CHAPTER 22: OF EGGS AND ELEPHANTS

Please take heed of the archive warnings. This chapter depicts intense situations and disturbing imagery. Discretion is advised.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2015–FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2015

She suspected it might be Morse. As a girl, she had memorised the Morse alphabet and practiced signalling the night sky with a torch, half believing an alien child might see her message and come to play. Once, at midnight, she had even tried flashing the beam through the window of the boy next door, hoping he might be inspired to play spy with her. But all that had come of that was his mum yelling at her mum, who had then dragged Sally to the neighbour's front door in her nightie and slippers where she forced her to deliver an insincere apology to the little sneak. Once she left primary school, she stopped playing altogether, alone or otherwise. It wasn't long before her skill at Morse slipped away almost entirely, but for a foggy familiarity.

But when she saw the code Sherlock had given her, that memory was stirred. She looked it up, and the pattern spelled out SD. That didn't mean anything to her, other than her own initials, which she doubted very much were what they meant. Nevertheless, it helped her remember.

Whatever it meant, when she punched the memorised code into the bell, they buzzed her up. How many times she had mounted those stairs were anyone's guess, but she'd never done so happily. In that respect, this time was no different. The difference was that she was going alone. Lestrade didn't even know she was going at all. And that was, simply put, weird.

On the drive over, she had designed to be in and out in under sixty seconds and didn't imagine that such a goal would be hard to accomplish. Walk in, deliver what she'd promised, and leave. But her plan was thrown off course almost the moment she crossed the threshold of the open door and laid eyes on the man himself.

'Christ, what happened to you?' she blurted out, forgetting to make even a half-arsed attempt at pleasantries. Sherlock was seated in his usual chair, and though it was mid-afternoon, he looked like he had only recently woken and was still wearing his pyjamas, dressing gown, and slippers as if they amounted to a suit and shined shoes. That's not what startled her though. She had seen that before, and less. No, what shocked her was the state of his face.

'You have a list, I presume,' he said, snubbing her inquiry as he rose to meet her.

She barely heard him, distracted as she was by the state of him. His face was black and blue and spattered with little red scabs across his otherwise ghost-white skin; his wrists were bandaged, as were his feet, or what she could see of them; and the way that he had arisen from the chair—stiff and mindful, rather than his usual speedy and lithe—suggested that his face wasn't the only thing wrong with him. She stared open-mouthed.

'Sally,' he prompted. 'The list.'

But she wasn't to be so easily dissuaded from her stunned curiosity. 'Did our boys do this to you?' she asked. She tried to imagine who it had been! Wilson had been running his mouth lately, swearing vengeance on Anderson's behalf as if they were sworn brothers, and Bailey had always had a violent temper about him. It was remarkable, seeing hitherto unknown but passionate allegiances rise up out of nothing, not so much in defence of a comrade but rather in objection to a common enemy.

Sherlock sighed and rolled his eyes, which looked painful, given the swollenness around the one on the left. 'Allow me to put your mind at ease concerning your boys. They did nothing.'

'Did nothing is exactly right,' muttered John from behind a newspaper. Donovan almost hadn't noticed him: He fit so naturally in that space that he might as well have been furniture.

'Then who—?'

'Funny where your mind went, though,' Sherlock said. 'Now. The list.'

'You were clearly jumped. Did you report this?'

'I'm seeking no redress.'

'Lestrade's handling it,' John chimed in.

'The list,' Sherlock persisted.

'Jesus,' she said behind gritted teeth as she dug into her attaché. She found the single sheet and passed it over. It took him less than half a second to scan.

'Four?' he said, incredulous. 'Only four? In all of London?'

She flinched. That's what she had said to Dryers. Word for word, in fact. Smoothing out her chagrin, she said, 'O's not such a popular letter for a first name, it would seem. Then whittle those down to surnames beginning with T and restrict that to presumed homeless persons, and you have your list of four.'

He turned away, stalking back to the table (though with notable gingerliness, as if his feet were hurting him) where he laid the page flat beside his laptop. 'Or you've not done your job properly,' he said.

'He means thank you,' said John, doing what John did best in making Sherlock seem like slightly less of an arse.

'Do I?' said Sherlock acerbically.

'She's done you a favour. Yes, you do.' He folded the paper and set it in his lap.

'Look,' said Donovan, who didn't like the word favour in this particular context, 'those were the names that were either in the system, on missing persons lists, or within shelter registries. If there are others out there, we don't know about them, and we couldn't find them.'

'We?' Sherlock straightened and looked at her inquiringly, if not a little suspiciously. Behind the bruising, the expression was almost pitiable. 'You and Lestrade?'

She was not about to be cowed by that look and answered, unrepentant. 'Me and Dryers. Thomas Dryers. He did the legwork, most of it. He doesn't know why he did it, other than following orders, and before you go off on who's trustworthy and who's not, just remember that you know who I work for, and you know, too, that I never trusted you from the start, so maybe calling on me and expecting fawning discretion wasn't the cleverest idea you've had lately.'

To her terrible surprise, Sherlock smirked, the unbruised side of his mouth quirking upward. 'Nonsense, Sally. You've trusted me from the start. You just never wanted to. And the one time you didn't trust me was the only time you've ever been so wrong. We are learning, now aren't we?'

Donovan opened her mouth in retort—was that a camouflaged insult or a backhanded compliment?—and found herself in want of defence.

'What was I to do? I didn't make you run that night. If you had just come to the station, we could have gotten it all sorted. You should have trusted Lestrade, at least, to do just that. I was working with what I knew. How quickly you solved it, finding those kids, and the little girl screaming . . . What was I supposed to think?'

'Perfectly reasonable suspicions,' he returned. 'You did exactly as you were meant to. We both did. Now shall we get on with it and stop playing into their hands?'

