Sherlock & The Copper Beeches

by Soledad

Summary: a modern retelling of the classic ACD story, with a twist. Set in the same 'verse as "Sherlock & the Illustrious Client". Time: between "The Great Game" and "A Scandal in Belgravia."

A few lines are borrowed from the original ACD story; those are in italics. The Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester truly exists.

My heartfelt thanks to the most generous englishtutor for the beta reading and to my dear friend, Linda Hoyland, for the Brit-picking. All remaining mistakes are mine. I'm too stubborn for my own good sometimes.

Chapter 11 – The Empty Room

As Miss Hunter had told them, Jeff Rucastle and his beautiful editor did indeed leave Otterbourne on the next day around noon for London. John watched them board the coach to Winchester from the window of their room, which happened to look over the street and provided him with a convenient view at the bus stop.

"They're gone," he told Sherlock, who was lounging across the sofa apathetically, with his feet propped on the back while his head was hanging over the armrest.

"Hmmm…" the great detective murmured noncommittally.

"Now all we need to know is when Toller leaves the house," John continued.

"Obviously," Sherlock replied in a tone of utter boredom.

"So, what do we do next?" John asked. "Shouldn't we, I dunno, watch the house or whatnot?"

"Stake-outs are dull," Sherlock declared.

"But necessary," John pointed out.

"It still doesn't mean we have to do it," Sherlock said. "Don't get all excited, John, it's been taken care of."

John gave him an amused look. "What, have you taken your homeless network with you?"

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Of course not, John, don't be ridiculous! But even in such a small village, there are always people who're willing to provide small services… for the right price."

"Let me guess," John sighed. "Alcoholics or junkies?"

"Bored kids, actually," Sherlock replied. "They were eager to play detective… especially as they're getting paid for it."

"When did you find the time to talk to any kids?" John asked, bewildered. "And how come I didn't notice it?"

Sherlock raised an imperious eyebrow. "As I've repeatedly told you: you see but…"

"… but I don't observe, yes, I know," John interrupted. "So, when did you hire the kids to spy on the house for you?"

"While you had your big, happy reunion with the charming Mr Rucastle," Sherlock answered with a long-suffering sigh. "Now, stop being a pest and rest for a bit – you'll need your strength tonight. We'll get a call as soon as Toller leaves the house."

The phone call didn't come until 7 o'clock. By then, Sherlock was prowling around in their room like a wounded tiger, snapping in the most irritable – not to mention rude – manner whenever John tried to start a conversation.

After a while the good doctor gave up the effort and immersed himself in the presentation copy of Jeff Rucastle's book instead, which he'd been given on the previous evening.

With a dedication. He never received a book with a dedication before. Especially not from someone he respected. And he did respect Jeff Rucastle for his work, regardless what the man might have done in his private life.

Finally, shortly after 7 pm, Sherlock's phone rang and he was told that Toller had arrived in The Otter, where he was drinking heavily, while flirting with the dumb blonde barmaid like there was no tomorrow.

"Excellent!" Sherlock exclaimed,a lready reaching for his coat. "Come on, John! The game's afoot."

"God, I hope not," John muttered, the word game rousing unpleasant reminiscences of Moriarty and his cat-and-mouse tug of war with Sherlock that caused the deaths of innocents. Including that of a blind old woman. But he jogged after Sherlock dutifully – well, as much as his still aching leg allowed.

Neither of them noticed Sergeant Liu following them like a shadow.

Unlike during the previous occasions, this time Sherlock didn't call a taxi. This was an investigation, after all, and he wanted to leave as little evidence as possible. So they walked all the way to The Copper Beeches, much to John's chagrin, whose bad leg started to act up seriously.

As a rule, he had no objections against a little physical activity; he had even teased Sherlock for his laziness on the previous evening. But there was walking and there was trying to keep up with Sherlock who dashed forward on his long legs, with little to no regard for the fact that John wasn't in top form right now. Hadn't been since the incident of the pool, in fact. He could walk with moderate speed well enough, but running was a different matter entirely.

So yeah, a taxi would have been mightily welcome. Hell, he'd even have welcomed one of Mycroft's pretentious black cars. But life rarely gives one what one wishes for, and so John dutifully hobbled after Sherlock, wincing every time his sprained arm got jarred. Sherlock, of course, didn't even take notice of his discomfort; not that he'd expect it from the madman, but just this once it would have been nice.

They reached The Copper Beeches shortly after half past seven. The group of trees with their dark leaves shining like burnished metal in the light of the setting sun were sufficient to mark the house, even had they not been there before. Miss Hunter was standing on the doorstep, wringing her hands anxiously.

