There was a moment where all sound and movement seemed hushed like a blown-out candle; the second of silence between the fall of a bomb and the outbreak of chaos.
Then Mycroft drew a deep breath. "Definitely not him," he repeated in stronger tones. "Wrong build entirely. The shoulders are too narrow, and the sternum is sitting too low." He gestured casually with one hand. "Moreover, this man has several blemishes Stephen lacks, which he couldn't have acquired in the time he's been in the hands of his abductors."
Sherlock peered impassively through the glass at the mangled figure. "Well, if it's not Stephen," he said slowly, "then the question becomes: who is it? This area of the world isn't known for frequent mutilation killings. Rather a coincidence."
"Not a coincidence," Mycroft responded. "And you know it." He had never had much time for Sherlock's self-professed love of coincidences. That such things inarguably did sometimes happen interfered with his carefully-wrought, ordered view of the world. "This man was killed and dumped specifically so that he would be found in precisely the right time and place."
"Diverting time and resources away from finding Stephen."
Mycroft looked wry. "Yes," he said. "Though I suspect he has a more personal reason than that."
Sherlock was silent for a few seconds, looking again at the corpse on the viewing trolley. This was unexpected. Paul Doherty may have been an amateur at kidnapping people, but he was determined enough in this venture to commit a murder for, apparently, no other reason but to pretend the corpse was Stephen's. Sherlock had known just one other man cold enough to do that: James Moriarty.
"I think," he said, "we need to get those ears DNA tested."
"No point," Mycroft said tersely, resting on his heels. "Quite aside from the time it would take to get a result – months, I imagine – DNA testing is only effective if one has DNA to match it with."
"And Stephen's records aren't on file?"
Mycroft shook his head briefly. "I made it clear to the relevant authorities many years ago that so far as science is concerned, the people in my employ do not exist. DNA records tend to complicate matters."
The corner of Sherlock's mouth twitched. Over the past thirteen years, Mycroft had had five "personal assistants", and all of their roles had varied according to their strengths and weaknesses. William had been a thug with a degree and a nice suit, hired during a period where Mycroft was making enemies and hadn't perfected the art of dealing with them yet. Then Alistair, who was more of a gentleman and knew how to negotiate a sharp deal – and exact the consequences if one reneged on that deal. After that it was Pamela, a fortyish spinster. She was a mathematical and organisational genius who kept all of Mycroft's affairs in order, and who had resigned after eight months to marry Lord Townsend. Then Christina Tate, the girl he called "Anthea"; largely useless, but presented well to others and had inner reserves of strength, resolve and ingenuity that had helped Mycroft out of more than one tight spot, both politically and personally.
And finally, Stephen - dull, pleasant Stephen James Hassell. No DNA on file, because his predecessors had taken so readily to the morally grey part of Mycroft's career. No DNA, even though the man had probably never stolen so much as a pencil from Mycroft's desk and had no ability or inclination to hurt anyone.
"No living relatives, I suppose."
"None, lamentably." Mycroft shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
"There never are. Too easy."
"There's a sister, I think, but she lives in Vancouver and we don't have time to track her down for DNA testing. We go with the assumption that the ears are Stephen's. But this is not. He planted this."
"You keep saying "he"," Sherlock remarked carefully. From the corner of his eye, he could see Mycroft turn to him questioningly, but he kept his gaze ahead at nothing in particular. Putting forward suggestions and ideas to Mycroft had always been a somewhat dangerous practice. Once Mycroft agreed with something, it almost invariably became an empirical fact.
And now Mycroft was waiting for this new information to process. Sherlock took a rare few moments to consider how best to express it.
"I'm sure Brian Merchant and Gary Doherty are assisting him," he finally said.
"No doubt," Mycroft conceded, as if the fact that he had more than one adversary had never fully occurred to him before now. "But it's personal to Paul."
"I think it may be personal to Brian and Gary too. You neglected to mention what happened to Cathy Doherty."
"I have no idea what you're referring to," Mycroft said brittly. "Once Doherty was incarcerated, I had better things to do with my time and energy than follow the minutiae of his life."
"She committed suicide, Mycroft. Four months after Doherty was put away."
Mycroft looked at him in silence for a few seconds. At first there was nothing but a dull, repressed kind of shock in his gaze; then, for a second, a chilly sort of reproach. It was as if he were saying, why would you tell me that? I didn't want to know that.
Abruptly, he turned back to the body. "Well," he said in his usual clipped manner. "I suppose we've solved the mystery as to why Paul Doherty is so determined to make me suffer."
