"Nothing to worry about," Lestrade said cheerfully, checking over his shoulder and changing lanes. In the passenger seat of the Metropolitan-issue Audi, young PC Tom Barrett of Bishopsgate Police Station seemed apprehensive. "Course, you'll have to face them in person. I need to see their reaction to you."
Lestrade did not say it aloud, but he also needed to see Barrett's reaction to the soldiers. It just wasn't done to imply that a member of the police could ever be a shoddy witness, but it wasn't out of the question. Everyone made mistakes, and the human brain was subject to some spectacular sinkholes.
"How much do they know about the murder?" Barrett asked him. He was a clean-cut, sandy-haired young man with brown eyes as alert as a labrador's, and a certain gentleness around his mouth.
"Not much. It's hit the morning newspapers and all the local news websites. Nothing we could do to avoid that, and I didn't want to give the impression we were trying to hush anything up, anyway. I don't think there'll be much fuss. The papers will struggle with reporting the human angle."
Of course, Lestrade thought, the newspapers could try using 'Wife and mother-of-two found murdered' as a headline; that was as accurate as 'prostitute found murdered'. But Martha Tabram was not the kind of wife and mother the middle-class public empathised with, which was part of the reason such murders often went unsolved. Nobody wanted to help, because nobody particularly cared.
"But we've told them we're investigating a street brawl," he went on. "I heard there were a few good ones in Wentworth Street last night."
"And every night," Barrett agreed. "At least, every Saturday night I've ever worked."
"So they'll probably not be too suspicious if we tell them we're looking into an incident where a bloke got king-hit in front of the Seven Dials…" Lestrade trailed off as his mobile phone started to ring. He slapped at the hands-free screen to open the call.
"Lestrade," he said, feeling slightly self-conscious. There were good reasons for detectives to answer the phone using their surname: the caller was often a detective or technician they'd never met before, and in an emergency, detectives had to be prepared to pick up each other's phones when they rang. Still, it suddenly seemed such a wanky thing to do, as if he was trying to show off to the poor inner-city bobby how the Big Shots at the Met did things.
"Oh, hello." The caller was an unknown woman; or at least, Lestrade assumed it was a woman. Judging from her voice, she was either Kathleen Turner bunging on an East End accent, or she smoked about fifty cigarettes a day. "Detective Inspector Lestrade, is it?"
"Yeah, 'sright," he said, trying to sound cheerful while wondering who to strangle for giving a civilian his phone number. "How can I help?"
"I'm Mary Ann Connelly."
He glanced at Tom Barrett in silent questioning, then mouthed Mary Ann Connelly? to him. Barrett shook his head. No idea.
Realising the confusion, the woman on the line sighed. "I go by Pearly Poll when I'm working," she explained. "Sherlock Holmes got in touch, said you wanted to talk to me."
"He was right," Lestrade said, going for 'unperturbed, because Sherlock Holmes works for me.' "There's a lot I might need your help with. I suppose you've heard the bad news."
"About Emma?"
He blinked. Oh, yes. Emma. He and Barrett had just found out that more often than not, Martha Tabram went by the name of Emma Turner when she was working the streets. Given the difference in surnames and the fact that Tabram was nearly ten years younger than Emma Smith and weighed a good forty pounds more, that had all but confirmed that whoever had killed Emma Smith hadn't confused her with Martha Tabram, or vice-versa.
"Yeah," he said. "About Emma—or Martha, her real name was. I heard you were friends. I'm sorry."
"So am I. We had our moments, but she was a good old thing, really."
"So I've been hearing." And Lestrade had. So far, everything that Dyer and Donovan and the other members of his team had dredged up said the same thing: Martha was a good old thing whose only vice seemed to be drinking. She was rarely sober, but even half-drunk she was still warm and generous and funny. She and Henry Turner had done a midnight flit from their previous address at Star Place, in Commercial Road, six weeks before she died. A couple of weeks after leaving, Martha had gone there without Turner, who was long gone, and returned the key and a week of rent, which was probably all she could afford. There was nobody in her life, including her two exes, who had any reason to want her dead.
