Derrick Rice had lived an interesting life, if his face went for anything. Pale blue eyes peered out from under a heavy brow. His skin was the colour of treacle and as tough as old boots, aging him well beyond his real age, which he'd given as thirty-eight. His hair was a curious ginger that bordered on yellow, and it stuck out in different directions from a double-crown. Despite the odd colouring, he'd clearly been attractive when younger.

Sherlock Holmes was not, however, busy evaluating whether the man sitting opposite them at the interview table was handsome or not. He'd already noticed that he was some sort of manual labourer - carpentry, if his observations of the scars on his knuckles were correct. Never married. No ring and no tan-line indicating he'd ever worn one. Nicotine stains on the fingers of both hands indicated that Rice smoked heavily and indiscriminately. He was not Cornish, hailing from somewhere south of the Thames, if his accent was anything to go by. He was a heavy coffee drinker. The stains on his teeth could have been nicotine and not caffeine - hard to tell during brief glimpses when he spoke - but the fact that he'd responded to an offer of a glass of water with the request for a coffee was a dead giveaway, as was the fact that he'd gulped down half of it before Lestrade, who also drank a lot of coffee on the job, could even begin his.

"Before we start talking about what you found yesterday when you boarded the yacht," Lestrade said, "I need to tell you that we now have reason to believe that Brett Holland is deceased."

Derrick's eyes widened for a moment, ever so slightly. "How can you know that?" he asked, voice as taut as a piano string. "I don't know anything about that! Have you found him? Have-"

"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to discuss details as yet," Lestrade said, shuffling his paperwork. "But we'll get to that at a later stage."

Beside him, Sherlock stifled a grin. He'd always found Lestrade's 'work voice' funny, with its 'as yets' and 'perpetrators' and 'assisting with our enquiries.'

"Right now," Lestrade went on, "we need you to give us any information you can about Brett and Sadie and Maisie. Everything helps, even if it-"

"Jesus Christ, Beryl must be about out of her mind," Derrick said, interrupting Lestrade's usual even-if-it-doesn't-seem-important-to-you speech. Then, catching John's questioning look: "His mum."

"Ah." John made a vague scribble on his notepad. "You sound like you know the family pretty well, then?"

"Yeah. Known Brett since I was about eight. We grew up across the street from each other, yeah."

"But you're a Londoner," Sherlock interjected, "judging by your accent. How long have you lived in Cornwall?"

"Two weeks."

"Two weeks?"

"Just recently, yeah. But Brett and Sadie have been there for ages. They moved down there when Sadie was pregnant with Maisie. Brett really got into sailing after Maisie was born, convinced me to give it a go. We used to go out nearly every weekend - it was part of why I moved down here. Got sick of travelling down every weekend."

"So you were sailing in your own yacht when you discovered the Marie Celeste abandoned," Lestrade said.

"Yeah." Derrick's mouth twisted sardonically for a second. "Not that I could afford something like that. Mine's the Lady Marlborough. She's one step above a dinghy. I moor her at the cove."

Neither Lestrade, Sherlock nor John were particularly interested in how luxurious the Lady Marlborough was, nor where she was moored. "Derrick," Lestrade said. "When did you first try to make radio contact with the Marie Celeste on Friday morning?"

He considered. "Twenty past seven," he finally said. "Maybe half past."

"What about twenty to eight?" John tried him.

But he shook his head. "No," he said. "Wouldn't have been that late. Between twenty and half past seven."

"What did you contact them for?"

"Honestly? To say hi. We do that. Mariners all do that. We're like truckers - it can get boring out there on your own. Half of our radio messages are just us saying hi to each other."

"But the Hollands didn't reply," Lestrade said, ignoring the eye-roll Sherlock always treated him to whenever he stated the obvious during an interview. "Did you take the Lady Marlborough to find them straight away, then?"

"No," he conceded. "I didn't think anything was necessarily wrong. They had Maisie with them. They could have been doing something with her. But I tried a couple more times, still no answer. I got a bit worried and went to find them."

"How long did that take?" John asked.

"Not long," was the evasive reply. "They weren't far away - I knew they were like to be at the north end of the cove."

