[fic] A Devil in Despair 2/7
Jan. 28th, 2011 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keTitle: A Devil in Despair
Rating: 14
Genre: drama
Wordcount: 28k
Warnings: slight gore.
Summary: There is a solution to every problem, even if sometimes one needs to step outside the realms of logic, common sense, or even human domain. Sherlock knows this and acts accordingly, while John is left picking up the pieces.
Author's note: the story is finished, will be posted whole over the next couple of days.
Credits: Strongly influenced by Supernatural, oddly enough the Mentalist and Neil Gaiman's Lucifer (to the point of borrowing characters from the latter).
Betaed byyami_tai. <3 Thank you so much, hun, for all the hard work!
John considered a crumpet. Not a fancy food, exactly, nothing he’d serve on any memorable occasion, rather a perfect side dish to afternoon tea. He was in the habit of having his bronzed and buttered, though a touch of Marmite wasn’t unheard of.
“You’re thinking about food,” Sherlock said, proving once and for all that his genius brain was overflowing and taking up space in others’, as John’s beautiful, bronze crumpets became soaked in blood that was dripping from something distasteful. “Crumpets, to be precise.”
“You’re thinking of blood dripping onto a porous surface,” John said, absently. The crumpet fantasy was crumbling before his eyes, leaving behind only a blood soaked plate and interesting coagulation patterns.
“How so?” Sherlock asked, curiosity doubling up as confirmation, and John sighed. The curiosity was genuine, gleeful and unrestrained, bordering on hysteria, which meant that waving the question aside now would merely send it hurtling into a wall, whereupon it would bounce and return, tenfold. Sherlock hated his mysteries unsolved.
“It’s four o’clock, teatime, it is cold, therefore I am thinking about warm food. I favour crumpets, therefore you think of crumpets. Your latest experiments all involved blood coagulation, so far on a tile, my sweater, a piece of wood and a bit of carpet. Plenty of accidents happen in the kitchen, testing patterns on food is only sensible, God help me.”
Sherlock barely moved. John sighed, again. “I don’t think I need to elaborate on the dripping, do I?”
Five feet above the ground a lone hand swayed gently in the wind. On its fingers the blood was darkening, and if John were any judge, there would be no more than three to five drops before it became too dense to fall.
The corpse quivered in the gentle breeze. It was sparkling in the harsh, white lights of the police lamps. Her face was hidden by a mass of platinum-blonde hair and her dress was rumpled, which only magnified the effect, as the light picked out the edges of the fabric, every sequin, every fold. She spun above the cobbles like a grotesque parody of a butterfly, caught in the act of emerging from its cocoon.
“I always said the freak was contagious,” Sergeant Donovan said to Lestrade, low enough for the whole street, full of coppers, to pick up.
“You said,” he agreed, wearily waving at Anderson to shut up before he began. “Gentlemen, the crime, if you will.”
“Very well,” Sherlock said and proceeded to outline the details of the victim’s not so private life, including her apparent preference for tall, ginger men. John noted the lone hair on her shoulder and rolled his eyes at the explanation -- Sherlock could be such a git at times -- but didn’t speak.
Challenging Sherlock was risky at this point. Whatever the experiment in the living room yielded had made him tetchy and irritable, and that was a bad state for Sherlock to be in. Bad for other people, that was. So John did the best he could, running interference on the detective’s behalf, stepping in to chat up Anderson before he could have his head bitten off, while Sherlock dashed back and forth, pausing now and then, tilting his head, sniffing at the corpse’s collar and some random piece of fluff that had found its way into her hair.
John could swear Sherlock was half-squirrel. Perhaps somewhere underneath the coat there was a fluffy grey tail, he thought and snickered. That would explain a lot, though John would prefer not to have to have that discussion with Mummy.
“John,” Sherlock said, uncomfortably close to John’s ear.
“What?”
“Cause of death?”
John blinked. She was dreadfully pale, not at all unlike a corpse, but... “I would say bled to death, except…”
“Except, of course, there is no blood. Splendid. We can go now.”
“Done already?”
“Of course.”
“Sherlock,” Lestrade said, rolling his eyes. “Would you deign to share your insights, before you flutter off?”
“Flutter off?” Sherlock repeated, putting enough stress on both words to depress the ground underneath his feet. Somewhere in the background Anderson and Donovan snickered.
“Nevermind. Who did it?”
“Her client.”
“Well, that narrows it down. Anything more specific?”
“I’m going to need to see the body,” Sherlock said.
