There are three sealed and guarded doors between the real world and James Moriarty. I pass through the first without waiting for Anthea. I wouldn't blame her, you know, if she made that her excuse to go no farther. But she follows. Not a single word, but she follows. There is a difference in her walk and how she holds herself, though. At the second door, it begins to make sense to me, and I realize that, in another life, as different people, she might ask whether I'm alright.

In this, we pass through the third door and she takes from me my overcoat, and that is all.

But I do wish she'd stand away from the door. He's waiting, in there. I'm on the other side of darkened glass and already I know he's waiting, that his eyes are on me, and that after last time he'll be looking for her when the door opens. And I don't want to give him the satisfaction.

She seems aware of this, and stands her ground. As though this in itself were a sort of victory. I'm afraid I can't quite make the logic follow.

Before anything can be done about it one of my own men arrives with the key. This may be a borrowed facility, but I've taken no chances with my staff. This is a trusted, tested gentleman who opens the door. Can't quite remember his name, but I've read his file and I'm comfortable to have him here. He rather quails, though, avoids eye contact. I'm well aware I must look quite disagreeable right now. One can only hope he has the strength of character to realize it's not him personally that I object to, but rather the fact that this door is about to open.

He looks to me for the nod. I pause a moment and clear my throat.

And God, the pain of hearing Moriarty's mocking echo of the sound. There is, he is telling me, only a door between us. No more than that.

The door opens. He's leaning out of his chair to see around it, appropriating something like a child's glee. Muttering, "Did he bring her, did he, did he bring her-he did! Hello. What's your name?" The door closes again, and I'm grateful. Terrible feeling Anthea might have been about to answer him. I take my seat. He says, "I'm getting her number when you let me out of here, y'know."

A cheap tactic. He intends for me to ask why I would ever let him out, and in that way to control the topic of conversation from the off. It's too neat, too obvious. Perhaps they've beaten a few of the sharper edges off him. He's looking the worse for wear, this is certain. It's gone a little beyond the usual bruising this time. That, however, would truly be a pity. I'd rather hoped we might get a while longer out of him. We'd been making such progress.

"How did you call it off?"

"Oh, straight to bloody business… You know, it's not like prison, they don't time you." I don't deign to respond. Ultimately, Moriarty sighs. Rolls his eyes as if we might have such fun if only I'd play along. "How'd I call what off?"

"Aberystwyth."

"Llanfarian."

I concede, "Llanfarian."

There is a hesitation in him, and for an awful moment I suspect he may not even try to answer, may not even be glib or joke or rattle off some cryptic rant or even say a word to me again. Then the first glimmer of a smile ghosts his face. I might almost breathe out relief. That would be a mistake, though. "You're right," he says, "It's a bit of a weird one. For instance, there's only you and me in here. And then the recordings, but you vet everybody that hears the recordings, don't you? There's the camera, but that's a closed circuit, and I imagine only a very select few have access. And barring my daily visitors, who are, by the way, getting a bit creative and unwelcome, I don't see anybody. It's a real fecking mystery, when you think about it. A locked-room mystery. You know who's good at locked-room mysteries?"

He makes no effort to disguise the hopelessness of this particular gambit. There's no shame, no giveaway, in laughing at it. A bold and brave attempt, no doubt, but utterly hopeless.

"What?" he grins. "I was going to say Chesterton. Oh, did you think I meant your brother? Oh, well… Actually, now that you mention it-"

"Who's Chesterton?"

"Spoilsport."

"Who's Chesterton?"

"Chesterton? Nobody important. I was only joking." No. No, there isn't a word of all of this, from the first moment, that has been a joke, or a slip, or a mistake. For all its bizarre banality, every syllable has been perfectly calculated. I ask him again who Chesterton is. Moriarty rolls his head back on his shoulders, groaning, "Fuck's sake! Joke's no good if you have to explain it." He looks back up, looks me in the eye , frustrated. As if I should know this. "Chesterton. Chesterton. G.K. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the author, the last fiction your brother ever read, aged fourteen, wrote all the bloody locked-room mysteries."

His voice hardened as he went on.

And I did know that. I knew that, very far away, long ago, I knew who Chesterton was and what that meant.

"How would you know that?" I say.

He pretends not to have heard me. "You remember him. He said that thing about thieves actually having the greatest respect for property, um… 'they only wish to possess it so that they may respect it more perfectly'."

