Sherlock didn't look up when John entered the room. He just raised his coffee cup absently, as if he expected that to be enough to convey his wishes, and then he went back to typing on his computer.
John rolled his eyes, but he collected the cup anyway. There were some things that were worth fighting about, and some not, especially first thing in the morning. That Sherlock had a cup suggested that there was coffee to be had, and given the way he felt, groggy and not quite plugged into the world yet, that wasn't a bad thing.
He went into the kitchen. There was coffee, but from the state of it, its brewing had occurred hours before. Dumping it down the sink seemed the most humane option for all concerned, including the coffee, so down the drain it went.
While the water boiled for a fresh carafe, John made toast. It was shopping day, so he did a quick inventory of the fridge and cupboards, noting everything down on a pad of paper. Feeling efficient, if only marginally more awake, he buttered the toast and poured water over the coffee, and put everything on a tray to carry out to Sherlock.
"Did you get any sleep last night?" John asked. He heaped sugar into Sherlock's cup, stirred, and then arranged toast on the saucer before handing it over.
Sherlock shrugged absently. "Some. And then my brain started making connections, so I got up."
"Yeah, at 3 o'clock. I remember."
Most of the time, Sherlock's nocturnal comings and goings no longer bothered him, but occasionally, after he was left alone, John was unable to settle, and his sleep became fractured. He found himself waking every half hour or so until it seemed to him that there was little point in staying in bed. He helped himself to a cup of black coffee and drank some of it before looking to see what had caught Sherlock's attention and cost him the rest of a decent night's sleep. On the screen there were a half dozen grim looking photographs arranged in a two by three grid. "So you got up and hacked the police database." He rubbed sleep from his eyes and looked again. "Hang on, those are morgue photos."
"Caffeine works its magic at last." Sherlock said. John gave him a dirty look, and Sherlock smiled cheekily to show he was only teasing.
John knew he was being ill-tempered. But it was 5 o'clock, a thoroughly uncivilised hour considering how late they had arrived home the night before, and how sleepless the previous week had been. He had anticipated a lie in, and now he was out of sorts because his expectation had been thwarted.
"Other than being dead, tell me what else those women have in common." Sherlock handed the laptop up so that John could carry it to his own chair and study the photographs as carefully as he needed to before offering his opinion.
The photos were all head shots, and didn't offer much information to go on. Nonetheless, John studied them closely. When he gave his summation, he started with the obvious. "Blonde. Well nourished. Physically similar features. High cheek bones. Small noses. Pointed chins. " He glanced away from the screen and over at Sherlock, who was stirring his coffee as he listened to the recitation of facts.
"What else?"
John rubbed sleep from his eyes and then he enlarged each photographs to look at it more carefully. "I'm going to say there not all natural blondes. Or at least that's not the shade they were born with. It's not quite … right, even taking into account the post-mortem pallor. And there's something else unusual. Six women of differing ages who have the same hair style."
"Top marks!" Sherlock said, clearly delighted by John's observation. "The Medical Examiners noted in their reports that in each case the victim's hair had been freshly dyed and cut prior to her death."
"Serial killer with a fetish?" John asked.
Sherlock ignored the question and posed one of his own instead. "What else do you notice?"
Bearing the idea that these were not isolated killings, and that all the women had fallen victim to a single killer, John looked for more clues. "Are these arranged by date of death?"
Sherlock nodded before he sipped at his coffee.
"There's a progression of age," John said. "The first victim appears to be in her late teens. The last, late twenties or early thirties."
"In summary?"
"A fixated serial killer," John replied. "Killing the same woman over and over again, but he's not stopping her in time, the way some of them do. He's letting her grow older as he grows older." He frowned at Sherlock. "That's unusual, isn't it?"
Sherlock shrugged, less interested in overall patterns and more in the individual data point of their particular killer. "If he holds to his timetable, he's due to kill again. All these women died on May 21st. "
John stared down into the dead faces. What information they gleaned from those case files could save a life, if only the puzzle pieces were put together correctly. "That's next week."
"So why that date?" Sherlock asked.
"What did the case files say?" John replied. "Was it their birthday?"
Sherlock shook his head. "Too obvious."
"The killer's birthday, then."
Sherlock pulled a disapproving face. "Come on, John, don't be boring. Think!"
John stared down into the faces of the dead women. No, not dead women, dead woman. No matter how many bodies, it was the same woman being murdered, over and over again. "The killer is recreating a moment, allowing the woman, whoever she was, a chance to do something different. Something happened. It didn't end well, and now he wants a different outcome. So he keeps trying. Setting up the same scenario and creating a facsimile of the woman who had started it all." He glanced over at Sherlock. "I'm guessing, it's a safe bet she's dead too?"
"Call her Victim Zero," Sherlock said. "She's none of the women in the files. Of that I'm certain."
