Sherlock Fic: The Long Game 6/? (Sherlock/John, 12+)
Title ~ The Long Game
Rating ~ 12+
Pairings ~ John/Sherlock
Summary ~ When Moriarty's plan to take out Sherlock and John in the swimming pool fails, John finds himself drawn into an even more complicated - and potentially deadly - game. (Continuation of The Great Game, with Chapter One starting exactly where the episode left off.)
Warnings ~ None.
Notes ~ Notes. I am indebted to ice_elf for all the encouragement she gave me when I was writing this, and for being the best beta anyone could ask for.
This fic has nothing to do with the Doctor Who episode of the same name; it's pure coincidence.
Disclaimer ~ Sherlock is the property of the BBC.
Masterlist
Chapter Six
A quick flip through a London Theatre Guide while on the tube between Baker Street and Piccadilly Circus told John that Chicago was playing at the Cambridge Theatre. The directions at the bottom of the page listed the nearest underground station as Covent Garden. John checked the Tube Map he had grabbed at the same time as the guide, and switched to the Piccadilly Line to resurface at the opposite end of London’s theatre district. He paused by the exit, leaning against the red tile façade of the Covent Garden underground station while he checked the tiny map at the bottom of the Chicago page. He studied it to memorise the route, glancing up a couple of times to orientate himself, then put the theatre guide into his pocket and set off.
He crossed the road, noticing that it was much quieter now, and started down a pedestrianised street. Rush hour was finally over, and he was no longer being jostled by hurried commuters everywhere he went. He had been glad of it on the tube; he had even managed to find his way to a seat, which had been a relief to his leg. He crossed the next road at a zebra crossing that led into a small square of open, cobbled space surrounded by shops. He turned down between an Urban Outfitters and a Diesel. This street was narrow, the pavements flagged and the road itself cobbled. As he walked, John noticed the entrance to an arcade that he hadn’t even known existed. He shook his head. At least he was learning more about the city he lived in.
At the far end of the road, he could just make out an oblong sign with letters lit up in red running down the side of the end building. As he got nearer, the letters coalesced from a distant blur into the word ‘Chicago’ in sparkling capitals.
John reached the theatre and walked along its side. As he passed, he noticed the poster beside one of the doors. He frowned. The poster itself was nothing out of the ordinary, or at least, nothing he hadn’t been expecting from the musical. It was a black and white photograph of four scantily clad women, presumably the stars of the show, lined up one behind the other and staring at the passers by from underneath text quoted from a positive review. However, someone had painted a red slash over the throats of all four women.
The theatre was shaped like a wedge, its narrowest face pointing inwards towards Seven Dials junction and the pillar at its centre. John walked around to that side of the building, which was just wide enough for a pair of narrow posters and another entrance. His frown deepened as he realised that the man and woman featured on both posters had the same red paint splashed across their necks. He poked his head around the third face of the theatre; the two posters on either side of the only entrance had been similarly defaced.
This third side was clearly the back of the theatre. John couldn’t help but notice that someone had propped a ladder against the awning that overhung the theatre’s entrances, out of the way of the general public. He turned and walked across to the sundial pillar, then turned around to survey the huge poster that filled the space that overlooked Seven Dials junction. There were two men in coveralls, one standing on a stepladder on top of the awning scrubbing at the poster while the other held it stable. John could see that every single one of the women depicted on the poster had a red slash painted across her neck. Despite the men’s best efforts, the paint was stubbornly refusing to come off.
Glancing from side to side to check for traffic, John took a few steps forwards and cupped his hands around his mouth to talk to the two men. “Hey! What happened?”
They both turned to look at him. The one up the ladder was the first to reply, a very sour expression on his face. “Hoodlums, I expect.”
“Have you called the police?” John asked. He didn’t want to get mixed up in a police investigation. That would definitely break Moriarty’s rules. It was only then that he realised that his curiosity might have driven him to break the ‘no talking’ rule - but it was already too late. He had to simply hope that he would be allowed his two questions. Even so, as the cleaners replied, his stomach squirmed anxiously.
“What do you think?” the cleaner said, shooting John a bad-tampered glare. “One of the managers called them in first thing, but they can’t find anything on the CCTV and there were no witnesses, apparently. Useless sods.”
That sounded like Moriarty, John thought.
