Sherlock had his phone out the second he settled his back against the taxi's seats. Serene sits next to him in silence waiting for him to speak.
He doesn't though, and when they pull up to St. Bartholomew's hospital he is out of the cab in a shot leaving her to pay. She sighs and hands over wadded up bills. She catches up with him midway down a hallway, his pace unbroken as if she knows the way.
Serene doesn't know how he walks and texts so confidently, but he makes it from the cab to the elevator without raising his eyes from his phone. The clunk of the elevator closing seems to rouse him and he drops it deftly into his pocket.
"Why lions?" He doesn't really seem to be talking to her; he says the question into the world as if he expects it to vomit out an answer. "Serial killers there's always something. "Catch me, catch me, catch me. Tell me I'm brilliant." They make a mistake eventually; their own cleverness gives them away. Are you the mistake or was Lauren Attwater?"
He looks at her then for the first time since the cab, his eyes appraising and wide. She had been thinking the same thing; it had made it so easy for them his lion obsession. That's why she was here now, how easy it had been had bothered her, driven her deeper for more answers.
"Perhaps it was a bluff? A distraction."
The elevator dings as Sherlock considers her response, the lion seemed too clear, too tempting. It called out to him from the muddled facts of this case. Serene was right that something was not right, but what? What was not right?
The doors open and he walks towards the morgue. He feels Serene just behind him.
"Well Doctor, I hope you are ready for the slab."
He pushes open the doors to the tiled room, his eyes searching for Molly. He hears the clang of a drawer being opened, a body being pulled out of refrigeration. He sees her at the far end and he walks towards her. He smiles as genuinely as he can; it is harder to get his way on a case when Lestrade is not with him.
"Ah, Molly."
The petite doctor whirls around to look at him.
"Oh hello Sherlock." She looks pleased until she sees Serene behind Sherlock, and her face falls slightly. Poor Molly her face was such a blank slate, all her emotions written across it so clearly. "Who's she?"
"A colleague of Lestrade's, actually" Sherlock barely turns to look at Serene as she catches up to him. He can see her in his mind's eye, her dark hair and eyes and trim figure. She was dressed simply, but she was more devastating for her simplicity. No wonder poor Molly, in her ill-fitting lab coat and awkward sweaters, felt jealous. "Dr. Laurent, have you met Dr. Hooper yet?"
Serene walks passed him with her hand extended. "Enchantée, Dr. Hooper."
Molly balks at Serene's wrists and her quick pathologist's eyes have seen the strangulation bruises. "Oh, are you all right? You've been attacked."
Guileless Molly straight to the point, she was so often over her head; but she was straightforward. Sherlock appreciated that about her. "Yes Molly, very observant. Last night actually, by him." Sherlock points behind her to the body on the slab.
"You've come to see the man who attacked you?" Molly's question is directed at Serene, but Sherlock answers quickly for her.
"Yes. If you don't mind."
"Why?"
"She thinks he's innocent. Well not innocent, he most definitely attacked her, but she doesn't think he killed the other girl. Really a shame he was shot then, if he wasn't a killer."
"The other girl?" Molly is staring at Sherlock transfixed her face halfway between confusion and distress.
"Yes she is probably here too, come to think of it. 5'7", brunette, late twenties came in last night, died from a head wound."
"Lauren Attwater? She's on my list."
"Excellent, we'll need to see her as well."
"I can't, Lestrade hasn't cleared you-"
After Molly had unintentionally refused her handshake Serene had drifted away to let Sherlock charm his way into the specialist registrar's drawers. She drifts passed the wall of metal, contemplating the names on the drawers. Her eyes land on the newly written label "Attwater, Lauren", she wonders if the tidy looping letters are Molly's, but the smudge in the ink tells her the writer was left handed. She thinks about the woman behind the metal door, her new life just started. She could have easily been next to her, here in the cold cavern of a room. The thought makes her heart drop and her stomach flip. The murmuring has stopped and Molly Hooper is walking briskly towards her, Sherlock his face mildly surprised follows behind her.
"You can't just flirt with me when you want something, you know. There are rules. I have superiors and it isn't like before when nobody noticed your experiments. You are practically a celebrity-"
Molly stops midway and angrily pulls open the drawer. Very suddenly Lauren is in front of them. It's different from in the alley; in the bright lights of the morgue death seems so final. Serene is taken aback at how real it all seems now; she feels silly for doubting herself. For making the story grander than it was, how dare she feel dissatisfied by this poor woman's end? As if the gruesome events that happened to her were not enough. She must have blanched because the anger had faded from Molly's eyes and she looked slightly sheepish.
"I'm sorry, Sherlock said you were a doctor I assumed-"
"Entomologist." Serene tries to smile nonchalantly but fears she must appear slightly sick.
"Ah, well, oh" Molly stammers and begins to pull the sheet over Lauren, but Sherlock stops her, his hand catching her wrist. Molly's mouth hangs open slightly and her eyes are fixed on Sherlock's hand on her wrist. He lets her go and begins examining the body's hands.
