Sherlock Fic: The Anatomist 2/4
Title: The Anatomist
Characters: Molly Hooper, Jim Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes, others. Multiple pairings.
Rating: Adult.
Warnings: Language, disturbing themes.
Spoilers: All three aired episodes of the BBC's Sherlock and bits and pieces of the original stories.
Betas: tricksterquinn, earlgreytea68, and eponymous_rose rock my world. They don't like to brag, but they're pretty awesome.
Summary: "You’re not the only one to enjoy a good murder. There’s others out there just like you - except you’re just a man. And they’re so much more than that." Jefferson Hope, A Study in Pink
chapter one
++
He’s halfway through his roast beef sandwich when the back passenger side door of his taxi opens, and a young woman slips inside.
The rain’s darkened her hair, plastered it smooth to her pale forehead and the back of her neck. She’s been caught out in the sudden storm without an umbrella or coat, and her rather unflattering checkered wool jumper is soaked through and beginning to smell. Her delicate features (upturned nose, small mouth) are neither plain nor pretty, but occupy an unlikely, indeterminate space between; she’s educated, employed (in medicine, probably - his cab stinks of hospital disinfectant, now, and it makes him want to gag) and socially awkward. She owns at least one cat.
Jefferson Hope sees all this in his rear view mirror, in the time it takes her to close the taxi door. She bores him already.
“Sorry, darling,” he says, and uses a napkin to wipe the mustard from his chin. “I’m engaged at present.”
The woman pushes a strand of wet hair from her eyes. “Oh,” she says with an anxious, apologetic twitch of her fingers. “I didn’t realise.”
“It’s all right. You can sit for a moment, if you like. Dry off a bit.”
She smiles, and it tips the scale toward pretty. “Thank you, Mr. Hope. I promise I won’t be long.”
He turns at that, shifting in his seat just in time to see her pull a dry manila folder from beneath the bulk of her jumper. She opens it, and he sees the words Hope, Jefferson H., cerebral aneurysm written on the front in small, neat handwriting.
“You shouldn’t have that,” Hope says, and it’s as if he’s suddenly awake for the first time in months. The world sharpens, and he grins. “I’m fairly sure that sort of thing is confidential.”
“I’m fairly sure you’re right,” the woman says. She takes a photo from the folder and passes it to him; it’s a date-stamped CT scan from his final visit to the hospital. He stares at the aneurysm, at the small shadow it casts across his mind, and the woman leans forward, her elbows resting on her knees. “Do you think, Mr. Hope, that people underestimate you because you drive a taxi for a living?”
He meets her eyes and sees the stillness there. The patience. Rain rings against the taxi roof. “The thought’s occurred to me.”
She looks down at the file folder, and her wet hair slides over her shoulder. “It’s an incredible act of trust, isn’t it? Getting in a car with a stranger. Putting your safety in their hands. But we don’t think twice about it, not if the stranger’s a cabbie.” She looks up, her eyes bright. “Is that trust? Or do we just forget to fear the people we don’t see?”
His fists clench; the CT scan crinkles in his hand. “Who are you?”
“I think people have always underestimated you, Mr. Hope. Your family, your employers, your ex-wife. I think you have something to prove.” She takes another photo from the file folder; it’s a picture of his children, laughing at the camera. The woman smiles, and looks a little like a child herself. “You must miss them.”
He snaps the photo from her hand. “If you’re threatening my children-”
She sits back, genuine hurt in her eyes. “I would never.” She pauses. “Well, I would, but usually I send someone else when there’s threatening to be done. It’s important to delegate these things.” She lifts her shoulders in a sweet little shrug. “And for some reason, people just don’t find me very frightening.”
His hand twitches toward the false gun beneath his seat. “Who do you work for?”
“Oh, I’m self-employed. Family business. You might not have heard of us; we rarely advertise.” She closes the file folder and lowers it to her lap. Taps her fingers against her knees. “Do you like puzzles, Mr. Hope?”
He looks at the woman again, looks properly (upturned nose, small mouth, and eyes like the edge of a knife, carefully honed) and this time he sees. A slow grin twists across his face. “I’ve always enjoyed a good mystery, Ms. Moriarty.”
“Excellent,” says the most dangerous criminal in London, her smile sweet as sunshine. “How would you like to be one?”
18
Molly moves to London for university. Jim follows her.
Their first flat is an airless one-room in Whitechapel with a mildewed bath the size of a cupboard and a temperamental furnace. The once white walls are aged grey with old smoke, and their small fridge moans in the night, rattling its chains like the ghost of a man long-damned.
They’ve never been so happy.
In the evenings Molly takes her books with her to bed, curls into a tight cocoon of blankets and spare towels and studies by the light of a torch, sheltered from the worst of the unforgiving winter chill. At night the windows grow pale with frost, and she slips into sleep without noticing, dreaming of open textbooks and unsolvable equations and page after page of cramped, shakily written notes.
It’s near dawn when the bed dips under his weight. “Budge up,” Jim says, and she hears her microbio text hit the floor with a thick thud. “You’re hogging the bed.”
“’s my bed,” she mutters, her lips numb with cold and sleep. She pries one arm free from her cocoon and points to the other side of the room. “Yours is there. Go.”
“Too cold,” he says, his fingers at her back, unwinding blankets and spare towels and exposing her to the air, piece by piece. Then he curls around her, chest against her shoulder blades, knees tucked behind hers, and he’s so cold that she shrieks a little, into her pillow. “Oh, baby,” he purrs, and makes a silly, pseudo-sexy snuffling sound into her hair. “You’re on fire.”
She jabs an elbow back into his ribs, and he grunts. “You smell like a sewer,” she says. “Where’ve you been?”
“In the sewers.” He wriggles against her, struggling out of his jumper and his damp-hemmed trousers. She hears them hit the floor on the other side of the bed, and the smell recedes. “You’d be proud of me, Mol. I’m making so many new friends.”
