A/N: Like I said, this has turned a bit dark after the first 10k words or so. Strange that. One more after this one. -csf
5.
Four hours have gone past with no signs of Sherlock.
The Watsons wedding is postponed and arriving guests are turned away by the family and the police officers on the scene.
John mindlessly thinks that a measly murder wouldn't have stopped Sherlock from getting married. He might even have insisted the reception be right next in the crime scene; makes for fantastic décor.
John finds his train of thought both wild and weird, shakes his head and lets it sink into his hands, hiding from the world.
Inspector Lestrade of the Scotland Yard is a good friend, currently very concerned about John Watson. Sherlock Holmes seems to have gone on a walk about, unannounced, and John is spiralling due to previous trauma of abandonment. He supposes that Sherlock did convince John that he was dead for all of three years and presumably only returned because John was about to get married, thus ending any chance of the two of them restoring to the good old days. Sherlock says that he had chased and captured enough of Moriarty's web by then, but to the inspector it stinks of insecurity from the wandering genius, the hurrying back.
'You know the berk, he'll be back in no time, John. He'll saunter back, hopping back in, all bright eyed and bushy tailed; no idea what he's doing to you.'
John looks over his shoulder to the inspector.
'I'm not a charge for any of you two. You think he's passed me along to you so to disappear and investigate on his own. He wouldn't do that. He never pushed me away from one of his investigations. He didn't push me away from this one either, no matter the possible conflict of interests.'
'Sherlock doesn't care for things like conflict of interest, chain of evidence or plausible deniability,' the inspector deadpans.
John smiles briefly.
'No, he really doesn't. And that's how I know for sure that he isn't hiding from me. Something happened. An accident or a kidnap.'
Greg Lestrade rights a chair and takes a tired seat on it. 'Sherlock has been known for his flights of fancy, often meaning he's gone for days.'
John stubbornly shakes his head. 'No, just yesterday he texted me so I would know where he'd gone because I was still asleep in the bed.'
The inspector stops himself from talking, then asks with fake casualness: 'The bed? As in just one bed for the two of you?'
John shoots him metaphorical daggers with his eyes and shuts down, no longer talking to the inspector.
.
Six hours. Lestrade is negotiating the scene with the local police. Sherlock is still MIA.
Anger boils inside an aggrieved John Watson. He is a battered soldier, he's seen men and women at their least human. He has resigned himself to what humanity can do at their worse before and alongside Sherlock. What he will not accept is to have Sherlock Holmes taken away from him – not ever again.
Adrenaline courses through his veins, urging for release. John cracks his knuckles and smiles his death-daring grin. He has been done wrong many, many times. He has fought impossible battles for patients' lives and for his own sanity throughout hard times. He is not now going to lay down and take the latest piece of crap that Life has got to offer him.
John is about to make his own destiny. He is about to solve a case, find Sherlock, and haul his skinny backside home as soon as he can. He doesn't know how, but he'll be damned if he cannot pull it together.
He just needs to think like Sherlock.
Tall order. Yet Sherlock has long narrated his thought processes to John.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. John is about to flatter the heck out of the skinny genius.
John focuses on the broken bits of rock on the coffee table, all lined up with an obsessive precision. According to Sherlock they must form an image. There are straight lines and curves. There's an area of impact, that shattered the tableau and broken the rock beyond repair. The edges are blunt, detail is missed.
What if it is not a picture? What if they are letters?
No English word comes to mind. What about Scottish words?
Oh, shit. He's got it. His fingers now automatically rearranging the letters on the table. There are gaps but the weathering pattern matches to a whole tablet once hung outside. Bothan, His old great-uncle Hadrian Watson has a lot to answer for… And Aunt Maggie wasn't the original rogue in the family.
.
If Sherlock was given the choice, he wouldn't get kidnapped. And if that wasn't an option, he'd get kidnapped with John. Always a lot more fun. John has a wicked sense of humour when kidnapped, all sass towards the kidnappers and complicit smiles towards Sherlock. It probably comes from all the training Mycroft's MI5 kidnappings have given the doctor.
Of course, with none of those options available, and with his phone and wallet taken from him and dumped outside the stone hut where he's been imprisoned, Sherlock now needs to solve this himself.
