Sherlock
Outside the hospital doors, with a quick fag to take the edge off an altogether different craving, I text Mycroft.
-You said Stendhal was dead. Never said you ordered it.
And then I count the seconds. It's a full fifteen of them before the phone rings. Not that I'm answering it. I have no desire to talk to Mycroft, or indeed to have to listen to him. But that took far too long. Five seconds or less would have meant he definitely gave the order, whatever his reply. It takes him five seconds equally to lie or tell the truth. Between five and ten and there would have been something complicated about it, something to consider, but he still would have been responsible. That would have still been a fact. Fifteen is far too long. Fifteen means Mycroft didn't know Stendhal's murder was professional.
And that's even more interesting.
Anyway, dear Charlotte is, nonetheless, a bit too dead to speak to regarding the case. Mies is an unknown quantity, just a name for now. Darcy, then.
I know a good deal about Darcy, actually. He shouldn't be too hard to find.
How? Well, because he's the soldier from the Tube, of course. Oh yes, I mean, once one's head is clear and one gives it a half-second's thought, it's rather obvious. We were on that train a good hour together. He could have told me anything in all that time. He could have blinked it at me in Morse. It could have been a message in a plastic cider bottle rolling down the aisle. You have to think about how it might look to the people following the man; I was there before him and I left only after.
It also gave me more than enough time to create a detailed, accurate profile of the man which is, thankfully, intact.
And once you know you're looking for a recently discharged soldier with something MI5 very much desire and who has managed to effectively hide himself to date, the options are pretty limited.
If I put my mind to it, he and I could be sitting opposite each other again by close-of-business.
But he's hiding well. And Mycroft wouldn't have brought me in, in his own, special way, if MI5 had any way of finding him themselves. And that's quite a feat, you know, avoiding them all by yourself when they are legion and have so much at their disposal. And twelve streetlights. Fifty-two parking bays, nine of which are vacant. The nurse in the blue Micra is Catholic, married, two children, experiencing domestic abuse, though not as the victim. The white coat at the third floor window is a consultant, dermatology probably, and a serial adulterer.
There are sick people everywhere, and I don't mean the patients. I can see them.
Or, to give the short version, what's the rush? Darcy will wait. Darcy will relish the opportunity to wait.
And I can't be expected to meet the trauma of the battleground face-to-face with both feet on the ground. This last cruelty, a sane and civilized society will not inflict upon me.
London, though… London is welcome to bloody try.
London can take its best shot. I, this morning, have the best defence, the upper hand, the secret weapon, the uber-cliché…
Well, it would be a sin to leave the hospital empty-handed. To have used the same exit route as I used for an entrance would have just made it far too easy for them, and if the alternative path just happened to take me past the pharmacy, that was not for me to question.
You, because you're a good citizen, or more likely because you're a generally thoughtless requiem for good citizenship, think hospital pharmacies are secure. The same way you think you can trust policemen. That newsreaders know what they're talking about and the papers don't lie. All plumbers overcharge, where there's blame there's a claim, banks are safe places to put your money. When you can't see cameras, nobody is watching you. When acorns drop on your heads you think the sky is falling.
My point is, if you're not really going to think, don't bother thinking at all.
My point is, I have three small glass vials of morphine in my coat pocket, and sadly they are more important than Jon Darcy.
The case, however, like all cases, is time-sensitive. The very nature of investigation means it works best following hard upon the crime; less time for evidence to disappear, for circumstances to change, for criminals to take off. A short delay won't do any harm, but really I should get onto this right away. Therefore, any administration of medication should be undertaken immediately.
Craving makes things difficult, though. Craving knows I'd rather be deep in the cotton wool of a perfectly justifiable stupor than end up with all the pointless counts and observations, and so it won't let me access useful information, like where the quiet corners are around the hospital. I'm trying to summon in three-dimensional memory the obscure little alley behind the Ear-Nose-and-Throat clinic and how many windows overlook it, and all I can think is that it's six degrees out here, six of the visible cars are German and six ambulances have come and gone to the emergency entrance below as I've stood here.
Six-six-six. Hello, Mephistopheles.