'Not long' was vague in the extreme, but it didn't really matter. It was a matter of police record that the Cornwall force had first been called from the radio of the Marie Celeste at exactly twenty-eight minutes past nine.


If anyone looked guilty, Brian Crouch did, and Detective Sergeant Sally Donovan saw it instantly. She sent him alone to the back room containing the hospital tank, leaving him there to sweat for fifteen minutes while she chatted with Molly and with Philip Anderson, who had just arrived to make his own evaluation of the arm and send it back for proper examination. A dangerous tactic, leaving a possible suspect alone when there was no CCTV around. Guilty parties had a nasty tendency towards destroying key evidence, and even sometimes offed themselves before they could confess. But she needed him to talk; and for that, she needed him to be ever-so-slightly rattled. Sitting on his own for fifteen minutes, waiting for a police interview, would probably rattle him.

The annoying thing was, Crouch was one of those people who experienced soul-crushing guilt over stepping on snails, and it didn't matter how guilty he looked. It didn't even matter if he confessed. She still had to mount a case as to how in God's name Marvin the Shark had eaten Brett Holland's arm. More immediately, she had to lodge a case on when this had happened, and the official timeline of the case wasn't leaving her much margin for error. Brett Holland's last radio transmission had been recorded at 6:48am, the morning before last, a Friday. Derrick Rice had found the yacht abandoned less than an hour later. The Cornish force had been done with their initial forensic investigation of onboard by midnight on Saturday and had had the Marie Celeste moved in one piece up to the Thames shipping yard where Sherlock Holmes had been examining it an hour before, two p.m. on Sunday, when Marvin had suddenly become the most interesting shark in existence.

"He's not doing too well," Crouch muttered, staring at the shark, which looked like nothing more than a wobbly grey lump from Donovan's view above the tank.

"I'm not surprised," she said. "Is he going to die, do you think?"

"I hope not."

Donovan decided not to tell Crouch that the Metropolitan Police were seeking advice on whether it was necessary, or even legal, that Marvin be euthanised and dissected for further evidence. "Noticed there's CCTV cameras all over the place," she said instead, grabbing a nearby chair and sitting down uninvited. She smoothed out her skirt and tweaked her pantyhose. "I suppose you'll let us have a look at those?"

"Yes," Crouch said, though it was through clenched teeth. "I don't know what you expect to find, though. This place is secure. Nobody could ever have got in here and fed a human arm to a shark."

"That's interesting." Donovan tucked one tendril of hair back into the tortoiseshell comb that kept it off her face, hoping she wouldn't have to resort to any more tics in her arsenal - examining her nails, splaying her toes. "Because about twelve people saw the shark puke one up, and I reckon it's also probably on CCTV. So it had to have eaten it somewhere, whether here or wherever it was before you put it on display here. Where did you get it from?"

Crouch hesitated.

"I'm going to find out if you're lying," she said. "Save me some time. I'm in the murder squad, not the animal ethics group."

"It was caught in waters just off Lamorna Cove," he said wretchedly. "That's in Cornwall."

"Yeah, I figured that last bit out all on my own. When did this happen?"

"About midday, the day before yesterday."

Donovan raised one eyebrow. "God, you didn't waste time putting it on display," she said. "Why's that?"

"Where else did you suppose we'd put it?"

"Quarantine?"

"From what? There are no other sharks or any larger fish in that tank." He sighed. "Constable -"

"It's Sergeant, actually."

"Sergeant Donovan," he corrected himself. "The aquarium has to present itself as some sort of sea-life sanctuary so that people will still come here and see the animals, and the tree-huggers will stay off our backs. The reality is, we're a business and we're here to make money. Checked the weather forecast? It's set to rain for another week, which means we get most of the zoo's overflow of customers, especially from overseas visitors. We're used to pulling smaller fish and marine animals from the wild, but the shark was an incredible bonus, and we didn't want to lose visitor money while it swam around in a quarantine tank out here. You generally don't get sharks like that in English waters, and you definitely don't get them this late in the year."

"Well," she said. "Apparently, you do. Unless you're lying to me."

"I'm not."

