Disclaimer, Rating, Summary, Credits and all Notes: Please see Chapter 1.
Holmesian Logic
Part 2
Chapter 4
For a moment the words hung in the air and then Sherlock nodded and blew out a soft breath. "Molly and I set it up before I texted Moriarty to suggest we meet on the roof of Bart's, working on the presumption he couldn't resist it. I knew that he would retreat at any deviation from the norm, so I could only work with what I already had, which was fortunately sufficient. The rubbish collection truck –"
"You jumped into it." He guessed.
"Yes. The truck pulled into the kerb on that side of the building at that same time every afternoon, which was essential. Moriarty and his snipers knew that so when it arrived it was invisible to them in plain sight."
"Whereas they would have noticed - had it not turned up at all or if it had turned up on a day when it wasn't scheduled to be there," he got that too. "I see."
"I couldn't lay any trail whatsoever myself, since if Moriarty got wind of it…so I used a hefty whack of Molly's cash, which I still owe her, to pay the rubbish truck driver to simply do his job only to a more exacting standard. I paid him to arrive punctually, to fill the truck with air bags made to look like refuse sacks beforehand and once he was there to do nothing but idle against the kerb until he heard a loud, heavy thud in the back, at which point he was to pull away at his normal speed – not even Moriarty would notice the truck staying outside the hospital a few minutes longer than usual."
"So since you knew any sniper or snipers would be focussing on their targets and you would only be on the periphery of their vision, you could risk jumping into the truck."
"I let Moriarty goad me onto the ledge, then started laughing and got off again, that was our pre-arranged signal to Molly to be ready. I provoked him and I made him angry enough to let slip that there was a 'stand down code' – a way he could call off the snipers. I think the fourth reason he killed himself was to give me no other option or out once he was dead. With the stand down code irretrievably lost I had no choice but to jump – to my death, as he believed - if I wanted to save you."
"And was it a signal to the cyclist, too?"
Sherlock looked down at his hands as if fearing to look at John's face any longer. "Yes. When I arranged for Wignall to send you that fake message about Mrs Hudson being hurt, I had hoped she'd be out shopping or at her sister's – no way for the sniper to find her either. But you would also be safely away from Bart's, because you were the one person who couldn't be allowed near my 'body'. However, if Mrs Hudson was home, you'd realise what was going on and you would have time – you did have time - to get back to Bart's before I was ready to take a swan dive."
"The cyclist was Wignall himself, your main homeless network man?" he surmised.
Finally Sherlock looked up, "Yes. John, I swear, the concussion was a genuine unintended accident. When he collided with you, Wignall gave you an aerosol blast of a mixture of sedative and euphoric; it's designed to disorient and mimic the confusion effects of shock without actual shock. You reached the pavement and managed to touch the corpse's hand, but then Ir- she- took your hand away and you blacked out."
"Leaving Molly as the Bart's resident forensic pathologist, and with pre-existing Met Police CSI credentials courtesy of Greg Lestrade, conveniently on the scene and able to formally ID your body as a pathologist and as a personal acquaintance, because the most logical candidate – me – was in hospital for the next three days with concussion and shock. When I was discharged it was all over because Molly had formally identified you and a duly sworn officer of the law – Gregory Lestrade – had also seen…he's always known…" The realisation dawned as he said it, "The other Mozart yet again."
"What?"
"Greg Lestrade has always known you weren't dead. Leopold Mozart had a child who was a gifted pianist, a protégé, a daughter, named Marie. But when she was eight years-old Leopold fathered Wolfgang Amadeus and nobody ever noticed her again. Greg Lestrade is about ten years older than you, he's Mycroft's age?"
"Yes? So?"
It gave him a bit of a fillip that Sherlock clearly had no idea where he was going with this.
"So, Greg made Detective Inspector on his own merits back when you were a spotty, snotty teenager streaming live from mummy's wine cellar." He didn't resist making the jibe. "If – when - he got within six feet of that corpse Molly had confirmed was 'you', he would have clocked the tell-tale surgery scars that cosmetic surgeons hide behind the patient's ears and realised immediately that the corpse was a Doppelgänger that explained the real kidnapping of the Bruhl children, and therefore a) that it wasn't you, b) that you had faked your very public Technicolor and Hi-Def demise and c) that Molly Hooper was in on it up to her eyebrows." And he kept the secret too, didn't he.
