WARNING: Some fairly gory content in this chapter. May put you off your tea.
Again, to everyone reading, reviewers or not, thank you so much for sticking with this story and keeping the hit count climbing. I'd like to add a particular thank you to Saturn-Jupiter for the incredibly long, detailed and analytical reviews; which are definitely stimulating my imaginative juices. I am planning on writing some nearly equally detailed replies to them; but it's 1:23am so it'll have to wait until I'm awake enough to do it justice.
SHSHSHSHSHSH
Heartburn
Sherlock Holmes was waiting.
He hated waiting. Waiting was boring. Ordinary people waited; and Sherlock Holmes was anything but ordinary. Consulting detectives should have a special licence to never have to wait for anything. Didn't they know how bored he got waiting for them to get their tiny little brains in gear?
It had been halfway through his ten day sentence before he was released by the hospital. In that time, Sherlock was visited and harangued by not only Mycroft, but Lestrade and Mrs Hudson too. And then there had been that unpleasant business with the trauma councillor…
Which was hardly my fault; I don't know why they all blamed me. If the stupid woman hadn't been so insistently irritating about talking about feelings I do not in fact possess I wouldn't have had to resort to such extreme measures to get rid of her…
"Sherlock Holmes?"
"Hmm." He grunted distractedly, flat on his back in the hospital bed; his mind engaged in a long-term scenario based on one of Moriarty's possible courses of action.
"Hi. My name is Trudi Michelson; Doctor Doshi asked me to visit you…"
"No, thank you," he replied, bored already.
"I haven't even told you why I'm here yet."
"Didn't need to. You introduced yourself by your first name but no title, so you're not a doctor or nurse. You're being purposefully friendly and non-threatening and that pathetic excuse for a doctor thinks I attempted suicide so obviously you are a therapist of some type. In which case, you are wasting your time; I have no need of any kind of counselling."
"That was very… perceptive… of you." Her voice was full of the faint shell shock that most people experienced on their first meeting with Sherlock Holmes. "I understand you've been through a rough time lately; and sometimes it can help to talk to someone entirely unconnected…"
"Spare me the psychobabble. I am a high functioning sociopath; I do not feel in the conventional sense. Therefore I have no need of emotional support or therapy. Go away; I am thinking."
"Sociopath? That is a fairly major diagnosis. Have you been seeing a psychologist regularly? I don't see any medication mentioned in your file…"
"I self- medicate."
"By which you mean you're a drug user?"
"What I am largely defies description. Now go away."
"I can't do that, Sherlock. I take my job very seriously…"
"Mr Holmes, thank you. And your job is irrelevant. You are single, live alone with at least two cats and read insipid romantic rubbish. You still phone your mother on a daily basis despite the fact you are nearing forty and you buy yourself cut flowers to make you feel more popular than you are."
"A display of such obviously negligible self-esteem is off-putting enough; but the implication that anyone with as many psychological problems as you is actually capable of helping others with theirs is frankly insulting to their intelligence. Admittedly, I am much more intelligent than the average person but you couldn't outmanoeuvre a ten-year-old. Now go and waste your pathetic little life on someone polite enough to indulge you and leave me alone."
Really, I do not understand why some women start to gush with mucus at the slightest little thing. It is singularly unpleasant to witness and I doubt they enjoy it much either. So what is the point? Surely they have some measure of control over their emotions; can they not just turn it off?
Sherlock had been kicked out the very next day. He doubted that this was a coincidence, but was far from complaining. 221B was a far more conducive environment for his thinking exercises than a bland hospital bed with constant interruptions from various members of staff.
The flat was far from how he'd left it, however. Mycroft had clearly been interfering; the place was actually tidy, and he'd found and removed everything even remotely resembling drugs or drug paraphernalia, no matter how cunningly hidden.
Worst of all, John's things were gone. All of them; vanished as if he'd never existed. Presumably, Harry had them.
When he gets home, John is going to be very annoyed about that. Especially if she gives all his clothes to Oxfam.
Even his bed had been stripped; there was nothing left but the lingering aroma that clung faintly to his pillow. Sherlock would willingly chew off his own leg before admitting that he had pressed his face into the scratchy fabric, just for the reassurance that John Watson was not in fact a figment of his imagination.
Finally, finally, the torturous two hundred and forty hours of agonising suspense were up and he'd received the texted instructions from Moriarty.
They were every bit as bad as he had anticipated.
Even if John never speaks to me again, it was worth it. His value is ten times mine.
Sherlock became aware that his fingers were tapping on the tabletop, even as he glared at the phone resting innocently before him, willing it to ring. He was already wearing his coat and scarf, fully prepared to run out of the flat as soon as the call came in.
And then, miraculously, it did.
Lestrade. At last. I was beginning to think they'd never find it.
"Where's the body?" He demanded, too impatient for a greeting. Lestrade was used to his customary brevity; but he still managed to sound slightly surprised that Sherlock had been expecting another death.
"The pool; what's left of it. It's Moriarty again; got to be."
"And how do you draw that conclusion, Inspector?"
"He left the victim's wallet. Forty-two, male, lecturer at Imperial College. His name is... was..."
"John Watson," Sherlock finished his sentence with certainty.
"Bloody hell; how'd you guess that?"
"It wasn't a guess, Lestrade. I'm on my way."
