Scorpion
BBC Sherlock
Rating 12 (violence)
Inspired by John's blog post on The Speckled Blonde.
Many thanks to Fengirl for betaing.
I was halfway through checking John's blog entry on the Roylott case the evening after he put it up - I felt I ought to know what idiocy the general public was lapping up this time - when he came into the living room with his last mug of tea for the day.
"What do you object to about this post?" he asked, without even looking at my laptop. For a moment I wondered whether it was just a lucky guess, but then I realised where his gaze had gone. The curtains weren't drawn, so he could see a faint reflection of my laptop screen in the darkened window; enough at least to realise the site I was looking at. And doubtless my expression had conveyed exactly what I thought of his latest outpouring. Observation and deduction; John may be an idiot, but he's not completely stupid.
You omitted the details of how I solved the case, I thought. It's like a theorem with five lines of the proof gratuitously erased. But no point in saying that: John's blog is not intended as a textbook on deduction, thank God, or it would be a miserable failure. It's read by people with dull lives to gain a vicarious thrill, but it does at least bring in the clients.
"You say we don't know why Gavin Roylott wanted to kill his step-daughters, and imply that's a tragedy," I replied instead, and John's face softened as he sat down at the table opposite me.
"And?" he asked. He enjoys talking and writing about the people in the cases, even when he's fuzzy on the details of the solution.
"Whatever the motives for a killing, the victim is equally dead," I pointed out.
"It makes a difference," John replied immediately. "Or are you saying that murder and manslaughter are just the same?"
He still thinks like a soldier, even now. A man trained to kill, but only for the right reasons. For the reasons he considers right. Five months and fourteen days ago, he did so in order to save my life, a day after he first met me.
John was thinking of that himself, I could tell. When he's upset, he still sometimes flexes his left hand, to hide a tremor that's no longer there. But that evening, it was his right hand curling round a non-existent trigger as his body remembered shooting someone.
"You thought Jefferson Hope was forcing me to take the poison, didn't you?" I asked.
John blinked and then smiled. "I didn't think anyone was a big enough idiot to take a pill like that voluntarily. But I didn't know you that well then, did I?" He paused and added more quietly. "I'd have been justified in killing him anyhow. Morally justified. He'd killed four people already, and he'd have gone on killing till the aneurysm stopped him."
Morally justified. It's so easy sometimes to point out the gaping holes in John's arguments.
"So should I have blown up the bomb-jacket at the swimming pool?" I asked. "We'd have died, but so would Moriarty. How many lives might that have saved?"
The smile had gone from John's face. "Funnily enough, I prefer not to die, given the choice."
"Which is why you grabbed Moriarty and told me to run. Sentimental and inconsistent."
John drained his tea, stood up, walked into the kitchen and started forcefully rinsing the mug out. He can wash up more aggressively than any other person I've met. He wanted to yell at me, but on this occasion felt he couldn't, so he removed himself from my presence instead. It'd be preferable if he could think more clearly, but there's no hope of changing that.
At least this time I didn't tell him he'd be better off not inflicting his blog on the world. But a minute ago, John had been happy: proud of me for solving the Roylott case, eager to talk about it. Now he was banging crockery around with a vague sense of injury. The poison of my criticism seeping through his brain. It'd be preferable if I could control my tongue, but I can't change what I am either.
***
When I was six, Mycroft - aged thirteen and self-important - found me reading Aesop's Fables.
"I like the one about the crow and the pitcher," I told him. "I didn't know birds could be so clever."
"There's another fable I know that's not in that book," he replied. "Though it's sometimes attributed to Aesop, it's probably of Persian origin. About a scorpion and a turtle."
I listened attentively; I was fascinated by scorpions at that age.
"There was a scorpion once who wanted to cross a river, but he couldn't swim," Mycroft began.
"What river?"
"It doesn't matter," Mycroft said dismissively. "So he found a turtle and asked him to carry him across the river. The turtle was worried that the scorpion would sting him and kill him, but the scorpion said he wouldn't, because then the turtle would sink and he would drown himself."
