The Girl Without a Mark

Going by the state of her knees...

All three of us got into a cab and headed for Brixton. Sherlock sat with his eyes fixed on his smartphone on the left window side, with me in the middle and John on the right. There was quite a bit of silence for a long time, an almost awkward silence, but I had a thin-tipped sharpie in my jacket pocket and I took it out to draw on my left arm, pushing the sleeve up as far as it would go. John kept stealing nervous glances at Sherlock until the other man lowered his phone, glancing at the drawing on my left wrist before looking at John.

"Okay, you've got questions," Sherlock said to him.

"Yeah," John replied. "Where are we going?"

"Crime scene. Next?"

"Who are you? What do you do?"

"What do you think?"

"I'd say, private detective," John said hesitantly.

"But?"

"But the police don't go to private detectives."

"I'm a consulting detective. Only one in the world. I invented the job."

"I figured you were some sort of consultant," I murmured, eyeballing the dragon head I had drawn on my wrist, and I from the corner of my eye I saw Sherlock look at me with that speculative gleam in his eyes and I smiled, sliding a sideways glance at him. He turned back to look at John once more.

"What does that mean?"

"It means when the police are out of their depth," Sherlock told him. "Which is always, they consult me."

"The police don't consult amateurs." I could feel the look Sherlock gave John and I chuckled quietly, causing both of them to look at me and I simply gave them both a blank expression.

"What?" I asked. Neither one said anything and I wondered if they knew what to make of me yet. So I rolled my eyes and went back to drawing while still listening to them talk.

"When I met you for the first time yesterday, I said, 'Afghanistan or Iraq?'" Sherlock said. "You looked surprised."

"Yes, how did you know?"

"I didn't know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself, says military. But your conversation as you entered the room said you trained at Bart's, so Army doctor–obvious. Your face is tanned but no tan above the wrists. You've been abroad, but not sunbathing. Your limp's really bad when you walk but you don't ask for a chair when you stand like you've forgotten about it, so it's at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan–Afghanistan or Iraq."

Sherlock loudly emphasized the 'k' sound at the end of the word "Iraq" and once again I found myself chuckling quietly. Sherlock continued to deduce things about John while I listened, and I was more and more impressed with his skills. I raised my head as his latest deduction came to a close to watch them interact.

"There you go, you see," Sherlock told him. "You were right."

"I was right?" John asked, clearly confused, "Right about what?"

"The police don't consult amateurs," Sherlock looked out of the window, biting his lip ( was he nervous?) while he awaited John's reaction.

"That," John said. "Was amazing."

"Indeed, it was," I agreed.

Sherlock looked back at us, apparently so surprised that he couldn't even reply for the next four seconds.

"Do you think so?" he asked in such a way that told me that this was what made people single him out for being different; his ability to almost tell a person's whole life story just by looking at them and making connections most others would never think of.