Here’s a picture of the crime wall the morning of John’s wedding.
See in the reflection in the mirror? The crime wall is full of stuff. All the careful planning that Sherlock put into John’s wedding.
Now. Here’s a picture of the crime wall at the beginning of HLV.
It’s all gone! The wedding stuff is all gone! Sherlock (or someone else, but I’m guessing Sherlock, Mrs. Hudson knows better than to touch his stuff) took it down at some point in the month between the wedding and HLV.
Wait. Hold on. Think about that for one minute. Let’s think about what happened on the wedding day for Sherlock. He gets ready for the wedding. Goes to the wedding. The wedding plays out….the way that it did. Sherlock leaves the wedding early, because he simply cannot bear being reminded of the fact that he could have had true love, and instead he let it slip through his fingers.
He goes home. Opens the door, relieved that it’s all finally over with, relieved that he can finally escape. And:
Oh.
This is literally what it looked like when Sherlock finally made it home after the wedding. He walks in and is assaulted by the wedding again. This time, with the full knowledge of what exactly it is that he had planned. He planned this. He did this to himself.
At some point, Sherlock had to remove every single one of those scraps of paper, pin by pin. Maybe he did it right then, in the dark. Maybe he did it in the cold light of day, early the next morning, after a sleepless night. It doesn’t really matter, does it. The wedding is over now. It’s done with.
