Chapter Text
Molly sat on her bed and watched through the bathroom door as her friend brushed her teeth with the exuberance with which Mary Watson did everything. She thought about Mary’s idea of choosing which voices to listen to and believe. Molly was sure that she had lived the last eight years of her life on the crumbs of praise that Sherlock occasionally let fall her way and had not even noticed the extravagant feast of encouraging words her other friends had offered her. She wondered if words she was not meant to overhear counted as well.
“Mary, I need to tell you something,” she burst out as her friend left the bathroom and headed to the sitting room, where her bed had been made up on the sofa. The young doctor immediately changed directions and plopped herself down on Molly’s bed.
“Two heart-to-hearts in one day! How exciting!” she exclaimed. “You can tell me anything you like; you know that.”
“I heard you and Greg yesterday, talking in my kitchen. You thought I was downstairs.” Molly could see the gears turning in Mary’s head as she tried to pick out one single conversation from all that had happened that busy day.
“Oh!” she cried at last. “I see!”
“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to pry. I didn’t know you were having a private conversation at first, but I couldn’t seem to stop listening once I realized, and then I thought I’d go back downstairs but the forensics gents were still there and I didn’t want to talk to them, and I thought I should make noise and let you know I was there but I couldn’t seem to move, and I thought I might go hide in the bedroom but I just. . . . didn’t and . . . . I’m sorry, but now we have to talk about it.” Molly’s confession poured out in a torrent and Mary’s eyes grew wider the longer she spoke.
“Oh, my, don’t feel badly about that,” Mary said reassuringly. “We were in YOUR kitchen, after all. But my dear, you’re quite freaked out over this, aren’t you? You think it’s strange or utterly bizarre?”
Molly shrugged apologetically. “It’s just . . . I’ve known him for so long, but I’ve . . . I’ve just never . . . thought, you know. . . .”
“You’ve never thought about Greg that particular way?” Mary finished for her. “Well, why would you, though? But it’s never really been a secret.”
“It’s . . . well, it’s a lot to think about,” Molly sighed.
Mary blinked, puzzled. “Is it? I mean, I know it’s unusual, but it is really that strange? I mean, I never had a father—not a REAL father—and I was born on the very same day as Greg’s daughter. I AM nearly ten years younger than you, after all.” Mary tried to tease Molly into a less sober mood.
Now it was Molly’s turn to cry, “Oh!” as she realized they were talking at cross purposes. “No, no, I wasn’t talking about that!” Her words gushed out in her hurry to remedy the misunderstanding. “You can call Greg any name you like—that’s not my . . . that’s no one else’s business. And, really, I think it’s kind of . . . well, sort of sweet. I mean, I’m glad . . . it’s good that you . . . fill a hole in each other’s lives. No, I meant, the other thing . . . .”
Comprehension dawned in Mary’s face. “Ah! Yes, well, yeah. . . . it’s true you weren’t meant to hear that. . . .” She took a deep breath and plunged on. “I know it seems strange that he should just begin seeing you this way after knowing you for so many years. But Greg’s an honourable man. So long as he was still married, he would be faithful to his wife. And then, of course, it was obvious that your heart belonged to one of his best friends. He would never want to interfere with that.”
“But when I started seeing Tom . . . .” Molly said slowly.
Mary nodded. “That seemed to indicate you were ready to move on from Sherlock. Left him free to . . . consider a different relationship with you. But he’ll never say anything, so long as he believes you might still want to . . . wait for Sherlock.”
Molly covered her face. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want,” she admitted desperately. “I’m so . . . I don’t know!”
“You don’t have to know,” Mary comforted softly. “There’s no rush. This move will be good for you—you’ll gain some distance emotionally and be able to think with more clarity.”
“He said . . . Greg said Sherlock needs me more than he does,” Molly wondered. “Do you think that’s true?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, dear,” Mary said firmly. “It doesn’t matter what Sherlock needs or doesn’t need; or what Greg needs or doesn’t need. What matters here is what YOU need. You never consider yourself, Molly! I want you to start thinking about what would be best for YOU.”
“But what do YOU think would be best for me?” Molly insisted. She didn’t know her own mind and longed for a new perspective.
Mary was silent for long moment, obviously struggling with her conscience about whether to speak her thoughts or refuse to put ideas into her friend’s mind. She sighed. “I think that Greg Lestrade was a patient, loving, considerate, and faithful husband for over twenty-five years to an unloving, inconsiderate, and unfaithful wife. Imagine if he were able to apply that level of commitment to someone who could appreciate him--who could love him in return.”
The thought took Molly’s breath away.
000
Jim Browner arrived at the St. Leonard Police Office the next morning handcuffed and in a police van. He was a big, powerful chap, clean-shaven and very swarthy.
