At lunchtime, Emili and John finally arrived home, tired, cranky, and each anticipating their favorite drinks.
Emili stopped off with John at 221B. She'd stashed some coffee in their fridge, just like John had stored a kit of tea in her cupboards. John opened the door with his key and they both went in tiredly, Emili shrugging out of her jacket and immediately wishing the softness were back on her arms.
Before they were more than a few steps in, a low voice greeted them. "You've been out a while," Sherlock remarked, sounding like a complaint. He was stretched along the couch on his back, eyes closed, hands over his abdomen.
Emili aggressively threw her jacket onto a chair.
John took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Yeah, well… you know how it is." He pulled open a squeaky cupboard in the kitchen and removed a white ceramic mug. The blogger put it down on the counter harder than was strictly necessary. His body was tense, his voice was hard, and his grip was tight. "Custody sergeants don't really like to be hurried, do they?" Sherlock remained silent, evidently no longer caring. John continued, anger thrumming under his tone. Emili opened the fridge, avoided looking at the human organ in a jar on the second shelf, and took out a Frappuccino. "Just the formalities," John scowled darkly. "Fingerprints, charge sheet."
That got his attention. Sherlock sat up, tossing his legs over the side of the sofa. "What?" He queried, staring at them in surprise. His hair was messy and stuck up from laying down.
Emili broke the seal on her drink and raised her voice at him. She considered herself to be fairly patient, and she liked that she got along so well with Sherlock, but sometimes he just drove her too far. This was one of those times. How could he just leave them like that? How dare he act like he didn't know what had happened? Emili had been arrested. She was completely humiliated.
"Your friend threw evidence at us and ditched, and we were arrested!" She spat. "If they weren't obligated to call my legal guardian, we would have to be in Magistrates Court sometime next week! On probation! For vandalism!"
"They wanted to give me an ASBO!" John joined her in venting, shouting across the room at Sherlock. Distantly, Em hoped that Mrs. Hudson wasn't home.
Temporarily, her curiosity overwhelmed her aggravation. "What's an ASBO?"
"A civil anti-social behavior order." Was Sherlock's prompt answer.
"Yeah, that!" She agreed, working herself up again. She pointed at John and crossed the kitchen to go back to the living room, and, pettily, she stole Sherlock's chair, sitting down and bringing her feet up on the ottoman. "He's a lot angrier than I am, but make no mistake, I do not enjoy being handcuffed, escorted to Scotland Yard, and sitting in a holding cell waiting for Mycroft to hurry up! I think he enjoyed leaving us there for a few hours, the sadist!" There weren't words for how glad she was that Anderson, Donovan, Lestrade, and Dimmock had all been absent.
Emili still felt a nasty surging temper in her belly, but she could already see that they were losing Sherlock's attention. When a case demanded his mind, it took a lot more than a pissed-off roommate to snap him out of it. His focus was laudable, but it was also a pain in everyone's collective ass. Her brother crossed his arms, leaning back into the couch, looking across the room to the fireplace and the pictures hung from the mantel.
Meanwhile, John was not so easily appeased. Mycroft had made it go away from her permanent record and had charges lifted, but while Emili's priorities had been sated, John's were still very much offended. "Yes, well, it may've gone away on paper," he allowed, still steaming mad. He turned so his back was to the counter. "It matters what people think, Sherlock. If you'd like to tell your little pal he's welcome to go own up any time, that'd be fantastic!"
"This symbol…" Sherlock murmured. Emili almost missed it, it was so quiet. "I can't place it."
There was a minute of silence. John set a tea bag in his mug to steep and Emili calmed herself down with her coffee, curling into the side of the armchair and snuggling into the warmth on her bare arms. Sherlock was quiet as a ghost.
The calmness didn't last long – just for long enough for Emili to feel less like hitting Sherlock with the glass bottle. Then he said, sitting up straight and pushing himself to the edge of the couch, "I need you to go to the police station."
John snapped his eyes to the other man. "Hey!" He objected.
"We were just there!" Emili similarly protested, meanly glowering. "For hours!" She added meaningfully.
Sherlock found it within himself to pay attention to them. With a sense of irritation, he stood up and looked down at her in his chair. "You're not injured, are you?" Without waiting for her to answer, he primly responded to his own question. "No? Then pay attention." He went to gather his coat from where it was hanging on the wall. "Ask about the journalist."
