St. Bartholomew's Hospital. The Morgue. In one of the brightly lit dissecting rooms, a young woman's body is laid on a table, a sheet covering her from neck to toes. At a workbench at the side of the room, Sherlock, Lestrade and Molly Hooper stand together in a semi-circle, all three of them looking down at a small plastic bag which contains a single small yellow pill, stamped with a cheerful sunflower design.
SHERLOCK (reaching for the bag): Well, then –
LESTRADE: No, wait.
SHERLOCK: Why?
LESTRADE: I don't want anything to go wrong.
Sherlock gives Lestrade an exasperated look.
LESTRADE: No, really. It's the first real lead we have, the first time we've actually got our hands on one of these pills. I can't afford -
SHERLOCK (with a shrug): Well, if you'd rather wait for your own techs at the Yard to come up with an analysis – around Christmas, probably, when the trail has long grown cold…
Lestrade looks unhappy.
MOLLY: Half of it, Greg?
Both men look at her in surprise.
MOLLY: Half of it will do. You take the other half with you, and let your own people look at it. That way it's still regular but also a lot quicker than usual.
LESTRADE: How am I going to explain where the other half is?
SHERLOCK (with a broad, confident smile): You'll have your case solved long before it's missed.
LESTRADE (to Molly, with a sigh): Why does he always have to be right?
MOLLY (without even so much as looking at Sherlock): He can't help it, you know. I think it's called something Latin with at least twelve syllables; and it's not contagious but really useful on occasion, so don't worry about it.
Sherlock looks at her in surprise, opens his mouth, then changes his mind and closes it again. Molly puts on a pair of gloves, carefully opens the evidence bag, cuts the tablet in it neatly in half with a lancet, replaces one half and puts the other in a small glass jar, stoppers it tightly and puts it on the workbench in front of Sherlock. He takes it without even trying to meet her eyes. Lestrade's eyes travel from Sherlock to Molly and back again, frowning a little. But Molly has already moved on. Still ignoring Sherlock completely, she has turned towards the dissecting table, and lets her gaze rest for a moment on the dead girl's face. The girl looks to be in her early twenties, her peroxide blonde hair, done up elaborately for a night out, now lank and dishevelled, the remains of her careful make-up standing out strangely, almost glaringly, against the pale skin of her still face.
MOLLY: How did she die so quickly, Greg?
LESTRADE (quietly): I was hoping you'd tell us that.
MOLLY (turning to look up at Lestrade): I was just wondering what you've heard. How it happened.
LESTRADE (with a shrug): Night out with her boyfriend. He thought he'd treat them both to something special. Paid twenty-five quid for each of the two pills. She swallowed hers at once, he was going to save his for a bit later, that's why he still had it. They both weren't new to it. He said she usually took a longer time than him to feel the effect.
SHERLOCK: Paid twenty-five quid to whom?
LESTRADE: To another girl. In the club. Didn't know the name, or couldn't remember. The poor kid was in shock when I got there, could barely get two coherent words out of him. They danced for a bit when she started to seize up, broke down on the dance-floor, twitching and struggling to breathe. By the time the ambulance got there, she was comatose. Died on the way to the A & E, was pronounced dead by the doc in charge there, got redirected straight here.
SHERLOCK: And all of that in less than an hour. Amazing. What club was it?
LESTRADE: It's called The Lodge. In the West End. Not particularly notorious though. Right. Can I leave you two to it?
Again, his eyes go back and forth between Sherlock and Molly, as if he is now seriously doubting that this is a good idea.
SHERLOCK (distractedly): Of course.
He has raised the little glass jar with the pill to the light and is peering at curiously.
LESTRADE (turning to Molly, with the slightest emphasis): Can I really?
MOLLY (in a deliberately casual tone): Yeah, sure. Get some sleep. I'll call you in the morning with the results.
Lestrade raises his eyebrows at her choice of words.
LESTRADE (still rather doubtfully): Well, good luck.
He gives Molly a nod, turns towards the door, then hesitates again and tries to catch Sherlock's eye, too - but without success. When the door has closed behind him, Molly turns back to Sherlock, and their eyes meet for the first time in the scene.
MOLLY: I didn't expect to see you here.
SHERLOCK (pocketing the glass jar, rather defensively): Well, it's what I do for a living. And, you know - it's a welcome distraction, too.
MOLLY (crossing her arms, rather coolly): So, a couple of weeks ago, I was an experiment. Then I get a fortnight of radio silence. And now I'm a welcome distraction?
