Since both the Hayden's and the Lestrade's honeymoon suites were now functioning as makeshift infirmaries for the sick, the helpful staff at Arndale Hall had offered the police on site the use of their staff room as a temporary crime investigation base. It stood in stark contrast from the rest of the hall, being small, modern and rather shabby, littered with plastic chairs and cheap appliances, reeking of dishwater and sour milk. But there was enough surface space to set up an incident room of sorts, and that was going to have to do.

Even better, Lestrade thought as he lowered himself into one of said plastic chairs, there was a nice, clean bathroom approximately six feet away. Though that was no guarantee that it was going to be nice or clean for much longer. He hadn't thrown up for a whole fifteen minutes, which made a nice change and put him well ahead of Melissa or Molly, but that didn't mean he was about to run any marathons. Melissa, whom he'd left in the capable hands of her mother back in the crime-scene bathroom, didn't seem to be improving. And from the sounds of things, Molly was even worse. He thought, and not for the first time, that he should send someone to help John out with looking after her. The only problem was that with Hayley on babysitting detail and Melissa spending her wedding night with a toilet bowl for company, he had no idea who to send.

And since Dyer wasn't on hand either to be coaxed into doing it for him, he got up and started shakily making himself a cup of black coffee. He needed the pick-me-up. But there was something about the taste that curdled his blood; and anyway, coffee was never good on its way back up. Instead, he was struggling his way through a glass of tepid water when the door opened and Donovan came in, clutching a pile of papers.

"Okay," she said, slapping the papers down on the table between them and pulling up a chair. "So I wrote down everything I asked the three of them, and everything they said in response. But poker bores me stupid, so I've got no idea what they were talking about. Have a look."

Lestrade took the papers and looked them over in silence for a few minutes. From what he could see, the Hayden brothers were marked not only by their bright red hair, but their painful pretentiousness. Donovan had asked the grieving husband how a hand had played out, and in her police officer's shorthand, she'd written that he'd used cheesy nicknames for all sorts of gameplay: pocket rockets, bullets, Cowboys, Snowmen. For a second he wondered whether Donovan had reminded this bell-end that his wife was dead on their bedroom floor.

"You're not sick?" he asked Donovan at length.

"Hmm?" She sounded vague for a second. "Oh. No, I'm fine. I feel fine. Jake went up and checked on Hayley, and he said she's not sick, either… and your sister says everyone with them is fine, including Matthew-"

He gave a sudden hiss.

"What's the matter?"

"This," he said, leaning over the table and pointing to a particular line of her writing. "You're sure this is exactly what you asked them, and exactly what they said?"

"Word for word, even when those words were stupid." She stopped. "You've found the liar."

"Ishani Parikh."

"Oh, what, just because she's-"

"Donovan, your Indian husband recently cleaned me out of a hundred and thirty bloody pounds when we played together one night, so if you're about to accuse me of racial profiling, I'm not in the mood for it. Cut it out with the is-this-because-my-mum-is-Jamaican thing, okay?" he snapped at her.

Donovan's mouth fell open.

Lestrade and Donovan had worked together for nearly twelve years, and in that time, Lestrade had never commented on the fact that his sergeant was not white. It had been drilled into him from the time she'd been appointed to him to never single her out, and after about half an hour on his team, it had never occurred to him to do it. So where the hell had that come from?

"Sorry," he said, rubbing his forehead with two fingers. "I'd say I shouldn't have thought that, but honestly, I'm still wondering if I actually did."

"Oh, don't get all sensitive on me," she said. "You're embarrassing us both. Will you just tell me why you think Ishani is the liar?"

"They're all lying, actually," he said. "In their own, unique brand of stupid. Stewart says he was sitting to Alec's right, but Alec reckons he was the small blind, which would put Stewart on Alec's left. Alec got the seating arrangement right, but since there was only three of them playing anyway, that's probably just dumb luck. Both the Hayden brothers sound like they're wankers but they actually know how to play. They just haven't got their stories straight enough. But a hundred quid says they were never playing poker downstairs last night. Ishani here hasn't got the faintest clue how anything works."

"Like…?"

"You asked her if she got 'buttoned out'. She said she did. That's bollocks. Anyone who actually plays knows the term is 'blinded out.'"

"Good point," she said, but then fell silent until he raised his eyebrows and stared her down. "Just thinking," she said.

"Then do me a favour and think out loud, will you? All I can think of right now is 'Don't vomit on the nice sergeant, no matter how much you want to.'"

"Thanks. I can see why women love you so much." She sighed. "Okay, if someone asked me a question like that and I didn't have the faintest clue what they were talking about, right, I'd do a much better job of bluffing them than Ishani did. She's a pharmacist, so she can't be a complete moron, Greg."

"Okay," he conceded, "so she's not a moron. I'm not saying she is. What are you saying…?"

"You didn't see her," Donovan began.

"What, just then? But I saw her when she was screaming the building down after we found Elizabeth."

"And didn't that strike you as a bit weird?"

"To be honest with you, I'm having trouble finding something that isn't weird about today."

She rolled her eyes. "Greg, we've worked on how many murders together? And okay, we've seen a few spouses behave like Stewart Hayden did, and more than few parents. But that was excessive."

"They were best friends, weren't they? She was the maid of honour."

"I don't care. Something about her didn't sit right with me, and anyway, it's only been an hour or two since her best friend was murdered, and she's calmly telling me about runs and straights and bets and raises and rivers and Christ knows what other things. Only she's getting them so wrong I'm wondering how someone could even manage it." She set her mouth in a hard line. "Thing is," she said. "I'm wondering if she was telling me as much crap as she could so I'd pick her out and question her more closely."

