Sherlock

Mycroft says there isn't a mastermind. He says there never was. Bear with me, though; I might not be hearing him right. A moment ago I could have sworn he was telling me there was a ghost in the attic. Quite apart from the fact that ghosts aren't real I live in a flat with two floors above me. Unless the old bat a floor up has snuffed it outside my notice. No, that's not fair, she wasn't an old bat. Isn't an old bat. She's alive and she's just a lonely, talkative old woman. Forgive me, Mrs Haniver, I tell the ceiling, it's the mood that I'm in.

You see, at Primrose Hill I began to follow, when they were taking Mies away. And as it turned out, neither she nor Mycroft wanted me along. My few dubious scraps of popularity slipping away from me. There's only really Ruby left. Donovan doesn't count; she doesn't know enough to count. All she knows of me is what I've done for her, and that's not knowing at all. No, anyway, I was held off. I was told, in no uncertain terms, by my brother that I would not be tagging along. Told by Mies to 'just stay out of it', which words, on paper, look very much like a threat, and may well have been. But threat comes from two places. One of these is real, true danger, and everybody knows what that means.

The second is fear. I told you before about fear, didn't I? About being afraid for someone else. Threat can come out of that too.

Of course, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. There comes a time, eventually, when you can't keep fending off self-doubt. Only so often you can be told you're wrong before you stop believing what you say yourself.

Like now, for instance. I got to this, didn't I? Mycroft's here. Been gone hours, I think. The sky is red. But then maybe the sky is always red, and this whole 'blue' business was just me being stubborn, because Mycroft has come to fill me in. This in itself is a thing disturbing to the natural order. Me in the loop, not having to chase and interrogate and beg. I don't trust this either. He's being very kind. He says I deserve to know. I don't trust it.

Stop. I'm confusing myself.

Events, in order, are as follows. They left me behind at the park. On my way home, I stopped off and got something. I brought something back here with me to the flat, cooked and shot it and I believe the needle is lying in the bathroom sink. So at least it's clean. That was a joke. You can laugh. I won't blame you if you don't want to, though, I'm not much in the mood myself.

Everything stopped mattering. Consider this my attempt at not caring.

There it is, in two words, the key reason, the only reason you'd ever need, to get on and stay on heroin; not caring. Everything simplifies. Life becomes about getting from hit to hit. The rest? Maybe it stops mattering, maybe I just don't care.

Long mellow hours of not-caring went by. Then Mycroft came up. He let himself in, without knocking, which I suppose just shows where we've fallen back to. He found me on the sofa and I'm damned if I'm moving for him. The only thing I did was roll over on my bared left arm, covering the constellation of recent punctures. That was instinct, if I'm honest; I am a little disgusted with myself that I made that concession for him.

When he came in he had that same sad fearfulness all over his face. It didn't last long. I might have blinked and imagined it.

He sat down, said hello, made no comment on my physical state. Told me he'd finished with Mies and had come to let me know how it turned out.

I was baffled. Told him, "She should still be insisting Mastermind is a quiz program." Maybe not the most elegant response. All I really meant to say was I didn't believe they could have tortured anything out of her so quickly.

"There is no mastermind, Sherlock," he said. "There never was."

I almost got up when he said that. There is just something so fundamentally wrong with that statement. I'm right, aren't I? 'There is no mastermind, there never was'. That's farcical, isn't it? It's so, so wrong. My mind was sprinting, trying to pick the evidence out of weeks of let-down and red herrings. There are definite facts which make him a liar, I'm sure of it. I just can't find them. Everything I light on has something to contradict it, to make it ridiculous. There's a truth here, already in my head, but there's just so much other guff... I don't even have to make sense of it, I just have to find it and I can't.

Buying time, just so he'll know where we all stand, "That's bollocks."

With a shrug, as though admitting, yes, certainly, there was a degree of bollocks involved in what he just said, "Well, it's not what we thought." Mycroft thinks he's getting away with that for a moment. I think it's my eyes, looking at him over the arm of the sofa, that force him onward, sighing, "Underwood."

No.

Please, Mycroft, my head hurts and I could have sworn you were talking about ghosts before; stop turning me in circles. Let me fall if you must, but just stop turning me around. I stretch out an arm to the end table and shake a cigarette out of the packet. Wondering where they came from, actually. I didn't get far enough last night to buy any and I was sure there were none left. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe I'm on the other side of a mirror, and where no cigarettes were, there are no cigarettes. That's a fallacy. That doesn't make sense.

Hardly the greatest of my mysteries right now. I shake one out and roll over on my back to light it. "No. Doesn't make sense."

"Of course it does. Think about it, Sherlock."

"I have thought about it," little white lie never hurt anybody, "and it doesn't make sense."

"He was seeking promotion." Mycroft says this like it's the most basic thing in the world. "He needed a coup."

"So Underwood set it all up just so he could solve it? Come on. On that scale? Who was the patsy supposed to be? And who killed Underwood? And where, then, did Hedegaard ever come into it?"

"Oh, it's been going on for years," Mycroft says. "It was just time to fold that particular business, I suppose."

"Wait, that's not what I asked you. And it's not what you were saying a minute ago." He's not looking at me. The eyes are low, and looking inward. That, and the knitted fingers, the body language is unmistakable. Mycroft is only just thinking all this through. He is weaving his answers and committing them to memory even as we speak. "I'm the first person you've told this to."

"I felt as though you should be informed."

"You haven't been through this with your bosses yet. What do you need a guinea pig for, Mycroft?"

