A/N: I apologize for taking a month between chapters this summer. I've had a lot of anxiety and stress the last couple months and it's not looking better anytime soon. I'm not sure how frequently I'll be posting for a while, but I promise I will not abandon this or John's Gamble. It's just been hard to be in my head too much of the time. Thanks for sticking with me and for all the kind comments :) I appreciate you all!
Warning for some grody morgue stuff.
Chapter 69
Mrs. Hudson packed a basket for them in lieu of a proper sit-down supper. John made Sherlock eat a little something in the hack on the way to St. Bart's, though the man eschewed the wine entirely. John had repacked the basket for later by the time they stopped near the hospital. Sherlock outdistanced John with that long-legged stride of his, and by the time John caught up, Lestrade was already scolding Sherlock for startling him.
"This mystery would be giving me nightmares if I had time to sleep, Holmes. I do not need you sneaking up on me in a dark corridor outside a room full of corpses."
"I was hardly sneaking, Lestrade. Oh, John, finally. Shall we begin?" Sherlock stripped off his greatcoat as he stepped past Lestrade.
John shed his basket and greatcoat just inside the door, balancing the handle of his cane over the edge of a countertop.
"Mr. Lestrade, if you have not eaten, you may share some of what Mrs. Hudson has packed for us," John offered, gesturing to the basket, which Lestrade fell upon with abandon.
"God bless Mrs. Hudson," he mumbled around a mouthful of cold beef.
Sherlock had begun lighting several lamps and dragged them closer to the sheeted table in the center of the room. John assembled a tray of equipment they'd need to thoroughly examine the body while Sherlock pulled back the sheet and started rattling off observations. Lestrade gathered he was supposed to take notes by the haughty pause in Sherlock's demeanor, and hastily seated himself at the desk in the corner and began jotting down details with a handy pencil stub, crust of bread dangling from the corner of his mouth.
"Burned flesh surrounds multiple contact points where wires had been inserted into the skin and muscle. These contact points include the temples, the chest region above and below the heart, and each extremity not attached in its original manner. There are lines of stitching around the neck, the elbow of the left arm, the right leg at the hip, the left knee, and in two vertical rectangles extending from an inch below the clavicle to an inch below the ribcage." Sherlock pressed lightly along the seam with a concentrated frown. "The musculature appears to be severed below the cuts, something which was not immediately discernible given the shocking nature of the discovery of the body."
John tried not to laugh at Sherlock's horrible pun, instead clearing his throat as he also made notations on a paper with a body outline pre-printed. Sherlock glanced over his work, counting out numbers of sutures along each line and approximate measurements between them. When the front of the body had been examined head-to-toe, Sherlock had John assist him in tipping the corpse to check for stitching or other incisions along the back but there was nothing further.
"No discernible livor mortis," John noted, meaning the majority of the blood had to be removed either prior to or immediately after death to prevent the bruise-like discoloration.
"John, my magnifying lens, left pocket." John moved behind Sherlock and reached into his pocket. He also tracked down a small concave mirror to help reflect light where Sherlock would need it.
"We'll start with the chest. Start clipping the sutures here."
John picked up a set of forceps and a sharp scalpel, tugging gently on the dark thread before severing and removing it from the skin.
"No sign at all of healing or swelling." John proceeded efficiently and soon they were able to pull back skin and muscle.
"The cuts show no sign of a struggle. I would deduce that the body, or bodies, present were sufficiently dead when these procedures began."
"I agree."
Lestrade stayed well out of the line of sight, taking notes as the Watson-Holmes' murmured over the body. Noting 'costal cartilage severed at the sternum' was beyond his handle of Latin or physiology, but he made do.
"You're humming," Sherlock said abruptly as John leaned closer to the body to examine a displaced chunk of ribcage.
"Apologies," John replied with an absent smile. Sherlock tilted his head up to look at his husband. John had quieted himself, turning again to the body to prod curiously at the exposed heart in front of him. There were burns from the wires and the stitches holding the organ in place were spaced somewhat haphazardly.
"So, Dr. Watson, what has you in such an agreeable mood this fine evening? Or do you simply enjoy a good autopsy like your husband?" Lestrade seized their quiet moment to inquire about the definite change in mood between the Watson-Holmes' since that afternoon.
"When I'm smiling in the morgue, you tell me it's inappropriate, Lestrade," Sherlock interrupted with brisk indignation.
"When you smile in the morgue, Holmes, it's bloody terrifying."
Sherlock huffed.
"So, Watson, you've discovered the secret of how to tame a hostile Holmes. When last we met, he was on the verge of one of his piss-poor moods and yet he hasn't insulted me once in the last half hour."
"You are an insufferable busybody, Lestrade, with the perceptive abilities of a gnat," Sherlock snapped, making up for lost words.
"Ah, there's the Sherlock Holmes I expected," Lestrade said with a bit of a laugh. "I was beginning to worry."
