Jim

Wednesday kicks off pretty much as normal. Get up, eat breakfast, check I haven't made the most wanted lists overnight, placate a couple of idiot clients, threaten the ones that get uppity. And at about five to eleven I go and put the kettle on. I do this because at eleven somebody usually rolls through the door. Hardly a year since we met, Moran and Danielle seem perfectly comfortable treating this place like a second home. I don't even go in the spare room anymore. There's too much of them just lying around. Until them there had never, ever been another foot over that threshold. I'm still getting used to having authorized personnel.

But I must be doing pretty well at getting used to it, because when nobody's come clacking or lumbering down the corridor by quarter past, life just sort of… stops. Like, there are other things I could be getting on with, and if they were here their arrival would not have interrupted my day in any way whatsoever. But because they're not here I can't make any of it happen.

Nothing happens. I try to concentrate for more than an hour and get nothing done. I mean, I knew Dani was pissed off, but I didn't think she'd be petty about it. She's always here. Anyway, she's got work to do. And Moran, well, he's not such a permanent fixture, but what if she's said something and-

And I'd get over it. Don't be thick, of course I would. I wouldn't even think of them for more than a couple of days. I'd maybe have to take on a little bit less, but that wouldn't be so bad. Maybe going solo is what's next, maybe this is the best thing for me.

I could almost believe that, if it weren't that when my phone rings the first words out of my mouth are, "Oh, thank fuck… Hello?"

"What does caveat emptor mean?"

Danielle. Pissed, yeah, but not at me, and pissed enough at somebody else to call me without compunction. Bless him, whoever he is. By the sounds of things he's about to have his still-beating cliché torn dripping from his chest. I won't stop her, but I'll be sorry. Anyway, I search through what scraps of legal Latin I have and dredge, "Buyer beware. Short, pretty way of saying, 'You bought it, now fuck off'."

"Then I need to borrow Sebastian whenever you give him a day off."

"What for?"

"Murder a car dealer for me. That Aston I bought last week is nine different kinds of fucked. Bonnet blew up on the bloody Limehouse Link. I'm lucky I got out with my life." She broke down. In spectacular style by the sounds of things, but she broke down, and that's why she's not here, because she broke down. Yes, absolutely we have to have the bastard murdered, of course we do. Let's stand him up on top of the Fourth Column and knock his block off with a machete, show the public how you do a service. "Anyway, I'm in a cab now, so I won't be long, alright?"

"Yeah. You shouldn't be driving anyway."

"Don't start. Seb already gave me that lecture. He just didn't know what the Latin meant, so I had to call you. Had to know if I'd been insulted or not."

"Listen; about yesterday-"

"Wait. I'm only ten minutes away."

Ten minutes is enough time for me to clean up the desk, avoiding looking at my watch, so I can pretend it's five to eleven and go back to the kettle. Pretend everything's still on track for a good day. And over the racket of the kettle just finishing up, like she promised, I hear the door open, and then shut a little harder than strictly necessary. I don't speak, mostly because I don't trust myself not to bid her good morning rather than afternoon. She'd laugh at me if she knew how hard I was ignoring all the clocks. She doesn't say anything either, just dumps her bag and coat in the hallway and eases herself up onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar. It's handier for her. But she still winces, and I think she catches my reaction. First direct words of the day, "I'm not doing it to annoy you, darling."

Next door to ignoring that entirely, "How're you feeling?"

"Fine. Promise. The one in my side still twinges, but that's all." Which is all very brave, comforting talk, but there's a little square shape in her front jeans pocket, which I know for a fact to be a tiny tortoiseshell pillbox, and that currently she says her nightly prayers to a god called Benzodiazepam. She says, "And it'll teach me to buy a car just because I saw one in the movies," so I'd say she's had a couple of them already. There's no way she should have been driving.

Then, because I want it out of the way, "So, the other thing-"

Danielle waves, tries to smile; definitely sedated. "Oh, listen," she breezes. "I was sore, and drugged, and I can't have sex while the stitches are in. We'll say I was irritable and call it quits."

"No but-"

"Really, there's nothing to discuss."

"You're not listening to me." Might have said that a bit sharply. Something gets through the temazepam haze, brings her eyes into perfect laser focus and onto me. It's a little bit unnerving, actually. "Me and Moran, we… If I said the words, 'Next, please', would that mean anything to you?"

"Oh!" and Danielle's face clears like I just unveiled the meaning of life and she knew it all along. "Is that what it is? Both of you? Oh, right…"

"Then you do understand." I'm not relieved. Only a weak sort of a person would need his mates to vindicate him. There's no way I'd ever want to rely that much on anybody's opinion, and least of all hers. But still. It's nice to have that feeling coming to me. She's nodding.

"When I was nineteen, I'd been housebreaking my way through uni for a year, year and a half… 'Next' was my first museum. Of course it was only a little one, but…" This is spoken with quiet, fond nostalgia. I'm not surprised. Now tell me, if I'm not surprised she did her first museum, even just a little one, at the age of nineteen, is that a sign that there's something wrong with her, or with me? "And then it was a bank, and then a gallery, private collection, international, item-over-value, steal-to-order… Lot of 'nexts'. I'm happy enough as I am now, but I get it. I really do. It's an awful feeling." Yeah. Yeah it's an awful feeling. I'm glad she gets that. I'm gladder still when she looks up out of her reverie, looks me in the eye and says with interest and absolute innocence, "So what're we going to do about it?"

