Fic: The Descent of Man [Sherlock]
Fic: The Descent of Man, Pt 2a
The second part of this. Sherlock and John investigate the death scene and reach some shocking conclusions. Oh, and John rather amateurishly refers to the Doctor as "Doctor Who" at one point, like it's his name. Please forgive him, he's only a "casual viewer"! ;D
Title: The Descent of Man
Part: 2 of 3?
Characters: Sherlock, John, Mrs Hudson, DI Lestrade, DS Donovan, Anderson (so far)
Rating/Warnings: Gen. Some mild swearing. Discussion of gruesome violence. Scientific testing on animals.
Word count: 8,200 approx. (Pts 1 and 2)
Summary: This one was weird even by Sherlock's standards. And if you've been reading this blog, you'll know that's weird. X-Files weird.
Disclaimer: Sherlock was created for the BBC by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, based on stories and characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I do not own any of this and am making no profit from it.
The Personal Blog of
Dr. John H. Watson
2nd March
The Descent of Man, Part 2
Went for another interview this morning. Don’t think I’ve got this one either. The main guy asking questions looked about twelve, and I think I let my contempt show in my answers. Not a good idea, really. Maybe I’m setting my sights too high - I could get locum work, I suppose, if I tried.
Enough of that. Sherlock’s playing his violin again. I could shout at him to be quiet, but he’d ignore me.
Back to The Adventure of the Nervous Animal-Vivisectionist - Sherlock will hate me calling it that. No, I can’t joke about it, the poor bloke’s dead. And I told him it would be alright. I’ve seen quite a bit of death, as a doctor, as a soldier, since I started living with Sherlock. Most of those people, though, I never saw them alive and whole beforehand, and if I told any of those wounded squaddies in Afghanistan that it would be alright, I don’t think I meant it.
Christ, what a horrible thing to think.
Sorry, I can’t do this now.
EDIT: Right, I’ve got my head together a bit. Had a fight with Sherlock about him putting empty milk containers back in the fridge. How was I to know it was an experiment?
Anyway, Trevor Bennett. When Sally said he was dead, I just sat there for a moment, like an idiot. Like I said, Sherlock didn’t even blink.
“So,” said Lestrade, very businesslike, grabbing a chair and planting himself down. “Why did this dead man contact you yesterday?”
“He liked my website,” Sherlock answered, like it was a game. “It’s really good.” It is all a game to him.
“Where were you between midnight and two?” Sally demanded.
“Here,” he said. “With John. Making sweet, sweet love.” If I’d actually managed to make that coffee, I probably would’ve choked on it.
“Stop lying,” Sally told him.
“How do you know I’m lying?” he asked her, with that piss-taking gleam in his eye. “John is such a gentle and considerate lover.”
“You’re talking, aren’t you?” She doesn’t even try to hide how little time she has for him. That amuses him, of course.
“How’s Anderson?” he asked, nastily. “His wife must still be at her mother’s because he cooked you dinner last night. How romantic.” Before he could humiliate her by explaining exactly how he knew this, Lestrade decided to stop messing about. I was grateful for that.
“Look Sherlock, we’ve got a man with his head bashed in, no witnesses, no suspects, you two are more or less the last people to see him alive…”
“Is this where you try to apply pressure by pretending to treat us as suspects, despite having nowhere near enough evidence to charge us?” Sherlock snorted. “Pull the other one, Lestrade.”
“If it was up to Sally, you’d be in an interview room right now waiting for your brief to arrive.”
“Yes, in a parallel universe.” Sherlock looked at Sally: “It was either lasagne or spaghetti Bolognese, and afterwards you and Anderson…”
“Stranger things have happened,” Lestrade told him, ominously. “What did Trevor Bennett want to talk to you about?”
“Can I plead client confidentiality?” Sherlock asked him.
“No.”
Sherlock looked back at Sally: “You did what with ice-cream? Really?”
“Let’s nick him right now, guv,” she suggested.
“You could,” Sherlock agreed. “Or you could admit that you came here because you haven’t a clue why Trevor Bennett was killed and you want - no, need - my assistance.”
“Tell us why he emailed you,” Lestrade persisted.
“Tell me how he died. Or better yet, let me have a look for myself and I’ll tell you. It’ll save everybody a lot of time.”
“Sherlock…” Lestrade fumed.
“Good.” Sherlock nodded. “Glad you saw sense. I’ll just go and make myself presentable - see you downstairs.”
I shrugged embarrassedly at Lestrade and Donovan as they made for the door again, wishing I could disappear down the back of the sofa cushion.. “Five minutes,” Lestrade said, “or we’ll be back up here with handcuffs.”
“I think Sally left hers on Anderson,” Sherlock replied. “He likes that kind of thing.”
“Freak!” she hissed.
