Notes: Britpicked!
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Chapter 4
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John woke up the next morning to the sound of a blowlamp. He was so used to Sherlock's practices that he had come to recognize the instruments he used at the mere sound. And this morning, it was obviously the blowlamp.
He yawned as he stretched, scratched his head, got up, and went down to the lower floor. In the kitchen, Sherlock was attacking something with fire. It was what looked like a bulls head or at least what was left of it. Its scent hovered in the room with the powerful smell of charred meat.
John didn't even flinch before the show. He had long been accustomed to wake up to experiments even more weird than these ones.
"Hello," he greeted nevertheless.
Face hidden by a welder's mask, Sherlock replied by nodding to him. John turned and, ignoring the current experiment, prepared his breakfast. He didn't fail to notice that the use-by date on the butter had almost expired and that he would definitely have to make the trip to Tesco today. He moved to the coffee table and turned on his computer.
"Further information on the Greenwich case?" he inquired.
The blowlamp extinguished in the kitchen, and he heard Sherlock remove his mask.
"The result of the autopsy hasn't yet been added to the file, but they went into the track of the neighbour, because of the time difference between his testimony and the forensic estimation. What I find completely stupid because they would just have to ask other neighbours to ensure the veracity of his statements."
He set down his equipment, leaving on the table the smoking bull's head.
"However, this is a track that may have an interest. According to the record, the witness has recently deposited on his bank account a large sum of money in cash. For someone who works in a junkyard, he doesn't seem very clear."
"Do you think he has been paid to lie, or to commit the crime?"
Sherlock crouched down as usual in his armchair, fingers reached under his chin.
"Commit the crime, I doubt it. He doesn't have the profile of the killer. The state of his hands suggests he works crudely, he would certainly not have the dexterity needed to pick a lock with so much fineness."
"An accomplice, then?"
"To pick a lock? When as a neighbour it would have been enough for him to ring her door? No, this man is not our killer."
John shrugged, all right with his conclusion.
"Well… In that case, where does that money come from?"
"There's only one way to find out."
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Released by his lawyer, the suspected witness had gone home. Sherlock found this strange. It was hard to conceive that the mere employee of a scrapper's yard would have had the means to afford such an effective lawyer. However, he didn't complain, it would greatly facilitate the task.
The police had left the building, leaving only the seals on the door of the crime scene. Sherlock passed without giving it the shadow of a look, knowing it was unusable after the Yard's researches, and went directly to ring the doorbell of the strangely opulent neighbour.
The man looked to heaven when, after opening the door, he saw the two men on his doormat.
"I told your colleagues that I was ready to stand at the disposal of justice if they needed," he sighed wearily.
"We are not our colleagues," Sherlock replied immediately. "Where does your extra income come from?"
"I have already told people, I make a bit on the side. You won't blame me for wanting to earn a bit extra, will you?"
But Sherlock didn't seem convinced by this explanation. He advanced a step, blocking the door.
"I'm not an expert in illegal work, but 7000 pounds, that's a lot of money for an a bit on the side or overtime."
"I work late; I have the right, don't I?" the witness protested. "Seriously, guys, I come home from work, I sit down to eat my pizza, I hear my neighbour being shot down, I do my duty by calling you, and it's me who gets suspected because I'm topping up my income as I can?"
John immediately bit his cheek. A wince from Sherlock told him that it looked like their 'offended' interviewee was going to get more than a little of his deductive skills aimed at him. The detective indeed looked at the man dead in the eyes.
"You weren't just back home that night," he asserted. "And it's precisely your pizza that told me."
"My pizza?" the man faltered.
With a flick of the chin, Sherlock pointed to the coffee table in front of the couch in the living room.
"Cardboard soaked in oil made clear it originally contained a very large pizza indeed. Unless you've eaten like a horse, you would never have the time to swallow all that in the time between when you say you got home and the time you heard the shot. You had oil on your t-shirt. You just said yourself, you were going to eat your pizza. So where did it go?"
Trapped, the witness shuffled from one foot to the other, uncomfortable.
"I could have been eating up until the police arrived," he suggested.
Sherlock had to remember not to raise his eyes to heaven.
"Just the fact that you suggested it as a possibility indicates something else. Especially with your poor health (he pointed to the punctures on his arm) and your intense nervousness; I hardly imagine you quietly eating your pizza while waiting for the police, knowing that your neighbour had just been killed in the flat next door. The truth, I'll tell you: you returned home earlier than you said. And why? Because you don't do overtime. So for the last time, where did the cash come from?"
The man became very pale, and John thought he was about to faint.
"Listen," he interposed, "Because of that money, rather than being a witness you became a suspect. If you really have nothing to do with things, tell us and we'll leave you alone."
At these words, the witness' shoulders fell. He ran a hand over his resigned face. Mute, John and Sherlock waited until he made up his mind to speak.
"I knew I shouldn't have put that money in the bank," he surrendered then. "It's just that… I didn't want to keep so much cash with me. True, I could be attacked in the street, or robbed."
He paused, waiting for an approval, but nothing came and he had to continue:
"The job pays poorly. With my health problems on top of things it wasn't easy. So I started to deal."
John frowned.
"Deal… You're talking about drugs?"
"No!" the witness protested, and his shocked look left no doubt about his sincerity. "I'm not into that shit, I'm not crazy."
"Spare parts," Sherlock understood.
The witness nodded ruefully.
"We have so many cars… What is more or less spare? So I do them up, and I resell them on the black market. I need heavy medicine and NHS is not sufficient so it makes me money for my treatments, what do you want, times are tough."
Sherlock was silent, analyzing the sincerity of his words. Then he stepped back.
"Will you tell your colleagues?" the unfortunate neighbour asked. "Look, I want no fuss, all I want is to get better."
