This one is dedicated to the amazing girls of the Johnlock Fanfiction group in Facebook, and to Andria, who prompted it and helped me to clean it from linguistic mistakes. Any mistake remaining is only my fault.
If you like it, don't hesitate in give me some feedback!
P.S. I've made for my own use a youtube list with 1930-1932 greatest hits to listen with this fic. If anyone is interested, here it is: youtube/ watch?v=YpGZBr-RYK8&list=PLiVajwJFCS7BD9YVyzaAhvAhy4KpFBcXL
I stepped in the Organised Crime Department at New Scotland Yard, exactly at 9 o'clock in the morning. Inspector Lestrade was already hanging in the wall the pictures of last night activities. When he finished, he settled the pushpins in the London map. He stood aside and gazed at his work: the huge London map was dotted with colourful little points and surrounded with black and white photographs of atrocities. Each colour stood for a different kind of crime: black was for arson, blue for armed robbery, green for illegal gambling, pink for prostitution, grey for other crimes. But the three pushpins Lestrade had just placed were red: murder. I approached the wall to watch the pictures, joining my small group of colleagues, and thanked God for the fact that the photographs didn't show the red colour. I had seen too much red lately.
Lestrade coughed and we all sat down in our uncomfortable wood chairs, or stood out of the way, leaning again our desks.
"Good morning, chaps. As you can see, we have had a rough night: three murders in different parts of the city. This one" he signalled the red dot in the Whitechapel area, "look like a regular one, so the guys of Whitechapel station will sort it out. The other two, on the contrary…" he signalled the horrid photographs, "have all the marks of the Holmes brothers."
A general grunt roamed by the room. Two more crimes for the thick file. The never-ending file, as it seemed to be.
"This one in Regent Street was a security guard in an office building. The place was searched thoroughly, but they haven't found anything missing. Watson and Smith, you two will go there now; perhaps at daylight they will discover what has been robbed, or perhaps they can tell you what they think the murderers were looking for."
I nodded, frowning. What would those gangsters possibly want from an elegant office? That was new.
"The other murder is more delicate", sighed Lestrade, pointing the red dot placed in Pimlico. "A couple has been shot in their home. The man was a banker, and both came from old and wealthy families, so the press will be stalking us until we can put someone in jail for the crime. They were awakened, tied up and supposedly interrogated before being shot. The domestics heard the shot and ran to the main bedroom, but of course the damned murderers were gone. Donovan and James, you will go there and try to find any lead. Frank will join you later; we need daylight photographs."
"And when will be that 'later'?", scoffed Sally Donovan.
I rolled my eyes and avoided looking at her. Sally was the only woman in the Force with the rank of 'sergeant'; she thought she had to be tough and sarcastic all the time in order to be respected and not treated as a weak damsel. As if we could ever consider that.
"'Later', Donovan, will be when Frank wakes up, has breakfast and decides to come to work. He has been awake all night taking these photographs and revealing them, and thanks to him, we have this visual aid in front of us every morning. So please, be kind to him when he appears in your crime scene, OK? This goes for all of you, guys."
We all nodded; nobody liked the photographer very much. Frank was a good lad, but very quiet and, of course, he wasn't one of us. We all felt a little intrusion every time he came with us to take pictures of the crime scenes. But, nice or not, we needed him: where could we find another photographer with enough stomach? He wasn't photographing flowers or weddings, precisely…
After that, we all began to take our equipment and prepare to go. Only Lestrade and Muffin stayed in the Department today. The Inspector approached me when I was finishing my coffee and Smith was waiting for me at the door. Lestrade told my mate to wait for me outside, and made me sit down.
"John… I know you expected to be assigned to the double murder in Pimlico."
I shrugged, but it was true. Delicacy was not the strong point of Donovan.
"I prefer you take the Regent Street one because is less stressing, and you and me have the night shift tonight."
"Yeah, I know. Do you expect more movement tonight, then?", I asked.
He nodded, concerned. He looked around us: all the rest of the team had gone, we were alone in the office.
"And there's more. I think we have a mole."
"What?! In here? No way, it's impossible!", I exclaimed.
"That's what I thought at the beginning… But John, our last operations have been a fiasco, and all our undercovers have been discovered and murdered. How, do I wonder?"
I gulped, suddenly nervous. Those people had my back. I had to rely on them, how else was I going to do my work?
"Keep your eyes open, John…"
The day was calm, in fact. Smith and I talked with the owners of the small offices in the building where the security guard was murdered. All of them affirmed that they didn't have a clue of the ulterior motives of the killer. The office that had been searched belonged to a lawyer, specialized in wills and divorces. The lawyer said exactly the same as his neighbours, although I didn't fully believe him.
