Suspicion

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

The first five minutes of the taxi ride were spent in silence. Sherlock was in his mind palace – presumably filing away the gathered evidence – while Molly was looking outside the window, watching the busy streets of London pass by. Well, she was not really watching. She was more trying to distract herself as not to ask Sherlock about his findings. Apart from telling the cabbie the address, he had not said a single word since they had left the flat.

Molly knew he wanted to be left alone at the moment, but she could barely stand it. Her whole body was tense, and her thoughts running wild. She desperately tried to think of anything else: the autopsy she had done yesterday, that she needed to do the washing up, the last film she had seen in the theatre, ... but nothing was able to distract her enough to keep her mind off Sherlock's findings.

Suddenly she felt the big hand of said man covering her small one that had been nervously fidgeting in her lap. Molly's head snapped towards the consulting detective, who looked annoyed, "God Molly, as much as I value your alert mind, tell it to stop. It's impossible to think when you are so loud."

The cabbie threw a glance at them through the rear view mirror, probably wondering why the dark haired man had told the petite woman to be silent, when she had not uttered a single word.

Molly cleared her throat and cast her eyes down. She did not know what made her more nervous: Sherlock's indignation or his warm hand that was still covering hers.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled, "It's just... I was wondering what you have found in the flat, that's all."

Out of the corners of her eyes Molly could see that Sherlock shook his head, as he finally pulled back his hand and let it rest on his lap again. For a second he looked at it, as if it were a foreign object that did not belong to his body.

"Then why didn't you just ask?"

The pathologist turned to look at him incredulously. She refrained from telling him the dozen reasons why it was never a good idea to interrupt the world's only consulting detective while he was thinking.

Sherlock looked right back at her, as if daring her to ask him directly, which Molly did, "So, what did you find?"

The words left the detective's mouth so quickly that Molly had troubles comprehending them all, "According to the police report and the look of the crime scene, the victim has fallen and hit his head on the table, which has broken his neck and lead to instant death. The traces on the coffee table and rug confirm that theory, but other evidence suggests another scenario: There are the half-empty bottle of wine on the table, the cork screw and the two glasses."

Sherlock looked at the pathologist as if everything should be clear to her now. She needed a moment to take in every word that had left his mouth and then started to question him in order to make sense of what he had said, "What about the wine bottle, the cork screw and..."

She could not remember what the last item had been that Sherlock had mentioned.

Sherlock sighed in annoyance and told her in his infuriating cryptic voice, "Two glasses, the two glasses are important."

Molly raised her eyebrows in question. "And why? There was only one glass on the table."

A glint of excitement was in Sherlock's eyes, for he was proud that his assistant had paid at least a bit of attention. "Obviously. But another glass had been used."

When Molly's face did not show any sign of understanding, but only more confusion, Sherlock reluctantly explained, "When I looked through the cupboards, I could see that all glasses had some water stains on them. Tom did not wipe them, just let them dry, like most men do. But one glass in the front row of the cupboard had been wiped with great care – there were no water stains on it. And as for the glass on the coffee table: It was full with wine under the brim and there was beeswing in it. Given Tom's state of intoxication at the time of his death, he was hardly able to carry a glass that was filled to the brim, yet even put it down onto the coffee table without spilling some of it."

He made a pause to give Molly time to take in all the information. Then he went on, "And as for the cork screw: There was a cork, but where was the screw? It was not on the coffee table nor to be seen on any of the police photos. I found a cork screw in one of the kitchen drawers, but the marks on the cork did not match the screw. So where is the cork screw with which the bottle has been opened?"

At the end of his explanation Sherlock looked at Molly expectantly, as if waiting for her to praise his genius.

The pathologist thought about it for a moment and then voiced out loud, "So, you think that there was someone else in the flat when he..." She could not say it, but made a motion with her hand.

Sherlock nodded eagerly, glad that she had followed this line of thinking.

All of a sudden Molly's stance got defensive when she crossed her arms in front of her chest. "And you base that conclusion on the fact that you could not find a cork screw?"

She sounded as if she was mocking him, and Sherlock did not like that at all, which led to his voice taking on a sharp edge while his eyes narrowed, "And someone has used a second glass. Did you not listen?"

Molly took a deep breath and drew the notebook out of her bag and started to make some notes.

Sherlock watched her and could not hold back on commenting, "You are writing from the back of the book to the front? What are you, Da Vinci?!"

Molly stopped her writing and turned towards him, planning on giving him a look, but when she met his eyes, she was surprised that there was a teasing twinkle in them. Hence she could not help the small smile that crept onto her lips.

She held his gaze, and not for the first time she wondered how that man could still be such an enigma to her. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the man ended and the mask began.

Sherlock's thoughts were quite alike. Although Molly Hooper had always been an open book to him, he had the feeling that he had skipped some pages while reading her in the past. There was something that intrigued him about her, although he would have never admitted that out loud. And since his fall and all the chaos that had followed, those... thoughts... feelings?... had become more frequent, more intense. He did not want to dwell on it or even read something into it, but he found it harder to resist day by day.

And for a split second he wondered if it had been a good idea to recruit Molly Hooper as his partner in crime again. He thought back on the last time she had assisted him with a case and how that had ended: He had asked her out. Even though he had seen the ring on her finger. What had he been thinking? Or had he done it because of the ring on her finger? Sure, he had just done it as a means to show his gratitude for what she had done for him. He had dinner with John after cases on a regular basis, after all. Maybe dinner was not the right word... Too many (Good? Bad? Disturbing? Unsettling? Confusing?) memories were connected with that term.

"So, what if Tom's friends refuse to talk to you?"

Molly's voice pulled the consulting detective from his thoughts. He hoped imploringly that his inner monologue had not been visible on his face. But given Molly's innocent expression, it had not.

Sherlock answered in a bored tone, "Doesn't matter, they do not need to say anything. You know that to me most people tend to be boring as soon as I have figured them out, which is generally about 15 seconds after I've first encountered them."

Molly chuckled and Sherlock was not sure if it was because she was nervous or if she was trying to make a joke when she said, "You've probably figured me out the moment you first laid eyes on me."

The consulting detective looked straight ahead when he stated matter-of-factly, "You are not most people."

Before Molly could contemplate if that had been a compliment, an insult or just a statement, the taxi stopped in front of a pub with a flickering neon sign that read "Bass Rock."