Sherlock Holmes and the Thief Of Souls
Mar. 18th, 2022 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bungakertasSherlock felt he displayed a remarkable amount of maturity and reservation by waiting until the next day, John’s day off, to demand that he accompany Sherlock on a round of visits to the victim’s places of employment, and to Rowle’s and Rosier’s homes. John must’ve agreed to some extent. He allowed himself to be pulled into the task, and Sherlock knew from experience that when John thought he was being drafted into a totally unreasonable task, he became the most immovable man in the history of the Earth.
The two of them set off for Pratt & Klein Publishing while Sherlock filled John in on what he’d worked out the day before.
“So…why do you think the murderer’s only going after them now?” John said from the other side of their cab. “If whatever awful thing it is they have in their pasts happened so long ago?”
“So you do think it’s murder, now?” Sherlock observed, mostly to be petty, but partially to deflect attention from the fact that John’s question was one he really should’ve considered before.
“It would be too weird if it wasn’t,” John shrugged.
“Oh, well, that will solve the whole case, then,” Sherlock said. “We’ll just eliminate whatever is too weird.”
“Don’t be difficult,” John replied with an easy grin.
Sherlock rolled his eyes and said, “Something changed, recently, to make the murderer act, obviously.”
“But they worked the same jobs for ages, all of them,” John protested. “Lived in the same places, did the same things. Nothing changed for any of them.”
“Then it must’ve changed on the murderer’s end. For some reason he can act now when he couldn’t before,” Sherlock said quietly.
“He?”
“Serial killers are more frequently male than female by a very large margin.”
“I wonder why that is?” John remarked idly.
Sherlock didn’t answer, busy hunting through police reports on his phone to see if any new information had turned up. John began checking the news on his mobile, making the odd comment about some new scandal of the American President’s, or the ventilation trouble on the underground until they arrived.
Pratt & Klein was an unremarkable, soul-crushingly tedious place to work, consisting of the second floor of the building in which it rented space. A few personable and mostly boring individuals were all crammed into cubicles in the main section of the floor and a few snobbish and entirely boring individuals supervised them from the actual offices along the end. Hoping to move things along as quickly as possible, Sherlock put on his best I-am-friendly-and-approachable smile and asked the boy delivering mail if he could speak to Eirian Rosier’s supervisor please.
They were instantly directed to the office of Gayle Finley, who cheerfully welcomed them in. Brown hair, brown eyes. Out of habit, Sherlock looked her over. Faint (probably; dark hose made it hard to be sure) bruises behind her left knee indicated recent sexual activity, the very faint scent of cigarettes from her hair but the lack of staining on her fingers suggested that she didn’t smoke herself but had spent the previous night around a large number of people who did and hadn’t yet had time to shower. Likely a club somewhere. Her office was a boring, four-walled block with next to no personal touches, indicating that she was competitive in nature.
These thoughts took up approximately the time needed to enter the room, and Sherlock found himself wishing—again—that people weren’t always so transparent.
“Sit down,” Finley said, indicating the chairs in front of her desk. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything to offer you.”
“That’s quite all right,” Sherlock said.
“I’m fine,” John agreed.
“Well, then, how can I help you?” Finley asked.
“You can tell me everything you can remember about Eirian Rosier,” Sherlock replied, deliberately reminding himself not to be snappish; she hadn’t been trying to be boring, after all.
“Eirian? Are you with the police?” Finley said.
“We are helping their investigation,” John answered with a nod.
“All right. It feels wrong saying this about her now she’s dead, but Eirian was…unremarkable. She didn’t seem to fit in really with anyone. Never went to the pub with anyone after work, or came to any parties or talked about anything outside of the job. People always tried to make friends in the beginning, of course, but she never had any of it. Acted like she thought she was above everyone,” Finley answered.
“Rude?” Sherlock pressed.
“Just distant,” Finley replied. “Never impolite, but always polite to keep people out, you know how that goes.”
“What was her job here?” Sherlock asked.
“She was only a copy editor. She would edit for grammar, spelling, missing words, that sort of thing. Not exactly a job to write home about, and she was much older than any of our other copy editors. But she never let you forget that she thought she was better than you.” There was a pause and Finley finally shrugged. “And it’s probably not important, but she had a tattoo.”
“Could you describe it for me?” Sherlock asked. He'd seen photos of it in the autopsy reports, but sometimes eyewitnesses told him things that pictures could not.
Finley closed her eyes as she thought on it. “A skull, open mouth. It looked like it was breathing out. And out of its mouth, there was a snake. Like it had a snake for a tongue. A snake that looked like it was smiling. But it was…odd for a tattoo.”
“Odd how?”
