Sherlock X Reader One Shots || 𝐹𝐿𝑈𝐹𝐹 + 𝑆𝑀𝑈𝑇

"Good Morning" ((Final) Part 6)

That's how you can tell someone is guilty. They always manage to come up with more interesting theories than what actually happened. 

Any credibility she'd once held in her bony little manicured hand had evaporated, and, judging by the way her speech seems to be tumbling from her mouth in an uncontrollable flow of excuses, she knows that. It's like she's trying to keep a fire going, desperatly shovelling fuel onto it but that's stifling the flame rather than making it grow. 

Y/N had been watching the conversation as if it was some kind of word snowball fight. Sherlock and Lestrade would pat together a question, a damning statement, and hurl it at the hotel manager who'd stumble under its impact, her spindly legs threatening to give way any second. "What does he look like, this Mr Arnold?" Y/N threw her own word snowball and it hit Ms Levine squarely on the nose.

She blinked a few times. "What?"

Sherlock cocked an eyebrow, giving Y/N a proud smirk. "That's a good question, Y/N." Confronting Levine, now: "What does he look like?"

Ms Levine gave a stuttering, childish attempt at a description, so poor that Sherlock felt it was almost sad to see a woman usually so articulate and phlegmatic reduced to...well, this. So he put her out of her misery:

"It doesn't really matter because he doesn't exist."

"What?" That had been Greg, watching Sherlock as if he was some kind of magician who'd just performed a rather impressive magic trick (although Sherlock's hands were actually resting nonchalantly in his spacious coat pockets).

"The new head of security, the so-called Mr Arnold, Levine hired to replace the one that left---and I can't stress this enough---when the robberies started doesn't exist. She fired the old security guy and replaced him with a fictional one. I spent an hour in that surveillance room and couldn't find a single trace that any human had spent more than five minutes in it during the past few weeks, let alone sat every day keeping the hotel under watchful eyes. The chair's lumbar support was even adjusted to be more suitable for a woman's stature; almost as if a woman had been using the computers that house the security footage. Unless Mr Arnold is just be very short man; over five inches below average height. He must be about..." A smile curled his lips which would have made even Greg's heart flop over if he was currently in Ms Levine's shoes. "Well, your exact height, Ms Levine."

Somehow, despite her career and life as she knows it hanging by a thread, Levine managed to harden her features into an enraged glower. "I'll have you know, Mr Arnold is just a very tidy man. And as for the chair, that isn't proof. It came like that when we bought it, maybe he just doesn't know how to change it."

The level of disbelief in Sherlock's voice when he metaphorically knocked Levine off her high horse was unfathomable: "You expect us to believe you hired a man who isn't intelligent enough to work a desk chair, to protect your entire five-star hotel? And I doubt any man is so clean he doesn't leave fingerprints, hair samples, or even litter in the bin. Or is he fingerless, hairless, and desperately thin from not eating a morsel during his ten-hour shifts?"

This got no reaction apart from a hoity-toity folding of her tooth-pick arms and a flick of her immaculate hair, so Sherlock turned his attention to Lestrade. "The staff have been lying to you as well about this," air quoted, "Mr Arnold. No doubt they were offered some of the money reaped from selling the stolen jewellery in exchange for their silence. Surely you can take it from here?"

Greg shifted his weight from one foot to the other, taking a sip of his coffee as if he wished it was whiskey. Through a grimace of disappointment or at the temperature, or both: "I mean, yeah. You're saying she waited until the coast was clear then snuck into the rooms herself. But we don't have any actual substantial evidence---"