Molly sighs; Jim’s definition of friend has always been flexible. She pulls the blankets over their heads, shutting out the chill and the faint dawn light from the windows, and tugs at his arm until it curves around her waist, heavy and solid as ice. His breath is hot against her neck; the rest of him burns with cold, and she shudders as he shakes, his fingers trembling in hers.
Slowly, he warms against her. The sun rises, and the room grows bright.
“Jim,” she murmurs, the rough weave of a blanket across her lips, “I have a class at ten.”
He kisses her ear, sleepily. “Very studious of you.”
“If you turn off my alarm-”
“I won’t,” he says, and slides his hand under her shirt, spreading his fingers wide across her stomach. “Not unless you ask me to.”
His palm is warm and dry, and she leans into the pressure. Smiles. “You think you can convince me to stay in bed all day and be your hot water bottle.”
“I don’t need to convince you,” he says. “My appeal speaks for itself.”
She rolls into him, onto her other side, and his hand slips to the curve of her back. She faces him across the sleep-warm pillow, sees the shadows like bruises under his eyes and the bloodless press of his lips. He wasn’t lying about the sewers; the smell is recent but not overpowering, sewage diluted with water diluted with - she sniffs - fresh soil, probably from landscaping, most likely in a public park. He fell in the dirt, smeared some on the back of his neck with his fingers, just after taking a punch - no, a shove, his knuckles are intact and Jim never misses an opportunity to hit back. Someone pushing him away, then. Someone trying to escape.
He gives her wide, delighted grin. “Reading my mind, little mouse?”
“Oh, fuck off.” She tucks her head beneath his chin and sighs. “Just this once,” she says. “I’ll stay home just this once.”
He swallows, and she watches the slow movement of his throat. His hand settles delicately on the angle of her shoulder blade, almost hesitant, easing her close. She lets her mouth brush the skin over his pulse, and his grip tightens. “I knew you would,” he says, softly. “I knew it.”
Molly listens as his breathing slows, gentling into unconsciousness. She watches his face, unnerved by his stillness. By the illusion of innocence that comes with sleep.
At half ten she slips out of bed to put the kettle on, crossing the arctic floorboards in a series of little, half-wincing hops. The fridge moans, and she gives it a sympathetic pat before opening the door and reaching for the milk.
Empty, of course.
She slips on socks and shoes, a clean jumper from Jim’s laundry and his heaviest coat. She leaves a note on his pillow that says, Went for milk. Back soon, and places a nailbrush and a small bottle of disinfectant on the bedside table, just in his line of sight. He’d scrubbed his hands clean, but left traces of the woman’s blood caked black under his fingernails; he’ll need the brush to get it all.
She thinks of it as an invitation, sometimes, or a dare. Look at me, he says with every clumsily hidden cruelty. Look at what I’ve done.
Don’t you think you could do better?
19
Her second winter at university, Molly goes back to Brighton for Christmas hols. Jim does not.
“I really don’t understand your brother,” Gran says, tapping her finger critically against the glass door of the oven. The roasting turkey glows golden in the light, and she frowns. “Imagine, being away from your only family at Christmas. Where did you say he was?”
“The last postcard was from Chongqing,” Molly says from the dining room.
Her grandmother leans through the open kitchen door, her eyebrows raised.
Molly sighs. “He’s in China, Gran. He’s travelling. Finding himself.” She sets the plates on the pristine white tablecloth with rather more force than necessary. “He’ll come home when he’s ready.”
First Dublin, then New York and Chicago, Moscow and Hong Kong. He’d bought the most recent postcard at the gift shop at the Chongqing Zoo: a photograph of two pandas curled around each other in the branches of a tree. They were either deep in the throes of genuine panda affection or viciously trying to shove one another to the ground; it was difficult to say which.
Molly Mouse, my love, the other side of the postcard had read in his long, looped handwriting, how I miss your darling face. I am meeting lots of interesting people and learning loads, and as promised am on my very best behaviour - you wouldn’t recognise me, Mol, I’ve been such an angel. I’m almost as good as you.
And then he’d signed it as he’d signed every postcard for the last four months: You should have come with me. Yours always, JM.
“It must be very difficult for you,” Gran says later, during dessert. “Being without him.”
Molly frowns into her coffee. Before Jim’s little jaunt around the world, the longest time they’d spent apart was a five-day school trip she’d taken to Glasgow when they were fourteen. They’d endured that separation with little fuss, though they’d spent the evening of her return shut away in her room, sitting side by side on her bed with their backs against the headboard, each simply breathing in the other’s silence.
Never again, Jim had finally said, just before the moon rose over the houses beyond, and she’d silently agreed.
It isn’t quite like losing an arm or a leg, she thinks - nothing so dramatic. Her heart beats as usual (sixty times per minute, give or take), and she sleeps and eats and studies as she always has. Her concentration hasn’t suffered, nor has her mood. She is herself, as always, only now she is alone.
It’s bearable, but only just.
“I’ve been all right,” Molly says. She takes a bite of her dessert, then gives her fork a meditative lick. “Though I have to do all the washing up myself, now, and he’s a much better cook than I am.”
Her grandmother fixes her with an unusually shrewd look. “Molly, my dear, do you think me simple?”
Molly blinks. “Of course not, Gran.”
“Then please don’t speak to me as if you do.” Gran drops her neatly folded napkin beside her plate and pushes back her chair. “I have another gift for you. Wait here.” She leaves the dining room, Molly staring after her in mute confusion. She returns a minute later and sets a small package wrapped in tastefully subdued red and green paper beside Molly’s plate.
Molly frowns at it. “Gran, I-”
“Open it,” Gran says, and Molly does, slides her finger into a crease in the sharp folded paper and eases it free with a clean, unnecessary precision. Inside the paper is a white cardboard box, and inside the box is a framed photograph of her mother.
