Sherlock Holmes and the Thief Of Souls
Mar. 14th, 2022 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bungakertasRating: PG-13
Warning(s): graphic descriptions of violence, depression, minor character death
Pairing(s): canon pairings only
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and related characters and situations are the property of JK Rowling, Warner Brothers, or both. Sherlock and related characters and situations are the property of the BBC. No money changed hands and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Summary: Lestrade asks for Sherlock's help on one of the most baffling cases of either of their careers. And each new piece of information serves only to make it more confusing as they run headlong into a world neither of them knew existed.
Spoilers: All of the HP books. Sherlock up to season 2, pre-Reichenbach, post-Hound.
**IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE**
All HP movie affectations are hereby discarded (for example, house crests on school robes). This fic is book-verse only.
More than that, unless something is actually in the books, I don’t count it as fully canon. Any JKR interviews or any other extra-canonical information I only accept if I like it. The one thing that is sort of in the books which I ignore is that I do not really hold with having fixed dates for the Harry Potter stories, whatever Nearly-Headless Nick’s stupid death-day cake might say. So get all of that out of your heads. It doesn’t affect the story all that much, but you may assume that the whole “the Battle of Hogwarts happened on May 2, 1998 precisely” bit is thoroughly ignored. And any reviews to the tune of same will be referred to this author’s note.
Some stories, usually for the sake of being dramatic, begin on dark and stormy nights. This story begins on a gray and rainy day in London. And it wasn’t dramatic at all. This was, in fact, a perfectly normal occurrence, and it happened on the perfectly normal Baker Street.
All of which was to the disgust of one of the tenants of the first floor flat of number two-two-one Baker Street. His name was Sherlock Holmes.
As far as he was capable, Sherlock Holmes was not an Ordinary Person. Indeed, he had a horror of Ordinariness, in nearly all of its incarnations. Even his appearance was not entirely Ordinary. He was quite a good dresser, and preferred expensive clothes. He was neither strikingly handsome nor distressingly unfortunate-looking. His hair was dark and curly, and he was quite tall and thin. He had blue eyes that seemed to be lit from the inside with the same nervous energy that kept him rushing to and fro or playing violin or irritably texting on his mobile.
His flatmate, Dr. John Watson, was almost as different from him as night was from day. He was short, with fair hair, and hazel eyes. And he would have much preferred to live in a clean flat, but Sherlock’s experiments and papers and assorted things were everywhere. He also had a steady job, something Sherlock found unbearably dull, and a girlfriend, which Sherlock found laughable.
The two of them were better friends than any two people with so seemingly little in common had any right to be.
At that moment, Sherlock was testing the displacement of arsenic through the human eyeball using a dye as an indicator and listening to his damp and disgruntled flatmate put away the groceries he’d bought on the way home. With most people, the grumbling would have been horribly distracting, but from John, Sherlock found it a soothing background noise. Affirmation that, yes, all was indeed right with the world.
As soon as he had the shopping put away, John slouched over towards his favourite chair by the fireplace, a slight limp giving evidence to a horrid day at the surgery, ignoring Sherlock as he passed, and sat down with an unhappy sigh. He had a set of red scratches on his arm, too widely spread to be an animal, but to closely placed to be an adult's.
"What did the child come in for?" Sherlock asked curiously.
John twisted around to look incredulously at him and then just shook his head. "Stitches."
Fear of needles then. "Wasn't his mother there?" The pronoun was a guess, but with only two options Sherlock decided to risk it.
"Foster care. He's not had a good time of it, by all accounts. Not that that excuses the attempted murder, mind," John frowned.
Sherlock nodded and went back to his eyeball, which unfortunately only took up fifteen more minutes of his time. He had, at that moment, little else to do, which would no doubt shortly lead to the horrible, crushing boredom he spent most of his time trying to dodge. He had no cases, and none seemed likely to walk through the door. But if John caught on to that fact, he'd probably follow through with that movie night he'd been threatening and Sherlock wasn't sure he wanted to spend another agonizing hour trying to decide whether or not he really wanted to delete the film from his mind. He'd never tell John this but he didn't enjoy the movies half so much as he liked spending time with his flatmate, but deleting the film meant deleting whatever was associated with it, which wasn't always something he liked doing. Organizing his memory had been useful, but there were certain rules of psychology that he couldn't break.
Just to stave off the inevitable, he actually put away everything from his experiment this time, though he couldn't bring himself to wash anything. He checked the news, noting that the underground was having intermittent trouble with their ventilation, which kept blasting passengers with freezing cold air, and decided that if this was what was being printed, then it was almost certain he would not get a case. He was about to tell John he might as well fetch one of his dull DVDs when an impossible miracle occurred.
His mobile beeped.
Message received, 1:50 PM
67 Onslow Rd. Possible serial.
Lestrade
Sherlock looked up from the screen in unadulterated glee. "Lestrade thinks he has a serial killer."
John frowned in confusion. "But there's been nothing in the papers. You usually notice serials long before the police ask for your help, if they ask at all."
"Exactly," Sherlock agreed, already getting excited. If Lestrade was right (which was likely as Lestrade did not like asking his help in the first place), then whoever this was, they hadn't even gotten Sherlock's attention. That was almost impossible.
Sherlock snatched up his coat and scarf, idly noting that John's limp had vanished as he trotted up the stairs to retrieve his own jacket.
