Page 73 - SHERLOCK transcripts

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SEBASTIAN: No? (To his secretary) We’re all sorted here, thanks.
(As the secretary leaves the room, Sebastian sits down at his desk and the other two sit side by
side opposite him.)
SHERLOCK: So, you’re doing well. You’ve been abroad a lot.
SEBASTIAN: Well, some.
SHERLOCK: Flying all the way round the world twice in a month?
(John frowns in confusion but Sebastian just laughs and points at Sherlock.)
SEBASTIAN: Right. You’re doing that thing.
(He looks at John.)
SEBASTIAN: We were at uni together. This guy here had a trick he used to do.
SHERLOCK (quietly): It’s not a trick.
SEBASTIAN (to John): He could look at you and tell you your whole life story.
JOHN: Yes, I’ve seen him do it.
SEBASTIAN: Put the wind up everybody. We hated him.
(Sherlock turns his head away and looks down, his face momentarily filling with pain. To this
day your transcriber cannot understand how Benedict didn’t win a BAFTA for that stupendous
moment of acting alone.)
SEBASTIAN: You’d come down to breakfast in the Formal Hall and this freak would know you’d
been shagging the previous night.
SHERLOCK (quietly): I simply observed.
SEBASTIAN: Go on, enlighten me. Two trips a month, flying all the way around the world –
you’re quite right. How could you tell?
(Sherlock opens his mouth but Sebastian continues speaking.)
SEBASTIAN (smugly): You’re gonna tell me there was, um, a stain on my tie from some special
kind of ketchup you can only buy in Manhattan.
(John smiles.)
SHERLOCK: No, I ...
SEBASTIAN (talking over him): Maybe it was the mud on my shoes!
(Sherlock simply looks back at him for a moment before speaking.)
SHERLOCK: I was just chatting with your secretary outside. She told me.
(John frowns round at him, confused by such an ‘ordinary’ explanation. Sebastian laughs
humourlessly and Sherlock smiles back at him with an equal lack of humour. Sebastian claps his
hands together, then becomes more serious.)
SEBASTIAN: I’m glad you could make it over. We’ve had a break-in.
(He leads them across the trading floor towards another door.)
SEBASTIAN: Sir William’s office – the bank’s former Chairman. The room’s been left here like a
sort of memorial. Someone broke in late last night.
JOHN: What did they steal?
SEBASTIAN: Nothing. Just left a little message.
(He holds his security card against the reader by the door to unlock it. Inside, hanging on the
plain white wall behind the large desk is a framed painted portrait of a man in a suit –
presumably the late Sir William Shad himself. On the wall to the left of the portrait someone
has sprayed what looks like a graffiti ‘tag’ in yellow paint. The tag looks vaguely like a number 8
but with the top of the number left open, and above it is an almost horizontal straight line.
Across the eyes of the portrait itself, another almost horizontal straight line has been sprayed.
Perhaps because of the texture of the paper or perhaps because the ‘artist’ oversprayed the
line, the yellow paint has run trails down the painting. Sebastian leads the way towards the
desk and then steps aside to allow Sherlock a clear view of the wall. John moves to stand on
the other side of Sebastian, who looks at Sherlock expectantly while the detective stares in
fixed concentration at the graffiti.)
(Later they’re back in Sebastian’s office and he is showing the boys the security footage of the
office from the previous night.)
SEBASTIAN: Sixty seconds apart.
(He flicks back and forth between the still photograph taken at 23:34:01 which shows the paint
on the wall and on the portrait, and a minute earlier – 23:33:01 – when the wall and portrait
were still clean.)
SEBASTIAN: So, someone came up here in the middle of the night, splashed paint around, then
left within a minute.
SHERLOCK: How many ways into that office?
SEBASTIAN: Well, that’s where this gets really interesting.

Transcripts by Ariane DeVere (arianedevere@livejournal.com)