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If there was one thing Sally Donovan knew, it was that workplace romances were messy. Or rather, she knew considerably more than that, being a detective sergeant who did a difficult and dangerous job, but that was one of the things embedded in her brain along with “don’t get shot” and “always wear practical shoes in case you need to chase someone”. Even the assumption of an office romance where there was none could make things unnecessarily uncomfortable. (Yes, Anderson’s wife had been out of town, which is why she’d agreed to drop off the files they needed him to work on, whereupon his kid had thrown up all over her and the linoleum so she had helped him scrub his floors because the man was too flustered to do anything useful, and she’d needed a shower after that, so of course she’d ended up smelling like sodding Anderson. Take that, you sodding know it all.)
Still, she found herself looking forward to seeing Molly Hooper whenever she happened to be in charge of their bodies. This, she told herself, was logical: Molly was pretty, intelligent, and brilliantly funny in the pragmatic way that made sense to coppers and pathologists. If she was a little too far gone on Sherlock Holmes, well, so was Sally’s boss. It was just a shame that when they saw each other, it usually meant someone had died.
In this case, it was an elderly businessman who left behind a small fortune, an attractive widow, and a teenage daughter who refused to believe her father had dropped dead of natural causes, as men over a certain age with a history of hypertension and diabetes sometimes did. She’d called in Sherlock Holmes, worse luck, but Sally couldn’t fault her for it. She’d been in charge of some of the initial interviews and something felt off, even though everything looked fine on the surface. She’d have to ask Mrs. Ferrour about that later.
“Lestrade was right to be suspicious,” Molly was saying as she pulled up a chart that filled her computer screen with lines of numbers and a baffling array of what Sally assumed were medical names and abbreviations. Some of the words she knew, and some looked like they had more syllables than should be allowed. “We found an extremely rare neurotoxin in Auguste Ferrour’s system. It wouldn’t have shown up in an ordinary toxicology screening, and, honestly, we might have missed it if Sherlock hadn’t insisted on us testing for every poison known to man, but there it is. Lots of it. I'll send these to your team, of course, but it’s almost certainly what killed him, and there’s no way he could have come by it accidentally unless he had a portal to a tropical sea in his bedroom, so it’s not looking like natural causes, I’m afraid. Sorry.”
“Hm.” Donovan didn’t love this, least of all because Sherlock was right, yet again. (Yes, she agreed with him. Yes, she could still be annoyed. Yes, she thought Molly was the most adorable thing even if she hero-worshiped consulting detectives. Human feelings were messy, damn it.) “I don’t know why you’re sorry. It’s not like you put it there.”
“I did, in a way,” said Molly in that precise way of hers. Sally quite liked the way she’d done her hair today, twisted a little and tied to the side. She was wearing a fetching shade of lipstick too. “I mean, I didn’t personally run the lab work, but I did order it, and I drew the sample, and I might have sat on them until they expedited it. And it’s just so much sadder when it’s a murder. I bet it’s more work for you too.”
Sally shrugged. “It’s what we do.” There was more she could have said about that. She had it in her to go on about justice, and making things right, and having an internal beat that went evildoers beware! but even other coppers found that sort of talk off-putting. She did not want to put off Dr. Hooper. “Mrs. Ferrour is going to be devastated.”
“Oh?” Molly sounded nonplussed.
"Yeah, she said her one consolation was that her husband died peacefully." At least, Sally was fairly certain that Mrs. Ferrour had said that. It was all a blur now, though hadn't she done that interview only two days ago? She needed to check her notes, only she couldn't remember writing it down either.
"Peacefully?" echoed Molly. "Of a conotoxin?"
"Well, he did die in bed..." Sally shook her head. No. That made no sense. She made no sense, and Molly Hooper probably thought she was a blithering idiot. "Sorry. I don't know why I said that. Long day, I guess."
"I know how you feel," Molly said a shade too brightly. "At the end of some days, it all looks like the same mashed up brain to me. Um." She hesitated, her small hands fidgeting with a pen on her desk. Sally noticed that she wore her nails short and unpainted, probably from all the handwashing she had to do after sticking her hands in corpses. "Listen, maybe later, I was wondering--would you like to have coffee?"
Sally should have been delighted. She should have said, yes, please, and dinner after, and you can come 'round to my place if you don't mind that I haven't hoovered in about a month. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. The inside of her skull was starting to feel foggy and cluttered, and it was getting harder to reach for things in there.
"Or--or tea, if you prefer," Molly pressed on. "Or there's this new place near here that does bubble tea, if you'd like to try that. They do banh mi too, if you're feeling peckish."
