"Sherlock, how can you possibly not know that?"
John wasn't sure whether to feel amused or exasperated by his flatmate's latest display of ignorance. The gaps in his general knowledge were shocking.
"I'm not good on trivia," confessed Sherlock, defensively, although he at least had the grace to look embarrassed.
"No shit, Sherlock! And, anyway, this isn't trivia. This is…something absolutely anyone would know."
"I'm sure they wouldn't."
"I'm sure they would!"
They were interrupted by a tentative knocking on the door. John, resigned to the fact that Sherlock would always ignore knocks, doorbells, ringing telephones, fire alarms, incendiary devices going off and anything else that wasn't directly connected to his investigations, went to answer it.
DI Lestrade was hovering nervously on the threshold. "Morning, John. Sorry I didn't ring the buzzer – Mrs Hudson was just on her way out when I arrived and she said I could go straight up…"
"Greg!" said John, practically pulling him into the flat. "You've arrived at just the right moment. Can you settle an argument for us, please? Who is Prince Charles's mum?"
Lestrade looked at John as if he were mad. "The Queen, of course!"
John swung round to face Sherlock. "And the Queen's name would be…?""
Sherlock shrugged. "I don't know. Mary, maybe? Anne? Margaret? It's one of those kinds of names, anyway."
Lestrade looked stunned. "Elizabeth II. Even my kids know that!"
"See!" John turned to his friend in glee. "Everybody knows that! Greg thinks so, too!"
Sherlock's eyes narrowed to slits. "Oh, " he commented tartly through tight lips, "so we're on first name terms now, are we? How touching! Well, 'Greg'," (and it was clear from his acid tone that the name was very much in quotation marks) "to what do we owe the pleasure, 'Greg'? Social call? Drugs bust? Police harassment? Do, please, tell us, 'Greg'. "
"Er, no, actually," admitted Lestrade, staring at his feet, "I came to see if you could give me some help. On a case."
Sherlock froze and a subtle change crept into his tone. "What kind of a case?"
"Murder. This is the victim." Lestrade reached into his inside pocket, took out a photograph of a man in his late 20s and handed it to Sherlock. John immediately peered over his flatmate's shoulder to get a better look. It had been taken at some kind of party – there were festive decorations in the background and he was wearing some kind of silly hat – but, despite the shy smile, it was fairly obvious that the subject wasn't the kind of man who had seen a great deal of fun in his short life. His hair was the kind of badly trimmed combover one wouldn't normally expect to see on a man under the age of 50, his acne-pitted face was dominated by a pair of steel-rimmed glasses in a deeply unfashionable style and he was wearing a cheap acrylic jumper with a lurid zigzag pattern all the way across it. If he'd been wearing a T-shirt printed with the legend "I Am A Nerd" he couldn't have made the point any plainer.
"I'm not surprised," replied Sherlock, casually, "With taste in knitwear like that. If I were one of the criminal classes, I might have been tempted to off him myself."
"He was a student at Hyde Park College. He was found dead this morning."
"Dull!" Sherlock exclaimed, in contempt. "What was it? An OD? A stabbing by some boring gangster in a hoodie? Or a lover's tiff that went wrong?"
"Er, none of those, actually. We reckon it was a professional hit."
Encouraged by Sherlock's silence in response to this, which he knew by now was a sign that the great man was not completely dismissing the case, Lestrade went on:
"Simon Besterton. A PhD student of Nuclear Physics. He was working on something with armaments applications. Revolutionary, apparently. Basically, if his theories turned out to be correct, the UK could have led the world in state-of-the-art nuclear weaponry. Recently, though, he'd been dropping hints to his supervisor that he thought that someone had been spying on his work. He thought that someone close to him, someone he trusted, might be a secret agent trying to get hold of nuclear secrets."
"And what did his supervisor do?" asked John. "Did he come to you?"
Lestrade shifted his feet, awkwardly. "I'm afraid he dismissed it as paranoia. Simon was quite a highly-strung individual. He didn't have many friends. He was prone to anxiety and stress."
"The supervisor just thought he was nuts?"
"Pretty much," Lestrade admitted.
"But he doesn't think so now?"
"I don't think any of us think that now. Not given how he died."
Sherlock's ears pricked up. "How did he die?"
"Acute radiation sickness. He seems to have ingested radioactive material with food or drink."
John winced. He knew what a painful death that would be.
"Hmm," said Sherlock, lightly. "I think you're right. Sounds like a foreign secret service job to me. Any shady Russians been inviting him to restaurants lately?"
