Finally a fic post!
Jul. 1st, 2011 07:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jumperfuckerI signed up to do a bit of last-minute fic'ing for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
holmestice on a lark. Maybe not the wisest idea, with everything that's been going on, but I had fun! The person I wrote it for wanted something from the new BBC verse, so I'm not sure how well I did with characterisation and stuff. So I sort of cheated a bit, and turned it into an ACD fusion.
Title: Turnabout's Fair Play
Pairing: Holmes/Watson friendshippy/squint/pre-slash/IDK
Length: 6,400
Rating: PG
Warnings: Contains a bit of everything. Asexual!Holmes, heavy nods to ACD canon, stealth nods to other fandoms, casefic and the expected amount of murder and misdeeds, H/C, light medical kink, either friendshippy or squint; I can’t tell.
Beta Credit:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
storm_ford and not_thatbill
Disclaimer: ACD might actually be rather amused by all this.
Summary: A holiday to Cornwall turns into a test ofWatson's John’s patience.
Turnabout’s Fair Play
John wanted to be surprised when Sherlock managed himself a particularly brutal case of pneumonia, but he found the emotion rather difficult to come by. If anything, he was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. Sherlock didn’t take care of himself; ignored basic signals from his body that most people hardly notice beyond registering the need to alter their behaviour in order to appease whatever had caused the signals to begin with.
Sherlock was so good at ignoring these signals that he managed his particularly brutal case of pneumonia in the middle of June. It was so typically Sherlock in every way.
“It’s not pneumonia,” Sherlock complained as John held the man’s head steady. “I’m fine.”
John waited until the digital thermometer he held in Sherlock’s ear beeped before checking the reading. “It is and you’re not,” he said. “This is what happens when you get into a punch-up while you’ve got a cold.”
“At least I won,” Sherlock muttered.
“Is that what you call this?” asked John. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He handed Sherlock a cup of tea and his laptop before settling down on the far end of the sofa. It took almost no time at all for John to realise that the muffled sounds coming from his friend were those of deliberately suppressed coughs. Sherlock would find a way to be difficult about every aspect of his illness.
“You want to get that stuff out of your lungs,” John told him as he picked up a section of a nearby newspaper.
Sherlock just snorted dismissively at him.
“You know what happens if you don’t?” asked John casually as he read over the sports page. “You either drown slowly, which I’ve been led to believe is quite an unpleasant way to go, or your lungs get so heavy that they crush your heart.”
“The term is congestive heart failure, Doctor,” Sherlock said in his tone that he used to protest being talked down to. “And I can’t. It hurts.”
John looked up at him, studying the positively miserable sight that was Sherlock in two dressing gowns and buried under a thick duvet.
“What hurts?” asked John.
“Felt something snap earlier,” Sherlock said into his tea. “All this damned coughing, I think I pulled something.”
After a hesitant moment, John put down his newspaper and got back to his feet. He took Sherlock’s mug from him before leaning him back against the arm of the sofa. John opened both Sherlock’s dressing gowns and gave a brief pause.
“That’s my jumper,” he said.
“You weren’t wearing it,” Sherlock pointed out.
“God, no wonder you’re burning up,” John muttered as he lightly pulled the jumper and the T-shirt underneath up as Sherlock motioned to his right side.
“I hate to do it to you, but I’m taking most of this from you,” John told him as he felt around the area Sherlock had indicated.
Sherlock hissed sharply and his entire body tensed up as John’s fingers pressed lightly into his side.
“You’re evil and I hate you,” Sherlock said.
“Of course I am. I’m a doctor,” John told him. He helped Sherlock sit back up and gingerly pulled both dressing gowns off of him, setting them aside. “Hard to tell without an X-ray, but I think you might have cracked something. But I don’t want to bind you, ‘cause you need to cough that crap out. Just let me know if it gets worse.”
Sherlock groaned again and sank back into the sofa, already shivering slightly.
As soon as Sherlock’s fever had dropped to levels that weren’t on the verge of requiring immediate hospitalisation, John resolved to get Sherlock out of London and away from the heavy air of the city. He’d thought that by that point, Sherlock would be back to his usual belligerent self, but he remained surprisingly subdued, if slightly more cranky than usual.
John used Sherlock’s credit card (the one he knew Mycroft paid for anyway) to book a couple of rooms in a small hotel in Cornwall, to which Sherlock put up surprisingly little fight. He spent the majority of the train ride asleep, wrapped in a large afghan he’d stolen from Mrs Hudson and with his headphones on, listening to God only knew what. Everything and anything, near as John could tell. John was just happy to see that he was actually getting some sleep, even if not exactly under the best of circumstances.
He left Sherlock in the cab as he checked into the hotel, letting Mycroft pay extra for two adjoining rooms. By the time he returned to the cab, Sherlock had fallen asleep again. Rousing him proved difficult as ever, but wasn’t quite as difficult as getting him up the stairs to the first floor. John helped him settle into the small sofa in the corner of the room before throwing open the curtains to get a bit of light in.
“I’ll be just through there,” he said as he pointed at the door that joined the rooms. “Shout if you need me.”
He pressed his lips to Sherlock’s forehead.
“Get off me!” Sherlock shouted, throwing his arms into the air in an awkward attempt to shove John off. The outburst triggered another fit of coughing that lasted well past the time it took John to make his way to his own room.
Much to John’s annoyance, it hadn’t taken long at all for people from the hotel and neighbouring village to get word that Sherlock Holmes was in town, and John quickly found himself overwrought with people ringing their rooms or knocking on their doors asking for help with the most trivial of matters. Again, John wished he could have been surprised, but the influx of traffic to his blog had been a fairly decent indicator that word of Sherlock’s skills had spread since the whole Moriarty thing. And it would seem that it had spread a bit farther than he’d thought. That, or there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in Cornwall. Either way, John had half a mind to demand a refund just on principle.
After telling the tenth person that Sherlock could not come out and play, John unplugged both their phones and locked the doors. Eventually, the locals got the point and gave up, much to John’s relief. Once things had finally settled down, he set out to find wherever Sherlock had decided to hide. With only so much space to check, John quickly found him half-asleep in a bath that was no doubt far warmer than it needed to be.
“Try not to drown for me,” John told him with a sigh.
Sherlock waved his hand vaguely, which John took as a signal that he was still alive and wouldn’t need checking on for another quarter hour or so.
He emerged on his own not too long after, pyjama-clad and with his still-dripping hair combed back out of his eyes. Before he was even settled on the sofa, John was back on him with the thermometer.
“Thirty-nine, eight,” John declared. “Sorry. Hand it over.”
Sherlock practically growled as he shucked his dressing gown. He threw it to the floor, taking a small amount of delight in watching John pick it up.
“Well, ask me to draw your bath next time, so you don’t boil yourself,” John told him as he retreated back to the bathroom.
He returned several moments later with a damp flannel, which he handed to Sherlock.
“Forehead,” he said.
Sherlock glared at him, but did as he was told, taking every effort to let John know just how cold and miserable he was. John, with all the patience that comes from living with the world’s most over-grown six-year-old, ignored Sherlock’s continued complaints.
By the next afternoon, John was completely willing to admit that this forced sabbatical had been a complete wash. Every time he tried to open the windows to get a bit of fresh air in, Sherlock had complained that the sea was putting him off and closed them again, and while pestering from the local inhabitants had slowed, it hadn’t stopped entirely.
Which was why, when a policeman knocked on Sherlock’s door, John knew it was going to be nothing but trouble.
“Sorry, he’s quite ill,” John said by way of a greeting. “He won’t even go outside, and that’s probably for the better, actually.”
“That’s fine,” said the officer as he flashed his warrant card, revealing himself to be a DS. “We only need him to come up the hall.”
“He really shouldn’t—” John started, but was interrupted by the sudden force of being shoved sideways.
“Stop stifling me,” Sherlock told him. “You’re not my mother.” He turned his attention to the sergeant. “I’ve been in town just over twenty-four hours, and already you lot are out of your depth. This doesn’t reflect well.”
