CHAPTER 22: THE PECULIAR EXLE OF MR DOYLE AND DR CONAN

MAY 2015

All train stations had a certain air to them. A noise and an odour at the convergence of human beings in the act of transition. A salad of creeds and cultures, it was quite the opposite of a home, and yet almost as familiar as one. At least, it was after nine days of rails. He had an urge to write about it, which was a funny thing. Such urges hadn't poked at him for quite a while.

'Joseph.'

Computers were out of the question, so he couldn't type anything, not even half-formed ideas. At a train station kiosk in Stuttgart, he had been tempted to purchase a spiral-bound notebook, a small one that could easily tuck inside his jacket, if only for the pleasure of carrying paper in his pocket. But again, out of the question. They were to neither leave nor carry any traces of themselves, and his writing even a smiley face would be one stroke of ink too many.

A shadow stepped directly into his line of vision, towering and with dark hair shorn close to the scalp, and he started. Embarrassed, he forced a scowl to replace the surprise. "A little less looming would be nice," he muttered.

'I called you three times.'

Had he? 'Sorry, I was …'

'It's no use leaving the old ones behind if you don't attune yourself to the new one.' Sherlock looked annoyed, but then, he'd not been terribly pleasant since leaving British soil, like he was determined to be miserable until the day he returned, just to prove a point.

'Apologies, Arthur,' John snipped.

'Train's arriving.'

Pushing to his feet, John wondered when was the last time his bones hadn't felt so tired. If hard pressed to think about it, he was pretty sure he hadn't felt properly rested since last September. But he didn't like to think about it.

He followed Sherlock past signs written in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets toward the platforms. Feeling an itch under his chin, he scratched his beard.

'Spri,' said Sherlock. Even though he was walking in front, it was as if he had eyes behind his head, and John instantly pulled his hand away from his chin.

He had been censured before—in Paris (arrête ça), in Nuremberg (Höraufdamit), in Bratislava (hagyd abba), in Timisoara (încetează)—to stop acting like a man unaccustomed to wearing a beard: it brought attention to his face, Sherlock said. So John couldn't help but scowl. Leave it to Sherlock to find it noteworthy when someone scratched an itch. Even more annoying was Sherlock's insistence that he use the local tongue to tell John to knock it off so as not to bring attention to themselves as foreigners (as if it weren't painfully obvious). Far from being impressed by Sherlock's proclivity in French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian (the current list), John wished he would just shut up.

Perhaps Sherlock wasn't the only one a little more tetchy than usual these days.

They boarded the train for Sofia. It was late in the day, and the carriage wasn't even half full. A quiet journey, then, hopefully. His eyes roved over his fellow passengers as they moved to the back of the carriage and sat across from one another, John with his back to the passengers, Sherlock facing them.

'Who's riding with us?' Sherlock asked in a low voice, barely moving his lips.

John sighed, hopes for a restful journey dashed. He felt a dull, pernicious headache behind his eyes give a weary throb. 'Eighteen passengers, not including us. Five female, the rest male. All adults, no children. Only two wearing hats . . . not quite half wearing eyewear . . . four traveling in pairs, the rest travelling alone … erm …'

'Five travelling in pairs,' Sherlock corrected. 'You missed two males with the seat between them.'

'Yes, all right, five. That leaves eight going solo.'

'Professions? Reason for travel?'

'I'm not nearly that good.'

'Who was wearing the red shirt under a black jacket?'

John closed his eyes tight, trying to recall the image. 'Third man on the left. He had a book in his lap, not reading it.'

'Where is the man with the goatee seated?'

Was there a man with a goatee? John's beard itched; he stopped himself from scratching. 'Was he with a woman?' Sherlock nodded. 'Right side, halfway down the carriage. Both on their phones.'

Sherlock grinned. 'You're getting better.'

'Ta.'

From day one, Sherlock had had been training him in, as he called it, 'observational prowess', which was the first step in deductive reasoning and, so he said, a key tool in keeping them alive. Both men needed to be sharp as flints when it came to spotting suspicious or untoward characters. As far as either of them knew, their flight from London was still unknown, but the more time that passed, the less they could rely on Moran's and Adler's ignorance. Once word got out, they fully expected the network would be notified. And Moriarty had eyes in every corner of the world.

'So no hot spots?' Sherlock asked. It was their code for danger, whether human or otherwise.

'No hot spots,' said John, fairly confident that no one aboard this train carried a weapon or intention to ambush them. No one had even glanced at them as they passed.

They lapsed into silence for a short while as the final passengers boarded and the conductor passed through to verify ticketholders. As the train left the station and rolled out of the lit city into the dark night, the lights in the carriage dimmed, but John, though travel weary, was not the least bit sleepy.

'Mary and I talked about doing this,' said John. 'Taking a holiday. Riding the rails.'

He had been thinking a lot about her lately on these long, quiet train rides, city to city. But he hadn't expected to mention it out loud. Surprised by himself, he turned his head from the dark window and looked across the way at Sherlock, who seemed equally surprised.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I don't know why I said that.' He pulled the shade, suddenly feeling like anyone out in that dark world could see him.