Sherlock flipped his collar up. John, in a miniature temper tantrum, dumped his tea down the sink, swearing. "Jesus!" He hissed, letting the cup land firmly in the basin as they were ordered to leave.
The detective ignored it expertly, picking up his scarf and winding it around his throat. "His personal effects will have been impounded," he informed helpfully. "Get hold of his diary, or something that will tell us his movements. I'm going to go and see Van Coon's PA. If we retrace their steps, somewhere they'll coincide."
Sherlock left the flat through the door that Emili and John had only entered moments before, moving with the energy that did not fit a man in his thirties. It was an unnatural energy that shouldn't fit anyone but a child on Christmas morning, yet he somehow managed to hold onto it whenever he was interested in a case.
Gripping the neck of her bottle, Emili stood up reluctantly. She hated obeying Sherlock and letting him grow to expect her to follow his orders without concern for her, but because she knew that people were actually dying because of whatever they couldn't find, she couldn't, in good conscience, ignore what she was supposed to do to help.
John left the kitchen to look at the closed door. "Don't you just want to strangle him sometimes?!" He asked in a loud, uncharacteristic outburst.
Em, without thinking about it, replied, "The scarf would make it really easy."
Both blogger and student looked at each other, equally surprised by the other's proclamation. John cracked a nervous smile and Emili started to anxiously giggle. John offered her a hand while she got out of the comfortably reclined armchair.
She fixed her shirt. "If it weren't for that people are actually dying…" she trailed off wistfully.
John nodded. "Right, of course." He responsibly agreed.
Her neighbor waited politely while Emili put her drink back in the fridge and reclaimed her coat, putting it on and zipping it up to below her breasts. They left as an exasperated pair down the stairs. Emili glanced around once they reached the ground floor, but she couldn't see any lights turned on or any other sign of the landlady's presence. John held the door for her as they exited.
On the sidewalk, she noticed that it had somehow managed to get cooler. She tucked her hands into her pockets while John stepped up to the curb and held up a hand to flag down a taxi. Emili stood back and waited for one to come to a stop. John and Sherlock were always better at flagging them down than she was – maybe because they were adults.
Usually, Emili was more than content with her location. Baker Street wasn't a tourist hotspot, but it was in London, so there wasn't often a shortage of people. It meant she got to have as much privacy as could be expected in an urban area without being isolated. As a sixteen-year-old female technically living alone, she was glad that there would be people around if she needed help. However, occasionally in the middle of the day, there would be more cars and pedestrians, which made her realize yet again just how big London really was.
A tour bus honked its loud bass horn from the top of the slight incline of the street. Pedestrians on the other side of the street walked downhill against the flow of traffic on the sidewalk. Emili looked down to the left, but couldn't see any taxis. They were going to be waiting for a few minutes. She sighed and lazily sought out those pedestrians across the seat again. The mother was holding a map and wearing a pretty dress that Em suspected she'd bought at a boutique that she herself had been to recently, because the dress looked very familiar.
The pedestrians looked up and down and then raced across the street in a gap between cars to get to Speedy's. The café didn't have the best coffee, but they had excellent sandwiches. Em hoped that their passion was for the Bolognese and swiss and not the European roast.
She looked across the street again and a spot of black caught her eyes. She focused more intently on the woman standing directly across the street from her, her back to a window. The woman's face was obscured by a camera. The pink-haired girl swore she came out of nowhere; she had only looked away long enough to see that the small family got across the street.
The photographer's camera was sleek and silver, and it was the brightest thing on her. Her black hair was pinned behind the back of her neck, and tight-fitting ebony clothes covered her up. She could even see the ridge of wide sunglasses to the side of the camera, behind pale hands and slim fingers.
The camera remained raised. Emili tilted her head. She was just standing in front of a flat building – her own, in fact, which doubled her confusion. What was she taking photographs of? Why take pictures of 221B – and why not lower the camera, at least for while Emili was in the shot?
The tour bus from up the street passed down between Emili and the black-haired woman. The huge vehicle completely blocked the teenager's view, just giving her a front seat to tinted windows and noticeably bright purple automotive paint. When the bus passed, the other side of the street was empty save for the man on the phone walking past.
