Title: Spiritual Healing
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Challenge: Candles
Rating: PG
Length: 4,510
Summary: A dying woman brings the case of her mysteriously vanished spiritual healer to Baker Street.

John drew his chin down as far as he could inside his collar, tucked his hands in under his armpits, and wished he had a coat half as good as the one belonging to the poncy git who’d sent him out here all on his own.

Wherever Sherlock was, John hoped it was cold there.

After another freezing gust of wind, and another hopeless scan of the area and a glance at their target obliviously serving customers, John ducked inside the canvas wall of the market stall opposite. He was almost immediately driven out again by the overwhelming smell of the ranks of multi-coloured candles on shelves, racks, packages, layered in glasses and even dangling from their wicks above his head. Possibly worse were the faux medical diagrams of the human body and booklets of pseudoscience proclaiming all sorts of unlikely medical benefits of the secret knowledge within—only ten pounds, or fifty for the beginner’s kit!

John assiduously avoided the eye of the dark-dreadlocked lady running the stall, who was aromatic all of her own in a way even the candles couldn’t cover. He circled around one of the tables, keeping it between them, and buried himself in a display of differently sized glass jars of poured candle.  Each jar was stamped with a Vitruvian Man style diagram, on which glowing orbs showed how each of the rainbow layers would heal the user’s body.

The placebo effect really was a powerful thing.

Which was really where the whole case had started.

“Out,” Sherlock had told their latest client sharply after barely glancing at her. “There’s no crime in selling false hope to the dying.”

The hand John had raised to invite the woman to take his armchair, instead of the usual client chair, continued its upward journey to rub his forehead.

He hadn’t had to be a doctor to see that the woman was very unwell: her eyes were bruised, her face pale and exhausted from the effort of the single flight of stairs, her plain, slip-on dress hung loosely, and she had the emaciated look and turbaned head of the resident of a terminal oncology ward.

“Excuse me…” spluttered Darlene Pepper, after a frozen moment.

“Amber necklace,” dismissed Sherlock, apparently missing John’s consternation, “magnetic bracelet, very much out of touch with the diamond rings. And the corner of your pocket has soaked through with a single drop of plain water, clearly from the residue of a homeopathic dropper. You have come here because you’ve realised one among the many snake oils peddled to you since your diagnosis is a sham, but the answer is clear as to which: all of them. Was there something else?”

“I…”

Darlene pulled her cuffs down stiffly over the bracelet at her skinny wrist and then seated herself in the client char. She reached into the deep, practical pocket sewn onto the skirt of her dress—which John could see now was indeed stained with a droplet of water in the corner—and pulled out a small bottle. Her knuckles bulged as she clutched one thin hand around it as though for strength.

“Yes, Mr Holmes,” she said, her voice hoarse and cracking with age beyond her years. “There was indeed something else. I’m here about a missing person. My very real, very effective, spirit healer. His name is Lhamo. Medical doctors…” She shifted uncomfortably and glanced at John, obviously familiar with his occupation. “They gave me four months, with chemo, and I made it nearly six before I elected to stop treatment. I’m… ready to go. It will be soon. No power on earth or beyond can stop that.”

She paused as a fit of coughing overcame her. Sherlock opened his mouth to interrupt, but John glared him into submission.

“Llamo’s done so much to help me,” she went on. “His medicine truly works!  But I’m terribly worried that something’s happened to him. He’s been gone from the market the last two weeks.”

“Do you happen to have run out of money to give him?” sneered Sherlock.

Darlene’s eyes flashed within sunken sockets. “If that’s your concern,” she snapped, “you needn’t worry. I can pay the fees listed on your website, Mr Holmes, even the extortionist ones for a ‘boring’ case. But Llamo never took money, not ever; his only payment was the chance to ease the stain on his Atman. He did so much for me, Mr Holmes, whether you want to believe it or not. All I want is an assurance that he’s safe before I’m gone.”  She bit her lip.  “Failing that, I’d at least to know someone will still be looking for him.”

Sherlock frowned at her for a moment, eyes flicking all over her as Darlene gazed back at him fiercely, her hands white-knuckled around one another in her lap. He pulled out his phone and quickly looked something up before laying it face-down on the arm of his chair.

“I see,” he said, and laid the phone aside, face-down on the arm of his chair.

He held out a peremptory hand.

After a moment more glaring at him, Darlene relaxed her death grip on the homeopathic dropper, and passed it over.

