CHAPTER 25: THE ICEMAN AND THE WATCHTOWER

Buckinghamshire, 1980s

When Sherlock was four years old, the family left him overnight at the funeral parlour with the body of his great-uncle Vern, who would be buried next day. In the hubbub of relatives, acquaintances, politicians, and reporters (for Uncle Vern had been a man of some importance), and amid errands and to-dos and a dozen back-and-forths, they had simply misplaced the boy, and had forgotten both where and when. All night they searched, and as the hours dragged on, they phoned the police to report a missing child. It was the undertaker who discovered him, next morning, sleeping in a display casket.

His only living company had been the grandfather clock, its pendulum ticking loudly with the rhythm of a beating heart.

Were you frightened? they asked him, later, once the panic had subsided and order had been restored.

What of? he asked in return as he squished his peas at the dinner table, delighting in their revolting ooze. And they sighed out their relief. A friend of the family, a psychologist of the anti-Freudian persuasion, assured them that at his age, if they let the incident alone, it would make no real impression on him in the long run. All the same, it was perhaps wise to lay off the ghost stories for a time.

This was not a problem. Mother did not approve of ghosts.

In time, nearly everyone forgot about it. Sherlock seemed to be suffering no long-term (or even short-term) effects, and he had had very little to say about it to start. Mycroft, however, would always trace the tragedies of his little brother's life to the night he fell asleep in a coffin, and wasn't afraid.

He was fascinated by death.

By five, Sherlock had memorised the name of every bone in the human body. He could list them alphabetically, by groupings (facial bones, ribs, bones of the feet), head to toe, large to small, and in ascending order based on the number of letters that made up their names. No one thought much of it. After all, by the same age, Mycroft could name all the countries of the world, their capital cities, their populations, and their kings', presidents', and prime ministers' birthdates without missing a beat. So bones were nothing special and impressed no one. Nevertheless, the knowledge delighted Sherlock. He marched in rhythm around the house with Cook's saucepan overturned on his head, smacking it with a wooden spoon, and shouting at the top of his young lungs: 'Mandible! Maxilla! Palatine bone! Zygomatic bone!'

His father, a great lover of quietude and order, shouted for the au pair to shut the boy up and take him away. As if the woman had any control of him whatsoever. She removed him to the nursery, where Sherlock proceeded to tear up the carpet instead of listening to her read to him Robinson Crusoe, never minding that his favourite stories were from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Later, his mother scolded him and asked why he had done such a thing. His one-word answer: 'Bored.'

He memorised the periodic table next, in the course of one afternoon sitting on a chair in his father's library during a 'time out' (the nursery was being repainted after he had set fire to the curtains, and his bedroom still smelt of sulphur, for some reason, and was being aired out, thereby rendering his usual punishment corners useable). The reason he was being punished this time was that he had gotten overexcited—as the au pair put it afterwards—during a simple game of Memory with a neighbour boy who had been brought over to play while their mothers sat tea. Sherlock quickly decided that the other boy was too stupid to play properly and so took over, running around the room and hiding all fifty-two playing cards in corners, on shelves, in, under, and atop tables, and daring the other boy to find even one pair in sixty seconds. When he failed, Sherlock called him a moron and zipped about matching pairs himself, beginning with the black twos, threes, and so forth, giggling all the while. The boy, failing to be amazed, called him cheater; Sherlock rejoined with another iteration of idiot. Within seconds, they had wrestled each other to the ground, resulting in a bloody nose (Sherlock's) and a badly chipped tooth (the idiot's).

So the library it was, for one hour, on a stiff wooden chair facing the wall in an effort to de-stimulate him and let him think about what he had done wrong. He had no idea what he had done wrong, so he thought about other things instead, like the large framed drawing on the wall, the one with all the uniform boxes and varying letters (they were different colours, too!) and the little numbers underneath. Not knowing their meaning, he stored them away in little cabinets inside his brain (H-1, He-2, Li-3) to make sense of later.

When he had learnt their real names and set the entire table to themes from Beethoven's Ninth, to sing loudly in every corner of the house, they saved their ears by putting him out in the garden whenever he started up, until one afternoon they found him uprooting Mummy's petunias and burying them in little rows he called the Magnoliophyta Necropolis. ('A cemetery for flowers, Sherlock?' Mycroft asked him later, while visiting him in his new punishment room: the empty larder of the unused second kitchen. 'Really?')

For that infraction, they took away his supper.

'What do you have to say about that, little man?' his father said with folded arms and upraised chin. 'Hm? How do you like going without your supper?'

Sherlock thought a moment, screwed up his little face in anger, and declared, 'Transport!' before marching off and slamming his own head against the keys of the grand piano. To the dry larder he went.

'What is wrong with that child?'

It had become almost a family mantra, so often Mrs Holmes, aggrieved by her odd little boy, repeated it and Mycroft overheard it and Mr Holmes nodded his agreement from behind his newspaper. Even Sherlock had been heard to mimic her in inflection and cadence, whenever he saw another child at the park throw a tantrum ('What is wrong with that child?') or a homeless man mutter to himself on a street corner ('What is wrong with that man?') or a woman cry on the news ('What is wrong with that girl?'). Never knowing when another mood would strike him, when another burst of uncontainable energy would come on, a tantrum would strike, or bout of excitement would seize him, Mrs Holmes avoided taking him on outings whenever possible, and she counted the hours when he was in the charge of the au pair as blessed, as he was rather too much for her to handle. For his part, an embarrassed Mr Holmes essentially ignored his youngest son, when he was able. He did, however, take an estimable measure of pride in the elder. Mycroft had long been a favourite of both parents.

For months, the Holmeses tried to handle with Sherlock themselves—the moody, unreasonable, recalcitrant child—if 'handling' meant delegating his rearing to the young, untrained, and underpaid German au pair (after the Italian, Polish, and Slovakian ones quit), whose English was, at best, poor. But between au pair lulls, the discipline was left to them, and none of their threats or punishments seemed to have any corrective effect. Sherlock was excitable, he was loud, he was destructive, he was disrespectful—in short, the perfect opposite to the only member of the family who could manage him to any degree of success when he worked himself into a state, and that was Mycroft. Seven years Sherlock's senior, Mycroft had always been a sober and practical child, highly intelligent, unfailingly gregarious with his superiors (adults), and fittingly sociable with his peers (all prospective Eton boys). A proper child.

From the start, Mycroft had always had a way with his little brother. He could sense a fit coming on like a clairvoyant knowing when the next bolt of lightning would strike, and he was expert at redirecting the energy—by distracting Sherlock with word games, board games, or outdoor play, or by suggesting that he audibly revise his latest recitations (Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Raven', a list of creatures in the phylum chordata, or their mother's favourite, the names of stars and solar systems). Failing that, Mycroft alone found any success in calming the storm in him whenever he got to screaming or throwing a tantrum or embarrassing his mother in any way, public or private. He was the only one who could keep Sherlock in his room, face down in a pillow to wear himself out screaming while Mycroft crawled on top to pin down his arms, legs, and neck; the only one who would bother holding that same pillow while Sherlock punched the stuffing out of it, his little fists ferociously whacking away while his face, red with rage, steamed like a kettle and Mycroft encouraged him to get it out, get it all out; and the only one who could have him laughing again within minutes. It was a suitable arrangement: Sherlock seemed happiest with Mycroft around, and Mycroft felt proud that he alone had such an influence over this extraordinary child. Their parents took their brotherly bond for granted. After all, they were, and always had been, terribly fond of one another.

It was when Mycroft, at the age of thirteen to Sherlock's own six, left for Eton in September of 1982 that Sherlock took a turn for the worse.

He loved bones.

Skulls, particularly, but any bone captured his fancy. At his pre-preparatory school, while his peers drew pictures of their families and dogs and houses and flowers, Sherlock drew bones. Skeletons. Fleshless children kicking a football or a skeletal dog digging for bones in the ground. His teacher, a highly strung but longsuffering woman, once recommended that he draw more normal things, like a little boy with clothes on. 'Boring,' he muttered, though on his next skeleton, he deigned to adorn it with a top hat.

He became frustrated easily when it took him so long to pencil in all twenty-seven bones of the human hand and angry when he was rushed to finish, and not a few times did his temper get the better of him, at which point he would crumple up his paper into a tight little ball and whip it at whichever of his peers had annoyed him most that day before storming out of the classroom like a miniature hurricane. He was told repeatedly that he was not allowed to leave, not without permission, and he was often made to sit in the corner, or kept after school to copy lines, or prohibited from playing with the other children. What did it matter to him? He had no friends. He made the others nervous. If he came near a cluster of them on the grounds, they scattered like a flock of ducks at the crack of a rifle. They treated him as if he were made of electricity, gathering to strike, and lord help the boy who got zapped. In an effort to keep the peace, the teachers kept him separated from the others whenever possible. He had a reputation among them, too, the teachers. Blessed was the man or woman who had a Sherlock-free term.

The real cause for concern, however, came not from his outbursts, his refusal to socialise with the other children, his disengagement with his schoolwork, or even his disturbing drawings. No, none of those things caused too much alarm. The consensus was that he would grow out of it in time and not to worry. Their attitudes changed, however, the day that Sherlock was found in the boys' loo, kneeling on the tiles with a pair of teacher's scissors and a dead pigeon, surrounded by toilet paper, feathers, and blood.

He wanted to see the bones in the wings, he said. He was trying to learn what made the bird fly.

It was that incident that sent him to his first child psychiatrist.

Dr Hennessey sat with Sherlock for a mere twenty minutes before making his diagnosis. 'There's nothing wrong with him,' he said to a sceptical Mrs Holmes. 'A boy like any other, if only, perhaps, more curious.'

Curious, yes, and highly intelligent, things which the Holmeses already knew about Sherlock. But when Dr Hennessey called him under-stimulated ('Under-stimulated!' his mother repeated, aghast), he went further: 'Bored. He's like a pot of boiling water with the lid firmly clamped down, trapping all that energy inside that little body. He needs a healthy way to release it, to channel it into something disciplined but productive. Otherwise, it will come out in destructive ways. Like with the bird.'

He suggested physical activity, sport. 'Fencing. Football. A junior rugby league. A team sport to help him learn to play with the other children.'

Mrs Holmes drew up in proper indignation. 'I won't have my child engaged in such barbarisms.' Sport, rugby especially, was not what proper little boys did.

'Then perhaps . . . music?'

Sherlock was already a proficient pianist, having begun lessons at age three, but he had never had much passion for it. Passion, Mother believed, was something children did not possess inherently but developed with time and so in the past had entertained none of Sherlock's complaints or desires to quit. She expected similar resistance when she repeated Dr Hennessey's suggestion to her husband, thoughtlessly within earshot of their son, who always noticed things they never expected or intended him to.