Nearly a half-hour later the two of them were stepping out of a taxi onto a street in Croydon, Sherlock making a disgusted face at the houses on the road. Every boring house on this boring street was exactly the same as every other boring house. Fortunately, Anderson’s team didn’t seem to be working forensics this time. He didn’t recognise anyone on this team at all, and in their blue coveralls, the only one who remotely stood out was the woman with the unfortunately frizzy hair.
John sighed as he caught sight of the person at the door. “Donovan. Brilliant.”
“You don’t like her?” Sherlock asked. He reviewed his mental observations of John’s interactions with the police sergeant and couldn’t recall any particular animosity between the two of them.
John frowned, but answered cryptically, “It’s not important.”
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. John wouldn’t have taken the woman in dislike without good cause. He wasn’t that sort of person. So, whatever John said, it must’ve been something important. It couldn’t be something very obvious or Sherlock would’ve noticed it. And it couldn’t be something John thought he should act on or else he would’ve done so already.
Interesting.
However, with a (possible) serial murder victim about to be taking up his attention, he couldn’t spare the focus on his flatmate, no matter how unusual he was acting.
“Hello, Freak,” Donovan said from the door of the house.
Sally Donovan was, in Sherlock’s opinion, one of the most boringly average people he’d ever met. Average height, average weight, average intelligence. Average, average, average. The one interesting thing she was doing—having an affair with a married man—was both repulsive and involved Anderson, who was unforgivably tiresome. Dull.
Aloud, Sherlock said, “Sergeant Donovan.”
“Hullo, Sally,” John said, quiet and polite like always. If Sherlock hadn’t just been talking to him, he wouldn’t know anything was amiss here.
“Still time to take up that hobby,” she said, standing aside, looking resigned.
John just gave her a patient smile and the two of them continued past that CSI with the hair and up the stairs to the first floor.
There was nothing remarkable about this house. Sherlock couldn’t understand how anyone could wish to live in such a cookie-cutter bland home, but the whole place seemed to have been transported directly out of a magazine. The walls were uniformly clean and painted bright, solid colours. Tastefully bland paintings hung along the staircase and landing. The furniture was upholstered in contrasting colours to the walls, with accent pillows and embroidered throws placed with careful carelessness on the overstuffed chairs.
The resident must be an interior decorator, of all the hateful things. Male, judging by the colours.
Sherlock gained the landing and followed the scowling police presence into the master bedroom.
Whereupon he stopped so short that John, who had been following along, plowed straight into his back.
“Sherlock?” John said, stepping out to the side.
Lestrade turned and caught sight of Sherlock’s face before he could school his expression into his customary ennui. “Exactly,” was his only comment. “This man is the third we’ve found like this.”
Sherlock didn’t even bother trying to hide his surprise at that. “Three?”
John was staring at the crime scene in as much consternation as Sherlock for once, although his focus was on the body rather than the room. But there was no escaping the conclusion they were both forced to make.
This man shouldn’t be dead.
The room was in a disarray, as if there had been a struggle, but the struggle had ended long before the time of this man’s death—dehydration, judging by the sunken eyes, swollen tongue, and that his body looked like it was laid over the wrong skeleton. Death a few hours ago at most, given that the body was not yet in rigor. There was a shattered lamp in the corner, with dust on all the upturned surfaces, and the rumpled bedclothes had settled well into place. The—admittedly unpleasant—smell from the victim suggested he hadn’t gotten up to so much as bathe for the past two days. But, given the position he was in, Sherlock was surprised he’d held it for two minutes. One of his legs was stretched out along the wall, but the other was hooked over the top of his bedside table. His body was flat on his chest, arms stretched out forwards, head was lolling to the side. He had a tattoo on his left arm.
For some reason, between two and three days ago, this man had lost a fight. And after loosing it, he had been left—alive—in a very odd position. The scent of unwashed person in the room was too strong for the victim to have been moved here from somewhere else, meaning he hadn’t left since he’d lost the fight. Perhaps the killer had waited for him to die, then returned to arrange the body?
John was examining the body and said, “Why didn’t he move?” He sounded absolutely mystified.
“He wasn’t posed?” Sherlock asked, now rejecting the idea that the killer had returned.
“No,” John said, bafflement suffusing his tone. “He died exactly as you see him.”
Lestrade said, “We’ve found two others like him, as well. One man, one woman. Always evidence of a struggle, always a few days old, always dead of dehydration.”
There were no restraints on the body, nor any evidence that there ever had been, which meant that the killer somehow induced his victims to stay absolutely still for two to three days while they died, Sherlock noted. Which was, of course, utterly impossible because no one would ever do that. Even if the killer had something to blackmail them with, this man, at least, would’ve moved a little. If only because he was in the most horribly uncomfortable position Sherlock had seen in a long time. But apparently this man had remained, in exactly the position he had been in at the end of the struggle, until he died of thirst.
“And he doesn’t tie them down at all?” John asked.
Sherlock did not bother listening to Lestrade tell John what anyone ought to already know because he’d just realised that the shattered lamp in the corner originally belonged to the bedside table. He knelt down and snapped out his magnifier mostly out of habit, but grew more intent as he realised that there didn’t seem to be any finger- or handprints around the neck or body of the lamp, as he would have expected if it had been thrown across the room.
“What about fingerprints at the other crime scenes?” Sherlock asked.
“From the first scene, we’re not sure. The victim, Thorfinn Rowle, was over sixty-five and the death was ruled natural causes. We can give you the autopsy, and the photos from the scene, but ultimately, he wasn’t processed as a murder. It’s only luck that the same coroner had the second, Eirian Rosier, and smelled a rat,” Lestrade said. “At the Rosier scene, we found her prints everywhere. Her house, so no surprise there. But none from whoever she rowed with—”
“The murderer, unquestionably,” Sherlock interjected, looking for other thrown items to see if there were prints he could use there.
