-Emily-
~~~~~~
I find the door just as the first police cars begin to pull up, their sirens wailing in piteous alarm and lights lashing walls in garish red and blue. The motorbikes arrive next, sputtering on their own exhausts, then a van – out of which file armed guards, visors pulled down and guns slung over their shoulders. An ambulance drives up, followed by the growl of an incoming helicopter – presumably the media – and a dark car with tinted windows.
It is a heavy duty operation.
I stagger out of the corridor and make my unsteady way along the side of the driveway, each step laborious, each movement sore, until I am in full view of the cars and the vans and the snarling motorbikes. White light renders me temporarily blind. I raise my hands above my head as red crosshairs prick my skin and the wind catches the loose hairs at my neck, lifting them up, flattening the shirt against my chest.
Someone shouts at me to get down. I oblige, numbly. Twenty gun barrels watch me.
Two people step out of the dark car: Lestrade is first, coordinating affairs, his phone pressed close to his ear, making sweeping gestures at the surrounding officers to clear the space, then Sherlock, closing the car door with some force. He looks positively haggard, his face pinched and lacking all vitality. I watch him adjust his coat. His expression is very flat, but I get the impression there is turbulence behind the straight mouth and narrowed eyes – I take a morbid interest in his countenance, and come to the conclusion that it is fear, concealed under the pretence of indifference. He looks up at the house, sees me kneeling on the gravel, then leans stiffly to one side in order to explain the situation to Lestrade – who, in response, turns around and shouts something at the gunmen. The red lights are trained elsewhere. I am hauled to my feet.
Sherlock approaches me, his face closed. He doesn't mince words.
"Where are they?"
"I don't know," I say, my voice rough and throat raw. "I saw her arrive."
"How?"
In spite of myself and the crippling nature of my circumstances, I find myself raising an eyebrow. "How do you think? I looked out the window."
"You live here." He regards me with cautious distrust. "Why?"
I feel myself falter.
Sherlock's eyes move across my face, observing the sag in my shoulders, the shallow wound at my neck. They flit down, down to the weights tied around the ring finger of my left hand, then the priceless satin of my skirt, the laddered nylon of my tights. He says nothing, for which I am exceptionally grateful, and nods, curtly, filling in the blanks.
"Let's get this place searched," shouts Lestrade, over the increasing roar of the descending helicopter. "Everyone back."
I am tugged into the shadowed alcove, away from the inquisitive glare of the helicopter lights.
When we are safely out of view, Sherlock turns to me.
"How do I get in?"
"Lestrade's taking down the door–"
"Alone."
I lift a heavy arm in the direction of the door. "Back entrance. Over there."
He doesn't wait for further instruction. I watch his retreating figure, shoulders squared, collar up, hands balled in his pockets. In the distance, I can hear the splinter of wood as the front door is wrenched off its hinges.
I don't want to watch.
Instead, I force myself to move, jogging back along the side of the building until I catch up with Sherlock. He doesn't acknowledge me. I slow my pace beside him. We walk in silence for some time, his footsteps soft and muted by the damp grass, mine sharp and staccato on the flagstones.
Eventually, I am granted a response.
"What are you doing?" he asks, as I lead him to the arched door.
"Helping."
Sherlock snorts. "I don't need your help."
"I didn't say I was helping you."
The door is pushed open, and Sherlock steps inside the marble corridor with its gold curtains and dark, locked doors. I recognise it as the left wing of the building. I'm not overly familiar with this section, which comes as a relief – I don't think I could bear walking through the rooms I have grown to associate with the untouched bliss of my recent past; the bathroom with its porcelain centrepiece and steam-swirled memories, the bedroom, the adjoining lounge, the ballroom we circled in clumsy, alcohol-induced dance. I cling to these recollections with the desperation of a drowning woman, and detach myself from the present. Perhaps this is all a vivid night terror. Perhaps I'll wake up tomorrow morning with Ivan's heavy, unmoving arm around my waist. Perhaps this is temporary.
We begin searching rooms at random. They are unfamiliar, dark, empty, easily checkable. Sherlock is muttering something about 'it all making sense' under his breath, but I don't care to listen. I reach the end of this particular corridor and open the final door – and then I stop.
I recognise this one.
My ghost sits on the edge of the embroidered sofa. She's on her laptop. Ivan's ghost stands behind her, smiling, one hand twisting her hair in gentle affection, the other holding his drink. He raises the glass to her lips. She takes a sip, and I taste the vodka on my tongue. My eyes sting. The room blurs.
My ghosts fade.
If Sherlock is aware of my lapse in ability, he's chosen to overlook it. He's opening and closing doors sporadically, checking the rooms, moving on, checking, moving on, checking, with the determination of a man on the brink of breakdown. I wipe my eyes and step out of the room, following Sherlock back through the corridor, down a flight of white steps, both of us checking, both of us falling into a pattern: open, look, check, close, open, look, check, close, open, look, check–
"Sherlock."