“Bloody nuisance, whoever did it,” the other man complained. He was older than the first man by a handful of years, and it showed in the grey at his temples. “This was supposed to be my morning off!”
John nodded sympathetically and raised a hand to wave thanks and goodbye. The men went back to work, though now he was aware of it he could hear the older man grumbling to himself, or possibly to his co-worker. John walked up to one of the posters and stared at it. The red marks across the throats of the characters had to be the clue; the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever of a culprit had only confirmed it. He scraped at the paint with a nail, ran his finger along and then down the stripe of red. Whoever had done this for Moriarty hadn’t been using spray-paint, that much he could tell. No, the paint was in some places thicker, and when he swiped his finger down he could feel the subtle texture of lines that only a brush would leave behind. There were splashes of red left behind by the rough swipe of the brush, and circular drops on the floor where the paint had dripped. John wondered if any of that was actually relevant.
He sighed and took a couple of steps back, looking from one poster to another. It probably wasn’t; if Moriarty wanted him to notice the paintwork itself, wouldn’t he have just painted over the entire poster? No, John thought, the positioning of each brush stroke - over the throat of the man or woman featured - had to be relevant.
What could it mean? Well, if the red signified blood it could mean a cut throat, possibly decapitation. Or perhaps strangulation, which would leave red marks around the neck.
Then there was the fact that Moriarty had painted over the posters advertising a musical. There had to be some link to Chicago - why else would Moriarty deface the posters? After all, neck trauma was hardly specific to a single location by itself. So was Moriarty pointing him towards another musical?
John grimaced as he made his way back to the Seven Dials pillar and took a seat with his back against it, the book Moriarty had had him buy resting on his knee in its bag. His knowledge of West End theatre wasn’t brilliant; it was barely any better than Sherlock’s, truth be told. He knew a little about some of the more famous musicals, but that was all. Not even the Theatre Guide in his pocket could help. It listed all of the current shows in London, but he knew from looking at the page about Chicago that it didn’t contain a detailed synopsis of each musical or play. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillar, trying to think of the musicals he actually knew anything about. There was Mamma Mia, but no one died or had their neck injured in that. He knew that Les Miserables was the longest running musical in the West End, but nothing about the plot. Phantom of the Opera had deaths, didn’t it? The Phantom strangled people, or garrotted them, or something.
The red paint evoked a spray of arterial blood more than anything else, certainly more than the red and purple bruising of strangulation. He sighed deeply and opened his eyes, rubbing a hand over his face. At least Sherlock wouldn’t do any better, he thought.
He sighed and watched the men cleaning the largest Chicago poster. He remembered, vaguely, what Harry had told him about the film. She had been to see it several times; she said she kept going back because it was an amazing story, but John still suspected the real reason was the golden combination of Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta Jones. Both women’s characters were murderers, and they spent much of the musical in prison. Were there any other musicals with a prison setting or murderers for main characters - murderers who slit people’s throats or chopped off their heads?
Thinking of Harry recounting the plot of Chicago sparked another memory - another musical she had been to see at the cinema. She hadn’t watched it over and over, but she had liked it enough to want to tell him about it in great detail. Sweeney Todd: the barber whose specialty was slitting the throats of his clientele.
He grabbed the Theatre Guide, silently thanking Harry for her taste in cinema, and ran his finger down the index of entries, searching for Sweeney Todd. It wasn’t listed. He swore, shoving the Theatre Guide away again. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became that the slashed throats were a reference to Todd - but if the musical wasn’t playing in London, where was he supposed to go.
He tried to think back to what Harry had told him. Todd had killed people in his barber’s chair, and their bodies had been ground up into pies and sold to the public. Horrifying, but completely unhelpful. He reached into his pocket for Lestrade’s phone, hoping he might be allowed a little help from Google, but he was still locked out of every single application. He put it away again and returned to staring at the Chicago posters and trying to remember. The film had had a tag line - hadn’t it? What the hell was it? Something about Todd being the ‘Demon Barber’ …
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The words returned to his brain in a rush, just as he was about to give up. The musical was set in London. He finally had another location.
He got to his feet. He knew that Fleet Street was at least a ten minute walk from the nearest station, so making use of the public transport would save him barely any time. He glanced down at his leg, remembering both the words of the doctor who had discharged him and his own medical training. He really should rest the injury as much as possible, but for ten minutes on the tube and almost as long a walk anyway, it was barely worth it - especially when the clock was ticking. He sighed and started to walk.
