Non Dimenticar
My love is like a star
My darling
Shining bright and clear
Just because you're near

Okay. Let me backtrack a bit. This morning I got a call from DI Carter, who haphazardly conducted the investigation into the hiker and the backfire all those years ago. I'm still getting used to the whole 'life as normal' thing, to the Yarders (other than Lestrade, of course) trusting me enough to ask for my help, to John looking after me and making tea and acting like nothing ever happened.

It took three months for the tabloids to leave us alone. Back from the Dead: the Amazing Story of Sherlock Holmes' Last Falsehood, or whatever they were calling it. I was a misunderstood, wrongly-persecuted hero. They never even thought about the fact that it was their fault a lot of the misunderstanding and wrong persecution happened in the first place.

I've given up on being bitter, anyway. Though John makes me keep a wide berth of Kitty Riley, and I caught him burning The Sun before I got to read her latest accusations. He made some kind of joke about her looking exactly like the lead of some TV show who lied on her CV and doesn't know anything about her job.

The long and short of it is, every man, woman and dog in London knows exactly who I am and what I'm doing, often right down to the street I'll happen to run down at one o'clock in the afternoon. The teenaged girls are the worst, even though most of the things they say are declarations of faith, that they believed in me all along, like I care what they think. John said I should stop and sign their scarves and ear-hats they wave in my face. I wonder how much they'll sell them for now. People usually make a killing at those 'murderabillia' auctions, no pun intended.

DI Carter called at ten o'clock this morning, to get back on track, with the news that a six month-old cold case of child molestation had been re-opened because, in his words, "the bastard's done another one". He gave me a list of victims and suspects, all of which I dismissed almost immediately. Eventually, though, I discovered that all of the victims attended the same Baptist after-school-care program and that the resident Bible-basher (honestly, do Scotland Yard do any kind of investigation before calling me? Because this was textbook) had a four year-old kidnapping rap and a few ancient ASBOs.

I think I actually jumped when John called out 'brilliant!' the first time. He practically shouted it, so proud and eager that I think he missed this almost as much as I did.

I should tell him the things I worked out when I was away. But out of the two of us, John's always been the brave one.

We ran down to Perry's sprawling house in Surrey to do a bit of covert surveillance because we didn't have enough evidence for the Yard to make a conviction. I knew Carter wouldn't just take my word that Perry was the man they were after, and I thought – correctly, as it happened – that the evidence we needed would be in his house somewhere.

He shared the positively idyllic residence with his older brother Alan and Alan's wife Shelley. Alan was in when we got there; a quick bit of acting and John's fantastic adaptability got us a spot in the library-cum-study to 'wait for Michael to get back'.

Well, he got back earlier than we anticipated. John – amazing, darling, beautiful John – tried to keep up the act he'd picked up on within moments of my instigating it, but I was bent over the bloodstain in the corner and so we had to tell him what was going on.

He didn't take it too well, obviously, and to cut a boring story short it turned into the physical scuffle of a desperate man. No-one saw it except John and I, but I pushed him aside and he fell, Derek Landy-style, into the corner of a bookshelf.

It was an accident. The mahogany corner went right through the soft spot at his temple. He was dead as soon as he hit it; a relatively quick execution for a monster like that.

I think I might have sounded like I felt guilty before, but I don't. He deserved to die, I'm sure; what he did to those children makes me sick to my stomach. It just shocked me, because I didn't mean to, and… well, to put it bluntly, I can't afford to be on the wrong side of a murder investigation right now.

They already thought I was a fraud for eighteen months before Mycroft fixed it. Now they have eyewitness accounts to prove I'm a killer as well.

Maybe I wasn't being entirely truthful to John. I don't know how much of this even Mycroft can sort out; especially if he's not taking calls for another two weeks.

Why did this have to happen when our only two allies (since Mrs Hudson's completely powerless in this case, I'm not counting her) are out of the country? It must be that thing John keeps talking about, the reason his toast always lands with the jam on the carpet when I make him jump and drop it – Murray's Law, or whatever.

Well, it sucks. Right now, running literally for my life, my whole body alight with the warmth spreading from where my palm is clasped around John's, I can't think, can't reason and negotiate a way out of this. Panic and unfamiliarity and maybe a little bit of John so close to me is making my head spin and lurch in nauseating ways.

I know why I feel this way around him, even though it wasn't always like this. Being away from him for so long made me realise a lot of things, and find people who knew the answer to the few questions I couldn't find answers to. I didn't want to ask Mycroft, but in the end I was desperate. The superior, pitying look on his face made me want to vomit.

"Oh, Sherlock," he said condescendingly. "Are you really that blind? You and John… that's love."

Well, I suppose I did know that. People have pinned the label on less than this before. But I never felt it before, never knew it could hurt like this, but make me want it to hurt so much.

And this definitely shouldn't be what's forefront in my mind right now. Right now, I have to focus on running – on surviving.