He declared that he wanted to play the violin. Father said no, he wouldn't have more noisemakers in his house, and Mother tried to convince him that piano was enough and attempted to distract his overactive imagination with other trifling hobbies, like coin collecting, vexillology, ornithology. But Sherlock could be neither distracted nor dissuaded.

Mycroft heard about the affair of the violin during the autumn months of 1982 through letters from home. His mother's:

He's an irascible child, so stubborn and single-minded. Honestly, treasure, I'm certain he's acting out only because he misses you. You were the only one who could really manage him, and he needs that sort of handling. Speak sense to him, would you?

And Sherlock's:

They're both so unapologetically irascible. My request is by no means unreasonable. When are you coming home? Eton is ghastly and old. Spend not a second longer there than needful.

Sherlock must have been reading nineteenth-century epistolary novels again, Mycroft thought with a smirk of affection. He did have a tendency toward imitation.

He wrote home:

Dearest Mummy,
Buy Sherlock the violin. And if he's rubbish, as I shall discern this Christmas, I'll tell him myself that he is not for it. He'll listen to me.

Their parents also listened to Mycroft, and so bought Sherlock a child's Windsor three-quarter size violin, thinking his interest would wane in a week and they would return it. It was with that confidence that they neglected to hire on a tutor and left him to his own devices, promptly forgetting about it.

That Christmas, Sherlock played for Mycroft: 'Good King Wenceslas', 'Sussex Carol', and 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas'. At the conclusion of his recital, no one applauded. Mother and Father sat stunned. Mycroft gave a curt nod of approval and offered one word of praise: 'Flawless.'

Sherlock kept the violin.

Though he loved the violin and even took to compositions of his own, scratching them out note by note on the string before scratching them out note by note on the paper he lined himself, he had no interest in performing, neither in recitals nor with other children, and he refused to play in front of anyone who was not family.

And though he now had outlet for his energy, thanks to Dr Hennessey's recommendation, he was not a 'fixed' child.

During the 1983 summer holiday, when Mycroft was fourteen and Sherlock seven, Mycroft noticed other oddities in his little brother's behaviour, patterns missed by parent or doctor. At first, it was just the small, ritualistic things, like straightening his cutlery before picking up fork and knife to eat; or eating the food on his plate in clockwise fashion; or obsessively sharpening his pencils and ordering his crayons according the colour wheel. Then there was the way he wore his clothes. It took only three cycles of laundry before Mycroft saw how Sherlock wore his clothing on a very particular rotation after each washing, shirts to socks. Upon investigation (as Mycroft was more curious than concerned), he saw that Sherlock's shirts were hung in the wardrobe and his trousers were folded in the bureau in the same chronological sequence each time. He wore his outfits left to right, like reading notes in a composition or words in a book.

An oddity, perhaps, but not something Mycroft was particularly worried about. Rather, he thought it funny and, as an experiment one morning, went into Sherlock's bedroom while his little brother sat breakfast. He removed that day's shirt and kicked it under the bed, then rearranged the neatly aligned socks and swapped the first day's trousers with the last, just to see if he'd notice. Then he stepped back to the breakfast table, and waited. He wasn't quite prepared for when, twenty minutes later, Sherlock, alone in his room to dress, began to scream. Mother came running, the au pair started crying, and Father slammed down his newspaper before stalking out the front door, not to return again until evening. Not even Mycroft could calm him, not until all his newly washed clothes were washed again and ordered properly in the wardrobe and bureau. Only then could Sherlock stand to dress.

Behavioural problems in school worsened in his fourth and fifth years. Teachers reported that he seemed intent on isolating himself from the other students and had no friends, that he was wilful and disrespectful and spoke only to correct the teacher, and that his interests were inappropriate and disturbing.

Mrs Holmes was called in to discuss incident after incident:

One: Not long after Katie Wenham's mother died in a car accident, Sherlock spent an entire lunch period asking her whether her mum had bled out, and from where, and for how long, and so forth until Katie dissolved into tears.

Two: During art, he drew pictures of tragic figures of history, literature, and mythology: a decapitated John the Baptist, Anne Boleyn, and Sydney Carton; the immolations of Joan of Arc and Patrick Hamilton; and the feasting of an eagle on the liver of a live Prometheus. The teachers were bothered but, being the ones to have shared the stories to begin with, weren't sure what to do.

Not long after, he drew a picture of a gravestone, with his own name on in bold black letters. 'Why have you done this?' his teacher asked in distress, shaking the page at him, nearly tearing it in two. Sherlock frowned at what she was doing to his work. He answered, simply, that he had wanted to see what it would look like. After all, it was what the other children told him, they who had never heard the name Sherlock before but in very old stories about very dead men. It was a not a normal name, they said. It was a name belonging on a gravestone.

But it wasn't until Sherlock began to illustrate the deaths reported in the papers and on local news that they finally decided to put a stop to it, sent him to the school counsellors, and phoned his mother.

Three: When all the other students were at lunch, Sherlock disappeared. No one noticed his absence until, upon returning to class, they saw that his chair remained empty. They thought he'd left the school grounds altogether, and in a panic they phoned his mother and the police. Hours later, they found him locked in the sound room above the stage in the school's theatre. He sat on the floor with his legs drawn to his chin and arms wrapped around his ankles. Rocking, slamming his head against the wall. There was too much noise, he said. Too much noise, and he couldn't think, and he needed to think, but there was too much noise.

Four: A male teacher discovered Sherlock in the loo, soaking from head to toe in toilet water and sporting a swelling bottom lip and torn blazer. The headmistress asked what had happened, who had done this to him, or had he done it to himself? He said nothing. She demanded that he speak. He did not. She insisted that he look at her when she spoke. He did not. She called him intransigent and insolent. He didn't care. And when she came forward to lay a hand on him, he shook his wet head like a dog and sprayed her with toilet water. She assigned him three detentions and an official school sanction.

Five: When a group of boys found a dead dog on the edge of the schoolyard between two buckthorn shrubs, they called Sherlock over to scare him; instead, they were the ones who got scared when Sherlock pulled out a pocket knife and began sawing off little chunks of dog hair and stuffing them in his pockets. 'For my catalogue,' he told them, but they thought him wrong in the head and ratted him out to the headmistress. Upon investigating, school officials discovered he had compiled a book into which he had sellotaped a vast sampling of dog hairs, cat hairs, rabbit hairs, human hairs (including his own), bird feathers, and snake skins, all labelled by animal and annotated with its location and any other observations worthy of note. The headmistress was horror-struck, accused Sherlock of cruelty to animals, and phoned his mother straightaway. Under the direction of the Board of Governors, she suspended him for five days and left Mrs Holmes with a fresh list of child psychologists.

Mycroft heard about the parade of shrinks over the phone, primarily. He listened to his mother cry and his father rage. Sherlock didn't come to the phone anymore. But he still wrote Mycroft letters.

They make me take all manner of tests. Pointless. They show me blots of ink and ask what I see. A blot of ink, of course, perfectly symmetrical along a y-axis only because the paper has been folded over, but they don't like this answer. They say, 'What's the first word that comes to mind when I say _', and then they'll say a word like 'home' or 'dog', and of course 'home' and 'dog' are then the first words that come to mind, so I repeat them, and they get angry and say I'm not playing their games. But their games are stupid. They're stupid. Ink is ink. They say dog, I think dog. What else can they reasonably expect?

Mycroft heard all about the remedies, too. One psychologist, believing that Sherlock had too loose of boundaries, recommended a firmer disciplinarian hand: a more rigid schedule, every hour of the day structured to keep him occupied in one task or another, to wake and eat and bathe and sleep according to the clock; he discouraged play and creativity, and encouraged a reprimand system for bad behaviours, including the loss of privileges and domestic corporal punishment to reinforce an understanding of his wrongdoing. In the Holmes household, these methods were instituted for a solid eight months. But when they failed to improve him, they took him to another shrink who pooh-poohed the last therapist's tactics and maintained that a change in diet and exercise was what Sherlock needed most, but neither Mr nor Mrs Holmes thought this solution drastic enough for their problem. They took him elsewhere, to a trendy New Ageist, whose philosophy was to free the spirit and let Sherlock sing his own song. Mr Holmes hated the man, called him a 'moon-child hippie nutter', and yanked Sherlock out of his therapeutic wonderland before he could attempt to prescribe his son marijuana.

But it was the next doctor who recommended medication.

'Three different pills,' said Mother on the phone to her eldest, 'that I'm meant to give him. Can you imagine? He's just a boy, and already he's on pills. Two dailies, and one taken every forty-eight hours to control the side effects of the other two.'

'What pills?' asked Mycroft distractedly. The Eton boys behind him were whipping each other with their ties and telling loud, lewd jokes. Mycroft had long been underwhelmed by their immaturity. He plugged one ear with a finger and leant into the wall by the phone, wishing the house master would pass by to shut the others up.

'They're to keep him calm, the doctor said. Calm and focused. They're to control his behaviour.'

'Like a sedative?' He couldn't believe what he was hearing. He whacked away one of the boys who tried to engage him in their play and turned his back to reinforce the private nature of this conversation.

His mother replied something, but for the racket behind him he couldn't quite make her out. Then, through the phone, he caught the words: '. . . neuroleptic for aggression.'

'What!'

'Mycroft, are you quite all right?'

'Did you just say neuroleptic? You're giving Sherlock neuroleptics?'

'Like I said, the doctor says it will help with his aggression.'

'What aggression? He's fine, Mummy, there's nothing wrong with him. You can't start feeding antipsychotics to a child!'

'Well, I'm sorry, Mycroft,' she said, sounding a little offended. 'You know I think you're terribly bright, sharp as flint, but you're not a doctor, love.'

'Mummy—!'

'And you've not been living here, day in and day out, have you? When you're home, Sherlock is on his best behaviour, and even that is still a challenge. But the moment you're gone—'

'You never learnt to handle him! You always left him to me. Always.'

'I'm at my wits' end! If I have one more conference with his teachers, one more mother phoning to tell me something else nasty he said or did to her child—'

'They're idiots, the lot of them. You know Sherlock's not crazy.'

A long, loud pause hummed through the phone. Then, 'I have to go, treasure. We'll talk again Sunday.'

The pills made Sherlock sick. For four months, when he wasn't nauseous, he was dizzy. He got headaches that kept him home from school, and he lay in bed and groaned and complained that he couldn't think. Father called it an improvement. Mother petitioned the doctors, who worked on adjusting his dosage, saying that it might take several weeks before they found the most effective balance of medications. Meanwhile, Sherlock went through bouts of moodiness, sickness, and lethargy.

