Mine is not a name that anybody is ever supposed to know. The idea is that I walk in, I do the job, I walk out again, and nobody needs to know any more than that it's done. I like it that way. So my name is not generally a thing I go about broadcasting. But today, now, for the record, my name is Sebastian Moran. It wasn't always and it's liable to change again at some stage, but that's another charge altogether and it can't be tried to today. My name is Sebastian Moran. It's been about ten years since my last confession.

The papers or the dock or the confessional, it all amounts to the same thing. Here is a thing that happened and here is a weight I need to get off my soul.

You will be familiar, if you haven't been in a coma, with the events that took place last week at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Two men dead, two suicides, two lives destroyed. Well, no, more than two lives destroyed. That would be nice, actually, if it was just the dead people who suffer when they die, but it's not. That would be a very comforting thing. But it's not. It's loads of people. Everybody's got mates and employees and people who, one way or another depend on them. People you don't even know personally rely on you to be what you are.

Look at me. No name, no face half the time. But people rely on me to be what I am. To get the job done.

So here's my confession. I, Sebastian Moran, was in a position to prevent every single scrap of this suffering. And as I'm sure you can tell from the fact that you are, after all, familiar with these events, I didn't do it.

Now, if this was the confessional, just admitting that would be enough. That's the idea of it; if you repent in your heart you're already forgiven. But there's a reason I'm lapsed these days. So just in case the confessional isn't working for me anymore, here's the details, like the judge and the journalist would want.

There are those who know of my former association with James Moriarty, now deceased. Those people have questioned, more than once, how he could be so close to the end of his own game and me not notice. I'll be honest, I've asked myself the same question a hundred bloody times since it happened. But there's a part of me knows there's no point asking that question. I never really take it seriously. I think it, and it stings, but when you boil it all down, I can't beat myself up over that. People who ask me that question clearly didn't know him.

He kept me out of it. It's that simple. Not just me, but others, just as close and closer. He kept everybody out of it. We were all just playing along. Pulling little jobs here and there. We got a painting nicked, we got a fella kidnapped, put a couple of kids in front of a pile of sweets and let nature take its course. Nothing we hadn't done before. We'd done something very like it almost exactly a year previous. I was thinking to myself I was going to have to start keeping that particular time of year clear, like Christmas, like August holidays. The Annual Mess-Holmes-Around Session.

But what with being closer than most, and making a will being absolutely useless if nobody knows about it, I had about twelve hours advance noticed of the actual… event. Did I want twelve hours notice? No. No, I frigging well didn't. But I got it, nonetheless. And I did what any sensible person would do in the face of talk like that, and I walked out and left him to it.

Don't hold that against me. I'm not proud of it, but don't hold it against me. Get your best mate to stand there and essentially tell you he's going to top himself before you hold that against me, alright?

So I walked out.

And then I walked home. And I got the rifle case out of the safe and then I walked almost all the way back. I parked up on the opposite building, and I assembled said-rifle, and I got a decent shot lined up right down the hall, where he'd be crossing for drinks or a last supper, or at the very latest for breakfast in the morning, and I settled myself to wait.

Prick's finished with this life, I was thinking, well fine. But I wasn't up for letting him hang it all out in public, make a spectacle and a media circus out of what should have been something private. And not just for him, the selfish bastard, but for us that would mourn him. And you can take that bleeding look off your face and all, because there's plenty to have mourned, or if there are only a few then it's quality over quantity. You call him the villain, knock yourself out. He called himself that. Me, I called him my mate and I'm not the only one did so. So just take the bleeding smirk off, please…

So I was sitting there maybe an hour before I realized I wasn't actually going to kill him.

That's not what I meant when I told you I was going to stop it all. What I meant was, even when I figured that out, my aim stayed true and I stayed behind my gun. It came to me very clearly. See, when it came to pulling all the strings, getting lots of disparate ducks to form an orderly queue, that was what made him special. Me, my talent lies elsewhere. My talent lies in the tiny weight of a single bullet. One shot. One shot can change everything and that's what I can do. Jim knew that. Really he was the only person who ever thought it was a proper skill to be proud of.

Lodged in his ribs too close to the heart to be easily removed. Jammed into his kneecap, surrounded by splinters of bone. In the wall behind him, but having grazed the side of his neck, the blood loss enough to knock him out but not kill him until the ambulance could get there.

One shot could have changed everything. Jim knew that.

He walked past the end of my sight. And I could have very easily got him in the knee. That would have been an end to it. Barring the crippling pain in the there-and-then, which honestly he just bloody deserved, he would have been off the leg. It would have been an end to all those stairs at Bart's, after all. Long way up to the roof. And he wouldn't have been able to move at any speed for me to stop him. Neighbours hear the shot, means cops, means ambulance, means necessary time spent in hospital and Bart's wasn't our closest.

In addition, he would have known I'd shot him in the kneecap, and he probably would have known I was thinking all that when I did it. And maybe, just a little bit of hope sort of maybe, that would have made him think again.

But one way or another it would have been over.

He walked past the end of my sight, made himself a sandwich, and walked back again. And then I disassembled my rifle, put it away, and went home. The next day he told me where to be and to keep an eye on Holmes, and I went and did it. And I watched him swallow a bullet. And that's how it happened, because I didn't stop it.

This can't be confession after all. I used to feel better after confession.

[A/N - Who do you want to hear from next?]