Chapter Nine

Sherlock and his father came to a staggered crossroad and turned left into the lane where the family home was situated, alerting Sherlock to the fact that this walk was almost over. The last two hours had been the longest period he had spent alone with his father for many years and the powerful connection he felt had taken him by surprise. He was struck by a pang of regret for all the wasted opportunities when he could have become better acquainted with this man who had given him life.

More of those complicated little emotions, Eurus, he thought, but the one that resonated most with him was 'melancholy'. It poured off his father like rain off a hillside and mingled with his own to form a deep pool.

'Oh, I haven't seen that car before. I wonder who that belongs to?' remarked Siger, indicating a black 4x4 parked in the lay-by just up ahead.

'That's mine,' Sherlock replied. 'Well, not mine exactly. I hired it to come here.'

'Hmmm, nice vehicle. Bit of a gas-guzzler, though. Did you consider an electric car or even a hybrid?'

Sherlock had to admit he hadn't. Maybe next time. If there is a next time, he thought.

'Your mother will be so surprised to see you!' Siger exclaimed.

Sherlock's brow crinkled into a frown.

'You are coming in, aren't you?' his father asked, the pleading edge to his voice pricking Sherlock's conscience.

His original intension had been to say goodbye in the lane, jump in his hire car and drive away but during their walk it had become abundantly clear that his plan would need to be revised. He couldn't ask his father to lie about meeting him. This honest man would find that impossible. Chances were, even if he tried, he'd let something slip unintentionally and that would put him in an intolerable position with his wife.

'Yes, of course!' Sherlock replied and was again pricked with guilt by the utter relief in his father's face.

Siger led the way down the garden path and in through the front door of his rural home.

'Hello, mother!' he called out. 'Come and see what I found in the lane!'

'Oh, Siger,' Mrs Holmes retorted, bustling into view from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea towel. 'Not another injured bird? You know it'll never survive. It would be far kinder just to wring its neck and put it out of its miser…oh!'

'Hello, Mummy,' said Sherlock, stepping forward to give his mother a hug.

'Sherlock, my darling boy!' she exclaimed. 'I knew you'd come when you heard how upset I was! Didn't I say so, father?'

'Yes, dear,' Siger replied, although that wasn't exactly how he recalled that particular conversation.

'I was passing nearby on a case,' Sherlock explained, which wasn't a complete misrepresentation of the truth, 'so I thought I might drop by.'

'Well, we're jolly glad you did,' his mother enthused. 'I really missed you, the other day, after the court case. And you're just in time for lunch! You will be staying, of course?'

Sherlock pursed his lips in preparation for declining that invitation but caught his father's beseeching look and capitulated. 'Yes, thank you, I'd be delighted,' he said, instead.

With a nod of satisfaction, Mrs Holmes bustled back into the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea while Sherlock shrugged out of his coat and his father took it to hang on one of the hooks by the front door.

'Thank you for that,' said Siger, patting his son's shoulder in gratitude.

Father and son followed the lady of the house into the kitchen and Sherlock took a seat at the stripped pine table while Siger sat in his usual comfy chair by the Aga.

'I was so terribly upset at the inquest,' Maura Holmes declared, 'especially when that awful woman accused me of killing that poor child. I mean, how dare she?'

'Well, she did lose her son, Mother,' Sherlock felt compelled to point out. 'I think perhaps we should forgive her for lashing out, under the circumstances.'

'What? Lost her son?' His mother looked confused. 'Oh! Oh, no, not that woman, the other one. The coroner woman! How dare she suggest such a thing? She wasn't there. She has no idea what lengths we went to in order to try and find the boy…'

'Except call the police, apparently,' Sherlock murmured, deliberately avoiding eye contact with his father, who he knew would be willing him to hold his tongue. But somewhat emboldened by the background buzz of agitation that had been his constant companion since watching the CCTV footage of Rudi and Eurus, the night before, he was disinclined to humour his mother.

'We did our best, didn't we, father?' Mrs Holmes retorted, appealing to her husband for support but not waiting to see if he gave it before continuing. 'We called your Uncle Rudi, which was better than calling the police. He brought his own people and they did a very thorough search but found no trace. You don't remember, of course, but we did everything humanly possible.'

By dint of a herculean effort, Sherlock reined himself in. Given the choice, he would have preferred not to be spending this time with his mother but, since that option had been taken off the table, he was resolved to take full advantage of this opportunity to hear about the family tragedy from her point of view. He was especially keen to understand the nature of his mother's relationship with her brother and why she trusted him so implicitly. But in order to secure her co-operation, he would have to adopt a more conciliatory tone.