John gave up and retreated back to the bed, where he’d been watching telly. “Help him or turn him away, Sherlock. Insulting him isn’t doing either of you any good.”
Sergeant Gregory shifted nervously. “We heard you were in town, and that finding evidence that no-one else sees is sort of your area.”
Sherlock reached for his stolen afghan and waved Gregory out of his way. The detective led Sherlock down the hall as John got back up to follow after.
“Let me guess. There hasn’t been a recorded murder out this way in twenty years?” Sherlock asked flatly.
“More like ten, but well… basically.” He took them to the other end of the small hotel to a room that was identical to their own, with the minor addition of a dead woman lying on the floor, half-obscured by the bed.
“Has anything been moved?” Sherlock asked as he handed his afghan to John and snapped his fingers at the single uniformed officer standing in the room. “Gloves,” he ordered.
The constable handed Sherlock a pair of neoprene gloves, eyeing him nervously.
“No, scene was only discovered about twenty minutes ago by housekeeping,” said Gregory.
Gloves on, Sherlock nodded and shakily got down to his knees beside the woman. He picked up her hand and gazed at it for a moment before putting it back down and reaching underneath to the back of her head. After bringing his hands back out, he inspected his fingertips and reached out for John to help him back to his feet.
“John,” he said, motioning for him to take his turn.
John put on a pair of gloves of his own, and while he gave the victim his own once-over, Sherlock studied the room at large, peering at every available surface.
“I’d say dead about… three hours,” John said. “Looks like she died somewhere else, and was moved here. Blunt force to the back of the head.”
He looked up at Sherlock, who nodded in confirmation.
“Nearly right,” he said. “She was moved, but it was before she was dead.”
He pointed at the TV stand, which had been scrubbed nearly-clean, leaving behind a brownish smear on the rounded edge.
“She knew her attacker,” said Sherlock. “There was an argument between them that got out of hand more quickly than either of them had been able to handle. The struggle was brief and her death accidental. Your suspect panicked; moved her so she was lying down, but when he realised that she was already dead, he fled. But not before trying to cover his tracks.”
“She knew the attacker?” asked Gregory.
“Under the nails,” Sherlock explained. She’d just had a manicure done. Still fresh; nothing under her nails at all. She didn’t fight back because she didn’t think she’d have to until it was too late. Whose room is this?”
Gregory checked his notes. “A… Mr Arthur Milliner. American, here on holiday.”
Sherlock frowned at that. “American? What American holidays to Cornwall?”
“Mr Arthur Milliner, apparently,” said Gregory.
“Fine. Whatever. Where is he?” Sherlock pulled off his gloves and wrapped his afghan back around his shoulders.
“We don’t know,” said Gregory. And then quickly amended, “We’re checking on it. No-one’s seen him since this morning.”
“What about her?” asked John. “She must have had a reason to be in his room in the first place. Any connection?”
Sherlock smiled expectantly. “Let me guess,” he said.
“We don’t know,” confirmed Gregory, suddenly rather sheepish.
“John, work this problem out for us, would you?” Sherlock asked.
John looked up at him with a mask of confusion for a moment before nodding in understanding. He carefully checked through her pockets, quickly locating a plastic key card.
“What are the odds that this card opens that door?” he asked, holding the card up to the constable. “Try it?”
The constable nodded and put the card in the slot outside the door.
“Works,” he declared before dropping the card in an evidence bag.
“Safe to say that Mr Milliner knows the victim,” Sherlock said. He got to his feet and made his way toward the door. “I’m done here. Let me know when you find Mr Milliner.”
“What about you?” asked Gregory.
“Going to bed,” declared Sherlock.
He made his way back to their rooms, John close behind.
“You really shouldn’t be doing their case for them,” John told him. “Remember that rest thing that we talked about?”
Sherlock snorted. “Simpletons,” he said. “I shudder to think of how many unrecorded murders they’ve had in the last ten years.”
John chuckled and shook his head. “I knew showing you that film was a bad idea,” he said as he shut the door and helped Sherlock into bed.
“Up for supper?” he asked.
Sherlock shrugged. “Order something. If I get hungry, I’ll eat.”
John rang for room service, which went straight to the mini-fridge in the corner of the room.
Sherlock was roused several hours later by the phone ringing. He lay on his side, listening to John’s side of the conversation with Sergeant Gregory. It was a short conversation, with Gregory doing most of the talking, which could have only meant that a break had been made.
“Thanks,” John said before he hung up. He put the phone down and settled back into the sofa. “They found Milliner.”
“Dead end,” Sherlock said simply.
John blinked. “How do you know?” he asked.
“I suspected as much when we were in his room, but I didn’t know until just now,” Sherlock explained. “If he had been their man, Gregory would have come to gloat in person. They all like to do that. But he’s embarrassed at the waste of time, so he phoned.”
John grinned. “Well, he was on a boat all day.”
“Good alibi, as they go,” Sherlock agreed. “Is he still here?”
John nodded. “Hotel moved him to the ground floor. Didn’t say how long he was staying, though.”
Sherlock frowned. “What’s his connection?”
John shook his head. “Dunno. They couldn’t find one, and I know what you’re going to say next.”
“Hardly surprising,” Sherlock said anyway. “This entire wretched affair could have been over and done with in ten minutes if these people had the first clue how CCTV worked.”
“They’ve probably never needed it,” John pointed out.
“And now they’ve made themselves look like fools by needing what they don’t have,” Sherlock pointed out.
John started to argue further, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. Instead, he made his point by throwing a small cushion at Sherlock as he got up to send their latest visitor away.
Before he could even greet the person, he was hit in the back of the head by the same cushion he’d thrown at Sherlock.
“Mr Holmes?” asked the man outside the door.
“Er, no. John Watson,” he said. “Sherlock’s over there, but he’s quite ill I’m afraid.”
“Yeah, I know,” said the man. “Katherine is… was my sister. I was told that Mr Holmes is on the case. I’m Bernard. Bernard Davies.”
“Right. Yeah. Come in,” John said as he stepped aside to allow the man to enter.
“It was Arthur, wasn’t it?” he asked as he hovered awkwardly near the chair near the bed.
“Why would it be Arthur?” asked Sherlock as he tried to sit up. All he managed to do instead was his sharply from the pull on his ribs and start coughing again.
“Please, sit down,” John told Bernard as he rushed to Sherlock’s side to help him up.
“Has he been to hospital?” asked Bernard as he sat. He leaned forward, trying to get a closer look as the pair of them.
“No,” John said tiredly. “But that’s what I’m here for.”
“Don’t need a hospital,” said Sherlock once he had his breath back. “And why would it be Arthur Milliner?”
“He fancies himself her boyfriend,” Bernard explained. “Been trying to get her to the States for a few years. But it was never gonna happen. I finally managed to convince her of it the other week, before he came back for another go at it.”
Sherlock stared hard at Bernard, making the man twitch.
“The police didn’t know who he was,” said John. “Why wouldn’t he have told them that he was dating the victim?”
Bernard shifted his attention between Sherlock and John. “I reckon because he still thinks I don’t know about it.” He snorted. “Yeah, like they were able to keep that secret.”
“And what?” asked Sherlock. “She told him that it was over, and he wasn’t going to have it?” He considered this for a moment, a light frown played across his face. “Wouldn’t be the first time. John, is it possible that your time of death estimate was wrong?”
“Well, yeah it’s possible,” said John. “But I don’t think it was. Sergeant Gregory would have said so if the coroner had disagreed with me.”
“Assuming he even looked at the report,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Mr Holmes, I know it was him,” Bernard said. “Who else could it have been?”
“Indeed,” agreed Sherlock. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Mr Davies, my doctor here is about two minutes away from getting upset with me for overworking myself, but I will contact you if I come up with anything.”
“Right. Of course.” Bernard rose to his feet, nodding nervously.
John rose to shake his hand and saw him to the door.
“We’ll work this out,” John assured him. “Trust me.”
He shut the door behind Bernard and turned to Sherlock.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I wanted him gone,” Sherlock explained. “He’s lying about something, but I don’t know what. Laptop.”
