A/N - Thank you again for reading - feedback greatly appreciated! Only a couple of chapters to go, but the next one may have a little delay due to Uni term/my non-fanfic WIP :)

For all that she was currently receiving the business end of Detective Inspector Lestrade's disgust, Beryl Holland was holding up well. Tearless, at least. Her primary concern was for Chris, who was to be interviewed separately. Lestrade had noted that concern, wondering if it was worry that she and Chris hadn't got their stories straight yet. All of the investigators had somewhat dismissed Chris so far, though the possibility of his being a hidden psychopath had once or twice crossed Lestrade's mind. By all accounts, he'd come in of his own free will and was sitting in the waiting room with a newspaper, as calm as you like, but that didn't mean he was going to stay that way. The community noticeboard—chock full of Missing Persons posters and Wanted notices—sometimes gave suspects the heebie-jeebies before they even entered the interview room. Even better, Jimmy and Jackie Monash were also in that waiting room, and if that didn't throw Chris off his game, nothing would. Lestrade had instructed the desk sergeant to keep an ear out for anything that sounded incriminating.

"So let's get this sequence of events in order, shall we?" He shuffled his paperwork. "Sadie's parents ask her for a loan, and because of some conditions her grandmother left, or some other reason, she said no. It was quite a lot of money. The only people I'd lend that kind of money to are my mother or my kids."

Beryl shrugged. She had both hands pressed against the table, as if she meant to push her chair out but couldn't summon the strength to.

"But you came to the rescue—for your son's in-laws."

"They weren't just Brett's in-laws," she said snippishly. "Where do you think Brett and Sadie met in the first place? We're all four of us teachers, or were before Chris and I retired, anyway. Chris and Jackie worked together at Chalton High School."

"And did Brett and Sadie go to school together there?"

"No. It isn't our local school, and we sent Brett to St. Mark's; I can't remember where Sadie went. Chris and Jackie got to be friends, and we had a few family barbecues together one summer. Brett was… about seventeen, I think. The summer before he left school."

"So you had teaching in common, then. Much else?"

"My husband wasn't having an affair with Jackie Monash, if that's what you're implying, detective."

Lestrade struggled to keep an even expression, but he was taken aback by something in Beryl's voice. She sounded like a general giving orders. So far as Beryl was concerned, Chris couldn't have been having an affair with Jackie because she'd forbid it; when Beryl forbid something, she expected to be obeyed. But why immediately bring up the idea of Chris, who'd only registered with the police as a chain-smoking doormat, having an affair? It was almost certain that he had slept with Jackie Monash, or that underneath the bravado, Beryl thought he had.

"No," he said mildly. "I wasn't saying that. Just trying to get a picture of how your families all got along. So you mingled socially, and having kids that got on, you got on yourselves. Would you say you and Jackie were closer friends than Chris and Jimmy? Or was it that Chris was Jackie's friend and you were more Jimmy's, or what?"

She folded her arms. "We were just social," she said stubbornly. "All of us."

"Okay." Lestrade shuffled his paperwork. Beside him, he sensed that Donovan was fidgeting. "But then," he went on, "all that must've changed, because the Monashes went out to Kenya. Why'd they do that, exactly?"

"They both got positions at a school in Nairobi," she said. "St Paul's Academy, I think it was called. It was a good opportunity. After a few years they decided to reach out further, to the poorer children in the city, the ones who couldn't afford St Paul's' fees. So they started up the Monash School."

"That was humble of them," Donovan muttered, but Beryl either ignored her or didn't hear.

"That school was their pet project," she went on. "When it started, they were literally teaching the little ones out of a falling-down community hall. Just as they were getting the go-ahead to build a proper building with decent facilities for the children, they lost their funding."

"Funding from who?"

"A charity. Every Child Ahead."

And now this was beginning to make some sense. Every Child Ahead had just gone very publicly broke. It turned out their CEO had been appropriating from the coffers and was looking at spending a few years in a nice, comfortable cell.

"I admire people with conviction, and Jackie and Jimmy certainly have that," Beryl went on. "I didn't want to see their hard work go to waste."

"Really?"

"Really?" Beryl echoed. "Are you saying I'm lying about what happened?"

"No, I'm saying you're lying about why it happened," Lestrade said. "You might've had good intentions when you let Jackie and Jimmy Monash borrow your life savings, but I doubt that, Mrs. Holland, I really do. There's no way my ex's parents would have lent mine that much money just 'cause they're nice people, and they actually are nice people." He paused for a moment, thinking back to when he'd first married Julie and they were living in a bedsit together in Easton. Julie's parents had been horrified—the Clarkes were solidly middle class, the Lestrades solidly not, despite the posh echoes of their surname. But either Tom and Carol Clarke hadn't offered to lend their daughter money for a better lifestyle, or Julie had refused an offer and never told her then-husband about it. He was still in occasional and amicable contact with Tom and Carol, now in their late seventies. They were, as he'd told Beryl, nice people, who had tried to remain neutral throughout the divorce. But they really weren't the type to lend family even modest amounts of money.

