author's note: a jump in time, but compensated for by a BIG chapter.
Chapter Twenty Six 2010 Consequences (Part Four)
Greg gathered a stack of books from the shelf and placed them into the cardboard box. It brought a memory back.
"Sherlock, your books aren't organised according to the colours of the rainbow, but they're not alphabetical either. What's your indexing strategy?"
Sherlock turned around from the tiny kitchenette, where he was packing up a box of scarcely used cooking utensils. He looked puzzled. "Why would you want to know? What difference does it make to you?"
Greg smirked. "Well, next time Sam comes to visit, he might decide the re-arrange our books again, and I will need to explain it to Louise. She didn't get it the last time, and I got an earful about it for days."
The tall brunet turned back to his task, while he answered. "It's in subject order, and then by the most useful and most often consulted volume in that subject being at the extreme right. When I am in a hurry working on a case, I don't want to faff about looking for data. I doubt Sam would do that to your books, because he doesn't use them. It he does rearrange them again, just ask him to explain it to you. He won't mind."
"Oh." Well, there was little else Greg could say to that- all very logical and practical.
Lestrade carried on packing, but used the mirror over the mantel piece to keep an eye on Sherlock as the younger man kept examining the items he was putting in the box, as if he'd never seen them before. It made Greg smile- clearly, someone else had kitted out the kitchen when he had moved into the one bed flat on Montague Street five years ago, and Sherlock had never used most of the kitchen tools in the intervening years.
To Greg's eye, the younger man bore little physical evidence of his injuries from twelve weeks ago. The broken bones were surprisingly quick to heal; weeks of enforced meals and regular sleep helped. The organ damage took longer; Sherlock's liver had been sliced up by shards of broken rib, and the bleeding took quite a toll. When he went into shock during the CT scan that first night, they'd rushed him into surgery for what was a serious Grade V laceration. Sherlock was only now recovering from continuing discomfort in his right shoulder area and stiffness in his abdomen.
Greg never wanted to live through another night like that, sitting in the hospital waiting room, caged up with Mycroft, both anxiously waiting for news about what the exploratory surgery had found, and worrying about Sherlock's concussion. When in the middle of a scan, Sherlock's haemoglobin and hematocrit levels dropped suddenly, the next three hours were even worse, as Sherlock underwent an emergency laparotomy to repair the trauma and stablise his blood loss. For most of that time, Mycroft had been on his phone, speaking monosyllabically to whomever it was he was supposed to be meeting. What Mycroft Holmes got up to at nearly midnight was a mystery, but Greg knew better than to ask.
Sherlock survived the surgery and then spent six weeks in a rehabilitation clinic. Fortunately, this one was for physical injuries rather than substance abuse or psychological issues, so he'd had more freedom. That said, the young man had railed against being forced into complete bed rest, to help the liver heal and to deal with the hairline fracture of his pelvis, too. The latter was a stable Type A facture that kept him totally flat on his back in bed for three weeks. Greg had learned a lot about the injuries and their treatment over the past three months.
The swelling and small cranial bleed caused by the concussion kept Sherlock out of it for almost two weeks. Looking back on it now, from the safety of a successful recovery, that downtime had helped, because it stalled the inevitable shouts of "BORED" that began to emerge from the hospital room by the fourth week.
For the first three weeks, Mycroft had refused Lestrade permission to visit. That rankled, but at least the elder Holmes texted with regular updates as to how Sherlock was faring. Only later did he learn that this was at Sherlock's insistence. He'd refused to take any oral medicine unless the texts were sent.
It had taken a four-day hunger strike to get Mycroft to relent and allow Greg to visit. The first thing he knew about it was when a black car dogged his steps on his way to the St James tube station. He'd phoned Louise to say he'd be missing dinner, as Mycroft laid down the new rules of engagement: no promises of a return to hot cases, a ration while in the clinic of only one cold case a week. And only one visit a week to deliver it and pick up the results of Sherlock's work on the previous one. Greg wasn't sure if that was meant as punishment for him, or for Sherlock, but he was grateful enough to take it. Better than nothing.