Sherlock took it and subsided back into his chair, turning it over in his hands. After a moment, he pulled out his pocket magnifier to conduct a minute inspection of the label.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about him.” 

---

And so despite his apparent reservations as to the man’s motives or the efficacy of his apparent ‘cure’, Sherlock had somehow ended up taking the case of the mysteriously vanished spirit healer.

That said, aside from keeping the bottle and sending Darlene away with considerably less rudeness than he’d greeted her, John didn’t see Sherlock actually doing anything to actually find the man. He was clearly busy with something, in between chemical experiments and frequent trips out to return with various unexplained packages he secreted in his room.

“How’s the case going?” John prompted him after a few days. “Any closer to finding this so-called ‘healer’?”

Sherlock snorted. “He’ll turn up soon enough,” he said, and returned to examining the series of strips of filter paper that had spent the last few days dangling from clips in nearly all the flat’s mugs.

Nearly all the flat’s mugs, only because when John had noticed Sherlock setting up the experiment two days ago, he’d casually stuffed two of the still-clean mugs under his jumper and sauntered away to hide them upstairs to make sure they still had something to drink out of.

“Soon enough for Darlene?” pressed John. “She said she doesn’t have long, Sherlock, and I can certainly agree with her diagnosis.”

“Aha!” said Sherlock, plucking up one of the strips of towel and brandishing it at John. “Aspirin! Is that contraindicated with cancer treatment?”

John frowned, thinking for a moment. “No?” he said eventually. “Actually, they often put patients on a low dose. Improves survival rates and decreases the chances of recurrence. Is that what was in Darlene’s bottle?”

“Mmm, yes,” said Sherlock, although he wouldn’t explain any further.

Three days after that, when John had just finished giving Rosie her breakfast, Darlene returned to Baker Street. Her skin was grey and she was leaning heavily on a walking stick, but her eyes were bright as she broke away from Mrs Hudson in the doorway and hobbled crisply towards the chair where Sherlock was crouched, fingers steepled and staring into space.

John put Rosie’s giraffe on the highchair tray and hurried over to supervise Sherlock.

“Darlene, you’re looking well,” he said, because despite being still dying, she was looking well. Even with the cane, she looked like she’d had a weight lifted. “Please, take my chai—”

But Darlene wasn’t looking at John at all. Wordlessly, she thrust a cheque at Sherlock, her paper-thin skin stretched tight over her knuckles. Sherlock stared at it as though he’d never quite grasped the concept of money before slowly taking it.

John could see it well enough upside-down: it was signed, and filled in with the consultation fee he’d talked Sherlock into listing on his website, including a week’s retainer at the significantly higher boring-case rate.

“For your time,” she told Sherlock with a mirthless smile when he looked back up at her. “I’ve found Llamo, and without your help. Your services are no longer required.”

John cast Sherlock a suspicious glance. In his experience, the more convinced a client was that Sherlock had had nothing to do with the solution to their case, the less likely they were to be right.

She gave John a nod, then turned and hobbled back towards the door.

“Wait!” managed John, but Darlene ignored him, brushing past Mrs Hudson, who gestured helplessly at John behind her back, and followed her downstairs.

“Raff! Raff!” demanded Rosie, banging with both palms on the tray of her chair and arching her back in protest.

“What was that all about?” demanded John. He stooped to return the giraffe onto Rosie’s tray, then threw his hands up as she immediately tossed it overboard again. This time he held onto it as she tried to grab it, dancing it out of range and making her erupt into giggles. “Did you find him? If you really didn’t have anything to do with it, you’d better tear up that cheque. I’ll not have us extorting money from dying women!”

“Oh, do as you like,” scoffed Sherlock, waving a hand in dismissal and using the dagger to stab the cheque to the mantelpiece. “She can afford it.” He crossed to the window, looking down at the street below.

“Sherlock!” hissed John, although he noticed that the man hadn't exactly denied it.

From downstairs came the sound of the door to the street closing, followed by the door to 221A.

“Right!” said Sherlock, and as he turned back from the window, his eyes were bright. “It’s barely past eight, and the market’s open until two. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see this healer for myself.”

At least, it turned out, Sherlock wanted John to see the healer for himself, given that Sherlock had apparently lost interest in the case again somewhere between breakfast and John detouring across town to drop Rosie at her daycare on the way, and was nowhere to be seen at the market

Still, John hadn’t needed Sherlock’s help to find Darlene’s mysteriously un-vanished ‘spiritual healer’, who was precisely as she’d described. Even amid the colour and variety of the alternative market, Darlene’s healer stood out.

