#a few of his crimes consist of murder ; breaking and entering ; robbery ; and some officer related crimes like resisiting arrest

[ordinrryarchive]

Feeling awful still but. Larry used to have a criminal record that he had managed to leave behind after he had left kanto, how do you ask did he manage this ? Blackmail, obviously.

[con-fection]

ASHES TO ASHES | jim moriarty x reader | part 2/13

Word count: 4.7K

"Sherlock," John says, for what is quite possibly the third time in a row. He sighs in frustration, his eyes darting between Sherlock's phone, which is set on the kitchen counter and has been ringing incessantly for the past half hour, effectively disrupting the peace in 221B, and Sherlock himself, who is positioned on his armchair, his elbows on his knees and his hands interlocked in front of his face.

"Not now, John. I'm thinking." Sherlock shakes his head, his eyes narrowing slightly, focusing in on something imperceptible.

"Right, well, I'll get it shall I?" John says, mostly to himself. He rises from the sofa, striding over to the kitchen to grasp the phone. "Hello? Oh, hi Greg. No, no, he's here. He's thinking. Yes, I'll let him know. Yes, thanks. Bye."

John turns around, eyeing Sherlock and waiting for any form of reaction. He doesn't even blink. His spine remains ramrod straight, but the tips of his fingers are twitching slightly, tapping rhythmically against his knuckles. He'd been trapped in a cycle of thinking and tossing away clients since he had last seen Moriarty - it was rather disturbing.

"Sherlock," He tries again. John really is one of the only people that Sherlock depends on, or even tolerates, and he's probably one of the only people that can tell when something has really got to Sherlock. Moriarty is under his skin, he has been in some way for years, starting with the murder of Carl Powers, and culminating with the bombs.  

"Not now, John. I'm - "

"Thinking. Yes, I know that." John snaps slightly, huffing. The frustration is evident in his voice, but he shakes it off quickly, disregarding it in favour of a calmer, more patient tone. "Greg just called - "

Sherlock finally blinks, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion. His gaze finally diverts from his interlocked hands to John. "Who?"

"Greg Lestrade, the man who you've worked with for literal years. You have known him longer than you have known me. You have a case." John explains.

Much like any knowledge of the solar system, Lestrade's name is simply deleted from Sherlock's mind, redacted on the basis of it being irrelevant. To John, it seems painfully rude, but to Sherlock, it's an everyday practice - he constantly filters out information that he deems not to be useful enough, disregarding it and then replacing it with something new, something more useful. Something smart, something interesting. And as far as Sherlock is concerned 'Greg' is neither of those things.

"Why didn't you just say so?" Sherlock looks mildly surprised, letting his hands drop and standing up, rising from his armchair. "And I think you mean that we have a case, John."

"Yes, alright, we." John begrudgingly agrees, tossing Sherlock his phone. The taller man catches it with ease, before shrugging his coat on and stuffing it into a pocket.

---

"So, ah, what happened?" Is the first thing that tumbles from John's mouth as he and Sherlock enter Lestrade's office at the police station. The door swings shut behind them, but he can still sense Donovan's burning stare at his back, piercing through the door.

Lestrade is sat at his desk, a collection of pictures strewn around him, haloed by sunlight spilling in from the window behind him. Some of the pictures have been pinned to a corkboard on the wall, connected to each other by thumbtacks and neon-coloured string. He looks rather thankful for Sherlock's presence, his shoulders sagging instantly in relief.

"Right, well, murder and arson." Lestrade says, turning one of the pictures around. Sherlock and John quickly crowd around it, both vying to see the charred skeleton of a house.

"That doesn't look much like London." John says, squinting slightly.

"Well, it's not really London London, you know? It's only London technically." Lestrade supplies, shrugging slightly.

John nods. "So, it's in your jurisdiction, but barely. And, ah, when exactly did this all happen? Do you have like an estimated time of death?"

"This morning." Lestrade says. "The fire started pretty early - we can be relatively certain that the victims were killed in the night or this morning. Our killer was pretty quick about it. We're not sure if anything's missing yet."

"Strange fire pattern," Sherlock remarks, his eyes flitting over all of the pictures. "I assume our perpetrator used an accelerant - most likely gasoline, which they would have poured throughout the house judging by the consistency of the burning. I'm guessing that the fire began in the basement?"

Lestrade nods. "It's probably the worst room in the whole house. They didn't bother as much with the victims."

"So the basement's more important, then?" John guesses.

"Or the most convenient room to start the fire in," Lestrade says. "Right, these are our victims." He rises from behind his desk and strides over to the board, pointing to three pictures depicting three women. The first is probably in her mid-thirties, and she's wearing this slinky black dress with matching silk gloves. Her pale blonde hair is arranged in waves, and she's smiling to display perfectly white teeth.