The day came when he refused to take the pills.

Mother started hiding them in his food, dissolving them in his drinks.

So Sherlock stopped eating.

Mother had him hospitalised.

Mycroft came home during the summer holiday of 1986, when Sherlock was ten, having only one more year left at Eton. It was the first time he had come through the front door after being away since Christmas that he had not seen Sherlock waiting for him in the entryway.

He sought him out and found him in his bedroom, writing at his desk with a metronome at his elbow. The swings of the pendulum, Mycroft noted instantly, were perfectly timed with the ticking of the clock on the wall, and with the tapping of Sherlock's middle finger at the side of his head at the temple. The skin there was red and raw, suggesting he'd been at it for a while.

'There you are,' said Mycroft.

Sherlock didn't turn, didn't so much as grunt. There was no acknowledgement whatsoever. Mycroft let the door fall closed and sat himself on the mattress. Only then did Sherlock speak.

'You're late.'

'Pardon?'

'Your school ends on Friday. It's Monday. You're late.'

'Prefects stay the weekend,' said Mycroft, 'to see everyone off and help the teachers get things ordered for the holiday. I told you that.'

'You said you were staying on a bit.'

'Yeah, well. A bit meant the weekend.' He inclined forward, trying to see Sherlock's face, but the boy's head lowered, and he kept tapping, kept writing. 'What have you got there?'

'Nothing.'

'It's obviously not nothing.' He stood, and before Sherlock could stop him, he grabbed the notebook from under Sherlock's pen and yanked it away, leaving a long slash of ink across the page. Sherlock spun in his chair, furious, and made an effort to spring forward and retrieve it, but Mycroft pushed him back into the chair, holding the notebook out of reach.

'Easy there,' he said. 'You can't hide things from me.' He lowered the notebook to eye level and saw . . . hash marks. Hundreds of them, in neat lines and tightly stacked rows. Occasionally, a large number interrupted the patterns: 2,580, 4,335, 18,304. Page after page, it went on like this, and in the bottom corner of the page, what appeared to be a numeric total. 'What the hell is this?'

But Sherlock didn't have to say. He was rocking ever so slightly in his chair. Not rocking. Bobbing. His head like a pigeon. Tick. Tick. Tick. And his fingers twitched. Tap. Tap. Tap.

'Sherlock, are you counting seconds?'

'Can't stop. You were late.'

Mycroft shook his head, befuddled. He converted the numbers to explanations in his head: 2,580 seconds equalled forty-three minutes, the time he had readied for and sat his dinner; 4,335 seconds equalled one hour, twelve minutes, and fifteen seconds, the time he had spent in the car driving to the therapist, sitting in the therapist's office, and driving back home; 18,600 seconds equalled five hours, ten minutes precisely, the time he had spent sleeping. Over the past three days, when he hadn't been making marks on the page, he had been keeping totals in his head. Mycroft's concern elevated. 'I'm here now.'

Sherlock nodded, but his body kept bobbing like a bird.

'You need to stop.'

Again, Sherlock nodded. In time with the clock.

'You've gotten too skinny.'

'You're growing too fat.'

Mycroft grinned. At last, his own smile cracked Sherlock's face, the clock stopped, and they started laughing together.

That was the summer Mycroft discovered that his little brother was in danger.

It was morning, and he was sitting in the parlour, reading the paper before breakfast—he had developed a habit of staying current on politics, economics, world affairs—where his mother sought him out.

'Some men are coming by later today to speak to Sherlock. They'll be in the library and are not to be disturbed.'

'What men?'

'Teachers. Educators, they said. They're here to give Sherlock some tests.'

Mycroft folded the paper and set it aside. 'Tests,' he repeated. 'Placement tests?'

She nodded and looked out the window.

'But his name is down for Eton,' said Mycroft.

'Eton may not be the best fit. Other institutions may be better suited to Sherlock's . . . needs. These men are going to assess whether he might have a place with them.'

'What institutions? Where do you mean to send him?'

'We've made no decisions yet, treasure. Don't look at me like that. I just want what's best for Sherlock.'

But Mycroft was little placated. 'Why was I not consulted about this?'

Her eyebrows rose in amazement. 'It's hardly your choice, Mycroft. You do not always know what is best for him. Besides, we didn't seek this out. These people came to us.'

So someone had had an eye on his little brother. Why? And for how long? What did they want with him? He feigned disinterest and left for his room. There, he watched through the window until a black 1983 Lincoln rolled up the long drive. Two men in pinstripes and carrying attachés, the pair of them, exited the vehicle. One checked a gold wristwatch; the other smoothed his lapels and checked the knot of his tie in the side mirror. Those were not educators.

Before the bell rang, he abandoned his room and made for the music room, which stood adjacent the library, and locked himself in. Moments later, he heard the bell, and while Mother went to answer it, he opened a vent leading to a flue that ran from the boiler, through the fireplace, and up through the chimney. But it was also connected to the flue that ran through the next room. He knew from past experience, spying on his father from this very room while the man made important phone calls after dinner, that this was the perfect space to overhear the goings-on of the library.

He waited.

A few minutes passed while Mother spoke to the men in the entryway, then another few while she called Sherlock down from his bedroom. Sherlock was in one of his more rambunctious moods today, perhaps because Father was away, and had spent the morning playing alone in the garden with his toy rapier (he had wanted a real one, and lessons, but Father hadn't even entertained the conversation), climbing trees and leaping onto invisible enemies. It was when he began prying up paving stones and digging his bare hands in the soil beneath for buried treasure that Mother had spotted him desecrating her garden and shouted him into the house and up to the bath, lest the neighbours should see, or worse, their imminent guests.

Now he came hopping down the stairs—Mycroft heard him pound each step in a way that was sure to upset Mummy. Sure enough:

'Sherlock, you silly spot, behave! We have guests.'

Apologies were offered and refused, introductions were made, and at last, Mother showed the men into the library. Mycroft placed his ear against the flue just as the library door clicked shut.

'Why don't you sit down, Sherlock?' said one of the men. His accent was the perfect model of RP. He might have been a cousin of the queen or a commentator on the BBC. 'Then we can talk. We just want to ask you a few questions, if it's all right with you.'

'You're not a teacher, are you?' Sherlock said, more of a declaration than a question.

There was a brief pause. Then, 'Why do you say that?'

'Your shoes. They're too shiny. Teachers shoes aren't shiny.'

'No?'

'Because of the chalk dust.'

There was a short laugh, and the other man spoke. 'Maybe we wiped them clean.'

'You can't wipe chalk from laces. And you don't smell like school, either. You smell like leather and polish and old-man cologne. Who are you?'

'Sherlock, if you don't mind, we'll be asking the questions. Will you be co-operative?'

There was a harshness behind the polite delivery, and Mycroft frowned. He wished he could be in that room standing beside his little brother, observing every bat of the eye, every crease of the lips, every twitch of the fingers. Because, like Sherlock, he didn't trust that they were who they said they were. And it did not sit well with him.

Sherlock didn't answer the question, but perhaps he nodded, because the first man began what Mycroft would later remember as an interrogation, though it started off innocently enough.

'How old are you, Sherlock?'

'Ten. How old are you?'

'Do you like school?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'Everyone there is stupid.'

'What about your teachers? Are they stupid?'

'Yes. Are you a psychiatrist?'

'Why do you ask me that?'

'They ask lots of stupid questions, too.'

There was a long pause. 'You're a very intelligent boy. Do you know that?' He didn't give Sherlock a chance to retort. 'That's partly why we're here. You score very high on intelligence tests. Very high indeed. The question is, what will you do with a mind like yours? Have you given any thought to that, Sherlock? Do you know what you'll do when you grow up?'

Years before, Mycroft knew, their parents had nurtured the hope that their sons would do well in life. Mycroft had long been encouraged to follow his father into politics, local government to start, but eventually (inevitably, certainly) he would be an MP in the House of Commons, and there was even talk around the dinner table of the day he would become Prime Minister. Barring that, he would at least work for a ministerial department. The Ministry of Justice or Home Office, something of the sort. It would be important work.

Sherlock? Even Mycroft struggled to remember what the early ambitions of his parents had been for him. Perhaps something governmental. Perhaps a professorship, or something in finance, or a doctor. But as Sherlock grew, talk of anything of the sort dribbled to nothing at all, save the occasional mention of keeping him out of trouble, out of the public eye, if he didn't sort himself out. Mycroft didn't know what Sherlock envisioned for himself.

'Piracy.'

Mycroft snorted and covered his mouth to keep from laughing aloud.

'Pardon?'

'I'll be a pirate. I'll waylay passing ships and steal their treasure. I'll use cannons and torpedoes. I'll throw the captain to the sharks and take their gold and their maps and their clean water.'

'Are you always this cheeky?'

'Don't ask stupid questions.'

'Fine. You don't want to be handled gently. I respect that. Then let's be more direct, shall we? Why do you like bones, Sherlock?'

Mycroft's smile slipped.

'Who told you I like bones?'

'Don't you?'

'Why shouldn't I?'

'It's an unusual interest. Most boys your age are more interested in sport. Or comic books. Or going to the cinema.'

'Dull, dull, and dull.'

'Do you have friends, Sherlock?'

For the first time since the interview started, Sherlock fell silent. Ear pressed to the vent, Mycroft frowned.

'Can you name even one?'

He couldn't.

And as the interview progressed, Mycroft grew more and more agitated with the men's questions, with Sherlock's answers. They weren't the questions of a schoolmaster vetting a potential student, or even of a psychiatrist trying to understand and help a sick mind. So who were these men? Why were they asking him questions about his social ineptitude, isolation, and intolerance for his lesser peers? What did it matter to them, Sherlock's drawings and interest in skeletal structures and anatomy? What business was it of theirs, his history of aggression and discipline problems at school and in the home? Mycroft wanted to tell the men to bugger off, or at the very least to shout at Sherlock and tell him to stop answering their invasive questions.

But Sherlock himself seemed to be getting impatient with them.

'Do you love your mother?'

'Do you love yours?'

'Let's not be impertinent, Sherlock. Is she kind to you?'

'She is not unkind.'

'That's not the same thing. What about your father?''

'What about him?'

'Do you love your father?'

There was the sudden sound of shoed feet hitting the floor. Sherlock was out of the chair. 'Shut up. Stop talking. I'm tired of answering questions. You're not teachers. You're not psychiatrists. I don't have to talk to you anymore.'

What Mycroft heard next was a door opening, then slamming, as Sherlock hurried himself away. He was about to leave, too, to go in search of him and calm him down before he worked himself into a frenzied state, if he was not there already, but he stopped short as the men continued talking.

