2. The Principle of Organization

Lestrade arrived just as Sherlock began to look around the stage area with the particular glare that he only got when he was concentrating very hard. He arrived through the auditorium entrance, and John heard his footsteps as he climbed onto the stage and fumbled with the curtain. John decided that Sherlock could be left unsupervised for a moment, and went to part the curtain and let Lestrade into what was now the crime scene. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of the auditorium, completely empty, with only his and Sherlock's coats still draped over their seats.

Lestrade took in the broken, blood-smeared piano and the abandoned instruments. "Christ," he said. "What happened here?"

John scrubbed his hand over his face. "If you can believe it, it was meant to be me taking Sherlock to a concert for his birthday. Except the piano lid fell down and crushed two of the players, and Sherlock thinks it was deliberate."

"Two players? At that piano?"

"It was a – a modern thing."

"John Cage," Sherlock announced, having completed his circuit of the instruments. "The pianist has an assistant who uses a metal rod on the piano strings. And it was definitely a crime."

"Right." Lestrade's jaw hardened. "Murder?"

"We don't know yet," John said. "The victims were alive when we sent them to hospital. The rest of the group is sitting in the green room, with instructions not to leave. Officially, they're waiting for word about the piano players."

Sherlock flexed his hands and began to pace, three little steps in either direction. "It doesn't matter. Murder, attempted murder, assault, whatever it was, it was deliberate. Don't you see? You have to see."

"See what?" Lestrade asked.

Sherlock whirled around and pointed at the wreckage of the piano. "That's a concert Steinway. Best-known brand of pianos in the world, lovingly cared for by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, do you really think they'd send one out on stage that wasn't in top condition? The lid support was sawn nearly through. A fine, clean cut, needed only a little pressure, say, a bump from the pianist's assistant reaching for a note."

Lestrade went over to the piano, leaned down, and peered at it, carefully avoiding touching it. After a moment, he straightened and nodded. "You're right," he said. "That's a clean cut. I'm going to call it in."

"What, bringing in the idiot brigade?" Sherlock scoffed. "I don't understand, are you actually trying to hinder me?"

"Sherlock." John put a hand on Sherlock's elbow.

"I am trying to make this investigation official enough to stand up in court!" Lestrade snapped. "All your puzzle-solving is worthless unless we can convict the bastard who did it, and I need at least Donovan and a SOCO to make that happen." He breathed in and out, and pulled out his mobile. "I'll try to have them send Ormsby, not Anderson."

Sherlock had the grace to look at least a little bit mollified. John took advantage of the moment. "They're not here yet, Sherlock," he said. "What do you think you can do before they get here? Astonish us."

Lestrade looked up from his phone. "But don't touch anything."

John pursed his lips. "So, someone sawed through that lid support. Who'd be awful enough to do something like that?"

"The stagehand," Sherlock said. "But that's not important right now."

"What? Not important? Sherlock, there's two kids in hospital fighting for their lives right now."

"And how do you know it's the stagehand?" Lestrade added. "Ten minutes."

Sherlock sighed. "Obvious. Who else would have had access to a fine saw, enough time alone with the piano to use it and to clean up the sawdust afterwards, and the skills to push a concert grand piano onto a stage and prop the lid without letting it fall until the right moment? As ever, John, you ask the least relevant questions."

John rolled his eyes. "Well, what's the important question, then?"

"Why?" Sherlock said. "Why was it done, and who was the target?"

Lestrade blinked. "Oh. Cherchez la femme."

"Crude, but not entirely inaccurate," Sherlock said. "Find the target, find the motive, and you'll find the real criminal."

"So the stagehand –"

"Basically a hit man. Unimportant."

"You don't event want to, you know, ask him who wanted him to do this?" John asked.

Sherlock shrugged. "When the paramedics extracted the musicians. You were too busy helping them – it's what you do – and you didn't see the look on the stagehand's face. He was terrified. If he'd known who asked him to do this, he'd have shouted it out then and there."

Lestrade scrawled a few lines in his notebook. "So you're saying this kid – what? Found an unsigned note in his box asking him to tamper with a piano and just went ahead and did it? As – I don't know, some kind of student prank? How stupid do you have to be to do something like that?"

Sherlock smiled. "Welcome to my world, Detective Inspector. John, go to the box office, get a list of the tickets, who was sitting where."