Donovan pretended to write notes in her folder. "So," she said, after an agonisingly long silence. "When did you first notice there was something wrong with the shark?"

"With Marvin?"

She looked back at him stonily. "With the shark," she said. The hell was she calling a wild animal, netted and dumped in an aquarium, by some dopey name like 'Marvin'.

"Hard to say," he said. "When you bring an animal of that size and complexity in from the wild, it can… take a while for it to adjust. So we expect the sharks to behave a bit oddly for a few days - maybe even a few weeks. Neurotic. They bump their heads against the glass, swim in circles…"

"Puke human arms," she chimed in innocently, still pretending to write in her folder. "Sounds like you poach for the aquarium a fair bit, Mr. Crouch. I mean, since you know how sharks behave when you yank them out of the ocean and stick them in a tank. What else are you keeping here that should be out swimming in the middle of the Atlantic?"

His pupils narrowed. "I thought you weren't worried about animal rights," he said.

"Never said that," she said. "I said I wasn't going to prosecute you for that sort of thing. Someone else might, but." She stood up. "If that's all you can tell us, I think I might just take your CCTV tapes and go," she said. "Don't leave London. You'll hear from us soon."

He grudgingly handed over the tapes, and she thanked him, just as grudgingly. She turned and, reaching out for the door handle, distinctly heard him mutter, "Bitch."

Prick. But there wasn't a lot she could do about him now - there were far more pressing issues to hand. She stalked out to where Molly was politely waiting for her, rocking Charlie to and fro in her pram, though the little girl was wide awake and sucking on a toy giraffe. Molly held a notebook, and passed it across the top of the pram to Donovan.

"Um," she said. "I made some notes. They might not be very good - I don't usually do this outside the lab, but I thought, it's evidence, and the later it's left…"

"Yep. Thanks." Donovan took the notebook, flicking idly through a few scribbled pages. "Find anything interesting?"

"I think so. I was telling Greg. The arm was cut off, not bitten off. And there was rope burn on it." She paused. "But Sadie and Maisie might still be alive," she said. "Maybe they're being held somewhere and can be rescued...?"

"Maybe. We might get them back alive. I'd like to think so," Donovan said, leaving off the punchline: But I don't think so. "Did John seriously just bugger off with Sherlock and leave you here with the baby?" she said instead, glancing Molly up and down as she read through her notes.

"Not really," Molly said, flushing. "I mean, he didn't leave for no reason. He had to go help Sherlock." She decided not to bother telling Donovan that two days a week, she 'buggered off' to work and left Charlie in the care of her father, nor that the last thing she wanted was John hovering over her anxiously for what was already shaping up to be an incredibly tedious third trimester.

"Yeah, well, if Rahul ever does something like that, he'll be hearing about it." Donovan pocketed the notebook. "I'll file these with the rest of the case notes, Molly. Thanks for that."


The aquarium was now closed and Charlie was due for her afternoon nap, so Molly took her home - or back to Baker Street, which had been home for the past three months. She and John had taken up residence in Mrs Hudson's old flat, since the basement flat was a 'work in progress', and had been since well before even Sherlock had ever moved in. She and John were currently sleeping in what had once been Mrs Hudson's spare bedroom, a room so small they had to practically climb over their bed to get into it. They'd made the master bedroom into Charlie's nursery. Neither really believed their own excuse that it was because it had already been painted a shade of pink that John found intolerable.

Molly put Charlie in her cradle and settled her, slightly absently. She was on the sofa, theoretically taking it easy, and in actual fact going through some photographs of the arm she'd taken with her phone, when she heard the street door open. Sherlock and John stepped into the passage outside.

"And you didn't find any clues," John was saying as they came in the kitchen door. "What's it like, feeling just as stupid as everyone else?"

Sherlock, busy removing his scarf and coat, ignored this last remark. "Once again, you weren't listening, John, and you certainly weren't observing." He draped them over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and, without troubling to even greet Molly, opened the fridge door.

John glanced at Molly. "But you just said-"

"I said I found nothing. Exactly." Sherlock was still half-submerged in the fridge, and both of them heard him mutter, "Why is there never any proper food in here?" He straightened up, holding a plate of leftover rissoles swathed in cling-film, and started picking at it.

