Sherlock

They ended up back at the crime scene at around quarter to four. John had managed to convince him to wear a coat over his pyjamas, after making various threats including throwing out his chemicals and burning his violin music. They both knew that John would never have actually done any of those things, but Sherlock had decided to humour him. And besides, it was cold.

There were still a few officers hanging around outside. Lestrade was sitting in the doorway waiting for them, rubbing his head with the heel of his hand and clearly regretting answering the rude texts that Sherlock had sent him. He did brighten up when he saw that Sherlock and John weren't fighting any more.

'Alright, you two?' he grinned. 'Back on track?'

Sherlock gave him a wordless glare as he swept past. Lestrade jogged to catch up. 'Anderson owes me a fiver then.'

'I'm glad you're making money off him, it's the only useful thing he seems to do,' Sherlock muttered as they stepped back into the lift. He didn't particularly want to ask what Anderson had thought they'd have done otherwise.

'I've got the camera recordings, like you asked, and I'm not going to ask why you need them here rather than at the station. I do have one question though,' Lestrade added as the lift doors closed.

Sherlock regarded him imperiously. 'Yes?'

'Why the bloody hell are you in your pyjamas?'

Sherlock sniffed, holding back a smirk. 'Of course I'm in pyjamas, it's barely four in the morning.'

He enjoyed the incensed look that Lestrade gave him. 'We know, Sherlock, you dragged us all out of bed for this!'

'He actually did drag me out of bed. It was quite alarming,' John remarked from behind him.

'Sherlock, you shouldn't do that!' Lestrade scolded him.

'He wasn't getting up,' Sherlock muttered.

'That's still no excuse!' Lestrade said. 'People need their space!'

'Then why,' Sherlock asked, 'were elevators invented?'

John snorted with laughter, and after a while, Lestrade, and finally Sherlock joined in.

A bleary-eyed officer eyed the three of them with distaste as they entered the otherwise silent apartment. The body was no longer there, and Sherlock made to sit on the sofa, before he caught John's stony glare and quickly moved to one of the armchairs. The other two sat around him, Lestrade handing Sherlock the laptop with the camera recordings of the night before. Before he played the clips he glanced up, looking for cameras.

'No cameras in here?' he asked incredulously.

'One by the door, but that's it in the living room,' Lestrade answered. 'There are twelve cameras around the apartment, including one in the corridor that leads to the bathroom where the blood is.'

'Yes, I, er… I'm going to need to look at that,' Sherlock admitted. Lestrade's eyebrows rose slightly, triumphantly. 'Of course.'

The recordings that he needed to see were short, and thankfully easy to find. He watched the woman stagger in, clutching her hand and looking fearfully behind her. He switched to the hallway camera. The bathroom door was open, and blocked a large portion of the screen, which was annoying, but he dismissed it and watched as she stumbled to the bathroom, only to re-emerge a minute later looking far worse. Sherlock watched as with trembling fingers she took her phone from her pocket, and then dropped it onto the sofa to look for another phone. For some reason she looked down the hallway to where the bathroom was, and as her back was to the camera Sherlock couldn't see her face.

He paused the video and looked up. 'John, will you go down that hallway?'

John looked at him, saw the 'please' in his eyes that he was unwilling to say in front of Lestrade, sighed, and stood up. 'To – where, exactly?'

'Just in front of the bathroom door is fine,' he replied. 'Lestrade, can I switch this video to live?' he asked as John walked away.

'Uh – yeah,' Lestrade replied, and hesitated before typing in a few incredibly obvious passwords without bothering to attempt to hide them from Sherlock's view. 'Do you think someone came in with her? Because that camera shows the door, and she was the only person in this apartment.'

'We'll see,' Sherlock replied distractedly. Lestrade rolled his eyes.

'OK, John,' he called as soon as he could see the live recording of John from the camera in the hall. 'That's the bathroom door, yes?'

'I think so -,' John replied, swinging the door open to check, and as he did so Sherlock cried, 'Wait! Hold the door open.'

'Like… this?' Sherlock watched John open the door halfway and look expectantly into the camera.

'No, so that it's perpendicular to the wall.' When opened like that, the door swung outwards into the hallway blocked the camera's view of most of the hallway – including one of the other doors in it.

