Chapter Three
"What did you do to Molly?" John dumped his carrier bag of Quavers and Mint Aeros on the kitchen table, brushing aside beakers of foul smelling liquid.
"Why don't you ask what she did to me?" Sherlock was buttoning up his shirt.
This precipitated a raised eyebrow from John. He was too tired to resist playing the game, so he said, "Okay, what did she do to you?"
"She wanted to have sex. I declined."
"Naturally. I can see why you'd be upset."
"I'm not upset." And there it was; the disproportionately intense scowl and the defensiveness of a stroppy child, that John had come to know meant the man's feathers were ruffled. Sex doesn't alarm me, he'd said. Still, John knew it couldn't have been that straight forward. Maybe Sherlock had gotten the wrong end of the stick. Stranger things had happened.
"She left her coat," John smoothed it down on the back of the chair. Brown corduroy.
"What brings you here on your day off?" Sherlock continued, "shouldn't you be rubbing your wife's feet, or something?"
"I'm rubbing her up the wrong way at the moment, so she told me to go out and do something constructive." He picked up one of the test tubes full of brown gunk. "What's this? Smells like the devil's crotch."
"I'm recording the rate of enzyme decay on various stomach contents after death." Sherlock slipped his eye-wear back on, preparing for splatter. A beaker bubbled ominously. "Funnily enough, there were no figures available relating to the consumption of squirrel meat, so aside from the help of a reasonably compliant butcher, I've had to do it myself. Hopefully it will shed some light on the Villegas case."
"Still chipping away at that one?"
"There's nothing else to do around here. Besides sleep with Molly, apparently." Sherlock resumed his experiment as John lazily picked up the newspaper.
They stayed like that for at least two hours; Sherlock getting frustrated with his decidedly inferior samples and John searching the papers for a case. It was reassuringly like old times for that brief but precious time.
John was just about to suggest a tea break when he was arrested by Sherlock's phone ringing and vibrating around on the table.
"Get that, will you."
John sighed and resigned himself to the position of personal secretary. "Sherlock Holmes' phone. John speaking, how can I help you?" he said in his best Receptionist.
"You can stop playing silly beggars and come down to Earl's Court," came Lestrade's gruff voice, "I've got another locked-room case for you."
"Thanks, yeah, okay, no problem," John continued with the act, "I'll tell him. Thank's, yeah, okay, love you, bye-bye."
"That was Lestrade," said Sherlock.
John handed his phone back, defeated. "How do you do it?"
"Tone of voice tells me it's about a," Sherlock cocked his head and squinted, "six."
"Come on, it'll do you some good, moping around in here with your - "
"Probably isn't worth my time."
John didn't bother trying to come up with a clever retort, he just blinked, emotionless. Three, two...
Sherlock folded his safety glasses and reached for his scarf. "Fine. But if it turns out to be boring, dinner's on you."
A bang on the front door startled them both. Three solid knocks, without the unconscious Morse code patterns of a casual caller, always meant bad news or something urgent.
You're here, I'm here, Lestrade is at the crime scene, John's look seemed to say, Molly's never speaking to you again, so who could that be?
Before they could get downstairs, Mrs Hudson had answered the door to a young woman. The cold October blasted through the open doorway. Sherlock stopped dead at the top of the last seven steps. Time slowed down. The girl had long, greasy, dark hair and exotic eyes filled with fear. She was dressed in a red body-warmer and held a wrapped bouquet out in front of her. She seemed to retreat, trembling, as Sherlock stepped down. She dropped the bouquet on the floor and said a single word, "Vă rog!", then she was gone.
Sherlock pushed past the confused Mrs Hudson and tried to chase the girl down the road, but she was already out of sight. He put his hands on his knees halfway down Baker Street, puffing. He'd gotten out of practice since he'd gotten back from Serbia, didn't quite have the energy he once had. Mycroft's words about middle age approaching certainly made sense now.
Back inside, John was chatting with Mrs Hudson. "Takes all sorts," she said, "still, we're getting used to young women running out on you, aren't we sweetheart?" She handed him the brown paper wrapped bouquet.
"Papaver Somnifarum." Sherlock breathed, blanching. The red poppies bobbed up and down as he turned the bunch, looking for a note or a card.
"Are you alright?"
