CHAPTER 65: A CASE TO DIE FOR
Moriarty gives a nod to Sherlock, who walks up to the wooden table and flips the folder open. On top of a pile of documents, there are photos of a crime scene: a tall man in his fifties lies on his back on a carpeted floor, a pool of blood under his head. Some bloody pawprints have stained the carpet all around the body lying right at the centre of a bedroom, at the foot of an unmade bed.
Moriarty introduces the case. "Problem: the man in the photo, Mr Oliver Portland, was found dead today at 5 pm."
Sherlock whips his head up, failing to hide his surprise. "Today? I thought you'd been planning this show of yours for a long time."
"Indeed, and I had something different in mind for this room," Moriarty admits, vexed that his rival could even assume that any of that was accidental or poorly prepared. "However, I got a sudden inspiration after reading the police report of this case and thought it was superbly suitable."
John frowns. "If he was found at 5 pm today, none of it has been made public yet: it's too early. How can you own pictures of the crime sc—" his voice fades away as he notices Moriarty's condescending look. "Right, it's you we're talking about. Why do I even ask?"
"Please, child's play. As I was saying, I thought this would be quite fitting for this round; Mr Portland was an astronomer. What a stroke of luck, isn't it?" He simpers but quickly changes his expression and purses his lips ruefully. "Well, maybe for him, just a stroke, since the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head."
"Blunt force trauma caused by what? What was the murder weapon?" Sherlock asks.
"Still unknown, at the current stage of the investigation. As you can see, there isn't anything near the body that could match the blow to the head."
Holmes takes a second picture from the folder; it's a close-up of the fatal wound.
"The wound is deep. It must have been caused by someone exerting considerable strength with a heavy object. The edges are not jagged, so not something sharp. Weird shape," he murmurs, squinting at the photo in his hands. Then he shifts his eyes to the picture showing the whole corpse. "Has the body been moved or shifted?"
"No. All the photos of the crime scene depict exactly what the police found when they entered the flat—they haven't moved anything. The body was found in the same supine pose of the first picture; only his head was turned to the side to allow the forensic team to get that zoomed-in picture."
Sherlock studies the first photo again: the dead man is on his back. Weird. Such a strong swing to the head would send anyone falling forward, face-down, he reasons.
After a second, he raises his confused eyes to the screen. "Who found the body?"
"His girlfriend, Rebecca Lockett. She got worried because she hadn't heard from him since last night, he wasn't replying to her calls and texts, and he was supposed to come pick her up this afternoon. When he didn't show up, she went to his place and had to convince the concierge substitute to unlock the door of his apartment. Interesting detail a locked door, wouldn't you say?" Jim scratches his chin in a pensive pose. "She told the police that when she opened the bedroom door, she found Mr Portland's dog, a Jack Russell Terrier, watching over his owner's dead body, his head smashed in."
"This explains the bloodied pawprints near the body," Giulia says.
"Rebecca Lockett said she was petrified at that sight. She didn't touch anything, she just rushed out, immediately called the police and waited for the cops on the landing. She said she couldn't even bear to stay in that house, the mere thought made her sick."
Giulia steals a glance at the pictures and quickly averts her gaze, murmuring, "Who can blame her?"
"Where did you get all these details about the discovery of the body, Jim?" Sherlock asks.
"From the duty detective's notes. You can find a picture of his notepad in the folder. Terrible handwriting, but great attention to detail. Detective Inspector…" Jim scrolls down on his tablet to retrieve the name. "Dimmock."
Every head in the room jolts up. A name they could hardly forget.
Jim smiles at Holmes. "He jotted down even the tiniest bit of information: impeccable police job. Exactly how badly did you humiliate him on the nun's case?"
Sherlock rolls his eyes and skims through Dimmock's notes in the folder. Rebecca Lockett's deposition and account of the events are all there, ink on paper, precisely how Moriarty has just relayed it.
"So, the girlfriend didn't have the keys to the apartment, but the concierge did," Sherlock reasons out loud, and Jim cues in.