One of them sighed deeply. 'That's it then, it seems.' Then a short, humourless laugh. 'He made it rather easy for us, didn't he?'

The other spoke without a trace of amusement. 'Indeed. He fits the profile, no question. We'll put him on the list and set up a watch.'

'Re-evaluation schedule?'

'Every three years for a period of no fewer than twelve.'

'Is that standard?'

'You saw his scores, his working profile. Coupled with the lovely interview he just gave, that's enough for now. Quiet. Here comes the mother.'

'Ah, Mrs Holmes.'

Mycroft heard his mother enter the room where the two men, quickly terminating their conversation, clicked closed an attaché and rose to their feet. He imagined them closing the top buttons of their suit coats resuming the mode of gentlemen.

'Is everything all right?' his mother asked; if she were not so dignified a woman, she would be wringing her hands. But Mycroft knew she had mastered every public face and posture, and she was certainly using them now. 'Sherlock just ran upstairs . . .'

'Perfectly all right. Thank you so much for inviting us. You have a lovely home. And a very special son.'

'Is he? That is, is he what you're looking for? For your school?'

There is no school, Mother, Mycroft thought.

'Only, I know he would do so well there. He's very bright. And talented. You should hear him play the violin. Do stay for tea. I'm sure I could persuade him to give you a performance.'

'That is very kind, Mrs Holmes. And he is very bright, there's no doubt. Unfortunately, he does not quite fit our criteria. I'm sure he'll excel, though, with his current curriculum.'

'Oh no. No, do reconsider. Please—'

'Good day, Mrs Holmes. You've such a lovely home.'

Mycroft slid shut the vent and hurried from the music room and into the hallway to see their backs disappearing through the front door. His mother bid them farewell, with all the dignity of her class and upbringing. But then they were gone, and in the silence of the house, his mother's shoulders slumped and she rested her head against the closed door. That's when Mycroft heard a rhythmic banging coming from upstairs.

His mother twisted around, her face pinched and reddening. She hurried up the long stairs, and Mycroft followed. But when they got to Sherlock's door, they found it locked.

'Sherlock!' Mother said, rattling the handled. 'You open this door right now.'

The banging did not change in tempo but intensity. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

'This instant, do you hear?' She slapped the flat of her hand against the door jamb. 'What did you say to those men? What?'

'Mummy,' said Mycroft, putting a hand on her arm to stop her pounding. She slapped it away.

'They just wanted to help you!' she yelled through the door. 'Why won't you let anyone help you! Why must you be such a nasty little boy all the time! I can't bear it!'

The banging got louder still.

Mycroft seized his mother by the arms and pulled her away, down the hall. 'I'll talk to him, I'll talk to him,' he said, even as she began to cry. He put her in her own room and closed the door, then returned to Sherlock's.

'Let me in,' he said. He twisted the handle, but the lock held fast. And beyond: Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. 'Sherlock. It's me. Let me in, I want to talk.' Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. 'If you're still counting those damned seconds, I'll thunk you myself. Stop it.'

The noise stopped. But Sherlock didn't let him in.

He didn't see Sherlock the rest of the evening. By dinner, Father had returned home, but still Sherlock did not leave his room. To Mycroft's vexation, Father didn't even ask about his empty seat. In fact, he didn't ask about the interview at all, and Mother made no mention of it. Mycroft began to suspect that she had never told him to begin with, just as she hadn't mentioned it to Mycroft, and he was seeing it now, that which he could not see and had not cared about while away at school. His parents sat at opposite ends of the table, but they might as well have been on opposite ends of England. Though they had never been especially affectionate in their marriage, they had at least been unified, a thing that no longer stood as true. There was a wedge that had been driving them apart for years, and it went by the name of Sherlock.

Dinner was eaten in near silence, forks clinking plates and small gulps from glasses, while Mycroft contemplated what had happened to his family. He thought about Sherlock, his mother's attempts to fix him, and his father's campaign to ignore him. He thought of the intruders, men who were neither teachers nor psychiatrists, and wondered why they had come. What about Sherlock had caught their attention, their interest, their concern? It couldn't have been based solely on his intelligence, or they would have come after Mycroft, too. They would have come after Mycroft first. So intellect was a factor, but not the only one. The difference then? It must have been based on personality and behaviour. They had asked too many questions about his preferences and then gauged his reactions. They knew about his disciplinary problems at school and his morbid fascination with skeletons and corpses and death. And Sherlock? He had done nothing to promote himself as a normal, healthy child. He had been belligerent, indecorous, and offensive as a mode of defence. Tally it all together and . . .

They were afraid of him.

Or rather, they were afraid of what he might do, who he might become. They thought he had the capacity to be dangerous. To whom? Not to the family, surely. Then to others. Classmates, teachers, strangers, society? The light of Mycroft's understanding was illuminating hitherto unseen truths, and he didn't like what he saw. It was clear to him now, their words: He fits the profile, no question. Profile? But of course. A checklist, a checklist of attributes that one can spot in early childhood that, when combined, are the summation of warning signs of . . . what? Criminals? Not just criminals. That was too simple, a matter for the police, and those men were not police. Who then? What greater authority was there? Were they government? They had not identified themselves as such, and certainly the standard government authority would not cloak himself in secrecy. But then, he supposed, what if there were underground branches of government, divisions within MI5 and MI6 who had an interest in monitoring people like Sherlock? If it were true, then they were watching him now, and they intended to watch him for the next twelve years. There would be a file somewhere secret, inaccessible to the common citizen or even standard official, with Sherlock's name on, evaluations every three years, strange men who didn't even know him determining just how risky he was. And Sherlock wouldn't even know. Father and Mother wouldn't even know.

But Mycroft. He knew.

And in that moment, it was obvious what he would do with his life. He would go into government after all, but not as a politician. No. He would discover what those men did, who they worked for, and when he did, he would take all the necessary steps to become one of them. He would learn their secrets, their plans. It would be the best way to keep his eye on his little brother.

And he would do whatever it took to get Sherlock's name off that list.

'Be normal.'

'Stop fidgeting.'

'Shut up.'

There were many reasons Sherlock did not like his father. Nevertheless, he learnt important life lessons from the man. Like how one should always abhor sentiment, recoil from physical affections, and never abide fools. Such were the Holmes brothers' earliest lessons, and they learnt them well.

He preferred it when his father was away, which was most often. And when he was home, Sherlock kept his distance, staying in his room, playing in the garden, and leaving the house to wander the streets. He liked being on his own. He liked public transportation—buses, mostly—just hopping on, paying the fare, and seeing where it would take him. He always found his way home again, sometimes in time for dinner, though not always. He got as far as London, once, which he had visited before with his family, back when they used to go on holiday together, to London, to North Devon, to Southern France; but the city seemed to have a new life when he set his own two independent feet on those streets, far from the shadow of his mother, the reach of his father, and he decided that he quite liked the thick London air in his lungs, the noise of traffic in his ears, and the pulse of the city, like the beat of a heart.

Mother called the police on him a few times, if dark fell and still he hadn't returned home. It was how he came to know the backseat of a copper's car, and how the police came to know the road to his front door. It embarrassed his mother, having them show up again and again with Sherlock in tow, and it infuriated his father, if ever he was there to witness it. His ire was aroused, but not because Sherlock had been caught doing something criminal. After all, all he had done was wander. No, it was because of the suspicious look in the policemen's eyes, and the questions, the insinuations: 'Normally, Mr Holmes, children don't make a habit of running, unless there is something to run from.'

'There's nothing normal about this one,' Mr Holmes rejoined, making every effort to appear in control of his own house. Once the door was closed in on them again, however, he turned a hateful eye on the boy. Sherlock returned it in full measure, for once again, he had noticed the distinct scent of perfume on the cuff of his father's sleeve when he had grabbed Sherlock to pull him into the house. It was a woman's fragrance, though foreign to his mother.

'Stewardess or receptionist, this time?' he asked balefully, raking Mr Holmes from collar to shoe with his gaze, looking for signs that might indicate one answer over the other.

His father's eyes went wide and his jaw fell open a moment before snapping shut. He snatched Sherlock up by the collar. 'Shut your mouth,' he said through gritted teeth as he shook the boy only inches from his face. 'Shut your goddamn mouth, and get the hell up to your room. I don't want to hear another word out of you. Not one. More. Word. Or I'll shut you up myself.' Then he thrust Sherlock toward the stairs like he was casting out the devil.

Sherlock did shut up. Experimentally. Just to see whether anyone would notice, whether anyone would care. In the end, he didn't talk for fifteen days. At the dinner table, in classes, and everywhere in between, he was as mute as a fish, and it didn't seem to bother a soul. This astonished him, their failure to observe, their pure stupidity, but what astonished him more was how much he enjoyed occupying the space inside his own head. In silence, he observed, and in silence, he thought intensely about what he had observed. It was during this time that he came to appreciate the vastness and superiority of his own mind. He had questions, so many questions, and so much space to store away answers. Cataloguing information? That was one thing. Easy. Child's play. Making sense of it was something else. He determined to never let anything more escape his notice.

At the close of day fifteen, after a very quiet dinner with just the two of them, Sherlock and his mother retired to the study where Mother poured herself wine and sat stiffly on the edge of a chair. Sherlock stood at the bookshelf, looking for something new to capture his interest, but he had read it all before. Then his mother spoke to him. 'Come here, Sherlock,' she said, and he moved to stand before her. She smoothed out the front of his shirt with her fingers. She never could abide wrinkles. 'You know, I don't think I've heard a peep out of you all day. Are you feeling well?'

Slowly, he brought his hands together, steepling his fingers and inclining his head, a gesture of genuflection, but really he was contemplating on whether he should break his vow of silence. It had proven so useful. But then he cleared his throat—scratchy from prolonged disuse—and said, 'Cook has been stealing fresh spices and herbs and using generic salt shakers on the food because your palate is too dull to spot the difference. She has an arrangement with Mrs Arnold, the Henrickson's cook down the street, who has a buyer. You wouldn't think there'd be a black market for spices these days, but there is. The postman lied when he told you he used to own his own hardware business. He used to be a Catholic priest—hasn't changed his haircut for years and uses words like absolution—until he started drinking too much. And Father is having sex with other women. The receptionist this week, I think, because he's not flying anywhere until Monday.'

The words came tumbling out of him without reserve, all the thoughts and observations that had been building up in him during his period of self-imposed silence. He simply couldn't hold it in any longer. But he had not anticipated her response. Surely, she would want to know she had been stolen from, lied to, and cheated on. Didn't people want to know such things? Shouldn't she be impressed, praise him for his acuity, thank him for bringing these things to her attention?