"That's the interesting thing," confided Lestrade. "No. We've worked out that he must have ingested it at home. And that limits our range of suspects because the only people who could have slipped the radioactive agent into his food or drink are his three flatmates."
"How very Agatha Christie!" observed Sherlock, sardonically. "The Country House mystery! Only reinterpreted for the Tesco Value generation. Instead of a country house, we have a student flatshare. Instead of twelve suspects, we have three. So, what can you tell me about these three flatmates?"
Lestrade took out his notebook and flipped to the right page. "All students at HPC. Natalia Morakova, a graduate of Moscow University, studying for a PhD in Philosophy. Daniel Schuberger, already has a doctorate from Harvard, doing research in the Biological Sciences. Kim Lee-Suk, originally from Seoul, studying for a Masters in Computing."
"A Russian, an American and a Korean, all sharing a flat," muttered Sherlock. "Sounds like the opening line to some interminable and extremely unamusing joke." He reached for his coat. "I suppose you want me to meet this scaled-down version of the United Nations?"
Lestrade grinned. "The car's outside."
When they arrived at the house – a dilapidated Georgian town house, now divided into several flats – they found a lanky young man, dressed in baseball boots, jeans and a Chicago White Sox jersey, idly shooting hoops in the front garden. He caught the ball and greeted them when he saw them approaching the house.
"I guess you guys are from the cops?" he stuck out a hand and shook hands formally. "Danny Schuberger. I'm…" he corrected himself: "I was one of Simon's roommates. I can't believe he's dead. This is real awful. He was a great guy."
"You like sport?" John asked brightly, trying to make conversation and lighten the tone, gesturing towards the basketball hoop against the side of the porch.
Danny blushed. "Gee, I hope you guys don't think it's callous of me, shooting hoops when my roommate's lying dead. Sometimes, when something real bad has happened, you just gotta do something regular and routine to get you through, if you know what I mean. To kind of anchor you back to real life."
John nodded. He did know what he meant, all too well.
"Would you mind if we came in and had a chat?" asked Lestrade, gently. "With you and your flatmates?"
"Of course not, sir. Come right in. Can I get you guys something to drink? Tea, coffee? Soda?"
They all declined, but he led them up the grimy staircase to the first floor flat and, with lovely manners, offered them a seat on a sofa which was rather old, rather losing its stuffing, but covered with a brightly coloured, vaguely ethnic-looking throw. There were tattered posters of Middle Earth and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album cover peeling from the walls and a rather bedraggled looking pot plant on the window sill. Somebody had made an effort in here, but not very much of one and not very recently.
"I'll just go get Natasha and Lee," said Danny. "They're somewhere in the apartment."
He softly tapped on a couple of bedroom doors and soon the other two members of the household trickled into the lounge.
One was a non-descript looking oriental boy, dressed neither trendily nor geekily, in jeans, trainers and long-sleeved T-shirt. He was the kind of young man you wouldn't notice – he'd just blend into the background, wherever he was.
The other, though, was the kind of person who would always be the centre of attention wherever she went and John felt his face redden and his pulse quicken the minute she stepped into the room. She moved with a feline grace and there was something almost cat-like about her face, with its narrow nose, high cheekbones and green eyes. The jet black hair which framed her face and the claret-coloured velvet dress which clung to her shapely frame as if it had been poured on could have been mistaken for Goth garb, but John instantly felt that this was an independent-minded lady who would have no time for gangs or subcultures. She dressed like that because that was her taste. She wouldn't deign to follow fashion or any other set of rules.
"How did the four of you meet?" asked Lestrade, after the formalities of introductions were over. "How was the flatshare set up?"
"Simon found the flat and put a card up in the Student Union," explained the beautiful Russian in flawless but slightly accented English. "I saw the advert and rang him. He asked me to come and take a look." She shrugged. "It was central, it was cheap and not so dirty as some. I took the room."
Sherlock leaned forward in his seat.
"And then you had a relationship with Simon?"
Disgust immediately flared across her face. "Don't be ridiculous, Mr Holmes! You think a woman like me would date someone like him, a…"
She broke off and looked down, embarrassed.
"A what, Miss Morakova?" Sherlock held her gaze and smirked. "Do go on."
She remained silent, so he attempted to fill in the blank.
"A saddo? A loser? A freak?"
"Don't make me speak ill of the dead, Mr Holmes!" she reacted, angrily. "He was a nice man. A very good flatmate. He always did his share of the cleaning, he replaced the toilet paper when it ran out, he never left pubic hairs in the bath…" at this she glared at Danny and Lee.
