Hi, there people! I thought I'd never post another chapter for this fic but the bug bit again and I really missed Alex.

No longer on Tumblr but still on Twitter if you want to come and say hi.

The light on the alarm continued to flash; the figures in the corridor changing rapidly from brightly lit one second and in silhouette against the grey backdrop the next.

Alex was shaking uncontrollably and even her breathing exercises that her therapist had taught her weren't having any effect. She shrank into John's side, secretly cursing herself for behaving so childishly. It was one of Alex's bones of contention that she didn't feel as brave or adept as her male counterparts. John, to Alex's amazement, still kept to their original cover-up story.

"Computer error, Major. It'll all have to go in the report."

The Major was livid.

"What the hell is going on?"

Then, a second voice cut in from behind the major, its owner approaching them confidently and his voice instantly lifting the tense mood of the situation. It was none other than Dr Frankland.

"It's all right, Major. I know exactly who these gentleman and the lady are."

"You do?" the Major asked suspiciously.

"Yeah, I'm getting a little slow on faces but Mr Holmes, here isn't someone I expected to show up in this place."

Sherlock began to speak, trying again to cover-up the real reason for his presence.

"Sherlock…" Alex hissed as she stared the detective square in the eye. He caught a glimpse of her interjection but deliberately looked away from her, turning his full attention to the two gentlemen now addressing him.

"Good to see you again, Mycroft," Dr Frankland said cheerfully as he extended his hand to the consulting detective. Sherlock played along with the charade by taking the hand and shaking it warmly, yet Alex could see a little spark of apprehension and uncertainty in his face. She was sure, however, that the Major would not observe this little fact given that the messages hidden under the facial expressions of this man would only be obvious to those that knew him. Sherlock smiled the best fake smile he could muster.

"I had the honour of meeting Mr Holmes at the WHO convention in… Brussels, was it?"

Sherlock appeared to think for a section before he responded.

"Vienna," he answered. Alex had to hold back a grin as she realised that simply agreeing to Dr Frankland's statement would turn the suspicion on them again. Sherlock was smart enough to know that a correction would solidify their façade.

Dr Frankland verified Sherlock's confirmation of their meeting place and emphasised to Major Barrymore that he was indeed in the presence of Mycroft Holmes. The Major signalled to Corporal Lyons to turn off the alarm and turned back to the doctor.

"On your head be it, Doctor Frankland."

Alex almost wept on John's shoulder in relief but she remained as strong as possible to ensure that she presented a united front with her colleagues. Dr Frankland offered to show them out and they soon found themselves in the yard once again, greeted by the extensive pipework and industrial décor.

"Thank you," Sherlock said with an obligatory tone as they made their way to the jeep. Alex wanted to express her thanks, too, but her throat was still shaking from nerves so she remained quiet.

"This is about Henry Knight, isn't it?" Frankland asked.

"What makes you think that?" Alex replied.

"Well, I thought so because I knew he wanted help, but I didn't realise he was going to contact Sherlock Holmes!"

Alex wanted to tell him to shush but she was having trouble keeping up with them and couldn't have got a word out without raising her voice significantly. They had been saved by this kind man and Alex certainly wasn't about to ruin it. Also, Frankland appeared rather upbeat and chatty in spite of the trio's recent scare and thought it would suit the mood of the situation to compliment John's blog and Sherlock's hat.

"That wasn't my hat."

"I hardly recognised him without the hat."

"That wasn't my hat," Sherlock repeated quietly, with a definite tone of annoyance in his voice. As perky as Frankland appeared, something about him was getting to Sherlock. It was starting to get to Alex as well. He seemed too nice, almost fake, but it was difficult to deduce.

After a brief chat with John about his blog, Sherlock found it necessary to return to the subject at hand.

"You know Henry Knight?"

"Well, I knew his dad better," Frankland answered. "He had all sorts of mad theories about this place. Still, he was a good friend."

Alex then saw that Major Barrymore and his colleagues were keeping an eye on all four of them, something that Frankland was obviously aware of.

