Please note: The following story is in fact what we call fan fiction. This means that the author is playing around with characters, plot, and settings that were first conceived of by someone else. In this particular case, Enola Holmes is property of Nancy Springer and Sherlock Holmes is property of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The modernization and the plot belong to Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat.
Chapter the First
My name is Enola Holmes. I am 18 years old and work in central London as the world’s only scientific perditorian – that is, I use science to find things that are lost. You may recognize my last name, and that would be because my brother, Sherlock, is rather famous. His crime solving expertise has been well documented by his friend Dr. John Watson. For all that expertise, however, Sherlock has no idea that I am living in London.
Nor, for that matter, does my other brother, the less famous, but no less intelligent, Mycroft Holmes.
I have been living right under their noses here in London ever since my Aunt Agatha passed away three years ago. Aunt Agatha did a wonderful job of setting up a number of bank accounts so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my brothers’ to set myself up in the world. She also knew I was smart.
Now because Mycroft had other ideas of what to do with me, and our parents basically washed their hands of the issue when I was younger and dumped me with Aunt Agatha in the first place, I found it much safer to remain here in London, using my talents to disguise myself.
Which is how I found myself where I am this morning. Walking to my office in a rare burst of sunshine.
The door reads: Dr. Leslie T Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian.
And no, Dr. Ragostin doesn’t actually exist. Sadly, people don’t often like handing cases off to teenagers. Fortunately, Aunt Agatha and I were able to set up the business before her passing. Aunt Agatha found it an amusement, but she also did it so that my mind would stay occupied.
“You’ve seen what happens when your brother, Sherlock, gets bored,” she told me once. “We’ll not have you doing the same thing. May as well keep your mind occupied.”
However, on my way in to work today, I had yet another task I needed to accomplish.
A homeless boy, approximately 20 years of age or so, though looking older from exposure to the elements, was seated on the stoop a couple of entryways down. Before going into my office building, I swung around by the boy and handed him an extra sugary coffee, just as he’d told me he liked it about a month before hand. His name was Geordie.
“Good morning, Geordie,” I said, smiling pleasantly.
“Good morning, Miss Ivy,” he said back. I was, after all, in one of my more common disguises: that of 22 year old Ivy Meshle.
“Geordie, I actually have a favor I need to ask of you,” I told him, quite bluntly. “I happen to know you do the odd job for a Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” Geordie gulped nervously, but I had been cozying up to him for the last month or so in an effort to turn one of my brother’s homeless network into one of mine. I had noticed that Sherlock seemed to think that he was the only one in the city who paid off the homeless for this sort of work. He was wrong, but that also meant he had a blind spot.
“Geordie, you don’t have to worry. I’m not about to do anything to you for that. I just need a favor, simple as that. I need you to keep an eye on Sherlock Holmes.”
“An eye on Sherlock Holmes, miss?” he asked, looking confused.
“Yes, Sherlock Holmes. He’s about to spiral out of control, if he hasn’t done so already, and I need to keep tabs on him.”
“Why miss?”
“Let’s just say, I’m a concerned party. Sherlock doesn’t know about me and I would like to keep it that way. But I’m also quite concerned about his health. I know he’s using again.”
Geordie studied her hard for a long moment, then slowly nodded. “I’ll make sure to keep an eye on Mr. Holmes for you, Miss Ivy. You’re a good sort. I can tell.”
“Thank you, Geordie.”
Goodness knows that was only the start of my day. It was about to get much, much worse.
When I got up to my office, I turned on my computer to be confronted with news: HOLMES ACCUSES PHILANTHROPIST OF BEING A SERIAL MURDERER.
Wonderful. My brother is off-his-rocker high, and now he’s accusing a celebrity – Culverton Smith to be specific – of committing serial murder.
Now, this isn’t to say I don’t believe him. I’d been tracking a few leads on the side just to keep an eye on things that were a bit suspicious as far as Culverton Smith was concerned. On one hand, the building of the new Culverton Smith Wing at the hospital had been riddled with hiring setbacks as one architect and builder after another were hired and fired. It never made front page news, but it was in the newspaper often enough, even if it was where most people don’t look. As a result of this, I had filed a request for all of the building plans with the city a few weeks ago.
The other thing that put me on edge was the high quantity of TD-12 that he seemed to have in his possession. “Bliss” – the street name for TD-12 – was a date rape drug that was not exactly readily available. Even a hospital shouldn’t have as much TD-12 in their pharmacy as the new Culverton Smith Wing did.
So while I believed my brother’s claim, he seemed to be going off of very little, if anything at all.
It did remind me of the last time I saw him though. A week ago I had seen Sherlock walking down by the pier talking with a blonde woman. The blonde woman had looked familiar, but I had trouble placing her – not a new feeling, but not something I felt all that often.
Between these two things, I knew I needed the plans to that hospital sooner rather than later. I was quite grateful when the phone rang. It was the city’s planning office.