He would find himself musing on it, surprised when the memory would rise up unbidden at random moments. Sometimes the connection was obvious—taking blood, when the leg was really acting up, running into Mike (although that happened seldom after he moved)—but he would also think of that angular face, the uncanny observations, the unusual name, at the oddest times. Once when he was nearly run off the road on his bicycle. Another time when Nicholas went into anaphylactic shock from strawberries and they'd had to rush him to the hospital, John holding his daughter's hand. He was thinking of his daughter, he was thinking of his grandson and then he was thinking about that meeting at Bart's.
It wasn't that John hadn't known anyone who'd died violently before. Men, good men, men he counted as friends, ripped open, blown to bits, burned alive, desperately calling for a God who didn't answer.
Maybe it was the fact that he'd died the day after John met him. Reading it in the paper John had thought, 'Well, thank God I didn't take that flat—been stuck with full rent after just one day." Then he'd chided himself for his callousness. It wasn't like him.
The man had been fascinating and bizarre, and really very rude. Somehow it didn't seem all that odd that he'd been murdered. By that murderer, the Suicide Serial Killer, the papers had dubbed him after. Actually, now that he thought about it John remembered that they'd caught the killer that next day. "Police Close On Suspect After Latest Murder." Too late for that poor sod, he'd thought.
He'd thought about going to see the flat, but in the end, after considering how badly a violin could be played and wondering why someone so public school needed a flatmate and then looking at that ridiculous website, he'd sent a note saying he'd found something else. A feeble lie that he was sure fooled no one, least of all someone with those powers of observation, but he'd been pretty depressed then, just back, feeling useless. He couldn't have faced all of that chaos, not with his nerves the way they were.
He'd moved, impossible to live in London on an army pension. With physical therapy, the leg had gotten better. Regular therapy had helped with the issues, although even now, so many years later, he would still wake from dreams full of the smell of cordite and the sensation of running and the sound of sirens, the sound of explosions, and he would just ache with loss, an emptiness that never quite went away.
Sometimes, sitting in his garden in Sussex, reading in the paper about some murder in London, John would look at Mary, knitting in her chair with needles clicking, and consider how he'd settled into a country practice after all; and made a good life there, raised children, indulged grandchildren, formed lasting friendships. He would shut his eyes and listen to the low whine of bees over the rhododendrons, smell the mown grass and wonder what his life would have been like if he'd gone with Sherlock Holmes to see the flat at 221b Baker Street.