Find Me (BBC Sherlock Fan Fiction)

Chapter 14

Six months later - September

Sherlock pointed at the pale, sweaty, morbidly obese woman in the consulting chair. 'You have five minutes,' he said. 'Go.' He checked his watch.

'There's a ghost in my bedroom,' she replied immediately, without any hesitation and in a tone of supreme assurance.

In the opposite chair, John snorted. 'Who are you going to call?'

Sherlock gave him a blank look. 'The police? I hardly think so.'

Their client gave John a vacant look. 'A medium? I tried that. She said it was the ghost of my sister.'

'And do you have a sister?' asked Sherlock, ignoring John's distraction.

'I do,' she said.

'And is she dead?'

'She is. But she wasn't green.'

John interjected again, to very little purpose, in Sherlock's view. 'You're being haunted by a green ghost and you don't know who to call? Come on – hasn't anybody else heard that before?'

Sherlock frowned, indicating to John to shut up. 'I haven't. And I don't think this is a moment for levity, do you? Miss Stoner has lost her sister. How exactly did she die? You have two and a half minutes.'

'She was murdered.'

Sherlock sat back in his chair, adjusting his mental stopwatch to account for John's interruption. 'Go on.'

'It was a dark and stormy night.' Helen Stoner licked her lips, glanced briefly around the room and sat forward. 'The day before my sister's wedding.'

John held up a hand. 'If I could just stop you there. What time of night was it? Exactly?'

'Three o'clock.'

'In the morning?'

'The afternoon.'

'Alright. It was a dark and stormy afternoon. How stormy? A light drizzle? Bit of a shower?'

'It wasn't stormy,' she clarified, taking a long slurp of the Coke she'd brought with her from the waiting room. 'It was a sunny day. Middle of the afternoon two months ago and the weather was about the same as it is now. I was sweating like a pig.'

'Excellent,' said John. 'I'm glad we got that straight. Carry on.'

'We were on a hen do, just me and my twin sister Julia. She was marrying Stephen from the supermarket, do you know him?'

'One minute left,' Sherlock intoned. 'And I only need the relevant details, not every single thought that crosses your mind.'

'We'd caught the bus into London, it was a big day, you know? She'd just come into some money, quit her job as a cleaner and she was really looking forward to the wedding. She'd bought a massive dress.'

Sherlock cleared his throat.

'Anyway, we'd been drinking for a while when Julia said she was hungry, so we looked for someone nice for afternoon tea, posh-like, I thought I'd treat her.'

John said, 'Tea at the Ritz then? Claridges?'

'No, the Krispy Kreme shop on the high street. So, we were eating and Julia had just started her fourth doughnut when it happened. She grabbed at her neck like this.' Miss Stoner demonstrated for at least thirty seconds of her allotted time, making gagging noises of surprising authenticity. 'Then with her last breath she said it. The sprinkled brand. That was all. Then she stopped breathing. They called the ambulance of course, but it was too late. She'd been poisoned.'