“Sure, soon as we get her down. I’ll give you a call.” Lestrade wore the long-suffering look of a man suffering a hideous injustice, but Sherlock was already striding out of alley, pulling John behind him with the force of his personality.
“So, a second Christmas and it’s only April. You must be ecstatic.”
Sherlock paused to look at John. “Why?”
“I’d assumed that this is the work of a serial killer.” John considered the obvious, but dismissed it, offhand. Moriarty was a genius but he made sure he inflicted the maximum amount of pain possible, and that was best achieved before bodies became corpses.
“I must be a dreadful influence,” Sherlock said. “You almost seem excited.”
“So, is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How so?”
“Obviously, this had been done by someone proficient at killing. This was no accident, and she didn’t see it coming. Why though? She had very little money on her and her handbag wasn’t far from the scene.” Sherlock paused for effect and held the pause, still drawing breath.
John took pity after a few moments, when Sherlock looked like he might be about to explode. “How do you figure?” he asked innocently, listening to Sherlock’s relieved, rapid-fire speech, full of words such as “indentation”, “spatter”, “obviously” and, oddly enough, “hair gel”.
“I expect he asked her out, so she locked up the salon and followed. There’s a pub near by, best reached through this alley.”
“Hang on, salon?”
“Hairdressing, yes.”
“I thought she was a prostitute.”
“Clearly, you haven’t spent much time with women.”
“Not prostitutes, no. Have you?”
“Have you the barest inkling how interconnected the sex industry and the criminal world are?”
“That doesn’t answer my question.” John hoped he was imagining this, but he was a damn doctor and he could recognise a blush when he saw one. “How much time have you spent in the company of prostitutes?”
Sherlock was silent for a long while. “You don’t really want to know.”
“No probably not.” John shook his head. “What now?”
“I need to examine the body in the morgue. Cause of death isn’t immediately apparent.”
“They have perfectly good pathologists on payroll.”
“Ah, pathologists,” Sherlock said, his tone assigning them the position on his scale of respect somewhere between hairdressers (performing a necessary service), but well below prostitutes (a valuable source of information). This would put them on the level of detective inspectors, John supposed, or thereabouts.
“So that young woman you had in our flat today was…?” John asked before he could think about it too hard. Sherlock had no trouble whatsoever walking into everybody else’s private lives.
“What woman?”
“Strange, I don’t recall any head trauma.”
“Really, John, if you so desire to be cryptic, you need to start making some kind of sense. Otherwise what you are spouting is gibberish.”
John rolled his eyes. “I was asking if she was a prostitute.”
“It.”
“It what?”
“It wasn’t a woman, therefore the feminine pronoun is unnecessary.”
John blanched. He wasn’t in a hurry to forget the sight -- it was a woman, certainly. She was too petite to have ever had been a man, for starters, and even if he was wrong there, John was quite certain that it was quite impossible for plastic surgeons to adjust the shoulder-width-to-head ratio. Not unless his knowledge of the medical profession was grossly out of date, that was.
“What do you mean ‘it’?” he said, carefully, because while he suspected Sherlock of a great many crimes against human sensibility, denying someone the right to be identified grammatically as a person was not one of them.
“It was a demon,” Sherlock said. “Sichuan?”
“Yes, do we have that much time?” Then, “Hang on, what do you mean it was a demon?”
“There’s a splendid Sichuan place nearby.”
“What, you’re eating now?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Of course, what was I thinking?” John followed in Sherlock’s brisk footsteps, all the while wondering what course of action he should now take. He liked to think he’d become well versed in Sherlock-speak, a necessity when tagging along someone who viewed human feelings as irrelevant. Sherlock had been sincere when he spoke of demons, and John wondered how much worse it was than the end Sergeant Donovan prophesied for him.
For Sherlock it would have been the worst possible outcome, John knew, being denied the one thing he truly appreciated. Being declared insane would have been the ultimate insult.
“I’m not insane,” Sherlock said without looking back.
John resolved not to breathe a word, not until the delusions became a threat.
“I appreciate the sentiment, John, but I am perfectly sane. You can trust me on this.”
And they were back to the regularly scheduled programme of mind reading. “Demons don’t exist, Sherlock.”
“Wrong. Ah, here we are.” The detective held open the door to a tiny restaurant. John caught the whiff of pork in sesame sauce and ginger. “Good evening. We’ll have the pork and egg-fried rice, quickly please.”
The waiter disappeared before John had the chance to open his mouth, but that was hardly unusual.
“So, demons,” John started, wondering how soon he could work in a tentative question about any other disturbing phenomena. “How do you know they exist?”