"Listen, I really can't talk now. Here's my cell number," Frankland said as he passed a business card to Sherlock. A little bell rang in Alex's mind as she clearly saw in both Sherlock and John's faces. Cell? The use of the American term for mobile phone sounded rather odd.

"If I can help with Henry, give me a call."

Alex seriously wanted to get away from there and was starting to edge towards the car. She was stopped in her tracks by a question from Sherlock that immediately peaked her interest.

"I never did ask, Dr Frankland, what exactly is it that you do here?"

The man intrigued all of them. He seemed shady and somewhat fake and Alex was dying to find out.

"Mr Holmes, I would love to tell you. But then, of course, I'd have to kill you!" Alex cringed at the false laugh that followed.

"That would be tremendously ambitious of you," Sherlock warned. "Tell me about Dr Stapleton."

"I never speak ill of a colleague."

What a strange answer, Alex thought.

"But you'd speak well of one, which you're clearly omitting to do."

"I do seem to be, don't I?"

"Is it her that you don't wish to speak ill of, or the work that she does?" Alex asked.

Frankland gave a patronising giggle that Alex could have slapped him for.

"Er… I'd really not like to say," he chirped, with fake cheer.

"I'll be in touch," Sherlock told him as he walked away, instantly pulling on Alex's arm.

"Why did you ask him that?"

"What do you mean?"

"The answer was obvious, it was a stupid question."

"Stupid? This place doesn't seem like the type of place that anyone would get personal with another, so it seems strange that Frankland would say something like that about a colleague who he probably doesn't work with closely at all. I was just curious."

Sherlock tutted and pursed his lips a little. Alex was not about to argue with him. She was beginning to detest this little adventure and would have decided to go home if it weren't for Henry Knight.

As per usual, Sherlock thrust up the collar of his coat with a stern look on his face as he approached the jeep. John picked up on this immediately.

"Oh, please. Can we not do this this time?"

"Do what?" the Detective queried.

"That…" Alex said, gently tugging the collar.

"Yeah, you being all mysterious with your… cheekbones and turning your coat collar up so you look cool."

Alex giggled. John had once again displayed his understanding of people and had deduced the Master of Deduction in a way that the man himself could not have done on another.

"I don't do that."

"Yeah, you do!" John and Alex said together.

The next stop was Henry's house. Alex thought that he would probably live in a flat converted from a large house. She imagined a rather cosy, lived-in bachelor pad with geeky but sentimental memorabilia and a second-hand comfy sofa, flat screen telly and washing up piled on the kitchen counter. Given that he had flirted with a girl on the train to London and retained her number, albeit for a short while, it showed that he did not live with a partner and from his nervousness and seeming loneliness, it was clear that he lived alone.

It was easy to feel sorry for the poor man. Alex hoped that, whether or not Sherlock could solve the case, he would remain in contact with them.

When they found the house, Alex kicked herself. She couldn't have been more wrong in her assumptions. Henry lived in a grand, partly converted house that probably dated back a couple of hundred years. The front of the house appeared to be a rather old greenhouse with pots, dead plants, dry leaves, dust and goodness knows what else strewn around the place.

The interior was very smart, old-fashioned but somehow modern with a conservatory extension. The kitchen was rather bright and spotlessly clean. It backed onto a reasonably-sized garden and Alex found herself feeling rather jealous.

"Are you, um, rich?" John asked as they entered.

"Yeah," Henry answered casually. Sherlock was clearly annoyed by John's query. He gave John a look that made his feelings clear and followed Henry swiftly with John and Alex in pursuit.

Henry's kitchen was part of a modern extension to the side of the house. It had a large glass sliding door that led to his back garden. Alex observed that there was a leaking hosepipe strewn across the patio just outside the door.

"Not finished in the garden?" Alex asked.

"Err… sorry?" Henry replied absent-mindedly as he bustled around, a little disorientated from organising the tea. Alex impatiently repeated her question, ignoring strange looks from her two friends.