"Thank God you're here," she said, relieved. "I was afraid you wouldn't be able to make it."

"Where there's a will, there is a way," John muttered darkly.

He was sweaty and red-faced due to the effort to keep up with the long-legged detective, his leg hurt and his arm felt like one big bruise. He hoped that military training would still make his hand steady enough, should he need to use his gun, but these weren't ideal circumstances.

Sherlock ignored them both, of course, focusing single-mindedly on the task at his hands.

"Where's Mrs Toller?" he asked.

"She's gone to bed already," Miss Hunter replied. "Her husband left for The Otter, where he has that little tramp of a girlfriend younger than his daughter. Mr Rucastle and Miss Toller have gone to London as planned."

"We know," John said, still breathing heavily. "I saw them get on the bus. What about the dog, though?"

"Still in the kennel," Miss Hunter assured them. "Toller is the only one who can let it out without endangering himself, and he never does so when he's out of the house."

"How long does he usually stay in The Otter?" Sherlock asked.

"Until midnight. Mr Rucastle insists that the dog be let out at one am, at the very latest."

"We have about four hours then; probably even less," Sherlock said. "That should be more than enough. Now, lead the way, and we shall soon see the end of this sorry affair."

It turned out that Miss Hunter had managed to lift Mrs Toller's keys – quite a feat, under the eagle eyes of the formidable housekeeper – and so they could go in at once. They passed up the stair, where she unlocked the door, and they followed her down a passage, which turned at a right angle at the farther end.

Around this corner were three doors in a line, the first and the third of which were open. They each led into an empty room, dusty and cheerless, with two windows in the one and one in the other, so thickly covered with dirt that the evening light barely shimmered through them.

The middle door was closed, and across the outside of it had been fastened one of the broad bars of an iron bed, padlocked at one end to a ring in the wall, and fastened at the other end with stout cord. The door itself was locked as well, and the key was not there.

"This barricaded door corresponds with the shuttered window outside," Miss Hunter explained.

"I can see by the glimmer beneath it that the room is not completely dark, though," Sherlock said. "Evidently, there is a skylight that lets in light from above."

"There's some sort of lantern in the front yard, right above the window," John commented.

Sherlock gave him a quelling look. "Thank you, John for stating the obvious as always. I wonder what I would do without your stunning observation skills."

Miss Hunter looked from one to the other in disapproval.

"I don't know about you, sweetheart," she said to John, "but if he treated me like that, I'd have broken his nose a long time ago."

John grinned at her. "And give him the satisfaction of having successfully provoked me? I don't think so."

She shrugged. "It's your funeral, honey, though I don't understand why you would play the doormat for him," she dangled the keys before their nose. "Shall we give the door a try?"

Sherlock snatched the keys from her without a word. He cut the cord with the Jack-knife he always kept in one of his coat pockets, and removed the transverse bar. Then he tried the various keys in the lock, but without success. No sound came from within, and at the silence Sherlock's face became very grim.

"I don't like it," he said. "If there were anyone held captive at all, they may be gone now."

"Or worse: dead," John added.

Sherlock nodded. "We need to check in either case. C'mon, John, help me break down the door!"

John made no attempt to do so.

"Hello: dislocated shoulder, remember?" he said instead. "Sprained arm, too."

"But that was weeks ago," Sherlock protested in honest confusion.

John gave him a tolerant smile. "Old and battered ex-soldiers need longer to heal than you, Sherlock. I'm in no shape to break down the door, sorry."

"But I am," Miss Hunter offered; seeing their surprise she made an annoyed face. "Oh, for God's sake, I'm not some fragile Victorian lady; and I'm a head taller than him and not half as skinny as you are," she glared at Sherlock. "What are we waiting for?"

After a moment of consideration Sherlock shrugged and they put their shoulders to work. The old, rickety door gave at once before their combined strength. Together they rushed into the room.

It was empty. There was no furniture save a comfortable sofa – the sort that could be pulled out to turn it into a bed – a chest of drawers and a fireplace. The skylight above was open and the prisoner gone… if there had been one in the first place.

"No, I don't think so," Sherlock said. "Not for a long time. Look at the fireplace: not only is it cold, it's also empty, swept clean. There hasn't been a fire made recently."

Miss Hunter didn't really listen to him. She was searching the chest of drawers instead.

"There are clothes here, lots of them," she reported. "Expensive lingerie as was in fashion ten, fifteen years ago. And some jewellery; seems old but isn't very tasteful."