Sherlock looked struck by this and pursed his lips. "That does explain his rather noticeable lack of surprise when I walked in on his meeting with my brother this morning very much alive."
"You couldn't let anyone outside Molly Hooper near the body because they would have realised what I did just now when you and your friend," or should that be 'pet fiend?' he wondered momentarily, "showed up in that doorway. When a person dies, rigor mortis sets in, but after that period, the body regains flexibility as decomposition begins and the flesh develops a spongy, soft-wax texture. At the time I was concussed and drugged but un- sub- whatever consciously – when I touched the hand of the body, I automatically registered that the skin was ice cold and grey, when it should still have been 98.6 degrees warm and pink as you had just died, and also that it was post-rigor spongy. If I'd been compos mentis –"
"You would have realised instantly that no matter what it looked like you were dealing with someone who had been dead for at least four days," Sherlock acknowledged. "Hence, Wignall, on the bicycle… Before I texted Moriarty, Molly had prepped Peter Richtiger Schwarz's head like she was an SF/X make-up girl on a sci-fi film to look like 'impact trauma'. Then she dressed the corpse in one of my suits and my scarf and a duplicate coat like mine that the costume designer lady from the Navel Treatment case made up for me, no questions asked on the QT as a rush job. Molly laid Schwarz out on the pavement seat bench in front of Bart's just adjacent to where the rubbish truck would pull into the kerb and covered him with a tarp and on top of that put the rankest old blanket she could find."
"Sure, nobody is going to go near a vagrant sleeping it off, especially not one you can smell from Southwark." he recognised the ingenuity.
"Molly was standing on the steps out from one of the basement lab exits, hidden below the railings holding one pole braced in the middle of Schwarz's back and another pole tied to the tarp and over-blanket. Me getting on the ledge and then getting back down onto the roof and gibing at Moriarty to make him angry enough to be distracted was her cue to get ready."
"The angry mind exists only for itself," he acknowledged, "the angrier you could make Moriarty before the point of no return the more likely you would succeed in fooling him – you needed to befuddle him enough so that he stayed where he was for a couple of seconds after you jumped before rushing to the edge to look down with victorious gloating at his ultimate victim, too awash with cortisol and adrenaline to realise the real you was being driven away in a dumper truck and he was seeing Schwarz."
"Exactly; I had no way of knowing that those vital seconds would prove unnecessary. I freely admit Moriarty's suicide was the last thing I expected to happen. But it went like clockwork: when I jumped from the roof into the truck, Molly used one pole to roll Schwarz off the seat onto the pavement and the other to slide the tarp and blanket back through the bench slats and railings – the whole move took her one point two seconds. Then she simply scurried up the basement access steps and out onto the pavement where everyone is gathering around the body that it seems has just appeared out of thin air on the ground with massive fatal head trauma. Since such a thing can't obviously happen everyone's brain works to find resolution and makes the logical assumptions; within seconds you have a group of eyewitnesses who genuinely believe they actually saw me fall to my death."
Sherlock lapsed into silence for a few seconds to let him absorb and work through the events, visualising them as Sherlock outlined what had happened.
"Moriarty's minions packed up their guns and went home without noticing that they couldn't see Moriarty on the roof any more either." Sherlock drew in a deep breath, "The one calculated risk I had to take was that Moriarty wouldn't instruct his sniper or snipers to kill you…kill you all…anyway regardless of whether I jumped or not. However, despite his predilection for cheating his hirelings I reasoned he wouldn't really want to spend the money if he didn't have to, but by the same token nor would he be foolish enough to anger professional killers who specialised in long-range kills…not unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life wearing full body armour and a heavy-duty helmet twenty-four-seven…so I risked that his instructions to the snipers would be that if I was dead, they should just pack up and go home without taking the shots – with a businessman's emphasis on the terms and conditions of how they would be paid and what for."
"And you couldn't let me in on the plan at all." He understood, but it rankled.