John shook his head as he fetched the laptop from across the room and handed it to Sherlock.
“I don’t know,” John said. “He seemed all right to me.”
“That’s how I know he was lying,” said Sherlock, already madly typing at something.
The next morning, John awoke to find Sherlock’s room completely devoid of any detectives, consulting or otherwise. What he did find was Sherlock’s laptop open to Arthur Milliner’s Facebook page. It was fairly bland, as Facebook pages go, but a high school chemistry teacher no doubt had to be careful about such things.
He seemed to have used his page mainly to update his students, posting mostly about exams and project due dates. There were a few photos taken from the classroom, but nothing incriminating of anything. Rather boring, really.
John forgot about the Facebook page in favour of making sure Sherlock hadn’t wandered off somewhere in a fever-induced state of delirium. After failing to find the man in the immediate vicinity, John decided to check the village on the very real possibility that Sherlock had simply forgotten that he was quite ill and been distracted by shiny and/or bleeding.
He didn’t get far, though. John barely stepped out of the hotel’s main entrance when he found Sherlock on a bench messing with his phone.
“Up early,” John noted as he sat down next to Sherlock.
Sherlock snorted lightly. “Eight o’clock is hardly early,” he said.
“Is when you’re on holiday,” John told him.
Sherlock snorted again and went back to poking at his phone. His attention snapped up sharply when someone walked out of the hotel. John recognised the man from the Facebook page and realised that Sherlock was on the case in earnest.
“Excuse me,” Sherlock said to the man, affecting the soft tone he liked to use on people when he was about to tell some sort of massive lie. “I can’t get any signal outside of London. Could I maybe borrow your mobile?”
Milliner stalled for a moment before nodding.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. He pulled the LG from his pocket and handed it over with a forced smile.
“Thank you,” Sherlock said. He pounded out a quick text message and handed the phone back. “Vodafone,” he complained. “Completely worthless network.”
“No problem,” said Milliner. He pocketed the phone without a second glance at it and nodded. “See ya round.”
“You too.” Sherlock watched him go, waiting until he was obscured by a hedgerow before getting to his feet and quickly making his way back inside.
“So,” said John, following after. “What did you learn from his phone?”
“Nothing. I needed to send a text.”
John frowned as he followed behind Sherlock as they ascended the stairs, keeping a light hand on Sherlock’s back. As soon as they were back in Sherlock’s room, John went to go change into some proper clothes as Sherlock went straight for his laptop.
“Have you eaten?” asked John from his own room.
“I’ve still got last night’s supper. Not really hungry,” Sherlock answered as he navigated through a maze of usernames and passwords.
“Well, try to eat something today,” John said as he stepped into a pair of jeans. “I know you don’t feel well, but you’ll feel even worse if you keep skipping meals like this.”
“Yes, Mother,” Sherlock said, not looking up from his laptop.
Sherlock spent the rest of the day staring at the screen of his laptop, barely moving at all. He drank the tea John would occasionally bring him, and had become resigned to being slightly manhandled for regular body temperature checks.
Just before a failed attempt at getting Sherlock to eat lunch, John sat next to Sherlock on the bed and untangled him from the mess of blankets and dressing gowns he had wrapped around himself. He checked on the state of Sherlock’s breathing with his stethoscope, through which Sherlock remained surprisingly still and cooperative. John put this up to the simple fact that Sherlock was – apparently – working, and therefore not entirely aware of the world around him.
“You’re getting there,” John said as he draped his stethoscope around his neck and re-situated Sherlock’s dressing gown on his shoulders.
“Good,” Sherlock said flatly. “Can we go home?”
“Not yet. I want to wait until your chest clears up a bit more. It might go faster if you didn’t keep breathing the same air in here,” John told him.
Sherlock rolled his eyes and pushed John away. He stretched out and put himself at an odd angle on the bed in order to force John off entirely.
A few hours later, Sherlock closed his laptop and stood up, giving the room at large a disgusted look.
“I’m going out,” he declared.
Before John could say anything, Sherlock left the room and made a line down the hall to the crime scene. It was still taped off, but the officer was long gone. No doubt sitting in a pub somewhere, waiting for something interesting to happen.
Sherlock let himself into the room, tearing down the tape on his way. He sat down on the foot of the bed and pressed his fingers against his lips as he stared at the TV stand in front of him. While he liked having the work to distract him, he hated that the thing he needed distracting from was also slowing him down and making thinking difficult. There was something he was missing, and he knew it. This should have been a simple case; it reeked of open-and-shut domestic, but something was wrong. Everyone was lying and the pieces weren’t fitting together.
He had the very strong feeling that the only honest person in this entire affair had been Katherine Davies.
Sherlock looked down at the blood stain on the carpet. She had died there, on the floor of her not-so-secret boyfriend’s hotel room while he was, depending on whose story contained the least amount of lies, on a boat at sea.
He shifted his attention back and forth between the stain on the carpet and the stain on the TV stand. There was something very wrong with something.
Head wounds bleed a lot; more than is generally expected of them. It’s part of what makes a cut on the scalp seem like horror film material. The stain on the floor was evidence that she had died there, and nowhere else. She’d been moved quickly from one side of the room to the other – the room was small, so it wouldn’t have been difficult.
But there was absolutely no trail between the point of impact and the stain on the floor.
Something was wrong.
“Shut up.”
Sherlock didn’t look at John as he entered the room, paying more attention to Sherlock than to anything else. John stopped in his steps and crossed his arms over his chest as he watched Sherlock think through everything.
“How tall would you say Milliner was?” asked Sherlock.
John shrugged. “Pretty tall,” he said. “About an inch taller than you, maybe?”
Sherlock stared hard at the stain on the TV stand for a few moments longer before getting up as quickly as he was able and grabbing John. He snaked his fingers around the back of John’s head, trying to visualise where the point of impact had been from memory. He found the spot, just above and slightly behind John’s left ear, and pressed lightly.
Glancing back at the TV stand, Sherlock frowned hard.
“How would you hit the back of your head on that?” Sherlock asked indignantly, staring at the TV stand as though it had been the real criminal.
John looked at the stand for a moment before trying to contort himself to his head anywhere near the hip-level surface where the stain had been.
“I’d have to be… over there,” he said, pointing at the stain. “She fell backwards on it.”
Sherlock pulled John over to the side of the bed and grabbed John by the wrist with one hand, and pushed his opposite shoulder by the other.
“No,” he said.
“Oi,” John scolded. “Be careful with that.” He tried to step backwards, but with his wrist in Sherlock’s grip, all he managed to do was twist a bit.
“Do that again,” Sherlock said as he knelt slightly, in an attempt to match Bernard Davies’ height.
John pulled away again, putting a bit more force into it and very nearly lost his footing.
“Oh!” Sherlock shouted as he pressed his hands against his forehead. “Oh, stupid!”
“Sherlock?” asked John.
“She had the card,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Yeah,” John agreed. “I found it in her pocket, remember?”
“Why would she need it if Milliner was here with her?” Sherlock asked. “She had the card because she was waiting for him to get back. He’d given it to her. Why would she accept it if she’d already been convinced to break off the relationship?”
John looked around the room as he chewed lightly at his lip.
“You think it was the brother?” he asked.
“She hadn’t been convinced at all,” Sherlock said as he pulled his hands through his hair. “She came here to meet Milliner, and Davies followed her. She didn’t want to be convinced. He probably didn’t even realise she’d hit her head until she went limp in his arms.”
John nodded once and pulled his phone from his pocket and rang Sergeant Gregory.
“Yeah, hi. John Watson,” he said quickly. “Er, you might want to have another word with Bernard Davies. Sherlock thinks he’s—” John paused abruptly and arched his eyebrows. “Oh. Well. That, er… I’ll tell him. Thanks.”
John hung up his phone. “Bernard Davies is dead,” he told Sherlock. “They just found him about twenty minutes ago.”
“Where?” demanded Sherlock, already on his way out of the room.
