Sherlock Fic: The Long Game 7/? (Sherlock/John, 12+)
Putting up the Christmas tree tonight! It's got lights on it already, and it looks delightfully twinkly. :D
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 Seven
The church was exactly as John remembered: a huge building of dark grey stone with white accents, a red brick tower rising over the arched entrance. He glanced up at the gold numbers of the clock face, high above on the side of the tower. It was almost noon.
He sighed to himself as he headed for the dark wood doors that led into the church. Everything felt as though it was taking too long. He wondered if he might already be too late. Moriarty had never told him how much time the ‘treasure hunt’ was supposed to take. He knew that his leg was slowing him down significantly. Had Moriarty taken that into account when he planned this?
Even though he could hear nothing from inside the church, he paused by the doors to check whether there was a Monday morning service. Thankfully, there was nothing scheduled for that morning, so he stepped inside. He stopped after a few paces to allow his eyes to adjust to the rather dim interior, sacrificing time in favour of actually being able to see properly to search. He limped across to the desk beside the book stall and handed over another precious portion of his money to the fail looking lady. She thanked him for supporting the church and he offered her a feeble smile as he turned away.
The church was as cold and majestic as it remained in his memory. He shivered slightly as he made his way up the aisle towards the oriel window. He kept his eyes peeled as he passed by the rows of stiff, wooden seating in case Moriarty had left him a clue. He paused a short way from the altar. There was someone standing just in front of the communion rail, and he didn’t want to interrupt if they were praying. He waited until the woman bowed her head and moved away, disappearing through one of the many stone arches that divided the seating from the side aisles. His feet were quiet against the tiles and stone grave markers as he moved forwards. The church was otherwise completely silent. He stopped in front of the oriel window and looked up at it, his eyes finding the barrel pierced by an arrow with ease. He stared up at it, allowing himself a moment to catch his breath. The familiar image, however, was only what had brought him here. It wasn’t going to give him any indication of where to go next.
With a sigh, John scanned the rest of the carvings. He couldn’t remember anything significant from the carvings around the oriel window aside from the barrel and arrow. Still, he couldn’t see anything amiss. He wished he could ask the lady in the book shop, but that would definitely break Moriarty’s ‘no talking’ rule - if he hadn’t broken it already.
He swallowed hard, trying not to think of what might have already happened to Sherlock. Surely Moriarty would tell him if he had gone wrong, or if he was too late or so behind schedule that finishing in time was no longer possible. He hoped that was the case, but a part of him - the part that saw the darkness in Sherlock, the part that remembered Moriarty’s chill voice deep in his ear when he dreamed - suspected otherwise. Moriarty derived some sick pleasure from seeing him fumble around in the dark, searching blindly for clues he barely stood a chance of solving. He would find even more in watching John come home - thinking Sherlock was all right, thinking he had won - only to find Sherlock with a bullet hole in his chest or temple, shirt stained red and those piercing blue eyes bereft of any spark of the intelligence the infuriated and fascinated him both at once.
He stumbled across to the nearest chair and sat down heavily, dropping his plastic bag beside him. His breath was ragged, and it had nothing to do with pain or physical exertion. For the first time that day, he dreaded going home.
He leaned his walking stick against the next chair along and brought both hands up to cover his face, rubbing his fingers into his eyes. He couldn’t keep thinking like this. He had to believe that Sherlock was all right. That Moriarty’s treasure hunt was more than just a trap. He had to believe that there was a way out of this dark maze, and that he would find it if he just kept following the clues. He had managed it so far, he told himself.
Yet he could feel the tug of exhaustion in his bones and muscles now. Even without the injury to his leg, he had been on his feet since early morning, and the unaccustomed exercise had taken its toll. He could have done this easily before the weeks of hospital bed-rest, but not now, and especially not with an unhealed gunshot wound in his thigh. He leant back on the chair and let his hands drop to his sides. Yes, he had managed to follow Moriarty’s complex trail this far, but he had no idea how much longer he could continue like this. He closed his eyes and tried to take deep breaths.
“Come on, John,” he murmured to himself after a few moments. He opened his eyes.
His gaze fell on the wooden barrier in front of him that divided the seats from the aisle. In his haste to sit down, he hadn’t noticed that there was a hymn book just an arm’s length away, propped on the sloping top of the barrier. He reached over and grabbed it, immediately noticing that the hard cover felt loose. He rested the book against the barrier and opened it.
He was presented not with the title page of a hymn book, but rather with the words ‘Henry VI Part Two’. He raised his eyebrows, surprised that Moriarty had given him a Shakespeare play. There was no doubt that the book was Moriarty’s doing: why else would something so strange be here? He wondered how the man had ensured that the book was waiting for him when he arrived - and then he remembered the woman. He had assumed she was praying, but as he had walked up the aisle he had noticed that she got up from one of the seats on this side of the choir. She must have been in place since that morning, waiting to leave the book here for him to find. He looked around, searching the dark corners of the church in case she was still there, but he couldn’t see her. He could barely remember what she had looked like; her hair and coat had both been dark, but there had been nothing unusual about her. He sighed and gave up, turning his attention back to the book in his hands.
Aside from the transplanted cover, it seemed to be a complete copy of Henry VI Part Two. John wondered what he was supposed to look for. He checked the publication information, just in case, but Moriarty hadn’t marked anything for his attention. He tried thumbing through the pages of the book. There had to be another clue, something that would point him to the right page.