“It never faded at all. The lines were always sharp and clean. For as long as I knew her.”
“It didn’t fade at all?” John asked in disbelief.
Finley shook her head. “I asked her when she got it once, and she said she’d had it for ages, but that can’t be right. I know some tattoos fade more slowly than others, but none of them stay perfect forever.”
Sherlock nodded. “How would you describe her wardrobe?”
“Always well-dressed, that one,” Finley nodded. “Expensive tastes. I think.”
“You think?”
“I could swear there were a few times when I’d seen the exact outfit she would wear in to work in a fashion mag. But she didn’t know one designer’s name from another, and she could never tell you where she bought anything. You’d ask, and she’d always say, ‘I don’t remember where I picked it up.’ or something. Like she never looked at the names on the shops or something,” Finley explained.
Sherlock frowned deeply at this. “Was she often forgetful?”
“Not normally,” Finley said, “No.”
“What about the quality of her work?”
“Acceptable. She could spell, at any rate,” Finley shrugged.
Sherlock sat back in his chair trying to decide what to make of all this. John leaned forward. “How old would you say she was?”
“It’s hard to be sure,” Finley answered. “She only looked fifty-ish. And she didn’t much talk about anything outside of work, and never about where she’d been before she came here. But every so often she’d talk about the 1940s like she’d grown up then. I couldn’t begin to explain it.”
“Yes, that would be unlikely,” Sherlock agreed absently. He stood. “Well, Ms. Finley, I think we should be off, but thank you for your time.”
He left the office. John stayed back, probably to make some kind of apology. Sherlock walked marginally more slowly until he caught up.
“Well?” John asked.
Sherlock shook his head. “Rowle’s work next.”
Rowle had had the misfortune to work for Wow! Marketing, which was located in another fairly bland office building. Still, at least the people here seemed less like they were cloned from an office-minion machine. Emails went back and forth, people rushed in and out of their cubicles, and there were two men squabbling on the far side of the floor about which shade of red would be more effective in a zoo advert. One of the offices had even been converted into a small sound studio, and a technician was inside nodding his head along to soundproofed music.
Thorfinn Rowle’s supervisor was Heather Morgan, brown hair, green eyes, happily married for seven years, two small children at home, and when Sherlock and John were seated in her office and Sherlock asked about Rowle, her brows snapped together in a thunderous frown.
“Ugh. That man. It’s too bad he died, but I’m not sorry to see the back of him,” she said irritably. “He was the worst graphic designer I’ve ever seen.”
“Could you show us?” Sherlock asked.
Morgan snapped open one of her desk drawers and brought out a file folder. And, looking through it, Sherlock had to agree with Morgan’s assessment. Worst graphic designer he'd ever seen. The graphics and ads in this folder were bland, colourless, uninteresting, uncreative, and downright ugly. It was virtually a how-not-to guide.
“Not what I expected from a man as well-dressed as him,” she sighed.
“I noticed his work records said you recommended him for termination multiple times,” Sherlock said. “Why is it he was never sacked?”
Morgan sighed. “I don’t know. I’d take this file to Mr. Garrett, our department head, and he would look at it and be appalled. So he’d call Rowle in, and Rowle would go into his office and then he’d come out a few minutes later and Garrett had forgotten the whole thing! This happened at least once every six months. It never happened with anyone else. And he and Garrett didn’t get on at all, either. And Rowle would always rub his tattoo when he came walking out of there, too.”
“Tell us about the tattoo,” Sherlock said.
“A skull exhaling a snake. Or vomiting it or something. Great ugly thing on his arm,” Morgan said. “I hated it. Every time he was talking to you, he’d start rubbing it, and then he’d get this look like he was better than you or something and go all polite and distant.”
“Do you think it bothered him because you are a woman and you were his boss?” John asked curiously.
Sherlock hadn’t considered that question, but he was glad John had. Still, Morgan was shaking her head.
“It would’ve explained a lot,” she said, “but he was just as horrible to the men working here. Always rubbing his tattoo and then going all sneery and arrogant on them. He seemed to hate everyone.”
“Did he seem to have any interests outside of work?” Sherlock asked.
“None that he cared to share with any of us,” Morgan answered. “He never talked. Not about anything. He was totally useless.”
With that, Sherlock and John took their leave and made for one of Shad Sanderson’s banking branches, to speak with Roderick Jugson’s supervisor.
Remembering his unpleasant “friend” who’d hired him for the case with the Chinese smugglers, Sherlock was looking forward to this interview the least. However, this office was thankfully not the one in which Sebastian Wilkes worked, though the same sort of people populated it. Largely male accountants in smart suits who gave orders to largely female receptionists in snappy skirts. Everyone had perfect hair and make-up. Everyone had a neat desk. Offices with glass walls ensured both a pleasant appearance and no privacy.
