Suchet ihr denn mich, so lasset diese gehen!"
(If you are looking for me, then let these ones go!")
- Bach, Johannes-Passion BWV 245.
This was a curious turn of events.
A threat—undoubtedly—the name Sherlock Holmes on the envelope proclaimed it.
A threat from whom? Why?
Leaving his turquoise cicada screaming in its glass enclosure, Sherlock took the envelope and its contents up to his bedroom to examine it more closely.
Standard British Air Mail envelope, the sort you might buy from any post office or supermarket. No useful leads there, except that the sender was the sort of person who would buy an envelope from a post office or a supermarket. No residue of any kind on the paper or seals, and no obvious fingerprints, though he didn't have the Disulfur Dinitride to test that observation properly. In any case, he doubted the sender was foolish enough to handle the paper without gloves. Smelled like… an envelope. Quite normal.
The handwriting was the same inside the envelope and out. A man's handwriting, almost certainly. Right-handed. Aged mid-thirties to mid-forties and educated at a grammar school, based on the shape of the lettering and the flow of the script. The aggressive, swooping vertical lines suggested someone highly organised, almost pedantically so, but with latent rage issues. The mysterious he had used a Caran d'Ache Leman fountain pen, medium-nib, with Herbin Pearl Noire ink. But the paper was cheap, manufactured in China, and available at a couple of hundred different UK locations. It seemed an odd choice for someone who would spend over three hundred pounds on a fountain pen.
Someone with a pen fetish, or someone who knew what Sherlock Holmes could do and who liked to play games.
He threw the letter aside and flopped down on the bed. It was another hot day—not ideal thinking weather. After a few seconds' reflection he rose again, darted across to the desk with unnecessary urgency, and fished a packet of cigarettes out of the top drawer.
Some problems couldn't be worked through with patches—not even three of them.
Toby was clambering all over John's lap, meowing frantically, and John was ignoring him. This alone told Molly, who had come into the sitting room to ask him if he wanted a cup of tea, that something was wrong. His left hand was clenched; in his right he held what looked to be a Christmas card.
"John?"
He snapped back to reality and glanced up at her, pale and drawn. "Yeah," he said vaguely. "Sorry."
"What's wrong?"
For a moment, John looked as though he was contemplating saying 'nothing', and Molly girded herself for a conflict.
"Got a card," he finally explained, handing it over to her. A flowing, feminine hand in ballpoint pen: Dear Captain Watson: you are in our thoughts, this Christmas and always. God bless you. Phoebe and Joseph Harris and family xx.
"Harris?" she asked. "Josh's parents?"
John rarely mentioned Josh Harris, who'd been flown home from Afghanistan in a coffin draped with the Union Jack. He'd told her about him only once, just before they'd become engaged, being unaware that she'd known the basics since that first New Years Eve they'd spent in each other's company. John's story was even more vague and disjointed than Bill's version of it. He'd run out under fire and been shot. Harris had been killed. Further details were, he'd explained, a bit of a blur.
"They've never sent me a Christmas card before," John said. "I didn't think they'd know where to send one. Do you—"
"No idea," she said. "Perhaps Bill told them. I'm sorry."
His face twitched briefly into that pinched smile that she secretly hated—she saw so much pain in it. "Not your fault," he said, but there was a catch in his voice. "Just… wasn't what I wanted to think about, ten days before Christmas."
She shook her head. "But you'd be thinking about it anyway. Maybe not… so much. But I think there's something about Christmas that makes you think about things like that."
When he neither turned away nor replied, she gently opened John's left hand and retrieved from it a silver medal: a cross on a wreath of laurel leaves. CGC. The Conspicuous Gallantry Cross.
"They gave you this," she said softly, reading John's name, rank and unit engraved on the back, "for what you did for that boy."
John shook his head. "When I woke up in hospital after it had all happened, people were all talking about how I'd bravely gone and tried to save the kid's life. They were calling me a hero. But when I broke cover, I wasn't trying to save Harris."
"Weren't you?"
"He was already dead. I knew that."
Molly wrapped her arms around his shoulders and kissed his hair. "What were you doing, then?"
"Trying to get to his fucking radio." He cleared his throat violently. "Sorry."
"I've heard the word 'fuck' before, John," she reminded him. "So you… you feel like you don't deserve praise for what you did that day."
"Why the hell would I?"
She looked at the medal again. It seemed brand new: never worn, hardly touched. He had never mentioned even owning it. The previous June, though, she'd found it in a box under the bed while she was spring cleaning. She'd put it back in its place and never mentioned it.
"Why were you trying to retrieve his radio?" she asked him.
He looked up at her, confused. "Mine wasn't working. We were under attack and I was trying to call for backup…"
"So you were trying to get help for your unit."
"… Yes."
