I am so, so sorry for the very, very long wait. I know it seems hypocritical to start a new story then complain that I was too busy to write, but I've been too busy to write the new story too lol.

Thanks to all those who have reviewed and put up with the wait!

Richard Brook vs. Jim Moriarty as characters, headcanons:

Jim Moriarty wears briefs, Richard Brook wears boxers.

Also, Rich and Jim have the same basic sense of humor, but while Jim uses it to gain the upperhand and mock others, Rich uses it to save face when embarrassed or hurt and also when things get too intense and he wants to lighten the mood for his own comfort. Jim wants to laugh at people, Rich wants to laugh with them.

So now, on to the story. I really hope you like this chapter!

(11:36 AM March 27, 2010. Cheap Hotel.)

A two star hotel was the most Richard Brook could afford after being fired and moving around Ireland, and then to the UK, trying unsuccessfully (and halfheartedly) to find work for almost a year now. He'd come to London first, then stayed in Cardiff for a while, and then came back to London again, ending up here.

'Here' was a little two star hotel that Rich could afford. It was in the city, near some shops, a church and a few apartment buildings.

And now, Rich and Molly were 'here'.

"Just wait in the lobby while I go in and get my things." Rich instructed, gesturing to an old armchair in front of a television with a grainy black and white moving image on its screen. The chair was right by the doubledoors and so whenever they opened, the person seated in the chair got an uncomfortable gust of wind to the back of their neck.

Molly glanced at the arrangement then turned back to Rich and shook her head.

"You saw my house, so I'll see where you've been living." She declared, "I need to assess your living conditions before I decide if you really need to move in with me."

"So I'm a charity case now?" Rich questioned, "You already agreed I could stay at your place. Can't take it back now."

They passed the front desk, walking and talking, Rich waving to the middle-aged man who was watching his own color television with his back turned to the entrance to the hotel, as they passed him.

Up three flights of stairs and down the green carpeted hall, Rich stopped in front of a wooden door marked '35'. He didn't open it.

Molly raised an eyebrow, "Go on." She motioned for him to unlock the door with a wave of her hand.

"At least let me straighten up a bit first before you come in. Please?" Rich pleaded, smiling embarrassedly at Molly, who folded her arms. He stood between her and the door.

"I had a brother, if you remember what I just told you." Molly reminded, "I know what messy rooms look like."

Rich rolled his eyes. "It's not a guy thing." He said, "And you should know that. Your dear departed dad was a neatfreak, wasn't he?"

"Yes." Molly confirmed, with a nod, "You noticed."

"He wanted the house exactly like the one in Brighton; probably had OCD so I see where you being all anal about thingscomes from." Rich explained, "So it wasn't much of a stretch. See, I'm smarter than I look. Not just a pretty face." He grinned.

"Just?" Molly repeated, "That would imply that you're a pretty face at all."

Rich's smile fell into a pout.

"Well, at least I know you're not hiring me for my looks." He shrugged, turning as he dug for the keys inside his pocket, then using them to manually unlock the hotelroom door because this two star that he could afford couldn't afford cardkeys.

The door opened to display an unmade queen-sized bed upon which a laptop sat open, stained carpeting below covered with dirty clothes and used tissues. Rich raced into the room and shut the laptop before Molly could get a look at what was on the screen.

Instead, as she entered after him, stepping over a pair of boxers, she saw a pile of homemade DVDs on the small wooden dresser next to the television that didn't come with a DVDplayer. (Rich kept them, but wasn't watching them or they would be by his laptop. The pile was the only orderly in the room, meaning Rich had not even touched them since putting them down).

"My brother was never this bad." Molly commented, examining each DVD in turn. They had no pictures on regular seethrough CD covers, only titles scrawled in sharpie. In the black of the television screen, she could see Rich's reflection. He was disposing of the tissues into the wastebasket in the adjacent bathroom.

"He only made it to eleven, though." Rich reminded, "Besides, you should like messes. I bet Sherlock is messy. The smart ones usually are. So much to think about they don't have time to clean."

