Elementary My Dear

~O~

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

-Hunter S. Thompson-

~O~

There was much shifting and murmuring after that Mr. Rathbone was untied and a seat was found for him. No one wanted to be next to him but all the guests regarded him with varying levels of suspicion; even Arthur couldn't help eying the other man while explained the events that had occurred up until Mr. Rathbone's surprise appearance. He couldn't help feeling that there was more to the svelte and suave character that sat perched on the armchair.

Once he was done speaking, Mr. Rathbone nodded with his fingers steepled underneath his sharp chin. "I see," he said. "That is very interesting. Could I first see the bodies? They will eloquently tell me nothing but the truth."

Arthur nodded. "Then let us go to the basement," he began to rise to his feet but was stopped by Mr. Rathbone's sharp voice.

"Stop!" He lifted a finger. "I would like all of the bodies to be moved to separate rooms."

The eyes watching him were confused. "But why?" Arthur asked.

Mr. Rathbone looked at him like a schoolteacher whose student had just asked a disappointing question. "The scent of the bodies might be a clue. If all three bodies are in the same space the scents might interfere with each other. Not to mention that the wine cellar will smell strongly of wine…" he turned to the earl, "on that note, will you lend me three rooms, earl?"

Ciel stared at him silently with his brows furrowed. Then he exhaled softly and said, "that would be fine I suppose." He ordered the four servants to attend to the corpses and rooms and then gave Mr. Rathbone permission to go and change out of his wet clothes.

Charlotte hummed softly to herself as she and the other servants made their way down to the wine cellar. She had never taken this route to the room. It was nothing more than a damp, winding staircase of slippery stone that ended in an equally damp corridor. The lantern in Bard's hand swung from side to side as the man grumbled through the unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth.

"Who does that man think he is? Showing up out of nowhere and acting all important – even though he's a priest he acts more like a policeman! Honestly, what a strange man…"

Finny made a soft sound of dissent and Bard and Mey-Rin turned to look at him. "Yes but…I get the feeling that he'll be able to do something about all of this. I don't really know why, but I feel like we can trust him."

Neither of them said anything for a while until they reached the cellar door. Then Bard huffed and pushed the heavy wood door open. "You'll get hurt if you trust too many people," he said.

"That's right," Mey-Rin agreed and followed him into the room. Finny looked a bit downtrodden and even Charlotte with her nonexistent heart and general disdain for human emotions, couldn't help saying something a little kind.

"It's alright too trust people. If you don't trust anyone, no one can help you," she said quietly and without looking at him, then she glided into the room and walked over to the stiff bodies that had just been uncovered. "Hey, all this wine must be good for something! They look pretty good for corpses!" The three of them stared at her, utterly aghast, and she blinked back. "What? That's a good thing right?"

Bard pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand and then gestured to Phelps with the other. "Just…grab his ankles, alright?"

"Aye, aye Captain Sir!" She chirped and helped Mey-Rin carry the body up the stairs and into one of the unused rooms. Charlotte poked the face that had gone cold and stiff and was only showing minor signs of discolouration with equal parts morbid fascination and professional curiosity. She noticed that his one of his eyelids was loose and his mouth was full of saliva.

"What are you doing?" Mey-Rin asked. She didn't know Phelps so his death didn't exactly mean too much to her.

Charlotte lifted the droopy flap of skin from his left eye and let it flop back. "I worked in a mortuary. I know some things about dead people. Huh, well then," she cocked her head and rose gracefully to her feet just as the door opened and Rathbone walked in. He was followed by Ciel, Arthur, and Earl Grey.

"I'll take it from here," the old man smiled. Bard, Finny and Mey-Rin all filtered out of the room but Charlotte stayed put. When the three men stared pointedly at her, she only smiled placidly and inclined her head towards the corpse on the floor. Earl Grey turned to Ciel and asked, "is your maid always so insubordinate?"

"More so than you know," the child replied darkly. Rathbone chuckled and walked over to examine the body.

"He was the only one killed by a different method than the other two," Arthur said as Rathbone assessed Phelps. "I thought, from the wounds on his neck, that someone may have injected poison while he was asleep. At the time of the murder, the only entrances and exits were locked."

Rathbone hummed thoughtfully, running his fingers over the discoloured skin on Phelps's neck where the two punctures were. "I see," he murmured.

Then Charlotte spoke. "If it was poison then it was from a snake. A black mamba to be specific. They utilise a blend of neurotoxins and cardiotoxins to take down prey."

All eyes in the room went to her, even Rathbone's although he looked a little amused. "How do you know that?" Earl Grey asked, his eyes narrowed.