'Yes, mother, of course you did,' he conceded, with the closest he could approximate to a sympathetic smile. 'And, as you so rightly point out, I don't remember. I don't recall anything at all from my first six years except a few fragments, just snippets, really.'

'No, dear, I know,' his mother cooed, placing a mug of tea on the table in front of him and resting a sympathetic hand on his arm.

'Oh! What's wrong with your hand?' she exclaimed, noticing the strapping for the first time.

'Oh, it's nothing,' he replied, disinclined to share the truth about that particular incident with his mother. Punching walls was not something he thought she, unlike his father, would understand. 'Just a bit of bruising. It'll be fine.'

'You haven't been fighting with your brother, I hope?' she censured, pouting her disapproval. 'You two boys really should try to get on better, you know. You're not children anymore.'

Keen to move the conversation back on track, Sherlock asked,

'So, would you mind answering a few questions about that time?'

'Of course not, dear,' his mother replied, smiling magnanimously as she took the seat opposite. 'You ask away.'

'Mycroft says I was 'changed' by the incident with Victor and never spoke of it again. Is that correct?'

'Well,' his mother replied, sitting back in her seat and giving the question a good deal of consideration. 'You were very upset at the time, obviously. First, your friend disappeared; next, our home burned down and then Eurus went away, too - three extremely traumatic events within a very short space of time. That's an awful lot for anyone to deal with and you were only six at the time. Though, in fact, not living at Musgrave Hall any more helped a great deal…'

'In what way?' Sherlock asked.

His mother pursed her lips, finding the subject matter distasteful, but she had agreed to give some answers, so...

'After Victor went missing, you hunted for him high and low,' she continued, eventually. 'You would not give up. Every day, from dawn until dusk, you ran around the grounds shouting his name…well, your name for him… Redbeard! Redbeard! That's all we heard, day in, day out. You stopped eating. And you hardly slept. You would cry all night, every night. It was heart-breaking to hear you. We were afraid you might never get over it. But when the house burned down and we were forced to move to the cottage, you had to stop looking for Victor. I suppose you could say it broke the cycle.'

Broke the cycle. That seemed an odd turn of phrase, under the circumstances. It suggested that his behaviour was considered inappropriate, an obsession perhaps, rather than a natural reaction to the sudden and unexplained disappearance of a close and much-loved friend.

'So, how did I react to not being able to look for him anymore?' he asked. 'Did I just accept it and give up?'

'No, not at first,' Siger interjected. 'You begged us to take you back there and, when we couldn't, you got terribly angry.'

'In the end, we had to forbid you from mentioning Victor's name,' Maura Holmes cut in, in a tone that Sherlock was very familiar with. It was the one his mother used to shut down any challenge to her own point of view.

Sherlock could read in his father's features that he did not share his wife's opinion. He obviously felt – now, if not then – that it had been the wrong thing to do.

'Did anyone suggest, at the time, that perhaps I might benefit from some help of some kind? Some counselling? Therapy, perhaps?' Sherlock looked from one parent to the other and thought he caught a flicker of something in a glance they exchanged between themselves.

'Well…' his mother began, 'the headteacher at your school did suggest something of that nature but your Uncle Rudi…'

Oh, here it comes, thought Sherlock. He'd been expecting the hand of Rudi to show itself, sooner or later.

'…said that talking about it would only make things worse, that the more you were encouraged to talk about it, the more obsessed you would become. Least said, soonest mended, he said. And he was right!'

'Was he?' Sherlock asked, keeping his tone level despite the rising pressure he could feel in his chest.

'Oh, yes.' Maura Holmes was adamant. 'Well, the proof of the pudding was in the eating, wasn't it? You stopped talking about Victor and, eventually, you forgot he even existed, as you did with Eurus. So, all that trauma just melted away.'

Sherlock almost laughed out loud at the irony of that statement but held it together.

'Didn't you find it rather odd that I completely erased every trace of Eurus and Victor from my memory?' he asked, instead. 'I mean, I was only six years old. That's hardly a normal thing to do, is it?'

'As your Uncle Rudi used to say, children are resilient,' his mother replied, emphatically. 'They find ways to cope - and that's what you did. You found a coping mechanism that worked for you.'

Sherlock was rarely lost for words but he had to admit to being dumbfounded by his mother's total conviction that the strategy Uncle Rudi had put forward was absolutely the right thing to do, despite it being in complete contradiction to that of a fully trained and qualified school head teacher with, presumably, years of experience dealing with young children.

