Sherlock picked up his cold slice of buttered toast and eyed it resentfully, as if wondering how on earth toast figured into this strange new world without Mrs. Hudson and her bizarre babble in it. He bit into it with a shudder, chewing mechanically, aware that Mycroft was sitting across the table, pretending to read the morning paper but actually watching the process carefully.

"Last night," Sherlock mumbled at last.

Mycroft looked up from the paper. "I do wish you'd speak in complete sentences," he said. "And preferably not with your mouth full."

Sherlock wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, not because he needed to, but because he knew that it drove Mycroft up the wall. "Then we're agreed that... my behaviour... last night never happened," he said, swallowing.

"It so emphatically did not happen that I've no idea what you're even talking about," Mycroft said serenely, going back to reading. "What do you make of this, Sherlock? According to the Guardian, the day before yesterday, construction workers near London Bridge left a steel demolition ball aloft on a crane one hundred feet in the air. The ball itself weighed two and a half tonnes."

"So?" Sherlock took another listless bite of his toast.

"So the following morning it had completely disappeared, with no evidence of where it went or who took it." *

"And I imagine you've already discovered the solution to this."

"Naturally."

"And you want me to investigate it?"

"No, I want you to solve it right here at this table. Very simple, once you see it."

Sherlock screwed his eyes up for a few seconds and exhaled, thinking hard. An obvious ploy on the part of Mycroft: concentrate on the work.

Demolition ball. London Bridge. One hundred feet. Two and a half tonnes.

"Possibly the work of a rival construction company," he finally said. "But I very much doubt it. There's a lot of traffic in that area, making it virtually impossible for anyone to commit such a crime unseen or unnoticed, even in the early hours of the morning."

"Yes. Therefore...?"

"Therefore the crime didn't happen." Sherlock gulped his coffee. "Nobody stole the demolition ball, because it was never left up there in the first place. No construction company would do that - it's a violation of occupational health and safety, and highly illegal. When they told everyone the ball had gone missing in the night, commuters and patrons of local business began to 'remember' seeing the ball suspended the night before. But it was never there."

"And?"

"And Andover Towers is a high-profile construction that has carried a lot of controversy with it. Publicity stunt. End of story."

"Rather." Mycroft shut the paper and put it on the table, reaching out for his own coffee.

Just over an hour later, Sherlock slithered out of a cab idling on the kerb of the little suburban house where John and Molly had been living together for the past three years. It had been a long and expensive trip, since his first assumption had been that everybody was still at Baker Street. When he'd gone there, though, Anne Morecombe - younger sister of Mrs. Hudson, and a large, sonsy, emotional woman - had told him that so far as she knew, nobody had been there that morning, though they'd been there past midnight the night before.

Sherlock reached into his pocket for the key to the front door; then, thinking better of it, rang the doorbell instead. After a few seconds he heard quick footfalls in the hall, and then the wrench of the door handle.

John looked exactly as Sherlock expected him to: scrupulously neat and clearly just out of the shower, judging by his slightly-damp hair and the strong smell of Ivory soap that attended him. And he looked like he hadn't slept in three weeks.

"Sherlock," he said blankly, without moving aside to let him in.

Sherlock cleared his throat. "I left you with... all this... yesterday," he said, waving one hand vaguely. "I shouldn't have. I want to help. What do you want me to do...?"

John's shoulders dropped. "Sherlock -"

"I'm not a child," Sherlock groaned, shutting his eyes. "Just tell me what you need me to do."

"Come in." John beckoned to him and moved aside, leaning over to shut the door behind him. From the sounds of things, Molly was upstairs with Charlie. But Sherlock detected another feminine scent in the house, one not associated with Molly. It was a cheap brand of women's moisturiser, probably Natio. It indicated that Harry was not only somewhere around, but she'd stayed there the night before.

Sherlock followed John into the kitchen, but he neither spoke nor moved on into the living room to sit down. Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and watched John, waiting for an answer.

"Uh." John ran one hand over his jaw, thinking. "Okay. Molly and I are going with Anne to the funeral home this afternoon," he finally said. "We were going to take Harry and Charlie with us. We can't leave Harry to look after Charlie on her own, and I don't think it's a good idea to take Charlie and leave Harry here. Will you just stay here with them? You don't really have to do anything, except make sure Harry's on this side of sane and not sneaking a drink when you're not looking." He went to the kettle, without taking the trouble to ask Sherlock if he wanted coffee.

"What about Charlie?" Sherlock asked.

"Don't panic; you don't have to worry about that part. Harry knows what to do with her, when she's on the rails."

Sherlock raised one eyebrow. "How do you know I won't relapse myself?" he asked, with no hint of sarcasm.

John looked up at him. "Because yesterday, I was absolutely sure you were going to end up getting high with your Homeless Network friends under a bridge somewhere," he said. "And you went to your brother instead."

Since this was undeniably the right answer, Sherlock shut his mouth. As a way of filling the silence he looked around, noting that Harry had spent all morning cleaning. The very light streaks on the kitchen floor, visible only when the light hit them at a certain angle, were a dead giveway. North to south. Both John and Molly used the mop in strokes that went from west to east, and Sherlock ruminated on this for a second. He couldn't remember for the life of him which direction John had used a mop when they had lived together at Baker Street, but he suspected it had been north to south. John had adapted innate habits to suit his wife's housekeeping.

A sudden blur of brindle charged into his peripheral vision and Toby, with a joyful meow, leapt up onto his knees before Sherlock could stop him.

"Are you giving a eulogy?" Sherlock ignored Toby.

John shook his head, then flinched as one of the cups he held sloshed hot coffee all over his hand. "Mrs. Hudson's nephew is doing that," he said, putting both cups down again and grabbing a nearby dishcloth.