Derek Knott, Jugson’s supervisor, occupied one of the glass-walled offices and greeted them pleasantly—with vague curiosity—when they entered.
Then Sherlock explained the purpose of their visit.
“Ah yes, the Arrogant Prick,” Knott sighed. “Shame he’s dead, I imagine,” he added.
Sherlock couldn’t help but contrast Knott with Sebastian Wilkes as he spoke. They did have similar voices and tonal inflections, but he could see that the similarity ended there. Knott was married, and loved his wife, though Sherlock was fairly certain they’d had a fight the previous evening, probably to do with their child who was struggling in school, if the numerous envelopes in his in-tray from a Danbury Academy were anything to go by. But the fact that he kept them at work indicated his family was obviously a high priority for him, and while his manners were superficially similar to Sebastian’s, Knott didn’t ooze with that off-putting smarm that Seb practically swam around in. When Knott greeted them or offered them a drink, it was because he was genuinely courteous. And none of his underlings seemed as generally unhappy and under stress as all of Seb’s had. So Knott’s disdain for Jugson likely meant that Jugson had been just as rude and intractable as the other two victims.
“You never mentioned arrogant in his work records,” John observed politely, when Sherlock didn’t speak.
“Not terribly relevant, I suppose,” Knott shrugged. “He was a decent enough accountant that there was no call to sack him, and his personality had nothing to do with the matter. Didn’t mean I liked him any.”
“Was there anyone he was close with?” John queried.
“Not here,” Knott answered. “Maybe outside of work, but we’d never know it.”
“What makes you say that?” Sherlock asked, leaning forwards.
“Never talked about anything that wasn’t strictly job-related,” Knott replied. “For all he couldn’t add worth a damn, he was very focused. Never had any pictures on his desk or interesting websites in his browsing history. Just…work. That was it. I almost wished he would browse porn or something in the office. It was almost unnerving, how focused he was.”
The rest of the interview proceeded along the same lines. Jugson also had a tattoo of a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth. Jugson also dressed noticeably well. Sherlock was remembering why sometimes he hated his job. Double-checking facts and following leads were both so unconscionably dull that if it weren’t for the euphoria of solving the puzzle that made things worth it, he would be as lazy as Mycroft.
And then it happened.
“You keep mentioning he couldn’t add very well. If his maths were so bad, how was it that he wasn’t a bad accountant?” John asked curiously.
“We never could work it out,” Knott answered, brows furrowed in puzzlement. “He honestly struggled to do simple accounts, but one day, early in his employment, we came across a really thorny problem. One of our business accounts had some numbers that weren’t checking out and we suspected an embezzler, but we couldn’t quite pin things down. Jugson looked at the accounts before he went out, and came back the next morning with the exact amounts of money stolen and the name of the man doing it! Handed it in like it was nothing remarkable and went back to his work.”
Knott tapped a finger on the desk irritably. “What I wouldn’t have given to know how he managed it. Sometimes I wondered if he identified the accounts in advance, worked out the problems at his leisure, then only pointed out the relevant bits when the rest of us spotted them, but he had a habit of checking his most basic maths four times just to be sure they were right. Slowest man in the department unless we had a problem nobody else could solve.”
“That’s…fairly unbelievable,” Sherlock said mildly.
Knott smiled. “I wouldn’t believe it, either. But ask anyone you like. They’ll tell you the same. Utterly bizarre.”
With that, Sherlock and John said their goodbyes and left the bank. Sherlock hailed a cab and they crawled inside, John frowning so deeply that Sherlock thought he was going to have a new wrinkle by that evening.
After two minutes, even Sherlock couldn’t stand the tension anymore. “Well,” he said. “Out with it.”
“Is the killer targeting misanthropes? Snobs? Should you be worried?” The last question was asked with the hint of a smile.
“Very funny,” Sherlock said. “No, you know that the tattoos are much more of a tell. Three, exactly the same. We’ll probably be able to track down the parlour where they got them.”
John sighed, but he leaned back against his corner of the cab and started scribbling in the book he always brought along when they were working a case, rather than asking any further questions. Sherlock wasn’t entirely satisfied with that, but he decided not to fuss. Instead, he watched as London passed by.
Thorfinn Rowle’s flat was not really that far from Baker Street and was, to Sherlock’s consternation, practically surrounded by CCTV. No one, unless they were invisible, could enter or exit the building without being caught on camera from some angle or another. Yet another impossibility in the case. He and John started up to Rowle’s flat as Sherlock turned things over in his mind.