He lifted his head, sighing in frustration. Then his eyes fell on the wooden hymn boards on either side of the church and, more importantly, the single number displayed there. He felt a rush of excitement as he remembered that there was no service planned for today. There shouldn’t have been any numbers on the hymn boards at all. He made a note of the number - one hundred and twenty two - and quickly turned to the relevant page.
He was confronted by the first page of Act Four Scene Six. The words directly after the scene number had been thickly scored through with a black marker. He flipped back a page to the previous scene, but there the words were unmarked and read ‘London. The Tower’: the setting of the scene. He turned back to Scene Six. Clearly, there was his clue - rendered unreadable by a layer of ink. He flipped the page, wondering if he could read what had been censored through the paper, but the pen had done its job: it was completely illegible. John sighed; he hadn’t really expected it to be that simple. Moriarty never made things simple. He settled down and began to read.
John didn’t bother reading beyond the end of the scene. There was little point, if he was right in guessing that the location of this scene in particular was where he was supposed to go next. Why else would Moriarty have blanked out this setting and none of the others?
The location had to be somewhere in London: the references to London Bridge, the Tower and to ‘London-stone’ made that obvious, though John had known it anyway from the rules of the game. The question was as it had been from the start: where in London exactly? Presumably wherever the London Stone was located, John thought. He had a vague knowledge of the London Stone, in the same way he knew about the ravens in the Tower of London. Both were supposedly linked to the wellbeing of the city: so long as the ravens and the stone were in place, London and its people were safe. He knew where to find the ravens; that would have been laughably easy. The London Stone, however, was a more difficult prospect. Among the city’s mythical safeguards, the stone was undeniably the poor relation.
He sighed and held the page up to the dim light filtering through the stained glass window beyond the altar. He still couldn’t read the words.
He looked around. On the wall of the aisle behind him were several memorial monuments, each one lit by bright lamps. John got up, careful of his injured leg; sitting down for a while after the exertion of the walk had stiffened the muscles, but an experimental step told him that it was no longer agony to move. He still winced as he limped over to the nearest monument. He glanced around, but there was no one around. As far as he knew, the church was deserted but for himself and the lady in charge of the little shop. He was glad; he felt bad enough holding the page in a beam of light that illuminated a tomb without having anyone see him doing it. He glanced at the name and sent a silent apology to Sir Walter and Lady Mildmay, then turned his full attention to the censored words.
Holding the book, with its ill-fitting hymn book cover, and trying to angle the paper was awkward. John sighed and pulled it out from in front of the light. He leant all of his weight into his good leg and dropped the plastic bag between his feet. Then he juggled the book and his walking stick for a moment, and managed to put a little tear at the top edge of the page near the spine. Then, with a final look around to check that he wasn’t being watched, he tore the page out completely.
The ripping sound seemed loud in the silence of the church. John grimaced and hoped the little old lady didn’t come to find out what had made the noise. He dropped the book into the plastic bag alongside the other one and waited a few seconds, listening for her footsteps. When he heard nothing, he let himself relax a little and turned his mind back to the problem at hand. He put the single page in front of the light, as near to the bulb as he could manage while still able to see enough to read it. Nothing. He tried twisting the paper, millimetre by millimetre, curling it into a narrow U, anything that might break through the sheen of black ink and reflect the light back off the printed letters.
He froze. There. Just at this angle, the paper tilted away from him at almost forty-five degrees, the letters became legible as “London. Cannon Street.”
John wanted to laugh. He felt as though he had beaten Moriarty in some small way, more so than he had with any of the other clues. He was sure this wasn’t how Moriarty had intended him to solve it - that he was supposed to be remembering where the London Stone was located, not using light to see through the black pen. Yet he couldn’t be accused of cheating: Moriarty had never said he couldn’t do something like this. Grinning, he stuffed the page into the bag and picked it up, swinging it gently by his side as he made his way towards the exit.
***
John took the Underground to Cannon Street. He was sorry to leave the familiar ground near Barts, but at the same time a little relieved. It would be just his luck to run into Mike Stamford or the girl from the mortuary, Molly - and that couldn’t end well. No one in the medical profession who knew, as they did, that he had been shot would be fooled by a brave face if they saw his limp. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to excuse himself quickly enough, or even if he would have been able to get away.
No, it was for the best that he was away from Barts, he thought as he stepped out of Mansion House tube station. The further he was from places and people he knew, the safer Sherlock would be.
He took the walk down Cannon Street as quickly as his leg would allow. He had managed to get a seat on the Underground, and although the mental and physical rest had come like a blessing, he couldn’t afford to slow down. He may have gained himself a little time on the last clue, but he was sure he had wasted much more earlier on. He kept his eyes peeled as he walked for any sign of the London Stone. He knew he was on the right street, but he didn’t know where along the length of the road the stone itself would be, or even if it would be sign-posted. He somehow doubted it.
His eye caught on a sign that read ‘London Stone’ above a recessed entrance surrounded by chalk boards. This was obviously a pub, but the name implied that he was at the least getting close. He slowed down, a piece of him wondering if Moriarty would take drastic measures if he went into the pub and asked where the real stone was. He smiled grimly; of course he would.
The next building had once been grand, but its green marble façade looked as though it had seen better days. John looked up at the glass windows that rose in ranks towards the sky, and when he dropped his gaze he spotted a nondescript little structure, poking out into the pavement. He went over. There was a plaque above a fancy metal grille, which named the contents as the London Stone. Behind a glass pane and badly illuminated from above, there was a plain grey lump of rock. John forced his leg to cooperate as he crouched in front of the grille. The movement dragged a groan of pain from his throat that made a couple of passers by turn to look, but they quickly moved on. John tried to take slow deep breaths through his nose, fighting the wave of nausea that followed the pain. He focused on the blank grey stone in front of him. If he could force his attention onto something, anything, other than his leg, it would remove him from the injury.
