A Case of Identity [Sherlock S4 Fanfic]

Part 4 - A Rubbish Kidnapping

The messages stared at Sherlock, burning into his mind. He felt responsible for the child's disappearance, and had a good idea of who was behind it.

"We need to go, John," he said, turning the screen of his phone off. But the messages still burned in his mind, weighing on his conscious.

"What's wrong, Sherlock?" John looked confused as he put his coat on. "What did your phone say?"

"I'll explain on the way to Scotland Yard."

Greg Lestrade was sitting in his office, enjoying a mid-morning doughnut and his coffee on the table before him. Sherlock and John walked in purposefully, the look of worry on their faces causing Greg to sit up straight and remove his feet from his desk. Sherlock spoke, shattering the silence that had fallen.

"We have a missing child."

"But that's not my-" Greg started to say, but John cut him off.

"It's Harriet. My daughter. She was taken. Please can you help get her back?" He looked up at Greg, then to Sherlock, his eyes pleading to get his child back.

"I need to use your equipment to track some phone messages," Sherlock started, walking out of Lestrade's office and expecting everyone to follow. Lestrade put down his doughnut for later and swiftly followed.

Half an hour later, Sherlock had obtained the whereabouts of all four different phones, and from their location he guess that they were most likely phones that had been swiftly disposed of.

"Well?" Lestrade queried. "Where are all these phones hiding then?"

"My homeless network are on it," Sherlock explained, checking his phone for messages from his own personal group of spies throughout England. "And here they are." He held up his phone for them to all see the location of each phone.

"But, but it's a bin. Four bins. Four different bins." Lestrade seemed disappointed. "Well, that's a bit rubbish. How are we supposed to get a lead from four different bins?" He looked around the room, but Sherlock was already racing out of the building.

"Keep in touch Lestrade, I'm going to go and piece together the evidence and then we can start a search party." With a swish of his coat tails, Sherlock was gone, John closely following behind.

"Just call if you need anything," Lestrade called out to the empty space where the two men were just five seconds ago. He sighed and turned, walking back into his office to finish the important consumption of the sugared and jam filled crime.

Back at 221B Baker's Street, Sherlock had printed off the four pictures of the bins and had stuck them to a map of the town, connecting the locations with both the images and the other locations using some bright red wool. They all seemed to create a pattern, the wool dancing across the page creating elaborate lines as it swayed to the rhythm of life.

The map was enlarged, and Sherlock took a pen and started to mark on it every single outdoors bin in the entire town, each one represented with a cross. John stood, watched and made many cups of tea.

"But look John, only a few bins have been used, and they all start to create a pattern." John pretended to know what Sherlock was on about. "There is a kind of rule, which is that no bin is used more than once, and no bin next to each other is used. There has to be at least a street between each bin used."

Sherlock stopped as his phone buzzed, alerting him to another message, from another disposable phone. It simply read:

The clock is ticking on my babysitting hours.