3. Observations
Sherlock Holmes is not a man who is patient with idiots. Luckily, I am not an idiot. Except, perhaps in comparison to Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is a genius, an actual genius. He could have been the top Inspector at Scotland Yard if it wasn't for his manners, or should I say his lack of them. Genius is one thing. Politics is another, and in most organizations getting along with your peers and bosses becomes more important than intelligence, sad, but true.
I bounded up the stairs into his apartment to find him standing by the window waiting for me. Of course, he knew why I had come. "Where?" he asked.
"Brixton, Lauriston Gardens," I replied.
"What's new about this one, you wouldn't have come to get me if there wasn't something different."
"You know how they never leave notes?" I said.
"Yeah."
"Well this one did."
He breathed in like a hound on the scent, and I knew then that I had him, but I had to ask anyway. "Will you come?"
"Who's on forensics?" he asked.
"Anderson."
He looked away. The animosity between Sherlock and Anderson was deep and longstanding.
"Anderson won't work with me," he said.
"Well he won't be your assistant," I replied.
"I need an assistant."
"Will you come?" I repeated.
"Not in a police car, I'll be right behind," he said rocking his body in that way that he only did when he was really pleased. I was relieved. He doesn't always grace us with his presence.
"Thank You," I said bowing. It was a bit of a dramatic gesture, but I find that Sherlock responds best to dramatic gestures, and if stroking his ego will help put a criminal behind bars, then that's what I'll do. Politics is, thankfully, something that I understand.
It was only then that I noticed the other people in the room. I had apparently interrupted some kind of meeting or interview. There was the landlady and a man sitting in a chair. His landlady, Mrs Hudson, I knew from when he lived in the downstairs flat. The other man...I'd never seen him before.
I turned and left for the crime scene. Anderson and Donovan were there before me. Anderson came over to me as I entered. "You didn't ask HIM did you?" he said.
"And if I did?"
"We don't need him. We can solve it without him."
"We had three chances to solve it without him. If he can give us even one solid lead it will be worth it."
"But ..." Anderson began, but I cut him off.
"I won't have anyone else die simply because we were too proud to ask for help."
"Begging for help is more like it," Anderson muttered under his breath.
"Did you have something that you wanted to say, Anderson?" I asked him with steel in my voice.
He shook his head. "Well then, until you have something worthwhile to add to the case, then I suggest you keep your mouth closed. He's coming, and I'll have no interference from you... or Donovan for that matter. You tell her that."
Anderson sulked off, and I went up the stairs to look at the body. She was youngish and pretty. What a waste. "Get some lights up here!" I called out. "We're gonna need cameras, and check out the other rooms. Let's be thorough ...this time."
I walked slowly back down the stairs. Bloody lot of stairs in this building. I was dressing when he showed up. The odd thing was, that he didn't show up alone. The man from the apartment was with him.
"Who's this?" I asked.
"He's with me," Sherlock said. I stared at the short man with the cane and wondered what sort of animal he must be. I had known Sherlock Holmes for five years. Five years of back alleys, murders, thefts. I've seen him depressed and ecstatic. I've seen him high as a kite on cocaine. I've seen him almost flirt with Donovan. I'd even seen him get hit in the face with a purse by an old woman who turned out to be a jewel thief in drag. But the one thing that I had never seen him do, was bring someone with him on a case. Never. Not once.
Sherlock Holmes doesn't do friends. I know this from first hand experience. From five years of trying to connect emotionally with a man who seems unable to understand the concept of 'friend' except as it applies to motive. It was, perhaps, too early to be applying such a word to this man, but it was obvious that Sherlock valued his opinion, and that alone was a mind shattering concept.
We entered the room and I stood aside to let Sherlock do his work. As I said, Sherlock is a man who loves dramatic gestures. He reached out one gloved hand as if absorbing information through his palm and stared at her for a full thirty seconds. "Shut up," he said to me though I was perfectly quiet.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking. It was annoying," he said before walking slowing into the room and fluttering around her like a bee. No matter how many times I see it, I'm still mesmerized by his technique. The way he can look at the angle of a pen or the turn of a coat and know so much. God, I wish I had brains to do that, or maybe it's just having the guts to make wild guesses and stick by them.
He turned to me, insulted Anderson, and began rattling off information about how long she'd been married and where she came from. All this was normal, I'd seen it a hundred times. What I had never seen before was Sherlock Holmes asking, not demanding, but asking someone else for their opinion.
"Doctor Watson, what do you think?" he asked respectfully of the man with the cane.
"Of the message?" Dr. Watson said.
"Of the body, you're a medical man."
"We have a whole team right outside," I reminded him.
"They won't work with me," he objected.
"I'm breaking every rule letting YOU in here," I said.
He interrupted me saying, "Yes, because you need me."
I wanted to deny him, but God knows he's right. I wouldn't have called him in if I had thought that we could solve the case alone. "Yes I do, God help me," I said.
"Doctor Watson," he called.
The man was hesitant, so I told him, "Do what you want, help yourself," and left them to ... whatever.
I left the room and called out "Anderson, keep everyone out for a few minutes." Anderson was livid. He stood next to me and whispered, "We already have one psychopath messing up our crime scene, are we going to let him bring others along too?"
"He said he's a doctor. Maybe if you weren't so hostile to him, he wouldn't feel the need to bring an outside assistant."
I walked back into the room to see the doctor examining the body. Seemed genuine enough. Sherlock was staring at him. Waiting for him. Talking to him. I crossed my arms waiting for the verdict.
He rattled off his facts including details about the woman's sex life that had me accusing him of making the whole thing up. The Doctor was impressed. He blurted out compliments which Sherlock ate up like the diva that he was. So was that what he had brought the man for? To boost his ego? No matter. What was of interest to me was how he kept going on about her suitcase when she obviously had none. He pointed out dirt on her leg, as if that proved everything, and then he told me that all of the deaths were murder and that we had a serial killer on our hands. Great!