"Cleaning gives me time to think." Molly countered, "It's relaxing. It's repetitive so I can focus on other things."

"Huh?" Rich asked, looking up from what he was bending down, picking up dirty clothes from the floor into a plasticbag with a restaurant logo on it. The clothes in his suitcase (open on one of those folding suitcase racks that Molly assumed nobody bothered to use) were the only things.

"Nevermind." Molly dismissed, continuing to peruse DVDs. She stopped at a particular title that interested her, "Doppel Gang Member?" She turned to show it to him quizzically.

Rich stopped picking up the clothes, stood up and laughed.

"It's not a porno about gang-rape if that's what you think." He chuckled, "It's just some dumb thing I did in university before I dropped out. Didn't realize how stupid it was, especially the name, until years later. It was about two twins. One was good, a hard-working student and all that, and the other way a druggie gang member. They had some sort of conflict. I wrote it just so I would have something to act out where I was both the hero and the villain. Yes, I know, I was little full of myself back then. Thought I would go places…"

"And now you're here." Molly completed, gesturing to the messy two star hotelroom.

"Exactly." Rich affirmed, sighing, "And I guess you probably know how that feels, too, in way. All we want is for people to see us…but nobody ever does."

"I don't need 'people'." Molly conditioned, "I just need one person. And you already know who that is by now, I hope."

Rich nodded. "I do…and since I'll probably never get another acting gig except working for you, I guess we're going to have to share that one person."

"I don't like to share." Molly warned, "It's why I stopped having a brother."

Rich tensed. He smiled, but it was an awkward, nervous smile. He returned to collecting his clothing.

It was strange, standing in the same room with a killer having a somewhat normal conversation. The calm between him and Molly Hooper, and even the rare moments of shared laughter, were always uneasy.

With Jefferson Hope it had been strange, too, but not as bad. Jeff had only killed strangers (and he had had a brain aneurism which, along with knowing he didn't have long to live, must have affected his judgment). Molly had killed family and friends.

Still, Rich couldn't help but admire Molly for the double life she had lived for so long. She was a better actor than he was.

He was learning from her.

Instead of changing her entire personality in order to hide the fact that she was a mass murderer who ran some sort of criminal network (Rich wasn't sure the details, she had told him next to nothing and Jeff knew very little other than that he wasn't the only one she was paying), she only changed a few parts of it, leaving most of who she was visible. She really did like cats, and pink, and frumpy clothes because she had no fashion sense. None of that was dependent upon whether she killed people in her spare time or not.

The only things she had changed was that she hid how rich she was, she was more friendly and polite in public, especially to Sherlock—and that she was 'dumbing herself down' for a boy, Sherlock, and everyone else.

Rich knew that Molly could probably do the same kind of deductions Sherlock could (if not naturally then from applying Sherlock's methods) and impress people the way Sherlock did, perhaps even impress Sherlock himself. The only reason Rich could think of as to why Molly hadn't done this was that she, despite all her talk of wanting Sherlock's admiration, preferred watching Sherlock safely from afar since it was what she was used to and it prevented the possibility of being rejected for who she really was…

…and also, revealing herself to Sherlock without him figuring her out first would mean that Molly was indeed smarter than him and had indeed beaten him. And there was this funny thing about women that made them want men that were better than them; that they weren't smarter than and that they couldn't beat.

(It had something to do with biology, and natural selection, and probably social conditioning, too. All topics Rich had tuned out or skipped the classes about during school.)

Right now, it seemed, that Rich was the only one that Molly could be herself to and so she was enjoying being rude and bossy towards the only person she could be.

She was smiling herself at the timid grimace-grin that Rich got on his face every time he remembered who he was talking to. He saw her for who she truly was and she saw him.

Scared andalone.

He had lost his job for the same reason he couldn't seem to find another one (and it had to have been something pretty bad, because the entertainment industry was pretty tolerant of sex and drugs) and maybe (or maybe not) that reason was also the reason he did not go to his friends, industry contacts, or even his parents for help after being fired. Instead, he was moving from hotel to hotel around the islands, aimlessly and anonymously.