He whirled away from her and jumped tracks to a different line of thought. 'Four names! Oliver Tesla, Orrin Tippet, Osmond Tracy, and Olive Teggart.' He rattled them off from memory, having left the page on the table. 'We don't know whose head is on the chopping block, so to speak, so we'll have to prioritise all four. And we have less than three days. Two days, really, we're already in dangerous territory. Better make it one. Now to go about finding them. What do you reckon, John? How do we find people with no place of residence when the network is down?'

'Can't go asking about them on the streets,' John said.

'No, not anymore. The network won't answer kindly to police, never have, and I'm not especially welcome among them myself at the moment, no matter the bribe.'

'Send an anonymous message?' John suggested. 'They seem keen on protecting their own. Maybe word will spread.'

'Simply alerting them doesn't place the mysterious OT under police protection, though, does it? And it runs the risk of exposing what we know to the Slash Man, or whoever may be running the show. He's in their midst.'

If snorts could be curt, Donovan's was exactly that. 'Looks like you'll be needing police involvement after all,' she said.

Sherlock revolved slowly away from John to face her. The look on his ugly face was unfathomable in its regard of her, and she braced herself for what was coming: a tirade against the Met, a snide insistence that she keep her hare-brained suggestions to herself, or one of his casually insulting looks of feigned surprise that she was still in the room. What came next, however, was more disarming than any of those.

'What are you proposing, Sally?' he asked. 'An alliance?'

'What?'

'You. With us. Lestrade, too, naturally, but he's always been on our side, even when he said he wasn't. You want in, is that it?'

'I said nothing of the sort.'

'I could do with an extra pair of feet on the ground.'

'I said, I said nothing of the sort! I am not your patsy! You do remember that you were recently arrested, don't you? For something you did do, this time. Shall I repeat the terms of your bail?' Her temperature was rising, her tongue flying. She felt out of control, spiralling. Where she would land and what she would hit on the way there, she didn't know—all she could do was shout the only thing that had any hope of grounding her: rules. 'You are to have no part in investigations, you are to handle no evidence, and no one, not Lestrade, not me, not anyone, is to discuss any aspect of an ongoing investigation with you or your b—'

He laughed—outright laughed!—and lifted the page from the table, if only to wave it in her face. 'You've already helped me violate three for three, all within the space of about seven hours. Well done, Sally, and welcome aboard. Now, shall we get down to some real work? There, take a look.' He pointed to the wall behind her and, helpless to do anything but follow the path of his finger, she turned and looked. 'Spend a moment familiarising yourself with John's work. It's fairly neat, small words, easy to comprehend. He even highlighted the most important bits. Off you go.'

The hell am I doing? she thought to herself as she took a stupefied step closer to the card collage on the wall. This is complete bollocks. He's an absolute knobhead, a bullying nutter. What the bloody hell am I—? The internal row came to a sudden halt as the copper in the back of her mind screamed at her to shut up and process the central cards tacked to the wall. Those were the names of the victims, stacked top to bottom in the order of their murders, the letters of their initials underlined, and in their names were revealed . . .

'Oh,' she breathed, at last understanding the significance of OT.

'Now, you can take that information back to the Yard,' Sherlock said. She turned sharply and saw that he was suddenly relaxed again in his chair across from John, one leg crossed over and fingertips lightly pressed together. He would have looked perfectly normal—Sherlock's version of normal, that was—if it were not for the battered face. She almost felt bad for him. Almost. 'Let Gregson get his team of three dozen officers swarming down the back alleys and through the multi storeys and under the bridges in search of our man. Let the word spread wildly and let the villain know we've cracked it. Contaminate the knowledge pool and spoil our first advantage since the dawn of the new year. Or.'

She groaned inwardly and wore little circles into her temples with her fingertips. He had stopped talking (miracle that it was) and seemed to be waiting for a reply.

'You're insane.'

'Not remotely.'

'Then I am.'

'Debateable.'

'I'm going to lose my job,' she muttered.

'Codswallop. If Lestrade has not, after all the things he has done . . .'

Her sigh was now the loudest yet. 'Go on, then. What do you need from me?'

'Information. Names aren't enough. I need histories. School records, arrest records, anything, whether you find it pertinent or n—'

But she had already reached into her attaché once again, producing a short stack of pages in a manila envelope, which she thrust in his direction, refusing to cross the room to hand deliver them.

His mouth fell open a little. When he realised this, he closed it again to re-establish an air of superiority. 'Sally Donovan,' he chided. 'You were holding out on me.'

'I told you I didn't trust you.'

'Then why bring it at all?' Again, the smirk. Bastard. She couldn't take this anymore.

'Right then,' she said, slapping the pages down on the nearest table. 'You have what you need. And I've work to do.' Before she had finished speaking, she was striding to the door.

'You'll be hearing from me,' he called after her.

'Whatever.'

She stepped through the open door and would have run down the stairs if her dignity and heels had permitted. As she reached the first landing, she heard, coming from the flat upstairs:

'How'd I do, John?'

'Excellent, Sherlock. Really excellent. That was damn near civil.'

xXx

They ruled out Olive Teggart before the day was out, as a little extra digging revealed that her family had recently found her and sent her to a rehab centre in Glasgow around the turn of the year. It couldn't be her. It was a comfortable dismissal. She was, after all, a woman.

Based on an accumulation of the disparate facts, hypotheses were formulated:

Supposition one: The Slash Man was targeting males. He preferred them. Lynette Avery had been an aberration from the pattern, used merely in service to the underlying threat delivered through nursery rhyme. Though Darren Hirsch had attacked both males and females indiscriminately prior to October 2014, recent evidence suggested that his predilections had since shifted, and the corpse of Ms Avery even supported this: though brutally abused, the sexual violation had been minimal compared to that which had been enacted against Ralston Winters. He never said it aloud, but Sherlock had his theories about what had caused this shift, and he suspected that John knew it, too. It matched the theory down at the Yard.