He normally liked impossibilities, as they often held solutions that were either deliciously complex or deviously simple. In this case, however, none of them seemed to resolve. A murderer could not invisibly enter a building, yet this one had. Tattoos could not stay perpetually pristine, though these had. Poor mathematicians could not resolve complex embezzling schemes that had whole bank branches tied in knots, but this one had. Graphic designers with no skill whatsoever could not maintain a job where both their bosses didn’t like them, however this one had. Perhaps the victims’ were still more connected to their past than he’d initially believed, and they still held connections that ran interference for them when they got into trouble. Or they were all part of some organization that did the interference. If that were the case, their deaths would probably be traced to that organization, given that they had all died together. But there was no evidence that they’d had any contact with each other or any kind of common threads any their lives.
Stop, he ordered himself. You don’t yet have all the facts. Information, then hypothesis, then test hypothesis, then conclusion.
They entered Rowle’s flat.
Thorfinn Rowle had been killed in his sitting room, and but it had been cleaned up as soon as his death was ruled suicide. Anything moved had been restored, anything broken had been replaced, the whole flat had been scrubbed and aired out, and virtually all useful evidence was gone. Naturally the flat had been closed again when the case was reopened, but by then it was too late, of course. Sherlock carefully scanned each of the rooms just be sure, but none of them yielded any new information and so he and John went back out to the cab and were initially headed towards Rosier’s home.
This was a proper house, though small, in Chiswick. And as they entered, Sherlock almost felt like singing for joy. The smell still lingered, the scene was so well-preserved. Admittedly, it wasn’t a very nice smell, but he was used to that.
They walked through the entryway, and a little down a hallway to enter the kitchen and Sherlock took note of the way one of the pots was on a far counter, all the water having long since evaporated from the countertops and floor. There was a package of angel hair pasta on the counter by the stove.
“Night in. She was making dinner when someone attacked her in here?” he theorised.
Sherlock glanced around and remembered the way the door had been flung wide open in the photographs.
“No,” he said slowly. “No, she was in this room and something called her attention to another.”
He went back out of the door and walked back across the hallway, through the foyer, and into the sitting room. Another broken lamp had apparently shattered against the window pane, and there were seven or eight knickknacks in varying states of integrity scattered around the room. But the most dramatic indications of the fight were from the bookshelf on the near side. There were enough books in the room to completely fill the shelf, but half of them now lay on the far side, having been flung there with an astonishing degree of force. Three of them were actually embedded into the far wall near the window.
John exhaled slowly. “Who was throwing books like that?” he wondered.
“Rosier, clearly,” Sherlock said. “But she did so without using her hands. And when those projectiles failed to make an impression, she retreated back to the kitchen, where she had water on the boil. She flung the whole pot at her attacker—without using her hands—and then he…somehow subdued her and forced her to remain in her kitchen until she died of thirst.” Sherlock frowned. Someone who had put up this much of a fight surely wouldn’t have meekly agreed to dehydrating herself. Certainly not in their kitchen, practically surrounded by running water.
“Impossible,” John said. “You saw the pictures of Rosier’s body. She wasn’t a small woman, but she was hardly muscular enough to do that! I know I’m stronger than she was, and I couldn’t come close to throwing a book hard enough to stick in the wall. Certainly not without using my hands.”
“Entirely impossible, and yet it happened,” Sherlock agreed absently.
“Nothing about this case makes any sense!” John said in frustration. “People holding jobs they can’t and dying for no good reason at all. It’s mad.”
Sherlock couldn’t help but agree. “There is a force at work here that we have yet to define.”
They had just turned to leave the room when an odd pop sounded from the far wall. Sherlock and John exchanged a glance and they whirled around.
There, standing calmly as you like, was that frizzy haired forensic woman, wearing something that looked like a cross between a greatcoat and a bathrobe. Sherlock had never seen clothes like that, and could deduce nothing from them. Aside from her bizarre clothes, he could tell she was married, quite happily, and had—
“Oh, what are you doing here?” she said, breaking through his observations in an irritated and slightly nasal voice. As if they were the ones trespassing!
Sherlock elected not to inform this person about the police and deliberately narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re just a forensic tech. Why are you here? And not in a lab somewhere?”
“How did you even get in?” John demanded. “We were just facing the only door.”
“I came in through the window,” she said.
“No, you didn’t,” Sherlock said, after looking her over once.
She scowled. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, we should,” John replied. “You shouldn’t. What’s your name, anyway?”
She sighed and reached into a pocket of her odd robe-thing, pulling out a long, very thin stick.
“I’m really sorry about this,” she said, and she did indeed sound sorry.
