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John made tea, once he'd located the teabags; Sherlock had shelved a year's worth of Shooting Times & Country Magazine in front of the teabags and sugar. John was about eighty percent certain that this was a suggestion that John somehow acquire a 12-gauge shotgun, though what possible use Sherlock thought that had in London was beyond him.
"I'm not getting a shotgun," he said, as Sherlock rearranged evidence on the kitchen table for the tenth time.
"Of course you're not," Sherlock said. "You can't imagine why I would want such a thing in London, and you're quite correct. I don't. I want a rifle; get that instead."
"Are you actually insane? I'm not, I don't know, joining a shooting club and going through the whole thing just so you can -- you know what? I don't even want to know why you want a rifle. I should've ditched my gun in the Thames when I moved in with you."
"Don't be ridiculous, John. I have the skull, and you have your gun."
John set Sherlock's tea down on the table by a pile of photographs, and didn't bother to answer; there wasn't anything to say to that, because it was true. Sherlock took a sip of tea and started tacking bits of evidence up to the walls. "Did you steal all this," John asked, "or did the police actually let you make copies?"
"Don't be absurd," Sherlock answered, and frowned at the snapshot of Grace from Adler's files. "Something's wrong," he said. "Why can't I see it?" He drummed his fingers, fidgeted, twisted his hands in his hair, sipped his tea. He took a report typed up by Adler and put it next to a report by Lestrade, and read both at the same time. Then he stood, again, and stared out the window for several minutes. The nicotine patches stood out on his bare forearm. "John," he said, finally, turning away, "keep an eye out for Lestrade, please."
John had long since given up asking how Sherlock knew when the police were going to turn up. He kept one eye on the window, and one eye on Sherlock; Sherlock paced, agitated, gesturing at nothing. Outside, a police car pulled up, its lights off. "Sherlock," John said. "He's here. I'll go let him in." He got to the door and opened it just as Lestrade reached it.
"I need to talk to Holmes," he said, and John jerked his head at the stairs; Lestrade took them two at a time and John followed.
"Yes, what," Sherlock demanded, as soon as Lestrade crossed the threshold.
"Adler's had Leon Blank arrested for the murder."
"What?" Sherlock said. "Blank's innocent. Well. Innocent of extremely artistic murder, in any case." He turned back to the wall, hands in his pockets; John could see the tension in his shoulders.
"Not the way Adler sees it." Lestrade paused, and the pause hung heavy in the air. "Holmes," he said, slowly, "I've got an itch in my brain."
Sherlock made a hissing noise through his teeth. "That's because you're not entirely useless. Give me everything."
Lestrade handed over a fat yellow envelope. "You're not supposed to have that, and you didn't get it from me," he said. "Though from the looks of your table you've half of it anyway."
"Yes, yes," said Sherlock, already shuffling the contents of the envelope about. "Is the audio in here?"
"No, but come by tomorrow morning and I'll have a CD for you," Lestrade said, and rubbed his eyes. "Look, Adler's obsessed because Grace was a student of his sister's. I interviewed her; she's pretty broken up about it. No leads on the parents, though. I'll email you my report when I write it up but I don't think there's much useful there. But him -- I don't know about him. He might come around to see you." He gestured at the envelope again. "That's one of the things that makes my brain itch," he said. "I told Adler I'd given it to you. He ought to've started in on me about regulations, but he didn't. Weirdest thing."
Sherlock's head snapped up. "That is odd," he said. "I wonder -- " He broke off, staring at something only he could see.
"Can you get us the evidence you pulled from Blank's flat?" John asked, after a moment, when it became clear Sherlock wasn't going to speak again. "And what are the odds of me getting a shotgun certificate?"
"Yes to one," said Lestrade, "and not a chance in hell to the second." He pulled out his phone and started texting; no doubt one of Anderson's minions would turn up soon with an annoyed expression and fat sacks of evidence (or non-evidence, as the case may be).
"I wanted you to get a rifle, John," Sherlock said, setting the file down on the table.
"No firearms certificates of any kind," said Lestrade, without looking up from his phone. Sherlock made an exasperated noise.
"Buck up," John said. "I'll buy you an airgun next Christmas."
Lestrade snickered. When Sherlock glared at him, he said "I'll just show myself out, then. Til tomorrow."
* * *
By midnight, John could almost feel Grace's hopeless eyes on his skin. He laid out all the evidence -- theirs and Lestrade's -- in chronological order. Sherlock flung himself into his favorite chair and picked up his violin; the music he drew from it was chilly and unpleasant and oddly familiar. "What is that?" John asked.
"The music that was playing at the scene," Sherlock said.
"You can remember it?"
"Of course. But I can't place it; I've never heard it before." He forced his voice into a little-girl's voice, breathless and weary. "Testing, testing --"
"God, don't," John said. "That's just eerie."
"It could be original," Sherlock said, setting the violin down. "The killer may have written it just for that particular work of art."
"I've never known an artist to stop with just one -- one, whatever," John said. "There's always the next painting, or performance."
