When the door was shut and they were in private, he said, “There are no recording devices in this room of any sort.” He appraised her with palpable interest, squinting a little at her boots. “And I trust you take precautions when being followed, because you certainly aren’t pregnant or diabetic yet, there’s that barely traceable swelling at your ankles, which isn’t swelling at all. You have a little toy with a mean bark hidden in the right boot, two knives, nothing fancy, strictly utilitarian in the other. And I must ask you to shut off any recording devices you might have on your person.”
With that, he went to his designated chair and lowered himself into it carefully, coffee in hand. It was easy to see the circles forming under his eyes in this light and two closing wounds on his wrist. “I know what bureaucracy is capable of and the scope and scale of it. If I may inquire, what drew your attention towards me? Did you have any prior knowledge of my work and how I conducted it?”
She was beautiful, no doubt. A femme fatale at her finest and were he a different man, he might’ve lingered on how her eyes matched her sweater and how toned she was, but he was Sherlock Holmes and regarded her with his usual brand of detached curiosity, noting all the details he deemed relevant about her, more curious about the shape of her psyche than her body, ultimately.
It also didn’t escape him how trained she must’ve been in the art of combat. The weather was chilly and her extremities required no protection… her blood flow was excellent.