Nothing graphic in this chapter.

Chapter Nine

Sherlock's driver pulled up in a short-stay parking bay, at Waterloo Mainline Station and escorted his passenger inside, walking almost the full length of the concourse to reach the British Transport Police office. Sherlock presented himself at the door and was invited inside. The driver stayed outside and stood, on guard duty, scanning the station concourse for anyone or anything suspicious.

Sherlock was led through the tiny Reception Area, through a door with a key pad lock, the entry code of which he memorized automatically, and into a sort of holding area. This consisted of a long bench, which held one occupant – a scruffy, skinny, weaselly-looking individual with spiky, mid-brown hair, a stubbly chin and blood-shot eyes. Sherlock recognised him at once.

'Hello, Billy,' he said.

The young man, who had been sitting hunched up, in his mud-stained Parka coat, looking very fed up with life, looked up, sharply, at the sound of his name and fixed Sherlock with a desperate look.

'Mr 'Olmes! You gotta 'elp me, Mr 'Olmes! These bastards' go' it all wrong, as bloody usual!'

'Where's the phone?' Sherlock asked one of the two attending officers. The man reached over the counter of the 'Custody Suite', for want of a better description of this tiny space, fished out the phone, now in an evidence bag, and handed it to the detective. Sherlock looked at it closely. It was obviously Arthur's phone, because it contained the tracking chip, and it was now switched on – presumably because 'Billy' had switched it on. Sherlock didn't take it out of the bag, in order to preserve any trace evidence it may retain. But he was dying to scroll through the call, text and Internet history, to see if it could tell him anything about Arthur's fate.

Instead, he looked at the weaselly man. Billy Wiggins was one of Sherlock's Homeless Network. Petty thief, habitual drug user, opportunist. Formerly a Chemistry major at Imperial College, London, he had proven far too good a chemist for his own good. The recreational chemical compounds he manufactured had rather scuppered his formal education and future career.

He had been living rough on the streets of London for about two years, now, and had met Sherlock when he tried to pick his pocket, one day, and got more than he bargained for. First, Sherlock grabbed his roaming hand and twisted it, flipping the man over on his back, then put a well-shod foot on his chest, to hold him down.

'Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kick you in the trachea and leave you to choke to death,' Sherlock had enquired, in his most louche public school drawl.

'Cos you'll be done for murder,' Billy had squeaked.

'Look around,' Sherlock replied, looking round. 'No passers-by, no CCTV, no witnesses. They'll find you in the morning, another casualty of street violence. You'll get two lines in the Evening Standard and a pauper's burial in a communal grave. End of story.' He looked back down at the man under his foot.

'On the other hand, you might want to work for me,' he said, smiling broadly.

Billy was not sure which was more scary – this man threatening to kill him or this man grinning like a loon. While he was taking a vote on that, Sherlock took his foot off his chest and offered him his hand. Apprehensively, Billy took the hand and let the scary man pull him to his feet.

'What's your name?' he asked.

'They call me The Wig,' Billy replied.

Sherlock looked down his aristocratic nose, and said,

'No, they don't.'

'Well, they call me Wiggo,' he tried again.

'Nope,' replied Sherlock, with a loud pop on the 'p'.

'Wiggins, Bill Wiggins,' Billy admitted, resignedly.

'Right, Billy ' – Sherlock managed to put so much contempt into those two syllables – 'you seem like a pretty observant chap.'

Billy looked confused. This toff had only just met him. How could he know anything about him at all?

Sherlock discerned his thought processes and rolled his eyes.

'You chose the only CCTV black spot in the whole of this area for your target site, you knew exactly in which pocket I kept my wallet - and it isn't the one most people would use – and you knew not to try to take my phone…why was that. by the way?'

'Tha' model is abaht to be replaced by a new model. Nobody will want 'at model nah.'

'Exactly. But how did you know which model it was? You can't have seen it for more than a second. I was putting it in my pocket, as I turned into this alley.'

Billy shrugged.

'So, what d'you want me t' do f' you?'