'Where did you want to go?' Sherlock asked. It was like he was holding onto a door that John was trying to close, standing in the threshold and asking to be invited in.

John sighed. 'The usual. Barcelona, Paris, Rome. She'd never left Britain, you know. Well, no, she went Paris on a school holiday, but we know that doesn't count. As an adult. Never been anywhere, wanted to see it all. And I wanted to show her everything.' He shook his head with self-deprecating laughter. 'As if I were some kind of cosmopolite.' An unexpected anger boiled up in him, all of the sudden, and he huffed. 'You know where she never wanted to go? Canada. But that's where they buried her.'

Sherlock nodded sympathetically. 'She should have been buried at home.'

'Sometimes . . .' He trailed off, not knowing what he was trying to say. Or rather, he had held these thoughts inside so long he didn't realise they could come out. 'Sometimes I can't believe I'll never see her again. I can't believe what her sister did to me.'

'We'll go,' said Sherlock. 'When this is all over. We'll visit the place where she's laid to rest. That is . . . of course, what I mean is . . . you'll go . . . but if you should want . . . that is, company or . . . a friend with you . . .'

John looked down at his hands. 'Let's just look ahead to tomorrow, yeah? That's all I can really do right now."

In the summer of 2011, after dying in London in front of his best friend, Sherlock set out on a tactical mission to dismantle a crime network created by his archenemy, the master spinner, which was preserved by a then-unknown spider. At first, he believed he would triumph. He was snapping the threads of the web in city after city, not seeing how they were being repaired once he moved on. If he could only see the whole web! A spider might have had eight eyes, but he had only two, and he was tiring. After little more than a year, however, and without being aware it was happening, he himself became trapped in a different web, with a different spinner, and just like that, he failed.

Not this time. Sherlock was no longer limited to two eyes. Back in London, he had Anthea and Lestrade. In the wild of the world, he had John Watson. And he and John had a plan.

'Anthea calls them linchpins,' Sherlock explained, that first night in a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of Paris. 'A term I presume she gathered from Mycroft, which he picked up from me, when he made me relate all my activities during my . . . absence. I said I needed to find the linchpins in the network. The whole thing cannot be destroyed otherwise.'

'And there are four,' said John. 'Just these four.'

'Mycroft believes so. They were the four Moriarty trusted most to hold down the stakes of the tent.'

'And the four that sent assassins to Baker Street to "get"you. Back then.' John licked his lips, thinking as he stared at the page on which he was making notes and which he would later destroy. 'Two were killed. The Albanian, Su— Sulem—'

'Sulejmani,' Sherlock affirmed. 'Member of an Albanian hit squad. The second was called Cáceres, part of the Armenian mafia located in Spain. Both shot dead, presumably by the other two: the Russian, Ludmilla Dyachenko, still alive as far as anyone knows; and the ex-pat American, Daniel Kaminski, believed to be hiding out somewhere between Budapest and Belgrade and working in arms trafficking for the Serbian mafia.'

'So if two are dead, that just leaves . . .'

But Sherlock was shaking his head. 'Those two assassins are dead. But they were just following orders. There are most certainly others, and their bosses are still in operation.'

'Okay, then, so we're taking on mafias and assassin's unions,' said John, bleakly.

'Taking on their kingpins, yes. Take down the most important person in the organisation, and the rest will follow, followed by the network they are holding up. Like falling dominos. It has to happen quickly, though, John, or the web will rebuild itself.'

Soberly, John nodded. They had a plan for that, too. Much of it hinged on an assumption: if they were willing to turn on one another before, maybe they would do so again. And if not . . . well, they were at war, and John was a warrior. He would do what he had to do. 'Where to first?'

'East,' said Sherlock. 'We're looking for needles in haystacks. But I think our surest location, of the four, is Albania.'

So they went east. From Paris to Stuttgart to Nuremberg, through Prague and Bratislava and Budapest, skirting Belgrade and Timisoara and Bucharest, and now to Sofia.

They were still two days away. Only two days.

The hotel for the night, located a short distance from the Sofia Central Station, was certainly on the cheap side, but it was clean. Because they never made a reservation, they took what they could get, which in this case was a small double on the second floor overlooking the rubbish bins. John preferred the ground floor, or a street view, but he didn't complain. He performed his usual security checks, marked all possible exits, and staked out the side of the bed closest to the door. Sherlock had first noted this behaviour in Prague and said he didn't need a first line of defence, but John wouldn't hear otherwise.

They had not eaten since noon, but by the time they arrived it was too late to find something. They munched on the nuts, dried fruit, and chocolate they had bought on the go, and each took his turn in the loo before settling their stiff narrow frames into the stiff, narrow bed. Without a word to one another, they turned their backs to sleep.