Sherlock took his time answering John, eyes flickering through his memory. "Fine, just felt like I'd seen a ghost, that's all." He thrust the flowers into Mrs Hudson's arms, back to his usual self within a split second. "Be a dear and put those in some water. Come on John, a homicide requires our urgent attendance."
And with that they were gone, leaving Mrs Hudson with her questions. All she could do was go inside to get a vase.
Movie posters flicked by as the tube carriage rocked them all the way to Earl's Court. Sherlock ignored all of John's questions. Who was she? What language was that? What does it mean when someone gives you poppies? Isn't that the secret language of flowers? You upset a girl, didn't you. First Molly, and now this.
"Don't shut me out of this, Sherlock."
"Hmmm?"
"I said let me in."
He seemed to consider that for a moment, brightening up, fishing in his coat pocket for something. "All in good time." He produced a white paper envelope, reaching over to John's side of the carriage.
"What's this?" John ripped it open ceremoniously, a lopsided smile tugging at his face.
"A gift."
"Sherlock, this is a lot of money."
"It's the proceeds from the King of Sweden case. I took the liberty of opening a trust fund for little Sherlock."
John remained motionless for a second, poker-faced. Ugh, how was he going to explain this? "The fuck you did."
Sherlock was clearly perplexed. A few other passengers turned in their direction. Most didn't want to get involved.
"I thought you'd be happy."
"Little Sherlock?" John was standing now, waving his arms around.
"There's no need to shout, John, you're only two meters away-"
"We're not calling him Sherlock. Or Mycroft, or any other nasopharyngeal spasm your parents mistook for a name - "
"Actually, I think they just stuck a pin in the phone-book." Sherlock looked at the grimy floor waiting for John to calm down.
John rubbed his face. "It's not your job to provide for him. That's my job. I'm his father. And it's not even a 'him' yet. She's only four months pregnant!"
"There's evidence - "
John cut him off, "I will decide how and when this child gets a trust fund, Sherlock, if at all," and then he added muttering, "I want my son to work for a living."
"You think I don't work for a living?"
"That's not what I meant."
"No, that is what you meant. Because I grew up in a big house, went to Cambridge, you think I've never had to work hard. That's it, isn't it? Well, I can tell a working class shoulder chip when I smell one."
"I don't have a chip on my shoulder, and don't turn this around."
"You think this," Sherlock gestured around, "all this isn't hard work for me. That all the case work doesn't break a sweat?"
"No, I think it's effortless for you, because you're so damn high functioning."
They stared at each other across the carriage, sulking for a while. Bayswater came and went.
Finally Sherlock spoke. "I had a normal job once, you know."
"Oh yeah?" John still felt confrontational.
"Yeah. It was the raw materials laboratory in a toothpaste factory. Lasted about an hour before they found me chain smoking in the toilets out of sheer boredom."
John tried his damn hardest not to share the joke. Then his mouth began to twitch and his anger turned to full blown mirth, and before long they were both lolling around on the seats, giggling like schoolboys.
Sherlock wiped a tear from his eye just as they pulled into Kensington High Street. "It is a boy, though, isn't it?"
"Sherlock…" John warned as they pulled off again.
"I was just trying to be nice."
"It's appreciated, but it's not appreciated."
"Either way…" Sherlock secreted the envelope back in his coat pocket.
Later, in his blog, John would say that Sherlock broke his own personal record that day. 30 seconds to solve a locked-room murder. They'd descended into the basement flat of an old town-house just off the Earl's Court Gardens. One of those properties stuffed to the rafters with struggling young professionals, somehow all managing to make a life for themselves without the luxury of space.
Lestrade and Donovan were crammed into the tiny bedsit, interviewing the dead girl's housemate. Sherlock studiously ignored Donovan, and she reciprocated, her lack of interest hiding the guilt of all the treasonable things she'd said about him.
"I heard her fighting with her boyfriend before I went to bed," the housemate said, tugging a preppy cardigan around her protectively, stroking her own pig-tails for comfort. "When - when I called on her this morning, the door was locked. She normally leaves for work around nine, but her mail was still on the mat at eleven." At this point the young woman took a second to catch her breath and squeeze her eyes shut, suppressing tears. She wasn't the murderer, then. "We burst in and she was slumped against the door."
"Any signs of forced entry?" Lestrade asked.