"The love story with Rebecca Lockett is quite recent and a bit delicate; you'll see. Anyway, our poor Oliver Portland was friends with the concierge and gave him a key to deliver all his packets and envelopes directly to his apartment and take care of his dog as well. Mr Portland used to stay out of his house for long hours, and despite having a small garden, he wanted his dog to be taken out regularly, so he paid the concierge extra money to walk his dog. The concierge left Portland's key to the substitute who was covering his shift tonight."
"A garden means ground floor. The killer might have left through a window or the French door to the garden. The detail of the locked front door seems less relevant now," Giulia theorises, but Jim intervenes to knock off her suppositions.
"No, darling. All windows were locked from the inside, and there are window grilles everywhere, as you can see from the pictures." He grimaces when he adds, "Unfriendly part of town, I'm afraid."
Sherlock takes some more photos of the crime scene from the folder and scatters them on the table. They show the rest of the bedroom: the door to the en-suite bathroom, the French door to the garden with the dog flap, the iron grating on the windows, some sparse furniture and the unmade bed, as well as moulded walls, an open toolbox and some screwdrivers disseminated around the radiator, just a few feet away from the corpse.
After a glance, Sherlock pulls out some more pictures of the rest of the house. A photo of the living room shows a messy kitchen table cluttered with empty takeaway boxes—clearly the remains of Oliver Portland's dinner—a grocery bag, a box of tablets, pictures of galaxies, and an agenda with a sticky note glued to an open page.
Sherlock takes in every detail before asking, "Estimated time of death?"
"10 pm, last night."
John furrows his brow. "Hold on. Had he really been dead for about twenty hours before his body was found?"
"It's Saturday, John. He probably didn't have to show up for work," Sherlock remarks.
"Partially true," Jim intervenes. "He would have had to show up for work today, just not in the morning, but tonight," and he flashes them a sinister smile. "Yet he was found dead in a locked apartment with a fatal blow to the head. The police are still groping in the dark, unsurprisingly."
"While you have already solved the case," Sherlock states. He doesn't even have to ask.
"Evidently. Now I'm giving you the chance to prove yourself, dearest. For reasons of simplification, I've drawn up a list of suspects, and I'll present the three people in question." From the monitor, he gestures at the folder, and Sherlock takes out all the remaining documents, including three pictures, and displays them on the table for all to see.
The first one is a professionally taken picture showing a middle-aged man in an elegant tuxedo a bit too big for him. He doesn't look at the camera and seems distracted—or rather, eager to be elsewhere, his eyes looking for something or someone out of sight. Clearly uncomfortable in front of a photographer, he put his hands in his pockets, causing his jacket flaps to open and reveal his sagged shirt tucked in a pair of large trousers that are cinched at the waist with a worn leather belt. The numerous pleats and crinkles suggest that his arms are swimming freely inside the too-large sleeves.
Moriarty introduces him. "Art dealer Benjamin Williams: the dead man's former best friend and Rebecca Lockett's ex-husband."
John smirks. "Oh, his best friend stole his wife. I can see the delicacy of the relationship now."
"Very perceptive, Doctor Watson."
"That sounds like a strong motive to me—jealousy and revenge. Why isn't he the main and only suspect?" John asks.
"Because he has an alibi. He spent the whole of yesterday evening at the lawyer's office to settle his divorce. He left only after midnight," Jim explains.
"That's past the time of death. Still, couldn't his lawyer be covering up for him?" Giulia chimes in.
"He's not the only witness. Rebecca Lockett was there too to sign the papers and she confirmed his presence. It's unlikely she would lie for her ex-husband, don't you think?"
"If he has an air-tight alibi, why is he still a suspect then, apart from his obvious reason for wanting Mr Portland dead?" Sherlock asks. Not everyone who has something against a murder victim is necessarily the murderer, and not everyone who hates somebody goes and kills them. After all, the world counts much more haters than killers.
"Because," Jim starts in the tone of a magician who's about to pull a rabbit out of a top hat, "his prints were found all over the living room."
"Okay, that's odd," John concedes, arching a brow.
