Page 190 - SHERLOCK transcripts

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to let it happen. The plane will blow up. Coventry all over again. The wheel turns. Nothing is
ever new.
(Neither Plummer nor the driver respond to him in any way. Some time later the car arrives at
Heathrow Airport and is driven past hangars to a 747 Jumbo Jet parked on the tarmac. The car
stops near the plane and Sherlock gets out and walks over to the steps which lead up to the
entry door. A familiar figure is standing at the bottom of the steps. It’s Neilson.)
SHERLOCK (nonchalantly, in a deliberately fake American accent): Well, you’re lookin’ all better.
How ya feelin’?
NEILSON: Like putting a bullet in your brain ... sir.
(Sherlock lets out a quiet snigger and starts to walk up the steps.)
NEILSON: They’d pin a medal on me if I did ...
(Sherlock stops.)
NEILSON (insincerely): ... sir.
(Sherlock half-turns back towards him, then apparently decides he can’t be bothered and
continues up the steps. Inside, he pulls back the curtain obscuring the passenger seating and
walks into the aisle. The lighting is very low and it’s hard to see. There are people sitting in
almost all the seats but none of them is moving or speaking or showing any signs of life at all.
Frowning, he walks forward and looks more closely at the nearest passengers. An overhead
light shows more clearly the faces of two men sitting beside each other and Sherlock now
realises the truth: they are dead. Although they’re not yet showing any signs of decomposition,
their skin is very grey and they’ve clearly been dead for some time. He turns and looks to the
passengers on the other side of the aisle, turning on another overhead light to get a better
view. The man and woman sitting there are also long dead. As he straightens up, realising that
everyone on board the plane must be in the same condition, his brother speaks from the other
end of the section.)
MYCROFT: The Coventry conundrum.
(Sherlock turns as Mycroft pushes back the curtain and steps through into the cabin. For the
first part of the ensuing conversation he talks softly, almost as if out of respect for the dead
bodies in front of him.)
MYCROFT: What do you think of my solution?
(Sherlock gazes around the cabin, still taking it all in.)
MYCROFT: The flight of the dead.
SHERLOCK: The plane blows up mid-air. Mission accomplished for the terrorists. Hundreds of
casualties, but nobody dies.
MYCROFT: Neat, don’t you think?
(Sherlock smiles humourlessly.)
MYCROFT: You’ve been stumbling round the fringes of this one for ages – or were you too bored
to notice the pattern?
(Sherlock flashes back in his mind to the two little girls sitting in his living room.)
LITTLE GIRL: They wouldn’t let us see Granddad when he was dead.
(He lifts his head a little, remembering the creepy guy sitting in the same chair on a different
occasion, holding a funeral urn.)
CREEPY GUY: She’s not my real aunt. I know human ash.
MYCROFT: We ran a similar project with the Germans a while back, though I believe one of our
passengers didn’t make the flight.
(Sherlock flashes back to the car with the body in the boot and the passport stamped in Berlin
airport.)
MYCROFT: But that’s the deceased for you – late, in every sense of the word.
SHERLOCK: How’s the plane going to fly? (He answers himself immediately.) Of course:
unmanned aircraft. Hardly new.
MYCROFT: It doesn’t fly. It will never fly. This entire project is cancelled. The terrorist cells have
been informed that we know about the bomb. We can’t fool them now. We’ve lost everything.
One fragment of one email, and months and years of planning finished.
SHERLOCK: Your MOD man.
MYCROFT: That’s all it takes: one lonely naïve man desperate to show off, and a woman clever
enough to make him feel special.
SHERLOCK (quirking an eyebrow): Hmm. You should screen your defence people more
carefully.
MYCROFT (loudly, furiously): I’m not talking about the MOD man, Sherlock; I’m talking about
you.
(He slams the tip of his umbrella on the floor. Sherlock frowns, genuinely confused.)

Transcripts by Ariane DeVere (arianedevere@livejournal.com)