Sherlock stared at him. The look went on so long that John started fidgeting uncomfortably. “I had a brain tumour,” Sherlock said eventually, placing his long finger against his forehead. “Right here. Inoperable, they said.”
“Medicine is evolving,” John managed to stammer out through the terror. “Just because it’s too difficult to extract now, it may not be so in a couple of years.”
“It’s not an issue anymore.”
“Sherlock, for God’s sake, you cannot be so cavalier with your life!”
“I said ‘had’, John. It’s not there any more.”
“Oh. So it was operable?”
“It wasn’t.” Sherlock smirked. “There was a doctor who offered to try, but the risks he proposed were preposterous.”
“Sherlock, for a brain tumour risks are, by necessity, acceptable.”
“Are they?” Sherlock glared, John hadn’t seen him this emotional since the last episode of boredom. “This is my brain, John. Anything else, I wouldn’t have cared. Take a lung, or a leg, I couldn’t care less. But my brain, John, a tumour in the frontal lobe.”
“You are more than a brain, Sherlock,” John hissed.
“Ah, details.” Sherlock toyed with a saltshaker as the food arrived. “Bodies are overrated.”
“So what happened? A remission?”
“I made a deal with a demon,” Sherlock said calmly.
“I’m sorry, could you please say that again? I think I might have misheard.”
“I made a deal with a demon.”
John counted to ten. “You are aware demons do not exist, aren’t you?”
“That is a common logical fallacy. Just because you have seen no conclusive proof of something’s existence, doesn’t mean it cannot possibly be out there.”
“You know, when I pictured us having this argument, I used the exact same words. I should have known it would end up being the other way around.”
“You plan our arguments?” Sherlock asked raising a brow in such a comical fashion John had to laugh.
“I assumed it would have to happen, sooner or later. Just like it did with the solar system.”
“Ah, the solar system. Why is that so important to you? We live on a giant rock, what does it really matter which way it turns. No practical use.”
“Whereas demons have enormous practical use.” John chewed in silence for a while. “What would you offer a demon, anyway? For a little bit of practical surgery?”
“They are obsessed with souls,” Sherlock said, offhandedly, already engrossed in the mannerisms of the restaurant’s other patrons, while John nearly choked on a piece of boiled Chinese leaf.
“You’d sell your soul?” he said, incredulous.
Sherlock turned to him, confused. “You deny that demons exist, yet you get so offended at the mention of a purely philosophical entity, which is only quantifiable as electrical impulses? You might as well be offended that the computers don’t get burials.”
“Sherlock…” John started and found he had no words. “It is your soul. I mean, I don’t believe in demons, but you are talking about your soul.”
“Repeating the word doesn’t really prove it’s anything but the firing of synapses.”
“Oh, and demons are more than the figment of imagination, are they? How is that you believe in demons, anyway?”
“I have proof, John.” Sherlock smiled, and for a second John really, really could believe in all manners of supernatural creatures. “I have x-rays, and I have the MRI scans of my brain, taken within a single week. On one there is a tumour, on the others it is gone, as if it was never there. None of those so-called doctors could offer a satisfying explanation.”
“Spontaneous remissions have been known to happen,” John said, defending his profession as best he could. He imagined Don Quixote approached windmills with similar zeal.
“Yes,” Sherlock said in the voice of a man who had studied every available case that claimed as much. “Not in this case.” He looked at the blank wallpaper, no doubt reading the establishment’s history from its texture.
“You are surprisingly okay with that,” John said after a minute. He wondered how that could be, when most of Sherlock’s life had been built on a foundation of logic and demons couldn’t possibly fit into that picture easily.
Sherlock, as though sensing this train of thought, gave John a long look. “I’m not pleased by the whole affair, if that’s what you mean. I found the experience distasteful and thoroughly unsettling.”
John knew that tone of voice. It was in use often, when Sherlock spoke of the weather. Like it was a necessary evil that he would gladly dispense of, even though he was aware it had its uses.
“Still, don’t you think it’s unwise-”
“They have excellent desserts, I’m told.”
Ah yes, debating with Sherlock. John suspected he might well find himself a cosy spot on the roof and shoot his gun at the moon. He ate his meal in silence, instead, at least up until Sherlock’s phone beeped and the meal was interrupted, as countless others before had been, by the joyous exclamation of “Come, John, there is a dead body waiting for us.”
John sighed, gathered up his things, looked around for the waiter to pay and was instead ushered out into the street. The joy of going out to eat with Sherlock was that you never had to pay for another meal in your life. John felt bad about it, most of the time. If he wasn’t half-broke, he’d insist on paying every now and then, but his stomach often complained louder than his pride.