"Why is that?" John asked. He had a fair idea. Whatever had happened had broken something inside of the killer. But it had taken time for the rot to set in, and for the compulsion to try and relive the triggering event to grow into something deadly.
Sherlock gave him a pointed look in reply. John shrugged it off. Clearly Sherlock wasn't in the mood to show off yet. "All right. Because it doesn't fit the pattern of pathology of these types of crimes. You've read the case files. What else links the victims? Geography? Career? Lifestyle choices?"
Sherlock stared out into middle distance as if the files were hanging in front of him and he was referring to them as he reviewed relevant bits of information.
"Each victim was a new arrival in London. Not one of them had been in the city for more than a month."
"So, I'm guessing no close ties," John surmised. "Vulnerable because they were all still trying to get established and find their feet." He shut his eyes for several seconds, trying to put himself into the head of a young woman new to the complexities of London. "If Victim Zero was younger than the rest then she would have probably just left school. What if someone close to her wasn't keen on the idea? A boyfriend or a parent? What if whoever is doing the killing is trying to convince this girl, over and over again, not to stay here in London?"
"Surely attempting to establish herself in a new city would be a blatant statement that Victim Zero was cutting ties with any previous relationships she may have had," Sherlock countered.
John gave Sherlock a patient look. "For a normal person, yes. But whoever did this, is doing this, isn't taking 'no' for an answer. 'If I can't have you, no one can.' Or maybe, 'My house. My rules. I say when you get to leave.'"
Sherlock raised an eyebrow, but nodded that he agreed, conceding that John had a point. "So where does that leave us?"
John was no longer sleepy or muddle-headed. Like Sherlock, he had scented the hunt. "Looking for the case file of a young woman probably between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, matching the physical characteristics of the other victims: blonde, petite, and finely boned. She would probably have died of some explainable cause, or at the worst, the coroner would have put her death down to misadventure. And there might have been a previous history of domestic violence, even Children's Services involvement. There are superficial lacerations and bruising on the faces of some of these women. What was their cause of death?"
"Road accidents," Sherlock said. "All the drivers were exonerated. In each case the woman stepped out into oncoming traffic without warning. The toxicology showed large amounts of alcohol in their systems, which coincides with what little investigation was done in each case."
"How so?"
"On the night of her death," Sherlock recited rapidly from memory, "each woman went to a club or bar. Each rebuffed the attention of one or more men during her approximately two hour stay. Each took a taxi home. Each driver dropped each woman off in front of her flat or bedsit. There were no common denominators in location or individuals in any of the cases. Several hours later, freshly coiffured, each woman stepped out into traffic and was either killed outright or died en-route to hospital without gaining consciousness."
John felt his eyes widen and his mouth fall open at the audaciousness of the killer. "And because the cases occurred in different parts of London and a year apart, no one remembered the interesting detail of the new hairdos."
"Precisely," Sherlock said.
"A perfect crime," John said softly and then he looked up at Sherlock with an expression of wry amusement. "That is perfect until your compulsive need to find patterns in random deaths, even when you're sleeping, kicked in."
Sherlock met John's eyes. When he smiled and shrugged it was a silent acknowledgement that he was what he was, and not even John's attempts at domestication could change that. "We need Lestrade on this. Call him and give him the details." He rose, finally remembering that John had brought him toast as well as coffee, and stuck a piece in his mouth. "I'm going to dress and then go to Barts. Have Lestrade meet us there with the pertinent files."
Sherlock was hunched over a microscope bracketed on either side by Molly and John. It was a typical scene, one he had walked in on more times than he could count, but Greg paused in the doorway and watched the trio working in perfect synchronicity. He waited until the Sherlock straightened and then he knocked on the door frame and held up the memory stick holding the information John had requested. "John tells me you've had one of your brainwaves."
"Hello, to you too, Lestrade," Sherlock replied. He extended his hand and Greg dropped the memory stick onto his palm. "How many?"
Trust Sherlock to get straight to the point, which was just as well. Greg had a workshop about new incident room protocols in an hour, and the Chief Super who was running it was a stickler for punctuality. "There were ten deaths that seemed to fit the criteria you were asking about. Young girls between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, recently left home and new to London. All killed in road accidents or similar."
Sherlock beamed. "Excellent!" he said.
John rolled his eyes and shook his head at the callousness of Sherlock's reply, but he didn't offer a rebuke. Instead he just pulled his laptop from his messenger bag, took the stick from Sherlock, and inserted it into the machine.
As the laptop booted, Sherlock took a deep breath and let it out again, centring himself before withdrawing into the weird headspace where he did his best work. He bent over the computer and began to scan through the ten incident reports and their associated files.
Greg's watch beeped the half hour. He glanced down at it, confirming the time. "I've got to dash. I'll drop round later. You can dazzle me."