Even now, after Sherlock had been discharged for more than a month, the same rules of engagement were being enforced by Mycroft. Greg had resorted to texting at first to try and get around the rules, but stopped when his phone mysteriously stopped working. Thinking it was broken, he'd bought a new one, only to have the same thing happen after one text to Sherlock. The penny had dropped then, so Lestrade tried using a landline at the Yard. This resulted in Sherlock's mobile being disconnected. So, reluctantly the two of them agreed to stick to the rules for a while longer.
He watched Sherlock open the kitchen cupboard below the sink and bend down to empty it of cleaning products, putting them carefully in a plastic box for transport. The manoeuvre was done with a little less fluidity than normal, Greg noted. When he was released, the doctors said that it might be another month before Sherlock could safely return to any rigorous physical activity, and counselled changes in the young man's diet and lifestyle. The only way he'd got out of the clinic was to agree to a regular session in a gym as the alternative to physical therapy under supervision. He was on a strict rota of follow-up visits to the clinic to make sure the recovery process continued. Greg had been accompanying him on the latest trips, as Sherlock was getting more reluctant to keep the appointments as he felt better. It gave them another chance to meet and talk about cases. It was only a week ago that Greg had slipped in a couple of questions about an on-going investigation into the death of a pair of twins. After a ten minute discussion, Sherlock had cadged a cigarette off Lestrade and they'd enjoyed an illicit smoke in silence.
As he lifted the next pile of books into the packing crate, he caught the title of a thick paper back directory- Tradesmen in London. That brought a smile to Greg, as it made him remember the first occasion when he was allowed to visit Sherlock at the clinic.
"What took you so long, Lestrade? You must not want to solve that Cuthbert Street case."
Greg had stood beside the bed and looked at the young man's smirk. "Ok, smarty pants. Tell me the tale. I assume that your brother hasn't had it out of you yet?"
"Nope, we're not exactly on speaking terms. I've been saving it just for you."
The older man sat down and watched the smile emerge on Sherlock's face. "You really haven't figured it out, have you? What's it like to have such a pedestrian intelligence?"
Greg huffed. "Might be pedestrian, but then at least I don't end up getting a pipe bender smashed into my liver. You do know that the suspect ended up with a broken neck after he fell from the scaffold?"
"Well, don't look at me- I was flat out on my face at the time. I can deduce, however, that he hit me with such force that the follow through unbalanced him. On my way down I hit one of the metal poles with the side of my head, and he must have tripped into me and over he went. I was out cold on the planking by the time he hit the ground."
Greg tried to visualise the fight, and then realised that Sherlock was looking at him with a slightly worried expression. "Relax, Sherlock, you're not a suspect in the murderer's demise. You can save me a lot of trouble, though, by telling me how the hell you figured out where he was hiding out when we don't even know who he was."
Sherlock stretched his neck a bit, so he could turn and look at Greg more easily. "His name was Bogdan Barlova- Bulgarian, and a work gang master. He brought in illegals from the Russian Caucus Republics, and hired them out all over East London. When they arrived, he confiscated their passports. The electrician was one of his- he murdered the guy when he threatened to report him to the UK Border Authority. Turns out, murder was his idea of labour relations- any complaints and the person simply disappeared. He wasn't the plumber, by the way. I got that wrong. The pipe bender belonged to the victim, who was the plumber. Should have seen that from the autopsy, look for the over-developed pollicis muscles in the palm of the hand- too much work with spanners. Barlova's weren't normal; your body on the waste ground had enlarged ones."
He seemed a bit short of breath, and Greg looked up at his face. Sherlock had closed his eyes.
"I'm tiring you out. I should probably go."
