Jim
Things were worse than I'd thought. Dani made me count back to my last drink, and then past that to my last full night's sleep. We're one tumbler in when I start falling asleep. She sees me shaking myself and stands out of the armchair. Reaching over me, she pulls the cashmere throw down on top of me. But I throw it off again. That's not what it's for, it's purely decorative. It'll get wrecked if I start actually using it. "Jim, don't be a child."
"You don't get it; between eleven and one is peak time for people getting in touch."
"You are an overgrown teenager, now go to bed." I start again, trying to explain, to make it clearer to her that if anything's going to go tits-up it'll obviously be when I'm in bed, but she's not having it. "Why don't I take a shift then? Believe me, I'll wake you if it's anything sensational."
This is a trap. That actually sounded sensible, so this is some sort of trap. I don't trust her with it; she's looking at me like I'm a wreck who doesn't know what's good for him anymore and I'm liable to get up in the morning and find the whole thing shut down and like it was never there. 'What big event, Jim? What on earth are you talking about?', in her best impression of an angel, through that girl-scout pout she does when she gets accused of something true and you look and see there's nothing behind the eyes to even analyse, and I'll never know. She'll get to Moran before I can as well, and get him in on it, convince him that it's the right course of action, to Gaslight me, to make me think it was all some weird drunken dream and it didn't work out how I thought anyway so obviously I'd never try it in real life and…
Jesus Christ, would you listen to this shite? "Are you sure you don't mind?"
"Of course not. I think I can manage. Now, to bed with you." Momentarily, she forgets herself; she puts her hand under my arm to pull me up. Through my sleeve, obviously, but it's rolled up, and I get the brush of her little finger and pull away. "Sorry. You just look so pathetic…"
"Oh, thanks."
"Really. You're running your own sweatshop. I wish I understood why. I mean, I know what you thought you were doing. Don't know if you do, but that's beside the point…"
I'm peeling myself up and she's following me. I feel her sliding my phone out of my back pocket, like she doesn't trust me not to be working via that all night. "You're going to tell me, aren't you?", and I don't like to be over-eloquent about things, but this is one time I would break out the word 'rueful' to describe my tone. "What I thought I was doing… Do me a favour, if you're going to analyse me, can you do it in a German accent? Then I can pretend you're imaginary."
"Not allowed to offend the Germans again. That would be strike three, after what happened in the Reeperbahn, and the time I got pissed after a job and they found me belting '1966' to the tune of Ooh Ah Cantona… Anyway, it hardly matters."
"Then why are you following me? Bloody woman…"
"Mostly out of pity. I'd untie your shoes and tuck you in if I didn't think it would give you nightmares."
I turn and stab a finger towards the office. "Go. Computer. Watch. Now."
Sherlock
Mycroft said to stay where I was and he'd send the officer in charge. Said he'd be discreet and no, I wouldn't be arrested. 'His people', whatever that means, would see that I was immune. To quote something very interesting directly, he said, 'If I put you onto something, naturally you'll enjoy the same status as any sanctioned investigator'.
It's interesting partially due to the sheer volume of jargon that might be bestowed upon one relatively short sentence. Partially due to the use, intentional or not, of the present-continuous. As if implying he might 'put me onto something' again in future.
But honestly, I'll think about that later. You see, he said to stay where I was. Needless to say, I am no longer sitting on the double bed. But I'm still in the room. I can still see it. Now that I've noticed them, the twin bulges in the end of the mattress are glaringly obvious. It's not just the sight itself anymore. No, when you're forced to stay with them, the mind necessarily wanders. Given that the bulges are rather arresting, it hasn't wandered far though. I can hear in my head a man, a husband, a father of three, complaining that he was too long for the bed, that his feet would be freezing all night.
I'm thinking of the folded-up sofa bed in the next room, really like two small, box mattresses, side-by-side, and now that they're folded on top of each other, face-to-face. I'm trying not to look at that stupid teddy bear slipper across the room.
Then, out in the other room, the door opens, and a man's voice thanks whatever lackey brought him up here and let him in. A smoker's voice, and a heavy smoker. Heavy footsteps. I know him even before I see him; one of these burnt-out coppers who couldn't care less anymore. The kind that thinks in statistics rather than victims. He's probably pissed off that I've found the bodies; now he can't just fob it off as missing persons anymore. God, I hate the type. If you sign up to work together for a safer London, you ought to at least pretend you're interested.
But then he steps into the room and, after a second of peeling back the reddened eyes and the bags beneath them and the two days of stubble, the need for a haircut, I find I recognize this supposedly-hopeless bureaucrat.
"Lestrade?"