"It seems to me I have already informed you that we weren't our colleagues" Sherlock interrupted. "However, I have one last question to ask you."
The man didn't really have a choice.
"Go on," he sighed darkly.
"Are you sure of the approximate time that you heard the shot? You are sure not to be mistaken?"
The witness immediately straightened.
"I've already said it. It was in the middle of the last episode of NCIS on Channel 5. It made such a racket that it certainly couldn't have come from the TV."
"You heard something else, then?"
The man pushed in his head in his shoulders, embarrassed.
"Well… actually… You know, when I heard the noise, I didn't think twice. I freaked out at once. The first idea that came to me was to hide in my kitchen with a potato peeler. I know it's pathetic, but I'm not like you. I freaked out, I hid myself, I called you. End of story."
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The front door slammed behind them. Once in the living room, John carelessly threw his coat over the back of his armchair before he collapsed into it.
"Well," he summed up, "We finally know that the murderer is definitely not the neighbour."
"Wonderful conclusion that illustrates your analytical mind perfectly, John."
He cast a weary glance at Sherlock, who just sat in his own armchair, fingers of thoughts together under his chin.
"You're disappointed, admit it," John quipped. "What did you hope for? That hearing the shot, he would have gone outside? Everyone isn't as recklessness as a certain consulting detective."
Sherlock didn't answer, deep in his mind palace. John made a vague gesture.
"Maybe the forensics were finally wrong," he suggested. "It takes very little to misread something : a difference of temperature, a change of environment… Unfortunately we couldn't see the victim's body; it may be elements that we lack."
"Or she was well and truly dead at the estimated time by the forensics and someone came behind to polish the job," Sherlock went suddenly.
"Polish the job?" John was surprised. "What do you mean by that?"
Sherlock opened his arms, placing them on the armrests of his armchair.
"That someone bothers to pick her lock to shoot her in the head and then set it all up to look as if it was a suicide, this was no ordinary murder. It was an execution. She certainly owed money to the wrong people."
John agreed with him, but that didn't explain the actual time of death. If forensics were correct, the victim was already dead when her executor had come to her home. In which case, if this theory was correct, why did he still bother to act at the risk of alerting the whole building? It was absurd.
"Nothing new in the file?" John asked then. "Perhaps there have been other elements in between."
Sherlock took his computer and turned it on. Meanwhile, John got up and went to the kitchen to boil water for tea. The charred bull's head was still on the kitchen table, and John thought that he would have to remind Sherlock either to package it or to get rid of it.
"Oh…" the latter's voice came in then.
John, pricking up his ears, returned to the living room. Sherlock was staring at the computer screen, frowning before an obvious illogicality.
"What's going on?" He asked.
"The toxicological analysis of the victim came out."
"And?"
Sherlock looked up at him.
"Medicine," he replied.
John frowned for a second, and then he understood.
"Drug overdose?"
"Phenobarbital."
"A barbiturate against anxiety and sleep disorders," John responded reflexively.
He went to Sherlock and leaned over his shoulder.
The analytical result was there, unquestionable. The victim had ingested a massive amount of phenobarbital, causing depression of the central nervous system and slowing down of bodily functions, followed by a coma that had led to the death. Not far from about fifty tablets had been found in her stomach. Sherlock then thought about the little piece of circular aluminium left on the carpet. The cap of a simple bottle of pills.
"A good old suicide by barbiturate," John concluded with disenchantment. "One thing for sure is that to swallow as much as she did, she really wanted to be done with it."
He straightened.
"So the time estimated by the forensic is correct," he summed up. "And now we have the actual cause of death. There is just one thing I don't understand: the murderer gets into his victim's flat. He finds her dead by suicide. Rather than leave her like that, why did he still bother to shoot her? He finds a suicide, that he turns into a murder, to disguise it as a suicide, it doesn't make any sense."
"Perhaps he had instructions," Sherlock suggested. "Perhaps the execution of the victim should serve as a warning to others, or maybe the murderer is good at his job but a bit dim when it comes to setting scenes."
Unfortunately, their sphere of action being limited, all comments from this step were reduced to theories. They certainly were now convinced that the victim had been "killed" twice, but they had no evidence to identify the perpetrator of the second action, which frustrated Sherlock at the highest point. He knew that the analysis of the firearm and the search for its origin would give excellent clues, but he had neither the weapon nor the means to study it. Which frustrated him even more. All he was able to do was send his findings to Lestrade and wait.
An article in the newspaper a few days later finally revealed the end of the puzzle. There was narrated that the history of the firearm found at the crime scene had helped to track down a man named Charles Hamilton. This man, who had acquired the gun legally, had sold it on a dedicated sales website. The buyer, after research of the transaction, had proven to be one Igor Ivanovitch, Russian subject working as a security guard in a casino. The latter, after several hours of interrogation, had finally admitted his guiltiness in the Greenwich case. The victim, with a debt of tens of thousands of pounds, had been unable to pay back. His boss had therefore ordered him to solve the problem, which he had been eager to do. The only problem was that his target was already dead when he arrived; at least she looked like it, with a pack of pills in her hand. But wishing to avoid problems if his target was to escape, he had done as he always did: conceal the murder into suicide and prove his work in the newspaper the next day. This dedication would eventually ruin it. His confession led to the arrest of his boss, the casino manager, and, according to the newspaper article, they were currently in detention waiting for the trial.
John closed the newspaper and put it with others on the coffee table. He knew that Sherlock had already read them and wouldn't bother to reread them again. Once the problem was resolved, the rest was only bureaucracy, a topic Sherlock found completely uninteresting.
The latter was leant on a toe he had brought out from the freezer to study the effects of freezing on the cells. Obviously, he hadn't yet found a case that could sharpen his curiosity.
John picked up the newspapers and threw them away.
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