Sherlock leaned forward, intent. "Yes."
"So what's next?" John asked, and Sherlock stretched himself out of his chair like a cat.
"Unknowable," he said. "Why work in human flesh? It's quite mad to work in flesh at all; flesh decays."
"Perhaps decay is meant to be part of it."
"Ahhhh--John, John, you simple, lovely man, I can't do without you. Yes. What if decay is part of the art? Suppose it is, it may tell us what his earlier works have looked like: corruption of the young, perhaps. Poisonings, oh, poisonings of animals -- two years ago, there was a spate of poisonings of dogs, John, do you remember?"
John tilted his head and pressed his mouth shut over anything he might have said in answer.
"Oh, Afghanistan," Sherlock said. "I must plot the poisonings on a map." He set aside the violin and began digging in one of his piles of papers, surfacing with a jar of push pins and a map of London. "Go on my computer; there's a folder for animal poisonings," he said, waving a hand at John and pinning the map to the wall.
"Of course you have a folder for animal poisonings," John said, but sat down and poked away at the damn thing. "Poisonings - Animal" contained a video of a monkey on a trampoline, six files about cats, a picture of a parrot with a cuttlefish, and there: "London 2008 dogs". He read off the locations of each dead dog to Sherlock, who put red pins in for the dogs and blue for the art museum and the homes of Grace Blue's associates: the art museum was much closer to the dogs than it was to Blank's or Stone's places.
"It's odd, the dogs," Sherlock said. "Normally animals are poisoned near their homes. The poisoner wants to hurt the animal, send a message to the owner. These dogs though, were all taken from their homes and turned loose in areas they didn't know. I couldn't work it out; why do that? The owners find out anyway, I suppose, but why risk moving a strange dog? Risking a bite, or someone seeing you with the dog -- oh, audience, perhaps the audience is important. Perhaps the goal is to be seen, but never to be caught."
"Part of the art."
"Yes."
"Going from poisoning dogs to this monstrosity is quite an escalation," John said. "Even if you're right about him beating up prostitutes, it's a huge leap."
"Of course I'm right," Sherlock said, his eyes moving over the map, hands on his hips. He caught his bottom lip between his teeth and worried it. "The trouble with poisoning dogs is they're so variable. They ingest more or less poison, they vomit it up or don't, they loop back on themselves or don't. Messy."
John walked up beside him and shoved his hands in his pockets. "You sound as if you've tried it."
Sherlock half-laughed. "Oh, yes, and you're next. Do tell me if you feel faint; I'm worried I miscalculated the dose as you're still talking."
"Last time I eat anything you make," John answered, and Sherlock sighed.
"I have never intentionally poisoned an animal. I overfed Mycroft's fish once, but I hardly think that counts." He paused, and then said "And once I gave Mummy's dogs some kippers that had turned and some dodgy eggs, but in my defence I was four years old. It's just that you can hardly rely on dogs for evidence. People are covered in arrows and doing a little "here I am!" dance most of the time, but dogs can't be arsed. Focus, John!"
John shook his head. "Only you would think dogs can't be arsed to get anyone to notice them."
Sherlock started gesturing. "People go from here--" he cut the air with his hand "--to there--" he cut the air on the other side, fingertips brushing John's sleeve "--with purpose. They rarely wander aimlessly; when they do, there's a reason for it, plain to see. Dogs just bugger off. Oh, he's got mud from this place on his paw, but plants from this other place in his ears -- which means anything? Do either of them? He could just have been having a lark on his way to his tragic demise; there's no way of knowing." He stopped, breathing hard. " I can't see anything," he hissed, jabbing his forefinger angrily at the laid-out evidence. "Nothing. It's as meaningless as mud in a dog's fur, all of this. I'm missing something." He threw himself back down in his chair and began to play Grace's music again.
John went to make more tea. The ritual of kettle and cup brought him back from Mummy's dogs (what kind of dogs did Mummy Holmes have? Corgis, like the queen? A proper pack of foxhounds? Or perhaps a pair of vicious terriers, to match her sons) to the case. He carried the tea-tray into the living room and set it where Sherlock could reach it, if he felt like it. "Tell you what," he said, sipping contemplatively. "When I go, I'd like there to be more left of me than an old photo."
"Leave me your gun," Sherlock said, "and I shall leave you my violin." He cradled the instrument to his cheek, eyes half-closed. John finished his tea and stretched out on the sofa for a nap.
He woke with a start when Sherlock yelped and sprang upright, still holding his violin. "The photo. John, of course, of course." He set the violin down and unpinned Grace's photograph from the wall, kissed it lightly. "Let's go," he said, groping blindly for his coat. John put it in reach of Sherlock's grasping hand before grabbing his own on the way out the door.
It was still dark out; he rubbed his eyes, wondering how long he'd slept. "What time is it?"
"Five a.m.," Sherlock answered. "Text Lestrade to meet us at the Yard. Taxi!" In the back of the cab, Sherlock drummed his fingers, ecstatic. "The photo's all wrong, John, all wrong. Look at it, really look at it."