Rich also only outwardly pretended to care about his physical appearance. He dressed nicely and presented as if he was put together, but behind the closed doors of his hotelroom he was messy and underneath his ironed and matching clothing, he didn't shower everyday (Molly could smell it) nor did he shave often (the growing beard and mustache looked almost a week old, and Molly remembered how he had stopping trimming or waxing—or whatever it was he used to do to—his chest and stomach hair, allowing it to grow back).

Molly decided that he was most likely suffering from a mild depression.

But depression didn't explain why he was willing to work for her when he knew what she did—what she was. However, the reason he was fired, unable to find a new job (other than working for Molly Hooper, secret criminal), and without friends or family to help him, probably did.

Molly wanted to know what it was.

She had watched as Rich finished putting all his dirty shirts and underwear from the floor and the pair of jeans draped on the back of the chair into the plastic takeout bag, which he then put into the suitcase of clean clothes before rushing into the nearby bathroom to grab his toothbrush and steal the complementary bar of soap (because the hotel was too cheap to give out free shampoo and body wash), putting them into a separate bag which he also threw into the suitcase.

He was struggling to zip it all the way up, so stuffed with unfolded clothing, and deliberate ignoring Molly when she approached him. She had put his DVDs into her oversized bag when she saw that he had forgotten them.

"I think I've got this, doc." Rich dismissed, before she could offer help, glancing back at her so she couldn't sneak up on him from behind. He grunted as he tried to keep his sweaty grip on the tiny metal zipper. The suitcase was two-thirds shut now, but the second curve was always the most difficult.

"I wasn't going to help." Molly returned, "I was going to have a look. I want to know exactly what you're bringing into my home. I won't allow drugs or weapons."

Rich dropped his hands from the zipper and turned to Molly, leaning against the suitcase and raising his arms in exaggerated innocence.

"I don't do drugs, I don't smoke—I don't even drink!" he exclaimed, "Yeah, weird coming from an Irishman, heard that before, but I don't do anything that would interfere with my work."

"Then why were you fired?" Molly questioned, "You never did explain and if you're going to work for me, I have the right to know. I can find out without you telling me, by the way. But I think it would be better for you if you were just honest and told me."

Rich shook his head.

"You actually really, really don't want to know." He disagreed, sighing, "You really don't. But by the time you find out why, it'll be too late. So that's why I'm telling you now. You don't want to know."

Molly sighed, too.

Rich was probably lying, too embarrassed to tell her why he was fired and not wanting to discuss it. But lying was acting and so he was demonstrating his abilities to her, which was good (well, good enough) because she couldn't tell for sure whether he was lying or not. The same with whether his parents owned a pub and if he was an only child.

She could look it all up, of course. It wouldn't be hard. But that would spoil the mystery, wouldn't it? And Molly had always loved a good mystery…

"Open the bag." She said.

"Oh come on!" Rich groaned, "I've just got it shut!"

"Open it." Molly repeated, folded her arms and waited.

Rich did as he was told, groaning again and rolling his eyes like a reluctantly obedient child. He unzipped the bag, and let it fall open, standing aside and gesturing towards it so that Molly could inspect the contents.

"Have a look." He allowed, "You won't find anything you don't like. Not even those dirty magazines. We all went digital years ago."

Molly rooted through the contents of the plasticbags first, and then the suitcase itself. Rich cringed as she messed up his folded clean clothes. (Molly cringed, too, also hating the look of unfolded clothing, but did it anyway to annoy Rich because his hypocrisy of letting dirty clothes be strewn across the floor annoyed her).

Finally, Molly stepped back from the suitcase. She didn't reclose or rezip it when she had.

"All clear?" Rich asked, knowing the answer.

"Yes." Molly nodded, turning to him and nodding, "Keep it that way. Please."

She already knew he would, though, because he hadn't been back to his hotelroom since they had first met and so had no time to hide any paraphernalia he was willing to leave behind after he checked out of the hotel before they had come to get his things.