"You reckon?"

"Look at all that slang, all those technical terms. People don't use slang like that when they're bullshitting, you know. They get as vague as possible, but they don't go using words if they don't even know what they mean. I'm going to bet she knows something, and she might want me to pump it out of her."

"God," he muttered, rising out of his chair. Nausea was fast rising again. "I think you might be right, Donovan. Even if she didn't kill Elizabeth, even if she doesn't know who did, she probably knows something that made her sit down on the floor of Elizabeth's room and scream… hang on, give me a minute…"


"Mycroft, please."

Sherlock was begging, and he couldn't bring himself to care whether his brother was smirking about it. He'd gone into the men's bathroom near the winding stairwell and was leaning against the sinks, phone at one ear, finger stuck in the other to hear Mycroft better down the line. Mycroft normally woke at five, but not on a Sunday, and he'd been particularly annoyed by Sherlock's call until he'd been given to understand the gravity of the situation at Arndale Hall.

"There's nothing I can do, Sherlock," he said, and even in a fit of childish pique, Sherlock could tell he was being sincere. And that was perhaps the worst of it. What was worse than Mycroft being obtuse? Mycroft being sincere. Mycroft saying he was helpless to act, and meaning it.

"I've already told you," he said. "It's very easy. Just send a helicopter, put Molly on it, and send it back the nearest hospital with a decent labour and delivery department and a neonatal intensive care unit."

"During a snowstorm? Are you particularly anxious that Mrs. Watson die in a helicopter crash?"

Sherlock reached out and turned one of the taps on, riffing it so violently that a spurt of icy water hit his shirt. He adjusted the flow and collected some of it in the palm of his hand to drink. It was true, as he'd already told John so many times, that he had none of the gastrointestinal symptoms that would indicate poisoning, by food or otherwise. But for the past hour he'd been nagged at with another sensation. He'd dully supposed it was thirst, but water didn't seem to be helping like he thought it would.

"For God's sake," he heard himself say after he'd splashed his face and turned the tap off. "This is what you do, Mycroft. You arrange things. You buy things. You fix things." The entire country dances to your whim, and now you're telling me you can't even send a helicopter?

"Kind of you to say so," was the smug response, though for once Mycroft sounded like he might be trying to pull it back a little. "But while I might assist in the running of the government, Sherlock, I can't do a single thing to control the weather."

"King Canute, trying to hold back the tide."

"You misremember that story, little brother; Canute wasn't a madman trying to hold back the tide. He was proving a point to those who treated him as a god that he couldn't control a single drop of the ocean. Look, gentlemen. Look at this thing I can't do."

Sherlock took a moment to concentrate on his breathing. In. Out. In. Strange how something he'd done millions of times without even realising could abruptly become something he had to give himself a pep talk to get through. Through it, he realised that Mycroft had begun talking again, though his tone was a lot less harsh than usual.

"You know as well as I do that to try to evacuate anyone, by air or by road, in these conditions would be a far more dangerous enterprise than remaining where you are," he was saying, "and trying to hold out."

"Hold out for how long?"

"I don't know, Sherlock: once again, I remind you that I can't control a single flake of snow. But I've contacts within the Bureau of Meteorology, and they all agree that the snowfall can't last much longer. Come daylight, things will steadily improve. The day's expected to be fine and mild."

Daylight. Four or five hours away, by rough calculation.

"And you'll send a helicopter then?"

"Sherlock. Please, try to be sensible-"

"Molly's in danger," he blurted out. "John's children are in danger. And you want me to be sensible?"

"Losing your composure can't help anyone; so yes. I want you to be sensible."

Mycroft was right, and for a second, it gave Sherlock the impulse to hurl his phone at the wall. "Is it my turn to tell you what I want you to be?"

Mycroft sighed. "I'm going to make a phone call or two to the appropriate people, Sherlock, and I'll ensure someone is on standby to leave Leeds as soon as it's safe to. I imagine the more provincial hospitals in the immediate area aren't equipped for what Mrs. Watson requires."

"And you'll let me know when it all happens?"

"Immediately."

That was, it seemed, Mycroft's final word on the subject. He was already mentally planning out some other part of his day; hacking Russian intelligence or taking out a terrorist cell in Saudia Arabia, perhaps. Sherlock had a moment of genuinely wondering how long it would take Mycroft to temporarily forget that the Watsons existed. The best he could do to show his displeasure about this was to hang up without saying goodbye. The meek little bleep of the disconnected line rang off the tiled walls around him, but it didn't have the same nuance as a slammed receiver.

A public bathroom was a public bathroom; but this one seemed relatively clean and pleasant, with only a faint odour of rust and brackish water. Sherlock retreated into the nearest stall, locking the door behind him and sitting down on the toilet lid before fumbling up his sleeve for the dwindling baggie of white powder he'd stashed there when he'd been called out of bed. Under the humming fluorescent lights, he sat looking at it for what could have been half a minute or half an hour.

You have a case.

Actually, you've got two of them. One infinitely more important than the other. Find the poison. If you can find the poison, you might be able to help Molly.

You can't help her if you don't have the energy to. This is just the energy you need. You're helping her. This is how you're helping. By keeping yourself alert and focused.

You promised—

But somehow, things seemed to have already arranged themselves on his wrist without his even being aware of it, and he'd expertly rolled the banknote he'd used before in his other hand, though he wondered for a second why it was shaking so much. He disliked waste.

You told John you'd look after Charlie.

Stop this. Stop this