"So do turtles live in rivers as well as in the sea?" My knowledge of zoology was still sketchier than I would have liked.
"Some do, yes. The turtle agreed to carry the scorpion across, but when they were in the middle of the river, the scorpion stung him, and the turtle knew he was about to die."
"Why did the sting kill him?"
"The scorpion's sting was deadly poison."
"But the turtle's shell would protect him."
"The scorpion stung him on...it doesn't matter." Mycroft's fat face was becoming agitated. "The point is, the turtle asked the scorpion why he had stung him, when it would kill them both. And the scorpion replied: 'It is my nature.'"
I looked at him for a moment, waiting, and then understood. It was a fable, it wasn't about what really happened. It was the lesson you could learn from the story.
"The scorpion killed the turtle because that's what scorpions are like?" I asked, and Mycroft smiled. The next thing he would do would be to start making a speech; I could tell by the way he was looking up at the ceiling.
"Can I read the rest of my book now?" I asked hastily. Mycroft's smile half-vanished, but he went away anyhow.
It was only several years later that I realised that the point of Mycroft's story was supposed to be that you should never trust a scorpion. Not, as I had heard it, that if you were a scorpion there was nothing you could do to become kinder.
***
It's a memory I should probably have deleted, but childhood events are the most persistent ones in one's mind. And the patterns repeat themselves, of course. I should have known that Mycroft would end up in the Secret Service from that incident alone. Someone had to protect the poor gullible turtles. And somewhere, in the dingy box-rooms at the back of my mind, there might be something else from my past that would tell me what to do about John.
But I didn't need to retrieve it. Because John was emerging from the kitchen determinedly again. He's lived with me for 165 days; he's becoming used to me.
"If I hadn't saved your life, Helen Stoner would be dead by now," he said, sitting down in his armchair and reaching for the remote. Ready to distract himself with an inane TV programme this time, if he didn't like the way the conversation went. And his comment, though logically flawed - he could not have predicted the Roylott case when he saved me from the cabbie - skilfully turned the subject back to what interested him, and away from himself.
Or perhaps not. It is possible, after all, that Helen Stoner occupied a larger place in the Case of the Unwarranted Quarrel than I have been willing to admit. John says nothing much about her in his blog. She was only thirty, but looked older; the grey hair that her sister camouflaged was clearly visible on her, and neither grief nor slow-acting poison are good for one's appearance. Without those factors and with a better choice of clothes, she would be precisely the kind of moderately attractive professional woman whom John is prone to consider as suitable girlfriend material.
Do I subconsciously fear that John will find some woman to marry and leave me? Is that why I push him away, so it can remain my decision, not his, when our flat-sharing arrangement ends? Is my anti-social behaviour - I accept that it is anti-social - inherent to me or just a learned response to stressful situations?
I became aware that I had said nothing in reply to John's latest statement, and that John was looking at me hard. Inspecting me almost. As if he hoped that he could somehow develop my skills at applied observation.
"Do you know why Dr Roylott did it?" John asked, and it was like a catalyst. Because the data was already there; I had just not applied it properly. My priority had been to save Ms Stoner and track down the murderer, not fill in the background to his crime.
"There are some possibilities we can eliminate, at least," I replied, as my brain slotted the pieces into place. "The key to this crime, as I told you at the time, is acute versus sub-acute poisoning."
"I didn't...I didn't follow you," John said. "We were standing in Julia's bedroom, and Helen was telling us about her last night alive. You were muttering something about whether the bed could be moved, and examining the vents, and then you suddenly straightened up and yelled 'Not acute: you can't have a snake every day, but you can have a bath', and started quizzing Helen about the bubble-bath. And the next thing I knew, you were taking off and heading for Barts."
"Where my deductions were confirmed. The bubble-bath was toxic and Roylott was the guilty man."
"But I don't see how you knew that it wasn't a snake."
"Because the poisoning was all wrong!"
