Greg Lestrade had never really had any time for sitting around doing nothing, except when forced to it by sheer exhaustion. This necessary idleness, enclosed in his living room with the curtains drawn, was driving him crazy. Nobody else was home, except for the cat. Molly had taken Charlie home, and Hayley and Melissa had rushed off to give the news of his death to the rest of his family, now congregated over at Julie and Mark's house.

After he'd flicked channels three times and perused every inch of last Sunday's paper twice, he heard the latch of the front door. Melissa stepped through the kitchen and down into the living room. Glancing up at her out of the corner of his eye, it took him a few seconds to register that she was crying.

"Hey," he said, sitting up. The last time he'd seen Melissa do anything that even resembled crying had been at Mrs. Hudson's funeral. "Hey. I didn't really die, right? I'm right here." He reached out and gently pulled her down onto the sofa beside him, putting one arm around her shoulders.

"Sorry," she said into her hand, then took a deep breath. "That was… ugh, I never want to do that again. I don't think it could've gone any worse even if you really had died. I left Hayley there - I think her Nan needs her. If it makes you feel any better, your mum actually does love you."

His face fell. "She wants to see me, doesn't she."

Melissa nodded.

"She's from Cornwall. They do things like that down that way. Not my cup of tea, but I should have known she'd probably ask. What did you tell her?"

By this time Melissa had wandered out to the kitchen and was filling the kettle from the sink. She twisted the tap off before she said, "As little as possible. I had no idea what to tell her, she put me on the spot with it. I think I said it really wasn't my call to make, and I'd have to ask Merivale."

"Good. She can say no to Mum then."

"But she's… okay, Greg," Mel continued, appearing in the archway that linked the living area with the kitchen. "Your mum. I mean, she's…"

"… Not likely to… uh."

"Yeah, that."

The electric kettle had just started to boil, and Melissa retreated back to the kitchen to tend it. He listened to her shuffling about, clinking ceramic coffee cups against the countertop and sniffing a couple of times. When she brought coffee for both of them back into the living room, he managed, "And how, um, how's Julie…?"

"Not great." Melissa showed her disapproval of the topic of Julie by plunking his coffee onto the table, instead of putting it into his hands.

He frowned, wondering how he was supposed to clarify what not great was meant to mean without flicking on Mel's raw nerves any further. "But she's mostly just upset about Matty, right?"

"No idea, Greg." Melissa sat down beside him again, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, and took a long sip of coffee. "I didn't actually talk to her - she was in her room. Mark said they've had a doctor around, and she's been sedated."

"Sedated? Bloody fantastic. Now we're medicating people for no reason. I hope Sherlock knows what he's doing."

"Does he ever not?"

"He's made mistakes. I don't know if that's the same thing." Despite being told not to, he got up and twitched the curtains aside a little to look out. Nothing doing over at the Braach house, though their car was parked outside. "I don't even know what I want. Whether I hope Matthew doesn't see the news, or… whether I hope he does. And freaks out enough to come home." Then, in a much quieter voice, he said, "And then we can take him to… whoever it is you take a teenager to help if you think he's autistic."

He waited for it: some variation on I told you so. Melissa was firmly convinced that Matthew had some form of spectrum disorder, even though he'd never been diagnosed with one. Over his shoulder, Greg heard her lift her coffee to take another sip, but she made no reply.

After an uncomfortable silence, and since there was still nothing of any note happening in the street, Greg turned around for the TV guide again, as if the contents could have changed in the ten minutes since he'd last read it. His gaze fell on the stapled stack of printed pages that John had left on the coffee table the night before. Matthew's novel, Death Watch.

Idly, he reached over and picked it up, flipping over to the second page, the dedication. To Mum, Dad, Mel, Sherlock, John and Molly, for all their help and support.

Well… that was nice. He felt guiltily that he could really have been more help to Matthew with all the technical details of the case, and he had no idea how much help Julie had been to him either, but it was nice to be appreciated.