"John, you are too honest – and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order. You said once, to Les- to Greg – how pitiable it was that we seem to live in a world where a person of honour and integrity is so extraordinary as to be almost regarded as a freak of nature at best and mentally disturbed at worst. You are an honourable man and you could not have carried off a deception on that scale. You would not willingly perpetrate such a deception, even on Moriarty, had he actually loved anyone for his death to matter." There was no doubting Sherlock's sincerity. "And I deeply wish I had not had to do it. But when me and Molly were planning our alternative ending to Moriarty's one-act play, as you put it, Molly pointed it out to me…once Moriarty believed I was dead…I would have ultimate freedom…you raise no defence against an enemy you don't know if there…the opportunity to damage Moriarty…the instant he killed himself, he left his crime empire completely exposed – the opportunity to not just damage but wreak utter havoc on that monstrosity, to stop a stooge filling the power vacuum…"
Someone like my equally psycho faux friend Seb Moran…
"…To divert all that money he collected by destroying lives to good and decent recipients…to tear apart his spider's web strand by strand – would never have come again."
"Its fine – no I mean it." He cut off Sherlock's response. "Yes, it hurts. It hurts a lot because…I know you're no more fraudulent than Mother Theresa and I've had to grieve for you for six months with people trashing your reputation– " and mine "-who aren't fit to lick your boots clean. But I do understand. I've seen a tiny bit of what you've had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to destroy in action. After you…died…poor Greg got sidelined – moved to oversee cold case reviews. It was a holding pen so his so-called superior Chief Superintendent could have him up for gross misconduct and sack him once the media attention had moved on to the next one minute wonder."
"I know, I asked Mycroft to…stall them."
He grinned. "Well Mycroft didn't need to. I think your man Wignall used his initiative and gave Greg some directions you don't find on a SatNav, or in The Knowledge. He's spent a lot of quality time up and down the Thames Tidesway these past six months has our Gregory and he wasn't mud-larking. So far his cold-case review has solved or provided vital new evidence to solve fourteen missing persons' cases, including three fake-your-death-for-the-life-insurances, eight British murders and two Interpol ones, plus five British armed robberies and a French one. While mucking about around on boats he's also been 'mentioned in despatches' in the Police Gazette for his cold-case reviews being instrumental in taking down two drug smuggling cartels – one South American and one Asian, a prostitute-trafficking ring and two illegal immigrant gangs, plus one home-grown Muslim terrorist atrocity. Thanks to Greg the solved crime stats are heading for the outer atmosphere; there's no way that bloated buffoon can oust Greg now without the Met having to explain why they're getting rid of one of their most successful officers."
"You really don't like the Chief Superintendent do you?"
"He swaggered into our home like he thought he owned the place and called you a weirdo," he pointed out. "And beyond that he was offensive to me. Professional 'professionals' like him and 'Red Ken' McCluskey and their ilk are the ones who get genuine working-class background people like me smeared as bigots and haters."
Sherlock raised an eyebrow, "Professional professionals?"
He moved the tea tray aside slightly, and stood up. They needed to get on with things or else Sherlock's resurrection would spectacularly backfire on him - on them - but he explained, "There are some people who make a career or a lifestyle out of being a professional at being a Professional Whatever that rakes in money for nothing or gets them a cushy life spent shirking not working, usually on the back of the British taxpayer. They started out as hippies, then jumped onto nuclear disarmament or being faux Gypies with that Traveller scam, then it was eco-mentalism and now it's global warming. When I did my first placement from Welbeck College at Birmingham Teaching Hospital, there were two med students in my cohort, a Muslim girl from Nottingham and a West Indian Londoner – she was a Professional Muslim and he was a Professional BME – Black and Minority Ethnic - to be jargonistic."
"I think I see," Sherlock also stood up, watching as John went over to his laptop and brought-up his long neglected blog. "They lacked a work ethic?"
"They lacked any redeemable virtues. Both of them were bone idle and could have written 'itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini' as the answer to any exam or assignment and still graduated with a medical degree. It was infuriating – I knew several Muslim girls who appreciated how damn lucky they were to have been born female and intelligent in a misandrist Western democracy not a misogynistic Eastern theocracy, and so had worked their backsides off to get an education and have the chance to be at Bart's, and ditto for my charming but bone-idle faux-Rasta Londoner-man. But they knew they were bullet-proof…hell, they were thermonuclear detonation proof – they were just itching for someone to point out, 'but you're both bone idle' and they'd have been screaming a variety of '-phobic' and '-isms' from the rooftops –"
"And pursuing a six figure compensation claim to set them up in style for a decade or so?"
