Chapter 3

It took slightly longer than anticipated. Rosie had slept on John's shoulder like a lamb for all of the short walk back to Baker's street, but then she woke up enough to complain bitterly about having to brush her teeth and go to bed when she wanted to be allowed to stay up with them. John wisely didn't tell her they were going out again. He just got on with getting her to sleep while Sherlock installed Mrs Hudson in the living room to listen out for her in case she woke up.

The sun was nearly down entirely by the time they'd reached Oldacre's house – a large, detached place with a garden that ran down onto the river. John, as was his way, mentally assessed the value of said house as he was walking into it. He put it at several million.

There was still a strong smell of burn wood and some plastic solution, carbon fibre as he later discovered, that permeated the house.

'Living room in here?' John asked, peering through to a room with large patio doors, currently open at the far side of it.

'Yes, but we're going in there last.'

'Sherlock! John!' Anderson waved at them through those doors.

'We'll come round the side!' Sherlock called back.

'Do you find it easier with him on side?' John asked.

'No. I find it even more irritating, if anything.

They stepped out into the garden. It was fairly low maintenance as these things go; evergreen shrubs and a few, small trees rather flowerbeds. The selling feature of it, and the thing that added at least a million to the price of it, was that it swept down to the wide water of the Thames. There was a short wall at the end of it, only a foot at this side, but a drop of about 4 beyond. It gave it a few feet of flood protection, though probably not enough for a storm over a springtide, but it would be worth those small inconveniences for the fact that you could own a whole boathouse with runners to take you straight down onto it along with a floating jetty. In a moment of idle curiosity following a case much further up the river, John had looked into how much a private mooring on the Thames would cost to hire for a month. It was eye-watering.

Today, the splendid Thames was slightly diminished due to the presence of two small dredgers and a larger one further out.

'Perhaps someone killed him just so they'd dredge this stretch,' Sherlock muttered. 'Ah, Anderson.'

Anderson peeled off his gloves before shaking Sherlock's hand.

'I'm legally obliged to tell you not to ruin my crime scene,' he said. 'There are gloves in the box over there.'

Sherlock went to put some on. He also took off his coat to better check the floor without it flapping around. He stayed off the marked-out path where John could see an indentation leaving a marked path through the short grass. He merely squatted down beside it to look from the side and into the doorway of the house. They'd lost the light, and he waved his hand behind him.

'Torch!' he barked.

Anderson hurried to put one into his hand. Sherlock shone it over the grass. Then he got down and put his head down so that he could see the depression in his eyeline.

'Fine,' he said, standing up. He kept hold of the torch to walk along the short wall, looking carefully. He hopped over the boat-runners and examined them closely too, then along to the shrubs at the far side. He finished his examination by walking along the jetty, shining the torch on it and then along the wall on the riverside. There wasn't much to see here; the tide was in far enough to obscure the bottom of the wall. The task of finding a body there would have to be left to the dredgers.

'Can I see the fire now?' he asked.

Anderson led across the garden to where there was the burnt out remains of a large shed.

'I'm afraid the smell isn't all that attractive,' he said. 'There was a fair amount of carbon fibre in here.'

This time Sherlock ducked under the police tape, and John followed him. He held his hand to his nose to try to avoid some of the acrid smell.

'That's where the body was, yes?' Sherlock said, pointing to the far corner where the worst of the fire damage was.

'Yes. There was wood already there, nice and dry for whatever boatbuilders use wood for, and petrol was used as an accelerant.'

John took his own torch out, and they both squatted down to look. There was always some disturbance when bodies are removed from such material, but it had been kept to a minimum. They could clearly see where a top layer of burnt material had been removed though.

'She was covered first?' John said.

'She was. We've also removed a belt hook from the ashes, along with a small scrap of denim that somehow survived. We think she was wearing a Prada belt over jeans. There appears to have been at least two rings, but made from zinc so they were melted up. We're still going through it, but they're the only finds so far.'

'Right.' Sherlock stood up. 'Thank you. We have all we need from here.'

Sherlock ducked back under the tape and marched towards the house.

'How are things?' Anderson asked John.

'Yeah, good. How about you?'

'Fine. It seems to be going well.'

'I'm glad for you. Apparently, we're going into the house now then.' He looked to where Sherlock was climbing back into his coat. He didn't go via the still open patio doors, but they went back around and approached the room from the other end. Sherlock toed his shoes off at the doorway, and John nodded at Anderson who was a gnat's tooth away from crying over it. John took his own off and followed Sherlock in.