And hello, Molly Hooper; I've lingered too long. She's out in her white coat, holding herself for lack of the pink-and-grey one, pointing me out to a security guard in a neat black uniform.
Best find somewhere else to spike a vein, then…
Things might take a bit longer than I thought. John Darcy won't mind; he doesn't want to be found. And Charlotte Stendhal doesn't mind. And I'm sure Danielle Mies doesn't need me charging in on whatever she's got on for the day.
Jim
After she'd spent forty minutes in the shower I got worried about her skin drying up. I know she's confined to these rooms, but I don't need little flaky bits of her lying everywhere. So I let the cuff beep for a few seconds, just so she could see she wasn't going to damage it that way. And when she still wouldn't get out I decided to see how she was with music.
I must say, I'm getting some wonderful reactions to the Gnossiennes. She gets so dizzy she starts to look weightless, falling off the toes of one foot onto the other, and all the while asking me, begging me, to stop. She's even deigned to get dressed. She keeps her hands in her pockets, out of the way, just to show how fucking harmless she is. Which is a bit like a dog fetching the stick after it's taken a lump out of you.
Not impressed, love. Not happening for you. Sterling effort, as in all things, but I'm not so thick as your usual crowd.
Gnossienne Number Four and she finally loses her feet. She sits down hard where the bed and the table make a corner, legs straight out, arms limp. Her eyes roll, half-shut, and she mutters something I don't quite catch.
"You do know you look fucking ridiculous? You do know how stupid this is, don't you, darling?"
Whatever she said, she says it again, and I miss it again.
Oh no, Jim, you cry, don't go over there. Don't crouch down close to her. It's a trick, it's a trap, she'll get her mitts all over you, steal the bomb remote and be out of the door before you, Mary Magdalen or all the Earthly Delights there are can stop her. She'd take the chance on the spare remote; I would.
That's fair enough. And I must say, it's nice of you to be thinking of me, I appreciate that. But the fact is, you're not here. You can't see her. She's useless, and nobody would be able to conceive of acting quite so uselessly over such inconsequential stimulus if it wasn't real. Danielle Mies isn't even here anymore.
When I get to her, she is almost smiling, and yet her face is infinitely sad. What she's saying, over and over, is "Take the arm."
She smiles it up at me.
"It's alright. It doesn't matter. Take the arm."
Which is when the Satie gets turned off and if I thought it could safely change it to Knees Up Mother Brown without sending her into bodily shock, I would.
"You listen to me, girl, you are not to bring suicidal ideation back into this flat, is that understood? And that includes references to mutilation, deformation and self-harm of any kind, or submission to harm from any other source."
All she says, covering her ears now that it's too late, is "Thank you."
Her eyes open, slowly, and then lift up to me. "Your poor hands." She reaches out, remembers where she is and who I am, and grabs the sheet down from the bed. With that between us she takes hold of my fingers, turning them over to study them. "Oh, someone's scrubbed them bloody. You shouldn't do that, you know. The arm doesn't matter. The arm is just an arm, it's just her arm, of all things, but not your poor hands, not…" And like an old fashioned ghost, from under the sheet she reaches up, brushing over my cheekbone, "Not your poor face… You shouldn't do that, it's not good for-"
She stops dead. Her eyes dart about, and she seems to realize properly what's been happening. Which is good, if I'm honest, because I'm not sure what I'd do with her if I actually drove her mad. Her face turns vicious and she tries to fight her hands out from the sheet, makes a grab for me, but I'm across the room and behind the Magdalene before she can manage it. Danielle falls back into her corner, averting her eyes. "Satie?" she chokes, hoarse, "Seriously?" She's trying to be brave, pouts like it's all nothing to her. "It's not even music. Even he never called it music. It's just sounds and… and bloody good timing…"
"What do you have to run away from, Danielle?"
Regaining control, voice strengthening, she starts to laugh. "That lying, alcoholic, frigid Frenchman has about as much chance of getting me to talk as a certain lying, alcoholic, frigid Irishman I could mention."
I turn the music back on. This time, I lock her in.
Suffer, Danielle. If you're going to fight when I only want to help you, you can fucking suffer for it.