No one said anything in reply. Sherlock had already merged with the computer and John was almost as gone. "Two peas in a pod," Greg said softly to Molly, and then he turned on his heel and made a mad dash for the lift. If he was lucky, he could make it to the workshop with moments to spare.
Boring people. Boring people with boring aspirations. Boring people who ended their lives with boring deaths. Sherlock scanned through the case files rapidly, and then he forced himself to slow, absorbing each individual fact related to every case until he knew everything they contained.
He visualised a second screen and loaded the files related to the murder victims on it.
Compare and contrast. Look for commonalities. Reject superfluous information.
So many pointless facts.
Start with the painfully obvious.
Investigating officers. Dozens of names and no significant percentage of repeats.
Irrelevant. Move on.
Incident locations:
Harrington's Wine Bar. The Crown and Castle. The Players. The Knightsbridge Club. Club Sirocco. The Elephant and Weasel. The Bell and Ball. Benson's. Club 76. Matey's. Valentine's. Hidey Ho! Deacon's Blues. The Fandango. Club Undeniable. The Mottled Oyster.
No commonalties. Except perhaps the locations? Sherlock put the clubs, pubs and bars on map view. They were spread across town in a disappointingly predictable manner.
Eliminate geography, at least provisionally.
Sherlock rearranged hundreds of names from the witness statements into alphabetical order and found nothing.
What about the cars who had hit the women?
Audis. Mercedes. Fords. A London Black Cab. Renaults. Saloons. Sedans. Two doors. Four doors. SUVs. No commonalities there either.
Question: Why recreate the accident exactly if the point of the murder's exercise was to change the outcome of some other event?
Answer: There was no point in it. Reject the cars.
Look at the victims.
Six students. One would be-doctor. One would-be historian. One might-have- been dentist. Maybe, if they had not been knocked down by careless drivers, in the fullness of time they might have had the opportunity to do something interesting or useful.
John would have liked the would-be doctor. On arrival in London, Sheryl Bond had signed up to do voluntary work at an organisation that helped wounded war veterans. Brother and sister had both served in the Forces. Sister lost a leg.
The would-be historian, Pamela Redmond, though her life had ended aged seventeen, already had practical experience working at the excavation of a Viking burial site. Mother was sixty and a museum curator. Father was sixty-two and an archaeologist. No siblings.
Jody Michaels, the would-be dentist had come from Hampstead. Her parents had taken her back there for burial. Siblings were ten and twelve years older. She had a brother in Sidney, Australia. A sister in Colchester. Knocked over after a night at the theatre with her flatmates. Two of them had been injured in the incident as well.
Two on business courses. Classmates Jill Saunders and Maeve West, both eighteen, had been killed by an intoxicated driver. They had been intoxicated themselves, celebrating Maeve's birthday. Both young women had been only children. Their families lived next door to one another in Oxford.
Two more students, actors this time. Olivia Hamlin, aged seventeen, from a family of actors. She had completed a term at Guildhall. Sherlock had seen her parents perform in Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre. Margaret Messina, aged eighteen, newly arrived and not yet started her course at LAMDA.
Drama students attracted drama.
Big dreams.
Out-sized personalities.
Or sometimes personalities that were unformed. The better actors disappeared inside their roles, becoming their characters. Couldn't let go when the curtain fell, at least until they took on their next role...
None bore more than a passing resemblance to the more recent victims.
The size or formation of their personalities was irrelevant.
Melissa Waters, no plans. No dreams other than see a real city. Sherlock couldn't fault her. No city in the world was in the same league as London. Modest means. Father a plumber. Mother a secretary. Estranged from her sister, they had plans to open a shop and fell out when Melissa had a change of heart.
Cynthia Best. Eighteen. Family dead. No ties to anyone, anywhere. Not a possible. Sherlock dismissed her as a potential for Victim Zero.
Leslie Mathers. Eighteen on the cusp of nineteen. Hairdresser. Divorced. Ex-husband Tom gutted at the news, even though he was already in a new relationship and had a child on the way.
Martha Smith. Sixteen. Left Cardiff to join her older sister who owned and operated a bakery. The sister needed an apprentice. Mum and Dad approved of the move. Drowned in the Thames. A probable suicide. Didn't fit the pattern at all.
None of the birth or death dates coincided with the dates of the murders …
Lestrade had said something when he departed. Sherlock had heard the sound of his voice. It had been a gently teasing jibe at John and himself. The sort of thing they'd become used to. But this time it resonated.
"Peas in a pod," Sherlock murmured softly.
EMTs had been called to attend at the Waters' house when the police made the official notification. Not for the parents, but for the sister.
"What'd you say?" John asked as he yawned and stretched.
Sherlock had the sense that a great deal more time had passed in the outside world then he had noticed.