“That’s not a nice thing to call him after he cooked dinner.”
Sherlock waited for them to go and then smiled smugly across at me:
“Game on!”
“It’s not a game!” I replied, shocked by his attitude. “That man…that man who was sitting here last night… He’s dead, Sherlock!”
“Yes. Interesting, don’t you think?” He got up and made for his bedroom.
“No,” I answered. I was trying not to get angry, hard as it was. “Why didn’t you tell Lestrade what Trevor told us, about Dr Presbury and the dog and everything?”
“Why would I do that?” Sherlock sounded puzzled.
“I don’t know, because it’s illegal to withhold evidence from the police? Because it might help them find out why Trevor died?”
“That’s certainly an intriguing notion,” he conceded. “Come on, John, get dressed! Unless you’re coming to the crime scene in your dressing gown…”
“I can’t,” I told him.
“What?”
“I’ve got another interview today.”
“John,” Sherlock sighed, “what’s more important? Getting a job,” and he spat the word out like it disgusted him, “or watching me being brilliant?
So, a few minutes later we were both in the back of DI Lestrade’s car.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Camford Pharmaceuticals,” Sherlock announced beside me.
“How do you know that?” Sally asked suspiciously from the front.
“How do I know anything?” The car stopped at the lights and Sherlock punched the back of Lestrade’s seat, making him jump: “Stop here. I’ll be two minutes.”
“They’re about to change!” Sherlock was already out of the car, coat swirling behind him as he dashed into a chemist’s shop. He’d left the door open, of course. Lestrade gave me an exasperated look as cars behind beeped their horns or tried to manoeuvre around us. I did my best to look sympathetic. Sherlock was back again a couple of minutes later with a carrier bag.
He shoved a crumpled piece of paper at Lestrade: “Receipt. I’m sure the police will reimburse me.”
“Reimburse you?”
“I had to buy some lipstick.” He pulled a handful of different brands out of the bag and dropped them in again. Then he saw me staring at him: “For research purposes, John.”
“That’s what they all say,” I said.
The Camford Pharmaceuticals laboratory was in one corner of a suburban industrial estate, surrounded by security fences and cameras. I could see why - even this early, there were protestors gathering with placards and leaflets. I heard them chanting slogans as we waited for security to open the gate.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone cruelty to animals. I don’t want to offend any of my readers either, but… As a doctor, I believe animal testing is necessary. Not things like testing cosmetics on rabbits - I mean things like pharmaceuticals and genetics. These things save lives, honestly. On the other hand, I think it’s kind of sick to call a dog Roy and say how friendly he is when you know you’re going to end up taking him apart to see whether your experiment worked. Okay, rant over.
Now that you’ve all stopped reading in disgust, I sort of sympathise with the protestors without agreeing with them. Not the extremists, but the ones I could see outside that lab just looked like concerned kids, student types. They didn’t look dangerous. Not to me, anyway. That’s probably why I’ll never make it as a consulting detective, because Sherlock seemed to view them with suspicion and disdain, although maybe it was just bafflement that anyone could give a toss about what seems to him an irrelevant issue.
Lestrade stopped in front of a square three-storey building, one of a row of four, divided from another identical row by a car park currently full of police vehicles. As Sherlock got out of the car, I saw him shove the bunched-up carrier into his coat pocket, looking around inquisitively.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Cameras.” He pointed at one corner of the building, at the building opposite. “And there’s our crime scene.” He pointed at one of the second floor windows. It had been smashed.
The ground floor was a reception area and admin office. The first floor was private offices and labs, with more labs on the second floor. That was where Trevor Bennett was, still lying where he had died beneath the smashed window, the centre of a small crowd of forensic technicians. The floor was littered with broken scientific equipment and containers. Whoever killed Trevor had cleared the workbenches in the middle of the lab and emptied all of the cabinets and cupboards, leaving the place a bloody mess. Literally. Sally hadn’t been kidding about Trevor’s head.
“I see you’ve left the body,” Sherlock smiled. Smiled! “You wanted me to see it in place, meaning that you were coming to me for help all along.” He glanced at Sally: “You know that that makes your efforts at intimidation earlier look even more ridiculous, don’t you?”
“What’s he doing here?” asked a familiar figure in a blue plastic forensics suit.
“Quiet, Anderson,” said Sherlock. “People are trying to work in here. I think Sally enjoyed the pasta and ice-cream, by the way.” Anderson looked like he was about to hit him. “Lestrade, could you get all of these tourists out of here, please?”
“Sir,” Anderson protested, but Lestrade was already waving the others out of the room. Anderson remained in the corner, plainly furious. Sherlock ignored him.
Instead, he swept around the room in his coat and scarf like Doctor Who or something, looking at everything, missing nothing. “Who found the body?” he asked Lestrade.
