Chapter Text
It is hard to picture a place like this, static and unmoving. Jamie feels as though this is her life now. She sits in the middle of her web and doesn’t move at all. And she is bored. She’d started a game for a reason, and now the game isn’t playing out how she’d initially intended. Jamie supposes that this is partially of her own making; she’d never laid out the terms, just flounced her way out of the room cackling and full of an emotion that she couldn’t define in words.
Jamie flies back to England on a Russian passport and breezes through customs with put-on poor grasp of the English language. She chats with the customs official for a few seconds longer than she would have liked, telling him about her supposed hometown and how she’s so excited to be in England. He apparently has a friend from the region and is eager to chat. Jamie lingers because it’s what a normal person would do, a smile on her face that is as fake as can be and a kind word in a language not her own when he finally stamps her passport. This passport is mostly blank, a few stamps from the Ukraine and America – nothing too special. She hadn’t wanted it to stand out. This is its first stamp from the UK, even though this is a homecoming that’s more than a year in the making.
Walking out of Heathrow and into a waiting car (a lesser lacky who has no idea that he’s transporting his boss), Jamie is stuck by how long it’s been since she’s actually been back to England. She’s been playing a ghost for so long, sitting in the shadows so as not to attract attention, the Macedonia job had taken far more planning than her usual work. And things still hadn’t gone quite as planned.
Joan Watson – Jamie puffs out her cheeks and stares out the window as she’s driven to the heart of the city and the flat that she’s carefully maintained even though she hasn’t had cause to be home in what feels like forever.
The driver stops at the corner, well away from the building itself. No one knows of this place, save Jamie herself. She intends to keep it this way, and the driver is so far away from the center of her web that he doesn’t even linger as she drifts into the grocer’s on the corner. Fool. She’ll have to find a use for him somewhere not in London now, though. Or maybe just kill him. She can always find a new driver.
She buys bread and tea and a small jar of raspberry jam and heads to the flat. It’s rented in her name, her real name and paid for out of her account in Switzerland every month. The key is where she’d left it, tucked behind the neighbor’s third flower pot to the left, under a crusty layer of dirt. She blows on it to clean it off, and slides the key home in the lock.
Inside is Jamie’s sanctum. It’s a crusty remnant of a girl with a cruel mother and an absent father, and it stands in defiance to the very essence of Moriarty. This place holds pictures, memories, art from her youth; everything Jamie wishes she could forget about herself. It’s the one place she knows she’ll be safe, at least for the time being.
She puts the kettle on for tea.
Jamie has people she could call into service in England, but she chooses to drift northwards. She ends up in Glasgow after a few days of meandering, directionless, around London. The holiday has clogged the city with people and it’s much like New York. She feels choked off by it, and yet, if Jamie’s honest, she enjoys the anonymity of the large city more than she likes the wide open spaces that the English and then subsequently Scottish countryside provide. She feels exposed there, even though no one knows her face here. Here she’s still safe to do what she pleases without having to constantly look over her shoulder. She never thought she’d miss being an unknown.
It had been a calculated risk to reveal herself, and Jamie still isn’t sure that it’s paid off.
The pretext of her trip to Scotland is to collect Mr. Collins from the impossibly messy business of handling his mother’s estate. She needs the information only his contacts can provide and he’s grieved for long enough. Westin says that he’s been away since October, and that’s more than enough time to settle the estate of the widow of a shepherd and the mother of a contract killer. Still, she’s been infected with the Christmas spirit, and she’s going to give him a choice.
The flat where Collins’ mother lived is impossibly small, just three rooms and a tiny toilet that Jamie takes one look into and proceeds to avoid like the plague. Collins himself is a large, hulking man. He’s probably the closest thing Jamie has to a friend, as well as her usual driver and bodyguard when she’s home. He’d been there the day that she’d first underestimated Joan Watson, and now he looks absolutely shattered in comparison to how he’d seemed in those moments that Jamie has spent the better part of four months scrutinizing down to the minutia.
Still, she’s let herself in and is standing in the doorway when he comes in from the kitchen, a can of beer in his hand, mumbling about the football match that’s playing quietly on the television in the corner. “Em,” he says, catching sight of her, his dark cheeks growing even darker. He’s blushing and she has no idea why. Jamie wonders if it’s because of the ghastly state of the flat. “What the bloody hell are you doing out?”
She smiles then, sliding into the room and depositing her purse onto an armchair that’s seen better days. “Prison walls are only as strong as their weakest link, Mr. Collins,” she replies. She bends down and picks up the television remote and silences the infernal noise of the match. “I’ve come to collect you. I am in need of your services once more and I simply cannot abide your wasting away in this place any longer.”
Collins collapses onto the sofa and sets his beer down on the floor next to his booted foot. He looks defeated, and as though he hasn’t slept in a long time. It is the drawn and weary look that Jamie knows well, and she hates it on him, he doesn’t deserve it. He needs to be distracted, to be thrown back into work so that he will remember that life is his to control, not an unstoppable force that he must sit by and passively observe. “I had no idea that you’d come yourself, mum,” he says.
Jamie likes her organization to be fairly autonomous. Each thread she casts has a specific purpose; they have no business knowing about any of the other’s existence. Collins knows of Sheng Li and Sam Westin, and Westin knows as many as she does. Jamie had needed him, and she’d brought him into the fold knowing he could betray her at any possible moment. It was a risk that had proven itself a thousand times over; Sam Westin was the greatest investment she’d made in recent years.
Still, she would have expected Westin to have called him. She sniffs and turns her nose up. “I would have thought Westin would be in touch.”