The London Stone itself couldn’t hold any information. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched since its interment in the wall of this building. There was nothing scratched or painted onto the glass, or onto any outer part of the little structure that had been built to house the stone. Then John noticed that someone had pushed a small bunch of flowers through the metal grille, which had withered and dried. He thought he could see the edge of something beneath them. He pushed his fingers through the bars and nudged the flowers aside. A key had been hidden beneath them.
John hooked the key out from behind the metal bars. It was small and silver, and looked much like the keys on his key-ring at home. He flipped it over in his palm. The flat, rounded head of the key was completely blank.
He used the London Stone’s housing to pull himself to his feet, hissing as he straightened his leg again and then leaning against the wall with one hand. The pain was getting worse again. He knew that for the sake of his leg he ought to stop, but that hadn’t been an option since Moriarty had appeared in his bedroom. He licked his lips and forced himself to straighten up, reaching for every shred of army training and putting it into practice. He had to keep going, for Sherlock’s sake if not for his own. He gritted his teeth and took a step back from the wall. Sherlock wouldn’t let him down; he couldn’t be the weak link in their little chain.
He raised his head and glanced about him. Since the key was completely ordinary and didn’t point him in a new direction, he guessed that it fitted into a lock somewhere nearby. His eyes caught on a doorway right next to the London Stone, which he had walked past without really seeing just a few moments before. There was a warning sign posted on the wood of the door itself, telling the world that it was under the protection of a security company. The door had been secured with a padlock.
The pain faded a little as John went across to try the key, his brain distracted by the anticipation. It turned in the padlock and John’s face broke into an automatic, triumphant grin. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering if any of the men and women walking past on their lunch hour would notice him, whether any of them had seen him crouch beside the stone before he came to this door and would think it strange. No one seemed to be paying him any attention. He smiled to himself, shaking his head as he slipped inside. Of course they weren’t.
On the other side of the door, there was a large room lit only by the light that filtered in through the windows that looked out onto Cannon Street, though the majority of them were mostly blocked by large, wooden shelves that had been pushed against the outer walls. A couple of feet from the door, in the middle of an otherwise empty space, there was a table. On it lay a single book. John frowned; Moriarty had given him three books now, two in successive clues. It seems strangely unimaginative for a self-proclaimed genius.
He went over to the table. His frown deepened as he read the book’s title: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. He picked it up. It was a hardback edition that had been stripped of its dust jacket, but the bright, cartoonish image of Harry and the school train was still splashed across the cover. He couldn’t quite believe that Moriarty had given him a children’s book, even one that was commonly held as acceptable for adults. He turned the book over in his hands, and noticed a bookmark made of a strip of printer paper poking out. He quickly turned to the relevant pages. The right-hand page was the opening of chapter six, ‘The Journey To Platform Nine And Three-Quarters’. His eyes skipped down the page to check, and sure enough, near the bottom, were the words ‘King’s Cross’.
His first reaction was to grin and slap the book closed in one hand. He couldn’t ask for clearer instructions than that: King’s Cross Station, either at the fake platform nine and three-quarters sign by the entrance beside the luggage trolley set into the wall, or between the real platforms nine and ten. He turned to go, but a though made him pause.
None of the other clues had been presented so neatly for him. Perhaps Moriarty was playing with him, trying to lull him into thinking that the hard part was over - but that made no sense. He sighed and took a step back to perch on the edge of the table and reopen the book. He wished he could just take the clue at face value, but the more he thought about it the more it felt wrong. He put the plastic bag down at his feet, thinking of the books inside it: neither of them had had their pages nicely bookmarked for him. He had had to work to find the answer with those. Why would Moriarty just give it to him this time? He sighed and pulled out the paper marker to properly study the two pages. There were no other locations, however. Perhaps Moriarty was giving him a break, he thought, though that was dubious. If he was anything at all like Sherlock, he would keep pushing - keep testing his mental limits. It made no sense that he would suddenly give him an easy way out.
Then the thought struck him: the bookmark. He had barely noticed it, and yet it was the most incongruous thing about the clue. He closed the book and put it down on the table, then looked at the bookmark. It really was nothing more than a strip of unlined white paper, apparently blank. Then he saw it. In the bottom corner, probably positioned just where they would have been partially hidden by the curve of the pages as they rose from the spine, there were tiny letters. Moriarty must have used a very sharp, very hard pencil. The writing was so faint he could barely read it in the dim light, but after a few seconds he made it out. Just two words: ‘Look around.’
John gritted his teeth and screwed the paper into a ball, throwing it aside. He felt angry - with himself as much as with Moriarty. How much time might he have wasted going to King’s Cross? How much more in coming all the way back - if he had found the little note on the bookmark at all? What if it had made him too late to stop Moriarty?
“Stop it,” he told himself, passing a hand across his face and making himself take deep breaths. He hadn’t been fooled by the false trail. Thinking about how close had had come to a mistake wasn’t going to help. He wondered if Moriarty had intended for him to go astray at this point, and whether that meant he was getting close. He dropped his hand onto the edge of the table and leaned onto it, tipping his head back and idly casting his eyes up to the ceiling.
