“What is that?” I asked.
Sherlock grabbed a metal instrument from a nearby table and poked at the nodule. On cue, the skin cracked and something shiny could be seen reflecting off the metal table. No bigger than a dime, there was a square USB drive embedded into the lobe.
“Incredible,” I said. “You think the jumper is connected somehow?”
“I am sure of it. Grab Michaels and meet me back at Mrs. Peppard’s.”
“The woman with the missing husband? You heard her, it was a private matter, he returned home. I hardly think—”
“See you there,” Holmes said, and with that, he was gone.
WE FOUND OURSELVES once again on Mrs. Peppard’s doorstep. She seemed confused, but she let Michaels and me in. I hoped Holmes was right about this. Since he wasn’t there, I would have to stall.
“Was there something you forgot earlier?” Mrs. Peppard asked. “To be honest, I sort of overreacted. Charley had a bad habit of wandering off at times, and without his medicine he gets confused. It was really just a mixup, hardly a police matter.”
“Agreed,” said Michaels, visibly annoyed.
“My assistant is on his way, just be patient, you two.” I sipped the iced tea Mrs. Peppard had brought me and asked a few questions to pass time.
“So your husband was having an affair? And you two own a biotech lab together? That’s not good for business.”
“We do, and I don’t think the other is your business. How did you know that?”
“The internet is full of amazing things. Healing Beauty, it’s a good name.”
“Oh, I know that place,” said Michaels. “My wife had some work done there once. Was unnecessary, if you ask me, but women can be pretty stubborn once they get their minds set to something. Oh, sorry ma’am.”
Then it hit me.
“Did you have another business partner?”
A panicked look came across her face and her eyes went wet.
“We did. Her name was Danielle Mackenroy. She passed away not too long ago. I’m sorry, it’s all still pretty new.”
Before I could inquire further, Holmes’ silhouette appeared in the doorframe.
“Oh, it’s new, alright,” said Sherlock, “and murdering your husband’s mistress can also be quite distressing.”
Mrs. Peppard’s tears vanished and a scowl stretched across her worn face.
“How dare you presume to know anything about me, about my marriage?”
“Oh, I know plenty, madam,” Sherlock said.
Michaels, once again intrigued, stood and positioned himself near the kitchen exit in case Mrs. Peppard decided she was through with our questions.
“You discovered the affair between your husband and the cabaret singer, and not about to be bested by some local dollymop, took matters into your own hands. But how?” Sherlock’s eyebrows rose, and he abruptly resumed his speech by answering his own question. “Ah, that was only part of it, wasn’t it? Among your investigations of the affair, you discovered something more, didn’t you? Something worth far more than that philandering husband of yours. This company was yours, built by your family.” Sherlock pointed to a framed photo behind the fireplace that showed a young girl amongst a tall, double of a man in front of a HEALING BEAUTY banner. “Your father, he started this company; and you weren’t about to let someone take that away from you.”
“My father worked his whole life to build that company. When my mother got sick, he vowed to save her, cure her from her disease. He died trying to fulfill that promise. This is more than just some lab, it’s his legacy.”
“So what happened?” Sherlock asked. “You went to confide in your business partner? A sweet unsuspecting Danielle to lend you a sympathetic ear? She confessed something, though, didn’t she? Something that could ruin you and your husband.”
“If we divorced, he would get half of everything that my family has worked for.”
“So why not kill him, then?” I asked. Michaels shot me a disapproving look. “Hypothetically, I mean.”
“I’ll tell you why,” said Sherlock, “because it was too late, the wheels had already been set in motion.”
“We were best friends,” Mrs. Peppard said.
“You went to your friend, hoping for support, and instead she confessed that she had not only known about the affair, but amongst her digging, had discovered information far more valuable for blackmail.”
“I suppose she had started out with the intention of telling me, but the idea of a payout had seemed too good, I guess. Science doesn’t pay what it once did.”