"Sherlock..." He began, once again reverting to his 'dealing with victims' voice. "I should warn you... it's bad. I've never seen anything like it. If you want to give this one a miss..."
"Give it a miss? Don't be absurd. Expect me within the hour."
Sherlock paused for a moment after he got out of his cab, surveying the scene of the collapsed swimming pool, once again swarming with police. There was even a faint aroma of chlorine lingering in the air.
He'd never be able to smell that again without remembering Moriarty's grin and John's terrified eyes and pain and fear and noise and choking grey dust and…
He started when a tentative hand was rested on his arm. Sally Donovan was looking up at him, something approaching concern in her eyes.
"Sherlock?" She said, for once totally without derision. "Are you OK?"
"Of course I am, Donovan," he replied disdainfully, finding his throat inexplicably thick. He cleared it quickly. "Why do you ask?"
"You've been standing there for the last ten minutes." She examined his expression critically. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
"It is not a matter of wanting. Where's Lestrade?"
"With the body. This way." Sherlock followed her along an access path that had been cleared through the rubble, presumably by the builders starting to work on the site.
"Why the sudden concern for my wellbeing, Sally?" he asked, curious despite himself. "You haven't even called me freak yet."
"Because you're not acting like one. Haven't been since… well, since the last time you were here."
"My behaviour is not significantly altered."
"You're at the scene of a grisly murder and you're not happy about it," she pointed out. "Seems pretty significant to me. Look, I know I've never been exactly nice to you, but…"
"Spare me your platitudes, Sergeant Donovan," he snapped. "Coming from you, I prefer the insults. Or even better, silence."
To his astonishment, instead of rage, a flash of understanding crossed her face.
"You want things to be normal, so you don't have to remember why they're not," she said with surprising gentleness. "Ok. You go and do your party trick for the Inspector and we can have a row on your way out. He's just behind that pile of rubble."
I will never understand human beings. I refuse her proffered olive branch and she takes it as proof that I am undergoing some complex grieving process. John could probably explain it…
But thinking of John is curiously difficult, here, with the smell of burning and chlorine in my nostrils, when I am about to tell Lestrade… No. Focus on the task at hand. Plenty of time for introspection later. Far too much, probably.
Sherlock rounded the rubble and found the Detective Inspector standing over the body, placed carefully in the hollow where the decoy corpse had been removed after the explosion.
"You look terrible," Lestrade greeted bluntly. "Are you sure…"
"Shut up and get out of my way, Lestrade," Sherlock snapped. As the policeman obeyed, he got his first good look at the body.
A middle aged man with blue eyes and mousy hair, positioned on his back in the centre of the hole. Not Sherlock's John, of course; too short, stocky build more fat than muscle, no scar on the left shoulder, clearly exposed by the open shirt.
The reason the shirt had been left unbuttoned and open was equally obvious; to display the appalling wound in the centre of his torso, more than twenty centimetres in diameter.
"Sherlock? Sherlock! Are you OK? Can you hear me?"
The detective vaguely registered Lestrade speaking to him, a note of panic leaking into his voice.
"Of course," he replied distantly. "The weapon was a handheld propane blowtorch. They can reach temperatures of upwards of five hundred degrees centigrade but this one was set rather lower; closer to two hundred. It was applied directly to the victim's skin, resulting in this very ugly hole in his chest directly over the heart. The killer knew his anatomy; notice how the weapon was concentrated on the rib to conduct the heat across his torso. Death would have been relatively slow and exquisitely painful as the heart muscle was cooked in his chest."
"Jesus Christ…" Lestrade breathed. "The poor sod."
"Quite," Sherlock acknowledged. The smell is indescribable. Burnt meat and dirt and death all mixed with chlorine… Strange; I have never before felt even vague nausea in the presence of a cadaver, not even the ones starting to liquefy in the later stages of decomposition… but I feel it now…
"The ME said that he was alive when he was burned, but there weren't any marks to show he'd been tied up…"
"Because he wasn't. The restraint was a chemical one. Clostridium Botulinum; a powerful paralytic with no analgesic properties. He would have felt every moment; but without the power to move, to scream, even to blink as the heart was literally burnt out of him."
"Clostrid… Hang on, isn't that what Moriarty was using before? This must have been him, then, mustn't it? Taunting you, the sick bastard, as if he hasn't done enough already…"
"No. Not Moriarty," he replied firmly. "I wanted to know what my John suffered."
"What?" The police officer protested, angry and incredulous. "Don't joke around, Sherlock…"
"This is not a joke, Lestrade. It is a confession. Less than four minutes; I think that's a new record."
The expression on the Detective Inspector's face was… stricken, disbelieving.
"You're… serious? You… you did this?"
"Yes."
"But… why?" he asked desperately. "You're not a killer, Sherlock; you catch murderers for a living, for God's sake…"
"I am responsible for the torture and murder of John Watson. It would be rather hypocritical for me to go unpunished, don't you think? Therefore I am confessing immediately."
Lestrade just stared at him, mouth agape, as if the foundations of the world had somehow crumbled beneath his feet.
Strange, that his disbelief should be more uncomfortable than if he'd simply accept that I have committed a murder.
"Shouldn't there be handcuffs by now?" Sherlock asked, with mild curiosity, trying to prompt him into some kind of action. "There are usually handcuffs when I'm arrested…"
SHSHSHSHSHSH
Too cruel? Not cruel enough? I need your opinions on these things…