Ciel huffed. "Oddly enough, Charlotte used to work with a snake charmer in a circus."

"The circus, huh?" Grey folded his arms across his chest and eyed the woman up and down with both disdain and a little desire. "That explains her terrible manners."

She ignored his gaze and lifted her chin, flashing her startlingly blue eyes at them. "His eyelid droops, ptosis. Not to mention the excessive saliva at the scene of the crime and in his mouth."

"How talented. You almost don't need me at all Earl," Rathbone pushed himself to his feet and smirked at Charlotte. "Would you mind showing me which room he died in?"

She rolled her eyes but decided to humour him and bobbed a curtsey. The group made their way up the stairs to Ciel's bedroom. Charlotte skipped ahead of the group, still humming under her breath. Earl Grey stared at her back. "So…a circus huh?"

"Yes!" She interrupted her singing to chirp. "That's actually where I first met the Earl. When we…disbanded, I needed a new job so he offered me one." More like she'd forced him to give her one but that was just pedantic.

"I didn't know the Earl went to a lot of circuses," Grey said slyly, glancing at the earl's stiffening back. "In fact, the only circus I know about is-"

"Oh look!" Charlotte piped up. "Mr. Rathbone's fallen behind!"

"What?" Grey looked behind him and saw that the staircase was empty, no old man in sight. "Dammit, this is why I hate old people."

Ciel leaned over the banister. "Jeremy?" He called down.

A moment later they heard footsteps and then the man appeared mopping sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief. "I'm here, I'm here! So sorry."

"You had a handkerchief all this time," Arthur muttered woefully. He had been quiet the whole time just listening. This mansion was full of fascinating things and the pale-haired maid was definitely one of them.

They made their way to the main bedroom where the door was still slashed to pieces. Rathbone eyed the broken hinges and the wood littering the floor. He pressed his lips together into a thin line but didn't ask what had happened. Instead he examined the damp spot on the floor by the door where Phelps had drooled before making his way over to the bed.

He went over the pillows and bedding with a polished magnifying glass. "It seems," he said after a long moment of silence, "that there are several killers in this crime."

Stunned silence greeted his announcement. "So there were multiple killers after all," Ciel muttered.

Rathbone nodded solemnly. "Indeed. It should be easy enough to apprehend one of them but it may be difficult to catch Phelps's killer. Moreover, in order to avoid any further victims we should catch this criminal soon. At any rate, no human can leave in this storm."

The strange emphasis on the word human gave Arthur pause. "What do you mean?" He asked.

"In order to catch Phelps's killer there are two things we need." Rathbone held up one finger, "one is to wait for nightfall, and the other is your cooperation."

Charlotte arched an eyebrow at him. "Mine?"

Rathbone smirked at her. "Yes maid, yours. I will explain everything later tonight but first there is one more body, is there not?"

Oh Charlotte was going to enjoy this. She wanted to see how Sebastian planned on being in two places at the same time. The group entered the room where Sebastian was being kept. There was indeed a body there and under the sheets it could have been Sebastian if you didn't know that the butler was taller and wider in the shoulders in the corpse.

Rathbone reached for the cover and, at the same time, Ciel pretended to become sick. He stumbled into Arthur's arms, trembling with a hand over his mouth. "I can't…"

"What's wrong? Are you feeling ill?" Arthur placed a kind hand on his head. Charlotte couldn't help thinking that his kindness was unwarranted but at the same time Arthur was the sort of person who cared regardless of whether the other person deserved it or not.

"I'm sorry," Ciel said in a broken voice that even Grey was a little convinced. "It's just…seeing Sebastian's corpse so many times…"

"Maybe you should take a break outside," Arthur fussed. "Maybe your maid could prepare something warm for you."

Charlotte did not tell them that she had never made warm anything for anyone in her life because she didn't need to eat and neither did her Papa so food was a luxury she let other people prepare for her. "It seems the butler was killed very simply," Rathbone said, pulling the covers back over the body and drawing their attention.

Grey looked annoyed. "You're done already?" He snipped.

"Yes, yes, I've seen enough," Rathbone replied mildly.

"Fine," he sniffed and waltzed out of the room. The others followed behind him and they trailed past a cuckoo-clock in the hallway. "It's almost dinnertime and I'm hungry. What are we eating?"

Ciel determinedly kept his face devoid of the scowl he wanted to express. "Who knows? Shall I ask the servants?"

"Nah, it's fine. I'll just be looking forward to it," he waved at them over his shoulder and began walking towards the stairs. "I'm heading back."

"I'll escort you," Charlotte said, smiling sweetly when he scowled at her. "This way, my lord."

