Cavendish's Mouthpiece
Watson examined the body and said he had found nothing unusual. But after following Sherlock for so long, his instincts led him to notice a small detail the detectives and forensic examiners had missed: the angle at which the blood had spattered onto the carpet was subtly unnatural.
Andrew lay on his back beside the enormous mahogany desk, his posture rigid. His trademark gold-rimmed glasses lay shattered beside him, with droplets of blood congealed by the cold on the lenses.
A heavy brass globe lay on its side, the edge of its base covered in a thick, dark-red substance. It all did indeed look like an unfortunate accident.
"The state of the fractured skull is wrong. The traces of repeated, heavy blows to the wound are too pronounced. It absolutely could not have been suicide." Sherlock crouched down but did not touch the body, scanning it inch by inch instead. His fingertips hovered a few millimeters above the skin of the deceased's neck.
"Lestrade, your officers' conclusion is like a piece of moldy cheese, giving off the nauseating stench of holes in logic." Sherlock's barbed words struck hard at the inspector's formidable nerves. The detectives around them were already glaring at Sherlock with hostility, but Lestrade alone remained unmoved.
Lestrade: You get used to it, you get used to it.
"There is a precise seven-degree discrepancy between the indentations in the carpet, the trajectory of the falling globe, and the direction in which the body's center of gravity tipped."
"That shows this was by no means a natural fall. Now look at the deceased's right cuff." He pointed to an almost invisible spot. "There's an extremely fine trace of pale-blue synthetic fiber here. The material doesn't belong to anything in this room."
"Finally, the most insulting flaw of all-his pupils. Although they've dilated, there are extremely irregular traces of slight contraction around the edges."
"That isn't consistent with the changes in the pupils caused by a cranial injury alone. This was murder, Inspector, an extremely crude provocation disguised as an 'accident.'"
Watson bent down and carefully examined the edge of the globe's base and the bloodstains around it, his brow furrowed. "Sherlock is right. The blood spatter pattern looks more like the body was moved slightly after the impact. Someone rearranged the scene."
"But the motive is far too obvious." Watson used tweezers and evidence bags to collect some evidence he considered important, and reminded Sitangna to hurry and record every detail of their deductions just now.
Such was the professionalism required of an assistant to one of the original crime-solving vloggers.
"The other body is in the basement. It used to be Andrew's wine-tasting room, but it was temporarily set up as a locked-room murder contraption. He... died by suicide too."
Lestrade sent the officers in the basement away and took only the three of them inside.
The wine-tasting room's main lights came on, revealing a male corpse sprawled lazily on the sofa. Judging by his silhouette alone, one might have thought he had fallen asleep drunk, because the room was filled with a strong smell of alcohol.
"Don't come closer. You'll throw up." Sherlock stopped Sitangna as she was about to follow him forward. "Hold this for me. I don't want to get it dirty." He took off his scarf and wrapped it around Nana, covering her nose and mouth.
"Another trick using an interfering smell to mask an informative one." Sherlock waved his hand in disgust, trying to dispel the foul air in front of him. The smell of alcohol mingled with the smell of blood, and now it was Watson's turn to feel sick.
The deceased still wore a mask, an ordinary flesh-colored plastic mask of a human face. From so far away, Sitangna had thought a department-store mannequin was lying there.
"As for why I didn't let the guards remove it or investigate the place, see for yourselves." Lestrade gently pulled down his mask, revealing a familiar face.
"Victor??? Didn't he kill himself on the day he was captured?" Watson hurried forward and checked the deceased's face for a skin-wax mask.
"Is it really him?" Sherlock asked. Watson frowned deeply and nodded.
"Then who died at the police station back then? Did he have an accomplice? Maybe even a mole in the police station?" Sitangna hurriedly recorded the development on her phone. Yes, writing in a notebook was too slow, so she had switched straight to typing in the notes app.
"What happened back then? Didn't Mr. Cavendish go to the morgue to check?" Sherlock kneaded Victor's corpse. It was still fresh; he must have lost his vital signs only that morning.
"I heard he didn't. After learning that the mastermind had killed himself, he only went to interrogate the surviving accomplice. That accomplice was later sent to Darada Prison and was transferred to another prison through the efforts of the American side."
Lestrade gently replaced Victor's mask. Until Sherlock got to the bottom of it, he could not reveal the deceased's identity to the outside world. A failure of supervision was a very thorny matter.
"The team escorting Victor at the time was the investigative squad Mr. Cavendish brought in. There shouldn't have been any mistakes; those men were all trusted members of the family's inner circle."
Sitangna remembered Emily telling her about the squad. On the surface, it was an investigative team overseeing security, but in reality, it also did some gray-area work for her father.
"If even his trusted men have been bought off, then Mr. Cavendish and Emily should be in the most danger right now. This councilman is just bait to lure the tiger away from the mountain."
Sitangna jolted in fright and hurriedly called Emily. Damn it, she shouldn't have let Candy go upgrade. If Candy were here, she could have confirmed Emily's safety directly.
"Hello, Nana. What's wrong? I just woke up." Emily yawned hugely on the other end of the line. Her voice sounded normal, and Sitangna immediately breathed a sigh of relief.
"Nothing. Just checking whether you were up. Remember to eat breakfast, and don't leave Baker Street before we get back, okay?" Just after she hung up, Sherlock noticed something was wrong.
"She isn't on Baker Street, and she didn't just wake up. I heard sounds from the docks." Sherlock led everyone back to the study. He told Lestrade to take both bodies back to the police station, while they stayed behind to search for information.
"Remember to run blood tests on both of them and check for traces of any substances." Sherlock was looking for something, turning the study into a complete mess.
"Isn't this a bit much? We're disturbing the primary crime scene." Watson and Sitangna nervously caught the books Sherlock threw down one by one. They nearly failed to catch a thick one, and it almost hit the body marker.
"None of that matters. The pendulum case was about more than just Victor's revenge from the very beginning." He stopped searching, quickly pulled a special encrypted communicator from his pocket, and dialed a number.
After three rings, Mycroft's perpetually unruffled, cool face appeared on the screen, which was about half the size of a palm. He looked as calculating as ever. Behind him was his office, piled high with top-secret documents.
"Good day, Sherlock. What can I do for you?"
Mycroft paused in the middle of signing a document and looked at the communication feed on his computer. The communicator's signal reception had been authorized at the highest satellite level, allowing it to connect anytime, anywhere.
But it could not be used an unlimited number of times, so Sherlock did not use it often. In fact, this was his first time using it.
"You orchestrated Emily Cavendish's kidnapping, didn't you? You used Victor's hatred of Cavendish as bait and Emily's identity as the hook, all to catch the big fish behind the Cavendish family."