Chapter 9 : The Suicides Begin
Brixton Bedsit — July 28, 2010, 7:15 AM
The headline was buried on page seven of the Evening Standard.
JUNIOR MINISTER FOUND DEAD IN BUILDING SITE — APPARENT SUICIDE
I'd been scanning the papers every morning for six weeks, waiting for this. Not this headline specifically — but the pattern. The word that would tell me the game clock had started.
Suicide.
Beth Davenport. Junior Minister for Transport. Found dead in a construction site in South London, a pill bottle nearby. The police were treating it as self-inflicted. The article was three paragraphs long, sympathetic in tone, and completely wrong.
I set the paper down and took a breath. Then another. The coffee in my hand had gone cold while I read — I'd brewed it twenty minutes ago and forgotten it entirely, which was unlike me, which told me something about the state of my nerves.
It's starting.
I pulled the notebook from under the mattress and opened it to the timeline page. Two entries already there, added in the past month as I'd caught the earlier reports.
June 12: Sir Jeffrey Patterson. Prominent businessman. Found dead in "apparent suicide." No note. No history of depression.
July 3: James Phillimore. Young professional. Found dead in his car. "Apparent suicide." No note. No warning signs.
July 27: Beth Davenport. Junior Minister. Found dead in construction site. "Apparent suicide."
Three. Three deaths over seven weeks, all classified as suicide, none of them fitting the profile. No history. No notes. No warning signs. Found in locations that made no sense for someone ending their own life — a business meeting, a parked car, a building site.
The police hadn't connected them yet. Or if they had, it wasn't public. Individually, each death looked tragic but unremarkable. Together, they formed a pattern so obvious it made my teeth ache.
Jeff Hope. The cabbie. He's already killing people.
I pinned Beth Davenport's name to the corkboard, below Patterson and Phillimore. Drew a red line connecting all three. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my knuckles against my forehead, thinking hard.
What I knew: the killer was Jeff Hope, a terminally ill cabbie being paid by Moriarty's network for each murder. He picked up victims in his cab, took them somewhere private, and offered them a choice between two pills — one poison, one harmless. A game. A test of wit. The victims always chose wrong, because Hope had stacked the deck.
What I couldn't prove: any of it. I had no evidence, no access to the crime scenes, no forensic data. Everything I knew came from a television show that didn't exist in this world.
What I could do: investigate from the outside. Build a parallel case file. Gather what information was publicly available and supplement it with my network's observations. If I could assemble enough independent evidence to point toward murder rather than suicide, I could feed it to the police — anonymously, the way I'd handled the warehouse.
Or I could go further.
[Case Acquired: Serial Suicides — Difficulty: Major — Status: Active]
[Warning: Canon Event In Progress. Intervention may cause divergence.]
The system notification appeared and vanished. I barely glanced at it.
---
Brixton Library — July 28, 2010, 10:30 AM
Public records first.
Sir Jeffrey Patterson. Fifty-seven. CEO of a consulting firm. Found dead at a hotel in Docklands where he'd been attending a conference. Toxicology report not public, but the inquest noted "ingestion of a toxic substance." His wife's statement described him as "happy, looking forward to retirement." No history of mental health issues.
James Phillimore. Thirty-two. IT consultant. Found dead in his car at a park-and-ride in Croydon. Similar toxicology findings. His girlfriend told reporters he'd been in "great spirits," had just booked a holiday.
Beth Davenport. Forty-one. Junior Minister. Found last night. No public toxicology yet, but the circumstances matched — unusual location, no apparent reason, no note.
I cross-referenced every detail I could find. Addresses, workplaces, social circles, travel patterns. Nothing connected them to each other. Different boroughs, different professions, different lives. The only common thread was the manner of death: voluntary ingestion of poison in a place they had no reason to be.
They got in a cab. They all got in a cab.
The realization — the one I already had, confirmed by the data — settled like a stone in my stomach. Jeff Hope was driving around London right now, picking up fares, chatting about the weather, and some of those fares never arrived at their destination.
I closed the laptop — the library's, not mine, I still couldn't afford my own — and rubbed my eyes. The screen glare had given me a headache that pulsed behind my left eye.
[Mental Stamina: Moderate use. Recommend rest period.]
Not yet.
I pulled out the burner phone and called Charlie.
"I need eyes on every cab rank in South London. Not a specific driver — I need patterns. Which drivers work the same routes every night. Which ones take fares to unusual locations. Which ones refuse certain pickups."
Silence on the line. Then: "That's a lot of ground, Nathan."
"I know. Use Marcus for Waterloo and Southwark. Rosa can cover the coaches — sometimes cabs queue near there for late-night fares. I'll handle Brixton and Camberwell personally."
"Can I ask what this is about?"
I hesitated. Charlie deserved more than evasion. He'd earned that, over the past two months — the trust, the reliability, the steady presence on his bench dispensing information and asking only fair payment in return.
"There have been three deaths in London in the last seven weeks," I said. "All classified as suicide. None of them fit. I think someone is killing people and making it look like they chose to die."
A long pause. Traffic noise. A bus horn.
"You're serious."
"I'm serious."
"And you think a cabbie is doing it?"
Damn. Too much. I'd let the meta-knowledge bleed through.
"I think the victims were all found in places they had no reason to be," I said, pulling back. "Which means someone took them there. Cabs are anonymous. Nobody remembers their driver."