"Have you ever actually read that?" Melissa asked him, in much more conversational tones.

"Bits and pieces," he said vaguely, flipping through the bulk of it without pausing to read. "I haven't really had the time to sit around reading novels, Mel."

"Well, you've got the time now, so maybe you should," she said. "Give him some praise for it when he comes back. He laps that up from you, you know. And anyway, I hear it's got one hell of a plot."

"But you haven't read it?"

She shook her head. "I asked," she said. "Ages ago, when he signed with the publisher. He muttered something about how I could read it after it was ready. If he wanted to show you, take that as your badge of honour."

"I suppose." Greg squinted at the typeface. Mel was right, again - time to concede that he may actually need glasses to read these days.

According to his employee file, Detective Constable Jacob William Dyer lived in a little basement flat just off Barker Street. Merivale, Sherlock and John arrived there shortly before eleven. After dropping her bomb, Caitlin Trent had closed up and refused to say much else. Merivale had had to concede both that it was her legal right to keep quiet, and that it was probably quicker and easier to go straight to the source.

There was no answer to her heavy knock, but after a few seconds, they all heard light footfalls in the hall and the curtains twitched. Merivale banged on the door again. "Dyer," she said. "Open up."

There was a pause before they heard the bolt sliding open and Dyer opened the door a few inches. Seeing who it was, he rolled his eyes. "Go away," he said.

"No." Merivale put out her hand to stop him from closing the door. "We're going to talk right now. You can either let us in, or I can take you in for questioning down at the station in front of all your colleagues. And you've got ten seconds to decide, so hurry it up."

No answer.

"You might as well," John said through the door, folding his arms and leaning back against the brickwork beside the kitchen window. "It's not like we're going to just go away if you ignore us, mate."

After another few seconds of deliberation, they heard the security chain being unbolted and the door opened.

Jacob Dyer was playing Lestrade's bereaved colleague to perfection - either that or the stress of the case was getting to him at last. He was unshaven and dishevelled, wearing a baggy pair of jeans and a blue t-shirt with Keep Up or Fuck Off emblazoned on it in bold white lettering. The flat behind him was in chaos. For a second, John wondered if Dyer had actually been drinking, but there was no tell-tale smell of alcohol on his breath or anywhere else in the flat as they trooped in.

"Okay. Sit down anywhere, I guess." Jake gestured vaguely to the sofa, which was heaped with a spilled basket of laundry in desperate need of ironing.

Merivale moved them aside to sit down, but Sherlock remained standing, and after a second, John's gaze met the kitchen doorway. "I'll make coffee," he muttered, heading for the fridge.

"I don't know if there's milk," Jake called after him.

"Then we'll do without."

Several minutes of near-silence followed. Sherlock, lost in thought, was wandering around the room looking at various things - the stereo, the television, the bookshelf. He turned over one of the sofa cushions, looked at it carefully, and flipped it back. As if understanding that John's coffee interlude was a chance for her to calm down and collect her thoughts before launching in, Merivale watched Sherlock in silence until John had returned with the coffee cups and handed them around.

"I'm just going to get down to it," she said, ignoring the fact that Sherlock was clearly mentally elsewhere. If he wasn't going to pay attention during an important interview, that was his own problem. "We found out who made that phone call to Hayley yesterday. Caitlin Trent. She said she was going to tell her all about how she'd just met up with you, actually."

"Oh." But Dyer didn't look particularly perturbed. He scratched the cowlick on the back of his head. "Yeah, we did meet up. She was going to tell Hayley what, though? That I met a friend of one of the victims for a coffee?"

"Oh, don't play dumb." Merivale pointed one finger accusingly at him. "Social meeting, was it? Last I checked, you weren't even on this investigation, and had been told to stay right out of it. So what the hell were you thinking, getting all cosy with Caitlin?"

Dyer looked at her. "I met her at the Pret-a-Manger in New Oxford Street. Bought her a coffee. I was trying to get her to come out of her shell. Nothing happened. All she did was blubber to me about what a great friend Celeste Biondi was."