John took the photo and looked: it was Grace, like always. "I don't see," he said, and Sherlock's face creased in a smile. John looked harder. "I don't see it, Sherlock."
Sherlock snatched it out of his hand. "I'm surrounded by idiots," he said. They looked out of the windows in silence the rest of the way to the Yard.
Lestrade was in his office, slogging through paperwork by the looks of it. Sherlock slapped the photograph of Grace down on the desk. "Where did Adler get this?" he demanded.
Lestrade blinked. "I don't know. His sister, I suppose."
"Then why is she on Leon Blank's bed?" Sherlock asked. "She's half-naked; there's drug paraphernalia. It's a personal photograph, certainly, but unless Adler's sister is involved, he didn't get it from her. So. Where?"
Lestrade picked it up, turned it over in his fingers. He looked irritated and thoughtful. "Blank might have had it. Or Ramona Stone, his drugs connection. They wouldn't've given it to Adler, though."
John frowned. "He could have, I don't know, taken it from Blank's flat at some point." Lestrade shot him a look. "You said he's obsessed. Obsessed people do things they shouldn't."
"Don't I know it," Lestrade said.
Sherlock had been leaning on the desk; now his spine straightened and he looked thunderstruck. "Adler," he said, slowly, "is not a police detective. He's been lying to us since the start."
Lestrade hissed through his teeth. "Are you sure?" At Sherlock's nod, he grabbed for his phone. "Donovan! Donovan! Find everything you can on Detective Inspector Nathan Adler. Now." He hung up the phone and said, "If he's lying, his sister has to be in on it. I checked her out; she is what she says she is. So what game are they playing?"
"Maybe they're telling the truth about Blank and Grace," John answered. Sherlock's eyes were closed, his face shuttered; he was thinking. John could see his eyes twitching under the eyelids.
"Oh," Sherlock breathed, eyes opening. "They're not playing a game at all; they're perfectly serious." He leaned over John into Lestrade's space, his face intent. "The obsession is real."
"Nathan Adler blames Blank for the murder, any rate," said Lestrade. "Whether he genuinely thinks Blank used his own hands or not, I don't know."
Sherlock opened his mouth, and then did a double-take at Lestrade's desk. He shuffled aside some papers, pocketed a CD, and picked up a theatre programme and a handwritten note. "Nathan Adler's a woman," he said, his voice low. "Nathan Adler's his own sister."
"What?" said John.
* * *
Holmes liked to give a fellow whiplash, Lestrade was sure, but this particular pronouncement seemed more astonished than theatrical.
"Nathan's Irene?" he said, and Holmes stretched his mouth into something that was nearly a smile.
"Oh, yes. Very good." He turned the note over in his hand, then held it out; Lestrade took it and frowned.
"You know from this?"
"Yes."
"How?" said Dr Watson, bless him.
"The signature. Look at the surname, and look at Irene Adler's signature on the programme."
"I'll be damned," Dr Watson said.
"And she walked strangely, do you recall, at the murder scene? And the eyes."
"I recall you mentioning it," Lestrade said. "I didn't notice, myself."
"God, you people. What I do isn't a trick. You just have to observe. Have you learned nothing?" He sighed. "She walked strangely because she was controlling her hips to make her walk more like a man's; her natural gait would be a dead giveaway. And her eyes were wrong because she'd applied her false eyebrows hastily when she heard about the murder, and it threw the proportions off."
That explained what'd been so off about Adler's face when he -- she -- came to Lestrade's office after arresting Blank. "She must've fixed them later," he said. "Something was wrong; the face didn't match my memory." He rubbed the back of his neck. "But I saw Irene Adler up close. She looks like her brother, but not that much like him."
Holmes waved a dismissive hand. "You weren't looking properly, Lestrade, you never do. Excellent makeup, of course, to pass up close as a man; I wish I'd been able to meet her."
Dr Watson had his hands on his hips; he looked thoughtful. "She dressed as a man to throw us off?"
"And to assume authority, I presume," Holmes said. "People are so much more willing to believe authority from a man -- isn't that so, Sally?" Donovan had just come in the door, her phone in her hand and an annoyed expression on her face.
"Piss off," she said to Holmes, and to Lestrade, "No such person as a Detective Inspector Nathan Adler, sir."
"Thank you, we know," said Holmes. "She's a woman." He looked rapt. "She's very good. Getting in here, stealing a police car, making people jump, oh. Excellent work."
"So he was just making it all up?" Donovan asked. "And all of us fell for it?"
"She." said Holmes.
"Oldest trick in the book," Dr Watson said. "You look the part, you act the part, everyone believes it even if it's not real."
Holmes smiled at Dr Watson, then: his rare, real smile, not the ecstatic, manic smile Lestrade had seen a hundred times, or the somewhat less common I've-got-a-joke smile. The man looked inexplicably pleased by something Dr Watson had said, and damned if Lestrade could figure out what.
Donovan shook her head. "But how did she get in anywhere? Even if she faked an ID, it's all punch codes."
