Mary's day-to-day work mostly involved the care and maintenance of children, but you couldn't get through life in public health without learning a lot about drug abuse. So once Isaac Whitney was clearly coming down she handed him off to Kate along with a list of NHS addiction resources (awful) plus the names of several private detox and rehab organizations (only slightly less crap). She did not, upon consideration, tell Kate that all of them were likely to be completely pointless until and unless Isaac decided he really wanted to stop. That was a sad little factlet and Kate would certainly figure it out on her own eventually anyway.
She'd offered to put Bill Wiggins in touch with an outreach group she knew of that focused on drug treatment for the homeless population. He'd declined, very politely, then asked her for twenty pounds for cab fare. Not being an utter idiot, she instead gave him three sandwiches, two bottles of Orangina, one of John's old jumpers, and an oyster card that was going to expire at the end of the week.
Then she finally got to change out of her pyjamas. It really was just feast or famine… either her husband was literally going stir-crazy, or else running off to crack houses and fishing out stoned consulting detectives, nothing in-between
She looked dubiously at the bread box, then made two slices of dry toast, which she successfully ate and kept down. Thirty two hours without being sick: a new and depressing personal record.
Her phone pinged.
-I need to borrow John for the evening, if I may. Just here in London, and nothing dangerous. It'll do him good to get out and about. He's put on ten pounds in the last month. -SH
Mary frowned, and typed back.
-It's maybe four. But yes, go ahead and have fun. Are you okay, though? I'm worried about you.
-Kindly confine your maternal instincts to your pending offspring. As I believe I said, I am FINE. It was for a case. -SH
-And we'll compromise and say seven. -SH
It was not seven… the past two weeks had been her opportunity to learn that male body image was just as fragile as female body image when it came to middle-aged spread, and the food in Italy really had been fabulous. Mary knew damn well it was back down to four because she was receiving daily reports on the topic from the source, usually accompanied with heartfelt monologues on whether they should buy a juicer. And as the only person in the conversation who knew how to lose an argument with any amount of grace, she let it go.
-Just be safe, all right?
-When am I ever not safe? -SH
-Yes, all right, I acknowledge that was possibly not the most confidence-inducing phrase I could have chosen.-SH
-However, in this case, *predictive*.-SH
She chuckled, and put her phone down. But ten minutes later, when she was debating if she should make an attempt at a soft-boiled egg, it pinged again.
-Mary, I need you to do me a favour.
-Sure, what?
-Can you go over to Sherlock's place, get the keys from Mrs. Hudson, and search his bedroom for drugs?
"Seriously?" she thought. They were definitely going to need to have an argument whenever he got home, because he was back into acting full-out ridiculous and it was just not on.
-Seriously?
-I know, and I'm sorry, but it's only the bedroom. The rest of the flat is probably clear.
Oh, well that made it totally okay, then, didn't it? The idea really just made her wince. It wasn't as though she'd never gone through someone else's private belongings but all those people had been, for want of a better word, bad. If Sherlock was using… whatever it was he used, somehow she'd never gotten around to asking and everybody just talked about Sherlock's "drugs problem" like it was some sort of dangerous pet that he kept… that was obviously worrying but he still surely had some fundamental right not to have his dirty laundry aired in front his friends.
And apparently she was oversensitive about this topic for some reason.
-I really do not feel comfortable with doing that.
-It sounds awful but sometimes all Sherlock needs is to avoid the near occasion of sin for long enough that he gets distracted by something else. If there's anything he can conveniently get access to that makes the whole process harder.
-And then things can get bad.
-Please. I'd do it myself if I could.
Mary rubbed the back of her neck and typed:
-Fine.
-You're a celestial goddess and I grovel beneath your feet.
-Duly noted. And yes you shall.
-Oh-ho... I'm rather sad I'm going to be gone tonight.
-Liar.