She was young when the portrait was taken, no more than nineteen, and though her hair was long and straight and sand-brown, it is Jim’s face Molly sees in her mother’s delicate profile, not her own. The woman in the photo has Jim’s nose and Jim’s mouth, his narrow chin and laughing dark eyes. Her pose is formal, her pale hands folded in her lap; Molly remembers the stiff height of her posture. The cool refinement in her smile.
“This was taken just before she left for university,” Gran says, quietly. She touches the edge of the simple frame. “You and James were born little more than a year later.”
“I didn’t know she was so young,” Molly says, her eyes still fixed on her mother’s face. “I didn’t even know she went to university.”
Gran’s hand flinches away from the frame. “Of course she did,” she says, her voice stiff. “She was brilliant. Very near genius level intelligence, I’d imagine, though I never had her tested.”
“Oh,” Molly says. “I didn’t--”
“Obviously not.” Her grandmother looks away, her fingers clenched in her lap. “Your father was one of her professors. He told me once that she’d taught him nearly as much as he’d taught her.” The corners of her mouth lift in a brief, humourless smile. “I suppose he thought I’d find that charming.”
Molly’s thumb brushes the glass over her mother’s high forehead. “I don’t look much like her, do I?”
Gran hesitates. “She was quiet, like you. Not shy, but - reserved. Watchful.” Her lips purse. “She was an odd girl. Some found her intelligence...unsettling.”
“My father didn’t.”
“No,” her grandmother says. “I don’t think he did.” She looks down at her lap, and the muscles of her jaw tense briefly. “I worry about you, Molly. I worry about your brother.”
“Please don’t, Gran,” Molly says, and leans close to kiss her cheek. She smells soft, like face powder and dessert wine. “Jim and I, we’ll always take care of each other.”
“Yes, I know,” Gran says, and passes an aged hand over her eyes.
Molly looks again at her mother’s face. At Jim’s eyes and the curve of his chin. “Thank you for the gift,” she says, and sets the photo carefully back into its box.
20
Cadavers are wonderful.
She’s careful to keep her fascination (her delight) from her fellow students, to pretend that the sight of the still body on the table makes her stomach churn. This is a normal reaction, one of three socially acceptable responses she’s observed and learnt to duplicate, but she needn’t have bothered; no one is watching her. People so rarely do.
Today’s body is a man - fifty-seven years old, Caucasian, myocardial infarction. Molly can read the story of his life in the corded muscles of his arms, the late middle age deposits of fat around his waist and thighs and the slightly swollen joints of his knuckles. His stiff, death-grey face is kind, round at the chin and cheeks, and she finds it almost impossible not to smile at him. He’s lovely.
Jim understands so much about her, more than anyone else ever will, but he cannot understand this. Jim thinks people are small, futile things, tin wind-up toys built either to irritate or entertain; he does not see the beauty of their architecture, the stunning complexities in a deceptively simple system. Life requires such delicate balances of blood and breath, acid and bile, tissue and bone, and she has always seen something beautiful in its ceasing. Death is the airless silence at the end of a symphony, an absence that preserves all that came before. It holds the answer to every question she’s ever asked.
“I hear if you puke on the corpse, it’s an automatic fail,” the girl next to her whispers, a cruel lift to the edges of her smile. Molly gulps, loud enough for the whole class to hear, and the room echoes with nervous laughter. The girl smirks, and Molly pictures her on a steel autopsy table, naked and grey beneath her knife.
One body at a time, Molly thinks, and makes the first, neat incision in the dead man’s chest.
21
Their father dies in gaol on the 4th of March, 1997. They leave London the next morning, two changes of clothing, two toothbrushes, and a hairbrush packed together in a single worn leather suitcase. Jim carries it in his left hand; his right lingers at her elbow.
“You’ll be the Professor’s girl,” says the prison guard at Arbour Hill, leaning forward across his desk until his long nose nearly touches the glass. “You’re his very image, just as he said. Mary, isn’t it?”
She swallows. “I go by Molly, usually.”
“’Course you do. Lovely name.” He turns to Jim, arching an eyebrow. “You her young man, then?”
“I am,” Jim says, before she can disagree. His grip on her arm tightens. “I’m hers, as long as she’ll have me.”
“Good lad.” The guard’s smile fades. “You’ll be here to collect the remains, I suppose.” She nods, and he reaches for a stack of forms, shaking his head. “So sorry for your loss, dear. He was a clever man, your father. Very well liked. Very civilised.”
“Thank you,” she says, and signs and initials the forms in the proper places. Jim stands close, his shoulder against hers. “He never told us he was ill. If he had-”
“You would’ve visited, yeah?” The guard stamps the word RELEASED at the top of each form in red ink. “That’s why he didn’t tell you. Last thing the Professor wanted was for his girl to see him in this place; he made that very clear.” He bends down below the desk, then reappears with a small, square cardboard box, its edges sealed with silver tape. The white label on the top says simply Arbour Hill #5839. “Here he is,” the guard says. “Ready for transport.”
Molly takes the box. Feels its weight shift in her hands. “Thank you,” she says again. “You’ve been very kind.”
“Not at all, dear, not at all,” the guard says, and turns back to his crossword.
21
It takes her less than a minute to pick the lock on the kitchen door of their childhood home.
The current owner is on holiday (forgotten scraps of food mouldering on the sideboard, a week’s worth of post piled beneath the letterbox) and the house is quiet, blue-dark in the fading evening light. Jim follows her inside, their old suitcase in one hand and the box of ashes in the other. They move through the house like ghosts.
She marks the changes silently, knowing that he does the same. The kitchen floor’s been replaced, of course, but years ago - it’s stained and chipped, cheap tile worn down by a decade of use. The cabinets have been repainted (a sickly avocado green, to hide the blood) but the other changes are little more than the simple signs of age and ill repair. Her hiding place under the stairs is the same, choked with cobwebs, and the loose floorboard in the front hall creaks at a familiar pitch when Jim stands on it, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes.
“I wonder,” he says, “if they ever found the bodies buried in the cellar.”