"I hear you're investigating them soldiers we went with," Pearly Poll said.
"In a way," he said, guarded. "Do you think you'd know them if you saw them again?"
"Oh, without a doubt. It was only last night, and I wasn't that sozzled." She laughed.
Lestrade looked at Barrett again. "Do you have a way of getting to the Tower of London this morning?" he asked her. "If you're desperate, get in a cab and we'll pay it when you arrive..."
John at least had the presence of mind to retrieve a Bounty bar from the vending machine on his way back into the NICU; he'd promised it, and Molly had a weakness for coconut. "Here you go," he said, handing it over the back of the wheelchair to her. "Might be an improvement on the usual hospital food, anyway."
Molly took it, but barely glanced at it. "I know you didn't go just to get chocolate," she said without smiling. "I'm not stupid, John."
He let out a breath. Looking back, the past ten minutes had been a collection of not-his-finest-moments. "Can I ask you a serious question?" he asked her.
"Of course."
"Do I… I mean, when I come to visit, am I, you know… coddling you?"
"Oh, probably, according to somebody, somewhere," she said wearily. Technically speaking, food wasn't allowed in the NICU, but she absent-mindedly unwrapped the Bounty and bit into the first piece, offering him the second. In turn, he pulled it in half and put a piece in Charlie's mouth, already expectantly open like a baby bird's.
"I know I'm supposed to be an Independent Woman and all that," Molly went on. "But John, I'm tired and everything hurts and I miss you and Charlie and I just want to get out of here and take the twins with me. I just… can't have an argument with the nurses as well. Especially when I see them every day, you know?" Finishing her chocolate, she checked her fingers for smudges, then reached through the aperture in the incubator and ran one finger gently down Sophie's arm. The tiny baby splayed her hand in response to her mother's touch. "Anyway," she said, swallowing. "It's really only that one nurse. I don't even know her name. The other nurses don't like her either; you can tell. But all the other nurses have always been nice to me."
"Say the word," John said, "and I'll get you transferred to another hospital."
She shook her head. "I can't leave the girls," she explained.
"They can come with you."
"And take resources away from babies in another NICU who might need it more, John," she reminded him.
This having not occurred to him, he fell silent.
"Anyway, um," Molly said, handing his phone up to him. "Will you take a message to Greg and Sharon? It's about Martha Tabram."
"Oh," he said, taking the phone. All business, then. "What did you think?"
"You say that nobody heard her scream or anything like that?"
"Not that we know of."
"Sharon describes some faint red marks on her neck that she can't explain away for sure. Ask her if she thinks they might have been done with the thumb and forefinger web of a left hand."
"Oh, wait, you think he strangled her?"
"No, he definitely stabbed her… I mean, stabbing is what killed her. Sharon wouldn't have made a mistake like that. But I think he had her in a choke-hold first. If he took her by surprise she mightn't have had a chance to scream." She paused and glanced up at Charlie, who was pulling idly on John's collar. "Also," she said, risking it, "Sharon says she found no signs of recent sexual activity on Tabram."
"Would she, though?" John asked. "He'd be wearing a condom… er, I assume. I assume that's what you'd do if you were going to be… intimate…" he also glanced at Charlie… "with a complete stranger."
"In that case it'd almost certainly leave traces of spermicide or latex transfer. If Sharon found any, she left it off her notes. I'd double check with that, because, you know, I'd expect…"
She was cut off when the phone in John's hand started to ring, the caller ID proclaiming: Mycroft. He stared at it, then looked up at Molly.
"Maybe answer that," she said, nodding. "It might be important."
