The Art Of Corruption ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book III}

Chapter 47- Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath

Millie's POV

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I am alone, a point of stillness within the rush of police and paramedics. Emily's jacket is warm in my hands, and I'm in her flat, watching the forensics team file past in plastic suits.

It was me who found the body. Emily had left her jacket on the armrest of our sofa, and, after her phone remained unanswered, I'd taken it over to her place. When I saw what was left of Cameron, I panicked- it was the only thing I could do, in that moment of sick, shocked trepidation. I connected Emily's temper with the man who was lying butchered on the floor at my feet, recognising the brutality, the violence, the cruelty behind it. It made sense. Emily has killed before; pounded an assassin's head against concrete until his skull shattered like ivory, cracked the neck of another, wrenched the jaw from his spine. She never grieves, after her actions. She doesn't sit, stunned by her self-destruction.

She moves on.

And so I called the police. It felt like a betrayal, but I couldn't ignore the homicide in front of me. Emily wasn't in her flat, and her laptop was left open on her table, still running. I'd assumed she'd lost her nerve, and bolted, too rushed to remember to take her electronics with her.

It was only as I heard the sirens start up in the distance did the stupor loosen its grip around my cognition.

If Emily was responsible for Cameron's murder, I wouldn't have been looking at a decapitated corpse. She wouldn't have slit his throat. Beaten him to death, certainly. Snapped his neck in a fit of rage, more likely still. But held a knife to his throat and hacked through skin and bone? I know Emily. And that kind of senseless mutilation isn't her.

So I sat down at her table, and I thought. I thought, because it is what I do best, and, if I didn't, Emily would be sentenced to life imprisonment for first degree murder.  I drew upon every ounce of experience I possessed; my years as a detective, as a criminal psychologist, thinking about possibilities and triggers and conclusions.

However, in the end, it wasn't my professionalism that helped me find the answer.

It was the dark, untouched memories at the back of my mind. My life as a teenage girl, damp and filthy in a cartel, watching the world go by through wide, dilated eyes.

He was a dealer. Big business man, well-known, respected and feared by the low-life of London. He wasn't like the others. He didn't drink, or sleep rough on the streets. He was smooth, slick, and unshakable, an efficient criminal of the highest class, the white collar kind. It was for that reason no-one anticipated his reaction on the fateful day his wife tracked him down, drunk out of her mind on expensive cocktails, and confessed to an affair.

I saw him snap; the accomplished, glacial executive with his unrivalled flare broke down, picked up the pipe at his feet, and turned on his sobbing wife. I was nineteen at the time, and utterly terrified, as I watched the dealer raise the pipe above his head and swing it at her, over and over again, until the ring of metal on bone became soft with pounded muscle.

It was a crime of passion, they said. Out of character. Unplanned. Unexpected.

And that is what I saw when I looked back at Cameron Devlin's maimed body.

The police were minutes away, and I needed to find Emily. I turned to her laptop, desperate, and found it open on an emailed conversation. It was brief, and not very informative, but it told me where she was planning to meet Amy. I scribbled down the address, and deleted the exchange of messages, just as the flat illuminated with flashes of blue; the light thrown off by police vehicles.