John privately thought that if that was the worse thing she found in her bath, she'd found herself a far better flatshare deal than he had.
She went on, "But he wasn't my type. I…for me, to be honest, he did not exist. I said 'Good morning', "Goodnight', that sort of thing, but we did not socialise. Although, I think that maybe he had hope that one day it might be more, obviously for me it was out of the question." She sat staring down at her lap, wretchedly.
"Yes," thought John. "Yes, I bet he hoped that there would be something more with this fascinating creature. What man wouldn't?"
"How about you, Lee?" Sherlock suddenly swung his attention to the Korean boy.
The boy blinked behind his John Lennon glasses, startled. "Me? Er…I didn't have a relationship with him, either. I'm not gay. And nor was he."
"No, you misunderstand me. I mean, how did you find out about the flatshare?"
"Oh, er…through the student accommodation office. I e-mailed them from Seoul before I came and they put me in touch with Simon."
"How do you know he wasn't gay?"
"What?"
"You said so just now. What made you so sure of that?"
"Well," the Korean wrinkled his brow in concentration, "he talked about girls sometimes. Not in a rude way or anything like that. But he would talk just a bit too much about girls in his department. Like he was a little in awe of them. And he had a bit of a crush on Natasha." He looked up, apologetically. "The three of us used to joke about it sometimes. I wish we'd been a bit kinder, now."
"We weren't ever cruel," broke in Danny. "Don't think that. It was kind of affectionate teasing…"
"You know, Mr Schuburger," interrupted Sherlock, "I've been thinking this ever since I clapped eyes on you – you look awfully familiar. I think we may have known one another when we were children. You didn't used to live in Hampstead, did you?"
"No, sir," responded Danny, taken aback. "I was raised in Detroit. American through and through. You must be mistaking me for some person else."
"Hmm," said Sherlock, then without warning, addressed himself to Natalia again. "So there's no way you would have cosied up to Simon for ….other purposes?"
She looked aghast. "Other purposes? What do you mean?"
"Oh, come now! I'm sure you're not that naïve. A lot of pretty girls from outside the EU try to find British husbands for immigration purposes. So what if he's a plonker? Far easier to manipulate and reel into your net…"
"How dare you?" she shouted, rising to her feet, the blood rushing to her face. "Get out of this flat at once! I will not sit here and be insulted!"
John found he had also stood up. "Sherlock!" he said, in a warning tone, trying to restrain his friend.
The tension was broken by the sound of a ringtone. Danny looked sheepish.
"Sorry about that," he said, fishing in his pocket. "It's my cellphone. I forgot to switch the darn thing off."
Sherlock scratched his head. "You know, are you sure you didn't spend time in Hampstead? I could have sworn there was a boy the spitting image of you in my class. Must have been when I was very young, though – I got packed off to prep school when I was eight…"
Danny began to sound a little more testy. "I'm telling you, Mr Holmes, I went to primary school in Michigan. It couldn't have been me. I wish it was, but it wasn't. Sorry I can't help you."
"Oh, on the contrary," snarled Sherlock, enigmatically. "I think you have."
He swirled round towards Natalia once again, his coat whirling around him like a top. "Or you could have been used as a honeytrap. Is that how it was? You seduced poor, deluded Simon as a way to try to steal nuclear secrets, but when he began to suspect what you were after, you killed him? Is that what happened?"
The magnificent Russian leant forward and dealt Sherlock a swingeing blow across the face.
"And now I demand you leave my flat! With the police or not, I will not allow you to spend a moment longer on my premises!"
There was suddenly the thud of boots on the landing as a group of armed police broke into the room.
"Oh, don't worry," Sherlock assured her with icy calm, as he massaged his sore cheek. "I'm going. I have all the information I need. Arrest him!" He pointed towards the American in the baseball top.
"Apologies for the rather fruity accusations, Miss Morakova," he said, as the officers handcuffed Danny Schuburger and hauled him away to the waiting police car, "but 'honeytrap' was the codeword I'd agreed with the police to call for reinforcements. I couldn't think how else to work it in."
It was only when they were back at 221B that John asked his flatmate the question that had been burning in his mind:
"So you knew him as a child, Sherlock? Bit of a lucky coincidence, wasn't it?"
