A/N: This is, like a bit of my other work, based on a real case from Australia in the 1970s. This chapter contains some post-mortem descriptions of a sexual crime against a minor, so I'll probably end up bumping this up a rating (much as I hate to lose 90% of potential readers...) Also, I'm aware of a few date/time gaffes in these chapters, which I'll iron out shortly when I get the time.

As usual, I'm incredibly grateful you've taken time out to read my work. Thank you x

It had only been a small thing, really, while Sherlock had been talking to Lestrade at his tiny flat the night before; but Sherlock's career was in noticing small things and holding onto them until he found out what they meant and why they were important. And as he'd stood next to Lestrade, listening to the details of his case, he had noticed that above the smell of tobacco, cannabis, whiskey and damp carpet there had been a breath of something else: chlorine.

Sherlock, stretched out on John's sofa in his bare feet and smoking a cigarette, thought this through with a troubled mind. Time had apparently stopped at the moment he'd aimed John's gun at Moriarty's bomb. He'd fully intended to pull the trigger and set it off. John had fully expected him to do it. It had been no bluff. He had a creeping feeling that it hadn't been a bluff on Moriarty's part either. The man wanted to die, but he didn't want to die in just any old way. He wanted it to be clever. He wanted it to be fun.

He was also, in the grand scheme of things, unlikely to be able to rip a hole in the time and space continuum on purpose, so the fact that he and John were somehow in Bristol in 1983 was therefore unlikely to be his doing. James Moriarty was a criminal mastermind and a genius, but he wasn't a god. Probably. It occurred to Sherlock that he knew almost nothing about Moriarty as a man: where he lived, what his tastes were, where he'd come from, what brand of toothpaste he used, where he bought his socks, and what had made him choose a life of crime. Mycroft had demonstrated that geniuses had no need to become criminal masterminds. They could earn ridiculous amounts of money legitimately—if you could call signing off on the purchase and sale of military weapons a legitimate business practice, and Sherlock didn't, which was part of the reason why he and Mycroft were at odds. The other part was that Mycroft was hideously smug and overbearing and interfered with everything, but Sherlock felt that he could have done with some interfering on his part this time.

Chlorine.

Barely in the atmosphere, but there, in Lestrade's flat in the middle of Bristol, with no legitimate, mundane reason for it to be there, coming off Lestrade's clothes or belongings or the carpet. Somehow, Lestrade's case—Sherlock was still convinced it was the work of a predatory pederast, boring, there was everything squalid and nothing interesting about that—was connected to the incident at the pool two nights ago. And, if John was to be believed, there might be a connection between solving Lestrade's case for him and somehow getting back to whatever Moriarty thought he was doing at the Whitechapel Sports Centre. Righting a wrong. Or making sure something vital happened to secure the future.

He'd burned his cigarette down to the filter and was just leaning over to stub it out when he heard a shuffle at the door, then the lock clicked over and John, looking half-exhausted, staggered in. He dropped, rather than put, his medical case on the first available bare area of carpet he could find.

"So you were right about Donna," he said. "Ground floor flat, first one on the left as you come in. And I think I'm sleeping with her."

Sherlock sat up, puzzled. "Sorry," he said, "You think you're sleeping with her?"

"That made for an awkward lunch together. But she calls me 'John', even when I'm working, and…" He shrugged. "I don't know. I just got a feeling."

Sherlock had nothing meaningful to respond with, so he waited while John took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. "She called in at the surgery because her teenage son had just beaten seven bells out of her," he continued on his way to the fridge. "I think I'll be having a word with him when he gets home. And if you're wondering: no, they're not Irish, their surname isn't Moriarty, and the kid's a few years too old to be Jim anyway."

The idea that Donna's son might be James Moriarty as a child hadn't yet occurred to Sherlock, and he was momentarily both impressed at John's having thought of it and annoyed that he hadn't thought of it first.

"So what's been happening on your side of things?" John continued, oblivious, as he pulled milk out for coffee. Unless it had materialised out of nowhere after Sherlock had left the flat, there was no more food in the fridge than there had been when he'd woken that morning. "Where's Greg?"

"At work, is my best deduction. He dropped me off before he left."

"And how much trouble have you got him in today?"

