A/N: I promised one reviewer that we'd have another Edmund and Peter fic soon, but as I was reading "A Study in Scarlet" by A.C. Doyle this morning, my brain caught the word "drains" in accordance with an empty house (in fact, a house there was a murder committed in) and of course Magician's Nephew was the first thing to come to mind. So this is not Golden Age, not even in Narnia, I'm afraid. And you could call it a crossover (which is interesting, because there are no recorded Narnia/Sherlock Holmes crossovers in the databanks. I checked).
By the way, if you have any requests for future oneshots, I'd be grateful. My creativity meter has been a bit...lopsided lately. :P
Enjoy.
7.
"…them two houses in Lauriston Gardens was empty on account of him that owns them who won't have the drains seed to, though the very last tenant what lived in one of them died o' typhoid fever…"
-Sherlock Holmes, a Study in Scarlet
"Polly," said Digory one day, when they were up in the Smuggler's cave, "I forgot to tell you—I was talking to Uncle Andrew the other day, and he told me why the house next to ours is empty."
"Good heavens!" Polly twirled a curl around her finger and let out a laugh. "Can you believe we thought it was going to be such an adventure? And look at all that happened—we never even got to the empty house! Well, why is it empty, then?"
A wide grin spread across Digory's face—one that was becoming much more frequent as his mother's health got better day after day after day since their adventure. "You know how your father said it might be the drains?"
Polly nodded. "Daddy knows about that sort of thing, you know."
Digory rolled his eyes. "Well Aunt Letty said that's part of why nobody lives there, but then she wouldn't give the rest of the reason until Uncle Andrew piped up and told me why."
He stopped, and looked over at her cashbox, wondering if she would let him read her story (the old one or the new one she'd started after their adventure—he didn't much care which) in exchange for this news. She didn't really give him a chance to decide, though.
"Well?"
Leaning forward, Digory put on a secretive expression. "Does the name 'Sherlock Holmes' mean anything to you?"
Polly's eyes widened. "He's been there?"
"Not just been there, silly—there was a murder there, and Holmes was the one to solve it."
"A murder! Gosh—and we almost went inside." Polly shuddered, whether with excitement or horror Digory could not tell. Perhaps a little of both. He cleared his throat.
"They say the owner hasn't cleaned it up since—well, not that there's blood everywhere. It was poison. But the murderer had a nosebleed and wrote 'Rache' on the wall."
"What, Rache? For Rachel?"
"No, silly. It's German for 'revenge'."
"That's ridiculous. Why would anyone write 'revenge' in German on the wall? Makes it sound like some sort of Communist thingummy."
"Perhaps the murderer was German and wanted revenge."
"So he made his own nose bleed so he could write it on the wall?" Polly snorted. "It'd be so much more romantic if he was trying to scrawl the name of his long lost love, but was rudely interrupted by the police—or Holmes."
"Romantic—what rubbish."
"It's not either."
"Tis so."
"Well I think yours is rubbish. And I don't think half those things are true. If the murderer did write the word on the wall than why wouldn't the owner have fixed things up since then—or the police, or cleaners, or somebody?"
"Look, Pol," said Digory, candidly. "There's one way to settle all this, and it's only about a hundred or so steps across those rafters."
"…Daddy said someone died from typhoid because of the drains."
"You're not scared are you? Of the blood?"
Polly gave him a very, very stern look. And then she smiled, sweetly, detecting a little bit of nervousness in her friend's eyes as he challenged her.
"Of course not, Digs. You know very well that I'm game if you are."