Richard Charles Moriarty was the third born child of Maria and Peter Moriarty. Deceased 16th of June. Survived by mother Maria, sister Sarah and twin brother James.
There is was, in black ink before him, the obituary of Richard Moriarty. Printed in at least four newspapers. The date of the fall was the date if death. Survived by twin brother James.
Sherlock pulled his laptop closer to him and remotely logged into Mycroft's files. Honestly, if Mycroft didn't want him to access the files, he should really change the password. The search bar of all of the commonwealth's records system flashed before him, and he typed in Richard's name. A tiny window opened, telling him that due to the multiple files related to the Moriarty case, it would take a minute or so. Sherlock sighed, patience was never his strong point.
When the download was finished, he double clicked on the first available link. The first result was a birth certificate. Confirmation that the men in question were in fact twins. The next official document related to Richard Moriarty was a marriage certificate. Richard Moriarty had a wife. Corrine Moriarty nee Myers. Deceased, if the accompanying death certificate was to be believed.
Sherlock dug deeper. Richard, preferred name Rich, was a lawyer. Quite a high powered criminal one who suddenly and without warning stopped working three and a half years ago. He had told his work colleagues that it was to get over Corrine, but that was a month before Jim's introduction to Sherlock's world.
Sherlock collapsed back into his sofa chair, taking on his patented thinking pose. A criminal lawyer turned possible criminal? It was almost poetic.
But Sherlock didn't have any proof that Richard was actually a criminal. All he had was Moriarty's word that Rich was the ideas behind the gunshot on top of Bart's. Had he volunteered? Or had he been coerced by his very persuasive brother.
That was, of course, if you were to believe that Jim and Richard hadn't been working together as partners from the very beginning. Was it possible? There had been many times when Moriarty's knowledge of a situation made it seem like he was in two places at once. How many times had he thought he was facing Jim when in fact he had been talking to Rich? Had they even worked that way. Was one the brains and the other the brawn? We're they really as interchangeable as Sherlock was thinking?
He returned to his computer and to a death report of Richard Moriarty. Cause of death: self administered gunshot wound to the head. Entry through the mouth, exit through the skull. He read the detailed report filed by one Doctor Molly Hooper. She was thorough, his Dr. Hooper.
There were no medical records for Jim Moriarty, there never had been. It had been one of the first things the consulting criminal had done, removing himself as much as possible from the public record. This meant that unfortunately Sherlock couldn't compare the two men's physical features to determine which Moriarty was which. The new information Sherlock had to work with had spawned numerous theories in his mind, but the lack of substantial evidence pointing to any one as the answer was beginning to drive him mad.
Sherlock was sure it had been Jim that had died that day, not Rich. But honestly, at this point, Sherlock had no way of telling the pair apart. Could it be possible that Jim was Rich and Rich was Jim so often that they had fooled him, along with the rest of the world?
He couldn't tell. But maybe there was someone who could.
The ringing in his ear built a sense of dread in his gut, waiting patiently for the answer he wasn't sure he wanted to hear.
"Hello?" Molly mumbled, obviously having been woken by the ringing phone. Sherlock looked at the small clock in the mantle, 1am, he really should have checked that before calling.
"Molly." Sherlock's serious tone cut all pleasantries between them. "Did you sleep with Moriarty?"
The silence that followed was tangibly thick and with every moment that passed, Sherlock's heartbeat increased. His mouth went dry and he had to swallow against the uncomfortable sensation, he needed her answer for the case, to help prove his theory, but there was also a large part of him that was happy not knowing.
"Molly?" He almost begged after almost a minute of silence.
"No." Molly whispered finally, regaining herself after the shock of the question. She assumed they'd have to discuss past lovers at some point, but had no idea it would be this soon into the proceedings. "We almost did..."
"Did you see him naked?" Sherlock asked, sitting forward in his chair, gripping his phone as though it was all that could save him.
"Not naked." Molly replied, her voice small, humiliation evident. "Shirtless."
"Was he shirtless, or were you?" Sherlock asked, his voice making him sound more comfortable with the conversation then he actually was.
Molly paused awkwardly before admitting. "We both were."
"What do you remember? Did he have any distinguishing marks? Tattoos? Scars?" Sherlock questioned, trying to keep the conversation going to avoid the fact that Jim had been shirtless with his Molly, a parallel to the situation he had found himself in not even 20 hours ago.
"Umm" Molly took a second to think before beginning. Her memory was hazy about the details if her short time as Moriarty's girlfriend. "An appendix scar, I think."
"Good" Sherlock smiled triumphantly, comparing notes with the ones on his screen. "Anything else you can remember? Birthmarks? tattoos?"
"It was dark Sherlock, the room was only lit by..." Realising what she was saying and who she was saying it too, she finished the sentence weakly "candles."
All thoughts of the case left him as a laugh bubbled to the surface. "Candles, really?"
"Oh shut up." Molly said quickly. Not only had Sherlock called her in the middle of the night to ask unusual and evasive questions, now he was laughing at her dating history. "I think he was going for romance."
"Romance?" Sherlock was now actually laughing. The idea of a cold, callous criminal mastermind going shopping for candles in an attempt to be romantic was amazingly hilarious to him. "And did that work, the romance?"
"At the time it did, obviously" Molly snapped. Sherlock was notoriously hard to manage when he was like this, mind moving at a million miles an hour and conversation swaying from point to point. The true frustration of the whole matter, however, was the subtext that Sherlock didn't think that she was deserving of romantic behaviour. "We can't all be easy bridesmaids." She whispered under her breath.
Sherlock's laugh tapered off and an awkwardness settled between them again. "I need this information for a case Molly. It has recently come to my attention that Jim had a twin."
