Scarborough Fair

Summary: Kuroba Kaito finds himself in a sticky situation when he's kidnapped by a man who's also guilty for the abduction of three others. How can even the Kaitou Kid escape drug-induced paralysis, a psychotic doctor, a blackmailed housekeeper, and a mansion filled with traps and dungeons?

Pairings: Very minor hints.

A/N: I own nothing except Dr. Hailey, Anita Hailey (though I don't own their names), Kojima Daisuke, Armagnac, Champagne, Cognac, Amaretto (though I don't own their designs) and 'A'. Okita Soshi and Nagashima Shigeo are actual DC people. Think Yaiba and Yoban Saado.

Title comes from Simon and Garkunkel song. Also loosely based around Mothy's song, 'Little Garden Girl' feat. Hatsune Miku. May be called alternate name of 'Clockwork Lullaby 2'.

Underlined sentences = Spanish

Prequel: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"

Side Story: "Clockwork Relations"

EDIT(24/03/2013): Plot holes.

"Say these are your work, and you'll be the best biochemist in the world," he pushed the briefcase towards her. "Daddy loves you, Anita. No matter what."

Ai couldn't force her eyes shut. She wasn't sure if she would have had she known for sure.

She still wasn't sure if deep inside, she had known that he'd shoot himself in his head with a trembling hand and tears in his eyes. But damn it, he didn't stop smiling that fatherly smile.

The loud sound of the gunshot was absorbed by whatever the walls were made out of. Not concrete, that was for sure.

She managed to tear her eyes away at last. A bullet to the temple was a quick and efficient way for sure, used far too many times in movies and overly dramatic television series, but it did the job. She turned her whole head away from the now-dead doctor after the simple movement of her eyes proved to not be effective. That was it? Suicide?

. . .

Why?

She had thought he would shoot her after she smashed his fantasy. During her time in the labs of the organization she had often seen a few chemists test drugs that caused hallucination on human subjects. One drug had given them a pleasant dream that was immensely addictive to the point where the test subjects would lash out with the strength of a true cornered psychopath when they were brought back into reality.

He may not have been on that drug, but he certainly was on that level of insanity. He should have lashed out at everything and anything, including her.

Instead, he killed himself. So maybe he wasn't a psychopath, just someone mentally unstable who really thought she and that doll had been his daughters.

Someone who had been mentally unstable. Maybe, or maybe she was just trying to think good things about him. It wasn't like her reasons mattered anyways. He was just dead now. A sad end to a genius mind.

Ai looked down the tunnel. If the police saw her – with the explosions she had heard, she had no doubt they'd find this place soon – she wouldn't be allowed to keep the suitcase and be taken in for an interview. To go back the way she had come would be to risk running into the people at the front.

Not a chance.

That left the other end of the tunnel. She wasn't sure about where it would lead but the doctor had considered it safe for him and his 'daughter'. The police probably weren't down there yet.

Grabbing the heavy briefcase, she began to make her way down the tunnel before she stopped and looked back at the doctor's body. "I'm sorry."

It hadn't really been his fault, anyways. It was the Organization that had led him to his insanity.

The tunnel felt like a stretch of forever and she was puffing because of the extra weight she was carrying by the time she reached the end, where a ladder stood waiting under a trapdoor of some kind. With difficulty, she managed to climb with her briefcase.

Kudo-kun was waiting for her outside. "Do I even want to know how you knew about this passage?" she asked, dragging the dead doctor's briefcase behind her. For a seven year old girl's body it was really quite heavy and hard to carry.

The shrunken detective tried to take it from her, extending a small hand. She glared at the offered help and implied pity until he withdrew it. "I guessed," he said, placing his hand into his pocket. Good move. She'd been considering biting it.

"And you were right. Great. Now let's go home before the police decide to take this away as evidence."

She half-expected an onslaught of questions from the danger magnet, but he surprised her by merely nodding. "Can I carry that for you?"

"No," the least she could do was carry the burden that had been placed on her.

"Excuse me?"