“You realized that she had found this,” Sherlock said, and held up the small shiny object that had been unearthed from the drifter’s lobe just hours before.
The color drained from Mrs. Peppard’s face, and she said, “She was going to sell it. My father’s formula, my formula. She had done some useless botox treatments on that Jenkins woman and she, unknowing that we were friends, confessed to having slept with my husband, which is what got this whole thing started. Danielle was doing chemical trials on a homeless man she had met to cure muscular dystrophy, the same thing that had stolen the life of my mother. She had planned to use it, document the proof, and sell the formula to the highest bidder. She knew what that meant to me, what had happened to my mother. I had worked endlessly, and she was going to take everything away from me. I had already lost both my parents to that disease, in one way or another; I was not going to lose my research, too.”
“So what? You confronted her? Told her you knew she had taken the formula?”
“It wasn’t that hard, really. Everything from the work computer was automatically backed up to our home hard drive. I saw the photos, a woman always knows when something’s not right, and I saw that the files had been recently accessed. I put two and two together and confronted her. She must have realized what had happened, because by the time I approached her, she had already hidden the drive. I searched everywhere for it; tore the office apart. I knew it had to be with her last patient, since it was nowhere in the office. I looked over the patient list and tracked down the last man who had come in. Danielle spent her professional career hiding things in plain sight, why would that drive be any different?”
“So why kill Miss Jenkins then if you knew she didn’t have the drive?” I asked.
“I strangled Miss Jenkins because she was sleeping with my husband. I also thought she might know more than she let on, and I was certainly not going to allow some whore to gain one red cent from my family.”
“Why cut her up?” Michaels interjected.
“Why not?” Mrs. Peppard said. “I had already killed that man in the hunt for the drive, dissected him in the hopes of finding it. I’m a scientist, after all, and there’s nothing more scientific than hands-on experimentation. I liked watching the flesh as I peeled it strip by strip from their bodies.”
“That’s sick,” I said.
“And anyway, it was fun watching the police chase their tails for a little while. Really got them going, thinking there was a bona fide serial killer on the loose.”
“And the girl at the ice cream shop?” Michaels asked.
“Wrong place, wrong time.” Sherlock said.
“Exactly. And I’d rather tell you all this now, be sure the facts are straight, than leave it up to some half-witted local media reporter to get even a minutia of the details correct. Healing Beauty will be famous by this time tomorrow. Mark my words.”
“All of this for a drive smaller than my pinky nail,” I said.
“It’s not just the drive. It’s about loyalty. Where is everyone’s loyalty these days? You can find me on the internet, sure, but can you find a way to make a husband honor his marital vows? When I held that gun to the temple of my former best friend, she told me she had implanted it somewhere within that gentleman.” Mrs. Peppard sighed. “I guess he was scheduled for a follow-up treatment, and was likely unaware of what he even had. A homeless man holding on to millions of dollars’ w
orth of scientific research. Oh, how deliciously ironic. The sick, the downtrodden, they are ignored, disrespected.” Mrs Peppard’s eyes flashed and the hurt of a little girl echoed from within her. “Danielle got what she deserved, trying to extort money from my husband, and in turn, me.”
“I think I’ve heard enough,” Michaels said, unclasping the handcuff from his front belt loop. “You’re coming with me, miss.” Michaels slapped the cuffs around her petite, pale wrists and headed out the door with Mrs. Peppard latched in front. She released a guttural laugh, then began to sob.
“Watson, good work. And you”—he pointed at Sherlock— “you should consider another line of work besides dentistry. I think you have a knack for this.”
I shot a pleading glance to Sherlock, knew full well he would love nothing more than to take this opportunity to talk about his grandeur, about all the cases he had solved, but instead he turned away, smiled, reached for his hat and coat, and said, “We all have our secrets.”