***
By the time he reached the Temple Bar Memorial with its rearing, reptilian griffin, every step was painful. John tried to block it out as much as he could, but his pronounced limp was starting to catch the attention of passers by. He was fairly certain now that the wound was bleeding again, but he had no choice but to carry on. At least his pyjama bottoms were black; that would make any blood that stained the fabric through the bandages slightly easier to explain away as spilled tea of coffee.
He paused next to a phone box at the end of the Royal Court of Justice building to catch his breath, and to wait in case Moriarty decided to call him with instructions. He even pulled out Lestrade’s phone to check it, but there were no new messages and it didn’t start to ring. He checked the time: twenty past eleven. He put the phone back into his pocket, the nervous tension in his fingers clenching them into fists.
“What now?” he asked under his breath, passing a hand across his face.
He had been sent to Fleet Street - if he was in the right place at all - because of Sweeney Todd, so he could be looking for a barber’s shop. Or he could be looking for the scene of a violent murder, for all he knew. The truth was, beyond the street itself, he had no clue. He had no choice but to walk along it, looking for anything abnormal, which seemed to be his primary method of detection. He couldn’t help but wonder as he started walking again, leaning heavily into his cane, whether Sherlock would have been able to determine exactly where he should be from the posters.
John passed a pubs and a large legal bookshop on a corner. He paused to check the window display in case it was full of criminal justice books pertaining to murder, but there was nothing. He hadn’t really been expecting it. So far, Moriarty’s choice of locations was diverse. He had been sent to two theatres - the Tricycle and the Cambridge - but that didn’t exactly set a precedent, since the Tricycle Theatre itself had been the first clue and the production Chicago the second. He sighed and checked the other side of the road, then moved on. He passed a few shops on the right side of the road followed by the entrance to a church on the left. On the side of the next building were four old newspaper names, from the Sunday Post to the Dundee Courier; they were clearly as much a part of the structure as its bricks and mortar and he stopped to inspect the writing for any indication of tampering, but they gave him no clues. He continued and noted that the architecture on his side of Fleet Street was more modern at this point, in sharp contrast to the buildings he had passed earlier.
There was another bookshop at the next corner and again he stopped to check the window. It was an ideal opportunity to rest his leg and he did so, pretending to peruse the display inside and trying not to draw attention. After a few minutes of gritting his teeth and trying to mentally overcome the ache that was spreading through his whole thigh, he forced himself to keep walking.
He had been walking for less than a minute when the phone in his pocket started to ring. Immediately, he moved to the inside edge of the kerb out of the way of pedestrian traffic and pulled it out, fumbling in his haste to answer.
“Yes,” he snapped, pressing the phone against his ear.
Silence for a few seconds, then Moriarty’s voice came through the speaker, smugness pooling in John’s ears. “Go up, John.”
There was a click, the unmistakable sound of Moriarty hanging up. John swore, causing a young couple who were passing to throw him an odd, offended look. He glanced away, putting the phone back into his pocket.
What was ‘go up’ supposed to mean? He tilted his head back to look up at the façades opposite; the building across from him was impressive, built out of grey stone and easily four storeys with classical pillars rising high above his head, but despite that it was unhelpful. He crossed the kerb and turned to look at the buildings behind him. He had been standing against the window of a narrow Orange mobile shop. Above, the building was white stone and similarly old-fashioned in design, sandwiched between two much more modern buildings. He could count six windows one on top of the other, not including the shop’s narrow glass pane. John turned his attention elsewhere, glancing further along the street. Since Moriarty had rung him while he was in this area, it had to mean that he was supposed to ‘go up’ from this point; otherwise, he could have called when John first arrived on Fleet Street. There had to be some way of getting up there.
He looked the other way, and for the first time noticed a glass door beside the Orange shop. He limped across the pavement. There were buzzers next to the door, but John didn’t bother trying them to see if he could somehow get in. He had seen the next door along, which was clearly labelled as a Fire Escape. There was no guarantee that the residential or commercial access corridors inside the building would lead all the way to the roof, and John wouldn’t put it past Moriarty to make this as difficult as he could for him. A fire escape might go up all the way, however. He decided to risk setting off the fire alarms and went across to the double doors to try them.