For a moment, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The woman began raising the stick towards them. Sherlock scowled. He had no idea what she could do, and he wasn’t sure what good a stick would be for it, but he had no desire to find out the hard way. John seemed to have the same idea and they both started for her.
But before either of them could even take a full step, she raised her stick and cried, “Obliviate!” There was a blinding flash of light, and then…
Nothing.
The two of them set off for Pratt & Klein Publishing while Sherlock filled John in on what he’d worked out the day before.
“So…why do you think the murderer’s only going after them now?” John said from the other side of their cab. “If whatever awful thing it is they have in their pasts happened so long ago?”
“So you do think it’s murder, now?” Sherlock observed, mostly to be petty, but partially to deflect attention from the fact that John’s question was one he really should’ve considered before.
“It would be too weird if it wasn’t,” John shrugged.
“Oh, well, that will solve the whole case, then,” Sherlock said. “We’ll just eliminate whatever is too weird.”
“Don’t be difficult,” John replied with an easy grin.
Sherlock rolled his eyes and said, “Something changed, recently, to make the murderer act, obviously.”
“But they worked the same jobs for ages, all of them,” John protested. “Lived in the same places, did the same things. Nothing changed for any of them.”
“Then it must’ve changed on the murderer’s end. For some reason he can act now when he couldn’t before,” Sherlock said quietly.
“He?”
“Serial killers are more frequently male than female by a very large margin.”
“I wonder why that is?” John remarked idly.
Sherlock didn’t answer, busy hunting through police reports on his phone to see if any new information had turned up. John began checking the news on his mobile, making the odd comment about some new scandal of the American President’s, or the ventilation trouble on the underground until they arrived.
Pratt & Klein was an unremarkable, soul-crushingly tedious place to work, consisting of the second floor of the building in which it rented space. A few personable and mostly boring individuals were all crammed into cubicles in the main section of the floor and a few snobbish and entirely boring individuals supervised them from the actual offices along the end. Hoping to move things along as quickly as possible, Sherlock put on his best I-am-friendly-and-approachable smile and asked the boy delivering mail if he could speak to Eirian Rosier’s supervisor please.
They were instantly directed to the office of Gayle Finley, who cheerfully welcomed them in. Brown hair, brown eyes. Out of habit, Sherlock looked her over. Faint (probably; dark hose made it hard to be sure) bruises behind her left knee indicated recent sexual activity, the very faint scent of cigarettes from her hair but the lack of staining on her fingers suggested that she didn’t smoke herself but had spent the previous night around a large number of people who did and hadn’t yet had time to shower. Likely a club somewhere. Her office was a boring, four-walled block with next to no personal touches, indicating that she was competitive in nature.
These thoughts took up approximately the time needed to enter the room, and Sherlock found himself wishing—again—that people weren’t always so transparent.
“Sit down,” Finley said, indicating the chairs in front of her desk. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything to offer you.”
“That’s quite all right,” Sherlock said.
“I’m fine,” John agreed.
“Well, then, how can I help you?” Finley asked.
“You can tell me everything you can remember about Eirian Rosier,” Sherlock replied, deliberately reminding himself not to be snappish; she hadn’t been trying to be boring, after all.
“Eirian? Are you with the police?” Finley said.
“We are helping their investigation,” John answered with a nod.
“All right. It feels wrong saying this about her now she’s dead, but Eirian was…unremarkable. She didn’t seem to fit in really with anyone. Never went to the pub with anyone after work, or came to any parties or talked about anything outside of the job. People always tried to make friends in the beginning, of course, but she never had any of it. Acted like she thought she was above everyone,” Finley answered.
“Rude?” Sherlock pressed.
“Just distant,” Finley replied. “Never impolite, but always polite to keep people out, you know how that goes.”
“What was her job here?” Sherlock asked.
“She was only a copy editor. She would edit for grammar, spelling, missing words, that sort of thing. Not exactly a job to write home about, and she was much older than any of our other copy editors. But she never let you forget that she thought she was better than you.” There was a pause and Finley finally shrugged. “And it’s probably not important, but she had a tattoo.”
“Could you describe it for me?” Sherlock asked. He'd seen photos of it in the autopsy reports, but sometimes eyewitnesses told him things that pictures could not.
Finley closed her eyes as she thought on it. “A skull, open mouth. It looked like it was breathing out. And out of its mouth, there was a snake. Like it had a snake for a tongue. A snake that looked like it was smiling. But it was…odd for a tattoo.”
“Odd how?”
“It never faded at all. The lines were always sharp and clean. For as long as I knew her.”
“It didn’t fade at all?” John asked in disbelief.
Finley shook her head. “I asked her when she got it once, and she said she’d had it for ages, but that can’t be right. I know some tattoos fade more slowly than others, but none of them stay perfect forever.”
