Fic: So I'll Finish part 7/12
Title: So I'll Finish part 7/12
Author: Unsentimental Fool
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Rating: (this part) PG (some language)
Word count: (this part 1,650)(total to date 9,361)
Summary: When Sherlock is invited onto a TV celebrity quiz show he has his own reasons for accepting. The competition, however, does not go at all as planned. Can he uncover the author of the unexpected questions and prevent the whole thing from turning into a humiliating PR disaster?
Summary; this chapter: The press are still persistent, but Sherlock has one reason to be cheerful, at least
back to part 1
"The answer was wrong."
John looked up from his book. "You said that already. Are you feeling all right?"
"No, listen! The quiz answer was wrong! This..." Sherlock waved at the newspaper cuttings on the wall."...is all about my getting the Moriarty questions wrong. It's supposed to humiliate me. But if the answers they had were incorrect, I couldn't have got them right. The entire question set was invalid. It proves nothing!"
The realisation left him more cheerful than he'd felt for days. John was smiling at him.
"Oh, Sherlock! All this and you're still worried about your score!"
"I'm not worried about it. I'm merely pointing out that no-one could score highly off a flawed data set and that any comments to the contrary are unfounded."
John nodded. "I guess that's fair enough. So how many of them were wrong?"
Twenty one questions. He'd got 11 right. He knew the scientific paper existed, and that Patrick Murtagh wasn't Moriarty. "Up to eight more, some of which will be extremely hard to invalidate."
John nodded. "Maybe Hubris knows nothing special about Moriarty at all? Is it really worth the effort, Sherlock? You know it was fixed now, that you couldn't win. We could just forget about it and move on."
"Hubris knew about the tea set. About when and where Moriarty died." And there was the small matter of his sabotaged television appearance. Sherlock didn't appreciate being forced onto the back foot, certainly not when cameras were involved. It didn't matter to him what the common herd thought, of course, but it was a poor advertisement for his abilities to the few people who might matter if he let it stand. "He can't hide forever. Tomorrow we'll find out what happened in the editing suite, and we'll chase up the other answers."
Tomorrow he would be the hunter, and Hubris the prey. He had a sudden, incongruous vision of the white terrier set upon a huge striped badger, of a crowd of men around, shouting encouragement and abuse. Sherlock shook his head slightly, pushed the image away. Irrelevant. Tomorrow the investigation would make progress; he was certain of it.
5am and Sherlock woke from a restless sleep to angry voices in the street below. There were photographers obstructing the pavement, blocking the entrance to Speedy's and the proprietor wanted them moved. As Sherlock rolled over and into a stretch, still listening, his phone rang.
"Hardly your department, Detective Inspector."
"Apparently anything to do with Sherlock Holmes is my department." Lestrade sounded barely awake and not particularly happy. "Just get them to go away, will you?"
"How?"
"I don't know! Get John to tell them you're not going to come outside while they're there."
"I fully intend to come outside, whether there are photographers there or not. I consider the tabloid press a complete irrelevance."
Snort. "That will be why I'm looking at your exclusive interview in the Sun this morning, full of total bullshit and quoting me as your source, Sherlock! The police didn't pull your Mastermind performance for operational reasons. We don't even have an open file on Jim Moriarty any more. You told us he was dead."
"He is dead."
"Well, then. We wouldn't care if you answer questions on him till you're blue in the face. I don't like being your fallguy, Sherlock, particularly when you can't even be bothered to give me a heads up first. Get the damn street clear now and I just might keep quiet about your crap, this time."
Lestrade hung up. Sherlock considered for a moment, decided that it might be wise to oblige the police on this occasion. The simplest method of removing the paparazzi was to remove himself. He dressed with particular care, left a note with instructions for John propped up against the kettle, then walked out, pausing for a moment on the doorstep to let the cameras flash.
That done, he walked with calm assurance and without answering any of the questions shouted in his face to the kerbside, hailed a taxi and ducked inside, careful not to look as if he were fleeing the pack.
"Where to, Gov?"
It was still only five thirty am. Far too early for the BBC, but a good time to catch people still at home. He gave an address in Surbition, ignored the cabbie's standard "south of the river at this time of day" complaint, settled back to open his phone and catch up on the morning's events.