There were words written on the single square of the grid-patterned hung ceiling that was directly above his head. The letters were just large enough to be read by someone standing below. He read them out to himself. “Go outside. Turn left. Library Place.”
His heart began to pound. What were the odds of him seeing that? Even with the help of the note, they had to be minimal. He swallowed hard. Moriarty hadn’t wanted him to find this one, he thought, that much was evident. He seemed to have gone to great lengths to keep him from the next location. That had to mean that this was important - the final stage of the treasure hunt.
Just in case, John slipped the copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into the bag of books. He glanced up once again to read the ceiling, and as he walked to the door he repeated to himself, “Library Place, Library Place …”
He locked the door behind him out of courtesy to the security company. He pushed the key into his coat pocket and while his hand was in there he grabbed Lestrade’s phone. He checked the time. It was twenty-five past twelve. Then he turned left and started walking.
He first ran into a problem at Monument Underground Station, where the main road curved around to the left. Across the road, there was a street that continued straight in the direction John had been going. He paused beside the traffic lights’ pedestrian crossing, considering his options. His natural instinct was to follow the main road around to the left. However, after the ‘turn left’, there had been no indication that he should deviate from a path that took him straight forwards. Then there was the fact that Moriarty was playing with him. Now, more than even, John suspected that he was being tested, to see what he was capable of, to see what he would do.
John thought of Sherlock. If it was Sherlock setting these puzzles, which way would he intend for him to go? If it was Sherlock running through the streets, which decision would he make: the main road, or the straight path?
The main road was almost too easy, too obvious, and Sherlock liked a direct route. John had seen him bark out directions to a cabbie enough times to know that. He nodded to himself and waited for the pedestrian crossing light to turn green. He would take the street that would keep him going in a roughly straight line from the London Stone. It was a risk, but then, so was every decision he had made that day. As the traffic lights began to bleep, signalling that it was safe to cross, he took a deep breath and made his decision.
***
John’s roughly straight path took him past the Tower of London and then onwards, heading east. A couple more times, he was given the option of following a bend in the road or continuing straight ahead, and each time, he did as he had before. His path took him out of the centre of the city into a more residential area, the street he found himself on running parallel to a railway viaduct. He could hear the trains rumbling past every so often as he walked. He passed a small length of shops, followed by yet more housing, and wondered if he was going in the right direction. He glanced at his watch. He had been walking for at least half an hour, and it felt far too late to turn around and go back.
He kept walking, staring at the names of the blocks of flats and streets as he passed, hoping that one of them would read ‘Library Place’. After a few more minutes’ walk, the viaduct peeled away and was replaced on John’s side of the road by a row of houses, sheltered from the road noise by a series of well-established trees growing on the edge of the pavement.
Up ahead, on the opposite side of the road, he caught sight of a brightly-coloured wall on the end of a row of houses. As he approached, the colours resolved into strangely curved images painted onto the wall. As he drew level with the end of the previous row, he noticed that there was a communal garden squeezed in between the two rows, with the mural looming over it. He paused to look back at the row that wasn’t painted, searching for a name, and saw a sign that told him that this was Library Place. His heart leapt in his chest. He had just about given up on his theory that going in a straight line was the right decision.
He hurried across the road as fast as his leg could manage and stepped through into the communal garden beneath the mural.
The painting itself was imposing. It was a mass of faces and figures, and what looked like a barricade of chairs, tables and even doors, rising high up to a painted blue sky. There were to panicky-looking police horses, and a third policeman down in the front being punched. Someone in one of the painted windows had thrown some milk bottles, and someone else a wrench. A man atop the barricade had thrown armfuls of paper into the air. There was even what looked like an aeroplane in the top right, and directly under it a figure that looked suspiciously like Hitler, dressed only in his underwear. John searched the crowded and confusing images for anything that might indicate another location, but there was nothing he could see - or, at least, nothing he could work out.
With a sigh, he turned away from the mural and wandered around the communal area as slowly as he dared. The place was empty and rather unkempt, and there were no clues that he could find. He went back to the road and ventured down the gated side-street that ran parallel to the mural against the side of the other row. There were a few cars parked down there and it led around the back of the row, but again he found nothing. He went back to stare at the mural again. The figures in the violent scene seemed to glare back. There were two signs being held by the painted crowd, but neither of them meant anything to him. He went over to the railings in front of the mural and looked down into the low gap, checking for a sign, but it was empty. In desperation, John went across to the bin at the far end of the mural, just in case, but there was nothing inside it.
John went over to one of the benches in the communal garden and sat down heavily. His leg was aching from the long walk. He wondered if the mural was supposed to point him somewhere. Or perhaps - like the clue Moriarty had left at the bookshop and the Chicago posters - whatever he had been meant to find here had been time-sensitive. Perhaps if he had arrived earlier there might have been something to find.
Now, though, there was nothing. The realisation dawned that he had failed. Whatever he was supposed to do or find here, he was incapable of it - either because he was too late or because he simply couldn’t work it out. Either way, he had failed. He couldn’t move on from this spot. He had no idea where to go.
He thought of Sherlock and his heart squeezed. He was as good as dead, now. John wondered if it was worth trying to call him, to warn him about Moriarty’s plan.
Then he remembered the phone. There was one last sliver of hope: Moriarty could have sent him a message or unlocked an application. He scrabbled for it, yanking it out of his pocket. There were no new messages, so he scrolled through the applications, silently praying that one of them would be active.