'He's a sexual fantasist,' said Barney Hinckley, one of the Yard's prime criminal psychoanalysts specialising in violent sex crimes. He had recently finished compiling an extensive profile for a man no one but John Watson had even seen since his dishonourable discharge from the Royal Marines, a discharge cloaked in euphemisms like unsavoury conduct and behaviour unbefitting a soldier in Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Hinckley's report was disseminated to all heads of subteams but delivered to Lestrade personally.

'Formisano and Yang, in their hunt for Hirsch, have uncovered a long history of hypersexual activity, even before serving in the armed forces, though one must read between the lines to see it: online pornography, a long string of short-lived relationships with women, blowing thousands of pounds on strip clubs and prostitutes and phone sex. He was never arrested for anything, and he never received professional counselling. And all this before he turned twenty-one, when he enlisted thirteen years ago, shortly after September 11. Something must have happened in Afghanistan to trigger a sort of psychological break. Those records are sealed, but based on his criminal actions after his discharge, it is likely that it was while in the service that Hirsch acted out his first rape, or his first rape of a man, at the very least. Against a fellow soldier, a prisoner, a civilian, it's all conjecture, we don't know. But it was likely during that time that he developed a taste for it.'

'He liked it,' said Lestrade, barely hiding his disgust. 'Not just the sex, but the act of rape itself.'

Hinckley nodded. 'He would have found it exciting. All of it. The sexual stimulation, yes, but also the adrenaline rush that comes from doing something so dangerous and transgressive. Combine the two in someone already psychologically volatile, and well . . . you get Hirsch.'

'If it was the reason for his discharge, why was it not reported? Why was he not locked up?'

'Not a question I can answer,' said Hinckley. 'When it comes to the military, you know how it can be. Sometimes things can get hushed up. Maybe it was tricky convicting him, or even charging him, if consent was thrown into question. Maybe it was something that would have embarrassed a superior officer, or something that involved a powerful family—he didn't come from one himself. All plausible, but doubtful. If you want my personal theory . . .'

'I do.'

'I think he went after a prisoner of war.' At Lestrade's raised eyebrows, he continued, 'I have a couple of reasons for thinking it. Firstly, and unfortunately, there is more, shall we say, leniency, more turning-a-blind-eye when it comes to criminal behaviour, sexual or otherwise, against enemy prisoners, isn't there? Because of internal obfuscation, the numbers are not solid, but most experts agree that, statistically, in a military environment, it is more likely that rapes occur guard to prisoner than soldier to soldier. And given his stature, I shouldn't be surprised if he was used as a guard. Don't take that as gospel, I'm only speculating. But where I am more confident is in the theory that, if his discharge was for committing an act of rape, it was his first.'

'Why?'

'Because the profile of serial rapists suggests that, many times, the perpetrator becomes a repeat offender in an effort to recreate that first rape, much the way a serial killer is in constant pursuit of the high derived from that first kill. Hirsch, as the Slash Man, violated all of his victims in much the same way—not only did he perform anal rapes exclusively, but the cold is something of an unusual and so noteworthy factor. I would hypothesise that his first victim was quite cold when he raped him, possibly wet, maybe from water torture, and this played a factor in the heightened thrill for Hirsch. But none of his victims—homeless Londoners, that is—quite fulfilled the fantasy. He couldn't recreate that first time to his satisfaction. That's where Watson comes in.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, Watson not only fulfilled the fantasy of his first rape, he replaced it.'

'Hang on, how did John fulfil it to begin with?'

'He met the criteria. He was a prisoner, wasn't he? Unlike the others, he was a prisoner, and had been for more than a week before Hirsch was allowed to touch him. And, unlike the others, Watson was also a soldier. A former soldier, yes, but the history may very well have been significant for Hirsch. Watson would have had training in tactics to withstand torture, like other POWs but unlike Hirsch's homeless victims, and seeing those tactics put into practise may have excited him. Here was Captain John Watson, a captive in a cold prison. It was the closest he'd come to reliving that first time. But there was also Moran, right? He was the man in charge, the superior officer, and he made Hirsch wait . . .'

He made him wait, John had said.

'. . . which must have frustrated him . . .'

He said it was hard on him.

'. . . so when he was finally given permission . . .'

Just so he'd be . . . overenthusiastic.

'. . . it was . . . a release. Sweeter, more thrilling, more gratifying. And it wasn't just the once. He got to have Watson again and again.'

'I think I'm going to be sick,' said Lestrade.

'But that's just the trouble, Lestrade,' said Hinckley. 'Watson has become his new fantasy. The newest victims share qualities with him now, don't they? All their hands have been bound, same as Watson. Granted, Hirsch has used shoelace and not wire, but the positioning has been the same. Their hands are never bound behind them, for instance. And the victims have all been strangled in one way or another, same as Watson. But furthermore, and more frightening, the men Hirsch has raped since Watson, he has also killed. In trying to achieve the same level of excitement, he has had to intensify the violence. That, or perhaps he becomes enraged at not being able to duplicate the thrill to a satisfactory level. Maybe these substitutes just aren't . . . you know.'

'What? Aren't what, Hinckley?'

'They aren't enough. Sooner or later, he's going to try to get hold of the real thing.'

Supposition two: The Slash Man was not acting alone. This was not as obvious a conclusion as it seemed. While it was assumed that the murders were arranged, even crafted, by Moran or Adler, neither were suspected in the actual deeds themselves. Moran, it was still believed, was not even in the country, and there was nothing about the crimes that suggested he was doing anything greater than orchestrating them. And though she was most certainly in England, Adler, too, to those who understood her connection, was believed to be playing the part of chess master, not slayer.