'I don't see why you can't be the one swinging doors around,' John grumbled. Sherlock ignored Lestrade's smirk as he leaned in towards the screen. 'Because, John, I need to see these camera recordings. Any windows in there?'

'They're on a laptop for Christ's sake, Sherlock, you can walk around with them! And no.'

'What was that door to your left?' Sherlock asked. Even from the fuzzy footage he could make out John's triumphant 'ha-I-won' grin.

'It's the bedroom – her bedroom, from the looks of it,' he replied, pushing the door open

'Windows?'

'Sherlock, there was nobody there, the cameras would have caught them!' Lestrade sighed.

'No, no windows… oh, hang on,' John said, disappearing into the room. 'Well, there's a skylight.'

Sherlock placed his fingertips together and leant his chin on the arch they created. 'Okay, what I want you to do now is try to walk from the bedroom to the bathroom without being seen by the camera.'

A few seconds later John replied, 'Done.' Lestrade raised his eyebrows. They hadn't seen any movement on the monitor at all.

'Was it hard?'

'No, it was really easy.'

'And why was that?'

'Because the bathroom door blocks the camera.'

Sherlock smirked in satisfaction. 'Good.' He snapped the laptop shut and walked into the bathroom. 'Do these stains match her DNA?' he asked, surveying the room. Everything was organized neatly into cupboards, with only a toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink. The sink itself was wide, well-designed, and stained with blood on the front and basin. Some of the stains reached the floor.

'Most do… but one of them doesn't,' Lestrade said, pointing to a small one at the front of the basin.

'Excellent. I'll need you to try to identify who that might have belonged to. And I want a list of people that she's been contacting recently, too.' Sherlock said as he swept out of the room.

'Yes, sir,' Lestrade muttered as he followed, but Sherlock pretended not to notice.

He entered the room that John had been in earlier. It was definitely her main bedroom, if the amount of small ornaments was anything to go by. The skylight was large and directly above the soft queen-size bed – if he had lain down in it and looked directly up, he would be able to see the sky.

He jumped onto the bed – ignoring the 'tsks' that it provoked from both John and Lestrade for having his shoes still on – and inspected the skylight. It opened, wide enough for a man to fit through, and from standing on the bed he was able to easily pull himself through and onto the roof. He stuck his head back into the room and grinned.

'John, come up please. You too, Lestrade.' Barely registering the identical sighs that the two men emitted (they were acting a lot like ill-tempered parents) he spun around to look at the rooftop. It was wide and flat, with direct connections to buildings on two sides and a low building close enough to jump onto at the back.

The front of the building faced a main road.

He heard the sounds of John pulling himself up behind him as he slowly walked up to the front of the building, stopping with his toes on the edge, looking onto the road below. It was high, very high, and looking down onto the pavement below brought back painful memories.

He blinked, breathing hard, and took a step back away from the edge. As he tried to set his mind back to the case, and far away from that horrible day, he heard John walking up behind him.

His friend stopped beside him, their arms touching, letting Sherlock know that he would always be there, that solid, warm presence at his side. They'd never quite agreed which of them had been more hurt by Sherlock's fake suicide – Sherlock himself, knowing that his friend was in pain and yet having to stay back and watch from afar; or John, wondering if somehow he had caused his 'suicide' and never expecting an answer.

Their eyes met as Sherlock turned to walk back along the roof, and only the sounds of Lestrade noisily climbing up caused him to break his gaze. 'Looks like a nice spot to get in from, yes?' he called, striding forward and trying not to think about John's expression when he'd looked at him. There'd been pain in those warm eyes, and worry, constant worry, and a little bit of something else that he was strangely unfamiliar with. But he was almost certain that he'd looked exactly the same.

Lestrade, oblivious to what had just passed between the two men opposite him, looked around saying, 'Yeah, pretty good. But where did he come from?'

'Just over there, I think,' Sherlock said, pointing east and shading his eyes against the rising sun in that direction. 'That's where those warehouses are, and unless I'm very much mistaken there's an easy path to the building's roof from here, and a way to get in.' He looked at John and grinned, gesturing into the sunlight. 'Shall we?'