Collins runs his fingers through his short black curls. He’s wearing a t-shirt that looks like it’s from his days at college and has certainly seen better days and faded jeans that are very expensive, even if they’re made to look shabby. “He said you’d gotten out and that I was needed. I figured that he’d come and fetch me. Miss ‘im, you know, it’s hard not working with your mates.” He glances at her sideways. “Do you erm… want something to drink?”
“Not particularly,” she says. She folds her arms across her chest and surveys the flat. It looks mostly packed up. There are bare patches on the walls where photographs had been hung on the wall. It looks rather like the walls in her safe-house in New York. “We have cleaners for things like this, Mr. Collins, why not employ their services?”
“Respectfully, mum,” Collins begins, reaching down with his large hands and picking up his beer. He stares at it for a moment before he takes a sip that looks almost painful. He’s uncomfortable relaxing around her, and Jamie doesn’t blame him. He owes her more respect than that. “I couldn’t bring myself to let anyone but me touch these things. I’m… not the best person, but this was my mother, I owe it to ‘er to make sure ‘er things get cared for. I just never thought…” Collins pauses then, and swallows nervously. Jamie watches the bob of his adam’s apple and wonders if she could slice it out of his throat without him dying. It’d be an interesting experiment, to be certain. She’s not sure, though, if she wants Collins dead. He hasn’t given her an answer that she likes, yet, however. “Well, that I’d be pants at it.”
She knows that she should be comforting, that she’s a good employer and while they are both murders, the death of a parent is never easy to stomach. Jamie remembers her own pain at her father’s death, but she does not understand the compassion for the mothers. Mothers, after all, are the cruelest of all. The problem is that this could not have happened at worse time and she needs Collins now. There simply isn’t time to fuss over every minute detail of his dead mother’s life.
Compassion has never come easily to Jamie, even when it should suit her to possess some. It was never taught in her family, and so even when she’s pretending it feels stilted and unnatural. Jamie overcompensates, as she always does, by being as ruthless as she possibly can. “Unfortunately, Mr. Collins, you’ve run out of time. Your services are required.” She lets her expression soften, her lips no longer a tight line of barely suppressed annoyance that he is daring to defy her wishes. “I can give you the afternoon, but we must leave tonight.”
He nods, just once, and picks up his beer once more. She watches him cradle it in his hands for a moment before she turns and walks out of the room. It’s started to rain.
She wanders the city under an umbrella; stepping into shops and never lingering long enough for her face to be remembered. She finds a book that she thinks might prove interesting, and then her fingers trail down the spine of a book that she’d been given on the eve of her father’s death by some long-forgotten cousin. She thinks about the message that was circled so tightly in the prose of the novel and wonders if it would help Collins to move on.
She buys the book and tucks one of the store’s bookmarks inside. It’s printed to look like an etching, an angel’s head carved into the book’s signage and a proclamation of ‘since 1895’ underneath the shop’s name. A breadcrumb, Jamie thinks. Perfect.
The book was never for Collins anyway.
Don’t Look Behind You (Leave it Past)
January (Six Months Ago) –
Halfway through January, Jamie finds herself painting once more. This time she’s able to count out a thousand strokes, twisting the brush around in yellows and reds until she has the perfect shade. She rocks back on her heels and stares at the small patch of high cheek bone, dusted with freckles. This is going to be quite the undertaking, and the weight of it presses heavily down between her shoulder blades.
She hadn’t been lying to Sherlock when she’d told him that she did not paint original work. Not exactly.
She’s just never found the occasion to create something truly her own.
And this is the second time she’s felt inclined to break that rule.
She’s working with oils this time. Having spent hours laying down her gesso and her basic color blocking; she’s finally started to paint proper, twisting the brush around circles of paint that smears like its namesake. Jamie’s trained herself to coax smooth, perfect lines from this medium, but she rather likes the harshness of how her brush is hitting the canvas now. She thinks she’ll maintain this style as it is truly one of her own. The painting has emerged slowly: the corner of a high cheekbone and freckles that dance like a dusting of stars across the night sky.
Jamie uses the time, a thousand brush strokes, to think about the current situation. She hasn’t taken a job in some time. There had been one on New Year’s Eve, a simple stabbing that she hadn’t even bothered to delegate. It had felt good to hold a knife in her hands, to twist it and to feel the lifeblood of this woman (pretty, 35, Pakistani - currently embezzling thousands of pounds from Jamie’s employer) seep out and over her fingertips. Jamie had just resisted the urge to lick the blood off as the woman stared up at her, a multitude of questions on her dying lips.
She had answered none of them and had woven her way back through the New Year’s revelers to a hotel that she’d booked for this express purpose. She’d stared at the blood that had stained her hands then, watching as it ran down her arms in the sink under barely hot water. It had swirled in soapy red circles until it was gone, reminding Jamie far too much of dirty paintbrushes and filling her mind with thoughts of what it would be like to paint in blood.
Nigel Peddicort, and through him, the PKE Group are moving on New York again. She’s watched as he’s blatantly disregarded her exceptionally polite request, and her anger has only grown. He will not defy her again. Jamie should have sent a stronger message, she knows that now. She’d extended a professional courtesy that she will not this time. Peddicort, in defying her, has signed his death warrant. It’s just a matter of time until Jamie acts.
On the far wall is her own version of the murder board that Sherlock and Watson so favor. Making sure that Peddicort is killed in the most humiliating manner for the PKE Group is second only to ensuring that her trail of breadcrumbs for her dear Watson continues to be maintained.