“His house,” John told him. “Gregory said it was suicide.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Sherlock said. He opened the door to his room and flung open the lid to his laptop. “What’s this wretched village called?”
“Portloe,” John answered. “Why?”
Sherlock didn’t answer, focused instead on looking up Bernard Davies’ address. Once he located it, he pulled up the page he’d spent most of the day staring at and quickly scrolled through the columns of data listed on it. He suddenly called out in triumph when he found what he was apparently looking for, only to start coughing again.
“What’s going on?” asked John.
“I need to speak with Arthur Milliner,” Sherlock said once he regained his breath. “Phone reception and have them send him up here.”
John eyed Sherlock curiously, but did as he was told. Rather than deliver the message for him, the woman at reception just connected him directly. While John rather awkwardly tried to convince the man to come upstairs, Sherlock crosschecked whatever data he had in his multiple browser tags before becoming convinced that he had everything right. After missing the obvious in Milliner’s old room, he felt compelled to double check his own information.
Once off the phone, John sat down in the chair near Sherlock’s bed and silently waited for an explanation. He hardly expected one at all, but when a knock came at the door and Sherlock remained infuriatingly silent, John silently cursed Sherlock’s rather childish need to be overly dramatic.
He got to his feet and opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you,” Milliner said, heavy with confusion.
“Yeah, he wants to…” John finished the thought with a shrug and stood aside to let Milliner in. “Have a seat.”
Milliner looked between the two of them, hesitating to move too far from the door. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’m investigating your girlfriend’s murder,” Sherlock said simply. “Well, was. I’ve worked it out now.”
Milliner’s entire posture stiffened slightly. “Yeah, well, you can tell your buddies from Scotland Yard or whatever that I wasn’t even here.”
“CID,” Sherlock corrected. “And we already know. Just like we already know that not two hours ago, you were ending Bernard Davies’ life. How did you do it? The police are calling it a suicide.”
“What?” Milliner demanded. “Where do you get off?”
“Don’t bother denying it, Mr Milliner,” Sherlock said calmly. “I followed you.”
“No you didn’t. I would have seen you,” Milliner objected.
“Not when I follow you,” Sherlock said with a grin. “Which, by the way. In future, don’t lend your phone to strangers. You can get all sorts of information about a person just from their phone. GPS tracking really has come a long way. Not the first time I’ve used it to solve a case.”
“You…” Milliner spat.
“Save us the stuttering,” Sherlock said. “I really don’t have the patience for it. I just want to know what happened at Bernard Davies’ house.”
John motioned for him to sit down as he settled into the sofa in the corner. “He’s not the police,” he said. “Neither am I. We don’t even work for them.”
“So, what?” asked Milliner. “You’re just… curious?”
Sherlock shrugged. “They dragged me into this, and now I want to know how it ends,” he said. “I know you were dating Katherine Davies, and I know she was killed by her own brother. Now I want to hear your side.”
“We weren’t dating,” Milliner said with a heavy sigh. “She was… we were married.”
Sherlock looked at him sharply, taken by surprise at the new information.
“She was living in New York when we met,” Milliner went on. “Her visa had expired already, and she was just running on luck by that point. So we got married so she could stay in the country. But it doesn’t work like it does in the movies. You still gotta go through all the red tape and other bullshit.”
“And you never told Davies?” asked Sherlock.
Milliner shook his head. “They deported her back anyway. And because of the circumstances, it’s even harder for her to get back in. Bernard was so pissed off about the whole thing anyway that we thought it would just be best to keep it to ourselves. Try to go through the process the right way this time and make it all legal.”
“That’s why you’re here now? Just another step in the process?”
“I come over every chance I get,” Milliner said. “It’s expensive as hell, but she’s my wife. I couldn’t just leave her here. Bernard was always accusing me of stringing her along and getting her hopes up over nothing. I got sick of it, so we decided to do it the other way around, and I was trying to move over here. Which is… still a pain in the ass.”
Sherlock nodded. “You weren’t on a boat at all. Where were you?”
“London,” Milliner said. “Max is an old friend of Katherine’s. He took the boat out and said I was with him so I could take care of what I had to in London. We couldn’t really keep it from Bernard that I’m here, but we could at least not let him figure out what I’m doing here. I got back here to find that a bunch of cops were up in my room because there was a murder up there.”
“I’d hardly call two ‘a bunch,’ Sherlock told him. “How’d you work out that Davies was responsible?”
Milliner laughed darkly. “Because that son of a bitch was trying his damnedest to pin it on me. Who else could it have been?” he asked. “Soon as the cops started talking to me, I knew it was him. I just couldn’t prove it. So I went over there today to try to talk him into turning himself in or something. I don’t know. I was pissed. Beyond pissed. He killed his own sister. My wife.”
“What happened? Did you honestly think that he would give in so easily?” Sherlock asked, unable to keep the amusement from his voice.
“Yeah. No. I don’t know. I didn’t expect him to start swinging at me. So I pushed him off of me and he fell down the stairs. Kind of like, I don’t know. I guess I didn’t realise how close we were to them,” Milliner went on. “And then I thought, ‘you know what? Screw him.’ This guy tried to frame me for something he did. Why should I care about him? So, whatever. Left him there on the floor. Thought maybe he could think about what he did as he lay there dying. Just like he did to Katherine.”
Milliner deflated and sank into the chair while the other two men just watched him.
“Guess you’ll be wanting to call the cops on me now?” he asked. “Looks like I’ll be staying in England after all.”
Sherlock tapped his fingers together for a few moments. “You’re a teacher,” he said. “High school, that’s what?” He looked at John; a silent request to fill in this information gap.
“About sixth form,” John said. “A bit younger sometimes, but not by much.”
Sherlock nodded. “Your students like you. It’s the middle of summer term, and they’re still leaving messages on your Facebook page. As much as they’d miss you if you relocated, you’d at least be able to teach here. Doubtful you’d be of any use in prison.” He chewed on his thumb for a few moments before waving his hand idly. “Whatever. I’m bored with this case. Open-and-shut domestic. Go home. Mourn your wife. Teach your students.”
He shut his laptop and shoved it aside. John looked at him nervously, as though waiting for the punch line to an especially nasty joke.
“What about the police?” he asked.
“What about them?” asked Sherlock. “I can prove that Davies killed his sister, and as far as they know, he killed himself. Or tripped, or whatever. Case closed.”
Sherlock flung himself a bit too dramatically back into his bed, causing his ribs to pull uncomfortably.
“Are you gone yet?” he asked.
“Right,” said John as he got to his feet. “I guess that’s it. Thanks. I think.” He shrugged as he opened the door.
Milliner stood slowly, casting a wary eye between the two of them. “Just like that?” he asked.
John shrugged again. “You’d better go before he changes his mind. But like I said, we’re not with the police, so they won’t be hearing about this, I guess.”
“Right. Well, thanks.”
Milliner shook John’s hand, and after giving Sherlock one more cautious glance, walked out of the room. After shutting the door, John sat back down in the seat Milliner had vacated.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded.
“What?” asked Sherlock as he glared at the ceiling.
“Whatever that just was. Are you really not going to the police?”
“Nope,” Sherlock said simply.
John chewed on that for a few moments. “Why?” he asked finally.
“You keep changing the rules,” Sherlock complained. “You tell me off for being too mean to people, and then when I try to be kind to them, you just tell me off all over again.”
“That was you being kind?” asked John incredulously.
“Is that so hard to imagine of me?” demanded Sherlock. “His wife was just murdered. I’ve been led to believe that people will react quite passionately when a person they love comes to harm. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t have done the same?”
“I… yes!” John said. “You let a murderer off.”
Sherlock snorted. “Manslaughter, if anything.”
“He left the man there to die,” John pointed out. “He knew that’s exactly what would happen.”
“Turnabout’s fair play, wouldn’t you say?” asked Sherlock.
John sighed deeply and shook his head. “Yeah, but I’m sure the police would like to know about it.”
“Oh, hell,” Sherlock growled as he sat up. “Contrary to what you might believe, I don’t actually enjoy doing their work for them. And besides. I’m on holiday!”