Not an hour later, John thought he heard something outside the door. It was past midnight, and he tried to ignore it. Probably just someone arriving late, passing by. But it came again, then again, not like passing but . . . pacing. In front of their door. He cracked an eye open and stared at the slice of light at the foot of the door, coming from the hallway. Nothing. He closed his eyes again, but only seconds later, he heard the footfalls again, and they stopped just outside their hotel room. His heart began to beat in earnest.

They followed us, he thought. They're here.

Where had he put the pistol? He reached for the bedside table, hand scrambling in the dark until he found it. Then he was out of bed. He pressed his back up against the wall adjacent to the door, listening, waiting. The pistol was steady in both hands, wrists pressed together.

Was that . . . whistling?

No. He was the dead. The Slash Man was three months dead.

Wasn't he?

John?

A voice floated somewhere far away, maybe above him. Sherlock. He was searching for him, had been searching for ten days. He wanted to shout that he was here, that he was trapped in the freezer, but he was afraid to make any noise. Had it really been ten days? He searched for the trigger on the pistol but couldn't find it.

A light flickered, and as it burst into being, and John gasped and slid down the wall, the pistol clattering beside his feet. He held up his hands to protect himself, his face, and found them joined by thin silver wire.

'John, it's me.'

The voice was closer now, though still above, like an angel descending from the clouds.

'Come back to me. You're safe, come back. Give me your hand.'

Could he? His hands were bound and bloodied. But then . . . he looked, and they were free. A foggy room came into focus, and Sherlock was lowering himself to a crouching position in front of him, at a distance, but hand extended.

'Oh,' John breathed, his voice trembling a little. 'Shit.'

'You back?'

'Yeah.' Embarrassed, he looked down, and he saw the remote control on the floor at his side and understood exactly what had happened. They weren't even travelling with a pistol. He took Sherlock's hand and let him pull him to his feet. 'Sorry.'

'Don't be.'

'Is there'—he gestured feebly to the door—'anyone out there?'

Sherlock stepped to the door and, while John braced, checked the peephole. For extra measure, he also checked the locks. 'No.'

'Shit,' he said again. 'I mean, good. I mean . . .' He hated this. Hated it.

'Come here.' Sherlock took his arm and led him the short three steps back to the bed and sat with him on the edge of the mattress. 'Let's just work on getting your heart rate back down. Water?'

''Kay,' he said shortly, not trusting himself to say more.

While Sherlock ministered to him, getting him water from the tap, helping him breathe, keeping himself always within John's line of sight, John fretted. He had been doing so well. At least, he thought he had. He had been feeling more in control of himself than he had for quite some time, and he hadn't had an episode—not really—since the night the cottage burned down. But he knew that such attacks accompanied high-stress situations, and it had been building. Everything from finding Bill to their little meeting in the war room to going into self-imposed exile. He'd been feeling stressed almost non-stop since leaving London. Maybe . . . maybe this wasn't the first one of these. Maybe he'd done the sleep-walking thing before, in other hotels, but had never come out of them, and to spare his feelings, Sherlock hadn't said anything . . .

'It's the first,' said Sherlock, who was sat beside him. For how long, John couldn't say with confidence.

'God, did I just say all that out loud?'

He heard the smile in Sherlock's voice. 'You're just a really loud thinker.'

'And you're a mind reader.' He sighed. 'You were waiting for a night like this one. Weren't you.'

'You've been sleeping with one eye open since we left,' said Sherlock by way of confirmation. 'Which is to say, you've barely been sleeping at all. Stress, sleep deprivation, hyper-vigilance . . . It was bound to catch up.' A pause. 'You okay?'

'Yeah.' He was damp from sweat, and shivering from cold and receding panic, and he felt on the verge of nausea, so it was fortunate he'd eaten nothing for several hours. Or maybe that was low blood sugar. 'I can handle this, Sherlock. What we have to do. I really can.'

'I don't doubt it,' said Sherlock with a squeeze.

It was then he realised his left hand was in Sherlock's right, their fingers interlocked and John was squeezing hard. He couldn't remember how long they had been joined like that. Newly embarrassed, he mumbled another sorry and tried to withdraw.

'Not yet,' said Sherlock.

John lifted his head in surprise.

'Let me . . .' Sherlock shifted John's hand into both of his now, and slowly began to massage the meaty flesh of the palm, thumbs kneading like dough. He rubbed the knuckles and the base of his fingers, each in turn, and spread them to stretch the muscles, then returned to knead the palm. To John's amazement, he began to calm. It felt . . . nice.

'When I was six, I got my first violin,' Sherlock said, apropos of nothing, but John, afraid to break the spell, let him carry on. 'I was obsessed with it. Whenever I had a spare moment, I was playing. Some days, I played for hours, literally hours, hardly removing my bow from the string. I played until the horsehairs frayed and my hands cramped into claws. It hurt so badly, I cried. I remember my mother massaging my hands, just like this, until the hurt went away. I've never forgotten it.'

Maybe it was the late-night hour or the need for sleep, but suddenly, their defences were lowering. Sherlock was showing him something he hadn't asked to see, maybe something he had never shown anyone, a simple but cherished memory, and John wished to reciprocate.