“—And none of her prints were where you’d expect if she had thrown the moved objects across the room,” Lestrade finished.
John blinked. “So, someone came in, had a fight with…?”
“Roderick Jugson,” Lestrade supplied.
“Jugson,” John said, continuing, “a number of his possessions flew around the room, possibly of their own accord, and then Jugson got into this impossibly contortionate pose to wait until he died of thirst while the person he fought with just…left?”
“The murderer certainly didn’t stay long,” Sherlock agreed.
“There’s no evidence this is murder,” Lestrade put in. “Bizarre assaults, possibly, but we can hardly prosecute for dying of thirst. We’re not in a drought, there’s plenty of water in this house—”
“Right, he planned his own suicide in a position like that on purpose,” Sherlock sneered.
“No hairs, no shoe prints, no fingerprints, no tangible evidence of any kind,” Lestrade replied. “Nothing taken, and no one saw the killer come or go from any of the three sites.”
“What about video of the killer?” Sherlock asked.
“There isn’t any,” Lestrade shrugged.
“What?” John asked. Sherlock almost couldn’t believe it himself. No video footage at all was a difficult trick to accomplish.
“And there’s no evidence that they stay after the fight, either,” Lestrade said. “These three people were left alone to live or die as they chose, and all three of them decided to die right where they were without lifting a finger to try and save themselves.”
For the first time in a long time, Sherlock found himself utterly at a loss. No one would simply sit back and wait to die of thirst. It ran contrary to the most basic human survival instincts. The murderer, whoever they were, had done the completely, totally, entirely impossible.
“Where’s his client list?” Sherlock asked. “Did he have anything on at the moment?”
“Client list?” Lestrade asked, totally baffled.
“Yes, client list,” Sherlock snapped. “Obviously this man was an interior decorator. Did he work from home, or is there an office where we’ll find the list?”
“He was an accountant,” Lestrade said, looking bewildered. “Not a very good one, either. He worked for Shad Sanderson. According to his supervisor, he struggled with basic maths, but somehow managed to successfully untangle enough financial puzzles that he was worth his pay cheques.”
“He struggled with basic maths and then pulled off miracle saves to do with complex accounts?” Watson asked, sounding skeptical.
“They couldn’t explain it either. No one ever worked out how he did it,” Lestrade said with a shrug.
Sherlock scowled at that, but decided to move on from the question of employment for the moment. “Who is his next-of-kin?” he asked.
“Doesn’t have one,” Lestrade said. “He’d been on holiday, so no one from work realised anything was wrong until he didn’t come in yesterday or today.”
John nodded. “Enemies?”
"None to speak of," Lestrade answered with a shrug. "Some work spats. But nothing that seemed this serious."
Sherlock gave the room another look over and said, “It’s unlikely the murderer was close to him simply on the fact he doesn't seem to have many friends at all. There are no personal touches whatever in this room. No…this was business.” Sherlock turned to Lestrade. “What about the other two victims?”
“All three on holiday when they died, all three had no contacts.” Lestrade paused, then said, “And they all three had the same tattoo.”
“Then until the investigation is concluded, all three crime scenes belong exclusively to the Yard, correct? Don’t release them to anyone without my authorization,” Sherlock instructed.
Lestrade arched an eyebrow. “I suppose you’ll be promoted to Chief Inspector any day now, then? Detective Inspector Holmes?”
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Please?” He didn’t sound very contrite, but apparently the form was enough as Lestrade nodded. “I’ll have the casefile, then,” Sherlock said, steamrollering on.
Lestrade led them out of the room, picked up a bland manila envelope and thrust it at Sherlock. “There. But if I find you withholding so much as a fingernail of evidence, you’ll be dealing with more than a drugs bust when I catch you. And I will catch you.”
Sherlock took the envelope without acknowledging the threat and charged past that frizzy-headed forensic woman and down the stairs, leaving John to follow him.
It wasn’t until they’d gotten into the cab and were headed back to Baker Street that Sherlock finally allowed himself to grin a bit. “I'm not supposed to be happy that this murder makes absolutely no sense, am I?”
"Not generally," John answered.
"Don't tell anyone."
John rolled his eyes with an indulgent grin. Sherlock would never admit that it was all down to his influence that he hadn’t been jumping up and down in front of the Yarders back there. But now that they were away from the eyes of the police, he didn’t bother to contain his glee.
They arrived at Baker Street, and Sherlock bounded up the stairs. By the time John was done seeing to the cab fare (Sherlock made a mental note to buy him dinner while they worked on the case) Sherlock had covered the outsides of the mirror on their wall—their usual criminology wall—with photos, police reports, and autopsy summations.
While neither Rowle nor Rosier were in such odd poses as Jugson had been, both were discovered in unusual positions, which Sherlock expected John to remark on first as he joined him in front of the mantelpiece.
“Thorfinn, Eirian, and Roderick,” John mused, looking over the collection. “Odd names.”
Sherlock smiled, adding another item to his mental list titled Unpredicted/Incorrectly Predicted Things John Watson Has Done, and said, “Three odd names, three odd poses, three odd murders.”
“I know you don’t think much of Lestrade—” John said.
“The least bad of the Met’s lamentable offerings,” Sherlock agreed.
“—But he did have a point. All three of these people could’ve gotten up to get a drink at any time and they just…didn’t.” John paused to frown deeply at the implications there. “That’s mental, but it’s not murder.”