"Lestrade called us 'peas in a pod'!" Sherlock said as he rapidly flipped through the records until he came to the relevant file.
"And?" John said. It was plain that he hadn't caught the significance of the remark.
John had read the incident files, leaning against Sherlock's shoulder as did so. It was the only other thing Sherlock had noticed, other than his peripheral acknowledgement of Lestrade's departure, before the investigation had captured his complete attention.
Sherlock sighed explosively. "Think, John! Peas in a pod. Lestrade used it because, like many people who spend a great deal of time in each others'company, we have picked up habits from one another. You in this instance, practically crawled into the computer alongside me."
John's face became a study in surprised acknowledgement, as if he hadn't been aware of what he'd done or how it looked to outside observers, but then he shrugged it away. "I suppose that was bound to happen, eventually." His gaze travelled to the laptop. "You're saying there's another set of peas in those case files."
"Sisters, John!" Sherlock could barely contain his excitement as all the pieces fell inexorably into place. "But not any sisters. Twins!"
Sherlock opened the laptop's screen to a better angle and pushed it so that John could see the notation under family relationships in Melissa Water's file. "Melody Waters. Sister. Twin. It's right there in black and white."
John frowned. "Twins. Fraternal or identical?"
Sherlock pulled the computer back. He closed the data file and used the internet to access the website for public records. "I suspect you know the answer to that already."
John nodded. He went to Molly and asked if it was okay if they confiscated her office for a while longer. He felt in his gut they were headed for an ugly place, and no place seemed more appropriate to dig into the secrets of the dead and their murderers than a morgue.
Lestrade was tired. Like many of the seminars and workshops meant to increase workplace efficiency, this latest one on team management was a boring time waster. Implementing its tactics would only increase his paperwork and take even more resources away from actual policing. He longed for the old days when Scotland Yard was interested in catching criminals and didn't care about the methodology as long as the villains ended up behind bars. Even so, Sherlock had his complete attention as he explained how what started as a random mental connection had blossomed into a full blown hunt for a serial killer.
"So you see, Lestrade," Sherlock concluded. "Melody and Melissa Waters were identical twins and shared that peculiar bond that those who started life as a single individual often do. But where Melody embraced the bond, Melissa rejected it. She wanted to be her own person. It caused a rift between the sisters. A rift that became permanent when she was abruptly killed in a road accident."
Greg looked up at Sherlock and didn't bother to hide his scepticism. "And you're saying Melody couldn't handle it, so when she was let out of hospital after her breakdown, she what, rejected reality and decided she was going to get her sister back no matter what?" Sherlock nodded, and gestured that he should keep following the bizarre line of reasoning. "So she started stalking women who reminded her of Melissa. And then what did she do? How did she approach them?"
"She would lure them to a bar or club. Everyone looks for a man in these circumstances, but no one looks at other women," John said, speaking for the first time since he had greeted Greg at the door and offered him coffee. "The witness statements that you have on the victims specifically mentioned men who might have been with them. Blokes that tried to pick them up. The taxi drivers. But no women."
"Rather sexist, don't you think, Lestrade?" Sherlock said with an arch lift of his brow.
Greg gave Sherlock a courtesy glower. "Yeah, well, none of these women were anything but accident victims to the original investigators. They wouldn't have been looking for any sort of a predator, male or female," he countered. "They took one look at the blood alcohol content of the victims and saw it for what it was meant to look like. Bad luck and a sad end."
He shuffled the stack of notes and documents and sighed. "I'll bet you ten quid when the press gets a hold of this, they're going to call her something lurid, like the Gemini Killer. They won't be able to help themselves, the sisters being identical twins and the deaths happening when they did."
"So what are you going to do?" John asked.
Greg sighed again and glanced at his watch as he rose. So much for seeing the inside of his flat before midnight. "Head back to the Yard. The clock is ticking on this one, and all of this evidence is circumstantial. It's going to take a hell of a lot of legwork to get a warrant for Melody. Hopefully, I can make that happen before she re-enacts her sister's death again."
He waved the stack of files in a gesture of farewell. "Night, lads. Have a thought for those of us burning the midnight oil." He made it as far as the doorway and then turned back towards John and Sherlock. "Hang on. There's one thing I'm still not getting here. Why the 21st?"
Sherlock smiled his most irritating smile, the one filled with condescension for the mere mortal plod. "Because, Lestrade, that was the date of the death that really mattered to Melody Waters. I think you'll find when you interview her that May 21st was the date Melissa boarded a London train, and Melody found herself truly alone and bereft."
A chill raised the hair on the back of Greg's neck when he glanced over at John. There was a dark cast to his expression that suggested that he was still processing the facts of the case and wasn't going to have an easy time of it until Melody Waters was locked safely behind bars. It was a subtle warning, but received all the same. There were troubling revelations yet to be had, and he had better be ready.
end