John raised his coffee to his mouth in an automatic gesture and tried not to fall asleep in the time it took the lift to lower him two floors. Sherlock had texted early this morning about a case and John had agreed to stop off at the morgue before work, if for no other reason than to ensure his friend left St. Bart's with the same amount of "organs and soft tissue" as when he arrived. The lift chimed its arrival, and John took another gulp of coffee.
Greg was already in the morgue chatting animatedly with Molly, who must be teaching today. Her lab coat hung off the hook of a cooler, exposing a slim-fitting dress in deep navy, and her hair was twisted into a professional-looking knot instead of her usual girlish ponytail. Judging by the amount of torso visible above the exam table she was leaning on, she was wearing heels too. John pictured Sherlock's reaction to this vision and suddenly felt much more awake.
"Wow! Don't you look nice."
"Oh." Molly gave a nervous laugh and stood up straight, smoothing her dress over her hips. "Thanks. It's new. Well, new to me at least. I found it in this little shop in—"
Sherlock burst through the doors. "Good, you're all here. I have a very busy day—" He broke off when he spotted Molly, freezing in place like a deer in headlights.
"The East End," Molly said calmly, finishing her sentence to John but looking straight at Sherlock and bearing his scrutiny (which appeared very thorough) without comment.
"You're teaching today," he said at last.
"Yes."
"But you worked all night."
She shrugged. "It's my job."
They continued to stare at each other. Greg looked from Sherlock to Molly before saying, "If you could just show us the body…."
"Oh! Of course."
Molly grabbed a pair of gloves from the dispenser beside the sink and came round the exam table towards Sherlock. John could swear he saw Sherlock's nostrils flare as she passed much closer to him than usual … inhaling her scent? He fell into step behind her like a baby duck, and Greg turned to John with a "did you see that?" expression on his face. John just smiled and they followed the pair to the third table, where a body lay under a white sheet. Molly drew the sheet back, exposing the disfigured face of a middle-aged woman and the Y-incision that told she had been autopsied.
The poor woman was malnourished and obviously beaten. John clenched his jaw, recognizing the patterned bruising of both fists and shoes and the telling multi-color contusions of repeated abuse.
"Cause of death?" Greg asked, even as Sherlock pulled out his magnifying glass and began examining the body.
"Take your pick," Molly said. "I honestly can't tell if it was blunt force trauma to the skull—the left parietal bone, there—or hemothorax from a punctured lung secondary to rib fracture, here. The bleed most likely took some time, so the head trauma is probably the death blow, but both would have been fatal."
Molly made no effort to stay out of Sherlock's way as she normally did. Absorbed in his examination, he bumped into her. Startled, he looked up.
"Oh, ex-excuse me. I just need—" He gestured towards the lower half of the woman's body.
"Of course," Molly said politely. But she didn't move, and Sherlock stepped around her with exaggerated care.
"It was done with a boot," Molly continued as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, stretching the woman's skin so the outline and tread pattern were visible. "Men's size ten. The computer is still working on the tread pattern."
"It will be a workman's boot, such as those worn in construction," Sherlock said, not looking up from—
John realized he didn't know the woman's name. "Jane Doe?"
Greg nodded. "She was found down by the docks yesterday. Laid out with the rubbish."
"Unbelievable," John muttered.
"Her assailant is someone she knows intimately, a husband or lover." Sherlock snapped his magnifying glass closed and tucked it in his pocket with characteristic precision. "One hundred seventy-seven point … eight centimeters, about thirteen stone, a construction worker, probably a welder. They lived by the water, though not in any structure you or I would consider housing. She was a seamstress, not a very good one—"
"Sherlock!" Molly protested.
"Look at her hands." Sherlock grabbed one of them and turned it over.
"Donovan is right," Greg said in an undertone, watching as Molly and Sherlock bickered over the woman's extremities. "I must need glasses, because if I didn't know better, I'd say there was something going on between those two."
"Well, you didn't hear it from me," John said, knowing the disclaimer was its own admission.
Greg's face was priceless. "Sherlock and—I mean, Sherlock?"
John tilted his head towards the couple. "Look again. What does he remind you of?"