"Don't you dare. I've had to starve myself and endure a gastric feeding tube for the last three days to get this chance, so don't spoil it." Sherlock opened his eyes again and glared at Greg, before continuing, "You need to approach literally every construction project in the East End to see if a worker has mysteriously vanished. After that electrician died six weeks ago, I tried ringing as many companies as I could to see if there was a common sub-contractor working for them. Casual labour hired out for the day by Barlova would have been very hard to trace, but now that you know who to look for it will be easier. I had narrowed it down to a dozen candidates, but as soon as I heard the Bulgarian accent, I knew he was the one. I think there are probably at least a half dozen other victims, but Barlova was better able to dispose of their bodies than the two you found."
"How the hell did you know where the plumber worked? That was an unidentified body…"
Sherlock snorted. "I wanted to find the place where Barlova had done the actual murder before the body dump. There was always a chance that he wouldn't have had time to clean up the site and dispose of the weapon. I used the Google street scene on my phone to look down every road within a ten minute walk from where we found the body. The map data was only six months old, so would show a major construction site. Given the weight of the victim, and the lack of car tracks, he had to be carried there. Really, Lestrade, it's not beyond the wit of even someone like you to figure that sort of thing out."
"Sherlock, I'm not going to repeat what I will bet your brother was already told you. Your work on our cases does not involve chasing after suspects. You know that."
"I wasn't chasing a suspect, I was investigating a possible place where the murder might have taken place. I didn't know that the Bulgarian would still be there, trying to finish the plumber's work and clean up the blood at the same time."
"Why didn't you answer your phone or my texts?"
Sherlock looked sheepish. "I spent the last bit of battery life I had on the street level images. It died just after I spotted the Cuthbert Street flats being renovated."
Greg sighed. "That little oversight might just cost you the chance to work with us in the future, you know that, don't you?"
Now it was the young man's turn to sigh. "He can't do that to me. Mycroft just has to realise that if he tries to take away The Work, I will go stark, staring bonkers. The boredom alone would kill me."
Greg gave a rueful smile. "No one ever died of boredom, Sherlock. You nearly did by breaking the rules we had agreed about hot cases. You're going to have to spend a lot of time recovering. This won't be like putting a bandage on a cut; you've got months of physical therapy to get through, even after recovering from the surgery and the broken bones."
"Then you might as well tell Mycroft to reserve me a place at that psychiatric clinic again," he snapped. "I will not survive imprisonment if there is no hope of returning to cases. It's not the boredom, Lestrade, it's what the boredom drives me to that should worry Mycroft. He has to relent and let me return to The Work, or face the consequences."
Greg thought that through. The way he says "The Work", you can tell that it's a capital letter; the only thing he lives for. He remembered the last time Sherlock thought he had been barred from case work; that had ended badly on a rooftop in south London and an intentional overdose.
"You know, you remind me of Sam when you get quite so obsessive. Did I tell you that he has graduated from toy car models? Now he is becoming the world's expert in everything about Formula 1 sports cars, right down to the colour saturation of the metallic paints used by Ferrari and how they are different from those used by the Honda team cars."
Sherlock's frown softened a bit. "Then encourage him, Lestrade. High performance automotive engineering is a very respectable profession, and he would be admirably suited to it. Computer-aided component design doesn't need social niceties, just a sharp eye for detail and an enquiring mind; he has more than enough of both."
That made Greg smile. Sherlock always saw Sam's potential, whereas everyone else seemed to talk about deficits. It was one of the things that Greg liked about Sherlock. Unlike everyone else he routinely rubbished as being idiots, he never had a bad word to say about Sam.
"Lestrade, if you're going to keep daydreaming, you won't ever get the books packed before you have to leave to meet your wife at the dinner you are having at her sister's place."
That snide comment brought Greg's attention right back to the present. How the hell did he figure that out?
"… and if you don't finish, I will have to do some of the heavy lifting. Of course, I think I'm ready for that, even if the doctors don't."
greg resumed packing the books. "You're sure you're alright about moving flats?"
"Too late now, Lestrade; the van is due here tomorrow morning."
"This Baker Street place, isn't it a bit West End for you?"
"I know the landlady; worked a case for her four years ago, involving a murder in Florida. She has lowered the rent as a favour. I refuse to let Mycroft find me a flat. I mean look at this." He held up an odd looking pasta spoon. "If this is what one of his minions thought I needed when I moved in here, he obviously wasn't briefed well. Mycroft's idea of the perfect flat for me would probably have bars on the windows and an electronic lock that only he can open."