*****
This was the first time since the explosion that John had seen Molly. He wasn’t sure about Sherlock, but judging by Molly’s reaction his previous appearance couldn’t have been a well-remembered one. John wondered if she was still waiting for Jim to call. He hoped not.
“Interesting…” Sherlock said as Molly opened the door to the mortuary and fled the room without looking back.
“Be quick about it,” Lestrade said.
John grabbed a pair of surgical gloves from the shelf. Now that the unfortunate hairdresser had been unwrapped, so to speak, cause of death was more than evident. There were two puncture marks on her throat, approximately quarter of an inch in diameter, one on either side of her neck.
“Looks like she was bled to death,” John said examining the wounds. “The wounds were made while she was hanging upside down and then something, probably a rubber tube, was inserted to catch the blood.”
“Excellent,” Sherlock said.
“Horrible, Sherlock, not excellent.”
“For her, yes. We are rather more lucky.”
“Honestly, why do I even bother,” John muttered to himself. “These are very clean, she was either drugged or too exhausted to fight,” he added. “It was done with much care, too. Antiseptic was involved.”
“She was drugged,” Sherlock said firmly. “A cloth soaked in chloroform was pressed against her mouth.”
“Chloroform?”
“Notice the smudges in her make-up around the mouth. Definitely a wet cloth. Chloroform is relatively easy to come by, therefore an obvious assumption.”
“How about something useful?” Lestrade said. “We are on the clock here, and I have a family to inform.”
“Her killer was a man, over six feet tall, approximately two hundred pounds. Menial job, though highly paid. Not a hitman though, too emotional, but comfortable with death. This has all the markings of a first kill, so a new face.” Sherlock slapped his palms together, like an excited schoolgirl. “A new killer, here in London!”
“I try to block him out when he gets like that,” John told Lestrade, who’d sent him a look that offered protective custody, no questions asked. “So far it’s working.”
“Is it?”
“That’s what I tell myself every morning.”
Lestrade looked at his phone. “I need to go. They just found her family. Call me as soon as you get something.”
Sherlock barely noticed Lestrade leaving. The hairdresser’s toes were, apparently, a wealth of information as to the nature of the crime. “Something is strange,” he said eventually.
“Aside from the fact that there is a dead woman on the slab, you mean?”
“No, that’s normal. What is strange is there seems to be no motive.”
“Do you see dead people?”
“This is a morgue, John.”
“Forget it.” John folded his arms. “How would you even know if there was a motive?”
Sherlock straightened. “People are boring, predictable, every last one. There are patterns and there is cause, there is emotion and it stays.” He whirled in place. “Something is wrong with this picture, don’t you see?”
John raised a brow.
“Don’t be pedestrian. Why was she killed? It wasn’t for the money in her purse, clearly. She was a pleasant, non-threatening girl, prone to sequins she didn’t fully like, which indicates easily swayed, which in turn suggests a crowd of friends she wants to impress. She’s so easily lead that she wouldn’t have had many enemies, certainly no one impressive enough.”
“Impressive enough? Sherlock, you are starting to worry me.”
“Starting?” Sherlock paused in the middle of his “I have a case!” tap dance and stared into the distance. “John, if I ever stopped worrying you, you would be frightfully bored.”
“No danger of that happening, not when there’s a dead body around, or parts of one. So why was she killed?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Was she a random bystander then? Is this like Moriarty? Is this Moriarty?”
“Doubtful. There was an explosion, if you recall.”
“Yes, I was there. Since I’m standing here, we can assume it wasn’t half as bad as it looked.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“So why can’t this be Moriarty?”
“Because it would be boring. It is boring. Doing the same thing twice is boring. He couldn’t bear it. Repetition, ha! As though there weren’t a hundred ways to achieve that, a hundred different, interesting crimes to commit!”
“It’s a wonder you are still breathing,” John said, though his throat had to be persuaded. Sherlock wasn’t there, wasn’t looking at the dead hairdresser, wasn’t concerned with the whys and wherefores behind her death. He was back at the pool, watching Moriarty tick.
“It gets unbearable, now and then.” Sherlock raised the dead woman’s arm to inspect her fingernails.
“Then stop.”
John hiccupped. This sometimes happened when he tried to inhale and exhale at the same time. “What did you say?” he and Sherlock said in unison, then looked at one another and said, “What?”
The dead woman sat up, hindered by rigor mortis. John winced at the cracking of her joints. “Sherlock Holmes…” she said, her sallow face tilting towards the detective. “Boo.”
