Many thanks to all readers/reviewers/favouriters/followers – I am insanely flattered. That's not to say I wouldn't appreciate some more of it, though…

9.

"Thanks so much Molly," Sherlock says, his baritone warm and almost sincere, pecking her on the cheek.

John inwardly groans, watching as her face lights up and the cheek where he kissed her warms to a rosy pink. She presses her lips together and tries not to look too flustered, furiously avoiding eye contact.

Molly follows Sherlock down to the morgue, John trailing behind the pair of them. He watches how the shorter figure scurries to catch up with the taller, sees how she tries to fall into step with him casually, hears how her voice hitches slightly every time the detective addresses her… despite her best efforts to prevent it.

His heart goes out to the poor girl, because frankly Sherlock had that effect on people and was oblivious to it except when it directly benefitted him. It was a daily revelation to John that Sherlock could tolerate his being alive, and the fact that he actually valued John's opinion was nothing short of bloody miracle. And, he wasn't in love with him like poor Molly Hooper.

Well, maybe a little bit. But not in that way.

That said, it was also a daily revelation to John that he could tolerate Sherlock being alive– at least there was some common ground, then.

Molly wheels the body out for them, despite it being gone two in the morning, and John backs against the wall with her, content this time to watch Sherlock from a distance.

He's calmed down in the cab on the way here, remembered that he shared a flat with a sociopathic idiot, and with a small stab of guilt has accepted that Sherlock never cares about the victims, it's just how he works. However, John doesn't think he can take any more malicious comments, unintentional or otherwise, about Mary and her daughter (called Felicity, apparently), so thinks it safer to hang back with Molly, at a safe distance from the detective's muttering.

"You don't have to do this," he says, looking at the mortician, and then back at Sherlock, and then at her again.

He watches her watch him for a bit.

"I know," she says. She looks tired, and the happy flush that had risen up into her cheeks has long disappeared. "I just – "

She shrugs. They both look back at Sherlock, who's holding a sample of something up to the light.

"I'll be upstairs," he announces curtly, suddenly jerking from his examination and sweeping past them in a whirl of blue coat tails.

The two he leaves behind stare after him sporting identical expressions of surprise. They turn, spot the expression on the other's face, and grin at each other, before following the detective at a rather more sedate pace.


"I was right," Sherlock crows, the moment they walk through the door. His eyes don't move from the lens of the microscope, one hand adjusting the focus on the side. John walks to his side straight away; Molly loiters a bit further off.

"Right about what?"

"This isn't straightforward – "

"Wonderful."

" – it's a long chain of events, to make it as hard as possibly to trace the deaths back to the perpetrator: the poison in the rats is what has caused the death of the animals and of Mary's daughter…there's clear traces in all the victims…as well as tiny fragments of snake skin in the mouth. Remember what I said about the cobras?"

John blinks.

"You say all the victims…sorry, being a bit obtuse here…surely you've only looked at Felicity?"

Sherlock finally drags his attention from his microscope to glare at John.

"What do you suppose I've been doing for a month?" he asks, voice appalled. "I do not spend a whole month trying to join a women's group when there's fun stuff going on!"

"Right."

"All the women with dead animals – and now child – have bought king cobras from Anenome Sky Pets…and rats to feed them. Those snakes have then mysteriously become ill and died…and by sheer coincidence come into contact with other animals in the house after death…who have similarly mysteriously become ill and died – "

"Bit too much 'mystery'?" John asks, grinning.

"Exactly. Very elaborate measures to go to, to just maliciously destroy valuable animals."

"How does that get our WI members killed?"

"Well Mary committed suicide when she accidentally killed her daughter, John."

"So it's them?"

"Precisely."

"And somebody's not happy with them doing that? Husbands maybe? Revenge?"

"Maybe," Sherlock repeats, his voice breathless. He eyes meet John's, glowing, and a wide infectious grin spreads across his face. "I don't know."

With that, he leaps from his chair and bounds from the room, seizing John's hand as he passes.

They're on the floor below before the door slams shut, leaving Molly Hooper looking steamrollered and more than a little unstable.