Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter XXXVI - Faceless Fairytale

-Millie-

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"Her parents came to see her this morning," says Molly, adjusting the tray beneath the girl on the slab. "I did my best to...you know. Clean her up."

"Her parents were allowed in?"

"They'd hired a private investigator. He wanted to see the body for himself. The parents came with him. Nice couple," she says, wistfully.

I look down. Molly really has tried to clean her up – her skin has been wiped down, the blood removed, her body modestly covered in a white, sterile hospital gown. The details are jarring; the chipped purple nail polish on her grey fingers and toes, the scrapes on her shins, the silver scar running across her ankle. Little things. Personal touches on an otherwise generic, dead canvas.

"I couldn't do much about her head," says Molly, sadly. "That was what set the parents off."

Her face remains remarkably undamaged. The skin has drained considerably, the waxy complexion the dead wear with expressionless pride adding years to what would have been a very young, very sweet set of features; her eyes are shut, white eyelashes casting spiked shadows across her cheeks, and her lips are ever so slightly parted, purple and cracked and stained red on the inside. The neck wound is, as stab gashes go, rather neat. It is small – about the size of my thumb in its width – linear, and running cleanly from side to side, the skin lacerated without ragged edges and the internal tissue black with oxidised blood.

It is her scalp that turns my stomach.

It's red and bloody, like raw meat; the perforations have blistered with the additional friction of knotted thread, and strands of dark, curled hair have been stitched into place with delicate precision. There are areas of blonde between the brown, a patchwork of bloodied colour, and, at the nape of her neck, the hair is matted in clumps, the stitching beginning to work itself loose from the scalp bed.

I begin to wish I had not visited the morgue alone after all. I didn't think it necessary to disrupt Sherlock's early morning chemical analysis and slipped out of Baker Street unnoticed, travelling via taxi to avoid another walk through streets that should – and don't – feel safe.

In all honesty, I did not want to see another victim with Sherlock beside me: I fear the deductions, now.

"Are you alright? You've gone a bit pale, Millie."

"Fine."

"Are you sure? I can put her away if you don't-"

"I'm fine."

"Oh." Molly's cheeks darken.

A painful silence ensues.

She clears her throat. "There was another one, you know."

"Another what?"

"Body. They found her with Beatrice, but they didn't show it on television. She was a government official – a really high position, too. Missing for a year. The journalists were paid to keep quiet. They didn't want the public to think they'd lost all control." She shrugs her thin shoulders. "They both had flowers between their teeth. Her hair had been cut off. He used it for this one. She'd been frozen. It's funny – she looked a bit like you," she adds, as an afterthought.

The nausea that had been steadily rising throughout Molly's small speech reaches its peak; I grip the side of the slab, fingers bruising against the metal, and will my body not to betray me in an act of self-induced stomach purging.

I don't understand. I've done nothing to warrant this bloody vendetta. I don't know who this individual is, or how I could have come into contact with him; I could not put a name to his invisible face if I tried.