False Flag

Chapter One

Sherlock was splayed out on the autopsy table, pale and sallow under the harsh artificial light of St Bartholomew's Hospital mortuary. Every inch of him was limp and lifeless, frozen in silent repose as John barreled impatiently into the cold, sterile room and promptly dumped Sherlock's mobile square on the bastard's chest.

Sherlock's eyes fluttered open in alarm. "What took you so long?"

"Your coat. You didn't leave it in the lab," John grumbled, his patience worn incredibly thin. "You left it in the taxi. It was halfway to Shoreditch by the time I caught up with it."

With nothing more than a cursory shrug of thanks to his bleary-eyed faithful steed, Sherlock sprung off the examination table and tugged the front of his jacket back down. "Come, I want you to meet someone."

Less-than-silently cursing Sherlock's ability to remain steadfastly upright after forty two hours with naught but a croissant and two Dead Eyes (so massive John had just decided to call them Dead Seas) down him, John shuffled over to his colleague's side and took a gander at the body that hadn't been there twenty minutes earlier. A healthy looking male in his thirties sporting three very unhealthy looking stab wounds. Two to the upper torso, one through the neck. Nicked the carotid artery, nasty way to go. "Right, who's this then?"

"Our new flatmate. Mugged, stabbed and left for dead on a side street just off Goswell Road earlier this evening. Died en route," Sherlock informed him calmly. "Provided no one claims the body in the next fifty six hours, thirteen minutes, I was thinking about stuffing him that spare wheelie bin behind the shed."

The noise John made was hardly dignified, something between a gurgle and a startled laugh and he couldn't clap a hand over his mouth fast enough. While it was hardly the oddest thing that had come out of Sherlock's mouth that week (or hell, that day,) in John's defense, it was half past two in the morning and his blood was likely 30% tea at that point, so his nervous system was pretty damn well shot. "What, for safe keeping?"

Sherlock's upper lip twitched in an impatient sneer. "My dermestid beetles came in today. He should keep them going for at least two, three months."

"So, you're finally just going to go ahead and do it, then?" John sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You're just going to turn our landlady's back garden into a full out body farm?" He could just picture Mrs. Hudson tiptoeing through the garden and fainting dead away at the sight of a pale, splotchy, beetle-covered arm poking out between the takeaway cartons and bin bags. "Can't you do that here? What's the point in having a state-of-the-art lab if all you ever do is bring your science projects home and stick them in the bloody fridge?"

"He's not going in the fridge, he's going in the wheelie bin," Sherlock announced as he twirled away from the autopsy table with more aplomb than a man clad in a bile and blood-spattered lab coat should have been capable of. "Besides, I have to check the colony every four hours to monitor the larvae's gestation for the first week and the taxi fare would be astronomical."

"Okay." New approach. Time to appeal to Sherlock's ever-dwindling sense of propriety. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but... what will the neighbours think, Sherlock? It's hard enough explaining why you're out digging up and then burying the same damn dog carcass every Tuesday morning for the past month. Particularly when we've never had a dog!"

"Damn the neighbours," Sherlock barked, impatience singeing the rough edges of his voice as he snapped off his blue nitrile gloves and launched them in the biohazard bin across the room with remarkable accuracy. "We'd still be in the dark ages if all we ever did was wonder 'Oh, what will the neighbours think!'"

John backed away, hands held up in surrender. "Right. I give up. I've nothing to do with this. But if we find ourselves suddenly tossed out on our collective arse, you're covering the security deposit on my next place."

"Don't worry. Mrs. Hudson's a reasonable woman, understands the eccentricities of my career," Sherlock replied flatly, shrugging out of his lab coat and pitching it into an open mortuary chamber for Molly to sort out later. "So, any luck finding your friend at the squat?"

"Nuh uh," John sighed, shoving a shoulder into the mortuary door as they spilled out into the antiseptic-scented hallway. "Neville had been there, left a few things behind. Clothes mostly, but no one's seen him for months."

"Did you collect his belongings?"

"Yeah, paid a bum thirty quid for the lot. It's upstairs. I thought, maybe you could take a look at it, work your magic?" John chirped hopefully. Something as mundane as a friend's missing husband wasn't exactly the sort of chaos and intrigue Sherlock normally clung to, but if the man was spending his free time breeding an unstoppable army of flesh-eating beetles, it was probably better to distract him now rather than later. Before London dissolved into an insect-infested, post-apocalyptic hellhole.