'I had night terrors as a kid,' he said. 'I was pretty young, I don't really remember them. But I do remember Mum bringing me out of my room and to the sofa, and she'd let me lay my head in her lap while she watched telly. And she would stroke my head and neck, just here.' He removed his hand to place it on the nape of Sherlock's neck to lightly brush the skin there, just beneath the hairline. Even when his thumb traced the ridge of a wide scar, now some eighteen-months old, Sherlock did not flinch. Instead, his eyes fell shut with a low hum.

'It's nice,' Sherlock mumbled. A few seconds more, and John's hand stilled. Sherlock opened his eyes again, and they stared at each other, neither quite sure how they got there, neither knowing what to do next. Then Sherlock said, 'How old were you when she died?'

John removed his hand back to his lap. 'Nine to fifteen,' he said, and at Sherlock's ruffled brow explained, 'Cancer is a slow death.'

'So is suicide, sometimes.'

For a moment, John was confused, thinking that in some twisted way Sherlock was referencing himself. But then he remembered what Mycroft had told him about the death of their mother. It was a subject they had never really breached, Sherlock and John, despite what they had in common in dead parents. These were not easy things to discuss. John didn't know which he found more surprising: that they were talking about it at all, that Sherlock had been the one to broach it, or that John didn't mind.

Still, he treaded delicately. Pretending he'd not heard it already from Mycroft—he wanted to hear it from Sherlock—he asked, 'How did she . . . ?'

'Pills and wine. Not terribly original, I know. Not like dropping from a hospital rooftop.' He smiled sideways at John, looking for a reaction.

John shook his head. 'God, I can't wait for the day I find that funny.'

To his further surprise, Sherlock chuckled deeply. 'Me too. Then I can finally tell you some of my jokes.'

Quite out of his control, the corner of John's lip quirked upward. 'What jokes?'

'Why did the detective fall from the roof?'

With mock exasperation, John played along. 'Go on then.'

'It was a hard case, John. He needed to get cracking.'

John threw his head back and laughed so loudly he clamped his hand over his mouth. 'I hate you, you bastard,' he said between giggles. 'That's not even funny.'

'I'm refining my art.'

They continued into the night, just talking, about nothing, really, and both were tired, but neither was particularly keen on trying again for sleep. Not just yet. At some point—and who knew when—their hands found each other again and, quite simply, held on.

The mobile phone was their most valuable asset, and it was just about as secure as 221B Baker Street. To access it required a thumb print, face recognition, voice recognition, verbal password, and typed answer to a security question, which never repeated, and which so far had generated 'What is the second name of your oldest sibling?', 'What were the last five digits of your phone number in 1992?' and 'What was the code to break into Father's safe in the library?' Clearly, Mycroft had been excessively detailed.

To be sure, the mobile was a comfort. It served as a link—in some instances, a life-line—to the London they had left behind. Through the phone, they gave updates, and from a thousand miles away, they received instruction. Text messages self-destructed within five minutes of receipt, as well as encrypted (or rather, cryptic), requiring Sherlock's highly analytical brainpower to discern the meaning.

The latest message read simply:

122380/02\269411/14

'The hell is that?' asked John, eyes narrowing.

'What's your best guess, John?'

'Erm.' He studied it more closely. 'Date and time? Somehow?'

'Coordinates,' said Sherlock. 'Latitude and longitude, only in reverse. Not especially cryptic. Just enough to befuddle the more simple-minded.'

John glared.

'Aha. And here is where it leads.'

He showed John a map of Elbasan, Albania, on the mobile. It was not a large city by any means, certainly not compared to London. A little dot on the map indicated where they sat in an outdoor café on Bulevardi Qemal Stafa, and another little dot showed them where they were to go.

It turned out to be a bank. And in the bank, under the name Arthur Doyle, was a large lockbox. And in the lockbox was a silver, metal briefcase.

They returned to the hotel to open it and found themselves staring at eight pistols resting in foam beds and boxes of ammunition.

John let out a whoosh of air, and lifted his eyes to Sherlock's, who perfectly mirrored the air of gravity that had descended.

'Bang, bang,' he said.

'Quite so."

JUNE 2015

The objective was clear: identify the head of the Albanian hit squad, the first of Moriarty's linchpins, and neutralise him. The how of it was the tricky bit. How large was the organisation, how protected was its head, how could it be discovered, exposed, dismantled, and destroyed in such a way as to ensure its utter annihilation and the impossibility of its reformation?

On his own, John would have had no idea how even to start. Sherlock, however, was not without experience. He had, after all, spent three years following the silken threads of Moriarty's network in foreign lands. It was a matter, he said, of tapping into the local crime syndicates, and that began with the local criminals. Obviously.

