John sighed and leaned back in his chair. He'd arrived at the Pembroke Road clinic that morning to be informed that a Dr. Edwin Cairfax, whoever that might be, had called in sick to work. This had almost doubled his own workload. The fact that the surgery's only computer was primitive in the extreme—it was not even plugged in—and had almost nothing of use on it was another frustration. The system at the surgery he worked at with Sarah wouldn't let him prescribe any medication that conflicted with what the patient was already taking, or with any of their listed conditions, or in a dose that would cause more harm than good to them. Here, now, he was supposed to know that information by heart. A simple mistake could kill someone. In between patients, he'd been brushing up on pharmacology all morning.
Something he did know, though, was that smoking was commonly known to be bad for you even in 1983, and that most of his patients did it anyway. He'd had to prevent one young man—who already had bronchitis—from lighting up right there in his office, and the stale smell of cigarettes from people's hair and clothes hung about the little room long after they'd left it. It had also become apparent that more of his patients than he'd expected were addicted to more than cigarettes. Just now, he'd come very close to having an outright row with a dignified man of sixty—whom he'd just discovered was the current Lord Mayor of Bristol—over the small matter of a Diazepam addiction that had apparently been going unchecked for the past two years. He was just deciding whether to call his next patient in when there was a knock on the door. The secretary, a red-haired girl of seventeen that he knew only as Helen, opened it when he invited her to.
"Was that Harry Gilbert who just left?" she asked, hushed.
"Yeah." There was no point in dithering about revealing a patient's name. She was the practice secretary, after all, and in any case the girl had eyes.
"What was he in a strop about?"
"You know I can't tell you," he said mildly. Surely, even in 1983, some form of patient-doctor confidentiality law existed. In fact, he'd just told Gilbert that under no circumstances would he be handing out any more prescriptions for Diazepam; he could come and collect a day's dose from the practice every second day on the condition that he enrolled in and consistently attended a private drug rehabilitation outpatient service. John thought back to Sherlock's prevarication that morning, annoyed. Giving him Diazepam—of course Sherlock would call it Valium—to knock him out cold? Sherlock was lucky it hadn't killed him.
Sherlock watched Greg Lestrade give Peter Noonan the full nine yards of interrogation with something like interest. It was rather like watching an incoming tide: Lestrade would ask questions that had nothing to do with the disappearances of Alan Clarke or the others, nothing to do with the murder of Derek, interspersed with the occasional enquiry that got closer and closer to the sharp end of the matter. After a nervous half-hour passing a five-pound note between them, it emerged that Peter did not know Alan Clarke personally, but he had grave and infuriatingly vague suspicions about where he was. Sherlock was at the end of his patience, something he did not have much of at the best of times.
"Peter," he said, interrupting a question of Lestrade's about where Peter and his friends liked to hang out on the weekends, "Do you have a criminal record?"
Peter looked at his mother in alarm, and Sheila started to rise.
"He's only asking," Lestrade jumped in, "because we just want to know if there's been any… well, look. I know some of the coppers around here can be hard to deal with. I find them hard to deal with, and I work with them. They mightn't have given you a good impression of the force. And if you're not comfortable with the police, Peter, I don't blame you for not being my best friend right now."
"He hasn't got a criminal record," Sheila said, but she was aiming this at Sherlock, and with considerable venom. "Never. He's never had a thing on his record."
"No, of course he hasn't," Lestrade jumped in before Sherlock could open his mouth again. He shot Sherlock something that was close to a glare—stare-downs would become Lestrade's speciality as a detective—and continued, "And anyway, even if he did, we're not interested in that right now. I'm just looking for some missing people. That's why I need Peter and Jeff to help me." He stood up and offered Peter his hand, shaking it. "Good game," he said. He had at that point been holding the ten-pound note, since Peter had declined to answer his last question—that of whether he remembered anyone at the party at Wookie Hole the night before Scott Pigeon disappeared as being drunker than you'd expect, even for a teen bender—but he handed it over good-naturedly anyway and turned back to Sheila Noonan, who'd relaxed her shoulders and unknotted her hands. "Do you reckon we could call Jeff in now?"
