Apologies in advance for the title. My great aunt Mary was a neurosurgeon and pulled the same stunt on my great grandmother that Sherlock did to John at the beginning of "The Great Game", so it's a running joke that I had to play with for humor value. I really am not as insane as Sherlock is.
Most of the time.
---
Sherlock Holmes was about to walk into Barts morgue pathology
lab in a foul mood. Mycroft had just
ruined his day. Most of it, anyhow.
As he
stomped the two miles down Oxford street to St. Bartholomew’s, unable to
scrounge the 10 quid for a taxi, he hammered out a text on his phone to his
brother. “Thanks for ruining ATM card strip. Please send money currently unavailable. SH”
Of course, Sherlock
only had to show ID at a Lloyds TSB anywhere near Baker Street, and fill out a
draft to get cash while the bank reissued his card. However, what was important was the
principle. The principle was that
Mycroft had just made his life very difficult, and Mycroft would pay him for
the inconvenience. That, and his drivers
license and passport were somewhere under a pile of papers back in the drawing
room of 221B, where he would have to actually take the time to look for them.
Tedious,
he thought crossly, and doubled his pace, his brows furrowing deeply and the
tail of his tweed overcoat flapping up behind his calves. The phone vibrated shortly thereafter.
“Just being a good
brother. MH”
There would be an
envelope with 500 sterling left with Mrs. Hudson tonight with “Sorry, Mycroft”
quickly scribbled on the outside. More
than enough to get a taxi with a hungry John, just off his shift at the Barts
NHS outpatient clinic, to yet another boutique restaurant, and passively apologise
the hundredth time for a cooktop and kitchen table occupied by the ghoulish
accoutrements of his profession.
It was not as if
Sherlock genuinely cared about
money. Thanks to his tedious brother, and the millions of
pounds at his disposal, that was not an issue.
But the dowdy, lovable, and badly decorated rooms at 221B were a point
of his masculine pride in self-sufficiency, and meant more to his self respect,
comforted by the well-ordered, well-earned tchotchkes and familiar shabbiness of
an upbringing by middle-class intelligentsia.
As
for rich bloody Mycroft,
sod
him, he thought bitterly.
The
reason Sherlock’s ATM card was unusable, was because Mycroft had sent a SIM
locator signal to Sherlock’s phone, which was a bit more powerful than the
usual text signal or call, and it had de-magnetised his card. He had absentmindedly forgotten to put his
phone in the other pocket of his overcoat.
Being able to make ingenious deductions definitely does not make you
superhuman or incapable of mistakes; this situation had happened twice before
and made him curse himself repeatedly.
And more angrily each time it happened.
He was seething now.
Mycroft did this on
occasion to keep tabs on the well-being of his brother, also to cross-reference
any known drugs locations in less respectable areas of town. This had not been
necessary for over a decade, but old habits die hard. His brother ruthlessly protected his hard
earned social standing by being an insufferably nosy prick.
To let him know this, Sherlock
made the motion of always smoking in his presence now that the government
officially frowned on it, and Mycroft had quit.
Yet, Mycroft did not admonish him.
Mostly because he did not want the immediate dressing down of a
sharp-witted fat joke delivered by his 37-year-old baby brother. And Mycroft also occasionally enjoyed an
illicit cigarette. It was a mutual
understanding, but personal space was otherwise always in lack of supply between
them.
Mycroft
was infuriatingly nosy regarding Sherlock’s appetite for troublemaking for the
sake of entertainment, and for good reason.
Getting criminal scumbags in a good hot-tempered bother was just Sherlock’s
cup of tea, and getting them to act out was his idea of pure victory. The internet calls them trolls, but Sherlock
took it to a dangerous level, just doing it to chuff himself in real life and
avoid boredom.
Mycroft
was the high success in the upper levels of government, and Sherlock the
coattail black sheep, or so Mycroft seemed to present it, and it drove Sherlock
round the bend. This time around,
however, Sherlock had other and more important things on his mind.
