Disclaimer: All the Harry Potter characters you recognise were created by J.K. Rowling and are hers entirely. I owe Sherlock Holmes to Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Russell to Laurie R. King, and the rest to my own imagination.

Author's Note: Thanks and praise to Excessivelyperky, a most excellent and resourceful beta reader, without whose collaboration and knowledge this story would never have been written, to OzRatBag2 for matters medical and logical; and to Snape's Witch, for her insight. Blessed be! DN

Chapter 39 A Minor Inconvenience

Sherlock Holmes arose stiffly, every bone in his body protesting. He put on his boots, rolled up his sleeping bag, and went to see if any coals were left from the fire he had banked before he went to sleep. He squinted at the horizon: ten of six, if he was any judge of sunrise. He checked his pocket-watch: eleven of six. The rolling hills of Ayrshire were cloaked in mist; he could hear the sea. The air was warm for a Scottish morning, although he could see his breath.

Holmes had left Edinburgh University two days before and taken train to Ayr. After a long and stultifying conference during which he had presented his paper on forensic methods in criminology, he determined to walk in the Ayrshire hills, to get some fresh air and exercise, before returning to Sussex. As if I were twenty years younger, he chided himself. Although hale and healthy for his fifty-eight years, Holmes believed he had deteriorated since his retirement. How else to explain that a night spent sleeping on the ground, which ordinarily would have been refreshing and salutary, caused him to feel as if he had been lying on the proverbial bed of nails?

He took out his water-canteen and rummaged in his kit for his tin cup, tea, sugar, biscuits and, if he remembered aright, a tin of kippers. He started up the fire, put water in his cup and set it next to the fire to heat, then retired behind a shrub to answer Nature's call.

As he restored his clothing, he became aware of a sound not native to Ayrshire; indeed, not native to nature at all. The corners of his mouth turned down. Someone was whistling. He despised whistling; it was an offensive and jarring sound.

Holmes straightened up and looked around the countryside. No-one was there; there was no whistler to be seen. Perhaps it had been a quirk of the wind blowing through a cracked and broken rock wall.

He returned to his fire and prepared to make his breakfast. He was about to open his tin of kippers when he heard it again: whistling, and not just any whistling, but the obnoxious sound of someone whistling through their teeth. Holmes stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. He stood as still as a stone, facing the direction from which the sound came. The top of a head appeared as a traveller climbed the small hill upon which Holmes had made his camp. The head wore an ugly brown woollen cap pulled down to the top of round-lensed spectacles. The face below the spectacles was no longer engaged in producing the sound of whistling; the jaw was clamped with iron fixity.

Mary Russell marched up to the detective until she stood toe to toe with him. "Holmes," she said through gritted teeth, "If I let you live it will not be out of pity for your advanced age. Where have you been?"

Holmes' eyebrows arched. "Why, Russell, you've come precisely in time for breakfast! Do sit down and have some kippers. Give me your cup; you shall have some of my tea. I will tell you about the stultifying Conference if you insist, but I think you will be much more interested in Dr Collier's peroration on the effect of shifting Continental plates on the appearance of the Loch Ness Monster."

Russell's shoulders slumped. There was no sense in trying to take the man to task for worrying her half to death. She sat down on a rock next to Holmes, pulled off her cap and shook her hair out. "Holmes, if you've no milk for tea, I have some sugar in my pack." She rummaged in her rucksack and produced several lumps of sugar.

Holmes looked at her, her cheeks pink from her long walk from the inn, her strawberry blond hair flowing over her shoulders. "Russell...ah, Russell, I thought you would still be at Oxford. You weren't worried about me, were you?"

Russell looked at him steadily. "Worried about you, Holmes? I am confident that if anything catastrophic should happen to you, I would have only to look at the morning paper to know about it. Worry? Not any more than you would worry about me."

Holmes drew a breath of relief. "I'm glad to see that you've taken the opportunity to get some exercise and fresh air and a respite from your Greek and Hebrew. As it is, there is the remnant of an ancient Druid temple nearby; I would welcome your opinion of it."

"Holmes, it is the end of the term, and I am looking forward to returning to Sussex and seeing how the farm fares. I don't mind visiting your Druid temple, but I suggest that when we have seen it, we return to Ayr and enquire when the next train leaves for Edinburgh."

A ghost of a smile quirked Holmes' mouth. "Always practical, Russell! We never know what adventure we may discover, and yet you are keen to get home to the mundane concerns of the farm."

"Adventure! Holmes, every adventure we have had together ends with my being cold and wet, sleepless and hungry, often in danger of my life and you of yours, and you wonder why the placidity of the farm sounds like Heaven to me? I have been working hard, as you well know, and would rather have taken train directly to Sussex than tramp over this inhospitable Scottish countryside. I had begun to hallucinate strange -- things --until I realised that it was merely the effect of fatigue."

"You? Hallucinations? Rubbish! You're never more yourself than when you are up to your eyebrows in danger, a step and a half ahead of peril! As for fatigue, you drive yourself without mercy, not that I provide much of an example in that regard. Your daring often exceeds your judgment, and I am forced to drag you back to sanity when you would crash on madly!"

"You have a colossal cheek; do you know it, Holmes? Since you brought it up, I might say that I almost had Scotland Yard looking for you in Loch Ness. It would be just like you to pay a call on Nessie, determined to have a ride through the loch on her back! One day they will fish you out of some body of water, wounded, bloody and probably covered in slime, and what shall I do with you then? Throw you back and return to Oxford?"

Holmes threw back his head and laughed. "You would haul me up and lecture me on the unsanitary conditions of the water!"

Russell scowled. "It's evident that your little constitutional on the Ayrshire moors hasn't tempered your acerbic wit any, Holmes. You lose no opportunity to throw your failings upon me as if they were my fault."

"I do no such thing. It is you who bring it on yourself, with your faulty logic and precipitous conclusions."

"Precipitous! Fiddlesticks! Holmes, you have invented yourself, with your self-involvement, disregard of personal peril and complete indifference to others' concerns. It is said that one never sees the hump on one's own back."

"Poppycock, Russell, I say, poppycock! I am always concerned about you. Why, in the space of one month, I..."

And so they packed up the breakfast gear, poured what was left of the tea on the coals, shouldered their rucksacks and set off in the general direction of Ayr, arguing every step of the way.

Finis