Mary made it into 221B an hour later because while the Bakerloo line was quite a quick trip, she had to sit with Mrs. Hudson for forty minutes of tea and chatting. Well, didn't have to, wanted to. Martha Hudson was quite possibly Mary's favorite person on Earth and had loads to relate about a pole-dancing masterclass that she was gearing up to teach ("Well, mentor, anyway, you know, the hip.").
Plus she was strongly implying she had slept with Paul McCartney back in the sixties and Mary had to try and winkle the truth about that out of her.
Mrs. Hudson provided her with the keys to the upstairs flat and a pair of Marigolds, saying, "You never know what you might find up there, dear, and you don't want to touch anything dangerous in your condition." Which was how Mary found out that she did in fact have the hormone-induced fat-face typical of early pregnancy, not that Martha phrased it so indelicately. She wondered why they were even bothering keeping it secret until the first trimester was over, given that it was apparently obvious to everybody.
Sherlock's flat sans Sherlock seemed silent and artificial, almost like a movie set, apart from the… smell? Curious, Mary followed her nose, tracing the ammonaical scent over to the fireplace, which someone had definitely pissed in. The reek and the mental image was enough to get her to abandon her tenuous hold on her food, and she staggered off to the flat's bathroom and threw up, which was really starting to get not-fun.
But her qualms about prying into Sherlock's personal life vanished down the drains along with about a quart of tea and Mrs. Hudson's excellent Battenberg cake. Mary knew men tended to go feral when they lived alone but if he was actually urinating into his fireplace then he was in more of a crisis mode than she had suspected.
She put on the rubber gloves, although when she got into Sherlock's bedroom she doubted she would need them. Unlike the rest of the flat, this room was uncluttered, tidy, and rather bare… the room of a man who lived elsewhere, and only slept here. Drawing a deep breath, she began to search.
It was actually quite revelatory once she got into it.
The first thing she found was the gun, tucked between the mattress and the box spring. Mary pulled it out and reflexively checked it over… Walther PPK, the obsolete, overpriced, overweight weapon of James Bond and the James Bond enthusiast. Super illegal in this country, loaded of course, and could definitely use a good cleaning. She wondered if it'd be better to maneuver John or Sherlock into doing that or simply to do it herself and act like she'd learnt about it on youtube.
Taped to the back of the periodic table on the wall, Mary found what looked like about twenty thousand pounds worth of emergency escape hatch money, divided between euros, dollars, and pounds. There were also three passports: Oyvind Sigerson, from Norway, Thierry Vernet, from France, and…
William? Really?
Mary took a closer look at the UK passport, and as best she could tell without a chip reader it was real, with all the appropriate holograms and so forth. But the other two looked real as well. She found it very hard to believe that a man with both "William" and "Scott" available to him would actually choose to go by Sherlock, but...
She was totally going to have to tell John that one, wasn't she?
The third intriguing discovery was behind the nightstand, and unlike the other two she didn't think it had actually been hidden. The pair of knickers (Ann Summers, bikini-cut, dove grey satin with ecru lace trim) seemed just to have fallen back there by accident.
Mary looked at the silky scrap in her hand and boggled. She could think of three possible reasons why a man might have a pair of women's underwear in his bedroom, and every single one of them seemed wildly inconsistent with Sherlock as she'd come to know him. Though on reflection she was glad she was wearing the Marigolds, after all. She tucked the pants, as she had done with the gun and the passports, back where she had found them.
Eventually she did find the drugs, because they weren't even really hidden. Sherlock had five identical copies of his enormous black coat in his closet, and in the capacious pocket of one of them was a roll of canvas, and in that roll was an old-fashioned reusable syringe, five capped Luer-lok needles, a length of stretchy tubing, and two small glass vials, all held tidily organized by elastic straps. Mary drew the vials out and looked at them, flat-eyed.
She'd known that they still used cocaine in medical practice, for minor surgeries on the nose and mouth, but until this instant she had not realized that pharmaceutical heroin was still a thing you could get. There it was, though, diamorphine, bearing the logo of a compounding pharmacy in Brighton. At least, Mary thought, trying desperately to find an upside, he wouldn't have to worry about adulteration or incorrect dosing like he would with street drugs.