“At the very least, all three of these people fought with someone before their decisions to suicide,” Sherlock shrugged. “Assaulting someone in their own home is illegal, even if leaving them to kill themselves in an utterly bizarre fashion is not.”
John nodded. “Any ideas?”
“A few. I need to think a bit more,” Sherlock said, eyes wandering over the papers he’d fixed to the mirror.
Although he stuck it out for a little while, John eventually left the mirror and made tea. Some of it materialised in a cup in front of Sherlock at some point before John left for the surgery. Sherlock barely noticed any of this at all, beyond drinking the tea, so lost was he in thought.
When that amount of caffeination failed to make any sort of impression on his system, he made himself a pot of coffee—hands moving almost without his conscious direction—and downed the entire thing as fast as he could.
It was unthinkable that any human being would remain in the position that Jugson had for three days without extraordinary motivation for doing so. However, a thorough search of Jugson’s personal information yielded no suggestions on what he could possibly be so motivated with. Probably it was blackmail of some sort. People could be motivated to do extraordinary things for some kind of reward, but a reward in this case would be next to useless. Jugson would’ve known at the outset of his ordeal that he would not survive it. But the man seemed to have no skeletons in his closet at all to be blackmailed with. He was, reportedly, a snappy dresser, and had few relationships. However, though Sherlock had encountered murderers with stupider reasons for killing than being jealous of their victims’ superior fashion sense, he’d never encountered a murderer this clever who killed for a reason that idiotic.
Clearly, then, Jugson had something in his past that wasn't in the records. But, given his rather unremarkable job history, and the fact that—going off his financial records—he didn’t seem to involve himself with anything but his job, whatever the skeleton was, it had been sitting in the back of his closet collecting dust for some years now.
Sherlock frowned and tried changing tack a bit. He picked up the information on the first victim. Thorfinn Rowle, late fifties to late eighties according to the autopsy, also tended to be well-dressed, worked a mid-level job in a marketing firm, where he had claimed to be fifty-two years of age, and had absolutely no skill for it. Had the same tattoo as the other two victims on his left forearm: a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth. His job history read like a comedy of errors and had been recommended for termination so many times that Sherlock couldn’t understand why it hadn’t actually occurred.
Nor could he determine why the medical examiner had been unable to determine Rowle’s age with any more precision than “late fifties to late eighties.” Even in the absence of a birth certificate, there were a number of ways to make educated guesses, but as Sherlock continued through the report he noted that all of the tests he could have wished for had indeed been performed. There were long reports on Rowle’s teeth, the fusion of his skull, the length of various long bones in his body, the bones in his hand, and even carbon dating involving his eyes. And every test had given different results, finally resulting in one frustrated lab tech scrawling I hate Thorfinn Rowle in one of the margins and then trying to erase the doodle when they realised that they had scribbled it on an official report.
There had been minimal police involvement with his death. There were photographs from fewer angles than Sherlock wanted—though each one demonstrated another house that would have design students fawning over it—and not a shred of useful data after the coroner ruled the death a suicide. However, Doctor Catriona Barrett had appended a short note to the file.
Although I am forced, for lack of evidence, to rule Thorfinn Rowle’s death a suicide, I believe it to be quite the most unusual suicide I have ever seen in my entire career. Though I am unable to support this assertion, my instinct is that Mr. Rowle did not die by his own hand, but was indeed murdered. I strongly suggest that the police keep this file on hand and look into the matter at the earliest available opportunity.
It was, essentially, a futile plea, as Dr. Barrett must’ve known. No police officer would have time for a suicide cold case, and had two more victims not followed Rowle, his murder would’ve no doubt been forgotten. However, since her instincts were correct, Sherlock decided that if he met her in the course of the investigation, he would at least make an effort to be polite.
Next was Eirian Rosier’s file. Sherlock was briefly very grateful that Dr. Barrett had caught her case as well. Similar conflicted results in determining her age was the first thing Dr. Barrett twigged as resembling Rowle, which elevated her yet another notch above idiot in Sherlock’s mind. Rosier worked for a publishing company and, unlike Rowle or Jugson, was not spectacularly bad at it. Certainly she was no stand-out, but her work records showed moderate success in her position and few complaints. Well-dressed, like Rowle and Jugson. Found in her home—kitchen this time; Rowle had been in his sitting room—and again Sherlock was struck with the teeth-grindingly perfect décor in the photographs. He idly noted that John would jokingly suggest that perhaps all the victims had once belonged to an underground society of evil decorators.
Unfortunately, Sherlock was unable to draw any conclusions beyond the blindingly obvious. All three victims had acquired their jobs around the same time and none of them were particularly good at them. Clearly something happened shortly prior to that time which required that they all leave their previous lives. A quick glance at their vital records prior to that showed that all of them were probably forgeries, but he would need to double-check in order to be sure. And whatever life it was they’d run from, it had left them all totally unprepared for their new ones. All of them had thoroughly out-of-date personal computers and mobile phones. Yet they’d all somehow managed to hang on to the jobs they had, despite being either unremarkable or remarkably bad, for over five years. And all this despite the fact that none of them had many connections or friends.
For the first time in a very long time, Sherlock found himself utterly confounded. Not only were the murders impossible, the victims were too.
He turned to speak to John and found himself confronted with an empty room. For the first time, it properly registered that John had indeed gone to work and he was alone in the flat.
He scowled. Once upon a time, before a certain ex-Army doctor had limped into his life, he wouldn’t have cared that he was alone at all.