"Oh, um. Yeah, I just got distracted," Henry answered.

It was both nonsensical and logical. Henry could easily be a man who was often distracted from certain tasks. He even seemed to be struggling to remain focused on tea-making. Leaving a job half-done was another sign that the poor man was in need of help. Either way, Alex was one-hundred percent sure that Sherlock would be able to assist him, however that would be.

"It's a couple of words. That's what I keep seeing. 'Liberty'..."

Henry said it as if uttering a word he'd been forbidden to say for years and had now been able to divulge.

"Liberty?" John repeated, reaching for his notebook. Henry affirmed this with a nod.

"Liberty and… 'in'."

"Odd," Alex commented. Her colleagues' faces echoed her confused statement.

Sherlock remarked quietly that Henry's words could be in reference to 'Liberty in Death'. It seemed to be a plausible interpretation and Alex pondered it for a moment.

Was it possible that the secret of the Hound could only be understood in death and Henry's father would only be privileged to that 'Liberty' once death had taken him? Or, when the Hound had taken him? It could also be that something or someone was trying to give Henry a message.

Alex had heard from Sherlock before that some people had tried to indirectly coerce people into committing suicide. It was a way to get rid of someone without being implicated and, Alex thought, one of the cruellest. Psychologically torturing someone into such a depressive and desperate state was a thought that she couldn't bear at that moment. Dealing with her own demons was still a process she was going through.

But she was there to help alongside her friends. If they could pull Henry out of the pit he was clearly in, she would certainly feel happy and hoped Henry would be able to deal with his demons effectively.

It also puzzled Alex that Henry was remembering not one, but two things. One was the Hound. The other was two rather abstract words. What was the connection, if there was one at all?

If it was indeed a monster that killed his father, how on Earth would those two words come into play? Had he seen them at different times but had someone made a correlation between the two things?

It was soon becoming awkward, for nobody had said a word about the plan of action. Henry asked nervously what the four of them would be doing next. John, to Alex's surprise, piped up that his colleague already had a plan in mind.

"Sorry?" Alex asked, her defences up.

"Yes," Sherlock affirmed, answering John's statement and completely disregarding Alex's question. Henry also acted as if she wasn't in the room.

"We take you back out to the moor and see if anything attacks you," Sherlock told Henry as if the stupid-sounding and very dangerous proposal was as obvious and casual like posting a letter.

"What?" John and Alex asked in unison. Maybe John didn't know, or Sherlock had made some changes.

"That should bring things to a head." Sherlock continued.

"At night," Henry started, "you want me to go out there at night?" John was equally unimpressed.

"You have any better ideas?" Sherlock asked him.

"That's not a plan," John stated. Alex agreed. It was silly.

"You might as well ask someone to enter a lion's den to find out how sharp their teeth are." Alex exclaimed.

"The person or the lions' teeth?" Sherlock quipped with a smirk, which Alex reciprocated sarcastically.

"If there is a monster, John, there's only one thing to do: find out where it lives."

The consulting detective certainly had an uncanny way of making the absurd seem logically sound. It seemed it really was the only course of action, but there was something about it that bothered Alex.

"Okay, but I don't think that Henry should come with us," Alex said to the three men. "If there truly is a monster out there, we don't need Henry to identify it. We will see it with our own eyes and, with all due respect, Henry, I really don't want to make you even more scared than you already are."

"That's ridiculous, Alex, of course Henry must come. It would be stupid of him not to," Sherlock remarked, sipping his tea in a way that made Alex want to throw it over his head.

"No, this 'plan' is ridiculous," Alex snapped and immediately stomped out of the room and out of the house. She hated being so rude to Henry in his own home but since a few months back, Alex could never let the feeling lie that she wasn't completely welcome when assisting Sherlock and John with a case.

Her opinions never seemed to be even remotely valid, let alone shared or even considered good ones. Suggestions were often ignored or thrown out before they had even been thought about. Another thing was that Henry, even more so than Darren Wallace, seemed their most distressed and vulnerable client.