Like murder.
In specific, two
murders the previous night, in the old Irish section of London, in two separate
housing estates. One an old man, the
other a young man, both living in unremarkable flats, but surrounded by cartons
and cartons of branded cigarettes, ashtrays bursting to full, fingers stained
from smoking, both simply falling dead seemingly of spontaneous asphyxiation
with no ligature marks.
At the first flat, the
old man’s, the body was sealed down with health and safety strip and plastic around
it to prevent contamination. There was
little to do regarding the corpse until it got to Barts, so he went about
inspecting additional evidence.
Both of the victims
were on public benefits, but their flats, one dingy and the other filthy,
denoted an otherwise middle class standard.
Even though their wallets were empty, obviously to make it look like a
robbery, the cash section of their wallets had been stretched to bursting. Both of them had nothing but post office
account cards where they got their benefits in, so Sherlock had made a
deduction and quickly followed a well-trodden dirty section of carpet and floor
in each of their flats to hiding spots full of money. There was over 120 grand in each nook, which
was unheard-of for your average scumbag drug pusher. The old man kept his stash behind a false
wall in his sink cupboard, the young man in the roof breezeway just behind the
immersion tank.
They both wanted for
nothing, but in this day and age it was difficult to spend without anyone
noticing. And these two obviously didn’t
want anyone to notice until they had enough to get to Spain.
Spanish language CDs
and holiday pamphlets were at their flats.
It was more than obvious they were planning a great escape, but to two
separate dream locations- Tenerife, for the young man, and Barcelona for the
old man.
Obviously the two
murders were connected, but since they were not family and did not have
official work together, he would have to find out who saw them together, and
where. And he knew by the smell of
brackish harbour mud on their shoes that he wouldn’t have to look too far to
get to the London shipyard storage dock.
The cigarettes were awful. Sherlock made a mental note to add knockoff Marlboros from Eastern Europe to his reference
collection of tobacco ash, because their smell was distinctly rank. Worse than bodegas, which Sherlock hated due
to being occasionally caught out in foreign locations by police inspectors fond
of Fidel’s weapon of choice.
Normally, Lestrade
wouldn’t have rung Sherlock on the deaths of two part-time cigarette smugglers
who very likely had stolen from their employer in some fashion. But the cigarettes were from Eastern Europe,
there had been a lot of them, and both men were Irish. Lestrade did not like where this was going,
and wanted to see if Sherlock could activate his Homeless Network to sniff out
a bit more. Especially since whoever
murdered these two men apparently didn’t care about the enormous amount of
money they had socked away.
They
died because of something else, thought Sherlock. They were in someone’s way, or saw something
they shouldn’t have. This was a
fairly easy deduction, but something else caught his attention: identical rally
driver certificates for both men at both flats, signed by the same instructor.
Here’s
our big connection, thought Sherlock. Bigger
than money, holidays, or smoking habits.
The difference was, the
old man had carelessly folded his certificate tightly and put it in his
wallet. The young man had hidden his
entirely, in the same spot where he had hidden his money: through the ceiling
access and up under the immersion tank.
But for one special
reason, Sherlock also rolled that certificate and stuffed it into his inside
coat pocket before he shouted down to Lestrade from the access ladder that he had
seen money. For now, thought Sherlock, these
murders need to remain unrelated on this level until my questions are answered.
Sherlock then put on
his forensic examination gloves to inspect the victim and noticed that the
sheet over him was again sealed to the floor with double sided health and
safety strip, meant to keep in contaminants, biological or otherwise.
He gave Lestrade an inquisitive but annoyed
look.
“No touching my good
man.” said Lestrade. “It’s for your
safety, for good reason.”
“Well that’s a waste of
my potential.” Sherlock sounded cross, and crosser still that John was not here
asking more questions, keeping him on the ground and pulling the rank of
expertise.
“I’ll give you the
reason in a minute.” Lestrade went to
the equipment station to open a large locked box, wrapped in plastic.