Rich had to start all over shutting the suitcase. It took him a frustrating few minutes.

They returned to the lobby, stopping in front of the front desk and tapping the little bell to get the owner's attention away from the television. He turned in his swivel chair to face them.

"35?" he recalled, and then glanced down at the suitcase in Rich's hand, "You didn't schedule a checkout for today."

"Sorry." Rich apologized, shrugging. He slapped the metal roomkey onto the desk.

"There's an extra fee for that." The middle-aged man decided, "And you owe me for the two and a half weeks you've stayed. But don't try to write me another check. That didn't work too well the last time, now did it?"

"Well, it did give me an extra few days until you tried to cash it." Rich reasoned, smiling sheepishly.

The owner was not smiling. He held out a hand.

"Cash only." He demanded, "I'm not going to risk a creditcard with you."

Rich gulped.

"Um…" he unsuccessfully stalled, glancing over at Molly.

She closed her eyes, breathing in and out because he had a feeling something like this would happen as soon as Rich mentioned stopping by the hotel to grab his things before continuing back to her house. It was obvious that someone who wasn't a criminal wouldn't work for her unless they had serious money troubles.

"I'll get it." she told Rich, reaching into her striped purse for her wallet. When she had found it and brought it out, she turned to the owner, "How much?"

"Your sister?" the owner, still addressing Rich, asked. The two looked alike to him (brown eyes and the same face shape) and the man was too poor to afford a girlfriend, what with women being such golddiggers and all.

Rich opened his mouth but no lie came out to correct him and so he closed it, deferring to golden rule of improve and going along with what the owner had said.

Molly, however, broke the rule.

"His boss." She corrected and handed the middle-aged man a wad of cash worth about a thousand pounds, "You sort out the change, I'll be waiting by the telly."

(12:00 PM February 3, 2010.)

After purchasing the ground floor flat across the street from 221b Baker Street, Molly had returned home and checked her computer to find that she had received an email. Apparently, she had won the sweepstakes she had idly entered a month or so ago online and then forgotten about. Free tickets to the Connie Prince show!

The next day, after work and a short nap, Molly took a cab to the studio address on the tickets she'd printed out and stood outside in line behind eager thirty-something to sixty-something year old women who'd also won the raffle and loved the show (though most not in the same way—loving to laugh at it—that Molly loved the show).

Once the women were brought in and sat down in the rows of the audience, they were read the rules by a tired producer; no talking or standing up during the show, no texting or filming the taping with your phone or it will be confiscated, never make eyecontact with Connie (too distracting), laugh and/or clap when certain signs were held up offstage, which one of them would be getting the free makeover (it wasn't Molly), smile if one of the cameras panned in your direction, and no auctioning off the free giveaway stuff you get for coming to the show.

During the taping Molly sat by herself in an end seat, the camera never pointing in her direction. She watched the tension between Connie and her brother as they interviewed a domestic violence survivor who had written a book. It wouldn't have been funny except for that fact that Connie and Kenny undermined the entire discussion by arguing with eachother, interrupting the guest.

When the taping was over, Molly was able to slip away into a back hallway while the rest of the studio audience was herded out by security guards and Connie escaped backstage.

Kenny didn't have to escape. He sat in his chair onstage, just waiting for the crowd to disperse and the large auditorium to go dark and silent. There was no swarm of women here to watch him and try to get his autograph (not that he liked women, anyway).

In the past, Molly had always sided with the sister in any sibling rivalry conflicts she had encountered. But this time she found herself feeling sorry for the brother, Kenny. She knew how it felt to be in the shadow of a sibling and couldn't imagine how Kenny had been able to handle it all these years. (Connie had become famous while hosting a radio with her brother. The brother and sister had worked equally hard on it, but the TV studios wanted a female host for their new show, an equivalent to America's Oprah.)