In his mind's eye, he could see ten-year-old Sherlock on his birthday, a shadow of his former self, a hollow, emotionless shell. And it explained so much! This was why he had spent his entire life trying to avoid emotional attachments, had tried to shut down his emotions altogether - though not very successfully. The 'what ifs' were queuing up yet again. But he couldn't go down that particular rabbit hole just now. It would require time and solitude to process these latest revelations so he pointedly changed the subject.

'Pa was telling me about when Eurus cut her arm,' he said, rather too casually to be entirely convincing.

'Oh, father! What a thing to bring up!' Mrs Holmes exclaimed.

'No, Pa didn't bring it up. I asked him about it,' Sherlock was quick to declare, saving his father a possible roasting.

But Mrs Holmes was not placated.

'We all agreed never to speak of it again…So, actually, I'm not quite sure how you found out…'

'It was just something that came up in conversation with Mycroft and I was curious about the details but it's not important...' Sherlock shrugged. He didn't wish to get his brother into any more trouble with his mother than he was already, either.

'Yes, well, let's not talk about it, shall we?' Maura insisted and promptly changed the subject to line-dancing, a hobby that had started life as a keep fit class but quickly became something of an obsession - for Mrs Holmes, if not so much her husband - and now, it seemed, it was their passport to touring the world, attending line-dancing conventions here, there and everywhere. And it had introduced them to lots of other like-minded people with whom they were now firm friends. The topic managed to dominate their conversation for the next hour, whilst Mrs Holmes finished preparing and then served lunch - steak and kidney pudding with steamed potatoes, carrots and cauliflower.

It was only after lunch was over and Sherlock was helping his mother with the washing up, Siger Holmes having retired to the parlour to doze by the fire in another comfy chair, that Sherlock managed to steer the conversation back round to the family's history.

'You were very close to your brother, weren't you?' was his opening line.

'Oh, yes, I loved Rudi very much.' Mrs Holmes sighed. 'He practically brought me up, you know. When I was at school, our parents lived abroad – Daddy worked for the Foreign Office, of course - so Rudi was my UK guardian. I used to spend all my school holidays at his house. In fact, I saw more of him than I ever did of my actual parents.'

'He was Mycroft's guardian, too, wasn't he?'

'Why, yes, he was. That's how Mycroft got into Eton. They never would have taken him otherwise. You have to know the right people to get accepted there.'

Sherlock was not sure that was entirely true. It certainly helped to have friends in high places but it wasn't absolutely essential, especially if you were particularly able. And Mycroft had won a scholarship to the school so presumably he had earned that place himself. But that small detail probably wouldn't have fit Rudi's narrative…

'I don't really remember him, except for his pantomime dame appearances,' he said.

'Oh, my goodness, yes!' his mother chortled. 'He used to make us all laugh with that, he was so funny! You know, if he hadn't been a civil servant, I'm sure he would have made a very fine actor.'

I'm sure he did, thought Sherlock.

'He loved you children very much,' Maura Holmes added, settling into her reminiscences, which is exactly what Sherlock wanted. 'He took a great deal of interest in your development and progress.'

'So, I gather,' said Sherlock. 'Didn't he pay for Eurus's violin lessons?'

'Yes, he did! He was incredibly generous, which was just as well, really. If it weren't for him, we would have been in dire straits, your father and I.'

Sherlock was intrigued.

'Why was that?' he asked.

'When your father inherited Musgrave Hall, it was practically derelict; falling to pieces after years of neglect and lack of investment by your grandparents. And Daddy's salary was nowhere near enough to cover the inheritance tax, let alone pay for all the repairs that needed doing. But Rudi, rather than see his little sister out on the street, loaned Daddy the money at a very reasonable interest rate - far less than the banks would have charged – and kept a roof over our heads. The refurbishments were always on-going but at least we had a home…until Eurus burned it down.' Her expression when she spoke those last few words held more than a tinge of bitterness. 'But, once again, Rudi saved us from disaster. Unbeknown to your father and I, he had insured the house and its contents and so we were able to buy this cottage and move here almost straight away. And we still own Musgrave, you know – well, Daddy does and Mycroft will, eventually – and the land it stands on. I'm sure it must be worth quite a bit at today's prices.'

The plot was thickening by the minute and Sherlock had a number of theories bubbling away on the back burner. But one thing was abundantly clear, Rudi had made himself absolutely indispensable to the family. And Sherlock's hatred of the man was growing more profound with every new revelation.

'You know, you shouldn't be jealous of Mycroft, just because Rudi chose him as his heir,' said Mrs Holmes, completely out of the blue.

'I'm sorry?' Sherlock replied, wondering what had inspired that comment.

'You shouldn't be jealous of Mycroft,' his mother repeated. 'You could have benefitted from Rudi's generosity, too, if you'd only tried to get to know him.'