She understands now, or at least she thinks she does, why Joan Watson is so important to this whole series of events that are just now starting to play out. She is going to take Joan Watson from Sherlock and it’s going to be the final straw that truly breaks him. She is going to take Joan Watson and corrupt her soul as only one such as herself can.
And watching Joan Watson fall is going to be the stuff that chases away the bad dreams that so plague Jamie late into the night.
She’s sitting in the middle of the room that she’s commandeered in a hotel that has no guests, her fingers splayed out like a queen, splendid over the vast riches of her kingdom. All around her is the empty sound of silence, the quiet ringing in Jamie’s ears fills up the void that is left by everything she's chosen to forget. She strains to hear something, anything, until the ringing is all that remains and she sits back, reveling in it.
Collins is sitting in the corner, going over papers from a solicitor regarding her assets in New York. Jamie doesn’t run drugs or girls or even weapons. She lets others do that. Instead she trades in secrets, as all the best do. She knows which screws to turn and which to leave unturned. The solicitors are keeping track of her assets as compared to how they’ve been frozen following her arrest in America, and Jamie hopes that this is good news.
She’s been throwing darts fashioned out of framing wire and razors at a cut out of Nigel Peddicort’s face for the better part of two hours while Collins reads. She’s waiting, knowing that she must act but not knowing how. New York and its people are her’s; she will not share them lightly. She hurls another dart and her face falls as it hits the first, buried as it is between Peddicort’s eyes at the bridge of his nose. She should have thrown it harder.
“It looks like they’ve managed to unfreeze some of the funds,” Collins says after a pause that Jamie feels lasts forever. His large hands cradle the papers between them and Jamie watches him with a curious expression on her face as he carefully taps them back into perfect shape.
“Good,” Jamie replies. “Get me the car; we must pay Mr. Peddicort a visit, Mr. Collins.”
“Certainly, mum.”
It is only later, when Jamie is staring down at Peddicort’s maimed body, a gunshot straight through his mouth to the back of his skull and railroad spikes through his hands and feet in a biblical style that she’s sure will scare the PKE Group into compliance, that she realizes how much she’s missed getting her hands dirty. Peddicort is pathetic in his death, and Jamie knows that leaving him like this is not enough. She has to find a way to make him stand out, to drive the point home and ensure that they know what is sure to happen should they dare cross her again. Above her a cross hangs, almost mocking, and Jamie's lips twitch. That will keep them guessing for a while. Hiding from Sherlock and his Watson has been one thing that has forced her into the shadows. Jamie hates to hide. She’s not the sort of person who can do that easily, and she refuses to on principle unless it is a necessity. This is not the time for subtlety.
She’d warned Peddicort, she truly had. She’d warned him and he’d spat in her face.
She would kill him three times over for that.
Once, she hopes, is enough to get the PKE Group to leave their enterprise in New York to others. They have no business in Jamie’s city, and Jamie wants them gone. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll already be leaving. She’s said that once before, though, and she’s not about to repeat the experience. Peddicort is beautiful in his death, and she strings him up in the middle of the church where they all met as boys for all of the PKE Group to see. She hopes they get the message.
One simply does not dare Jamie into action. Moriarty will win every time.
-
July -
A body is found floating in the water just off Brighton Beach on July 4th at nine-thirty in the morning. Joan doesn’t get a text about it until three o’clock that afternoon, when her phone starts to vibrate obnoxiously in her pocket. She’s content to ignore it, she’d told Sherlock, after all, that she’d be unreachable for the day, but Oren gestures to her buzzing pocket and inclines his head in question. Joan sighs and pulls it out of her pocket, setting down the Mets tickets for later on that night and somehow knowing that she’s not going to get to go.
Sherlock has texted her a series of increasingly incomprehensible acronyms for things that Joan is pretty sure are completely made up on his part. She understands that he likes to take shortcuts, and that not being able to speak directly to Joan is enough to drive him mad. He has enough trouble coming to the point as it is.
“Something up, Joanie?” Oren asks. He leans over the picnic table and pucks her phone from her fingers, twisting it over in his hands. His eyebrows climb steadily up his forehead and he sucks his lower lip into his mouth for a moment, as he always does when he’s thinking. “That man,” he announces, handing Joan back her phone and shaking his head broadly, “is absolutely insane.”
“I know,” Joan replies. “I keep telling people, but no one seems to listen to me.”
Oren gestures to her phone. “What the hell does any of that even mean?” He passes it to Joan when she holds out her hand for it, ever the good bother.
Joan laughs and tucks her phone back into her over-shirt breast pocket. “Smarter people than you or I have tried to figure that out, little brother. No one’s had any luck.” She’s lying about the last part, but Oren doesn’t need to know that. He’s not the sort of person who can understand what it means to have an arch nemesis who prides herself on being smarter than the smartest. Joan isn’t really even sure that she understands it, but she does know that it’s very quickly becoming her problem as well.
There’s so much she doesn’t speak to Oren about anymore. They used to be so close, but things have changed so drastically in their relationship in the past few years. Joan has left the profession that he idolized and aspired to follow her into, she’s had a failed career as a sober companion and now is trying, desperately, to keep her head above water with it comes being a consulting detective.
In January, as the New York courts held the first of a series of highly public and widely reported trials for Sonny Park, Korean national and denizen of the criminal underbelly of China, Moriarty had sent her a book. It had come from London, but the bookseller was in Glasgow, Scotland. Joan had spent an evening researching the bookseller, one of the oldest in the city. The book had lain, unread, on her bed as she chased the nightmares away trying to figure out why Moriarty would be in Scotland. Sonny Park had ruined her nights for her, and Moriarty was a welcome distraction.