They were all greyed out. John scrubbed a hand across his face. He really had failed, then. Moriarty had won. Sherlock was going to die, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
Chapter Eight
.
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 Seven
The church was exactly as John remembered: a huge building of dark grey stone with white accents, a red brick tower rising over the arched entrance. He glanced up at the gold numbers of the clock face, high above on the side of the tower. It was almost noon.
He sighed to himself as he headed for the dark wood doors that led into the church. Everything felt as though it was taking too long. He wondered if he might already be too late. Moriarty had never told him how much time the ‘treasure hunt’ was supposed to take. He knew that his leg was slowing him down significantly. Had Moriarty taken that into account when he planned this?
Even though he could hear nothing from inside the church, he paused by the doors to check whether there was a Monday morning service. Thankfully, there was nothing scheduled for that morning, so he stepped inside. He stopped after a few paces to allow his eyes to adjust to the rather dim interior, sacrificing time in favour of actually being able to see properly to search. He limped across to the desk beside the book stall and handed over another precious portion of his money to the fail looking lady. She thanked him for supporting the church and he offered her a feeble smile as he turned away.
The church was as cold and majestic as it remained in his memory. He shivered slightly as he made his way up the aisle towards the oriel window. He kept his eyes peeled as he passed by the rows of stiff, wooden seating in case Moriarty had left him a clue. He paused a short way from the altar. There was someone standing just in front of the communion rail, and he didn’t want to interrupt if they were praying. He waited until the woman bowed her head and moved away, disappearing through one of the many stone arches that divided the seating from the side aisles. His feet were quiet against the tiles and stone grave markers as he moved forwards. The church was otherwise completely silent. He stopped in front of the oriel window and looked up at it, his eyes finding the barrel pierced by an arrow with ease. He stared up at it, allowing himself a moment to catch his breath. The familiar image, however, was only what had brought him here. It wasn’t going to give him any indication of where to go next.
With a sigh, John scanned the rest of the carvings. He couldn’t remember anything significant from the carvings around the oriel window aside from the barrel and arrow. Still, he couldn’t see anything amiss. He wished he could ask the lady in the book shop, but that would definitely break Moriarty’s ‘no talking’ rule - if he hadn’t broken it already.
He swallowed hard, trying not to think of what might have already happened to Sherlock. Surely Moriarty would tell him if he had gone wrong, or if he was too late or so behind schedule that finishing in time was no longer possible. He hoped that was the case, but a part of him - the part that saw the darkness in Sherlock, the part that remembered Moriarty’s chill voice deep in his ear when he dreamed - suspected otherwise. Moriarty derived some sick pleasure from seeing him fumble around in the dark, searching blindly for clues he barely stood a chance of solving. He would find even more in watching John come home - thinking Sherlock was all right, thinking he had won - only to find Sherlock with a bullet hole in his chest or temple, shirt stained red and those piercing blue eyes bereft of any spark of the intelligence the infuriated and fascinated him both at once.
He stumbled across to the nearest chair and sat down heavily, dropping his plastic bag beside him. His breath was ragged, and it had nothing to do with pain or physical exertion. For the first time that day, he dreaded going home.
He leaned his walking stick against the next chair along and brought both hands up to cover his face, rubbing his fingers into his eyes. He couldn’t keep thinking like this. He had to believe that Sherlock was all right. That Moriarty’s treasure hunt was more than just a trap. He had to believe that there was a way out of this dark maze, and that he would find it if he just kept following the clues. He had managed it so far, he told himself.
Yet he could feel the tug of exhaustion in his bones and muscles now. Even without the injury to his leg, he had been on his feet since early morning, and the unaccustomed exercise had taken its toll. He could have done this easily before the weeks of hospital bed-rest, but not now, and especially not with an unhealed gunshot wound in his thigh. He leant back on the chair and let his hands drop to his sides. Yes, he had managed to follow Moriarty’s complex trail this far, but he had no idea how much longer he could continue like this. He closed his eyes and tried to take deep breaths.
“Come on, John,” he murmured to himself after a few moments. He opened his eyes.
His gaze fell on the wooden barrier in front of him that divided the seats from the aisle. In his haste to sit down, he hadn’t noticed that there was a hymn book just an arm’s length away, propped on the sloping top of the barrier. He reached over and grabbed it, immediately noticing that the hard cover felt loose. He rested the book against the barrier and opened it.
He was presented not with the title page of a hymn book, but rather with the words ‘Henry VI Part Two’. He raised his eyebrows, surprised that Moriarty had given him a Shakespeare play. There was no doubt that the book was Moriarty’s doing: why else would something so strange be here? He wondered how the man had ensured that the book was waiting for him when he arrived - and then he remembered the woman. He had assumed she was praying, but as he had walked up the aisle he had noticed that she got up from one of the seats on this side of the choir. She must have been in place since that morning, waiting to leave the book here for him to find. He looked around, searching the dark corners of the church in case she was still there, but he couldn’t see her. He could barely remember what she had looked like; her hair and coat had both been dark, but there had been nothing unusual about her. He sighed and gave up, turning his attention back to the book in his hands.
Aside from the transplanted cover, it seemed to be a complete copy of Henry VI Part Two. John wondered what he was supposed to look for. He checked the publication information, just in case, but Moriarty hadn’t marked anything for his attention. He tried thumbing through the pages of the book. There had to be another clue, something that would point him to the right page.