At dinner time, all the agents went home and only Lestrade and I stayed at the office. We had some hamburgers from the corner's café, and then the Inspector lay down on the sofa, beside the windows, and in less than two minutes gentle snores were filling the room. I sat down in front of my desk and made the crosswords from that morning newspaper. I finished it quickly: I had a degree in crosswords with all those night shifts! I looked with envy at my sleeping mate, but I had to be awake for six more hours, so I stood and went again to the coffee machine in the hall. I sat with my paper cup next to Molly, the receptionist: she was always up for a chat. Nice girl, Molly; a little bit too sweet and shy for my taste, but a nice girl all the same. I'd been thinking about asking her out for a while then, but at the last moment I always refrained. We had been talking and laughing for more than an hour, with the only interruption of a couple of calls, when the phone rang again. I kept the conversation low, since two officers from other departments had joined us, but the way Molly opened her eyes wildly caught my attention. She wrote the details, her hand flying over the notebook, assured the other party that an officer would be there as fast as possible, and hung up looking at me.
"John, this is for you".
I ran back to the office and woke Lestrade. He put his shoes on and hurried on my heels. Molly gave us the paper with the address and the name of the caller.
"She says there's a man inside her house: somehow they have passed through the dogs and the alarm."
We nodded. Not a common burglary, then. Definitely for our department. We were heading for the main door, Lestrade with the car keys already in his hand, when Molly shouted at our back:
"Look at the name of the caller!"
I did, as I ran, and cursed loudly.
"Last mayor's wife", I told Lestrade.
"Fuck! First the banker, and now London ex-mayor? This is escalating out of control, John. Run!"
It took us less than five minutes to get to the spot, a nice terraced house in Belgravia. Two women were sitting in the front porch step, but they stood as soon as they saw us running out of the car. I recognised one of the women from the society pages of the news: a tall ash-haired one in her fifties, now with streaks of tears in her face.
"The man is in the cellar now!", she cried out. "He told us to go out of the house if we wanted to live; I told him that I had already called the police, but he laughed at this…"
"Is there anyone else in the house?", Lestrade asked her.
"No, my husband is on a business trip, and today is the domestics' free day; only one of the maids was at home", she signalled the woman by her side.
I nodded, and Lestrade and I opened the front door and stepped in the house as silently as we could. The lights were off, but there was enough light coming from the windows. We were at a wide hall, with two arches, left and right, leading to the parlour and the dining room. An elegant staircase climbed up to the first floor. We looked each other, nodded, and went through different arches. I took the dining room one: no movements there. I released the safety lock of my gun and crossed the door that led to the kitchen. It was darker, there, because of the closed blind. I approached the window so I could raise the blind just a little; I didn't want to alert the intruder turning the lights on, but I didn't want to alert him either stumbling against a pan.
"If I was you…"
The deep smooth voice sounded mere inches from my ear. I froze, cursing in my head. The intruder leaned still closer to me; so close that I could feel his breath in the side on my neck, in my earlobe. I couldn't help to shiver.
"If I was you", repeated the voice, "I would go down to the cellar, take a look to the hidden door now opened, and then walk off here as fast as you can. Actually, you have exactly five minutes to do so."
I felt movement at my back, and I turned fast, in time to see the intruder going out by one of the dining room windows. I targeted him, my hand steady around my gun. Steel blue eyes shone in his shadowed face, and I would swear that he was grinning at me.
"Time flies, sergeant…", he said.
And in an instant, his silhouette in profile was gone. I turned the kitchen light on and ran to the cellar door. A short flight of stairs led to a wide and wet room with piles of wine boxes and some garden tools, now in disarray. A smaller door was opened in one of the walls; I had to crouch so I could take a peek inside the low room at the other side of that door, and what I saw left me open-mouthed: it was a small storage room, and what was stored there… were tenths of machine guns, ammunition and some small boxes containing grenades.
I ran upstairs again, calling Lestrade aloud. We met in the hall, as he was coming from the first floor. I pulled him from a sleeve and kept running through the main door.
"Please, madams, run away from the house! As far as you can!"
"What happens, John?", asked Lestrade, astonished.
I didn't know for sure, but I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. The women, Lestrade and I had barely arrived a hundred feet up the street when hell unchained at our back: a small explosion, with a huge explosion at its heels.
"The intruder placed an explosive", I shouted in Lestrade's direction, trying to be heard over the awful noise of the fire and the resounding echo of the explosion. "In the cellar, inside a closed storage room, there were a good amount of guns and grenades: this was the second bigger explosion."