"Shoulder surfing," Dr Watson answered. "It's how I'd do it, anyway." He tapped some numbers on his phone and held it out to Donovan. "Your code," he said, and she huffed angrily.
"You never got that yourself," she said, and jerked her head at Holmes. "You got it from him."
"Yes," said Dr Watson. "I did. And he got it by shoulder surfing. If he can do it, Adler can do it."
"So then why bring me in at all?" Lestrade wondered aloud, then promptly wished he hadn't; the scathing look Holmes was giving him was more than a man should have to bear.
"She needed real police," Holmes said. "To hold Blank afterwards. She needed to make sure Blank was delivered in a tidy little box, and she couldn't trust you to do that, so she had to play the part. But she couldn't play it far enough, not all the way to court."
"But she could get Blank off the street," Dr Watson said. "And hope that the police could take it from there."
"Giftwrapped," Holmes said. "I've never liked giftwrapping."
"That's because you never get any presents except body parts, where the wrapping is pointless, and scarves, where the wrapping makes it look as if someone cared when really they just had a girl in a shop do it up," said Dr Watson, and Holmes crinkled up his eyes as if he were happy in some kind of normal human way.
Donovan noticed, too, because she frowned and said, "How'd you get him to act halfway human?"
"I beat him with sticks on a regular basis," answered Dr Watson, without even blinking.
"Speak roughly to your little boy," Holmes murmured, looking fond and happy again. It was beginning to give Lestrade the creeps, on top of the damn headache he was getting from this Adler nonsense. He rubbed his temples, trying -- he suspected futilely -- to ease some of the tension, and turned to Donovan. "Right. I don't want us to tip Adler off that we know about her. Send someone to stake out her place, but she's way down my priority list." He pointed at Holmes. "You, Sherlock, still have a murder to solve, and frankly, my people are stretched a little thin right now. We're not chasing after her unless we have to."
Holmes said, "It may not be worth the time, staking out Adler's home. She's very good, and I doubt watching her will get us any closer to our killer." He shivered ecstatically. "Two clever people in one case, Lestrade; you've outdone yourself. John!" He pulled the CD Lestrade had made for him out of his pocket -- when had he taken it? -- and twirled it between his fingers.
"Yes?"
"Let's have a cup of tea and listen to some delightful music at home, shall we?" He stalked out of the room in that imperial way he had; Dr Watson raised his brows, shrugged, and followed, his hands in his pockets.
Lestrade watched him go, wanting to drill a hole into Dr Watson's skull with his eyes. The man looked and sounded ordinary as dirt, but he couldn't be; there was something secret under his skin, something hidden in his nerves or his brains, that let him spend days on end with Holmes without either of them appearing tired of the other. Lestrade wished he knew what it was, and if it meant that Dr Watson was as dangerous as Holmes, or merely very very tolerant.
He shook himself and turned to Donovan, who looked as if she needed several hours of sleep; he was sure he looked the same way. She saw his expression and straightened her shoulders.
"Right. Job to do, sir."
* * *
In the cab, Sherlock smiled and tapped his shoe against John's boot. "What?" John asked, and Sherlock curled into the corner of the cab, a lazy smile on his face, and rare genuine warmth in his eyes.
"You," Sherlock said, "are like Adler. Oh, look at me, I'm a doctor, I've got a war wound, I'm an ordinary fellow like anyone else. And everyone believes it. Lovely."
John looked at him steadily; he felt the battle-calm down in his bones. Streetlights played over Sherlock's profile through the windows of the cab. "You don't," he said. "A few others. Even Lestrade, probably, by now."
Sherlock's eyes drifted nearly shut. "You could kill me now," he said, "and your blood pressure wouldn't even go up."
John could feel the muscle in his jaw pulsing, but all he said was, "I need a better reason to kill than you being an abnormally messy flatmate."
"Besides," Sherlock said, "you love what we do."
John laughed, but it felt hollow. "You've known that since Day One."
"Day Two," Sherlock said. "Day One didn't give me enough data to evaluate. But Day Two, ah, John, after Day Two you couldn't've done without me."
"Nor you without me," John said, softly, and was rewarded with a slow blink, and a widening grin.
"Well," said Sherlock, "without you I might have died, and then we'd be nowhere."
John studied his hands, listening to the quiet voice of his conscience. He knew who he was, and what he believed about himself; Sherlock knew him very well, but Sherlock did not know everything. "My blood pressure would go up," he said, eyes on Sherlock's pale face. "Killing you. Killing anyone who wasn't an immediate danger." Sherlock was silent, oceans of stillness deep. "That's who I am, Sherlock. I'm not a machine; you can't point me at a thing and say 'kill' and expect me to do it. There needs to be a reason." He paused, willing steel into his voice. "A good reason."
"I shall endeavour to make sure I always provide one," Sherlock said, his eyes shrouded behind their lids, lashes just brushing his cheekbones, the lazy smile still in place.
Under the circumstances, John rather thought he'd take that as comforting.