"If you must know, I took John to bed in the afternoon and it has improved his mood," Sherlock announced haughtily, as if he himself hadn't been the one in the ferocious mood.
"Sherlock!" John gasped. "That's private!" His thoughts on the body in front of him fled his mind as his face grew hot.
"It is not as if I groped you in public, John. In fact, despite your protests, I believe you may just enjoy that."
"What makes you think that?" John set down his scalpel with a clang.
"Your breathing rate has increased, your eyes have widened, and if I am not mistaken…" Sherlock's eyes narrowed as he examined John very closely, "I would say that your pulse rate has increased as well."
"Those physiological reactions could be caused by annoyance rather than arousal."
"They could be," Sherlock agreed, "but it is unlikely."
"This is an utterly inappropriate conversation, Sherlock." John turned a bit so Lestrade could only see his back.
"Men speak of such things all the time, John, and often in a much more ribald manner," Sherlock replied. "I do not understand why it is suddenly something to be embarrassed about."
"Men speak of such things, yes, but rarely in the presence of their spouses. And we are hardly in an environment suitable for… pub talk."
John glanced at Sherlock. His husband still didn't seem to understand and John was not certain in the least how to explain it.
"I think what Doctor Watson is trying to say is that he doesn't want me to see him as your lady wife, Holmes, but as a valued colleague," Lestrade offered from across the room.
"You are most certainly not my lady wife, John," Sherlock declared. "But you are correct. This manner of talk is distracting us from our true purpose here. Stop diverting us from the work, Lestrade."
"Sher… ugh, never mind." John redoubled his efforts in the chest cavity of the corpse on the table.
"It is an absolute mess in here," he said a few moments later.
"What do you mean?" Sherlock leaned back over the corpse, all former conversation forgotten.
"Nothing is connected where it ought to be if one was truly trying to make things work. Muscles are severed, arteries tied off instead of being attached or reattached. The lungs could be lifted free, intact. The pericardium has been removed completely, though that may not make a difference in this experiment; I have no idea."
"Would you say this body was pieced together by someone with no medical experience?"
"No. What stitches exist are small and precise, skilled, but with no real intent. And look at this."
Sherlock bent closer to see the small gap in the aorta John was indicating with the tip of his scalpel.
"Any blood or fluid being pumped by the heart would have immediately leaked out into the chest cavity. In fact, is it not odd that the organs in the chest cavity are not utterly floating in fluids? Did Anderson drain the body before we arrived?"
"Anderson would not touch the body. Muttered something about devils and walked out when he got a good look at it," Lestrade offered.
"Did the electricity cause the fluids to vaporize? But that couldn't be true else Lazarus would not have leaked on his victims." Sherlock began to pace, narrating his thought processes to John and Lestrade. "No, there must not have been any measurable amount of such a fluid within this body. But if the experiment that worked, Lazarus, has this fluid running through his veins, why does this body have none?
"And if the stitches holding the body's organs in place are imprecise and would not hold against the rush of the fluid, the only conclusion to be made here is that this experiment was not meant to actually work. If that is the case, what is the point of it at all?
"If we draw in the fact that the driver so casually showed us this place, interrupted his master's semblance of an experiment, what can we conclude? We were meant to find this laboratory, this body, or perhaps even the mastermind himself?"
Sherlock swept up a scalpel and began to quickly clip the stitches holding one of the arms in place. When half the stitches were released and arm began to completely separate from the rest of the body, Sherlock tossed the scalpel back onto its metal tray with an abrupt clang.
"The arm was held in place by the stitches in the skin; the muscles were never reattached. The heart was never adequately reinstated into the circulatory system. The lungs were separated from the bronchial tubes and pulmonary arteries. What other organs would just fall out onto the floor if we tipped the corpse?"
John and Lestrade had frozen during Sherlock's manic tirade.
"Why would we be shown some sort of elaborate façade? Braggadocio? To thrill and distress the populace? Surely the multitude of bodies found in public spaces would have served that purpose."
"A distraction?" Lestrade offered.
"A diversion?" This from John. "Perhaps the entire laboratory was faked, to make us think we'd found it, dismantled it."
"A warning?"
"An apprentice?"
Sherlock allowed the two men to keep throwing out ideas in case one of them landed on something brilliant.
"An apprentice is an interesting idea, John. Someone trying to reproduce the results but has neither the skill nor neural capacity to produce those results. An apprentice would be someone close to the initial criminal as none of the general public has been apprised of such details."
"The driver, perhaps," John suggested. "Do you not think it suspicious he brought us directly there as if he wanted us to discover it all?"
"But the driver could not have been the man that started the electrostatic generator, nor escaped out the back of the building. Someone else was there. The question then becomes: if this was a trap, was the trap set for us, or the scientist? We need to speak to Lazarus."
"Do you think he'll answer? That he's capable of answering?"
"We'll find out."