It takes him an extra few seconds to place me. Even then, all I get is, "Oh, for fuck's sake…"
"You spoke to my brother then?"
"No, to a woman…" P.A. I don't know whether to be offended he doesn't feel the need to deal with me personally or proud he doesn't feel the need to deal with my personally anymore. But anyway, Lestrade's decided that whether he recognizes me or not is irrelevant. He peels his struggling eyes open an extra millimetre or so and adds, "She said something about bodies?"
"Were you in charge of whoever went over the rooms?" He nods. "Why didn't they open out the sofa bed next door? Why didn't they care that the same brown hairs were present in all three rooms?"
"Look, this isn't a murder investigation yet-"
"So?"
"There aren't the resources to devote too much attention to hotel walk-outs."
See? This is what I was talking about; any police officer who uses the word 'resources' ought to be stripped of his position and promptly shot. "They could have at least turned over the mattresses."
That seems to be the hint he needs. He, like I did, avoids the single, the child's bed, and goes to the double. That bed is far heavier than it has any right to be, but he manages to lift the corner and look underneath. Then, again like I did, he pulls out his phone can calls a number he's able to find with the speed of familiarity.
Tells somebody called Sonia to get Forensics down here now, and he doesn't care what other scene she has to pull them off to do it.
Jim
I don't sleep well. It feels really ungrateful, since Dani's going to such lengths to help out, but mostly I just toss and turn. There's just so much going on in my head. And yeah, it's all crap I don't really need to think about it, but I can't help it. So I grab a half-hour's doze here and there. But eventually, about four-thirty, I get up, wrap the duvet round me and make my way through to the office. Dani looks up, mouth open, about to tell me to go back to bed. But she's tired and slow and I get in first; "Look, look, I'm bringing bed with me. See? Anything to report?"
"Insomnia's a key indicator for stupid levels of overwork, y'know."
"Did you really sing 1966 in Germany?"
"Yes."
"So when I had to bail you from the Berlin heist, that wasn't really anything to do with suspicion-of-grand-larceny, was it?"
"Jim, you're making me tired looking at you; will you at least try and lie down on that couch?"
"I thought you weren't going in for psychoanalysis?" She gives me such a look, even by the half-light of just the desk-lamp, that I really do try. But after just a couple of minutes staring up at the ceiling, "You're really not going to tell me what you think I thought I was doing, are you?"
Irritably, she spins the computer monitor away from her, turns the lamp around to throw its light on me instead. Rather than interrogate me under those hot lights, I think she must be watching my reactions. Or at the very least, she doesn't want me to see hers. I keep my eyes on the ceiling, stay as much inside the duvet as possible. But I am listening. "You thought you'd make a mark. It was a power grab. Proving that you could do so much worse to this country than it could ever be ready for. And the reason it didn't work, the reason you don't feel any better, is because you can't. It doesn't work if nobody knows you exist. You can't do it without stepping forward, making a spectacle of yourself, and either getting arrested or shot. Can't do it and stay the man behind the curtain. Will that do? Or would you like me to repeat it in a German accent?"
I stay quiet. Let her think I've fallen asleep. Not sure she's buying it, though.
Sherlock
It's taken them hours upon hours. Forensics have a very precise, very time-consuming way of doing things. No wonder they're getting nothing done with this week's increased workload. Lestrade is yawning. He's so exhausted he even forgot to hate me, and when I stepped out to smoke he followed along. Then some young constable who calls him 'boss' comes out looking really rather green. Says they'll let us in now.
The family suite looks like it's landed in from another planet now. Full of beaming lights, covered in white and transparent plastic sheets. The smell of decay has overwhelmed the carbon. They remembered to unfold the sofa, and painstakingly undid the stitches that had held closed massive slashes in the fabric bases. Beyond those, smothered and blue-lipped, blotchy from lying so long, twin boys of nine or ten, curled up as though sleeping top and tail, side by side.
In the other room, the double mattress has been moved to the floor, and opened along similar slashes. In hollows carved into the filling, scarred by springs clipped away short, mother and father lie side by side, her arm across him, her head on his chest. His toes pushing through the end wall.
And there's another smaller bed in the room. Lestrade won't look so I go over. She couldn't be six years old, still wearing her other slipper. The covers from her bed were on the floor because she's holding tight to a blanket of her own, cheap and much-loved fleece with a purple dragon on it.
It's an awful thing, but doesn't it make you wonder how the honeymoon couple upstairs were left…
"Their clothes," I tell him, "will probably have been turfed down into the hotel laundry and will have gone unclaimed. The luggage was then used to take the mattress stuffing and the springs away. At an educated guess anyway."
He wanders over next to me, looking down at the little girl. Says, "Yeah," and leaves it at that.