"That's..." Charlie exhaled. "That's actually sharp."
"That's what you pay me for. Except you don't pay me — it goes the other direction."
"Right. I'll put the word out. Cab patterns. It'll take a week, maybe two."
"Fast as you can, Charlie. I think more people are going to die."
---
I spent the afternoon walking. Not running — walking. Through Brixton, through Camberwell, through Kennington and the Oval. Hands in my pockets, mind grinding through possibilities like a machine with too many gears.
The weight of foreknowledge pressed down on me in a way it hadn't before. Missing packages and fencing operations were one thing. People dying — real people, in this world that was real now, regardless of what it had been before — was something else entirely.
Beth Davenport had a family. Patterson had a wife. Phillimore had a girlfriend who'd just booked a holiday.
I stopped at a bench — not Charlie's bench, a different one, on Kennington Park Road — and sat. The afternoon was warm. Kids played on the grass thirty metres away, their shouts carrying on the breeze. Normal. Everyday. The kind of scene that made you forget there was a serial killer operating in plain sight.
You can't go to the police. Not yet. You have no evidence they'd accept — just connections drawn from public records and a hunch about taxis. They'd file it and forget it.
You can't confront Hope directly. Even if you found him, what then? You're a Level 2 PI with a PHY of 9 and no combat experience.
You can't tell Sherlock. He doesn't know you exist, and even if he did, approaching him with "I know things I shouldn't" would end one of two ways: he'd deduce you in five seconds, or Mycroft would have you in an interrogation room in ten.
What I could do was work the problem from the edges. Gather evidence independently. Build a case file that stood on its own merits, free from foreknowledge, supported by observation and deduction and the network I'd spent two months constructing.
And when the police finally connected the deaths — when Sherlock Holmes entered the picture and the investigation accelerated — I'd have something to offer. A piece of the puzzle they didn't have. Maybe enough to save a life.
[+15 SP. Total: 125. Investigation: Independent case analysis.]
[DED +2: Pattern recognition across multiple cases. New total: 13]
[OBS +2: Sustained detail tracking in public records. New total: 17]
I pulled the notebook from my jacket pocket and started a fresh page.
SERIAL SUICIDES — WORKING FILE
Victims: 3 confirmed. Likely more to come. Pattern: All ingested poison voluntarily. All found in unusual locations. No notes, no history, no warning. Theory: Victims transported to locations by unknown party. Cab driver most likely vector — anonymous, trusted, ubiquitous. Needs: Cab pattern data from network. Toxicology details (source?). Victim movement data (CCTV? Public transport records?)
The CCTV angle was interesting. If the victims had been in a cab before their deaths, there might be footage. But accessing CCTV required either police authority or hacking skills I didn't possess. The library computers had public databases and news archives, not security camera feeds.
Unless.
I flipped back to an earlier page. Pemberton's properties. One of his buildings in Peckham had a CCTV system that covered the street. If Patterson or Phillimore had been anywhere near Pemberton's buildings before their deaths—
Long shot. Astronomically long. But I'd built a career at the Bureau on long shots that paid off because nobody else bothered to check.
I wrote: Ask Pemberton for CCTV access. Frame as security audit for his properties. Review footage for cab patterns in relevant time windows.
Then I wrote something else. Something harder.
Decision needed: How far do I go with this? If I gather enough evidence to identify Hope before Sherlock does, do I act? Do I go to the police directly? Do I stay anonymous?
The answer should have been obvious. People were dying. Any information that could stop the deaths faster should be shared as fast as possible through whatever channel worked.
But it wasn't that simple.
In canon, John Watson shot Jeff Hope. That shot saved Sherlock's life. That moment — the gunshot in the darkened building, the cabbie bleeding out on the floor — was the foundation of the most important friendship in this world. Sherlock and John's bond was forged in that violence, in that choice. Without it, everything downstream changed. Every case. Every friendship. Every sacrifice.
If I stopped Hope before that moment, John might never become the John Watson that Sherlock needed. Sherlock might never become the Sherlock Holmes that London needed.
The butterfly effect. The one thing every transmigration story warned about and no transmigration story adequately resolved.
You're not God, Cole. You're not even a particularly good detective yet. You're a Level 2 nobody with a corkboard and a homeless network.
But you're a nobody who knows a serial killer is operating in London. And doing nothing with that knowledge makes you complicit in every death that follows.
I closed the notebook. The kids were still playing on the grass. The sun was still warm.
I picked up my phone and dialled a number I'd memorized from the news article.
It rang three times. A voice answered — tired, official, clipped.
"Metropolitan Police, Crimestoppers line."
"I'd like to report a connection between three recent deaths. Sir Jeffrey Patterson, James Phillimore, and Beth Davenport. They've been classified as suicides, but I believe they're connected. Same method, same lack of motive, same unusual circumstances. I think someone is killing these people."
Silence.
"Sir, those cases are being handled by separate—"
"Check the toxicology. I believe you'll find the same substance in all three. And look at how they got to where they were found. I believe a taxi was involved."
I hung up before they could ask for my name.
Anonymous again. A voice on a phone, pointing toward a truth that the police would need weeks to verify — weeks during which more people might die.
I pocketed the phone and stood. The park was quiet. The kids had gone home.
Jennifer Wilson was still alive. A media professional going about her day, oblivious to the cab ride that would end her life sometime in the next few weeks.
I had a case file to build and a clock that wouldn't stop ticking.
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