John had always had the impression that Detective Inspector Tobias Gregson didn't like him. But there was no call to take that personally, because Gregson didn't really seem to like anybody. The two men had only spoken a handful of times in the years John had worked with Sherlock, and John had never had the pleasure of working directly with him. But Gregson's lanky, scowling entity was regularly seen stalking the hallways and vestibules of the office like an ill-tempered ghost.
He was particularly brusque with John when he arrived at New Scotland Yard just after twelve with Charlie, who was nestled fast asleep in her pram. Gregson eyed her with deep misgivings, but said nothing.
"I know," John said apologetically, tapping the pram brakes on. "I don't usually take this one everywhere, but my wife's at work at the moment..." Molly was, or last he'd heard from her forty minutes before, spending her so-called holiday knee-deep in research into what the wounds from various knives looked like under magnification. "But she won't be any trouble, promise."
Gregson gave Charlie another very dubious glance; John could practically see him reflecting that nobody else in the building was allowed to take their children to 'work.' He suddenly remembered that Gregson had four kids of his own, though he was sure they were much older than Charlie. He couldn't quite imagine Gregson's office festooned with colourful crayon drawings of ambiguous spindle-legged creatures, lovingly crafted at nursery school and clumsily addressed "to daddy".
The first time he'd been in Lestrade's office, he'd seen one solitary indication that the man had kin, beyond the gold band on the fourth finger of his left hand. It was a small birthday card, furtively perched on the desk between his landline handset and a pale ring on the surface of the desk that indicated this was where he put his mug of coffee. Generic card, bought from a Sainsbury's checkout or some other thoughtless place. In it was written, "To Dad, from Hayley and Matthew." The kids' names were written in different handwriting, and the card had then been nearly five months old. You didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out.
Gregson was different; and sadly, it was Gregson who was scowling at him, not Lestrade. "How can I help you, Dr. Watson?" he asked, politely but tersely.
John glanced back down at Charlie again. An hour, Charlotte Mary Watson. Please give me an hour, and I promise I won't be playing with the gun when your first date comes to pick you up.
"Inspector Lestrade said you could help me," he said, giving his attention back to Gregson. "With records into the indictment and trial of Paul Doherty in 2002."
"Did he now?"
That was not, in fact, what Lestrade had said; it was what Sherlock had said. But John nodded. If there was anything useful he'd learned from the great Sherlock Holmes, it was to never underestimate the value of a well-placed bluff. Get someone to believe they're following orders, and they'll do just about anything for you.
Gregson was looking at him impassively, but John did not back down. After a few seconds, the DI let out a breath. "Just a second," he muttered.
He pulled out his mobile phone and put it to his ear; for a few seconds he paused, then opened with, "Lestrade, do I owe you a favour I've forgotten about? 'Cause I've got John Watson here, and he seems to think you said I could show him records of Paul Doherty's indictment..."
John tensed, but only for a moment. Lestrade probably had little to no idea of what was going on, but he adapted quickly, and he'd probably back him over Gregson.
He glanced down at Charlie again as Gregson, phone still at one ear, stalked away to his office and shut the door behind him.
"Number's busy," Sherlock muttered, holding his phone to his ear with one hand and shutting the car door with the other. "I don't leave messages. I'll call back." He shoved the phone in the console and jammed the keys in the ignition, starting the engine with a lot more vim than was strictly necessary. Beside him, Mycroft fidgeted for his seatbelt. Sherlock knew he absolutely hated being his passenger, but both John and the Kent paramedics had been more than adamant on that point: absolutely no driving for forty-eight hours at least.
"Important business, is it?" he hissed impatiently.
"He's on the case, Mycroft. Give him five minutes. Lestrade doesn't really have anything to talk about for longer than that."
As he checked the flow of traffic to merge, Sherlock's phone blooped out a text alert; regardless of the fact that he was preoccupied, he grabbed at it and checked the incoming text. A brand new number, for a brand new prepaid phone he'd purchased just that day.
arrived norich give me til 6 2 have ur man dolan
Sherlock blinked and put the phone back in the console, then merged onto the road without speaking. Obviously Dolan's determination to wreak havoc with the law and vengeance on anyone who crossed him had precluded his learning basic English, or at least, precluded his using it in a text.
"London?" he enquired.
Mycroft grunted in assent. He was staring absently out the window, though there wasn't much to look at. The sky was a dull, iron grey; they were just then negotiating a roundabout as they pursued the arterial road. Above, an overpass pedestrian bridge reached over them like a great skeletal arm. He leaned back in the chair and shut his eyes.
"What are you thinking about?" Sherlock asked at length. Mycroft half-opened his eyes.
"I'm imagining myself standing in a hospital room," he said slowly.
"Stephen's."
"Yes."