She had a point. Mycroft didn't call people for idle chit-chats about what they were doing with their weekend. All the same, the last person John wanted to hear from just then was Mycroft Holmes, even if he had been instrumental in saving the lives of Molly, Sophie and Louise. Taking Charlie with him again, he wandered out into the waiting room before opening the call.
"Mycroft, I'm really not having a good day, can this wait?" he said immediately.
"I'm afraid it can't." Mycroft sounded unamused, grim even; but there was nothing in his tone to indicate an incident on the level of, say, someone having died. "I have a car waiting for you out the front."
"Out the front of where-?"
"You're not at Baker Street. I checked. Therefore, you're at the hospital."
John decided not to tell Mycroft he'd spent hours that morning at Martha Tabram's post-mortem. Mycroft was sure to point that this was, in fact, a hospital; and that it was the first time he'd been anywhere other than visiting Molly and the twins in a solid week. "I've got Charlie with me," he said instead. "So if you want to talk, she'll have to come with me. And she can't travel without an infant's booster seat."
"There's one fitted in the back of the car. The driver will assist you if you need it."
If anything, John was now consumed with curiosity as to what an MI6 Mercedes Benz looked like with a kid's car seat installed in the back. "You'll have to wait a bit," he said. "Sophie and Louise are awake for a change, so I'm not cutting things short with them for a cuppa with you. I'll be there when I'm good and ready. Out the front, did you say?"
Well, this was a turn-up for Lestrade's books.
Mary Ann Connelly, AKA Pearly Poll—prostitute, fifty, and barely sober—had identified the man she'd gone with up Angel Alley last night, as well as the companion who'd gone with Martha Tabram.
And both of the sneaky bastards had signed back into the barracks at midnight and been fast asleep, with half a dozen witnesses, between two and three o'clock that morning.
Meanwhile, PC Tom Barrett—good, clean, middle-class, and of unimpeachable honesty—had failed to recognise anyone in the line-up as the man he'd seen loitering near the crime scene at 2 a.m. Under private questioning, he was adamant that neither of the pair Poll and Martha had picked up was the man who'd told him he was a Grenadier Guard who was waiting for a mate. As Sherlock Holmes had predicted, whoever Barrett had seen had been lying about what he did for a living. Lestrade thought it was a curiously specific claim for a guy to make, especially when 'I'm in the army' would have done, but without Barrett's corroboration, he was on his own in pursuing that one.
"Sorry, old peel," Poll said to Lestrade, once Barrett left to return to his duties and the assembled men had dispersed. Since he had no reason to detain anyone, Lestrade was on his way back to the car, and Poll had decided to follow him. She'd turned out to be exactly as she'd sounded on the phone: a stubby woman with a throaty voice, leathery skin and a mass of none-too-clean hair that still showed streaks of its original auburn among the grey. She reeked of wet laundry left in the machine too long. Her accent wasn't as broad as Lestrade had first expected, but she spoke in a distinct sort of street argot where she apparently just made up words every now and again. Maybe, Lestrade thought, that was at least partly due to her leisure activities. This early in the morning, and there was whiskey on her breath.
"I'll bet I can tell you the obvious, though," she was saying as she trotted along behind him, puffing with asthma.
"What's that?"
"Well, I told you from the first that it couldn't have been more than midnight when I said goodbye to my young man, and Emma—sorry, Martha—she was working roughly the same time. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm sure there are fancy women who spend three hours with a client, but I'm not one of them, and Martha wasn't either. Just get in, get out." She chuckled at her own risque joke. "So it's not a surprise that young constable Barrett saw a different man. Our pair would have been back here asleep long before that happened."
"Well," he said, sighing heavily and reaching for the car door. "It was worth a try. Come on, get in. I'll buy you a coffee."
She looked suddenly suspicious. "Why?"
"So you can chew my ear off with anecdotes about what Martha Tabram was like—it might help me work out who killed her. And also, because you're as hung over as hell and I bet you need the caffeine."