"Neither is it fake, though," Sherlock took the gold necklace with the oval-shaped medal from her and examined it thoroughly through his magnifying lens. "It is eighteen-carat gold, according to the jeweller's mark, and the diamonds are clear and unblemished."

He tested one of the small stones on the window plane; it cut the glass effortlessly. Then he turned the locket around and discovered the tiny initials MM engraved in the back in decorative copperplate letters.

"Look at this!"

"Melissa Moretti?" John guessed. "Could it have been hers?"

"Obviously," Sherlock replied. "Her photographs that Miss Hunter found were clearly placed in the chest of drawer in her room by mistake. I assume the two chests are identical," he looked at Miss Hunter.

She nodded. "My guess is that this chest here used to be part of the furniture in what is my room now. It seems to be the same style. Does this mean that my room used to be the room of that Moretti woman?"

"Perhaps," Sherlock shrugged. "I can't tell, not without a thorough investigation. But even if it had been, she was clearly moved here eventually."

"Yeah, but where is she now?" John asked. "Cause she isn't here; and as you've pointed out yourself, she hasn't been her for a while."

"She might have fled," Miss Hunter suggested. "Through the skylight, and down a long ladder on the other side."

"Possibly but unlikely," Sherlock said. "That would have had to happen months, even years ago, based on the state of this room. In that case she wouldn't be considered missing by the Chicago Police, though, and Mr Fowler wouldn't be sniffing around the house, watching you."

"She must be dead, then," John said grimly, and Sherlock nodded.

"That's the most logical conclusion, yes; which raises several other questions. How did she die? And where's the body?"

"There are dozens of possible answers to the second question," John said. "The Copper Beeches is surrounded by woods; nobody would be seen digging a grave there. She could be anywhere."

Sherlock nodded again. "I'm afraid that's quite right, John, I'm sorry. I know you're a great admirer of Jeff Rucastle's work and rightly so. His work is excellent. His character, on the other hand…"

"I can't imagine him killing that woman," John said stubbornly.

Sherlock shrugged. "Perhaps he didn't kill her, not with his own hands. But if she couldn't bear being caged like an animal and took her own life he's still responsible for her death."

"They must have loved each other once, though," Miss Hunter said. "Look at this!"

She pushed the sides of the diamond-studded gold pendant together and it opened, revealing it to be a locket. Inside there were two small pictures: one of the mysterious Melissa Moretti and one of a much younger, carefree and even more handsome Jeff Rucastle.

"One of them might be infatuated," Sherlock allowed. "Unless she thought to buy her freedom by marrying a very unsuitable man and letting him take all her money, in exchange for escaping her family."

"And walked straight into another prison," John looked around in dismay. "If she truly committed suicide, I can understand her. I wouldn't want to live out my life in a place like this, either… though I almost did," he added in a low voice that only Sherlock could hear. "That bed-sit of mine… it wasn't much better than this."

"See? You're better off with me at Baker Street," Sherlock replied; then he looked around in the empty room one last time. "Well, I don't think we can find here any evidence. This room can't tell us anything. Let's hope that somebody in the house can."

"Perhaps Mrs Toller will, now that we can catch her alone," Miss Hunter suggested. "She seems the most burdened of all inhabitants of The Copper Beeches."

"We'll let John flirt with her," Sherlock declared, as they left the room and went down the stairs. "No middle-aged woman can resist the infamous Watson charm."

John was about to answer with something decidedly unfriendly when their banter was interrupted by the baying of a hound, and then a scream of agony, with a horrible worrying sound which was dreadful to listen to. In the next moment, there were repeated gunshots, and then Mrs Toller came running, a dressing gown haphazardly pulled over her nightgown.

"My God!" she cried. "Somebody has loosed the dog! It's not been fed for two days! Quick, quick, or it will be too late!"

John and Sherlock rushed out and rounded the side of the house, with Miss Hunter, who was clearly not easily frightened, hot on their heels. The sight that offered itself to them was not for the faint of heart.

There was the enigmatic Mr Fowler, writhing and screaming on the ground, the black muzzle of a mastiff of the size of the pony buried in his shoulder. The dog, too, was bleeding from several deep wounds in his flank, apparently caused by the service gun of Sergeant Liu, who had tried to keep the hungry beast from the injured man.

She clearly wasn't a crack shot, though, since she had missed the head of the dog – or any vital organs – repeatedly, only managing to make it all the madder with pain.

Running up to them, his leg pain forgotten and his hand steady as a rock, John blew the brains of the mastiff out with one well-aimed shot. It fell over, with its keen white teeth still firmly lodged in Fowler's shoulder.