Sherlock nodded. “How would you describe her wardrobe?”
“Always well-dressed, that one,” Finley nodded. “Expensive tastes. I think.”
“You think?”
“I could swear there were a few times when I’d seen the exact outfit she would wear in to work in a fashion mag. But she didn’t know one designer’s name from another, and she could never tell you where she bought anything. You’d ask, and she’d always say, ‘I don’t remember where I picked it up.’ or something. Like she never looked at the names on the shops or something,” Finley explained.
Sherlock frowned deeply at this. “Was she often forgetful?”
“Not normally,” Finley said, “No.”
“What about the quality of her work?”
“Acceptable. She could spell, at any rate,” Finley shrugged.
Sherlock sat back in his chair trying to decide what to make of all this. John leaned forward. “How old would you say she was?”
“It’s hard to be sure,” Finley answered. “She only looked fifty-ish. And she didn’t much talk about anything outside of work, and never about where she’d been before she came here. But every so often she’d talk about the 1940s like she’d grown up then. I couldn’t begin to explain it.”
“Yes, that would be unlikely,” Sherlock agreed absently. He stood. “Well, Ms. Finley, I think we should be off, but thank you for your time.”
He left the office. John stayed back, probably to make some kind of apology. Sherlock walked marginally more slowly until he caught up.
“Well?” John asked.
Sherlock shook his head. “Rowle’s work next.”
Rowle had had the misfortune to work for Wow! Marketing, which was located in another fairly bland office building. Still, at least the people here seemed less like they were cloned from an office-minion machine. Emails went back and forth, people rushed in and out of their cubicles, and there were two men squabbling on the far side of the floor about which shade of red would be more effective in a zoo advert. One of the offices had even been converted into a small sound studio, and a technician was inside nodding his head along to soundproofed music.
Thorfinn Rowle’s supervisor was Heather Morgan, brown hair, green eyes, happily married for seven years, two small children at home, and when Sherlock and John were seated in her office and Sherlock asked about Rowle, her brows snapped together in a thunderous frown.
“Ugh. That man. It’s too bad he died, but I’m not sorry to see the back of him,” she said irritably. “He was the worst graphic designer I’ve ever seen.”
“Could you show us?” Sherlock asked.
Morgan snapped open one of her desk drawers and brought out a file folder. And, looking through it, Sherlock had to agree with Morgan’s assessment. Worst graphic designer he'd ever seen. The graphics and ads in this folder were bland, colourless, uninteresting, uncreative, and downright ugly. It was virtually a how-not-to guide.
“Not what I expected from a man as well-dressed as him,” she sighed.
“I noticed his work records said you recommended him for termination multiple times,” Sherlock said. “Why is it he was never sacked?”
Morgan sighed. “I don’t know. I’d take this file to Mr. Garrett, our department head, and he would look at it and be appalled. So he’d call Rowle in, and Rowle would go into his office and then he’d come out a few minutes later and Garrett had forgotten the whole thing! This happened at least once every six months. It never happened with anyone else. And he and Garrett didn’t get on at all, either. And Rowle would always rub his tattoo when he came walking out of there, too.”
“Tell us about the tattoo,” Sherlock said.
“A skull exhaling a snake. Or vomiting it or something. Great ugly thing on his arm,” Morgan said. “I hated it. Every time he was talking to you, he’d start rubbing it, and then he’d get this look like he was better than you or something and go all polite and distant.”
“Do you think it bothered him because you are a woman and you were his boss?” John asked curiously.
Sherlock hadn’t considered that question, but he was glad John had. Still, Morgan was shaking her head.
“It would’ve explained a lot,” she said, “but he was just as horrible to the men working here. Always rubbing his tattoo and then going all sneery and arrogant on them. He seemed to hate everyone.”
“Did he seem to have any interests outside of work?” Sherlock asked.
“None that he cared to share with any of us,” Morgan answered. “He never talked. Not about anything. He was totally useless.”
With that, Sherlock and John took their leave and made for one of Shad Sanderson’s banking branches, to speak with Roderick Jugson’s supervisor.
Remembering his unpleasant “friend” who’d hired him for the case with the Chinese smugglers, Sherlock was looking forward to this interview the least. However, this office was thankfully not the one in which Sebastian Wilkes worked, though the same sort of people populated it. Largely male accountants in smart suits who gave orders to largely female receptionists in snappy skirts. Everyone had perfect hair and make-up. Everyone had a neat desk. Offices with glass walls ensured both a pleasant appearance and no privacy.
Derek Knott, Jugson’s supervisor, occupied one of the glass-walled offices and greeted them pleasantly—with vague curiosity—when they entered.