Molly was just about leave the hallway and come back into the auditorium to empathize with Kenny, when she saw Raul emerge from backstage to sit next to Kenny in Connie's chair. Kenny didn't look up at him, he just continued to hold his head in his hands. Raul patted him on the back just a tad awkwardly (he had grown to care for the older man, but never would have had he not had a rich sister and he wasn't used to providing this kind of comfort for him).

"You don't have to put up with this any longer." Raul declared, "We should just leave. Go live on some island together."

"With what money?!" Kenny lamented, sitting up and throwing his air towards the spotlights in the high ceiling, "My sister gives me too small an allowance to ever run away from her! She's too lonely and she needs to keep me here as her punching bag!"

"…are you still in the will?" Raul questioned.

Kenny blinked, turning to the younger man. "Yes, as far as I know…why?" He narrowed his eyes.

"Well, you know…you're younger than her and nobody lives forever." Raul shrugged.

"She'll outlive me." Kenny sighed, "She's always been so stubborn…Face it, Raul, I'm trapped! I'm a houseboy just like you."

"Except you can't do chores." Raul reminded, matter-of-factly.

"I can do hair and make-up." Kenny countered, "I've been doing Connie's since we were little kids and my dad wanted me to play rugby. I'm the only one she trusts to do hers. Not sure why, though, I've sabotaged her more than once over a boy….Connie was always mum and dad's favorite. I was a disappointment. She was perfect. Is perfect. More successful, not gay, didn't go gray—sure she got fat but so did I. I've wanted to be her for so long. "

"I like you better than her." Raul tried, now patting Kenny's shoulder. He smiled, hoping to make his distraught sort of boyfriend feel better.

"Thanks." Kenny smiled in return, weakly.

Molly, who had watched the whole scene unnoticed from behind the doorway of the hall, clenched her fists. She was decidedly on Team Kenny now. And just like Carl, she would stop Connie.

Home again, Molly sat typing in front of her laptop. She was contacting Raul DeSantos with a convenient way to kill Connie Prince.

(12:12 PM March 27, 2010.)

Back in her old house, Molly and Rich (not allowed to drag his suitcase) thundered up the creaking wood stairs, Toby scurrying away out of the sitting room to hide under the dining room table at the noise (amplified by his sensitive feline ears). Upstairs, Molly led Rich to a bedroom door that hadn't been opened in years.

It was labeled, in Star Wars themed sticker letters, 'Carl'. (Because a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Carl and Molly had been Luke and Leia).

Molly pushed the door open to display a preteen boy's room. Superhero posters on the walls, a car pattern on his comforter and pillowcases, more comics than 'real' books on the bookshelf, legos and action figures hidden away in a bin under the bed because he was 'too old' to play with them anymore.

"This was Carl's room." Molly stated the obvious, "Or an exact replica of it, anyway. He never lived in this house, but these are all his things. My father and I had them moved here, along with everything else, from the house in Brighton."

"…okay…" Rich responded, unsure of what to say or why Molly was showing him this room.

"This is where you'll be staying." Molly smiled. It was almost sinister, and definitely cheeky.

"But this is a kid's a room!" Rich exclaimed, "A dead kid's room! I can't sleep here…it's not right! Don't you have anywhere else?" He would've thrown up his hands had they not been holding his suitcase.

"Yes, I do." Molly replied, "But I've converted my old bedroom into a study, my father's master bedroom is mine now, and the couch is where Toby sleeps. So this is where you'll stay if you want to live here with me."

"Fine." Rich grumbled, "Can I clean it out at least?"

"It's a time capsule of my dead brother's bedroom." Molly declared, "It's been preserved for over twenty years. Do you really think I'll let you change it now?"

Rich sighed.

He trudged into the room, dropping his suitcase onto the rug designed to look like a swimming pool and plopping down onto the bed. There was a thick layer of dust on everything in the room. Sitting down on the bed caused it to become a cloud in the air that made Rich sneeze. Several times. Molly never said "bless you" and so Rich didn't bother to cover his mouth and nose.

After he was done sneezing, Rich rested his elbows on his thighs and his head in the palms of his hands.

…So this was going to be his life now…?