Well,
this is certainly not as interesting as 300 live ducks suddenly appearing in
someone’s back garden, he thought. But he bitterly regretted
not jumping at the new email he got from the British Museum in Cardiff, instead
of doing this.
Apparently the museum had
lost 6th century weapons and brooches, and reports of unearthly
screaming and disembodied drumming were reported outside Merthyr-Tydfyl after
midnight last Saturday. He had emailed the curator back
apologetically letting him know that he was being currently engaged by Scotland
Yard, but that it sounded fascinating, and meanwhile the curator should lock
the most important artifacts in the local bank vault until he could inspect
them. The curator sounded on edge and
worried on the phone later when Sherlock had to confirm his interest, but he
agreed to help make for a delay.
I’d
love to bother with that one as soon as possible,
thought Sherlock. The IRA is boring and foul. Slow
attrition, American propaganda, kitchen chemical bombs, smuggling rings, and
now politics, were bloody tedious as ever. I’d rather stab myself in the perineum with a
metal fencepost than waste my time chasing down alcoholic psychopaths. That’s MI-bloody-5’s job. But he stayed
quiet, due to the questions he had simmering over the rally certificates that
he needed answers for.
Sherlock was able to
see the soles of this man’s shoes peeking from under the sheet, and huffed
internally with delight. The local politically
questionable boozer between the two disconnected estates, (thankfully there was
only one left) was a well-decorated but raucous hole with tolerable pub grub called
the Fenian Inn, and this young man had sawdust from its floor on his
shoes. For a man who didn’t work in
carpentry, it pointed fairly obviously to his sawdust-employing local, and
Sherlock knew the place by name as his Homeless Network easily reached there.
He also remained quiet
about this detail.
Then Lestrade did
something new just before Sherlock left the second scene. He pulled out an evidence bag from the
plastic bagged, chemical hazard labeled lockbox with a set of long forceps, and
in it were two business cards on smart parchment stock. On both were one letter:
-M-
Sherlock’s eyes lit up
like ice blue fire. He instinctively
reached out to grab the triple wrapped bag.
Lestrade jerked it back. “Don’t
come near these, Sherlock. They’re the
murder weapons, both coated in sodium cyanide.
We’re lucky that the discrepancy between time of death two days ago and
the odd lack of insects led to noticing the bitter almond smell. You can thank Phil Anderson for that.”
Anderson in his white
forensics onesie looked up from scraping blood off the kitchen counter into a
labeled plastic jar, and haughtily cocked his head with a disdainful look of
acknowledgment. “Obviously my lack of smoking habit gave me the ability.”
he went on casually. “Amazing I could
detect it in this fog of filth.” He went on scraping.
Sherlock sneered
internally and seethed momentarily at Anderson.
He sidled over to the counter and looked at the blood. It had been shed over a week ago from an
unrelated incident, and the beer can pop top responsible for the man’s nick to
the thumb was even on the counter with a small bit of blood on the edge. Sherlock was amazed that nobody noticed it,
so he reminded Anderson that the blood was completely unrelated to the current
crime scene, and was caused by a rogue, criminal aluminium can a week before this
even happened.
Anderson looked
decidedly disgusted, while Sherlock glimmered with deductive self-righteousness. Not
being the one with the pleasure of finding something as interesting and
dangerous as cyanide calling cards, with his nose no less, massively got his goat. So he whipped out a zinger for Anderson in a
low, quiet, voice.
“I’m not certain if my
smoking habit has dulled my sense of smell.
But smoking dulls my wits just
enough not to stab the witless to
death.” he smiled. Anderson shrugged, still disgusted, and
refused to look up at Sherlock. Sherlock
whirled round on his heels and brightened his tone for Lestrade. “Ring me day after tomorrow, Gary. I have some thinking to do. Also, get me anything else you can get on
those cards as long as they don’t kill your lab techs. …Well, all except one.” Anderson ignored the
barb silently. “…I’ll be in touch.”