* * *
Next chapter: The voyeur of utter destruction
Your shadow on my wall
John made tea, once he'd located the teabags; Sherlock had shelved a year's worth of Shooting Times & Country Magazine in front of the teabags and sugar. John was about eighty percent certain that this was a suggestion that John somehow acquire a 12-gauge shotgun, though what possible use Sherlock thought that had in London was beyond him.
"I'm not getting a shotgun," he said, as Sherlock rearranged evidence on the kitchen table for the tenth time.
"Of course you're not," Sherlock said. "You can't imagine why I would want such a thing in London, and you're quite correct. I don't. I want a rifle; get that instead."
"Are you actually insane? I'm not, I don't know, joining a shooting club and going through the whole thing just so you can -- you know what? I don't even want to know why you want a rifle. I should've ditched my gun in the Thames when I moved in with you."
"Don't be ridiculous, John. I have the skull, and you have your gun."
John set Sherlock's tea down on the table by a pile of photographs, and didn't bother to answer; there wasn't anything to say to that, because it was true. Sherlock took a sip of tea and started tacking bits of evidence up to the walls. "Did you steal all this," John asked, "or did the police actually let you make copies?"
"Don't be absurd," Sherlock answered, and frowned at the snapshot of Grace from Adler's files. "Something's wrong," he said. "Why can't I see it?" He drummed his fingers, fidgeted, twisted his hands in his hair, sipped his tea. He took a report typed up by Adler and put it next to a report by Lestrade, and read both at the same time. Then he stood, again, and stared out the window for several minutes. The nicotine patches stood out on his bare forearm. "John," he said, finally, turning away, "keep an eye out for Lestrade, please."
John had long since given up asking how Sherlock knew when the police were going to turn up. He kept one eye on the window, and one eye on Sherlock; Sherlock paced, agitated, gesturing at nothing. Outside, a police car pulled up, its lights off. "Sherlock," John said. "He's here. I'll go let him in." He got to the door and opened it just as Lestrade reached it.
"I need to talk to Holmes," he said, and John jerked his head at the stairs; Lestrade took them two at a time and John followed.
"Yes, what," Sherlock demanded, as soon as Lestrade crossed the threshold.
"Adler's had Leon Blank arrested for the murder."
"What?" Sherlock said. "Blank's innocent. Well. Innocent of extremely artistic murder, in any case." He turned back to the wall, hands in his pockets; John could see the tension in his shoulders.
"Not the way Adler sees it." Lestrade paused, and the pause hung heavy in the air. "Holmes," he said, slowly, "I've got an itch in my brain."
Sherlock made a hissing noise through his teeth. "That's because you're not entirely useless. Give me everything."
Lestrade handed over a fat yellow envelope. "You're not supposed to have that, and you didn't get it from me," he said. "Though from the looks of your table you've half of it anyway."
"Yes, yes," said Sherlock, already shuffling the contents of the envelope about. "Is the audio in here?"
"No, but come by tomorrow morning and I'll have a CD for you," Lestrade said, and rubbed his eyes. "Look, Adler's obsessed because Grace was a student of his sister's. I interviewed her; she's pretty broken up about it. No leads on the parents, though. I'll email you my report when I write it up but I don't think there's much useful there. But him -- I don't know about him. He might come around to see you." He gestured at the envelope again. "That's one of the things that makes my brain itch," he said. "I told Adler I'd given it to you. He ought to've started in on me about regulations, but he didn't. Weirdest thing."
Sherlock's head snapped up. "That is odd," he said. "I wonder -- " He broke off, staring at something only he could see.
"Can you get us the evidence you pulled from Blank's flat?" John asked, after a moment, when it became clear Sherlock wasn't going to speak again. "And what are the odds of me getting a shotgun certificate?"
"Yes to one," said Lestrade, "and not a chance in hell to the second." He pulled out his phone and started texting; no doubt one of Anderson's minions would turn up soon with an annoyed expression and fat sacks of evidence (or non-evidence, as the case may be).
"I wanted you to get a rifle, John," Sherlock said, setting the file down on the table.
"No firearms certificates of any kind," said Lestrade, without looking up from his phone. Sherlock made an exasperated noise.
"Buck up," John said. "I'll buy you an airgun next Christmas."
Lestrade snickered. When Sherlock glared at him, he said "I'll just show myself out, then. Til tomorrow."
* * *
By midnight, John could almost feel Grace's hopeless eyes on his skin. He laid out all the evidence -- theirs and Lestrade's -- in chronological order. Sherlock flung himself into his favorite chair and picked up his violin; the music he drew from it was chilly and unpleasant and oddly familiar. "What is that?" John asked.
"The music that was playing at the scene," Sherlock said.
"You can remember it?"
"Of course. But I can't place it; I've never heard it before." He forced his voice into a little-girl's voice, breathless and weary. "Testing, testing --"
"God, don't," John said. "That's just eerie."
"It could be original," Sherlock said, setting the violin down. "The killer may have written it just for that particular work of art."
"I've never known an artist to stop with just one -- one, whatever," John said. "There's always the next painting, or performance."
