Part 2: "But there ain't no stopping and there's nothin'/ You can do about it"
"I thought that only happened to tapes," said John as Sherlock frantically skimmed through the tracks. So far they'd found that the CD contained Beethoven's "I Want To Break Free" and Vivaldi's "I'm Going Slightly Mad", and the consulting detective made a funny little choking noise when the next one proved to be Puccini's "Radio Ga Ga".
"It happens to everything," said Lestrade (All we need is, Radio Ga Ga, sang Freddie Mercury). "I can't tell you how much my daughter hated me when she left her iPod in here after Christmas."
"I remember Harry just gave up and went with it after a while. She started looking for old tapes to leave in cars on purpose."
"But how does it happen?" demanded Sherlock. He'd let the CD stop at Bach's "One Vision" and was peering into the player's slot as if he expected it to give him answers.
"The best guess is that it's a kind of magic," said Lestrade with the air of somebody who had given the matter much thought and failed to come to any satisfactory conclusion. "And will you get back in your seat? I'm not dying in a horrible accident on the M25 just because you were in the way of the gearstick."
The consulting detective threw himself back against the passenger's seat in a huff, though he soon busied himself with investigating the contents of Lestrade's glove compartment.
"You can't mean it's never happened to you, Sherlock?" asked John, leaning forward so that he could see what his flatmate was doing. It never did to coop him up in a car for long – next thing you knew, he'd be getting into the wiring – and the traffic on the M25 was particularly unholy.
"Not that I've noticed, no. And what are these?" Sherlock held up a stack of CDs, and waved them in front of Lestrade's face when the D.I. continued to pay an unseemly amount of attention to the road.
"Best of Queen albums, the lot of them." Lestrade swatted Sherlock's hand out of the way. "I don't keep music in the car anymore. Too much trouble."
"Do you mind?" Sherlock had already dumped the discs onto his lap, and was opening one that proclaimed itself to be a collection of light jazz.
"Knock yourself out. It's not like we have much of a choice anyway, unless we listen to the radio." And I'm in no mood for your one-sided row with BBC Radio 4,was heavily implied.
Sherlock ejected his CD (Visions of one sweet union-), handed it to John, and eased the new one into the slot, whereupon it began to ask anybody to find it somebody to love. "So it works on tapes and CDs and MP3 players, but notthe radio. Why?"
"I've always thought," conjectured John, leaning forward and reaching between the seats for the empty case on Sherlock's lap, "that it was because the radio doesn't store music. It plays music that's stored elsewhere. Does that make sense?"
"About as much sense as everything turning into Freddie Mercury. What?" The consulting detective looked from one shocked face to the other, clearly affronted. "I know who that is."
"Well, you didn't know about the solar system-"
"Or Monty Python-"
"Or the Prime Minister-"
…But everybody wants to put me down, they say I'm going crazy…
"So you'll forgive us if we're surprised-"
"Yes, yes, all right, you've made your point. It was useful. For a case. That didn't involve any music turning into anything else." Sherlock jabbed the eject button again, passed the disc to John, and opened one that had David Bowie on the cover.
"You could do this yourself, you know," said John, with no real rancor as he fished for the second empty case. "Or you could at least give me the cases too."
"It gives you something to do."
"I'm not the one who can't sit still in a car unless I'm driving. I'm fine looking out the window." And he gave Sherlock's thigh a pat that was definitely more than friendly to show that he didn't mind, not really. Lestrade gave John a meaningful look in the rearview mirror (please, no PDA in my car, it said), and the doctor sheepishly withdrew his hand as the speakers began to emit a familiar bass line.
"Hey, this one's not so bad," Lestrade said brightly when he realized what was playing. "That song's actually on the CD. Did you see that film where they did that with penguins and elephant seals?"
…Watching some good friends screaming, "Let me out"…
"I took my sister's kids to the cinema, okay?" he added defensively when his passengers treated him to long, blank stares. "It was a cartoon, and the little penguin sang opera."
"If you say so," said John quickly, before Sherlock could contribute his thoughts on the matter. "Let's see what's next, shall we?"
They ejected the disc when the next track turned out to be "Headlong" instead of "Dancing in the Streets" like it said on the case, and Sherlock fed disc after disc into the player. A compilation of classic rock music yielded "I Want It All"; a scratched Radiohead album (Lestrade gave that one a sad look, as if he'd somehow failed it) played "You're My Best Friend"; and the soundtrack of Bridget Jones's Diary("My ex-wife's," explained the D.I. sheepishly. "She likes Colin Firth.") bawled "Too Much Love Will Kill You" as they swung off on to the M40 up to Oxfordshire.
Sherlock, having run out of discs to test (they were all in the back with John now), let that play on through "Seven Seas of Rhye", "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", and "We Will Rock You" as they drove through what were, all things considered, pleasant country roads. A new song started up just as the BMW crested a hill.
"Well, here we are," said Lestrade, over the music.
…Born to be kings,proclaimed the speakers, We're the princes of the universe…
"Tadfield."