She slides her hand along the banister, feeling its forgotten grooves under her fingertips. She sees him step toward the light switch, and her grip tightens. “Don’t. The neighbors will see.”
He turns to her, his face half-shadowed in the light from the slender windows. “It’ll be dark soon, Mol,” he says. “What do you suggest we do instead?”
Their mother kept candle stubs and a spare book of matches in the hall cabinet; she reaches for them on instinct, and finds they’re still there, slick with dust. She lights one candle and shoves the others into Jim’s coat pockets. The flame burns high, casting tall shadows; she shields it with her hand. “Let’s find a place to sleep,” she says, and together they climb the narrow staircase.
There are no children in this house. Their old rooms have been turned to storage, piled high with boxes and the misshapen silhouettes of broken furniture. Her fingers linger on the linen cupboard door as they pass, the corridor close around them and shuddering with candlelight. At its end they reach the master bedroom, a large, low-ceilinged room with shuttered windows, an unfamiliar armoire, and the dark wood bed their parents shared for more than a decade.
Jim toes off his shoes and sets their case down on the threadbare rug. “Sleep or food?”
Molly sits on the edge of the bed and slowly removes her boots, her fingers stiff with exhaustion and damp. “Food, I think. If you’re hungry.”
He takes another white wax candle stub from his coat pocket, bends close and lights it with hers. “I’ll see if there’s anything salvageable in the pantry. He seems like a stale cracker and tinned soup man to me.”
She slides back against the headboard of the bed and sets her candle on the nightstand, balanced in a frosted glass ashtray. “Kippers on toast, more like.”
“We’ll see.” He pauses in the doorway, as if he’s about to say more. The candle flame shudders under his breath, and he pins her with a steady, studying gaze, his eyes sharp with something like concern.
“I’m fine,” she says, biting back her sudden irritation. “Go. Bring back food.”
“Bossy,” he says, and fades into the liquid dark of the corridor.
She watches the box of ashes, the small square shadow of cardboard and tape at the end of the bed. My father fits in that box, she thinks, inanely. He must have lost weight.
Jim comes back ten minutes later with a green apple, a box of crackers, and a crumbling block of good cheddar. “You were right about the kippers. Luckily our neighbors have cheap locks and commendable taste in cheeses.” He jumps onto the bed and sets the food between them. “Behold the feast.”
“Drinks?”
He pulls a bottle of beer from his coat pocket and offers it to her with a flourish. “House specialty.”
She gives him a thin smile. “Such a good provider.”
“Well, I’m a family man. It’s how I was raised.” He strips off his rain-damp coat and muddy socks, lets them fall to the floor with a wet slap. He crawls across the bed and sits beside her, his back against the headboard, his toes bare and pale against the blankets. Their shoulders touch. “Darling Molly.”
“Darling Jim.” She holds out her hand. “Knife.”
He pulls the flick knife from his trouser pocket and drops it into her open palm. “Careful,” he says, winking. “It’s sharp.”
She opens the beer, takes a long drink, and presses it to his waiting hand. She slices the apple in half, then into quarters. They eat in silence, passing the beer between them. The candlelight flickers.
“It was a bit odd,” she says, brushing the crumbs from her lap. “That guard knowing everything about me and nothing about you.”
Jim has a sliver of apple skin trapped between his teeth; she watches as he worries at it with his tongue. “Odd that our father would avoid mentioning me to the police? Or odd that he’d talk about us at all?”
She closes his knife and slides it into her own pocket. “He knew, then. About your interests.”
“And yours.” His gaze settles on the cardboard box at the end of the bed, his eyes dark. “I saw him before I went to New York two years ago. I applied for the visit with a false name, so he wouldn’t refuse to see me.”
She’d thought of that. She just hadn’t tried it. “What did he say?”
“He asked about you.” He finishes the beer and gives her the empty bottle, licking his lips. “I told him about Barts. He was pleased.”
She turns away. Sets the bottle down beside the ashtray, a clink of glass against glass. “He was disappointed.”
“You’re wrong,” he says, and his voice has a whip-sharp sting to it, an edge of unfocussed anger that makes her shoulders hunch and her throat ache. “Maybe he thought you could do more, Mol, that you were made for better, but he never-”
She slides clumsily off the bed, knocking her knee against the nightstand. She almost falls, but Jim’s sudden grip on her waist steadies her, restores her balance. She smacks his hands away.
“Molly-”
“I’m going to use the loo. If a few minutes separation is too much for you to bear, you’re welcome to stand outside the door and listen while I piss.” She snatches the candle from the table and walks out of the room, down the corridor. Melted wax spills hot over her fingers, and she slams the bathroom door behind her, hissing in pain.
“Shit,” she whispers, bending over the sink and turning on the cold tap. She hears Jim’s footsteps outside the door; she kicks out and slams her bare foot hard against the wood, startling him away. “Leave me alone.”
“You said I could listen.”
Her reflection in the wide antique mirror above the sink is distorted, silvered and pale. She clenches and unclenches her fist beneath the stream of water, feeling the cold in the joints of her fingers, the fine hairs beyond her wrist. She shuts off the tap. “I’m not going to leave school.”
“I didn’t say you should.” The closed door creaks; she hears him lean against the wood, his shoulder to the frame, his head bent toward hers. “I could do this without you, Molly. I just don’t want to.”
Her reflection in the mirror is blank, expressionless. She closes her eyes, and the shape of her face follows her into the darkness, the curves of skin over bone and the shadows of her eyes. Her face, and her father’s. “Do what?” she asks.
There’s silence from the other side, then the soft rustle of paper. Jim crouches low and slips a creased brown paper bag under the door.
The creases are deep, worn stiff and frayed with time; water damage and the lingering specks of lint tell her that he keeps it in his pocket, folded tight. Her thumb brushes a long-dried smudge of ink, and she reads the blurred remnants of her own childishly precise handwriting.
Moriarty, it says. Moriarty, Moriarty, Moriarty.
Molly looks up and sees her reflection - sees her face, and the slow twist of her father’s smile.
