"Woman. Late 20s. Strangled."
"Yeah. We did get that far," Lestrade muttered under his breath, hopefully inaudibly. He sighed.
Lestrade didn't really need Sherlock on this one, but when he gave John an update on the difficulties they were having determining Moriarty's whereabouts, he had flat out said that anything that would get Sherlock out of their front room would be "very much appreciated, thanks." He braced himself for the onslaught of Sherlock in a bad mood for a good reason.
She was splayed out on the sofa with a bright blue silk scarf loosely draped around her neck. One wine glass, but wood of the mahogany veneer table moist with droplets of condensation, so...two glasses... one removed. Hastily. Exceedingly tastefully-decorated flat. Superior quality clothing, but scarf is all wrong.
Certainly it wasn't color-coordinated, and the rest of the woman's outfit was, right down to the subtle reddish tint of the hosiery. Sherlock sniffed the wine glass. There was a slight odour, largely masked by that of the wine itself. He sniffed the scarf too. Musty. He vanished into the bedroom.
After observing the details and formulating his hypothesis, he would sometimes listen. He'd never try to ask (that was rarely fruitful, communication was seldom two-way, and when it was that was... special) but occasionally, if the situation was dire, an object would, not talk, but emote. To anyone that could potentially hear, he assumed. Like a scream into a void.
He used to think this was simply projection, when an object suggested details to him, but eventually, he realised that projection and objects tapping into his own subconscious were essentially the same thing. Ideas would enter his mind first and then he would hear them from the inside. Whatever pedantic label you wanted to place on the experience... inspiration from the ether, the language of the muse... it was impossible to determine if the origin was internal or external. As Grand-mere Vernet used to say, art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms. He wasn't, in fact, delusional, which came as a bit of a relief, since there had been times he hadn't been entirely sure. It was just the way that sort of communication worked.
He'd been denying the sensations for longer than even he could recall. Once it no longer made him question his sanity, he began chalking it up to a far too vague mysticism, unworthy of serious consideration, until he stumbled upon theoretical subatomic physics while shamming his way through a conference in Switzerland. He was there trailing an attendee and listening to just enough of Nick Herbert's lecture on Quantum Animism to be able to pose as a physicist, but he had found it intriguing and unexpectedly relevant to his personal situation. Consciousness was essentially "energy", which can neither be created nor destroyed, but can readily transfer from conduit to conduit amongst the subnuclear realm of the elementary particles (quarks, gluons, leptons). Particles which were essentially the building blocks of all existence. Any object's inner life is connected to the inner life of its observer, and their potentias influence and enhance each other. In short, yes, he truly could sense things from inanimate objects as if they were alive, because, on a subatomic level, who was to say they weren't? He was neither crazy nor relying on pure mysticism. Science had got his back.
He knew what to look for; he focused on the items that seemed out of place. The wine glass. The scarf. He cleared his mind to give them room to speak. This time, the scarf did.
It was confused. It didn't belong there.
He already knew why.