"But we didn't know what the poison was." John says patiently. "That was the point: it was an unknown toxin." I watched his brow furrowing: I occasionally wonder how he got through medical school, but I suppose he wasn't actually a danger to his patients. I suspect they were rarely targeted by ingenious murderers.
"But we know where the poison was supposed to come from," I reminded him. "A snake. A snake's venom has a precise purpose - to kill its prey - and it therefore acts quickly, within minutes, if not seconds. Whereas Julia Stoner had been run down for several weeks before her death. Perhaps a coincidence, but now the same thing is happening to her sister, suggests not a coincidence. So we're looking for some other common factor, something having a slow-acting effect, so that Julia was then more susceptible to an otherwise non-fatal snake-bite."
John's slow, but he can follow a simple train of logical thought. He said hesitantly:
"Sub-acute poisoning, affecting both of the sisters-"
"-But not Gavin Roylott," I interjected. No harm in encouraging him, if he was starting to use his brain.
"And probably something that they'd only recently started coming into contact with, but were now using frequently," John went on.
"Or a situation that had abruptly got more toxic." I smiled at him, and added: "Where is this hypothetical poison located? What do the sisters share?"
"A house," John said triumphantly. "They have different jobs, they don't eat together often, but they do live together." And then his face fell. "With Roylott."
"I therefore needed to see Julia's bedroom, to examine if there was something specific to that side of the house."
"So that was why you were checking the ventilation?" John said. "In case there was a possibility of carbon-monoxide poisoning? It's a modern house, so unlikely to have dangerous wallpaper, no obvious signs of mould..."
I suspected those ideas came from remembering some strange TV medical drama, but they weren't immediately ridiculous suggestions. I'd eliminated them myself, if about ten times quicker.
"But you couldn't find anything in the room," John went on, "so you had to look for something else...But why the bubble bath?"
"Sub-acute poisoning caused by some random product, followed by a snake-bite: there's bad luck and there's implausible bad luck. Hence the snake was misdirection, hence Roylott was probably the guilty man, hence look for anything he could have tampered with." I rattled out the string of inferences, hoping that John wouldn't comment on how long it had taken me to see through such a transparent ploy.
But of course, things that are - or should be - transparent to me remain opaque to John's average mind.
"And you were right about that, and you solved the case. It's staggering," he said, and the expression on his face was...well, it gratified me. Appreciation is always welcome.
"I solved that aspect of the case," I replied. "As for Roylott's motive, we're back to the issues of his wife's death."
It was one of the first things I'd checked, of course. A remarriage, a dead wife; always worth investigating if murders ran in a family.
"But there was nothing odd there," John said. "Mrs Roylott died of breast cancer a couple of years after she remarried and she left all her money to her daughters." He frowned. "Oh, so that was why you were asking Helen about her will, was it?"
"Yes. She and Julia had both made wills leaving the other everything. Hence the money is irrelevant."
John's look of bafflement was back, but I suppose I can hardly expect him to have the English law of succession at his fingertips.
"If Julia had married," I explained, "it would have revoked her will, and until she'd drawn up another one, her money would automatically go to her nearest relative, her husband, Percy Armitage. The only person to benefit financially from Julia's death before her marriage was Helen."
I could see a thought strain its way into John's brain. He put down the remote and said: "But if Helen had died after she'd inherited Julia's half of the money, wouldn't her will have been invalid as well? So all the money would go to her nearest relative."
"Correct," I said. "Who is a paternal uncle in Wolverhampton, from whom neither of the Stoners have had more than a Christmas card in the last five years. No obvious way that he could have wandered onto the scene and started poisoning them."
"Gavin Roylott was Helen's stepfather-"
"-And hence had no claim on her. It's bloodlines that count in these matters, not affinity." I didn't feel capable of implanting accurate legal knowledge securely into John's thick skull, so I simply added. "Trust me, the money is not a factor."
"OK," said John. "So why did Roylott do it?"
He can follow a logical argument; he can't construct one of his own, even with all the building blocks ready to hand. But he's no worse than the police in that. Probably better; he's more willing to learn than any of them are.