"I'll leave you to it, then." Molly said, still standing in the doorway with her head peaked around the door, as if she was afraid to enter her long dead brother's bedroom (which he had never even slept in) because it still had cooties after all these years, "I'm going to get some sleep before work tonight. Don't disturb me. Thanks."

She removed her head from the crack in the open door, slowly shutting it behind her. When Rich heard the definite click of the latch (like have prison bars closed in front of you, locked in the cell) he knew for sure now that this was real.

(10:00 PM March 27, 2010.)

Nine hours later, Molly had emerged from the master bedroom to take a shower in the bathroom nextdoor. She could hear the television blaring downstairs as she got cleaned up and ready for work.

An hour after that, dressed in her work clothes and labcoat, she was downstairs learning that Rich had helped himself to some old cereal, eating it dry on the couch because there was no milk in the kitchen refrigerator. Rich was on one end of the couch and Toby was on the other, a cushion between them. The cat was not curled or sprawled; unrelaxed he was watching Rich with suspicion (blinking each time he took a bite of crunch cereal) as Rich watched telly, pretending not to notice him.

"No crumbs." Molly warned, as she took her coat off the rack by the front door and put it on.

Rich glanced at her, nodded, then quickly turned back to the television screen. On it, Molly could see what was unmistakably a younger version of Rich having a conversation with a younger version of Rich. It must have been that twin movie he had made.

…which she had put, along with the other DVDs, into her purse. Her purse that had been in her bedroom the entire time she was asleep!

Now the striped bag was hanging from her shoulder. It was its normal weight, which should have tipped Molly off earlier if she wasn't in a hurry to leave for her 12:00 AM shift two hours early at only 10:00 PM. She checked inside and indeed the DVDs were gone.

Hearing her fumble with her bag, Rich paused the movie with the remote in his free hand and turned back to Molly, smiling proudly.

"I'm good, aren't I?" he praised himself, "You didn't hear me come in or out. Didn't wake up, didn't even stir. And you snore, by the way."

"Don't touch my purse and don't go into my room." Molly hissed. Like a sister.

"You ever had a man in there before?" Rich teased. Like a brother.

"My father." Molly reminded. After all, it had been his room first. "Anyone else isn't your business."

"Are they still alive, any of your old boyfriends?" Rich wondered, chuckling, "Or do you bite off their heads and drink their blood when you're finished with them?"

Molly rolled her eyes.

"Whatever I do or don't do, it doesn't end up in tissues all over the floor in a cheap hotel room." She countered, folding her arms.

Rich was silent for a moment, his face getting pink, and before he could figure out a clever response, Molly had already left the house, closing and locking the door behind her.

And so Rich returned to watching his old lowbudget film, wishing he was still as skinny and as happy as his university-age self.

(1:30 AM February 12, 2010. Saint Bartholomew's. )

The Saint Bartholomew morgue always seemed colder, darker and creepier late at night and in the early mornings. The windows looking into the examination room let in no light because the hall lights had been turned off for the night hours ago to save electricity (trees (money)). It was the basement, anyway, nobody would be working down here at this hour anyway.

Except for Molly Hooper, of course.

The nightshift pathologist that nobody left the lights on for. That nobody noticed and nobody remembered.

Molly liked it this way. Being a secret, hidden in plain sight. A mystery that no one could solve because no one even knew it was one (not even Sherlock Holmes…).

The body on the table tonight was an elderly man, naked and wrinkled, a little fat. His wallet had told Molly his name, Robert Thompson. His lungs told Molly that he smoked…but that wasn't what had killed him. The strangulation marks, red and purple tattoos (post mortem bruising), around his neck did.

Or rather, someone's hands had. And by Molly's measurements, those hands had been large ones. Wide and long. A male's, by the finger proportions.

The person who had strangled the old man on the morgue table to death was an extremely tall man who, unluckily for Molly (and the investigation once she had ruled it a homicide), had been wearing gloves.

Suddenly there was a sound. Footsteps—high heels—on the linoleum of the hall outside the examination room.

