1.
Swift Holmes enjoys living in Baker Street with her father and adoptive grandmother, Mrs Hudson. She spends most of her time helping her father on cases, playing the violin, composing music, or writing, as she passed her GCSEs and A Levels aged ten and refused to go to school after that. Children can be cruel, and Swift has no desire to sit in a crowded room with brash, obnoxious kids with no inclination to learn any more than they had to. She had enough of that in primary school, so she learns everything she could at home—willingly helped by her father whenever she asks—and roams free until roped into the latest case that had been mildly challenging enough to stump the morons at Scotland Yard. Except D. I. Lestrade; she likes him. This particular fact annoys her father immensely as he thinks the man is an incompetent idiot and refuses to learn his name even, although father and daughter are united in their opinions of one Sally Donovan.
Swift's father is not ordinarily a sentimental man, but there is one topic of conversation that is off limits, and that is Swift's other parent. She had taken to thinking of them as a parent when she was about eleven; she couldn't decide whether they would be male or female. Obviously she had to have a mother somewhere, but she doesn't know whether her mother was connected to her father romantically, or a surrogate was used (she was too similar to her father, and an amateur DNA test she had conducted aged six showed that she wasn't adopted). There are no photos of her father with anyone else in the flat, although obviously the flat itself is important as her father refuses to hear anything about moving, even when the toxic gases escape from the beaker and the flat is deemed too hazardous for residency. They just move into the flat downstairs which 'has been done up since the thing with the trainers, it's lovely now, new wallpaper, new carpet, no more damp, and definitely no more missing-murder-evidence trainers'. (Swift makes a note to ask about that, but she's never allowed because nothing existed before her birth. D. I. Lestrade has been given strict instructions not to tell her anything, either, even though she worked out when she was seven that he had been coming to her father for help since over half a decade before she was born.)
Mrs Hudson won't tell her either, and although she makes vague allusions to past cases constantly, no one other than the people at the Yard—whom she doesn't like very much, something about drugs busts and endangered lives—is mentioned.
When they move back into their own flat and her father spends almost two hours making sure everything is just as it was before, Swift grows increasingly frustrated, but resigns herself to composing angry, violent pieces for the violin, full of crescendos and clashing chords with reluctant resolutions. Sometimes her father is present when she plays them; she waits until he's well out of the way before she plays Frustrato. He, in turn, plays pieces that convey his mood, varying widely, except for when he's maudlin, sort-of-not-quite high, and drunk. In the first too instances, which are often dependent events, he plays one lullaby over and over, trilling and flowing gently and comfortingly. (Swift often hides behind the sofa with her favourite white fluffy blanket to listen and fall asleep. Her father is yet to realise). When he is drunk—a rare occurrence, but common enough for there to be a trend—it's a love song: intimate and intense and passionate and caring all at once. Swift creeps out to leave him alone for that one.
So they solve cases, have deep personal conversations through the medium of violin, and muddle on through all of it.
(Swift decides later that maybe it would have been easier to live a normal life, even if it would have been nearly impossible. Her violin case, a heavy pressure on her right leg, asks if she really means that, and Swift doesn't know the answer.)
Really, it works. Swift puts petty criminals behind bars, her and her father put dangerous criminals behind bars, her father works on trying not to end up behind bars for murdering some of the people at Scotland Yard, who have yet to put anyone behind bars. D. I. Lestrade acts as an unofficial (and unwanted, in her father's case) uncle, and Mrs Hudson as an unofficial (and much more accepted) grandmother. Swift is fluent in Italian because she loves it, and can converse in almost any other language to enough of a degree that she wouldn't be mistaken for the average tourist. She plays concertos and sonatas and canons and performs a few times at the little concert hall where they solved that case of arson that one time (a very, very misguided declaration of love), although her father refuses to play anywhere other than Baker Street. She publishes a murder-mystery novel under the pseudonym 'A C Doyle' because she's sure she heard her father mention an Arthur Conan Doyle before and because it feels right. (She decides it stand for Artemis Conan Doyle; Artemis always was her favourite goddess). She also publishes a small volume of poems under the name 'Artemis' alone, without any surname at all. Both sell reasonably well and Swift puts the money in the bank. She still hasn't worked out where her father gets any of his money from, although she suspects her real uncle has something to do with it. Her real uncle is very cool, but she has only seen him twice in her entire life because her father pretends he can't stand him (Swift doesn't know how much of it is faked, only that there is some degree of faking going on) and he's always busy with work even if the two did get on. She has D. I. Lestrade to stand in, anyway, even if he's busy with work, too, half the time. Usually, however, it's work that Swift is involved in, in one way or another (she's less picky than her father when it comes to cases), and the detective inspector has remarked on several occasions that the Met should just hire her now. He was only joking in four of those instances. In any case, Swift doesn't want a career with the police force—not directly. Too many rules and regulations and health and safety guidelines. Maybe she'll follow in her father's footstep.
Whatever her plans for the future are, they're sent spiralling off track by a trip to Sainsbury's late on a Friday night.
Swift's father hates shopping, but sometimes it's a necessity that he can't avoid, especially if alcohol is involved. Swift would have no problem acquiring whatever alcohol her father wanted, with or without an I.D., fake or not, but Mrs Hudson would give her the special look she reserves for when one of the Holmeses has done something that really isn't okay, and Swift hates being on the receiving end of that look. Her father does too, no matter how much he hides it, which is why he's dragged himself up off the sofa and managed to assemble some sort of outfit that is some degree of acceptable in order to make the loathed trip to the shop. They need milk, butter, bread, eggs, and a twenty-four pack of Guinness—the only alcoholic beverage Swift's father drinks, ever—so Swift grabs a basket and starts in the dairy aisle. It inevitably ends up with her father snatching it off of her because she isn't going fast enough, and sending her to wait by the checkouts. Swift is neither surprised nor annoyed by this outcome. She is surprised and annoyed by a light-haired man in a knitted jumper and jeans handing her one of his three bags of shopping and pushing her ahead of him, calling her Wren.