He hopes the knock-off handcuffs with which he's had his wrists bound behind his back are cheap online merchandise, as he extracts John's grenadier bear magnet from his pocket. A silent thanks to Aunt Maggie for keeping hold of the keepsake and passing it on to John, and Sherlock is carefully trying to magnetise the inner mechanism of the cuffs to swing the mechanism inside the lock.
It might take a while.
Meanwhile he can just hope that Lestrade is doing his job and keeping John safe. If Sherlock is half-right, then John is in terrible danger just for the fact that he knows too much. He knows the killer. Known since childhood.
Bringing John to Edinburgh has placed John in deadly danger. A weekend visit turned into a murder chase.
John is never boring.
.
There is a spot in the forest where little John Watson and his young friends used to play Cowboys and Indians. A small derelict stone hut, they used to pretend was some sort of fortification of a castle that somehow the Indians or the Cowboys had. Twigs and rubber bands were used as bows and arrows procured from shrubs, sometimes pinecones were used in a sort of catapult contraption. None of the boys was particularly fussy about historical accuracy, as young boys often aren't.
John recalls vividly this spot. The story maker in him often supplying the other boys with the basic plot for their playfights and adventures. Almost as if this spot in the forest was magical on his own, and its magic enveloped and shaped young John.
Decades later now, hair turning from sunshine to moonlight, John Watson is once again attracted by this magic spot. In it, he believes he will find his companion, held against his will. How much of this real-life narrative resembles one of those he once put together for his audience of feisty boys (and Hetty, Hetty was in it often too) is something he doesn't fail to notice, as one notices and dismisses the crazy coincidences of everyday life.
John Watson is a man on a mission, walking solidly on forest grounds, unwavering in his directions. He knows these parts of the woods like the palm of his hand.
Speaking of which, his hand is not shaking. Too much adrenaline. There will be hell to pay for, later on, as the adrenaline crashes.
He deems it worthwhile and presses on, never veering off course or doubting himself.
Sherlock has always been John's true North Star, and its pull is stronger every yard closer.
DI Lestrade must be about to get himself free from his own handcuffs, the ones John nicked from his pocket and shackled the protesting inspector to the radiator with. Lestrade said John was to wait, to keep to the guest suite. Lestrade volunteered to look for a forest hut he didn't know the first thing about. Said that John should rest. Said John was not fit to go out and bring Sherlock back.
John decided not to particularly listen to bad advice, he notices, as he fingers the cuff keys in his own pocket.
He guesses he learnt to nick police handcuffs from Sherlock, in the first place.
The forest has been growing steadily dark due to the dense tree growth, the canopy of leaves allowing for little passage of the weak daylight. It will rain soon. It always does.
A few yards away he finally sees the stone hut with a slate roof. The openings once sporting proper windows now just ugly gaps on the disformed frame. John can imagine the sign over the heavy wooden door, before that modern, sturdy padlock keeping the door shut. Bothan. A Scottish name for a hut or booth, especially the kind used for illegal drinking. The timeline of construction fits well with Hadrian Watson and the alcohol consumption prohibition brought about the Temperance Movement in 1913.
Scotland's own moonshine distillery in the woodlands outside Edinburgh.
John shakes his head in faint reproach – all Watsons are prone to vices – and finally calls out his friend's name.
'Sherlock?'
A few seconds' wait and finally, finally the must awaited response:
'If you could unlock the front door for me, John, that would be grand!'
Even Sherlock Holmes will have trouble picking a padlock on the other side of the locked door.
John sighs and tackles the problem the only way he can think of. He grabs a rock and slams it against the padlock, wrecking it in one go. His shoulder twinges at that, but overall feels much looser than before, so he doesn't really notice it much.
John swings the door open, and finds Sherlock indolently leaning against the nearest wall, arms crossed and smirking, as if just waiting to be rescued. John sees more. He sees the bruising on his friend's forehead that explains the subduing, and he sees the handcuffs discarded on the dirt floor.
Sherlock was well on his way to freeing himself on his own.
'Got bored of waiting for me?' John asks, nonchalant, pointing at the handcuffs.
'Sad you didn't get to see me in those?' Sherlock's cat eyes shine back.