Not having an answer that didn't involve discussing the business with offending Sheila Noonan, Sherlock simply changed the subject. "I'm afraid you owe him a hundred and twenty pounds," he said.

"What? Why?"

Sherlock glanced down at himself, and to the new suit he was wearing: blockish and navy blue, loose over the shoulders and waist. "I had to borrow cash from him. I draw the line at wearing the same clothes indefinitely."

John smiled. "You look ridiculous," he said, but there was something fond in his tone.

"And you," Sherlock said acidly, "fit seamlessly into 1983 with your current, 2010 wardrobe."

"Okay, I might have deserved that," John said, putting the milk back in the fridge.

"Has it occurred to you—"

"Probably not, no." John put his coffee down on the coffee table and sank into the armchair. Sherlock noted, annoyed, that for once he hadn't made any for him as well.

"Very funny," he said. "Have you forgotten the issue at hand? How are we here?"

"Sherlock, if I can't work out what to make of a dead kid's shoes, I haven't a hope in working out why we've suddenly time travelled. Anyway, I don't think I even care why we're here. I just want to get back…" John trailed off as the phone in the bedroom started to ring, then got up again and went in to answer it. Sherlock waited, blatantly listening in. But there didn't seem to be much to work on on John's end, just a series of perfunctory, almost meek responses. That, in itself, was interesting. John was getting a bollocking.

"Sorry," he said, once he emerged from the bedroom again and picked up his discarded jacket. "Brian Stern wants me down at the station, I assume to discuss this body they've found. Completely forgot about it… what are you doing?"

Sherlock, who had stood up, looked puzzled. "What do you mean, what am I doing? I'm coming with you."

Central Police Station was roughly the size of a warehouse, an old Georgian building complete with square windows and Grecian columns supporting the front steps. John, after warning Sherlock to for God's sake watch what he said, alerted one of the desk sergeants that he was there and wanted to see Detective Inspector Brian Stern, which got him a puzzled look in response.

Of course. Security doors were for banks and vaults in 1983; anyone could wander into the operational section of a police station. He and Sherlock went up the stairs to the second level. Here a dozen or so police officers in uniform were milling about the place, none of whom were Lestrade; he could be anywhere, from writing a traffic ticket to breaking up a domestic. John recognised Stern, though, and one of the officers who had been with him at the crime scene, the one with the smirking, predator's face. The more kindly of the two was also nowhere to be found. Brian Stern was standing at a whiteboard at one end of the room, his goutish face green in the fluorescent light he was sitting under and in the fug of cigarette smoke that surrounded him. John met his gaze and made his way over to him. "Sorry," he said. "I'd completely forgotten. Rough day at the surgery." He wondered briefly if he was expected to call Stern Sir. Well, too bad if he was. Almost involuntarily, he found himself putting his hand in his pocket, closing his fingers around the medal of sea green and blue hidden there.

Stern appeared not to notice any breach of protocol. "Who's this?" he asked, pointing at Sherlock.

"My colleague," John said without hesitation. "Dr. Holmes here is a biomedical scientist working out of St. Bartholomew's in London, and he'll be assisting me with my work for the next few days." He hoped that Sherlock looked young enough to pass as a newish graduate, and that Stern already had so much to do with this breakthrough in the murder case that he wouldn't bother to send enquiries to Bart's about whether they'd ever heard of a Sherlock Holmes. The man lit up cigarettes at crime scenes and called his junior colleagues demeaning names, so it was a fair assumption that he was not particularly interested in workplace ethics.

Stern gave Sherlock a distrustful look, but as Sherlock miraculously said nothing, he simply grunted ungraciously and walked off without a word, leaving John and Sherlock to follow him until they were in the relative privacy of his office. He pointed at the door and grunted again. When Sherlock refused to, John shut it.

"Post-mortem report," Stern said, handing it over the desk to John as if it were nothing more important than a magazine. The only other people who had ever handed him such a thing were Molly Hooper and Greg Lestrade, and both of them treated that sort of paperwork with the same care they'd have given to a piece of Ming china. The Nineties had done that for medical protocol and probably police operations too, John thought as he looked over the typewritten notes in front of him.

