Find Me (BBC Sherlock Fan Fiction)

Chapter 22

Eventually, he went home, after a day spent flicking cigarette ends into the Thames. He unlocked the front door with a jerk, slammed it behind him and made his way upstairs. Mycroft would arrive in the morning, to whisk him away to an incarceration of unknown length, and all because he had supposed himself in love.

At the top of the stairs he stopped, sensing something amiss and pushed open the door to the living room cautiously.

Irene was sitting in his chair. She had resumed her professional disguise - high heels, tight skirt and a sheer blouse that he could see straight through. He averted his eyes, felt the sudden onslaught of anger, the bite of fingernails into his palms as he attempted to control it.

'Get out.' His voice came out higher than normal, and with a wobble at the end.

Her eyes roved over his body, lingering slightly too long on his lips, his chest, his crotch.

He suppressed the desire to hide behind something, battling a flood of images in which she was kneeling at his feet, spread-eagled beneath him calling his name and on top of him, head thrown back in ecstasy.

She made no sound, raised a single eyebrow.

He took a deep, steadying breath, pointed at the glamourous, polished, furious looking woman determinedly not sitting in the consulting chair. 'You have five minutes,' he said. 'Go.' He checked his watch.

She uncrossed her legs, wrapped them around each other again more slowly and bent forward, resting her chin on her fist. Her eyes were steel and anger. 'I've had you in my mouth, Sherlock,' she said. 'I'm not a client.'

A wave of revulsion crashed through him. 'No, but I am, aren't I? I'm just someone you've been paid to have sex with. I'd better sit in the chair.' He fumbled for the back of it, sat down with a clatter.

'Roleplay, darling? You should have told me that turned you on. How about I pretend to be the wronged woman and you pretend to be the lying detective?' She extended a slim and shapely arm, and uncurled bright red fingernails to reveal a somewhat battered memory stick.

He frowned, squinted at what she was holding, shook his head.

The crack of her voice across the room startled him. 'You have exactly five minutes to explain yourself before I walk out of here and you never see me again. Go.'

It took him a while to work it out, nine seconds at least - but then, his mind had never operated particularly coherently when she was around. He took a breath. 'Six months ago, the first time I came to your flat you told me the Russians had been after you because of what happened in Karachi, but that you'd managed to straighten out the misunderstanding. What you meant was, you'd agreed to work for them. You'd agreed to entrap me into sleeping with you so that you could take my phone and use it to work out when I'd found some secret information for Mycroft. That information was then stolen from me and a sex tape you'd recorded without my consent was circulated to incriminate and discredit me and weaken my brother.'

'I've had relationships with lots of people in my life, personal and professional. Men and women. Have a guess how many of them I've let do exactly what they wanted to me? Have a guess how many of them I've ever trusted. You have four minutes remaining.'

He continued because he simply couldn't stop himself. 'Or that was what it was supposed to look like. The information on that memory stick was in the possession of a woman named Hope Trelawney two months ago, after she'd stolen it from her Foreign Secretary lover. She was murdered for the data and the body was very effectively concealed, along with her real identity, by a complex and organised hostile agency at work in London, who made Miss Trelawney disappear at short notice. But the treaty wasn't where it was supposed to be. Just before she died Miss Trelawney had hidden the stolen memory stick in a compartment under the rug in her flat from where it was recovered by her cleaner, who had moved the rug in the course of her weekly visit. Julia Stoner was Hope Trelawney's cleaner and, with an eye for a profit she took the USB stick home. You, I assume, then worked out who had found the data and bought Julia's information from her, as she came into enough money to give up her job and plan a big wedding. But she wasn't careful enough, because, to cover their tracks, the agency involved poisoned Julia Stoner. Not you, because if you'd wanted her dead you wouldn't have bothered paying her off – rather, someone you report to but have no control over had her killed. It was easily done, a fellow diner in the café just slipped an extra doughnut onto her plate when she wasn't looking. The diner was an impoverished drug dealer called Brandon something.'