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Chapter 5

"Where are we going?" John asked as they walked down the road.

"Mycroft."

John, utterly surprised, tried to read something from Sherlock's features, which was a bit more difficult than usual because the investigator had again turned up his collar.

"Who are you and what have you done with the man who'd rather cut off his tongue before going to his brother to ask him for a favour?"

"We're in a very delicate situation and have to deal with a very dangerous and cunning man. We should use all the resources we can get."

He sounded as if that was all he was going to say about that matter, so John fell silent.

But not for long. "Does he know you're alive?"

"Not yet."

"Shouldn't you tell him before you… you know… ring his bell?"

"Why?"

John raised his eyebrows. "Well, he's your brother and he thinks you're dead. It might be a bit of a shock to him. At least you could be a bit more sensitive than… than you usually are." And definitely more sensitive than some hours ago in my flat, he added to himself.

Sherlock snorted. "You should have realised by now that Mycroft is not like that."

John wanted to disagree but on the one hand, he wasn't that sure about Mycroft's emotional state himself, and on the other, he sensed that Sherlock wanted to say something else.

He wasn't mistaken. "You know what he told me during the Adler case, when we thought she was dead? He said that caring is not an advantage. He's right. And I can guarantee you that he's rational enough to stick to his word."

Still, John wasn't sure about that. Mycroft was definitely a person who knew how to control his emotions, but he was fairly certain that at the time Mycroft had told Sherlock that not caring was better only to make it easier for him to cope with the death of his… friend/lover/significant other or whatever their relationship might have been.

"Anyway, there's no time for sentimental considerations," Sherlock ended the argument.

They didn't say anything for a while and just walked through streets and alleys John had never seen before. He waited for Sherlock to explain his plan, but it occurred to him that he might be waiting for that to happen for a very long time. However, he didn't want to ask too many questions, as he knew from experience that this sort of thing tended to render Sherlock both irritated and arrogant, in short unbearable, so he tried the only alternative he could think of: provocation. "You know, you were wrong about Irene Adler. I saw her, she's an accomplice of Parker."

"John, please, of course she was there!" And his plan worked. "You do realise that she's a part of this, don't you?"

"Uh… I'm not sure I do."

He sighed. "All right. Since there's no point in trying to keep you out of this anymore, you might as well know the key facts. So, as I thought you had worked it out by now, Irene is not Parker's accomplice, but mine."

John frowned. Had he just used the woman's first name? "Irene, huh?"

"Although it's none of your business, you might as well know that we had enough time to get to know each other well enough to use first names. Her help was very useful to me."

"So you knew that she wasn't in that witness protection scheme in America? And that she was alive? How?"

John wasn't sure, but he thought he heard a smile in Sherlock's voice when he answered, "That's one you may figure out by yourself."

John frowned and told himself that he might rather not think too much about the relationship between 'Irene' and Sherlock. "So what have you been up to since… you know, for the past year?" he asked instead.

"Well, in short, I worked on my plan to catch Moriarty's confederates."

John waited, but evidently that was everything Sherlock was ready to offer. "Okay, and in the slightly longer version?"

"All right then." He took the deep breath that was necessary for his following monologue. "After the first arrangements to keep me out of the view were made, I had to get out of the country, which created a good possibility to team up, as one might put it, with Irene who was very helpful in gathering information about the social construct of Moriarty's most loyal friends and clients, one of which you had the rather doubtful pleasure of meeting tonight."

John frowned. "That wasn't really much longer, but it did contain more information, so all right. And what about Parker and Moran?"

"They're the only ones left from Moriarty's confidantes, we were able to eliminate the others."

"Eliminate as in…?"

"Arrest, no reason to worry."

John couldn't but breathe a small sigh of relief. "Okay, and now Moran's the last one left."