'Just observe, watch, notice, and report back to me,' Sherlock replied.

'An' who 'r' you? The Fuzz?'

Sherlock snorted with derision.

'P-lease!' he scoffed.

In the here and now, Sherlock looked down at his erstwhile little helper and indicated the phone.

'Where did you get it, Billy?'

'Aht ov a bin, Mr 'Olmes.'

'What were you doing looking in a bin, Billy? You don't eat out of bins, do you?'

'Cause not! What d'you fink I am? Nah, I saw the geyser drop i' in there!'

Sherlock's eyes lit up.

'Tell me what happened…No! Better still, show me what happened,' he exclaimed and grabbed Billy by the arm, hooking him up off the bench and dragging him toward the exit.

''Old on a minute! Where you goin' with 'im?' demanded one of the Transport policemen. 'He's a felon!'

'No, he isn't, officer, he's a witness. He's done nothing illegal, unless you count stealing from a bin as a crime.'

'An' I was comin' to 'and i' in!' Billy protested.

'Don't over-egg the pudding,' Sherlock warned. 'There are limits to the credulity even of the police,' he muttered, as he swept out of the little police 'station', with Billy scuttling along in his wake.

Once back out in the concourse and reunited with the driver, who was doubling as Sherlock's body guard, the Consulting Detective whirled round on Billy.

'Right, which bin was it?' he demanded.

'Rahght dahn the ovva end,' Billy pointed, so they all trouped the full length if the concourse to the end where Sherlock had come in.

'Which bin?'

'That one, ovva dere,' Billy pointed.

Sherlock looked around. There was a CCTV camera in the vicinity but it was one that oscillated so it may not have been pointing in the right direction when the phone was dumped.

'Show me how it was done,' he snapped, giving Billy Arthur's phone, still in the evidence bag.

Billy walked over to the wall, by the entrance, opposite the bin.

'I wuz 'ere, riogh'?'

Sherlock nodded and stood where Billy had been standing when he saw the phone being dumped. The weaselly man then walked just outside of the station entrance and turned to walk back in.

'The geyser cams in 'ere, don't he, an' I sees 'im walk past the bin. An' just as 'e gets by the bin, he teks 'is 'and ahter 'is pocket' – Billy demonstrated the actions he was describing, walking toward the bin with his hands in his pockets, and pulling his left hand out, as he drew level with the bin – 'an' drops the phone in the bin.'

He dropped the phone into the bin, walked on a few strides, then stopped and turned back. Sherlock had already walked over to the bin and looked inside, seeing the phone, partially concealed under a couple of lighter items that had given way to the heavier object. He reached in and tool the phone out, looking at it in his hand.

'Alright, Billy, what did he look like, the man who dumped the phone.'

Billy screwed up his eyes and searched his visual memory for the correct image.

'OK, 'e wuz abaht six foot, kinda stocky, short 'air – like a US Marine, like – an wearin' camouflage trousers an' a sorta bomber jacke', but not leathah or denim. Just sorta greeny-grey, like wot you'd get from a campin' shop, y'know?'

Sherlock really didn't know but he thought that, even if the camera had not picked up the drop or the dropper, Billy's description should give them a fighting chance of spotting the perpetrator, on the CCTV, at some point across the concourse. They might even see where he went when he left the station.

Sherlock took a twenty pound note out of his wallet and showed it to Billy.

'Nice work, Billy,' he said. 'Now, you need to come with me. I want you to talk to an artist, so they can draw our man, OK?'

Billy nodded and gave a sly smile.

'There's a MacDonald's just over dere, boss. Maybe you could buy me a Big Mac and Fries?'

Sherlock turned to the driver and gave him the twenty.

'Go get him one of those – whatever it is – and bring it back here.' Sherlock was not about to give Billy his reward until he had completed his task.

'And a coffee?' Billy called after the driver.