Not petty criminals. No pickpocketing or drunken brawls or domestic violence. They were looking for something more organized: street gangs and drug lords and weapons dealers. The easiest to spot were the street gangs, which necessitated that Sherlock and John move through dark city streets after midnight. For two weeks, they wandered the streets of Elbasan, both night and day, watching. Sherlock was better at it, but he tested John's growing acuities. When they got back to the hotel—changing hotels as frequently as was reasonable in a city as small as Elbasan—they swapped observations and came up with new plans.

It was these sessions John liked best, not only for the reprieve and chance to eat—they were both down a couple of belt notches already for unreliable mealtimes and lack of appetite—but also because their scheming tended, these days, to devolve into, well, something softer in their conversations, and though they sometimes began with one of Ella's questions (the cards were left at home, their content stored in memory), those questions often evolved into the kinds of topics they had rarely explored.

'Wherever did you come up with the name Arthur Doyle?' John asked, shovelling rice and chicken into his mouth from a takeaway box.

Sherlock was prodding at some suspicious-looking mushrooms, carefully separating them to the side of his own box. 'Hm? Oh.' He shrugged. 'I was half delirious when I said it, I think. Hadn't prepared my next guise, and it just popped into my head, like childhood stories sometimes do, I suppose.'

'What would that be, then, eh?' asked John. 'For someone who read Crime and Punishment in the nursery, I mean. Some stuffy philosophical treatise from the eighteenth century, or, I don't know, Arthur the Chimpanzee?'

'Who?'

'Nothing. It was a joke.'

'The reference is hardly obscure, John. I am referring, quite obviously, to Arthur, King of the Britons. Le Morte d'Arthur, of course, being a compilation of the best of the stories.'

'I saw Camelot once,' said John, mostly in jest, but he was intrigued by what Sherlock was telling him. Like anyone, he was familiar with the stories, though they had always made him sad: the doomed King Arthur betrayed by those whom he loved most and whose destruction was wrought by a creature of his own making. He hoped Sherlock did not identify too strongly. 'And Doyle?'

'Mummy's maiden name,' he said simply.

John always got the sense that Sherlock disliked talking about his family, those early years. They had been troubled years, John knew that much. He had wanted to ask more about the drawings revealed in that disturbing metal box, but it had never seemed the right time, and it was not easy pivoting a conversation in that direction. Often, he doubted whether he should. But many of Ella's questions centred on exactly that—Sherlock's past. He wondered if now was the right time to push it.

'Was she Irish?' he asked casually.

'Couple generations back,' said Sherlock in a monotone, a clear warning sign, but John heedlessly pressed on.

'Must explain the black hair,' he said lightly, and was pleased to see the smallest of quirks in Sherlock's lip. 'But your father was—'

'Irrelevant,' he interrupted.

'Not a great dad, eh?' he asked softly.

'No,' he said shortly.

'What kind of man was he?'

'As fascinating as the subject may be to Herr Freud, I promise you, John, it's not worth exploring. Mr Holmes was a non-actor in my life, and any action he may have taken I would just as soon forget.'

'Do you mean . . . That is, was he . . . violent? Did he ever hit you?' As soon as he reached the question mark, John regretted it, for Sherlock was tipping from testy toward anger.

'Oh yes, of course, that has to be it, doesn't it? How prosaic. Abusive childhood, that explains everything.'

'I was just asking—'

'The answer is no. He couldn't be bothered to be violent. Why, was yours?' He meant it as an insult, a way to shut him up, John knew that. It didn't make it sting any less.

'You're right,' he said, rising from the edge of the hotel bed. 'Stupid question.'

Sherlock's face fell, seeming to realise he had made a mistake of his own. 'John?'

But John wasn't in the mood for an argument. He went to the loo and turned on the shower, but he didn't undress. He just sat there, wondering why he had asked such a bone-headed question.

Later that night, they stripped the double bed of the blanket—it was too hot for even a sheet—and lay sweating in thin pyjamas, both tired but neither restful. Sherlock was on his back, an arm thrown over his head. John had rolled to his side, facing outward. For the greater part of an hour, they listened to one another's restless shifting and little huffs of agitated breathing.

'I'm sorry,' Sherlock finally said into the dark.

'Go to sleep,' John said into the pillow smooshing the side of his face.

'What I said . . . It was thoughtless. I know you never got on with your father, and of course I deduced his alcoholism, not only from your sister's behaviours but from your own, and so often that kind of abuse is coupled with others. Neglect, verbal abuse, assault …"

'How prosaic.'

There was silence behind him as Sherlock fell chastised, leaving John pricked with guilt. The man was only trying to apologise. It was wasn't entirely his fault that he was so rubbish at it.

'Sorry,' Sherlock murmured again. He let the quiet abide a little longer, then said, rather softly, 'So. Your dad was a bastard, then, too.'

'Oh no, you don't.' John rolled onto his back and sighed. 'You don't get to do that.'

'Do what?'

'Make it out like I'm the one with issues that I haven't dealt with. Yes, he was a drunk, you know that already. And yes, he smacked me around a bit when he got sloshed, and I was ashamed of him most days, up to and including the day I buried him. And none of that was okay. But I loved him. And I've made my peace with it all.'