"Not half. When I was a locum at – the surgery –" he did not say Sarah's name, "Chloe Reddish the nutritionist was also the Practice Recruitment Manager and was driven to foaming-mouthed fury by the women who turned up for interview who clearly only wanted a job to claim maternity pay from us whilst forcing us to employ someone to cover the work she should have been doing, and those Professional Working Mums who thought demonstrating the inevitable consequence of unprotected sex made them demi-goddesses and who expected flexible this and term-time that because Having Bred Made Them Better than everyone else around them. Since her husband Craig is our deli butcher and keeps us in the good food round here, I thought I'd better reduce her blood pressure and by association his, to keep our sausage supply line open, so I let her in on how both my sister and my father had kept their General Practices profitable and relatively stress-free with low staff turnover and high employee reliability."
"How so?" Sherlock appeared genuinely interested, but then again whilst his intellect towered above everyone else within a thousand miles - with the exception, probably, of Mycroft - his experience was academic rather than practicable, like the genius Oxbridge professors who felt victim to Nigerian spammers.
He had no familiarity with emotional and emotive subjects such as arrogant working mothers who perpetrated such public idecency as the breastfeeding blight, or ethnic minority malingerers, inverted snobs, and the like who knew they could get away with their behaviour because the UK was now a country that punished the victims and bend over backwards to tend to the boo-hoo of villains, unless you had sufficient money and/or power to buy justice or pay for appropriate punishment to be administered by third parties...for a fee.
One of his best men, whom he had got fasttracked up the ranks, had had to take disability thanks to an IED. Going to stay with his elderly granddad, a WWII Para, his descent into PTSD and depression had been halted when his granddad armed himself with a stout stick and used to go out to confront jeering gangs of feral yobs plaguing their suburban estate. In recent years local QUANGOES and the police had taken credit for the plummeting anti-social behaviour incidents on the estate, unaware that Mike's granddad had gone around all the oldies and they'd clubbed together and contributed from their pensions and benefits to pay Mike a 'living wage' of £20,000 a year to be the estate's enforcer and employ his own 'hands on' help/bouncers as and when necessary. Mike had admitted that he had a purpose, focus, and was sustained by the moral outrage of elderly people in his own country being more at risk than vulnerable people surrounded by terrorists in the –Stan countries. Although, Mycroft no doubt knew all about his friend Mike and his activities, at least if his poking his nose into Matters About John Watson that were None of His Business ran true to form.
"My mum, as dad's practice manager and Clara as Harry's PM found ways to only employ White British gay men or Eastern European women. In all the years he was a GP Dad never had to pay two women to do the job of one because that one had got herself knocked up purposely to do so, and he never had any staff member dare ring in at five past nine on the busiest day of the week because her little darling had sneezed once in the night and so she'd been up since five in the morning with him-stroke-her boohoo. If the Poles and Bulgarian women were up since two a.m. with Junior or Little Miss projectile vomiting, they cleaned it up and then came into the surgery on time and did a full shift and then went home. What gets me just as angry as Chloe Reddish used to get is that Chief Superintendent Braithwaite is just the same – he's a class bigot, an inverted snob. He's a Professional Northerner - hides his incompetence and plain rudeness behind that whole 'bluff Yorkshireman' excuse and has a boulder on each shoulder about anyone who can enunciate properly and who was born south of Watford Gap. He's one of those self-serving career climbers who'll throw their own mum to the wolves if it gets them an advantage. Even Anderson manages to be ten times the copper just by getting out of bed in a morning."
"Mm," Sherlock thought about that for a moment, then gave a sharp nod of agreement with that assessment, before nodding at where he was putting up his blog and last minute flight deal websites up side by side, "So what are we doing?"
"The technical term is 'getting our arses in gear'," he said crisply, before raising his voice loudly and glowering generally around their living room as he said, "just as soon as the Deadly Duo get their fingers out and get here! Move it Mycroft, and get going Greg!"
"How did you know Mycroft had continued surveillance once I was-" Sherlock trailed off.
"I didn't, not until she said that you'd seen me, quote, 'sat there in that armchair-' unquote," he didn't repeat the rest of what Irene Adler had said, 'gazing at Moriarty's shrivelled-up I.O.U. apple nursing a tumbler far too full of Scotch in one hand and that blasted Browning in the other', "So Occam's Razor, either you suddenly added CIA level Psychic Remote Viewing to your repertoire or else Mycroft still had this place wired for sound, so to speak."