Greg sniggered at the image.
Sherlock continued. "You are not entirely without blame, I know. Of course, I could afford a one bedroom flat on my own, if a certain Detective Inspector I know hadn't stuck his nose in my business."
Greg grimaced. He didn't think that Sherlock knew it was his idea. Once the young man had left the clinic and came back here, much of the sensible regime went out of the window. He couldn't be bothered to eat and sleep to a normal schedule. He had resumed hazardous experiments, much to the landlord's and the other residents' disgust. Lestrade had tried to stop by as much as he could, but Louise was getting annoyed about his absences. He'd met with Mycroft to talk it over.
"Your brother is rather high maintenance. As much as I am delighted to see him back on his feet, he's getting a little demanding in what he expects me to do for him. And he keeps banging on about when he can return to crime scene work."
"Never, if I have my way." Mycroft had not quite forgiven the DI for what had happened, but neither had their conversations been quite as frosty as the exchanges during the night at the hospital.
Greg just smiled at the elder Holmes. "Both you and I know that you won't have 'your way'. Not entirely. He's probably the only one you don't have power over. It must drive you batty at times. Why not just skip the overbearing protective brother routine and move on straight to a negotiated cease fire?"
"You've just admitted that Sherlock isn't coping well on his own. So, why should that change?"
That comment made Greg stop and think. "He makes more of an effort when he's around someone he trusts. If I wasn't married and if I didn't have a life of my own, I could do more. But I can't. Louise quite rightly has first claim on my time when I'm not at work. What Sherlock needs more than anything is a friend who could move in, and share a flat with him."
Mycroft laughed. "A friend? Sherlock? Are we talking about the same person who is happy to describe himself as a sociopath?"
"Maybe that is stretching things a bit, but there are lots of single professional people in London who flat-share with people they don't know before moving in."
"Who on earth would agree to share a flat with my brother?
"With housing costs in London what they are, it wouldn't be impossible to find someone willing to share a two bed flat, someone who was acceptable to you and to Sherlock."
"A person would have to be certifiable to take him on."
"Maybe you're a little too out of touch to make that kind of judgment. People generally agree to share accommodation costs not out of love of living with other people, but because of necessity. You might find that it would be just the sort of thing that would remind Sherlock that he has to meet certain standards of behaviour. Maybe a place that has a resident landlord, too- someone who could remind him more regularly that he can't get away with crazy things- before it's too late and he's burnt the kitchen down again."
Greg thought about it further for a moment. "And, it would probably be better if he and his flatmate were the only tenants. Otherwise, a landlord would be more tempted to evict him if the other tenants complained about late night violin serenades."
Mycroft was looking at him with a curious look. "How do you know these things, Detective Inspector?"
"Well, I've rented flats in London all my adult life, unlike you. And I've been watching my nephew Sam grow up, been trying to talk to my sister about what kind of life he can manage when he is an adult. I don't want her to think that he is going to be with her forever; she has to let him go when the time is right."
"And how do you propose that I convince Sherlock about this new requirement to share his living arrangements?"
This time, Greg just laughed. "Oh, that doesn't take a Sherlock to figure out! Come on, Mycroft- he'll agree to it if you make it a condition of resuming his work on cases. You know that as well as I do."
Mycroft realised he'd just been outfoxed. Eyeing the Detective Inspector with a new respect, he knew that he had been backed into a corner that only a concession to Sherlock would allow him to escape. He sighed.
When it came to asking the question of his brother, Sherlock had taken only a matter of minutes to think it thorough. "Yes, of course. I have just the landlord in mind, a place on Baker Street. Mind you, I can't imagine anyone in their right mind wanting to share a flat with me, but I will try anything, Mycroft, just to get back to The Work."
So, three weeks later Greg found himself packing books and any heavy items, and hoping that this time Sherlock would be able to keep out of trouble.