Sally shook her head again, more to clear it rather than to indicate refusal, but she despaired of what an outside observer (Molly) would think. Or that's what she wanted to think, but it was getting hard to think about anything at all. Coffee with Molly, agreeing to, with enthusiasm drifted in and out of the fog like a boat never quite making it to the mooring dock. Tea and washing-up liquid, must get before going home was a boat that had sank out of sight of the shore. Supper was vaguely visible on the horizon. But Auguste Ferrour, murdered burned like a beacon in her head. Christ on a bike. She knew she could be horribly single-minded when she was on the job, but this was ridiculous. She'd have to explain that to Mrs. Ferrour.
"Are you okay, Sally?" Molly had come out from behind her desk and had one hand hovering at Sally's elbow as if to say please, let me help.
"Probably." Sally put a hand to her head. It didn't do anything, except perhaps point out where the problem was. "Maybe. I don't know."
"Can I help? I am still a doctor, even if all the patients I see are dead. Oh god. Sorry. Morgue humor."
Sally managed a half-hearted laugh. "No, no, you're fine. I'm fine. I think I just need a couple of paracetamol and some fresh air."
"Hm." Molly peered at Sally's face, then took her hand with a soft May I? and examined her nail beds. Sally found herself biting her lip. "When did you last eat?"
"Lunch." Sally was reasonably sure about that. "Tuna sandwich. And I've got to--got to go." That she knew for certain. Her head began to feel clearer at the very thought of walking out in the open air. And if her footsteps headed in a certain southwesterly direction, so much the better. Mrs. Ferrour would approve.
"Hm," said Molly again, turning to reach behind her for something on her desk. "I know I can't make you do anything, but will you at least have a sweetie? You look...peaky."
She was holding a bag of what looked like boiled sweets under Sally's nose. Upon closer inspection, they proved to be little eyeballs. Sally blinked and amended that to boiled sweets shaped like little eyeballs.
"They were a birthday present," Molly explained. "Raspberry flavored. They're nice. Just don't look at them too closely--though you can't help feeling they're looking at you."
"Thanks." Sally took one cautiously, popping it into her mouth before she could examine the blank pupil and vivid blue iris too closely. It was, indeed, quite nice.
"And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make things awkward with--with the coffee thing and all. I mean, I didn't mean--or I did mean, but not if you're not interested," said Molly in a rush. "I thought--but I shouldn't have--awful of me to assume. Sorry."
"Mmph!" protested Sally around the sweet in her mouth. She pushed it to her cheek so she could speak normally, even if the tradeoff was doing a passable impression of a hamster. "Don't worry about it." It was on the tip of her tongue to say that coffee would be wonderful and amazing and perfect, maybe on Saturday if they were both free and people would just stop violently killing each other for long enough, but the words got caught in her teeth and what tumbled out from between her lips was, "I have to run. I need to see Mrs. Ferrour before Greg or, god forbid, Sherlock gets to her." She tried again, desperately wanting to redeem herself. Molly was blushing the deep red of horrible embarrassment, and she couldn't stand it. "Sorry about coffee."
Mrs. Ferrour’s flat was not at all far from Bart’s. Sally was grateful for that small mercy. She simply couldn’t get there fast enough, never mind how sensible her shoes were. She started at her fastest walking pace, elbowing her way through the crowd on the pavement and found herself going at a dead sprint by the time she turned a corner onto the street where Mrs. Ferrour lived.
Belatedly, she realized she could have taken the squad car, which would have parted traffic like the Red Sea, but there was no use appealing to hindsight. And it might not necessarily have saved her all that much time, what with having to park it and all, though it would have been nice not to show up at Mrs. Ferrour’s front door all sweaty and out of breath, hair going every which way, and her coat all rumpled because she’d been clutching her handbag to her side to keep it from swinging as she ran. There was at least a little bit of time in the elevator to straighten herself up after she was buzzed in.
Or neaten up, anyway. Sally had kissed straight goodbye a while back.
And, well, if she hadn’t, Mrs. Ferrour would have done it for her.
Sally lost her breath all over again when Mrs. Ferrour opened the door to her third floor flat. The fog in her head went away almost immediately at the sight of her, and she sighed in relief. There hadn’t been time for paracetamol.
“What do you have for me?” she asked, leading Sally into the living room. She was wearing a dressing gown the deep, bruised red of crushed rose petals that seemed to leach all the other colors out of the pale room, and a thin smile of sorts lit her angular features.
Somehow, Sally knew she was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, not least because she’d been unsure of her reception. It was a shock to realize it, but she’d been afraid of being turned away at the door with her head full of cloying fog and a blazing urgency to deliver an extremely important message, which was, “They think it’s murder.”