From downstairs there came the noise of a door opening – not the front door, but the inner connecting door from the corridor connecting the ground floor Flats 221A and 221C to the entrance hall.
"Mycroft has full mobile connectivity," murmured Sherlock, either as explanation or apology, or possibly both as the stairs creaked under footsteps' one pair stealthy and stalking, like a hunting leopard, the other firm and deliberate and inexorable.
Of course he has; Mycroft – and yes, Greg Lestrade behind his shoulder in an inadvertent rerun of Sherlock with Irene Adler's head behind his shoulder – had no doubt watched this entire denouement on an iPad or some wireless in-car screen over the past ten minutes of getting here.
Mycroft as ever was impeccable in a bespoke tailored conservative pearl-grey double-breasted suit; Greg wore a High Street store suit, a charcoal grey single-breasted, as ever with his hands non-threateningly in his pockets, pulling off slightly rumpled rather than dishevelled, and of course appearing deceptively pedestrian and pen-pushing. He also appeared to be not the slightest bit intimidated or wary of Mycroft Holmes enduring and weary of, more like.
But Greg's face had an unhappy tinge of greyness and his eyes were tired. He got that – operating at that level of intensity 24/7 for six months in the knowledge the tiniest infraction would be ballooned into an epic attack on your reputation and personal integrity to get rid of you, having to daily pull the rabbit out of the hat – or the corpse from the Tideway – to stave off the circling wolf pack -
Oh yes, he got that. His being hospitalised in the immediate aftermath of Sherlock's supposed death - had been a godsend – keeping the hysterical public and press frenzy at bay whilst his military discipline enabled him to get into that detached headspace and drag around his psyche at least a thin buffer.
Upon being discharged at three in the afternoon and making his way anonymously by bus from the hospital – since the 'smart money' claimed 'Watson would finagle leaving at midnight or sunrise to evade the press' nobody had expected him to just walk out of the hospital in the middle of a workday afternoon and stand at a bus-stop instead of demanding a blues-n-twos ambulance to bull through the throng. The simple expedient of ordering online from Craig Reddish, with his purchases dropped off by the silently sympathetic and understanding Chloe, and remaining largely in their rooms at 221B and not engaging with any telephonists, tweeters, bloggers, emailers, and the like had seen the sharks go in search of fresh blood – particularly when a series of juicy celeb scandals tripped along in quick succession and the rehashing of a dead fraudster was so, like, bore-ring!
He looked around over at the clock. Half the night had sped away. "We're on a tight timetable here."
"To do what?" Sherlock asked again.
"To 'control the narrative'," he retorted succinctly. "The paparazzi have mostly given up now apart from the odd on-the-off-chance snapper, so luckily nobody saw you come here besides Mrs Hudson and next door's cat, but our honeymoon period of you being blessedly incognito is like a vampire - it isn't going to survive much past sunrise, not in this town and not now the Twenty-First Century is where everyone's everyday life is basically lived in a goldfish bowl. Did you come in a cab?"
"No, I – we walked from the Tube." Sherlock's slight hesitancy explained that it was no doubt Irene Adler who had vetoed the cab idea and she had realised that an ordinary couple walking from the Tube exit station was less conspicuous – thank goodness for a dominatrix with a PhD in understanding the human mind.
"Good, that gives us a bit more breathing room, without some cabbie touting the tattle that John Watson might be vacating his tenancy to some upwardly mobile yuppie couple as column fillers to the redtops."
"An accurate summation," Mycroft agreed with no discernible emotion, "I'd say Sherlock's unexpected lack of decease will be headlining News at One tomor- today, unless-?"
"Unless nothing," he found the flights. "We can control the narrative, but not erase it. Too many too interested people still around who haven't disengaged fully, like fans who go to ComicCon as characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer a decade after the series ended."
"Too many too invested people about," Greg translated the pop culture reference for the deadly duo, nodding at Sherlock. "Since The News of the World went the way of the dinosaurs London has been snided out with Kitty Riley clones – at every turn there is a down on his or her luck hack, hacker or hacktavist needing to pay the mortgage and desperate to be the one that scoops that little nugget, that a bit of spin that turns into a whacking great diamond and gets their foot in the door or their fingers on the keyboard of a national newspaper with a regular salary plus pension plan again. To them a cabbie's column filler is the Cullinan."