For the second time that day, a door that ought to have been locked and alarmed did nothing more than swing open before him. He slipped inside quickly, glancing over his shoulder to check that he wasn’t being noticed. Inside, there was a flight of stairs. John glanced around for security cameras. There was one crouching over the door, angled down towards him. He narrowed his eyes in its direction, guessing that Moriarty was watching his movements. He wanted to check on his leg, but he didn’t really fancy taking his trousers down in front of the man who was responsible for putting him in this situation. It would have to wait. Even if he confirmed his fears that he was bleeding again, there was nothing he could do about it. He started up the flight of stairs in front of him.
***
John’s breathing was ragged as he stumbled out onto the rooftop. He paused to kick a fire bucket full of sand into place on the threshold to prop the door open. He had no desire to be trapped up here with no way back down. Then he rested his hand on the wall and put all of his weight on his good leg until the pain subsided. He might be working against the clock, but it was worth taking a moment to clear his mind in preparation for the next clue.
When he was able to lift his head and look around, he noticed that there was something sitting on the very edge of the roof directly in front of him. He limped over, not bothering to suppress the hiss of pain brought on by each step while there was no one around to hear him. It was a pair of binoculars. He didn’t dare bend down to get them. Every movement of his right leg was agony, and even when it was still there was the now-familiar ache of healing muscle. He turned his walking stick over and hooked the handle into the strap to lift them up into his hand instead. He gave them a quick once-over in case the clue was on the item itself, then lifted them to his eyes.
After a few seconds, he let his hand drop back down to his side. It was cooler up here and a chilly wind pushed insistently against his left side. The sky above was a heavy shade of grey, punctuated only by the dim circle of the sun, just visible through the cloud cover. The tower-block landscape of north London spread out before John’s eyes. New multi-storey buildings built from metal and glass were crammed in alongside old-fashioned brick-and-mortar; he could see the turrets of the Royal Court of Justice and the face of an office block that seemed to be made entirely out of greenish panes of glass. He raised the binoculars to his face again to take a closer look at the pale stone of the Royal Court of Justice building. He turned his head slowly, scanning the rooftops and the windows for any sign of Moriarty’s interference.
He could see people going about their business in their offices through the strong magnification of the lenses, but nothing that would help him. He looked across the next floor down of the nearest building he could see directly into and paused.
There was a small spray of colour in a window. It was almost too small for him to make out, even with the help of the binoculars. His hand couldn’t hold them still enough to focus. He closed his eyes and took a breath, willing his hand to be steady, and looked again.
It was in the window of an empty office. The monitor on the desk was half-turned towards the window, and unlike those in the other offices, it was dark. The office wasn’t in use today: it would be the perfect place for Moriarty to lay down a clue. John licked his lips and tried to see the image that had been drawn across the floor-to-ceiling glass. It took up less than half of the space at the centre of the office’s transparent wall, and looked like nothing more than a series of colourful lines drawn in what looked like spray paint directly onto the glass. A fat ellipse, its ends flattened, with a line jutting out from the top and bottom curves. The shape was somehow familiar. John ran his eyes over it again. The lines were not just that; there was a triangle on the end of each, both of them pointing downwards.
Realisation hit John like a physical blow to the stomach. The ellipse was the shape of a barrel and the lines were the two ends of an arrow, the triangles forming the fletching and arrowhead. A barrel shot through with an arrow: John had seen that image before. He remembered it from his days as a student. He and his friends at Barts used to laugh about the play on words the image was supposed to convey.
Though he and his friends hadn’t been particularly religious, they had visited the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great a few times. At one time, the hospital and church had been part of the same institution, and so were close together. The church had always seemed as good a place as any to catch a few quiet moments. John also found that sitting in a pew calmed nerves shattered by a tough day in the hospital. So he knew the church well enough, and was particularly familiar with the story behind the strangely secular image on the oriel window above the south aisle. Carved into the stone below the window was a picture of an arrow piercing a barrel - or a bolt passing through a tun, as one church official had explained when asked by one of John’s friends on a slow afternoon. The image was a pun, the bolt and tun supposed to evoke the name of the man who had the window built: Prior Bolton.
The terrible wordplay had made John smile every time he glanced up at the oriel window from that day on. The sight of the barrel and arrow brought a smile to his lips as he stood on the edge of the rooftop and lowered the binoculars. He knew where he had to go.