Sherlock didn't say much. He crouched with his face against the carpet again, so that he could see the projected path of the heavy object. Then he knelt up and looked at the position of the furniture and the scattered cushions. He waved his hands towards the blood drops as an instruction for John to take a look.

'We don't think the spatter pattern is right,' Anderson said, from the doorway.

'I agree with you,' John said. 'For one thing, there's not enough of it. For another… the scatter pattern isn't right.'

'It's certainly been careful not to drop itself on anything expensive,' Sherlock muttered. 'We'll know more when we hear the DNA results, but I'm willing to bet that this is Oldacre's blood.

'So he was fought in this room?' Anderson asked. Sherlock looked to John.

'He was certainly in a fight in this room,' John said. 'It's unlikely that it led to his death. Or anyone else's. Some of it's been set up.'

'How do you know?'

'That chair there, for example,' Sherlock said, pointing. 'It's a heavy sofa. Expensive and well built. It's feasible that it was moved if someone relatively heavy was forced sharply against it, and that movement may have caused that cushion to catapult from it…'

'Conveniently smearing someone's blood on it,' John put in.

'Quite. And, also conveniently, this heavy chair was scraped across the carpet in one direction, but then seems to have been scraped again slightly to change its position, then lifted to be moved again. It ended up several inches from its starting point.'

John paced carefully across the floor a few times.

'And whatever hit it, must have hit it from over there, where that perfectly intact table with its nicely placed vase of flowers is. It couldn't have been our charred woman either; Molly will be more accurate, but I'm fairly sure she wasn't heavy enough for it. It would have to have been one hell of a push otherwise, and I'd expect a crushed ribcage if that were the case.'

'So, the scene was set up?' Anderson said.

'It was,' Sherlock agreed. 'Now, for the next.'

He put his head down on the carpet again, near the door, and then, when he went through to the hall, he did the same thing on several of the stair-treads.

'I think that whatever was dragged came from upstairs,' he said. 'What have you found there?'

'No sign of struggle,' Anderson said.

Sherlock led the way upstairs. He spent little time in each of the bedrooms which were small and relatively Spartan, but one of the larger rooms had been turned into a study.

'Why have a study up here?' John asked.

'The view,' Sherlock said. From this angle, the view from the wide windows was straight onto the Thames which now, with the last of the sunset streaking the sky and reflecting below, was particularly lovely.

The study itself was more like a shrine. There was a large draftsman's table in the centre with rolls of plans and blueprints. The rest of the room contained pictures, scaled models of boats, presumably ones he'd made, ship's compasses, barometers, boat-hooks, ropes of varying thickness and strengths and even plastic cups with printed pictures of anchors on them. Sherlock studied these for a while. Then he started opening the large, wooden lockers that lined the room. He stopped at one of them.

'Yes, it came from here,' he said.

John squatted down to look.

'See the dust pattern?' Sherlock said. 'There, around the edges, there's dust. In the centre, no dust. The edges of it have been blurred slightly, as though someone dragged something large and heavy out of it. Something that had been here a good 20 years or so, given how much dust there is in a closed cupboard. We also know that our missing cleaner didn't get to see in here too often.'

'So this is where the heavy object came from?' Anderson asked. 'Could it have been whomever was on the fire?'

'Not unless she'd been here 20 years, and the body wasn't decomposed enough for that.'

'Oh yes, of course. Sorry. I'll shut up now.'

Sherlock gave John his exasperated look.

'Finally, the last,' he said, straightening up.

Sherlock paced along the top landing, counting as he went, stared out the large, picture window at the end of it, then charged back down the stairs again. John and Anderson followed. He paced along the bottom hallway and straight through to the large kitchen at the end of it. Then he turned and ran back through the house to the upstairs, along to the picture window, then down again with the other's trailing him. Then up. Then down.

'Can you give us some clue as to what this might be about?' John said, panting.

'Yes. You have been gaining weight of late, and this seemed like a good opportunity to resolve some of that. No no!' he laughed, putting his hands up at John's cross face, 'it did start as a genuine enquiry, but it came to nothing and it amused me that you kept following me. I just wanted to pace out the landing upstairs. It's exactly as it should be. There's nothing more we can do here tonight, I don't think. Let's head home.' They gathered their shoes from the hallway and set off back to Baker Street.