Life After Death - A Post-Reichenbach Trilogy

Part Three – Unfinished Business

Chapter Nine

Mycroft Holmes sat at his desk in his plush office in Whitehall, overlooking Horse Guards' Parade. The room resembled a gentleman's study, with its green leather wing chairs, and walnut desk, with brass fittings and a green leather panel inlaid into the desktop. On one side of the desk was the ubiquitous green reading lamp, favoured by many gentlemen of Mycroft's vintage, on the other side, a bronze ink stand, featuring the figure of a water buffalo being attacked by a Bengal tiger. Mycroft was reading a document, with rapt attention, when a quick knock at the door was followed by the appearance of his PA, Anthea, in the door way. He looked up, his interest piqued by the fact that she had not waited to be invited to enter.

'Sir,' she said, 'we've had a call from Tech Centre. Surveillance is down in the whole of Miss Hooper's area.'

Mycroft was on his feet immediately.

'Have you scrambled the Hooper team?' he barked.

She replied in the affirmative.

'And my driver?'

'Down stairs,' she said.

Mycroft left his office at a brisk walk and followed his PA into the vintage lift, alighting on the ground floor and exiting the building through the main doors, slipping straight into the back seat of the waiting car. Even as the car moved away, he had his mobile in his hand and was pressing Sherlock's speed dial number. Sherlock answered on the third ring.

'To what do I owe the…..' Sherlock began to drawl but was cut off by Mycroft's urgent tone.

'Surveillance is down in Molly's building and her phone is going straight to voice mail. I'm on my way to pick you up.'

'No!' Sherlock snapped. 'Go straight there. I'll get a cab and meet you.'

He shut off his phone, jumped up from the kitchen table where he had been looking into the lens of his microscope, and hit the ground running.

ooOoo

Bernadette drove the blue van, via a very circuitous route through back roads and residential streets, to avoid CCTV surveillance, Molly guessed. After half an hour or so, the van pulled onto an abandoned demolition site, pressed into service as a temporary car park by the indigenous population. The woman halted the van and shut off the engine.

'Right,' she said, 'we just need to do a bit of housekeeping.'

She reached across in front of Molly, into the glove compartment under the dashboard and took out a device that looked like a small hair drier. She flicked on a switch and it began to hum, quietly. Molly's eyes widened in alarm as the woman pointed the device at the top of William's head.

'Don't hurt him!' she begged.

But the woman just laughed and began to move the device down William's body, in a scanning motion. It continued to hum quietly until she came to his shoes, when it emitted a high pitched whine.

'Oh, Mycroft Holmes, you're so predictable,' the woman laughed. 'Take off the child's shoes,' she ordered Molly, who looked at her without the slightest clue as to what had just happened.

Bernadette saw her confusion and explained.

'Uncle Mycroft has tracker devices fitted into the wee man's shoes, Miss Hooper. He's probably fitted one somewhere on you, too. I just need to find it.'

Molly was astounded. She'd had no idea. Reluctantly, she removed William's shoes and placed them in the woman's outstretched hand. She put them in the door pocket, saying, mostly to herself,

'We'll deal with those, presently.'

She got out of the van and came around to Molly's side, opening the door.

'Get out, Miss Hooper,' she snapped.

Molly's stomach lurched, for the umpteenth time since this nightmare began, but she did as she was told and got out of the van, giving William a reassuring smile as she did so. William just gazed at her with that solemn, strangely knowing look of his and continued to sit quietly in the front of the van. The woman slid open the rear side door to the empty interior of the vehicle.

'You will be travelling Club Class from here on in,' she said and gestured for Molly to get into the back of the van. Molly thought about this for a moment but could not see any way out of the situation at the present time, so she climbed in. She was ordered to sit in the corner, behind the driver's seat, and her wrists were secured to a strut on the side of the van by a length of twine, tied there for this precise purpose, slipped through the cable binders that encircled her wrists. Bernadette took a sack-like bag out of her coat pocket and shoved it over Molly's head.

It happened so fast, Molly could do nothing to avoid it but, plunged into the suffocating interior of the bag, she began to struggle, making it difficult for the woman to secure the draw-string around Molly's neck. To enlist some co-operation, the woman banged Molly's head hard on the side of the van, splitting her eyebrow and causing her vision to spark and flash inside the bag. The ploy worked, as Molly became passive and the draw string was tied tightly at the back of her neck, where she could not reach it.

Having made Molly secure, the woman carried out a scan on her, too, with the detector device but she found nothing.

'Mycroft Holmes missed a trick, there,' she sneered and turned to get out of the van.

'Why are you doing this?' Molly called out, plaintively.