"Second suspect: Mrs Edith Sheffield, Oliver Portland's landlady," Moriarty announces, and Sherlock takes her photo in his hands.
This one, too, looks like the work of a professional photographer. The old lady posing in front of the camera is wearing a magnificent Valentino dress in its characteristic bright red colour. She has matched it with a pair of black Louboutin pumps and a black handbag hanging from her left shoulder.
John steals a glance at the picture and quirks his lips. She looks quite harmless.
"What about her?" he asks Moriarty without raising his eyes to the screen.
"An old family friend and Mr Portland's landlady. She knew Oliver's father well; they lived next to each other in the countryside, where Mr Portland was born. When her husband died, she sold her house and used the money to buy two small apartments in London: one for herself and the other to put up for rent to ensure some income. A few months ago, when she got back in touch with Oliver to offer her condolences for the passing of his father, she learned that he was looking to move to London for a year for work, and she offered to rent him her second little flat. The young Portland probably just accepted out of politeness and in the name of the old friendship with his family, but he was never very close with her: maybe because of the age gap, more likely because she was rumoured to be his father's mistress before his mother died in a car accident. The two of them have been heard and witnessed fighting on several occasions over the last weeks and days."
"What were they fighting about?" Giulia questions.
"Mr Portland was refusing to pay the rent."
"Was he having money problems?" John asks.
"Not at all. He was an only child and had inherited the huge country mansion at his father's death. Money wasn't a problem for him. It was a matter of principle. He was lamenting that the flat was freezing and the central heating system of the apartment was malfunctioning and needed repair. He argued it was the landlady's duty to fix it."
"I think he was right about the temperature in the house," Sherlock jumps in. "Look at those clouds of small black spots and mould on the walls." He points at the pictures of both the bedroom and the living room. "That dampness could be caused by condensation—first warning bell. In fact, condensation occurs when wet air comes into touch with a cooler surface, such as a wall. But the walls aren't supposed to be cold and wet—that's a sign of bad insulation. His flat must have been quite cold these days."
"In any case, the landlady disagreed with him about her responsibility and didn't intervene, so Mr Portland stopped paying rent in retaliation," Jim explains. "She claimed it was a breach of the rent agreement. A petty owner-tenant quarrel, probably heightened by that old murky gossip and past secrets. According to the neighbours, their discussions had gotten pretty heated lately."
John instinctively smiles. "Not sure about Mrs Sheffield's involvement in this death, but I'm glad we've never had issues with Mrs Hudson: she'd definitely be the type to kill us."
"Does she have an alibi?" Giulia asks, steering the conversation back to the most pressing issues.
"Not really. She was watching the telly alone, in her flat on the first floor, just a staircase away from the crime scene. Convenient, isn't it?" Jim's lips bend in a cruel smile, and his white teeth glimmer menacingly. The mere thought of evil acts puts him in a good mood.
"What about the third suspect?" Sherlock inquires, holding up the last photo in the folder. This is significantly different from the previous ones: not a professional picture of someone in formal attire, but a photo taken with a phone, almost paparazzi/stalker style (no doubt taken by one of Moriarty's henchmen unlike the other two that were probably copied from a photographer's camera). The last photo shows a man in waiter's clothes talking on the phone while smoking a cigarette just outside of a service door.
"Mr Logan Sullivan, the abovementioned concierge," Moriarty introduces him, and Giulia's brows knit at that revelation.
"Wait. Why is the concierge a suspect?"
"His fingerprints were found at the crime scene—" Moriarty starts, but she interrupts him. "Of course his prints were in the house: he was taking care of the dog daily."
"Sure. And last night, a little after 7 pm, one of Mr Portland's neighbours spotted him entering the apartment—" Moriarty tries to finish his sentence but is cut short again, by John this time. "Rather suspicious."