Warning(s): graphic descriptions of violence, depression, minor character death
Pairing(s): canon pairings only
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and related characters and situations are the property of JK Rowling, Warner Brothers, or both. Sherlock and related characters and situations are the property of the BBC. No money changed hands and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Summary: Lestrade asks for Sherlock's help on one of the most baffling cases of either of their careers. And each new piece of information serves only to make it more confusing as they run headlong into a world neither of them knew existed.
Spoilers: All of the HP books. Sherlock up to season 2, pre-Reichenbach, post-Hound.
**IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE**
All HP movie affectations are hereby discarded (for example, house crests on school robes). This fic is book-verse only.
More than that, unless something is actually in the books, I don’t count it as fully canon. Any JKR interviews or any other extra-canonical information I only accept if I like it. The one thing that is sort of in the books which I ignore is that I do not really hold with having fixed dates for the Harry Potter stories, whatever Nearly-Headless Nick’s stupid death-day cake might say. So get all of that out of your heads. It doesn’t affect the story all that much, but you may assume that the whole “the Battle of Hogwarts happened on May 2, 1998 precisely” bit is thoroughly ignored. And any reviews to the tune of same will be referred to this author’s note.
Some stories, usually for the sake of being dramatic, begin on dark and stormy nights. This story begins on a gray and rainy day in London. And it wasn’t dramatic at all. This was, in fact, a perfectly normal occurrence, and it happened on the perfectly normal Baker Street.
All of which was to the disgust of one of the tenants of the first floor flat of number two-two-one Baker Street. His name was Sherlock Holmes.
As far as he was capable, Sherlock Holmes was not an Ordinary Person. Indeed, he had a horror of Ordinariness, in nearly all of its incarnations. Even his appearance was not entirely Ordinary. He was quite a good dresser, and preferred expensive clothes. He was neither strikingly handsome nor distressingly unfortunate-looking. His hair was dark and curly, and he was quite tall and thin. He had blue eyes that seemed to be lit from the inside with the same nervous energy that kept him rushing to and fro or playing violin or irritably texting on his mobile.
His flatmate, Dr. John Watson, was almost as different from him as night was from day. He was short, with fair hair, and hazel eyes. And he would have much preferred to live in a clean flat, but Sherlock’s experiments and papers and assorted things were everywhere. He also had a steady job, something Sherlock found unbearably dull, and a girlfriend, which Sherlock found laughable.
The two of them were better friends than any two people with so seemingly little in common had any right to be.
At that moment, Sherlock was testing the displacement of arsenic through the human eyeball using a dye as an indicator and listening to his damp and disgruntled flatmate put away the groceries he’d bought on the way home. With most people, the grumbling would have been horribly distracting, but from John, Sherlock found it a soothing background noise. Affirmation that, yes, all was indeed right with the world.
As soon as he had the shopping put away, John slouched over towards his favourite chair by the fireplace, a slight limp giving evidence to a horrid day at the surgery, ignoring Sherlock as he passed, and sat down with an unhappy sigh. He had a set of red scratches on his arm, too widely spread to be an animal, but to closely placed to be an adult's.
"What did the child come in for?" Sherlock asked curiously.
John twisted around to look incredulously at him and then just shook his head. "Stitches."
Fear of needles then. "Wasn't his mother there?" The pronoun was a guess, but with only two options Sherlock decided to risk it.
"Foster care. He's not had a good time of it, by all accounts. Not that that excuses the attempted murder, mind," John frowned.
Sherlock nodded and went back to his eyeball, which unfortunately only took up fifteen more minutes of his time. He had, at that moment, little else to do, which would no doubt shortly lead to the horrible, crushing boredom he spent most of his time trying to dodge. He had no cases, and none seemed likely to walk through the door. But if John caught on to that fact, he'd probably follow through with that movie night he'd been threatening and Sherlock wasn't sure he wanted to spend another agonizing hour trying to decide whether or not he really wanted to delete the film from his mind. He'd never tell John this but he didn't enjoy the movies half so much as he liked spending time with his flatmate, but deleting the film meant deleting whatever was associated with it, which wasn't always something he liked doing. Organizing his memory had been useful, but there were certain rules of psychology that he couldn't break.
Just to stave off the inevitable, he actually put away everything from his experiment this time, though he couldn't bring himself to wash anything. He checked the news, noting that the underground was having intermittent trouble with their ventilation, which kept blasting passengers with freezing cold air, and decided that if this was what was being printed, then it was almost certain he would not get a case. He was about to tell John he might as well fetch one of his dull DVDs when an impossible miracle occurred.
His mobile beeped.
Message received, 1:50 PM
67 Onslow Rd. Possible serial.
Lestrade
Sherlock looked up from the screen in unadulterated glee. "Lestrade thinks he has a serial killer."
John frowned in confusion. "But there's been nothing in the papers. You usually notice serials long before the police ask for your help, if they ask at all."
"Exactly," Sherlock agreed, already getting excited. If Lestrade was right (which was likely as Lestrade did not like asking his help in the first place), then whoever this was, they hadn't even gotten Sherlock's attention. That was almost impossible.
Sherlock snatched up his coat and scarf, idly noting that John's limp had vanished as he trotted up the stairs to retrieve his own jacket.
Nearly a half-hour later the two of them were stepping out of a taxi onto a street in Croydon, Sherlock making a disgusted face at the houses on the road. Every boring house on this boring street was exactly the same as every other boring house. Fortunately, Anderson’s team didn’t seem to be working forensics this time. He didn’t recognise anyone on this team at all, and in their blue coveralls, the only one who remotely stood out was the woman with the unfortunately frizzy hair.