But no. Instead, she did something she had never done before and would never do again. She rose to her feet and slapped Sherlock hard across the face. Then, without another word, she walked away, leaving him alone in the middle of the room, silent once again.

'Sherlock, you idiot.' Mycroft nearly shouted into the phone at the conclusion of his brother's recapitulation, some days later. 'Why did you have to go and say a thing like that to her?'

'Why? Because he's a—!'

'We all know what he is. I've known it since last summer. And Mummy's known it longer. You think you're telling her something she doesn't already know?'

'But—'

'She was happy that way, pretending.'

'But—'

'And now you've taken that away from her, because you've shown that you know, too, and she can't pretend anymore. Badly done, Sherlock.'

'She's not been happy. I was only trying to help, and I would do it again.'

'Are you really so hell-bent on upsetting her? You'll ruin the family.'

'I've only told the truth. People want the truth.'

'Not that truth. Very badly done, indeed.'

'You disapprove of me?'

'You've done little to warrant my approval. Stop trying to be so clever sometimes, and just think.'

Even in his most rational of moments, Mycroft would always blame Sherlock for their parents' divorce. Cause and effect, and Sherlock was the cause. He was sorry for the dissolution of their marriage, and not because he hated to see the man go (far from it), not even because of his mother's subsequent dependency on tricyclic antidepressants and almost complete withdrawal from parenting. Rather, his primary concern was that Sherlock's secret file would now be re-evaluated to include the fact that he came from a broken home. His profile was worsening, and he was doing nothing but harming himself in this regard, thereby making Mycroft's future job all the more difficult.

The last time the Holmes brothers saw their father, he was leaving through the front door, though they did not stand together to watch him go. While Mother lay in her bedroom, wide awake and listening to the sounds in the house, Mycroft stood at the end of the hall and watched his father's back pass over the threshold for the last time. High above them, Sherlock observed the man through a window. Once the car rolled away, silence fell on the house, and each kept to his or her respective spaces until dinner, which Mycroft arranged with the kitchen and for which Mother did not show. It was only later that Mycroft discovered that Sherlock had spent the hours dismantling his violin, regretting it, and trying to put it back together again, but in vain.

The last time they heard from Mr Holmes was nine years later, in an obituary.

But it was in the succeeding two years that Sherlock and Mycroft's bond of brotherly affection and camaraderie, already plucked and fraying, began to unravel. Mycroft no longer held back in being openly critical of his little brother's deviations and eccentricities, or of his failure to utilise his mind in productive and normalising daily occupations; and Sherlock's earlier displays of adoration fizzled and vanished like white smoke. From afar, they regarded one another warily, and in close quarters they practised sharp repartee and insult, Mycroft usually gaining the upper hand for wit and wiles while Sherlock tried mightily to keep up. Never minding that he was seven years older, Mycroft dealt his little brother sharp mental blows as if he were of equal cerebral standing and a perfect intellectual counterpart, of which Mycroft, in truth, had none. He was not unaware of what he was doing, of course, but he had a purpose: if Sherlock could but divorce himself from all passions and sentiment, he would—logically—be of more stable mind and character, and of little interest to those in higher, more dangerous circles.

Eton, 1989

Mycroft completed his schooling and went on to university, just as he was meant to, and Sherlock, making every sign of displeasure, followed in Mycroft's footsteps and went to Eton. Mother would hear nothing of his desires to go to London schools, not when so fine an institution as Eton was willing to accept him. On the day she sent him off, hiring a car to carry him away so she wouldn't have to leave the house herself, she stood before him and severely adjusted his tie and flattened his mess of dark, curly hair.

'I don't want to see you again before Christmas, hear me?' she said. 'You are to behave. Keep your nose clean and keep to your studies. I don't care if you don't make a single friend, but if I get one phone call from your house master, even one, so help me God, Sherlock, I will ship you off to South Africa. Don't tempt me on it.'

It was 1989, and Sherlock was thirteen years old. As his mother predicted, he made no effort to befriend any of the other boys and kept mostly to his study-bedroom, if he could help it, earning him something of a reputation as a recluse or pariah. But unlike the children of his youth who had made efforts to avoid him, the Eton boys singled him out as peculiar—for his manner of speaking, his funny face, the way he seldom smiled (some called him a cyborg)—and made sport of ridiculing and humiliating him. It was in this way that he became intimately acquainted with the floor of the boys' loo, learnt how to untie himself from all manner of knots, and began practising the arts of foregoing both food and sleep while he kept vigil against another midnight attack of boys pissing on him while he slept, or against another midday prank wherein they hid rat shit in his food.

And it was while sitting in the nurse's station, holding a cold compress to his left eye, that his right eye caught the headline of The Times left on a nearby table:

11-year-old Sussex boy seizes, drowns in pool

For lack of anything better to read, he dragged the paper closer.

London – The Stratford Recreation Centre has been closed indefinitely while officials look into the death of 11-year-old Carl Powers, son of Marion and Judy Powers of Brighton. His death comes as a shock and tragedy for all who knew him. His family was unavailable for comment.

Powers, a member of the Brighton Junior Swim League, suffered an apparent seizure while swimming in the Stratford Recreation Centre pool at approximately 9.00 Friday morning while on a school trip. He drowned when help failed to reach him in time. His coach, Mr Terry Granger, says that Powers had been swimming regularly for the last four years and was a strong and capable swimmer for his age.

'He took to the water like a fish,' Granger said. 'We all expected such great things from Carl, and he was such an upstanding lad. Clearing out his locker was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.'

Powers kept a temporary locker at the Centre, which his coach took responsibility for emptying. Granger recalls the moment of turning over Carl's folded shirt, trousers, underwear, shampoo, towel, and gym bag to his mother.

'I felt like an American soldier,' Granger said, 'handing a folded flag to the mother of a fallen comrade. Awful, just awful.'

Services for Carl will be held . . .

In his mind's eye, Sherlock saw the pool and a boy seizing beneath the water, splashing wildly as his body convulsed. He scowled a little, thinking of how incompetent the lifeguards must have been, to fail to see it and pull the boy out in time. How could they not see that? He also imagined the locker full of the dead kid's possessions. It really didn't seem like much to leave behind, the simple evidences of a life, the shell of a body, dressing the boy from head to . . .

He quickly reread the article. Curiously, the coach had not mentioned . . . shoes. He had named everything else, even the underwear, but there had been no mention of shoes. Odd.

Terribly odd. Was it odd? Why was it odd?

He mentioned it to the nurse. She thought he was odd.

But he couldn't get it out of his head. He brought the matter to his house master while being written up for insulting the cleaning staff, slipped it into a conversation with the boys he caught filling his sock drawer with fire ants from the biology lab, and included it in his report on 'current world news' in his history class. Despite his efforts, no one seemed interested in the curious matter. So he took it to the next level.

He called the police.

'Where are Carl Powers' shoes? Have you found them yet?'

A sigh from the opposite end. 'Sherlock Holmes. Stop calling.'

'Stop ignoring me. No one goes on a school trip shoeless without someone noticing. It's eccentric behaviour at best, and Carl Powers was not an eccentric, was he? No one mentioned a shoeless boy, so we can conclude—with a high degree of probability—that he had those shoes on when he entered the rec centre. Did you find them or didn't you? Your refusal to acknowledge that you did not indicates you have not, in fact. So who took them? Why? I'll suggest to you once again that the suspicious nature of their disappearance is highly indicative of foul pl—"

They hung up on him, once again.

That didn't stop him. He wrote to the papers. All of them. The vast majority ignored him, but one small paper in Carl's hometown printed his query as a letter to the editor. Excitedly, he waited for his in-print suspicions to light a fire, to incite the Powers family, at the very least. But not a thing came from it. In literature and reading class, rather than writing on the assigned topic of Charles Dickens, he wrote a speculation on the importance of shoes; in history class, rather than deliver a speech on the Great Fire of London in 1666 and architect Christopher Wren, he gave a long, rapid speech about the suspicious death of a boy in a pool and police incompetency; and in art class, he illustrated a drowned boy with watercolours. And he didn't stop phoning the police, every day, at three o'clock.

The police phoned the school. The school phoned his mother.

'. . . fixation . . . obsession . . . compulsion . . . Mrs Holmes, we would like Sherlock to see somebody about this. A professional . . .'

Eton, Early 1990s

In his notes, Dr Langlais described Sherlock as a subject with compulsive tendencies, strong antisocial inclinations, underdeveloped sympathetic responses, and resistance toward adaptation to communal norms. It was in this context that Sherlock first encountered the term sociopathy. Dr Langlais was out of the room, responding to a telephone call, and without compunction, Sherlock rose from his chair, seated himself behind the therapist's large desk, and opened the man's notebook.

'. . . exhibits some of the traits commonly associated with sociopathy (or rather, some form of psychopathy, a question worthy of further exploration), though notably lacking some of the more basic . . .'

Dr Langlais returned suddenly and scolded him for being a snoop.

Later, on his own once again, he looked up the term and the long list of its traits. He was not a fit. Well, not a perfect fit. Well, the term itself was problematic. But he decided that he fitted well enough to the description: after all, he checked enough boxes; he could emulate the rest. In any case, it was something of a relief to him to have encountered an explanation for himself. Without further exploration, he adopted the term and started using it as a first line of defence against those who had taken to calling him freak, which, he supposed, he was.

His newest therapist was something of an experimentalist, and his treatment of Sherlock shifted every time he read about a new methodology being developed in places like Sweden, Switzerland, or the United States. But mostly, his focus was on correcting Sherlock's errant behaviour and aberrant personality through shaming and scare tactics, and each session was a barrage of annoying, self-reflective, non-productive questions, like 'Are you happy being different, Mr Holmes?', 'Which of your peers do you admire?', 'Wouldn't life just be easier if you were more like your peers?', and 'If you were more like the others, would you want to be friends with you? Let's try a thought-experiment and put yourself in someone else's shoes, and observe you from the outside. What do you think puts you off about that Sherlock boy over there? What about him makes you not like him? Come on, now, Sherlock, play along. You'll learn a lot about yourself this way.' And finally, 'What do you want to make of your life, Mr Holmes? Does loneliness attract you?'

It seemed to bother everyone but him that he had no friends.

To combat his friendlessness and antisocial nature, and to make him learn to play nice with other boys, they made him join teams where he played football, cricket, fives, and rugby. He hated it, all of it, and he was hated in return, because though he was competitive and liked to win, he couldn't abide it when his teammates made mistakes, and he insulted them both on and off the pitch for their errors, win or lose. In return, they beat him up. He thought it a fair trade.