He threw one of his pillows at John and buried himself under the tangled mess that was his duvet.
holmestice on a lark. Maybe not the wisest idea, with everything that's been going on, but I had fun! The person I wrote it for wanted something from the new BBC verse, so I'm not sure how well I did with characterisation and stuff. So I sort of cheated a bit, and turned it into an ACD fusion.Title: Turnabout's Fair Play
Pairing: Holmes/Watson friendshippy/squint/pre-slash/IDK
Length: 6,400
Rating: PG
Warnings: Contains a bit of everything. Asexual!Holmes, heavy nods to ACD canon, stealth nods to other fandoms, casefic and the expected amount of murder and misdeeds, H/C, light medical kink, either friendshippy or squint; I can’t tell.
Beta Credit:
storm_ford and not_thatbillDisclaimer: ACD might actually be rather amused by all this.
Summary: A holiday to Cornwall turns into a test of
Turnabout’s Fair Play
John wanted to be surprised when Sherlock managed himself a particularly brutal case of pneumonia, but he found the emotion rather difficult to come by. If anything, he was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. Sherlock didn’t take care of himself; ignored basic signals from his body that most people hardly notice beyond registering the need to alter their behaviour in order to appease whatever had caused the signals to begin with.
Sherlock was so good at ignoring these signals that he managed his particularly brutal case of pneumonia in the middle of June. It was so typically Sherlock in every way.
“It’s not pneumonia,” Sherlock complained as John held the man’s head steady. “I’m fine.”
John waited until the digital thermometer he held in Sherlock’s ear beeped before checking the reading. “It is and you’re not,” he said. “This is what happens when you get into a punch-up while you’ve got a cold.”
“At least I won,” Sherlock muttered.
“Is that what you call this?” asked John. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He handed Sherlock a cup of tea and his laptop before settling down on the far end of the sofa. It took almost no time at all for John to realise that the muffled sounds coming from his friend were those of deliberately suppressed coughs. Sherlock would find a way to be difficult about every aspect of his illness.
“You want to get that stuff out of your lungs,” John told him as he picked up a section of a nearby newspaper.
Sherlock just snorted dismissively at him.
“You know what happens if you don’t?” asked John casually as he read over the sports page. “You either drown slowly, which I’ve been led to believe is quite an unpleasant way to go, or your lungs get so heavy that they crush your heart.”
“The term is congestive heart failure, Doctor,” Sherlock said in his tone that he used to protest being talked down to. “And I can’t. It hurts.”
John looked up at him, studying the positively miserable sight that was Sherlock in two dressing gowns and buried under a thick duvet.
“What hurts?” asked John.
“Felt something snap earlier,” Sherlock said into his tea. “All this damned coughing, I think I pulled something.”
After a hesitant moment, John put down his newspaper and got back to his feet. He took Sherlock’s mug from him before leaning him back against the arm of the sofa. John opened both Sherlock’s dressing gowns and gave a brief pause.
“That’s my jumper,” he said.
“You weren’t wearing it,” Sherlock pointed out.
“God, no wonder you’re burning up,” John muttered as he lightly pulled the jumper and the T-shirt underneath up as Sherlock motioned to his right side.
“I hate to do it to you, but I’m taking most of this from you,” John told him as he felt around the area Sherlock had indicated.
Sherlock hissed sharply and his entire body tensed up as John’s fingers pressed lightly into his side.
“You’re evil and I hate you,” Sherlock said.
“Of course I am. I’m a doctor,” John told him. He helped Sherlock sit back up and gingerly pulled both dressing gowns off of him, setting them aside. “Hard to tell without an X-ray, but I think you might have cracked something. But I don’t want to bind you, ‘cause you need to cough that crap out. Just let me know if it gets worse.”
Sherlock groaned again and sank back into the sofa, already shivering slightly.
As soon as Sherlock’s fever had dropped to levels that weren’t on the verge of requiring immediate hospitalisation, John resolved to get Sherlock out of London and away from the heavy air of the city. He’d thought that by that point, Sherlock would be back to his usual belligerent self, but he remained surprisingly subdued, if slightly more cranky than usual.
John used Sherlock’s credit card (the one he knew Mycroft paid for anyway) to book a couple of rooms in a small hotel in Cornwall, to which Sherlock put up surprisingly little fight. He spent the majority of the train ride asleep, wrapped in a large afghan he’d stolen from Mrs Hudson and with his headphones on, listening to God only knew what. Everything and anything, near as John could tell. John was just happy to see that he was actually getting some sleep, even if not exactly under the best of circumstances.
He left Sherlock in the cab as he checked into the hotel, letting Mycroft pay extra for two adjoining rooms. By the time he returned to the cab, Sherlock had fallen asleep again. Rousing him proved difficult as ever, but wasn’t quite as difficult as getting him up the stairs to the first floor. John helped him settle into the small sofa in the corner of the room before throwing open the curtains to get a bit of light in.
“I’ll be just through there,” he said as he pointed at the door that joined the rooms. “Shout if you need me.”
He pressed his lips to Sherlock’s forehead.
“Get off me!” Sherlock shouted, throwing his arms into the air in an awkward attempt to shove John off. The outburst triggered another fit of coughing that lasted well past the time it took John to make his way to his own room.
Much to John’s annoyance, it hadn’t taken long at all for people from the hotel and neighbouring village to get word that Sherlock Holmes was in town, and John quickly found himself overwrought with people ringing their rooms or knocking on their doors asking for help with the most trivial of matters. Again, John wished he could have been surprised, but the influx of traffic to his blog had been a fairly decent indicator that word of Sherlock’s skills had spread since the whole Moriarty thing. And it would seem that it had spread a bit farther than he’d thought. That, or there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in Cornwall. Either way, John had half a mind to demand a refund just on principle.
After telling the tenth person that Sherlock could not come out and play, John unplugged both their phones and locked the doors. Eventually, the locals got the point and gave up, much to John’s relief. Once things had finally settled down, he set out to find wherever Sherlock had decided to hide. With only so much space to check, John quickly found him half-asleep in a bath that was no doubt far warmer than it needed to be.
“Try not to drown for me,” John told him with a sigh.
Sherlock waved his hand vaguely, which John took as a signal that he was still alive and wouldn’t need checking on for another quarter hour or so.
He emerged on his own not too long after, pyjama-clad and with his still-dripping hair combed back out of his eyes. Before he was even settled on the sofa, John was back on him with the thermometer.
“Thirty-nine, eight,” John declared. “Sorry. Hand it over.”
Sherlock practically growled as he shucked his dressing gown. He threw it to the floor, taking a small amount of delight in watching John pick it up.
“Well, ask me to draw your bath next time, so you don’t boil yourself,” John told him as he retreated back to the bathroom.
He returned several moments later with a damp flannel, which he handed to Sherlock.
“Forehead,” he said.
Sherlock glared at him, but did as he was told, taking every effort to let John know just how cold and miserable he was. John, with all the patience that comes from living with the world’s most over-grown six-year-old, ignored Sherlock’s continued complaints.
By the next afternoon, John was completely willing to admit that this forced sabbatical had been a complete wash. Every time he tried to open the windows to get a bit of fresh air in, Sherlock had complained that the sea was putting him off and closed them again, and while pestering from the local inhabitants had slowed, it hadn’t stopped entirely.
Which was why, when a policeman knocked on Sherlock’s door, John knew it was going to be nothing but trouble.
“Sorry, he’s quite ill,” John said by way of a greeting. “He won’t even go outside, and that’s probably for the better, actually.”
“That’s fine,” said the officer as he flashed his warrant card, revealing himself to be a DS. “We only need him to come up the hall.”
“He really shouldn’t—” John started, but was interrupted by the sudden force of being shoved sideways.
“Stop stifling me,” Sherlock told him. “You’re not my mother.” He turned his attention to the sergeant. “I’ve been in town just over twenty-four hours, and already you lot are out of your depth. This doesn’t reflect well.”
John gave up and retreated back to the bed, where he’d been watching telly. “Help him or turn him away, Sherlock. Insulting him isn’t doing either of you any good.”
