The tiny hair had made it safely home in 221B, where Sherlock found his microscope under the sink and set up on the floor where the table once was, plucking a short blonde hair from the round armchair he had refused to let anyone sit on for comparison.
The analysis took less than forty eight hours: it was a match. Both the hairs were John's.
How, Sherlock didn't quite understand.
He'd torn the strings and pictures and pages from the walls where they had nested: he threw them all on the ground, destructed everything and reorganised them. Data and news clippings and interviews, cut up and rearranged: they all pointed to something, and all of them were that John Watson wasn't buried in that suit, in that hole, in London. He'd worked on this for months. A year.
John Watson didn't die when he fell off that building across the street from St. Barts, a little over one year ago. There should have been blood: brains. They should have taken days to sew the remains together. How did he get the money for a plot in London? And why would he, when he had a hometown to be buried in?
He probably died sometime after that, still in Moriarty's hands, long after Jim had thought that I would have had the sense to break out of jail and keep playing the game.
It was good to remember that part.
But, apparently, it was John Watson down there, suit and hair rotting off his bones, casket broken apart. The break in and subsequent digging up of the body solicited little response from the press— Mycroft's doing, no doubt. The news just didn't touch it. The grave was covered in a too-green sod by the dawn of the next week, after the police had had their fill.
Shame. He could have stood to study the curvature of that skull a little more finely. See if the cheekbones matched up from those photos he took at Christmastime in the optimal lighting.
It would balance the mantle, at any rate. Friends of mine, he'd smile to the next person a colleague sends to him in search of a roommate.
Sherlock smiled to himself, to spite the pit that formed in his stomach at the thought.
Lestrade came to the flat a few days later: He stood in the doorway, surprised at the sudden cleanliness of the place (relative to the past: the papers that had stuck themselves to the wall with threads and bits of tape were presently lying in dampening molehills by the open window: Sherlock, dressed and cradling his violin, stood in the middle of this mess, looking out onto the bright day with distaste. In greeting, Sherlock nodded once to Lestrade, continuing his practice of very deliberately moving his fingers up and down the neck of the instrument only to stop and play a single chord of discontent and melancholy, letting it ring out to the flat and the street below him before playing another.
"Official results are in. It's Watson's body."
"Well, that was an obvious conclusion. I ran my own tests on samples that I trust; I came to the same conclusion."
"That's not all. There were fingerprints all over the place."
"Not mine?"
"No, yours showed up, of course, but we were expecting that. There was another set, along with some bootprints."
Sherlock frowned. He plucked one last chord, finding the two only notes in the world that could explain his thoughts and letting them feel for him. He turned, finally, to face the detective:
"I didn't see any bootprints."
Lestrade nodded.
"Neither did I. They must have been put there after we left. It rained for about an hour after we left, it must have been done after that."
"But probably not much longer, I'd assume. We were being watched. Did the prints match anyone?"
"A... Sean McCormick. Runs some online shop specialising in selling cooking products. His store is active, as is his bank account, facebook page, and cell phone. He's apparently a weekly regular at The Diamond Column, a pub in Leeds where his parents live: There're pictures of him up on the wall, and tabs on his debit card every Saturday. But here's the thing: No one has any recollection of him. His parents don't exist. Everyone who has any meaningful relationship to him over facebook doesn't exist. Sean McCormick seems to be just another dead end."
In response, Sherlock steepled his fingers.
"The website. Have you tracked the IP address? If the shop is running, they must be shipping form somewhere. Have you—"
"Of course we have. Shipping out of some old factory in Leeds. Completely empty when we were there. No hints, no clues."
"Of course there wasn't. Sean McCormick isn't the killer. He's the clue."
"Clue? I thought he was done giving you clues."
"Oh, no. I've disappointed him. I didn't play by his rules, I missed a step. He thinks I need them now. This, the Watson deaths, everything that he's doing that makes it to the public eye... There will be more clues that will undoubtedly lead to your killer, and through him, Moriarty. He's making things easy for me."
He smiled. Lestrade didn't get it.
"Why? Why would he make it easier for you to catch him?"
"Because he wants to kill me."
His smile grew. Then faltered.
"Oh, don't you see? I had beaten him. Last May. I had beaten him by playing dumb but I misjudged the weakness he would play to and he won because of it. But now he wants to make things easy for me, he wants to make me angry. He wants to drag me closer to him in a fury so when he comes to finally kill me, I won't expect it. My reputation was first, but he doesn't understand loyalty. And he doesn't understand me, either."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Of course it wouldn't. Not to you. Now let's check out this Sean McCormick, shall we?"