That was, until Joan had opened the book and found a carefully penned line of an adage that she had made her mantra for years. Joan hates that she recognizes Moriarty’s handwriting, and she hates the fact that she finds it somewhat beautiful in its looping, almost girlish curl even more. Moriarty has no business being involved in her life, even if Joan has sworn her doom and Moriarty has sealed the deal with a kiss.
“This, too, shall pass.”
This book is by an obscure French author, and it takes Joan some fairly extensive Googling, plus a call to a friend who works as a librarian, to learn anything about her. The book itself is about an unnamed calamity that befalls a family and their attempts to carry on. The worst part of all is that it’s helping in a way that Joan’s therapist and her mother and everyone else who’s trying to help her cope with what Sonny Park did to her cannot. The book itself looks inconsequential, but Joan’s taken to carrying it around with her, thumbing through it when she can’t shake the lingering pain in her arm or the nightmares that plague her sleep.
Moriarty is tossing her breadcrumbs and Joan is choosing to take the book for what it is, a tool that helps her on her recovery. She supposes that tumbling her nose like to that to Moriarty is sure to irritate her more than actually trying to track her down in Scotland or England or wherever the hell she’s gone off to now. There haven’t been any sightings of the woman in close to five months.
Her phone beeps again and Joan looks almost longingly at the Mets tickets on the picnic table between herself and Oren. “I don’t think we’re going,” she says quietly. “Take mom.”
Oren lets out a bark of sarcastic laughter. “And get a lecture on how liking baseball isn’t a productive use of my time? As a grown-ass man, I think I’m entitled to say no thanks.”
Joan slides her thumb over her phone and punches in her unlock code (which does absolutely nothing to protect her privacy, but Joan likes to pretend that it does), and stares at the most recent text. It’s from Sherlock, but it makes a lot more sense than the others.
Need you Watson, it reads. Body found is Russian or Ukrainian. Shows signs of repeated sexual abuse. Could be a former sex worker? Want your assessment post haste.
It’s easy to sigh it off then, because Sherlock doesn’t need her medical opinion at all. Joan hasn’t been a doctor for a long time now, it’s reasonable to expect her skills and knowledge to fade. Reasonable to everyone but Sherlock it seems. He’s the only one who knows her well enough to know that she was top of her class and that she still keeps up with the journals, even if she’s not currently practicing. Everyone else that Joan knows thinks she was stupid to leave medicine in the first place. Sherlock, at least, respects her decision to do so.
“What about your girlfriend?” Joan asks. She’s met her a few times now, each time it’s been awkward, because she still sees Oren as a fifteen year old kid, obsessed with baseball and his N64. “She like the Mets?”
“Phillies fan,” Oren mutters.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Joan asks, sliding her phone locked once more after sending a message to Sherlock that he owes her a baseball game of her choosing. “I’m pretty sure I heard something about being a fan of the Phillies.”
“Hey, she could be a Nats fan,” Oren tries, but Joan’s already doing her best impression of their mother and scowling deeply at him, righteous judgmental anger expressed in every inch of her face. He knows she’s joking, but the look is one that their mother uses to great effect and has utilized for many, many years. “Oh come on, sis. Sherlock doesn’t even like baseball.”
“As I am not dating him, that is simply one of his many unfortunate personality quirks that I must cope with on a daily basis,” Joan replies breezily. As if she was even remotely interested in getting into bed with Sherlock, Oren really should know better. She’s already gathering her things and pressing the tickets into Oren’s hand. If she hurries, she can catch the three-twelve train back to Brooklyn. “Look, I’ll try to come back tonight, but if not, tell mom that I’m working and that I’ll make it up to her.”
Oren watches her go, his fingers cradling the tickets in his hands and sighing expressively as Joan hurries away. She hates that she has to go, but the details that Sherlock’s texted her are intriguing and Joan wants to know more. It’s not exactly an unknown fact that there’s a seedy underbelly of New York, or that there is a pretty active sex trade in the city. It’s not as bad as some cities, but they’re no strangers to encountering sex workers in their line of work. Sherlock, in particular, seems to revel in meeting them. Joan just tries to be polite and respects the hell out of some of them for doing what they do. She certainly could never do it.
The train ride goes quickly, once Sherlock realizes that she’s actually going to respond to his texts, he provides her with fairly comprehensible details of the case. Joan reviews the information and realizes why Sherlock was so desperate to get a hold of her. Nothing about this makes any sense.
-
The girl looks like she could be a college student, lying on a slab in the morgue as Marcus argues with Sherlock over the merits of a canvas around the beach. Sherlock doesn’t see the point, mostly because the girl obviously had not been in the water for very long at all – her body was dumped and probably spent less than three hours in the water. Her skin is scarcely bloated. Joan would be willing to bet that the medical examiner might actually be able to determine time of death based on the condition of the body.
“She has a tattoo,” Joan says. She’s wearing gloves, her fingers dancing over the girl’s hairline and pulling some of her sandy-blonde (not dyed, Joan notes, jotting it down) hair out of the way above her ear. The interlocking P and backwards K inside a thick black line of a square makes her breath come in a quick gasp that gets Sherlock’s attention when her announcement that she had a tattoo had gone uncommented upon.
He and Marcus crowd around Joan and the three of them take in the mark. Joan knows that Sherlock recognizes it from the case last November with the fake iPhones and iPods. It’s the mark of a group that they’d been pretty certain dealt only in counterfeit technologies and maybe some drugs. They’re not one of the major players in the city; Sherlock’s assured her of that.