“Fine, Sherlock. …Som’ing else as well,” Lestrade clipped in
his warm, gravelly cockney voice.
“What?” Sherlock
wheeled round as he was lifting the crime scene tape and stalking out the door
of the flat.
“IT’S GREG,” Lestrade grinned as Sherlock
grunted and left. He added “…you silly
tit.” after Sherlock was out of earshot. Anderson snorted. “Really, for the ‘undredth time.” Lestrade
chuckled in exasperation.
“I HEARD THAT.” barked a
Queen’s-English baritone halfway down the walkway of flats as he walked to the
main road to hail a cab. But for an
egocentric dramatist, he didn’t sound that particularly upset.
That was the night
before, while John Watson had been engaged in catching-up hours for the
outpatient clinic, thanks to his deliciously bad habit of engaging in adventures
with Sherlock. A gigantic wave of summer
holiday norovirus patients had just bowled over the Barts ER at midnight, and
John had regrettably left Sherlock to entertaining Lestrade on his own.
This put Sherlock in a
morose mood, without his usual sounding board and best friend. After coming in at 4 a.m., John then spent
most of the morning sleeping while Sherlock paced the drawing room in his
dressing gown, muttering to himself, frustrated that he was alone drinking Mrs.
Hudson’s morning tea. Twenty minutes of tearing out Brahms on his violin at 10
AM did not have any effect on waking John, a lump under his duvet upstairs, so
he went on and added “Knockoff cigarette ash” to his “Science of deduction”
website’s tobacco ash section.
He was also incredibly
on edge, wondering when he would get Moriarty’s game invite, if at all. It was only an M…it could be a copycat. His network markers were all silent. He flinched inside thinking of copycat
arch-criminals wasting his time vying for attention, when far more interesting
cases were always afoot. This is why he
did not care much for fame. Of course,
John cared for it even less.
“John, is my teacup on
the fireplace?” he absentmindedly asked while staring down his website entry
over interwoven hands. No reply emanated
from the ugly orange lounge, and its uglier tartan lap blanket where John would
normally have been digesting a ridiculously awful tabloid and drinking tea. But tabloids were also the source of a good
bit of their odder case material, so John had the job of maintaining his awful
habit for the good of their entertainment and profession.
This
is rubbish, he thought.
Stay upstairs sleeping John, I
don’t bloody care. He shuffle-stomped
to the bath in a huff with his curly black hair cheekily bouncing behind him,
showered, shaved, dressed and threw on his overcoat and scarf. He whipped out his phone and pocketed his
leather wallet that had been sitting on the dining-now-blogging table. “Going to Barts lab.” He texted. “Let me know work hours, IOU dinner. SH” He slipped the phone into the wrong coat pocket,
flew down the stairs, and then popped out of the black lacquered doorframe of
221B like a smart, curly-headed cork. He
stomped his way down to the Lloyds ATM two blocks away for cab money.
Just then, John
wandered downstairs grizzled and yawning to find a cold tea service and no
Sherlock. Mrs Hudson had gone off to meet
a friend at the cinema. Not being proud,
or a tea mad aficionado, he shuffled into the kitchen and committed tea treason
by microwaving the pot for two minutes, and sitting back with a hair-raising cuppa
that had steeped for over three hours.
He tossed it back in three gulps, woke up promptly, gave his silvering
ginger head a good scratch, and made a beeline for the shower. It was 11:45 and he wanted to be in at work for
3 or 4 hours of paperwork duty.
Sherlock headed for the
ATM. The plan did not last long. A prolonged buzz emanated from his phone. Thinking it was set on vibrate, he pulled it
out, but there were no text messages. His
mood instantly sank. Mycroft.
I’ll bet my card is banjaxed.
The ATM agreed with him, and he bent forward in hopeless existential
rage, teeth and eyes clenched.
“aaaAARRRRRGGH!” Sherlock raised his hands to his head and
clasped his temples. Then he noticed
that the familiar Kensington residents were out lunching and mingling, and
walking their teacup dogs. People were
looking at him with puzzled expressions.