"Really?" Sherlock broke in, suddenly giving his full attention. "She said that?"

"That was the gist of it, yeah, and not much else. If I'd got anything useful from her, I'd have said so ages ago."

"And she literally cried?"

"Like a bloody fountain. I there-there'd her a bit and when she'd calmed down, she left first and then I went home. What's wrong with that?"

"Jesus Christ, Dyer," Merivale said. "Were you born yesterday? As if anyone's going to take your word over hers if she decides to tell you had other things in mind than trying to get her out of her shell. You and Hayley-"

"All right, you can stop right there," he said with some heat. "If I have to take a bollocking from you, I'm not taking one about Hayley. Yes, there's seven bloody years' age difference between me and Hayley. Yes, she was legal when I met her. No, I'm not a pervert. And I'm not a cheater, either -"

"Dyer," Sherlock said, cutting him off. "Who is this?" He picked up a framed photograph from beside the television, showing a couple in their thirties, standing out the front of a Victorian semi. The man was obviously in a job involving manual labour or mechanics - even from the photograph Sherlock could tell his nails were rarely clean. The woman was holding a white-swathed newborn, tilted up toward the camera proudly. Slightly to one side was a boy who was obviously Jacob Dyer, on the cusp of a very unforgiving puberty.

Dyer glanced at it. "Family," he said, shrugging. "Mum, Dad, me. The baby's my brother Josh. Why?"

Sherlock examined the photograph carefully before answering, "Because when we went to the Trent house the other day, I noticed there were no photographs of the mother anywhere in the living room." He put the frame down. "There were plenty of the children. There was one on the mantelpiece of Robert Trent holding a toddler - not Edward, so they have another younger child together, then. But there are no photographs of the mother. Isn't that odd? If she'd left the family, or even if she'd died, perhaps…"

"Not necessarily," John said. "There are no pictures of me downstairs at my place, either. When you have kids, you take down the wedding photos and start putting the baby pictures up."

"Wait, hang on," Merivale said, holding one hand up like a referee. "When you went where the other day?" As if recognising that she wasn't going to get a straight answer out of Sherlock, she looked at John. "Just how deep does this little sideline investigation go?" she demanded.

John cleared his throat, then sipped at his coffee. "Not far," he finally said vaguely. "I think a couple of detectives who usually work - worked - with Greg might have started interviewing some of Celeste's friends before you were brought into the case. And, um. Philip Anderson-"

"Oh, for God's sake," Merivale moaned, covering her face in her hands. "Why the hell didn't anyone tell me? You know-"

"Dyer," Sherlock said, his tone defying Merivale to interrupt him. "Have you ever seen Caitlin and Edward Trent's mother?"

"I got to the café first and was waiting outside for Caitlin. A woman in a blue sedan dropped her off on the corner, so I figured it was her mother." He shrugged. "But I didn't really see her. Wasn't looking properly. Brown hair. Early, mid-forties, maybe. Why?"

"She brought her stepfather," Sherlock mused, cupping his hands over his nose and mouth and pacing over to the window, glancing out at nothing in particular. "Both times. Robert Trent sat in on the interview with Jones, Donovan and myself. Then Caitlin brought her stepfather again when she came in to be interviewed this morning. Why would she do that? It was obvious from the moment we walked into their house that she hates him."

"Maybe the mother was busy - yeah, fine," John conceded. "You'd have to be awfully 'busy' to not come with your kid when the police question her."

"His name is Trent," Sherlock went on. "His name, not Caitlin and Edward's birth surname… but their stepfather married their mother only seven years ago. Caitlin used one name for ten years, and she hates the man whose name she took."

"What's that all mean, Sherlock?" John asked.

Sherlock took his hands away from his mouth and scruffed at his hair restlessly, turning back to John. "It means," he said, "she's trying to hide her mother from us. For some reason. Do we even know what her name is?"

They looked at Merivale, who shook her head. "It's probably in the case files somewhere," she said. "But then, if we've never met the woman and the Trent kids aren't serious suspects, why would it be?"