"You think the real criminal was in the audience?" John said.

"I don't think. I know. Go and get the list. I need to think."

"Right." John pushed the curtain aside, jumped off of the stage, and strode out through the auditorium.

"A seating chart?" the girl in the box office asked. "We don't really do that. I mean, we have a plan of the seats, so we know what's taken, and we have the list of people who've bought tickets, but there's no seating plan with names on."

John shrugged. "Then we'll just have to combine them. I can do it over on that bench, won't be any trouble. It's part of the investigation."

"Really?" The box office girl looked troubled. "Are they going to be okay, Nick and Charles?"

"Still waiting to hear."

"I didn't see it happen, but everyone was talking about it when they left. They said you could see Nick twitching, and that Charles's whole arm was chopped off."

John grimaced, and wished with his whole heart that the concert hall had been organised enough to drop the curtain the moment after the piano lid had fallen. But then, he supposed, the stagehand in charge of the curtain had been just as shocked at the results of his handiwork as everyone else. "Last I saw, Charles's arm was still attached," he said. "Let's wait and see what the doctors have to say before we go jumping to conclusions, all right?"

"All right." The girl gave him the seating chart and a list of the tickets, and John took them over to the bench to start matching names to seats.

Lestrade joined him when he was halfway finished, holding his mobile to his ear with one hand, and dragging Sherlock by the wrist with the other. "Right," he said into the phone. "Police guard on them at all times, and only hospital personnel or visitors authorised by me – oi, Sherlock, you're not escaping – and first word to come to this number and no other. Got that? Good." He ended the call and tugged Sherlock over to the bench where John was working.

"The victims are under police guard at University College Hospital," he said. "The doctors will call me when they have something to report."

"Do you have anything now?" John asked.

Lestrade shrugged. "One of them's being operated on, the other is waiting for a theatre to open up. That's all I know. How are you coming along?"

"About half done." John gestured at the seating plan, which he had begun to fill in with names. Sherlock snatched it away and peered at it.

"Close enough," he said, and turned away.

Lestrade reached out and grabbed the back of Sherlock's belt to hold him in place. "Backup's here," he explained to John. "Donovan kicked Sherlock out so she and Ormsby could work in peace."

"They're not needed," Sherlock muttered. "I almost have it." He dropped the seating chart and grasped his head in his hands. "Think, think, think. John, seat E11, what was the name?"

John glanced over the list of tickets, running his finger down the page until he found the correct entry. "Er, Susannah Probert."

"Excellent." Sherlock pulled his mobile from his pocket and began to poke at it. "Facebook, Twitter . . . this doesn't make sense."

"What doesn't?" Lestrade tugged at Sherlock's belt to reel him in.

"Susannah Probert is another piano student," Sherlock said. "Based on her social media profiles, she's friendly with both Nicholas Barker and Charles Milton, but not romantically involved with either of them, never has been. Damn."

"Disappointed?" John asked.

"No, but it would have been – wait." Sherlock's gaze turned inward for a moment, and then his eyes lit up. "Of course! Brilliant. John, you've cut to the heart of the question. I'd assumed that the target of the assault was either Nicholas Barker or Charles Milton."

"It's not?" John asked.

"Who else could it be?" Lestrade added.

Sherlock ignored their questions in favour of one of his own. "John, what are the chances that Charles Milton will lose his arm?"

John thought for a moment. "Minimal," he said. "The weight of the piano lid wasn't as much as some crush injuries, the ambulance arrived quickly, got him out inside the golden hour. Can't say how much of a future he has playing Beethoven, but he'll probably keep his arm."

"Probably. Which means there's an outside chance he won't keep it." Sherlock smiled. "That's all I need. We can go talk to the ensemble members now."

"We can?" Lestrade said. "What are they going to tell us?"

"They're going to confirm Susannah Probert's reasons for arranging the assault on her fellow students," Sherlock said. "I'll give you instructions while we walk." He twisted out of Lestrade's grasp and strode back toward the auditorium. John and Lestrade hurried to follow him.

The percussion ensemble members were chattering softly to each other in the green room, but fell silent instantly when Sherlock opened the door. Donna rose to her feet. "How are Nick and Charles?" she asked. "Have you heard anything?"

Sherlock gave John a prompting glance, and John cleared his throat. "Er, well, nothing definite yet. There is a chance that Charles could develop acute compartment syndrome, or, er, rhabdomyolysis, might require an amputation." Which, he did not add, was highly unlikely, although not technically impossible.

