Rache.
The dying woman had scratched something into the floor with her fingernails.
Rachel? Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade had been wrong before, and with a fourth victim, he wasn't prepared to take any chances. Down on his heels beside where the corpse lay unfurled like a flower fallen from a bouquet, he pondered, replacing the l with every letter in succession. Rachea? Racheb? Rachec? Rachel was the only one that fit. Rache wasn't a word, he felt sure. At least, not a word in English.
Hadn't been here for long; the dingy upstairs room where she'd been found still reeked of her perfume. And not some sort of funereal, floral scent, either. She smelled, Lestrade thought, exactly like the pink sugar mice he and Julie still put into Hayley's Christmas stocking every year.
He'd have preferred her to smell like putrefaction than like a living, breathing woman. A woman who loved the colour pink. Shoes. Nails. Surprising that her hair wasn't pink. Lestrade felt that there was probably something in all of that.
The question was, what?
Luckily, he knew someone who could tell him. Unluckily, that man was easily the most obnoxious person he had ever met. Luckily, he had his number on hand. Unluckily, one of the many obnoxious things Sherlock Holmes did was refuse to answer his phone for days on end, on a whim.
"Sherlock, for God's sake," Lestrade muttered to the brrrrring line. He'd wandered into the vacant adjourning room to make the call, checking over his shoulder that Sherlock's name hadn't been overheard. There were going to be plenty of unhappy campers from the Met when he showed up. If he did. Wasn't even answering messages on his website this week. Something about him moving flats.
There was a dull click as the line dropped in. For a second his hopes rose, but this was premature. He was speaking to Sherlock's voicemail service.
"Sherlock, answer your bloody phone," he growled by way of leaving a message, and hung up. All those smart-arse, know-it-all texts the day before, and now he couldn't even be bothered to pick up the line.
"Donovan," he called down to his sergeant as he began to make his way down the stairs. She was in the front hall, talking to a PC in uniform. "I need to leave for a while. You're in charge until I get back. Don't let anyone move her, and keep as many people out as you can."
She looked at him suspiciously, as well she might when the most senior officer on duty decided to leave a major crime scene and not explain where he was going. "Where -"
"I'll be back."
Oh, well, this was going to please Sherlock and his gigantic ego. Sherlock Holmes: the man DI Lestrade literally went to when he needed help. Now where the hell had he moved to? Lestrade had read the address on the website just that morning, and then promptly forgotten it. Somewhere in... Baker Street?