On to Chapter 3
Rating: 14
Genre: drama
Wordcount: 28k
Warnings: slight gore.
Summary: There is a solution to every problem, even if sometimes one needs to step outside the realms of logic, common sense, or even human domain. Sherlock knows this and acts accordingly, while John is left picking up the pieces.
Author's note: the story is finished, will be posted whole over the next couple of days.
Credits: Strongly influenced by Supernatural, oddly enough the Mentalist and Neil Gaiman's Lucifer (to the point of borrowing characters from the latter).
Betaed by
yami_tai. <3 Thank you so much, hun, for all the hard work!John considered a crumpet. Not a fancy food, exactly, nothing he’d serve on any memorable occasion, rather a perfect side dish to afternoon tea. He was in the habit of having his bronzed and buttered, though a touch of Marmite wasn’t unheard of.
“You’re thinking about food,” Sherlock said, proving once and for all that his genius brain was overflowing and taking up space in others’, as John’s beautiful, bronze crumpets became soaked in blood that was dripping from something distasteful. “Crumpets, to be precise.”
“You’re thinking of blood dripping onto a porous surface,” John said, absently. The crumpet fantasy was crumbling before his eyes, leaving behind only a blood soaked plate and interesting coagulation patterns.
“How so?” Sherlock asked, curiosity doubling up as confirmation, and John sighed. The curiosity was genuine, gleeful and unrestrained, bordering on hysteria, which meant that waving the question aside now would merely send it hurtling into a wall, whereupon it would bounce and return, tenfold. Sherlock hated his mysteries unsolved.
“It’s four o’clock, teatime, it is cold, therefore I am thinking about warm food. I favour crumpets, therefore you think of crumpets. Your latest experiments all involved blood coagulation, so far on a tile, my sweater, a piece of wood and a bit of carpet. Plenty of accidents happen in the kitchen, testing patterns on food is only sensible, God help me.”
Sherlock barely moved. John sighed, again. “I don’t think I need to elaborate on the dripping, do I?”
Five feet above the ground a lone hand swayed gently in the wind. On its fingers the blood was darkening, and if John were any judge, there would be no more than three to five drops before it became too dense to fall.
The corpse quivered in the gentle breeze. It was sparkling in the harsh, white lights of the police lamps. Her face was hidden by a mass of platinum-blonde hair and her dress was rumpled, which only magnified the effect, as the light picked out the edges of the fabric, every sequin, every fold. She spun above the cobbles like a grotesque parody of a butterfly, caught in the act of emerging from its cocoon.
“I always said the freak was contagious,” Sergeant Donovan said to Lestrade, low enough for the whole street, full of coppers, to pick up.
“You said,” he agreed, wearily waving at Anderson to shut up before he began. “Gentlemen, the crime, if you will.”
“Very well,” Sherlock said and proceeded to outline the details of the victim’s not so private life, including her apparent preference for tall, ginger men. John noted the lone hair on her shoulder and rolled his eyes at the explanation -- Sherlock could be such a git at times -- but didn’t speak.
Challenging Sherlock was risky at this point. Whatever the experiment in the living room yielded had made him tetchy and irritable, and that was a bad state for Sherlock to be in. Bad for other people, that was. So John did the best he could, running interference on the detective’s behalf, stepping in to chat up Anderson before he could have his head bitten off, while Sherlock dashed back and forth, pausing now and then, tilting his head, sniffing at the corpse’s collar and some random piece of fluff that had found its way into her hair.
John could swear Sherlock was half-squirrel. Perhaps somewhere underneath the coat there was a fluffy grey tail, he thought and snickered. That would explain a lot, though John would prefer not to have to have that discussion with Mummy.
“John,” Sherlock said, uncomfortably close to John’s ear.
“What?”
“Cause of death?”
John blinked. She was dreadfully pale, not at all unlike a corpse, but... “I would say bled to death, except…”
“Except, of course, there is no blood. Splendid. We can go now.”
“Done already?”
“Of course.”
“Sherlock,” Lestrade said, rolling his eyes. “Would you deign to share your insights, before you flutter off?”
“Flutter off?” Sherlock repeated, putting enough stress on both words to depress the ground underneath his feet. Somewhere in the background Anderson and Donovan snickered.
“Nevermind. Who did it?”
“Her client.”
“Well, that narrows it down. Anything more specific?”
“I’m going to need to see the body,” Sherlock said.
“Sure, soon as we get her down. I’ll give you a call.” Lestrade wore the long-suffering look of a man suffering a hideous injustice, but Sherlock was already striding out of alley, pulling John behind him with the force of his personality.
