"Okay, Hayley, I'm off, but - hey, pay attention, please."

It was dangerous to expect Hayley to pay attention when she was absorbed in a book at the breakfast table, but it had to be done. She looked up in dazed good-naturedness. "Hmmm?"

Lestrade waved his hand in front of her face. "Are the lights on in there, Hayley? Everyone home?"

"Dad."

"Just checking. I don't like wasting my breath. Now, I'll probably be home by the time you get home tomorrow. In the meantime, your favourite shopping assistant is to be looked to as your favourite authority figure. Clear?"

"Yes," she agreed flatly, putting down her book. "But I'm not a kid, Dad. I doubt she's going to send me to bed without dinner."

"On the off-chance that she does, I don't want to hear of any complaints about it. If I do, the next time I have to be off somewhere, you'll have to go off to your mum's."

This was a new one, and Hayley didn't quite understand it. She was seventeen, and the last time Mel had taken Dad away for the weekend, she'd stayed at home on her own without him wringing his hands over it. She knew that if she didn't agree completely and immediately that Dad was going to stand there and lecture for as long as it took, so she nodded her head. "I'll behave. Promise."

"You'd better." Lestrade leaned over to give her an awkward peck on the forehead by way of goodbye. It had only been over the last year or so that he'd begun kissing her goodbye at all. Once, three months after she'd come to live with him, he'd tried to shake her hand.

Melissa's farewell in the hallway was quite a different brand of kissing. But even there, practicalities had to eventually be addressed.

"I don't want Dyer here when I'm gone, if you can avoid it," he told her.

Melissa smiled and tweaked at his chin affectionately. "What if I stand over those two the whole time and make sure they're not-? Okay, fine, there's no need to be so grumpy about it." She avoided reminding him that in seven months' time Hayley turned eighteen, and could run off and marry Dyer if she was crazy enough to want to. Hayley could survive for one night without Jake. Probably.

The poor, dear, deluded man. Had it really taken him this long to figure out Hayley and Jake? That had been old news a month ago.

"Call me when you get there," she made him promise at the door. He was halfway down the front steps and turned to look at her in surprise. Call her when he got there? That was the sort of thing he made Hayley do when she took the car out at night.

"Call you...?"

"You know I wouldn't ask if you were travelling with anyone else. You're just as likely get knocked clean out and wake up aboard a pirate vessel or something."

He laughed a little. Melissa had a good idea of Sherlock Holmes and the craziness he trailed along behind him, but even she had no idea how close to the mark that one was.

He'd bought her flowers.

Molly had come back from her lunch break and found them sitting on the lab bench, positioned so they were the first thing she'd see when she opened the door. John rarely bought her flowers, and never, to her memory, for 'just no reason.' Valentine's Day and her birthday, yes; she'd received blue irises for the latter the week before. John knew she loved flowers, and she knew he was not the flower-giving type.

These were pink and cream tulips. Twelve of them; they weren't in season yet, and must have cost him a fortune. Professionally arranged and presented. Faintly scented - their sickly sweetness undermined the more bitter tones of alcohol wipes that always pervaded the lab.

Molly knew the language of flowers, and John knew that she knew it. Pink tulips - I love you. Cream tulips - I'm sorry. Twelve of them? Completely.

It was the first time in their relationship that John had expected vegetation to say what he couldn't.

She looked at the card, which confirmed it. It was in his handwriting, not the impersonal copperplate of a florist, but a simple and awkward scrawl: John. No mention of Captain or Doctor; not even Watson. They were "Watson" - but only he was John.

She pulled out her phone and called him, waiting on the line until he picked up on the fifth ring. He knew she'd found the flowers.

"Thank you for the flowers," she said. "They're beautiful... I love them. Thank you."

"Uh. You're welcome..."

She cleared her throat. "I was wondering, if you're not busy, would you like to come up to the lab this afternoon? I'm working on my own today, and I'd like to... thank you..."

A short pause. John was clearly trying to work out how she could thank him at the lab when she'd already done so - twice, even - on the phone. Then she heard a little redirection in his breathing as her meaning suddenly dawned on him. They'd talked about doing this before. As a joke. Just a cheeky little fantasy...

"Are you serious?" he blurted out.

"I'm completely serious."

"The lab? Wouldn't you prefer to come home for that? We might get caught..."

"Would it be so awful if we did?"

Another pause while John was contemplating this. Molly was obliging and open-minded about taking suggestions, but she'd rarely come up with one like this...

