A/N: Hello everyone! Thanks as always to everyone reading/following along with this story.
I'm introducing a second mini-case here...this time I've decided to come up with an original one, so apologies in advance for any logical inconsistencies...I tried my best! But the case after this one will be drawn once more from ACD canon (and it won't be so much a mini-case, more a full-length one...)
I've also decided, for purposes of later chapters, that I am, in fact, canon-compliant all the way up to and including S3E3; basically, just assuming that S4 didn't happen.
So here's the next chapter, a new case, and, inevitably, some more Sherlolly drama...
Chapter 5: Switched at Birth
Sherlock had been anticipating the inevitable moment in which John would finally materialize in order to lecture him over his recent social infraction, but said moment never came. Evidently, neither Molly nor Lestrade had felt the need to lodge a complaint with the good doctor.
Well, good. Of course, Molly had never replied to Sherlock's text inquiring as to the current availability of certain tissue samples, but then, Sherlock told himself, he'd not been particularly keen on doing that experiment anyway.
And then, one morning, with almost a week gone by, during which he'd filled his time largely with walk-in clients and various brief monographs, Lestrade finally sent him the details of a new case, and just like that, equilibrium was restored. To Lestrade's credit, the case did have some intriguing features attached to it, and though the crime scene had already been documented and released, Sherlock was welcome to come down to St. Barts' later that afternoon and examine the body. In the meantime, Lestrade had forwarded all the relevant records and details they had amassed so far in the investigation.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm solving a case, John."
"Right, and for some reason, that meant you had to break into my flat this morning?" John said exasperatedly.
Sherlock opened his eyes to see John glowering down at him as he lay, reclined, on one of their couches. Mrs. Hudson had been kicking up an insufferable racket in Baker Street that morning as she'd done her monthly cleaning, mostly through her incessant litany of complaints and rebukes concerning his living habits. Considering the circumstances, Sherlock had decided it would be best for both parties involved if he were to escape to John's and Mary's for some solitude, where he could think uninterrupted for a few hours while they were out with Rosie for the morning.
Unfortunately for him, they had returned rather earlier than he'd anticipated.
"Needed some quiet," he said, feeling it should be rather self-explanatory. He really wasn't sure why John still affected the pretense of being surprised each time it happened. He pushed himself up to sitting from the couch. "Besides, I thought you might want to join. It's a decently interesting one; going to inspect the body in a few hours."
"Can't, sorry. I've been called in to the practice later today."
"Oh, come on, we can at least hear it, can't we, John?" Mary was leaning against the doorway to their living room, back from putting Rosie down for a nap.
Sherlock exchanged an approving look with Mary, and then arched his eyebrow up at John. "Come, John. We wouldn't want to disappoint dear Mrs. Watson, now, would we?"
John threw a reproving look at Mary, something along the lines of don't encourage him, but then, clearly sensing he'd been outnumbered, he gave a faintly frustrated sigh, and plopped down in the chair across from Sherlock. "Oh, go on, then."
Smiling, Mary joined them by settling into the other armchair.
Sherlock relaxed into the back of the couch and began to relate the details, clinically and precisely. "A young nanny by the name of Anna Musgrove shows up dead in her flat yesterday morning. The flat's been ransacked. She was employed by a certain well-to-do political family whenever they resided in London, watching their two young children. She's held her position for almost two years now. She has a sister in Sussex and a boyfriend who's finishing up university, but otherwise no familial attachments. The boyfriend is taken in for questioning after her death, and her sister comes up from Sussex to identify the body."
"What about her employers? Have they been questioned?" John interrupted, with his usual brisk matter-of-factness.
"Not yet, to my understanding," Sherlock said, steepling his fingers. "They were just in the process of departing to their second residence in the countryside, in fact, when all this happened. Besides, I'm sure with the influence they exert, the police want to be quite certain of the narrative before approaching them."
"You haven't gotten to the interesting part, yet, have you?" Mary chimed in readily. While Sherlock had been speaking, she'd tucked her legs up comfortably on her couch and propped her chin up on one of her hands.
Sherlock quirked up the corner of his mouth in a half-smile. "No, I haven't," he acceded, closing his eyes once more. "The sister arrives, comes in to ID the body, standard procedure. She walks into the viewing room, and not a second passes before she declares, 'I've never seen this woman before in my life.' The woman isn't her sister the nanny, at all. Oh, it's true enough that she has her wallet and possessions and was found in her flat, but the body on the slab is a complete stranger. A Jane Doe. A very close physical resemblance to the nanny, no doubt, enough that it might fool someone if they were seeing her for the first time, but not if that someone is her sister." Sherlock opened his eyes, pleased to see both Mary and John listening raptly. The bait had been taken, he reflected with satisfaction. "Suggestive, isn't it?" he asked them.