The traffic was reasonable in this direction, and he was dropped at the small terraced house in under half an hour. Lights showed the inhabitant was up and moving around. There wasn't a peephole, so Sherlock rang the doorbell and waited.
"Christ, you!- just fuck off." The woman tried to drag the door closed again, but Sherlock pushed his way inside.
"Good morning."
"I'm going to call the police!"
"No, you're not. You're going to listen to my very simple question, you're going to answer it and then I'm going to leave."
"Why should I?"
"Because you can't afford to lose everything again, can you, Kitty? This will cost you nothing, my way. There are things that you and I know about your last employment that have never come out. They could."
She glared at him, but made no move towards the jacket that her phone was in. "Bastard. What do you want?"
"I want to know how much the Sun agreed to pay Richard Brook for his story."
"Oh!" She laughed at that, surprise and genuine amusement. "That was one of the questions! I saw it on YouTube. So much for your bloody deduction! You looked like an idiot, you know that? Fifty thousand pounds, you said! Not likely!"
"Just the answer, Ms Riley, and I'll leave."
She shrugged. "What the show said. Five grand. He was a real pushover. I told him he'd make the rest when we serialised his diaries, if they were any good."
Sherlock didn't think she was lying. "Who knew about the five thousand?"
"Me. The features ed. Mohan might've had to authorise it- he's the editor. The finance office. No-one else on our side. Brook might have told someone. Oh, and it could have gone to Leveson by now."
"Who's Leveson?"
Her look changed to one of total derision. "The enquiry, of course. God, don't you know anything at all? Go on, get out. You've have your bloody question. I need to get to work."
She wasn't going to give him anything else without further pressure, and his hand wasn't strong. He had enough to be going on. A second accurate answer. Now he had to work out how Hubris could have known.
The taxi back into central London was much slower, snarled in rush hour congestion. Sherlock searched for Leveson. A judicial enquiry into the practices of the press; he recalled it being mentioned, hadn't been interested. News International had submitted a great deal of confidential information on individual cases to the enquiry. The police had seized considerable numbers of files as well. It was quite possible, as Kitty Riley had said, that the data on Brook had been distributed wider than the newspaper by now.
The Leveson enquiry definitely looked like his brother's territory. Mycroft might be able to tell him if Brook had been included in the disclosed News International files, but Mycroft had made his views on Sherlock's own investigation very clear. Sherlock put aside the unappealing option of consulting his brother, for the moment. There were still other questions, other lines of enquiry to follow up.
Sebastian Moran, for instance. One of Moriarty's people, gone to ground since his boss's death. He would have been on Sherlock's watch list if he had ever surfaced long enough to be spotted. Now finding him was a priority.
Sherlock broke back into 221B by a rear facing window to avoid the inevitable media surveillance. The place was empty- John had left already for Broadcasting House. The phone rang an hour later as he was reviewing his old notes on Moran.
"The Tower of London is nothing on this place. Moriarty should have made it his fourth impregnable target."
Sherlock smiled. He'd known the man would find a way. "What have you got for me, John."
"None of the editing staff say they leaked the story to the Sun."
That was more disappointing. "Then someone was lying. Find out who."
"No, Sherlock. Listen. There was a bomb alert while they were working on taking your appearance out. They were all out of the building for nearly an hour."
"Damn!" He'd been confidently expecting something from the editing suite, but Hubris was ahead of him, again. "What caused the alert?"
"I checked with Lestrade. You'll like this. It was our new friends the Real IRA again.The caller had verified code words, but no device was found."
Sherlock briefly considered the possibility that he was the victim of Irish terrorism. It made no sense. He'd never been involved in counter terrorism actions, cared nothing for either side in the residual Northern Ireland conflict. Besides, Hubris's malice felt to him far more personal than any political cause might generate.
"I'll meet you by the fish in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in 45 minutes.".
"Hang on. Why there? What fish?"
"A big one. You can't miss it."
"A fish. Right. Why don't I just text you when I'm there?"
"Huh."It had been a perfectly straightforward direction, but John just had to complicate matters. Sherlock hung up, packed up his laptop and left, via the front door, startling the woman across the street posted to report his arrival.