“It seems that she lied,” Sherlock says when they walk out of the morgue some twenty minutes later, a box of files in Sherlock’s hands as Joan hails them a cab. They don’t have much to go on, so they’re going to try and identify her based on recent work visas issued to Eastern European women. INS has been very considerate, considering their volatile relationship with the NYPD with the request.
“Who?” Joan asks, even though she knows the answer already.
Sherlock stares up the street and hugs the box to his chest like it’s going to protect him from the undercurrent of emotions that Joan knows are filtering just below the surface of his impassive face. “Moriarty,” he says quietly. She can tell from his tone that he’s not entirely sure that he wants to share. Joan’s glad he’s trying, they’ve played this game before it’s always ended in one of them being exceptionally frustrated by the other. “She assured me that she had effectively eliminated the PKE Group from New York at the time of your kidnapping. They were, after all, the group who’d initially hired Sonny Park.”
Joan… had not known that. Or rather, she’d known that Moriarty had been instrumental in her rescue from Park’s hands, and that she and Sherlock had agreed to each other’s terms to orchestrate the rescue. She hadn’t realized that Moriarty had been more involved than chancing upon the right floor. She looks at Sherlock sharply and he closes his eyes in a look that Joan knows is resignation, no matter how much it looks like annoyance on his face.
“Because of Jess Delhaney’s husband?” Joan doesn’t know what she wants out of this, but she wants to get to the bottom of this before they delve into another case. She’s told Sherlock time and time again that this partnership won’t work if they’re not honest with each other. Sherlock’s learning; she understands that it’s a slow process for someone like him and she’s a little more willing to be forgiving when it comes to Moriarty.
“I would think so. She was able to determine that they’d acted and she used that moment to warn them out of the city,” Sherlock explains, tapping his chin with one hand and fidgeting as the cab pulls to a stop beside them. He sets the box on the cab seat and slides in after Joan. She tells the cabbie their address and then watches as Sherlock pulls out his phone. “I found this not long after they arraigned Sonny Park.”
The article in question is about a bizarre murder that took place in London near a boy’s school sometime in mid-January. Joan reads the report with almost greedy eyes, a sick feeling growing at the pit of her stomach. She recognizes the handiwork, even if it appears religiously motivated and doesn’t fit any known profile they have of Moriarty.
Nigel Peddicort, 45, international business man with connections in exports in Hong Kong and Seoul, had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the mouth after he’d been nailed to a cross outside of the church he and several of his business partners frequented with railroad spikes. What was even more interesting was that this was just outside the boy’s school where Peddicort had spent his formative years.
“Well,” Joan begins, but finds that she has nothing that she wants to say. She doesn’t want to think about Moriarty and her smug, smiling face as she flounced out of Joan’s bedroom that night. She still doesn’t understand why Moriarty had risked so much to come back to return something as inconsequential as a set of lock picks.
(Joan doesn’t use them anymore. She’s buried them deep at the back of her closet with the sketch that she’d been sent on Christmas Day. She doesn’t hide the book from Sherlock, and he’s read it cover to cover and had announced one day that if Joan truly thought that it was helping, then all the power to her, Moriarty obviously must know a thing or two about handling the sort of trauma that she inflicts upon people. Joan had rolled her eyes at that, but she’s got whole passages in the book dog-eared and highlighted to remember them. She hates that it’s helping and she hates even more than Moriarty knows her well enough to know that it would.)
They lapse into silence then, and Joan hands Sherlock back his phone. “Maybe she didn’t lie,” Joan suggests as they sit behind a long line of cars at a red light on a timer. “Maybe they’ve just pushed back into the city. Her control over the city probably isn’t as good as she thinks it is, especially after her time in prison.” Joan isn’t sure that she actually believes that, but it makes for a better narrative than ‘oh, the PKE Group decided to stick it to the evil queen of the underworld herself’ on a lark.
She’s not afraid of Moriarty or her twisted web of murderers and informants. This murder, however, is so over-the-top that she wonders if Moriarty is indeed trying to send a message, and if so, to whom. It’s obviously meant to instill fear in someone.
“Peddicort,” Sherlock explains, tapping the phone and going to another window. Joan leans over until she sees that he’s fired up Candy Crush for something to do with his hands as they discuss the case. “Was one of the five board members of the mostly France-based PKE Group. If they have some sort of a prostitution operation going on in the city, it is probably a fairly new establishment. I’m sure, if we asked around, we could find a few annoyed prostitutes who might be able to point us in the right direction.”
“Sherlock, we don’t even know if she was a prostitute,” Joan replies, feeling almost exasperated that he’s already figured out that the dead girl was. She hadn’t seen anything, other than trauma to the genitals, that would indicate that the girl was in the sex trade.
His expression darkens, and he voices the concern that Joan hadn’t articulated, but certainly was thinking. “Or if she willingly participated in the sexual acts that left her body so obviously traumatized.”
“The salt water would have destroyed any evidence a rape kit would have collected,” Joan says, puffing out her cheeks and staring out the window at the city street as it starts to inch by once more. The cab is moving slowly, its rush hour. They should have taken the subway; they would have been home by now on the C-Train.
“Which is why we need to investigate the prostitution angle fully, Watson,” Sherlock replies. He’s a nervous bundle of energy, crushing candle with his thumb, hardly looking at the screen. Joan has no idea how he’s doing it, but she supposes that he sees the pattern and the puzzle in the game as well. “We can go out tonight, if you’re amenable to the idea of spending a night chatting up hookers.”