Sherlock leaned forward, intent. "Yes."
"So what's next?" John asked, and Sherlock stretched himself out of his chair like a cat.
"Unknowable," he said. "Why work in human flesh? It's quite mad to work in flesh at all; flesh decays."
"Perhaps decay is meant to be part of it."
"Ahhhh--John, John, you simple, lovely man, I can't do without you. Yes. What if decay is part of the art? Suppose it is, it may tell us what his earlier works have looked like: corruption of the young, perhaps. Poisonings, oh, poisonings of animals -- two years ago, there was a spate of poisonings of dogs, John, do you remember?"
John tilted his head and pressed his mouth shut over anything he might have said in answer.
"Oh, Afghanistan," Sherlock said. "I must plot the poisonings on a map." He set aside the violin and began digging in one of his piles of papers, surfacing with a jar of push pins and a map of London. "Go on my computer; there's a folder for animal poisonings," he said, waving a hand at John and pinning the map to the wall.
"Of course you have a folder for animal poisonings," John said, but sat down and poked away at the damn thing. "Poisonings - Animal" contained a video of a monkey on a trampoline, six files about cats, a picture of a parrot with a cuttlefish, and there: "London 2008 dogs". He read off the locations of each dead dog to Sherlock, who put red pins in for the dogs and blue for the art museum and the homes of Grace Blue's associates: the art museum was much closer to the dogs than it was to Blank's or Stone's places.
"It's odd, the dogs," Sherlock said. "Normally animals are poisoned near their homes. The poisoner wants to hurt the animal, send a message to the owner. These dogs though, were all taken from their homes and turned loose in areas they didn't know. I couldn't work it out; why do that? The owners find out anyway, I suppose, but why risk moving a strange dog? Risking a bite, or someone seeing you with the dog -- oh, audience, perhaps the audience is important. Perhaps the goal is to be seen, but never to be caught."
"Part of the art."
"Yes."
"Going from poisoning dogs to this monstrosity is quite an escalation," John said. "Even if you're right about him beating up prostitutes, it's a huge leap."
"Of course I'm right," Sherlock said, his eyes moving over the map, hands on his hips. He caught his bottom lip between his teeth and worried it. "The trouble with poisoning dogs is they're so variable. They ingest more or less poison, they vomit it up or don't, they loop back on themselves or don't. Messy."
John walked up beside him and shoved his hands in his pockets. "You sound as if you've tried it."
Sherlock half-laughed. "Oh, yes, and you're next. Do tell me if you feel faint; I'm worried I miscalculated the dose as you're still talking."
"Last time I eat anything you make," John answered, and Sherlock sighed.
"I have never intentionally poisoned an animal. I overfed Mycroft's fish once, but I hardly think that counts." He paused, and then said "And once I gave Mummy's dogs some kippers that had turned and some dodgy eggs, but in my defence I was four years old. It's just that you can hardly rely on dogs for evidence. People are covered in arrows and doing a little "here I am!" dance most of the time, but dogs can't be arsed. Focus, John!"
John shook his head. "Only you would think dogs can't be arsed to get anyone to notice them."
Sherlock started gesturing. "People go from here--" he cut the air with his hand "--to there--" he cut the air on the other side, fingertips brushing John's sleeve "--with purpose. They rarely wander aimlessly; when they do, there's a reason for it, plain to see. Dogs just bugger off. Oh, he's got mud from this place on his paw, but plants from this other place in his ears -- which means anything? Do either of them? He could just have been having a lark on his way to his tragic demise; there's no way of knowing." He stopped, breathing hard. " I can't see anything," he hissed, jabbing his forefinger angrily at the laid-out evidence. "Nothing. It's as meaningless as mud in a dog's fur, all of this. I'm missing something." He threw himself back down in his chair and began to play Grace's music again.
John went to make more tea. The ritual of kettle and cup brought him back from Mummy's dogs (what kind of dogs did Mummy Holmes have? Corgis, like the queen? A proper pack of foxhounds? Or perhaps a pair of vicious terriers, to match her sons) to the case. He carried the tea-tray into the living room and set it where Sherlock could reach it, if he felt like it. "Tell you what," he said, sipping contemplatively. "When I go, I'd like there to be more left of me than an old photo."
"Leave me your gun," Sherlock said, "and I shall leave you my violin." He cradled the instrument to his cheek, eyes half-closed. John finished his tea and stretched out on the sofa for a nap.
He woke with a start when Sherlock yelped and sprang upright, still holding his violin. "The photo. John, of course, of course." He set the violin down and unpinned Grace's photograph from the wall, kissed it lightly. "Let's go," he said, groping blindly for his coat. John put it in reach of Sherlock's grasping hand before grabbing his own on the way out the door.
It was still dark out; he rubbed his eyes, wondering how long he'd slept. "What time is it?"
"Five a.m.," Sherlock answered. "Text Lestrade to meet us at the Yard. Taxi!" In the back of the cab, Sherlock drummed his fingers, ecstatic. "The photo's all wrong, John, all wrong. Look at it, really look at it."
