a desperate stare. "Well, I was hoping you would come and have a look."
"Because you've heard things about me."
"Well, yes," he said. "I've heard that you have experience - with the supernatural."
I supposed you could put it that way; it had never occurred to me before. I half-wondered where he might have heard that; the fact of it unsettled me, because I had half an idea about it. I glanced at the clock: it was almost a quarter past nine. Finally, I said, "I'll take a look."
As far as I knew at that time, Mr Rutherford was a businessman and a widower. He worked in the City but lived out in Finchley - and he was a genuine collector of rare and antique books. He drove me out to his house now, and I sat silent in the passenger seat of his car as we drove through the leafy backstreets. I wondered what I expected to find at his house and why I had bothered to come; surely he had nodded off over his work and his half-sleeping brain had conjured up a vision of his dead daughter for him which vanished into the night air as he regained his faculties. But the spark had moved inside me - the one which had taken me out to a house named Wester Drumlins on a fateful night almost four years ago, and which had provoked me to hand over my most valuable possession to a man I hardly knew. I have heard that curiosity is a terrible disease; I don't know that that has been my experience.
He showed me into the study where he had been working and pointed to a large bay window looking out onto the garden. "That's where I saw her," he said. I walked up to the window and peered through it: there was nothing out there now, of course. I left him in the study and walked around the house with a torch to look at the garden alone.
There were no fingerprints on the window - as far as I could tell. The ground looked as if it had been disturbed but there were no discernible footprints and the garden was not well-kept enough for me to tell whether the disturbance was recent or just a feature of the lawn. I stepped lightly across the lawn to the wall at the end of the garden and examined the trees (deciding that if anybody had been in the garden this might have been a likely escape route). Here I saw that several small branches had been broken on one of the holly trees and part of the trunk had been scuffed. I climbed carefully up an adjacent tree and peered over the wall; using the torch I saw dirt on the pavement which must have been deposited there recently - as it had rained that afternoon, and the water should have washed the pavement clean of any soil.
"Well?" said Mr Rutherford as I walked back into the house. "Did you - sense anything?"
I stared at him. "Who do you think I am?" He looked away, and I felt a pang of guilt for my shortness. "I didn't 'sense' anything," I said, "and I don't know what you saw, but I do think someone was in your garden tonight and climbed over the wall to escape."
He sat down in the study chair. There was a long silence, and then he said , "I must seem so foolish to you, to think my daughter had come back to me."
"Not foolish," I said, overcome with sadness for him - this man who had been a husband and a father, who had lost his wife and then his daughter. I knelt beside him and put my hand over his for the second time that night. "Not foolish."
He turned to look at me. "It was good of you to come out here tonight, Sally." I looked away; I knew inside I hadn't come out of any kindness.
"You should report this to the police," I said.
"No," he said. "No, I think I've troubled enough people with this business. Better just to let it alone now, I think." And he drove me back to my little flat above the book shop in contemplative silence.
- - -
Arthur Rutherford was killed in his home that night.