I hear him stop behind me. I point to the closed door. The light is on – a pink light, visible beneath the gap and stretching out across the white marble. Sherlock inhales sharply. I close my eyes and immerse myself in my self-constructed theory: the quicker I face the horrors of my imagination, the quicker I will rouse from my hellish dream sequence. I'll tell Ivan about it, and he'll laugh and lift my chin and ask me with that brilliant smile if he looks like the sort of man capable of murder. I'll shake my head. He'll kiss the corner of my mouth. We'll fall back into routine. I believe it wholeheartedly.
I raise a finger to my lips and motion for Sherlock to stand back, but he ignores me, fierce in his desperation, and pushes the door open with a force bordering on violence.
He stops.
I move around him, preparing myself for red, for gore, for whatever vile tableau my sleeping mind can concoct.
At first, I think she's dead.
She's lying at the back of the room, her skin glowing pink, unmoving, one arm outstretched as if reaching for something I can't see. Her shirt has been torn open, her jeans at her knees. There are tears on her cheeks, but she's not crying. She's too still. I'm trying to understand, trying to process, when she moves, only slightly, a small hitch of her breath. Her eyes are closed. There's a little blood collecting at the crease of her elbow, more on the back of her arm. Her lips are swollen. Her hair has been fanned out behind her, brushing the marble in damp curls.
My illusion shatters.
Sherlock takes a step backwards.
I don't think I've ever seen this expression on his face: it is one of absolute, unmitigated horror, of first-person shock, wide-eyed and open mouthed. It hits him like nausea. The mechanisms of his magnificent mind grind to a halt.
I'm the first to move.
I feel myself kneel down beside her, feel the stone beneath my shins, feel my breathing snag and catch and tear. I start re-buttoning her blouse, my fingers missing the slits in the fabric, numbed, knuckles ghosting the cold ridges of her ribcage. She makes a soft noise at the back of her throat. I lift the jeans over her hips. She opens her eyes.
I hear myself exhale, slowly.
Millie regards me with strange, wide eyes, her pupils so unnaturally dilated I can see my own face – expression twisted, skin flushed – trapped in their black convexities. She watches me for a minute, then smiles, her lips cracking as she does so. She laughs, a little breathily, and then lifts a hand that trembles so violently I feel the air next to my face hum with quivering energy. She presses it to my cheek.
"Emily," she says. Her voice is higher than the one in my memory, more sonorous. It wavers with the rest of her. "Emily."
I nod. She copies me, nodding in earnest, then lets her hand fall back.
"Please," I say, addressing Sherlock. The words splinter in my mouth. "Help."
It is enough to jolt him to reality. Together we heave her to her feet – she stumbles, clutching the side of my shirt in her fist, then starts to cry again, weakly. Sherlock doesn't look at her. He keeps his eyes fixed ahead as he helps me haul her out of the room. Movement becomes very slow, as we walk down that endless corridor; every step, every clench of muscle and shift of bone is difficult, strained, as if I am wading through waist-deep syrup. It cloys my sense of perception. Dimly, I register that I'm in shock. It's a good word, shock. Harsh. Choked. Instinctive. I don't feel anything else: no hurt, no anger, no sadness. A comforting emotional purgatory.
We find the police at the end of the corridor. I realise that they're surrounding an open door leading to a narrow staircase, a cellar, waiting – guns poised – for someone to come out. I feel myself slow. Millie is jerked between us.
"I've got her," says Sherlock, flatly.
I open my mouth to protest, but Sherlock reaches across and takes Millie's arm from around my shoulders, lifting the other up and over his neck. He grunts under the additional weight, but stays standing – then nods at me; a wordless thanks.
"I've got her," he says again, a little more kindly.
They make their slow way around the corner, out into a world that welcomes them.
The door to the cellar opens quite suddenly – I spin around and see a pair of policemen exit, gripping the side of the frame for support. One shakes his head. The other lifts up his visor and says, "We need backup. There's forty of them in there–"
"Forty-eight," comes a voice from inside. "There's more at the back. Kids, too."
People are instructed to move down, to search the cellar. The crowd surges forwards. I find myself walking with them, against all rationality, through the unassuming door with its whorls of rosewood and gold.
I notice the drop in temperature first.
It smells like meat, here. Raw meat. The walls are coated in frost; we stand in a vast mouth, the floor beneath us a tongue, red and slick, with icicle teeth growing down from the ceiling, ferocious in their glacial lethality. White bags are being lifted down from rows of metal, each suspended by a coarse band of fabric slung over industrial meat hooks; as they begin unzipping the bags, I start to see familiar faces, the frozen variants of the women on the walls. This one has her throat slit, a thin, congealed curve from ear to ear, the blood and the torn tissue solidified in the sub-zero temperatures. That one can only be ten – a pale girl with white cataracts developing over her eyes, her exposed chest pierced with little, red slits. A trio with stomach wounds. Five more with macerated necks.