A car honked. Emili jumped nearly out of her skin at how close it was, only just realizing that John had managed to get a taxi to pull over to the sidewalk. John stood with the back door open, waving for her. "You comin'?" He called expectantly.
She blushed and hurried to the cab, sliding in while John held the door. Her mind stayed stuck on the woman in black. She couldn't shake the feeling that it was weird – and not just in the quirky, touristy way.
"Sorry," Em automatically apologized to the driver and to the blond once she was seated. John climbed in after her and pulled the door shut. The taxi almost immediately started to lurch forward into the street. "I just…"
Just what? She wondered. Saw someone with a camera? When she was about to say it, she realized how dumb it would sound. Someone wearing black wasn't a big deal, and someone with a camera in London was nothing bizarre. She trailed off and swallowed, shaking her head.
John was too nice to just let her dismiss her own nerves. He put his hands on his knees and looked out the window past her, looking for whatever she'd been staring at. "What was it?"
She looked, too, but she wasn't surprised that she still didn't see the black-clothed woman. Soon, they had left the block and were inching up the slope of Baker Street. She stared at her lap, her eyebrows furrowed as an uneasy feeling crept across her back. "I thought I saw someone," she said uncertainly.
"Anyone you know?" John prodded, curious and a little concerned.
"No… and they're gone now," she added, trying to convince herself to stop being creeped out by people with cameras. If she was developing a phobia of that, then she was living in the wrong city. "Was probably just a tourist," she decided, crossing her arms and looking ahead through the windshield. John hummed noncommittally in agreement.
She wasn't sure what it was, but when Emili and John arrived at the station and asked for Dimmock, he seemed much more relaxed and amicable than he had been at all in their brief acquaintanceship. He took Em and John through the station and to his desk, chatting politely with the two freelancers the whole way.
"His diary?" Dimmock repeated, bemused but with a lighthearted scoff. "What's that going to tell you at all?"
John gave him a tight and tired smile. "We're not entirely sure yet," he answered.
Emili knew that without a good reason, it would be irresponsible of any detective to give them evidence, so she gave him something to work with. "If we're right, and the two men were both murdered," she said, making it hypothetical to be polite. She knew that Dimmock still disagreed. "Then they were involved in the same activity that got them killed. We don't know what that is, but maybe by reading Lukis' journal, we could find it."
"Well, it's been processed," Dimmock reluctantly admitted, raising his coffee in passing to a sergeant on her cell phone. "Got it delivered back to me just before lunch. Suppose it can't hurt much of anything. The man's too dead to be embarrassed, anyway."
John forcibly chuckled, but looked uncomfortable with the joke. Emili shrugged at him apologetically and stopped at the front of the DI's desk while the brunet went around to the other side of it. He pulled out the chair, put his coffee down, and bent over. When he straightened up, it was with a small, tagged evidence box. Dimmock thudded it on the table.
Then, he paused, his hands grasping the sides of the cardboard and flexing. "Look," he said, slow and halting. "Your brother – Sherlock –" He started to grimace.
Em understood immediately his change of attitude. She imagined Sherlock could be pretty intimidating, especially to the people whose jobs he was doing better than they were. Normally, she was of the opinion that they should operate with cooperation, not with rivalry, when they both wanted the same thing: the bad guys identified and caught. However, since she was still notably pissed off, she was willing to be on Dimmock's side.
"It's okay," she assured. "You can insult him this time."
John nodded quickly, holding up his hands in invitation. "And, as a bonus, we're behind you one hundred percent."
"Don't ask," she advised.
Dimmock licked his lips, seriously considered what he wanted to say with a tip of his head, and decided on lowering his shoulders non-confrontationally. "… He's an arrogant sod," he went with, a flash of irritation running over his face.
John and Emili both raised their eyebrows, waiting for him to finish, but it seemed after a few seconds that that was all Dimmock wanted to say.
"Well." John coughed when he realized that they expected a lot worse than what actually was going to happen. "That was mild." Em nodded sincerely. People were usually a lot meaner – Donovan and Anderson, for instance, never gave Sherlock a break. "People say a lot worse than that."