++
chapter three
Characters: Molly Hooper, Jim Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes, others. Multiple pairings.
Rating: Adult.
Warnings: Language, disturbing themes.
Spoilers: All three aired episodes of the BBC's Sherlock and bits and pieces of the original stories.
Betas: tricksterquinn, earlgreytea68, and eponymous_rose rock my world. They don't like to brag, but they're pretty awesome.
Summary: "You’re not the only one to enjoy a good murder. There’s others out there just like you - except you’re just a man. And they’re so much more than that." Jefferson Hope, A Study in Pink
chapter one
++
He’s halfway through his roast beef sandwich when the back passenger side door of his taxi opens, and a young woman slips inside.
The rain’s darkened her hair, plastered it smooth to her pale forehead and the back of her neck. She’s been caught out in the sudden storm without an umbrella or coat, and her rather unflattering checkered wool jumper is soaked through and beginning to smell. Her delicate features (upturned nose, small mouth) are neither plain nor pretty, but occupy an unlikely, indeterminate space between; she’s educated, employed (in medicine, probably - his cab stinks of hospital disinfectant, now, and it makes him want to gag) and socially awkward. She owns at least one cat.
Jefferson Hope sees all this in his rear view mirror, in the time it takes her to close the taxi door. She bores him already.
“Sorry, darling,” he says, and uses a napkin to wipe the mustard from his chin. “I’m engaged at present.”
The woman pushes a strand of wet hair from her eyes. “Oh,” she says with an anxious, apologetic twitch of her fingers. “I didn’t realise.”
“It’s all right. You can sit for a moment, if you like. Dry off a bit.”
She smiles, and it tips the scale toward pretty. “Thank you, Mr. Hope. I promise I won’t be long.”
He turns at that, shifting in his seat just in time to see her pull a dry manila folder from beneath the bulk of her jumper. She opens it, and he sees the words Hope, Jefferson H., cerebral aneurysm written on the front in small, neat handwriting.
“You shouldn’t have that,” Hope says, and it’s as if he’s suddenly awake for the first time in months. The world sharpens, and he grins. “I’m fairly sure that sort of thing is confidential.”
“I’m fairly sure you’re right,” the woman says. She takes a photo from the folder and passes it to him; it’s a date-stamped CT scan from his final visit to the hospital. He stares at the aneurysm, at the small shadow it casts across his mind, and the woman leans forward, her elbows resting on her knees. “Do you think, Mr. Hope, that people underestimate you because you drive a taxi for a living?”
He meets her eyes and sees the stillness there. The patience. Rain rings against the taxi roof. “The thought’s occurred to me.”
She looks down at the file folder, and her wet hair slides over her shoulder. “It’s an incredible act of trust, isn’t it? Getting in a car with a stranger. Putting your safety in their hands. But we don’t think twice about it, not if the stranger’s a cabbie.” She looks up, her eyes bright. “Is that trust? Or do we just forget to fear the people we don’t see?”
His fists clench; the CT scan crinkles in his hand. “Who are you?”
“I think people have always underestimated you, Mr. Hope. Your family, your employers, your ex-wife. I think you have something to prove.” She takes another photo from the file folder; it’s a picture of his children, laughing at the camera. The woman smiles, and looks a little like a child herself. “You must miss them.”
He snaps the photo from her hand. “If you’re threatening my children-”
She sits back, genuine hurt in her eyes. “I would never.” She pauses. “Well, I would, but usually I send someone else when there’s threatening to be done. It’s important to delegate these things.” She lifts her shoulders in a sweet little shrug. “And for some reason, people just don’t find me very frightening.”
His hand twitches toward the false gun beneath his seat. “Who do you work for?”
“Oh, I’m self-employed. Family business. You might not have heard of us; we rarely advertise.” She closes the file folder and lowers it to her lap. Taps her fingers against her knees. “Do you like puzzles, Mr. Hope?”
He looks at the woman again, looks properly (upturned nose, small mouth, and eyes like the edge of a knife, carefully honed) and this time he sees. A slow grin twists across his face. “I’ve always enjoyed a good mystery, Ms. Moriarty.”
“Excellent,” says the most dangerous criminal in London, her smile sweet as sunshine. “How would you like to be one?”
18
Molly moves to London for university. Jim follows her.
Their first flat is an airless one-room in Whitechapel with a mildewed bath the size of a cupboard and a temperamental furnace. The once white walls are aged grey with old smoke, and their small fridge moans in the night, rattling its chains like the ghost of a man long-damned.
They’ve never been so happy.
In the evenings Molly takes her books with her to bed, curls into a tight cocoon of blankets and spare towels and studies by the light of a torch, sheltered from the worst of the unforgiving winter chill. At night the windows grow pale with frost, and she slips into sleep without noticing, dreaming of open textbooks and unsolvable equations and page after page of cramped, shakily written notes.
It’s near dawn when the bed dips under his weight. “Budge up,” Jim says, and she hears her microbio text hit the floor with a thick thud. “You’re hogging the bed.”
“’s my bed,” she mutters, her lips numb with cold and sleep. She pries one arm free from her cocoon and points to the other side of the room. “Yours is there. Go.”
“Too cold,” he says, his fingers at her back, unwinding blankets and spare towels and exposing her to the air, piece by piece. Then he curls around her, chest against her shoulder blades, knees tucked behind hers, and he’s so cold that she shrieks a little, into her pillow. “Oh, baby,” he purrs, and makes a silly, pseudo-sexy snuffling sound into her hair. “You’re on fire.”
She jabs an elbow back into his ribs, and he grunts. “You smell like a sewer,” she says. “Where’ve you been?”
“In the sewers.” He wriggles against her, struggling out of his jumper and his damp-hemmed trousers. She hears them hit the floor on the other side of the bed, and the smell recedes. “You’d be proud of me, Mol. I’m making so many new friends.”
