In the car, Sherlock gets out the plane ticket again, then tells Plummer what he has deduced.
SHERLOCK: There’s going to be a bomb on a passenger jet. The British and American governments know about it but rather than expose the source of that information they’re going 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 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 as he remembers 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.)