"Acute versus sub-acute poisoning again," I said. "The puncture marks were made to try and throw suspicion onto Armitage, but the poison used didn't match that. Hence it was more important for Roylott that Julia and Helen died slowly than that the symptoms were exactly right."
"Did he only have a slow-acting poison to hand? Or perhaps he thought it would be harder to detect?" John suggested.
I shook my head. "Any man who could synthesise the compound he came up with could have managed an acute toxin or two. And a slow-acting poison leaves more time for detection, or simply for the victim going off bubble-bath."
"Then why?"
"Breast cancer," I said. "Roylott could hardly blame his step-daughters for that. A heart attack or an accident of some kind, maybe he could have convinced himself that it was their fault his wife died young. Some bizarre kind of revenge that something nasty should happen to them. But as it was, I suspect he'd simply watched her dying slowly and then seen them still alive. One engaged, on the brink of having the married life he felt he'd been cheated of. You suggested yourself that maybe they reminded him of his wife."
"And so he tried to kill them both. God," John said, and his hands came to his face, shielding it.
He sat there in silence and I wondered what one was supposed to say in situations like this. Well, he only achieved 50% of his aim, thanks to us. Or: It's hardly news that the man liked unhappy women: he ran a cosmetics business, after all.
I decided it was best to say nothing. John looked up after a while, and his weary grey eyes stared into mine.
"Did you...was that what you really objected to in the blog post?" he said. "Me saying it was a tragedy that Helen didn't know Roylott's motives?"
"Surely they were obvious?" I replied, because I should have worked out that far earlier, shouldn't I? Careless not to.
"You were right," John said. "Not to tell Helen that bit. And I...I guess I was wrong for me to think that. She is better off not knowing just how malignant he was."
He thinks I knew all along and didn't tell Helen Stoner to protect her, I realised. How had he missed that five minutes ago I'd known the answer to "who", but not "why"? I should tell him, I thought, but I didn't. Better to have him think me considerate than slow on the uptake.
"I won't change the post though, if that's OK," John went on. "I don't think...nobody else will make the deduction, apart from you."
If they had all the evidence I had, they would have done. Anyone with half a brain would. Still, the percentage of even one functioning brain hemisphere among John's readers is apparently low, judging by the comments he receives.
"As you wish," I said. John was still looking me, and there was something pleased in his eyes now. A hopeful half-smile on his face that was for himself, not directly for me. That he'd got something right and so had I. That something in me was different.
"So what televised drivel are you wanting to waste your inadequate brain power on now?" I enquired, smiling, and John's smile broadened, as he reached for the remote again.
***
The turtle in Mycroft's fable was a volunteer, of course. He wasn't forced into carrying the scorpion, and it was only when I was considerably older that I wondered why he had helped it. A clever turtle, I decided, would have waited till it was halfway across the river, and ducked down into the water so abruptly that the scorpion would drown before it could sting in retaliation. One scorpion less in the world: surely a good thing?
But people so seldom do what is in their best interest. The bad - Gavin Roylott, Jim Moriarty - distort the precision of their plans by the desire to make a show. The good make no use of the weapons they do possess.
Or perhaps they do. Acute exposure to a substance is for 24 hours or less. John had known me for just more than that when he shot the taxi-driver and saved my life. Motivated by a huge dose of sentiment for a man he barely knew.
Chronic exposure requires more than three months: five months and fourteen days would certainly count. Sentiment creeping unnoticeably into my blood stream, mingling with the toxins already there. Counteracting them, perhaps. A ridiculously inaccurate description, of course, but occasionally metaphors can convey more than scientific facts. Chronic poisoning by sentiment; caused by prolonged exposure to John Watson. Not yet fatal, of course, but doubtless it will eventually be so to someone. A scorpion cannot change its nature, but it can change the target of its stings. One of these days, I will kill a man to save John's life, just as he once did to save mine. I can only hope that when the occasion comes I will know the right man to kill.