"Well," Beryl said, bringing him back to the case in front of him. Her voice was calm, but there was a great, rolling tremor of outrage underneath it. "If you're so clever and know so much, why do you think we really did it, Detective?"

"We? Let's not try to throw your husband under the bus, Beryl," Donovan said. "I doubt he blows his nose without your permission. I don't think you were working together, either. I'll tell you why I think you really did it. You like to keep a tight rein on your children, and when Brett finally grew a pair and got fed up with it, he moved his family down to Cornwall to get away from you. You had to think of a way to get him back under control."

"Yeah, nice work," Lestrade chipped in. "You certainly made a good go of it."

Beryl looked up, and for a moment, Lestrade saw something in her eyes that made him recoil in disgust. She really was, in some secret, vile way, pleased with her 'nice work.'

"You said you lent that money to the Monashes 'before Maisie was born'," Donovan went on. "Can you be more specific about that?"

"I don't have the exact date," she said tartly. Right from the beginning of the interview, it was clear that she despised Sergeant Donovan and considered her to be an unnecessary intrusion on her conversation with Lestrade. "It was the summer before Maisie was born, so 2014. July. Maybe early August."

"So it was obvious by then that Maisie was on the way," Donovan remarked. "Brett and Sadie had already moved down to Mousehole, and Siobhan was with them, and do you know what? I'm going to say she was probably keeping a really low profile. Would you agree with that?"

Beryl looked sulkily at her hands.

"That used to happen a bit back when I was a kid," Lestrade went on. "Somebody—somebody's sister, somebody's girlfriend—suddenly went on a trip to visit their aunt in London, or Wales, or wherever, and came back six months later looking like she'd been put through a wringer. And everybody asked her how her holiday was, pretending they didn't know she'd just been through probably the worst six months of her life."

"Yes," Beryl agreed snippily. "Yes, that happened when I was young, too."

"I've got to tell you, I never expected it to happen these days. But then, I'm not sure poor Siobhan had too many options, after Brett gave her a huge guilt trip and you sold her down the river. You knew Siobhan was pregnant, of course. And you knew how and why that happened. Like you said yourself. A mother always knows."

"I-"

"See, that's the bit I find really disgusting, Mrs. Holland." Lestrade heard a little mutter from Donovan, a hint to tone it down a touch. He ignored it. "Your own daughter's been raped, she's pregnant, her husband's doing time, and you came to it like, 'how can I use this to my advantage? What can I get out of this?'"

"I did not. I-"

"You used the rape of your own daughter to get her and Brett and Sadie indebted to you, prepared to give you anything you wanted. You didn't just move in with Siobhan; you and Chris took over her house and treated her like a doormat. She was too terrified you'd tell Adrian about the baby to ever tell you where to get off."

"I-"

"So then you started harassing Brett and Sadie to pay you back what you lent to the Monashes. You found out at Christmas that they'd spent their money—which you clearly thought was yours—on a yacht, and did it ever piss you off. You had a row, and if I'm reading his character right, Brett told you to bugger off and leave his family alone."

"He would never have said something like that to me!"

"But he did, didn't he? And there was nothing you could do to stop him or discipline him—except threaten him. You told him that if he and Sadie didn't cough up fifty thousand pounds to repay you, and do it sharp, you'd tell Jackie and Jimmy that Maisie, strictly-speaking, wasn't their granddaughter. How would they know, otherwise? They've been in Kenya for years. What you didn't know until after you murdered Brett was this: Brett and Sadie had no money. Chris thought she'd inherited over a million quid—it was less than half of that, and they'd made a few interesting financial decisions and already spent the money they did inherit."

"I didn't murder Brett!" Beryl shrieked at him, with such force that she had to take a deep breath before she could continue. When she did, her words tumbled out in a disorganised rush. "I was… we came down and stayed in Paul... we... I was just going to... I mean, I never... I didn't even leave the King's Arms until eight o'clock on the morning of—on Friday morning…"

"Where did you go?"

"How dare you ask me that? I was completely wrong about you, Inspector Lestrade! You're incredibly rude, and I don't want to talk to you anymore!"