"Hearing from a doctor that he'll recover completely."
"Yes."
Sherlock paused, unable to explain that what had kept him going in the weeks John had clung to life after being shot was an image: John unleashing a torrent of abuse worthy of a dress sergeant on him, and then punching him for good measure. It had never happened, but the hope that John might one day be well enough to do it was what had mattered.
"And Doherty?" he ventured.
"I'm imagining that fucking bastard on a morgue slab, minus his head," Mycroft snarled. "And then I'm imagining myself spitting on the – "
He cut himself off as abruptly as a switched off radio, and swiped at his mouth as if to clean it.
"The what?" Sherlock nearly smiled. "Go on, Mycroft, say it. You've already said "fuck", and Mummy's not here to be shocked."
Mycroft pursed his lips up into a prim, intractable line of British propriety. "I'd rather not."
"Yes, you would."
Mycroft had never said the dreaded really terrible swear word before, though plenty of the boys he'd bunked with at school had used it often – usually in its strictly anatomical sense, once their contraband MAD magazines had been replaced with what some politely called smut. He'd once written it on a desk because a boy named Christopher Barfield had paid him ten pounds to do it, but all the money in England wouldn't have convinced Mycroft to actually say it. After all, in an ill-judged moment of tween rebellion, he'd once said "fuck" in front of Mummy. She'd slapped him so hard his neck had clicked. The really terrible swear word would probably get him killed. The possibility of that outcome still bothered him, even though Mummy had been in her grave for twenty years.
"I am waiting," Sherlock said.
"He's a..." Mycroft hesitated, and then out it tumbled: the really terrible swear word.
Twenty minutes of silence followed; after goading him into something he felt genuinely ashamed of, even Sherlock knew better than to engage Mycroft in any further conversation. The next time he spoke was when his phone rang; he muttered politely for Mycroft to pass it to him, and Mycroft did so without any accompanying bitching about the dangers of distracted driving. Sherlock, glancing between the phone and the road, was able to note the caller ID before answering.
"John. News?"
"Yeah." John's voice sounded slightly warped, as if he were a long distance away; Sherlock glanced at the horizon, devoid of reception towers, and hoped they were driving out of and not into a drop zone. "Listen, I've been able to grab some records from the police databases, but I don't know how much use they're going to be. Doherty's daughter's name was Eliza Catherine, and I doubt she'd have changed it when she was adopted, 'cause she was eleven at the time."
"She probably changed her surname, however, especially if she was feeling ambivalent about her father. And either way, she could be married by now and have a totally unrelated surname."
"Yeah, I know it doesn't help much, but it's a start. She was put into foster care in January of 2003 and was placed for adoption in July of 2004."
"And who adopted her?"
"No idea in the world. I've just been on the phone to Norwich County Council, but they won't give me any information without a court order." There was a sort of blunted shuffling noise in the background of the call. "Or they might play nicely after a call from a particularly influential man named Holmes."
"Mycroft couldn't negotiate worth a damn right now, John." Sherlock disregarded the look of controlled outrage that passed over Mycroft's face. He held his hand out, as if to take up both the phone and the challenge; Sherlock took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at him and firmly shake his head.
"Yeah," John continued. "I didn't mean him, though."
Sherlock calmly ignored a second insistent 'give me the phone' gesture from Mycroft. "Fine," he said. "Text me the number and I'll be on it as soon as possible. What about the wife?"
"No record of suicide method that I can find... they don't stick things like that in the papers, and it wasn't a Yard issue. The autopsy wasn't done at Barts, but Molly's on it."
"Excellent..." Sherlock trailed off. "Is that Charlotte?" he demanded, addressing the gurgling in the background of John's call.
"Uh, yeah." John suddenly sounded distracted as the gurgling escalated into a thin sort of whining noise. "Just woke up, and probably wondering where she is."
"And where exactly is that?"
"Right now? Gregson's office. I've got to go, Sherlock. I'll keep in touch."
Sherlock's mouth twitched despite himself; he hung up the phone and put it back in the console without a further word.
"You idiot," Mycroft growled.
"Shut up."
"I'm going to call John back."
"Good for you. He won't play – he's already convinced you're not in a fit state to parley with a trio of kidnappers. Pass me my phone."
The phone had just bleeped out a text alert; sighing, Mycroft retrieved it and put it in Sherlock's hand. He curled his fingers around it, sliding his thumb across to reveal the new text. Eric Dolan had only been out of prison for a few hours, but he'd been as good as his word.
muchel frend reckons pauls missus burried eccles on sea. St johns church. will find out let u know dolan
A/N- Much thanks to Darkin520 and Ersatz Einstein for their beta help!