Molly whirled around, surgical knife in her own gloved hand, staring through the window into the darkness. She could just barely make out the form of a woman peering right back at her.

It was not the professional woman who worked for Mycroft Holmes, as Molly had first expected it would be. Instead, this woman was older, middle-aged, with black hair and red lipstick. Well dressed in a skirt, blouse and jewelry, even this late at night.

Molly gestured for her to enter the room. The woman left the window, and came through the door into the well-lit area.

"I came as soon as I got the call." She declared, in an accent that sounded close to German but not quite, "I'm here to identify the body of my father."

She pointed to the old man cut open on the table, eyes wide open because Molly preferred making eye-contact with the dead rather than the living.

"You're his daughter?" Molly asked the woman, setting down her knife and eyeing the older woman carefully.

"Adopted." The woman specified.

"That still counts." Molly replied, "Legally and emotionally."

"No, it doesn't." the woman shook her head bitterly, "Not after what he did to me."

"…oh." Molly sighed, sadly, glancing down, "I'm so sorry."

"Don't apologize." The woman snapped, "You weren't the one who did it. He was." She scowled past Molly at the dead man. "And he got what he deserved…but I shouldn't say that, should I? Not after he's died. 'Never speak ill of the dead', they say. Besides, it might implicate me…"

"You have an accent." Molly commented, "May I ask where you were adopted from?"

"Czechoslovakia." The woman answered, then quickly corrected herself with, "It's the Czech Republic now. I was born in Prague, abandoned or orphaned, I don't know. I was brought here as a little girl, told I was being saved from Nazism and Communism and poverty…but they damned me to a new hell."

"And all these years and you've never lost your accent?" Molly asked.

"He always hated it." the woman explained, "Preferred English girls, you see. But he never could make one of his own. He blamed my adoptive mother for that. I blame her, too. She wanted a child so badly she didn't care what he did to me. She knew, I know she knew, but she pretended not to and did nothing. She wanted to keep her husband, her child and our 'perfect' family together."

Molly was silent. She didn't know what to say to this woman who obviously had no one else to talk to about her painful past and so she said nothing. Still, she felt bad for this suffering woman who was just as isolated as she was.

Molly walked around the metal table, over to the desk where she picked up the file on the dead man. Opening it, she read from the first page.

"Robert Thompson's next of kind is listed as Margaret Thompson." She said, "Is that you?"

"No." the woman responded, definitely, "I returned to using the name I was given at birth, Sofie Wenceslas. Margaret Thompson is my mother. I've been estranged from her and my father for years, so they never gave me power of attorney. But she is sick. She breaths only with oxygen tank and has gone blind due to persistent cataracts. She'll join him soon."

"I see." Molly accepted, evenly. So the wife of the dead man smoked, too.

This woman, Sofie Wenceslas, was bitter and morbid. She hated her parents and didn't bother to hide it. No doubt she had hired the man who had killed her adoptive 'father'.

Once Ms. Wenceslas had thanked Molly and left, the clicks of her heels getting fainter until they faded out, Molly ruled the death a heart attack. The bruising would fade soon enough and nobody would bother to check, anyway. No homicide, just another smoking statistic.

(February 20, 2010.)

A few weeks later, in her spare time, Molly looked Sofie Wenceslas up online (and on confidential financial and personal records she should not have had access to).

It turned out the older woman owned a small modern art gallery in the city. She dressed the part of a wealthy, educated and cultured woman but she had been born poor and soon would be poor again, as her gallery was losing money every year.

Molly decided she could use this situation.

Anonymously, she contacted Wenceslas offering to give her money in exchange for getting the hitman she had used to kill her father to work for the mysterious criminal mastermind 'M'. Wenceslas agreed.

The name the assassin had been given at birth was Oscar Dzundza. He was orphaned or abandoned, he didn't know, and met little Sofie in the orphanage they lived in together briefly. Sofie was adopted. Oscar was not. He was too large for his age, his features to extreme—he wasn't cute enough. Hideous. Just a freak. He was kicked out of the home at fifteen when he was already six feet tall. No one would educate him, no one would hire him, no one would help him and so had no choice but to turn to crime.