Chapter Seven
.
Rating ~ 12+
Pairings ~ John/Sherlock
Summary ~ When Moriarty's plan to take out Sherlock and John in the swimming pool fails, John finds himself drawn into an even more complicated - and potentially deadly - game. (Continuation of The Great Game, with Chapter One starting exactly where the episode left off.)
Warnings ~ None.
Notes ~ Notes. I am indebted to ice_elf for all the encouragement she gave me when I was writing this, and for being the best beta anyone could ask for.
This fic has nothing to do with the Doctor Who episode of the same name; it's pure coincidence.
Disclaimer ~ Sherlock is the property of the BBC.
Masterlist
Chapter Six
A quick flip through a London Theatre Guide while on the tube between Baker Street and Piccadilly Circus told John that Chicago was playing at the Cambridge Theatre. The directions at the bottom of the page listed the nearest underground station as Covent Garden. John checked the Tube Map he had grabbed at the same time as the guide, and switched to the Piccadilly Line to resurface at the opposite end of London’s theatre district. He paused by the exit, leaning against the red tile façade of the Covent Garden underground station while he checked the tiny map at the bottom of the Chicago page. He studied it to memorise the route, glancing up a couple of times to orientate himself, then put the theatre guide into his pocket and set off.
He crossed the road, noticing that it was much quieter now, and started down a pedestrianised street. Rush hour was finally over, and he was no longer being jostled by hurried commuters everywhere he went. He had been glad of it on the tube; he had even managed to find his way to a seat, which had been a relief to his leg. He crossed the next road at a zebra crossing that led into a small square of open, cobbled space surrounded by shops. He turned down between an Urban Outfitters and a Diesel. This street was narrow, the pavements flagged and the road itself cobbled. As he walked, John noticed the entrance to an arcade that he hadn’t even known existed. He shook his head. At least he was learning more about the city he lived in.
At the far end of the road, he could just make out an oblong sign with letters lit up in red running down the side of the end building. As he got nearer, the letters coalesced from a distant blur into the word ‘Chicago’ in sparkling capitals.
John reached the theatre and walked along its side. As he passed, he noticed the poster beside one of the doors. He frowned. The poster itself was nothing out of the ordinary, or at least, nothing he hadn’t been expecting from the musical. It was a black and white photograph of four scantily clad women, presumably the stars of the show, lined up one behind the other and staring at the passers by from underneath text quoted from a positive review. However, someone had painted a red slash over the throats of all four women.
The theatre was shaped like a wedge, its narrowest face pointing inwards towards Seven Dials junction and the pillar at its centre. John walked around to that side of the building, which was just wide enough for a pair of narrow posters and another entrance. His frown deepened as he realised that the man and woman featured on both posters had the same red paint splashed across their necks. He poked his head around the third face of the theatre; the two posters on either side of the only entrance had been similarly defaced.
This third side was clearly the back of the theatre. John couldn’t help but notice that someone had propped a ladder against the awning that overhung the theatre’s entrances, out of the way of the general public. He turned and walked across to the sundial pillar, then turned around to survey the huge poster that filled the space that overlooked Seven Dials junction. There were two men in coveralls, one standing on a stepladder on top of the awning scrubbing at the poster while the other held it stable. John could see that every single one of the women depicted on the poster had a red slash painted across her neck. Despite the men’s best efforts, the paint was stubbornly refusing to come off.
Glancing from side to side to check for traffic, John took a few steps forwards and cupped his hands around his mouth to talk to the two men. “Hey! What happened?”
They both turned to look at him. The one up the ladder was the first to reply, a very sour expression on his face. “Hoodlums, I expect.”
“Have you called the police?” John asked. He didn’t want to get mixed up in a police investigation. That would definitely break Moriarty’s rules. It was only then that he realised that his curiosity might have driven him to break the ‘no talking’ rule - but it was already too late. He had to simply hope that he would be allowed his two questions. Even so, as the cleaners replied, his stomach squirmed anxiously.
“What do you think?” the cleaner said, shooting John a bad-tampered glare. “One of the managers called them in first thing, but they can’t find anything on the CCTV and there were no witnesses, apparently. Useless sods.”
That sounded like Moriarty, John thought.
“Bloody nuisance, whoever did it,” the other man complained. He was older than the first man by a handful of years, and it showed in the grey at his temples. “This was supposed to be my morning off!”
