Chapter Ten

The staff car pulled up outside the entrance to the Pathology Department at St Bartholomew's Hospital, to drop off Sherlock. Before he stepped from the car, he reached across and lifted the coffee cup from Billy's hand.

Oi! I weren't done wiv tha'!' Billy protested.

'Yes, you were, and even if you weren't, you are now. I need a set of your prints for elimination,' Sherlock replied and slammed the car door, cutting off any further protests from the other man.

The car drew away. The driver had his instructions. He was to take Billy to a nominated safe house and stay with him until someone came to relieve him. Then – and only then – he was to give Billy the change from the twenty pound note, after the purchase of the Big Mac, fries and coffee. The forensic artist would be meeting them there and Billy could do his bit, describing the phone dumper, so that an image could be constructed. Then the witness would remain in protective custody until it was considered politic to let him out on the street again. Billy wasn't complaining.

Sherlock strode through the archway into the huge inner quadrangle, surrounded on all four sides by the buildings that housed the oldest still-working hospital in London. He turned to his right and entered the Pathology Department, taking the stairs two at a time to 'Molly's' lab. Of course, she wasn't there at the moment. She was still on Maternity Leave, and was in Hertfordshire anyway.

Sherlock wondered if her replacement, Dr Winterbotham, might be on duty, this evening. He'd had some dealings with her, in the last six months or so, and she had proven herself a perfectly competent pathologist, now that she had learned not to cut corners, but she lacked both Molly's experience , expertise and intuition. She was also rather prone to accept the flimsiest of evidence as conclusive, which Sherlock found extremely irritating.

As he pushed though the heavy fire door into the lab, he saw a figure standing at a work bench, head bowed over a microscope. She looked up as the door banged shut and her cheeks flushed, instantly. Sherlock heaved an inner sigh. This used to happen with Molly, all those years ago. She, thankfully, had gotten over the awkward stage, eventually, and now it was he who was often in awe of her. Dr Winterbotham, he knew, was still rather embarrassed about committing that awful faux pas, when she thought he and Molly were having an affair behind Molly's husband's back. He hoped she would put all that behind her soon. It was so tedious, how she blushed, every time he walked into the room.

'Mr Holmes!' Amanda Winterbotham squeaked, 'How can I help you?'

'You can't,' he declared. 'I need to process a mobile phone. I can do that on my own. All I need a space to work and to be left alone.'

He marched across to his preferred work space, pulled Arthur's phone from his pocket and placed it on the work bench, alongside Billy's empty coffee cup. He then assembled all the materials he would need, in order to lift Billy's prints from the cup and process the phone, and set about doing just that. Amanda watched him for a moment or two but, realising that he had no plans for any further interaction with her, she returned to her own task.

ooOoo

At Regents campus, the building had been searched from basement to roof, every nook and cranny, cleaning cupboard and foot locker, had been thoroughly swept, using electronic CO2 detectors and dogs, as well as good old-fashioned poking and prying. No sign of Arthur had been found. He had, most definitely, left the building.

All the images that had been captured during the evacuation of the building were now being processed to see if any known Persons of Interest were amongst them, someone who might connect this incident to a particular group or individual

Arthur's clothes, including his trainers, had been retrieved from the clothing bank in Brent Cross, all stuffed inside a black bin liner. On close inspection, it was noted that the trousers and t-shirt had been slashed, with a sharp knife, indicating that they had been cut from his body. There was no CCTV surveillance anywhere nearby, so any hope of establishing who had dumped them lay in the outside chance of finding latent prints on the plastic bag. The bag and its contents were taken straight to Westminster Public Mortuary, to be processed there, in the state of the art forensic facility.

The tech guys had run every pixel of CCTV footage through FaxRex and compiled a file of all the images of Arthur from that day – both inside the college and from the street cameras. The last sighting was of him walking along a ground floor corridor, after the class broke up for lunch, around 12.30 pm. He turned left, through a rear exit - and vanished.

All Arthur's class mates remarked on what a pleasant, friendly, personable young man he was. No one had a bad word to say about him. The statements taken from the other students revealed that it was his normal practice to go for a walk, at lunch time, in a nearby public garden, for a breath of fresh air. He usually picked up a sandwich and a drink from the coffee shop, at morning recess, to eat in the park.

'They're going to use a dog to track him from the rear exit, sir,' Anthea advised Mycroft, still sitting in the back seat of the staff car. 'They need something with his scent on it.'

Mycroft thought for a moment. Arthur's travel bag was in the boot of this very car. He instructed the driver to bring it to him. He unzipped the top of the bag and reached inside, fishing out a t-shirt – the t-shirt Arthur had worn yesterday, for the family barbeque. It still held the faint aroma of out-door cooking but, predominantly, it smelt of Arthur. Mycroft resisted the temptation to hold the shirt to his face and breathe in that scent. Had he been alone, he would have done just that, but instead he handed the shirt to the waiting policeman, who took it to the dog unit.

'Sir,' Anthea began, when she and Mycroft were alone again, 'it is getting late and we're almost done here. Could I suggest you go home? If anything happens, I will call you at once.'

He smiled, gratefully.

'I appreciate your concern, my dear,' he replied, 'but let's see what the dog turns up first, shall we?'