'Have you?'

'Have you?'

'No.'

'Right. So.' They fell again into silence, staring through the dark to the ceiling overhead. 'So why do you get angry when you think about your old dad?'

'I don't think about him.'

'Liar.'

'He was not a father to me, John. That was . . . well, that was Mycroft.'

Piece by piece, sometimes just a word or sentence at a time, he began to open up. And so they talked late into the night, and John learnt more of Sherlock's early years than he had ever known, but by no means was it a monologue or a one-sided history. John spoke just as openly of his own, and soon they began comparing notes: how had each spent Christmas 1985, where had each found himself in summer of 1991, how had they found their respective schools, what were their mothers like, their fathers, their roles as second children. And it was easier than either of them expected, comforting and welcome, even, to share an unhappy past and the people and choices that had brought them to this place. Ella would be proud, John mused. At some point, their voices faded, and they fell asleep.

JULY 2015

Sherlock said that Moriarty liked puzzles, but he also got a kick out of hiding things in plain sight. After three weeks of roaming the streets and stalking its criminal class, here was what they knew: not much. However, Sherlock had a suspicion about a particular shop that sold shoes. Why? It was nothing about the storefront itself. He had popped inside himself once to have a look around on the pretence that he was in the market for some trainers, but found nothing of particular resonance to suggest nefarious dealings.

It was the carrier bags, he said, that drew his notice. He saw them in the city, hanging at the sides of men, always men, always walking solo. To John—who paid little mind of people carrying their shopping, let alone from where—this didn't mean much. So they had bought some shoes. So what? But Sherlock was quick to point out that the weight and shape of whatever was in the carrier bag was most definitely not a shoebox, nor indeed a pair of shoes. Trust Sherlock Holmes to spot such a detail.

'Then what?' John asked, sceptical that this would have anything at all to do with their quarry.

'Let us find out.'

It was an hour before midnight. They were trailing one of those men with the carrier bag (okay, John conceded, that was a little suspicious, given that all the shops had closed hours ago), keeping their distance. Sometimes, when on patrol, they took opposite sides of the street, lest they be seen too often together ('Pairs are more often recognisable than singles, John.'), but tonight, they walked side by side ('Pairs are less threatening than singles, John.'), keeping a reasonable distance from their target.

They meant to overtake him, Sherlock parting one way and John the other, and Sherlock would accidentally bump into him in the passing and judge more rightly the object in the carrier bag by feeling it for himself. If things went well, if the air was ripe for it, he would find a way to knock it clean out of the man's hands and retrieve it for him, which would yield a much greater assessment. If things went poorly, they would just knock the man to the ground and rob him. John hoped things went well.

Unfortunately, they did not have an opportunity to execute any part of their plan.

The man with the carrier bag was three metres ahead, no more, and they were gaining on him. But then Sherlock heard the impending attack only half a second before it happened: quick footsteps coming up from behind, then the sharp gasp before the strike. His head snapped around just in time to catch the glint of light off the thin edge of the raised blade. He shouted, and shoved John forward. Quick. Not quick enough. He heard the loud tear of fabric through the back of John's jacket, and John pitched forward to the ground. Sherlock balled his fist, not yet feeling the sting of a sliced hand, and planted it in their attacker's face. The man screamed, held his nose, and cried angrily, 'Të qifsha robt!'

Further down the street, Sherlock saw the shadows of five more men, coming closer.

'Go go go!' shouted Sherlock, forgetting his Albanian tongue entirely. He grabbed John under the arm and hoisted him back to his feet. The man with the carrier bag was gone. They swung around the first corner they came to and lost the would-be murderer and his gang.

Back at the hotel, they bolted the door. Sherlock was in a panic.

'How bad?' he asked, trying to push John's torn jacket down his shoulders. 'How bad?'

'I'm fine, Sherlock, get off me.'

'Is it deep? Are you bleeding?' He pulled John's shirt from where it was tucked inside his trousers.

'Off!' With that, John shoved him so hard his back struck the bolted door.

Sherlock stared, stunned, but suddenly comprehending. 'I'm sorry,' he started, but John, eyes misting, was backing away, muttering apologies of his own.

'I . . . need a moment,' he said before turning heel and locking himself in the tiny loo. It was only then that Sherlock looked down at his hand, a neat slice bisecting the back of his right hand and dripping down his trouser leg. He hadn't even felt the cut. For the first time since acquiring it on their travels, he broke into their emergency kit and set about patching himself up with surgical spirit, glue, and bandages.

It was almost an hour before John emerged and announced he would take the first watch. They had not been keeping any kind of watch at night before now, but Sherlock didn't argue. They would lie low for a day to two, take stalk, reassess their strategy. They would talk about their failed mission in the morning. So they double checked the locks and Sherlock crawled into bed, careful not to upset his wounded hand, and set his mental alarm clock for three hours.