Mrs. Ferrour tsked and sank all her angles down gracefully onto the white leather sofa.
As soon as she’d said it, though, Sally wondered why she’d said that. You didn’t just tell people things like that, not outside of the investigating team, and certainly not if they were a murder suspect (and spouses were usually at the top of the list, more’s the pity); and here she’d gone and done it for no good reason she could name. Now that the blaring beacon screaming MURDER was no longer occupying space in her mind, she was noticing that her head hadn’t cleared at all. More fog was rushing in to take its place, and it occurred to Sally, briefly, distantly, that perhaps Mrs. Ferrour’s presence hadn’t made it go away at all. Maybe it was more that she’d been dumped in a vat of the stuff and had thus momentarily reached equilibrium. Osmosis, she thought, reaching for a memory of Molly Hooper going off-tangent on the subject of semipermeable membranes. (Anderson had done this too, more than once, but his version had been ever so slightly less enthralling.)
“That’s unfortunate,” Mrs. Ferrour was saying in her high, light voice. “I did think my Auguste died peacefully. His heart was tricky, you know. And so was his pancreas. And his liver. His lungs were questionable too.” She fixed her pale eyes on Sally’s, and Sally felt herself pinned in place to the lush, ivory carpet. “But you don’t think it was murder, do you, my sweet thing?”
“No.” It was hard to think anything, to be honest. Not that Sally wasn’t trying.
Mrs. Ferrour’s smile deepened. “Good.”
“Or--I don’t know.” Of a conotoxin? said Molly’s voice in Sally’s head, cutting quietly through the fog. “Was it?”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Ferrour, all honeyed reassurance.
Sally nodded. It was easier to agree with Mrs. Ferrour. What had she seen anyway? Rows of little figures on a computer screen, but damned if she knew what all those numbers meant, really (forensic lab results were very seldom colored photographs of the relevant molecule labeled “THIS ONE DID IT!!!”). Molly could have been mistaken. Sally didn’t like that thought: it was highly unlikely, but not completely impossible. And Mrs. Ferrour knew best. Of course.
But then Mrs. Ferrour said, “I’d never hurt my Auguste.”
And perhaps she did not know best after all.
If she had, she would have known that if there was one thing Sally hated--more than people who did bad things getting away with it, more than smug, snotty, arrogant bastards who were right all the damn time--it was being managed. (She’d been furious when she learned how easily she’d fallen for all that bunk about Sherlock being a fraud. She knew the arsehole. She should have known he was for real.) Even Lestrade knew better than to try and get her to do something through the power of suggestion rather than telling her the facts outright. Also--though this was usually an advantage in her line of work--Sally was suspicious to a fault. No amount of foggy-headedness would take that away.
“I never said you did,” she said sharply.
“Neither did I.” Mrs. Ferrour’s tone was smooth, light as ever, but a little frown line appeared between her impeccable eyebrows.
“Yeah. You didn’t.” Sally was waking up now, and waking up angry. She was aware of her shirt sticking to her back, the strap of her handbag digging into her shoulder, and the strangeness of that colorless room. “You said it too quickly.”
“You’re being very silly, my dear.” Mrs. Ferrour leaned forward earnestly, and Sally almost agreed with her (Going off of wordplay when she had no evidence? Who was she, Sherlock Holmes?). The shoulder of Mrs. Ferrour’s scarlet dressing gown slid down, revealing acres of pale skin, delicate collar bones, and the tempting curve of a breast. She patted the white leather space beside her. “Come here and let’s talk.”
There was nothing Sally wanted more than to sit next to Mrs. Ferrour, to bury her nose in her smooth hair, breathe her in, kiss her, touch her, let herself be touched...which, now that she was thinking semi-clearly, was really fucking stupid. She didn’t know this woman from Eve, Adam, or the apple. She’d talked to her a grand total of once, when she was conducting interviews, and the memory of that was hazy, as though someone had wafted colored smoke over the whole thing. She would admit that she would dearly love to sit down (her feet were killing her and her lower back was starting to lodge complaints), but sitting next to Mrs. Ferrour was not happening. Sally squared her shoulders, widened her stance, and did not move.
“Oh dear. It’s so distressing when they’re difficult,” sighed Mrs. Ferrour to no one in particular. “Maybe the charming inspector would have been more manageable, but I can work with what I’ve got.” She stood, coltishly graceful, dressing gown slipping a fraction lower, and strode over to Sally. “Tell me, my girl, who knows?”
“Me.”
