Author's Note: For those who have wondered, Sherlock and John are on different timelines - Sherlock's longer, stretching over the year or more since his death, John's far shorter, covering a few days in late spring. Thanks for the feedback on this - I learn as I go, and this time, I have learned to be explicit on timelines or really confuse people. So Sherlock is watching John's blog in early spring and as yet there has been nothing from John. Hope it makes sense.
Hope you like the story too!
-Sef
Hard Rain 12: Sherlock, March
A medium sized town on the Welsh borders houses a charitable clinic for the destitute. It is a walk in centre where food, medicines, counselling and job seeking advice are offered, free and anonymously, for those unable to access regular services. It is an admirable aim, slightly marred by my theory that they are using their walk in clients as human guinea pigs for the gene therapy which has been tried on the rabbits.
A classic idea, simple and effective. It relies on poor record keeping and worse auditing to remain undiscovered. Backed up, no doubt, by liberal bribes to avoid the kind of questions I am asking now.
Questions such as, why does a charity clinic have biosamples delivered to the back door? Who are all the sober faced people who work upstairs in the brightly lit, high security so called Admin department?
Another good one: why do so many of their clients die? I followed one back to the underpass where he stays and got talking to him and his friends. There has been a flurry of sudden deaths in the homeless community, which in a beautiful irony, has been sending the clients back to the clinic.
He wasn't even ill, I hear more than once.
I research the organisation behind the charity and find layer after layer of fronts, companies owning companies and beneath it all, a holdings group with seemingly limited links back to this clinic -but they are there all the same, those links, because I have found them and documented them - a parent organisation called Echo, or properly, EHCo.
It takes more time to find the unabbreviated name, and when I do, sitting in the Land Rover parked close to this evening's laughably insecure WiFi signal, I stop dead and the hand holding my phone falls to my side.
It is a name I know. An unsolved case from ten years ago and an unpleasant man I couldn't catch. He enjoyed human trafficking, and I'm sure would love this new project for its element of human misery. He also found it amusing that I could not, ultimately, prove his involvement with the illegal movement of people in and out of Britain and Europe.
He is also a good fit for someone to fill the arch-criminal void left by Moriarty.
His organisation was small back then, but it looks like he has gone places since I last encountered him. He's kept the street name of his firm, though. Perhaps he is a traditionalist at heart.
The alias of this man is Crash, and the name of his company is Empty Hands.
I pace the streets, anonymous, trying to think. Now that I am out of the wild I cannot concentrate. This never bothered me in London. But here, in a town with a pedestrianised High Street and a dreary retail park as its two principal features, I cannot think. Collecting evidence, arranging it, hiding it in my secret places for later retrieval... it seems not like my work, but just a job. Almost a chore. These urban streets are exhausting.
Perhaps I need the wilderness.
...It is not gene therapy. Not for curing anything. For killing? But there are far cheaper ways to achieve this. I could give them a list off the top of my head. Best not, it would be typical of current policing standards to arrest me and not the Hands.
Gene alterations... the stuff of science fiction. Mutants walk the earth, et cetera. The main things I know are that it is being done secretly, and by a man in a sordid relationship with his species. A criminal.
Is it ... DNA disguise? Is it possible to change a person's DNA so that it cannot be recognised?
Interesting idea. My mind fills with possibilities, chief among which is this thought: what would someone like Moriarty do with that power?
Sell it. Sell it to any criminal network able to afford it. Jim, can you fix it for me to disappear?
But it goes wrong. Is not perfect. The rabbits die, people have died. Isn't cancer when DNA has become corrupted? John would know.
DNA in disguise. Carte blanche to commit any crime, and the police databases are useless.
Now that is an interesting idea. But now I am hungry.
I eat.
In the unpleasantly generic chain pub in the High Street - new horse brasses, gas fire in pretend inglenook, prints of could-be-anywhere in olden times - I order a mixed grill and fall upon it like the Cro-Magnons I evolved from. Though this is probably unfair on the Cro-Magnons, as they were unhindered by social niceties and I am tearing apart the steak with utter impatience and an inadequate fork.
The facts indicate that we should all be vegetarian. It will give the planet, us, a few more years.
But this lamb chop is calling to me and I pick it up in my fingers and bite in. I despise niceties. I am a stranger here and I am in forgettable jeans and a T shirt and I am so hungry.
I never used to need to eat. When I am me I can run for days without needing fuel. But I am not me, I must constantly interrupt my work in order to maintain myself, to get food, eat food, wash, wear clothes. I am aware that I used to let John bear the burden of maintaining me so that I could think. He did it without complaint even though is so tedious and time consuming and I-am-starving.
I am also, I notice, attracting some attention.
She is blonde, mid forties, self assured. Her clothes are inexpensive and I assume fashionable, but nicely chosen to complement her age rather than to try to disguise it. She has an engagement ring, which she removed and put into her purse before she knew I had seen her watching me.
She waits until I am wiping my chin with the paper napkin before coming to sit opposite me. She arranges herself on the chair so as to draw my attention to her generous hips and bosom.
"You on your own?" she asks without preamble.
"Clearly," I reply. My hunger damped down for the moment, I need to consider the purpose of the DNA transformation. If it is not to disguise DNA, stupid idea, that would almost certainly kill anyone on whom it was tried, then what is it for?
"Do you want to be?" she asks.
"Yes," I say shortly, although my body is saying No. Ah. It is one of those days. More maintenance.
"If you fancy a dance later there's a club over the Rose and Crown. It doesn't look much but it plays great music."
As if music is the thing she is offering me.
I make a mouth-only smile. "I don't dance."
"What, you can't dance?"
Never say Can't, to me. "I can dance. I don't."
"You should."
The sound of Blondie's Atomic fills the crowded, sweaty room above the bar at the Rose and Crown: instant memory of one of Mycroft's so called friends being very pleased with having a Sony Walkman to listen to it on.
She is looking at me. "You're here now. Are we going to or what?"
I don't go to clubs, don't dance.
But I must remember: I am not me. Not me could easily have fun, dance around, zone out and let the brain do its work on a different level. And it would all be more plausible if I did.
It could be like meditation, like the walking meditation practised by some Zen followers, where repetitive motion frees the brain from thought and allows the mind simply to be. I don't believe my mind is capable of such utter absence of action, but I could take things down a notch or two and let the ideas settle. All is proceeding as fast as it can. I have time.
And when I tune in to my body I notice, with a flash back to my college years, that I am feeling rather... predatory ... tonight.
She is waiting for me to respond.
I raise my arms, bring my wrists close together above my head, keeping eye contact with her, and move my hips to the rhythm.
I say, "Come on then," in open challenge.
I can dance.
Later, in the back of the Land Rover, neither of us calling out the right name, I think, DNA, transported. It means something. And then I forget again.