"The old identical twin switcheroo." Molly sat up in bed, genuinely shocked at Sherlock's words. "Oh god, that's like a bad movie."
"I am trying to determine if I, and by proxy, you, have been dealing with the same Jim the whole time, or if either if us have crossed paths with Richard Moriarty."
Molly paused, suddenly all of his unusual questioning making a little bit more sense. "The appendix scar is all I can remember. It was dark and I wasn't paying attention to other distinguishing features."
"The post mortem you did on Jim, or Richard, suggests that the body that died on the roof of Bart's also had an appendix scar." Sherlock began his deductions.
"But Sherlock, all appendix operations of the time resulted in uniform scar sizes, shapes and positions" Molly interrupted him. She was sure that he knew that, but she felt confident that she knew something that he hadn't thought of. "Most of the population over the age of 25 has a scar in that same area. Mary has one. So does Greg."
"How do you know Greg has an appendix scar?" Sherlock suddenly seemed outraged. Molly couldn't help but smile to herself.
"The point I am making is that both of the Moriarty twins..."
"How do you know about Greg's scar?" Sherlock asked firmly, cutting off her tactic to divert him back to the Moriarty case.
"You're not concerned that I've seen a scar on Mary?" Molly teased, the tension from earlier in the conversation evaporating as she slowly gained the upper hand. "I am a doctor Sherlock. He came into the morgue to see a body, complaining of rib pain after a violent arrest. I was concerned he may have broken it and was too stubborn to let him leave without giving him a once over."
Sherlock relaxed, satisfied with the answer and finally able to register what Molly had said. "So you think both of them had the same scar?"
"Possible." Molly admitted. "But whether or not you believe it is probable is another thing."
Sherlock shocked Molly with the next question out of his mouth. "Why didn't you sleep with him? Moriarty, I mean."
The only thing more shocking than Sherlock's question was Molly's answer. "He wasn't you." Sherlock was so shocked by the sincerity of the statement that he almost didn't hear the next part. "Besides, he didn't seem very into me."
It took a few minutes for those words to register also. "What! Why?"
"I don't know." Molly sounded small all of a sudden, as though the memory she was about to recall was a particularly bad one. "He started out all keen, then when things escalated he just... Stopped. Got real quiet, pensive. Told me he needed time."
"Time?" Sherlock's repeated the word to feel its gravity. How could someone need time when faced with a half naked Molly Hooper.
"Yeah, then after that, every time I made an advance, he would make up some excuse to leave, as though I was some disgusting monster or something."
"He's the disgusting monster." Sherlock reminded her firmly. "I hope you didn't take it personally, him ignoring you like that, I for one am very happy he needed time..."
"It was a pretty rough time for me, self esteem wise." Molly cut him off. "You'll remember a week later I found out he was a pyschopath. I was the girl who dated the pyschopath. That's not an easy thing to live down. Then, only a few months after that, a certain consulting detective told me a Christmas gift was an over compensation for the size of my mouth and breasts..."
"Oh don't listen to that bastard, he didn't know what he was talking about." Sherlock muttered, embarrassed by his past behaviour. The conversation had taken a turn that he didn't want, leaving him to try and undo the bad memories he had pulled to the surface for her. "I love your mouth and breasts."
Molly giggled. His weak flirtation had helped.
"So, try to disconnect the personal side..." Sherlock began thinking through the case, knowing that further discussion of past relationships would probably be the wrong path to travel. "Why would a man, when faced with a beautiful half naked woman, need time?"
"Well, he could have been scared?" Molly began the long distance brainstorm. Sherlock nodded, adding the mental excuse to a list in his mind.
"He could have been hiding something" Sherlock suggested.
"Like?"
He couldn't help himself. "Maybe he was gay."
"Still waiting on an apology for that deduction too." Molly muttered carefully, but there was a soft playful tone to her voice also. "Performance anxiety?"
"Possible. Or an actual physical inability to perform." Sherlock said. Molly nodded. This is what it had felt like that day that she had helped Sherlock with his cases. She felt important and useful.
"Recent relationship break up." Molly began, continuing with an explanation when Sherlock made a sound suggesting that he didn't quite understand the point she was making. "You know, like when you're not quite ready to move on after a break up because you still have feelings for your ex?"
"Another experience I am not quite familiar with." Sherlock admitted, then was struck by a bolt of lightning. "Would this idea apply to a widower. This inability to move on after the death of a loved one?"
"Oh. Of course! It would probably be a stronger emotion in someone in that situation" Molly filled in. "Why? Is our newest Moriarty a widower?"
"Yes. Wife Corrine died only about 18 months before the fall" Sherlock filled in. "Before that, Richard was a fine, upstanding citizen."
"Only 18 months!" Molly repeated. "I would bet my meagre life savings that the man I was with that night was Richard then. A loss that recent would explain a lot."
"So it is possible that the twins were interchangeable" Sherlock sighed. He knew it wasn't concrete evidence, but it was a start for his investigations. "But the question is, which Moriarty died that day, and which Moriarty are we still living with?"
"What was Corrine Moriarty's cause of death?" Molly asked suddenly.
Sherlock reached for his laptop again, scrolling though the relevant documents. "Suicide. Pills. Pre-existing battles with depression were a contributing factor."
Molly was pensive for a second. "Who was the pathologist?"
"Considering the lack of detail in the death certificate and the autopsy report, probably one of the lab jockeys over at Public..." Sherlock began, making Molly smile at the reference to the rival hospital in the area. "Wait... This can't be right?"
"What?"
"Molly." Sherlock swallowed nervously. "You did Corrine's autopsy."