He dreamed the same dream that had haunted him since the previous October. In a strange, twisting basement, in a dark, broken freezer, a man lay dying. He entered the tight space, which smelt of blood and worse things, and callously pushed the suffering, naked creature onto his stomach with his foot, exposing a blood-smeared back. Then he lowered himself, straddling the pathetic form, and with his scalpel began to dig, long and deep. I . . . O . . .

Sherlock gasped and shot upright in the bed, a sheet tangled around his waist. He grabbed the side of the mattress and hung himself over the precipice, feeling the need to retch.

John had been sitting under a low-lit lamp by the curtained window, one of the new pistols on the wobbly side table. Now, he abandoned his post and came swiftly to Sherlock's side.

'Sherlock?' He crouched down at his side and tried to push his head upright. Sherlock felt like his face was on fire, and sweat dripped precipitously down his forehead. John was trying to see his pupils. 'Okay, mate?'

Shaking, he nodded, and pushed himself back onto the mattress, still panting like he had sprinted a mile.

'Need the loo?'

He shook his head. 'It's passing.'

'Nightmare?'

Sherlock couldn't answer. He felt a sob rising in his throat; he fought to throttle it.

'You were saying my name,' John said softly. Slowly, he sat on the edge of the mattress, as though unsure he was welcome. Sherlock couldn't look at him just then, for fear of losing himself entirely to sentiment.

John placed a hand on his arm. 'Hey.'

Sherlock looked at the hand, then up at John, then away again. But he didn't retract his arm.

'What I meant to say,' said John, 'was thank you. I didn't even hear him coming up on us like that. But you did, and thank God.'

'Yes,' said Sherlock quietly, testing the stability of his voice.

'You thought he got me. I don't blame you. The jacket, the shirt, both are ruined. But he didn't get me. Is that what . . . does that explain the dream?'

Sherlock sighed and pushed himself to sitting. He scrubbed cool hands down a hot face but didn't answer the question.

'I know you don't want to talk about it. I think I have some idea of what you dream about because I have them, too. Bad dreams, that is. And I wish we could do this slowly, in our own time. But this isn't 221B. We don't have the luxury of time, of deciding when's a good time to talk or when we need a moment. I shouldn't have locked myself away earlier tonight. I just . . . I reacted. Poorly. I felt someone tugging at my clothes, and it didn't matter that it was you, I just panicked. I need to do better. I need to talk about it more, I guess. Like Ella said. Because locking ourselves away in our own minds? It's not working.'

'Just a dream,' said Sherlock, but not as though he believed himself.

'About what?'

'. . . You.'

John waited him out.

'Finding you. Down there. Believing you were dead.'

John nodded slowly. 'That's horrible.'

'I dream . . .' He closed his eyes, and to his horror felt a tear roll down his cheek. 'That I'm the one . . . cutting you.'

'. . . Oh.'

'It's me, John. I'm holding the scalpel. I'm—' He couldn't say more. But in his mind's eye, he saw himself once again dragging the blade through tender skin and watching the blood bloom from underneath.

John let his arm go and slowly rose to standing. 'Every time?'

'Every time.'

'You're watching through Moran's eyes?'

'No. It's me. It's me. I'm the one hurting you.'

'You're not responsible, Sherlock. You know that, right?'

'Until I close my eyes to sleep.'

'I see. Do you ever . . .' He cleared his throat. 'I can't believe I'm going to ask this. Do you ever dream about . . . anything else he did to me? Like what you saw in the video.'

Sherlock's head snapped up. 'No. Never.'

'Okay. I just . . . I hate to think you saw that.'

'I hate that it ever happened.'

'Yeah. Me too.' John sat on the edge of the mattress, facing away. 'You haven't really dealt with it, though, have you?'

'I . . .'

'Those days you spent searching for me, knowing what was happening, not able to stop it. And then finding me like you did, in the state I was in. God. What was that like for you?'

Sherlock was grateful that John wasn't facing him just now. He wiped his face with a hand and tried to refrain from sniffing. 'What I thought, what I felt . . . it doesn't matter. Compared to the hell you went through, the pain you endured, it was nothing. Nothing.'

'Don't say that again. I don't believe it. In any case, my suffering is not a measuring stick for yours. Just tell me what you went through.'

His wall of defence was crumbling. 'I couldn't stand it, John. Seeing you like that. Alive, in pain, violated in the worst possible way, and I couldn't find you fast enough, I couldn't stop it. I got that video, and wanted to reach through the screen and stop it. I wanted to reverse time to keep any of it from happening. But it was impossible. The distance to you was unendurable. What could I do but close myself off from it? I . . . watched the video twice, but in my mind was blacking you out to see the details around you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It was like I was abandoning you to a monster. And you suffered for it. I know we've talked about this, and I know you've forgiven me, but it doesn't stop me from seeing those damned IOUs, Moriarty's message to me, carved into your back, raw and bleeding, every time I close my eyes. I may as well have carved them myself.'

John didn't turn around. He breathed loudly, hands braced on knees. 'Raw and bleeding. Every time?'

'Every damned time.'

'The last time you saw the marks . . . was it down in that basement?'