What Sherlock doesn’t realize, as always, is that Joan doesn’t mind speaking to sex workers. During her residency, she’d done an ER rotation and she’d patched up her fair share of strong, beautiful women who did what they had to do to survive. They always had stories to tell her that made her day a little more interesting. She doesn’t even mind being flirted with, because the attention of anyone attractive is better than thinking about the dry spell she’s working on right now.
(And Joan has tried, really she has. But she’s getting older and she honestly doesn’t like the idea of picking up a twenty-something in a bar and taking them home for the night. She doesn’t particularly care who she picks up, but it’s the sick moment of realization that it’s getting to the point where a twenty-something could be her kid that has chased Joan away to online dating and all the joys that that entails.)
“That’s fine,” Joan replies smoothly. She doesn’t blink as he looks are her curiously. She’s learned over their partnership that it’s better to not when he’s looking at her like that. It’s a sign of weakness that he pounces on and obsesses over until the point where Joan’s learned that it’s simply not worth the trouble. She always wins staring contests with him, anyway.
-
Marcus has vice connections that point them in the direction of three hotels where there have been arrests of Russian-speaking Johns in the past. Sherlock promptly nixes two of them as being 'too upscale' for the sort of girl that they're looking for. Joan isn't exactly sure that she likes his implication there, but she goes along with it because he does have something of a sense about these things. She trails half a step behind him as they slip into a hotel bar and situate themselves where they can people watch.
It’s the oddest thing, going to bars with Sherlock. She knows, as anyone who’s done any worth with those struggling with addiction, that the temptation isn’t worth it. The problem is that Sherlock has never been particularly interested in alcohol, even before he’d been to rehab. “Dulls the senses,” he’d explained. “Even after…” he’d shaken his head and shrugged. “I wanted to forget and I wanted to do it quickly. Heroin seemed the more expedient option.”
Joan hadn’t had a response for that then, and she still doesn’t now, as Sherlock marches up to the bar and demands to know if they have had any ladies of the evening about the place recently. The guy looks at Sherlock as though he’s got two heads and slowly shakes his head. He waits until Joan slides onto a barstool beside Sherlock before actually acknowledging the question.
“Get a few,” he says, his lips barely moving as he sets a glass down before them and Sherlock slips him a twenty. The bartender slides the bill into his pocket and then adds, “None right now though.”
As it’s close to eight, Joan’s not entirely sure she blames them for not being out. She lets her shoulders slump and stares around at the televisions above the bar. Two are playing the Sox-Yankees and a third is showing Sports Center.
"Anything for you two?" the bartender asks.
Joan sets a twenty down on the bar and smiles at the guy (mid-30s, gym rat with a barbed wire douche-tattoo around his bicep, trying to look 25 with spray tan and hair gel). "Could I get a vodka tonic, and... what do you want?"
Sherlock leans over, forearms on the bar. "Seltzer with lemon." He smiles all teeth and regret that is entirely fake-looking to Joan. Sometimes she catches herself wondering when she grew to be able to read him quite like the open book that he is to her now. He still does things, sometimes, that she cannot explain, but for the most part Joan understands Sherlock, and she’s still not entirely sure when he started to make sense to her. It’s an odd feeling, to look at him and be able to see all that he wants to convey to this man, and all that he is (stubbornly) holding back from her. "I'm the DD." He says it so truthfully that it’s only in his eyes that Joan sees the insincerity.
The bartender, however, seems to buy it. "Tough luck bro," he says, and turns to get their drinks.
Joan checks her watch and leaves the five she gets with a few singles as change for a tip. This is something that Sherlock hadn’t needed to teach her. To get a bartender to talk to you, you tip more than you should. Joan had learned that lesson in college, with Emily and a terrible date that they’d be so desperate to ditch that they’d pooled all their change to have the bartender sneak them out through the kitchen and into a waiting cab. "Can you put on the Mets game?" she asks, accepting her drink.
It's only two innings into the game that the bar starts to fill. The Mets are losing spectacularly, and Joan's stopped paying attention. Going to a middle reliever after two innings is never a good sign. Neither is being in a five-nil hole.
They sit next to each other, knees knocking together, and watch over each other's shoulders. Joan’s done this enough to know what to look for. She’s sipping on the vodka, and the bartender hasn’t made it particularly strong. She finds herself contemplating her notes and she notices that he’s looking over at her and then inclining his head towards a woman who has slipped into the bar without either of them noticing. Joan tugs Sherlock’s sleeve and he turns slowly, like he’s done it a million times before. They’re not playing a couple, or at least she hopes not, because that would be weird, but rather partners. Two equal halves.
Sherlock nods his agreement with her query, he lets her do the approach, watching with his seltzer and lemon held before him like it’s a lifeline.
This is the part that Joan likes. Talking to people has always been her forte; even in surgery she enjoyed that part the most. Getting to know her patients was always her favorite part. "Hi," she says, sliding in next to the girl. "I'm Joan."
The girl looks up at her though overly made up eyes and a haggard look that Joan hates that she's come to know during her time working with Sherlock. It's the look of a person whose life has become so downtrodden that they are numb to the world. "Kitty," she replies and her accent is present, but not as pronounced as Joan might have expected. She's fiddling with a cigarette, even though there's a ban on smoking indoors in the city. Joan debates offering to take her outside and away from the hotel entrance so she can smoke, but decides not to. "What do you like?"
"I like talking," Joan says quietly. Over the time she’s worked with Sherlock she’s become something of an expert at this particular game.
Kitty puffs out her cheeks, a dirty-looking lock hair falling into her eyes. "Then you are in the right place," she leans in closer, and Joan can see that her teeth are crooked, but well cared-for. She smells nice, but the stale smell of cigarettes lingers around her. Joan wonders how many cigarettes she smokes and if she’s been to a doctor about the dark splotches under her fingernails. They look painful. Like a door was slammed on her hand. "I am an excellent talker."