But these were crimes Darren Hirsch could not have perpetrated completely on his own. Two, at minimum two, had been needed to hoist Sam Jeffries into the tree. It was unlikely that Hirsch had created a cable noose and thrown Ewan Nichols over the bridge alone. And it was also doubtful that he had abducted both Ralston Winters and Lynette Avery all on his own without any witnesses noticing a large, powerfully built man dragging two bodies from the attack site and eventually to the skip where they had been found. So there were others, there had to be others. Perhaps many.

Again, the fear of a larger conspiracy loomed. How many of Moriarty's network were involved? Were there still double agents in the Yard? Everett Stubbins had spoken of a host of Moran's people. Legion, he had said, but he had offered no further details. A prisoner of the state now, he had no reason to divulge more information, as loyal behind bars as he had been outside of them. Loyal, or afraid? That was a point of debate. But his words rang in Lestrade's ears: We want them both. Sherlock Holmes, and John Watson.

And supposition three: It was a taunt. All of it—the nursery rhymes, the name games, the veiled threats—was, at its root, simply a way to taunt Sherlock, to terrorise his friends, and to point to his ultimate demise.

'It's why he left the notes on Jack and Jill,' Sherlock explained to Lestrade as they stood in front of John's collage, one pondering, the other pontificating. 'I wasn't seeing the pattern, so he pointed it out to me. Look! he's saying. See how clever I've been!'

'Not so clever,' countered Lestrade, 'when we use it against him to stop him.'

Sherlock glowered. 'If he feared that, he would never have given us the clues to start with. It's a dangling carrot. An illusory pot of gold he's confident we'll never reach.'

'So we prove him wrong.'

'We prove him wrong,' Sherlock agreed, but Lestrade saw something in his unfocused gaze that should never colour the eyes of Sherlock Holmes: doubt. What he didn't show to Donovan, what he tried to hide from John, were his own misgivings. He didn't speak them aloud, but he allowed Lestrade to see. 'We save OT. And then . . .'

'What?'

'There are two more to go, aren't there. OT, then two more.'

'Yes. We'll find them, too.'

'No, what I mean is, it's a countdown.'

'Countdown?'

'What happens, Lestrade, once John's name and mine have been spelt out in the bodies of eight hapless victims? What happens then?'

xXx

On day two of the unspoken search, Donovan and Dryers found Osmond Tracy. He was, according to their research, a regular patron—though patron wasn't quite the word—of the St Margaret Refuge and Refectory in Islington. It was there that the two officers, wearing plain clothes and earpieces to communicate with one another, planted themselves at opposing entrances and waited. Each carried a photocopy of Tracy's most recent mugshot, now three years out of date, with the hope of spotting him, and recognising him when they did.

It was Dryers, stationed at the south entrance, who picked a man of like enough resemblance out of a steady stream of passers-by whose faces were all beginning to blur into one; and, after double checking the photograph and mentally adding three years and about four more inches of grisly ginger beard, determined that this was their man. 'Donovan, I've got eyes on a possible match,' he said into his collar where the mic was positioned.

'Standing by for positive ID,' Donovan replied.

Dryers pushed himself off the brick wall of St Margaret's and started toward the prematurely aged homeless man who was munching on the second half of a gyro wrapped in brown paper. 'Osmond!' he said familiarly as he approached, spreading his arms and shaking his head in disbelief, as if this were an old friend he'd not seen in ages. 'Ozzie, mate! How the hell are ya?'

The man froze in the act of chewing and stared at him in bemusement. He swallowed. 'I know you?'

Dryers affected a look of offence. 'Come on, Oz. It's been a while, but it ain't been that long. We were at Kent together!'

'Make the ID and let's get on with it,' Donovan hissed impatiently in his ear.

'Sorry, mate, Kent was a long time ago,' said the man. 'And nobody ever called me Oz in all my life. It's Osmond, long and full, thank you.'

Dryers shook his head lamentably and put an arm around the man's shoulders. 'Pity, that,' he said. 'Oz suits you.' Then, before Osmond Tracy could pull away from the stranger's too-familiar arm, Dryers flipped open his officer's badge. Tracy stiffened at the sight of it. 'How's about you and me go for a little stroll. You can finish up that there Greek food, and my partner and I will explain everything, yeah?'

'I'm not your partner, constable,' Sergeant Donovan said tetchily.

'She's a doll. You'll like her.'

It was in this way that Osmond Tracy was saved.

xXx

Oliver Tesla and Orrin Tippet were more evasive. Neither had a criminal record or particular habits or haunts that were likely to show up in school reports or hospital records. Both men were of an age, one with the other, thirty-nine and forty-one, respectively, and so of an age with John, too. Both were white. Neither had a military background, drug addiction, or family. All they knew was that Tesla had once worked in a warehouse before injuring his back, and Tippet had been a window-washer at the Gherkin, sacked for making lewd gestures through the glass when he knew women were watching (that is, he made a habit of grabbing his crotch at inopportune moments) and for deliberately dropping Scotch eggs from thirty storeys up to the pavement below on a dare. He was also—according to the five-year-old photo still on file in the Gherkin's employment records—bald, and rather portly. Tesla was smaller, a stature more comparable to John's. For this reason, he became Lestrade's primary focus.

It was Thursday, and Lestrade was getting desperate. He assigned Donovan and Dyers to get back onto the street, to play the part of two sorry down-and-outs and search discreetly among the homeless for their quarry.

'Any leads, you let me know immediately,' he said.