Shaking his head incredulously, Dimmock cleared his throat. He reached into the cardboard. Em stood on her toes and peeked inside. It was about halfway full, carrying the loose items from the suitcase and the couch of Lukis' apartment. The clothing was unwashed, just combed for evidence, so it was all sealed in plastic bags. Aside from that it was probably going to mold while it waited for a dead owner to pick it up, the box was lightweight and included a computer, several books, a magazine, various pens, and even a shoe.
Dimmock went ahead and took out a dark blue journal with nice, clean-cut pages. "This is what you wanted, isn't it?" He asked, holding the spine in the palm of his hand and letting the pages fall open. They were unlined and unmargined, marked only with slanted, half-print and half-cursive handwriting. "The journalist's diary?"
"Yes, please," Em confirmed. Dimmock sighed skeptically, but handed it to John.
While the detective inspector lifted the box off of his desk and moved it out of the way again, John looked at the back of the journal. The book was unmarked on the outside. The veteran opened it up like Dimmock had, but turned to the end, then started rifling backwards in the pages, finding the last entry.
Emili saw the little leaf sticking out of the top of the book before John had found the entry, but patiently waited for her neighbor to get there first. The slip of paper bookmarked the last entry. John paused, took the paper out, and showed Emili what it said.
It was an airplane boarding pass from Dalian DLC, a Chinese airport, to the London Heathrow airport on Zhuang Airlines, only a small number of days old.
For all that London was radically different from America, Emili supposed that they were very similar in how they represented China. Although everyone sounded British, and there were U's where she didn't expect them to be, Chinatown in London looked much like the Chinatown in California where her father took her to get a massive amount of fortune cookies they'd never been able to eat all of.
John carried Lukis' journal, open in his hand, at the last entry within the pages. He was technically leading, but Emili was walking ahead of him, eager to see more. Her stomach rumbled every other time she caught a whiff of food. She didn't think she'd ever craved lo mein more in her life.
The streets were cobbled. Cars could still drive through, but the majority of all transport in the neighborhood was done either by foot or on bicycle. The sidewalks would've been crowded if most people weren't just walking carelessly on the relatively narrow street. Em thought it was a safety risk, but she wasn't going to complain – it meant she and John had room to walk and not get elbows driven into their ribs.
There was also a lot of litter, she noticed. Cigarette butts to small blue candy wrappers were shoved and trampled down into the cracks between stones. She took care to avoid the multicolored, quarter-sized spots of gum on the sidewalk.
"This kind of reminds me of Chinatown in San Francisco," she shared with John offhandedly, looking up at the Mandarin characters on a banner over a clothing store. She made a mental note to come back at some time with time to spend shopping. "But there were a lot more pigeons." San Francisco had been full of birds. "Are we going the right way?"
John nodded, frowning more intensely at the journal. He turned it almost entirely sideways before holding it right again. "We must be," he confirmed, though he sounded a little uncertain himself. "See, the numbers are going down. The odds are to our left, so…" John pointed with his right hand towards the other side of the street and down the block. "Whatever it is, should be over there."
Scooby Doo had nothing on the misadventures of the freelance detectives from 221 Baker Street. Emili used to wake up at six AM just to watch the cartoon reruns of the classic series. Never had she imagined that she would actually be a teenage investigator herself. Scooby Doo, however, had taught her that behind every crime – no matter how terrifying or strange – there was a culprit, and the culprits were only human. They made mistakes, and they could be unmasked, and the good guys always won. Given that someone had been ordered to kill her recently, and they still didn't know who had arranged it, Emili wasn't as certain about the last part as she usually was, but she did know that there was a reasonable explanation as for the connected break-ins and murders, and she was excited to find what it was.
"What do you think it's even going to be?" She wondered aloud to John, hoping he would speculate with her. The ground was hard under her shoes, which she felt when she almost stumbled over an uneven stone in her path.
"Dunno." The blond shrugged and glanced at her while they walked. "Post office, maybe?" Emili pursed her lips. A post office wouldn't be very exciting. She reluctantly took her eyes off of John to start seeking out the address numbers on the sides of the buildings. Before she could really begin, she saw the collision course the vet was on. John obliviously continued, "We're getting closer; now there's just-"
"Watch out!" She warned, too late, as John plowed right into Sherlock.
Sherlock, just as startled as John, caught the shorter man's shoulders before either of them tumbled or tripped. He moved John a step back. Sherlock saw Em, nodded to her, and looked down to John, probably to scold him about not watching where he was going (which would've been hypocritical).