John sighed as he caught sight of the person at the door. “Donovan. Brilliant.”
“You don’t like her?” Sherlock asked. He reviewed his mental observations of John’s interactions with the police sergeant and couldn’t recall any particular animosity between the two of them.
John frowned, but answered cryptically, “It’s not important.”
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. John wouldn’t have taken the woman in dislike without good cause. He wasn’t that sort of person. So, whatever John said, it must’ve been something important. It couldn’t be something very obvious or Sherlock would’ve noticed it. And it couldn’t be something John thought he should act on or else he would’ve done so already.
Interesting.
However, with a (possible) serial murder victim about to be taking up his attention, he couldn’t spare the focus on his flatmate, no matter how unusual he was acting.
“Hello, Freak,” Donovan said from the door of the house.
Sally Donovan was, in Sherlock’s opinion, one of the most boringly average people he’d ever met. Average height, average weight, average intelligence. Average, average, average. The one interesting thing she was doing—having an affair with a married man—was both repulsive and involved Anderson, who was unforgivably tiresome. Dull.
Aloud, Sherlock said, “Sergeant Donovan.”
“Hullo, Sally,” John said, quiet and polite like always. If Sherlock hadn’t just been talking to him, he wouldn’t know anything was amiss here.
“Still time to take up that hobby,” she said, standing aside, looking resigned.
John just gave her a patient smile and the two of them continued past that CSI with the hair and up the stairs to the first floor.
There was nothing remarkable about this house. Sherlock couldn’t understand how anyone could wish to live in such a cookie-cutter bland home, but the whole place seemed to have been transported directly out of a magazine. The walls were uniformly clean and painted bright, solid colours. Tastefully bland paintings hung along the staircase and landing. The furniture was upholstered in contrasting colours to the walls, with accent pillows and embroidered throws placed with careful carelessness on the overstuffed chairs.
The resident must be an interior decorator, of all the hateful things. Male, judging by the colours.
Sherlock gained the landing and followed the scowling police presence into the master bedroom.
Whereupon he stopped so short that John, who had been following along, plowed straight into his back.
“Sherlock?” John said, stepping out to the side.
Lestrade turned and caught sight of Sherlock’s face before he could school his expression into his customary ennui. “Exactly,” was his only comment. “This man is the third we’ve found like this.”
Sherlock didn’t even bother trying to hide his surprise at that. “Three?”
John was staring at the crime scene in as much consternation as Sherlock for once, although his focus was on the body rather than the room. But there was no escaping the conclusion they were both forced to make.
This man shouldn’t be dead.
The room was in a disarray, as if there had been a struggle, but the struggle had ended long before the time of this man’s death—dehydration, judging by the sunken eyes, swollen tongue, and that his body looked like it was laid over the wrong skeleton. Death a few hours ago at most, given that the body was not yet in rigor. There was a shattered lamp in the corner, with dust on all the upturned surfaces, and the rumpled bedclothes had settled well into place. The—admittedly unpleasant—smell from the victim suggested he hadn’t gotten up to so much as bathe for the past two days. But, given the position he was in, Sherlock was surprised he’d held it for two minutes. One of his legs was stretched out along the wall, but the other was hooked over the top of his bedside table. His body was flat on his chest, arms stretched out forwards, head was lolling to the side. He had a tattoo on his left arm.
For some reason, between two and three days ago, this man had lost a fight. And after loosing it, he had been left—alive—in a very odd position. The scent of unwashed person in the room was too strong for the victim to have been moved here from somewhere else, meaning he hadn’t left since he’d lost the fight. Perhaps the killer had waited for him to die, then returned to arrange the body?
John was examining the body and said, “Why didn’t he move?” He sounded absolutely mystified.
“He wasn’t posed?” Sherlock asked, now rejecting the idea that the killer had returned.
“No,” John said, bafflement suffusing his tone. “He died exactly as you see him.”
Lestrade said, “We’ve found two others like him, as well. One man, one woman. Always evidence of a struggle, always a few days old, always dead of dehydration.”
There were no restraints on the body, nor any evidence that there ever had been, which meant that the killer somehow induced his victims to stay absolutely still for two to three days while they died, Sherlock noted. Which was, of course, utterly impossible because no one would ever do that. Even if the killer had something to blackmail them with, this man, at least, would’ve moved a little. If only because he was in the most horribly uncomfortable position Sherlock had seen in a long time. But apparently this man had remained, in exactly the position he had been in at the end of the struggle, until he died of thirst.
“And he doesn’t tie them down at all?” John asked.
Sherlock did not bother listening to Lestrade tell John what anyone ought to already know because he’d just realised that the shattered lamp in the corner originally belonged to the bedside table. He knelt down and snapped out his magnifier mostly out of habit, but grew more intent as he realised that there didn’t seem to be any finger- or handprints around the neck or body of the lamp, as he would have expected if it had been thrown across the room.
“What about fingerprints at the other crime scenes?” Sherlock asked.
“From the first scene, we’re not sure. The victim, Thorfinn Rowle, was over sixty-five and the death was ruled natural causes. We can give you the autopsy, and the photos from the scene, but ultimately, he wasn’t processed as a murder. It’s only luck that the same coroner had the second, Eirian Rosier, and smelled a rat,” Lestrade said. “At the Rosier scene, we found her prints everywhere. Her house, so no surprise there. But none from whoever she rowed with—”
“The murderer, unquestionably,” Sherlock interjected, looking for other thrown items to see if there were prints he could use there.