The trouble, though, was that the homeless rarely knew anyone's full name and often referred to each other by monikers or descriptors. There was McFriendly, the Irish bloke who made sport of trying to kiss women off their guard; and his companion, Yankee Doodle, the illegal American who got off on exposing himself to unsuspecting female tourists. There was Smalls (who was not small) and Red (who was black) and Pippa and the Gaffer and Jack and Jill and the Slash Man. No one they encountered knew anyone by the name of 'Orrin', and the only 'Oliver' they had heard of was the nickname for a bloke whose real name was Daniel but who had a reputation for begging for more of anything he got: pence, pity, food, and flat-handed slaps across the face ('Please, sir,' he was known to say, 'can I have some more?').

The homeless refuges and churches where their names had been found to begin with hadn't seen either man in months and could offer neither descriptions nor details about them, despite an evident willingness to help. The police, believing themselves to be working of an anonymous tip, were quickly exhausting all resources and increasing their own scepticism of the lead. And Sherlock had no evidence to work from, no contacts to consult. He thought regretfully of Ewan Nichols.

Then, Friday morning, Sherlock and John stepped out onto the street on their way to John's physical therapy session. John hadn't been for weeks, had in fact missed out on his last two sessions with Ella, and knew he needed to return; and Sherlock, recovering, restless, and dissatisfied with being relegated to the role of code cracker, needed to get out of the flat.

That's when they found the note tacked to the knocker.

'He walks the rails at dusk,' Sherlock read aloud, frowning.

And set on the edge of the step was a half-empty beer bottle.

John cancelled his appointment.

xXx

Railroads. There were miles and miles of tracks in London and roundabout, and Lestrade couldn't hope to choose the right line, let alone the right stretch of line. He gathered his full team, announced that there had been an anonymous tip, and set them about searching the train yards and tunnels, establishing lookouts and posting keep-away signs as the day drew on. But they couldn't close down every station in this city or mark every possible entry point; they didn't even know who they were looking for. Sherlock believed it was all futile anyway.

'It's another puzzle,' he said, pacing the flat, gesticulating his frustrations. He had already made the mistake of pulling at his hair, which had torn John's stitches and caused a minor amount of bleeding again. John scolded him without ire before patching him up again. 'Damn it all.'

'He wants us to find him,' said John. His vagueness needed no translation.

'He wants us to find him,' Sherlock agreed. 'Not the police. The note, the bottle, left on our doorstep.'

'Or maybe it's not him. The homeless know we're looking for an Orrin or an Oliver,' John said. 'They know you're looking, they must. It could have been them. It could have been a genuine tip.'

'I might think so,' said Sherlock, 'if it were not for the bottle.'

'The homeless drink,' John reasoned.

'They drink beer.'

'Okay . . .'

'That's more than beer.' He pointed to the luminescent green bottle that now sat beneath the light hanging above the centre of the kitchen table. The silver label around the neck read Carlsberg Elephant Beer, which John knew to be a strong pilsner and which Sherlock knew to be out of Copenhagen.

'Is it?'

'Smell it.'

John reached for the bottle—they were not concerned about fingertips; identifying them would tell them nothing, and there was no time anyhow—and took a whiff. 'You're right,' he agreed. 'Definitely alcohol, but something's off.'

'I need to find out what. Exactly what.'

He called Molly, but for the first time in their entire history, she refused him access to the lab at Bart's. She assured him (repeatedly) that it was nothing personal—it was midday and the lab was in use—but he supposed she was concerned that his presence at the hospital would fare poorly, not only for him but for her as well.

He did not have the time or full equipment to set up a proper lab in the kitchen and discover the drink's properties. And the clock was ticking quickly toward dusk.

'I'm going to drink it.'

'Like hell you are,' said John.

'Just a taste.'

'No.'

'It's not poisoned.'

'You don't know that.'

'I do. Think about it, John. What would he have to gain by killing me at this stage in the game? Remember, he wants me to solve the puzzle. This is a piece of it.'

Staring him down, John said, 'If you're so confident, let me taste it first.'

He reached for the bottle, but Sherlock lifted it first and held his arm out of his reach; his face briefly betrayed a flicker of doubt, but he covered this swiftly by saying, with an air of unflappable confidence, 'Not to disparage you in any way, John, but you have a rather unhappy history with alcohol, given your father's and sister's abuses, which meant you only ever imbibed socially; whereas I, aside from having a rather sensitive and superior palette, spent the better portion of my time at university refining those sensitivities in becoming familiar with a vast array of alcoholic beverages. Experimentally.'

'I thought you spent your time shooting up,' said John with wry humour.

'That was after,' said Sherlock equivocally, and he lifted the bottle to his lips, felt the air change as John held his breath, and tipped the bitter liquid into his mouth. One gulp, and it burned as it slid down his throat, though not badly. It was flat, weak, the diluted form of something heady, and . . . a little fruity.

He smacked his tongue a couple of times, capturing the last fumes of alcohol and swallowing them. John removed the bottle from his hand and set it back on the table to preclude him from taking even one more sip.

'Well, Monsieur Connoisseur?' he said.

'Nutty,' said Sherlock. He ran a tongue against the roof of his mouth. 'Though mild. Sweet.'

'Pale lager?'

'Brown ale. But it's fruity, too. Mixed? I'd say with . . . wine.' He smacked a couple of more times. 'No, brandy. It has a warm, distilled smack to it.'

'So what does it mean?'

Ale and brandy. What did it mean? Was there something in the drink he hadn't noticed? (He licked his lips, walking back into the sitting room.) Ale and brandy. The two notes together played a familiar harmony in his memory, something he had read recently. But where? What was the context? (He sank slowly into his chair, fingertips coming together. John stayed in the kitchen, letting him think in quiet.) He'd been researching a wide variety of subjects of late: nursery rhymes (not a likely candidate), PTSD (it was a possibility), property law (doubtful). No, no, and no. Irene Adler, though, had left a bottle of claret in Molly's refrigerator. Half drunk, like this one. He had taken it for a twisted romantic gesture, much like rose and the brassiere, but maybe it was something more, something he'd not consid—

No! Back up! Nothing to do with the claret, no connection to property law, to stress disorders, not in this case. It was another rhyme!