Sherlock breathed,
straightened, smoothed his scarf, cleared his throat, pocketed his phone, and
began walking the 2 miles to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital morgue. His mood was temporarily too foul to wait for
the London bus, or take the underground.
People: no.
When he got to the
coroners back entrance at Barts, Sherlock discovered that the ID strip on his
hospital authorisation card, in his wallet just behind his ATM card, also wouldn’t
work at the employee entrance. He tried
it twice and growled on the third attempt.
But he held his temper in and thought about buzzing the door button, and
the ribbing he would get from Molly Hooper for the explanation he’d have to
give.
Fortunately at that
moment, the coroners van got in from the primary investigation of a double
homicide at different addresses in Cricklewood. Sherlock simply followed in the morgue
attendants through the double doors by the entrance, and made his way to
pathology.
Sherlock put his coat
and scarf in his usual locker just outside the pathology lab doors, and
exchanged it for a fresh folded lab coat from the scrub tubs. He rolled up his sleeves, washed his hands to
the elbows in the scrub station, shrugged his coat on, and sidled into the
pathology lab to see Molly in a plastic mask, putting on the hazard
jacket.
She looked at Sherlock
with wide eyes. “Don’t go near the
tables, Sherlock! There’s cyanide in
today. I don’t bloody believe it. They’ve
actually got a wall up round the whole autopsy room.”
Sherlock casually stole
one of her custard cream biscuits from next to her teacup, which she would not
be finishing for several hours at this stage.
He munched it and picked up the coroners report.
“Believe it. I was on them last night. I was amazed their smoking habits didn’t kill
them first. And I smoke. …Occasionally.”
“But how does someone
get their hands on cyanide in England?”
Molly bagged her feet with double scrubs and put on a rubber glove to
her elbows, and then another on top of it. “Unless they made it here.”
“Unlikely. Too expensive.” said Sherlock, mouth full of
biscuit. “But it’s easy enough to
transport if you have the nerve to do it.
A bit tricky though.” Scenarios
flashed through his mind of a multiplicity of ways and means to transport
crystalline cyanide into Britain, such as a wax matrix in a fake lipstick, or a
filled shampoo bottle in the packed baggage, nonchalantly triple bagged. He curled his lip and wrinkled his nose. “Not a job I’d like having, if you ask me.”
“Want mine?” she added
dryly, snapping down the edges of her hazmat suit.
He picked up her tea,
gave it a good gulp and nabbed the other custard cream. “Be sure to give them a good wash down as
soon as you take the skin cultures, then I’ll be in to inspect the secondary
details. Anything I might have missed
last night.” He took another gulp of her tea and Molly rolled her eyes. She snatched the coroners report clipboard
out of his hands and stomped away through the PVC curtains at the end of the
lab leading to the main autopsy room.
Well,
it’ll be three hours prepping these lads at least,
thought Sherlock. Time for a meeting. He
shrugged his lab coat back off, set it by his microscope station, gulped down
the remainder of Molly’s tea, binned the cup and left to find John. He was due to be in work by now, for a few
hours of paperwork after yesterday’s ER assistance, and then they would be free
for the evening.
But that was no reason
not to go bother him during lunch.
Sherlock was a professional at bothering people, and an appointment for
a discussion with the one man who didn’t mind being bothered by him was just
what began to lift his mood a little.
Sherlock whipped out
his phone. “We have a case. Helping SY find killer. Criminal scumbag tedium, but involves
cyanide. Looks interesting. Postmans Park in 5 minutes? SH”
John Watson had just
left the taxi on Little Britain to make his way to the outpatient clinic on
Bartholomew Close. His phone went off, and he stood and visibly sighed with an
“ugh”. He would be in for his paperwork
in 5 minutes on time. But as always he
would be a bit late, thanks to Sherlock Holmes, so this was never, ever to
happen. He mentally shrugged and made
his way down toward Postmans Park. The
truth was, he genuinely did not mind.