Sherlock nodded gravely. "Not only the last, but also the hardest. He was Moriarty's closest friend, partially because their souls were of a similar shade of black. All the other confederates I was able to link to other crimes so that they could be arrested without it being essential to find a direct connection to Moriarty. But Moran is too prudent for that."

"How come I've never heard of him?"

"You'd never heard about Moriarty before he came in contact with us either, had you?"

"No, I guess you've got a point there," John muttered and once more thought about how scarily overwhelming the notion of one sole super-villain had been to him at that time.

"So, how was it supposed to work, Parker's arrest? Did you really use me as a decoy?" He could hardly imagine it, but after tonight's events, anything seemed possible.

But Sherlock said no. "Of course not. As you might remember, I didn't even want you to join this investigation, and I certainly didn't want you to play superhero and get yourself assaulted. I did, however, know that the best way of removing Parker from the game was to make him careless. We feared he might have learned I was alive since he was in contact with another accomplice of Moriarty who we made the French Police arrest a couple of days ago. So Irene contacted him and told him I was alive, that the two of us had parted ways and that, re-joining Moriarty's gang, she wanted to team up with him to kill me. We were a bit worried he might not believe her, but after all, she can be quite convincing and we were also rather sure that Parker would set aside any caution once he got the chance of getting to me. Fortunately, he hadn't known about me being alive before, so Moran with all probability doesn't know about it. For out of all of Moriarty's confederates, Parker is the only one he's ever been in contact with, and Irene made certain Parker had no contact with Moran since he knew about my faked death."

John was still quite stunned about Sherlock's hitherto unknown use of the word 'we', but he managed to throw in a, "Why does Parker want to kill you so badly?"

"Well, I can hardly be considered a friend of his. A couple of years ago, I helped Scotland Yard arrest him. He's a contract killer. A pretty unpleasant one, likes to play with his prey before he gives them the coup de grâce. You may imagine what they looked like when they were found. We were counting on his penchant for games, for if you hadn't shown up, I would have been in your position and then when Lestrade arrived, he would have caught Parker red-handed."

"Your plan was to let yourself be tortured by this maniac," John remarked dryly in order to hide his horror. "And I've always tended to think of you as fairly clever."

Sherlock grinned in amusement. "We didn't have that many alternatives," he explained. "We had to act quickly before Parker could notify Moran. There was no time to prove his guilt in another matter, so we had to set up something for him and hope he would fall into our trap. Besides, it wasn't that risky, considering that Irene was there to prevent the worst."

"If you say so," John said for the sake of argument. He renounced on asking his companion if he was really sure he could rely on 'the woman' that much and decided to be just glad that everything had ended well.

They turned onto one of the bigger roads again and John had a slight idea about where they were. "There's still one thing," he said after some silence speaking a bit louder to drown out the traffic, "if Parker is a killer and you helped to get him arrested, how come he isn't in prison?"

"He escaped," said Sherlock simply. "That's not very difficult when you're close friends with a man like Jim Moriarty. Parker had worked for him several times before, so I guess Moriarty owed him this little favour."

"If you knew that, why didn't you prevent it?"

"I probably would have, if I had known it at the time. But back then, I could see no relation between the two of them. Well, errare humanum est, isn't it?"

John tried to smile, though he couldn't help but wonder what might have happened if Sherlock had realised such things in time. Maybe there would have been a chance of stopping Moriarty before all of this?

But there was no sense in pondering about it. The past was past, and they'd better take care that everything would go without problems in the foreseeable future.

They were now in a quiet neighbourhood; the very ideal of middle-class Britain. Sherlock came to a halt before a neat little row of terraced houses.

"And here we are!" he said with mock enthusiasm.

John was a bit disappointed. More than once, he had wondered where someone like Mycroft might live. He hadn't pictured it as a place that was as utterly ordinary as this, but considering the discretion he showed in his job, it somehow made sense.

"We're on time," Sherlock observed, glancing at his watch. "Just past midnight. The perfect time for Mycroft to have a ghostly apparition."