Greg's echoing of his own illustration to Sherlock a few minutes ago answered any lingering doubts he might have had that Mycroft and Lestrade hadn't watched the whole exchange via surveillance. He got over it.
"Ergo, we take the story to them, on our terms, rather than wait for someone to twig and lead the ravening horde to our doorstep – again - which is why we are not going to wait around here. We are going to be business as usual, we are going to be 'yes, Sherlock is alive, yes, Sherlock is taking cases, yes, didn't you notice?' Blasé, élan, nonchalant – take your pick."
"Which is why we are going to see- the Princesa? Good grief is she still around?" Sherlock commented.
"Yes and yes. Mycroft, I need you to stop Daphne."
Greg Lestrade managed to wince with his eyes; he momentarily reran what he'd just asked of a psychopathic compulsive overachiever. Oh. Right.
"Let me rephrase: I need you to delay Daphne from getting here until at least after 7.00am to give us time to get to Gatwick."
"The inestimable Daphne," murmured Mycroft in a tone loaded with subtext, but pulled out a small black mobile phone that he doubted very much was a commercially available item or anything remotely pedestrian as an iPhone or that ilk, Mycroft's finger stroking the front screen, "What would be your ETA for her?"
He glanced at the clock, aware of the night retreating from them. "Given I cut her off at the knees, she'll be up at the crack of dawn and out for a cab so as to get here full of mock solicitousness and barbed criticism by 6.30am."
Mycroft's coolly imperturbable face did not alter an iota, but suddenly he was confident that Daphne would find herself unable to secure any form of transportation across London other than her own two feet until Mycroft chose to allow her to do so.
It didn't bother him; Daphne's subtle controlling, and her criticisms disguised as faux sympathy had not been lost on him, but for the past six months quite frankly he had been too numb to care about anything - he suspected that had Sherlock really been dead he would have slept-walked into a disastrous henpecked/browbeaten marriage – Daphne wanted a husband she could lord it over by being willing to 'overlook' his previous poor choices and lifestyle so the unfortunate spouse was in the supplicant position of gratitude and would never be allowed to forget it.
Having been thoroughly slated, slandered, traduced and libelled as a co-conspirator in Sherlock's 'frauds' by the press and online media and anyone who could hit keys with opposable thumbs without let up 24/7 for the first two months following Sherlock's 'death', he fell into the ideal husband-victim category.
Sherlock's fingers were already way ahead on his iPhone, "Seven minutes for us to walk to the nearest Tube - twenty-two minutes to the DLR across to Gatwick...the first flight back is...tomorrow afternoon at 12.25pm from Warsaw?"
"Nope'" he input flight times on the website, "We'll need to stay tom - tonight and the next..."
Sherlock was, after all, Sherlock, so he perked up slightly. "How much trouble is the Princessa in?"
"Oh none at all, not for us. You'll solve the case in five seconds - ten if you dawdle about it - that's not the point."
"The Princessa is hugely respected and greatly liked, but not a celebrity enough so that you and John turning up on her doorstep incognito and in the middle of the night will go instantly viral - whispers will germinate into rumours that will swirl for a few hours and build nicely on our timetable. On top that, everyone is going to woefully underestimate the acumen and intellect of a 94-year-old because she is a 94-year-old, and, no reporters will or will be allowed to hassle and harrass her, and not now and not ever, nobody is ever going to impugn the version of events as stated with a thousand years of regal grandeur by an Imperial Princess of the House of Hapsburg," drawled Greg, showing he was far more astute and knowledgeable about a lot of things than you would imagine.
Half to himself, half to Mycroft, he outlined, "We need to arrange to get back to London day after next just before tea-time, give them as little time as possible to catch up with us going into Baker Street so the story can't be falsely edited or spun too much before they need to run it on the six o'clock news?"
Mycroft gave a cool nod, of agreement or approval - or more sinisterly assurance that this would be made to be so - and commented to the room generally, "It may be an idea to book return flights to Gatwick, then change them at the last minute and get an earlier or later flight into Heathrow, then come back by Tube as before, not by taxi. Anyone waiting at Gatwick to ambush you at the taxi-ranks will be discombobulated in the extreme."
John nodded, turning to Sherlock and pointing at the flights he intended to book, which would not be used; Sherlock was already looking up alternative real flights. He turned to Greg, "What about your duty shift?"