“So, a second Christmas and it’s only April. You must be ecstatic.”
Sherlock paused to look at John. “Why?”
“I’d assumed that this is the work of a serial killer.” John considered the obvious, but dismissed it, offhand. Moriarty was a genius but he made sure he inflicted the maximum amount of pain possible, and that was best achieved before bodies became corpses.
“I must be a dreadful influence,” Sherlock said. “You almost seem excited.”
“So, is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How so?”
“Obviously, this had been done by someone proficient at killing. This was no accident, and she didn’t see it coming. Why though? She had very little money on her and her handbag wasn’t far from the scene.” Sherlock paused for effect and held the pause, still drawing breath.
John took pity after a few moments, when Sherlock looked like he might be about to explode. “How do you figure?” he asked innocently, listening to Sherlock’s relieved, rapid-fire speech, full of words such as “indentation”, “spatter”, “obviously” and, oddly enough, “hair gel”.
“I expect he asked her out, so she locked up the salon and followed. There’s a pub near by, best reached through this alley.”
“Hang on, salon?”
“Hairdressing, yes.”
“I thought she was a prostitute.”
“Clearly, you haven’t spent much time with women.”
“Not prostitutes, no. Have you?”
“Have you the barest inkling how interconnected the sex industry and the criminal world are?”
“That doesn’t answer my question.” John hoped he was imagining this, but he was a damn doctor and he could recognise a blush when he saw one. “How much time have you spent in the company of prostitutes?”
Sherlock was silent for a long while. “You don’t really want to know.”
“No probably not.” John shook his head. “What now?”
“I need to examine the body in the morgue. Cause of death isn’t immediately apparent.”
“They have perfectly good pathologists on payroll.”
“Ah, pathologists,” Sherlock said, his tone assigning them the position on his scale of respect somewhere between hairdressers (performing a necessary service), but well below prostitutes (a valuable source of information). This would put them on the level of detective inspectors, John supposed, or thereabouts.
“So that young woman you had in our flat today was…?” John asked before he could think about it too hard. Sherlock had no trouble whatsoever walking into everybody else’s private lives.
“What woman?”
“Strange, I don’t recall any head trauma.”
“Really, John, if you so desire to be cryptic, you need to start making some kind of sense. Otherwise what you are spouting is gibberish.”
John rolled his eyes. “I was asking if she was a prostitute.”
“It.”
“It what?”
“It wasn’t a woman, therefore the feminine pronoun is unnecessary.”
John blanched. He wasn’t in a hurry to forget the sight -- it was a woman, certainly. She was too petite to have ever had been a man, for starters, and even if he was wrong there, John was quite certain that it was quite impossible for plastic surgeons to adjust the shoulder-width-to-head ratio. Not unless his knowledge of the medical profession was grossly out of date, that was.
“What do you mean ‘it’?” he said, carefully, because while he suspected Sherlock of a great many crimes against human sensibility, denying someone the right to be identified grammatically as a person was not one of them.
“It was a demon,” Sherlock said. “Sichuan?”
“Yes, do we have that much time?” Then, “Hang on, what do you mean it was a demon?”
“There’s a splendid Sichuan place nearby.”
“What, you’re eating now?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Of course, what was I thinking?” John followed in Sherlock’s brisk footsteps, all the while wondering what course of action he should now take. He liked to think he’d become well versed in Sherlock-speak, a necessity when tagging along someone who viewed human feelings as irrelevant. Sherlock had been sincere when he spoke of demons, and John wondered how much worse it was than the end Sergeant Donovan prophesied for him.
For Sherlock it would have been the worst possible outcome, John knew, being denied the one thing he truly appreciated. Being declared insane would have been the ultimate insult.
“I’m not insane,” Sherlock said without looking back.
John resolved not to breathe a word, not until the delusions became a threat.
“I appreciate the sentiment, John, but I am perfectly sane. You can trust me on this.”
And they were back to the regularly scheduled programme of mind reading. “Demons don’t exist, Sherlock.”
“Wrong. Ah, here we are.” The detective held open the door to a tiny restaurant. John caught the whiff of pork in sesame sauce and ginger. “Good evening. We’ll have the pork and egg-fried rice, quickly please.”
The waiter disappeared before John had the chance to open his mouth, but that was hardly unusual.
“So, demons,” John started, wondering how soon he could work in a tentative question about any other disturbing phenomena. “How do you know they exist?”