Sherlock

For some reason, I wake up with the thought in my head that the girl's name is Ruby, that I met her a year ago, that she helped me out with a few things, and that that's where I knew her from. She was not so bruised or bony when last we met, hence the feeling that I loaned a fag, not to the woman herself, but to her remnants. Wake very slowly into a sick, sore world, having slept through the comedown, straight into the hangover. That's why I don't open my eyes right away. And when I do, I am looking at a strange ceiling which is very, very far away. Because I'm not at home, and I'm not up on my bed, curled into a quietly ashamed ball. No, I'm still at that doss, flat on my back on that mattress on the floor. There's an arm flung across me, a head using my chest for a pillow.

Her name is Ruby and I met her a year ago and she helped me out with a few things and that's where I know her from.

It's coming back to me. She held onto my lighter, you see. After she lit the cigarette, she didn't throw it back to me. She just lay back and blew smoke at the ceiling. So when the time came to light my own cigarette, I had to go and get it. I thought she was sleeping. Certainly she pretended to be sleeping. And when I reached over her to retrieve the lighter from her right hand, she put her hand behind my neck and pulled me down next to her. I was high, so it made me laugh. I just lay there, though. Nothing happened. I must have fallen asleep and she just followed suit. Nothing happened.

I reach for the first fag of the day, then think better of it. The smell might wake her. What I do instead is ease out from beneath her, gently lowering her head to comfort. Then I get last night's shopping out of my former corner and get out of the room as quickly and quietly as I can. Out, and down the stairs, where a doorman grins. He puts his hand in his pocket and shows me a palmful of little single dose bags. "One for the road?" he laughs.

"No," I tell him, "Thank you."

He laughs. Whistles as I edge past him out the door so I have to look back. He nods over, "Your belt, mate. I'd fix that, before you go anywhere."

Open. Unbuckled. Nothing happened. Nothing happened.

With a head and senses too big for any human body, I get out into the street, get my bearings and start to make my way home. It's hell. It's like the worst of the old days; I count the windows on buildings, the separate stones that make up the curb, the sewer grates and streetlights and add up the postcodes from the street signs, all at once. I read the lives of those few early-morning people I pass. A P.A. in fear of her job, going in early to score points, a merchant banker who never made it home last night, or not his own home anyway (something bloody happened), a schoolteacher who has understandably lost all faith in her vocation. And dogwalkers and joggers and deliverymen and shopkeepers, Christ's sake, damn it all, to hell with them. But I have to look at them like they matter. What's the alternative? Nothing. Thoughtlessness. Emptiness.

And I make it back to my own building, climbing the stairs to the flat. Somebody else has come this way, and only recently. Somebody out of the ordinary, somebody who doesn't belong. Somebody worth thinking about. Oh, thank God… Let it be a break-in. Please, please, please let it be a break-in…

Oh, but it's not, is it? No, on the first floor landing, I get a sudden waft of a certain aroma and I know it's not. The smell knocks me for sick, goes straight to my pounding head and sends me staggering and swearing as fast as I can up the rest of the stairs and into the flat. The door's closed, and locked again, but that doesn't mean anything, not really. I shut myself inside and go from room to room until I'm absolutely sure that I'm alone. And then I start putting all the clothes back into the holdall, and all the books back into the box, because I have to move again. This place isn't a sanctuary anymore. It isn't even really mine anymore.

Mycroft found me. That's what the smell was. Italian leather and French aftershave and that fat he puts in his hair. That was the smell in the stairwell and that's the smell in here, in my flat, in my place that I found for myself and didn't tell him about for a bloody reason.

I'm not safe here anymore. I need to move. It takes me less than ten minutes to gather my belongings. I'm in no state to be going anywhere and I don't know where I'll go, but I've no choice. So I put the old bag across my shoulders, take up the box under one arm and reach down over the back of the sofa with the other, to wrap my hand around a cool, familiar handle and lift up the violin case.

Hold on.

I put everything back down again. Then round the sofa and sit down next to it. Definitely mine. I know the frayed edges and they're all correct. I know the scuffs and stains. It's my case. But I never brought it here. Because it's a trigger, because it starts up a voice in my head telling me fairytales, Once upon a time… And yet there it sits. It's blue and the handle is black. I reach out and slowly, carefully, start to pull back the zippers. The violin is mine too. There's a scratch by the chin rest that marks it out immediately. There's no subterfuge here. It's all genuine, all mine.

The hair in the bow, which had been cut in two, has been competently replaced.

And there's a little white notecard stuck through it. No doubt a threat of some kind. At least, that's what I'm trying to tell myself. Can't quite convince myself it's true, though; my name on the front face is elegant, arabesque, like a signature. Means he took his time over it, wanted it to mean something.

Give me something to tell Mummy, it says. And the address of a café and a time tomorrow.

Mycroft wants to be seen with me in public? This I have to see.