"It's fine, I saw her last night. I just- it seemed different."
Molly leans over the body whispering only to her, as if Sherlock was paying attention, which he wasn't. "Why do you want to see her? I don't understand-"
Sherlock springing into action cuts off Molly, he moves quickly to Serene and grabs her close by the arms. For a moment in the shock she wonders if he is going to embrace her, moved by Lauren's death. Instead he steps behind her, his one hand stays firmly gripped on her shoulder, while the other flies with full force to her throat. Grabbing her roughly, squeezing her aching flesh as if he means to kill her. Molly cries out slightly as Serene's hands instantly fly to her throat, tearing at his hand.
It is a struggle and she is panicking, but finally she manages to dig her fingers into his hand and tear him off, in one movement she thrusts her elbows backward to push him away. He falls back at her force and he tries to catch himself as she tries to get away from him. His hand is slightly bloody and he is flushed from the exertion of strangling her.
"Now, why-' He is examining his hand in fascination as the wounds well up slightly 'didn't you do that last night?"
"Wh-what?" Serene can barely choke out the word as she collapses against the drawers.
"How do you fight a strangler? He caught her, but she didn't fight. She must have wanted to fight. Tell me what you thought? What did you feel? Your instinct? You scratched me and you pushed me. She was drugged the same way you were what did you feel now that you didn't feel then?"
Serene still bent over thinks to the night before, what was different.
"You said it, you said it last night you wanted to seem him change. You wanted to see an animal, why? Most people would call him a 'monster'. You said animal."
"I felt fear. Not like… it was different, I couldn't look away. It was like being hypnotized."
"I need her blood work when you've done it." Sherlock turns to Molly and she jumps.
"Lestrade hasn't given you clearance-" Molly straightens her shoulders getting ready for an argument, but Sherlock ignores her. He walks quickly to the man Molly had been working on when they came in.
Sherlock looks at the man from top to bottom, his atrociously dyed blonde hair. Sherlock pulls up the man's lip to look at his teeth. He leans in and smells him.
"Oh, oh this is brilliant." Sherlock is whirling and pacing in his excitement.
Serene straightens with some difficulty and walks over to the man's body. She can see the bruised, torn hole in his chest. The place where Greg's bullet pierced his body, she hadn't thought about it until this moment. As she fell into the darkness she assumed he had been instantly dead pinning her to the earth with his lifeless body, but now she saw where the bullet had gone in. Greg had good aim it was a kill shot, but not instant. He had laid on her alive then, the warmth she had felt was his blood pumped from him by a slowly dying heart. Serene hadn't considered this, for a moment she felt sick all over again, and sad. Yes he had tried to kill her but now he was in front of her again she saw something she didn't see then, what Sherlock was seeing right now. A drug addict, a new one. A man who smelled like sweat, but vaguely of cigarettes and beneath that of something chemical and familiar. Lauren Attwater had smelled of it as well. She looked closed at the man's hairline; the blonde had blotches of brown at the scalp.
"Coal-tar shampoo?" Serene knew the smell well, it took her back to her travels trying to stop lice invading her long hair.
"Yes, common for the treatment of psoriasis. Now I suppose it is possible that both Lauren Attwater and this man were part of the 2% of the population that suffer from that particular skin condition or-?" He looks at her waiting for her to fill in the thought.
"Up until recently they had been sharing the same space." The grim realization makes Serene feel a little sick. To be betrayed by someone you trusted so completely. "The killer didn't take her ring, she worked it off herself."
"You wake up one day and realize the man you're going to marry is a stranger to you, a drug addict in fact. What do you do? Walk away, get rid of the ring and go out with your girlfriends for a night on the town?"
Serene can hear hurt in his tone, this is something Sherlock Holmes understands. Was it possible then that this was the fiancée they had known was out there?
"What about the other girls?" That was the piece that didn't add up the four other women who had come before Lauren Attwater.
"Yes what about them? If she were the final piece, the last revenge he wouldn't have gone after you. Unless, unless our poor dead friend over here was just the puppet. The master was the one drugging him, teaching him the trade, grooming him. Her death was a treat, a last gift before sending him off on his own. You were his first. Explains the sloppiness."
His gestures bring attention back to his hands, the wounds weeping slightly.
"Sherlock, your hand." Molly had been watching them mesmerized, but she was distracted now by Sherlock's wounds. She moves forward and tries to catch his hand.
"Never mind that, we have so much to do. Come along."
Sherlock turns on his heel and sweeps out of the morgue leaving Serene and Molly staring at each other. Serene feels like a mess, that they've thrown Molly's afternoon into chaos. Surprisingly Molly seems calm and unruffled. She does have a slightly awkward look on her face.
"Umm that's usually means you." Molly looks apologetic.
"Oh yes, I guess it must."
There is no sign of Sherlock at the elevator and she takes the lift alone hoping she hasn't lost him entirely. She finds him though outside the hospital getting into a cab madly texting. She barely catches him in her damaged state; she practically throws herself into the cab.
"Scotland Yard." Sherlock says without looking up or acknowledging her wheezing.