Lestrade was good, so far as they went; but then, Sherlock had already known that. He also had no intention of telling him so, in this timeline or any other. But in the time they had worked together, he had seen Lestrade effectively manage frightened children and confused old ladies; blokes who were ready to punch him on sight and women who seemed more interested in a date than an interview. He was good with people. Sherlock felt it on the outskirts of his mind, but did not give in to the full thought: I imagine that's why he's good with me.
"Peter," Sherlock said, "I have a question, before you go."
Peter, half-rising from the piano stool, looked at him, attentive and good-natured.
Sherlock asked, "Who is it that's molesting you?"
"Great," Lestrade said on the doorstep roughly forty seconds later, where they'd been shoved by Sheila Noonan. "She'll go to Brian Stern about that, just see if she won't. What the hell were you playing at, just blurting it all out like that?"
In a moment of illumination, Sherlock realised Lestrade had been on the exact same track as he was. His tidal questions had been edging nearer and nearer to the idea that someone had been abusing Peter, and quite possibly his brother too.
"Well," he said snippily, following Lestrade to where he'd parked his car, "at least we have an answer now. His reaction was a confirmation."
"And that's no good to us if the Noonans stop talking to police," Lestrade complained, opening the car door and gesturing for Sherlock to get in the other side. Sherlock noted that, true to form, Lestrade was annoyed with him but not particularly angry. It took a lot to make him angry; even more than Sherlock could manage, most of the time.
Once they were both sitting in the car, Lestrade paused to scrub both hands over his face, and Sherlock saw, rather than observed, how exhausted he really was. With his girlfriend and her parents in town and frantic about their lost Alan, it was very unlikely that he was sleeping well. It went some way to explain the spliff and the whiskey the night before.
"Did you hear it?" Sherlock asked him, trying to take his mind off that.
"Hear what?" Lestrade asked, putting his keys in the ignition and reaching for his seatbelt. "You mean, how desperate the mum was to tell you hadn't got a criminal record, when most people would tell you he hadn't committed a crime? Yeah. I'll put next week's pay on his being interviewed in connection to something else, and either walking away through lack of evidence or, more likely, being given an unofficial kick up the arse because of his age. But if that was for graffitiing or something, what's that got to do with anything?"
Sherlock opened his mouth to interject, then shut it again.
"What?" Lestrade asked peevishly. "You think it does have something to do with it?"
Sherlock remained silent as Lestrade merged into traffic on the main road. When they'd reached the first set of red lights, Lestrade said, "Right, got you. It's not about Peter, necessarily. It's about the mum. The mum of both boys, making out like she's parenting a pair of saints. But if Alan and the others…" He swallowed. "If they've been abducted by, you know, a sicko, what's that got to do with Sheila Noonan? Women don't do that."
"Myra Hindley 'did that'."
"Her victims were younger," Lestrade countered, and Sherlock was, for a moment, impressed at his casual knowledge of the Moors Murders case. "And she was working with a bloke, and it was probably mostly his idea to start kidnapping and killing kids. She was there as the lure."
"Yes," Sherlock said. "Don't talk. I need to think. You should think, too, if you feel yourself capable."
John was finishing up his notes and about to call in the next patient on his list—an eighty-seven-year-old woman named Frances Dempsey; malaise unknown but likely to be pleurisy, from the notes Helen had provided—when he heard a commotion muffled through the two closed doors between his office and the reception area. A woman's voice, urgent and low; something that might have been a sob, then the flutter of paperwork and the creak of footsteps on the bare floorboards outside. There was a timid rap on the office door.
"Come in," he said, burning with curiosity by now.
Helen popped her head in the door. "Sorry," she said, in a cringing way that reminded John of Mrs Hudson, "But it's Donna Meade in the waiting room. Looks like the bastard's bashed her about again. Will you see her?"
John did not even glance at his list of remaining patients. Wherever and whenever he was, he still knew how to triage. "Show her in," he said.