~~o0o~~

It was after three o'clock before Dyer finally called the interview with Adrian to an end. In the intervening hours, he, Sherlock and John had employed every weapon in their interviewing arsenal, from deploying Good-Cop-Bad-Cop—changing sides where necessary—to asking him pointless minutiae about his trip down to Cornwall by car in the early hours of Friday morning. What kind of weather was it? Did he hit traffic anywhere? Was anyone awake at the King's Arms in the village of Paul—where the others had stayed on Wednesday and Thursday nights—when he'd arrived in the early hours of Friday morning?

All about as useful as a lighthouse in a bog. Adrian answered questions readily and thoroughly, but shed no light on the murder of Brett Holland. Nor could he even begin to speculate on where Sadie and Maisie were.

"Do you think he's telling the truth?" John asked Sherlock when the interview finally concluded and Dyer had taken Adrian up to the front desk to deal with some paperwork.

"There's two kinds of telling the truth," Sherlock reminded him, exchanging a look across the room with Dyer and leading John toward the double glass doors that led outside.

John waited for an elaboration. None came.

By this time they'd stepped out into the freezing afternoon. After scattered sunshine that morning, heavy clouds had rolled in over the town, and flocks of agitated gulls swirled through the car park, swarming a nearby skip bin and squabbling loudly over the contents. There were few people about. Across the street, a bedraggled girl in a red coat struggled with a push-chair. No actual child was visible, but the enraged screams of one echoed all the way over to them, and John idly wondered how Molly and Charlie were getting on in Newlyn. Hopefully, Molly would have hit the antique shops and come back with one or two of the miniature tea sets she adored, and Charlie would be so content and exhausted she'd sleep straight through the night for a change.

As he was considering sending Molly a text asking what she was up to, he heard a car door slam. He looked up just as Lestrade got out of a car parked across the street and, after barely glancing each way in case of oncoming traffic, made his way over.

"Thought you'd gone home ages ago," he said instead of saying hello. "But I'm glad I've got you on hand and not on the phone. Beryl's sticking to her story." He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and glanced dubiously up at the clouds looming overhead. "She's halfway admitted that she mightn't have been in London on the day Brett was murdered, but we already know that, and I think she knows our evidence is circumstancial. Then she pitched a fit with me and decided she wasn't saying anything more, not even when Donovan pulled the 'us girls' routine. How'd you go with Adrian?"

"I was right about Ethan," Sherlock said, lighting a cigarette.

"What I don't get is, how Adrian didn't notice Siobhan had given birth." Lestrade took Sherlock's offered lighter and lit his own cigarette. "What is he, thick or blind? Julie looked like she'd been mauled by a tiger four months after she had Hayley."

"I'm seeing why you're divorced now," John muttered.

"Stretch marks, as well as changes in breast size and shape, can both be attributed to weight gain," Sherlock said. "And Siobhan gained weight while Adrian was in prison, partly because of her pregnancy and partly, I think, as a subconscious defensive response to her rape trauma. By the time Adrian was released, Siobhan was well over her post-partum period, so why would he jump to the conclusion that she'd given birth?"

"Yeah, well. The months where she wouldn't visit him in prison didn't clue him in?"

"Apparently not. Occam's razor at work: it was more plausible that she had emotional difficulty seeing him in prison than that she was trying to hide a pregnancy. All riddles are simple, once you see the solution."

"See, the problem I have with your solution is this," Lestrade said, "it still doesn't solve what happened to Sadie and Maisie, and now nobody and everybody's got a reason to want the Hollands dead." He leaned against the low stone wall and took another drag of his cigarette. "If Chris and Beryl were blackmailing Brett and Sadie, to the point where they were chasing them all over the country for the money… well, maybe they finally snapped and decided the only way they were going to get that money is by killing Brett," he said. "I honestly wouldn't put it past Beryl—control freak with a definite nasty side to her. But then, Sadie could have wanted out and killed her husband, then gone to ground with their daughter. They could be on the other side of the world by now, for all we know. Then we've got Siobhan, who could have changed her mind and decided she wanted Maisie back, killed Brett and Sadie, and hidden Maisie somewhere."

"We can safely rule that out," Sherlock said. "Siobhan cares about Maisie, even if she didn't raise her. She would never attempt suicide if she was the only person who knew where Maisie was. But there are other possibilities—that Siobhan and Adrian are in this together, that Adrian already knew about Maisie's adoption and fought with Brett about it. Very unlikely, because of Adrian's pupils."

"His pupils?"

"When I reached the punchline about Maisie being Siobhan's child, they immediately dilated. Surprise and uncertainty. There are ways to consciously dilate one's pupils—actors avail themselves of such techniques—but unless Adrian is a full-blown psychopath, has a secret career onstage at the West End, or both, it was involuntary."

"He did set his brother on fire," Lestrade pointed out.