Donovan shook her head. "There aren't even any windows on this side of the basement. But we're bringing the boyfriend in for questioning, obviously"
"Sherlock," said Lestrade, acknowledging them, "John."
"There isn't even room to swing a cat in here, let alone murder someone." John pulled on latex gloves and knelt down to examine the corpse. Jennifer Birt. She was on her side on the carpet, still lying where the door had pushed her. There was a contusion on the back of her head, glistening between long corn-row braids, probably from a glass object.
It wasn't enough to have killed her, anyway.
It was then that Sherlock did something so arrogant, so elegantly disrespectful, that John couldn't help but stare in awe. He ignored the housemate, stepped over the body, threw open the cupboard to reveal hundreds of cans of tuna, announced that it was "mercury poisoning" and tossed one of the cans to Donovan, who just stood there with her mouth open. At the same time Lestrade opened his mouth to say 'how?'. Then Sherlock turned on his heels, stepped back over the corpse, which they now knew was only the victim of her own bad eating habits, and reached into a homemade calico shopping bag that was hanging on the back of the door. He pulled out a picture frame, about five by five inches, containing a cross-stitch sampler saying 'he who cares wins'. The glass in the frame was shattered. He handed it carefully to Donovan, who was already wearing latex gloves.
"What… Just happened?" she asked, mouth still lax.
"Care to expound?" Lestrade put his hands on his hips, "so, you know, I can fill out the paperwork with actual facts."
Sherlock pointed to various items around the girls room. He didn't like wasting time. "Dry skin cream, falling hair, loose teeth, erratic behaviour, empty hook on the door. She had a seizure and fell back on the picture. The picture fell in the bag. The boyfriend is innocent. How long, John?"
"Huh?"
"I said, how long?"
John glanced at his watch, "About twenty nine seconds from the moment we came in the door."
Donovan, less interested in Sherlock's records than she was with actual police work said, "no seizure I've ever seen could cause an injury like that."
"Oh, I don't know about that, Sally," Sherlock sniffed the air near her, "knew a man once, broke three ribs at once just by sneezing. It's not unreasonable to suppose a person's muscles are enough to break their own bones, ergo - "
"Oh, you just have to have the last - "
"That was fun," said Sherlock, ignoring her, "what's next?"
John ushered Sherlock out before Sally could say anything else. She scowled after them.
John and Sherlock were back out on the street and the dead girl's housemate followed them, stumbled over her own feet, said, "you're him, aren't you? The guy in the papers." She caught up with John. "That was incredible. How did he know all that stuff?"
They were leaving the Gardens now and turning back onto Earl's Court Road. Sherlock began to look for a cab, leaving the other two behind.
"He knows everything," said John, "watch this; Sherlock, what time is it in Addis Ababa?"
Sherlock didn't even look at his watch. "Three twenty-six pm."
"How would you know if that's right?" The girl wasn't that impressed.
So John yelled again, "Sherlock, what's nine hundred and ninety six times fifty three?"
"Fifty two thousand seven hundred and eighty eight." Sherlock did not skip a beat, although he was not having a lot of success with the cab.
"Is that right?" asked the girl.
John just shrugged, he didn't care, he was enjoying himself now. "Sherlock, What's number one in the charts right now?"
"No Idea." Sherlock finally flagged one down as they caught up with him.
"Well," John said to the girl, "maybe not everything."
"John, if you've quite finished showing me off. I don't believe we've had the pleasure of your name,"
"Oh," the girl blushed, holding out her hand, which Sherlock took briefly, "Amelia. Amelia Hubbard."
"I hope you're happy together." Sherlock opened the cab door.
"Wait!" Lestrade caught up, puffing. He leaned on the cab.
"'Ere, are you people actually going somewhere," called the cabbie, "or are you all just going to stand around talking, because you don't need me for that."
"Yes, we are. Sorry." John reassured him by getting in.
"Please tell me you've got a real homicide this time," said Sherlock, "not another one of these absurdities."
"We don't know yet. But won't it kill you if you never find out?" Lestrade smiled.
"I suppose we could take a look." Sherlock was trying not to give him the satisfaction of knowing he'd got him interested in something, but John knew deep down he was excited. "Where do you want us to meet you?"
"Down by the Leg o' Mutton."
"I know it. Lonsdale Road."