'Really?' Sherlock gasped. His ire, already on a very short fuse, had unfortunately been lit by that remark and he just couldn't stop himself.

'Please be assured, Mother,' he snorted, 'that I am not jealous of any of the attention Uncle Rudi gave to Mycroft.'

In fact, he was extremely grateful that Rudi had shown so little interest in his younger self. Just that one small act of interference had shaped his entire life. That was more than enough attention from Uncle Rudi.

'And I'm especially not jealous of the attention he gave to Eurus!'

No sooner were the words spoken than he instantly regretted them. But it was too late now.

Drawing herself up to her full height, his mother fixed him with an eviscerating glare

'Rudi was very kind to Eurus,' she retorted. 'He couldn't have loved her more if she had been his own child. And he was beside himself the day he came to tell us that she had died, absolutely beside himself. He cried like a baby…'

Sherlock stared at his mother in disbelief. What level of self-delusion was this?

'But, Mother,' he exclaimed, 'she's not dead, remember? She didn't die. Rudi lied.'

He watched, through a kaleidoscope of confused and conflicting emotions, as the colour drained from his mother's cheeks and her features contorted into a mask of abject desolation.

'Of course…I…I…I know she didn't die,' she stammered. 'But Rudi didn't lie. He did it for us, to spare us from the pain of knowing what our daughter had become. And I forgive him!'

'Sherlock, Sherlock…'

Sherlock was aware of his father standing at the kitchen door and the last thing he wanted was to cause him grief but he couldn't let his mother's last remark go unchallenged.

'So, you can forgive your brother, who took your daughter, told you she was dead and put her in a top security prison for her entire life, but you can't forgive Mycroft for leaving her there after he found out about her, which wasn't, I suspect, until after Rudi died…'

'Sherlock…'

'Mycroft had no right!' Maura Holmes shouted. 'He had no right to keep my daughter from me!'

'He was only following orders, Mother, just as Rudi trained him to do…'

Sherlock knew he had to stop talking or risk blowing the whistle on his plans to have Eurus released but as long as his mother persisted with these irrational arguments, he couldn't hold his tongue…

However, Mrs Holmes came to his rescue.

'Get out!' she screeched. 'Get out of my house and never come here again, you wicked, ungrateful child!'

Sherlock didn't need telling twice. He turned on his heels…and was confronted by his father's stricken expression.

'I'm so sorry, Pa,' he mumbled as he pushed past and made for the front door, grabbing his coat from the hook as he went by. Once outside, he paused for a moment on the door step, closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, to try and steady his racing heart, then marched down the path, out through the gate and off down the lane towards the lay-by and his means of escape.

As he approached the car, he pointed the key at it and pressed the 'unlock' button so that, when he reached for the handle, he could wrench open the door, toss his coat onto the back seat and jump straight inside. He grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, almost relishing the pain it caused in his injury, and roared at the top of his voice.

You idiot! You idiot! he told himself, over and over. You absolute, bloody idiot!

He was still sitting in the driver's seat, eyes screwed shut, cursing himself, when he heard a gentle tap on the window next to his ear. Turning his head, he looked up into the ashen face of his father. Now his shame was complete. He had put that expression there. He had caused that pain.

He opened the door and scrambled out, throwing his arms around his father and burying his face in his shoulder. 'I'm so sorry, Pa, really, I'm so sorry,' he choked, immeasurably grateful for his father's comforting embrace but equally convinced he didn't deserve it.

Father and son stood in the lane, holding each other, for quite some time but, eventually, they eased apart.

'I shouldn't have come here,' said Sherlock, cuffing at his cheeks with the back of his hand. 'And I'm truly sorry for causing such upset…'

'Don't be sorry, dear boy,' his father interrupted. 'It's I who should apologise to you. I let you down. And you were absolutely right to say what you said in there. Your mother is being most unfair to Mycroft. But you will never get her to admit that Rudi did anything wrong. Her entire world view is based on him being perfect.'

Sherlock shook his head, disconsolately.

'Mycroft should be grateful that you stood up for him, though. It's more than I ever managed to do.' Siger Holmes was crestfallen.

'Pa, I'm sure you tried to stick up for all of us on many an occasion but you were out-numbered, two to one,' Sherlock replied, with a rueful smile. 'But I'd better be going.'

'Yes, and I'd better be getting back inside before your mother charges me with desertion.'

The two men hugged again - a warm, affectionate embrace - then Siger stepped away from his son, Sherlock climbed back inside the car, started the engine and pulled away down the lane as they each waved a fond farewell to the other.

ooOoo