Kitty's real name is Donka Kuzovski. She's from somewhere out in rural Russia that Sherlock recognizes but Joan doesn't know, but thinks sounds vaguely familiar when he reminds her of a book she’d read as a child in school. It’s on the steppes, far away from most normal civilization, even by Russian standards. Sherlock and Joan explain to her what they’re looking for, showing her the picture of their Jane Doe and watch as Donka’s expression changes from the polite intrigue that she’d held downstairs in the bar, to something drawn and worried. After a long moment of staring at the dead girl’s face, hair pulled to the side so that the PKE Group’s mark is clearly visible, she sits down heavily on the bed in their hastily purchased hotel room and tells them what they want to know.
"Everyone knows those girls, you know?" She shakes her head and takes a pull on her cigarette. Her English is fantastic, Joan notes, and while it is accented, she can converse without it showing through too much. "This work isn't for everyone, and you can tell the ones who have no choice. When I came here, I knew what was coming - they do not."
"If you don't mind my asking, do you know how the girls are tricked into coming here?" Joan asks. She doesn't think it’s right to question Donka on her choices, as she's obviously fully in control of her life. The injury to her hand is enough to make Joan worried, but she seems fine, not in distress and completely in control of her surroundings.
Joan has read magazine articles and seen specials on the TV news about how much of a problem girls being pulled off the streets in poor, former Soviet countries has become. It’s almost a global crisis at this point, and Donka seems to have embraced the life, even if Joan’s not entirely sure it’s right to ask how she’d ended up in New York and working like this. "Is it the promise of citizenship?"
"They are told there is a manufacturing job, maybe textiles or even farming, usually that's on the eastern part of Long Island though. And then one thing leads to another," Donka shakes her head and she suddenly looks far older than she had before, her eyes carrying the weight of all of those girls and their pain around with her. "You understand, though, that the men who do this to care little for the girls in their care. They are not well cared for, and only the cheapest, most desperate men go to them." Donka looks away, her expression growing dark. "They are little girls, and they do not deserve the fate they have been handed."
"Is this why you're willing to help us?" Sherlock asks.
"I knew her, the girl you showed me," Donka replies. "Her name was Katia and she was one of their good earners. Why they'd want to eliminate her is beyond me. I think she didn't mind the work as much as some of their other girls."
Sherlock catches Joan's eye and they share a long look. Joan knows what he's thinking and it truly doesn't make much sense. Why would a pimp kill off his best earner? The very idea seemed contradictory to a business so founded in earning money.
Donka glances between them and her shoulders slump. "You both think you know so much, that you see because you think to ask. Katia, she was the same way. She told me in January that something was wrong."
"How do you mean?" Joan asks, her brow furrowing, thinking of the heavily censored picture that the newspaper article on Nigel Peddicort had painted of how he'd been killed. Katia had been connected to the PKE group in one way or another, and Peddicort was one of their board members.
Shrugging, Donka tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and produces another cigarette. She lights it and exhales politely away from Joan. "I don't know. She just said changes were coming, I didn't ask her to elaborate."
They leave the hotel some two hundred and fifty dollars of Sherlock's petty cash an hour later with as many names as Donka could remember and a promise to keep her name out of it unless they truly have no other choice. As they're not the police, Joan truly hopes that they can honor that agreement. Marcus and Captain Gregson have their way of doing things, and it oftentimes doesn't give a great deal of respect to women who chose to work as Donka does.
They head down to the subway station, waiting idly on the platform for their now infrequently-running train as Sherlock flips through Joan's notes with a disinterested expression on his face. He sighs heavily, shifting from foot to foot, antsy.
"What?" Joan asks after a few more minutes of twitchiness. She's used to it, she has to be, but it still doesn't make much sense at all.
Sherlock hands her back her notebook and scratches at his chin. He's relatively clean-shaven today, which is good as he's been complaining almost daily about how the summer heat of the city makes his beard horribly itchy. Joan had picked him up hypo-allergenic aftershave almost as a joke, but he honestly seems to be making something of an effort, even if it's just due to the heat.
"Why would any self-respecting madam or pimp decide to kill their favorite whore?" Sherlock posits the question like Joan has the answer and when she shrugs, he continues, "And why did Katia think that there were changes coming back in January? Is it because of Nigel Peddicort's death? I can't imagine how the death of one executive would stop such a remote string of their operation."
"We really don't know what the extent of their operation is in the city, though," Joan points out. The train is coming; she can hear it rattling about in the dark of the tunnel. "All we know is that Moriarty doesn't want them here."
Sherlock shakes his head. "It almost is enough to wish that there was an easy way of demanding answers from that woman. She’s obviously killed Peddicort, but why? What sort of a message does a murder that theatrical send and why has it ended in the death of a prostitute who probably didn't know Nigel Peddicort from Adam?"
The train rattles into the station and Joan bites her lip. She's not about to tell Sherlock that he cannot even entertain the idea of trying to get in contact with a known fugitive. They've been good with Gregson and with Marcus recently, but Joan knows that another slip-up like what happened with Sebastian Moran and Sherlock will lose his position with the NYPD forever.
She trails half a step behind him onto the train and sits beside him, yawning and pulling out her phone. There are five texts from Oren, each more and more excited.
The Mets had come back to win the game and she'd missed it.
"Fancy that," Sherlock says, reading (as always) over her shoulder. "I put the odds of that happening at one-hundred to one. You missed something rather extraordinary, it seems, Watson."