“Yes, and I’m going to take such good care of you. Who else, my sweet?”
“Sherlock Holmes.” That one was easy.
Mrs. Ferrour made a face. “My stepdaughter’s PI. The clever one. Of course. You’ll have to get rid of him for me.”
“Excuse me?”
“My darling girl, you’ve said you can’t stand him. It’s not going to be that hard. Who else?”
“The entire damn pathology lab,” spat Sally.
“I’m not fool enough to try that,” Mrs. Ferrour laughed. “And you can’t tell me that they’re all invested in this. I know you’re stretched thin and overworked. Is there anyone in particular?”
Sally shook her head.
“You can’t lie to me, my sweet thing.” Mrs. Ferrour’s finger traced Sally’s jaw from beneath her ear to her chin, her breath cool on Sally’s cheek. “Who?”
Fog rolled into Sally’s head, denser than ever, forming questing tendrils that grabbed at her recent memories, wrapped around a name and dragged it out into the open, so Sally found herself choking out, “Molly Hooper.”
Mrs. Ferrour smiled widely now, pleased with herself for a job well done and utterly self-absorbed. She probably didn’t even notice the tone or the distress in Sally’s face. “All right. This is what you are going to do for me, Sally Donovan. You are going to take care of Sherlock Holmes--”
“I don’t think I could--”
“He’s just a man in a big coat and a funny hat. You’ll do this for me, yes?”
More fog. “Yes.”
“Good. Then this Molly Hooper--”
“I won’t do it.”
“You will, my dear.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. I’m not going to have this argument with you. Then you will write a note--a long, sad note about how you’ve been obsessed with me and you killed Auguste so we could be together but are heartbroken now that I’ve rejected you because I can’t believe you’ve taken my Auguste from me.” Mrs. Ferrour paused, considering this. “Or given your personality, maybe a short note. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, my darling, but do try to make it tragic. And then you’ll take a little jump off a bridge--”
“No,” said Sally through the fog. That passed beyond stupid and went well into insane: how did this woman think anyone would believe that when they’d only met once? (Admittedly met once was not an issue. Sally had known people to do extraordinarily reckless things for people they’d met once. But the timeline was the problem here: surely this woman didn’t expect investigators to believe that Sally was responsible for a murder that had happened before she’d even met the supposed motive?) And she needed to double down on a much more important thing. “And I’m not touching Molly.”
“Oh, so stubborn!” Mrs. Ferrour said, all but stamping her foot. “If you’re going to be like that, it might be better if you just take a tumble from the balcony now.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said a voice from behind her. “I really don’t.”
Mrs. Ferrour whirled around, turning to face the very same balcony she was going to send Sally over. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded, sounding ever so slightly less elegant and desirable.
Especially, thought Sally, in comparison to who, wonder of wonders, had swooped in to save the day. She found herself grinning, quite happy to play a damsel in distress for...
“Molly Hooper.” She was out of breath, with a backpack slung over one shoulder, and still wearing her white coat and her badge from work. “You wouldn’t have heard of me.”
“I just have.” Mrs. Ferrour glared at her. “You seem to be more trouble than you’re worth.”
Molly faltered a little. She held up something small and round, and Sally recognized one of the horrible eyeball sweets. “I try.”
“You shouldn’t, really. It’s a waste of effort.”
“Yes, well. That’s not true, is it? Because this is holding you off, or you wouldn’t be trying to convince me that it wasn’t. I wasn’t sure it’d work, if it makes you feel any better. I didn’t have an evil eye charm on me, but I had these and they were the right shape and a gift given in goodwill...” Molly leaned a bit to the right to see past Mrs. Ferrour. “All right, Sally?”
“I am now, yeah.” Now that Mrs. Ferrour wasn’t focused on her, Sally could feel the charm she was aiming at Molly. It was thick and nasty, like someone forcing your head into a plastic bag and spraying perfume into it. She doubted the little eyeball would be edible after holding that off.
“Good. And to your point, Madam Whatever-You-Are, by dint of a little effort, I found out where you got the poison from. It was so specific, you see, so it didn’t take long to find out there was only one lab in London that dealt with products from that particular species of cone snail. And your husband had shares in the company. So. Um. We know. That it was murder.”
“Who knows?” snarled Mrs. Ferrour, stalking towards Molly like a tigress.
Molly flinched, but her hand held the eyeball steady. Her other hand, Sally noticed, was in an outside pocket of her backpack. “Everyone. I called everyone while I was running here, even Mrs. Hudson, because of course Sherlock wasn’t picking up his phone. We’ve got you, and you’re not going to pull your tricks on me. Or Sally. Or anyone. Not anymore.”