Sergeant Gregory shifted nervously. “We heard you were in town, and that finding evidence that no-one else sees is sort of your area.”
Sherlock reached for his stolen afghan and waved Gregory out of his way. The detective led Sherlock down the hall as John got back up to follow after.
“Let me guess. There hasn’t been a recorded murder out this way in twenty years?” Sherlock asked flatly.
“More like ten, but well… basically.” He took them to the other end of the small hotel to a room that was identical to their own, with the minor addition of a dead woman lying on the floor, half-obscured by the bed.
“Has anything been moved?” Sherlock asked as he handed his afghan to John and snapped his fingers at the single uniformed officer standing in the room. “Gloves,” he ordered.
The constable handed Sherlock a pair of neoprene gloves, eyeing him nervously.
“No, scene was only discovered about twenty minutes ago by housekeeping,” said Gregory.
Gloves on, Sherlock nodded and shakily got down to his knees beside the woman. He picked up her hand and gazed at it for a moment before putting it back down and reaching underneath to the back of her head. After bringing his hands back out, he inspected his fingertips and reached out for John to help him back to his feet.
“John,” he said, motioning for him to take his turn.
John put on a pair of gloves of his own, and while he gave the victim his own once-over, Sherlock studied the room at large, peering at every available surface.
“I’d say dead about… three hours,” John said. “Looks like she died somewhere else, and was moved here. Blunt force to the back of the head.”
He looked up at Sherlock, who nodded in confirmation.
“Nearly right,” he said. “She was moved, but it was before she was dead.”
He pointed at the TV stand, which had been scrubbed nearly-clean, leaving behind a brownish smear on the rounded edge.
“She knew her attacker,” said Sherlock. “There was an argument between them that got out of hand more quickly than either of them had been able to handle. The struggle was brief and her death accidental. Your suspect panicked; moved her so she was lying down, but when he realised that she was already dead, he fled. But not before trying to cover his tracks.”
“She knew the attacker?” asked Gregory.
“Under the nails,” Sherlock explained. She’d just had a manicure done. Still fresh; nothing under her nails at all. She didn’t fight back because she didn’t think she’d have to until it was too late. Whose room is this?”
Gregory checked his notes. “A… Mr Arthur Milliner. American, here on holiday.”
Sherlock frowned at that. “American? What American holidays to Cornwall?”
“Mr Arthur Milliner, apparently,” said Gregory.
“Fine. Whatever. Where is he?” Sherlock pulled off his gloves and wrapped his afghan back around his shoulders.
“We don’t know,” said Gregory. And then quickly amended, “We’re checking on it. No-one’s seen him since this morning.”
“What about her?” asked John. “She must have had a reason to be in his room in the first place. Any connection?”
Sherlock smiled expectantly. “Let me guess,” he said.
“We don’t know,” confirmed Gregory, suddenly rather sheepish.
“John, work this problem out for us, would you?” Sherlock asked.
John looked up at him with a mask of confusion for a moment before nodding in understanding. He carefully checked through her pockets, quickly locating a plastic key card.
“What are the odds that this card opens that door?” he asked, holding the card up to the constable. “Try it?”
The constable nodded and put the card in the slot outside the door.
“Works,” he declared before dropping the card in an evidence bag.
“Safe to say that Mr Milliner knows the victim,” Sherlock said. He got to his feet and made his way toward the door. “I’m done here. Let me know when you find Mr Milliner.”
“What about you?” asked Gregory.
“Going to bed,” declared Sherlock.
He made his way back to their rooms, John close behind.
“You really shouldn’t be doing their case for them,” John told him. “Remember that rest thing that we talked about?”
Sherlock snorted. “Simpletons,” he said. “I shudder to think of how many unrecorded murders they’ve had in the last ten years.”
John chuckled and shook his head. “I knew showing you that film was a bad idea,” he said as he shut the door and helped Sherlock into bed.
“Up for supper?” he asked.
Sherlock shrugged. “Order something. If I get hungry, I’ll eat.”
John rang for room service, which went straight to the mini-fridge in the corner of the room.
Sherlock was roused several hours later by the phone ringing. He lay on his side, listening to John’s side of the conversation with Sergeant Gregory. It was a short conversation, with Gregory doing most of the talking, which could have only meant that a break had been made.
“Thanks,” John said before he hung up. He put the phone down and settled back into the sofa. “They found Milliner.”
“Dead end,” Sherlock said simply.
John blinked. “How do you know?” he asked.
“I suspected as much when we were in his room, but I didn’t know until just now,” Sherlock explained. “If he had been their man, Gregory would have come to gloat in person. They all like to do that. But he’s embarrassed at the waste of time, so he phoned.”
John grinned. “Well, he was on a boat all day.”
“Good alibi, as they go,” Sherlock agreed. “Is he still here?”
John nodded. “Hotel moved him to the ground floor. Didn’t say how long he was staying, though.”
Sherlock frowned. “What’s his connection?”
John shook his head. “Dunno. They couldn’t find one, and I know what you’re going to say next.”
“Hardly surprising,” Sherlock said anyway. “This entire wretched affair could have been over and done with in ten minutes if these people had the first clue how CCTV worked.”
“They’ve probably never needed it,” John pointed out.
“And now they’ve made themselves look like fools by needing what they don’t have,” Sherlock pointed out.
John started to argue further, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. Instead, he made his point by throwing a small cushion at Sherlock as he got up to send their latest visitor away.
Before he could even greet the person, he was hit in the back of the head by the same cushion he’d thrown at Sherlock.
“Mr Holmes?” asked the man outside the door.
“Er, no. John Watson,” he said. “Sherlock’s over there, but he’s quite ill I’m afraid.”
“Yeah, I know,” said the man. “Katherine is… was my sister. I was told that Mr Holmes is on the case. I’m Bernard. Bernard Davies.”
“Right. Yeah. Come in,” John said as he stepped aside to allow the man to enter.
“It was Arthur, wasn’t it?” he asked as he hovered awkwardly near the chair near the bed.
“Why would it be Arthur?” asked Sherlock as he tried to sit up. All he managed to do instead was his sharply from the pull on his ribs and start coughing again.
“Please, sit down,” John told Bernard as he rushed to Sherlock’s side to help him up.
“Has he been to hospital?” asked Bernard as he sat. He leaned forward, trying to get a closer look as the pair of them.
“No,” John said tiredly. “But that’s what I’m here for.”
“Don’t need a hospital,” said Sherlock once he had his breath back. “And why would it be Arthur Milliner?”
“He fancies himself her boyfriend,” Bernard explained. “Been trying to get her to the States for a few years. But it was never gonna happen. I finally managed to convince her of it the other week, before he came back for another go at it.”
Sherlock stared hard at Bernard, making the man twitch.
“The police didn’t know who he was,” said John. “Why wouldn’t he have told them that he was dating the victim?”
Bernard shifted his attention between Sherlock and John. “I reckon because he still thinks I don’t know about it.” He snorted. “Yeah, like they were able to keep that secret.”
“And what?” asked Sherlock. “She told him that it was over, and he wasn’t going to have it?” He considered this for a moment, a light frown played across his face. “Wouldn’t be the first time. John, is it possible that your time of death estimate was wrong?”
“Well, yeah it’s possible,” said John. “But I don’t think it was. Sergeant Gregory would have said so if the coroner had disagreed with me.”
“Assuming he even looked at the report,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Mr Holmes, I know it was him,” Bernard said. “Who else could it have been?”
“Indeed,” agreed Sherlock. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Mr Davies, my doctor here is about two minutes away from getting upset with me for overworking myself, but I will contact you if I come up with anything.”
“Right. Of course.” Bernard rose to his feet, nodding nervously.
John rose to shake his hand and saw him to the door.
“We’ll work this out,” John assured him. “Trust me.”
He shut the door behind Bernard and turned to Sherlock.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I wanted him gone,” Sherlock explained. “He’s lying about something, but I don’t know what. Laptop.”
John shook his head as he fetched the laptop from across the room and handed it to Sherlock.
