Sherlock had sent John home hours ago. His wife's nocturnal disruptions had left the retired soldier exhausted. He was doing a fair job of hiding it and pushing through, but his physical signs were loud and clear. His blinks were fractionally longer and the small capillaries in his eyes were dilated. He was drinking so much caffeine his hands had a slight tremor.
Looking up from the GLC readout on the lab computer, Sherlock saw the grey daylight through the high, narrow basement windows. He stood and rolled his shoulders and neck, working out the tightness that always resulted after so long at the bench. The red numerals on the lab clock informed him it was just after 6am. Not long past sunrise. He could hear the rain hitting the ground outside.
In the early hours, he'd confirmed his suspicions. The dust was contaminated with vapours from methamphetamine production chemicals and contained human skin cells of varying freshness, confirming that there had recently been people staying in the house for an extended period. Tiny grains of borosilicate glass were embedded in the splinter of oak flooring he'd retrieved, and there were signs of exposure to caustic vapours on the cabinet screws. There'd been some sort of spill, probably as the clandestine chemists tried to clean up so they could leave the property.
The use of borosilicate glassware and purified methylamine told him that these were no amateurs. It was confirmed by the fact that they were alerted before the estate agent showed up and had the organizational ability to remove even the wallboard, which would have been saturated enough with the chemicals that even the Met would have been able to see it had been a drugs lab. That they managed to do it without alerting the neighbours even further supported the conclusion that they had outside help and outside money. There were only two major players in London at the moment, but this had the feel of only one.
Moriarty's network had been intimately entwined with drugs operations the world over. It was their primary, though not only, revenue source. James Moriarty had owned, in one way or another, most of Afghanistan's poppy fields and a significant chunk of the - very legitimate - European pharmaceuticals market. It seemed appropriate to him that the madman owned a warzone and the companies sending free drugs to the refugees from the wars.
Sherlock knew Moriarty was dead. He'd had the opportunity on more than one occasion to collect DNA samples, and Mycroft had compared the body from Barts' rooftop with samples from various sources. They would not repeat the mistake they'd made with The Woman. All of the samples - official and otherwise - matched the body. There was no doubt the man was permanently dead, but Sherlock had discovered in the past few weeks that he hadn't destroyed the network as completely as he had thought when his brother had pulled him out of Serbia.
The use of an uninhabited house instead of the professional manufacturing operations the network once supported for their designer drugs told him that the producers, in this case, were not completely affiliated with the criminal network. The professionalism of their activities implied some support, but they would not have been mixing meth in a suburban kitchen had the full weight of the organization been behind them. He wondered if it was a try-out.
During his time away, he'd had to prove his worth to the organization to find his way in. Being a graduate chemist had served him well as he integrated himself into the drugs operations. He was able to follow the money and the supply lines quietly. It had taken him three months for his audition to be picked up by Moriarty's men. They'd found him in a similar setup, and for a while furnished him with better supplies before he had proven himself enough that he was welcomed into the heart of the operation. Another year of working his way up the chain - crime syndicates did tend to have a rather high attrition rate, so the slight increase in the rate of mysterious upper management deaths didn't alert anyone - positioned him perfectly to gather the information which permitted his six month field mission to tear down each network hub individually.
In the sixteen months since his return to London, he had distracted himself well enough. First the bombing he averted, then John and Mary's wedding that summer. He'd had a handful of private cases that occupied his time once his return was publicized, most only moderately interesting. Many taken just to spare him from boredom; hardly challenging enough to actually require his input. It wasn't until John's wedding and meeting Jeanine, days after Lady Smallwood had contacted him for help, that he finally took on a case that rated above a seven.
He knew John had noticed his hesitation. Since his resurrection, Sherlock hadn't returned to the most dangerous work he'd had before. The absence of cases from NSY had played a part in that. Mycroft hadn't brought him any more government jobs since last November, except for the work in Eastern Europe that had been co-opted to serve as his aborted sentence for shooting the news magnate. Magnussen had not been the first unarmed man he had eliminated. Sherlock wondered dispassionately if he would be the last.