His phone went off
again. “Bring tea if convenient. Morgue tea is rotten. SH” John looked up and rolled his eyes. He had just passed the coffee shop. He turned around and went in.
John hesitated quietly
with the tea tray while walking up the park footpath. Sherlock was parked nonchalantly in the same
exact bench where Mike Stamford had met his old friend John Watson during his
lunch hour a number of years ago, and told him that another acquaintance using
the Barts morgue pathology lab was in need of a flatmate. So many
years ago it seems, thought John. He
quietly grinned to himself, looked down and sighed at the thought of such a
world of history and breathless adventure between then and now.
Sherlock was hawkishly
gazing in the opposite direction, bolt upright as usual, scanning his environment,
hands folded in his lap, curls blowing in the light breeze, jaw muscles
clenching and relaxing as his mind worked.
His head had not yet turned toward John, standing still about 50 feet
away. John started walking again toward
the bench, and Sherlock turned his head and gazed toward John on a smooth, owl-like
swivel. John sat down. Sherlock wordlessly
picked a cup from the tray and checked his tea for the requisite extra milk and
sugar.
Check. “Thank you.”
“You practise that one,
then?” John chuckled and squinted upward
at his statuesque companion. He knew Sherlock
had made a character leap of atypical gratitude.
Sherlock sighed and answered
with his slight cockeyed smile and familiar baritone. “My consideration is well earned, John.” His
usual flat tone brightened on describing last night’s murder scenes. “Meanwhile I saw two murders last night. Cyanide.
Something you shouldn’t have missed, just for the reference.”
“Cyanide! That’s mad.”
John was shocked; such a toxic substance was as rare in England as polonium. “Did the corpses have the characteristic
lividity and bitter almond smell?”
“Smell, yes. Lividity, no.
They were actually quite pale.
Now I’ll be more interested in the toxicology report.”
“How was it delivered?”
asked John, sipping his tea.
“Parchment business
card with an ‘M’ printed on it and nothing else, hidden underneath the back
shirt collars of both of them.” said Sherlock ominously.
“You don’t bloody
think…” said John worriedly, his heart jumping into his mouth.
“Not sure. I’ve had no calls,
no warnings, no indications. My network
picked nothing up. It’s confusing, so
I’ll just keep my eyes open for now.”
John breathed in, then
out slowly, and started to relax. “I
wonder how they acquired the internal dose then, if any.” he said, and cleared
his throat.
“You wonder,
indeed. I’m questioning if that was how
they died. The cards were meant for the
investigating authorities. Obviously.”
Sherlock stared ahead at the oak trees in the park, placidly shimmering in the
increasing sunshine. It was rapidly
warming that afternoon and approaching 30 degrees, so his shirtcuffs were still
up and he had foregone his familiar overcoat.
However, being Sherlock, he still had a buttoned waistcoat on over his
shirt, belt, and ironed trousers. Of
course.
He sipped his tea again
and brightened his tone. “Meanwhile, I
have a plan for this evening. How does
pub grub sound? Shepherds pie, chips,
that sort of thing.” He looked over at John, eyebrow raised. His curious vocal tone quickly indicated that
they would be on the job, so to
speak. Or, at least, working up to one.
John’s eyebrows
raised. Sherlock was fond of boutique
restaurants, the kind that served salads, and the typical working class fish
and chip fare seemed a bit gritty for his preferences. But he would always surprise him at odd moments,
and John loved a proper British Sunday roast plate of meat and potatoes, though
he wouldn’t tell Sherlock. That fare he
usually had out alone to keep Sherlock from rolling his eyes, but Sherlock
would always annoyingly detect the smell of malt vinegar in John’s clothes and
complain about it back at the flat. So
of course, he was surprised.
“Yeah, all right.” He
cocked his head to one side in bewilderment.
“Pub grub? When was the last time I saw you in a pub?”
“The last time I drank
enough to realise I shouldn’t be in one.