John took the photo and looked: it was Grace, like always. "I don't see," he said, and Sherlock's face creased in a smile. John looked harder. "I don't see it, Sherlock."
Sherlock snatched it out of his hand. "I'm surrounded by idiots," he said. They looked out of the windows in silence the rest of the way to the Yard.
Lestrade was in his office, slogging through paperwork by the looks of it. Sherlock slapped the photograph of Grace down on the desk. "Where did Adler get this?" he demanded.
Lestrade blinked. "I don't know. His sister, I suppose."
"Then why is she on Leon Blank's bed?" Sherlock asked. "She's half-naked; there's drug paraphernalia. It's a personal photograph, certainly, but unless Adler's sister is involved, he didn't get it from her. So. Where?"
Lestrade picked it up, turned it over in his fingers. He looked irritated and thoughtful. "Blank might have had it. Or Ramona Stone, his drugs connection. They wouldn't've given it to Adler, though."
John frowned. "He could have, I don't know, taken it from Blank's flat at some point." Lestrade shot him a look. "You said he's obsessed. Obsessed people do things they shouldn't."
"Don't I know it," Lestrade said.
Sherlock had been leaning on the desk; now his spine straightened and he looked thunderstruck. "Adler," he said, slowly, "is not a police detective. He's been lying to us since the start."
Lestrade hissed through his teeth. "Are you sure?" At Sherlock's nod, he grabbed for his phone. "Donovan! Donovan! Find everything you can on Detective Inspector Nathan Adler. Now." He hung up the phone and said, "If he's lying, his sister has to be in on it. I checked her out; she is what she says she is. So what game are they playing?"
"Maybe they're telling the truth about Blank and Grace," John answered. Sherlock's eyes were closed, his face shuttered; he was thinking. John could see his eyes twitching under the eyelids.
"Oh," Sherlock breathed, eyes opening. "They're not playing a game at all; they're perfectly serious." He leaned over John into Lestrade's space, his face intent. "The obsession is real."
"Nathan Adler blames Blank for the murder, any rate," said Lestrade. "Whether he genuinely thinks Blank used his own hands or not, I don't know."
Sherlock opened his mouth, and then did a double-take at Lestrade's desk. He shuffled aside some papers, pocketed a CD, and picked up a theatre programme and a handwritten note. "Nathan Adler's a woman," he said, his voice low. "Nathan Adler's his own sister."
"What?" said John.
* * *
Holmes liked to give a fellow whiplash, Lestrade was sure, but this particular pronouncement seemed more astonished than theatrical.
"Nathan's Irene?" he said, and Holmes stretched his mouth into something that was nearly a smile.
"Oh, yes. Very good." He turned the note over in his hand, then held it out; Lestrade took it and frowned.
"You know from this?"
"Yes."
"How?" said Dr Watson, bless him.
"The signature. Look at the surname, and look at Irene Adler's signature on the programme."
"I'll be damned," Dr Watson said.
"And she walked strangely, do you recall, at the murder scene? And the eyes."
"I recall you mentioning it," Lestrade said. "I didn't notice, myself."
"God, you people. What I do isn't a trick. You just have to observe. Have you learned nothing?" He sighed. "She walked strangely because she was controlling her hips to make her walk more like a man's; her natural gait would be a dead giveaway. And her eyes were wrong because she'd applied her false eyebrows hastily when she heard about the murder, and it threw the proportions off."
That explained what'd been so off about Adler's face when he -- she -- came to Lestrade's office after arresting Blank. "She must've fixed them later," he said. "Something was wrong; the face didn't match my memory." He rubbed the back of his neck. "But I saw Irene Adler up close. She looks like her brother, but not that much like him."
Holmes waved a dismissive hand. "You weren't looking properly, Lestrade, you never do. Excellent makeup, of course, to pass up close as a man; I wish I'd been able to meet her."
Dr Watson had his hands on his hips; he looked thoughtful. "She dressed as a man to throw us off?"
"And to assume authority, I presume," Holmes said. "People are so much more willing to believe authority from a man -- isn't that so, Sally?" Donovan had just come in the door, her phone in her hand and an annoyed expression on her face.
"Piss off," she said to Holmes, and to Lestrade, "No such person as a Detective Inspector Nathan Adler, sir."
"Thank you, we know," said Holmes. "She's a woman." He looked rapt. "She's very good. Getting in here, stealing a police car, making people jump, oh. Excellent work."
"So he was just making it all up?" Donovan asked. "And all of us fell for it?"
"She." said Holmes.
"Oldest trick in the book," Dr Watson said. "You look the part, you act the part, everyone believes it even if it's not real."
Holmes smiled at Dr Watson, then: his rare, real smile, not the ecstatic, manic smile Lestrade had seen a hundred times, or the somewhat less common I've-got-a-joke smile. The man looked inexplicably pleased by something Dr Watson had said, and damned if Lestrade could figure out what.
Donovan shook her head. "But how did she get in anywhere? Even if she faked an ID, it's all punch codes."
