He should never have taken it. He didn't need it, Richard Brook was no longer his division, but he had copied it down anyway, sat there at home with a piece of paper in front of him and his phone in his hand. She hadn't noticed anything, but why would she, she was glowing like she'd just had the best sex of her life. Bitterly he thought, "she probably has" but Bryan wasn't married to her, and that had to mean something.
He'd left the piece of paper on the sofa when he'd followed her upstairs. They'd gone to bed, and he'd rolled over, stroked patterns on her skin, tried to have a nice conversation, dropped hints...It hadn't worked, she seemed irritable. So he'd tried to hug her, curled up against her back, spooning like they used to. She was having none of it. She'd pushed him away. Told him she didn't appreciate him pressuring her, that love wasn't the same as sex. Told him that physical intimacy wasn't the same as emotional closeness. Fool that he was, he'd believed her and slept on his side of the bed.
Two weeks later he'd managed to get a grease stain on one of the sofa cushions. It took him a full hour to take the cover off, wash it and put it back on, and at the end of it, he sat back down on the cushion to watch something. It was then he realised he'd only gone and dropped the remote down the side of the cushion, so he reached down the side, cheese on toast placed carefully on the coffee table to prevent another disaster.
He'd found fifty-eight pence in small coins, mostly five pence pieces. He found a small key, the kind that unlocks super secret diaries, probably belonging to one of their nieces or one of the neighbours' kids, found a voucher for a free manicure when he [or more likely his wife] spent 40 quid on beauty products 'This Autumn'. 'This Autumn', it turned out, was 2009. He found a loyalty card that was one meal away from a free pudding, a lego man's head, a huge amount of crumbs, almost all of which were probably his fault, a piece of paper with a number on it, and finally the remote. To be fair, he'd found the remote before most of the fifty-eight pence, but had decided while he was there to clean the crevice next to the sofa arm.
It was only half an hour later, when he'd watched a rerun of a rerun of a rerun of QI that he'd realised who the number belonged to. He'd quickly entered it into his phone and thrown the paper away. Along with the voucher, the lego head and the crumbs. He kept the loyalty card of course.
The Coffee had run out again. He was betting Gregson with his smug grin and his shiny, impractical shoes had been the one to empty it. He texted Bradstreet his lamentations, planning to have a healthy bitch about their mutual colleague. About four minutes later he received a reply.
It wasn't from Bradstreet.
He saw his error immediately, sitting demurely in his contact list between Inspector Samantha Brown and Inspector Dave Bradstreet was the name 'Richard Brook'. Quickly, he rattled off a reply, an apology. Hopefully he'd be able to pass it off as a wrong number and delete that contact from his phone and the matter would be at an end. No such luck for him. Another reply. A joke.
He couldn't help it, he replied, his coffee forgotten. If anyone noticed him texting under the table while they pow-wowed about their latest mugging-turned-stabbing-turned-hit-and-run, they didn't mention it. Good thing too. He didn't know how he'd explain away being in close contact with someone they'd arrested and who had been in league with the fraud that had got him suspended.
But Rich seemed to understand, as he should, that Sherlock wasn't a fake genius, just a fake detective. And that was why he kept texting him. And probably why he kept getting replies back.