Part 36 - Pink!
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13th_sherlockby Soledad
EPISODE 03 – A STUDY IN PINK
Author’s note: Again, I use here some of the unaired pilot’s dialogue. However, as you’ll see later, this is a very different situation.
My thanks to my good friend,
saki101 who helped me transcribing some of the lines. I’d never have managed that on my own. PART 36 – PINK!
John suppressed a sigh as he dragged his other leg down into a kneeling position and then leaned forward so that he could look more closely at the woman’s body. He put his head close to hers and sniffed to check for the smell of booze but found nothing. He could smell the unpleasant stench of vomit, though, so he pulled back fairly quickly. He lifted her hand to check on the skin then straightened up to kneeling again and looked at Sherlock.
“Yeah... Asphyxiation, probably. Passed out, choked on her own vomit. Can’t smell any alcohol on her. It could have been a seizure; possibly drugs.”
Sherlock interrupted him with an impatient gesture. “She was poisoned.”
John raised a surprised eyebrow. “How would you know that?”
“Because they were all poisoned,” Sherlock replied impatiently.
John wasn’t so easily persuaded, though. “By whom?”
“By themselves,” Sherlock answered testily.
“Themselves?” John repeated in surprise. “The papers didn’t say anything about suicides.”
“We’ve identified the drugs,” Lestrade, who’d come back into the room and was now standing just inside the doorway offered, but he was rudely interrupted by Sherlock who managed to wave him off without even turning back to him, which was quite a feat unless one was really limber – which Sherlock apparently was.
“Doesn’t matter; it was poison!”
Lestrade crossed his arms with a long-suffering expression on his face. Sherlock ignored him practically crawling over the body to check on details that made only sense to him,
“The same pattern every time,” he murmured. “Each of them disappearing from their normal lives,” he sniffed the dead woman’s palm, then her fingernails. “From the theatre… from their home… from the office… from a pub… and then a few hours later they turn up where they’re not supposed to be,” he was now sniffing the back of the woman’s hand; then he pulled back the sleeve of her coat to take a look at her wrist, “dead.” He looked under her collar again, then lifted her hair, too. “No sign of violence on the body, no suggestion of compulsion. Each of them killed by the same poison and, as far as we can tell, taken it voluntarily.”
Lestrade had apparently had enough. “Sherlock, I said two minutes! Tell me everything you’ve got.”
Sherlock whipped out his phone to check something and smiled. “Okay, take this down,” he said absent-mindedly.
The Detective Inspector, however, clearly couldn’t be bothered with taking notes. “Just tell me what you’ve got!” he demanded.
Sherlock looked at him with so much honest confusion that John’s heart went out to him. “You’re not gonna write this down?”
“Sherlock!” the Detective Inspector bellowed, obviously at the end of his rope.
“It’s all right,” John interfered on Sherlock’s behalf who seemed almost hurt by Lestrade’s lack of appreciation and took out his notebook and pen. “I, um, I can do it.”
“Thank you,” Sherlock beamed at him; then he took a deep breath and began to rattle down his deductions with such insane speed that John was barely able to write down the key phrases.
It made him wish Harry were present; she was very good at shorthand. When she happened to stay sober, that is.
“Victim is in her late twenties,” Sherlock was speaking a mile in a minute in the meantime. “Professional person, going by her clothes; presumably something in the media, going by the frankly alarming shade of pink. Travelled from Cardiff today, intending to stay in London for one night. That’s obvious from the size of her suitcase.”
“Suitcase?” the Detective Inspector repeated with a frown. John looked around the room but couldn’t see a suitcase anywhere, either.
“Suitcase, yes,” Sherlock replied impatiently and went on to tell them about the woman being unhappily married and having a string of lovers, none of which knew she was married.
“Oh, for God’s sake, if you’re just making this up!” Lestrade burst out.
Sherlock gave him an irritated look and pointed down at the dead woman’s left hand. “Her wedding ring. Look at it: it’s too tight. That means she’s been married for a while. Also,” he lifted the hand in question and turned it so that the other two could see it, “there’s grime in the gem setting. The rest of her jewellery has been regularly cleaned, but not her wedding ring. That says a lot about the state of the marriage.”