The corpse he had partially examined when it had been discovered the day before had, indeed, been confirmed to belong to one Derek Metcalfe, aged sixteen. He had been dead for a week or ten days, and his cause of death had been a massive loss of blood from an anal injury, probably several of them repeated over time. Also present on the boy's body were a number of mutilations, including a wound cut directly into his abdomen and through into the small bowel, part of which was missing; the skin around the wound had been shaved, as if the boy had been prepared for surgery.

"Holy God," John said softly to himself. "He was a kid..."

"Extra incentive to catch this bastard, eh?" Stern went to his desk drawer and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, and John, still reading the particulars of the report, could not be bothered even looking annoyed about it.

"How in God's name did he end up with that much Mandrax in his system?" he asked eventually, once he'd conquered the urge to punch the nearest wall in frustration. A kid had been drugged and tortured to death…

"You've never prescribed it?" Stern asked him.

"God, I hope not," he muttered, finally giving in and handing the report to Sherlock so he'd stop reading it over his shoulder. Mandrax had been illegal so far back as his memory went, so he didn't know much about it except that it resembled Rohypnol in effect, and that was why it was illegal. "But if it was prescription and not just bought off the street somewhere, that should make it easier to track down, right? Just find out who's prescribed it, and to who."

"Whom," Sherlock corrected him absently, reading the report.

John decided to ignore this. Instead, he waited for Sherlock to reach the boy's cause of death. He was suddenly curious, not as to what Sherlock would make of it intellectually, but how he'd react to it as the human being he presumably was. Sherlock's eyes grew wide for a second, then he made a noise of either contempt or disgust and gave John the papers again.

"So what do we make of it then?" Stern asked him, leaning back in his chair. A waft of body odour emanated from his shirt, as though it hadn't been changed in a day or two. "There's photos there as well, if you're keen."

John paused. If you're keen? Was that some sort of trap? He wasn't prepared to state an opinion on anything else to do with this case unless he'd seen it for himself. He picked up a pile of 8x10 photographs of the boy Derek's injuries, comparing them with their description in the report.

"My guess is," he said finally, "The killer, or killers… ah." He rubbed his hand over his chin. "They inserted something into him, lost it, and did some… makeshift surgery to get it out again."

"Why bother with that?"

John shrugged. He wasn't fond of this subject, and wished Stern and Sherlock would get into a squabble about it with one another so they could leave him to think about something else. "Worried that whatever they used could be linked to him?" he guessed. "Whatever it was, it likely had fingerprints on it. Jesus, the poor kid. Judging from the rate of decomposition—and no indication the body was frozen or mummified—he would have been alive for months after he was kidnapped."

"Encouraging," Sherlock said. He was still reading the report.

John blinked. "Sorry, what exactly is encouraging about the kidnapping and torture of a kid?"

"He'd been missing for five months and his is the only body that's been found. He died as a result of blood loss after repeated sexually-motivated torture, which indicates the perpetrator more than likely did not intend to kill him in the first place. Therefore, we can assume the other boys are being kept alive somewhere."

"Alive and tortured."

Sherlock sneered.

"What?"

"Sexual assault as 'a fate worse than death'," he said. "How very Victorian of you, John."

John, unable to stand still any longer, went to the window, looking out at nothing in particular for a few seconds. "Okay," he said, when he was finally able to look at Sherlock again without the overwhelming urge to strangle him. "Okay. What I want to know is, all that…" He waved one hand vaguely at the report. "Is it going to actually help catch this guy? Or guys? If multiple boys are being held captive somewhere, I'm assuming more than one person has to be involved."

"Of course," Sherlock said. "This is all building a picture, John. We know these killers."

"Do we?"

"You just said it yourself. There are at least two people involved. Statistically, they are men, and over the age of thirty. They have access to a remote place to keep several young men alive and they have the proclivities to sexually torture them. This is an escalated crime, so they're almost certainly in the system for various other more minor abuses against children. If they really did retrieve an instrument from Derek Metcalfe's body because they were afraid of a link to themselves, they are educated and possess some modicum of common sense. And they have access to Mandrax. Couldn't be easier."

Something in Sherlock's tone made John glance sharply at him. But Sherlock was not paying him any attention at all. He was looking at Brian Stern. John couldn't be sure, but he thought it was a look of disappointment.