"I'm coming over," he said. She could hear the lift in his voice, and she giggled by way of agreement. "You'd better have clothes on when I get there, Mrs Watson..."

"Well, we made it here in one piece, anyway," Lestrade remarked, getting out of the car and shutting the door with a little more energy than was necessary. "No thanks to you."

"Oh, shut up," Sherlock grouched as he did the same. "If you had better nerves while driving, that incident would never have happened at all."

"Yeah, well, if you didn't have a habit of suddenly squealing like a girl when you have a mental revelation..."

It had not been a long drive, as far as they went; however, it had seemed a lot longer and Lestrade was close to the end of his tether by now. And that was unfortunate, because it was only really the start of the ordeal of the Great Wyrley investigation.

It was shortly past midday. When Lestrade had picked up Sherlock from Baker Street that morning it had been sunny and bright, but rain had drifted in, slowly and surely. By the time they arrived in Jones's Lane, just outside of town, it was coming down in a fine but steady mist. One that didn't appear to be bothering the young PC standing in the field across from where Lestrade parked the car. His raincoat was slick and shining in the white glare.

"Inspector Lestrade?" he called across, just as Lestrade neatly cleared the barbed-wire fence with more casual grace than Sherlock had expected of him. He flashed his warrant card. Lestrade saved the yelling for when he really meant business.

"Behave, Sherlock," he said through a forced smile without looking across at him. He was still negotiating the fence and trying to pull a couple of wires out of his coat. "If you're nice to the PC and don't embarrass me, I'll take you to the McDonald's in Walsall for dinner."

"Lestrade, please." Sherlock freed his coat and double-stepped a few paces to catch him up.

Lestrade shrugged. "That worked on the kids when they were little. Thought I'd give bribery a go before resorting to threats..." By this time they'd approached the PC. He was little more than a boy; dark-haired, gangly underneath his raincoat, which was far too big for him. His teeth, too, seemed to be far too big for his thin, ferrety little face.

"Afternoon," Lestrade greeted him easily enough. There was no need for posturing. A DI from Scotland Yard was next door to God Himself in these parts. "You are...?"

"PC Heffernan, sir. Daniel Heffernan."

"Well, Daniel Heffernan, this is Sherlock Holmes..." Lestrade watched anxiously as Sherlock took the young PC's hand for a brief but polite shake. Cold, yes, but at least the man wasn't doing anything bizarre or rude yet. "And this, I suppose, is where they found the pony."

"Yes, sir. But I'm afraid you might not see much. It was nearly a month ago that it happened..."

But Sherlock was already on the scent. Lestrade and Heffernan watched as he paced the length of the field twice, once with his head up, and then with his head down. When he was returning for the second time, and about ten feet away, he stooped among the soaking grass. At first he examined a few blades; poked at the spongy, wet ground. Before long he was grubbing around the mud with his long white fingers.

"What've you found, Sherlock?" Lestrade asked him, trying to ignore how baffled the PC was. Sherlock had just then pulled something out of the ground and was examining it in the palm of his hand. To Lestrade's eyes, it was a bell-shaped lump of mud.

"Know much about gardening, Lestrade?" Sherlock asked him.

Lestrade shrugged."Not really. Not my kind of hobby. What's that?"

"That," Sherlock announced triumphantly as he stood up and showed him, "is a bulb of meadow saffron. You might know it as autumn crocus, Heffernan."

"Okay, so it's a bulb of meadow saffron," Lestrade agreed. "So what?"

"So this field isn't used," Sherlock concluded, "not for pasturing animals, anyhow. This bulb won't flower for months yet, but in any form, meadow saffron is poisonous. No one in their right mind would pasture a pony, or any other animal, in a field of it. Furthermore, I've just walked through every inch of this field and I couldn't see a residence nearby, no matter where I stood. It was particularly hard to do so with the high hedge..."

"Nearest house is a mile down that way, sir." Heffernan pointed.

"So there's no way a person could have witnessed this crime or found the pony incidentally. They'd have to have been walking or driving down this road, not viewing from a window or from another property. And even so they'd have to have found a gap in the hedge. Inference: no witnesses."

"No, sir, none-"

"I'm not talking about the report this time." Sherlock cast the young constable a withering glance. "I meant that the lack of credible witnesses is something our mutilator may have been well aware of when he chose the location for the crime. We're looking for a calculating perpetrator. Who owns this field, Heffernan?"

"Man by the name of McInerny, sir." Lestrade could see that by now, the poor kid had had quite enough of Sherlock Holmes; he was red-faced and starting to falter under the pressure of Sherlock's gaze. "But he lives in Rushall, and he's been cleared. He was in Birmingham the weekend it happened."