The hunched over little man, bald as an egg and in the saffron dyed robes of a Buddhist monk was set up at a plain little stall with barely any of the advertising and false claims that papered the candle stall where John had found refuge from the wind. In front of him sat a single folding table stacked with rank upon rank of tiny glass bottles like the one Darlene had showed them. And yet, despite the lack of advertisement—and the miserable day—the stall thronged with people, clustered three deep around him, their faces full of hope and relief as they waited patiently for their turn.

Each visitor exchanged a few words with him—sometimes he reached out to lay a professional-looking palm briefly on their their shoulder, or stomach, or wherever else they had indicated held the trouble. Then he would withdraw the hand, wrapping it around one of the small bottles and bending his head over it, deep in some form of prayer for minutes at a time, before he straightened again, presented them with the bottle and finished with a deep, palm-together bow.

Contrary to Sherlock’s assertions on the man’s intent—and John’s cynical perspective—it all seemed to be exactly as Darlene had said.  Occasionally he wrote something down on a little slip of paper he kept in some inner pocket of his robe, but none of the visitors to the stall even touched their money.  All of them went away smiling.

“You want buy candle?” asked the stallholder at John’s elbow.  In his distraction, he’d missed her approach. “Patchouli good for root chakra. Gives grounding and stability.”

“Er… no,” said John, hastily putting the plain red pillar candle down. “Stability’s never, um, worked very well for me.”

He peered over at the other stall, trying to see between the people. It looked like something might be happening over there—one of the customers, a scruffy looking man whose face was hidden by a dark hoodie, was starting to get rowdy. John could hear yelling, and the crowd began shuffling backwards into a loose circle, in that peculiar human way of getting just out of range while still being able to see the action unfolding.

“Ah: discerning customer!” pressed the stall-holder behind John. “I make you custom blend, very good value! What you need? Jasmine, sandalwood—luck with the women, I think you like! Give luck with the men too, if you prefer, mmm? You say what you need, I make up for you.”

“I need…” said John absently, not really listening as the angry customer he’d been squinting at through the racks of candles seized the orange robes of the stall-holder and pulled him bodily forward over the table, scattering tiny bottles everywhere, and then punched him to the ground.  “… to be over there.”

John ran, pushing his way through the crowd between two twittering teenagers to where the two men were fighting, to grab a fistful of the aggressive customer’s hoodie and pull him out of range of the struggling monk’s swinging fist.  The monk was still on the ground but not doing as badly as John had thought.  John wrapped one arm around the customer’s neck in a choke hold and pulled it tight, keeping a wary eyes on the monk; with two targets and still no fucking idea what was going on, he didn’t have time for this.

Three seconds into the choke, the man’s legs went watery on cue, and John let him fall, rolling him over to pin him with one knee and an arm locked up behind his back.

The monk, crumpled on the ground beside them, began to rise onto one knee, shaking his bald head to clear it.

“Don’t you go anywhere either,” snarled John. He hooked his free hand behind the bald monk’s standing leg and pulled forward, forcing him to sit down again abruptly, and then fisted his hand in the chest of his orange-robes. “We’ll let the police sort out who started this.”

“John,” protested the monk in a familiar, if strained voice. “You’re meant to be holding onto him, not me.”

John gaped at Sherlock for a moment—because of course the monk was Sherlock—before gathering his wits and letting go of him to return both hands to the now struggling, unhappy customer who’d been assaulting him. He didn’t, however, manage to take his eyes off Sherlock, who was… almost unrecognisable.

He’d covered his skin with some kind of stain, giving himself a weathered tan which, up close, contrasted sharply with his pale eyes and somehow made his gaze even more shockingly intense. But the apparent change of skin colour wasn’t what had shocked John the most.

“Your hair,” breathed John, horrified at the sight of his friend’s naked scalp. However much he denied it, Sherlock was deeply vain about his hair—John was capable of deducing that solely from the population of hair care products in the bathroom. This was going to take months to grow back! Maybe a year! “Sherlock, how could you? Even for a case!”

Sherlock frowned for a moment, then his expression cleared. “Oh,” he said, reached up to his forehead, and lifted the edge of a piece of thin latex that had been covering his hair, revealing a vivid white strip of uncoloured skin and the shadow of compressed dark hair, before letting it snap back into place. “Makeup artist owes me a favour. I took care of the little matter of a theater ghost for her.”