This time he would get ahead of his unknown opponent. Sebastian Moran might think he was hidden but Sherlock knew how, and where, to flush him out. Hubris couldn't cover every track forever.
to Part 8
Author: Unsentimental Fool
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Rating: (this part) PG (some language)
Word count: (this part 1,650)(total to date 9,361)
Summary: When Sherlock is invited onto a TV celebrity quiz show he has his own reasons for accepting. The competition, however, does not go at all as planned. Can he uncover the author of the unexpected questions and prevent the whole thing from turning into a humiliating PR disaster?
Summary; this chapter: The press are still persistent, but Sherlock has one reason to be cheerful, at least
back to part 1
"The answer was wrong."
John looked up from his book. "You said that already. Are you feeling all right?"
"No, listen! The quiz answer was wrong! This..." Sherlock waved at the newspaper cuttings on the wall."...is all about my getting the Moriarty questions wrong. It's supposed to humiliate me. But if the answers they had were incorrect, I couldn't have got them right. The entire question set was invalid. It proves nothing!"
The realisation left him more cheerful than he'd felt for days. John was smiling at him.
"Oh, Sherlock! All this and you're still worried about your score!"
"I'm not worried about it. I'm merely pointing out that no-one could score highly off a flawed data set and that any comments to the contrary are unfounded."
John nodded. "I guess that's fair enough. So how many of them were wrong?"
Twenty one questions. He'd got 11 right. He knew the scientific paper existed, and that Patrick Murtagh wasn't Moriarty. "Up to eight more, some of which will be extremely hard to invalidate."
John nodded. "Maybe Hubris knows nothing special about Moriarty at all? Is it really worth the effort, Sherlock? You know it was fixed now, that you couldn't win. We could just forget about it and move on."
"Hubris knew about the tea set. About when and where Moriarty died." And there was the small matter of his sabotaged television appearance. Sherlock didn't appreciate being forced onto the back foot, certainly not when cameras were involved. It didn't matter to him what the common herd thought, of course, but it was a poor advertisement for his abilities to the few people who might matter if he let it stand. "He can't hide forever. Tomorrow we'll find out what happened in the editing suite, and we'll chase up the other answers."
Tomorrow he would be the hunter, and Hubris the prey. He had a sudden, incongruous vision of the white terrier set upon a huge striped badger, of a crowd of men around, shouting encouragement and abuse. Sherlock shook his head slightly, pushed the image away. Irrelevant. Tomorrow the investigation would make progress; he was certain of it.
5am and Sherlock woke from a restless sleep to angry voices in the street below. There were photographers obstructing the pavement, blocking the entrance to Speedy's and the proprietor wanted them moved. As Sherlock rolled over and into a stretch, still listening, his phone rang.
"Hardly your department, Detective Inspector."
"Apparently anything to do with Sherlock Holmes is my department." Lestrade sounded barely awake and not particularly happy. "Just get them to go away, will you?"
"How?"
"I don't know! Get John to tell them you're not going to come outside while they're there."
"I fully intend to come outside, whether there are photographers there or not. I consider the tabloid press a complete irrelevance."
Snort. "That will be why I'm looking at your exclusive interview in the Sun this morning, full of total bullshit and quoting me as your source, Sherlock! The police didn't pull your Mastermind performance for operational reasons. We don't even have an open file on Jim Moriarty any more. You told us he was dead."
"He is dead."
"Well, then. We wouldn't care if you answer questions on him till you're blue in the face. I don't like being your fallguy, Sherlock, particularly when you can't even be bothered to give me a heads up first. Get the damn street clear now and I just might keep quiet about your crap, this time."
Lestrade hung up. Sherlock considered for a moment, decided that it might be wise to oblige the police on this occasion. The simplest method of removing the paparazzi was to remove himself. He dressed with particular care, left a note with instructions for John propped up against the kettle, then walked out, pausing for a moment on the doorstep to let the cameras flash.
That done, he walked with calm assurance and without answering any of the questions shouted in his face to the kerbside, hailed a taxi and ducked inside, careful not to look as if he were fleeing the pack.
"Where to, Gov?"
It was still only five thirty am. Far too early for the BBC, but a good time to catch people still at home. He gave an address in Surbition, ignored the cabbie's standard "south of the river at this time of day" complaint, settled back to open his phone and catch up on the morning's events.