Then Sherlock explained the purpose of their visit.
“Ah yes, the Arrogant Prick,” Knott sighed. “Shame he’s dead, I imagine,” he added.
Sherlock couldn’t help but contrast Knott with Sebastian Wilkes as he spoke. They did have similar voices and tonal inflections, but he could see that the similarity ended there. Knott was married, and loved his wife, though Sherlock was fairly certain they’d had a fight the previous evening, probably to do with their child who was struggling in school, if the numerous envelopes in his in-tray from a Danbury Academy were anything to go by. But the fact that he kept them at work indicated his family was obviously a high priority for him, and while his manners were superficially similar to Sebastian’s, Knott didn’t ooze with that off-putting smarm that Seb practically swam around in. When Knott greeted them or offered them a drink, it was because he was genuinely courteous. And none of his underlings seemed as generally unhappy and under stress as all of Seb’s had. So Knott’s disdain for Jugson likely meant that Jugson had been just as rude and intractable as the other two victims.
“You never mentioned arrogant in his work records,” John observed politely, when Sherlock didn’t speak.
“Not terribly relevant, I suppose,” Knott shrugged. “He was a decent enough accountant that there was no call to sack him, and his personality had nothing to do with the matter. Didn’t mean I liked him any.”
“Was there anyone he was close with?” John queried.
“Not here,” Knott answered. “Maybe outside of work, but we’d never know it.”
“What makes you say that?” Sherlock asked, leaning forwards.
“Never talked about anything that wasn’t strictly job-related,” Knott replied. “For all he couldn’t add worth a damn, he was very focused. Never had any pictures on his desk or interesting websites in his browsing history. Just…work. That was it. I almost wished he would browse porn or something in the office. It was almost unnerving, how focused he was.”
The rest of the interview proceeded along the same lines. Jugson also had a tattoo of a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth. Jugson also dressed noticeably well. Sherlock was remembering why sometimes he hated his job. Double-checking facts and following leads were both so unconscionably dull that if it weren’t for the euphoria of solving the puzzle that made things worth it, he would be as lazy as Mycroft.
And then it happened.
“You keep mentioning he couldn’t add very well. If his maths were so bad, how was it that he wasn’t a bad accountant?” John asked curiously.
“We never could work it out,” Knott answered, brows furrowed in puzzlement. “He honestly struggled to do simple accounts, but one day, early in his employment, we came across a really thorny problem. One of our business accounts had some numbers that weren’t checking out and we suspected an embezzler, but we couldn’t quite pin things down. Jugson looked at the accounts before he went out, and came back the next morning with the exact amounts of money stolen and the name of the man doing it! Handed it in like it was nothing remarkable and went back to his work.”
Knott tapped a finger on the desk irritably. “What I wouldn’t have given to know how he managed it. Sometimes I wondered if he identified the accounts in advance, worked out the problems at his leisure, then only pointed out the relevant bits when the rest of us spotted them, but he had a habit of checking his most basic maths four times just to be sure they were right. Slowest man in the department unless we had a problem nobody else could solve.”
“That’s…fairly unbelievable,” Sherlock said mildly.
Knott smiled. “I wouldn’t believe it, either. But ask anyone you like. They’ll tell you the same. Utterly bizarre.”
With that, Sherlock and John said their goodbyes and left the bank. Sherlock hailed a cab and they crawled inside, John frowning so deeply that Sherlock thought he was going to have a new wrinkle by that evening.
After two minutes, even Sherlock couldn’t stand the tension anymore. “Well,” he said. “Out with it.”
“Is the killer targeting misanthropes? Snobs? Should you be worried?” The last question was asked with the hint of a smile.
“Very funny,” Sherlock said. “No, you know that the tattoos are much more of a tell. Three, exactly the same. We’ll probably be able to track down the parlour where they got them.”
John sighed, but he leaned back against his corner of the cab and started scribbling in the book he always brought along when they were working a case, rather than asking any further questions. Sherlock wasn’t entirely satisfied with that, but he decided not to fuss. Instead, he watched as London passed by.
Thorfinn Rowle’s flat was not really that far from Baker Street and was, to Sherlock’s consternation, practically surrounded by CCTV. No one, unless they were invisible, could enter or exit the building without being caught on camera from some angle or another. Yet another impossibility in the case. He and John started up to Rowle’s flat as Sherlock turned things over in his mind.