John let that pass, although he would definitely be following up on that story later. But now that he knew what he was looking for, he could see a faint line all the way around Sherlock’s forehead, expertly hidden just in front of where his hairline should have been.

He shook his head in disbelief. “What’s going on, Sherlock?” he demanded. He frowned at the man he still had pinned down, who was shaking his head groggily, having regained consciousness. “Why have you been manning that stall all day, and dressed like that? Please, I’m lost.”

“This man is a professional con artist,” Sherlock explained in a loud voice that reached the bystanders as he stood and dusted off his orange robes. Without the affected stoop in his back that had reduced him to barely five foot tall, they fell bizarrely to mid-calf.

He gestured to John to pull his captive upright a little, and then tipped back the man’s hoodie, revealing a lightly stubbled head and scowling face. A murmur went through the crowd, who obviously recognised him.

“The great 'Spirit Healer' here,” said Sherlock, “gives out free product for a few months—nothing but aspirin, in fact—along with a little hocus-pocus show to enhance the placebo effect. All the while, he’s dropping hints about the dark past he’s atoning for coming to catch him up. Then he disappears, leaving his loyal customer base worried literally sick. It’s an easy matter from there to hang out here, pick out the most concerned, follow them home individually and beg for help. A few hundred here, a few thousand here, a diamond ring or two, on and on, milking each one of them dry while they’re all sworn to secrecy for fear of his dangerous ex-associates. This is the third market in Britain packed with of credulous idiots that he’s hit.”

“And what were you doing here?” asked John, gesturing to the stall with its rows of identical bottles.

Sherlock shrugged. “I set up in his vacated stall, explained to his loyal customers that he was just fine, but felt called to another task, and that he’d arranged for me to take care of them in his place. I was convincing.” He put his hands together and bowed again—posture folded over, abruptly every inch the mystic monk—but when he raised his head, he was Sherlock again. “He couldn’t run the con if no one was working themselves up into a froth over him being missing, and I knew he’d be staking out the market to choose his next target. He wouldn’t put up with having me take over his well-groomed idiots just when all the tedious work he’d put in was about to pay off.”

There were angry mutters, and a noticeable thickening of the press of people around them.

“You can’t prove any of that!” protested Llamo, but his eyes were wild as he struggled in John’s grip. “I helped people! I never took a penny!”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows, and his voice again. “Didn’t take a penny? Ah, well I’m sure the police will let you go… unless there’s anyone here who wants to make a complaint?”

On cue, Lestrade and Donovan made their way through the circle of bystanders, just as a woman on the opposite side of the crowd said sharply, “I gave you three hundred quid on Tuesday! You said it was to buy a plane ticket. Why are you still here if that was true?”

“Me too,” yelled a man, the people in front of him separating slightly at his words so he could shoulder his way through to the front. “I gave him a thousand!”

“Police,” announced Lestrade, showing his badge. “John,” he said, sotto voce, “what’s this about? Have you been making citizens arrests again? We talked about this!”

“I didn’t start it,” protested John, looking up at Sherlock for help. “I just stopped him from beating up—”

“Namaste,” said Sherlock, and bowed deeply to Greg before the man could get a decent look at his face.

“Right,” said Lestrade, giving the top of Sherlock’s head an uncomfortable nod and turning back to John. “Where’s Sherlock? I’m willing to bet he’s up to his eyes in this.”

Behind Lestrade’s back, Sherlock straightened again and winked at Donovan. She gave a strangled squeak, her eyes going wide.

John rolled his eyes and inclined his head towards Sherlock. “He’s right here,” he said. “Being a dramatic git.”

“He’s—” said Greg in confusion, before his face paled.

Sherlock gave him a demented, toothy grin like a bare skull.

“Christ, Sherlock!” breathed Greg. “Your hair!”

“We’ve got a con artist,” Sherlock explained, his face straightening as he went through the story again for Greg’s benefit. “There’s quite a few angry victims in the crowd here, and there were plenty of others today whom I noticed he’d already started milking. I told them their condition was complicated enough that I needed additional meditation to treat them. After all the grooming he’s done on them, they were happy to leave me their contact details. As were the three with clotting disorders and the five with heart conditions, for whom the aspirin posed a serious hazard to their health. If you leave someone to canvas the market I’m sure you’ll find more.”

Greg listened seriously, nodding in all the appropriate places, but was still staring, slack-jawed and shaking his head.  

“But…” he managed after Sherlock wound down the explantion. “Your hair!”