"So what you're saying is – the nanny is the one who killed her?" John said, frowning.
"Wonderful, John!" Sherlock said, clapping his hands together. "Really, it never fails to amaze me how utterly you always miss the mark."
"If it was the nanny," Mary told John gently, "why would the flat have been searched?"
John crossed his arms defensively, looking between the two of them. "Well, it could have been to throw off the police, couldn't it?" he offered obstinately, but it was a half-hearted obstinance at best.
"You know what I think?" Mary said, turning back to Sherlock, her eyes glinting with appreciative absorption, "I'll bet the killer mistook her for the nanny, right? Only, the real question is – what was this look-alike doing in the nanny's flat in the first place?"
"Very good, Mary," Sherlock said, abruptly pushing himself off of the couch. "It's heartening to see there are at least some favorable genetics in play for Rosie." He strode over to the kitchen table, where he'd haphazardly thrown his things earlier.
"Honestly, Sherlock!" John exclaimed, in a tone which Sherlock recognized, with a gratifying sense of victory, as one which usually signaled equal parts reproach and resignation. "Why is it we put up with him again?" John said, looking over to Mary.
Mary smiled, an amused twinkle in her eyes. "I think it's because we secretly like him," she whispered in reply, crinkling her nose playfully. She tilted her head at John in consideration, and Sherlock, shrugging on his coat, knew he had officially won John for the morning. "You know," she said thoughtfully, "you still have an hour or two, if you want to go with him."
Before John could reply, Sherlock broke in. "In the interest of time, let's skip over the usual, inevitable routine. I'll cover it, shall I? John protests, Mary insists, John objects, Mary perseveres and John eventually relents – though not without making it clear that it is very begrudgingly and very inconvenient to him. Right. Now that we have that done, here's your coat." Sherlock tossed him the jacket which had been hanging on their coat rack. "We're off to make a rich family very uncomfortable."
John instinctively caught it and stood up, though he only slung it over his arm rather than putting it on. "Hold on," he said, "I thought we were going to see the body."
"No, John, the body's this afternoon. Do keep up. Right now, we are going to go see the family who employed her," Sherlock said, elegantly tying his scarf and throwing a wink to Mary, who tried to suppress a smile, though not before John caught it and rolled his eyes.
"Honestly, the two of you," he muttered, finally putting on his jacket.
Sherlock met Lestrade in the corridor outside the lab later that day.
"Not really sure where to start with this one," Lestrade told him, frowning in perplexity, and Sherlock just barely resisted the juvenile urge to roll his eyes. Despite having distinctly enjoyed the case's progress that morning, Sherlock suddenly found himself demonstrably irritated.
"A truly unusual position to find yourself in, I'm sure," he replied.
"Right, well, it started out simple enough," continued Lestrade, seemingly oblivious to the disdainful impatience in Sherlock's tone. "Wasn't till the sister came up that we knew anything was wrong." The Inspector sighed heavily, raising a hand to scratch at the back of his neck. "Instead of a straightforward murder enquiry, we've now ended up with a Jane Doe and a missing persons case."
"The body, Inspector?" Sherlock said in a bored tone, and Lestrade finally seemed to grow aware of Sherlock's rather unwelcoming expression.
"Right, of course," he said hastily. "Molly will bring it out for us."
Well, if Molly was already prepared to assist Sherlock on cases, that must mean he'd not upset her nearly as much as he'd thought. She must have simply missed his text, Sherlock reflected.
When they strode into the lab, Molly was taking notes on one of her samples, but she looked up as they entered. "Just a mo, Greg," she said abstractedly, jotting down some final marks. Sherlock crossed his arms behind his back and waited for her to finish. Her hair was falling loosely from her braid in a few places, traces of her morning's makeup already largely eroded. There was a stain on her right lab coat sleeve, probably from lunch – a hurried one at the canteen today, then. An early morning start and a busy day of intake, it seemed.
Finally, she looked up. "Right, you'll be here for Jane Doe, won't you?" She grabbed a clipboard from the wall, thumbing through the pages quickly. "I just did her this morning. No matches in the database. Victim was in her early twenties. Died from strangulation, judging by the pattern of contusions on the anterior neck. Looks like it was done from behind, likely with her own scarf. She'd been dead about four hours by the time she was found." Molly was speaking relatively quickly, detachedly, and when she did glance up, it was only ever in Lestrade's direction. If Sherlock hadn't seen her cheeks grow slightly pink, he would be under the assumption that she was wholly oblivious to his own presence. So – still a little bit upset, then, he amended.
"I'll take you to see her now, then?" Again, she addressed her question to Lestrade.