Sherlock looked at him as if he were a moron. "No, of course I didn't know him as a child! I made that bit up! Same as I made up that crap about Morakova being a golddigger looking for a free passport. It was just to get a rise out of them. Playing the suspects, John, that's what it's about! I play people like I'd play a fine Stradivarius." He blushed,in a rare moment of modesty. "Rather better, if truth were told. My bow work does leave a little to be desired."
John now felt even more confused. "Then at what point did you realise he was the murderer? And how?"
"Straightaway," came the response. "From the moment I clapped eyes on Danny Schuburger, I felt sure he was an impostor, a plant. No way could that man be a real American."
"Sherlock, come on! He looked really American – the baseball shirt, the high-top sneakers…"
"Exactly. He looked too American. And he sounded too American. He was like a comedy American in a play or a sitcom. No real American would have laid it on so thick."
"For example?"
"For example, he talked about his 'apartment', his 'roommate', his 'cellphone', having been 'raised' in Detroit. The guy had been in England for nearly three years. He'd lived among British students, he'd worked with them. You'd expect the local dialect to have begun to bleed into his by now. You see it all the time with Brits who go on holiday to Disneyland. They're gone for only two weeks, but they come back talking about 'going to the store' to buy some 'candy' or some 'soda'. He's been here three years, but he still talks like he's just stepped off the bloody plane. Only someone who'd been deliberately rehearsing his dialect would talk like that.
And yet, when I asked him to talk about his childhood, the one topic on which you might expect an ex-pat to lapse back into his native lingo, he dropped his guard and made one fatal mistake…"
"Wait!" said John, the cogs of his brain starting to turn super-fast now. "I think I know what that was! He said 'primary school'." He looked up expectantly at Sherlock, hoping for praise, as the truth hit him. "An American wouldn't say that!"
Sherlock raised an eyebrow, appraisingly. "Very good, John," he purred. "You're learning. That's not a phrase you would expect Schuburger to have come across much in Britain. Why should he? He had no children – he wouldn't have had any contact with the school system here. And yet it's the one British phrase that appeared in his otherwise impeccably American speech."
They were interrupted by the trill of Sherlock's mobile.
"Would you mind very much…?"
Grimacing, John walked round, extracted the 'phone from Sherlock's inner pocket and handed it to his unbelievably indolent flatmate, who took it without so much as a "thank you" and pressed the "Accept call" button.
"Sherlock Holmes…..Ah, just as he said….Did he, indeed? Interesting. Very interesting."
He ended the call and grinned at John.
"That was Lestrade. He asked his contacts in the US to check out Schuburger's background story. He'd certainly done his research – or his controllers had. Most of the facts fitted perfectly. Daniel Schuburger was born and brought up in Detroit. He did attend local schools, from where he earned a scholarship to Harvard."
"But?"
Sherlock shot an inquisitive look in John's direction. "We're becoming a mite suspicious, aren't we?"
"Oh, come on! There's got to be a 'but'."
"Yes, indeed. The real Daniel Schuburger was killed in a traffic accident in July 2007. Coincidentally, just a month before 'Daniel Schuburger' " (Sherlock used his long, slender fingers to illustrate quotation marks in the air) "applied for a research position at Hyde Park College. I know that our universities are doing sterling work in the field of equal opportunities, but I feel offering research places to dead people is political correctness gone too far, don't you?"
"So the man we met wasn't Schuburger – he was a British man who had taken on Schuburger's identity?"
"Possibly. More likely a foreign agent, though. Maybe from the former Soviet Union? Maybe from the Middle East? But a foreigner who originally learned English from British textbooks. The British Council have been aggressively promoting our language teaching materials ahead of the Yanks' all around the world for decades. Fascinating stuff. We're fighting a little-discussed Cold War of our own. There's an army of agents beavering away as we speak to try to ensure our cultural dominance. Just ask Mycroft.
Now, speaking of culture, if you wouldn't mind just passing me the remote. It's nearly time for Jeremy Kyle."
John wordlessly obeyed orders, just as he'd been trained to do, and it was only when the two of them were ensconced cosily on the sofa in front of some spectacularly crap telly, that he realised there was one thing his friend hadn't explained.
"Sherlock?"
"Hmm," murmured the famous detective, utterly engrossed in a slanging match between two blubbery girls with velour tracksuits and high ponytails.
"What do they say?"
Sherlock stared at him, blankly, baffled by the question and mildly irritated that his favourite programme had been interrupted.
"Americans? Instead of 'primary school'?"
"Ah," Sherlock smiled, triumphantly. "'Elementary'. My dear John, how can you possibly not know that?"