Sherlock didn't seem to have an empathetic bone in his body and John wasn't even showing much compassion today.

The sun had come out and the air was light and cool. It was so much cleaner than London and Alex would have enjoyed the fresh air under any other circumstances.

She walked the short distance to the cross keys pub, noticing a cemetery to her left and more Victorian-style houses. It made her want to move to the country.

It was frustrating that she couldn't appreciate first-hand how beautiful it was and even a second visit on a different agenda wouldn't make up for first impressions.

Alex slumped on a bench, clenching her teeth before sighing so hard that she almost ran out of breath. Sherlock was pretty shady most of the time about his plans. He hardly even shared them with John but with Alex it was almost like she wasn't there.

Why on Earth was she there? At least John knew that Sherlock had a plan. Alex didn't.

Well, Alex knew, of course, that Sherlock would have something in mind, but not something already fully formed and so surreptitious that not even his best friend, with whom he almost always seemed to have some sort of telepathic contract, would be privy to.

It wasn't long before the consulting detective and his army doctor comrade emerged from the house. They headed for Alex's direction but, as she had anticipated with a slight sinking of her heart, they didn't approach her. They didn't even acknowledge her.

Sherlock, leading the way, marched with more authority than any rank above John's position in the army in the direction of the pub.

Alex really wanted to say something. She really wanted to say her piece but the men were so fast even at walking pace that she wouldn't have been able to stop or distract them with a verbal command.

"Fuck it," Alex muttered vehemently as she followed them.

The boys had stopped in the lobby and were chatting between the two of them, completely oblivious to Alex, even though she was behind them and it would have been blatantly obvious to anyone else that she was there.

What were they discussing? What were they planning? Alex knew the gist of it; that they would be going to the moor and to the place where Henry's father met his end but when and what would they need?

It was getting too much. It was a brutal plan as well as a stealthily arranged one. That was it, Alex had to speak up.

"You're going to screw that man's mind up more than it already has been! Is that what you want to do?" She laced her voice with as much sarcasm as she could manage without moving into a silly voice but she wasn't sure if she had mastered it. A tone like that used in front of her mother would probably have earned her a slap.

The looks John and Sherlock gave her were so familiar that it was fast becoming a code. John sighed and prepared to give an inarguable statement whereas Sherlock merely rolled his eyes and looked away. Alex knew that Sherlock hated any kind of dampener on case solving.

The outburst had clearly made John uncomfortable and Sherlock couldn't wait any longer to leave. John signalled to Sherlock that he need not stay and could go about what he needed to in order to prepare for the task ahead.

"No, Alex. Why would you think that?"

"Henry's already terrified to go back there and he'll probably end up having a nervous breakdown. Plus, Sherlock seems to have made plans without consulting us. How do we know if he has more planned?" John gave Alex a questioning look. She dipped her head and quickly looked around the room for any sign of the consulting detective.

"What if he's thinking of using you and me as, I don't know, bait or something?" She whispered.

"Course he wouldn't."

Alex doubted John's own belief in his words.

It wasn't unlike Sherlock to use people. He did it with Molly often enough and even his own brother. He would definitely use John and Alex for anything that would help him.

They were all set to visit the moor that night and Alex couldn't help but think that she and John, as well as poor Henry, who was as fragile as porcelain, would just be serving as extensions of Sherlock's eyes and ears.

Feelings didn't matter. What the detective wanted and needed was eye-witness testimony. It certainly made logical sense that he would pit the versions of Henry's view against Alex's creative brain and John's pragmatic brain.

As foreboding as her gut was feeling, and how angry she was with Sherlock for not learning from past mistakes and not seeming to care about people, her fingers were tingling, her head was alert and she was wide awake. It was like she had been given an extremely high dose of caffeine and she was more than ready to keep her eyes and ears wide open on the moor for any signs of the demonic Hound of Baskerville.