Chapter Fifteen:

Author's note: now for a bit of a diversion, but you will begin to understand why by the end... and it explains Mycroft's text to Sherlock in the previous Chapter.


In the late afternoon light, it took a while for him to find the cuts, but, eventually, his fingers traced the wounds in the tree bark. In the decades that had passed since the initials were first carved, the bark had healed over a bit, leaving a ghostly raised surface on either side of the slices. Still the letters were there. The S had been the hardest; the curves were more challenging than the straight lines of the H. The pen knife, a gift from Mycroft, had not been a very good chisel. Still, the lone copper beech in the corner of the barley field was where he left his mark all those years ago, the first time he passed this way.

Sherlock was in the foothills of the Sussex Downs. He'd picked up the Downs Link footpath for a while, but was now to the east of it, with just one field in front of him before Woolpit Wood. On the other side of that was a break in the woods that covered the South Downs- a narrow passage of pasture running north between the hills, a natural alley way that ended in the village of Peaslake. He'd been walking for a night and a day, and needed to rest. His muscles had adapted to the rhythm of fast walking on soft tracks. After years of London's pavements, his shin muscles were strong and he relished feeling the more pliant earth with its unevenness beneath his boots. The physical repetition was soothing, a form of self-stimulation that passed unnoticed should anyone have been watching. He'd become better at that sort of disguise over the years. The nine year old who stopped here was less adept.

He pulled the water bottle from his coat pocket and opened it. He'd have to brave civilisation tomorrow to get another. Probably on the outskirts of Dorking, before he found the watercourse of the Mole River and used it to travel under the M25. He finished the water, and then he sat with his back to the tree and let his thoughts drift back to the last time he stopped here.

oOo

He was nine. His mother later described it as his "running away from home". He didn't see it as that, at the time. More a case of running to some place, to a certain someone, and away from another person. It was late May, 1988. His mother had gone to France for ten days "to get some sun" after the cold, wet spring. She'd not been well, and wanted to be cosseted by relatives in Provence, who would look after her. Mycroft was in his last term at Eton, already getting ready for next September at Oxford. Sherlock had been left in the care of Mrs Walters and for three days, and things had gone well enough. His tutors came in every day, and when they weren't around, he experimented with his chemistry set.

Then his father came home from a business trip. That night he made Sherlock have dinner with him, which made him anxious. His father always made him anxious, especially when he didn't have Mummy or Mycroft with him to give him some grounding. The nine-year old didn't know why he always felt even less able to control things when his father was around. The tall forbidding figure was always watching him, judging him. And that made him anxious, which meant that the things he didn't like about Sherlock became even more evident. He'd learned over the years to stop flapping his hands and rocking, but the continuous rubbing of his thumb over the first knuckle of his left hand's index finger was now being stared at by his father.

"You won't be able to use a knife and fork properly if you don't stop that." The deep baritone from across the table startled the boy, and he almost dropped his fork. He didn't look up from his plate, but focussed on the swirling pattern around the edge of the fine china plate.

"When someone speaks to you, boy, it is expected that you will have a reply."

"Yes, Father" was all he could manage, in a timid voice.

"Say something interesting, Sherlock, if you are even remotely capable of it."

That made the boy pause, and he looked at the barely touched fillet of plaice on his plate. What would be interesting to his father? What Sherlock was interested in had never pleased his father. He had years of experience in being asked to talk about something and then, when he finally had, being told to "shut up. I was hoping for a conversation, not a lecture about something so tediously boring."

He remembered his mother's advice. "Sherlock, don't just talk at people. Conversation involves asking questions and listening to the answers. And questions are not always about trying to get more data. Try asking people about what they are doing or thinking."

So, he tried with his father. He looked out the window behind where his father was sitting at the head of the table- it was the nearest he could get to making eye contact. "When are you going to tell mother about your girlfriend?"

There was a pause. "What do you mean, girlfriend?" It was said with some emphasis on the last word.

Sherlock tried not to stammer. "I th..thought that's what you call someone that you do things with. The lady you went to Singapore with. She works for you. She's got long blonde hair."

"How do you know about her?"

He could see through his peripheral vision that his father had put down his fork and was now glaring ferociously at him. Sherlock put his left hand under the table and started rubbing his thumb against his finger very hard.

"HOW DO YOU KNOW?" This was almost but not quite shouted at him.

He ducked his head away from the noise, but answered as best he could. "I can see. There's a long blonde hair on your jacket. Not Mummy's- her hair is like mine, dark and wavey. That one's long and straight and blonde- probably dyed, not a natural colour. You left stuff from your jacket pocket on the desk this afternoon, including two plane seat ticket stubs, yours and another one in the name of Margaret James. You've spoken to her on the phone a lot- before supper I saw you in the study, you called her Meggie. I know you were talking to her, because your face goes all…funny- kind of soft- when you are talking to her. You were smiling. You don't do that with Mummy. And your coat and jacket smell of that woman's perfume, at least I think it is, because it isn't Mummy's. She uses Joy, by Arpege, and that woman's smells different. My guess is that it's Chanel Number Five, because that was on the duty free receipt that was also on your desk, along with the receipt for The Shangri-La Hotel on Orchard Road, where you had a Garden Suite, and dinner for two on room service. It was all there on the hotel bill. So I think you have a girlfriend and her name is Margaret James, but you call her Meggie. When are you going to tell Mummy?"