He leapt up from the chair and nearly as quickly collapsed into it again, having forgotten about the bloody rib.

'Easy there,' John said, stepping out of the kitchen. 'What do you need?'

'Says the hobbled man,' Sherlock said, wincing and holding his side.

'I'm more able-bodied than you at the moment.'

'Aren't we a sad pair.'

'Tell me what you need.'

Sherlock nodded to bookshelves where he kept all twenty volumes of the 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. 'Pull down H,' he said.

John did, and set it at the table by the boarded windows.

'Look up humpty dumpty.'

John looked astonished, uncertain, but quickly flipped to the back of the tome, searching, his fingers dragging down the pages. 'Got it,' he said.

'And the first entry?'

'Humty-dumty: A drink made with ale,' John read, 'boiled with brandy. Circa 1700.' He looked up. 'How the hell did you know that?'

'I told you: Once I started recognising the rhymes, I researched them.'

'And thoroughly, by God.'

'How else does one go about it?' But he recognised the tone of admiration, and appreciated it. He stood—more carefully this time—and came to stand behind John's chair. He leant in close, pointing to the page. 'And the second entry?' he prompted.

'A short, dumpy, hump-shouldered person,' said John, dragging his forefinger below the tiny print. He leant back and looked up at Sherlock. 'Orrin Tippet. The portly fellow. Lestrade's looking hard for the wrong man.'

Sherlock clapped a hand on John's shoulder, though he withdrew it quickly when John contained a small flinch. 'That's it! It's the nursery rhyme, it has to be. It's all falling into place! Tippet, an egg-shaped man working in an egg-shaped building, grabbing the most egg-shaped part of his anatomy to scandalise women, and dropping eggs on unsuspecting passers-by. He's our egg-man, our humpty-dumpty!'

'And he's about to have a great fall,' said John.

'But from where?'

'If the rhyme is any indication'—their eyes locked—'from a wall.'

'I'll get the maps.'

They spread them across the tables and onto the floors, every map of London in the flat and one on each computer screen. John traced railroads with his forefinger, looking for intersections with London's walls or what might be construed as a wall; Sherlock scanned for words, little printed Ws rising off the page like champagne bubbles, which, when they proved fruitless, he mentally popped to clear the space. They were silent for five minutes, the sun quickly sinking toward the horizon, when Sherlock suddenly exclaimed, 'Walworth!'

John's head snapped up.

'The A215, also called Walworth Road.'

'But that's a road, not a—'

'Your thinking is too literal.' He brought the map closer to John and stabbed his finger triumphantly at a point in Southwark. Walworth Road crossed right under the tracks that ran parallel to—nearly hugging—Elephant Road.

'Hang on,' said John. 'That's just south of the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre.' He looked back at the bottle of Carlsberg Elephant Beer sitting in the kitchen. 'Bugger me.'

'Less than thirty minutes of daylight left, John!' Sherlock cried, striding for his coat, or, rather, the unfortunate substitute, an old, dark brown leather blouson he'd dug out of the wardrobe, hardly suitable for winter conditions, but he'd yet to replace his favourite coat.

'Wait, wait, shouldn't we tell Lestrade? He's out there right now—'

'I'll call him from the cab.'

'Bloody hell,' said John, pulling his own coat off the back of the chair.

'You're coming?'

John zipped his coat to the chin. 'The last time you went wandering about on your own, you came home with a cracked skull.'

'You do exaggerate.'

John said nothing, but Sherlock saw him pat the small of his back. He was wishing it too, in that moment: that he'd not given away his gun.

xXx

Neither man, not John, not even Sherlock, could have predicted how quickly that evening's events would unfold.

Only the last hues of orange still hung in the sky. The ignorant cabbie sped them away from Baker Street on the promise of double fare if they reached their destination in ten minutes, not the estimated twenty; so, as the cabbie zipped through yellow lights, pushed ahead of slower cars, and honked insistently at sluggish pedestrians, Sherlock, using John's phone, contacted Lestrade, who was searching the lines near Wormwood Scrubs Park, and Donovan, who was with Dryers at Stonebridge. Neither was positioned to reach Walworth Road before them. Lestrade said he would dispatch closer units and make a phone call to stop all trains on the Thameslink line but pleaded with him not to go all the same, and Donovan called him a stubborn arse. Nevertheless, both, without knowing in even a vague sense how Sherlock had pinpointed the site, were en route to Southwark by the time Sherlock and John crossed the Thames and merged onto Kennington Lane.

They were dropped off at the Elephant and Castle Station where they bolted inside as fast as their damaged bodies would permit, charging past the Friday evening commuters to buy two tickets. Then, on the platform, they looked down the line to see whether a train was incoming. When it seemed that the way was clear, they jumped onto the tracks.

'Oi!' someone shouted.

'The hell they doing!'

'Someone call security!'

'Jesus Christ, but isn't that Sherlock Holmes?'

No one could answer—Sherlock and John were already jogging down the track and out into the open night, torches alight.

The tracks were dark, quiet, and the traffic below sounded miles away.

'Wait wait,' said John, slowing, and Sherlock with him. He pointed his way down the track, then back in the direction they had come. 'Should we be going north or south?'

'Walworth runs south,' Sherlock answered, and they started jogging again, Sherlock clutching his side and John with an uneven gait. The air was so cold they could feel the tears from their stung eyes harden in their lashes, and the harsh wind pushed against them, trying to force them backwards and rob them of their warmth.

Though the strip of concrete dividing the double tracks was narrow, they jogged side by side, and on unspoken understanding, each directed his own beam of light at his own half of the pass, searching. Then Sherlock's fell against a dark mound farther up the track.