"Thanks," Lestrade said, smiling at her. She smiled back, though Sherlock fancied it was more perfunctory on her end. Meanwhile, she still had yet to acknowledge him in any way. How tedious.
"Thank you, Molly," Sherlock said loftily, heading past her towards the examination room. If she expected to get some sort of rise out of him by acting this way, he regretted to inform her she was fated to be sorely disappointed.
Once in the mortuary, Molly pulled back the sheet from a body laid out on one of the tables to reveal the young female victim. Sherlock barely waited for Molly to step aside before he was already hovering over the body, taking in all the pertinent details as they subsequently jumped out at him in high relief. Yes, interesting. Suggestive. He hummed in appreciation of the faint mark on the bridge of her nose, the smudge of ink on the palm of her right hand, the tattooed letters sprawled across her forearm, the pristine, decorated, professionally-done nails. He could feel Lestrade's eyes on him – and Molly's as well, he noted with a fair amount of smugness, despite her apparent resolution of ignoring him. She never had been able to resist watching him at work.
Finishing his inspection, Sherlock straightened abruptly, expecting to catch Molly's gaze before she had time to glance away, but instead, she was staring down at the victim, with a faint frown creasing her forehead, as if she were trying to recall something. Really, Sherlock thought with annoyance, how much longer were they going to play this little game?
"So, what d'you think?" Lestrade asked, crossing his arms. "Any ideas on who she is?"
"Well, there would certainly be more to go on if I'd been able to see the crime scene," Sherlock said, giving a pointed scowl to Lestrade (Molly was still lost in seeming introspection) "but as it goes, I would say she's a graduate student in literature."
Lestrade's forehead crinkled in surprise. "How do you figure that?" he asked, looking back down on the victim.
"Well, the tattoo makes it rather obvious, don't you think?" Sherlock said, twisting the forearm upwards. "Several years old, judging by the fading of the ink. A very particular quote – 'Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan than may be yeve of any erthely man.' A revealing quote, that, don't you think?"
"As in, revealing she was rubbish at spelling?" Lestrade suggested wryly, glancing at Molly to see if she found the joke amusing, but Sherlock was pleased to see she had as little reaction to the Inspector as she had had to him.
"No, Inspector, revealing she was probably very good at spelling, and reading as well, seeing as she was familiar with Canterbury Tales' initial Middle English text. It's not the sort of quote you would have tattooed unless you were well-acquainted with the source material, and felt proud of being acquainted with it."
"Doesn't mean she's studying it, though. Could just be a show-off," Lestrade countered. "Know the type, Sherlock?" he added, giving him a meaningful look.
Sherlock didn't bother dignifying that with a response.
"Well, it would be a leap, if only everything else didn't support the hypothesis. Now, you'll notice, of course, that she's near-sighted – a groove on her nose, where her reading glasses usually are. She wears them a fair amount, but not all the time, as she would if they were prescription glasses, or the groove would be more pronounced. She writes a fair amount by hand, judging by the faded ink smudged across her inner right palm – that would be when she's taking notes; but she types a lot as well, the welts across both her arms where they're pressed in the desk. You'll have noticed the little note she made on her left hand, almost faded now?" He glanced up at Molly, for whom the question had really been intended, but she made no sign of having heard him. Sherlock brushed it off and plowed on. "It says Spenser, followed by the Roman numeral IV, followed by 119-20; author, book, line number. She's marking a reference she wants to remember for later. She's thin, meaning she has a rather erratic, poor diet, she has a nervous habit of chewing the ends of her hair, she only got her nails done recently – recently came into some money, perhaps? – but underneath them, the stubs of her nails show they're chewed down, bags under her eyes, meaning a poor sleep schedule, the worn instep of the shoes you sent pictures of shows that she cycles often – in short, everything, including her age, pointing to the life of a graduate student, and the tattoo narrows down the discipline more decisively to literature."
"Now, as to which college she attends," Sherlock continued, "if I were you, I would start with the one attended by the nanny's boyfriend, seems one of the more likely ways they could have – "
"Her nails!" Molly exclaimed suddenly, interrupting Sherlock. He stopped mid-sentence and stared at her blankly, feeling for a moment as if they were back working together on the Boscombe case, except in contrast to that, he had no idea what she was on about this time.
"Sorry," she said, turning to Lestrade with barely suppressed excitement, "but I just realized. The pattern on her nails, the one on the thumbs – the little bird and butterfly. It's been driving me mad trying to remember where I've seen it before. I thought it was some sort of logo at first, but it's not – it's a signature. The Monarch and Dove Salon, I walk past it everyday from the Tube - that's their little emblem."
"You sure?" Lestrade asked, sounding keen. "And it's a stand-alone, is it? Or a chain?" He was already pulling out his phone. Sherlock frowned in annoyance.