Then he discovered fencing, karate, and judo—single man sports that taught him more practical skills, like defending against an attack and incapacitating an opponent. None of this hand-and-ball goal-scoring rubbish. In the martial arts, he exceled, and in fencing, he became a champion, and by the time he turned fifteen, he effectively put an end to the physical bullying.

Emboldened by his newfound self-sufficiency, he wrote to his mother:

Mummy,
I've told Dr Langlais that we are not having any more sessions. I am done with the pills. I am done with therapy forever, and I consider the matter closed.
Sherlock

His mother cried to him on the phone. Oh, how she cried. It was not within her nature, such histrionics, and he suspected that she had overdone it on the wine before picking up the phone. The filter was gone, and she told him exactly what she thought.

'You must continue your sessions, Sherlock. You must.'

'No.'

'You scare me, sometimes. Do you know that? You scare your own mother. If you were only normal, if you could just be normal! You make it so hard to love you!'

He gripped the phone and stood taller in the phone box where he had chosen to make the call. Straightening out his face as well, he replied, 'Don't bother. You needn't try anymore.'

'Oh believe me, I shan't. There's no point to it, no point at all. All these years, it has never made the least bit of difference, has it?'

'I'm hanging up now.'

'That's why your father left. Did you know that? You're so clever, such a bright little boy, you must know how you pushed him away. You push us all away, everyone, your own brother, even. How he used to adore you! That's why you're so alone in the world, my darling. If you keep on the way you are, you will always be alone.'

'Fine. Good. That's how I like it.'

She huffed and sniffed into the phone, a loud burst of air that sounded to him only like static. He knew she was frustrated, and he didn't care. Let her be. 'Don't you talk to me like that,' she said. 'I can't love you when you're like this!'

'I said, don't bother.'

He slammed the phone back onto its cradle, wrenched open the box door, and stalked away.

Mycroft didn't come home for Christmas of 1991, citing exams and studies and a new job with responsibilities too complex and numerous for his mother to fully comprehend. Depressed, she kept to her room, neglecting the holiday entirely—no tree, no crackers, no pudding, no presents. Occasionally, she wandered out with an empty wine glass to refresh, padding soullessly throughout the expansive house in her slippers and dressing gown, hardly able even to look at her youngest son. Once, she ruffled Sherlock's dark curls as she passed behind where he sat at the kitchen table revising his chemistry notes. But that was the extent of her warmth.

When she was gone from the room again, he ran clawed fingers roughly through his hair to get rid of the feel of her.

He returned to Eton as soon as possible and, to his surprise, found Mycroft on the grounds in front of his building.

'Ghastly and old, you once called this place,' Mycroft said by way of greeting. He was dressed sharply in a new light-grey suit, dark-red tie, and coal-black coat, and he held the lapels like one might hold a cape, as if he had become an important somebody in the world overnight. 'How are you finding it, now you've been here a while? Has it grown on you?'

'It's just a school,' said Sherlock. He was nearing his full height now, though he still fell shy of Mycroft's. And, if things kept on as they were, he imagined he'd always be bested for girth. 'I'll be gone from it before long.'

'Quite right. Some of these Eton boys, they grow far too devoted to the place. In their heads, they never really leave. I would not expect you to exhibit such foolish attachment.'

'What are you doing here, Mycroft?'

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. 'Don't look so startled. I had the morning free, so I thought I would stop by and wish my little brother a happy Christmas.'

'Christmas is over. You missed it.'

'I was busy, as I said. Work, you know. New job. At this stage, one can't be too careful about making a strong impression.'

'You're making a large impression, at least.'

Mycroft's eyes narrowed at him. 'Does Mummy know you've taken up smoking?'

Sherlock's eyes narrowed back, wondering just how he knew. He had taken special care not to smell of smoke, and he wasn't carrying a pack on him. He was further convinced that Mycroft hadn't caught him at it. He would have to figure that one out, what subtle evidences had given him away. 'Probably. Cigarettes are hers.'

'You're a terrible liar.'

'I'll work on it.'

'Mummy smokes low tar. Mind you, we're not supposed to know she smokes at all, so you'll do well to keep that one to yourself. But that's beside the point, isn't it? You're smoking Deaths. What attracted you to that brand? The skull and crossbones on the packaging? Really, you are too predictable.'

Yes, he really needed to figure out Mycroft's methodology. 'Is this why you came by? To scold me?'

'If I wanted to scold you, I'd phone. No, I came to drop off your Christmas present.'

Sherlock eyed him even more suspiciously now. They were not in the habit of exchanging gifts. Furthermore, Mycroft made no move toward a pocket.

Mycroft saw his eyes flitting. 'It's in your room,' he said. 'I do hope you find it adequate.'

After that, there was little more to say. Each kept a straight face as they shook hands and parted ways, and though Sherlock chided himself, he couldn't stop his legs from moving a little more quickly to speed himself to his room, nor his mind from guessing at what Mycroft might have brought him. A job, after all, meant extra pocket money, and judging by the suit he'd been wearing, Mycroft had plenty of it. He envisioned, a little hopefully, an IBM or the new MS-DOS. If it was another damn bird-watching book or dressing gown, he'd chuck it straight out the window.

He opened the door and saw, laid out on his bed, an open case, and inside, a new violin. Though he tried, he couldn't stop himself from smiling.

Later, he would consider his years at Eton to be little essential to his education. Academically, he performed well, when performing well was required, and if hard pressed, he would actually admit to enjoying chemistry, maths, biology, and German. He tolerated Greek and philosophy, and absolutely abhorred the social sciences.

As it had been with Dr Langlais, it was a period of experimentation. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, Sherlock made a habit of sneaking out of his room and off the grounds, mostly at night, though sometimes in the middle of the day. He was never caught. Once free of Eton's stone walls and snobbery, he escaped into Windsor, Maidenhead, West Drayton, or Staines-upon-Thames, where he practised a range of different accents from around the country, adopting new names and strange personae and complex backstories, just to see if he could pull it off convincingly. He could. Additionally, he made a study of people—observed them, evaluated them, and emulated them. He was good at that: mimicry. And once he had learnt all he could, he exploited them. He taught himself how to pickpocket, how to sneak into private clubs, how to creep past all manner of securities and surveillance systems. He became a trespasser, a petty thief, and a schemer. This was where the real education was—the streets.

And he became acquainted with the kids of the street, the smackheads and snorters and smokers, who offered him his first fag at fourteen and his first needle a year after that. He got sick the first time he took a drag, but it wasn't long before he actively sought the rush of energy and substitute euphoria. He crashed cigarettes off of them often, whenever his own stash ran low, and they passed the snout around a circle from time to time, but he would never call them his friends. They were a means to an end, useful, in their own way, especially when it came to satisfying his need for a stimulant, but ultimately they were too stupid to waste his time on.

That's what it came down to, in the end: stimulants. An ever-growing need, a desperate craving, to keep his mind and body active, engaged, feeling something so he didn't have to feel everything, and before long he felt nothing, nothing but thrilling highs and dreadful lows, and a pounding in his head that never went away. He spent countless hours in his room, thinking, rocking and thinking, hitting the side of his head to the beat of an internal clock, and thinking. The pounding answered back, always, a pounding that said more more more and never enough until his Eton days were done.

But somewhere, in the back of his mind, a little something kept gnawing away at him: Carl Powers' missing shoes.

London, 1995–1996

Mycroft was precisely where he had designed to be.

On the face of things, and what he told Mummy, who asked about his work, and Sherlock, who didn't, he occupied a minor position in the British government. He was not a politician, not a policy maker, not a representative, nothing requiring an election, which was a disappointment to her. Instead, he worked as a researcher, strategist, and advisor. An innocuous profession, to be sure.

But there were other machinations at work within the governing bodies of Britain, flowing through them, interconnecting them, like invisible veins, organisations hidden and inscrutable to all but those who knew how to look—and he knew how to look. He saw them, plain as day. It astounded him, sometimes, that others could be so blind. But then, he knew that the greater population saw the world in tones of grey where he alone could see colour.

Not that he let on. He was discreet, subtle about what he knew. He had made all the right gestures, had spoken all the right words to all the right people and with just the right cadences. His goal was the clandestine land of By Invitation Only, where he knew the true power of England lay, and he had already set his foot on the path to reach it. But one did not just walk through the gates, nor apply for entry, because none knew its existence. None but him. Instead, he had to wait, and patiently, for his personally addressed invitation to arrive. He prided himself on many things, and patience was among them.

He had every confidence they would invite him. They would want a man like Mycroft Holmes.

While Sherlock begrudgingly entered his first year at King's College London (having declined offers at both Oxford and Cambridge, to Mycroft's strongly vocalised disapproval), Mycroft continued about the business of positioning himself to eradicate—or at the very least neutralise—any sort of file the Big Boys Upstairs had on his little brother. That's how he had come to think of them, anyway, given that they had no known name, title, or organisation. But he felt himself working on a clock. The men who had sniffed Sherlock out to start with, as a child, had said they would be monitoring him for twelve years. Nine had passed. And in recent years, Sherlock, though surly and unlikable, had done nothing to elevate their suspicions further. Nothing dangerous, at least. No bloodied animals in the toilets or drawings of dead children from news reports.

No, Sherlock had left Eton in good academic standing and with superior recommendations, and now he was attending university to study chemistry. That he had chosen chemistry as a course of study was respectable, admirable, even, and Mycroft felt vindicated in insisting, for so many years, that Sherlock would calm and straighten himself into a reasonable, socially adjusted young man, something like himself. Well, at least someone who didn't draw attention to himself. An extraordinary mind, surely, but in all other ways normal. Mother expected—hoped—he might ultimately choose the path of a doctor, but Mycroft had slightly less ambitious career hopes for his brother, something involving fewer people and zero life-and-death scenarios, like a research chemist. Even early on, he knew that no one should trust Sherlock Holmes with a life.

Mycroft was so certain of Sherlock's newfound stability, in fact, that he began to lose track of the man himself in favour of his cause. Furthermore, Mycroft's own career was shaping into something quite attractive to him, even if his concern for Sherlock hadn't propelled him toward it. As a result, he found himself extraordinarily busy with his work and never visited and seldom called, and Sherlock paid him the same courtesies of lack of engagement. Life was steady. He was steady. Sherlock, mired in his studies, was steady.

Or so he thought.

He had no idea how bored Sherlock really was. He didn't know just how disliked and isolated he was. He didn't know about the drugs. Or about the resurgence of interest in corpses. Or about how he had stopped attending classes regularly to study topics of his own interest in the library or in the 'field'. Or that he was developing his own brand of science.