'You are a clever girl, Miss Hooper, I know you are. Why don't you take a leaf out of your smart boyfriend's book and figure it out for yourself. What is it he calls it, 'The Science of Deduction'? Well, you deduce.'

Bernadette jumped out of the van and slid the door closed, shutting out even the defuse light that had permeated the inside of the blindfold hood. As the engine started up again and the vehicle began to move, Molly felt her panic rise and she began to tremble, violently.

ooOoo

By the time the cab dropped Sherlock outside Molly's building, the scene was a hive of activity. There were figures in blue SOC suits coming in and out and Mycroft was standing by a white Tech van, talking to someone inside. Sherlock hurried over to him, to hear what the technician was saying. The interior of the van was lined with state of the art surveillance monitoring equipment, including numerous key boards and monitor screens.

'The Wi-Fi went down at 17.24 hours, sir. We found a jammer stuffed down the side of a chair in the flat. It was very powerful, knocked out all the Wi-Fi signals over a half mile radius. Nothing was working until we shut it off.'

'What about before it was activated? What do you have saved?' Mycroft demanded.

The tech guy clicked back through a number of screens on his computer until the monitor showed an image of Molly approaching the front door of her building. All three men watched in silence as the scene played out before their eyes. They observed the conversation between Molly and the smartly dressed woman, standing by the door, with a suitcase, and saw Molly open the door and lead the woman in.

The view changed to the vantage point just above the arch from Molly's hall way to her sitting room. They saw William sit down to watch TV and Molly and the woman go into the kitchen. The technician moved the action on and the woman came back into view, approached the arm chair and took a black device from her hand bag. She handled it briefly, and the screen went blank.

There was a nanosecond of silence, before Mycroft said,

'What about the tracker?'

'We did have a brief signal, when we shut down the jammer. It was in Poplar, just north of the Isle of Dogs but it cut off after only five or so minutes. However, before it shut down, it was heading east. Last location was East India Dock Basin.'

'The basin?' Sherlock's face was a gaunt mask.

'Yes, sir,' the tech continued. 'We don't think shoes were being worn when the signal stopped. They have a bio-feed circuit which is activated when the sensor is in contact with his feet. It works like those monitors they put on your fingers in hospital. As long as there's a pulse...'

'I know how it works,' Sherlock snapped. It was not lost on him that the absence of a pulse could be down to something other than the removal of the shoes. The tech man, thus admonished, continued with his report.

'We've sent a team over there to retrieve the shoes and see if there were any witnesses to them being dumped. We're also checking CCTV in the Isle of Dogs and Poplar area,' he concluded.

'Who is this woman? Do we have a full face?' Mycroft interjected.

The tech clicked to another window and it showed a full face image of the woman standing by the front door.

'We've run it through facial recognition, sir, but there's no match in any data base, so far. She appears to be an Unknown.'

Sherlock turned around and leant back on the side of the van, cupping his hands to his face.

'We missed someone, Mycroft! How did that happen?'

His voice was desolate.

Mycroft Holmes reached out and placed his hand on his brother's shoulder, in a rare gesture of fraternal solidarity.

'Alright,' he said. 'Call Lestrade. Bring in the Met. We need all the help we can get on this.'

ooOoo

Molly had been shaken around in the back of the van for what seemed like an age, except for a short stop, about five minutes into the journey, when Bernadette had stepped out of the vehicle, briefly, before getting back in, performing a U-turn and driving on.

During that brief period, when Molly and William were alone in the van, separated only by the thin wall of the cab, Molly called out softly to her son, telling him she was still here and he was OK. She could picture William, sitting silent and still in the front of the van, like a wild animal freezing in response to sudden danger. She had known him to react like this, in the past, to strange or unfamiliar situations. It was a coping mechanism.

He would be wondering where his mummy had gone, not understanding why she left him without saying goodbye. She hoped he could hear her calling to him and that he was comforted and reassured by the sound of her voice. But the woman was climbing back into the van, curtailing any further communication between mother and son.

ooOoo

Following a series of rapid direction changes, the van came to a halt and the engine died. Molly leant her head on her upraised arms and heaved an exhausted sigh. Without being able to use her hands to aid her balance, she had been at the mercy of inertia and she felt battered and bruised.

She heard the woman get out of driver's door and, next, some loud clanking noises and metallic screeches. Then the side door of the van opened and the woman climbed into the back. She untied the twine that held Molly's shackles to the side of the van and yanked her to her feet, pushing her out of the van, where she fell flat on her face on a hard tarmac surface, scraping her knees and her elbows as she tried to break her fall.