SHERLOCK (shaking his head, quickly): No, no. (Honestly at a loss) I - I know you're waiting for an explanation, Molly, but I hardly know how else to put it.
MOLLY: So I was an experiment?
SHERLOCK: Yes.(Her jaw tightens. Hastily) I mean no. I mean, it wasn't my experiment.
MOLLY: I was under the impression that it was you I talked to, on the phone that day.
SHERLOCK: It's - it's complicated. It's a long story.
MOLLY (raising her eyebrows): Oh. Well, in that case, save your breath.
SHERLOCK (puzzled): What? Why -
MOLLY (gesturing towards the body of the girl on the slab): Because most of that stuff, when ingested, has a half-life of no more than two hours and thirty minutes. So if we want to get anywhere with her, we'd better not waste any more time.
She walks over resolutely to the cupboard that holds the instruments needed for an autopsy, and starts putting on a protective apron. Sherlock is left standing rather forlorn in the middle of the room.
SHERLOCK (after a moment, almost too low to hear): Point taken.
St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Molly Hooper's lab. Subdued light and nightly quiet. By the clock on the wall, it is half past midnight. Sherlock has put his coat and scarf over the back of a chair and is sitting at a microscope, looking at a slide that contains a small quantity of a powdered substance, by the still discernible yellow colour, it'sa part of the half of the tablet he has been given to examine. His phone is next to him on the bench. From time to time, he glances at it, although there is neither a visible nor an audible signal that there's anything new on it to see. Molly Hooper walks past him carrying a small stainless steel bowl.
SHERLOCK (after another minute, under his breath): It's just MDMA. Just plain, ordinary, mundane hydrochloride salt of MDMA.
MOLLY (from the other side of the room, busy separating the contents of her bowl into Petri dishes): Sorry, what?
Sherlock leans back from the microscope and blinks a couple of times to relax his eyes.
SHERLOCK: It's just MDMA. Nothing special at all.
MOLLY (with her back still turned to him): Like in all the other cases, then.
SHERLOCK (quoting, thoughtfully): "Boss McGinty strikes again."
He shakes his head, then takes the slide out from under the microscope and switches it off. He gets up from his stool and turns towards Molly, who is still busy at her workbench.
MOLLY (over her shoulder): Did Greg mention that?
SHERLOCK: Yes. Mentioned the name, said he'd explain in the car, then was too busy filling me in on the details of all the previous cases, and then we were here already. Well, you tell me now. (He pulls a face, eyes wide in a grimace of mock-excitement.) Who is that enigmatic Boss McGinty, who goes around London poisoning innocent girls?
MOLLY: They poisoned themselves, you know. With ecstasy tablets stamped with a sunflower, which they'd bought because someone had whispered to them that they came straight from Boss McGinty's lab. Like a silly brand name, you know. What, do you think it's a real person?
SHERLOCK: Why not?
Sherlock is silent for quite a while, his eyebrows drawn together, deep in thought. Molly works on, her lancet and tweezers clattering faintly, then puts her dishes on a tray, picks it up and heads towards the door of the room with it. She elbows the door open and is about to leave when Sherlock speaks up again.
SHERLOCK: Can I take a look at your reports on the five previous deaths?
Molly nods over her shoulder at a large cabinet at the other end of the room.
MOLLY: All in the folders for this month and the last, respectively.
A moment later, the door falls shut behind her.
An hour later, Sherlock is back at his own lab bench, sitting at it in a pool of light from a single desk lamp. Everything around him is dark and utterly quiet. He has spread out the autopsy reports on the five previous ecstasy victims and is still poring over them, elbows propped on the table, his head in his hands. Then he picks up his phone, checks it for new messages, and puts it down again. Molly, who was nowhere to be seen, re-enters the room from the corridor, a sheaf of papers - computer printouts - in her hand and a look of deep satisfaction on her face. Sherlock looks up briefly at the sound of the door opening and closing again.
SHERLOCK: Six girls die over the course of barely eight weeks, all from taking an ecstasy tablet stamped with a sunflower, and the only other unifying factor is their shoe size.
MOLLY: What?
SHERLOCK: Their shoe size. Three and a half, invariably.
MOLLY (with a laugh): Lots of women wear that size, Sherlock. I do.
Sherlock's eyes travel down Molly's person to where the tips of her light brown trainers peek out under the hem of the comfortable burgundy-coloured corduroy trousers she's wearing under her lab coat. Then they travel up again all the way to her face. Molly blushes. Sherlock, apparently unaware of the possibly offensive nature of such a scrutiny, smiles contentedly.
SHERLOCK: Oh yes. Yes, that's it. You're a small woman, Molly.