He'd sat down next to Lestrade, laptop in hand; barely hidden under the hundred-dollar cologne he smelt thickly of cigarettes and stale sweat. He pulled up an internet browser and rapidly typed in the subject's name: his online shop was the first to come up. It was a garish display of the worst kind of web design; Sherlock scowled.
"The Marinate Snob. How... Trite."
"Hey, we're not here to critique names of made up stores. Can you tell anything by the website?"
Lestrade sounded hopeful. Not in the way that he was used to (with John, he would ask because he was excited to know the answer— could you really?) but with a familiar sort of desperation, a please, tell me you can in between the end of the sentence and the full stop.
It ushered less challenge than, say, any Adler or Moriarty could, but it did the trick. He fired up his brain.
"This website isn't hosted by some free provider that gives you templates and helps you along the way: Someone wrote this code. Someone who knows what they're doing, but was told to act as if they didn't. This is a farce. It checks every box on the do not do list of web design. The cursor is a tiny steak, it's all in Comic Sans. It's a mess. But the code is impeccable— someone who does all of Moriarty's computer work. Maybe it was Moriarty himself."
"And what does that tell us?"
"That this is where we start looking."
The weeks passed slowly.
(Slowly? How could time move slowly? How could time move any faster or slower than it does normally, if fast and slow are adjectives to describe spatial comparisons of time A and time B? How does a day drag? How does an hour tick?)
The mess had reappeared in 221B: this time it littered the floor, clothes and papers and a tall man lying in the middle of them, sweating and sleeping.
A young woman stood in the doorway: she had been called for by the same man that lie sleeping on the hard wood floor beneath her.
Mrs. Hudson behind her. Her stern look was unfamiliar but well-practiced; she would have made an excellent mother, had she gotten the chance. Loving, laughing, with good food and warm blankets and a tone like that to pull out in circumstances like these.
"Sherlock, get up. Sherlock!"
He stirred. His eyes rolled in their lids, opened, closed.
He eased himself up. Rolled his shirt sleeve down.
"Oh. Oh, yes. Hello, Dorian."
Dorian was a small girl of about twenty, twenty one. She had mousy brown hair and a definitely homeless air about her.
She also had a notebook in her hands, which was all that mattered to Sherlock at the moment.
"Oh, oh, yes. Good. Thank you, Mrs. Hudson."
He stretched his back, pulling his arms back behind him and leaning forward. A minute nod towards the couch invited Dorian in. A tiny smile saw Mrs. Hudson out.
"Did you talk to all of them?"
Oh, dear. She was actually sitting on the couch. There'd be fleas all over it.
"Yessir. Was Jus' chattin' with the last'un before I realised the time. Came back here hastily."
"Good. Give me that notebook."
She stretched her arm out, gently. She had been a ballerina in a past life, before she'd found herself on the streets.
She was afraid of him. He could tell by the way she wouldn't look him in the eye: by the way she avoided the spots where he would look for her unless it was winter or she was hungry.
He snatched the book out of her hand and she jumped.
He leafed through the book greedily, glad that she had decent handwriting. Not like the last one.
"You could have stood to have been a bit more thorough with your research, Dorian. But this will do, yes."
She took that as a queue to leave; she eased herself from the couch.
"It's fine, it's— it was no problem, Mr. Holmes..."
"No, If you could say, please. I would like to hear you speak about your interviews as I read them. It helps to alleviate discrepancies."
Upset as she was, she stayed. He turned to page one.
"All right. Lieutenant Harold Fitz.."
—
Undocumented Ex-Military. Probably English. Mostly likely male. Unbelievably good shot.
He paid the most trustworthy of his network to clean up and go to all of the houses on a list of twenty veterans, posing as a journalist scraping for war stories. Of the twenty, four of them had stories of an unruly Colonel. In Service during the Iraq War, he was the protagonist of many a violent story, laughing with a cigarette dangling from his lips and blood on his hands (sometimes literally). He could shoot a man in the left eye at 1000 meters. No one knew where he was now. Each of them called him by a different name.
Maberry.
Meisner.
Moran.
It took him two days to throw away the useless information, stumbling back on Moriarty's clue:
The Diamond Column. The Marinate Snob.
Colonel Sebastian Moran.
Anagrams and Allusions. That was what he'd been reduced to.