He didn't know that his little brother felt like he was detached from the world, floating and aimless, spiralling and headed for a collision, and that the only things, the only fool-proof things (aside from playing his violin), that could calm the storms raging in his aching head, were chemical. Mycroft didn't know any of that.

At the end of Sherlock's third year at King's, Mycroft received his invitation in the form of a man, an older colleague, approaching him in a park, clapping a hand on his shoulder, and saying, 'Mr Holmes. Walk with me.'

And just as he was entering the clandestine realms of the Big Boys Upstairs and pledging oaths of the most profound secrecy, Sherlock dropped out of university, and disappeared.

London, 1997

The default course of action, Mycroft learnt, when one of the subjects on the 'watch list' disappeared from surveillance, was automatic renewal of interest in the form of an additional nine years, minimum, on the list. Sherlock had already passed eleven years as a subject of interest. One more year, and he might have been removed altogether. Just one more year, Mycroft thought. Couldn't he have behaved for just one more year?

Mycroft was furious, but he played unamused instead. 'I imagine I can ferret him out,' he told Them with carefully played exasperation.

'You are too close to this one, Mr Holmes,' the Big Boys said. 'We wouldn't risk your affections for the man compromising the necessary courses of action.'

'Affections?' He couldn't let anyone imagine for even a moment that he had anything close to affection for Sherlock, lest he be prohibited from ever handling his case. So he allowed a posh sort of smirk to flavour his next words. 'For Sherlock? He's been a stain on the family from the start. My only interest is to bring him back onto the grid where we can monitor him properly.'

They consented to allowing him to search on his own, for now.

It was a time Mycroft would later think of as the 'missing year' from Sherlock's life, before that larger stretch of time eclipsed it, when Mycroft believed for more than three years that his little brother was dead. Finding him proved to be tricky. He wasn't really suited to field work—it was so tiresome and dull. Nevertheless, he was not yet in a position to send others on assignment. So he went out on his own. His first stop, of course, was King's. Sherlock's things had all been left behind in his room, which Mycroft cleared out for him when rent collectors came knocking. Well, not quite all his things had been abandoned. His shoes, for instance were gone, as well as his violin. At least, wherever he was, whether traipsing about the countryside or lying dead in a ditch, he had something on his feet. But it was the absence of the violin that gave Mycroft real hope.

He would later claim to have found Sherlock the following winter. To be fair, though, Mycroft never actually found him. With time, he would come to learn that when Sherlock Holmes didn't want to be found, he stayed hidden. So no, Mycroft didn't ferret him out. Instead, Sherlock reappeared on his own, coaxed out of hiding when the papers announced the death of their father.

It happened while Mycroft stood at the gravesite, contemplating the pointlessness of his being there for a man he hadn't seen or heard from in nine years, who was dead, and who couldn't appreciate any of the gestures made on the occasion of his death. It was specious, he thought, the act of funeral rites, and he should be happy if he never attended another funeral again in his life. But he had a public face to wear and responsibilities pertaining thereto. Thus, he stood at his father's grave.

From the corner of his eye, Mycroft recognised the slumped though angular form the moment it shifted in his periphery, fifty metres away and cloaked in the shade of the trees. But he didn't let on. Not at first, when there were still well-wishers left to appease. But he kept the figure marked, waiting for him to try to disappear again, and steadfastly ignoring the sense of relief he felt at seeing him.

When the time was right, he told his driver to go warm up the car and wandered over to the shady grove. Sherlock hadn't moved a muscle.

'Is this what it takes to pull you out of hiding?' he drawled. 'A death in the family? I should have guessed.'

Sherlock didn't answer. So Mycroft stepped out of the sunlight and joined him in the shadows. There, his eyes adjusted quickly, and he took the whole of him in at a glance. Sherlock wore a ratty black hoodie, his hands burrowed in the front pockets, and though the hood was thrown back, his unkempt, unwashed hair hung listlessly like a shroud around his face, which drooped low.

Mycroft grabbed Sherlock under the chin and forced his head up. There, he read the story in his bloodshot eyes and pallid skin and hollow cheeks. 'Dear god, look at you,' Mycroft scowled. He seized Sherlock's wrist next and pushed the sleeve to his elbow, revealing the reddened punctures and skin damage. Enraged, he threw the arm away from him, nearly causing Sherlock to spin if Mycroft hadn't grabbed his shoulders to keep him straight. 'Well? Which is it? What have you been using?'

'Dunno,' said Sherlock, sluggishly. 'All of them?'

Mycroft grabbed the back of his hoodie and marched him to the road where his driver was just arriving. 'Get in the damned car.' And he threw him inside.

In his will, the deceased Mr Holmes had stipulated that all of his considerable assets were to be liquidated, and his eldest son, Mycroft, was to be bequeathed the whole of his rather sizeable inheritance. In the event that Mycroft was unable to act as recipient, the inheritor was to be Eton College, his alma mater.

Sherlock's name appeared nowhere in the will. He was, however, alluded to, in the phrase unto my son Mycroft, and no other soul. 'No other soul', Sherlock knew, meant him.

He refused to go to a rehabilitation clinic. He wanted to be back in London. He secretly wanted Mycroft to put him up, just until he got well again.

Mycroft didn't even offer. He couldn't. He had not yet seen Sherlock's file for himself, and if he exhibited any displays of compassion or concern for the man himself that might override his devotion to Queen and Country, he never would. He would be deemed 'compromised' and removed from his place. Really, his coldness was for Sherlock's own good.

So he sent him to the very last place Sherlock wanted to go: home.

Buckinghamshire, 1998

She died on a Tuesday, some seven months following the death of her ex-husband. Sherlock found her in her bed, stiff with rigor mortis, two empty bottles of wine on the floor, a full bottle of antidepressants in the cupboard, and an empty bottle of sleeping pills by the bathroom sink, where she had also left a note:

Sherlock, this isn't about you. I'm just so tired of not being happy anymore. My love to Mycroft.

Setting her morning tea aside, he sat on the edge of the mattress and touched her stiff hand, which lay atop the pillow by her face. Then he just stared. Her face was pale, her skin waxy. Her hair was seven days past its last wash and silver around the hairline where she had stopped colouring it two months ago. She had died facing away from the window and the night table where she kept a picture of her sons as children on the beach in North Devon, taken many years before. For nearly an hour, he just sat there, looking at her, thinking. He had seen the signs of her depression. They had been there for years, even before the divorce—hence, her medication, the therapist bills, the wine. But upon the death of her ex-husband, things had worsened considerably, and this puzzled Sherlock more than anything else. Why should she care? How could she still feel anything for a man who hurt her like that?

Weakness. Sentiment. That's what it must come to, in the end. Her own affections had poisoned her.

What a dangerous thing they were! Feelings!

Sherlock stayed with the body for hours, but not because of sentiment. He was curious about this rigor mortis he had read about only in textbooks and observed only in animals, and he wanted to investigate it further. The body was well past its period of primary flaccidity; the neck and jaw were especially rigid, but also arms and fingers. She had been dead between four and six hours, he supposed. Knowing her nightly patterns, and estimating the time it must have taken for the excess of sleeping pills to take their effect, he estimated that she had deliberately overdosed around two in the morning. Due to the steadiness of her handwriting in the note, he believed that she had penned it while sober, before even the wine. Premeditation. Conviction and determination. He wondered if she had even thought twice about what she was doing to herself, to her sons, if there had been even a moment of fear or regret. Sherlock doubted it. Hell, he almost admired it.

They arrested him. Of course they did. For nine hours, they interrogated him, took a coffee break, and grilled him for three more. Why had he waited so many hours before phoning someone? ('What was the rush? She was already dead.') Why had he phoned the coroner's office and not the police? ('How can suicide be a crime? Who are you going to arrest?') They were disturbed by his chilling calm, his unabashed claim that he had handled the deceased's body and touched every bottle and taken the note. ('She addressed it to me. It's mine.')

But in the end, they could not prove that Mrs Holmes' death was not suicide. The police reluctantly released him. But the Big Boys were watching.

London, 1999

The estate went to Mycroft, as stipulated in Mrs Holmes' will. He sold the property and all the possessions of the house, but when he offered to cut Sherlock his due percentage of the proceeds, Sherlock refused.

'And just how do you expect to live?'

'I'll live.'

'Then you'll need a job.'

'Job?' He sighed in annoyance but said in monotone. 'Jobs are boring.'

He was a right old prat, and only twenty-two years of age. He wouldn't return to school to finish his degree, and he wouldn't condescend to perform any work available to the bum of a drop-out he had become because none of the options were a match for his brilliance, and he knew it.

To keep him from becoming entirely dispossessed (and thereby keeping him from giving the Big Boys one more reason to worry over him), Mycroft provided him with a living stipend, enough to get him through a month-to-month sort of menial existence. But Sherlock was a stubborn soul and accepted very little. All the same, he insisted on living in London. This meant he had no choice but to find a flat share, with four or five flatmates at a time. And he hated people.

He was moving constantly that first year, booted from one flat to the next, never staying anywhere for more than six weeks. No one could stand him, and he had no patience for any of them. They certainly had none for him. He never did the shopping but helped himself to whatever was in the fridge, he disparaged any of his flatmates' guests and revealed personal details about them with merely a glance but without a thought, and he never tidied up after himself. His things (books, mostly, but also whatever newest tech gadgets he could acquire) were stacked in piles on the floor and on tables and in hallways. They rowed constantly, and if it ever came to blows, Sherlock proved himself an able fighter.

One time, for instance, Sherlock's tolerance was tested during a party his three other flatmates were hosting. Students, all of them, and their girlfriends, along with at least half a dozen others, all crammed into one small sitting room, drinking and blaring music at half one in the morning. Uninvited, Sherlock kept to his room, grinding his teeth at the dial tone screeching while he tried to connect to the Internet, and trying to tune out all the noise of laughter and off-key singing to Cher's 'Believe'. Then, for the eleventh time that night, someone picked up the phone to invite another idiot over for snout, bong, and bonk. The Internet connection failed. He couldn't take it anymore. Barefoot and tousled-haired, he strode into the sitting room, yanked one of the stereo speakers off the wall, and chucked it out the open window. The ensuing brawl resulted in a bloody nose (Sherlock's) and a chipped tooth (his idiot flatmate's).

'You might do others a favour and leave them well enough alone, Sherlock,' Mycroft said, not long after posting his bail. 'You make them all miserable.'

'Just returning the favour,' he said.

'I'm serious. You're the kind of person who should just be alone. No one wants to deal with you. Me least of all. But here I am.'

London, 2000

The Big Boys had fingers in every pie where it concerned the safety and governing of the free world, and some of the un-free ones as well. They had operatives—eyes, ears, hands, and feet—in every government, military, and civilian outpost conceivable. They were MI5, MI6, JIC, GCHQ, MOD, and DI, and They alone knew of Their own existence.

