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Ivy Liu takes a slow drag of her cigarette, watching Sherlock with those sharp, unblinking eyes that seem to s...
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Soo Lin-Yao
The London streets were stained with the icy breeze, the chill of the damp air brushing against Ivy's skin as she walked alongside Sherlock. She glanced at him as they passed shopfronts, mentally cataloging the odd mixture of clues and information swirling in her mind.
Sherlock spoke suddenly, his voice sharp with revelation. "It's an ancient number system!"
"Yeah," Ivy chimed in, her tone quick, cutting. "Specifically Hangzhou numerals."
As Sherlock walked, the symbols from the Hangzhou system flashed in his mind's eye. The connection, sharp as always, was immediate.
"These days," Sherlock continued, "only street traders use it. Those were numbers written on the wall at the bank and at the library."
Ivy's eyebrows rose at this. "Maybe that's why you saw your mum using it when you were little," Sherlock added. "In the Chinese quarter."
Ivy blinked, caught slightly off guard by the personal comment. She hadn't thought about that for years, her mother's meticulous chalked scrawls outside the little stall in Chinatown. It was strange, the way the past found its way into everything.
Sherlock veered off suddenly towards a greengrocer's, his pace quickening as his eyes flitted over the handwritten signs on display. The vegetables had their names written in both Chinese and English, with the cost written in Hangzhou numerals. Sherlock's long fingers brushed over the signs, flipping them over one by one, checking each symbol.
"Numbers written in an ancient Chinese dialect," he muttered, more to himself than anyone else.
John, who had been watching in his usual baffled but patient way, suddenly pointed. "It's a fifteen! What we thought was the artist's tag—it's a number fifteen."
Sherlock snatched up the tag that John had pointed at and smiled triumphantly. "And the blindfold, the horizontal line? That was a number as well."
Ivy grinned at the price tag he held up, the almost-horizontal line marking the top, with "£1" written beneath. "The Chinese number one."
John's face lit up. "We've found it!"
Just as they all turned to walk away, Ivy caught a glimpse of something in her periphery. The woman with the dark sunglasses, the one taking a photograph outside 221, was there again. Her camera was pointed towards them, another shot snapped, and then in the blink of an eye, she was gone.
Sherlock, of course, had already moved on, his mind leaping ahead of the moment as they made their way to the restaurant across from The Lucky Cat, the tourist shop outside of which Andy Galbraith had stood.
They sat in the window, Sherlock already scribbling Hangzhou numbers and their English equivalents onto a paper napkin. Ivy had her elbows on the table, her eyes darting between Sherlock and the shop, her brain spinning like a well-oiled machine.
