Oh, here he bloody comes. His Highness.
This is my favourite part, you know. What will follow on is fairly standard, but I like this bit; right before he comes into me, he stops and takes a long, deep breath. He's just a shadow through frosted glass, but I can see it, and it's my very favourite part. It gives me enough strength to look like I'm being strong.
And I am, by the way, being periodically tortured, so strong is in pretty short supply. I need that deep breath of his as much as he does.
Then the door starts to open. As he comes in, I look past him. The P.A. is outside, where she always is. Holding his coffee and briefcase. She looks unruffled and, indeed, unrufflable, but she doesn't fool me. No, she's raging. She hates me. Afraid for him and hates me for it. That's a little extra strength too. So I look past him so he can notice and say, "I like her. Why does she never come in? Does she not talk?" While the door swings closed, I wave out at her, "Hello." But the door closes and that blessed distraction is gone again.
Just me and Frosty now.
"You know," I tell him, "When I said I'd give it all up if you just brought me the interesting Holmes, I meant it."
Mycroft settles himself. That chair opposite me isn't any more comfortable than the one I'm sitting on but, given he's not shackled to his, I'm still jealous.
He says, "I know."
"Ah, you'll come round."
"Oh?"
"Well, if everything's still running to schedule there's a little village school in Wales goes up in smoke next week. How's the country coping, by the way, with the spate of random and senseless violence and misfortune befalling the very weakest in society?"
And he, quite brutally, quite openly, "The country doesn't know."
He's making sure everything is underreported. So the nursing home in the Shetlands that mysteriously exploded even though it was on electric and not gas and the children's playground that was shot up worse than the south of Los Angeles one night, those have been played down, and nobody's getting a chance to panic. But he can only keep me here so long before word still starts to get about. I'm going to make his precious nation so paranoid, so heart-scared, feed the redtop tabloids into such a fecking frenzy that no decent person will cross their door, and he knows that.
He says, "Where in Wales?"
I make a show of thinking hard, of having forgotten. I puff up my cheeks and blow the breath out long, shaking my head. "Jesus… Hold on, it'll come to me. I put it in place, God's sake. It'll come to me… Anyway, like I say, that's only if the trains are still running on time, as it were. Me being incarcerated and all, I've no way of knowing. No way of controlling it anymore."
That last part is complete crap. I've left everything in very good hands, hands I trust. Hands that have a list, and that know it's one a week for the first three weeks, and two each week thereafter, and if it goes on much longer than that just to come and get me.
I know my limits.
And Elder Holmes knows crap when he hears it. He knows better than to just ask again, and he knows better than to send for those boys who come in and ask harder than him.
He knows, even if he doesn't know how, that I can call off anything I want anytime I want. I've been telling him that. Two occasions so far he's come in here for a little chat. Two occasions I've offered to call it off. Two occasions he's refused to give me anything in return, and aren't there fourteen old-age pensioners, three children and seven parents who could all thank him for it?
He says again, "Where in Wales?"
"I'm thinking, I'm thinking. I feel so stupid. I mean, I had it written down on the list and everything and I must have read it over a dozen times and here I am completely lost… It's those Welsh names, though, they're too strange. Irish names are bad, but the Welsh have it down to a fine art…"
He just sits there. Doesn't move, doesn't pound his fist down on the table, doesn't rage at me, has nothing scathing to say, no awful leverage to pull out and change the game. He just sits there. He knows what I want, see. He couldn't help but no. I've told him outright, oh, quite a number of times.
He says, wound up tight, "Where in Wales?"
And this time it's just his way of saying, What do you want to know?
"What age were you when he was born?"
"…Seven."
Oh yes. Suddenly it's all worth it. Every cut and bruise and graze is redeemed in that one word, that one little fact. It's beautiful. It's really, really beautiful, and though I try my very best not to, I end up laughing.
"School age," I tell him. "And how did you feel? The mists are clearing, by the way. I'm getting the stench of the Irish Sea, but how did you feel, getting a little brother? Excited? Jealous?"
He takes another one of those long deep breaths, nostrils flaring. I don't know if he's fighting the past or fighting killing me. Whatever it is, I don't care, I just love it.
You don't understand, you can't possibly, what it's like to suffer everything the rather inventive gents from Vauxhall Cross can come up with, all in anticipation of something you can only really guess is coming. He might have been stronger than this. I never thought so and it wasn't all that likely, but he might have been. Me and the schoolchildren of Laver Bread Land might have suffered in vain for a long, long time. You can't understand what I'm feeling right now.
"Yes," he concedes. "Both. I thought… I thought I would be able to… to teach him things."
"But you were old enough to appreciate being an only child too, I'll bet. Resent him at all, for that?"
