John shakes the thoughts from his h

John shakes the thoughts from his head. “So who was she?” he asks. “Or have you still not identified the body?”

“Well,” Greg hedges. “Technically, I’m not at liberty—”

“Oh, come off it. You texted me. If you hadn’t wanted my help, you wouldn’t have done, and I can’t help if I don’t have facts. So, again, do you know who she is?”

Greg sighs but doesn’t pretend to deliberate. “No,” he admits. “No fingerprints on file, and no one we’ve interviewed has been able to identify her. We don’t know much yet, to be honest. Still waiting on the autopsy results. With any luck, they’ll find a bit of trace evidence that can lead us to whoever pushed her.”

John can’t stop himself from correcting, “Not pushed. You saw the body. She was… practically mangled. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and she can’t have weighed more than—more than Sherlock. But she looked so much worse than he did. So I don’t think she was just pushed from the roof. I think she was thrown off it—and by someone with a lot of strength.”

*

When John finally leaves the pub, a good hour or so after Greg, he’s decided to just take a cab back to Baker Street. He’s tired, his leg aches, and drinking on an empty stomach has left him closer to sloshed than he would be otherwise.

But when he goes outside, it isn’t a cab that pulls up beside him on the kerb, but a long black car with tinted windows. Its back driver-side door opens, and, to John’s surprise, it’s Mycroft himself who peers out instead of a member of his staff.

“If you would be so kind as to accompany me, John,” he says with a pinched smile, “I would appreciate it.”

It can’t be a coincidence: a woman in Sherlock’s homeless network thrown off the roof of Bart’s just this morning and now Mycroft himself seeking John out. It’s this thought that convinces John to step forward and slide into the sleek leather seat beside Mycroft.

The car starts driving as soon as the door closes, but John pays little attention to where it’s headed. Instead, he focuses on Mycroft, who straightens his suit with a lofty sniff like John is the one inconveniencing him.

He decides not to wait for Mycroft to speak first. “What do you know about the woman who died today? No,” he says, because the face Mycroft pulls is one of bewildered innocence, “don’t pretend you don’t understand. I may not have your IQ, but I’m not an idiot. She knew Sherlock, however distantly, and she was thrown from the roof where he—where he died exactly six months ago. What do you know?”

Mycroft merely looks at him. Searching him, it seems, although for what, John can’t imagine. Eventually, he answers, “Very little, I’m afraid.”

“Really? No CCTV footage, no information about the woman?”

“Although I am flattered by the assumption,” Mycroft says, again smiling that pinched, false-looking smile, “neither I nor any member of the British government is omniscient. The only piece of information I have which New Scotland Yard does not is her name—Margaret Wiggins—although I suspect it will not be much longer now until she has been officially identified.”

Margaret Wiggins. John makes a firm mental note.

“I have looked into the incident extensively, of course,” Mycroft continues, “but to my knowledge, the connection between Ms Wiggins’s and Sherlock’s deaths is entirely coincidental.”

“Then why are you here?” John asks.

“To warn you that the issue is not worth pursuing—which I knew you intended to do, of course. As I’ve been informed, Ms Wiggins had quite a long history with a number of street gangs in London. She had no shortage of enemies, and any attempt on your part to investigate her death might prove… unwise. It might be hard for you to imagine, John, but I don’t wish to see you come to any harm.”

His voice softens on the final sentence; he even sounds a little fond and wistful, as though the two of them have had any sort of relationship in the time they’ve known each other. John finds his hands clenching into fists, his jaw clenching, filled with anger at Mycroft for Sherlock’s death all over again. He forces himself to turn away and stare out the window.

“Right,” he mutters. “Course you don’t.”

They spend the rest of the drive to Baker Street in silence.

*

John had never questioned Sherlock about the particulars of his network of homeless—the number of people involved, how it started, how he kept it going—and, he realises in the morning, he consequently knows woefully little about it. It had sometimes seemed that Sherlock knew every homeless person in London by sight, and they knew him, but of course that’s preposterous. And although occasionally one person would stand out to John for one reason or another—Margaret Wiggins being the woman Sherlock held a short conversation with, and then there was the teenager who’d waggled his eyebrows and licked his lips at John, and the bearded man with the bright orange hat, and so on—he had never seen Sherlock rely on any one person twice.

So when, the morning after his conversation with Mycr