“Edith Morphy, the animal keeper. She came into work at eight, came up here and… We’ve got her in the building across the car park there. She’s in a state, as you can imagine.” Lestrade nodded towards the building visible through the broken window: “That’s where they keep the animals. Someone got in there too, broke the locks on some of the cages. A chimp got loose.”
“A chimp?” I asked. “Can’t they be, well, dangerous?”
“Apparently,” Lestrade agreed. “It’s back under lock and key now.”
“Those door locks,” Sherlock said. “They record every time somebody uses a card to open them. You’ve checked that, of course.”
“Yeah,” Lestrade replied, rankling a bit at the patronising tone. “First thing we did. All of the staff went home between five and eight. Last ones out were Bennett and the boss man, Dr Presbury. Bennett came back here around midnight, which apparently wasn’t unheard of for him, got signed in by security, and…” He hesitated.
“Yes?”
“He was the last person to enter this lab until Edith Morphy found him this morning. Nobody else entered or left this building or this room all night.”
“What about Dr Presbury?” I asked. Sherlock and Lestrade both looked at me.
“He was still at home when Edith called him just after eight,” Sally cut in. “He was the first person she contacted after dialling 999. Got here about nine, just before we did.”
“I see.” Sherlock turned back to the window, almost grinning. “A locked room mystery… I love it. Except…it isn’t much of a mystery. See all of this broken glass? This window was smashed inwards, from the outside. That’s how the killer got in. Thick glass too…” He leaned out of the jagged-edged hole, examining the ground below. “A two-storey climb, no drainpipe, no ledges - the windows don’t open from the outside and are in any case locked… What do you think, John?”
“Where was Spider Man between the hours of midnight and two?” I murmured, and immediately felt bad. This wasn’t a laughing matter.
Sherlock crouched beside Trevor, taking out his little magnifying lens. “What do you make of this body?” he asked me.
“He’s dead.”
“Yes,” he said, testily. “Cause of death?”
“Somebody kept hitting his head ‘til he didn’t have a head any more,” I answered, quietly, thinking about exactly what that meant.
“Lestrade, Donovan, anybody,” Sherlock called out, “weapon?”
“None that we could see,” Lestrade admitted.
“That’s because whoever it was used their fists.” That took a moment to sink in:
“No, no way,” I blurted. “How could a person do…do that with their fists?”
“I didn’t say anything about a person.” Sherlock pointed to a smear of blood on the floor beside Trevor’s dead hand: “Look.” He held the lens over it so I could see.
“A print?” I wondered.
“Yes, but not a fingerprint. See, horizontal wrinkles… It’s a knuckle-print.”
“A knuckle-print?” Anderson was dumbfounded. “There’s no such thing!”
“Are you still here?” Sherlock stared at him for a moment. “When nobody said anything idiotic for a couple of minutes, I thought you must have left.” He stood to examine the similar bloody marks trailing across the floor, along one of the workbenches, on top of a cabinet, muttering to himself as he went: “When you’ve got rid of the things that couldn’t possibly have happened, then what you’re left with, however unlikely… And I’m not kidding about the “unlikely” part.” He turned to Lestrade: “You see how it was done now, don’t you?”
“No.”
“No, of course not.” Sherlock sighed. “You see but you don’t… Look! The killer didn’t come through the door, whoever, or whatever, it was…”
“Whatever?” Anderson scoffed. I had been about to say the same thing.
“Ah-ah,” said Sherlock, waving a finger under Anderson’s nose.
“What - ?”
“Ah-ah-ah-ah…” Sherlock kept waving the finger until Anderson lapsed into silence. “Thank you. Now keep quiet, the grownups are talking.” He turned back to Lestrade: “Whatever it was came through the window. He, she or it was agile enough to scale the side of the building without significant handholds, and strong enough to punch a hole in a plate-glass window. He, she or,” he glanced insolently at Anderson again, “it, then proceeded to do the same to Trevor Bennett’s head while generally wrecking the place, all the while walking around on his, her or its…”
“Knuckles!” Lestrade exclaimed, getting it in the same instant I did. I wonder if he felt as thick as I did for not tumbling to it sooner. “It was the bloody chimp!” he told Sally, who stared at him open-mouthed for a moment:
“You must be joking…”
“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it, Sherlock?” he asked.
“You should probably go and interrogate it,” Sherlock suggested. “Just don’t expect any clever answers.” Lestrade made for the door:
“Anderson, bring your kit! We need to examine that ape for traces!”
“And you, Sergeant Donovan,” Sherlock smiled, “should probably look at the CCTV footage for the car park outside. Who knows, you might actually see Spider Man breaking in here and prove me wrong.” I could see Sally was on the point of throwing some insulting remark back, but instead she swallowed her anger and left the room too.
Continued here: jjpor.livejournal.com/63397.html