"That's Verona Archer, and those are her two daughters Aubrey and Alora."

"Twins?"

"Yes, both of them are nineteen, on their gap year. A shame really, from what I can tell they were all very well liked." Lestrade confirms.

John nods slowly, his eyes travelling over to Verona's daughters. They're identical - the pictures are different, one depicts a young blonde girl wearing a sparkly pink dress, and the other depicts a blonde girl that is her mirror image in every way riding a white pony and waving to the camera. "And their father?"

"Ah, their dad died when they were three, of kidney failure. Verona remarried - he died nine years ago, in a car crash. Poor woman, losing both of her husbands." Lestrade answers. "Here's what the Archer family look like now." He grabs another three pictures off his desk and pins them underneath the pictures of the women whilst they were alive.

They're almost impossible to distinguish in death. Their bodies have been charred, their skin turning shrivelled, red and twisted. There's blotchy patches of red and white travelling down their arms, culminating in blackened fingertips that have crumpled to reveal bone. A few strands of their blonde hair has survived, but it's marred with thick blood and ash.

Their bedrooms, too, have been completely burnt. There's dark black smudges running up the walls, smoke stains pooling on the ceilings and floors, their belongings burnt, singed or reduced to piles of ash.

Their faces have been mostly obliterated in the fire, the bedsheets around them singed. There's a matching neck wound on each of them, one that's hard to see as a result of how badly their bodies were burnt. The remaining flesh on their neck has bubbled up into blisters and stuck to the sheets, almost melting off the bone. There's a glint of pale cartilage visible, poking out from between pieces of mangled, burnt skin.

"Their necks were hacked open," Sherlock observes. "There's no hesitation marks, from what I can tell. This wasn't some robbery gone wrong - they were sleeping. They wouldn't have even seen their attacker coming. This looks like a meat cleaver - I'd wager that you could find the murder weapon in their own kitchen. That alone should imply that this was unplanned, and yet, it seems to thoughtfully executed. Delightful."

John blinks rapidly. "I'm sorry, Sherlock, did you just say - you know what, never mind."

"He really hated them - he resented the Archer family more than anything. Do we know if any of the women had recently rejected a man? Broken off a relationship, perhaps?" Sherlock asks.

Lestrade shakes his head. "Not that I'm aware of, but I've got people looking into that avenue - forensics is going through the girls' phones right now."

"He?" John repeats, confusedly.

"About ninety percent of arsonists are male. Most of them are also white and have a low IQ, typically ranging between seventy and eighty. They're almost always either under eighteen, or in their late twenties." Sherlock says. "We can narrow down our search once we get to the scene."

John sighs, exchanging a long-suffering glance with Lestrade. "Sherlock, I hate to break it to you, but there's not much left to see."

"Not for you, but there will be for me." Sherlock says, glancing at John.

"But we're looking for a man, yes?" Lestrade asks.

Sherlock narrows his eyes, his gaze flitting between all of the pictures. "Most likely, yes. But we can't rule out a female suspect yet. It's always possible that it's a scorned female lover rather than a male one, or perhaps she could be acting out of jealousy, if those Archer girls were so well liked."

"Erm, will we even be allowed in the crime scene?" John enquires. "I mean, I imagine it would be quite dangerous, with the house literally crumbling, and all."

Sherlock scoffs, "You're more than welcome to stand outside and watch, John."

---

Central London isn't quite what you expect it to be. The bus ride is a nightmare - the incessant chatter of the other passengers around you sets you on edge. Their conversation is all so mundane, so pitifully boring that it makes you feel almost resentful.

These are people who have always had their freedom - who haven't had to kill and burn their way out of a gilded cage. And they use it to discuss things as asinine as the weather. You long for the depth that you had always been denied, the warmth, the love, the meaning.

It's so strange, that you can sit among them, an outsider - a dark Cinderella - in the midst of rodents that have yet to turn to carriagemen.

You're glad when you get off, and you can escape their dull conversations. Though, the streets are much louder. There's not any pretty, delicate fragments of birdsong to be heard here. There's the occasional squawk of some hungry pigeons vying for food, but no birdsong. The air is rife with pollution - contaminated, tainted by smoke. It's all cigarette smoke or the chemical-smelling kind that billows up from factory chimneys in plumes of white and grey smoke.

It's nothing like the kind you had smelled only earlier today - it's not the corpses of your step-family being reduced to charred remains. That was far more pungent, far sweeter, if only in the way it made you feel.