Sherlock stared at him. The look went on so long that John started fidgeting uncomfortably. “I had a brain tumour,” Sherlock said eventually, placing his long finger against his forehead. “Right here. Inoperable, they said.”
“Medicine is evolving,” John managed to stammer out through the terror. “Just because it’s too difficult to extract now, it may not be so in a couple of years.”
“It’s not an issue anymore.”
“Sherlock, for God’s sake, you cannot be so cavalier with your life!”
“I said ‘had’, John. It’s not there any more.”
“Oh. So it was operable?”
“It wasn’t.” Sherlock smirked. “There was a doctor who offered to try, but the risks he proposed were preposterous.”
“Sherlock, for a brain tumour risks are, by necessity, acceptable.”
“Are they?” Sherlock glared, John hadn’t seen him this emotional since the last episode of boredom. “This is my brain, John. Anything else, I wouldn’t have cared. Take a lung, or a leg, I couldn’t care less. But my brain, John, a tumour in the frontal lobe.”
“You are more than a brain, Sherlock,” John hissed.
“Ah, details.” Sherlock toyed with a saltshaker as the food arrived. “Bodies are overrated.”
“So what happened? A remission?”
“I made a deal with a demon,” Sherlock said calmly.
“I’m sorry, could you please say that again? I think I might have misheard.”
“I made a deal with a demon.”
John counted to ten. “You are aware demons do not exist, aren’t you?”
“That is a common logical fallacy. Just because you have seen no conclusive proof of something’s existence, doesn’t mean it cannot possibly be out there.”
“You know, when I pictured us having this argument, I used the exact same words. I should have known it would end up being the other way around.”
“You plan our arguments?” Sherlock asked raising a brow in such a comical fashion John had to laugh.
“I assumed it would have to happen, sooner or later. Just like it did with the solar system.”
“Ah, the solar system. Why is that so important to you? We live on a giant rock, what does it really matter which way it turns. No practical use.”
“Whereas demons have enormous practical use.” John chewed in silence for a while. “What would you offer a demon, anyway? For a little bit of practical surgery?”
“They are obsessed with souls,” Sherlock said, offhandedly, already engrossed in the mannerisms of the restaurant’s other patrons, while John nearly choked on a piece of boiled Chinese leaf.
“You’d sell your soul?” he said, incredulous.
Sherlock turned to him, confused. “You deny that demons exist, yet you get so offended at the mention of a purely philosophical entity, which is only quantifiable as electrical impulses? You might as well be offended that the computers don’t get burials.”
“Sherlock…” John started and found he had no words. “It is your soul. I mean, I don’t believe in demons, but you are talking about your soul.”
“Repeating the word doesn’t really prove it’s anything but the firing of synapses.”
“Oh, and demons are more than the figment of imagination, are they? How is that you believe in demons, anyway?”
“I have proof, John.” Sherlock smiled, and for a second John really, really could believe in all manners of supernatural creatures. “I have x-rays, and I have the MRI scans of my brain, taken within a single week. On one there is a tumour, on the others it is gone, as if it was never there. None of those so-called doctors could offer a satisfying explanation.”
“Spontaneous remissions have been known to happen,” John said, defending his profession as best he could. He imagined Don Quixote approached windmills with similar zeal.
“Yes,” Sherlock said in the voice of a man who had studied every available case that claimed as much. “Not in this case.” He looked at the blank wallpaper, no doubt reading the establishment’s history from its texture.
“You are surprisingly okay with that,” John said after a minute. He wondered how that could be, when most of Sherlock’s life had been built on a foundation of logic and demons couldn’t possibly fit into that picture easily.
Sherlock, as though sensing this train of thought, gave John a long look. “I’m not pleased by the whole affair, if that’s what you mean. I found the experience distasteful and thoroughly unsettling.”
John knew that tone of voice. It was in use often, when Sherlock spoke of the weather. Like it was a necessary evil that he would gladly dispense of, even though he was aware it had its uses.
“Still, don’t you think it’s unwise-”
“They have excellent desserts, I’m told.”
Ah yes, debating with Sherlock. John suspected he might well find himself a cosy spot on the roof and shoot his gun at the moon. He ate his meal in silence, instead, at least up until Sherlock’s phone beeped and the meal was interrupted, as countless others before had been, by the joyous exclamation of “Come, John, there is a dead body waiting for us.”
John sighed, gathered up his things, looked around for the waiter to pay and was instead ushered out into the street. The joy of going out to eat with Sherlock was that you never had to pay for another meal in your life. John felt bad about it, most of the time. If he wasn’t half-broke, he’d insist on paying every now and then, but his stomach often complained louder than his pride.