"Help me," John said to Sherlock. "We must separate them and carry him into the house. I must do something to stop the bleeding. Miss Hunter, call the ambulance; the man needs a tetanus shot against blood poisoning, and I don't carry such things on me usually."

Miss Hunter controlled her visibly rising panic and ran back into the house, where she could use the landline in Mr Rucastle's office. John, with Sherlock's help – and with much effort – forced the jaws of the hound open and freed Mr Fowler. Then they carried the heavily bleeding man into the house, laid him onto the drawing-room sofa and John did what he could, using the meagre contents of Mrs Toller's first-aid kit to stop him from bleeding out completely.

After having washed the wound with a salt water solution to irrigate as much dirt and bacteria as possible, he tried to stop the bleeding – with moderate success. Towels and the one clean bed-sheet Mrs Toller could find in a great hurry were no suitable ersatz for proper bandages.

"I just hope the paramedics will hurry up," he muttered. "The dog's teeth have nicked an artery; my provisional pressure bandage won't stem the bleeding for too long, and I'm running out of sterile gauze pads very quickly."

Fortunately, the paramedics arrived in record time and took the still living but horribly mangled man to the A&E of the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester.

"Will he live?" Sherlock asked.

John shrugged. "Perhaps. If he doesn't bleed out on his way to the hospital, and if he can avoid blood poisoning later, then yeah, he does have a reasonably good chance. But even if he survives, his shoulder will never be the same. I'm fairly sure there'll be some serious tendon and nerve damage, apart from the splintered bones."

"He'll learn to live with it," Sherlock said dismissively. "You have."

"'Cause I met you," John replied. "But believe me, even so, it's not a delight to have barely any feeling in my left shoulder… and sometimes even in my left arm. Why, do you think, I keep clenching and unclenching my hand all the time?"

"Sherlock frowned. "I thought that was a nervous habit."

"It is… now," John admitted. "But it started out with the urge to check if I can still feel my fingers at all."

"I…" Sherlock looked away uncomfortably. "I never realised that."

"Why should you?" John asked with a tolerant smile. "I was never relevant for the Work; why should it have shown up on your radar?" he turned to Liu. "I'd be more interested in the reason why you are here, Sergeant."

"Orders," she replied simply. "Detective Inspector Gregson wanted me to shadow you, in case you'd need somebody to get you out of the clutches of the local police."

"And how were you to do that?" Sherlock asked arrogantly.

"By arresting you," Liu told him bluntly. "The Detective Inspector suspected that you'd try to break into the house or something equally stupid, and he thought you'd be better off in our custody than in theirs."

John laughed. "He does have a point, you must admit, Sherlock."

"But you didn't break in!" Miss Hunter protested. "I've let you in voluntarily. With the keys."

"Which you've lifted from Mrs Toller without asking," John reminded her. "But let's not discuss such minor details," he turned back to Liu. "So, you followed us, I presume…"

Liu nodded.

"But how comes Mr Fowler into the picture?"

"I can only assume that he, in turn, followed me," Liu said thoughtfully. "He must have the constitution of an elephant… on an unusually high resistance to drugs. He had four double whiskeys within half an hour; that, combined with the sedative that I slipped into his first drink, should have knocked him out till the morning," she allowed herself a thin, cold smile. "He was not happy about my interference."

"Did he let the hound loose on you?" John asked, understanding dawning.

Liu nodded again. "I must admit I was scared shitless. But for some reason the beast turned around and attacked him, instead of me. I don't understand why."

"Simple," Sherlock said. "The dog was obviously meant to keep Fowler from entering the house… or somebody like him. It was most likely trained to attack a certain type of man; or perhaps certain individuals, with the help of conserved scent samples."

"That can be the case," Liu allowed. "Oh, and by the way, I have reason to believe that Mr Fowler's real name is Julian Luna."

Sherlock raised his head like a hunting dog that had caught a scent. "What's your reason to believe so?"

"Would a passport and a driver's licence suffice?" Liu asked.

"Do you have them?" Sherlock demanded eagerly.

"I've got photographs," she corrected. "Sent them to Detective Inspector Gregson at once; but you can see the copies later."

"Why not now?" John asked, a bit disappointed.

"Cause I think we should talk to Mrs Toller first," Liu said. "She can probably tell us a great deal – if we manage to persuade her to speak, that is. And we shouldn't let her alert Mr Rucastle, I think, or he might pull the chameleon act on us again."

~TBC~