There's a constant urge to look over your shoulder. You still feel intensely victorious, and full of a pride that burns just as brightly as your house had done mere hours ago. Yet, amongst those addictive, elated kind of feelings, is a sliver of paranoia.

You don't want to get caught, not now. All pictures of you, all evidence even of your existence, had been destroyed first. It had to go, you had to be free to start afresh, to reinvent yourself as the princess rather than as the maid.

Cleaning the house constantly had been so useful. It had taught you a lot about cleaning up after yourself, about making sure that there would be no evidence you were even there. All those surfaces had shined brightly, but so had the knife when you lodged it into their throats.

The streets in London aren't as nice as you had thought they would be. In every alleyway lingers a different shifty person, eyeing passersby carefully, likely determining who they would try to pickpocket next.

There's so much noise, too.

There's the drunken ramblings of men who are going through a midlife crisis and day drinking. They stumble through the streets, seemingly having gravitated towards one another, forming packs of aimless, rowdy men who just want to escape from their lives and live something that's more interesting.

Then, there's the noises of the cars. There's so many cabs, all identical in their sleek, black appearance, hurrying through the streets. And then there's the people hailing them, standing in the streets and raising their hands, calling out loudly.

"Taxi!" Yet another man yells, and you flinch instinctively, automatically turning around to look at him. He's nothing special, nothing dangerous.

In fact, you're probably the most dangerous person on this street. And yet, you remain hypervigilant. There's only the remnants of all that adrenaline in your system, but still, you remain awfully flighty. You are more than aware that soon it's going to wear off and you're going to be absolutely exhausted.

If you were any normal, entirely sane person, by now you would have been concerned at the lack of guilt.

But it wasn't like these deaths were accidental, or spur of the moment attacks. They weren't self-defense.

They were retribution.

They were violent acts of revenge designed over years and years. It was premeditated in every sense of the word. The only thing that could really, truly bring you warmth on those cold nights in the basement wasn't those scratchy blankets. It was the thought that one day you would take them out of this world, and that they would burn for everything they had done to you.

Over the years, the plan itself had taken a great many differing directions. You had planned versions where you would burn them alive, torture them for days on end, or even use something as simple as a poison to achieve your aims - that would have been remarkably easy considering that you did all the cooking. But ultimately, those fantasies had to be short-lived. They fell victim to practicality. Poison wasn't readily available, and the longer your step-family lived, the more likely they would be to escape or attract the attention of any neighbours.

It was your own version of Cinderella. And although you hadn't much planned for after the murders, you knew that if she got to rule a kingdom, then you would, too.

But first, you wanted to find a hotel room. One with nice blankets and decent heating and light walls that didn't remind you whatsoever of that basement. You'd been trawling for a while, ever conscious of the amount of cash you had, and the fact that eventually, you would have to gain some form of employment and find a more permanent housing situation.

The third hotel that you look at is the one you decide is just right. The first had been far too expensive, and the second one had looked like it shouldn't even be in business with how dilapidated it was. It's pretty enough, a grand white towering structure with flowers in all the windows and delicate borders around the windows. The price, which would be steep elsewhere, is decent for London.

You push the door open - it's a glass door with cursive, swirly golden writing emblazoned across it, and a little overhead bell jingles. The lady at the desk's head immediately turns your way, and she gives you a bright smile.

The entrance is spacious, but sparsely furnished, a few simple chairs and tables scattered around, but nobody's using them. Security seems relatively lax here, you can't see any cameras yet, and despite the hotel seeming acceptable to you, it's probably not one of the most popular establishments in London.

You approach the lady at the desk - your eyes immediately darting to her nametag. Emily.

"Hello, how can I help?" She asks, smiling. Her voice is dripping with that faux-sweetness that is innate to anybody working in customer service. It's cheery, and terribly fake - but you can't really bring yourself to feel any contempt for her lack of genuity. For her it's protection, and just a part of her job. It's not malicious.

"I'd like to book a room, please." You reply.

"Sure," She says, her fingers darting to the computer keyboard. "Do you know how long you'll be staying with us for?"

"A week, I think." You decide that it should be enough time for you to get everything together.

The top priorities for you now were evading the police and finding yourself some new documentation so that you could work, and move on with your life.

Emily nods, her finger tapping away and clicking for a few, silent moments. "We have you booked in room 125." She briefly ducks below the countertop, emerging with a keycard in hand.

It's blue, with a curvy lime green stripe swerving up through it. It's not the most impressive graphic design you've ever seen, and it doesn't really match the rest of the hotel, but it's good enough. You take it from her with a smile. "Thank you."