“I don’t know,” John said. “He seemed all right to me.”
“That’s how I know he was lying,” said Sherlock, already madly typing at something.
The next morning, John awoke to find Sherlock’s room completely devoid of any detectives, consulting or otherwise. What he did find was Sherlock’s laptop open to Arthur Milliner’s Facebook page. It was fairly bland, as Facebook pages go, but a high school chemistry teacher no doubt had to be careful about such things.
He seemed to have used his page mainly to update his students, posting mostly about exams and project due dates. There were a few photos taken from the classroom, but nothing incriminating of anything. Rather boring, really.
John forgot about the Facebook page in favour of making sure Sherlock hadn’t wandered off somewhere in a fever-induced state of delirium. After failing to find the man in the immediate vicinity, John decided to check the village on the very real possibility that Sherlock had simply forgotten that he was quite ill and been distracted by shiny and/or bleeding.
He didn’t get far, though. John barely stepped out of the hotel’s main entrance when he found Sherlock on a bench messing with his phone.
“Up early,” John noted as he sat down next to Sherlock.
Sherlock snorted lightly. “Eight o’clock is hardly early,” he said.
“Is when you’re on holiday,” John told him.
Sherlock snorted again and went back to poking at his phone. His attention snapped up sharply when someone walked out of the hotel. John recognised the man from the Facebook page and realised that Sherlock was on the case in earnest.
“Excuse me,” Sherlock said to the man, affecting the soft tone he liked to use on people when he was about to tell some sort of massive lie. “I can’t get any signal outside of London. Could I maybe borrow your mobile?”
Milliner stalled for a moment before nodding.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. He pulled the LG from his pocket and handed it over with a forced smile.
“Thank you,” Sherlock said. He pounded out a quick text message and handed the phone back. “Vodafone,” he complained. “Completely worthless network.”
“No problem,” said Milliner. He pocketed the phone without a second glance at it and nodded. “See ya round.”
“You too.” Sherlock watched him go, waiting until he was obscured by a hedgerow before getting to his feet and quickly making his way back inside.
“So,” said John, following after. “What did you learn from his phone?”
“Nothing. I needed to send a text.”
John frowned as he followed behind Sherlock as they ascended the stairs, keeping a light hand on Sherlock’s back. As soon as they were back in Sherlock’s room, John went to go change into some proper clothes as Sherlock went straight for his laptop.
“Have you eaten?” asked John from his own room.
“I’ve still got last night’s supper. Not really hungry,” Sherlock answered as he navigated through a maze of usernames and passwords.
“Well, try to eat something today,” John said as he stepped into a pair of jeans. “I know you don’t feel well, but you’ll feel even worse if you keep skipping meals like this.”
“Yes, Mother,” Sherlock said, not looking up from his laptop.
Sherlock spent the rest of the day staring at the screen of his laptop, barely moving at all. He drank the tea John would occasionally bring him, and had become resigned to being slightly manhandled for regular body temperature checks.
Just before a failed attempt at getting Sherlock to eat lunch, John sat next to Sherlock on the bed and untangled him from the mess of blankets and dressing gowns he had wrapped around himself. He checked on the state of Sherlock’s breathing with his stethoscope, through which Sherlock remained surprisingly still and cooperative. John put this up to the simple fact that Sherlock was – apparently – working, and therefore not entirely aware of the world around him.
“You’re getting there,” John said as he draped his stethoscope around his neck and re-situated Sherlock’s dressing gown on his shoulders.
“Good,” Sherlock said flatly. “Can we go home?”
“Not yet. I want to wait until your chest clears up a bit more. It might go faster if you didn’t keep breathing the same air in here,” John told him.
Sherlock rolled his eyes and pushed John away. He stretched out and put himself at an odd angle on the bed in order to force John off entirely.
A few hours later, Sherlock closed his laptop and stood up, giving the room at large a disgusted look.
“I’m going out,” he declared.
Before John could say anything, Sherlock left the room and made a line down the hall to the crime scene. It was still taped off, but the officer was long gone. No doubt sitting in a pub somewhere, waiting for something interesting to happen.
Sherlock let himself into the room, tearing down the tape on his way. He sat down on the foot of the bed and pressed his fingers against his lips as he stared at the TV stand in front of him. While he liked having the work to distract him, he hated that the thing he needed distracting from was also slowing him down and making thinking difficult. There was something he was missing, and he knew it. This should have been a simple case; it reeked of open-and-shut domestic, but something was wrong. Everyone was lying and the pieces weren’t fitting together.
He had the very strong feeling that the only honest person in this entire affair had been Katherine Davies.
Sherlock looked down at the blood stain on the carpet. She had died there, on the floor of her not-so-secret boyfriend’s hotel room while he was, depending on whose story contained the least amount of lies, on a boat at sea.
He shifted his attention back and forth between the stain on the carpet and the stain on the TV stand. There was something very wrong with something.
Head wounds bleed a lot; more than is generally expected of them. It’s part of what makes a cut on the scalp seem like horror film material. The stain on the floor was evidence that she had died there, and nowhere else. She’d been moved quickly from one side of the room to the other – the room was small, so it wouldn’t have been difficult.
But there was absolutely no trail between the point of impact and the stain on the floor.
Something was wrong.
“Shut up.”
Sherlock didn’t look at John as he entered the room, paying more attention to Sherlock than to anything else. John stopped in his steps and crossed his arms over his chest as he watched Sherlock think through everything.
“How tall would you say Milliner was?” asked Sherlock.
John shrugged. “Pretty tall,” he said. “About an inch taller than you, maybe?”
Sherlock stared hard at the stain on the TV stand for a few moments longer before getting up as quickly as he was able and grabbing John. He snaked his fingers around the back of John’s head, trying to visualise where the point of impact had been from memory. He found the spot, just above and slightly behind John’s left ear, and pressed lightly.
Glancing back at the TV stand, Sherlock frowned hard.
“How would you hit the back of your head on that?” Sherlock asked indignantly, staring at the TV stand as though it had been the real criminal.
John looked at the stand for a moment before trying to contort himself to his head anywhere near the hip-level surface where the stain had been.
“I’d have to be… over there,” he said, pointing at the stain. “She fell backwards on it.”
Sherlock pulled John over to the side of the bed and grabbed John by the wrist with one hand, and pushed his opposite shoulder by the other.
“No,” he said.
“Oi,” John scolded. “Be careful with that.” He tried to step backwards, but with his wrist in Sherlock’s grip, all he managed to do was twist a bit.
“Do that again,” Sherlock said as he knelt slightly, in an attempt to match Bernard Davies’ height.
John pulled away again, putting a bit more force into it and very nearly lost his footing.
“Oh!” Sherlock shouted as he pressed his hands against his forehead. “Oh, stupid!”
“Sherlock?” asked John.
“She had the card,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Yeah,” John agreed. “I found it in her pocket, remember?”
“Why would she need it if Milliner was here with her?” Sherlock asked. “She had the card because she was waiting for him to get back. He’d given it to her. Why would she accept it if she’d already been convinced to break off the relationship?”
John looked around the room as he chewed lightly at his lip.
“You think it was the brother?” he asked.
“She hadn’t been convinced at all,” Sherlock said as he pulled his hands through his hair. “She came here to meet Milliner, and Davies followed her. She didn’t want to be convinced. He probably didn’t even realise she’d hit her head until she went limp in his arms.”
John nodded once and pulled his phone from his pocket and rang Sergeant Gregory.
“Yeah, hi. John Watson,” he said quickly. “Er, you might want to have another word with Bernard Davies. Sherlock thinks he’s—” John paused abruptly and arched his eyebrows. “Oh. Well. That, er… I’ll tell him. Thanks.”
John hung up his phone. “Bernard Davies is dead,” he told Sherlock. “They just found him about twenty minutes ago.”
“Where?” demanded Sherlock, already on his way out of the room.
“His house,” John told him. “Gregory said it was suicide.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Sherlock said. He opened the door to his room and flung open the lid to his laptop. “What’s this wretched village called?”