She could tell, despite the restrictions of the hood, that it was dark outside, and, by the smell of the air, that they were somewhere near water. The woman, who despite her genteel appearance was remarkably strong, dragged her up onto her feet and propelled her forwards into a cavernous space that rang with a metallic clang, and amplified her footsteps. She was pushed against a cold metal wall and made to sit on the hard bare floor, also metallic and cold.

Molly heard the woman walk away and began to panic but then she heard her returning with William. She couldn't hear his footsteps, as he was in his stockinged feet, divested of his bugged shoes, but she sensed his presence. The woman pushed William towards Molly and he ran over and threw his arms round her neck. She couldn't see him, because of the bag over her head, or hug him, because of her bound wrists, but she spoke quiet, loving reassurances to him, as he clung to her.

Molly felt the woman apply binders to her ankles, like the ones she had fastened to her wrists earlier, then the bag was unfastened and roughly removed. Molly looked around. She was in a large metal shed of some description. It was completely empty except for her, her child, the woman and a Tesco shopping bag which lay on the floor, just out of reach.

Her captor spoke.

'This is going to be your home for the next day or two,' Bernadette explained. 'Not quite up to your usual standard but I hope you will be happy here.'

'Who are you?' Molly asked.

'Have you not worked it out yet?' the woman exclaimed. 'Goodness me, what does that smart man of yours see in you? You must be damn good in the sack because you don't seem to have much in the way of brains,' she taunted.

'Oh, alright,' she capitulated. 'Since you bothered to ask, I'll tell you. You know that wee boy I told you about? Well, he was a very clever wee boy and he grew up to be an even cleverer man. He was very successful, had a business that stretched right around the whole world and he was doing so very well for himself until he got involved with your man. That was his undoing.

Your man killed him. I don't know how or why but I know he did. And, d'you know, I never even got to say goodbye to my wee man because his body has never been found! But his business associates told me that your man was to blame for his death. They also told me that your boyfriend had died too, on the same day, and that his evil brother had sworn to dismantle my boy's business empire, destroy everything he had worked so hard to create. And so he did, the evil murdering bastard.

And just when I think it can't get any worse, I pick up the paper one day only to see that Sherlock bloody Holmes is not dead after all but has been in hiding for three years, hunting down some master criminal's henchmen. How DARE he call my darling wee boy a master criminal!'

Bernadette's voice had been rising steadily as she related her twisted version of the facts, until she practically screamed the last few words.

Molly stared in horror at the mad, ranting female in front of her. Her intuition, back there in the bathroom at home, had been correct. She had guessed or perhaps deduced, that this revenge-crazed harridan was none other than the mother of James Moriarty.

The woman seemed to regain control and blew out a long breath.

'So, my dear Miss Hooper, it's payback time. Wouldn't you do anything to avenge the death of your wee boy, here, should he die in such a manner as my boy? Well, we'll see what your Mr Sherlock has to say for himself soon enough but, for now, you are my guest, you and Sherlock Holmes' child. We'll let your man stew for a while and you can make yourself at home here for a day or two.'

The woman reached behind her and threw the overnight bag that Molly had packed for William on to the floor in front of her.

'There's food and drink over there, enough for a day or two, at least,' she smirked, indicating the Tesco bag. 'And you will be needing this, as I'm afraid this house has no windows.'

She tossed a shiny red object onto the overnight bag. It was a clockwork wind up torch.

The woman turned and walked out of the shed and the heavy metal doors clanged shut, sealing Molly and William into the darkness.

ooOoo

'Sir, I think you should see this.'

The man in the blue overall had approached Mycroft and Sherlock from the direction of Molly's building so the two brothers followed him back the way he had come, in through the main front door, passed the suitcase still standing by the front door. As they entered Molly's flat, Sherlock felt physically sick. This was all his fault. How could he have been so stupid as to come back and announce to the world that he was alive? It was bound to attract someone's attention.

But who could it be? They had been so thorough. Moriarty's whole operation had been shut down, dismantled, destroyed. But they had obviously over-looked someone. The SOC man was leading them past the bedrooms. Sherlock looked into Molly's room and saw the blue suited agents pouring over her possessions. It felt like witnessing a rape.

Passing William's room, he looked in and saw the same gross invasion of privacy going on in there too and, although he knew it was necessary, it still felt wrong. The only consolation he could find in this was that these were Mycroft's men and not Anderson.

The brothers were led to William's bathroom. Sherlock walked to the doorway, and stopped dead. His eyes were drawn immediately to the magnetic letters stuck to the side of the bath. They spelt out a phrase.

'jims mum gun.'

ooOoo