The four of us looked to the remnants of the house, not very much indeed. Lestrade stared back to me, still shocked, the dogs barked at their burnt house, the maid was doing her best to ease her landlady, and said lady was crying out loud that it couldn't be true, that her husband was a respectable gentleman, a London mayor, and her poor house, her lovely and expensive furniture, all gone, all lost…
The next morning, Lestrade called the younger Holmes to Scotland Yard. He made him sit in an interrogation room for half an hour before entering himself; the usual procedure. Sherlock Holmes was perching in the chair, his long legs over the desk, smoking languidly and sending smoke rings to the ceiling. He didn't even look to the door when it opened. Lestrade sat in his chair, left his papers on the table and tried to enter in the man's zone of sight. Sherlock Holmes kept on looking to the ceiling and the smoke figures in the air.
Lestrade coughed and started without preamble.
"We have caught you this time, Holmes… Sergeant Watson saw you yesterday in the mayor's house, inside the house, just moments before it exploded."
The man finally glanced at Lestrade, barely a moment, and resumed his enjoyable activity making smoke rings. He smirked with one side of his mouth.
"Watson, eh?", said he, with a low and deep voice that resounded in the small and almost empty room.
Lestrade bit his lip. He was waiting for the threat, of course, but he regretted having to put a Damocles sword also over John Watson's head. At least, John was single, without children, and his parents lived far from London, in a small village by the sea. The only person who can be threatened to keep John's mouth shut was his sister, and John's himself, of course. He would see to it that John wasn't alone under any circumstance, from now on.
"Can you tell me what were you doing in that house, Holmes? Any reason, besides the obvious, placing explosives?"
"I can't remember being at that house at all, Inspector…", answered Holmes, still staring at the ceiling. "In fact, I think I was playing cards until very, very late… 4 a.m., perhaps? Yes, that would do. I was playing cards in my club until 4 a.m. with… let's see… Bill Morris, Washington Comb and Tommy Wallace."
Lestrade felt rage raising from his stomach and filling his head.
"Do you have to make it so clear, that you are making it up as you talk, do you?" asked the Inspector, trying hard to not raise his voice. "Who do you think the jury will believe, a bunch of felons or an honest and reliable Scotland Yard sergeant?"
Sherlock Holmes put out his cigarette in the ashtray and looked Lestrade in the eye. The Inspector gulped; the man's stare was difficult to stand. Those cold blue eyes seemed to pierce him and nail him down in his chair. When Holmes finally talked, a chill ran through the Inspector's back.
"Did your honourable sergeant see me under plain light? I bet he didn't turn the lights on, if he was chasing a criminal, and last night the moon was barely crescent, so he hadn't much light from the street either. Had he seen me at all?, that's what the jury will wonder. What did he saw? A shadow, a silhouette… That's not enough to put the blame on a man. But, of course, it was a Mayor's house, you need a scapegoat… Who do you think the jury will say is making it up? Your sergeant, who in fact didn't see much of anything, or me?"
The cold rage was well installed in Lestrade head now. Of course. This is the Holmes brothers who were they talking about. No evidence, ever: they always came away clean from every trial. But he thought that, this time, with a witness, it could be different. A crooked smile appeared in the gangster face again, as his gaze went down from Lestrade's eyes to the rest of his body and up again.
"They don't pay you a great deal, I see… Your clothes are, at least, a year old, and your wife doesn't love you enough to keep them in a good state. And, of course, you can't afford a maid who irons your shirts… That's a pity…"
The Inspector felt violent, and still more when Sherlock Holmes leaned over the table, so close that their hands were almost touching and their heads were a mere fifteen inches from each other. Lestrade had the urge to lean back, but he felt frozen in the spot, with those ice eyes like needles fixed in his own. When the gangster spoke again, his voice sounded like a low purr, dissolving the cop's anger and turning it into confusion and a strange stomach clenching.
"I wonder what you would look like in an expensive suit… A silk shirt, light blue, would be great with your tan skin… And an Italian tie, of course… Yes, I'm picturing you and God, it would be amazing, you would look… delicious."
Lestrade felt his hands shake. He gulped and, with a considerable effort, took his eyes off Holmes and looked again to his papers, trying to keep his trembling hands under control playing with a pen.
"Are you trying to bribe me, Holmes?", said Lestrade, managing to raise an eyebrow, in what he hope was interpreted as a 'not-very-impressed' gesture.
Holmes leaned back in his chair again and lit another cigarette. The Inspector was glad of having space again.
"Oh, I wouldn't even dream of offering you money, Inspector", said the gangster in a casual voice, "but every man have their prize, don't you think? Something they need, something they want. Sometimes they aren't aware of it and they content themselves thinking they don't need anything, but of course they are wrong. They only need to be shown the thing they really wish in their darkest dreams, and in a moment they would easily kill to obtain it."
Sherlock Holmes was staring at him again with an indecipherable face, shrouded in smoke, and Lestrade looked, fascinated, how the man leaned his head backwards to exhale, and followed the movement of his pale long neck. The Inspector shook his head, gulped and said:
"You can go now, Holmes. We'll be in touch."
Holmes grinned openly.
"Of course we will."