Silence. Sherlock rolled his eyes. "If I board a yacht where three people have been swept overboard, kidnapped by pirates, or savaged in some configuration of murder and suicide, I expect to find something," he said. "There was nothing amiss. You can't clean up after your own suicide. And what kind of pirates clean up after themselves?"

"Yeah, all right, you've made your point," John said. "So who else could have done it?"

"I don't know," Sherlock said slowly. "That's why it's currently a mystery. And as always, you're asking the wrong question. The question is not who else could have done it. It's why would they do it."

With that he flounced out, taking his plate of rissoles with him. As he passed Charlie's nursery door they heard him announce, "Charlotte, your parents are idiots."

John waited until Sherlock's heavy tread left the stairs and they could hear him walking around on the ceiling above. "Yeah," he said to Molly. "I really do think he likes having Charlie around."

She laughed. "She keeps him busy," she said. "The mystery of where Charlie's put his things this time."

"Exactly." He paused. "Look, I know he's been carrying on like that for days, but at least he's got a case now. He's just… you know."

"Worried we're about to move out."

"He misses Mrs Hudson."

"We all do."

"Yeah. But we didn't live with her."

Molly decided not to remind John that, for nearly two years, he did live with Mrs Hudson. With a cough, she changed the subject. "Has he said anything else about…? Sorry, I've forgotten…"

"Christabel," he said. "And not that I know of. See, I don't get that. Off he goes to Germany, just after we moved in. He's gone for four days, back again, wants to talk all about a case he couldn't normally be bothered leaving the flat for, and not one word about his sister."

"Did he see her while he was over there?"

"I have no idea. He won't even say that."

She fell silent, looking around her at nothing in particular. "Oh," she suddenly said, more businesslike. She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket. "Look, I found a double pushchair on sale," she said, passing her phone over so that he could see the sales-floor photograph she'd taken. "You can adjust it five different ways and take the capsules out if you need to carry them. What do you think?"

John decided not to remark on the price. "Yeah, good," he said as enthusiastically as possible, handing the phone back. "We'll go get it on Thursday then?"

She nodded.

"Did we decide whether we wanted to start painting, or… wait til we're in our own place…? I mean, now we know what colour scheme we're after… oh, no." He chuckled and shook his head. "You've been dying to say it for two days, but don't. Don't you dare say you're sorry."

"Well," she said. "Not the sort of sorry where it's my fault. Just sorry that you're disappointed."

His eyebrows shot up. "Who said I'm disappointed?"

"I don't know," she back-tracked meekly. "I just… I know you wanted boys."

"Yeah, well, I wanted Charlie to be a boy," he said. "She was two seconds old when I got over that."

Molly frowned. "You never told me that," she said.

"That's because I'm not stupid," he said. "Nothing we could do to change anything, and like I said. Two seconds." He gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Anyway, it's up to you. If you want to stay, we'll ask Sherlock if we can stay a while longer. If not, we'll go to that open house on Saturday and at least have a look." Then, seeing her questioning look, explained, "The one we were looking at online last night, with the shed we can set up as an office."

"Oh, yes! Ugly carpet, though," she said, trying not to smile.

"Hideous," he agreed. "But we can fix that. Whatever you like, Lolly, but we're sort of running out of time on this one. You've only got a month before you're back on leave."


A/N - Thanks again for reading :) I'm a student this year so don't have as much time for writing, but I hope to keep this going pretty regularly.

I usually base these stories off real cases, and this is no exception. The Marie Celeste (more correctly, Mary Celeste) was an American brigantine found abandoned off the Azores in 1872. There was no sign of any crew, even though she was completely seaworthy, and among the missing were the captain, his wife and their daughter, aged two. None were ever seen again. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was particularly interested in this case.

In Coogee Baths aquarium, Sydney, in 1935, a 3.5m tiger shark vomited up a human arm in front of horrified spectators. The subsequent case (technically unsolved) involved organised crime, smuggling, fraud, all that kind of 1930s period-piece stuff. I was debating for a long time which to do for the next fic, and then decided to merge them and add my own solution.