Joan turns her phone sideways and navigates to the highlights on ESPN's website. It's not the same as watching the game, but she leans against Sherlock and offers him one headphone as together they watch the highlights of the game.
The train spirits them through the underground of New York, stations flashing by as the train rattles over the bridge and back into Brooklyn. Night has fallen and the holiday city goers have left the city. There's a lingering smell of gunpowder in the thick, humid air of the subway and above ground as they head back towards the brownstone. Even now, at close to one thirty in the morning, it is uncomfortably warm.
And when Joan falls asleep, she doesn't dream of anything at all, Moriarty's book clutched between her fingers like the security blanket her father burned when she was five and deemed too old to hang onto such attachments.
-
When Sam Westin calls Jamie at an odd hour of the morning for one five hours behind London time, she picks up the phone immediately. She's halfway through the crossword and has gone back to her painting in order to resist the urge to ask Collins if he has any idea what obscure sport culture reference this particular clue is making. It's the key to the whole puzzle, and with this one word she'll be able to solve the rest of it effortlessly.
It's a shame she doesn't particularly care for American football, it has a violence about it that she can almost respect. She remembers the ad campaign referenced in the clue from when she was very young, but she doesn't remember what 'Bo' was short for.
"It's rather late in the city, Mr. Westin, are you out celebrating with the Americans?"
He chuckles, the smile clearly evident in his voice. "Unfortunately, no, mum. Our man at the city morgue just contacted me. They've had a floater with PKE's mark on her come in and it looks like there could be more of them coming."
"Describe the body." She puts her brush down and wipes the smear of burnt umber from her wrist on a cloth she's appropriated from a remnant of an old shirt. A thousand strokes, she keeps telling herself, but she’s no closer to understanding.
"Female, Eastern European going off dental work, and she can't be more than twenty." He pauses for a beat of time that's all Jamie needs to pull the phone from her ear and stare at the girl's face. She looks impossibly young to be involved with the PKE Group, except as collateral or possibly as a whore. The mark makes the latter more likely, but Jamie is fairly certain that PKE has never run girls before. This is a new enterprise for them, or rather one that they’ve decided to no longer pursue. "He's taken the case."
Naturally, Jamie thinks. She doesn't comment, because Westin knows her too well for her liking as it is. In the six months since her departure from Newgate and the Sonny Park affair, Jamie’s spoken to him a handful of times. She’s kept her distance and largely dealt with Sheng and Collins, she’s been burned by keeping her lieutenants too close one too many times, and she still bears the scars of those encounters, a daily reminder of what letting people get to close does. "And his companion?"
Arrived late,” Westin supplies after a rustle of paper and half a second of contemplation. He’s checking his notes, Jamie reasons, and she’s glad that he’s being so thorough. “Something about a baseball game and her brother.”
"I can't imagine that those tickets came cheap, pity," Jamie muses. She's standing before the canvas, a thousand strokes already this morning and an eye is emerging in warm brown and a back so deep that Jamie's sure her soul will be sucked into it if she stares for too long. A thousand brush strokes to distract her from the mundanely of things like this.
She can't stomach that she's creating something, not simply copying for her own amusement. And yet the urge to create, to make, pours out of her like water from a faucet untapped. She cannot stop it, and all the little fingers she's tried to plug the holes with keep leading to new leaks. She has to find something to distract herself, because this is getting out of hand.
Her breadcrumbs have been studiously ignored, but the content of her gift has been embraced. Jamie had known it would help, and she'd shoved the same book into Collins' hands in March and instructed him to read. He's looked decidedly less melancholy after reading the book, and Jamie's glad. A glum driver and body guard is something she simply cannot abide.
"If I may, mum," Westin says. He sounds almost hesitant, and Jamie likes that. The decision on how to proceed is her's and her's alone. "There is a chance that the PKE Group might be liquidating their operation here the old fashioned way. If so, wouldn't it be wise to ensure that they stop their process before Holmes and Watson end up loose ends?"
He’s overstepping, but he does have a point.
Jamie stares at her painting in its half-finished state. She'd wanted to finish it before returning, a gift to tilt the odds in her favor. Time is not, it seems, on her side. She closes her eyes and sees the trajectory of this; it will end in calamity and death. And while those are completely acceptable to Jamie under the right circumstances, she does not want that, and therefore it must be stopped.
"Find out everything you can," Jamie tells Westin. "I want a name, Mr. Westin, and I want to know the extent of the operation that's being liquidated." She opens her eyes and stares into the reflection of a soul she wants desperately but cannot possess. They’re unfinished, warm and cruel and inviting and Jamie wants to own them. She wants to tear them apart and see what’s inside, she wants and she wants and she wants. She'd sworn to Sherlock, truthfully, that she never thought she'd create an original work. She's apparently miscalculated.
Jamie sets her phone down beside her brushes and spins on one bare foot, toes almost sticking on the hardwood floor of her workspace. "Mr. Collins, I need you to book a flight," she calls from the doorway to where he's absorbed in the newspaper football pages. "We're going to New York."
And there's an almost joyous tone to her voice that makes Jamie want to curl up and pull herself apart as well. She has to know why she wants this so badly, otherwise the game has no goal in mind. She drifts back past the remains of her breakfast and the forgotten crossword, collecting it and a pen with one hand and scribbling in the answer as it comes to her.
v-i-n-c-e-n-t
Perhaps she doesn’t need Westin’s help finding the name after all. Jamie tucks the half-completed puzzle into her purse and goes to collect her brushes. They’ll need to be cleaned before she leaves.