Oh, I am going to get all seven shades of shite knocked out of me tonight, and all seven bells to boot. It's all over his face. The first order out of his mouth on the far side of that door is going to be that I am to be kept pretty much senseless for a number of hours if not days.
Looking at him, right now, when he's shifting in his chair and hating himself for giving me even that much, it's really very hard to care.
He finally deigns to answer me. "Yes. Later on."
"Aberystwyth," I tell him. "That's definitely the nearest city. I'm trying to think north or south from there. So when did you start to notice he was… what's the polite word… special?"
He tries, bless his heart, raising that eyebrow of his at me, "You find something special about Sherlock?"
It's a brave attempt, no doubt, but I laugh. "Or was it Swansea?"
"It was early on. He'd spend hours…" He pauses here, as if he's afraid, as if he's just realized what he's doing. But he's started, so maybe he feels he has to finish. He continues, "…studying the skeletons of leaves."
"Botany was the first science, then?"
"No, he hated them." There is no way for me to express the scope and scale of my joy when I see his eyes drift. His gaze turn inward. Memory supersede me. "None of them were the same, you see. No uniformity. He never understood uniqueness."
"There's an irony there I probably don't need to point out."
"Quite."
"South from Aberystwyth, I think… What about animals? Pets, bird-watching, that sort of thing?"
"Insects. If you looking for the first science, you might say entomology. Early drawings were in naturally childish proportion, but very detailed. Spiders, millipedes, anything he could keep in a jar."
Oh, he's getting careful now. Look at him, breaking it into neat facts, phrasing it like an encyclopaedia entry. Have to watch that. I don't want him controlling what he tells me, that's not the point of this at all.
"I think it's south, anyway…"
"And a frog." Oh, God, I could survive weeks on how fast he offered that up, how quickly he's learned to invest in this little game. "Raised it from a tadpole. Watched it through every stage of its life cycle. Kept it to its natural end. Buried it."
"Did Froggy have a name?"
"No."
There's not much to do there but nod. If you'd asked me to guess the answer, that's what I would have said.
Anyway, we're live now. The game, as they say, is afoot, and I need to keep it going.
I sit back and consider my next gambit a long moment before I commit to it.
"In a small, narrow mid-terrace house, in a little street off Bayham Road, there lives a very talented and not very famous bomb-maker named Yusuf Shikra. You and him should probably have a chat about the kind of people he works for." Holmes stares at me in absolute shock. I've no idea why. After all, didn't I tell him I'd talk? Didn't I tell him I'd give him every possible chance? And I'm a fair and lenient source; I ask for staggeringly little in return. "Now tell me how your brother was at school."
He looks away. Props his face up on his fist, like he's trying to hold his mouth closed. "No," he says through it. Making no effort to disguise anymore the fact that he's deeply uncomfortable. He's starting to understand just what he's let himself in for now. What he doesn't understand yet is that we've started now, and he can't go back. I've just given him the first golden egg with Shikra. He knows there's a hell of a lot more where that came from, and wasn't it easy to get? Man in his position, and he does so very much for the people he represents, this is too good to pass up.
That's us Catholic boys all over. All those people, all that time and energy, my entire childhood teaching me to fight temptation, and here I stand making it my middle name.
"Y'know, the more I think the word 'Swansea', the more it's ringing bells…"
Mycroft sits up, lifts his face off his hand. Hissing in breath. "He got in trouble," he begins. "First day."
Forgive us our trespasses.
"What for?"
"Wouldn't say his prayers at assembly. Four years old. I doubt he even knew he was arguing for God as the scientific obsolete."
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus.
"Llanfarian. Am I pronouncing that right? It's got two Ls at the start of it. How do I say that? yLanfarian? Yeah, anyway, that's the one. It's a primary school with two Ls at the start of it."
And with that, Holmes stands up and goes to the door. It's opened for him just before he gets there.
I call after, "See you soon!" And I nod at the assistant again, "Bring her again, I like her."
He doesn't even answer me. Doesn't even say goodbye. I can't tell you how good that feels. And you'd think, maybe, the edge would go off the feeling just a little bit when the door doesn't even get a chance to close. Before Mycroft and his little girlfriend have even moved on, there are two rather larger, very Spooks-looking gentlemen standing in front of them. Apparently he didn't even have to give the order. They have anticipated his whim, and done it very well.
You'd think it would take the edge off. God knows I did.
But I don't care. I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. We're talking now. Channels of communication are open. I don't care how much it hurts. I tip my head back. If my arms weren't bound behind me, I'd hold them open and leave myself so entirely vulnerable, just so that they'd know, so he would know, there's nothing they can do to me anymore. My victory is already assured.
Me and you, Mycroft. We are nearing our limits. And Christ, what a shock to find that we are limited. I, however, am not quite there yet.
"C'mon ahead, lads," I tell them. "Do what thou wilt."