A complete non-sequitur. The quotation is witty, but not famous. There's no logic. But then again the logic doesn't matter. That his last speech jarred with what went before was intentional. Because now I have a choice. I can pursue my former course, to discover who could have told him about Sherlock as a teenager.

Or I can ask him why he would mention thieves.

"Oh, because I love them," he says, like I've just brought up his very greatest passion. "Aw, thieves are the best. The good ones, though. Not the mercenaries. No, the real ones, that just take the things they want. They're the best. If somebody comes to me and says, I don't know, mad example, I want Caravaggio's Magdalene to hang in my study, I will help them get it, no bother. Thieves are my favourites. There's a woman works for me actually, she's got a job lined up. And I gave her some ideas, but I'm dying to see if she pulls it off, so-"

Ah. This week's distraction. The one I have to fight him for. I was wondering how long it would take us to get here.

"Everything might go a little easier for you if you just told me who and where."

"Oh, I would, only I'm starting to get these terrible black spots on the old memory where your mates keep hitting me…" I try, without saying anything, to let him know just how terribly bored I am with all this double-talk. He is, however, undaunted. "I thought of you, though, I remember that. That I should tell you because it was somebody you know and… Nah, sorry, it's gone."

This time, at least, I have been able to prepare for him. Our last discussion was unnecessarily free-flowing, too much given up in exchange for too little. Only the value of the experience redeemed it in any way. This time, I am at least ready. "One can only assume you know exactly what would help you remember."

"I do, come to think of it." He only smiles. Only in a small and mistrustful way. I had expected him to glitter. As if I had accepted his terms, and along with them defeat. This is a much more measured, wary reaction. "Tell me about your parents."

During our first meeting, he had a stab at a few of these questions. I thought they were ploys. I believed he never expected me to answer, only to somehow shake me with the deliberately personal tone. There is now a knot in my chest as I craft an answer which tells me there's more than that.

"Sherlock was really too young to have properly known Father. And there wasn't a lot of talk about him after. Mother was… difficult. Strong, yes, and intelligent but… unavailable."

"Tell me about Christmas," he says.

I say, "No." Too quickly, before I've really thought about it, just 'No'. "Something else."

I'm surprised, but he accepts this. "A birthday, then. Doesn't really matter." So I tell him the frog, the frog with no name, that it finally died on Sherlock's birthday. How Mother threw it in with the rubbish and he fetched it out for a burial, but I get this far and Moriarty begins to laugh. I look up. "You're lying." Yes. But he's not supposed to know that. His laughter grows until it doubles him over. "You're lying and you actually thought it was going to work! How much time did you invest practicing that story? It's shite, by the way. That wasn't four sentences and I stopped counting inconsistencies." He laughs until he's pushing tears from the corners of his eyes, hysterical. "Aw, Jesus, you'll have to do better than that if you want to stop this heist going ahead."

I answer him with a shrug. "A heist. No casualties, civilian or otherwise, all parties reimbursed by insurers…"

He shrugs, nods along, says, "Global press coverage," like it's just another item on the list. And when I look up, "Well, after last time. What did you expect? You told me you were keeping it all hushed up, and I don't want it hushed up."

"You're bluffing."

"Maybe. When I remember what she's stealing I suppose we'll know for sure." Cuffed hands keep him from rubbing his eyes. He squeezes them shut, turns his head against his shoulder to scratch, but it's not enough. "I'm sorry. I'd be thinking, but I've got Land of Hope and Glory stuck in my head. There was this fella, where I grew up. He was from the North. And any time you heard that music on TV, end of the Royal Variety, usually, he sang it as 'Land of shi-ite and sna-tters…' Snatters is like Irish for snot, see, and, well, it was the eighties, so…"

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because it doesn't make any difference when I tell stories and you weren't talking."

And so I breathe very deeply. There are quite a number of options, but I'm left casting about for one which is both viable and agreeable.

"Age fifteen," I say, very slowly. There is guilt, and the guilt is made all the more terrible by a strange sensation that, if he only knew, Sherlock would forgive me. "That was the first time Sherlock couldn't think of anything he wanted for his birthday. Nothing. He thought about it, too, thought for weeks, and Mother was very determined that if he wanted nothing he would receive nothing."