“Portloe,” John answered. “Why?”
Sherlock didn’t answer, focused instead on looking up Bernard Davies’ address. Once he located it, he pulled up the page he’d spent most of the day staring at and quickly scrolled through the columns of data listed on it. He suddenly called out in triumph when he found what he was apparently looking for, only to start coughing again.
“What’s going on?” asked John.
“I need to speak with Arthur Milliner,” Sherlock said once he regained his breath. “Phone reception and have them send him up here.”
John eyed Sherlock curiously, but did as he was told. Rather than deliver the message for him, the woman at reception just connected him directly. While John rather awkwardly tried to convince the man to come upstairs, Sherlock crosschecked whatever data he had in his multiple browser tags before becoming convinced that he had everything right. After missing the obvious in Milliner’s old room, he felt compelled to double check his own information.
Once off the phone, John sat down in the chair near Sherlock’s bed and silently waited for an explanation. He hardly expected one at all, but when a knock came at the door and Sherlock remained infuriatingly silent, John silently cursed Sherlock’s rather childish need to be overly dramatic.
He got to his feet and opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you,” Milliner said, heavy with confusion.
“Yeah, he wants to…” John finished the thought with a shrug and stood aside to let Milliner in. “Have a seat.”
Milliner looked between the two of them, hesitating to move too far from the door. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’m investigating your girlfriend’s murder,” Sherlock said simply. “Well, was. I’ve worked it out now.”
Milliner’s entire posture stiffened slightly. “Yeah, well, you can tell your buddies from Scotland Yard or whatever that I wasn’t even here.”
“CID,” Sherlock corrected. “And we already know. Just like we already know that not two hours ago, you were ending Bernard Davies’ life. How did you do it? The police are calling it a suicide.”
“What?” Milliner demanded. “Where do you get off?”
“Don’t bother denying it, Mr Milliner,” Sherlock said calmly. “I followed you.”
“No you didn’t. I would have seen you,” Milliner objected.
“Not when I follow you,” Sherlock said with a grin. “Which, by the way. In future, don’t lend your phone to strangers. You can get all sorts of information about a person just from their phone. GPS tracking really has come a long way. Not the first time I’ve used it to solve a case.”
“You…” Milliner spat.
“Save us the stuttering,” Sherlock said. “I really don’t have the patience for it. I just want to know what happened at Bernard Davies’ house.”
John motioned for him to sit down as he settled into the sofa in the corner. “He’s not the police,” he said. “Neither am I. We don’t even work for them.”
“So, what?” asked Milliner. “You’re just… curious?”
Sherlock shrugged. “They dragged me into this, and now I want to know how it ends,” he said. “I know you were dating Katherine Davies, and I know she was killed by her own brother. Now I want to hear your side.”
“We weren’t dating,” Milliner said with a heavy sigh. “She was… we were married.”
Sherlock looked at him sharply, taken by surprise at the new information.
“She was living in New York when we met,” Milliner went on. “Her visa had expired already, and she was just running on luck by that point. So we got married so she could stay in the country. But it doesn’t work like it does in the movies. You still gotta go through all the red tape and other bullshit.”
“And you never told Davies?” asked Sherlock.
Milliner shook his head. “They deported her back anyway. And because of the circumstances, it’s even harder for her to get back in. Bernard was so pissed off about the whole thing anyway that we thought it would just be best to keep it to ourselves. Try to go through the process the right way this time and make it all legal.”
“That’s why you’re here now? Just another step in the process?”
“I come over every chance I get,” Milliner said. “It’s expensive as hell, but she’s my wife. I couldn’t just leave her here. Bernard was always accusing me of stringing her along and getting her hopes up over nothing. I got sick of it, so we decided to do it the other way around, and I was trying to move over here. Which is… still a pain in the ass.”
Sherlock nodded. “You weren’t on a boat at all. Where were you?”
“London,” Milliner said. “Max is an old friend of Katherine’s. He took the boat out and said I was with him so I could take care of what I had to in London. We couldn’t really keep it from Bernard that I’m here, but we could at least not let him figure out what I’m doing here. I got back here to find that a bunch of cops were up in my room because there was a murder up there.”
“I’d hardly call two ‘a bunch,’ Sherlock told him. “How’d you work out that Davies was responsible?”
Milliner laughed darkly. “Because that son of a bitch was trying his damnedest to pin it on me. Who else could it have been?” he asked. “Soon as the cops started talking to me, I knew it was him. I just couldn’t prove it. So I went over there today to try to talk him into turning himself in or something. I don’t know. I was pissed. Beyond pissed. He killed his own sister. My wife.”
“What happened? Did you honestly think that he would give in so easily?” Sherlock asked, unable to keep the amusement from his voice.
“Yeah. No. I don’t know. I didn’t expect him to start swinging at me. So I pushed him off of me and he fell down the stairs. Kind of like, I don’t know. I guess I didn’t realise how close we were to them,” Milliner went on. “And then I thought, ‘you know what? Screw him.’ This guy tried to frame me for something he did. Why should I care about him? So, whatever. Left him there on the floor. Thought maybe he could think about what he did as he lay there dying. Just like he did to Katherine.”
Milliner deflated and sank into the chair while the other two men just watched him.
“Guess you’ll be wanting to call the cops on me now?” he asked. “Looks like I’ll be staying in England after all.”
Sherlock tapped his fingers together for a few moments. “You’re a teacher,” he said. “High school, that’s what?” He looked at John; a silent request to fill in this information gap.
“About sixth form,” John said. “A bit younger sometimes, but not by much.”
Sherlock nodded. “Your students like you. It’s the middle of summer term, and they’re still leaving messages on your Facebook page. As much as they’d miss you if you relocated, you’d at least be able to teach here. Doubtful you’d be of any use in prison.” He chewed on his thumb for a few moments before waving his hand idly. “Whatever. I’m bored with this case. Open-and-shut domestic. Go home. Mourn your wife. Teach your students.”
He shut his laptop and shoved it aside. John looked at him nervously, as though waiting for the punch line to an especially nasty joke.
“What about the police?” he asked.
“What about them?” asked Sherlock. “I can prove that Davies killed his sister, and as far as they know, he killed himself. Or tripped, or whatever. Case closed.”
Sherlock flung himself a bit too dramatically back into his bed, causing his ribs to pull uncomfortably.
“Are you gone yet?” he asked.
“Right,” said John as he got to his feet. “I guess that’s it. Thanks. I think.” He shrugged as he opened the door.
Milliner stood slowly, casting a wary eye between the two of them. “Just like that?” he asked.
John shrugged again. “You’d better go before he changes his mind. But like I said, we’re not with the police, so they won’t be hearing about this, I guess.”
“Right. Well, thanks.”
Milliner shook John’s hand, and after giving Sherlock one more cautious glance, walked out of the room. After shutting the door, John sat back down in the seat Milliner had vacated.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded.
“What?” asked Sherlock as he glared at the ceiling.
“Whatever that just was. Are you really not going to the police?”
“Nope,” Sherlock said simply.
John chewed on that for a few moments. “Why?” he asked finally.
“You keep changing the rules,” Sherlock complained. “You tell me off for being too mean to people, and then when I try to be kind to them, you just tell me off all over again.”
“That was you being kind?” asked John incredulously.
“Is that so hard to imagine of me?” demanded Sherlock. “His wife was just murdered. I’ve been led to believe that people will react quite passionately when a person they love comes to harm. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t have done the same?”
“I… yes!” John said. “You let a murderer off.”
Sherlock snorted. “Manslaughter, if anything.”
“He left the man there to die,” John pointed out. “He knew that’s exactly what would happen.”
“Turnabout’s fair play, wouldn’t you say?” asked Sherlock.
John sighed deeply and shook his head. “Yeah, but I’m sure the police would like to know about it.”
“Oh, hell,” Sherlock growled as he sat up. “Contrary to what you might believe, I don’t actually enjoy doing their work for them. And besides. I’m on holiday!”
He threw one of his pillows at John and buried himself under the tangled mess that was his duvet.