Nagashima Shigeo looked up from the release forms the hospital had told him to fill out with a wary expression. The last time someone had said those words to him he had been tasered and imprisoned by a crazy doctor with some kind of doll fetish. "Yes?" he asked, gripping the ballpoint pen.

It was the foreigner medic who'd been treating Kuroba back outside the house, standing in front of him with a baseball in her hand. "Sorry to bother you, but I'm a fan. Would you mind signing this for me?"

He took the sphere from her gingerly and stepped back before signing the curving surface. "Who should I make it out to?" he asked.

"Just 'A'. That's what everyone calls me anyways."

Shigeo scrawled out a large, loopy English letter under his signature. "Here you go."

The blonde took it with a large smile. "Thank you!" 'A' chirped before going off somewhere with a cheerful spring in her step.

Shigeo handed the forms into the secretary at the counter and waited for Yutaka to come and pick him up.

"OKITA!"

The swordsman found all of his kendo teammates trying to get into the room he was in. All of them were trying to fit in through the narrow way all at the same time.

And again, the stereotypical image of a dumb jock came into his head.

His fellow teammates and dumb jocks were now imitating something even more annoying – a reporter.

"Ya think ya can play for th' tournament next week?"

"Didja lose yer touch?"

"Can ya fight?"

"Shh!" several nurses hissed at the mass of high school boys all still stuck in the doorway.

His kendo team members didn't know the meaning of that annoying hissing sound the nurses were making like epileptic snakes and as such they were banished from the hospital for disturbing patients.

Soshi sighed and filled out his forms as quickly as possible before hurrying out to make them stop embarrassing Osaka.

How the hell had they even come down to Tokyo this quickly?

Takagi stepped out of the car and opened the door for Diana-san, who all but jumped out of the vehicle before flying into her husband's arms. Colin Smith lost his balance and fell over, pinned to the ground by his wife. He didn't seem to mind being on the ground. Or maybe he just didn't notice. He looked quite busy while he tousled her hair and told her it was alright as she cried into his shirt.

After a few moments they started kissing. The whole thing was like a scene out of a romance movie, and neither of them looked ready to get up by their own free will any minute. Embarrassed, he looked away with a smile. A happy ending.

Sato snickered. "At least someone's happy."

"Huh?"

"You forgot? There's one boy still missing. They're searching the place the boys said they were trapped in-"

Her cell phone buzzed. The female detective picked up. "Sato here."

Someone on the other side said a few things. "Oh, really? And him too? Now? Alright. Yeah, I will."

"What was it?" Takagi asked when she put her phone away with a somber expression.

"Speak of the devil," she sighed. "They found Kojima Daisuke's body."

"Oh," he suddenly didn't feel so happy about the Smith reunion anymore. "Oh."

"They've also found Dr. Hailey. He's been shot in the head, point blank. It was too late to do anything."

"Oh," he remembered seeing Conan-kun at the house. "Did someone die here?" he had asked the genius boy after seeing him there unexpectedly. Prophetic words.

"Forensics are already at the house. They want us there now," Sato stepped back into the car.

He shot one last look at the couple still sitting on the ground – still kissing, too – before going back to his job.

The medic swung put casually through the back entrance of the hospital, trailing right behind the large crowd of nurses going off on break with a cell phone in her hand. The security cameras would record a distracted member of the herd who was trying to stay connected to the vast, invisible web around the world and that would be the image the police would see if they ever reviewed this clip for some reason.

Of course, if they were looking specifically for her this probably wouldn't fool them long. Once she knew she was out of the camera's range she swung away from the herd and entered a car that was waiting for her. Once inside, out of sight behind heavily tinted bulletproof glass windows she let out a sigh.

"Kojima Daisuke died," Eliza Sterling told her immediately from the front passenger's seat. The British woman had sunglasses on – a sight as rare as the Loch Ness Monster – and she was tapping away at the seat of her chair. A was willing to bet her life on the name of that numerical sequence.

The woman in the driver's seat hummed. "It's not your fault," she said. "We had to keep confidentiality-"

"And so I deliberately made sure that my profiling wasn't my best work. Whether it was my fault or not a boy is dead and I was involved."