But the musicians didn't know that, and several of them shrieked in horror. Sherlock took advantage of their shock and bore down on them. "Do any of you know Susannah Probert?" he asked. "What would she think of all of this?"

"Susannah?" the girl who had played The Anvil Chorus said. "Oh, God, you're right. Susannah. Someone'll have to tell her."

"She'll be pleased as punch," a xylophone player said. "Though she'll never show it."

"Well, it would be her big break," Donna said.

"You think?" the xylophone player countered. "Alex was pretty firm about her."

Donna shrugged. "Well, if Charles can't play, who else does Alex have?"

"Alex?" Lestrade asked.

"Alex Ryder," Donna said. "He's the director of the percussion ensemble."

"Precisely," Sherlock said. He turned to Lestrade. "It's an auditioned group. Alex Ryder chose all of these musicians personally. Charles Milton joined in October, beating out Susannah Probert, among others, at the auditions."

"She was angry at Charles?" John asked.

Sherlock shook his head. "That was my first thought. Someone was after either Charles or Nick. One or the other, which one was it? But either way, it didn't make sense. No one could predict when the lid would fall, there'd be no guarantee how badly Nick would be hurt, or if Charles would be in a position to be injured. No, the only thing that was certain to happen was that the concert would be disrupted, the piano smashed, and at least one player bashed about. Nick and Charles weren't targets, they were incidental. Alex Ryder was the real target."

"Alex?" the Anvil Chorus girl gasped. "Who'd want to hurt Alex? And why?"

"Susannah Probert," Sherlock said. "Obviously. He chose another pianist over her at the auditions, she took it personally, tweeted about it at some length, longer than you'd expect for a run-of-the-mill disappointment. She was convinced that Alex Ryder was deliberately trying to stifle her career. She wanted to get back at him, strike him where she thought it would hurt the most. The percussion ensemble, the one he'd kept her out of, the instrument he hadn't accepted her to play for him. The musicians who actually were playing it were just a bonus at that point."

The musicians stared at Sherlock, their mouths open in horrified shock. John shut his eyes and shook his head. "Even allowing for artistic temperament, what could possibly make you think of this girl?"

"We can only hope that she's better at playing the piano than at orchestrating violent acts of revenge. She was stupid and came to the concert tonight," Sherlock said. "Sat a few seats away from us, breathless with anticipation. I thought she was simply enjoying the music, until the piano lid fell. She was the only person who wasn't startled. She'd been expecting it, knew it would happen. She just didn't know when."

Lestrade sighed. "All right. You've convinced me. I'll take Donovan and go and pick her up."

He called to a constable and assigned him to take down contact information for the rest of the percussion ensemble for statements afterward, and then shooed Sherlock and John out of the green room. "They've had a shock, they don't need you two hovering over them. Go home. I don't suppose you can get your ticket money back?"

John shook his head. "Probably not. They'd played most of the programme. Sherlock, I am so sorry. This was meant to be your birthday present."

Sherlock shrugged, and smiled. "Oh, John. Even if I didn't hear the entire concert, I solved a case. And you helped to save Nicholas Barker and Charles Milton. If they come out of this at all well, it's because of you."

"Really?"

"Of course," Sherlock said. "None of the others would have thought to call for help so fast. They might have attempted the rescue themselves and only done more damage, but you stopped them, which incidentally gave me a cleaner crime scene. Surely that's worth a few minutes of John Cage."

"When you put it that way," John said. "Come on, let's go home. I'll go out to the shops tomorrow and see if I can find you a recording of that John Cage piece to make up for it."

"Won't be as good," Sherlock said, but his eyes lit up at the prospect of the extra present anyway. John followed him into the auditorium to reclaim their coats, and then out onto the street to hail a cab to take them home.

END

Afterword: Many thanks to everyone who has enjoyed this little short. And it's out of my head now, so I'm glad of that. It strikes me that I neglected to mention Sherlock's Christmas presents. You can, in fact, buy some weird and wonderful gifts from the gift shop of the Mütter Museum – properly the College of Physicians of Philadelphia – and they do appear to ship internationally. For $35 plus shipping, you could be the proud owner of a conjoined-twins-skeleton paperweight, just like Sherlock! See you next time.