When Molly Hooper received the mutilated corpse, she was warned to brace herself for a bit of a shock, but that did little to diminish her gasp on seeing it. However, she held her composure admirably; when the officers had left the room, she began to examine it as if it was a perfectly ordinary cadaver, like the ones she saw every day. Her eyes were ever drawn to that face, however, and it was after quite a while of unsuccessfully trying to concentrate on the other features that she sighed, halted and studied the face in closer detail.

Nobody had told her much of the story behind this corpse, for no reasons other than she didn't need to know most of it. She also found that knowing little allowed her to view corpses from an unbiased stance. However, she knew that this one was an unusual case.

It was only when she turned over the arm that she saw the name Merlin that had been burnt into the skin. At once, she remembered Sherlock's strange flatmate. The young man who had tried to convince her of the existence of magic. The young man who, doubtless through coincidence, shared a name with a great wizard of myth.

She smiled a little, and wondered what he had to do with this case. Curiosity overtook her for a moment, but, professional as she was, she abandoned her thoughts and returned to her study of the corpse.

She would perhaps have called the extra skin around the face a genetic mutation of some sort, an unfortunate, but perfectly natural, growth. She had however been informed that it was no such thing. She pinched the skin between her fingers, ran numerous simple tests on it – it was human skin. Rather discoloured, she had to admit. And it felt very new.

Very rapidly, she determined the cause of death as suffocation. The skin had grown so thickly over the poor man's nose and mouth that he would not have stood a chance – his death would have been very quick, which she supposed could only have been a comfort. She wondered if she was supposed to explain the growth, which of course she couldn't. She furrowed her brow, straightened, and decided to go and make a cup of tea.

John Watson was in the kitchen when she arrived. Of course he was. John's tea breaks always seemed to be at the same time as Molly's, which she chalked up to coincidence, but she couldn't be sure. Anyway, he was friendly, and she had got to know him quite well since he arrived a few weeks ago, so she enjoyed their little chats by the kettle before they disappeared off into entirely different departments.

Today, however, the kitchen was occupied by a third man, who was standing slightly to one side, holding a mug precariously in one hand, and typing on his phone with the thumb of the other. He was dressed somewhat scruffily, but wore a lanyard proclaiming that he worked for the hospital. Molly hadn't seen him before, so she greeted him in a friendly sort of manner.

He looked up, smiled lopsidedly, murmured a return greeting and went back to his phone.

'Who's that?' she mouthed to John Watson.

John shrugged. 'New guy. Don't know him.'

Molly shrugged in return and poured herself a cup of tea. She and John chatted briefly about mundane things – the weather mostly, they were British, after all – and then John apologised and said he really should get back to work.

Molly nodded, and took his mug; she rinsed both mugs off, then left them in the sink. She was about to leave the room herself when the other man strode past her. He brushed against her and she recoiled a little; he had left the room before she noticed that he had slipped a piece of paper into the pocket of her lab coat.

She unfurled this piece of paper, and was surprised to see that it had on it the name Jim followed by a number. A light blush rose into her cheeks. The man hadn't been all that bad looking, she immediately found herself thinking. Automatically, she looked towards the door through which he had just left. A small smile spread across her face, and when she returned to the morgue, it was with something of a spring in her step.