"Stand-alone, I'm pretty sure," Molly said, unconsciously tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. "And her nail art looks custom, and quite recent. I'm sure they might remember her if you show them her photo." She took the phone from Lestrade's hands before he had a chance to pull anything up on it, quickly typing and then pulling up a picture of the storefront on the screen, which she showed to him. "Here, it's only two blocks over."
"If she paid with a card, then we could have our ID by the end of the hour – thanks to you!" Lestrade said, grinning. "Bloody well done, Molls!" Molly blushed shily, though it was embarrassingly obvious to Sherlock how pleased she was with his praise. "Don't you think, Sherlock?"
Even then, Molly still hadn't looked up at him once, choosing instead to fiddle with Lestrade's phone under the guise of looking something up.
"Well, I don't think she actually did anything, precisely," Sherlock said coolly.
At that, she finally did look up from the phone, meeting his gaze for the first time since he'd arrived at the lab, though the expression in her eyes was strangely inscrutable at the moment.
"Yeah, well, not yet. We have to follow it up first," Lestrade amended amicably. "If it doesn't lead anywhere, we'll go with your way, Sherlock, but this way's faster, innit? And you have to admit, it's clever!"
"Clever?" Sherlock said, still looking steadily at Molly. "Mmm, not the word I would go with. If I were to call it anything, I would be inclined to call it 'dumb luck.' "
"Dumb luck?" Molly repeated in a fairly level tone, her eyebrows raising and her nostrils flaring slightly.
"You happen to regularly walk past the salon she recently had her nails done in. That's not deduction, it's happenstance."
"Now, hold on – " Lestrade started, but Molly interceded by exhaling a humorless laugh.
"It's fine, Greg," she said, handing back his phone before turning back to Sherlock. "Right, so, just to rephrase," she said carefully, "when you get something, it's clever, but when the rest of us do, it's 'dumb luck.' Is that how it works, Sherlock?" she asked, arching an eyebrow in challenge at him.
"It is when you didn't actually deduce anything," Sherlock said stiffly, crossing his arms behind his back.
"So, basically – " Molly said, speaking slowly, enunciating each word with a forceful precision, " - you're saying that you think I'm stupid." There was a dark, steely glint in her normally soft, unguarded gaze. Sherlock watched with an almost scientific interest as the side of Molly's jaw twitched with the pressure from which she was gritting her teeth. Perhaps, in retrospect, he had been faring better when she'd been ignoring him.
He finally relented, allowing his expression to soften, and a bit of contrition to creep into his eyes. "I don't recall ever saying that, Molly."
"No, you didn't. I suppose," she said, her words now laden with a heavy, scathing sarcasm, "that I must have deduced it from your tone." And with that, she flicked the sheet back over the body, turned on her heel, and marched out of the room.
Sherlock blinked. Frankly, he wasn't entirely certain how the exchange had escalated so quickly – he'd never once called her stupid, had he? Well, most people were (compared to him) but surely she knew that; and as far as regular people's intellect went, it was hardly as if he had ever held her in low esteem – he was fairly certain he'd been far more insulting in regards to John's intellectual capabilities, and Lestrade's, than he ever had with hers.
He finally looked at Lestrade, who was glowering at him in a definitively un-Lestrade way. "Really, Sherlock, do you have to be so bloody condescending all the time?"
"I wasn't –" Sherlock started, but Lestrade cut him off, lifting a hand.
"Insult me however much you want, but for once, you leave Molly out of it. Now I'm going to go follow this lead, and I'll call if we need anything." And he jabbed the screen of his phone, putting it up to his ear. "Yeah, Bailey? We're meeting down at St. Bart's, we got –" And then the door swung shut behind him, and Sherlock could no longer hear his conversation.
Sherlock frowned down at the covered body. It would appear that, aside from just the effects of his affront last week, Molly's and Lestrade's new relationship had shifted their dynamics in some undefinable, inconvenient way. He'd been wrong that morning – equilibrium had not been restored at all. It had been disrupted, perhaps irreparably, and at the moment, Sherlock found he did not much appreciate this revelation.
With a sweep of his coat, Sherlock turned and strode out of the lab. In retrospect, he supposed that he should've led with the fact that he'd already solved the murder that morning – but then, he reflected, it was predominantly Molly's and Lestrade's fault that he hadn't gotten to this reveal. No matter. He had better things with which to occupy his time. When Lestrade finally realized he did, in fact, need Sherlock's help – and he would, as he always inevitably did– the Inspector would know where to find him.
A/N: Gosh, Sherlock's being frustrating. But we'll get Molly's POV next chapter, so we'll get to see her take on all this...thanks so much for reading! :D