He lifted his head, sighing in frustration. Then his eyes fell on the wooden hymn boards on either side of the church and, more importantly, the single number displayed there. He felt a rush of excitement as he remembered that there was no service planned for today. There shouldn’t have been any numbers on the hymn boards at all. He made a note of the number - one hundred and twenty two - and quickly turned to the relevant page.
He was confronted by the first page of Act Four Scene Six. The words directly after the scene number had been thickly scored through with a black marker. He flipped back a page to the previous scene, but there the words were unmarked and read ‘London. The Tower’: the setting of the scene. He turned back to Scene Six. Clearly, there was his clue - rendered unreadable by a layer of ink. He flipped the page, wondering if he could read what had been censored through the paper, but the pen had done its job: it was completely illegible. John sighed; he hadn’t really expected it to be that simple. Moriarty never made things simple. He settled down and began to read.
John didn’t bother reading beyond the end of the scene. There was little point, if he was right in guessing that the location of this scene in particular was where he was supposed to go next. Why else would Moriarty have blanked out this setting and none of the others?
The location had to be somewhere in London: the references to London Bridge, the Tower and to ‘London-stone’ made that obvious, though John had known it anyway from the rules of the game. The question was as it had been from the start: where in London exactly? Presumably wherever the London Stone was located, John thought. He had a vague knowledge of the London Stone, in the same way he knew about the ravens in the Tower of London. Both were supposedly linked to the wellbeing of the city: so long as the ravens and the stone were in place, London and its people were safe. He knew where to find the ravens; that would have been laughably easy. The London Stone, however, was a more difficult prospect. Among the city’s mythical safeguards, the stone was undeniably the poor relation.
He sighed and held the page up to the dim light filtering through the stained glass window beyond the altar. He still couldn’t read the words.
He looked around. On the wall of the aisle behind him were several memorial monuments, each one lit by bright lamps. John got up, careful of his injured leg; sitting down for a while after the exertion of the walk had stiffened the muscles, but an experimental step told him that it was no longer agony to move. He still winced as he limped over to the nearest monument. He glanced around, but there was no one around. As far as he knew, the church was deserted but for himself and the lady in charge of the little shop. He was glad; he felt bad enough holding the page in a beam of light that illuminated a tomb without having anyone see him doing it. He glanced at the name and sent a silent apology to Sir Walter and Lady Mildmay, then turned his full attention to the censored words.
Holding the book, with its ill-fitting hymn book cover, and trying to angle the paper was awkward. John sighed and pulled it out from in front of the light. He leant all of his weight into his good leg and dropped the plastic bag between his feet. Then he juggled the book and his walking stick for a moment, and managed to put a little tear at the top edge of the page near the spine. Then, with a final look around to check that he wasn’t being watched, he tore the page out completely.
The ripping sound seemed loud in the silence of the church. John grimaced and hoped the little old lady didn’t come to find out what had made the noise. He dropped the book into the plastic bag alongside the other one and waited a few seconds, listening for her footsteps. When he heard nothing, he let himself relax a little and turned his mind back to the problem at hand. He put the single page in front of the light, as near to the bulb as he could manage while still able to see enough to read it. Nothing. He tried twisting the paper, millimetre by millimetre, curling it into a narrow U, anything that might break through the sheen of black ink and reflect the light back off the printed letters.
He froze. There. Just at this angle, the paper tilted away from him at almost forty-five degrees, the letters became legible as “London. Cannon Street.”
John wanted to laugh. He felt as though he had beaten Moriarty in some small way, more so than he had with any of the other clues. He was sure this wasn’t how Moriarty had intended him to solve it - that he was supposed to be remembering where the London Stone was located, not using light to see through the black pen. Yet he couldn’t be accused of cheating: Moriarty had never said he couldn’t do something like this. Grinning, he stuffed the page into the bag and picked it up, swinging it gently by his side as he made his way towards the exit.
***
John took the Underground to Cannon Street. He was sorry to leave the familiar ground near Barts, but at the same time a little relieved. It would be just his luck to run into Mike Stamford or the girl from the mortuary, Molly - and that couldn’t end well. No one in the medical profession who knew, as they did, that he had been shot would be fooled by a brave face if they saw his limp. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to excuse himself quickly enough, or even if he would have been able to get away.
No, it was for the best that he was away from Barts, he thought as he stepped out of Mansion House tube station. The further he was from places and people he knew, the safer Sherlock would be.
He took the walk down Cannon Street as quickly as his leg would allow. He had managed to get a seat on the Underground, and although the mental and physical rest had come like a blessing, he couldn’t afford to slow down. He may have gained himself a little time on the last clue, but he was sure he had wasted much more earlier on. He kept his eyes peeled as he walked for any sign of the London Stone. He knew he was on the right street, but he didn’t know where along the length of the road the stone itself would be, or even if it would be sign-posted. He somehow doubted it.
His eye caught on a sign that read ‘London Stone’ above a recessed entrance surrounded by chalk boards. This was obviously a pub, but the name implied that he was at the least getting close. He slowed down, a piece of him wondering if Moriarty would take drastic measures if he went into the pub and asked where the real stone was. He smiled grimly; of course he would.
The next building had once been grand, but its green marble façade looked as though it had seen better days. John looked up at the glass windows that rose in ranks towards the sky, and when he dropped his gaze he spotted a nondescript little structure, poking out into the pavement. He went over. There was a plaque above a fancy metal grille, which named the contents as the London Stone. Behind a glass pane and badly illuminated from above, there was a plain grey lump of rock. John forced his leg to cooperate as he crouched in front of the grille. The movement dragged a groan of pain from his throat that made a couple of passers by turn to look, but they quickly moved on. John tried to take slow deep breaths through his nose, fighting the wave of nausea that followed the pain. He focused on the blank grey stone in front of him. If he could force his attention onto something, anything, other than his leg, it would remove him from the injury.