"On the Tidesway again, officially. Nobody's interested in me these days, especially not since I'm a poisoned chalice. I'll make sure I hop on the Bakerloo at the Embankment to come meet you outside when you get off the Tube and walk round here with you. I'll make sure Mrs H. is in the loop."
Sherlock frowned slightly, "But if the rumour mill starts up that I'm alive by lunch-time today, is there a risk that Superintendant Brat-Thug will get the wind up him and start micro-managing you in an attempt at damage limitation?"
Greg's lip curled, "Not likely; as soon as I spiked his sack-me-on-the-sly plan courtesy of Wignall's tips - good man you got there by the way - he's tied himself in knots making sure we're nowhere in the same postcode. Besides, not a fast and adaptive thinker is the Superintendent. By the time he's finished ponderously working his way through the fact that you are pulling a Mark Twain, it will be next week."
"And it doesn't matter anyway," he put in firmly. He knew everyone in the room was way ahead of him in his little master plan but he said it anyway so certain people got that yes, he could think on his feet when he needed to and what won the race - hello, tortoise.
"This is Phase one of Control the Narrative, that will be Phase Two. When we three are spotted outside No.221B Baker Street, we are going to what is technically known as lay it on with a trowel. By the time Sherlock Holmes has finished lavishing Kitty Riley with praise for her keen investigative journalism and her bravery in holding her nerve against a psychopathic whackjob for weeks on end, she will be walking into any broadsheet and naming her own terms and conditions. You will likewise heap adulation on Superindent Braithwaite's bold leadership and support of innovative and daring up-and-coming officers. By the time that's gone around the world twice, in all of about an hour, there is no way either of them or anyone else for that matter - " he didn't specify the likes of Donovan or Anderson - "is going to be able to admit the truth - that James Moriarty played them like a fiddle and they fell for Richard Brook hook, line, sinker and copy of Angling Times - without losing all the plaudits, fame and desperately needed regular salary that they got by becoming complicit with our version of events."
Mycroft raised one eyebrow slightly, summarising 'phase two' neatly, "Mutually Assured Destruction."
"And, of course, it cements the fact that, thanks to James Moriarty, you are now untouchable." Greg said coolly, something indefinable in his tone, hands in pockets and looking particularly innocuous as they all looked at him, but he gave them the level, unintimidated stare that came naturally to a proper British copper, these days sadly a dwindling breed.
"For Moriarity's discredit then destroy plan to work, Richard Brook had to be flawless, especially since the press was key to 'exposing' you as a fraud. Not a single inconsistency, not one loose thread that Kitty Riley, poor quality hack though she is, could tug on, that intensely determined people who believed your version - like a Met Detective Inspector, for one - could not winkle out and bring down his whole deception. And Moriarty pulled it off - Richard Brook was beyond Oscar winning, it was a perfect performance - so perfect that James Moriarty was buried on the local council's dime as Richard Brook in a pauper's funeral a week after you took your header off Bart's roof. What that means now is that thanks to Moriarty you two can decide to start inventing cases right now and become full-blown frauds and nobody will ever be able to bring you down. No reporter or dogged officer will ever get it past their editor or super, not after you have simultanously exposed and suborned Kitty Riley and Bill Braithwaite, even though their bosses are probably smart enough to know how true it is."
Now, as well as then? He didn't say it. But it mean something, caused a reassuring warmth deep inside, at the genuinely surprised expression on Sherlock's face - whilst Sherlock was too intelligent not to have rapidly realised what Moriarity had, unintentionally, gifted to him, it was clear that the thought of using it to his own corrupt benefit had never occurred to him. Much less reassuringly, Mycroft gave Greg a look of thoughtful contmeplation, as if slightly surprised and not in a good way, that Lestrade had worked that fact out.
Besides, the actual number of people who accurately saw through the flammel to the great steaming pile of B.S. it was in fact, were irrelevant because neither Riley nor Braithwaite could or would sabotage their own benefits for honour and integrity, as neither of them possessed those qualities. Finally, he let go of the last of his resentment that Sherlock had kept him entirely in the dark, because he was proud of the reasons Sherlock couldn't have involved him in the Grand Plan.
Continued in Chapter 5…
©2013, The Cat's Whiskers
All rights reserved
