marysutherland | A capital woman (221B metafic)

BBC Sherlock

Rating: 15 (swearing)

For shouldboverthis, with congratulations on her clever Gloria Scott-inspired fic.

A sort of sequel to B221

"She fooled your team again, I see. Hardly surprising, when you're so blind."

"How did she do it then? How did she pass the message on?"

"Obvious, surely, to the meanest intelligence? Oh, I forgot-"

"Up yours, Sherlock! She's beaten you before now. Ms Adler's too clever for the lot of us."

"Lestrade, I hardly think you can compare my minor error to your catastrophic blunder. You actually saw her write the story in the internet cafe."

"Don't rub it in. It looked harmless."

"But it wasn't."

"OK. But we checked it, like you told us to. Every third word, reading it backwards, looking for codewords. We even ran it through that statistical analysis programme."

"Visual inspection would have been enough, if you had but eyes to see."

"Excuse me, I came here for help, not to get sneered at."

"Really? It's so simple, I wonder why I bother."

"Tell me. For God sake, Sherlock, tell me what you know."

"How it was done? Simple. Look carefully down the story and tell me what you see."

"If you take the first letter of every sentence...no, the first letter of every paragraph, it –"

"Spells out the name of Ms Adler's contact. Who has now had ample time to escape. I think the word you're looking for here, Lestrade, is Buggeryfuckingbollocks."