He normally liked impossibilities, as they often held solutions that were either deliciously complex or deviously simple. In this case, however, none of them seemed to resolve. A murderer could not invisibly enter a building, yet this one had. Tattoos could not stay perpetually pristine, though these had. Poor mathematicians could not resolve complex embezzling schemes that had whole bank branches tied in knots, but this one had. Graphic designers with no skill whatsoever could not maintain a job where both their bosses didn’t like them, however this one had. Perhaps the victims’ were still more connected to their past than he’d initially believed, and they still held connections that ran interference for them when they got into trouble. Or they were all part of some organization that did the interference. If that were the case, their deaths would probably be traced to that organization, given that they had all died together. But there was no evidence that they’d had any contact with each other or any kind of common threads any their lives.
Stop, he ordered himself. You don’t yet have all the facts. Information, then hypothesis, then test hypothesis, then conclusion.
They entered Rowle’s flat.
Thorfinn Rowle had been killed in his sitting room, and but it had been cleaned up as soon as his death was ruled suicide. Anything moved had been restored, anything broken had been replaced, the whole flat had been scrubbed and aired out, and virtually all useful evidence was gone. Naturally the flat had been closed again when the case was reopened, but by then it was too late, of course. Sherlock carefully scanned each of the rooms just be sure, but none of them yielded any new information and so he and John went back out to the cab and were initially headed towards Rosier’s home.
This was a proper house, though small, in Chiswick. And as they entered, Sherlock almost felt like singing for joy. The smell still lingered, the scene was so well-preserved. Admittedly, it wasn’t a very nice smell, but he was used to that.
They walked through the entryway, and a little down a hallway to enter the kitchen and Sherlock took note of the way one of the pots was on a far counter, all the water having long since evaporated from the countertops and floor. There was a package of angel hair pasta on the counter by the stove.
“Night in. She was making dinner when someone attacked her in here?” he theorised.
Sherlock glanced around and remembered the way the door had been flung wide open in the photographs.
“No,” he said slowly. “No, she was in this room and something called her attention to another.”
He went back out of the door and walked back across the hallway, through the foyer, and into the sitting room. Another broken lamp had apparently shattered against the window pane, and there were seven or eight knickknacks in varying states of integrity scattered around the room. But the most dramatic indications of the fight were from the bookshelf on the near side. There were enough books in the room to completely fill the shelf, but half of them now lay on the far side, having been flung there with an astonishing degree of force. Three of them were actually embedded into the far wall near the window.
John exhaled slowly. “Who was throwing books like that?” he wondered.
“Rosier, clearly,” Sherlock said. “But she did so without using her hands. And when those projectiles failed to make an impression, she retreated back to the kitchen, where she had water on the boil. She flung the whole pot at her attacker—without using her hands—and then he…somehow subdued her and forced her to remain in her kitchen until she died of thirst.” Sherlock frowned. Someone who had put up this much of a fight surely wouldn’t have meekly agreed to dehydrating herself. Certainly not in their kitchen, practically surrounded by running water.
“Impossible,” John said. “You saw the pictures of Rosier’s body. She wasn’t a small woman, but she was hardly muscular enough to do that! I know I’m stronger than she was, and I couldn’t come close to throwing a book hard enough to stick in the wall. Certainly not without using my hands.”
“Entirely impossible, and yet it happened,” Sherlock agreed absently.
“Nothing about this case makes any sense!” John said in frustration. “People holding jobs they can’t and dying for no good reason at all. It’s mad.”
Sherlock couldn’t help but agree. “There is a force at work here that we have yet to define.”
They had just turned to leave the room when an odd pop sounded from the far wall. Sherlock and John exchanged a glance and they whirled around.
There, standing calmly as you like, was that frizzy haired forensic woman, wearing something that looked like a cross between a greatcoat and a bathrobe. Sherlock had never seen clothes like that, and could deduce nothing from them. Aside from her bizarre clothes, he could tell she was married, quite happily, and had—
“Oh, what are you doing here?” she said, breaking through his observations in an irritated and slightly nasal voice. As if they were the ones trespassing!
Sherlock elected not to inform this person about the police and deliberately narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re just a forensic tech. Why are you here? And not in a lab somewhere?”
“How did you even get in?” John demanded. “We were just facing the only door.”
“I came in through the window,” she said.
“No, you didn’t,” Sherlock said, after looking her over once.
She scowled. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, we should,” John replied. “You shouldn’t. What’s your name, anyway?”
She sighed and reached into a pocket of her odd robe-thing, pulling out a long, very thin stick.
“I’m really sorry about this,” she said, and she did indeed sound sorry.
For a moment, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The woman began raising the stick towards them. Sherlock scowled. He had no idea what she could do, and he wasn’t sure what good a stick would be for it, but he had no desire to find out the hard way. John seemed to have the same idea and they both started for her.
But before either of them could even take a full step, she raised her stick and cried, “Obliviate!” There was a blinding flash of light, and then…
Nothing.