'There!' he called, and they picked up their feet, bolting ahead.

The sight before them did what the wind had not, and chilled them to their bones. The figure of a large man lay across the westernmost rails, his bare belly protruding toward the blackening sky. As Sherlock and John hurried nearer, breaths rising and disappearing in fervent huffs, they saw in Sherlock's unsteady light that the man's trousers and underwear had been shimmied down to his knees, his shirt and coat rustled up toward his armpits. But even as Sherlock's dread began to rise and John's fear spiked, the rails began to tremble. Sherlock put a hand out, grabbed John's arm, and halted him. They looked behind them into blackness—nothing. Then, ahead. At some distance yet, but fast approaching, the light of a train was beginning to round the bend.

'Shit! Oh shit!' John cried, and he broke into a run again, straight toward the barrelling train, Sherlock hot on his heels. The man on the tracks didn't stir with the rumbling of the rails. When they reached him, John dropped his torch and skidded down to his knees beside the prone man. He yanked his fingers out of his gloves and placed them at the man's neck, feeling for a pulse. 'He's alive!'

'John, we have to move!'

John's lifted his head into the blinding light of fifty tonnes of speeding steel, but in the surrounding darkness, and with the rapidly shortening distance, it was visually impossible to tell which rails the train rode.

'Left or right, Sherlock? Left or right!'

Sherlock's brain fired at speeds to match that of the train, reasoning through it but unable to reach any certain conclusion. Had there been more people on the western platform, or the eastern? Could he recall which side of the track the northbound trains usually rode on this line? No! They were neither of them regular Thameslink riders. Left or right? The wrong choice would kill them.

'Put him in the centre!' Sherlock hollered, his voice almost lost to the wind and howl of steel on steel.

'There's not enough room!'

But they both jumped into action. Sherlock seized the man at the shoulders, and John took the feet, and they rolled him to the narrow strip between the parallel tracks, northbound and southbound, until he lay in the exact centre. The blast of the train's horn rocked them.

'Sherlock!' John cried in alarm, his voice drowned by the scream of the oncoming train and lost to the night. He froze in terror, watching the light grow brighter and press against the limits of his vision.

Sherlock pulled him down, flat on the ground between the rails, and threw an arm around his shoulders, the other around his head, and held on tightly, just as the force of the monster train tore across the iron rails to their right where the man had been lying just seconds before. Mere inches from their prone bodies, the sound of it was like the earth wrenching itself apart, and the ground beneath John's skull and against his breast quaked and groaned and rolled into Sherlock's bones.

And then it was gone.

With panting hearts, they lay still, marvelling in the knowledge that death had just rushed against them and they had survived. It was then, in the quiet of a wind taking a breath, that they heard a pain-filled moan. Sherlock lifted his head off of John's. Just ahead, they saw their half-living quarry, who trembled from pain if not from cold. Sherlock unwound himself from around John, and John, pushing himself to hands and knees, shaky with the flood of adrenaline, crawled closer to Orrin Tippet.

John's torch was gone, destroyed on the rails, but Sherlock found his own still alight on the tracks that lay on their left. He retrieved it and pointed the beam down at the body of the round man, whose wrists were bound with the shoelace from one of his own shoes and whose exposed thighs bled in stripes. His face, too, was a mess of blood, and a wide, dark patch of red soaked his rustled shirt. John pushed the man's shirt further up his torso and saw something protruding from the ribcage. It shone with blood, a thick metal disc on the end of a rod, buried deep.

'It's a lag bolt,' said Sherlock, out of breath. 'Like a large nail. Used to secure railway trestles and sleepers.'

'He's bleeding out,' John said. He gingerly touched the head of the bolt, and the half-conscious man puled at the pain. 'But it's not too late. We need paramedics, right now.'

Sherlock still had John's phone on him, but as he shoved a hand into his pocket, they both heard, from behind, a whistling. John twisted and Sherlock pulled up, spun on his heel, and threw his beam at a bare brick wall standing on the edge of the track, a barrier of sorts between the trains, the drop-off to the street, and the buildings below. The whistling came again, this time slightly further south, down the track. Sherlock's beam jumped to capture the source.

And there stood a man, hooded and faceless, and dressed fully in black, his legs spread wide in a challenging stance. For a moment, no one moved. Then the man lifted an arm, pointed it at Sherlock, and spun around to bolt further down the track.

He didn't even think: Sherlock took off after him.

'Sherlock!' John cried.

The cry almost carried him back, but in the end he couldn't stop himself from flying. That was him! It was him! The height, the hulk of him, the shadow he carried in his wake! After all he had done, after all the lives he had ruined, Sherlock could not allow him to escape! John would take care of Mr Tippet, but he had to stop Darren Hirsch.

His feet pounded the darkness between the tracks that obscured steel bars and errant stones, but he wasn't watching his feet. His full attention was fixed like a tractor beam on the figure darting ahead of him, at a speed he couldn't match, not with a searing side and sharp, laboured breath. He had no plan beyond the wild need to reach him, lay him flat against the concrete, and pummel the life out of him. He saw himself beating Hirsh's head bloody against the iron rails, not considering for even a second that such a creature would fight back, tooth and nail, not even considering that such a man, a rapist and a murderer, might get the better of him. The synapses in his brain were firing riotously, but there was no logic to the electrical storm raging in his head, not until the man, twenty paces ahead of him, passed beneath a steel crossing that stood some five metres high and spanned the width of the elevated tracks. Sherlock raised his torch higher. Hanging from the crossing was a man, his neck in a noose.