The traffic was reasonable in this direction, and he was dropped at the small terraced house in under half an hour. Lights showed the inhabitant was up and moving around. There wasn't a peephole, so Sherlock rang the doorbell and waited.
"Christ, you!- just fuck off." The woman tried to drag the door closed again, but Sherlock pushed his way inside.
"Good morning."
"I'm going to call the police!"
"No, you're not. You're going to listen to my very simple question, you're going to answer it and then I'm going to leave."
"Why should I?"
"Because you can't afford to lose everything again, can you, Kitty? This will cost you nothing, my way. There are things that you and I know about your last employment that have never come out. They could."
She glared at him, but made no move towards the jacket that her phone was in. "Bastard. What do you want?"
"I want to know how much the Sun agreed to pay Richard Brook for his story."
"Oh!" She laughed at that, surprise and genuine amusement. "That was one of the questions! I saw it on YouTube. So much for your bloody deduction! You looked like an idiot, you know that? Fifty thousand pounds, you said! Not likely!"
"Just the answer, Ms Riley, and I'll leave."
She shrugged. "What the show said. Five grand. He was a real pushover. I told him he'd make the rest when we serialised his diaries, if they were any good."
Sherlock didn't think she was lying. "Who knew about the five thousand?"
"Me. The features ed. Mohan might've had to authorise it- he's the editor. The finance office. No-one else on our side. Brook might have told someone. Oh, and it could have gone to Leveson by now."
"Who's Leveson?"
Her look changed to one of total derision. "The enquiry, of course. God, don't you know anything at all? Go on, get out. You've have your bloody question. I need to get to work."
She wasn't going to give him anything else without further pressure, and his hand wasn't strong. He had enough to be going on. A second accurate answer. Now he had to work out how Hubris could have known.
The taxi back into central London was much slower, snarled in rush hour congestion. Sherlock searched for Leveson. A judicial enquiry into the practices of the press; he recalled it being mentioned, hadn't been interested. News International had submitted a great deal of confidential information on individual cases to the enquiry. The police had seized considerable numbers of files as well. It was quite possible, as Kitty Riley had said, that the data on Brook had been distributed wider than the newspaper by now.
The Leveson enquiry definitely looked like his brother's territory. Mycroft might be able to tell him if Brook had been included in the disclosed News International files, but Mycroft had made his views on Sherlock's own investigation very clear. Sherlock put aside the unappealing option of consulting his brother, for the moment. There were still other questions, other lines of enquiry to follow up.
Sebastian Moran, for instance. One of Moriarty's people, gone to ground since his boss's death. He would have been on Sherlock's watch list if he had ever surfaced long enough to be spotted. Now finding him was a priority.
Sherlock broke back into 221B by a rear facing window to avoid the inevitable media surveillance. The place was empty- John had left already for Broadcasting House. The phone rang an hour later as he was reviewing his old notes on Moran.
"The Tower of London is nothing on this place. Moriarty should have made it his fourth impregnable target."
Sherlock smiled. He'd known the man would find a way. "What have you got for me, John."
"None of the editing staff say they leaked the story to the Sun."
That was more disappointing. "Then someone was lying. Find out who."
"No, Sherlock. Listen. There was a bomb alert while they were working on taking your appearance out. They were all out of the building for nearly an hour."
"Damn!" He'd been confidently expecting something from the editing suite, but Hubris was ahead of him, again. "What caused the alert?"
"I checked with Lestrade. You'll like this. It was our new friends the Real IRA again.The caller had verified code words, but no device was found."
Sherlock briefly considered the possibility that he was the victim of Irish terrorism. It made no sense. He'd never been involved in counter terrorism actions, cared nothing for either side in the residual Northern Ireland conflict. Besides, Hubris's malice felt to him far more personal than any political cause might generate.
"I'll meet you by the fish in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in 45 minutes.".
"Hang on. Why there? What fish?"
"A big one. You can't miss it."
"A fish. Right. Why don't I just text you when I'm there?"
"Huh."It had been a perfectly straightforward direction, but John just had to complicate matters. Sherlock hung up, packed up his laptop and left, via the front door, startling the woman across the street posted to report his arrival.
This time he would get ahead of his unknown opponent. Sebastian Moran might think he was hidden but Sherlock knew how, and where, to flush him out. Hubris couldn't cover every track forever.
to Part 8