The London Stone itself couldn’t hold any information. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched since its interment in the wall of this building. There was nothing scratched or painted onto the glass, or onto any outer part of the little structure that had been built to house the stone. Then John noticed that someone had pushed a small bunch of flowers through the metal grille, which had withered and dried. He thought he could see the edge of something beneath them. He pushed his fingers through the bars and nudged the flowers aside. A key had been hidden beneath them.
John hooked the key out from behind the metal bars. It was small and silver, and looked much like the keys on his key-ring at home. He flipped it over in his palm. The flat, rounded head of the key was completely blank.
He used the London Stone’s housing to pull himself to his feet, hissing as he straightened his leg again and then leaning against the wall with one hand. The pain was getting worse again. He knew that for the sake of his leg he ought to stop, but that hadn’t been an option since Moriarty had appeared in his bedroom. He licked his lips and forced himself to straighten up, reaching for every shred of army training and putting it into practice. He had to keep going, for Sherlock’s sake if not for his own. He gritted his teeth and took a step back from the wall. Sherlock wouldn’t let him down; he couldn’t be the weak link in their little chain.
He raised his head and glanced about him. Since the key was completely ordinary and didn’t point him in a new direction, he guessed that it fitted into a lock somewhere nearby. His eyes caught on a doorway right next to the London Stone, which he had walked past without really seeing just a few moments before. There was a warning sign posted on the wood of the door itself, telling the world that it was under the protection of a security company. The door had been secured with a padlock.
The pain faded a little as John went across to try the key, his brain distracted by the anticipation. It turned in the padlock and John’s face broke into an automatic, triumphant grin. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering if any of the men and women walking past on their lunch hour would notice him, whether any of them had seen him crouch beside the stone before he came to this door and would think it strange. No one seemed to be paying him any attention. He smiled to himself, shaking his head as he slipped inside. Of course they weren’t.
On the other side of the door, there was a large room lit only by the light that filtered in through the windows that looked out onto Cannon Street, though the majority of them were mostly blocked by large, wooden shelves that had been pushed against the outer walls. A couple of feet from the door, in the middle of an otherwise empty space, there was a table. On it lay a single book. John frowned; Moriarty had given him three books now, two in successive clues. It seems strangely unimaginative for a self-proclaimed genius.
He went over to the table. His frown deepened as he read the book’s title: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. He picked it up. It was a hardback edition that had been stripped of its dust jacket, but the bright, cartoonish image of Harry and the school train was still splashed across the cover. He couldn’t quite believe that Moriarty had given him a children’s book, even one that was commonly held as acceptable for adults. He turned the book over in his hands, and noticed a bookmark made of a strip of printer paper poking out. He quickly turned to the relevant pages. The right-hand page was the opening of chapter six, ‘The Journey To Platform Nine And Three-Quarters’. His eyes skipped down the page to check, and sure enough, near the bottom, were the words ‘King’s Cross’.
His first reaction was to grin and slap the book closed in one hand. He couldn’t ask for clearer instructions than that: King’s Cross Station, either at the fake platform nine and three-quarters sign by the entrance beside the luggage trolley set into the wall, or between the real platforms nine and ten. He turned to go, but a though made him pause.
None of the other clues had been presented so neatly for him. Perhaps Moriarty was playing with him, trying to lull him into thinking that the hard part was over - but that made no sense. He sighed and took a step back to perch on the edge of the table and reopen the book. He wished he could just take the clue at face value, but the more he thought about it the more it felt wrong. He put the plastic bag down at his feet, thinking of the books inside it: neither of them had had their pages nicely bookmarked for him. He had had to work to find the answer with those. Why would Moriarty just give it to him this time? He sighed and pulled out the paper marker to properly study the two pages. There were no other locations, however. Perhaps Moriarty was giving him a break, he thought, though that was dubious. If he was anything at all like Sherlock, he would keep pushing - keep testing his mental limits. It made no sense that he would suddenly give him an easy way out.
Then the thought struck him: the bookmark. He had barely noticed it, and yet it was the most incongruous thing about the clue. He closed the book and put it down on the table, then looked at the bookmark. It really was nothing more than a strip of unlined white paper, apparently blank. Then he saw it. In the bottom corner, probably positioned just where they would have been partially hidden by the curve of the pages as they rose from the spine, there were tiny letters. Moriarty must have used a very sharp, very hard pencil. The writing was so faint he could barely read it in the dim light, but after a few seconds he made it out. Just two words: ‘Look around.’
John gritted his teeth and screwed the paper into a ball, throwing it aside. He felt angry - with himself as much as with Moriarty. How much time might he have wasted going to King’s Cross? How much more in coming all the way back - if he had found the little note on the bookmark at all? What if it had made him too late to stop Moriarty?
“Stop it,” he told himself, passing a hand across his face and making himself take deep breaths. He hadn’t been fooled by the false trail. Thinking about how close had had come to a mistake wasn’t going to help. He wondered if Moriarty had intended for him to go astray at this point, and whether that meant he was getting close. He dropped his hand onto the edge of the table and leaned onto it, tipping his head back and idly casting his eyes up to the ceiling.
There were words written on the single square of the grid-patterned hung ceiling that was directly above his head. The letters were just large enough to be read by someone standing below. He read them out to himself. “Go outside. Turn left. Library Place.”