Parallels
Jenni Hill
A friend and fellow editor, Jenni’s a new talent in the short fiction world, with a number of anthology credits to her name. I was hugely pleased to be able to get her on board. ‘Parallels’ takes the anthology’s concept to its bleeding limit, not only wholly reinventing Holmes and Watson—as teenaged girls, no less—but giving us an alternate Holmes story itself full of alternate Holmes stories. It’s almost frighteningly meta, and is a perfect finish to the anthology. Enjoy.
SUDDENLY, IT ALL made sense to John Watson. Sherlock’s true nature: the clues had all been there.
His pale skin, his piercing grey eyes, the way he mesmerised John and others around him. Sherlock always had preferred the dark.
John thought of the many times they ’d stayed awake all night, talking, smoking, following leads, chasing criminals through the gaslit streets of London. Had he ever seen Sherlock during daylight? He didn’t think so.
As John watched Sherlock hold the unconscious Moriarty in his arms, teeth sunk into the master criminal’s neck, crouching with his long black coat spread out behind him like the wings of some enormous bat, he faced the horrifying realisation: Sherlock Holmes was a vampire.
And John—trapped in the sewers with no way out, with dawn still hours away—John would be his next victim.
“IT’S GOOD.” CHARLOTTE’S words broke Jane out of her reverie. Watching over her friend’s shoulder as the girl read her work, Jane had been lulled into a trance by the familiar paragraphs and the soft hum of the computers in the I.T. teaching room. It took a moment for her to process her friend’s words.
“It’s awful. I’m sorry you had to read it!”
Charlotte smiled. “These people don’t seem to think so.” She pointed to the feedback section at the bottom of the webpage. “Logically, awful writing probably wouldn’t get you nine hundred hits in one week.”
Jane shrugged.
“To put it in perspective, that’s nearly three times the number of people who go to this school. Reading your fanfiction. Believe them, if you don’t believe me.”
“There’s no accounting for taste,” Jane mumbled, but she was pleased by the praise. Charlotte did not give compliments lightly.
“Your public loves you! Listen.” Charlotte began to read the feedback out loud, putting on different voices for each comment, and Jane cringed, looking around to check they were alone in the computer room.
A trio of Year Fours gathered around a PC terminal playing the latest first-person shooter, but showed no signs of having noticed Charlotte’s pantomime of fannish glee:
MrsWatson: Vamplock is my favourite flavour of Sherlock. Can’t believe we have to wait another week to find out if Sherlock killed those girls! Or did Moriarty do it?
Tea And Johnlock: Oh noes! I can’t believe it ended here! Moar plz.
BakerStreetRegular: My new sexuality is Vampire Hunter Moriarty.
221Baby: I wish I could write fanfic like this! I wish the writers on the show could write like this. Plainjane, I love you.
Charlotte grabbed the smaller girl in an overdramatic hug at ‘plainjane, I love you,’ lanky limbs and long black hair flying everywhere, and Jane screeched in surprise.
“Oh, plainjane!” cried Charlotte. The year fours looked around accusingly at the noise, but seemed to dismiss this as typical sixth-form behaviour and went back to their shoot ’em up.
Jane disentangled herself from her friend, who always smelt faintly of coffee and cigarettes: Charlotte’s two favourite vices. “Do you really have to read all my fanfic?”
“Can’t your best friend take an interest in your hobbies? Anyway, how I am supposed to work out why Eric Sadler would take your notebook full of dirty fanfiction unless I study the subject?”
“He took it because he’s a scumbag. My scumbag ex who wants to embarrass me horribly, a bit like what you’re doing right now. And hey! Who said it was dirty?” Jane could feel herself blushing.
“Well, you won’t tell me what’s in it. What am I supposed to assume?”
“It’s private, okay?” It was hard to say ‘no’ to Charlotte—the girl was a star student and proficient in five languages, but Jane often found herself wondering if Charlotte knew what ‘no’ meant in any of them.
“Spoilsport. Go on. We’ve known each other forever. What have you got to hide from me?”
“I just can’t tell you.” It was impossible to hide anything from Charlotte for long, but this time, Jane had to. She really had to.
“Please?” Charlotte actually fluttered her eyelashes.