"For raping his wife at knifepoint. If that's what makes a man a psychopath, they're alarmingly common."

"Which leaves us with one Derrick Rice." Lestrade stubbed out his cigarette under one heel. "And if you ask me, while Beryl's the mother from hell and was clearly here to punish Brett and Siobhan for spending their own money…"

He was interrupted by the sudden trill of his phone. With an apologetic glance at Sherlock, he pulled it out of his pocket and answered it with his surname, a sure indication it wasn't Mel with wedding information or Hayley wanting to know why Jake wasn't answering his texts. He wandered away toward the carpark, but all Sherlock and John could hear from his side was a vague progression of noises that indicated he was paying attention to the caller. After a few minutes, he hung up and returned to them.

"The pathologist's had a look at Brett's head," he said on the exhale. "It was a single blow to the right-hand side of the skull. Front. So he was facing whoever did it."

"You're absolutely certain?" Sherlock was suddenly on the alert.

"Yep. Or at least, the pathologist is. Just above his right eye and temple. It smashed the skull just over his brow and caused a massive brain haemorrhage. Death would have occurred within five minutes."

John flinched. Five minutes was a long time, so far as dying went.

"At first we were thinking a left-handed assailant, but it seems more likely that he was hit on the backswing," Lestrade was saying. "Pathologist reckons it was an instrument with a large, flat surface area, like a mallet or an oar."

"And he was definitely hit only once?"

Lestrade nodded. "And there were no marks on his hands or forearms indicating he put them up to defend himself, either, so it would have all happened really quickly. You'd have to be incredibly strong to kill someone with a single blow like that—I don't think Beryl, Chris or Siobhan could have done that, and neither could our old backup plan, Brian Crouch. Derrick Rice definitely could, though."

John turned to Sherlock, intending to ask him if he agreed and what they should do next, but both questions died on his lips. Sherlock had gone white.

"Sherlock?" he ventured, honestly wondering for a moment if he needed to sit him down. "You okay?"

"He lied to us," Sherlock said slowly. His voice sounded hollow and too even, as if he were talking in his sleep. "I didn't recognise it at the time, but it was a definite, cold-blooded lie."

"What was?" John exchanged a concerned glance with Lestrade, who was already dialling something into his phone.

"He said Brett had only got into sailing as a hobby after they moved to Cornwall, which was three years ago. But the man in the corner shop told us that the entire family were known for loving the water and each had enough skill to pilot a small boat. If we look at which one of them is more likely to be lying…"

"Derrick," John muttered. "Why would he tell a lie like that, though?"

"I don't know, but when small lies are told, larger ones follow. Do you remember how anxious he was to tell us about his own boat? The Lady Marlborough. He even started to go into details about her size and level of luxury. If he hadn't been interrupted, probably would have described her from the keel up. And John, only lies have unnecessary detail…"

"But the Cornwall force checked that out," John objected. "Confiscated the Lady Marlborough, went through it with a fine-toothed comb."

"Yes. But what if…" Sherlock trailed off. A few feet away, Lestrade had the phone to his ear and was pacing around.

"Derrick," he said pleasantly. "Hi, it's Greg Lestrade."

John glanced at Sherlock again, barely daring to breathe.

"… Yeah. Yeah, I know. Hey, listen, I was wondering if I'd be able to pop in and see you at the hotel this evening, say, an hour's time…? Nah, mate. Just want to clear a couple of details up about what Brett and Sadie were like, nothing official. You can show me what the locals drink around here… yeah, well, what my bosses don't know won't hurt them, will it?"

There was a long pause. Lestrade met Sherlock's gaze as he waited.

"Great," he finally said. "Don't dress for dinner or anything, I look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards…" He gave a light chuckle. "Great. See you then. Bye." He hung up the phone, looked at it for a few seconds, then took a deep breath. "Says he's going to meet me at the Old Coastguard in an hour," he said.

"And?"

"And he won't. You can always tell from the tone of voice. How far do you think—"

"Not far." Sherlock had his own phone out and was now texting at lightning speed.

I urgently need the current co-ordinates of phone IMEI 990000862471854 - S

- Today 3:17pm

50.0896279, -5.546070600000007. Paul, Penzance. - M

- Today 3:19pm

Send me the tracking program you're using? - S

- Today 3:20pm

Downloading…

- Today 3:21pm

Last Google search from that phone? - S

- Today 3:24pm

"Epilim over the counter" 9:44am today. - M

- Today 3:27pm

"Sadie Holland's still alive," Sherlock said, putting his phone in his pocket. "Probably Maisie as well. And if Derrick Rice keeps his phone on him, he's going to lead us straight to them."