“We’ll see about that.” Mrs. Ferrour loomed over Molly, and Sally was surprised that she’d ever thought her beautiful. She looked good, yes, she was undeniably fit, but there was something unwholesome about her, something rotten that was suddenly obvious when juxtaposed against Molly’s honest face. “I haven’t outlived four husbands to be done in by a little slip of nothing. You may think you’re a smart girl, but I don’t need a charm for this.”
She whipped a knife from the folds of her dressing gown, an old thing, its blade small and wicked. But before she could bring her arm down, before Sally could even blink, Molly dropped the eyeball and took her hand from her backpack pocket, revealing a bright pink canister of pepper spray. She caught Mrs. Ferrour right in the eyes from less than a foot away.
Mrs. Ferrour howled and rubbed frantically at her face. That was enough. Sally dropped her handbag and lurched forward, knocking the knife out of Mrs. Ferrour’s hand and kicking her spindly legs out from under her. She sat on her to keep her in place, and grabbed hold of her wrists.
“Don’t you have handcuffs?” asked Molly, carefully nudging the knife to one side.
“In my bag. Thanks.” Sally took them from Molly, who obligingly held Mrs. Ferrour’s kicking heels down while Sally fastened them around her wrists. “Mrs. Ophelia Ferrour, you are under arrest, and I swear to god, if you call me your anything one more time...”
Sally didn’t get to finish that thought, which was probably just as well since anything she had to say would botch up the arrest entirely. Lestrade burst through the door, followed closely by Sherlock Holmes, smug as ever, and John Watson, who had the look of a man with complete confidence in his years of medical and military training, not to mention the gun concealed in his right jacket pocket, which Sally pretended not to know about. And after them came what looked like half of New Scotland Yard and maybe a quarter of the Bart’s pathology team.
There was complete chaos for a few minutes, with Sherlock (of bloody course) explaining what Molly had just said about the poison’s origin, though his version had the added detail of security footage showing Mrs. Ferrour snogging one of the company’s research assistants in a broom closet. This was punctuated by Mrs. Ferrour shrieking about assault as they led her away. It took a while for Sally to sidle over to Molly, and it took longer still to get a word in edgewise since she was surrounded by a gaggle of concerned co-workers.
“How did you even get in here?” Sally asked, which wasn’t what she’d wanted to say at all. She couldn’t blame Mrs. Ferrour for it this time though. This awkwardness was all her own.
“Oh, being a doctor’s handy,” said Molly sheepishly, waving at her colleagues who were firmly being escorted out by an irate PC. “I, um, told the doorman that Mrs. Ferrour called me about a medical emergency, then I went to the wrong flat on purpose and asked if I could borrow their fire escape. Then I picked the lock with a paperclip and a broken barrette.”
“Nice.” Strictly speaking, Sally was in a profession that encouraged her to frown on breaking and entering, but there were abundant extenuating circumstances in this case. Plus it was a tiny bit sexy. “You’re very...practical.”
“Thanks. I thought I might not find you, you know. You were going too fast for me to follow, but I had Mr. Ferrour’s address from his file. Which was lucky.”
“Lucky. Yeah.” Sally crossed her arms, bit her lip, and tried for a rueful grin. “You must think I’m a complete idiot to have fallen for all of that.”
“Oh no! No, no, no.” Molly touched Sally’s shoulder timidly, pulled her hand back ever so slightly, and settled it there when Sally didn’t pull away. “Absolutely not. It’s really hard to see it when you’re looking at it from the inside. Jim Moriarty tried the same thing on me. Sort of. That’s how I knew.”
“Ah.” Sally watched the crime scene techs begin to filter into the room, blue coveralls bright against all the white. Sherlock disdained coveralls, as Sally expected he would, but he did put on gloves to pick up the eyeball sweet. It looked rancid now, all filmed over with an awful, oily layer. He glanced in their direction, and Sally pointedly looked away.
“Yes, well.” Molly patted Sally’s shoulder once, and took her hand away.
Impulsively, Sally grabbed it. She couldn’t have said if she was trying to hold Molly in place, or trying to keep herself from chickening out of finally saying, “Look, Molly, I think I owe you my life. Or at least coffee.”
“Oh!” Molly Hooper blushed, actually blushed, after literally swooping in through a window like a mad superhero. Sally’s heart, already putty when it came to Molly, melted like butter under the grill. “If you don’t mind, then.”
“Coffee or anything you want. Anything at all.”
Molly beamed and squeezed Sally’s hand. “Coffee,” she said firmly, “will be wonderful.”