Fermented grapes are bad enough.” said Sherlock with a sniffing grimace.
“And that was to make you happy.” He
sounded positively doleful. “However…you
are required to enjoy a drink this evening. I will be playing my violin.”
“You? With an audience? You don’t do
audiences.” chuffed John, becoming progressively more entertained.
“I will tonight, but
I’ll be in the background. And jigs and
reels aren’t exactly Brahms.” snorted Sherlock.
That having been said, he had to remind himself to practise traditional flourishes
and gracenotes in his bow technique, as they were certainly not familiar ground
for a long while, and often far more technical than a sustained vibrato.
“Irish music. That’s a
new one.” John had never heard Sherlock
fiddling out Irish tunes.
Sherlock sighed. “It was a phase.” …and that’s all he said.
12 years ago he
recalled a blissful 3 weeks of summer in Kerry playing traditional music almost
nightly, until he uncovered a hashish ring coming in through the local harbour
via Spanish fishermen. As the rules in
Ireland were different, he hedged his bets with the local Fine Gael political
party office, instead of the police. That ten minute sit down with the local
campaign officer running for TD resulted in a gigantic haul of cash and product
for the Criminal Assets Bureau and Gardai.
It was a very smart move, though he had to exit stage left immediately
and be on a plane from Shannon the next day to be certain about his
safety.
Sherlock was sad about leaving
the incredible musical assortment of traveling virtuosos in the town where he
stayed that summer, but the locals found him a bit tiring and grating, if his
music pleasant. Angering the wrong
individual in such a “who-you-know” culture would otherwise eventually prove
very dangerous, and Mycroft was just a little too far away to get backup within
10 minutes.
He had seen later
online back home in London that the man he talked to had gone on to win his
section of Kerry as a TD in the Irish legislative Dail, rousting out the Sinn
Fein TD, something about which the remains of the Provisional IRA was obviously
not happy. Sherlock quietly hoped that the IRA wouldn’t
know who he was beyond London tabloids, which would be bad enough.
“Is country and western
your next foray?” John grinned, interrupting Sherlock’s quick reflection.
“Not very likely. I dislike cowboy hats.”
“That’s relieving. So do I.”
John smiled and sipped his tea.
“So I suppose it’s tweed hats and knit jumpers tonight.”
“I’ll stick with the hat. It’s not as ugly as the deerstalker, and cable
jumpers look better on short people.”
John rolled his eyes and sighed. “On
me they look like…” Sherlock looked
thoughtful. I look like a Kerry fisherman off the boat, he thought. His creamy pallor and black hair nailed him
for a man from the southwest of Ireland.
This was why he preferred suits, to avoid working class entanglements
and to be taken seriously in London. “…Actually,”
he said, “I’ll go with a cardigan tonight.
And corduroys.”
John leaned backward
and stared at Sherlock incredulously, with his usual bewildered smile. “You really are going outside your comfort zone, aren’t you?”
“Everything has its
purpose.”
What Sherlock did not
mention, was that while he was on that nice long holiday in Kerry 12 years ago,
he had also learned how to drive a turbo rally car down a six foot wide back
boreen at 120 km an hour, without ditching on hairpin curves.
Mycroft had told him to
find another hobby, in order to stay out of trouble. He even paid for the instructor, who was
shocked by Sherlock’s immediate skill. ...Coincidentally, the same instructor whose name was scribbled at the bottom of the younger
victim’s cert, in his coat inside pocket back at Barts morgue.
Game on.
--
At 3 PM after having
John buy him a salad for lunch, Sherlock wandered back into the pathology lab
to find the crew still busy with contamination procedure and skin
sampling. He poked his curly head in
through the PVC zippered barriers and asked Molly how long they’d be. The team barked in concern, but he didn’t
step in further. She shooed him off with
“Hour, tops.” He zipped up the barrier
and sat in the pathology lab to read about cyanide toxicology at the Internet
station.
Of course with
Sherlock, being entertained doesn’t last long.