The Magnussen case weighed on him. The man was dead, and with him vast swaths of information that could be put to nefarious use, but Sherlock knew Magnussen's business was not only in news. He could feel a connection forming in his mind between the journalism empire and the samples that sat on the bench in front of him. It just wasn't completely clear yet. There was something but he needed more before the nebulous threads between Moriarty and Magnussen would solidify.
"And every person has their pressure point; someone that they want to protect from harm," Moriarty had told him. The spider and the rich man, their methods so very different but at their core, the same information, the same basic strategy of exploitation.
He had protected John's pressure point and, by extension, his own. One of them.
His thoughts, unbidden, travelled to the third floor, where his unexpected pressure point most likely lay.
Sherlock could count on one hand the number of people he considered friends. He had railed against the idea for so long, but had finally let John's influence sink into his thoughts during his time in India, where he first realized he missed his friends. John, of course, Mrs. Hudson, Greg Lestrade - for all his teasing of the detective inspector, Sherlock knew his name perfectly well - and now Mary. While they had had their ups and downs and near-fatal shootings, John's wife had welcomed Sherlock into her life with surprising ease and he found the former assassin to be a loyal friend. Anyone willing to shoot him in the liver to save him deserved his friendship.
He was carefully dancing around thoughts of the other woman who had killed him, though he knew he'd have to sort them out before long. He drummed his fingers on the white tabletop and let out a huff of breath.
Unfolding himself from his slouched position at the lab table, he rose and pocketed his sample envelopes once again. He quickly saved his analyses to his USB key fob and dropped it into his inner breast pocket. He shut off the computer and strode out of the lab. As he exited the building towards the cluster of skips - one of the few places on the property hospital security wouldn't harass him for lighting up - he tapped a fag out of the packet he'd brought with him. As he lifted his head to light his cigarette, he saw her.
Hair splattered by the heavy, wet snowflakes; over large coat and horrid pink-striped scarf wrapped tightly around her thin frame, Molly Hooper puffed out a jet of blue-grey smoke. Her long hospital gown was gathered under her coat, but he could see the plastic patient identification bracelets at her wrist. She looked down at the lit cigarette in her hand, pensive. Sherlock lit his own and walked slowly towards her.
"You don't smoke." The woman jumped slightly and her eyes snapped to his face.
She shrugged and looked back across the lot towards the rapidly increasing traffic. "I used to, in uni. Seemed fitting today." She took another drag and inhaled slowly, closing her eyes as if to savour it.
He could see in how she stood that she was weak. Her left arm held tightly to her side, as if she were refusing to let it drift over her abdomen, shoulders hunched and knees bent slightly. She was still in pain. Her eyes were sunken, not inflamed, so she hadn't been crying. The slight tremble of her hands told him she had been given some morphine and it was making it hard for her to cope with the chilly air.
Her eyes had turned to him as he took her in, reading her condition as clearly as if he held her chart. His eyes met hers and he opened his mouth to speak. "I'm.."
She cut him off. "Don't, just don't. Don't... say you're sorry. Don't apologize to me, Sherlock." She swallowed thickly and averted her gaze again. "It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anybody's fault."
"That's not what I am saying. I just want to... I..." he had a hard time gathering his thoughts, something that had happened with alarming frequency in the last few months, and glanced down at his feet as he spoke, feeling rather like a schoolboy called before the headmaster. "I'm sorry for what I said to you the other day."
Her eyes were hard when he looked back to her. "What, for implying that I actually tricked you - you, of all people!? Or for calling me stupid and selfish? Maybe for telling me what a horrid mum I'd be? Doesn't matter much now, does it?" She spat out the last, her lip curling. The colour had risen in her frighteningly pale cheeks and she wobbled slightly, her ire stressing her weakened body. Sherlock reached out to steady her but she smacked his hand away. "I told you I don't need anything from you and I meant it. Just stay the fuck away from me, Sherlock Holmes. You've done enough."
She threw down the last of her cigarette and left a very confused detective behind her as she walked back to the hospital and swiped her ID card at the door to let her in.