John didn't blame him; God knew John had been thrown by Sherlock’s new look, too.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Sherlock snapped. “It was funny for the first five minutes, but it’s just a skull cap. It’s only hair! I had it short and ginger for a while when I was away,” he sneered. “And that was horrifyingly real.”

John and Lestrade exchanged a wide-eyed glance.

“Are there pictures?” demanded John, who simply couldn’t make the image work in his head.

“Yes, of course,” said Sherlock, with exaggerated politeness. “I had a whole portfolio shoot done, because it wasn’t as though the entire purpose of the exercise was to remain unnoticed! Now if you imbeciles are quite finished gawking, please do make a start on doing your job and take our friend to Scotland Yard, so I can get home and out of this ridiculous getup. I’ll email you the reports about the previous markets where he’s run this con—in the meantime, you’ve got the perpetrator, you’ve got the names and numbers of more victims to chase.”

He thrust the list he’d been waved around at Greg hard enough to make him take it reflexively, and sneered a little.

“They’ll be reluctant to believe, but if you get them all in a room together comparing stories like this lot lot”—he gestured at the small knot of mutinous-looking people who’d clustered close, waiting for police attention—“they should turn on him very quickly. They’ll all testify.”

He glanced back at the stall, papered with signs promising health and wellbeing and surmounted by a spill of tiny, tipped-over bottles from the brief fight John had stopped.

“You can use my stall as a field office,” he offered grandly. “The rent’s paid for the day, and it’ll draw just the right sort of customers.”

Lestrade looked at the size of the crowd and sighed, then gestured over a couple of constables and instructed them on gathering statements.

John made sure Sergeant Donovan had Llamo secure and then hurried after Sherlock, who’d managed to slip away through a gap in the crowd to make his escape.

“We should probably contact Darlene before Lestrade does,” said John once he’d caught up with Sherlock. “She’s our client; it should come from us. God, she’s going to be devastated.”

“She’s not on the list,” Sherlock dismissed the idea, striding out and making John do an undignified half-jog to keep up, clutching his coat around him as they cleared the paltry shelter of the clustered market stalls and the wind bit in.  

“What?” asked John, confused.

Sherlock glanced at him sideways and conceded to slow down a little. “They won’t need her testimony,” he said defensively. “She doesn’t have long enough to give it at trial, anyway. The recording I made of her telling her story, and his possession of her ring will be enough to include her among the victims. If there’s a bequest to him in the will, her executer can handle it with the police. There’s no reason to disillusion her.”

“Would the police agree about that?” asked John dubiously. He rather thought Lestrade might think her testimony was important. Of course Greg would be sensitive when he interviewed her, but she’d truly believed in Llamo. The disillusionment of discovering she’d been the victim of a confidence scheme wasn’t what John would want for anyone in their final few weeks of life.

“There’s no crime in selling hope to the dying,” reiterated Sherlock, without looking at John. “For her, ignorance is worth the price she paid him.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes. John thought about Sherlock’s initial refusal to take the case, about his ostensible detachment from it until Darlene had announced she had no further interest. About how much work he’d put into gathering witnesses to resolve the case without a need for her input.

“You know,” said John, tilting his head to get a better look at the back of Sherlock’s shiny scalp as they walked. The contrast of his smooth, round skull seemed to make those mad cheekbones stand out even more. “I think I’m getting used to the bald look. Maybe you should keep it.  You could shave it for real!”

Sherlock glared at him. “No.”

“I dunno. You're always saying it's only transport,” said John with a smirk.  “I think it kind of suits you.”

“Only the perpetrator of that moustache could possibly be so misguided.”

“So says Ginger Holmes,” giggled John, who’d become inured to that insult over time.

“I was in hiding!” snapped Sherlock, outraged.

“Ooooh,” said John, stopping in place as a thought occurred. “Your sister’s definitely Scary Holmes! Mycroft’ll have to be Posh Ho—”

“What are you talking about?” Sherlock turned at the edge of the road to stare at John. His face was a study in irritated confusion beneath the eerie bald head.

John started walking again, bumping his shoulder against Sherlock’s and grinning up at him fondly. “I had a girlfriend in Uni who liked to play ‘Which Spice’. Never mind, I’m sure you’ve deleted them. Let’s go back to the flat, all right? You can get your hair back where it belongs.”

“Finally the man speaks sense,” agreed Sherlock, giving John one last dubious look, before hailing a cab to take them home.