"John?"
The second I heard the voice on the other end of the phone, I wished I'd never picked it up. A foreboding flowed through me. Mycroft Holmes wasn't going to tell me anything good.
I had been sitting in my surgery in an almost blissful near-ignorance, trying to sort through my paperwork before it was time for the next patient's appointment, when the phone rang.
"Something's happened. I thought you should know." A part of my mind, a part I'd endeavoured to ignore, not wanting to confront the suspicions that lurked there, had been dreading this phone call for months, ever since Sherlock, my best friend, had been sent on a mysterious mission to Eastern Europe.
"What is it?" Curiosity mingled with my fear. Another part of my mind was desperate for any news at all of Sherlock.
"Sherlock... Sherlock's dead," Mycroft's tone was unemotional and factual. I'd be lying if I said the statement was unexpected. And, yet, although I'd considered the possibility, something inside me broke at his words. Then I remembered the last time I'd felt that feeling. Anger rose up inside me, anger at the things I thought I'd reconciled myself to.
Images flashed before my eyes, the way they say your life does just before you die. All the images were of Sherlock, but the one that kept being repeated was of him falling through the air after he jumped off the hospital roof. He hadn't died then.
He wasn't dead. I knew it. Mycroft had to be lying to me.
"I'm not letting you two do this to me again!" I shouted down the phone.
"John, listen to me..."
"No! Last time I let him and you trick me together! I grieved for years and he wasn't even dead!" In truth it was Sherlock who I was angry at, not Mycroft. But Sherlock wasn't there to yell at. Mycroft, who had assisted Sherlock when he'd faked his death before, was the next best thing. "He's not dead! Don't you dare lie to me! Tell me where he is!" My yelling was probably more than audible to everyone in the surgery, but I didn't care.
"John, he's... he's gone. He really is dead. The details are confidential... so I can't tell you how it happened. But I can tell you that he put up a good fight. He saved hundreds of lives with what he did out there."
"Nothing you say will fool me. Last time, I saw him fall. I saw the body, the blood. I felt his stopped pulse! But he wasn't dead! He isn't dead this time either!"
"Well, we managed to get the body home. The funeral's tomorrow morning." He named the time and place in an incredibly weary voice, before hanging up.
I was left to my thoughts, to my anger, to my disbelief, to my fear. Thoughts raced through my head but all of them seemed disjointed and out of reach. I was almost glad when they were interrupted by a knock at the door.
"Come in." It was Caroline, one of the doctors I shared my surgery with.
"I just wanted to check if you were ok."
"You heard."
"I could hardly not... Is something wrong?" I wanted to think that she was asking out of kindness, but the cynical side of me thought she was probably rooting for gossip.
"No. Well, yes. I just heard... I got some bad news on the phone. I'm sorry I disturbed you."
She gave me a strange look and I had a feeling that she must have guessed from my shouts the nature of my bad news. I knew that Caroline, like everyone I ever met now, must know of my association with Sherlock Holmes, although she had never mentioned it to me.
Sherlock, and by extension me, had been in the news often enough. The incident with Charles Augustus Magnussen and Sherlock's leaving for Eastern Europe had not been covered, however. Mycroft must have hushed it up. But there had been plenty of speculation about the disappearance of the famous consulting detective, and I'd even needed to decline requests for information from several newspapers and news channels.
"Are you alright to stay to deal with your patients' this afternoon?" she said, sounding genuinely concerned.
"Yeah. I'll be fine." What was the point in leaving early? All I would do at home would be to wallow in my denial and theorise about how he did it this time. At least at work I would have something to distract me.
Or so I thought. But in reality nothing could distract me from thoughts of Sherlock. As each patient came in, I engaged in something that had become an unconscious habit of mine over the last six months. Taking in their appearance, I tried to work out what Sherlock would deduce about them.
Occasionally I would hit upon a correct fact, although it was only ever with things that Sherlock would have called obvious. Sometimes I could extract a small amount of surprise from the patient when I revealed that I knew their job or the pet they kept. They probably knew what I was doing, having recognised me as Sherlock Holmes' friend.
Most of the time, anyway, I drew a blank at their appearance. The attempts at deduction just made me feel worse. My mental comparisons between Sherlock's genius and my own feeble ideas made me miss him even more. I felt I was letting Sherlock down, having known him so well and yet learnt so little from him.