“You don’t have to know everything all the bloody time!”
Charlotte’s face clouded, and she turned away, back to the words on the computer screen. Even as she said it, Jane knew she was making a mistake. If there was one thing Charlotte hated it was a mystery: she never let go until she had all the answers.
When Ms. McManus had given everyone detention because no-one would own up to the graffiti in the girls’ bathrooms, Charlotte had worked out the culprit. When a masked flasher had turned up at the school disco, Charlotte had worked out his identity. (Mr. Harrison had been working out some issues after his divorce. The school had a new maths teacher now.)
If you had a problem to solve, a mystery to unravel, then Charlotte was your woman. She wouldn’t be nice about it, but she’d find the answers. Such brutal honesty did not win her many friends.
Being seventeen years old and hanging out in the school computer labs writing fanfiction did not win you many friends either, which explained why Charlotte and Jane had remained so close.
It wasn’t the only reason they were friends. In the years since they’d met, sitting next to each other in Harrison’s maths lessons,Jane had come to appreciate Charlotte’s intelligence, her energy, the way she always made life much more interesting.
What she didn’t appreciate about Charlotte was how she sulked when her curiosity was denied.
“Do you want my help or not?” Dark eyebrows knitted together, Charlotte studied the screen, still not meeting Jane’s eyes.
Why had Eric taken the notebook? What was he going to do with it? Where was he keeping it, and how could they get it back? Jane needed to get it back. Charlotte would solve this.
“Yes. I do want your help. But I still can’t tell you what’s in the notebook.”
Charlotte sighed, and rolled her eyes. “Then either do something useful or let me study the problem in peace.”
There was no talking to her when she was like this. Jane left Charlotte in the computer lab, reading around ‘plainjane’s’ own unique corner of Sherlock Holmes fandom.
Holmes and Watson had always been beloved characters in pop culture, but recent reboots for TV and film had seen interest soar. The internet was full of fan forums, fanart, cosplay, fanfiction.
Quite a lot of the fan-created works focused on the two characters as each other’s romantic interests—a dynamic some of the reboots did nothing to dispel. The reboots even pl
ayed with the idea: emphasising Holmes’s jealousy of Watson’s wife, the awkwardness of their living arrangement, or the adulation of Sherlock shown in Watson’s written accounts of their adventures.
Then again, as Jane was always quick to point out, quite a lot of fanfiction did not focus on this homoerotic dynamic. (Hers did.)
Jane herself specialised in alternate universes, or ‘AUs’ for short. AUs took the characters and situations from the original work, and placed them in different worlds, different stories. The characters might be aliens, barbarian warriors or rock stars, but at the end of the day they were still themselves.
Jane had written about Sherlock and Watson as vampires, serial killers, subversive radio hosts, WW2 super-soldiers; the list went on. Jane was, she had to admit, mildly internet-famous for her AUs.
It was a pity that ‘mildly internet-famous’ wasn’t something that one could put on a university application, considering all the hours she’d spent writing fic when she could have been doing her homework, or even doing something her mother would call ‘healthy,’ like playing sports, spending time outdoors or kissing boys.
The fans loved her though—‘plainjane’ had quite a following. It fascinated Jane that even AUs where the characters had completely normal, mundane lives could win a huge readership if enough love and attention were put into the details, the characterisation, the dialogue. Coffee-shop AUs, for some reason, were quite trendy. Perhaps because young fans of the shows with plenty of writing time on their hands were more likely to be able to write their way around a coffee shop than an investment bank or a lawyer’s office. Jane had lost count of the number of fics she’d written on her laptop at Starbucks.
Jane’s own coffee-shop story, a multi-chapter epic titled ‘Where the Barista Knows Your Name,’ was one of her most popular works. She was genuinely proud of it, unlike so much of her other work she’d never quite got around to deleting online. That was the problem with being even mildly internet-famous. All your earliest mistakes stayed around to haunt you.
Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets Page 28