*****
This was the first time since the explosion that John had seen Molly. He wasn’t sure about Sherlock, but judging by Molly’s reaction his previous appearance couldn’t have been a well-remembered one. John wondered if she was still waiting for Jim to call. He hoped not.
“Interesting…” Sherlock said as Molly opened the door to the mortuary and fled the room without looking back.
“Be quick about it,” Lestrade said.
John grabbed a pair of surgical gloves from the shelf. Now that the unfortunate hairdresser had been unwrapped, so to speak, cause of death was more than evident. There were two puncture marks on her throat, approximately quarter of an inch in diameter, one on either side of her neck.
“Looks like she was bled to death,” John said examining the wounds. “The wounds were made while she was hanging upside down and then something, probably a rubber tube, was inserted to catch the blood.”
“Excellent,” Sherlock said.
“Horrible, Sherlock, not excellent.”
“For her, yes. We are rather more lucky.”
“Honestly, why do I even bother,” John muttered to himself. “These are very clean, she was either drugged or too exhausted to fight,” he added. “It was done with much care, too. Antiseptic was involved.”
“She was drugged,” Sherlock said firmly. “A cloth soaked in chloroform was pressed against her mouth.”
“Chloroform?”
“Notice the smudges in her make-up around the mouth. Definitely a wet cloth. Chloroform is relatively easy to come by, therefore an obvious assumption.”
“How about something useful?” Lestrade said. “We are on the clock here, and I have a family to inform.”
“Her killer was a man, over six feet tall, approximately two hundred pounds. Menial job, though highly paid. Not a hitman though, too emotional, but comfortable with death. This has all the markings of a first kill, so a new face.” Sherlock slapped his palms together, like an excited schoolgirl. “A new killer, here in London!”
“I try to block him out when he gets like that,” John told Lestrade, who’d sent him a look that offered protective custody, no questions asked. “So far it’s working.”
“Is it?”
“That’s what I tell myself every morning.”
Lestrade looked at his phone. “I need to go. They just found her family. Call me as soon as you get something.”
Sherlock barely noticed Lestrade leaving. The hairdresser’s toes were, apparently, a wealth of information as to the nature of the crime. “Something is strange,” he said eventually.
“Aside from the fact that there is a dead woman on the slab, you mean?”
“No, that’s normal. What is strange is there seems to be no motive.”
“Do you see dead people?”
“This is a morgue, John.”
“Forget it.” John folded his arms. “How would you even know if there was a motive?”
Sherlock straightened. “People are boring, predictable, every last one. There are patterns and there is cause, there is emotion and it stays.” He whirled in place. “Something is wrong with this picture, don’t you see?”
John raised a brow.
“Don’t be pedestrian. Why was she killed? It wasn’t for the money in her purse, clearly. She was a pleasant, non-threatening girl, prone to sequins she didn’t fully like, which indicates easily swayed, which in turn suggests a crowd of friends she wants to impress. She’s so easily lead that she wouldn’t have had many enemies, certainly no one impressive enough.”
“Impressive enough? Sherlock, you are starting to worry me.”
“Starting?” Sherlock paused in the middle of his “I have a case!” tap dance and stared into the distance. “John, if I ever stopped worrying you, you would be frightfully bored.”
“No danger of that happening, not when there’s a dead body around, or parts of one. So why was she killed?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Was she a random bystander then? Is this like Moriarty? Is this Moriarty?”
“Doubtful. There was an explosion, if you recall.”
“Yes, I was there. Since I’m standing here, we can assume it wasn’t half as bad as it looked.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“So why can’t this be Moriarty?”
“Because it would be boring. It is boring. Doing the same thing twice is boring. He couldn’t bear it. Repetition, ha! As though there weren’t a hundred ways to achieve that, a hundred different, interesting crimes to commit!”
“It’s a wonder you are still breathing,” John said, though his throat had to be persuaded. Sherlock wasn’t there, wasn’t looking at the dead hairdresser, wasn’t concerned with the whys and wherefores behind her death. He was back at the pool, watching Moriarty tick.
“It gets unbearable, now and then.” Sherlock raised the dead woman’s arm to inspect her fingernails.
“Then stop.”
John hiccupped. This sometimes happened when he tried to inhale and exhale at the same time. “What did you say?” he and Sherlock said in unison, then looked at one another and said, “What?”
The dead woman sat up, hindered by rigor mortis. John winced at the cracking of her joints. “Sherlock Holmes…” she said, her sallow face tilting towards the detective. “Boo.”
On to Chapter 3