Sherlock thought. He remembered so clearly John's bloody back when he found him in that freezer. He remembered John, half conscious, puling at the pain when Sherlock lifted him in his arms to take him out of there. He remembered, too, placing his coat (Lestrade's coat) over his body when Moran had shown up and forced him to put John back on the ground, and covering the awful slash work. After that? He had caught a glimpse or two when John was in hospital. And the night the Slash Man attacked, he had removed John's shirt. But the power had been cut. It was dark, there had been blood, and he had covered John in a dressing gown before the ambulance arrived. So yes, the last time he had seen them properly was in that basement.

'You've never seen them healed,' John concluded.

'No.'

'I think you should.'

Sherlock blanched. 'What?'

John stood again, still facing away. He began to unbutton his shirt.

'John, no, you shouldn't— You don't have to—'

But John didn't stop. He unbuttoned all the way down, took a deep breath, and removed his shirt. Then, with resolve, he pulled the white vest over his head and let it fall.

Sherlock stared, for a moment uncomprehending. John's pale back was criss-crossed as if flogged repeatedly with a bullwhip, and as Sherlock's stomach turned over, his first instinct was to turn away. But John was offering himself for inspection, and Sherlock forced himself to look. There were eight of them, distinct enough to read, the dreaded IOUs rising as weals three shades darker than the surrounding skin. They splashed across shoulder blades, cut across the spine, rested in the small of the back. Eight. The ninth was on his chest, out of sight. But these eight were enough to make him want to cry.

'The skin is closed,' said John, guiding Sherlock's observations. 'They don't bleed anymore. They don't even hurt. See for yourself. Touch them.'

Shyly, Sherlock scooted forward on the bed and lifted his hand. Gently, he grazed one of the wounds with a trembling finger. He traced another. The skin was hardened, firm, compared to the softer skin that had been left unmarred. He wished he could smooth it out, or that a kind hand could somehow erase the cruel one that had created them. Finally, he laid his hand flat against John's back, as though his touch might be a balm to soothe any pain. But John was right. There was no more pain to soothe. It was healed.

John turned around to face him, and Sherlock's eyes fell to the ninth and final IOU over his heart. John took his hand and pressed it there.

'I know the scars will never go away,' he said. 'It can't be as if this never happened. They're part of my story now. Our story. But they don't hurt. I want you to see that, and believe it.'

Sherlock let his thumb rub against the scar, in awe at the wisdom of John's words, and at his bravery and in showing Sherlock these things. There was no fear in him, no anger or hate or pain. If anything, there was peace, which he imparted to his friend.

'Ella once told me to observe how my body has been healing,' he said. 'For a while, I couldn't look at myself in a mirror. All I saw was someone who was broken. But I wasn't looking properly. I wasn't observing my body do what all broken bodies do. They heal, if we let them. I don't know if this helps. But I want you to see how I've healed.'

'Thank you,' Sherlock said. He withdrew his hand and one last time wiped his face. 'You should dress. If anyone were to see us like this, people might talk.'

John laughed softly. 'They do little else.'

For the next three days, they lay low. They didn't know who had tried to knife them that night, but Sherlock suspected that it was not a random attack. More likely, someone had noticed them, and had grown suspicious. Perhaps they were even under orders from someone higher up to get rid of them. If that was the case, it meant two things: one, they were getting warmer; and two, they had to watch their backs a little more carefully.

They changed hotels. They ordered takeaway. But the rest of their investigations were—at the moment—relegated to what they could inside a hotel room, which mostly meant sharing the phone back and forth between them. Sherlock had already spent hours and hours studying the website of the shoe store, from determining when it had first been created to trying to read meaning into its logo to reading reviews online, but nothing he found gave any indication that it was a front for something more criminal. Nothing. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree.

Then John took a look.

'Erm, Sherlock?' he said from a chair by the window. Sherlock was on the bed, reading from an Albanian dictionary and sounding out words.

'Hm?' Sherlock hummed.

'You know how you said Moriarty liked to hide things in plain sight?'

Sherlock lowered the dictionary.

'Tell me I'm crazy.' He held out the phone. 'But take a look at the full URL on the contact page for that shoe store.'

Sherlock stood from the bed, eyebrows already pinched, and took the phone. There, he read the URL: /kontaktoni/rrjete/agra/

'A.G.R.A.,' Sherlock read aloud. 'Son of a bitch.'

'You think? Could it really be so simple?'

Sherlock looked up, eyes delighted, and laughed. 'Simple! There's nothing simple about it! How likely was it that we should have come across those initials to begin with, if not for Mary's father getting caught up in something nefarious? If he had not, those letters would never have been sent to Mary, then come to you, and you never would have spotted the watermark, and lo those many months later you would not have made the connection to the cleaners Murray hired. Simple! I must heartily disagree with you, John.'

'My mistake.'

'It took years to uncover this key, and they don't even know we have it. Now that we do . . . Well done, Dr Conan. It seems to me we now have the power to open all of Moriarty's locked doors.'