"Come on, Charlie-bear, please smile for Mummy…"
John looked up from his pile of books. There was only a month to go before the big return to work, and he was out of both theory and practice, so he had to study up for it. The upstairs office was now the bedroom of a certain fair-haired young lady, so the dining-room table had to suffice for one. Molly was curled up barefoot on the floor near the sofa. Charlie was lying on a purple fairy-print playrug beside her, examining her hands and kicking her little feet up. Molly had been trying for the past fifteen minutes to get her baby to smile at her. The best she could get was a studious, contemplative stare.
"Charlie, isn't seven weeks a little young for me to have to tell you to mind your mother?" John said. "Not sure grounding's much of a threat at your age."
"What if there's something wrong with her, John?" Molly asked. "All the other babies at Mother's Group are smiling already. I mean literally every single one. And they were all born the same week she was…"
He sighed and put down his book properly. "Lolly," he reminded her, "we had her to Dr. Milne only three days ago, and she said it was fine, remember? She was nearly two weeks early, and her milestones are calculated from her due date, not her birthday."
"Yes," Molly said. "But I don't want her to be behind..."
"She's not behind. Babies do things at different ages. Maybe she just doesn't feel like smiling."
A sudden memory flashed through John's mind: of reading his father's diary in that close, cluttered bedroom in Essex the day before Charlie's birth. It was true that he'd read words of compassion and love and repression and deep grief in those diaries. He had also read things like: October 4th, 1973: Harriet took her first steps today. John didn't. I can't say I'm surprised.
And that was before the Falklands. No PTSD excuse for that.
"Besides," he continued, going over and getting down on the floor beside her. "I don't care what the other babies at Mother's Group are like. Charlie's got better parents than they do." He kissed Molly's cheek, then snaked an arm around her waist. "Well, a better mother, anyway…"
"Not sure about that." Molly smiled wearily. "Every time they talk about what they're doing with their babies, and it's different to what we're doing, I feel like I'm wrong."
"And you know what? I bet they think they're the ones who are doing it wrong. Besides, Charlie's the testing-stage of this parenthood thing, so we can't be expected to get everything right. We did say five kids, right?"
Molly shot him a filthy look.
John smiled and kissed her again. "You look tired," he said. "Go on up; I'll keep an eye on her."
She hesitated, looking over at her serious-faced little daughter. "Well… aren't you meant to be studying…?"
"I can multitask." John scrambled to his feet and picked a textbook up off the table. "I'm only revising, not getting my degree. We can read together... well, okay, maybe we won't be reading that." He pushed aside a copy of the Color Atlas of Sexual Assault and picked up the next book. "Let's read Wound Closure Biomaterials and Devices, Charlie. That's nice and age-appropriate."
Molly gave in, smiling and heading upstairs for a long soak in the bath. As John sat down cross-legged on the floor beside his daughter, she broke into a gummy, dimpled grin at him.
"Don't you dare let your mother see that you can already do that," he muttered, tweaking one of her cheeks with his finger. "You know, you could smile at her for a change… right. Page seventeen. Now pay attention, because you're going to be a genius and have a degree by the time you're twelve, so this is all practice…"
John had read aloud through to page twenty-six, and the bath had stopped running upstairs, when the landline started to ring. He got up a little stiffly and went over to where it lay on the kitchen counter to answer it. "Hello?"
"Hi. Is this a terrible time for it?"
Lestrade.
"Nope, go ahead." John rubbed at his eyes. The smiling, happy little creature on the floor had been decidedly less chilled-out at half-past one that morning. And then again at ten to three, twenty past three, five past four… "Please tell me it's a case. And one that doesn't involve me memorising every muscle in the human body."
"Yes and no."
"Yes and no?"
"Some working knowledge of poison'd come in handy. The wife letting you out yet?"
John glanced down at Charlie, who was now fascinated by her own fingers. "She's off duty for the moment. Come around, if you want."
"Sherlock's with me. He's going to love it."
"He'll cope."
Lestrade and Sherlock arrived at the house an hour later and let themselves in, finding John still on the floor amid his pile of books. Molly had gone to the bedroom to watch TV.
"Sherlock," John said, looking up at him. "Did you find the diamond?"
"Of course I found the diamond," was the contemptuous response. He was referring to the famed jewel of the Duchess of Morcar; a large and rare blue stone with the hideous name of the Blue Carbuncle. "The problem with smuggling diamonds inside of geese is that geese are often hard to tell apart."
"… Geese?"
"You heard me perfectly. What are you doing?"
"Taking a shower, clearly," John said, with just the mildest hint of acid in his voice. "Yep, I was waiting for that…"
Sherlock had gone back into the kitchen while John had been speaking; they just then heard the pantry door open. He had, John knew, been hard at work on the diamond case for the last six days. He hoped he'd eaten in that time, but was a little afraid to ask. Sherlock returned to the room a few seconds later, holding a packaged loaf of bread and picking dry slices out of it as if he were starving - which, John reflected, he probably was.
