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Herlock Sholmes is used to the unusual, unfamiliar, and unexpected. It’s practically part of the job description.
Still, even he is caught off guard by a newborn infant, and even more unprepared to raise her alone.
(He wants to be upset with Yujin for this, but he can’t find it in himself.)
It’s perhaps his own fault that Iris grows up to be dangerously curious. Despite his, admittedly rather weak, efforts to keep her away from the more gory side of his business, she’s still raised on a diet of mystery and intrigue.
It’s no surprise that the greatest mystery of all is herself.
Iris takes to books like water, and is reading earlier than Sholmes’ research says she should be. She’s his own little genius, and he likes to think that he rubbed off on her at least a bit. She devours the children’s books he gives her and swiftly moves to trying to crack whatever else she can get her hands on: newspapers, scientific texts, Sholmes’ correspondences.
(She asks him about the letters in Japanese. He’s glad she can’t even begin to read them, because he doesn’t know how he would explain why someone as far away as Japan is asking after her.)
Eventually, she finds her way into Yujin’s papers. Sholmes thought the chest was carefully locked—he didn’t have it in him to get rid of anything, especially with how diligent Yujin was with his personal archives—but by now, Iris can get into nearly as many locks as he can.
There is a chance he should stop teaching her ways to break the law. He never claimed he would be a good parent; he just ended up here through no fault of his own.
Sholmes really should be more worried about her reading the notes from their cases. But at this point, at five (and a half, as she insists on reminding him) years old, she already knows far more than she should about his work. What’s the harm in her learning a few more procedural details and reading Yujin’s sometimes flowery descriptions?
But Iris has been raised by a detective. Sholmes will never underestimate her, but he didn’t know the exact details of everything in that chest.
What he didn’t account for was a signature from one John H. Wilson.
Iris doesn’t know how old she was when she first asked Hurley about her parents. She doesn’t remember it, but she knows there had to be a first time.
There had to be, because all the characters in stories had parents: a mother and a father.
Iris has neither. She has a Herlock.
It’s not as if she feels like something is missing, but more that she knows something, someone, was there and now isn’t. And she wants to know the who and why of the situation.
The apartment could be full of clues, but it’s also full of red herrings. Random items Hurley has collected in all the years he’s lived in this one space, some with more meaning than others. Some have stories he’ll share with her before bed, stories of stolen jewels and missing people. Others are simply things he picked up and never put down. Many, many, of them up high out of Iris’ reach. She pokes around what she can, wanting to know her home as much as herself, and one day pokes the chest in just the right way to pop it open.
It’s like uncovering the treasure pirates are always looking for. Hundreds of pieces of paper, all covered in careful notes.
At first, Iris thinks they belong to Hurley. But the handwriting doesn’t match and nothing about Hurley makes her think he would be able to take such neat and meticulous notes—or that he would ever want to.
So someone wrote these notes, and they were important enough that Hurley has kept them for at least as long as Iris has lived with him.
She could just ask—and maybe she will when she’s truly hit a dead end—but for now, she has reading to do. Lots of it.
The writer wasn’t just detailed and organized, they knew Hurley well—or at the very least, as well as Iris knows him. The chest wasn’t full just because they wrote many pages for each individual case. It was full because the cases went back years. The notes were ordered chronologically, as Iris deemed proper, and she didn’t know what to call the feeling in her chest when she got to the bottom of the trunk and realized the first date meant that this mysterious whoever had known Hurley for longer than she has.
It isn’t lost on her, either, that the most recent notes are dated just days before Hurley said she appeared on his doorstep.
There aren’t many defining features of the writer. The most identifying thing is how they talk about Hurley. But of all the people Iris knows, she can’t think of a single one who speaks to or about Hurley like that—with a kind of awe and reverence and depth of care that certainly would mean they’d visit.
Surely, someone who cared so much as to detail all their joint cases and go on all those investigations and live with Hurley for six years would be hard-pressed to stay away for nearly the same amount of time.
There’s a tiny part of Iris that wonders if somehow, in some way, it’s her fault. But that couldn’t be true. …Could it?
Iris pushes away the thought, because for now it’s based on absolutely nothing, and curls up in front of the fire day after day to make her way through case notes, imagining Hurley and a mystery partner dashing through the foggy London streets and chasing after bad guys, often in the dead of night in her imagination.
If she tries hard enough, she can imagine she’s there with them.
“Hurley,” she says when she’s several years into the notes. She’s reading them from beginning to end, wanting to see how Hurley changes in the writer’s eyes as time goes on. “Who wrote the case notes in your trunk?”
He looks up from a letter he’s been scratching away at for the better part of an hour, a smudge of ink on his cheek. “Hm?”
Iris holds up a page detailing the murder of a colonel. “The writer? Who was it?”