"Not really. You didn't let me finish." The criminal mastermind glowers at him. "He was entering the flat with the Jack Russell Terrier and some bags. He had been walking the dog and brought some groceries at the explicit request of Mr Portland. The police found a note on the concierge desk with a list of items: I put a copy in the folder." Moriarty lowers his eyes on his tablet and reads out loud, "Collect takeout order from Chinese restaurant at the corner, ask for extra soy sauce. Supermarket: buy milk, beans, eggs. Pharmacy: usual weekly collection (atorvastatin and enalapril) + buy anything to relieve dizziness and tachycardia, ask the pharmacist to add to my bill (tell them I'll go next week to pay)."
Sherlock spreads out the photos of the living room. "This explains the Xanax tablet on the dining table, next to some empty takeout boxes."
Giulia studies the photos and asks, "What about the rest of the pharmacy bag?"
"What do you mean?"
She points at the kitchen table in the picture. "He got the Xanax for his vertigo and tachycardia or whatever, alright. But he also asked the concierge to grab a couple of other medicines—his weekly collection apparently. I would assume the pharmacist put everything in one bag, but we can't see any pharmacy bag anywhere in the house. Where is it?"
Holmes spaces out for a second, surprisingly short of answers. After some seconds of unnerving silence, he admits, "I don't know, but I don't think it could be related to the murder. Maybe Oliver Portland had already put his usual medicines in the bathroom or his bedside table's drawer and threw the bag away. Perhaps the pharmacy where he usually gets his drugs was closed and the concierge got the Xanax from somewhere else and didn't collect the rest of the prescription. Or maybe the concierge was just heedless and mindlessly took the bag with the rest of the stuff with him," he lists all the possible alternatives.
"That's one risky oversight. Atorvastatin and enalapril are commonly used to lower cholesterol and blood pressure," John jumps in with his professional insight.
"Fair enough," Sherlock concedes. "But I don't see why it should be relevant. We can accuse the concierge of negligence, but we need something more to accuse him of murder, too. He might not have delivered every item on that list, but he certainly had a good reason to be in the flat after 7 p.m. Moving on and considering that forensics placed the time of death around 10 pm, I assume Mr Portland must have come back home soon after the concierge's drop-off, and ate his last supper before meeting his death."
"Come back home? No, no." Moriarty shakes his head. "He was already home. He had stayed in the whole day, to be precise. According to D.I. Dimmock's notes, the neighbours heard thumping and pounding noises coming from his flat, which are corroborated by the presence of the toolbox in the bedroom. But they also reported some shouting in the late afternoon."
"Another confrontation with the landlady?" John asks.
"Not this time. Mrs Sheffield was out shopping with a friend for the whole afternoon and evening."
"He was fighting with someone else, then. Quite the belligerent type, this Mr Portland," John comments, staring at one of the photos of the body. Could he have upset the wrong person?
Jim rests his chin on his palm, overdoing a contemplative pose.
"Curious that you should say that, Doctor Watson. He actually wasn't at all: he was of notoriously calm and poised temperament." He scrolls down on his tablet again, consulting some documents. "But some of the people closest to him did notice some weird behaviour on his part, recently."
Giulia widens her eyes. "How can you possibly know that?"
Jim gives her a conceited look. "The police investigation is ongoing, and some of his friends are being interviewed as we speak. I have eyes and ears on the inside."
"Clearly," Sherlock snorts. The information is so fresh that Jim hasn't even had time to include it in the folder. His resources are shockingly vast. "Still, if Mr Portland was home, why didn't he walk his dog himself?"
"Wasn't feeling too well. Remember the note to the concierge about a remedy for tachycardia and dizziness?" Jim says in a singsong voice, gloating over the detective's misstep.
"Right." Sherlock clenches his jaw, loathing that his nemesis is feeding him the clues. He needs to focus: there's no room for mistakes. There never was, but now with Mycroft's life on the line…
He screws his eyes shut for a second to block out that thought. He can't possibly allow his humanity to show. Not now. Turn it off, he internally shouts.
He opens his eyes and places both his hands on the table to regain his composure.