"So the pony wasn't his either?"

"No. It belonged to a kid in town - a ten year old girl. Birthday present, only a fortnight before."

"Great," Lestrade commented dourly, but Sherlock brushed this off completely.

"So why was a child's birthday present being pastured in a field full of poisonous weeds... and one owned by a man who lives outside of town?"

"It wasn't," Heffernan told him. "It was found here, but we don't know why. It was being pastured in another field a mile that way." He pointed north. "The fence wasn't broken. The pony must have been led into the field, but I'm d- I mean..." he glanced at Lestrade. "I mean, I don't know why someone would do that. None of us do."

Sherlock sighed heavily. "You could have mentioned that earlier," he said, ignoring Lestrade's warning glance. "Once again demonstrating that I really need to see that police report, Lestrade. Second-hand reports of it are only going to be so useful - less so with an unreliable source." He brushed his hands together to shed the mud on his fingers. "Show me where the pony was found."

"Here, sir."

"No, I mean exactly, precisely where."

It was clear from Heffernan's blank look that he had no idea of the exact location. "Do you have a crime-scene photograph, perhaps?" Lestrade prompted gently.

"All the photos are in the case file, sir. I don't have access, I'm afraid."

It was as Sherlock had suspected, and as Lestrade had warned. The wheels of justice were almost stationary in a country town, especially on a Sunday.

"PC Heffernan would probably be more useful as a conductor of electricity than as an officer," Sherlock growled over his coffee. It was half past six in the evening. Lestrade had eased off on his promise - or threat - of McDonald's, and they were now sitting in the Mary Rose at Cheslyn Hay. Lestrade, remembering that Sherlock didn't eat when he was working, wondered briefly what he'd ever do if he was presented with a case that took him a month to solve.

Maybe that was part of the man's motivation. Lestrade felt sure he'd be pretty keen to wrap up a case if he couldn't get a decent meal until he did. Pity Sherlock was missing the food, anyway; it was excellent stuff. But then, Sherlock was just sulking that the Wyrley officers hadn't allowed him access to the case files that afternoon. It was Sunday. These things did not, apparently, happen on a Sunday. Lestrade had suspected that if Mycroft had been anywhere more accessible than Ghana at the time, the constabulary would have had a call from the government that afternoon.

"Normally, I'd defend the poor kid," he said with his mouth full, just because he knew his table manners, or lack thereof, annoyed Sherlock no end. "But even I thought that was a bit of a pointless venture."

"Not pointless," Sherlock objected. "We learned a great deal. Or at least, I learned a great deal, and you would have too, if you'd been thinking and listening at the same time. We learned that the pony did not belong in the pasture where it was found. We learned that nobody could have had the opportunity to witness the attack unless they had some purpose to be in Jones's lane in the middle of the night. We learned that the pony belonged to a child. All very important things." He sighed. "Lestrade, I've known you for the better part of ten years. If you just made the effort..."

Lestrade decided to take no offence to that. In his roundabout way, Sherlock had just pointed out that he was clever. Lazy, but clever. He'd take that.

Before he could really launch into the details of Lestrade's intellectual shortcomings, though, Sherlock trailed off as there was a sudden weak bleep from his pocket. He fished his phone out promptly. The message was brief; he read it in half a second, then groaned and shoved the phone back in its place.

Even an apparent lack of mental acumen hadn't stopped Lestrade from making a deduction on this one. Text from John.

"How is he?" he asked, without bothering to elaborate who "he" was.

"Unhappy," was the terse answer. "However, less unhappy than I'd expected, given his... reconciliation to his wife this afternoon..." Sherlock cleared his throat. "Multiple reconciliations, it seems..."

Lestrade chuckled. Good for John. And Sherlock's extreme squeamishness on that particular topic was never going to stop being funny. Neither was the fact that Sherlock just had to boast about knowing all about it, however ambivalent he actually felt about it. And, of course, the fact that he could tell the state of a man's sex life from an entirely unrelated text message.

"Well," Sherlock said eagerly, seeing that Lestrade was finishing up and evidently keen to change the topic. "I think we'd best be off, don't you? I imagine you'll want to get dressed into something else for church."

"Church?"

"Yes. Shapuriji Edalji is, I presume, presiding over the service at St Mark's at half past six. This is a perfect chance for us to observe the Edalji family in their element. We'd best get moving. I'm told it's considered bad manners to be late for church."