"A bloody computer on two legs?"
"Come on, Detective Inspector," John chided. "Detect. Inspect. Forget that it's Sherlock and just observe. What do you see?"
"You've been hanging around him too long, you have," Greg complained, but he did as instructed. "Molly's awfully stiff," he said after a moment. "It's not the dress or the heels making her uncomfortable because she was perfectly relaxed with me. Obviously it's not the dead body, so it must be Sherlock. That's new. She hasn't been flustered around him in a long time, but she's never been—"
"Cold?" John suggested, eager for Greg to see what he did: Mr. The-Mind-Is-Everything, showing off for a woman for ordinary bodily reasons.
"I was going to say 'distant,' but cold works," Greg agreed, taking in Molly's crossed arms and flat stare as Sherlock pointed out something on the woman's toenails. "That's Sherlock's speciality, but he's anything but today. He's practically bouncing around her, like an overeager—" His expression changed to wonderment as the penny dropped. "Bloody hell. They've got together, haven't they? He did something to piss her off, and now he's trying to impress her, trying to get back in her good books."
"Pretty much."
"And it's not working. He's being clever and smiling at her and everything, and it's not working."
"I did tell him to grovel," John said, wanting to be clear that his friend's failure was not due to lack of proper coaching. "Two weeks ago. He thought it a ridiculous idea."
Greg snorted. "He would. God, it's good to see her standing up to him," he said, watching Molly as she was the one talking now, moving the woman's arm across her stomach to turn her onto her side, pointing out a scar on her lower back. "He's an absolute arse to women and they fall all over him anyway. It's infuriating."
"We are talking about the woman who dumped James Moriarty," John reminded him.
Greg looked at him. "That's right. She did."
John couldn't help thinking there might be more than admiration in Greg's sigh.
"You do know she's in love with him, right?" John said. "I mean, properly, genuinely in love? Molly won't admit it, but Mary's confident that's why she broke her engagement."
" 'Course," Greg blustered, straightening up and busying himself with his phone. "I also know he's not half good enough for her."
"Mmm," John said. "That might be a problem."
"How do you mean?"
"Sherlock is trying with Molly because he wants to be able to work with her, he wants access to the morgue and the lab. But I think he won't really give it a go precisely because he thinks she's too good for him."
"And when he doesn't pursue her, she's going to think she's not good enough for him. Bugger."
"I need to see the crime scene," Sherlock announced, walking away from Molly. "Molly can tell you my observations."
"Molly can tell you her observations because she's the one who did the postmortem," she retorted. "I'm not your assistant, Sherlock." She ripped off her gloves.
Sherlock spun towards her at the sound, watching closely even after Molly flung the gloves in the bin. John remembered she had done just that, removed a pair of latex gloves, right before she slapped Sherlock. Apparently it had made an impression, despite the drugs.
Molly reached for the hand sanitizer and rubbed her hands together briskly, then shrugged into her lab coat. "I emailed you my report as soon as you made the request, Greg. If you will excuse me, I'm needed above ground." She disappeared into her office, reappeared with her coat and a leather handbag, and marched out of the morgue.
The three men listened to the sharp cadence of heels on linoleum fade away, then John turned to Sherlock.
"Would it have killed you to tell her she looked nice today?"
"I have no doubt you and Gary covered that quite thoroughly before I arrived." Sherlock took his own palmful of alcohol foam, but not before sending a dirty look in Greg's direction.
"But you're the one who needs to apologize," John reminded him, wanting to keep Sherlock's attention off Greg's opinion of the petite pathologist.
"I was here for a case."
John rolled his eyes. "Multi-task, Sherlock. I've seen you charm women out of their flats, their cars, their bloody shoes! Yet you won't pay Molly one simple compliment. And what was that bit about her telling us your observations? She's a pathologist, one of the best in London! You can't just dismiss her like that."
"Just because you're not getting any sex is no reason to take it out on the rest of us," Sherlock said haughtily, adjusting his scarf. "How old is Josephine now, five weeks? Less than seven days to go, Doctor."
John ground his teeth together and reminded himself this sod was his best mate. "I'm going to work. You're on your own."