Sherlock's jaw dropped open, as if this constituted some sort of upset in the universal order of things. "That's ludicrous," he protested. "I don't even think I've ever heard Mrs. Hudson mention her nephew."

"She did, once or twice, but I don't get the impression they were very close."

"So why not you?"

"Because Anne didn't ask me, and if I'm honest, 'cause I don't want to. I've given enough eulogies in the last twelve months to last a lifetime, thanks very much." John leaned over and handed one cup to Sherlock, who took it and sipped without reservations. John was much better at instant coffee than he was at tea. "How are you feeling?" John asked him. "I mean, physically. Mycroft said you were pretty out of it when you got to his place yesterday."

"I'm fine," Sherlock said absently, taking another sip of his coffee. He looked down at the warm, purring mass of tabby cat who was moulting all over his trousers. "Why is your cat sitting on me?"

John smiled. "He does that," he said. "Spent all last night on Molly's lap, when he usually goes for mine. I don't know. I could go and get Charlie if you prefer."

Sherlock huffed and gingerly shifted his legs a little; both he and John looked up at the tread of soft, bare feet in the doorway. Harry stood there, dressed down in jeans and an old t-shirt. Her face was blotchy and her eyes bloodshot.

"Hi," she croaked to Sherlock. "No, John, I'm still not bloody drunk, more's the pity."

"I sympathise," Sherlock said before John could open his mouth.

"What?"

"I've spent a large part of the last twenty-four hours telling everyone I'm not bloody high."

She smiled weakly at him. "John," she said, "Molly's crying again. Go up and give her a hug?"

John, looking alarmed, disappeared up the staircase. Harry sat down next to Sherlock and brushed her sandy, disobedient hair back from her forehead. "He's going to kill me for lying about that," she remarked, reaching across Sherlock's lap to stroke Toby's furry head.

"Yes, noted," Sherlock said.

"Of course you noted it."

"So why lie?"

"I figured John could do with a hug, but hell will freeze over before he ever asks for one, so..." She shrugged. "He doesn't want you to know this," she said. "But we had a call from the coroner an hour ago."

Sherlock looked up swiftly. "And?" he demanded.

"So they did an autopsy this morning, and it was heart failure, like John thought. She was seventy-seven, Sherlock, though if I look that good at seventy-seven I'll be a happy woman. But she didn't suffer. Just went to sleep and never woke up, quick and easy." She had been giving her attention to Toby, but now looked up at him, so directly that he felt himself mentally shrink. "I'm glad you're back," she said. "John didn't sleep last night. He was worried about you."

Sherlock's mouth twitched. "He worries about everyone," he protested.

"True," Harry conceded. "He looks after everyone, too. But who looks after him?"

Mrs. Hudson was laid to rest two days later, in a white casket decked in chrysanthemums of cream, wine, and coral pink. Anne had chosen the flowers for the funeral, but John, looking at the coffin and trying not to think about what was inside it, remembered the second Mother's Day he'd been living at Baker Street, not long before Sherlock had himself "died". Embarrassed, he'd brought Mrs. Hudson a big, cheerful bouquet of chrysanthemums in crimson and yellow. A thoughtless thing, really, bought from a petrol station or somewhere; he couldn't even remember now. Their stems had been dank with water they'd been sitting in too long, their blooms drooping low beyond the pink tissue paper they were wrapped in. Would it... would it be okay if I gave you these?

Mrs. Hudson had accepted them, as goofy and pleased as a girl with her first beau. Chrysanthemums are such lovely flowers, she'd gushed at him. They look like big smiling faces, especially the yellow ones. Don't you think?

John had little patience with the commentary trotted out at just about every funeral he'd ever been to: the deceased had been so "full of life." But this time, no other phrase would do. Mrs. Hudson had been more full of the sheer joy of being alive than any other person he'd ever met.

Anne Morecombe sat in the front pew, dressed in a nicely-tailored suit of claret velvet. Looking at her, John thought to himself that both sisters had good taste in clothes and style was obviously a family thing, though in other respects they were not noticeably alike. Anne was flanked by her son and daughter, Tim and Eugenia; colourless, middle-aged and middle-class, and no doubt lacking any of their late aunt's spark or spirit. John began encouraging Harry into the pew behind when Anne, glancing over her shoulder, saw them and stood up.

"No, no," she said gently, pressing a soggy, bunched-up tissue against her wet eyelashes with one hand and reaching out for Sherlock's arm with the other. "No, Lou wouldn't like that. Come and sit here with us, all of you."

As John shuffled obediently out of the pew to move up into the first one, he glanced back at the congregation of mourners. Quite a lot of them, he noticed with some surprise, were people he knew - Greg, Mel, Hayley, Jake. Even Matthew was sitting awkwardly beside his future stepmother, and John couldn't remember Matthew ever being in the same space as Mrs. Hudson in his life. But then, he reminded himself, people attended a funeral not for the dead, but to show their support for the living. That explained mourners like Mike and Chrissy Stamford.

In the third-to-last row, Mycroft sat alone and aloof, fidgeting with his umbrella. John, sitting down between Sherlock and Molly, glanced at Sherlock. He was mentally busy, or perhaps mentally blank. He stared into space, pallid and grim, tweaking idly at one sleeve; John realised he hadn't yet noticed his brother was there, and decided not to point him out. There lay perilous waters. And anyhow, the opening strains of Frank Sinatra's Young at Heart had just started to play, indicating the beginning of the celebration of the life of Martha Louise Hudson.

* This is also an alleged real incident, happening in Indianapolis in 1974.