"Shoulder surfing," Dr Watson answered. "It's how I'd do it, anyway." He tapped some numbers on his phone and held it out to Donovan. "Your code," he said, and she huffed angrily.
"You never got that yourself," she said, and jerked her head at Holmes. "You got it from him."
"Yes," said Dr Watson. "I did. And he got it by shoulder surfing. If he can do it, Adler can do it."
"So then why bring me in at all?" Lestrade wondered aloud, then promptly wished he hadn't; the scathing look Holmes was giving him was more than a man should have to bear.
"She needed real police," Holmes said. "To hold Blank afterwards. She needed to make sure Blank was delivered in a tidy little box, and she couldn't trust you to do that, so she had to play the part. But she couldn't play it far enough, not all the way to court."
"But she could get Blank off the street," Dr Watson said. "And hope that the police could take it from there."
"Giftwrapped," Holmes said. "I've never liked giftwrapping."
"That's because you never get any presents except body parts, where the wrapping is pointless, and scarves, where the wrapping makes it look as if someone cared when really they just had a girl in a shop do it up," said Dr Watson, and Holmes crinkled up his eyes as if he were happy in some kind of normal human way.
Donovan noticed, too, because she frowned and said, "How'd you get him to act halfway human?"
"I beat him with sticks on a regular basis," answered Dr Watson, without even blinking.
"Speak roughly to your little boy," Holmes murmured, looking fond and happy again. It was beginning to give Lestrade the creeps, on top of the damn headache he was getting from this Adler nonsense. He rubbed his temples, trying -- he suspected futilely -- to ease some of the tension, and turned to Donovan. "Right. I don't want us to tip Adler off that we know about her. Send someone to stake out her place, but she's way down my priority list." He pointed at Holmes. "You, Sherlock, still have a murder to solve, and frankly, my people are stretched a little thin right now. We're not chasing after her unless we have to."
Holmes said, "It may not be worth the time, staking out Adler's home. She's very good, and I doubt watching her will get us any closer to our killer." He shivered ecstatically. "Two clever people in one case, Lestrade; you've outdone yourself. John!" He pulled the CD Lestrade had made for him out of his pocket -- when had he taken it? -- and twirled it between his fingers.
"Yes?"
"Let's have a cup of tea and listen to some delightful music at home, shall we?" He stalked out of the room in that imperial way he had; Dr Watson raised his brows, shrugged, and followed, his hands in his pockets.
Lestrade watched him go, wanting to drill a hole into Dr Watson's skull with his eyes. The man looked and sounded ordinary as dirt, but he couldn't be; there was something secret under his skin, something hidden in his nerves or his brains, that let him spend days on end with Holmes without either of them appearing tired of the other. Lestrade wished he knew what it was, and if it meant that Dr Watson was as dangerous as Holmes, or merely very very tolerant.
He shook himself and turned to Donovan, who looked as if she needed several hours of sleep; he was sure he looked the same way. She saw his expression and straightened her shoulders.
"Right. Job to do, sir."
* * *
In the cab, Sherlock smiled and tapped his shoe against John's boot. "What?" John asked, and Sherlock curled into the corner of the cab, a lazy smile on his face, and rare genuine warmth in his eyes.
"You," Sherlock said, "are like Adler. Oh, look at me, I'm a doctor, I've got a war wound, I'm an ordinary fellow like anyone else. And everyone believes it. Lovely."
John looked at him steadily; he felt the battle-calm down in his bones. Streetlights played over Sherlock's profile through the windows of the cab. "You don't," he said. "A few others. Even Lestrade, probably, by now."
Sherlock's eyes drifted nearly shut. "You could kill me now," he said, "and your blood pressure wouldn't even go up."
John could feel the muscle in his jaw pulsing, but all he said was, "I need a better reason to kill than you being an abnormally messy flatmate."
"Besides," Sherlock said, "you love what we do."
John laughed, but it felt hollow. "You've known that since Day One."
"Day Two," Sherlock said. "Day One didn't give me enough data to evaluate. But Day Two, ah, John, after Day Two you couldn't've done without me."
"Nor you without me," John said, softly, and was rewarded with a slow blink, and a widening grin.
"Well," said Sherlock, "without you I might have died, and then we'd be nowhere."
John studied his hands, listening to the quiet voice of his conscience. He knew who he was, and what he believed about himself; Sherlock knew him very well, but Sherlock did not know everything. "My blood pressure would go up," he said, eyes on Sherlock's pale face. "Killing you. Killing anyone who wasn't an immediate danger." Sherlock was silent, oceans of stillness deep. "That's who I am, Sherlock. I'm not a machine; you can't point me at a thing and say 'kill' and expect me to do it. There needs to be a reason." He paused, willing steel into his voice. "A good reason."
"I shall endeavour to make sure I always provide one," Sherlock said, his eyes shrouded behind their lids, lashes just brushing his cheekbones, the lazy smile still in place.
Under the circumstances, John rather thought he'd take that as comforting.
* * *
Next chapter: The voyeur of utter destruction