John nodded sympathetically and raised a hand to wave thanks and goodbye. The men went back to work, though now he was aware of it he could hear the older man grumbling to himself, or possibly to his co-worker. John walked up to one of the posters and stared at it. The red marks across the throats of the characters had to be the clue; the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever of a culprit had only confirmed it. He scraped at the paint with a nail, ran his finger along and then down the stripe of red. Whoever had done this for Moriarty hadn’t been using spray-paint, that much he could tell. No, the paint was in some places thicker, and when he swiped his finger down he could feel the subtle texture of lines that only a brush would leave behind. There were splashes of red left behind by the rough swipe of the brush, and circular drops on the floor where the paint had dripped. John wondered if any of that was actually relevant.
He sighed and took a couple of steps back, looking from one poster to another. It probably wasn’t; if Moriarty wanted him to notice the paintwork itself, wouldn’t he have just painted over the entire poster? No, John thought, the positioning of each brush stroke - over the throat of the man or woman featured - had to be relevant.
What could it mean? Well, if the red signified blood it could mean a cut throat, possibly decapitation. Or perhaps strangulation, which would leave red marks around the neck.
Then there was the fact that Moriarty had painted over the posters advertising a musical. There had to be some link to Chicago - why else would Moriarty deface the posters? After all, neck trauma was hardly specific to a single location by itself. So was Moriarty pointing him towards another musical?
John grimaced as he made his way back to the Seven Dials pillar and took a seat with his back against it, the book Moriarty had had him buy resting on his knee in its bag. His knowledge of West End theatre wasn’t brilliant; it was barely any better than Sherlock’s, truth be told. He knew a little about some of the more famous musicals, but that was all. Not even the Theatre Guide in his pocket could help. It listed all of the current shows in London, but he knew from looking at the page about Chicago that it didn’t contain a detailed synopsis of each musical or play. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillar, trying to think of the musicals he actually knew anything about. There was Mamma Mia, but no one died or had their neck injured in that. He knew that Les Miserables was the longest running musical in the West End, but nothing about the plot. Phantom of the Opera had deaths, didn’t it? The Phantom strangled people, or garrotted them, or something.
The red paint evoked a spray of arterial blood more than anything else, certainly more than the red and purple bruising of strangulation. He sighed deeply and opened his eyes, rubbing a hand over his face. At least Sherlock wouldn’t do any better, he thought.
He sighed and watched the men cleaning the largest Chicago poster. He remembered, vaguely, what Harry had told him about the film. She had been to see it several times; she said she kept going back because it was an amazing story, but John still suspected the real reason was the golden combination of Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta Jones. Both women’s characters were murderers, and they spent much of the musical in prison. Were there any other musicals with a prison setting or murderers for main characters - murderers who slit people’s throats or chopped off their heads?
Thinking of Harry recounting the plot of Chicago sparked another memory - another musical she had been to see at the cinema. She hadn’t watched it over and over, but she had liked it enough to want to tell him about it in great detail. Sweeney Todd: the barber whose specialty was slitting the throats of his clientele.
He grabbed the Theatre Guide, silently thanking Harry for her taste in cinema, and ran his finger down the index of entries, searching for Sweeney Todd. It wasn’t listed. He swore, shoving the Theatre Guide away again. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became that the slashed throats were a reference to Todd - but if the musical wasn’t playing in London, where was he supposed to go.
He tried to think back to what Harry had told him. Todd had killed people in his barber’s chair, and their bodies had been ground up into pies and sold to the public. Horrifying, but completely unhelpful. He reached into his pocket for Lestrade’s phone, hoping he might be allowed a little help from Google, but he was still locked out of every single application. He put it away again and returned to staring at the Chicago posters and trying to remember. The film had had a tag line - hadn’t it? What the hell was it? Something about Todd being the ‘Demon Barber’ …
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The words returned to his brain in a rush, just as he was about to give up. The musical was set in London. He finally had another location.
He got to his feet. He knew that Fleet Street was at least a ten minute walk from the nearest station, so making use of the public transport would save him barely any time. He glanced down at his leg, remembering both the words of the doctor who had discharged him and his own medical training. He really should rest the injury as much as possible, but for ten minutes on the tube and almost as long a walk anyway, it was barely worth it - especially when the clock was ticking. He sighed and started to walk.