“—And none of her prints were where you’d expect if she had thrown the moved objects across the room,” Lestrade finished.
John blinked. “So, someone came in, had a fight with…?”
“Roderick Jugson,” Lestrade supplied.
“Jugson,” John said, continuing, “a number of his possessions flew around the room, possibly of their own accord, and then Jugson got into this impossibly contortionate pose to wait until he died of thirst while the person he fought with just…left?”
“The murderer certainly didn’t stay long,” Sherlock agreed.
“There’s no evidence this is murder,” Lestrade put in. “Bizarre assaults, possibly, but we can hardly prosecute for dying of thirst. We’re not in a drought, there’s plenty of water in this house—”
“Right, he planned his own suicide in a position like that on purpose,” Sherlock sneered.
“No hairs, no shoe prints, no fingerprints, no tangible evidence of any kind,” Lestrade replied. “Nothing taken, and no one saw the killer come or go from any of the three sites.”
“What about video of the killer?” Sherlock asked.
“There isn’t any,” Lestrade shrugged.
“What?” John asked. Sherlock almost couldn’t believe it himself. No video footage at all was a difficult trick to accomplish.
“And there’s no evidence that they stay after the fight, either,” Lestrade said. “These three people were left alone to live or die as they chose, and all three of them decided to die right where they were without lifting a finger to try and save themselves.”
For the first time in a long time, Sherlock found himself utterly at a loss. No one would simply sit back and wait to die of thirst. It ran contrary to the most basic human survival instincts. The murderer, whoever they were, had done the completely, totally, entirely impossible.
“Where’s his client list?” Sherlock asked. “Did he have anything on at the moment?”
“Client list?” Lestrade asked, totally baffled.
“Yes, client list,” Sherlock snapped. “Obviously this man was an interior decorator. Did he work from home, or is there an office where we’ll find the list?”
“He was an accountant,” Lestrade said, looking bewildered. “Not a very good one, either. He worked for Shad Sanderson. According to his supervisor, he struggled with basic maths, but somehow managed to successfully untangle enough financial puzzles that he was worth his pay cheques.”
“He struggled with basic maths and then pulled off miracle saves to do with complex accounts?” Watson asked, sounding skeptical.
“They couldn’t explain it either. No one ever worked out how he did it,” Lestrade said with a shrug.
Sherlock scowled at that, but decided to move on from the question of employment for the moment. “Who is his next-of-kin?” he asked.
“Doesn’t have one,” Lestrade said. “He’d been on holiday, so no one from work realised anything was wrong until he didn’t come in yesterday or today.”
John nodded. “Enemies?”
"None to speak of," Lestrade answered with a shrug. "Some work spats. But nothing that seemed this serious."
Sherlock gave the room another look over and said, “It’s unlikely the murderer was close to him simply on the fact he doesn't seem to have many friends at all. There are no personal touches whatever in this room. No…this was business.” Sherlock turned to Lestrade. “What about the other two victims?”
“All three on holiday when they died, all three had no contacts.” Lestrade paused, then said, “And they all three had the same tattoo.”
“Then until the investigation is concluded, all three crime scenes belong exclusively to the Yard, correct? Don’t release them to anyone without my authorization,” Sherlock instructed.
Lestrade arched an eyebrow. “I suppose you’ll be promoted to Chief Inspector any day now, then? Detective Inspector Holmes?”
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Please?” He didn’t sound very contrite, but apparently the form was enough as Lestrade nodded. “I’ll have the casefile, then,” Sherlock said, steamrollering on.
Lestrade led them out of the room, picked up a bland manila envelope and thrust it at Sherlock. “There. But if I find you withholding so much as a fingernail of evidence, you’ll be dealing with more than a drugs bust when I catch you. And I will catch you.”
Sherlock took the envelope without acknowledging the threat and charged past that frizzy-headed forensic woman and down the stairs, leaving John to follow him.
It wasn’t until they’d gotten into the cab and were headed back to Baker Street that Sherlock finally allowed himself to grin a bit. “I'm not supposed to be happy that this murder makes absolutely no sense, am I?”
"Not generally," John answered.
"Don't tell anyone."
John rolled his eyes with an indulgent grin. Sherlock would never admit that it was all down to his influence that he hadn’t been jumping up and down in front of the Yarders back there. But now that they were away from the eyes of the police, he didn’t bother to contain his glee.
They arrived at Baker Street, and Sherlock bounded up the stairs. By the time John was done seeing to the cab fare (Sherlock made a mental note to buy him dinner while they worked on the case) Sherlock had covered the outsides of the mirror on their wall—their usual criminology wall—with photos, police reports, and autopsy summations.
While neither Rowle nor Rosier were in such odd poses as Jugson had been, both were discovered in unusual positions, which Sherlock expected John to remark on first as he joined him in front of the mantelpiece.
“Thorfinn, Eirian, and Roderick,” John mused, looking over the collection. “Odd names.”
Sherlock smiled, adding another item to his mental list titled Unpredicted/Incorrectly Predicted Things John Watson Has Done, and said, “Three odd names, three odd poses, three odd murders.”
“I know you don’t think much of Lestrade—” John said.
“The least bad of the Met’s lamentable offerings,” Sherlock agreed.
“—But he did have a point. All three of these people could’ve gotten up to get a drink at any time and they just…didn’t.” John paused to frown deeply at the implications there. “That’s mental, but it’s not murder.”