Saying goodbye at the hospital was difficult enough for John and Molly, let alone Charlie, who still didn't understand that she and her mother weren't being separated for life. By the time John arrived at Mycroft's office she was still crying; not the screams of rage she sometimes came out with when she didn't get her own way, but heartbroken little sobs that made him feel like the worst father in the world. Nor did she stop when he knocked on Mycroft's door and came in when invited to. Mycroft was sitting at his desk, all business, apparently unperturbed. As he usually did when entering Mycroft's office, John reflected that it looked like a villain's lair. Or a comfortable gaol cell.
"Sorry," he said over Charlie's crying. "It's just, y'know, she doesn't like being separated from her mother."
"Ah, yes." Mycroft strove nobly to project his voice without the indignity of actually raising it. "I expect she's been at the hospital a lot over the past week. How is everyone?"
"Not dying. I don't really want to talk about it with you."
"Just so." Mycroft went to his desk and started rummaging around one of the middle drawers, eventually locating and producing the last thing John had expected: a fun-sized Mars bar. He unwrapped it and handed to Charlie, who stopped crying immediately.
Bloody hell. Despite having already had a cardiac episode or three, Mycroft Holmes was still, it seemed, a sugar addict. And Charlotte Watson was going to end up one too, if her collection of unofficial uncles didn't stop giving her chocolate, cake or biscuits to appease her.
And John was too tired to be bothered having this argument with Mycroft, or anyone else, right now. He sat down without being asked, silently encouraging Charlie to create as much mess as possible. "So what's so bloody important that you had to drag me here?" he asked.
"This." Mycroft passed a stack of papers across the table.
John raised an eyebrow, but did not touch them. "What's that?"
"Notes from Seamus Ritchie, MD. Sherlock's drugs counsellor. Have a look."
"No." John slid one arm around Charlie and pulled her closer to him. "I told him before that I wouldn't, Mycroft, even if he asked me to. If he wants me to know this stuff, he can come and tell me. I'm not sneaking around looking at his therapist's notes."
"Then I'll summarise them. He's been participating in free association therapy. I trust you're familiar..?"
"Is that the thing where they say a word, and you say the first word that comes to mind? Charlie, darling, don't put chocolate on the upholstery, please..."
Did he just hear me call Charlie d— yeah, you know what, I don't even care.
"Yes." Mycroft said. "He's been indulging more in the written form during sessions, though. The copies are there in front of you. Of particular note is the repetition of the name 'Christabel' and another phrase: 'I reject him utterly.'"
"Him?"
"Not a difficult leap to make, surely."
"Your dad." John picked up the papers, though he was determined not to read them. "So it's pretty obvious Sherlock doesn't reject him utterly. If he did, he wouldn't be writing about him in therapy." This was something John could at least claim from experience. Weeks and months of therapy sessions post-Afghanistan, whether it had been before he'd met Sherlock or after he'd thought he'd committed suicide. And not once, he thought, would he ever have voluntarily come out with a mention of his father during a session. Ella had asked him about his parents exactly once: Mum died of breast cancer when I was seventeen. I wasn't traumatised. Dad and I don't talk. And that had been the end of that. John had barely spared his father a thought from the day he'd left home until the phone call from Harry to tell him he'd died.
"So," Mycroft said heavily, "what are we going to do about this?"
John looked questioningly at him. "… Um… nothing…?"
"I know you're not in the habit of doing nothing when Sherlock needs your help, John."
"Yeah, I'm not convinced he needs my help. If he wants to chat about this with you or Christabel, he knows where to find both of you. He's your father, after all. What's it got to do with me?"
Mycroft rolled his eyes and sighed. "I suspect it's been a very long day for us both," he said snippily, "so please don't be obtuse. I'm asking you to agree to oversee Sherlock's emotional health during what might be a… difficult time, shall we say. It is a role I am not equipped for."
