Chapter Text
Greg Lestrade slipped into the middle lift just as the doors were closing, a paper Costa cup clutched firmly in hand. He did not acknowledge anyone else in the lift, keeping his eyes on the doors so as to avoid any attempt at conversation, and tried his best to ignore the mechanical whirring as the lift lurched into life. He failed: the sound of the lift and its twittering passengers managed to get on every last one of his frazzled nerves.
As the lift stopped at the first floor and shed three of its passengers Greg’s mind returned to his new case. Natasha Brailsford had been found hanging from the staircase by her housemate, Joanne Burnett, when she’d returned from a night shift in the Amazon warehouse. As distraught as the young woman had been, she had been absolutely adamant that her friend had not committed suicide, and Greg’s instinct told him she was right; apart from a messy break-up at the tail end of last year, everything had been going well for her, from progressing further with her gender confirmation treatment to her new job. No, Greg and his team had quickly come to the conclusion that Natasha had been murdered. The problem had come when they had starting drawing parallels between this murder and a death that DI Bradstreet and his team had investigated recently, which was in the process of being closed as a suicide. Greg, however, did not like the odds that two trans women dying by hanging in the same city within the space of three weeks were unrelated, and had properly put the wind up Bradstreet by going to their DCI, poking holes in the other man’s work, and asking for the case to be transferred to him.
Eventually the lift reached the seventh floor, which housed the major crimes teams, and Greg left with a sigh of relief. He’d never liked starting the day in an overheated lift packed with gossiping coppers, but there was no way he was taking the stairs with the thumping headache he had woken up with. Fortunately, it was early enough that he was one of the first to arrive, and he managed to make it through the open plan office to his team’s area without anyone attempting to make conversation with him. A quick detour by Whittard’s desk to stick a note asking her to see him on arrival on her monitor later, and he was soon within sight of his cool, dim office. That, however, was the moment that his morning started going to pot: through the blinds he saw a shape that was most definitely Sherlock Holmes.
“Christ, what’re you doing here?” he asked resignedly as he entered his office. “Don’t tell me Mrs Hudson’s kicked you out. I told you to stop disposing of body parts in her bins.”
“Bradstreet is an idiot: no one noticed that Amy Golding’s ex-girlfriend is still active on a Facebook page for the angry exes of trans women,” Sherlock said by way of greeting.
“Bradstreet decided it was a suicide early on so I doubt they put that much thought into her friends and family,” Greg replied, dropping into the least uncomfortable of the visitors’ chairs. “I’ve asked our boss to transfer it over to me because it’s got to be linked to Natasha Brailsford’s murder.”
Sherlock hummed, his gaze still fixed on the screen. “You’re right: both women were killed by Golding’s ex-girlfriend. When I can get access to her phone, I expect to find messages between her and your victim’s ex-girlfriend discussing how badly they have been wronged by their respective exes. Having got a taste for revenge killing when she murdered Natasha, she will have been unable to resist taking revenge on her new best friend’s behalf. ” He paused and frowned at the screen, rapidly clicking the mouse. “I know Bradstreet; he will have seen a short, pregnant woman, apparently having moved on and set up with a new boyfriend, and immediately written her off as a potential suspect.” He suddenly looked at Greg, an intensity in his eyes that took Greg aback. “Why did you decide Brailsford had been murdered?”
“A few things,” Greg answered immediately. “I know suicide’s common in the trans community, but she had a lot of therapy as part of her gender confirmation treatment and not one of the people she saw noted suicidal ideation. I interviewed her housemate yesterday evening and she was very clear Natasha wasn’t suicidal - she’d just started a new job and they even had a holiday planned.”
“Very good, Lestrade; you’re learning,” Sherlock said approvingly with a glance down at his watch. “DCI Cooke emailed you half an hour ago confirming that the Golding murder has been allocated to you, by the way.”
Greg huffed into his coffee, not at all surprised that Sherlock had hacked his computer. Again. “I changed my password last week.”
“I know,” Sherlock smirked. “Oh, and you needn’t worry about Whittard: she wouldn’t miss being involved in solving these cases for the world.”
Cold anger crashed over Greg like a tsunami as Sherlock spoke. There was no way that Whittard had told Sherlock about starting gender confirmation treatment, not when she had only disclosed it to him as her direct supervisor when offering to hand in her notice out of fear that she could not undergo that treatment and be a copper. Greg had quickly put paid to that, spent days reading everything he could get his hands on so as ot to fuck up, and offered every assurance of confidentiality and support within his power, but Sherlock fucking Holmes had still found out. “Have you been going through my personnel files again?” Greg demanded, waving his now-tepid coffee angrily. “I’ve fucking told you about that!”