Thankfully, after a bit of persuading and a promise to do all the shopping for the next month, Sherlock relented and they headed up to the lab to rifle through the box of soiled clothing that was most definitely not worth the thirty quid John paid for them. However, before Sherlock could offer more insight than that the clothing smelled overwhelmingly of piss and had passed through the hands of no fewer than five streetpersons, Molly scrambled into the lab like a startled deer, her mouth thin and white with annoyance. "Sherlock!"

Sherlock bolted upright, gladly dropping the dirt-caked coat back in the box. "What is it?"

"The stabbing victim, he's gone," Molly wheezed, pressing a hand to her chest as she struggled for breath. "This isn't a... a... pick 'n' mix! You just can't run off with any dead body you want whenever you like, Sherlock!"

"I assure you, I left our friend in the mortuary but fifteen minutes ago."

"Well, he's not there anymore and you're the only one still working on the sixth floor," she practically shrieked, jabbing a finger in the center of his chest.

"Did you check the access logs?"

That gave her pause and she gaped rather like a fish for a long moment. "N-no."

With a laboured sigh, Sherlock spun to his terminal and with three dramatic, pointed clicks of his mouse, he brought up the mortuary's access log. "Oh, naughty," Sherlock breathed, scrolling through the list. He had been in and out of the morgue six times that evening, but only the first four were accounted for. Anything after 2.00AM, including John's return post-coat retrieval had been completely erased, suggesting that whomever wiped the logs had been in such a hurry, they didn't have time to handpick. Smash and grab.

"Stay here," Sherlock instructed Molly with the wave of his hand. It was born more out of a fear of someone messing with his lab than concern about her safety, but she mercifully stayed glued to the spot with doe-eyed determination. John, however, didn't need so much as an invitation to break into a run as they flung themselves down the narrow stairwell and into the mortuary.

"Maybe security camera caught something?" John groaned, nodding towards the camera mounted at the mortuary's entrance. The run, however short, left him a bit disorientated and sluggish. John was in desperate need of sleep and knew the second the adrenaline rush wore off, he'd be out like a light. He only prayed that when it happened, he'd be somewhere relatively comfortable and largely devoid of peril this time around.

"No use. That's the first thing they would have erased," Sherlock informed him as he began a thorough investigation of the cold room, crouching and craning with practiced ease. Every discovery sharply tugged the corner of his mouth back in amusement. Every bin had been emptied, instrument sanitised, surfaced wiped clean with a hospital grade disinfectant that tickled the edges of Sherlock's memory. Still soggy granules of pink powder clung to the underside of the examination table. Someone didn't read the directions, didn't use enough water when dissolving the tablet. Smelled faintly of raspberry. Virkon. Potassium peroxymonosulfate, sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, few other nasty little chemicals that'd make retrieving DNA a fool's errand. Fantastic.

From top to bottom, the entire operation reeked of the Security Services, SIS perhaps. In and out in under ten minutes, probably far less. Shame the poor fools didn't realise the absence of evidence could in fact be more damning than its counterpart, the presence. Swinging open the mortuary doors, half expecting to find a small armed Special Branch squad crouched, shivering behind a few cadavers. But he found something even more enlightening: his lab coat, flecked with the missing man's blood.

Noting the time with a wry grin, Sherlock shot up to his full height and crushed his mobile to his ear. His smile deepened, eyes crinkled at the sound of his brother's usually cool, refined voice hoarse and stuffy with sleep. "Sherlock? You're calling, rather than texting. You must forgive my surprise."

"Someone's stolen a body from Barts. I'd like it back. Please do pass that message along to the intended recipient."

"You seem to be operating under the assumption I have something to do with that."

Sherlock sniffed distastefully at Mycroft's poor attempt to feign ignorance. There wasn't a corner of the British government he couldn't reach, no stone he couldn't squeeze until it inevitably bled, no MP he couldn't force to resign with nothing but a pointed glare. For as much as he found his brother exceedingly tedious, Mycroft was, at the very least, one hell of an ace to have up his sleeve at times. "You have something to do with everything."

"Mmm, yes," Mycroft admitted after a beat. "I'll see what I can do."

Swiftly ending the call before his brother could turn the conversation to more familial matters, Sherlock spun neatly on his heals to grin wildly at John, who was slumped against a freezer door, balancing precariously between lucidity and mild catalepsy. "Good news. Mycroft couldn't even last twenty seconds without lying to me. I think he might be losing his touch."

John drooled in what Sherlock could only assume was a show of his enthusiastic congratulations.

Reviews would be greatly appreciated. It's been ages since I've done anything of this sort, but inspiration struck. Thanks for reading!