"You know you may as well be eating glue," he said. "Besides, we need that for breakfast tomorrow. But there's a shepherd's pie in the fridge you can have if you want. Might be a bit more nutritious."
Sherlock did a u-turn back to the kitchen, and they heard the fridge door open and close. Five seconds later he returned.
John sighed. "You could heat it up, too," he suggested.
"What for?"
"Tends to be more pleasant to eat that way… also, just so you know, modern man has this wonderful invention called a plate."
"No time for that," Sherlock said with his mouth full, taking another bite before he'd swallowed the first.
"Hey, easy." John frowned. "If you scoff that down it'll just come right back up again. So what's happened?"
Sherlock worked on his mouthful of pie for a few seconds. "Murder," he was finally able to get out. "French ambassador's daughter poisoned her husband. Do you know much about chloroform poisoning, John?"
"Not as much as I think you want me to know," John said. "And if everyone knows she poisoned her husband, why all this?" He glanced at Lestrade again.
"Ah, now you're asking the right questions. Autopsy held just after midday showed a large quantity of chloroform in the dead man's stomach, but there were no chemical burns in his mouth or esophagus. And no fumes in his lungs…" Sherlock coughed a little over his mouthful of pie. John, once convinced that he wasn't choking, thought for a second.
"I probably shouldn't admit this," he said, "especially not in front of a senior police officer. But chloroform is one of those things medical students like to pinch from the supply closet and muck about with after-hours. It's pretty corrosive. If you tried to force it down someone's throat they'd have chemical burns on their mouth and fumes in their lungs, like you said. I don't think you could mask the taste in any other kind of food or drink, either. It'd be like drinking drain cleaner."
"Nothing else in his stomach, anyway, except the remains of two tablets of aspirin," Lestrade supplied.
John nodded. "Well, aspirin wouldn't have made the chloroform any worse. It's not a toxic combination. If you tipped a small bottle of chloroform straight down the hatch, it's possible you could avoid the chemical burns… could it have been a suicide?"
"That's what Mrs. Bartlett was trying to peddle to me earlier today," Lestrade said. "She has no other defence, because she and Edwin were alone when it happened."
"But you're not buying that."
"No, not after that she went ahead and confessed."
John blinked. "She confessed? Seriously?"
"When the first responders showed up they found she'd got into the liquor cabinet. They tried to take a statement anyway, which is when she confessed."
"So you can't use it."
"No, we can't. She was obviously not in a fit state - crying and laughing and playing music at full blast, and apparently she tried to kiss Halloran. Anyway, there's no other evidence to suggest that Edwin Bartlett was suicidal, and the initial police report, such as it was -" Lestrade had never regretted a delayed arrival at a crime scene more- "suggests he was found lying on his back quite peacefully."
"And the chloroform? Where did that come from? Not the kind of thing you'd find lying around everyone's household."
"Four little bottles of it were found on the premises, and the dose was large enough that it would probably have to have come out of all four. We're still investigating how and when they were bought."
"Were there fingerprints on the bottles?"
"Both Addie and her husband's were on all four," Sherlock said. "If she's provided any reason for hers to be there, I've not been - oh for God's sake, put it down, Lestrade."
Lestrade had stooped down to pick Charlie up off the floor.
"It's rude not to say hello to people, Sherlock," he said, settling Charlie in his arms and gently prising her sticky fingers off his collar. "How's life going for you these days, kid?"
"Smiling for everyone except Molly," John said. "Try not to tell her. She's feeling a bit fragile about it. I mean, it's not like she's old enough to be doing it on purpose."
"I don't think Hayley smiled until she was about five," Lestrade said. "Grumpy little bugger she could be sometimes. So, anyway..." he said in louder tones, deferring to Sherlock's scowl, "Adelaide Bartlett was released at seven this evening. I had no real reason to hold her without making an arrest, and if I arrest her, I need to have a damn good theory as to how she did it. Which is where you two come in."
John looked at Sherlock in surprise. "You mean you haven't interviewed her yet?"
"Mycroft," he said. "Apparently, Adelaide's father will make a fuss if we go around to the house interviewing her late at night."
Sherlock wasn't always prepared to defer to Mycroft's wishes on every case. But since the failure of the Bond Air plan, and the botched hit on Sebastian Moran, he'd had to concede that sometimes it was better to do so.
"Proceed with caution," Lestrade reminded him. "Your brother didn't even like the idea of me interrogating her." He paused. "Mind you," he conceded, "the impression I got was that she's a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Mel thinks she might be mentally ill in some way, but we can't find that she's ever been diagnosed."
"I'm not a mental health expert," John pointed out.
"No, but you'll do. We'll go first thing tomorrow," Sherlock said ungraciously. "Don't bring Charlotte with you."
As yet, Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes were the only people who had never once referred to Charlotte Watson as Charlie.