“At the very least, all three of these people fought with someone before their decisions to suicide,” Sherlock shrugged. “Assaulting someone in their own home is illegal, even if leaving them to kill themselves in an utterly bizarre fashion is not.”
John nodded. “Any ideas?”
“A few. I need to think a bit more,” Sherlock said, eyes wandering over the papers he’d fixed to the mirror.
Although he stuck it out for a little while, John eventually left the mirror and made tea. Some of it materialised in a cup in front of Sherlock at some point before John left for the surgery. Sherlock barely noticed any of this at all, beyond drinking the tea, so lost was he in thought.
When that amount of caffeination failed to make any sort of impression on his system, he made himself a pot of coffee—hands moving almost without his conscious direction—and downed the entire thing as fast as he could.
It was unthinkable that any human being would remain in the position that Jugson had for three days without extraordinary motivation for doing so. However, a thorough search of Jugson’s personal information yielded no suggestions on what he could possibly be so motivated with. Probably it was blackmail of some sort. People could be motivated to do extraordinary things for some kind of reward, but a reward in this case would be next to useless. Jugson would’ve known at the outset of his ordeal that he would not survive it. But the man seemed to have no skeletons in his closet at all to be blackmailed with. He was, reportedly, a snappy dresser, and had few relationships. However, though Sherlock had encountered murderers with stupider reasons for killing than being jealous of their victims’ superior fashion sense, he’d never encountered a murderer this clever who killed for a reason that idiotic.
Clearly, then, Jugson had something in his past that wasn't in the records. But, given his rather unremarkable job history, and the fact that—going off his financial records—he didn’t seem to involve himself with anything but his job, whatever the skeleton was, it had been sitting in the back of his closet collecting dust for some years now.
Sherlock frowned and tried changing tack a bit. He picked up the information on the first victim. Thorfinn Rowle, late fifties to late eighties according to the autopsy, also tended to be well-dressed, worked a mid-level job in a marketing firm, where he had claimed to be fifty-two years of age, and had absolutely no skill for it. Had the same tattoo as the other two victims on his left forearm: a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth. His job history read like a comedy of errors and had been recommended for termination so many times that Sherlock couldn’t understand why it hadn’t actually occurred.
Nor could he determine why the medical examiner had been unable to determine Rowle’s age with any more precision than “late fifties to late eighties.” Even in the absence of a birth certificate, there were a number of ways to make educated guesses, but as Sherlock continued through the report he noted that all of the tests he could have wished for had indeed been performed. There were long reports on Rowle’s teeth, the fusion of his skull, the length of various long bones in his body, the bones in his hand, and even carbon dating involving his eyes. And every test had given different results, finally resulting in one frustrated lab tech scrawling I hate Thorfinn Rowle in one of the margins and then trying to erase the doodle when they realised that they had scribbled it on an official report.
There had been minimal police involvement with his death. There were photographs from fewer angles than Sherlock wanted—though each one demonstrated another house that would have design students fawning over it—and not a shred of useful data after the coroner ruled the death a suicide. However, Doctor Catriona Barrett had appended a short note to the file.
Although I am forced, for lack of evidence, to rule Thorfinn Rowle’s death a suicide, I believe it to be quite the most unusual suicide I have ever seen in my entire career. Though I am unable to support this assertion, my instinct is that Mr. Rowle did not die by his own hand, but was indeed murdered. I strongly suggest that the police keep this file on hand and look into the matter at the earliest available opportunity.
It was, essentially, a futile plea, as Dr. Barrett must’ve known. No police officer would have time for a suicide cold case, and had two more victims not followed Rowle, his murder would’ve no doubt been forgotten. However, since her instincts were correct, Sherlock decided that if he met her in the course of the investigation, he would at least make an effort to be polite.
Next was Eirian Rosier’s file. Sherlock was briefly very grateful that Dr. Barrett had caught her case as well. Similar conflicted results in determining her age was the first thing Dr. Barrett twigged as resembling Rowle, which elevated her yet another notch above idiot in Sherlock’s mind. Rosier worked for a publishing company and, unlike Rowle or Jugson, was not spectacularly bad at it. Certainly she was no stand-out, but her work records showed moderate success in her position and few complaints. Well-dressed, like Rowle and Jugson. Found in her home—kitchen this time; Rowle had been in his sitting room—and again Sherlock was struck with the teeth-grindingly perfect décor in the photographs. He idly noted that John would jokingly suggest that perhaps all the victims had once belonged to an underground society of evil decorators.
Unfortunately, Sherlock was unable to draw any conclusions beyond the blindingly obvious. All three victims had acquired their jobs around the same time and none of them were particularly good at them. Clearly something happened shortly prior to that time which required that they all leave their previous lives. A quick glance at their vital records prior to that showed that all of them were probably forgeries, but he would need to double-check in order to be sure. And whatever life it was they’d run from, it had left them all totally unprepared for their new ones. All of them had thoroughly out-of-date personal computers and mobile phones. Yet they’d all somehow managed to hang on to the jobs they had, despite being either unremarkable or remarkably bad, for over five years. And all this despite the fact that none of them had many connections or friends.
For the first time in a very long time, Sherlock found himself utterly confounded. Not only were the murders impossible, the victims were too.
He turned to speak to John and found himself confronted with an empty room. For the first time, it properly registered that John had indeed gone to work and he was alone in the flat.
He scowled. Once upon a time, before a certain ex-Army doctor had limped into his life, he wouldn’t have cared that he was alone at all.