John, looking up to Sherlock's face, saw who he'd run into and scowled. "Right…"
"What are you doing here?" Em asked, exasperated. If they were just going to end up in the same place, then why had she even bothered to make the trips to Scotland Yard and Chinatown? She could've stayed home and eaten something.
Sherlock held up a small, crinkled slip of paper from his coat pocket. It was off-colored and had tiny writing on it, but Em didn't get to determine more than that before Sherlock shoved it away again. "Eddie Van Coon brought a package here the day he died," he answered. "Whatever was hidden inside that case, most likely."
They were both here? Part of the troubles Em had been having with connecting the murders was finding how the victims were related. If they'd been at the same place on the same day, then maybe they had known each other; or maybe that place was where the killer saw them together and chose to kill them.
She started scanning the street more intently, pushing herself up onto the tips of her toes. They still had very little information on what they supposed to be looking for, but the address from the journal was the strongest lead to start with, and then maybe Sherlock would have additional insights to share.
"I've managed to piece together a picture using scraps of information," Sherlock was saying educationally.
Then Emili saw it, a few doors down and across the street, just like John had said it would be. She pushed the heel of her hand against his shoulder and pointed. "John! The number!"
John turned to look, found it after a few seconds, and kept his eyes glued on it.
"Credit card bills, receipts." Sherlock continued, not realizing that he'd lost his audience. He was getting wrapped up in that big brain of his again. "He flew back from China, then he came here."
"Sherlock," John interrupted.
"Somewhere in this street, somewhere near." Sherlock scratched the back of his neck and looked over John's shoulder, itching to keep pursuing the path that his roommates had already come from. "I don't know where, but-"
You'd know if you paid more attention, Emili thought pointedly. She put emphasis on her stare and flatly informed, "It's that store across the road."
Sherlock, as she knew he would, turned his head to look across the road. She pointed it out again, this time with John also pointing at the same time. The store in question was red with golden trim. It was a small shop, with the address numbers in blocks by the door. A glint of yellow was visible at the top of the door, and mounted over the entry was a huge, unnervingly-scaled cat statue. One of its arms was up and waving mechanically. Its big, glass eyes stared at the building across from it. Em frowned at it in distaste.
"How can you tell?" Sherlock interrogated, turning back to them and arching an eyebrow skeptically.
John pointed to the brown book in his left hand. "Lukis' diary," he answered, tapping on the delicate paper inside. "He was here, too. He wrote down the address."
Sherlock looked down at it. Despite it looking upside down to him, his eyes roved across the page swiftly a few times before he found the line with the address of the Lucky Cat Emporium. When he found it, he leaned back and stared across at the gift shop predatorily.
"We're going in the store, aren't we?" Emili asked rhetorically, sending a longing look at the restaurant just a few yards in the opposite direction.
The bell over the door had a spot of rust near the opening, and the chime was high-pitched, even for entryway bells. The slim ribbon tying it to the door looked frayed at the end.
The Lucky Cat Emporium – surprise, surprise – sold Lucky Cats. To Emili's dismay, it only sold Lucky Cats. There weren't candy bars, or packs of gum, or little souvenir pencils. It was all Lucky Cats, in plastic, ceramic, glass, wood – yellow, blue, pink, red, purple, white, grey, black, green – in sizes ranging from small enough to rest in her palm to round and fat enough to stick a lampshade over its head and call it a lamp.
Emili tried to school the terror off of her face before the store owner, a black-haired Asian woman behind the counter, saw and took offense. Sherlock made no expression, but went immediately to the wooden Lucky Cats on the higher shelves along the adjacent wall. In place of aisles, the small storefront had tables, each draped with scarlet tablecloths and gifted with dozens of Lucky Cat displays.
John made the unfortunate error of accidentally making eye contact. "Hello," he said politely, smiling awkwardly and making an uncomfortably, half-aborted waving gesture.
The lady perked up, slipped off of her stool nimbly, and circled around the register. "You want Lucky Cat?" She asked him persuasively in choppy English. She gestured to the very nice-looking ceramics on the table closest to her.
Em bit her lip to stop from giggling at John's uneasy face. "No, thanks."
"Ten pound! Ten pound!"
"No," John repeated, smiling apologetically, but making the mistake of continuing to look around.