The two of them walked in silence that was only interrupted by Charlotte's quiet humming. Earl Grey turned to her after a moment. "So which circus did you say you came from?" He asked.

"I didn't say," she replied cleverly.

"You don't sound very English," he prodded, commenting on the slight French accent that lent a pleasant lilt to her voice.

"I'm not," she said.

"You know what's going on, don't you?" He stopped on the stairs and she stopped a stair above him. She blinked up at him, tilting her head both left and right. Her neck moved like a well-oiled hinge."You know what's happening."

"I assure you, my lord, I am as clueless as you are," she said, which said quite a lot. She smirked and her eyes glinted coldly like sunlight on a glacier. "Shall we continue on Earl Grey? We do not want to be found suspicious."

Charlotte loved vents. They were dry, cosy, and unless you minded the occasional rat or spider then they were a fun way of getting around. Charlotte didn't mind the little creatures even when they scampered over her feet and nibbled at her fingers. She did draw the line at finding them in her hair however.

The Phantomhive manor had an excellent ventilation system, small enough to be snug but large enough that Charlotte could crawl through them quite easily without having to disconnect her arms. If she had to live here, at least there was always that silver lining. That and the beds.

Speaking of beds, Ciel's bed was so unnecessarily soft? Charlotte recalled nights in her youth spent lying on stiff beds because her parents thought it would help her stand up straight like a true lady. The woman made a mental note to get herself a nice bed like this at some point.

Why was she in Ciel's bed you ask? Well there were two reasons that were very connected.

Reason number one: Father Jeremy's appearance, though hilarious and amusingly overdone, was a bit annoying. To her his introduction heralded the beginning of the end and while Charlotte was beginning to lose interest in the story, she had a feeling that the end would be wrapped up so perfectly it would leave the viewer feeling disappointed by the lack of loose strings.

It did occur to her that she might have been more interested in the whole plot if she hadn't known about Sebastian being a demon. Clearly she had been privy to a huge spoiler.

Reason number two: so when Father Jeremy had requested that someone dress up in the earl's clothes and get under his covers, Charlotte had allowed herself to be the obvious choice. She was only a few inches taller than Ciel after all, and unlike Mey-Rin and Ran-Mao she was almost entirely flat-chested.

She caught Father Jeremy's annoyed frown and returned it with a demure smile and both were completely aware that they were on similar pages.

Charlotte yawned even though she wasn't tired, and stared up at the textured darkness above her. She had been lying there for only a few minutes, ignoring the occasional whisper and hush from the other occupants of the room.

Then she heard it; the almost silent sounds of scales sliding on metal followed by the deliberate rustle of cloth. Finally she felt a weight land on the pillow, right beside her head. The thing hissed and something brushed against her cheek.

"Out of the way!"

Charlotte kicked the duvet off the bed just as Rathbone blocked Grey's sword with the thin end of a riding crop. "Mr. Grey, I would ask that you show some modicum of calm before you kill what may very well be a valuable witness to the case," he rested the crop on his shoulder and turned to Charlotte with a wry smirk. "Well Ms. Blanche, may we see them?"

"'See them?'" Grey muttered perplexedly, and then screeched as a large black head attached to a thick neck lifted itself from around the maid's slender shoulders. "What the hell is that?"

"A black mamba," Rathbone explained cheerfully. "I must say, you do have an excellent handle on him. How are you managing to keep the snake so calm?"

Charlotte giggled and the hairs on Grey's arms prickled. He knew that laugh. "Oh, you know," she said airily with something hard glinting in her eyes, "I worked in a circus not too long ago."

"That's a bit suspicious, isn't it?" Grey snapped, his heart thudding a little too hard for his liking. "How do we know you're not the killer? None of your alibis matter if you had a snake to do all the work!"

The maid blinked at him silently and then she cocked her head. "First of all, the circus I worked for no longer exists any more. Where would I get a snake? Especially one that is native to Africa? I am naught but a poor housemaid," she doubled the irony of this statement by temporarily upping her high-class French accent, "do you think I could ever afford the fees of importing something as expensive as a foreign snake?"

Grey scowled at her, realising that she had a point and an airtight alibi. He huffed and stormed out of the room, muttering unsavoury things under his breath. Charlotte watched him go with a wide smile.

"You play a lot of games, Ms. Blanche," Rathbone observed with his own smile.

"No more than anyone else," she retorted. The snake hissed softly into her ear and she cooed something back before passing Ida B. to Rathbone with a hissed warning for him to be careful with her or else. "I suppose we have a murder weapon now, but who do we accuse?"

"You leave that to me," Rathbone neatly tied the snake into a loose knot. "Come, we have a case to end."