Molly sighs; Jim’s definition of friend has always been flexible. She pulls the blankets over their heads, shutting out the chill and the faint dawn light from the windows, and tugs at his arm until it curves around her waist, heavy and solid as ice. His breath is hot against her neck; the rest of him burns with cold, and she shudders as he shakes, his fingers trembling in hers.
Slowly, he warms against her. The sun rises, and the room grows bright.
“Jim,” she murmurs, the rough weave of a blanket across her lips, “I have a class at ten.”
He kisses her ear, sleepily. “Very studious of you.”
“If you turn off my alarm-”
“I won’t,” he says, and slides his hand under her shirt, spreading his fingers wide across her stomach. “Not unless you ask me to.”
His palm is warm and dry, and she leans into the pressure. Smiles. “You think you can convince me to stay in bed all day and be your hot water bottle.”
“I don’t need to convince you,” he says. “My appeal speaks for itself.”
She rolls into him, onto her other side, and his hand slips to the curve of her back. She faces him across the sleep-warm pillow, sees the shadows like bruises under his eyes and the bloodless press of his lips. He wasn’t lying about the sewers; the smell is recent but not overpowering, sewage diluted with water diluted with - she sniffs - fresh soil, probably from landscaping, most likely in a public park. He fell in the dirt, smeared some on the back of his neck with his fingers, just after taking a punch - no, a shove, his knuckles are intact and Jim never misses an opportunity to hit back. Someone pushing him away, then. Someone trying to escape.
He gives her wide, delighted grin. “Reading my mind, little mouse?”
“Oh, fuck off.” She tucks her head beneath his chin and sighs. “Just this once,” she says. “I’ll stay home just this once.”
He swallows, and she watches the slow movement of his throat. His hand settles delicately on the angle of her shoulder blade, almost hesitant, easing her close. She lets her mouth brush the skin over his pulse, and his grip tightens. “I knew you would,” he says, softly. “I knew it.”
Molly listens as his breathing slows, gentling into unconsciousness. She watches his face, unnerved by his stillness. By the illusion of innocence that comes with sleep.
At half ten she slips out of bed to put the kettle on, crossing the arctic floorboards in a series of little, half-wincing hops. The fridge moans, and she gives it a sympathetic pat before opening the door and reaching for the milk.
Empty, of course.
She slips on socks and shoes, a clean jumper from Jim’s laundry and his heaviest coat. She leaves a note on his pillow that says, Went for milk. Back soon, and places a nailbrush and a small bottle of disinfectant on the bedside table, just in his line of sight. He’d scrubbed his hands clean, but left traces of the woman’s blood caked black under his fingernails; he’ll need the brush to get it all.
She thinks of it as an invitation, sometimes, or a dare. Look at me, he says with every clumsily hidden cruelty. Look at what I’ve done.
Don’t you think you could do better?
19
Her second winter at university, Molly goes back to Brighton for Christmas hols. Jim does not.
“I really don’t understand your brother,” Gran says, tapping her finger critically against the glass door of the oven. The roasting turkey glows golden in the light, and she frowns. “Imagine, being away from your only family at Christmas. Where did you say he was?”
“The last postcard was from Chongqing,” Molly says from the dining room.
Her grandmother leans through the open kitchen door, her eyebrows raised.
Molly sighs. “He’s in China, Gran. He’s travelling. Finding himself.” She sets the plates on the pristine white tablecloth with rather more force than necessary. “He’ll come home when he’s ready.”
First Dublin, then New York and Chicago, Moscow and Hong Kong. He’d bought the most recent postcard at the gift shop at the Chongqing Zoo: a photograph of two pandas curled around each other in the branches of a tree. They were either deep in the throes of genuine panda affection or viciously trying to shove one another to the ground; it was difficult to say which.
Molly Mouse, my love, the other side of the postcard had read in his long, looped handwriting, how I miss your darling face. I am meeting lots of interesting people and learning loads, and as promised am on my very best behaviour - you wouldn’t recognise me, Mol, I’ve been such an angel. I’m almost as good as you.
And then he’d signed it as he’d signed every postcard for the last four months: You should have come with me. Yours always, JM.
“It must be very difficult for you,” Gran says later, during dessert. “Being without him.”
Molly frowns into her coffee. Before Jim’s little jaunt around the world, the longest time they’d spent apart was a five-day school trip she’d taken to Glasgow when they were fourteen. They’d endured that separation with little fuss, though they’d spent the evening of her return shut away in her room, sitting side by side on her bed with their backs against the headboard, each simply breathing in the other’s silence.
Never again, Jim had finally said, just before the moon rose over the houses beyond, and she’d silently agreed.
It isn’t quite like losing an arm or a leg, she thinks - nothing so dramatic. Her heart beats as usual (sixty times per minute, give or take), and she sleeps and eats and studies as she always has. Her concentration hasn’t suffered, nor has her mood. She is herself, as always, only now she is alone.
It’s bearable, but only just.
“I’ve been all right,” Molly says. She takes a bite of her dessert, then gives her fork a meditative lick. “Though I have to do all the washing up myself, now, and he’s a much better cook than I am.”
Her grandmother fixes her with an unusually shrewd look. “Molly, my dear, do you think me simple?”
Molly blinks. “Of course not, Gran.”
“Then please don’t speak to me as if you do.” Gran drops her neatly folded napkin beside her plate and pushes back her chair. “I have another gift for you. Wait here.” She leaves the dining room, Molly staring after her in mute confusion. She returns a minute later and sets a small package wrapped in tastefully subdued red and green paper beside Molly’s plate.
Molly frowns at it. “Gran, I-”
“Open it,” Gran says, and Molly does, slides her finger into a crease in the sharp folded paper and eases it free with a clean, unnecessary precision. Inside the paper is a white cardboard box, and inside the box is a framed photograph of her mother.
She was young when the portrait was taken, no more than nineteen, and though her hair was long and straight and sand-brown, it is Jim’s face Molly sees in her mother’s delicate profile, not her own. The woman in the photo has Jim’s nose and Jim’s mouth, his narrow chin and laughing dark eyes. Her pose is formal, her pale hands folded in her lap; Molly remembers the stiff height of her posture. The cool refinement in her smile.