His heart began to pound. What were the odds of him seeing that? Even with the help of the note, they had to be minimal. He swallowed hard. Moriarty hadn’t wanted him to find this one, he thought, that much was evident. He seemed to have gone to great lengths to keep him from the next location. That had to mean that this was important - the final stage of the treasure hunt.
Just in case, John slipped the copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into the bag of books. He glanced up once again to read the ceiling, and as he walked to the door he repeated to himself, “Library Place, Library Place …”
He locked the door behind him out of courtesy to the security company. He pushed the key into his coat pocket and while his hand was in there he grabbed Lestrade’s phone. He checked the time. It was twenty-five past twelve. Then he turned left and started walking.
He first ran into a problem at Monument Underground Station, where the main road curved around to the left. Across the road, there was a street that continued straight in the direction John had been going. He paused beside the traffic lights’ pedestrian crossing, considering his options. His natural instinct was to follow the main road around to the left. However, after the ‘turn left’, there had been no indication that he should deviate from a path that took him straight forwards. Then there was the fact that Moriarty was playing with him. Now, more than even, John suspected that he was being tested, to see what he was capable of, to see what he would do.
John thought of Sherlock. If it was Sherlock setting these puzzles, which way would he intend for him to go? If it was Sherlock running through the streets, which decision would he make: the main road, or the straight path?
The main road was almost too easy, too obvious, and Sherlock liked a direct route. John had seen him bark out directions to a cabbie enough times to know that. He nodded to himself and waited for the pedestrian crossing light to turn green. He would take the street that would keep him going in a roughly straight line from the London Stone. It was a risk, but then, so was every decision he had made that day. As the traffic lights began to bleep, signalling that it was safe to cross, he took a deep breath and made his decision.
***
John’s roughly straight path took him past the Tower of London and then onwards, heading east. A couple more times, he was given the option of following a bend in the road or continuing straight ahead, and each time, he did as he had before. His path took him out of the centre of the city into a more residential area, the street he found himself on running parallel to a railway viaduct. He could hear the trains rumbling past every so often as he walked. He passed a small length of shops, followed by yet more housing, and wondered if he was going in the right direction. He glanced at his watch. He had been walking for at least half an hour, and it felt far too late to turn around and go back.
He kept walking, staring at the names of the blocks of flats and streets as he passed, hoping that one of them would read ‘Library Place’. After a few more minutes’ walk, the viaduct peeled away and was replaced on John’s side of the road by a row of houses, sheltered from the road noise by a series of well-established trees growing on the edge of the pavement.
Up ahead, on the opposite side of the road, he caught sight of a brightly-coloured wall on the end of a row of houses. As he approached, the colours resolved into strangely curved images painted onto the wall. As he drew level with the end of the previous row, he noticed that there was a communal garden squeezed in between the two rows, with the mural looming over it. He paused to look back at the row that wasn’t painted, searching for a name, and saw a sign that told him that this was Library Place. His heart leapt in his chest. He had just about given up on his theory that going in a straight line was the right decision.
He hurried across the road as fast as his leg could manage and stepped through into the communal garden beneath the mural.
The painting itself was imposing. It was a mass of faces and figures, and what looked like a barricade of chairs, tables and even doors, rising high up to a painted blue sky. There were to panicky-looking police horses, and a third policeman down in the front being punched. Someone in one of the painted windows had thrown some milk bottles, and someone else a wrench. A man atop the barricade had thrown armfuls of paper into the air. There was even what looked like an aeroplane in the top right, and directly under it a figure that looked suspiciously like Hitler, dressed only in his underwear. John searched the crowded and confusing images for anything that might indicate another location, but there was nothing he could see - or, at least, nothing he could work out.
With a sigh, he turned away from the mural and wandered around the communal area as slowly as he dared. The place was empty and rather unkempt, and there were no clues that he could find. He went back to the road and ventured down the gated side-street that ran parallel to the mural against the side of the other row. There were a few cars parked down there and it led around the back of the row, but again he found nothing. He went back to stare at the mural again. The figures in the violent scene seemed to glare back. There were two signs being held by the painted crowd, but neither of them meant anything to him. He went over to the railings in front of the mural and looked down into the low gap, checking for a sign, but it was empty. In desperation, John went across to the bin at the far end of the mural, just in case, but there was nothing inside it.
John went over to one of the benches in the communal garden and sat down heavily. His leg was aching from the long walk. He wondered if the mural was supposed to point him somewhere. Or perhaps - like the clue Moriarty had left at the bookshop and the Chicago posters - whatever he had been meant to find here had been time-sensitive. Perhaps if he had arrived earlier there might have been something to find.
Now, though, there was nothing. The realisation dawned that he had failed. Whatever he was supposed to do or find here, he was incapable of it - either because he was too late or because he simply couldn’t work it out. Either way, he had failed. He couldn’t move on from this spot. He had no idea where to go.
He thought of Sherlock and his heart squeezed. He was as good as dead, now. John wondered if it was worth trying to call him, to warn him about Moriarty’s plan.
Then he remembered the phone. There was one last sliver of hope: Moriarty could have sent him a message or unlocked an application. He scrabbled for it, yanking it out of his pocket. There were no new messages, so he scrolled through the applications, silently praying that one of them would be active.
They were all greyed out. John scrubbed a hand across his face. He really had failed, then. Moriarty had won. Sherlock was going to die, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
Chapter Eight
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