"Enjoy your stay!" She calls out after you, just as you've started to head further into the hotel.

You don't bother to acknowledge her comment. You simply keep walking, wandering around the bottom floor of the hotel lobby. There are these tiny, light-up signs plastered everywhere, giving the guests directions. It doesn't take you long to reach your room once you start following them.

Room one hundred and twenty five is incredibly boring.

The entrance-way is frustratingly narrow, with a cramped bathroom on your left, and a wardrobe on your right. It opens up to a relatively small space - a double bed against the left wall, a TV mounted just opposite it, a desk and some windows with terrible, thin curtains that do nothing to obscure the light.

It's so terribly basic, and the whole place smells like cleaning supplies - that alone makes you recoil. It brings you back to scrubbing each and every surface again and again. It makes your fingers twitch with the urge to just tear it all apart - to pull the curtains from their rails, knock the sparse furniture over and destroy it.

It feels so fake. It's all orchestrated to look appealing - but to you it appears bland and disingenuous.

The smell of bleach permeating from the bathroom makes you flinch. It's so sterile. There's no life in this place. There's nothing real here.

You have to constantly tell yourself over and over again that this is temporary. For a fleeting moment, you feel some kind of pain, a sharp pang of longing for your home - it had been a prison in every sense of the word once both of you parents were gone, but still it was familiar, the safe haven of your childhood where your mother would read you bedtime stories.

In your story, Cinderella would get her palace. Your happily ever after wouldn't be marred by the fact that a few people had died at your hands.

This hotel room is temporary - something to be used briefly and once you've moved on, never to be dwelled upon again. For now, you just have to lay low, and establish your new life here. The hotel room, with it's bland white and beige decor is hardly the fruition of all your planning. It's just another stepping stone.

It's only saving grace is the mattress and the heating. You're all too happy to kick your shoes off and lay face-down on the bed, letting all of the tension in your body go. The sheets, for all that they smell like cheap detergent, are petal-soft beneath your fingers. They're nothing like the ones in that cold, awful basement.

---

It doesn't take long for Sherlock to become a man obsessed.

They had first visited the residence of the victims - the scene of the crime. The Archer home had been destroyed, completely reduced to rubble and ash - even Verona Archer's car had been caught in the blaze, though the damage to the car was inconsequential next to the damage to the house and the lives lost within it.

What had once been a grand, elegantly decorated four-bedroom house was now barely standing. It's roof had caved in, and there were slate tiles strewn throughout the top floor and around the garden. Some beams of wood had been exposed, and many of the bricks had simply tumbled over, left with dark scorch marks over them.

It had been necessary to wear hazard gear within the house, and there was still one fire-engine waiting on the street, just in case the house were to be set aflame again. That was a common procedure, at the very least. A few neighbours would come out every once in a while, looking at the burnt remains of the Archer house in awe and horror.

There wasn't a whole lot actually left of the house.

Sherlock had torn his way down to the basement first, and quickly discerned what most of the items were - bookshelves, and lots of family photographs that didn't survive the blaze. But, most of the items in the basement were really irrelevant. It was the pile of scorched blankets that drew his attention.

"This is where the fire started, then, is it?" John asks, peering down at the blankets - they've melted together in some places, fusing to one another under the extreme heat. The entire house smells awful - the sickly scent of burnt human flesh mixed with gasoline - but the blankets smell awful, too. They were probably, back before they had been reduced mostly to ash, some sort of plasticy-material.

"Of course it is." Sherlock says, flitting around the basement and moving to inspect every little thing. "The Archers weren't the only ones living in the house. They were allowing someone to live in their basement."

"I thought they had four bedrooms?"

Sherlock shakes his head slightly. "Mm, no. One was Verona's closet. They had left their guest to sleep in the basement. The blankets are mostly polyester - they're well-used but they don't match anything upstairs. I think our guest has been down here for quite some time. The basement was a mess before the fire. Ms. Archer keeps things down here that she doesn't particularly like, but can't bring herself to throw away, just in case they become useful later."

"Wait, are you saying that the Archer girls - who, may I remind you, the mother being a grieving widow twice over, and her teenaged daughters - had been keeping somebody in their basement?" John asks, incredulously. He looks up from the pile of blankets and to Sherlock, in utter disbelief.

Sherlock scoffs. "Yes, John. That's exactly what I'm saying. Their guest was probably closely related to them. It's even possible that Verona had a third child. I'm almost certain now that our arsonist is a woman."

"A woman?" John frowns, "I thought you said most arsonists were men?"