Jim

The bar we're waiting in is a small, quiet basement. Very nice, very classy. More importantly, it's well known as a spot for friendlies, and being very much off the police radar. There's a gang of scam artists sit planning in one of the booths, but nothing ever happens here, so it just gets ignored. They won't work with me, but in the interests of holding on to a place to drink, I'm not making a big deal out of it. This is where Moran brings his merchant bankers when he gets lonely; if I ruin that for him I'm not sure how long my head would stay attached to my neck.

Anyway, no City pretties tonight, just me and him. Hold all the gags there, please. Dani'll make them when she gets here.

But Jim!, I hear you cry, surely you haven't got the person who's been talking all day to keep you a shady secret coming straight to you directly afterward.

Well, why the fuck not? If the job's done there's nothing to fear. If it's not, she knows better than to show up at all, or ever again. She'll be halfway to Jakarta, if she knows what's good for her, and somewhere I wouldn't immediately think of if she's really smart.

Hooked over the pool table, Moran manages to balance mercilessly beating me with having a thought. I can't tell you the effort it takes to keep the words 'Who's a clever boy then?' from actually escaping me. He talks out loud too, but the sound of the purple stripe clacking into the corner pocket drowns him out. I have him repeat while he lines up for the blue. By the way, I've always been bloody good at this game, but what can I say? He takes his shots seriously.

"I said, are you sure it should be taking this long?"

Considering he broke all of thirty seconds ago and we're well on our way to me not even getting a shot in… Oh, he was talking about- right, right… "Yeah. He has hours' worth of excuses to scrabble for. Just be nice to Dani when she comes in; she's had to listen to it all day." A jolt of pure dread runs through him at the very idea of sitting in a room with Holmes for hours on end. He loses his concentration and the blue stripe bounces harmlessly off the bank next to the pocket.

I should have thought of this sooner. The best part is, he finds the whole thing too traumatic to even notice. Steps meekly back from the table, knocking back that lager rather quicker than before. "Hours," he mumbles.

"Yeah," I tell him, leaning in to start putting the spots away. And because he was doing so well, all the shots are relatively clear. Told you I was good at this game, I just need to get a look-in. "And him just talking and talking…"

Distraught, "I'm gonna ring her. If it was me, I would want to hear another voice." He can if he wants, but Danielle's phone is off, and is in my coat pocket. No way that was going with her. It has the GPS set-up, remember? If they took it off her and found that, that would be me done for. No, I surgically excised that certain-death-machine from her this morning before she left.

The only downside, so far as I can see, to stunning Moran so thoroughly, is that he doesn't really care when I win and it's his round. It's not so much fun when he doesn't care. He just mopes off to the bar without an argument. Now I have to beat him again, Christ's sake. So I start racking up the balls again, and it's while I'm doing that that all the theatrics I ever could have wanted come clattering down the stairs at the doorway. I don't even need to look up. First it's the high-heel noises, shaky and loud; so depressed by it all she's lost her posture, apparently.

Those noises walk straight up to Moran, who must be waiting, and with a soft, mutual whumpf, Dani falls into his arms and he holds onto her very tightly. Now I watch, counting in my head, trying not to laugh at them spending a full eight seconds stood like that in perfect silence. Her arms are hanging down by her sides like she can't even lift them, until he lets her go again. Then one lifts up to slap the bar. "Thank you, Sebastian, that was a very nice hug, and bartender? Where is barten- Oh, you darling man, if we could chase that with a very nice dry martini that would be stellar."

I think she's lucky he knows her, talking like that.

But maybe I shouldn't be thinking about the barman's reactions and more about my own because here she comes, pointing one finger, trembling all over with accusation. "And you. You are a monster. Monster can do his own talking from now on."

"You loved it," I tell her.

Blunt, matter-of-fact, "I wanted to claw his eyes out every second." So dramatic, so very crippled by it all, I'm debating whether or not to tell her it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out tomorrow she was just the world's most convincing drag queen. But there's a smile beyond it all. She's alive and she's present, so that tells me something straight off.

"You knew what we were doing to him."

The start of a grin, "Only reason I didn't leap across the desk and eat his face with my teeth and claws, darling. But I still wanted to do terrible, terrible things." She points at the pool cue in my hand. "That would have been a very good idea. Right up, straight through 'til it came out his mouth and-"

I drop it very sharply out of my hand onto the table. "Jesus, Danielle!" Moran, when he comes back with the drinks, is laughing at me. I don't know that he heard the trigger, but he's laughing anyway.

"'Course I did get to shaft him anyway," she murmurs, falling into a seat behind us where Moran can hand her that martini like an offering. "I brought you something." As she shakes her coat off she lifts the hem into her lap and runs her hand along it. Right at the back there's a place that doesn't bend, and this lump is edged around to the side where a completely-accidental tear in the lining lets her take it out. And hand it to me.

Flat, incredibly thin, it's a recorder.

I never told her to. I'm looking down at it in my palm like… like an offering again, I suppose. Like something come down out of heaven for me.

"Seb, have you got earphones for him?" He starts to rustle, looking for them. "I'm not sure when the memory ran out, but there's enough on there to be incriminating. In case he ever gets uppity. I thought you'd want to hear."

I do. I do want to hear. Obviously I won't be rude and go running now to play it loud on very good speakers that'll give up every tremor of his voice. But Moran's found his earphones and I just want just a little taste, a little bit of something…

Where I come in, Dani is saying, Listen to me; it's you or Underwood. Underwood is dead and doesn't care. We are trying to help you, Mr Holmes.

And Mycroft, glory of glories, oh, hosanna, hallelujah, as long as I'm listening to it, Mycroft says nothing. Whole, multi-textured, expert symphonies of utter silence. I could die.