It was a Tuesday evening in mid-November, a day cold and rainy. Holmes sat in his chair as was custom; nearly asleep, as often he was by this time, his mind was drifting ever farther from himself. The lids of his eyes were nearly shut when three sharp knocks at the door gave him a great startle. He had to take a moment to calm himself down. He stood wearily from his chair as he concluded with looming dread that it must be his brother, or a barely-conscious drunk, or worse, for certainly no client with his wits about him had or would ever come at such an ungodly hour.

The detective mumbled a greeting to the figure behind the door, making towards it to allow the person in.

As he swung the door open, however, he had another start: not only was this person in fact two persons, they were children, a boy and girl - barely twelve years of age each.

This fact wouldn't be much of a shock on its own, of course, as occasionally pranksters got a kick out of, say, toilet-papering his flat so near the midnight hour, gaining entry with fairly realistic homeless outfits. These two, though - it might have simply been the nicotine in his system, or the desperation for sleep, but these two wore clothes so genuinely frayed and soaked, so right yet so off for English street-dwellers, and held themselves only ever so slightly differently than an orphaned Brit, that it was nigh impossible that they weren't homeless - or at least parentless. Their eyes clearly showed exhaustion, fear, and loneliness that should never weigh further down the burden of a child of such an age. Their clothes were soaked, from their worn shoes, to their torn jeans, to the near-matching olive-green winter coats never needed in this section of Europe. As a final clue, begging to be caught, were a small sewn American flag peeling off the left breast of each child.

In a voice raised in suburbian American corn-fields, but faintly distorted by the dark and dampness of what must have been the Underground, the girl speaks. "I'm Jessica Parker. This is my brother, Thomas. Would you mind much if we simply stayed the night?"