Donna Meade turned out to be a tiny woman—as John moved past her to close the door behind them, he noted that she barely reached his shoulder—with a pale, sad face and a mop of short black curls. She was probably in her mid thirties but seemed much younger, partly because of her height and partly because she was wearing ripped stonewash jeans and an oversized purple cable-knit jumper, which gave her the look of a child dressed in her mother's clothing. She was adorned with a multitude of bangles and earrings, one of which had been ripped out of her earlobe, which was bleeding onto her shoulder. She had been wearing a lot of heavy eye makeup at one point; most of it was now smeared down her tear-stained cheeks. One of those cheeks also looked dangerously swollen, as was the eye above it. She was sobbing so incoherently that John, unable to think of anything else to do, sat her down and handed her a box of tissues in silence. Then he found an ice pack, wrapped it in a surgical bandage and handed it to her, waiting out her crying jag.
"What happened?" he finally asked her, gently moving the ice pack away from her face so that he could have a better look at her injuries.
"The usual." He felt her flinch as he shone his pen-torch at the corner of her eye, testing her reactions. There didn't seem to be any real damage to the eyeball itself, but the lid was already swelling shut. Her eyes were an odd and particularly beautiful colour, like winter smoke, and John felt a twinge of annoyance that he was rendering medical assistance to a patient, a woman he'd met about two minutes ago, and the colour of her eyes had even crossed his mind.
"Same issue?" he asked her, hoping she'd give him a bit of help.
"Michael wanted to go to London for a concert," she said. "I said no. What else was I supposed to say, John? He's fourteen!"
John saw. The 'bastard' in question was Donna's son, not her lover. He took advantage of her closed eyes to pull out her patient file and give it a quick glance. Judging from her own date of birth, she'd been all of nineteen or so when Michael had been born in 1968 or 1969, making the kid only a few years older than himself… in a way. He suddenly remembered a girl he'd gone to school with, one Allison Mason, the only kid in a grade full of sheltered middle-class professional's-kids who had 'never had a father'. There'd been all sorts of snide talk about her and about her mother's morals, or lack thereof. Last he'd heard, Allison was spiting every single one of the bastards by having a successful career as a sound editor for the BBC.
"Yeah," he finally said, realising his long delay sounded suspicious. "Yeah, I agree with you there." He had a sudden memory of his father putting his foot down and forbidding him to attend Live Aid at Wembley when he'd been fourteen himself. Live Aid, which in this world hadn't even happened yet. "Looks like he didn't just punch you this time, though."
"Oh, he did," she insisted, swiping the back of her hand across her nose, which was crusted in blood. The force of her hand triggered another dribble of blood from her nostril, and John handed her another tissue. "He had his keys in his hand, though…"
He held his hands up, appalled. "Donna," he said. "That's an escalation. You know I can't ignore that."
But apparently, before all this, some version of him had been ignoring it. This was a woman who was used to coming to him when 'the usual' happened, and he'd been so ineffective at dealing with it that it was 'the usual.'
"What's his dad have to say about all this?" he asked her. Then a momentary panic washed over him: 'Donna', someone he apparently knew so well that he had her name unadorned in his Teledex, someone who would come to him in crisis about her abusive, out-of-control teenager… their abusive, out-of-control teenager? If he'd served in a war he couldn't even remember, then…
"You know Ken's long gone," she reproached him, and John felt a huge wave of relief that he'd no hand in creating this problem. "But if you find him, tell him he owes me twelve years of child support."
"Bastard," he said mildly. "Donna, you can't go home to that kind of violence. You know that, right?"
"I have to. He's a kid. My kid. I can't leave him on his own, and where else is he to go?"
For a second, John considered… but no. The last thing he needed right now was playing babysitter to a violent teenager. "Where is he now?" he asked.
She scoffed. "God knows. Probably throwing a brick through a shop window somewhere."
And that, John thought, mightn't be a bad thing. If Michael did something to get the police involved, they might just intervene in his abuse of his mother in a way he couldn't.
"He'll probably survive by himself, at least until it gets dark," he said. "In the meantime, let's get you patched up, and then you can lie down in the bay in Dr. Cairfax's office. He's not in—I'll get Helen to unlock it for you. My lunch break's at half-past twelve. We'll talk more then, okay?"