Sherlock

Sherlock bared his teeth at the ringing phone. Even an hour after he had heard the door slam from upstairs in John's room, he was still seething after their fight, and the selfish part of him was hoping that John was, too.

The phone was on the table, a mere metre away from him, but he couldn't be bothered enough to reach over and get it. It persisted to ring, on and on, until he snapped, and swiped it towards him with a fast, jagged movement.

It was Lestrade. He almost broke the phone with the force with which he punched the screen to accept it. 'What?' he snarled with nothing short of pure venom in his voice.

'Whoa, bad time?' Lestrade asked uncertainly. Sherlock knew that he must sound incredibly angry for Lestrade to reply with that tone – usually he would have just laughed at him.

He took a few deep breaths to calm himself before speaking again. 'I'm fine. What is it you want?' he asked, in what he viewed as a more pleasant manner.

'We've got a case for you, if you want to help out.' Lestrade still sounded hesitant.

Sherlock barely wasted a second in answering. 'I'll be there.' He would be ready to do anything to get himself out of this flat.

He listened to the address and details that Lestrade gave him, nodding even though the DI couldn't see it, because he was too lazy to do anything else. The case was a murder. The classic kind, too, the one that never failed to stump the police force – all doors and windows locked, no signs of struggle, a single wound. But wait, this one was special, because the wound wasn't in a place that would usually cause death. And there was barely any blood around the body. Sherlock pondered in silence as the case was described to him, eyes half-closed, until Lestrade paused and added something that jolted him out of his reverie.

'We could really use John's help, too.'

Something twisted painfully inside him at the mention of John's name, and his voice came out much more slowly than before as he replied, 'I… don't think he'll want to…'

'I'll ask him, okay?' Lestrade hung up, unaware of the horrified look that Sherlock was giving the phone.

He closed his eyes in shame and waited, listening. Upstairs, the phone rang. John answered more promptly than Sherlock had, sounding far less annoyed than Sherlock had, too. Their conversation was short, and a few seconds later he heard the door open and John come slowly down the stairs.

Sherlock sprang up to put on his scarf and coat before John came in to grab his. He was waiting quietly by the door when it opened and John came in. Neither was sure whether or not to break the heavy silence, and so neither did.

The cab ride to the crime scene seemed far longer than the few minutes that it really took, and the two of them only spoke twice in total, but not even to each other; Sherlock gave the cabbie the address, and John thanked him after they had gotten out.

The street outside the apartment was swarming with policemen and women, but Sherlock cut through the middle of them with little notice of the half-protests he left in his wake. Typically, John did his apologies for him, although they were a lot less in number than was usual.

Lestrade was waiting for them in the hallway, in front of an elevator with its doors opened. One glance at the DI's face told Sherlock that Lestrade had already half-figured out what was going on, which shortened his temper again. 'Where is the body?' he asked.

'It's, uh, just up here-,' Lestrade began, but Sherlock swept past him and into the lift before he finished. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw John hesitate before trading a glance with Lestrade and then following him into the lift.

The doors closed, and there was something far more solid than Lestrade between John and Sherlock. Nobody spoke as they ascended, not even Lestrade, who was prone to attempting awkward conversation at the worst of times. Sherlock felt some sort of invisible pressure upon him, like the lift was shrinking, and almost ran out of the doors when they opened.

'So… there she is,' Lestrade said, after looking curiously between two men opposite him, who were staring determinedly away from each other. Sherlock followed Lestrade into a spacious living-room, where a body was lying on the sofa.

'You haven't moved her, did you?' Sherlock asked, moving closer to the woman's body.

'No,' was the reply. 'She was like that when we found her. But there's blood in the bathroom.'

'That's of no use to me.' Sherlock glanced quickly around the room, making note of and assessing everything in it. The place was incredibly tidy, with all furniture at perfect right-angles and books stacked neatly in the large bookshelf that covered two-thirds of the side wall. There were many gift-type objects in the room, but none of them had even a remote resemblance to each other; the woman had had quite a steady stream of boyfriends, but had been single for at least a few weeks now, judging by her lack of make-up and sloppy dress. Left-handed – no, right-handed, that mug on the table – no, definitely left-handed, the placement of the TV remote said so – fine, the layout of her cupboards said maybe she was ambidextrous. Lestrade, telling him details about the woman that he didn't need to know. Tasteful yet relatively cheap furniture, regardless of the expensive apartment – despite appearing to keep everything together she was unorganized at heart, but dedicated to her job as a… a high-up surgeon, at the local hospital. She'd moved in recently, too. An officer or two hung around the sides of the room, watching him. And John, standing there far more quietly than he usually did, looking angry and wounded even as he studied the body.

'Where's the wound?' Sherlock asked abruptly, tearing his eyes away from his flatmate and stopping Lestrade mid-sentence. He didn't even look surprised, just showed him the woman's palm, in which a deep gash had been made.

Lestrade had been right – that wound wasn't in a place that should have caused death, unless left untreated for a long time, even though that was the only sign of how she had died. But there was still no blood.

