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Sherlock’s eyes gleamed with unholy glee. “It’s a visual riddle,” he breathed. “The killer’s given us a picture of his next victim.”
John looked at the distorted, blurry mess in front of Sherlock. Although the red light of the darkroom probably wasn’t helping matters, he still couldn’t see how anyone could make out anything useful. “How on earth are we supposed to figure anything out from that?”
“It’s a matter of translation,” Sherlock told him with barely-restrained impatience. “We simply have to find the right medium to view it through, or with, or perhaps some combination of both.”
“Sounds like we’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” John groused.
Sherlock gave him a quick grin. “More like trying to look through the eye of a needle. And the needle is someplace in this darkroom.”
“What?” Moments later, it hit John. “Oh! The killer wants us to figure it out, you mean. So he’d have left clues somewhere in here.”
“Exactly.” Sherlock gave him a sideways smile, the one he couldn’t seem to hide when John said something Sherlock thought was clever. “Chances are excellent that the equipment we need to view the image properly is sitting right here in the room with us.”
John looked around the cluttered darkroom, with its shelves of old camera equipment, projectors, developing trays, bottles of chemicals, and random bits of stuff. “Oh, brilliant. Definitely a needle in a haystack, and a treasure hunt to boot.”
Some of Sherlock’s enthusiasm visibly waned as he took in the chaos. “Hm. Quite. And there’s almost certainly a time limit, too. If we don’t figure it out within a certain period…”
“…then the image will be useless, because he’ll have already killed that person,” John finished. “Right. So there must be more to it than just randomly picking up stuff and figuring out what it does.”
“There must be some further connection, some aspect that ties in with his previous killings…” Sherlock whipped out his phone and started typing furiously. “We need an expert in photographic equipment, someone who can tell us quickly what all these things are and what they do, what their names are.”
“Grass’ assistant.” John headed for the darkroom door to go fetch the young woman from the front of the store. She’d been too shaken by the death of her boss to want to come with them into the darkroom itself. Finding the man you worked for with his face mostly dissolved by photochemicals was understandably upsetting.
Fortunately John was able to calm down Tess sufficiently to get her to come help them. Either that, or she found John’s little speech about stopping the killer before he killed his next victim really inspired her. Whichever, she dove into the task with a will. She and Sherlock exchanged terse sentences about angles of refraction and distortion indexes that made John’s head spin. And some of the things he fetched off of the shelves had the oddest names. As it turned out, they needed a specific fish-eye lens, a magic lantern set at a precise distance from a curved paper screen, and three different filters in order to finally bring the image into clarity.
And when they did, John’s stomach dropped into his shoes.
Sherlock already had his phone out, dialing the number. His lips curled up into a snarl. “No answer.”
John was slower with his mobile, but at least he got an answer.
“Sergeant Donovan.”
“Sally, it’s John. Where’s Lestrade?”