"You want me to offer him a shoulder to cry on." I sometimes feel like there's a queue for that. "After seeing his father. How's this meeting going to happen, anyway? Have you even thought that far? Asked your dad how he feels about meeting up? For all you know, he's not keen either."
Mycroft ignored this. "It seems clear to me that Sherlock's mental state would improve if we removed all doubt and speculation—"
"—And tried to force a meeting. You know Christabel already tried that? It didn't end well. She ended up over here, you both kicked her out of Baker Street, and to be honest, I'm not sure Sherlock's talking to her now."
"I'm assuming not, from the alarming amount of times he returns to her name in his writing sessions." Mycroft offered John the papers again. Again, John ignored them.
"What I want," Mycroft continued, "and what I think Sherlock needs, is an… elucidation, from our father's own mouth, of the status of their relationship."
"You mean, you want to hear your father tell Sherlock to piss off in person."
"Not necessarily, and I doubt our father would put it so crudely. He may wish to reconcile."
"Yeah, an iceberg might fall through this ceiling any second, too, but don't hold your breath."
Hearing himself, John felt a flash of heat course through his veins. An iceberg might fall through this ceiling… An expression he'd heard a thousand times throughout his childhood, but it had never come out of his own mouth before.
"Your dad's had thirty-five years to reconcile," he went on. "And he hasn't. So why the hell would he do it now?"
"Perhaps," Mycroft mused, "if he was given to understand how brilliant his son is..."
"Don't play that game." John got up, pleased to see that Charlie had wiped chocolate all over the arm of the chair. "You'll lose. Some people are like that, Mycroft. Don't try to sell a man's son to him by telling him he's brilliant… as if he'd be worth ignoring if he wasn't."
"I see I've touched a nerve."
"Nope." John retrieved Charlie's backpack from where he'd left to one side of the doorway. "But if you really want my opinion, the last thing Sherlock needs in his life now is a father who walked out on him when he was four. Therapy's not about changing your circumstances. It's about changing the way you think about your circumstances. Sherlock needs to accept he's never going to get the old man's approval, and move on with his life."
"… But…?"
"But of course I'm going to put an oar in for him if you decide to go through with it. I've got no idea why you keep asking. Will you do something for me, though?"
"What?"
"Don't say or do anything without the permission of his drugs counsellor. And that includes even mentioning your father or Christabel to him. He could fall off the wagon altogether, and then we'll be dealing with him in hospital with an overdose."
Mycroft made a vague movement of agreement. "On the subject of hospitals," he ventured, "it probably won't surprise you to learn that I'm rarely home. When I am, I'm afraid I'm not of a…" he grimaced… "domestic sort of turn. I hire a woman to come in and do a bit of work: cleaning, laundry, and so on. She's employed by an agency that I'd be happy to recommend."
John blinked. "What brought that on?" Oh, God, are Charlie's clothes on inside out or something?
"You smell of bleach," Mycroft replied.
"Yeah, I've just been at a hospital."
"No, this isn't hospital-grade bleach, which, of course, you'd never use around a young child anyhow. Your hands are also rather a giveaway." Mycroft glanced at them, and John drew his free hand into his sleeve, abashed. "Of course, you clean when you're in distress. Time to stop, Dr. Watson."
"Yeah, you've already presided over my finest moment by handing me a cheque for ten thousand pounds," John snapped at him. "Time to stop, Mycroft."
"I wasn't proposing to hand you a cheque." Mycroft sounded vaguely offended. "In any case, I don't need to. Molly's health insurance policy covers both home nursing care and assisted living, or what you might refer to as a housekeeper or cleaner."
"How did you—"
"I checked."
John quickly decided he couldn't be bothered trying to work out how Mycroft had 'checked' an insurance policy that wasn't his. As he exited the lift and took Charlie out into the grey January day, with its gusts of wind and the smell of the Thames in the air, he realised the only mystery wasn't how Mycroft had checked the policy, but how he'd changed it. It hadn't covered home care when John himself had consulted it that morning.