'Wanna go back to our place now?'
'Hm. Definitely.'
.
'So, who did this to you?' John asks, as the pair walk back through the woods.
'John...' You won't like it. Sherlock presses his lips, and decides to feed John hints instead of saying the name outspokenly. 'You know my methods, John. Apply them.'
John chuckles. 'What? I should speak at lightspeed and say something like… Right-handed assailant going by your left temple wound, you'd likely be facing this person, as your left hand has abrasions consistent with self-defence. A powerful individual as that was a nasty wound (thank goodness it has stopped bleeding), but also someone you trust. You don't know any of that lot, really, so someone I trust, and you transferred on that trust from me. Aunt Maggie is unpredictable and has shown signs of being prone to violence, but she would hardly have the strength to swipe you so fast it'd catch you off-guard. Hugh is dead, so either Henry or Hetty. Henry or Hetty. I trust both. Clearly, I'm wrong. Out of the two, Henry is the one who inherits the money and the house. He's strapped for cash. He could have killed Hugh. Hetty, she didn't have a motive. So... Henry.'
Sherlock hums. 'I don't speak that fast,' he opts to state. It's a lie. He speaks even faster.
John narrows his eyes and continues: 'But, wait. Something you said. Doesn't add up. You said there was only one key to the library, Hetty brought it down. But Hugh must have opened the door to the library, he got inside.'
'Indeed.' Go on, John, impress me.
'So how did Hetty get the key? Is it a slip? Did she slip? Did she have the key because she followed Hugh to get something from him, and locked the door behind him, trying to get away, not thinking how it would look?'
'Hm.' Plausible. What else?
'And what she got from Hugh wasn't enough. There was more. She was looking for more at our place. She ransacked it.'
'There is never a need to overturn a sofa, it really was an overkill,' Sherlock drawls. His eyes are bright and intense, though, keen on John's success at deducing.
'She was looking for the piece of sign that Aunt Maggie gave me. She thought she'd find it with our things. But when she didn't... she told Henry that you were dangerous and needed to be contained.'
'Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I am dangerous.'
John stops short. 'Why keep this hut secret? Why did Aunt Maggie think it was important you saw it?' John shakes his head, a full-on headache now clasping his consciousness. Damn adrenaline crashes.
Sherlock is looking carefully down at his doctor, the pain and emotional turmoil so evident in his features. If only he could keep John deducing, hiding from the world's pain by using his rational abilities, then he'd feel like he could indeed keep his friend safe.
But reality must come, it always does, and Sherlock cannot keep John from the onset of a painful discovery. No matter the suspect under the observation lens, the inevitable reality is that one of John's childhood friends has killed another of them. And John was unlucky enough to be present at this dreadful time.
'Why would Hetty kill Hugh?'
'So Henry would inherit the estate.'
'Unlikely, she's bringing her own money into the marriage.'
'Shit, she might yet murder another man. Henry. He's not been faithful. He confessed at something. They had a spat earlier, when we were setting up the wedding venue.'
'A solid lie is a great foundation for a legal commitment,' Sherlock says, looking very serious. John squints at him.
'Anyway, she's not got enough money to fix this place up, does she? They are both liers, hoping to gain from their deceit.'
'I suspected as much.'
John chuckles. 'You mean, you guessed.'
'Same thing.' Sherlock smirks. But he smiles softly at John. Brilliant John, who got there almost all on his own.
John mutters, wonderingly: 'What is so special about the hut, then?
'Oh,' Sherlock seems surprised. 'That's likely where Henry and the nursemaid have been consummating their affair. Aunt Maggie's insistence that I see the clue from the stone sign was nothing but a bit of frisky flirting from an old woman who has lost all sense of propriety either through mental degeneration or the unavoidable realisation that social norms are pointless.'
'Did my 92-year-old aunt really get frisky towards you?' John scoffs.
'Perhaps she always was that way. You were a child when you visited last, you wouldn't have noticed.'
John just shakes his head. Way too much to digest.
'We should go uncuff Lestrade,' he says instead.
Sherlock's eyebrows raise instantly.
'You really are my favourite Watson.' He further hums, in appreciation.
.
TBC