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “No: I merely observed. Gender identity isn’t simply what a person looks like or which name they use, Lestrade. If I can tell an airline pilot by his left thumb, do you really think I don’t know a woman when I see one?”
Closing his eyes and breathing evenly to give himself space to reason rather than react, Greg forced himself to think through the pounding in his skull. Sherlock was a colossal dick, more than capable of cracking the Met’s security and reading those files, but Greg had seen him pull the finest threads together to get to the right answer many times over the course of their acquaintance. The outrage ebbed, and he sighed. “Well, that’s alright then. Just you see that it stays that way.”
“Stop wittering, Greg,” Sherlock replied distractedly, turning his attention back to the monitor. “I need to find what else that cretin missed.”
After a few minutes, when the caffeine had had time to do its job, another thought occurred to Greg. “What’s got you interested in this, anyway? You turned down a cracking locked room last week because it was ‘boring’, but you’re all over a bog standard murder.”
“Which bit of ‘stop wittering’ did you not understand?” Sherlock snapped, not moving his eyes from the screen. “Your team is arriving; get them ready to go, and tell your favourite magistrate that we’re going to need a warrant soon. Oh, and I suggest that you don’t ask Whittard if she is comfortable working on this case unless you intend her to believe that you doubt her ability to manage workplace stress.”
Greg left his office and went to replenish his coffee before calling his staff to order, taking the note off Whittart’s monitor in passing.
***
What followed was sixty odd hours of absolute chaos, with nothing like enough sleep and far too much coffee. Sherlock had been more driven than Greg had seen him in a very long time, exploiting every lead and piece of evidence to its fullest, and overturning the many mistakes made by Bradstreet and his officers in investigating the first death.
By the time Greg got home with his third-rate curry and still-banging headache, the murderer was in custody and Greg had three of his own team awaiting disciplinary action for sexist and transphobic comments. He’d heard some ignorant shit from Bradstreet’s lot in the early stages of their investigation, but he had hoped that the way that had been stamped on would have served as a warning to his team; he had been disappointed. Whittard, Donovan, and Kapoor, however, had really shown their worth. He smiled to himself, thinking of Donovan’s withering put down when Jenkins had opined that a woman couldn’t possibly hang ‘someone who’s basically a man’, and opened his first bottle of London Pride.
There was, however, something that hadn’t stopped bothering since his first conversation with Sherlock about the cases: he just could not figure out what had got the bugger so interested. It wasn’t unusual for Greg to enter his office and find Sherlock sticking his nose into cold cases when he had nothing better to do, but to show up for something that barely rated a five on his scale, to adhere faithfully to chain of evidence procedures, and then actually sit and do the paperwork with a minimum of swanning around? That was unique in his dealings with the world’s only consulting detective.
He still hadn’t solved the question of what it was about these mundane cases in particular had piqued Sherlock’s interest by the time he had given up on his chewy curry and dry rice and progressed to his fourth bottle. Given his exhaustion and lack of proper food over the last few days, it didn’t surprise him that he was struggling to keep his focus, but it was frustrating nonetheless. He was sure that it was right there, staring him in the face, but the harder he looked at it, the less distinct it became. The only thing that marked these murders out from any other case he’d had since Sherlock’s return from the not dead was that the victims were transgender, but what would Sherlock Holmes, of all people, care about —
“No…” Greg said to himself, as those words rearranged themselves in his mind, and set his empty bottle carefully on the coffee table with the detritus of his curry. “I’d know, wouldn’t I?” The more he thought about it, the more sense it began to make. Despite the drink, Greg’s copper’s mind rebooted, unable to find a puzzle and not give solving it his very best shot. The number of people Sherlock cared about - genuinely cared about - could be counted on the fingers of both hands with a few fingers’ change, and Greg was confident that he knew all of them.
Mentally running through Sherlock’s chosen few, he quickly discounted his parents and Mrs Hudson, and then Molly after a bit of thought. Consideration was given to John’s height but the possibility was quickly ruled out given what Greg knew of the man. Mary, though, was definitely a possibility. The more he thought about Mary, the more another thought took hold: Mary was the warm and friendly type, and Greg knew a young trans woman in the very early stages of treatment, going through hell with her family and shedding friends. If he could put her in touch with someone he knew and trusted, someone who had been through it and gone on to have a normal life, then surely he’d be stupid not to. The more he thought about it, the more his alcohol-addled mind decided that it was the best idea he’d had since leaving his cow of an ex-wife, and it was with this mission in mind that he fell asleep on his sofa for the third time in five days.