'She wasn't attacked here.' Sherlock moved to look around the apartment more closely. Thermostat: 20 degrees, even though it was spring. Lots of healthy snacks, and three full jugs of water, were in the fridge. Sherlock glanced at the sink – at least ten glasses were there, recently used, and her cupboards were home to many more.

'What?' Lestrade asked incredulously, but he was already moving back to the body, taking off her shoes. Thick socks, to keep feet warm.

'Not. Attacked. Here,' Sherlock repeated slowly as he glanced up, his searching eyes narrowing as Lestrade stepped into their way. 'But she did die here, if that's any help.'

'What the bloody hell are you on about, Sherlock?' he asked.

'That wound was made somewhere else, not in this building, and she came back here to try to treat herself, because she was a doctor and that's what they do, even though it's stupid and they should get someone else to help them.'

Sherlock ignored the way John shifted as he said that. He also ignored the disgusted expression Lestrade's face took after Sherlock lifted up the dead woman's hand and sniffed the wound after examining the nails, before peeling back her sleeve to look at her arm. He smirked and leant back, satisfied.

'But it was too late, because she has very poor circulation – possibly even anaemia – and though she managed to minimalize the blood loss before getting to the building, it was still too much for her body to cope with.' Here he paused to fish out his phone and open the maps app. 'She wouldn't have taken a cab. When you're wounded like this your basic instincts kick in, and being so disorganized she wouldn't have thought of it in time, even though she was practically fainting when she came in,' Sherlock added, bending and examining the floor. 'But there was someone here…' he muttered.

Lestrade cut him off. 'Disorganized? Sherlock, look at this place.'

'I know, such a muddle, isn't it? Look at the haphazard way in which that plate has been left in the sink – it's barely parallel to the rest of the dishes.' He studied the area around them on the map. 'Anyway, a cab driver would have wanted to take her to the hospital. There are plenty around, so she intended not to take a cab – or maybe, she wanted to avoid the hospital. So if she didn't take a cab, the place that she was hurt would be relatively near – in fact, it was probably here,' Sherlock said, showing them a block of abandoned warehouses that he had just located, known to house many murders and attacks of this sort, marked with a bright red pin on his phone.

Deducing things wasn't half as fun when John didn't praise him afterwards.

'How can you be so sure?' Lestrade asked incredulously. 'Maybe -,'

'What, someone came to her apartment, cut her hand, waited for her to bleed herself to death, cleaned up afterwards and locked her in?'

There was a pause. 'Why wouldn't she have called for help?'

'She tried to.' Sherlock leaned over the body, reached into the gap between the cushions and pulled out a phone. Its screen was smashed, but after carefully unlocking it, the dial pad came up on the screen. The emergency number had been typed in, but the bottom of the screen was too cracked to reach 'Dial'.

'But – but why not use the landline?'

'There isn't one. She'd just moved in.' Sherlock was getting frustrated again. Why wasn't Lestrade getting it? What were those officers whispering to each other? Why didn't John say anything?

'How did you know about the circulation thing?'

'Thermostat. Water. Socks.' Sherlock hissed through his teeth. 'Whoever wounded this woman knew her; otherwise they would have stabbed her somewhere more likely to cause death. They would have known that she would try to manage herself, thinking it a non-deadly wound, would have known that she would rather walk and further endanger herself than take a cab, would have known that her body would tire quickly.' They would also no longer be at those warehouses.

'They were here too. They must have – what?' he snapped. Lestrade was shaking his head.

'Sherlock, look at this place – it's huge! There are cameras all over, and nobody came here with her.'

Sherlock stopped for a millisecond, taking that in, and then said, 'Well, they must have missed something. There was definitely someone with her.'

Lestrade didn't get it. He refused to believe anything that he couldn't understand, and since for some unfathomable reason he couldn't see the links that Sherlock was so carefully trying to lay in front of him, he was already shaking his head. This wasn't helping his mood at all.

John got it, though. Sherlock could see it in those eyes that refused to meet his own. Nothing was going right today, and though he should have felt sorry for John, having to spend his first few hours as an engaged man with a resentful flatmate at a crime scene in London, the selfish part of him stopped him from caring, and instead made him increasingly bad-tempered. The slightest provocation could make him snap, and nobody would want that.

Sherlock tried to calm himself down, but unfortunately, before he could do so, something could come. Sherlock's eyes narrowed into slits of pure murderous ice, even as Lestrade's eyes widened in shock, as Anderson's voice sounded from behind them.

'Oh, it's you. Well, we found something that you might-,'

Sherlock spun around and snarled. Actually snarled, like an animal, teeth bared and eyes fixed on Anderson, who backed away fast.

Sherlock hadn't intended to react like that – he'd meant to snarl words, and in fact, it had scared him almost as much as everyone else – but it had had the desired effect. However, there was nothing to do now except to storm out of the suddenly completely silent room, shoving Anderson aside as hard as possible, without drastically injuring him, as he left.