He clears his throat as if he was just casually studying the pictures in front of him, but Giulia hasn't missed the jamming in his mechanism. She steps forward and is about to place her hand on top of his to convey her unfaltering faith in his capabilities, but she stops with her hand in mid-air. She can't do it to him. A genuine gesture of unbounded affection is the last thing he needs right now: it would break him and his cold reasoning skills.
She steps back. This is not the time. Let him be a stolid machine, she exhorts herself. And that's where the real selflessness lies.
Sherlock taps on the concierge's picture. "Logan Sullivan did him a favour last night and had a good reason to be in the house at that time. I don't see anything fishy about him. Besides, what would his motive be anyway?"
Moriarty shrugs. "That's for you to establish. I can only tell you that Oliver Portland was helping him scrap some more money in times of economic hardship. Not only did he pay him to be his dog sitter, but he had also managed to get him a one-time job as a waiter for a catering tonight." He nods at the picture in Sherlock's hands. "Which incidentally is the reason why there was a substitute concierge tonight."
Giulia raises a brow at that comment, perplexed. "Then why is he a suspect?"
"He was seen at the scene of the crime just before the estimated time of the death. We can't entirely rule him out," John asserts.
"No, I suppose we can't," Holmes murmurs reluctantly; he looks distracted, lost in thought, staring at the photos of the suspects.
"Sherlock?" John tries to stir him from his daydream, and he lifts his glazed-over eyes on him, his brain chasing feverishly after the wisp of an idea. He has already seen all of them.
John asks, "What do you think of the suspects?"
"That they look weirdly familiar."
John scratches his forehead, peeved and confused. "Why isn't the girlfriend a suspect too, by the way? Couldn't Moriarty be trying to throw us off by handing us a neatly wrapped present?"
At that mention, Jim teases him, "Is it your trust issues talking, Doctor Watson?"
John glowers at him, but Sherlock chips in without averting his gaze from the photos. "Ignore him, John. He is just playing with you."
"He's playing with all of us," John rebuts.
This time, Sherlock raises his eyes to look straight back at him. "Yes. Let him. There's no way out. These are the rules of this round: Moriarty gave us three people and asked us to point a finger at one of them. We can't just answer: None of them did it. Someone else killed him. So no, we won't consider Rebecca Lockett a suspect: she had the same alibi as her ex-husband and no apparent motive." He shakes his head and spreads the suspects' photos on the table. "The responsible for this death must be among them."
"Nice pictures, by the way—professionally taken by the looks of it," Giulia comments, pointing at the ones of Mr Williams and Mrs Sheffield, then says sarcastically, "Am I the only one who was expecting mugshots?"
"No priors for any one of them. I just provided you with the most updated photos," Jim intervenes, then shifts his eyes to the detective and licks his lips. "So, Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective. Do you take the case?"
Sherlock looks taken aback for a moment and glances instinctively at the curtained capsule where his brother is trapped. That's it?
"There isn't enough information. I haven't visited the crime scene or examined the body. I can't question the suspects and study their reactions and behaviours," he protests. "You've just fed me titbits and snippets, but that's not enough to have the whole picture of the case."
Moriarty nods slowly. "You're right. That would be insufficient. If only you weren't the one solving it—the most observant man in London. If only you didn't possess any additional information about the suspects. But you do, Sherlock. Just think: you love thinking, it's your favourite pastime. Now go on. Save Mycroft's life. Show him that you are worthy of his affection, that you aren't just his junkie little brother. You have forty minutes."
At that moment, the buzzing that they had heard upon entering the room and that had kept playing in the background the entire time suddenly stops and an eerie silence descends over them.
Moriarty's face fades, and a timer appears on the screen in its place, the digits decreasing unnervingly fast, rushing towards zero.
Author's Note: I'm finally back! And I'm here to stay.
I do apologise for the long hiatus, but a lot of (great) things have happened in my life. Now I'm finally ready to finish this story.
I've already written most of the remaining chapters to give this story the ending it deserves—the one I'd always imagined, anyway. It's now just a matter of editing and polishing, so I should be able to provide you, my dear amazingly patient readers, with regular updates.
Thank you for sticking with me for so long. It's been a great ride, now brace yourselves!
