Sherlock: Dancing with Death, Part Two

Chapter Two

"Wait for us here," John told their cabbie, thirty minutes later, as he handed the man some money.

The three flatmates had arrived at the scene of the crime--a small house on the edge of London, now circled with cars and police tape. The lawn was well groomed--it had only been cut the day before--and the garden Lestrade and the rest of Scotland Yard was already there, and he waved them over to where he stood in the doorway.

"Oh," Lestrade said in surprise when he saw Beatrice with them, his familiar cockney voice easy to distinguish amongst the chatter of the rest of the Scotland Yard team. "Hello Miss Martin, I didn't know you were in town."

"Just flew in this morning, Detective," Beatrice told him politely--he was one of the ones that trained her, besides being the cheif detective inspector, so she was always respectful around him.

"This won't be a good welcome, I'm afraid," the man sighed, running a hand through his greying hair. "It's bloody awful in there."

"Let's have a look then," Sherlock said impatiently, going past Lestrade and into the house--but he stopped only a few feet from the entrance. "Oh my."

The first thing that struck Sherlock was the strong, metallic smell of blood, and then the amount of said substance that splattered the parlor in which he had just walked into.

"What--What the hell happened in here?" Beatrice stammered as she, John and Lestrade followed Sherlock in.

"Suicide," Lestrade explained, looking over the grisly scene with them.

"But?" Sherlock said, already knowing the answer; Lestrade merely gestured around them.

As previously noted, there was blood everywhere--literally, everywhere. The scarlet liquid stained the carpet in--still rather squishy--puddles, and ran down the wall to Sherlock's left in dried-over streams. It was mostly centered around the body of a young man, who was sitting, slumped against the wall. There was a pistol in his hand and a hole in his head, but other wounds riddled the body as well. Horizontal cuts lined the wrists of both arms, gaping deeply, and that was where most of the blood seemed to have come from--odd, Sherlock thought, that there were three life-threatening injuries, but which one killed the man? The shot, or the cuts? Or all three?

But what was on the wall was the most interesting thing to Sherlock--the blood seemed strange; there was too little of it, because it was mostly cranial fluid. After looking at the wall in silence for several minutes, Sherlock crouched down to study the body.

The man's face was practically unrecognizable as a face to the untrained eye--it was as if the man's face had been exploded. Sherlock carefully tilted the man's head to see the back--slightly less damaged than the front.

"This man didn't shoot himself," Sherlock said finally, standing. "He was shot in the back of the head, and was set up to look like a suicide. The man was not killed by the shot, however."

"How's that?" John asked from beside him, also studying the corpse.

"The shot was fired only after the man had bled to death from his other wounds, assumingly inflicted by someone else. He was then held up to this wall, and shot in the back of the head, to create this lovely splatter effect. But it's mostly brain tissue and cranial fluid, not blood. So then the killer set the man up as if he'd shot himself. Not sure why the killer made the wrist slits--perhaps just to confuse us. Quite an easy one though, I'd say," Sherlock finished, rather pleased with himself. "Now, if you'll excuse us, we shall let you do your work--"

"Sherlock," Beatrice interrupted, picking something up off of the floor. "Look at this." She held out a crumpled bit of note paper, stained with blood but still readable.