***
By the time he reached the Temple Bar Memorial with its rearing, reptilian griffin, every step was painful. John tried to block it out as much as he could, but his pronounced limp was starting to catch the attention of passers by. He was fairly certain now that the wound was bleeding again, but he had no choice but to carry on. At least his pyjama bottoms were black; that would make any blood that stained the fabric through the bandages slightly easier to explain away as spilled tea of coffee.
He paused next to a phone box at the end of the Royal Court of Justice building to catch his breath, and to wait in case Moriarty decided to call him with instructions. He even pulled out Lestrade’s phone to check it, but there were no new messages and it didn’t start to ring. He checked the time: twenty past eleven. He put the phone back into his pocket, the nervous tension in his fingers clenching them into fists.
“What now?” he asked under his breath, passing a hand across his face.
He had been sent to Fleet Street - if he was in the right place at all - because of Sweeney Todd, so he could be looking for a barber’s shop. Or he could be looking for the scene of a violent murder, for all he knew. The truth was, beyond the street itself, he had no clue. He had no choice but to walk along it, looking for anything abnormal, which seemed to be his primary method of detection. He couldn’t help but wonder as he started walking again, leaning heavily into his cane, whether Sherlock would have been able to determine exactly where he should be from the posters.
John passed a pubs and a large legal bookshop on a corner. He paused to check the window display in case it was full of criminal justice books pertaining to murder, but there was nothing. He hadn’t really been expecting it. So far, Moriarty’s choice of locations was diverse. He had been sent to two theatres - the Tricycle and the Cambridge - but that didn’t exactly set a precedent, since the Tricycle Theatre itself had been the first clue and the production Chicago the second. He sighed and checked the other side of the road, then moved on. He passed a few shops on the right side of the road followed by the entrance to a church on the left. On the side of the next building were four old newspaper names, from the Sunday Post to the Dundee Courier; they were clearly as much a part of the structure as its bricks and mortar and he stopped to inspect the writing for any indication of tampering, but they gave him no clues. He continued and noted that the architecture on his side of Fleet Street was more modern at this point, in sharp contrast to the buildings he had passed earlier.
There was another bookshop at the next corner and again he stopped to check the window. It was an ideal opportunity to rest his leg and he did so, pretending to peruse the display inside and trying not to draw attention. After a few minutes of gritting his teeth and trying to mentally overcome the ache that was spreading through his whole thigh, he forced himself to keep walking.
He had been walking for less than a minute when the phone in his pocket started to ring. Immediately, he moved to the inside edge of the kerb out of the way of pedestrian traffic and pulled it out, fumbling in his haste to answer.
“Yes,” he snapped, pressing the phone against his ear.
Silence for a few seconds, then Moriarty’s voice came through the speaker, smugness pooling in John’s ears. “Go up, John.”
There was a click, the unmistakable sound of Moriarty hanging up. John swore, causing a young couple who were passing to throw him an odd, offended look. He glanced away, putting the phone back into his pocket.
What was ‘go up’ supposed to mean? He tilted his head back to look up at the façades opposite; the building across from him was impressive, built out of grey stone and easily four storeys with classical pillars rising high above his head, but despite that it was unhelpful. He crossed the kerb and turned to look at the buildings behind him. He had been standing against the window of a narrow Orange mobile shop. Above, the building was white stone and similarly old-fashioned in design, sandwiched between two much more modern buildings. He could count six windows one on top of the other, not including the shop’s narrow glass pane. John turned his attention elsewhere, glancing further along the street. Since Moriarty had rung him while he was in this area, it had to mean that he was supposed to ‘go up’ from this point; otherwise, he could have called when John first arrived on Fleet Street. There had to be some way of getting up there.
He looked the other way, and for the first time noticed a glass door beside the Orange shop. He limped across the pavement. There were buzzers next to the door, but John didn’t bother trying them to see if he could somehow get in. He had seen the next door along, which was clearly labelled as a Fire Escape. There was no guarantee that the residential or commercial access corridors inside the building would lead all the way to the roof, and John wouldn’t put it past Moriarty to make this as difficult as he could for him. A fire escape might go up all the way, however. He decided to risk setting off the fire alarms and went across to the double doors to try them.