Mary had an abrupt surge of memory, and she could almost hear Sherlock's voice in the silent flat, saying, "As a mental exercise, I've often planned the murder of friends and colleagues. Now John I'd poison."
Which was absolute amateur-hour bullshitting on his part, and also example number 4625-c of John or Sherlock actually talking about themselves when they thought they were talking about the other one. The difficulty in murder had nothing to do with the killing… that was usually embarrassingly easy. Human beings were incredibly fragile. The difficulty was all about the getting away with it. And if you wanted to get away with poisoning anybody, Sherlock Holmes would probably be your best choice.
This was a man, after all, who had kept potassium cyanide in a tin marked "sugar" next to the teabags until Mary and John had freaked out at him about it, individually and then as a team. A man who routinely experimented with all sorts of exotic toxins, to the point where he could die of… oh, say, the venom of the brazilian wandering spider, and it could still plausibly look like an accident. And now, apparently, a man who was injecting bloody Belushi-killing respiratory-depressing arrythmia-inducing bloodborne-disease-transmitting speedball straight into his body.
She understood now why quiet, gentle, endearritating Molly had had that alarming outburst back at the lab at Barts. Frankly if Sherlock had been in the room right then Mary wasn't 100% sure she wouldn't have clipped him around the earhole herself. She was suddenly and blackly furious. Sherlock had every possible advantage: a good heart, a truly remarkable mind, and very good looks (she was married, not blind), and for him to just callously endanger all of that for no reason besides boredom… argh!
But that wasn't really why she was upset, she supposed. It didn't make her angry that Isaac Whitney had broken poor Kate's heart over and over again, after all. She was upset because Sherlock's self-destructive conduct had accidentally set her off on a train of thought that ended with Mary thinking, in Amy's midwestern accent, "As a mental exercise, I've often planned the murder of friends and colleagues. Now John I'd-"
And of course it was obvious, wasn't it? Veteran, handgun owner, a few psychiatric diagnoses under his belt, life-long history of shattering losses…
If someone were to stage his suicide, everybody would be very sad. Nobody would be one bit surprised.
Then Mary had to sit down on Sherlock Holmes' bed, with his drugs and paraphernalia in her hands, and have a cry, a big blobby ugly one. She hated that this was her life, that she had these thoughts, that she was who she was. And as much as she would have liked to, she couldn't even blame Magnussen. This was her fault, and he'd just reminded her of it. Amy and Mary were the same damned woman, after all, and that part of her was always going to be there… that cold, cynical bitch was always going to be watching from inside her eyes and seeing these things with that calculating gaze.
Eventually Mary felt dehydrated and overly self-indulgent, so she stopped.
Out in the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of water and drank it down. She rinsed the two drugs down the drain, bent the needles, and tossed them into Sherlock's sharps container (less obviously necessary than the labels for the poisons and thus requiring a far more significant Molly Hooper freak-outing to get him to acquire). Mary considered breaking the syringe and the vials into bits, but on consideration decided she'd just take them with and toss the whole works at the office, since they had better capabilities for disposing of medical waste.
She had bought, a week ago, a cheap prepaid mobile at a Carphone Warehouse. She pulled this out of her bag and tossed it in the air, letting it flip three times before catching it.
The best way to run an operation is to integrate yourself seamlessly into the local routine. But if you can't do that, the second best way is to disrupt the routine in an unpredictable but minor way. She had a free evening, she was in just the right mood, and really, who would want to have dinner with the Marketing Group of Great Britain, anyway? He'd probably be itching for an excuse to back out.
Mary dialed a number, and while it rang, dug a version of Greg Lestrade's mockney accent out of her bag of tricks. A man answered… not Magnussen, thank heaven… and putting her best nerves into her accent, Mary said, "Yeah, um, right, so I heard from a friend that… somebody at this number might pay for information about important people. And, um, I've got some of that."