“This was taken just before she left for university,” Gran says, quietly. She touches the edge of the simple frame. “You and James were born little more than a year later.”
“I didn’t know she was so young,” Molly says, her eyes still fixed on her mother’s face. “I didn’t even know she went to university.”
Gran’s hand flinches away from the frame. “Of course she did,” she says, her voice stiff. “She was brilliant. Very near genius level intelligence, I’d imagine, though I never had her tested.”
“Oh,” Molly says. “I didn’t--”
“Obviously not.” Her grandmother looks away, her fingers clenched in her lap. “Your father was one of her professors. He told me once that she’d taught him nearly as much as he’d taught her.” The corners of her mouth lift in a brief, humourless smile. “I suppose he thought I’d find that charming.”
Molly’s thumb brushes the glass over her mother’s high forehead. “I don’t look much like her, do I?”
Gran hesitates. “She was quiet, like you. Not shy, but - reserved. Watchful.” Her lips purse. “She was an odd girl. Some found her intelligence...unsettling.”
“My father didn’t.”
“No,” her grandmother says. “I don’t think he did.” She looks down at her lap, and the muscles of her jaw tense briefly. “I worry about you, Molly. I worry about your brother.”
“Please don’t, Gran,” Molly says, and leans close to kiss her cheek. She smells soft, like face powder and dessert wine. “Jim and I, we’ll always take care of each other.”
“Yes, I know,” Gran says, and passes an aged hand over her eyes.
Molly looks again at her mother’s face. At Jim’s eyes and the curve of his chin. “Thank you for the gift,” she says, and sets the photo carefully back into its box.
20
Cadavers are wonderful.
She’s careful to keep her fascination (her delight) from her fellow students, to pretend that the sight of the still body on the table makes her stomach churn. This is a normal reaction, one of three socially acceptable responses she’s observed and learnt to duplicate, but she needn’t have bothered; no one is watching her. People so rarely do.
Today’s body is a man - fifty-seven years old, Caucasian, myocardial infarction. Molly can read the story of his life in the corded muscles of his arms, the late middle age deposits of fat around his waist and thighs and the slightly swollen joints of his knuckles. His stiff, death-grey face is kind, round at the chin and cheeks, and she finds it almost impossible not to smile at him. He’s lovely.
Jim understands so much about her, more than anyone else ever will, but he cannot understand this. Jim thinks people are small, futile things, tin wind-up toys built either to irritate or entertain; he does not see the beauty of their architecture, the stunning complexities in a deceptively simple system. Life requires such delicate balances of blood and breath, acid and bile, tissue and bone, and she has always seen something beautiful in its ceasing. Death is the airless silence at the end of a symphony, an absence that preserves all that came before. It holds the answer to every question she’s ever asked.
“I hear if you puke on the corpse, it’s an automatic fail,” the girl next to her whispers, a cruel lift to the edges of her smile. Molly gulps, loud enough for the whole class to hear, and the room echoes with nervous laughter. The girl smirks, and Molly pictures her on a steel autopsy table, naked and grey beneath her knife.
One body at a time, Molly thinks, and makes the first, neat incision in the dead man’s chest.
21
Their father dies in gaol on the 4th of March, 1997. They leave London the next morning, two changes of clothing, two toothbrushes, and a hairbrush packed together in a single worn leather suitcase. Jim carries it in his left hand; his right lingers at her elbow.
“You’ll be the Professor’s girl,” says the prison guard at Arbour Hill, leaning forward across his desk until his long nose nearly touches the glass. “You’re his very image, just as he said. Mary, isn’t it?”
She swallows. “I go by Molly, usually.”
“’Course you do. Lovely name.” He turns to Jim, arching an eyebrow. “You her young man, then?”
“I am,” Jim says, before she can disagree. His grip on her arm tightens. “I’m hers, as long as she’ll have me.”
“Good lad.” The guard’s smile fades. “You’ll be here to collect the remains, I suppose.” She nods, and he reaches for a stack of forms, shaking his head. “So sorry for your loss, dear. He was a clever man, your father. Very well liked. Very civilised.”
“Thank you,” she says, and signs and initials the forms in the proper places. Jim stands close, his shoulder against hers. “He never told us he was ill. If he had-”
“You would’ve visited, yeah?” The guard stamps the word RELEASED at the top of each form in red ink. “That’s why he didn’t tell you. Last thing the Professor wanted was for his girl to see him in this place; he made that very clear.” He bends down below the desk, then reappears with a small, square cardboard box, its edges sealed with silver tape. The white label on the top says simply Arbour Hill #5839. “Here he is,” the guard says. “Ready for transport.”
Molly takes the box. Feels its weight shift in her hands. “Thank you,” she says again. “You’ve been very kind.”
“Not at all, dear, not at all,” the guard says, and turns back to his crossword.
21
It takes her less than a minute to pick the lock on the kitchen door of their childhood home.
The current owner is on holiday (forgotten scraps of food mouldering on the sideboard, a week’s worth of post piled beneath the letterbox) and the house is quiet, blue-dark in the fading evening light. Jim follows her inside, their old suitcase in one hand and the box of ashes in the other. They move through the house like ghosts.
She marks the changes silently, knowing that he does the same. The kitchen floor’s been replaced, of course, but years ago - it’s stained and chipped, cheap tile worn down by a decade of use. The cabinets have been repainted (a sickly avocado green, to hide the blood) but the other changes are little more than the simple signs of age and ill repair. Her hiding place under the stairs is the same, choked with cobwebs, and the loose floorboard in the front hall creaks at a familiar pitch when Jim stands on it, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes.
“I wonder,” he says, “if they ever found the bodies buried in the cellar.”
She slides her hand along the banister, feeling its forgotten grooves under her fingertips. She sees him step toward the light switch, and her grip tightens. “Don’t. The neighbors will see.”