Hurley looks from the notes to her, studying her for a long moment with an expression she can’t quite place and doesn’t think she’s seen cross his face before. She tries not to squirm under his sharp gaze.
Finally, Hurley sits up a little straighter and says with a tilt of his head and a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, “Why, dear Iris, your father wrote those.”
Nothing about the content of the notes changes, but Iris feels inexplicably closer to the writer. Hurley won’t tell her anything else when she asks, just winks and says that’s for her to figure out herself, but suddenly it’s almost as if the notes are being written for her.
That’s impossible—how could he have known nearly fifteen years ago that one day he would have a daughter who wanted to read his notes?
(If they were for her, she finds herself thinking when she’s especially tired or when Hurley’s been particularly focused on his work, why would he have disappeared as soon as she was born?)
Iris goes through the notes with a fine-toothed comb. She reads about coronets and dead husbands and secret rooms. She learns that Hurley doesn’t know about the solar system but can tell apart over twenty brands of cigars just by their ash. She thinks she’s figured out the rhythm of their relationship, at least from one side—whoever her father is isn’t the best at masking his emotions and sometimes hardly attempts to at all.
What she can’t find in all those hundreds of pages and six years is a name.
Sometimes, when Hurley is bored or excited or just feels like it, he’ll allow Iris to go with him to a crime scene or on an investigation. Or, in this case, to the morgue.
Technically, she isn’t allowed to go through the autopsy reports. But she’s eight and quite short, and Hurley is busy with Doctor Stevens, and while dead bodies are very interesting, they’re not talking about a dead body. Hurley is showing Doctor Stevens evidence he’d found at a crime scene that Iris already had ample time to look over. So Iris is, possibly, a little bit bored. And the drawer is open, and they can’t see her behind the autopsy table.
She’s flipping through the pages—quietly, something she has plenty of practice at from when she’s supposed to be sleeping—looking for an interesting cause of death or peculiar injury, when a familiar looping catches her eye.
Tugging the report free, Iris stares in awe at the top page. She would know this handwriting in her sleep. She’s traced it with her fingertips and held it close to her nose, like staring at the way the t’s were crossed and how the i’s were dotted would answer all the world’s questions.
Behind her, Doctor Steven’s words gain a bite. Without thinking, Iris neatly folds the report in three and sticks it into her dress, silently shutting the drawer and focusing her attention on the plush dolls on the bench above her.
When they leave, the autopsy report of Klint van Zieks burns in her pocket.
Iris bides her time.
She keeps the autopsy report hidden safely in the pages of one of her journals—a privacy Hurley would never breach. Then, after a few weeks and any suspicions about a missing report directed elsewhere, she waits until Hurley darts out the door on a sudden hunch and another fifteen minutes to make sure he doesn’t double back, having forgotten something in his hurry.
She doesn’t even dare to sit in the living room by the fire, though she thinks the setting and mood would make a perfect scene. Instead, she pulls the top bundle of notes out of the trunk and rushes back to her room.
Heart racing, she carefully takes the autopsy report out of hiding and places it alongside her father’s notes.
Breathing slowly, Iris compares common words: “like”, “the”, “and”, “of”, “be”. She studies the way letters loop together, the way they tilt; how low the stems drop, how high the ascenders reach.
It’s the same. It’s all the same.
Iris bites down on her bottom lip, takes a deep breath, and flips to the very last page of the autopsy report.
There, at the bottom, is a signature.
John H. Wilson.
The autopsy report can’t be returned to the morgue, but it can be returned to a hiding place—an even more secure one. The notes go back into the trunk. A kettle goes on the stove.
It’s odd, Iris thinks, having a surname to call her own. It—something—settles within her, slightly odd and uncomfortable like a new pair of shoes, but with a solidity that must be truth.
She’s solved her own mystery. She’s not just Iris.
She’s Iris Wilson.
Iris writes her first story under the name “Iris Wilson” and beams when she shows Sholmes the finished manuscript.
His eyes catch on the byline, a slight stutter that trips him for just a moment before he dives in.
“By god!” he announces as he puts down the pages, and if he’s playing it up a little for the girl he doesn’t let himself call his daughter, neither of them care. “I’m living with the next Shakespeare!”
When the story is printed in The Randst, Sholmes buys a dozen copies. Half he hands to acquaintances, four go into storage for posterity, and one is displayed on the wall. The story in the last is carefully cut out and slipped into an envelope headed to Japan.
The accompanying letter is brief. Yujin will understand all the hidden messages in Iris’ story—ones even the writer hasn’t found. Sholmes smiles to himself as he seals the envelope with Iris’ pink wax.
There’s still more to this mystery for her to solve. And as terrifying as it is to think about, he can’t deny that he’s excited to see her try.