She reasoned this out in her head. "So you feel so bad because people think you went to save one man. But you actually went to save as many men in the unit as you could. Is that such a terrible thing?"
He was still looking confused and she realised, with a pang, that for nearly five years it had not once occurred to him that he had attempted to do something more noble and self-sacrificing than he'd been given credit for.
"You're a good person, John."
"Am I?" He rubbed his eyes wearily. "Then why do I feel like such a bad one?"
Molly knew the reason, but this was no time to bring it up. She put the medal back in his hand and closed his fingers around it. "Do you have a return address for the Harrises?" she asked him instead.
"Yes."
"I'll write and send them a card in return, from both of us. And then, after Christmas, perhaps we could go out and see them, and you can explain about the radio. It'll help."
"Will it?"
"Yes. I don't think they'll be as disappointed in you as you think they'll be." She still had her arms around him, and kissed him again. "Do you know what else will help you?" she asked brightly.
"What?"
"It's the fifteenth. It's kitten day."
"Sherlock Holmes, if you don't shut that bloody thing up, I'll render it useless to you, even as a specimen."
"It's a cicada, what do you expect it to do?" Sherlock said defensively.
Mycroft, who had sitting in front of his laptop at the dining room table all afternoon, pushed his chair back. "Forgive me for being slightly traditional about this," he said, kneading his temples with his fingertips, "but I expect locusts to live outside, and not on my dining room table."
"Our dining room table." Sherlock lay aside his phone and got up to move the terrarium over to the coffee table in front of his armchair. Back home, Linwood had definitely been Mycroft's house: left to him in Mummy's will, as a matter of fact. But this nameless residence was rented, half of it came out of Sherlock's inheritance, and he wasn't prepared to let Mycroft forget that.
"Mind you're quiet," he told the cicada facetiously. "My brother seems incapable of studying with a bit of background noise. Oddly, I've never had that problem." He flopped back into the armchair and resumed his phone search, though not without an eye to seeing how Mycroft was taking the insult.
"Why, what are you doing?" was all he asked, without taking his gaze off his computer screen.
"I'll happily tell you, when you let me know what you're working on."
Mycroft sighed and rolled his eyes. "You know I can't, Sherlock."
"Well, then."
Neatly dodged. There was no way for Sherlock to tell Mycroft that he was reading the Bible on his phone. The Gospel of John, as a matter of fact, cross-referencing five different translations.
1 Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha.
2 (It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.)
3 Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.
4 When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.
5 Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus…
Lazarus was himself- even Sherlock didn't have the arrogance to equate himself with Jesus Christ. Not for the purposes of this story, anyhow.
Mary.
Sherlock leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. That had to be important—it had to be. Mary? There was nobody in his family by that name. He had once had a client named Mary Donnell, but she had been an infuriatingly dense circus performer who'd been attacked by a lion, and he couldn't for the life of him see how she was connected to the case at hand.
"Sherlock, that cicada…"
"Answer a question and I'll let it go," Sherlock said.
Mycroft raised his eyebrow. "You know I can't answ—"
"For God's sake, entertain for one moment the idea that I don't care what you're working on." Sherlock went to the terrarium and closed his hand gently over the cicada, drawing it out and taking it over to the window. He opened the latch and slid the pane up with his other hand, then held his closed hand through it.
Mycroft sighed. "What's the question?"
"Who do we know by the name of Mary?"
"Why?"
"I'm asking the question."
Mycroft paused, considering this. "We have a third cousin on the Devereaux side named Mary," he finally said. "But whatever the reason you're asking, I doubt she has much to do with it."
"No-one else?"
"I suspect Molly Hooper's birth name might be Mary. It's a nickname. Now for God's sake…"
Sherlock opened his hand and watched regretfully as the brilliant little cicada flew off into the night. Oh, well. It wouldn't be too difficult to catch another, and Mycroft had yet to find that Funnel-Web spider he was keeping in a jar in the bathroom. He scratched the three or four little bites on the palm of his hand absently. Gratitude was apparently unknown among the insect kingdom.
Molly Hooper. Mary Hooper?
That was a lead—yes, a definite lead. He couldn't then ask Mycroft whether they knew anyone by the name of Martha—that would raise his brother's suspicions far too high. But with his thoughts squarely back to London, to Bart's and Baker Street…
Yes, he had had a client named Martha once. She'd hired him to help out with the case of her husband, who stood accused of the murders of seven women.
He'd flown to Florida for that one. Fascinating case. The accused had been found guilty, which was exactly the result Sherlock had wanted, and executed by lethal injection four years later. His name had been Rex Francis Hudson. His wife was an Englishwoman: Martha Louise Hudson, now of 221A Baker Street.
Unbidden, Bach's Johannes-Passion re-entered Sherlock's head in a glorious rush. Johannes-Passion.
The Passion of St John.
The Suffering of John.
Molly. Mrs Hudson. John.