'I don't believe it !'

DS Barbara Havers violently closed her laptop.

'It's not possible!'

She unlocked it from its base.

'How dare they?!'

She crossed the room with her laptop under her arm, under the curious gaze of her colleagues.

She strode across the room and forcefully knocked on the door of DI Thomas Lynley. Without waiting for an answer she opened the door.

'Do you know what's going on?' she angrily asked him.

'Havers, when my door's shut it means I don't want to be disturbed,' Lynley snapped. 'I'm in a meeting.'

'That's more important!' she retorted and she forcefully put her laptop on his desktop, hustling away the young man who was sitting in front of Lynley.

'I think it will have to wait, Sergeant,' Lynley said icily.

'You'd rather have a look at this before you pull up ranks, Inspector,' she replied on the same tone.

They were eyeballs to eyeballs for a few seconds. The poor constable on his chair didn't dare move nor say anything. He'd been told Lynley and Havers sometimes clashed violently but he'd never expected, not even in his worst nightmares, to be caught in the middle of one of their fights.

Finally Barbara gave in and softened her tone.

'Seriously, Sir, you need to see this.'

Struck by the seriousness of his sergeant, Lynley dismissed the constable.

Barbara took the chair in front of Tommy, opened her laptop and unlocked it. Then she handed it to Tommy.

'What am I looking at?' he asked without looking at the screen.

'Fanfictions.'

'And they are?'

'Remember when you played Zorro or Robinson Crusoe with your chums, or pretended to be Nelson at Trafalgar? If, instead of playing games, you had written stories about your heroes and shared them on the net they would have been fanfictions.'

'Why were you so desperate to show this to me? Copyright infringement's not our division [1].'

Barbara rolled her eyes in exasperation.

'It's not a problem of copyright infringement. These guys don't make money out of their fanfics; they do this for the fun. The problem's the subject of the fanfics.'

'Which is?'

'Us.'

'Us?'

'Yes, you and me, us.'

'How come?'

Lynley put on his reading spectacles and began to read.

'Blimey! It's hot!'

'And I spared you the adult-only ones.'

'Which I can access…' Tommy asked innocently.

'Don't you dare!'

Barbara slammed her laptop shut. Lynley laughed.

'Honestly, Barbara, this is embarrassing, I agree, but I don't think there's much we can do. I suppose none of the writers use their own names.'

'No, they don't but some aliases are not too hard to break.'

She opened her laptop again but didn't turn the screen back to Lynley.

'There's Hades, who is, as you know probably better than me, the god of the dead in Greek mythology, and who knows a lot about forensics.'

'Lafferty?!'

'BrixtonCopper69.'

'Nkata?'

'And worst of all, even if her stories aren't as steamy as the others, LadyOfTheCastle.'

'No?'

'Yes.'

'Mother?'

'I'm afraid so.'

Tommy put down his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

'You were right, Barbara, this is serious matter.'

'I thought you needed to know. Not all the stories have graphic sex scenes in them…'

'Thank God; my Mother writes some of these stories.'

'…but us getting together is a recurring theme.'

'Do you think they're trying to send us a message of some sort?'

'I do. And, by the way, your mother did write some M-rated stories.'

'This is getting worse by the second.'

'So what do we do now?'

'What do you propose?'

'Maybe it's time we let them know we've been together for almost 5 months. Maybe they'll stop dreaming about us being an item once they know we already are.'

'That's one solution but I don't think we should hurry.'

'You suggest we let them stew?'

'As you know, Sergeant, it's important to gather as many facts as possible before bringing a case to court so I propose we study carefully those stories before we decide what to do. Besides, in order to avoid any disruption, I suggest we read the stories when we're alone in our bedroom. What do you think?'

'You have my vote.'

'No time to waste, then. I think we have a lot of stories to read.'

'I already bookmarked some of them I wanted to review more in depth.'

'Excellent initiative, my love.'

They left the building and went home as fast as the London traffic would allow them, Barbara's laptop on the rear seat of the car.

[1] as Greg Lestrade would say. (Sherlock – BBC Series)