MOLLY (wavering between embarrassment and belligerence, but quickly settling on the latter): And you're not as tall as people think, either.
SHERLOCK (distractedly): Who said I was? The point is, all those girls were small, too. None of them was taller than five foot four, and their BMIs… (He scans the reports in front of him for the relevant data.) … never higher than nineteen.
MOLLY: You mean that's why they all overdosed? Because the dose would have been fine for anyone with more – body – to digest it, but because they were kind of petite, it was too much for them?
SHERLOCK: Precisely.
MOLLY: Good. Well done.
SHERLOCK: What?
MOLLY: That coincides exactly with what the contents of poor Gemma's stomach are telling me. (She holds up the printouts.) I won't bore you with the calculations unless you insist, but it all amounts to an unusually high concentration of MDMA in that single pill. Over a hundred milligrams, more like a hundred and twenty. (Sherlock raises his eyebrows.) Explains the price, and the effect. That much of it would killme easily.
SHERLOCK: It very likely would.
He contemplates her for a moment with his head to one side, like one would contemplate the set-up for an experiment that might yield interesting results. Molly looks deeply disconcerted for a moment, then composes her face into an expression of stern disapproval.
MOLLY: Sherlock, if you think that you can drag me through the nightclubs of this city as bait, just on the off chance that there's some lunatic out there who deliberately targets small young women because he gets a kick out of them dying from ecstasy overdoses or something, you're very much mistaken.
SHERLOCK (after a moment of dumbfounded silence): How did you manage to get all of that out in a single breath?
MOLLY: Learning by imitation, I suppose.
SHERLOCK (dead serious): Would you come if I found a better pretext?
MOLLY (looking down her lab coat to hide a slight blush rising up her face): I'm not even remotely dressed for clubbing, am I?
SHERLOCK: Who cares.
MOLLY: And besides, I'm on call til eight in the morning.
SHERLOCK: Oh.
MOLLY: Yes. Not doing overtime just to keep you company, you know.
SHERLOCK (defensively): I didn't think you were.
There is another pause.
SHERLOCK (almost gently): Molly... is there any hope of –
MOLLY: - coffee? Not at this hour, no. Except if you're content with stale Nescafe out of my thermos.
SHERLOCK (quickly): No, I didn't mean that, I -
But Molly has already walked over to the chair where she has placed her bag, taken out a small thermos flask, opened it and put the lid that doubles as a cup on the bench in front of Sherlock, filled with steaming coffee. Then she pulls up a stool for herself and sits down at his side, glancing over the reports.
MOLLY: But we've as good as settled Greg's big question now, haven't we, whether this series of deaths could have been deliberate or not?
She collects the reports in her hand and flicks through them. Sherlock reaches for the coffee cup and takes a sip. He grimaces briefly at the taste, but then takes another.
MOLLY: They all had MDMA in their bloodstream, but since they all took much longer to die than Gemma tonight – up to five days of coma – of course it was too late to examine the amount they'd actually ingested. And there's no certain way to calculate that from a blood sample alone. But doesn't it make sense to assume that their pills had the same unusual – and dangerous – concentration of MDMA in them as the one Gemma took? And whenever any of their friends bought and took the same sort of pills and survived, they were simply saved by their higher BMIs?
Automatically, her eyes still on the papers, she reaches out to where Sherlock has replaced the coffee cup on the worktop, takes a sip as well and puts the cup back down.
SHERLOCK: Should be easy enough for Greg to verify whether there was a pattern there.
He sounds genuinely disappointed, not to say frustrated, at this mundane explanation.
MOLLY (attempting a smile): No Jack the Raver, then.
SHERLOCK (unsmiling): No.
MOLLY: You know, most people would take comfort from the fact that those deaths were random, rather than purposefully planned.
SHERLOCK (with a deeply sad undertone): What's comforting in a random death, Molly?
MOLLY (awkwardly): I didn't mean -
SHERLOCK (talking over her, staring at a point in the far distance, beyond the walls of the lab): And there still remains the fact that someone in this city is currently flooding the market with highly concentrated MDMA, quietly making a fortune while walking over the bodies of young women who simply happen to be bordering on underweight. (His eyes return to Molly. Almost accusingly) And you tell me Boss McGinty is just a silly name.
He picks up the small coffee cup again, drains it, gets up, refills it from the thermos flask, takes another sip and puts it down again on the worktop.
SHERLOCK: And now do tell me why Greg waited until the sixth victim to call me in.