He said that she must have left her case in the killer's car, and then cried out one of those infuriating exclamations which meant, 'I've just solved the whole thing, but I'm not going to tell you the answer'. The kind that make me want to punch him. He said that the killer had made a mistake.
"What mistake?" I asked.
But instead of answering me. Instead of explaining a tiny bit of his thought processes to me, all he did was yell the word, "Pink!" and run off.
I stood there open-mouthed. I had no idea what was going through his head, but he had given me the leads I needed, and I knew where he would be. Obviously he was going to look for the case, so I put that out of my mind and went to finish up on the body.
Back at Scotland Yard, I called the team together and asked for volunteers to search Sherlock's apartment for drugs. I didn't expect to find any. Sherlock had been clean for a year and a half, and as far as I know, he hadn't taken anything since the overdose, but it would be enough to pressure him into giving up the evidence that I knew that he must have found by now.
Sherlock was my trump card, but he was not a team player. He was rude, and insensitive, and he had to be coerced into sharing. A surprising number of people volunteered to search Sherlock's apartment. Well, now that I think of it, it wasn't really that surprising.
We found the bag immediately. A pink case with her name on it sitting in the middle of the living room, but Sherlock was nowhere to be seen. I had the team search the flat for anything else that they could find.
There were a number of disgusting body parts in the kitchen, and Sherlock's design sense always did lean toward the morbid, skulls and dead animals being a recurring motif. The strangest thing was when they told me that this was a two bedroom flat. Did Sherlock Holmes have a flatmate? Who would live with Sherlock Holmes?
I was just mulling that over when I heard the door open downstairs. I sat down and crossed my legs ready to confront Sherlock. I guess, I'm not immune to the dramatic gesture myself. I told the team to quiet down, best to surprise them and was surprised myself by the sound of laughter filtering up through the stairwell. Sherlock Holmes was laughing. Donovan met my eyes with shock of her own.
Sherlock was angry when I told him that we were here on a drugs bust. The other man, Watson, was amused. "This man...seriously?" he asked in disbelief until Sherlock stared him down telling me that if we looked hard enough that there were drugs in the flat. I'd have to be careful not to let the gang look too hard then. We only wanted to pressure him, not to arrest him.
Sherlock paced around nervously. "Sherlock, this is our case," I told him, "I'm letting you in, but you do not go off on your own, clear?"
"Or what, you set up a pretend drugs bust to bully me?"
"It stops being pretend if they find anything."
When he seemed sufficiently cowed I gave him some of the information that we had found and stood back to watch him work. I always find his deductions interesting to watch, but I must say that I was distracted this time by the presence of his flatmate, Dr. Watson.
Anderson and Sherlock threw their usual insults at each other, but when Sherlock showed what an insensitive clod he was by asking why a dying woman would think of their daughter in her last moments, he turned toward Watson to ask his opinion...again.
He said, "not good?"
"Bit not good, yeah," Watson replied.
"But if you were dying ...if you'd been murdered in your very last few seconds, what would you say?"
"Please God, let me live," Watson said.
"Use your imagination," Sherlock said.
And the doctor replied, "I don't have to," which shut Sherlock up for a good three seconds. For Sherlock, that's a long time.
I watched John Watson wondering what made him different from every other person in the world. What was it that made him able to get Sherlock to listen to him, to ask his advice when in five years he had never once asked for mine?
But then my eyes were drawn back to Sherlock. Maybe it was the presence of an audience that had buoyed him up, but I could see that he was approaching another revelation. I told the group to quiet down as I waited for it. It spilled out accompanied by a host of insults to our intelligence that I had luckily learned to ignore. The only difference was the presence of Watson who asked him questions and assisted him. He didn't seem to be put off by Sherlock which was, in my experience, frankly amazing.
Sherlock told us that the phone was planted on the killer, but the GPS said it was in this flat. It wasn't until later that we found out that the killer was in the flat with us. I had my entire crew with me, and the killer was right there. We could have caught him then with no harm to anyone, but what happened next was so typical of him. Sherlock left the flat with the killer without saying a word to any of us.
For someone blessed with more brainpower than half of Scotland Yard combined, Sherlock Holmes can be remarkably stupid sometimes. A dozen officers within an arms reach and he sneaks off to try to capture the killer alone. I kick myself whenever I think of it. Well, to tell the truth, I want to kick him.
I stood in that flat after Sherlock had gone and asked, "Why did he do that, why did he have to leave?"
"You know him better than I do," John Watson said.
I stared. "I've known him for five years," I said, "and no, I don't."
At the time, when we noticed that he had driven off in a cab, I assumed it was just another one of Sherlock's dramatic stunts. I didn't know that the killer had taken him. It was Watson who called us, after Donovan had stormed out in a huff, after we had headed back to the office. He said that the killer was on the move, and that Sherlock was probably with him.
Later, after we pulled up to that college and found Sherlock standing over a dead body, poison pills scattered on the floor, I found out what was different about Dr. John Watson. I didn't discover it at once. It was only after Sherlock told me about the person who shot the cabbie. About how he was a fighter, a military man, his voice trailing off as he looked at his flatmate with awe.
Now, I am not an idiot. I know that one plus one equals two, and I now know that the thing that makes John Watson special, is his trust in Sherlock Holmes. He believes in him so completely that he was willing to kill to keep him safe.
The evidence in the cabbie's flat, not to mention his log, was enough to convict him posthumously so no one seemed to notice when the bullet from the hand gun that killed him went missing. It may seem a bit dishonest, but in the long run it is better for everyone, because Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and with John Watson's help, he has a chance of becoming a good one.