Anthea nodded and turned back to her Blackberry. The traffic on there, like that on the London streets, had thinned out considerably. They had exhausted nearly all avenues of enquiry and still they had no idea who had done this.

ooOoo

When John Watson entered the lab at St. Bart's, Amanda looked up and smiled, broadly. To her obvious delight, she received a friendly smile in return. She liked Dr Watson. He was always polite – quite the opposite of his friend and colleague. Over the last few months, Amanda had realised that it wasn't actually Sherlock that she idolised at all, but his side-kick whom, she had learned, was the real brains of the outfit.

He credited Holmes, in his blog, with all those brilliant deductions because he was just that self-effacing sort of guy. And he felt sorry for his friend, who was without any saving graces, whatsoever. Amanda could see, now, how Mr Holmes and Dr Hooper were so well matched because Molly was pretty geeky, too. Dr Winterbotham was sort of glad that she had found out the truth about her former hero before she made too much of a fool of herself emulating him.

Having exchanged pleasantries with the over-effusive Amanda, John Watson extricated himself and went over to Molly's office, where Sherlock was sitting at her PC, with a phone plugged into the processor via a USB port, downloading the contents of the phone into a file.

'How's it going?' he asked. 'Any news?'

'Hmm, what? Oh, hello, yes…I mean, no…no news. Well, nothing significant, as far as I can tell. He has a small list of contacts. He only calls or texts an even smaller selection of those, on any sort of a regular basis, and his emails are mostly to or from old army friends or other nurses. I've requested his call log from the phone company. There are several calls from blocked numbers and a few from unidentified ones, so they might be significant.'

'And from Mycroft?' John specified, realising that Sherlock had only referenced his own line of enquiry, so far.

'Nothing.'

'Perhaps you should ring him,' John suggested.

'Why? He would call me if there was anything to report.'

'Well, just to see how he is, perhaps.'

'I know how he is, John. Remember how I was, when William and Molly were taken? That is how he will be. I don't need to call and ask him to know that.'

John closed his eyes and sighed. Sherlock still had the tendency to be rather obtuse. He had come a long way but there were certain aspects of his personality that were - and would ever be - immutable.

'So, where do we go from here?' John asked.

Sherlock turned to look straight at him, and he saw, at once, the concern and worry in his eyes.

'I really have no idea,' he said.

ooOoo

The dog handler held the t-shirt over the dog's muzzle for several seconds, almost half a minute, in fact, so that she got a really good impression of the scent she was to look for. Then, the officer took the dog to the rear exit of the building and gave her the order to 'Seek'.

Immediately, the animal dropped her snout to the ground and began to run around in little circles and eddies, just beyond the threshold of the building. Bearing in mind that many people had passed that way, since half past twelve that afternoon, it was asking a great deal for this dog to discern one scent from all of the others, but she was giving it her best shot, so the handler just encouraged her and let her get on with it.

After more than a minute of furious activity and still no result, the handler looked at Agent Delaney – who was still Lead Agent on the ground – and said,

'The scent has been scattered or obliterated here. Too much foot traffic has passed this way. I think we need to move somewhere that's less of a bottle neck. She'll stand a better chance of picking it up, if the scent is there.'

Delaney nodded his agreement and the handler called the dog and set off across the court yard, toward one of three alley ways that led off this open space, in three different directions. The first one drew a blank. They gave the second one a good going over, and were about to quit and move on, when the dog suddenly pricked her ears and set off at a good clip down the middle one of the three alley ways, tugging on her long lead, urging the handler to go faster.

Man and dog jogged along the alleyway for several metres until it came to an abrupt end, opening onto Cavendish Square, right opposite the entrance to Cavendish Square Garden. Here, on the pavement outside a bank, the dog lost the scent again and began to circle around, nose to the ground, looking for the trail of its quarry. Delaney, who had been jogging behind the handler, looked across at the park and said,

'Take her over the road and see if she picks it up there.'

The handler called, 'Come on girl!' to the dog, in a lively, encouraging voice, and walked her over the road to the park entrance. Straight away, she found the trail again and charged into the park, tail wagging, racing along as fast as her handler could go. She ran down the short path to where it joined the circular one, then onto the grass and across toward a large tree. She then ran around in big circles, then back to the tree and sat down, looking up, expectantly, at her handler.

'Good girl!' he exclaimed in an excited, high-pitched voice, took a yellow tennis ball from his pocket and threw it to the dog. She caught it, deftly, in her jaws and flopped down on the ground, chewing the ball, energetically.

'This is the end of the trail,' said the handler, indicating the spot under the tree.

Delaney looked around the area, then up into the tree canopy, then back to the handler.

'So where did he go from here?' he asked.

'No idea, but were ever he went, he certainly didn't walk. His scent trail ends right here, under this tree.'

'So, you mean he was carried?' Delaney asked, shaking his head, a little confused.

'Or cycled. He could have ridden a bike from here or been pushed in a wheelchair or…'

'Changed his shoes?'

'Yes, that's a possibility. If he put on a brand new pair of shoes that he had never warn at all or a pair that someone else had worn, that would change the scent. But, whatever changed, it changed here,' the police dog handler replied, then unclipped the dog's lead and, walking off across the grass, began to play with her, throwing the ball for her to fetch – her reward for a job well done.

ooOoo

I've never been to Regents Campus, so I have no idea if there is a rear exit, into a courtyard, with alleyways going off, in real life but in my Sherlolly Universe there is!