Moriarty sits forward. Quietly, as though not to disturb me; "She's definitely not travelling for work. I remember her saying she'd run out of Air Miles. So it's London…"

"And that's exactly what happened. He got nothing." That's not exactly true. I gave him a card. He looked at it as if he didn't really know what it was for. I don't think he kept it for more than an hour. The whole event bothered me a great deal more than it ever bothered him.

He's 'getting something', by the way. Moriarty, I mean. Slowly, in fragments, something's coming to him. The pretence is sickening. Worse still is knowing there's nothing I can do about it. "Jewellery?" he's murmuring to himself, "Diamonds, maybe? Fuck's 'Jubilee' got to do with anything? Tube line, maybe?" Worse still, worse still. Worst of all is the sensation of having absolutely nothing. I have thought of every counter-measure and found none even worth trying. The parameters of a normal mind aren't broad enough. He thinks around us and faster than we can think.

Damn him.

Damn him eternally, but then, brightly, glimmering, something; "Chesterton."

Moriarty stops muttering. "I beg your pardon?"

"Chesterton. The only reason he ever read them, fiction and all as they were, was because the answer was there. The deliberate intention of those novels is for the answer to be perfectly plain, every single clue given to the reader that they could possibly need. He read them as case studies. The answer in plain sight. Or, in other words, to return to my first question, how could you ever have known my brother's reading habits as a teenager?"

"Ah, now, that wasn't quite your first question."

"Answer it, nonetheless."

He looks away. Won't meet my eyes. He sniffs before he answers. "You're not my only source." One less cautious might almost dare to think I have him on the back foot. Unfortunately, he doesn't intend to leave it at that. "Anyway, it couldn't be much of a dilemma for you. I'm sure you've got it well figured out by now." Before he'll turn his head, just his eyes slide back. Slyly watching. Forcing me to admit I'm none the wiser while still pretending not to notice. Singing 'God Save The Queen' under his breath. 'Frustrate their politics, confound their knavish tricks.'

We're having two different conversations, now that I think of it. One about Sherlock, one about the heist. This last is designed to lead me back to the latter. Land Of Hope And Glory, God Save The Queen…

I am absolutely certain when I say, "No. It's not possible."

"Oh, nothing's impossible. The people I work with, impossible is just an invitation." This time he grins. He knows I thought I had him. "I had to be able to guarantee global coverage, after all."

He's left me with no choice. We both know it. I can't describe to you the sound of his laughter, of his joy, when I ask, "What do you want?"

The laughter trails off just enough to let him breathe, hooked over the table. A moment later he wheezes, "About time."

"Enough. What do you want?"

"Oh, say it again." I won't. A moment later he goes on. "Well, since you were so good as to ask. Twice. And believe me, it's a feeling I'll carry to the grave-"

"Sooner than you think."

On a heartbeat, he stops laughing and only burns. "I wouldn't threaten me. I know I'm chained down in a locked-room but I've got mysterious ways. Anyway, I'm trying to be nice to you. Don't threaten somebody who can be very nice or very, very not-nice, alright?" It's the absolute shift of mood, rather than what he actually says, that leaves me silent. "Now what I was trying to get to before you interrupted to threaten me is that I actually won't ask for anything this time. You can have this one for free, Elder Holmes."

"Most obliging. A show of good faith, is it?"

"You might say that. Definitely a show of something. Of course, if you choose to have it called off, you'll never find that other source of mine."

Oh.

Oh, no. We haven't been having two different conversations. Not at all. We spoke about Sherlock and a person who knew him, and we spoke about a potential theft and a thief.

Oh, damn him. Damn him eternally.

I stand and start for the door. "Call it off."

"Yes, sir," he shouts after me, laughing. "Whatever you say, sir. I'll give her your regards when I see her, sir."

The laughter grows wild. He pays no attention to Anthea. The door closes, but I can hear it still, and hear rising out of it, loud and almost drunken, "Land of shite and snatters…"

I can still hear him. Of course I can. There is only a door between us.

[For Kaelir, sevenpercent, and Fergie, without whom this wouldn't have happened and the story would have stayed a one shot. Special mention to sevenpercent for the spooky-moment - I had been considering alternating with Mycroft, but was a little wary of the idea. This is my first ever attempt at Mycroft even as a primary character, never mind his actual personal voice. I'll admit, it doesn't come as easily to me as my own dear Wild Irish. Naturally, then, any responses to it are more than welcome. But thank you so much anyway, folks; the reviews have been such a boost.

Hearts (and I really, really mean those hearts)

Sal.]