'Maybe you could buy your own,' Sherlock muttered and walked away, back toward the parked car, with Billy trotting cheerfully beside him.

ooOoo

Once seated in the back of the car, with Billy in the jump seat – as far away as he could put him, short of in the boot - Sherlock told the driver to take him to St. Bart's, then took out his own phone and put Arthur's in his pocket. He dialled John Watson's number, again, and got the answerphone, as before. He tried to remember what shift John was working this week. Molly would have known but she was miles away, by now, in Hertfordshire, with the children.

Sherlock looked at his watch. It was nearly seven o'clock in the evening. Molly would be getting the children ready for bed. He wrote a text and sent it:

Hug my babies for me. Tell them Daddy loves them very much. Ring me when you're free. Love you.

That was quite a quantum shift from back in the day, in terms of verbalising his emotions. He even surprised himself, sometimes, but this terrible thing that had happened to Arthur was a wakeup call for all of them about how fragile life could be. He didn't want to miss a single opportunity to tell the ones he loved just how much he loved them because it may be his last.

His rather morbid thoughts were disturbed by the ringing of his phone. It was John, returning his call, at last.

'Are you at work?' he asked, abruptly.

'Hello to you, too, Sherlock and, no, I'm not at work. I just finished. I'm on Days but we're a bit short staffed so I did a couple of extra hours to help out. What can I do for you?'

'Arthur's been snatched,' Sherlock announced, unceremoniously.

'He's what? When? How?'

'Today, from the university, we think, and how? We don't know yet, or by whom, for that matter. We are assuming it's a terror group or perhaps someone with an axe to grind over this latest child abuse scandal, although how they think kidnapping Mycroft's boyfriend is going to have any influence there, God knows. And, of course, it could just be some rogue fanatic, operating alone, and those are the worst kind, because they don't need to communicate with anyone.'

'It can't just be one person, Sherlock,' John interjected.

'Why not?' the detective asked, wondering if he had missed some vital clue that John had spotted – however unlikely that might be.

'Arthur's not exactly a lightweight, is he? He's a big lad and a fit one, too. It would have taken more than one person to snatch him, even if he was unconscious.'

'What about at gun point?' Sherlock asked, just out of interest.

'No, Arthur would have disarmed them and then kicked the shit out of whoever it was. No, you've got to be talking three fairly strong blokes, at least, plus one to drive the getaway vehicle,' John concluded.

'Well, remind me to come to you, next time I need to plan a kidnapping. Are you sure there isn't something you're not telling me about your past?'

'Quite sure, but I do have combat experience. It's amazing what skills you pick up on a battlefield. And Arthur's been to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He's a seasoned veteran.'

By now, the car was nearly at St Bart's, making steady if slow progress through the late rush hour traffic.

'What do you need me to do?' John asked, as Sherlock had gone a bit quiet.

'Can you meet me at St Bart's?'

'Sure. Let me ring Mary and let her know. I'll see you there in about half an hour.'

They both rang off and Sherlock lapsed back into musing. He guessed that no significant progress had been made back at Ground Zero, or Mycroft would have been on the phone to tell him about it, but he needed to tell them about the phone dump in the bin so that the CCTV footage could be looked at.

He dialled Anthea's number and she answered. He passed on the details of the phone drop.

'I'm sending you someone who can describe the person who dumped the phone. Get him to talk to an artist, will you? And find him somewhere to stay. He's a valuable witness, so needs protecting – for now, at least.'

Billy looked up from his meal, on hearing himself being described thus.

'And make sure it's somewhere with a bath!' Sherlock added, then explained that he was going to St. Bart's to process the phone.

'How is my brother?' he asked, aware that Mycroft was sitting right next to Anthea and might even be able to hear him speaking.

'No change,' she replied, conveying volumes with just those two words.

'Tell him we will find him and we will get whoever has done this,' he muttered into his receiver.

'I will, Sherlock, thank you,' Anthea replied and hung up.

ooOoo

Sorry but I couldn't resist borrowing that little exchange between Sherlock and Billy from His Last Vow. It was just too delicious! Don't sue me, Mofftiss!