Molly puts her elbows on the surface of the bench and rests her head in her hands for a moment. Then she runs her palms over her cheeks and sighs in resignation, looking suddenly very tired.
MOLLY: Isn't it obvious? He was worried.
SHERLOCK: So would I be, if I had someone that dangerous and unpredictable on my hands.
MOLLY: He was worried about you, Sherlock.
SHERLOCK: Oh. (After a moment, sarcastically) Well, ditto.
Molly gives him a reproachful look.
SHERLOCK (sitting down next to her again, intently): Molly, tell me. What do they know, what do they suspect, and why exactly wasn't I supposed to help?
MOLLY: You know that. (She takes another sip of their coffee, which by now seems to have been mutualised by silent accord.) When the girls started dying, about two months back, you were in no shape to do any casework. You could barely stand and walk straight most of the day, you know.
SHERLOCK (peevishly): I wasn't aware that I had to be at a hundred and fifty sit-ups before bedtime to be allowed to look at a handful of autopsy reports.
MOLLY (drily): I'm sure a mere hundred would have done, too.
Sherlock snorts.
MOLLY (genuinely interested): How many are you at again, by the way?
SHERLOCK: Forty-eight. (With a wry smile) Getting there. Anyway -
MOLLY: Anyway, by the time you were back among the living, so to speak, Boss McGinty was already a household word in rave culture. They'd risen like a comet, out of nowhere. And the price for those sunflower pills was rising steadily, too, even though there had already been three deaths. Then came number four and five, within a single week. And the rest you know.
SHERLOCK: You said that the pills were being referred to as coming from their lab.
MOLLY: Yes. At the Met, they're assuming that they run their own drug lab here in London. And you'd think that sooner or later bulk orders of those sorts of chemicals are bound to get noticed. As is the apparatus you'd need. But it's never been discovered.
SHERLOCK: If they're making the stuff themselves, they must have a background in that sort of thing. It's not like you can pull it off with any kid's chemistry set. Not in those quantities, anyway. That should narrow the field considerably.
MOLLY: Not really. So many people could do it, you know. I could do it here, after hours. You could do it in your kitchen. (A shadow passes over Sherlock's face, but Molly doesn't seem to notice.) Nobody at the Met has any idea or any lead who is behind it all.
SHERLOCK (testily): And still Greg didn't want me to look into it? What's that supposed to be about, "lead us not into temptation"? (He gestures almost angrily at the slide with the drug sample that's still on the bench next to the microscope.) Did he think I'd rather swallow this than analyse it?
MOLLY (drily): You might have argued that that would yield the fastest result.
SHERLOCK (under his breath): Me and empathogens? Really not a good combination.
MOLLY: Greg was worried you'd take this a little too personally, you know. Because all this started when you were out of action. It's like they took advantage of that, or something. Nobody there to stop them.
SHERLOCK (with an incredulous laugh): And now Greg thinks that's reason enough for me to go on some sort of personal vendetta? Like I'd be affronted by the fact that the London underworld didn't immediately stop committing crimes, as soon as they heard that I wasn't available to solve them?
MOLLY (in an appeasing tone): I know it sounds absurd when you put it like that.
SHERLOCK: It is absurd.
MOLLY (with an air of concluding the conversation): Well, I suppose you've got the facts you need now?
SHERLOCK: Yes, I suppose so.
He gets to his feet and reaches for his coat.
MOLLY: Then it's your turn now.
Sherlock hesitates in mid-motion.
SHERLOCK (slowly): Yes... Yes, you're right. (He puts his coat down again, then clears his throat. Awkwardly) So - I meant to say - I've been meaning to say for a while -
But he doesn't get any further than that. There is a buzz from a phone, and Sherlock, almost electrified, immediately reaches for his, which is still lying on the bench.
MOLLY: No, that's mine. (She takes it out of the pocket of her lab coat and takes the call. Into the phone) Yes? (A pause.) Oh. All right, I'll be down in a minute.(She ends the call, sighs, and gets to her feet, too.) Car crash in the Blackfriars underpass. Two more new guests to take care of tonight. I've got to go.
SHERLOCK (soberly): Well, don't let me keep you.
Molly's expression softens for a moment.
MOLLY: It'll keep. You go get some sleep now. (She nods at his phone on the bench.) You know there can't be any news before noon tomorrow.
SHERLOCK (pocketing the phone, distractedly): Yes, I keep forgetting.
MOLLY (with the ghost of a smile): If you can't sleep, solve the case.
SHERLOCK: Maybe I'll find the answer already waiting on the doorstep when I get home.
MOLLY (now smiling for real): Well, then don't stumble over it in the dark.