"But there are notes, surely?" John asked. "I mean, from that first interview you had with the kids…"

"Jones had most of them," Sherlock said. "And who knows where those are now. But Donovan was also taking notes. We need her in on this. We need her professional opinion - and to find out if she knows more about Mrs. Trent."

Everyone has a secret hobby. One they're not quite ashamed of, but don't readily advertise. And for Sally Donovan, that hobby was baking.

Ordinary cooking bored her to tears - before moving in with Rahul, she'd been addicted to takeaway Chinese meals and cheese-on-toast combinations that seemed just fine to fuel her from one day at work to the next. But two years ago, Lauren Jones had caught the baking bug and started bringing in cupcakes and tea-cakes and biscuits to work nearly every day. George Castelli had hee-hawed like an idiot and made some obnoxious remark to the effect that the team couldn't expect to ever get home-made treats from Donovan, in tones that suggested she'd be likely to burn water.

Sally had never backed down from a challenge, and that time was no different. Days, weeks, months went by where she wrangled with flour and baking powder and eggs almost every day off she got. It had first been simply out of spite, because fuck Castelli and his smarmy, sexist bullshit. But by the time she was confident enough to start bringing her creations in to work with her (and long after Jones had got over the novelty and stopped), she had to admit it - she found baking incredibly therapeutic.

And she was in need of therapy now, though sneaking spoonfuls of carrot-cake batter in between pouring it into a rectangular cake tray was helping just as much as her creative efforts. Because she strongly suspected it was either bake enough cake to supply a church fete, or curl up into a ball on the sofa and sob.

Bob Thompson had been nice enough, though everyone knew he had a marriage breakdown and a drinking problem-she knew for a fact that Lestrade had sent him home twice to get his act together when he'd come to work either hung over or still drunk. He'd always seemed friendly and upbeat to her, and he had a great rapport with kids, so much so that he'd been the Liaison officer more often than she had. Sad that he'd died, and horrible how he'd died. But colleagues had died before. The world would still spin without Bob Thompson.

Jones had been a friend, of sorts, even though the two hadn't had much more than their gender in common. Jones had been a domesticated animal, the sort of woman who made her bread from scratch and ironed her underwear. She'd been hoping her fella would hurry up and propose so they could try for a baby before her thirties ran out. Donovan suspected that she hadn't even really enjoyed baking, as such - she'd enjoyed the feedback. The praise. The validation.

Jones's death meant something. She'd had a place in Sally's life, and now all that was left where she used to be was a hole, a gaping wound.

And now Greg was dead, too.

Fuck it, she had liked him.

More than anything, she'd liked him because he'd always listened to her and considered her. Always. He was one of the most fair-minded detectives she'd ever worked with, valuing an opinion even if he didn't always agree with it. There were times, she had to admit, that she hadn't given his position the respect she probably should have, while he'd been one of the few superiors she'd had who'd respected hers. Who'd never given the impression he thought she was there because of some sort of Affirmative Action policy.

The doorbell rang, clear and abrupt in the quiet flat. She dropped the cake tray in alarm and it clattered to rest on the countertop, cake batter listing up one side a little before sliding down and coming to rest. She reached out for a tea towel to wipe her hands. "Coming," she called.

Probably Merivale, or someone she'd sent. In retrospect, telling a Detective Inspector to fuck off probably wasn't one of her greatest career moves. She was going to have to answer for it eventually, and there was no time like the present. Rahul was on afternoon shift and wasn't expected back until eleven o'clock. There was another long, petulant ring of the doorbell as she crossed the hall toward the door.

"All right, Jesus," she muttered. Reaching the door, she took a peep through the stained glass panel and then opened the door a crack, chain still attached.

"You're back." She gave a beleaguered sigh. "Don't mean to be rude or anything, but this is really not the right time for it."

"Please. It's urgent. I've got to talk to you."

Another sigh.

And then Sally disattached the security chain and opened the door.