He turns to her, his face half-shadowed in the light from the slender windows. “It’ll be dark soon, Mol,” he says. “What do you suggest we do instead?”
Their mother kept candle stubs and a spare book of matches in the hall cabinet; she reaches for them on instinct, and finds they’re still there, slick with dust. She lights one candle and shoves the others into Jim’s coat pockets. The flame burns high, casting tall shadows; she shields it with her hand. “Let’s find a place to sleep,” she says, and together they climb the narrow staircase.
There are no children in this house. Their old rooms have been turned to storage, piled high with boxes and the misshapen silhouettes of broken furniture. Her fingers linger on the linen cupboard door as they pass, the corridor close around them and shuddering with candlelight. At its end they reach the master bedroom, a large, low-ceilinged room with shuttered windows, an unfamiliar armoire, and the dark wood bed their parents shared for more than a decade.
Jim toes off his shoes and sets their case down on the threadbare rug. “Sleep or food?”
Molly sits on the edge of the bed and slowly removes her boots, her fingers stiff with exhaustion and damp. “Food, I think. If you’re hungry.”
He takes another white wax candle stub from his coat pocket, bends close and lights it with hers. “I’ll see if there’s anything salvageable in the pantry. He seems like a stale cracker and tinned soup man to me.”
She slides back against the headboard of the bed and sets her candle on the nightstand, balanced in a frosted glass ashtray. “Kippers on toast, more like.”
“We’ll see.” He pauses in the doorway, as if he’s about to say more. The candle flame shudders under his breath, and he pins her with a steady, studying gaze, his eyes sharp with something like concern.
“I’m fine,” she says, biting back her sudden irritation. “Go. Bring back food.”
“Bossy,” he says, and fades into the liquid dark of the corridor.
She watches the box of ashes, the small square shadow of cardboard and tape at the end of the bed. My father fits in that box, she thinks, inanely. He must have lost weight.
Jim comes back ten minutes later with a green apple, a box of crackers, and a crumbling block of good cheddar. “You were right about the kippers. Luckily our neighbors have cheap locks and commendable taste in cheeses.” He jumps onto the bed and sets the food between them. “Behold the feast.”
“Drinks?”
He pulls a bottle of beer from his coat pocket and offers it to her with a flourish. “House specialty.”
She gives him a thin smile. “Such a good provider.”
“Well, I’m a family man. It’s how I was raised.” He strips off his rain-damp coat and muddy socks, lets them fall to the floor with a wet slap. He crawls across the bed and sits beside her, his back against the headboard, his toes bare and pale against the blankets. Their shoulders touch. “Darling Molly.”
“Darling Jim.” She holds out her hand. “Knife.”
He pulls the flick knife from his trouser pocket and drops it into her open palm. “Careful,” he says, winking. “It’s sharp.”
She opens the beer, takes a long drink, and presses it to his waiting hand. She slices the apple in half, then into quarters. They eat in silence, passing the beer between them. The candlelight flickers.
“It was a bit odd,” she says, brushing the crumbs from her lap. “That guard knowing everything about me and nothing about you.”
Jim has a sliver of apple skin trapped between his teeth; she watches as he worries at it with his tongue. “Odd that our father would avoid mentioning me to the police? Or odd that he’d talk about us at all?”
She closes his knife and slides it into her own pocket. “He knew, then. About your interests.”
“And yours.” His gaze settles on the cardboard box at the end of the bed, his eyes dark. “I saw him before I went to New York two years ago. I applied for the visit with a false name, so he wouldn’t refuse to see me.”
She’d thought of that. She just hadn’t tried it. “What did he say?”
“He asked about you.” He finishes the beer and gives her the empty bottle, licking his lips. “I told him about Barts. He was pleased.”
She turns away. Sets the bottle down beside the ashtray, a clink of glass against glass. “He was disappointed.”
“You’re wrong,” he says, and his voice has a whip-sharp sting to it, an edge of unfocussed anger that makes her shoulders hunch and her throat ache. “Maybe he thought you could do more, Mol, that you were made for better, but he never-”
She slides clumsily off the bed, knocking her knee against the nightstand. She almost falls, but Jim’s sudden grip on her waist steadies her, restores her balance. She smacks his hands away.
“Molly-”
“I’m going to use the loo. If a few minutes separation is too much for you to bear, you’re welcome to stand outside the door and listen while I piss.” She snatches the candle from the table and walks out of the room, down the corridor. Melted wax spills hot over her fingers, and she slams the bathroom door behind her, hissing in pain.
“Shit,” she whispers, bending over the sink and turning on the cold tap. She hears Jim’s footsteps outside the door; she kicks out and slams her bare foot hard against the wood, startling him away. “Leave me alone.”
“You said I could listen.”
Her reflection in the wide antique mirror above the sink is distorted, silvered and pale. She clenches and unclenches her fist beneath the stream of water, feeling the cold in the joints of her fingers, the fine hairs beyond her wrist. She shuts off the tap. “I’m not going to leave school.”
“I didn’t say you should.” The closed door creaks; she hears him lean against the wood, his shoulder to the frame, his head bent toward hers. “I could do this without you, Molly. I just don’t want to.”
Her reflection in the mirror is blank, expressionless. She closes her eyes, and the shape of her face follows her into the darkness, the curves of skin over bone and the shadows of her eyes. Her face, and her father’s. “Do what?” she asks.
There’s silence from the other side, then the soft rustle of paper. Jim crouches low and slips a creased brown paper bag under the door.
The creases are deep, worn stiff and frayed with time; water damage and the lingering specks of lint tell her that he keeps it in his pocket, folded tight. Her thumb brushes a long-dried smudge of ink, and she reads the blurred remnants of her own childishly precise handwriting.
Moriarty, it says. Moriarty, Moriarty, Moriarty.
Molly looks up and sees her reflection - sees her face, and the slow twist of her father’s smile.
++
chapter three