Sherlock's feet skidded on the loose gravel. The man dressed all in black kept running, but Sherlock almost didn't notice. His eyes, and then the beam from his torch, were riveted instead on the lynched dead man in a black hood, wearing nothing at all but a black Belstaff coat, his coat. A steel pole was drawn through the sleeves to hold his arms out like a scarecrow's, like birds' wings. The unbuttoned coat flapped in the unforgiving wind. The man's bare ankles were bound with shoelace. Across his exposed chest, revealed with every flap of the wide lapels, dripped the freshly cut letters I O U.

And then, despite the wind, he heard the soft ringing of a mobile phone. Not the one he still held in his hand. No, not John's. He knew the ring—it was his ring. And it was coming from the pocket of his old stolen coat.

Wary, afraid, he slipped John's phone inside his own pocket and slowly drew nearer the swinging corpse. The wind howling in his ears almost drowned the sound of the phone, but he heard it as clearly as if it were calling his name. He reached up, put his hand inside the pocket of the Belstaff, and withdrew his mobile.

Unknown Caller.

His heart pounded as his thumb moved to answer, as he lifted the phone to his ear.

Silence. Then:

'Jack be nimble.'

The howling grew louder, and Sherlock's heart raced with the speed of a war drum.

'Jack be quick.'

There was a soft click. The line went dead.

Then the body burst into light, and began to burn.

xXx

'Sherlock!' John cried, and he watched in horror as the mad detective rush into the fallen night. He wanted to race after him, pull him back, keep him still and close at hand, but those hands were filling with blood, Mr Tippet's blood, and he couldn't staunch it, not properly, not with that spike driven into his side; but nor could he pull it out, not when he could barely see at all, not when doing so would risk greater damage and more blood loss. His primary goal had to be simply to keep the man alive.

'Stay with me, Tippet, help is coming,' he said. He pulled away for a moment, shucked his coat, and draped it across the man's bare hips and groin, restoring to him a modicum of dignity. Then he divested himself of his jumper, balled it tightly, and pressed it into the wound in man's side. He began shivering at once in the deeply bitter cold. The man moaned and wept and trembled, his head rolling on the gravel beneath him. Then it stilled, and in the dark, John could barely make out that his eyes were in fact open and watching him. His lips moved, but John couldn't hear him. He bent closer.

'Orrin Tippet?' he said.

The man nodded frightfully.

'My name is John Watson. I'm a doctor. You're going to be okay. I'm here to help. Do you understand?'

'Help.' The man's lips moved, but his voice was weak.

'That's right, Mr Tippet. The police are on their way. I know it hurts, but don't be scared—'

A cloud rolled over the moon and away, a break in the solid black sky. And it was in that moment, as the moonlight struck Orrin Tippet's eyes, that John registered their direction: Tippet was not looking at him, but beyond him, just over his shoulder. Not with a gaze of bewilderment or stupor: they were fixed, and they were fearful. His lips were again forming the word help.

With the force of a rushing train, John felt himself wrenched away. Large hands seized the back of his shirt and jerked him up, dragged him backwards. His feet, hurried along, lost purchase, and he landed, hard, across the easternmost rails. Before he could think beyond the pain of impact, those same hands grabbed two fistfuls of the front of his shirt and lifted him bodily off the ground, only to shove him backward and slam him into the solid brick wall, the only barrier between the track and plummeting to the pavement far below.

The air left his body, and as his head struck the wall, his vision, already filled with darkness, clouded and blocked out all city lights entirely. But he remained conscious, and next second, his head was jerked up by the hair. A large hand held his skull against the wall, ground it into the brick like a pestle into a mortar, and a large body pressed in on his. When he lifted his eyes, he made out the silhouette of a giant of a man, two heads taller, seven stones heavier, a face in shadow, a man with a kink in his right ear—a silhouette he knew.

His chest constricted in fear, and his heart stopped beating. A terrifying paralysis overtook him. He couldn't move an arm, lift a leg, turn his head. Every muscle refused to obey, so while his brain shouted at him to fight, to struggle, to wrench himself away at the cost of pain or worse, his body remained frozen and unresponsive. Like it wasn't even his own.

There was a long moment of stillness, when time was suspended, and nothing penetrated his senses, not the deepening cold, not the howling wind, not the distant lights. They stared at one another until, slowly, the man lifted a large hand, dragged it up John's chest, and curled his fingers around John's throat. Still, John could not move, and in his mounting fear, even his mind was darkening in its need to escape. He could barely think at all. He was captured, like he always knew he would be, like he had never been free to start with. He was back, back in the kitchen, the freezer, cold and naked and shivering and about to be devoured.

Then the man's mouth collided with his, and John came to life. He jerked and twisted and thrashed, desperate to get away from that awful touch and the body that had made itself his prison. But the fist in his hair cracked his skull a second time against the brick, and the other tightened around his throat. Teeth sank down into his bottom lip, his cheek, and his neck—he felt he was being eaten alive. When he tried to push away, weakly, ineffectually, the monster hands trapped his wrists against the wall so fiercely he thought the bones might snap. He hollered in pain. Then suddenly, with a growl, the man flipped him around, pressing his chest so mercilessly into the rough bricks he couldn't draw breath. One arm pinned him down at the neck, laying across it like a crossbeam; hot breath scalded his cold cheek; and a groping hand travelled down, down, until it grabbed him below the waist.

He cried and quailed and fought, trying to lash out with his feet at the very least, but the man kicked his legs wide and pressed him flatter. Panic choked him, a caged and silent scream resounded deep inside him, so when, of a sudden, he was released and fell boneless to the ground, he didn't know that his captivity had lifted, not until he saw, through swimming vision, the thick legs and large boots retreating from him, advancing on the other prone man.

There was a gun in the shadow's hand.

The large figure loomed over Orrin Tippet, who trembled where he lay, a look of pleading and fear in his eyes. The Slash Man shot him in the head.

Somewhere down the track, a column of fire erupted into the sky.

20