Emili held her hands behind her back. Unlike John, she knew that someone was likely walking out with a new mantelpiece decoration. It was just weird to come look around in such a small store, buy nothing, and leave, especially after spending the time scrutinizing the Lucky Cats the way that they were. Although she didn't really want a Lucky Cat, she also didn't want to look like a rude white girl, especially not in the middle of Chinatown.
"I think your wife, she will like!" The merchant coerced.
Emili sidled up to John's left side. "I didn't know you were married," she said, because it was either that or to comment on how there were way too many Lucky Cats in one place.
"That's 'cause I'm not," John answered, holding his hands out and motioning with his palms down. "No, thank you."
The seller didn't want to take no for an answer, and she had long since fixed in on John. Sherlock was unbothered by his roommate's struggle, walking slowly down the tables further away from the rest of them. The glass Lucky Cats caught Em's eyes; in particular, the ones at the end of the table, furthest from the front doors. She went towards them curiously.
The ones made of glass were, in her opinion, the prettiest. The ceramics were clean and neat, but they had a porcelain look to them that the teenager had never appreciated. The glass were elegant; there were a few that were made of clear glass, through which the gears that operated the waving paw could be seen, and melted into the glass were thin swirls of colors.
She picked one up carefully. It was cute, especially when there was a swirl of pink in the face that could've been meant to be an abstract portrayal of the cat's nose. Royal blue, teal, lime green, and violet streaked through the inside of the body, and wavy lines of crimson and fiery orange decorated the insides of the ears. The paint in the glass was applied so sparingly that although it was a noticeable splash of color, the majority of the cat was still see-through.
On the bottom of the cat was a sale sticker. In black felt marker, there was a price (heftier than Emili had ever seen for Lucky Cats, but then, she'd never seen one made like hers). As if she wasn't polite and intrigued enough to buy it already, she then recognized one of the letters from the cipher. The yellow spray-paint had made them bigger and very deliberate, but although the mark on the price tag was made faster, it was still unmistakably the second symbol in the cipher.
Emili raised her hand, still in the habit of doing so for attention. "Ni hao," she called, quickly exhausting her conversational Chinese. "Excuse me."
John's relief was unparalleled. The store owner turned around and hustled to her, moving far faster and more gracefully than any woman her height and age should've been able to move.
"You buy Lucky Cat?" She asked with a hopeful and encouraging smile.
"Shi," Emili nodded, putting down the cat long enough to take her wallet out of her pocket.
One ten-pound and five-pound note later, the saleswoman was picking up the cat Em had expressed interest in and was carrying it to the front, where she wrapped it speedily in packaging paper and then slid it into a paper bag.
Em held her hands together and bowed towards the woman. "Xie xie ni," she respectfully stated.
The merchant clasped her hands and bowed back. "Xie xie ni."
At the door, the pink-haired girl stopped and called to the boys. "Sherlock," she summoned. "John." John came to follow her out rapidly, pleased to have an excuse to leave, but Sherlock dragged his heels. Em just walked out the door and waited for him on the sidewalk. If he wanted her to talk or do something, he would have to leave.
Sure enough, he came outside shortly after. He looked annoyed. "What was that for?" He asked her, his mouth in a firm, irritated line. "This is hardly the time to be getting into your interior decorating, no matter how sparse your flat appears."
"Excuse me!" She objected, her eyes widening.
"It is of the utmost importance that we find what brought Lukis and Van Coon to the same shop days before their demise."
Emili crossed her arms and stared rebelliously up at her brother. "Well, if you'd stop ranting for a second, I'd show you what possessed me to get a cat toy," she retorted with spite. Now there was no way she was going to tell Sherlock she thought it was pretty.
Though the cat was well-packaged, Em took it out of the bag with one hand and untwisted the tie at the top of the packing paper with both. Aggressively, she tore the paper off of it, balled it up, and put it back in the sack from the store. She turned the cat over, cupping a hand over its glass paw, and showed both men the sticker with the cipher underneath the familiar Arabic-based numbers.
John looked up sharply. "Sherlock, that's the cipher."
The aggravation had melted from Sherlock's countenance. "Yes, I see," he murmured, looking back towards the Lucky Cat Emporium. He took the cat from Emili's hands, turned it around, and looked at the cipher upside down before humming and handing it back to her.