1.
For all her abrasiveness, Sally Donovan was my right-hand...man for the last four years; we've seen our share of dismembered corpses and drowned children. I'm trying to get these new developments across to her without grinding her face in them, but it isn't easy. Sherlock's cases have been reviewed; he was the real thing.
"What's Joe said about all this? I miss him and his pink shirts." She means the constable working with us on the kidnapping case, the one who'd been around awhile.
"He put you up to saying Sherlock had planned the kidnapping, didn't he?"
She stares at me; she's honest, even now. "Yeah, but it's nothing I wouldn't have come up with myself."
"He was Moriarty's man, the one who was supposed to shoot me if Sherlock hadn't..."
She's shocked. So was I. Her teeth chattered on her coffee cup.
"I didn't care much about the freak topping himself because people had found out he was a fake. But you're saying that he did it because… Moriarty was going to hurt all of you?"
"Yes," I told Sally. "For the fifteenth time, yes." I don't have to point out that self-sacrifice isn't much of a value for psychopaths.
"Oh fuck," she said. "Greg, how could I?-"
"Moriarty manipulated all of us. Don't feel too bad."
2.
Sherlock Holmes wondered if he were in hell. It had seemed so pleasant here. A break in the endless humidity had allowed them to take their dinner outside; just now he could appreciate the beauty of the trees draped in their epiphytes, the richness of unfamiliar scents, the variety of insect calls in the heavy air.
The first part of the dinner had been very promising, meat drenched but not overwhelmed by mustard and vinegar, melting under his fork. "So this is real barbecue?" This turned out to be an excellent diversion away from himself, as the standard of reality for barbecue was strongly regional and fiercely divisive.
It was the last course that wrecked his ability to withhold judgement. It jiggled, heavily, like a fat man's thigh, only translucent, green, and lumpy. Innocent ingredients in limbo. The worst of it was the…
"Don't you just love the topping?" his hostess asked. "No fat at all!"
Sherlock thought of studies proving that fat helped the absorption of vitamins and minerals - the sort you would find in salads. Thought about protease inhibitors, the reason he would not find fresh mango or pineapple in gelatin. Thought about clotted cream. On a scone made with butter. He was homesick. Sadly, he dissected the green amoeba on his plate and ate a piece of banana.
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3.
John was trapped. It wasn't just the hangover currently roiling his head, like a runaway freight train. The weight on his chest was just short of stifling. He had some idea how he'd ended up here, but last night's tipsiness hadn't been the kind where he'd expected to end up with a bedmate.
Heavy breathing sounded in his ear; huge, yearning eyes looked into his from much too close.
Awful breath.
"Get off," John said. "I don't like you. There are consent issues here."
He kicked, but the sheets had wrapped themselves around him, swathing his arms and legs in untidy mummy-wrapping- it must have been a lively night- and the legs between his refused to move. He could feel an eager pressure pushing against his ribs, as a tongue curled out and rasped against his morning stubble.
"No," said John. "Absolutely not." He heard movement in the room nearby.
"Molly! Help! Your cat's topping me!"
"Good morning, John. That's strange, Toby usually doesn't take to strangers."
She smiled indulgently at them. Toby put his paw in John's ear. It tickled.
"Does he have a safeword? He won't listen to me."
"All cats listen to the same ones." She rattled a fork against a tin; Toby abandoned his victim to trot into the kitchen. "This time of day, it's 'breakfast.' "