For the second time that day, a door that ought to have been locked and alarmed did nothing more than swing open before him. He slipped inside quickly, glancing over his shoulder to check that he wasn’t being noticed. Inside, there was a flight of stairs. John glanced around for security cameras. There was one crouching over the door, angled down towards him. He narrowed his eyes in its direction, guessing that Moriarty was watching his movements. He wanted to check on his leg, but he didn’t really fancy taking his trousers down in front of the man who was responsible for putting him in this situation. It would have to wait. Even if he confirmed his fears that he was bleeding again, there was nothing he could do about it. He started up the flight of stairs in front of him.
***
John’s breathing was ragged as he stumbled out onto the rooftop. He paused to kick a fire bucket full of sand into place on the threshold to prop the door open. He had no desire to be trapped up here with no way back down. Then he rested his hand on the wall and put all of his weight on his good leg until the pain subsided. He might be working against the clock, but it was worth taking a moment to clear his mind in preparation for the next clue.
When he was able to lift his head and look around, he noticed that there was something sitting on the very edge of the roof directly in front of him. He limped over, not bothering to suppress the hiss of pain brought on by each step while there was no one around to hear him. It was a pair of binoculars. He didn’t dare bend down to get them. Every movement of his right leg was agony, and even when it was still there was the now-familiar ache of healing muscle. He turned his walking stick over and hooked the handle into the strap to lift them up into his hand instead. He gave them a quick once-over in case the clue was on the item itself, then lifted them to his eyes.
After a few seconds, he let his hand drop back down to his side. It was cooler up here and a chilly wind pushed insistently against his left side. The sky above was a heavy shade of grey, punctuated only by the dim circle of the sun, just visible through the cloud cover. The tower-block landscape of north London spread out before John’s eyes. New multi-storey buildings built from metal and glass were crammed in alongside old-fashioned brick-and-mortar; he could see the turrets of the Royal Court of Justice and the face of an office block that seemed to be made entirely out of greenish panes of glass. He raised the binoculars to his face again to take a closer look at the pale stone of the Royal Court of Justice building. He turned his head slowly, scanning the rooftops and the windows for any sign of Moriarty’s interference.
He could see people going about their business in their offices through the strong magnification of the lenses, but nothing that would help him. He looked across the next floor down of the nearest building he could see directly into and paused.
There was a small spray of colour in a window. It was almost too small for him to make out, even with the help of the binoculars. His hand couldn’t hold them still enough to focus. He closed his eyes and took a breath, willing his hand to be steady, and looked again.
It was in the window of an empty office. The monitor on the desk was half-turned towards the window, and unlike those in the other offices, it was dark. The office wasn’t in use today: it would be the perfect place for Moriarty to lay down a clue. John licked his lips and tried to see the image that had been drawn across the floor-to-ceiling glass. It took up less than half of the space at the centre of the office’s transparent wall, and looked like nothing more than a series of colourful lines drawn in what looked like spray paint directly onto the glass. A fat ellipse, its ends flattened, with a line jutting out from the top and bottom curves. The shape was somehow familiar. John ran his eyes over it again. The lines were not just that; there was a triangle on the end of each, both of them pointing downwards.
Realisation hit John like a physical blow to the stomach. The ellipse was the shape of a barrel and the lines were the two ends of an arrow, the triangles forming the fletching and arrowhead. A barrel shot through with an arrow: John had seen that image before. He remembered it from his days as a student. He and his friends at Barts used to laugh about the play on words the image was supposed to convey.
Though he and his friends hadn’t been particularly religious, they had visited the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great a few times. At one time, the hospital and church had been part of the same institution, and so were close together. The church had always seemed as good a place as any to catch a few quiet moments. John also found that sitting in a pew calmed nerves shattered by a tough day in the hospital. So he knew the church well enough, and was particularly familiar with the story behind the strangely secular image on the oriel window above the south aisle. Carved into the stone below the window was a picture of an arrow piercing a barrel - or a bolt passing through a tun, as one church official had explained when asked by one of John’s friends on a slow afternoon. The image was a pun, the bolt and tun supposed to evoke the name of the man who had the window built: Prior Bolton.
The terrible wordplay had made John smile every time he glanced up at the oriel window from that day on. The sight of the barrel and arrow brought a smile to his lips as he stood on the edge of the rooftop and lowered the binoculars. He knew where he had to go.
Chapter Seven
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