He picked up speed, proving them with merciless deduction, based on the state of her jewellery and on the size of her hypothetical suitcase why she must have been a serial adulteress. John was fairly blown away.
“That’s fantastic!” he said in open-mouthed awe.
Sherlock stopped for a moment, turned to him and said in a low voice. “D’you know you do that out loud?”
John blushed, realising that he must have sounded like some hare-brained teenager meeting their first pop star. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I’ll shut up.”
For some reason, that seemed to embarrass Sherlock for a change, although he managed to sound absurdly pleased at the same time – only God knew how. “No, it’s... fine.”
The Detective Inspector, however, seemed a lot more sceptical.
“There was no suitcase,” he told Sherlock, crossing his arms again in a challenging manner.
“Sorry?” Sherlock was honestly taken aback.
“You keep saying ‘suitcase’!” Lestrade elaborated. “There wasn’t one.”
“Oh!” Sherlock said in surprise. “I was assuming you had taken it away.”
“There was a handbag,” Lestrade said with a shrug. “Why did you say she had a case?”
“Because she did!” Sherlock snapped. “Her handbag, was there a mobile phone in it?”
“No,” Lestrade replied simply.
Sherlock shook his head in confusion. “That’s odd. That’s very odd.”
Lestrade looked at him as if seeking for sure signs of insanity on his face. “Why?”
“Never mind,” Sherlock waved impatiently. “We have to find her case!”
“How d’you know she had a case?” John asked.
Sherlock launched into another rapid-fire explanation about how the splash patterns the hypothetical suitcase left on her right leg proved the existence of said case in the first place, and how the state of her coat and umbrella proved – combined with the weather report that he’d checked on his phone – that she came from Cardiff and only meant to stay one night.
“Maybe she checked into a hotel and left her case there,” John suggested.
Sherlock shook his head. “No, she never got to the hotel. Look at her hair. She colour-coordinates her lipstick and her shoes. She’d never have left any hotel with her hair still looking...” he stopped talking as he made a sudden realisation. “Oh!” His eyes widened and his face lit up. “Oh!” He started to hurry down the stairs.
Lestrade leaned over the railings. “What is it, what?”
Sherlock stopped for a moment and looked up at him. “Serial killers are always hard. You have to wait for them to make a mistake.”
“We can’t just wait!” Lestrade protested.
“Oh, we’re done waiting!” Sherlock replied. “Where she was found, she couldn’t be here very long, is that right?”
“Not long at all,” Lestrade replied. “Less than an hour.”
“Less than an hour,” Sherlock repeated, thinking furiously. “An hour! News black-out. Can you do that? Don’t say that you’ve found her, nothing for a day.”
“Why?” Lestrade asked, honestly perplexed.
“Look at her,” Sherlock yelled, “really look! Houston, we have a mistake. Back in a moment!” He reached the bottom of the stairs and disappeared from their view.
“What mistake?!” Lestrade called after him in frustration.
Sherlock came back and ran up a couple of stairs before yelling up to him. “PINK!”
He hurried off again. Lestrade looked after him for a moment, baffled, then called out to Anderson and his team who had been waiting on the next landing down. “Anderson! You can come in now.”
Anderson came up the stairs, pushing past John rather urgently. "I'm here. So? What was the point in all that?"
"We're after a psychopath,” Lestrade told him.
"And you're bringing in another psychopath to help,” Anderson pointed out sourly.
Lestrade shrugged. "If that's what it takes," he turned and pointed to the room "All yours. Get on with it."
John found it better to get out of the way, but not without contributing his own part. He held out his notebook to Lestrade. "My notes. Do you want me to, um..."
The Detective Inspector gave him a blank look. "I'm sorry, you're..."
"Doctor Watson," John supplied.
Lestrade pointed down the stairs. "I'm sorry; you're going to have to go, Doctor Watson. Don't need your notes."
For some reason, John felt insulted on Sherlock’s behalf. The man’s deductions had been absolutely brilliant, and the police didn’t want them in written form to use later? Were they insane or just insanely jealous? In either case, it wasn’t his job to make them see the light. If they wanted to fail again, big time, it was their problem.
"OK," he said amiably and hobbled off towards the stairs.
~TBC~
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-26 06:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-26 07:03 pm (UTC)