Page 122 - SHERLOCK transcripts

121

JOHN (straightening up): Twenty years?
SHERLOCK: They’re not retro – they’re original.
(He shows John an image on his phone.)
SHERLOCK: Limited edition: two blue stripes, nineteen eighty-nine.
JOHN: But there’s still mud on them. They look new.
SHERLOCK (looking thoughtfully at the trainer): Someone’s kept them that way. Quite a bit of
mud caked on the soles. Analysis shows it’s from Sussex, with London mud overlaying it.
JOHN: How do you know?
SHERLOCK (nodding towards the computer screen): Pollen. Clear as a map reference to me.
(Two dots are flashing on a map of Britain, one around the borders of East and West Sussex
and the other to the south-east of London.)
SHERLOCK: South of the river, too. So, the kid who owned these trainers came to London from
Sussex twenty years ago and left them behind.
JOHN: So what happened to him?
SHERLOCK: Something bad.
(He looks up at John.)
SHERLOCK: He loved those shoes, remember. He’d never leave them filthy. Wouldn’t leave
them go unless he had to. So: a child with big feet gets ...
(He trails off, staring ahead of himself.)
SHERLOCK (softly): Oh.
(John looks across the lab, trying to see what his friend is looking at.)
JOHN: What?
SHERLOCK (softly): Carl Powers.
JOHN: Sorry, who?
SHERLOCK (still staring into the distance): Carl Powers, John.
JOHN: What is it?
SHERLOCK: It’s where I began.

Later, the boys are in the back of a taxi.
SHERLOCK: Nineteen eighty-nine, a young kid – champion swimmer – came up from Brighton
for a school sports tournament; drowned in the pool. Tragic accident.
(He shows John the front page of a newspaper on his phone.)
SHERLOCK: You wouldn’t remember it. Why should you?
JOHN: But you remember.
SHERLOCK: Yes.
JOHN: Something fishy about it?
SHERLOCK: Nobody thought so – nobody except me. I was only a kid myself. I read about it in
the papers.
JOHN: Started young, didn’t you?
SHERLOCK: The boy, Carl Powers, had some kind of fit in the water, but by the time they got
him out it was too late. But there was something wrong; something I couldn’t get out of my
head.
JOHN: What?
SHERLOCK: His shoes.
JOHN: What about them?
SHERLOCK: They weren’t there. I made a fuss; I tried to get the police interested, but nobody
seemed to think it was important. He’d left all the rest of his clothes in his locker, but there was
no sign of his shoes ...
(He leans down and picks up a bag containing the trainers.)
SHERLOCK: ... until now.

SIX HOURS TO GO. As Sherlock sits in the back of the taxi holding the pink phone and lost in
thought, the woman who rang him earlier sits in her car crying in despair.

221B. Sherlock has shut himself in the kitchen and is sitting at the table with the trainers
nearby – still in the bag – while he looks through photographs and printouts of newspaper
reports of Carl Powers’ death from 1989. In the living room, on the other side of the closed
doors, John is pacing back and forth. He stops and slides open one of the doors.
JOHN: Can I help?
(Sherlock doesn’t react to him at all.)
JOHN: I want to help. There’s only five hours left.

Transcripts by Ariane DeVere (arianedevere@livejournal.com)