After ten minutes of scanning information, he got bored quickly, and
looked round the lab. Under a protective
cover was the generously donated head of a well-lived older gentleman with
drooping jowls and closed eyes, on a refrigeration tray.
The mouth was open
about two centimeters. Molly had been
preparing it for the introductory neurosurgery week of undergraduate gross
anatomy at London School of Medicine, just adjacent to Barts.
Sherlock figured it
would be kind to have him tell a joke one last time, if he had told any during
his lifetime. Few possess such an
entirely ghoulish sense of humour as Sherlock Holmes, but when he decides to
have a laugh, usually at your expense, the only option is to take it well and
move on.
He got up and casually
looked round the lab for clean airway tubing, and found a still-packaged tracheal
airway vent. He attached the tubing to
the vent, put on a pair of fresh gloves, gently lifted the man’s head and inserted
the tracheal vent firmly into the open tracheal hole at the bottom of the
neck. He then quietly set the head back
in position, casually trailed the tubing to the other side of the table, and
sat back at the microscope station, waiting for Molly to finish and come back
into the lab. This would make the wait worthwhile. He went back to scanning the internet.
After about half an
hour, an exhausted Molly stepped out of the PVC containment unit and zipped off
her suit, tossing everything inside the zippered door for incineration to pick
up.
“Right, the containment
unit will be off in about ten minutes when the health and safety get in. Then they’re all yours, Sherlock.”
“Very good. I’m curious to find everything I can.” he
said cheerfully. More cheerfully than
usual, but Molly hadn’t noticed.
She sighed and took the
report paperwork to her desk station to fill out, and she sat on the stool just
opposite the center lab table where the head was sitting. She hadn’t noticed the cover was off. All she noticed was that Sherlock had not
replaced her cup of tea and custard creams, which would have made her a little
cross, if she hadn’t known him so well.
Fortunately, in knowing
the rate of the coagulation of saliva after death, and also knowing this gentleman
had died just all of 48 hours ago, Sherlock figured the soft palate certainly wasn’t
too sticky to separate from the back of the throat and vibrate the vocal
cords. He covertly lifted the tubing to
his mouth and blew firmly.
He was not disappointed
by the result.
“hngaaaaaaaa” said the
head in a toneless, but higher tonality than Sherlock’s familiar voice. Molly looked up and round the lab, puzzled.
“Did you hear
something, Sherlock?”
Sherlock had hidden the
tubing and placed it down. He looked up
from the laptop. “Hm? Nope.”
he glanced down deadpan and continued looking at his laptop screen.
Molly looked somewhat
perplexed, and sat back down to scribble things. Sherlock grinned, and blew again.
“…gknaaaaaaaaa” said
the head. Molly threw her own head up,
whirled around, and said to Sherlock, “You had to have heard that.” She got up to check outside the doors of the
pathology lab. Sherlock had gotten red
round the ears and looked like he was about to explode, but he swallowed it
deadpan as soon as Molly turned toward him.
He casually looked up and shrugged.
She put her hands on
her hips and gazed around the lab, looking for an explanation.
Just as her gaze fell
on her neurology prep for Queen Mary College gross anatomy, Sherlock slipped
the tubing into his mouth behind his laptop screen, and blew hard.
“GNGAAAAAAA” said the
head.
Molly screamed so
loudly, that the orderlies came bolting down the hall from 40 yards away. Over it they heard the inexplicable sound of
Sherlock laughing…the rarest of all noises.
She laughed as well
when she could finally catch her breath.
She didn’t tell the orderlies what had happened, just through gasps of
combined shock and laughter that she had forgotten to cover her gross anatomy
prep and had surprised herself. Sherlock
was bursting deadpan behind his hand, and shrugged, ears redder than
Christmas.
These diamond-rare
moments of silly insanity were the reason why Molly had a soft spot for
Sherlock. It was too shockingly
unorthodox and disrespectful, at least to normal
people.
People who weren’t
Sherlock Holmes.
