john watson, p.i.?

After I dropped Sherlock at school this morning, I went to talk to the young woman Mrs H told me about.

Obviously, there's a lot about it that I can't say, and I've been trying to think how to talk about it. This is going to be about 80% true in substance and about 80% made up in the details. It'll sound a bit like a Victorian novel, but I think it'll work.

Mary's in her early twenties, just out of university, with some sort of computer science degree. She told me about it. I won't pretend I understood. She'd probably get on well with Mycroft.

Three months ago, her mum disappeared. She'd been on a business trip to Paris. She left her hotel one morning and never came back. Mary didn't realise anything was wrong until the police called her. All her mother's things were still in the room. The police found the cafe where she'd had breakfast that morning. After that, nothing.

A week later, Mary got a pearl in the post. Small box, brown paper wrapping. She showed it to me, not that I could make anything of it. I imagine it's been checked for fingerprints and so on. Mrs H certainly doesn't need me for that. Two weeks after that, there was another pearl, and another two weeks after that, and so on.

The most recent one came with directions - turn right, go a quarter mile, take the third left - not those actual directions, but things like that. Which might've been helpful if you knew where to start from. Mary and I started from her flat, but the directions had us turning right and walking 20 paces through a brick wall...not that helpful.

That's about as far as we got today. She thinks her mum is alive and responsible somehow for the pearls and the directions, suspects the directions may be code of some sort, and resents the French police and Mrs H for not taking it all more seriously. I can't blame her, but Mrs H doesn't do anything by accident, so there must be some reason she sent me. Just need to figure out what it is.