Oh since the day I saw you
I have been waiting for you -
You need a little something, when you work alongside him. A little secret to call your own.
As a small ripple of recognition runs through the Beehive, Molly reflects on her day:
The pathology lab is quiet, white, and smells of hygiene. Bluish lights gleam on the hard metal desks; the computers whir softly. Molly is working methodically through a tray of samples taken from the control group. It is growing late: she is just collecting data. She will begin the analysis tomorrow. This has been another long day.
"The heart drugs could not have delayed coagulation to the extent found in the body."
His voice, low and rich, breaks the silence.
She glances to her right.
He is sitting beside her, his head in the second best microscope, his own biosample, procured from the morgue, in front of his workstation. "The drugs were contaminated. Deliberately or not remains to be seen." He sounds pleased. He likes to get a result.
"A miscalculated dose of haemophilia treatment might cause a similar effect," Molly says, and then kicks herself. She is meant to be ignoring him.
He lifts his head. She tries to look away, to remain as focused on her work as he was on his, but it is too late. She sees blue eyes, dark eyelashes, a mouth too sensuous to spend so much time in a grimace of annoyance, and feels his attention fall onto her like an eiderdown billowing heavy onto an expensive hotel bed.
She breaks eye contact, writes something unintelligible in her lab book. He is absorbing her suggestion, his mind simultaneously hoovering data from her face and clothes. She darts a look back at him and they stare at each other for five beats of her heart.
He turns back to the microscope and more time passes...
"Molly. Scalpel."
She ought to go home. She has a slight headache - too much coffee today plus an accumulation of late nights.
Eighteen inches from his left hand is the scalpel.
She hands it to him. Five years of medical school, she thinks. Postgrad ward walking and more qualifications. Senior position in the capital's most prestigious pathology team.
"Molly. The slide."
He is holding out his hand again, eyes focused on the slim cut he has made on his test material.
She waits.
"Please."
She places it in his palm, not quite avoiding contact with his cool skin. Draws her hand back and sits hunched, sighing.
The Lovely Debbie at least got a flattering introduction and a ripple of applause as she handed Paul Daniels the wand, the top hat or the white rabbit to vanish away. -On the other hand, Debbie had to spend her working life in a spangly leotard, not exactly striking a blow for Women's Lib.
Molly wears a beige trouser suit and pussy bow blouse, flat shoes. Not glamorous, perhaps, but the dead do not judge and these are her own clothes, no uniform: in a hospital, this is the badge of professional status, along with her actual badge which bears her name, Dr M Hooper plus her numerous qualifications and a mag stripe which is essentially Access all areas.
So why is she sitting here passing implements to a slender dark haired man wearing a Savile Row suit and a frown, who is paler than most of the deceased, who ignores her except when he wants help, and who, despite the hours he has clocked up lately, does not even work here?
It's not a million dollar question. Maybe a three quid one. He knows the answer, she knows it, everyone since university (his second, her first) has known it. There are two reasons: first, this man, poised and always on alert beside her, is the unique, impossible, unequalled Sherlock Holmes, and second, Molly Hooper used to be in love with him.
Sherlock frowned into his microscope for hours after that, looking directly at her again only once: "That journalist you got rid of. The one who wanted a story about me."
"That was yesterday," she says. Sherlock maintains the illusion that time means nothing to him. She knows better.
Sherlock ignores her correction. "He accused you of being a typical bad tempered redhead. 'Typical bloody ginger', was his exact phrase."
"Yes." Insult added unnecessarily to the earlier insult of turning up and trying to interview Molly about her relationship, hah, with Sherlock.
"But you don't have red hair." Sherlock's eyes shimmer as he looks at her hair, apparently memorising every strand.
Molly's hand goes to the end of her pony tail. "I do," she says. "You just can't see it very well, tied up. Tied back." His blue eyes, focused on her face. Why does he invoke these mortifying, apparently Freudian slips?
Sherlock frowns. "No doubt his journalism is as lazy as his observation. You have auburn hair." He squints at her, his head tilted. "Do auburn people also stereotypically have hot tempers?"
"I think it's all the same -"
He has bent to the microscope once more. She is dismissed.
"And it's just a cliché," she finishes. "Passionate redheads." A half giggle emerges: she clenches her jaw down on it and looks at him.
His hair is falling over his forehead. His strong, slender fingers work the focus on the scope. He smells of apples and tobacco leaf and his long legs are folded awkwardly under the lab bench.
He looks half-fed and overdressed, but Molly knows how tough he is, how he can fell your would-be attacker with one strike, how he can lift you and carry you to the nearest all night clinic as if you weighed no more than his violin, and how those fingers, suddenly gentle, can identify more quickly than the x-ray, which bone in your wrist was fractured during the struggle with the creep who tried to pin you down.
She has known Sherlock a long time, and even though he never gives her a reason, she keeps proving the stereotype right, because she cannot be indifferent to him, and even hurt and bitterness are full of passion.
She stands. "I'm off now."
He is biting his lip at his screen.
"Night then."
No reply.
Another body is being wheeled in as she leaves but her junior, Harjit, will deal with it. Molly needs her relief.
Author's Note:
Be My Baby - The Ronettes
And I made up the line about haemophilia drugs. It just seemed like the kind of counterintuitive thing that would exist in medicine.