Now, forty years later, he was known as The Golem. The most dangerous killer in all of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.

And the most dangerous killer in all of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland had recently, finally located the only friend he had ever had when happened to see her picture on the Czech news that was praising one of their own for becoming so successful as to own a London gallery. Oscar walked all the way to Belgium, starting that day, and would have swam the channel if he knew how to swim. Instead, he hid in the bottom of a boat and found his old friend the next afternoon right where the television had said she would be.

Wenceslas promised to connect 'M' to The Golem.

…She also informed 'M' of something else that might be of interest to 'him'.

A painting she had made while studying abroad in a Prague art school during university. She had been learning about Vermeer at the time and copied his methods perfectly to create a new painting based on one he had painted of his hometown.

'M' told her she would bribe authenticators and get it sold, as long as they split the money…and Wenceslas did one other thing.

Smuggled in semtex from the Czech Republic to England.

Again, Wenceslas agreed. She asked what address 'M' wanted the explosives delivered to. 'M' gave the address for the flat across from 221b Baker Street.

(11:00 PM March 27, 2010.)

Now Molly was inside the flat across the street from 221b Baker Street which she had bought about a month or so earlier. It was empty; windows boarded up and completely unfurnished. The packages, signed for by the friendly upstairs neighbor, were left on the doorstep in plain brown cardboard boxes.

Once alone, the door locked behind them, Molly opened the first three boxes up to find fire blankets wrapped around strange shapes. She unwrapped the shapes to see what they were.

Five orange abstract sculptures.

Modern art.

In the fourth smaller cardboard box, yet unopened, Molly was surprised to find a box of expensive stationary and a case with an expensive pen inside. She decided the box must have accidentally been delivered to this address by mistake, since all of the cardboard boxes had come from the same country.

Shrugging, Molly folded the paper into a makeshift envelope and wrote the name 'Sherlock Holmes' on it with the pen.

A woman's handwriting—and not just any woman's handwriting—Molly Hooper's handwriting. Sherlock had seen it many times in lab reports, and the cute handwritten little notes she attached to the dead body parts she snuck him out of the morgue for his experiments. A clue…

…but would he notice…?

The fifth cardboard box had been shipped from Taiwan, rather than the Czech Republic. Inside it, surrounded by bubblewrap, was a pink-cased mobilephone identical to the one Jennifer Wilson, the cabbie Jefferson Hope's final 'serial suicide' victim, had owned. Molly had ordered it online (anonymously, of course) and also had it delivered to this address (anonymously, of course). She got service for it not through one of the UK companies but through an online service instead (anonymously, of course).

Molly tucked the pink phone in the makeshift envelope and shut it tight.

Then she opened the sixth, final and much heavier cardboard box. Inside was another box. A metal strongbox. Luckily, it was new and so wasn't locked. Molly pulled its little door open and then set the makeshift envelope inside. She closed the door again and didn't bother to lock it. The police would get to it first, not Sherlock, and so it would take up too much time for them to blunder around trying to decode the combination.

Finally, Molly cleaned up all the bubblewrap and cardboard, throwing it in the trash and recycling bins outside, respectively. She left pink phone inside the makeshift envelope inside the strongbox, along with one of the five orange semtex sculptures in the flat across from 221b Baker Street.

She then left with the four other semtex sculptures, draped in fire blankets and inside two of the cardboard board boxes, and got back into the taxi that was waiting (meter running, but no questions asked) outside for her.

It drove her to work.

Okay. Well. Rich and the owner of the hotel's comments about women...not my own opinions or any message I'm trying stick in the minds of readers, other than that there are people out there who think like that.

Czech adoption was actually a thing, too, after WW2, I think. According to Wikipedia many orphaned Czech kids were adopted by British families.

Can't think of anything else to say now at the moment so...

I hope you enjoyed this chapter, sorry about the wait and please review!

Thanks!