While he was saying all this, he watched his father out of the corner of his eye. The man put his fork down. Then his napkin came out of his lap to be flung onto the table. He stood and came around the table to where Sherlock was sitting.

"Shut up, boy. You are wrong and you are never, ever to say such things to me, or repeat such filthy lies to your mother, ever. Do you understand me?" His voice was tight and angry.

But Sherlock was confused. He was right. He knew he was. His mother had explained about friends, about how men and women became good friends, and then became a couple. He knew all the biology of it; read the booklets and understood them. He watched the Gamekeeper's dogs, the farm animals. Reproduction wasn't a mystery. He couldn't understand why his father was trying to pretend it wasn't happening with this woman. "No, sir, I don't understand. Does it mean you are just friends, and that you are not doing sex things with her?"

Because he wasn't watching his father's face, he didn't see the blow coming. The back of his father's hand connected with the side of Sherlock's face and the force of it knocked him out of the chair and onto the floor. Stunned, he looked up at the enraged man, then tried to scrabble backwards under the table and some sort of protection.

"You will never, ever make such a stupid mistake again, boy. If you breathe one word of this to anyone, then I will ensure that you regret it. In fact, as soon as your mother is back from France, I will talk to her about sending you away to a school. You'll never amount to anything. Time you were locked up, you useless piece of rubbish." His father stormed out of the room.

The nine-year old Sherlock got up and fled. Back upstairs to his bedroom where he sat in the dark. He'd done something very wrong; he knew that, but didn't understand what it was. His father had never hit him before. He reached up and felt the swelling on his cheek. It was sore and it burned; the skin felt hot. He wondered why. He thought he should research that- read about what caused it to do what it was doing now. Would it be like the time he fell out of the tree? Did the pain mean something was broken, like his collarbone had been then? He didn't know about bones in the face.

He kept thinking about what his father said about being sent away to school. It was something he'd threatened to do in the past, but his mother had always argued against it. Mummy will be angry with me if what I have done means Father sends me away. To be "locked up"…what did that mean? That's not what Mycroft's school was like. He'd pestered his brother to tell him all about what Eton was like. A different kind of school then, someplace where they would lock him up. He began to worry. What would happen if his father did it before his mother got back from France? There was no one here to stop his father. He began to get scared.

The house around him stilled. He heard doors shut, the quiet voice of Mrs Walters saying goodnight to the House staff, then feet on stairs. He was up in the east wing of the house. His father's room was on the floor below on the central part. If Sherlock was very quiet, he could get out of the house. Be gone before his father could come in the morning to send him away to this school where he'd be locked up. He waited until he couldn't bear it any longer, then crept down the back stairs to the dark kitchen. He took an apple and filled an empty bottle with water from the tap. Then put on his mac that was hanging by a hook in the boot room, unbolted the door and fled into the night.

He knew he couldn't get to his mother in France, so he headed for the only one he thought might be able to argue against his father's plans. He knew where Eton was, he had once carefully traced the way there on a series of maps. And that was where he would go now. If Dick Whittington had walked to London, then so could he. His brother would know what to do.

oOo

That thought raised a rueful smile on face of the older man now sitting with his back to the beech tree. He was in a worse bind now than he had been all those years ago. Then he thought Mycroft was his saviour. Now he knew better. He needed to think about that problem he had parked in the back of his mind when he set out from the house the night before. He'd been procrastinating too long. Time to stop stalling.

The final problem was simple enough. Any rational plan to take Moriarty down would inevitably fail. His contingency plans had been well constructed with those threats in mind. The consulting criminal was simply too smart; he'd figured out every angle that a security service or police force would or could use. Either an arrest or an assassination by any one of the thirty two countries where he operated – or anywhere else in the world, for that matter- would simple trigger too many consequences for any government to be willing to take the risk. Mycroft would not be able to figure a way out of this.

So, what was left? Sherlock's solution to any problem was to eliminate the impossibilities, and then whatever was left, however improbable, would be the way to do it. As he saw it, there were two improbable, but technically possible solutions. The first is that Moriarty would himself dismantle his "dead man's switches"- that is, cancel his own contingency plans. Improbable in the extreme; it would be tantamount to handing all those governments a loaded gun and sending an embossed invitation to shoot him. The man would have to be suicidal to do it. For a moment, he idly wondered what could drive a man like Moriarty to take his own life. He snorted, losing. If that insufferable ego came to realise he wasn't the smartest thing on the planet, that might cause his whole sense of self-worth to crumble. But that was a circular argument. The only way to make him believe he'd lost was to make him lose- so, another route was needed, to make him lose.

The second possibility was that someone else outside of a government- a rival criminal- could eliminate Moriarty, and take over the man's network at the same time, ensuring that those plans were never put into effect. This was improbable, too. He'd never met a criminal as intelligent as Moriarty and he hoped he never would.

Both of these "solutions" seemed improbable. Was there a third alternative? A way to make Moriarty's own network doubt his sanity or his capacity, so that when he tried to invoke his safety net, they would not oblige? But how could that be done? He closed his eyes and disappeared into his Mind Palace. This would take some serious thinking.


Author's Note: If you would like to read about the journey Sherlock made when he was nine, check out the Ex Files- Expedition, tomorrow. Normal service with this story will resume on Wednesday.