Then come the patchwork girls, the works in progress: a woman with her wrists hacked to the bone, foreign hands stitched and hanging from slim flaps of crystallised skin, a stripped girl, her jaw dislocated and swinging at the hinges – an open invitation – with someone's curls threaded into her bloodied scalp. Some are in dresses, fanciful art, swathed in pale blue silks and green velvet and pearl bodices. Some have been gutted – there's a bucket at the back of the room, heavy with a glistening mass of pink and red. Some miss eyes, some noses. Some have the beginnings of makeup on their poor, blue faces; rouged cheeks, soft lipstick, eyebrows plucked into delicate, raised arches.
Millicent Collins is found towards the back of the room, seven years old and glassy with solid blood. Others lie discarded against the walls, missing various, coveted parts, their used bodies angular and stiff and devoid of all clothing, all modesty. Those ready for display are stored on shelves; the flower girls, lying in various stages of decomposition, studded with white and arms folded across their chests.
There are sheets on the floor – hurriedly brought down, folded, a little bloody. These are recent additions. He wouldn't have risked bringing one up with me in the house. This must be where he came on the nights I thought he was working, down here, to satisfy whatever sick cravings my living body couldn't satiate. There's a work station against the opposite wall bearing a mirror opaque with condensation, a desk, a white sewing machine and reels of thread, combs, fabric stored in baskets. Red needles. Red scissors. A woman's torso has been propped up on the wood, all breasts and stomach, cut bluntly at the head and arms and waist with coils of measuring tape collecting at the base stump. There's an old-fashioned gramophone too, with stacks of records behind it. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Photos of Millie, tacked to the available wall space. A pack of cards. A box of half-smoked cigarettes. A Polaroid camera.
The lights in my head are clapped out without warning.
~~~~~~
"Mrs Yakovich?"
I groan, and try to turn away from the noise, succeeding only in knocking my chin against metal.
"Mrs Yakovich?"
I open my eyes.
I'm sitting on the edge of an ambulance step, utterly disoriented, draped in something silver and foil and feeling like someone has shaken the contents of my skull like a bottle under pressure.
A woman's face comes into focus. "Do you know where you are?"
I shake my head and begin to tug the material off my shoulders. She stops me with gentle firmness.
"You collapsed. You've got to stay here."
"I don't collapse."
The paramedic looks at me, sadly.
"You've been out for ten minutes."
"That's impossible."
"Listen," she says, gently. "You're in shock. We really advise you–"
"Where's Sherlock Holmes?"
"With the victim. They're taking her up to King's College."
I look around and see the bodies getting moved out of the building, carried like cargo by a stream of white-suited officers.
"They didn't find him?"
"No sign of him anywhere. There's a car missing – he must have heard us coming. Don't worry. We have a name, now. It's only a matter of time before they bring him in."
A policewoman approaches us, face grim. She looks meaningfully at the paramedic, who promptly retreats back into the sterile confines of the ambulance.
"My name is Sergeant Parry," says the officer. "I understand this has been a very troubling night for you, Mrs Yakovich, but I'm going to need to ask you to come with me. We have a few questions about your husband–"
"I'm not Mrs Yakovich."
She blinks. "Sorry?"
"It's Emily Schott. I'm not married. I don't know an Ivan," I say. "I don't. He's not my husband. I'm not married. I don't know Ivan–"
"Emily Schott?"
"Yes."
The woman turns away and presses two fingers to her earpiece. I lift up my left hand and look at the rings, the beautiful rings, the blood diamond and the white gold with our names, his and mine, a lie and a truth, cut into the soft metal and wound into the detail. They sting my skin. I feel them lacerate. Panicked, I try to wrench them off my finger joint, cutting myself in the process and getting both bands of metal stuck on the bone. The more I pull, the more desperate I become, until I start to sob again, these wretched sobs, tugging the rings until my finger is raw and the metal has marked grooves into my skin and I can't feel the surrounding tissue–
My arm is pulled away by rough hands. The arm bearing the rings follows suit. They are both held behind my back.
"Emily Schott," says someone's voice – a man's, this time, "you are under arrest for the systematic breaching of international security, two counts of assisted terrorism and fraudulent activity."
"What? I'm not–"
Handcuffs fix both wrists in place. "You have the right to remain silent."
Stunned into compliance, I feel myself being led away.
As we walk, I see Millie being lifted onto a stretcher, see her hands raised in cocaine-induced wonder at the clouded sky above her head, see Sherlock with his white face and oversized coat standing some distance away, watching her, lost and isolated from the bulk of the movement. More bodies are coming out from the house. Photographs are being taken. A second ambulance arrives.
My head is pushed under the lip of the vehicle roof as I am forcefully guided into the back seat of an awaiting police car.
I make no attempts at resistance.
~~~~~~