"They are. They also tend to have a low intelligence - but she is neither a man, nor is she stupid. No, she's smart. She's smart and she's hurting right now. They're not going to find any evidence. She won't have left any. She's wanted this for a very, very long time." Sherlock whispers. "The rest of the house will be useless - the stairs are liable to give in if we try them. The basement was the only part she cared about. The burning was about obscuring her identity, not her crimes."

Naturally, the next place they turn to is the morgue.

All three bodies are already lain out on metal slabs when Sherlock and John enter, the latter wrinkling his nose. The house had, of course, smelled worse. But the actual scent of a charred corpse right in front of him was still incredibly sickening.

Molly greets them both with a smile, "Hi, Sherlock, - "

Sherlock brushes past her, his hands clasped behind his back. He circles around the bodies, his eyes darting over their wounds, their burnt, blistered skin, and the protruding bones.

The pictures had made Verona, Aubrey and Alora seem to be in even better condition than they were.

Their flesh had sunk, plastering itself to the bone in flaky pieces. They were more a mass of bloody body parts, sullen skin and ash than a real human body. There were a few persistent strands of platinum hair that had survived both the fire and the murder, clinging to their burnt scalps.

"That - oh, my god, the smell," John says between coughs, bringing a pale hand up to clasp it over the bottom half of his face. It was more a gesture of self-soothing than any actual attempt to block out the pungent fumes, but he does step back and momentarily avert his eyes.

Molly winces slightly, her cheery visage disturbed only slightly. "Yeah, I've tried pretty much everything. There's not much you can do for them. Ah, they died in their sleep, at least, so..."

"From the uh," John gestures to his throat, drawing a line across his neck horizontally with his pointer finger.

By far, the most disturbing part of the burnt cadavers is their necks. There's a grand, gaping hole in the charred flesh. It pulls away from itself, ribbons of burnt skin dangling into the throat cavity, and tiny pieces of ripped, hacked skin flaring upwards, soaked in crimson blood. They've been almost decapitated - their heads only very tenuously linked to their shoulders via the back of their necks.

It's much worse in real life - the crime scene photographs hadn't quite captured the depth of the cut.

"Yeah," Molly confirms with a grimace.

"No hesitation marks," Sherlock whispers. "Just as I thought. The twins were killed first. Aubrey, then Alora not soon after. Verona was saved for last - she was the culmination of all of this, the main target, if you will. Our perpetrator hated the twins, yes, but she hated Verona much more. You won't find any gasoline on their bodies. She put the gasoline on the floor, but not her victims. She wanted to obscure her identity but avoid damaging her work as much as possible."

"Okay, but we still don't know who the culprit is, or better yet, where they are." John says.

Sherlock shakes his head. "No, we know lots of things about her. Petite, early twenties. She hates the smell of disinfectant and she hates the cold even more. We can make the assumption that she may not even be Verona's daughter at all - perhaps one of those husbands had an affair, or more likely, a previous marriage that produced Verona's step-daughter."

"So, once again, the Archer girls were keeping a... step-daughter in their basement? And she killed them?" He questions.

"Oh, yes, she absolutely did." Sherlock grins. He sounds terribly fascinated, almost breathless - it's a kind of intrigue that John has only ever seen Moriarty produce in him. It's the kind of intrigue that never ends well. The kind that leaves Sherlock invigorated as he tries to unwrap every tiny mystery, whilst John is probably in some sort of danger.

"Right..." John's voice trails off, dying slowly as he watches Sherlock's eyes light up.

The consulting detective paces around the room, stalking around the bodies, grinning and muttering softly to himself. Moriarty's game is still afoot, but whilst they're waiting for his next move, Sherlock is going to indulge himself with another clever little side quest.

"She was smart. You're probably not going to find her - I mean I can tell she's probably gone to a major city, most likely London, given the proximity and her lack of resources. But, there's not going to be anything about her that's distinguishable from any other girl living in London." Sherlock announces.

"So that's it then. Case closed?" Molly asks, confusion colouring her tone as she folds her arms over her chest.

Sherlock pauses in his stride, and narrows his eyes, going so far as to look mildly affronted. "No, of course not. We're going to find her."

"Of course we are." John groans. "Was it not enough to just identify the unstable murder-arsonist lady?"

"No, John. Don't be silly." Sherlock scoffs. "We're going to find out everything we can about our Cinderella."

John frowns, looking to Molly who still looks equally puzzled. "Cinderella?"

"What else would you call a step-daughter mistreated by her step-mother and step-sisters?"

"I don't think that Cinderella killed her step-family and burnt their house down." John points out, sighing. "She's meant to go to a ball, meet a prince, not try to decapitate her family."

Sherlock dismisses John easily, "Perhaps not in the original version, no. But in this one? Absolutely."