"We all were," Lady A told her as she changed into different clothes.

She saw Eliza scowl in the mirror. "The police said that the first bomb was set to make sure that the gasoline was spread everywhere. The second bomb insured instant inflammation. It was a time bomb and if I could have sent a better profile quicker that boy would still be alive."

The woman in the driver's seat sighed as she turned the keys. "If he managed to get his hands on the profile done in your usual style he would have known, and then everything you've done to keep him safe would have been put totally out of commission."

Eliza didn't answer. The phantom thief had a good suspicion of just what the former profiler was hiding under her dark shades, but she kept her mouth shut.

Her phone beeped, letting her know there was a new message. It was from the boss, a curt reply to the text she had sent informing him about the (mostly) success.

It had been about ten minutes since she had sent it. He was back to his usual self again.

Their teammate and designated driver stepped on the gas pedal and they began to move forward, the hybrid car engine barely making a sound.

When the Smiths finally got up from the ground, their attire was significantly rumpled. Smiling in kind understanding, the officers allowed them to go to the bathrooms to straighten up.

Diana Smith gave her husband one last kiss and a watery, content smile before trotting off into the bathroom where she bumped into a woman who dropped her makeup kit. Tubes of lipstick, foundation, BB cream, mascara and other things tumbled onto the ground and bounced into different directions. "Oh, I'm so sorry," she apologized for the benefit of anyone listening in.

"It's alright," the other woman replied for the same reason as the two of them began picking it all up. "I drop them all the time!"

Smiling sheepishly, Diana handed the cheerful woman her lipstick and the hairpin Colin had tugged off her hair 'accidently' during their reunion. "Me, too," she admitted as the woman with brown hair took her offering, hairpin and all. "It drives my husband nuts."

"Wish I could say I had one," zipping up her bag, she waved and left the room.

Diana smoothed her hair, wiped away tear tracks – careful not to touch the temporary alterations to her face – and straightened her clothes. In the mirror stood the reflection of a recently rescued woman who could be strong again because she was with her husband.

Perfect.

She walked out of the bathroom. The clumsy woman with the defective makeup case was gone.

Both of Kojima Daisuke's parents were at work when the police called them. Chiba was taken aback at just how impassive they seemed about their own son's death.

"Is that him?" the father asked, gesturing at the covered body with his chin.

Inspector Shiratori nodded.

They exchanged looks. "Please have him cremated," the mother requested in clipped, polite tones.

And that was it for the cold couple, who left after filling out a few forms. Chiba looked down at the sheet covered body lying on the cold metal table and wondered just what this boy's life had been like.

"Can't believe you made me meet you here," Champagne muttered in Spanish as she slid into the seat opposite of her team member. "In public, full disguise and all. I hate latex masks, you know that."

Armagnac took a sip of his drink. He didn't even bat an eyelid, the bastard. "I know."

She glowered at him. "Why in a public place, then? And why aren't you in disguise?"

"Café Poirot has amazing coffee and an employee I need to have a word with. As for the reason why you're in disguise and I'm not . . . well, no one cares about some head of the media. I'd prefer, though, not to be known as the mystery man having coffee with Beniko Banderas."

Damn the man and his love of staying in the shadows. "Here," she tossed him the hairpin that was also a hidden microchip containing information her friend had risked everything for. She had already made three backups. "Happy birthday."

The black-haired man paused as he put away the hairpin. "You remembered?"

Champagne rolled her eyes – ow! Damn coloured contacts! "Hard to forget."

He paused. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. And don't you dare order birthday cake, you know I need to watch my figure."

One more chapter and I'm done!

Here's a mention of the sequel - my DC remodelled version of a famous boy group will be appearing. I'll give you two hints about the identity of the original group. Let's see who knows who they are.

1 - They're Korean.

2 - They're going to be performing on 08/03/2013 and 09/03/2013 at the Orpheum Annex Theatre, Vancouver, BC. That's this Friday and Saturday, folks!