“We looked for him on his ferry,” the constable in charge explained, “but I was told that he had been acting in such an extraordinary manner that the captain had been compelled to relieve him of his duties. Arriving at his house, I found him seated upon his bed with his head sunk upon his hands, rocking himself to and fro. He jumped up when he heard my business, and I thought I’d have a struggle on my hands, but he seemed to have no heart in him, and he held out his hands quietly enough for the cuffs. We found no real evidence that he’d done the deed, but as it turns out we shall want no more evidence, for during the journey here he asked leave to make a statement as soon as may be.”
Browner was taken into an interrogation room with Chief Superintendent Jemison and Detective Inspector Lestrade and a recorder at the ready. Mary and Molly and the interested constable stood at the two-way mirror and listened to the exchange.
“Have I anything to say? Yes, I have a deal to say,” the wretched man began. “I have to make a clean breast of it all. You can hang me, or you can leave me alone. I don’t care a plug which you do. I tell you, I’ve not shut an eye in sleep since I did it, and I don’t believe I ever will again until I get past all waking. Sometimes it’s his face, but most generally it’s hers. I’m never without one or the other before me.
“But it was Sarah’s fault, and may the curse of a broken man put a blight on her and set the blood rotting in her veins! It’s not that I want to clear myself. I know that I went back to drink. But Mary would have forgiven me; she would have stuck as close to me as a rope to a block if that woman had never darkened our door. For Sarah Cushing loved me—that’s the root of the business—she loved me until all her love turned to poisonous hate when she knew I thought more of my wife’s footmark in the mud than I did of her whole body and soul.
“There were three sisters altogether. The old one was just a respectable woman, the second was a devil, and the third was an angel. There was no better woman than my Mary. And then we asked Sarah up for a week, and the week grew into a month, and one thing led to another . . . .”
On and on the poor man rambled, and his story so dove-tailed with the stories of Susan and Sarah Cushing and with the deductions Molly and Mary had drawn from the evidence that nothing new was really brought to light, until at last he reached the climax of the tale.
“Sarah calls me four days ago and says ‘That angel of a wife of yours is going on holiday with her new man—on your very ferry this very day! They’re laughing at you, Jim! They’ll put their tongues out at you as they pass you by on their way to their private suite. And what do you think they’ll be doing in that private suite for two hours? Spiting you, that’s what!’ I tell you that from that moment I was not my own master, and it is all like a dim dream when I look back on it. I had been drinking hard of late, and that morning when they boarded the ship I seemed to have all Niagara whizzing and buzzing in my ears.
“I checked them in, then turned my job over to another lad, and I took them to their room myself. It was just as if they had been given into my hands. I closed the door behind us and put my hands around that man’s blasted neck. I would have spared her, perhaps, for all my madness, but she threw her arms around him, crying out to him, so when he lay limp, I strangled her too. If Sarah had been there, by the Lord, she would have joined them!”
Clenching his teeth, Browner went on to describe how he had locked the bodies into the suite and then, as they pulled into port at Belfast, has sabotaged the engines so as to ensure staying put until after dark. Just as Greg had deduced, the steward had altered the manifest so it looked as if the couple had missed the boat, then bundled the bodies into a lifeboat and took them off to sea.
“No one would have ever known what happened. I know I avoided all the security cameras and patrols, easy as nothing. I ought to have left it at that. But, Lord! That Sarah Cushing had to know what she’d done, pouring her poisonous words into my Mary’s ears! So help me, before I put the bodies overboard, I pulled out my knife and . . . . Well you know what I did. Packed them up and sent them off to that devil-woman that very night.
“There you have the whole truth of it. You can hang me, or do what you like with me, but you cannot punish me-- I have been punished already. I cannot shut my eyes but I see those two faces staring at me. I killed them quick, but they are killing me slow; and if I have another night of it, I shall be either mad or dead before morning. You won’t put me alone into a cell, sir? For pity’s sake don’t, and may you be treated in your day of agony as you treat me now.”
A silence followed this solemn confession, broken only by the hollow sound of hopeless sobs.
000
Molly was glad that no word was spoken by either Greg or Mary about leaving that day as they had planned. It seemed a wordless agreement among them that leaving any one of them alone after such a harrowing story was unthinkable. They spent that day exploring the sights of Molly’s new home and stayed out late that night in a local pub, talking about anything in the world except murders and misery and violence and fear. Greg’s lodgings had been booked only for the training session, but it seemed only natural for him to spend the night on Molly’s couch while the girls shared Molly’s double bed. None of them wanted to be left alone with their own thoughts that night.
But the next day, reality set in and it was time for Molly’s new life to begin and for Greg and Mary to return to theirs.
“I’ll text you every morning on my way to work,” Mary vowed earnestly, hugging her friend tightly. “And on my way home every night.”
“I will send you a card in the post once a week,” Molly promised. “And I’ll come to visit as soon as I can.”
“Erm, I wonder,” Greg ventured shyly, his hands in his pockets, “I wonder if I might call you sometimes, too? And, maybe, visit sometimes?”
Molly looked into his eyes and wondered how it was that she had known this man for eight years and had never really seen him before.
“I wish you would,” she told him sincerely. “I would like that very much.”