They kept lists. Long and classified lists: military personnel (active, retired, and discharged) evaluated on the question of their threat level to the country, its civilians, or themselves; government officials (both politicians and those holding the leash) evaluated on the question of loyalty to the country and integrity respecting its people; criminals (incarcerated or released) evaluated on the question of danger to those in their sphere of influence; and the ordinary (or not so ordinary) civilian, neither military nor government nor criminal, evaluated on the question of capacity for widespread harm.

These were the mentally deranged, the antisocial, and the brilliant. And where all three met together in one individual, the threat level elevated, and the Big Boys watched closely.

'His name is William Dower,' They said. 'Twenty-nine years old, currently residing in Bridgwater. He's been on the list since he was twelve. Diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder in 1994. Scored a 148 on the Wechsler intelligence scale. His risk factor has been at a 12 for the last twenty-four months. Yesterday, it escalated to a 15 when Mr Dower's computer was found to contain a listing of all police officers in Cornwall, and maps of the sewage systems and electrical lines.'

'And I take it he's not a city planning enthusiast?'

'He's a danger, Mr Holmes. He has breached the threshold of tolerability. Procedures are in place with cases such as these. I believe this is your first.'

'What do we do about him?'

'Initiate Emergency Protocol 68.'

'What is that?'

'He needs to be removed.'

'Removed . . . We're taking him out?'

'No, Mr Holmes. We do not get our hands dirty. We merely apply the right sorts of pressure to incite the inevitable chain reaction leading to an arrest.'

In other words, Mycroft thought, we encourage the criminal behaviour that will get them taken off the streets for good. It was, as They said, an inevitable outcome. They merely hurried it along in a more controlled environment. And if there was some, say, collateral damage along the way, it could not be helped. Better few than many. Better the driver than a whole busload.

With interest, Mycroft watched the chips fall. Pressure was applied to a sensitive nerve: Mr Dower's long-time girlfriend inexplicably announced that she was done with him. On the night she tried to move out, Mr Dower attacked her with the fireplace poker. The girl survived to spend the next several years enduring reconstructive surgeries, but Mr Dower was arrested on charges of attempted murder.

The girl had done nothing wrong. Mr Dower had acted of his own volition. The legal system was already in place to put him away for many years to come. A flawless system. The Big Boys Upstairs didn't even have to turn the wheel—just give it a nudge.

London, 2001

'Take a seat.'

She sat, spine straight, knees together, shoulders back, hands resting in her lap. A perfect figure of self-assurance and femininity.

He had already seen her entire application, one of the very few he had let cross his desk. It rose up in his mind with ease and with perfect clarity. No need to refer to it again. Education, previous employment, qualifications and skills—it was a flawless curriculum vitae. And her recommendations were second to none. No, he needed to read her now, and he saw all he needed to see in the first five seconds, as she walked through the door and sat down.

Upper-class, Scotland born but Surrey bred, twenty-one or twenty-two years old. Young, but a girl of some intelligence, capable of being moulded. Orphaned, but not prone to self-pity or maudlin reminiscences. Accustomed to travel, finer things, and men doting on her: she had not bought those earrings herself, or she would not have gone with white gold. All the same, she was single, lived alone, and travelled most frequently by train. Acquaintances were many; friends were very few indeed, and not of the intimate sort.

'You come highly recommended,' Mycroft said.

'I know.'

He was almost amused and quirked an eyebrow at her. 'Nevertheless, government work does not feature strongly in your work history.'

'I have no interest in government work, Mr Holmes. I will be your PA.'

'Any PA of mine would need to be a practitioner of the highest discretion.'

'I am discreet.'

He didn't doubt it. That was what the background check had been for, the psychological screening, the two-week–long surveillance. He had narrowed down his pool of candidates to only two, and within moments of her arrival, he had already made his decision. There would be no need to see the other candidate. The interview, therefore, did not last long.

'I demand the highest quality of assistance. You will keep a flat here in London, as near to Home Office as possible, and I expect you capable of making anything possible, or I shan't tolerate you for long. Naturally, you will also need to keep regular lodgings in Washington, Paris, Vienna, and Hong Kong. Your considerable compensation should pose no challenge in financing your newest acquisitions. You will add Mandarin to your list of languages, so you'll want to hire on a professional but private tutor straight away. You will get ample time off, of course, but must be available to me when I call, whenever I call. Any time of day, any day of the year.

'And finally, you will answer to me, and only to me. As far as you're concerned, I have neither colleagues nor superiors, so if anyone asks you for information beyond that which I have cleared you to give, you will refuse them. Whatever I tell you to do, you will do it, and whatever secrets you overhear will be taken with you to the crematorium. Am I perfectly understood?'

She didn't even blink. 'Perfectly, sir.'

'Quite right I should be. Now go. You will return in the morning to be summarily debriefed.'

She arose and started for the door.

'One more thing.'

She turned back.

'Your name. You can no longer use it. I'll come up with something different for you. That other girl you once were . . . She's disappeared.'

For the first time, the girl looked impressed. 'You can do that?'

'My dear,' Mycroft said with a grin, 'I can disappear anyone.'

'This one's fallen off the map,' They said, handing him a silver memory stick. 'We want you to find him.'

For a flash of an instant, he imagined that this one mean Sherlock (it was the only paranoia he allowed himself), but he dismissed the thought as illogical. He had checked in on Sherlock himself only the week before, even though Sherlock's case was not one he had any authority over. Not yet.

Mycroft accepted the memory stick with a nod. 'I take it his risk status has been elevated.'

'In light of his disappearance, his risk factor is elevated to 14. Surveillance will resume at Grade 4, Active, once you have found him. And when you do find this man, Mr Holmes, keep a firm grip on him. He's a slippery fish.'

Alone in his office, he slid the memory stick into the computer and pulled up the encoded file. He input his password and surpassed other protections before the file became readable, providing him with the name and full profile for one James Moriarty.

The file, to his surprise, was quite small for a man with such high scores in all risk categories, as displayed in the assessment summary at the start of the report. But as he continued through the file, he discovered why. There were large gaps in James Moriarty's timeline, either periods of perceived inactivity or of genuine vanishing from surveillance. So this wasn't the first time They had lost track of him. A slippery fish indeed. But what disturbed him more than this was that many of the characteristics of his profile sounded very . . . familiar. Moriarty's intelligence scores and risk profile, his interests and aversions, his history with child psychologists, his bullying peers, his cheating father and suicidal mother, even his fascination with skulls—Mycroft felt like he was reading Sherlock's own profile, but for a notable difference: unlike Sherlock, Moriarty was an only child.

He made plans to hunt down this James Moriarty, to put some of his operatives on the scent, beginning at his last known location in Dublin.

But he didn't find him. He would have done—he knew he would have done—had it not been for a new exigency. The United States was attacked, and Britain found itself pulled into war. The Big Boys Upstairs collectively turned Their eyes to Afghanistan.

London, 2002

'We should send you over there,' Mycroft said tetchily, pulling The Times out from under Sherlock's feet where he lounged—sprawled out—on the sofa in Mycroft's very well-situated and luxuriously furnished high-rise flat. He clipped off the telly where BBCNews was reporting on the Tarnak Farm incident.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. 'I don't much fancy getting shot at,' he replied glibly. He lazily reached for The Guardian on the coffee table.

He was there because he had been kicked out of another flat. This was becoming terribly annoying.

'You would at least be useful to a cause greater than yourself—'

'God, here it comes. Queen and Country . . .'

'—instead of doing nothing with your life, nothing with your brain—'

Sherlock groaned loudly and let the newspaper fall over his face. His arm drooped dramatically to the floor. 'Idiots,' he muttered.

'What?'

He slapped the paper away from his face and dragged himself up to sitting. 'The lot of them. Sheer morons.'

'The devil are you on about?'

'The Littleport murders of the twin girls.'

Mycroft glanced down at the floor where the front page of the paper displayed the photographs of two little girls under the caption Still missing. He hadn't really been following the two-day-old case. Boring.'Oh, they're murders now, are they?'

'Obviously. The shrubs in the front garden have moved. Rotated. Uneven trimming went from left to right literally overnight. And you can see that the soil has been turned, even on the telly. Since the first report, three more shrubs have been added. So the Kroger girls go missing, and Mrs Kroger and her boyfriend get a sudden urge to plant forsythias? No. The girls aren't runaways, and they're not kidnapped. They're dead. And they're buried in the garden. Sloppy, really. Not how I would have done it.'

Mycroft scowled. He hated when Sherlock said things like that.

'So clearly, the police are idiots. They miss more evidence than they find. My bet is they'd find freshly turned soil on the garden shovels, if not DNA from bludgeoned skulls. I bet they haven't even thought to look in the garage. Morons.'

'A pity,' Mycroft said without any real interest. He was looking around at all the empty coffee mugs Sherlock had left strewn about in his day-and-a-half being there. The housekeeper hated it whenever Sherlock stayed over, which, though infrequent, was still too frequent for Mycroft's tastes.

'Their incompetency is maddening. Speaking of which, where's that housekeeper of yours? I'm out of tea.'

'If it bothers you so much,' said Mycroft with heavy sarcasm, slipping into his suit coat, 'just solve the case yourself. Now then. I'm off. I should be happy to return and find you gone. But do leave a forwarding address. You know how Anthea hates tracking you down.'

And he was out the door, mind already on other matters, not realising that he'd left his brother—unshowered and in two-day-worn pyjamas on the sofa—in a moment of epiphany.

2002–2008

The first time Mycroft heard Sherlock call himself a consulting detective, he had passed it off as a joke.

Then he noticed Sherlock had filched one of his credit cards to buy himself nice shirts, suits, and dress shoes. He also found himself a flat in Camden, and a flatmate, Tim, who lasted a whole five months. An impressive feat, thought Mycroft, who had run the background check on the bloke shortly after he had learnt of the arrangement. But Tim was harmless. A computer salesman or something, unremarkable family history, dull acquaintances, nothing to raise an alarm. Five months for the poor, long-suffering fellow, until he couldn't bear it another day and gave his notice.

As the years went on, Mycroft made a habit of running thorough background checks on all of Sherlock's short-lived flatmates and acquaintances, ensuring that he didn't involve himself with the questionable sorts (drug addicts, particularly, but anyone, really, whose history or psychological profile might elicit some latent psychopathic tendencies in his untrustworthy little brother). Mostly, they were dull as doorknobs, but on rare occasion, whenever Sherlock happened upon someone even slightly interesting (or, as Mycroft thought of them, triggering), Mycroft took pains to get rid of them—through subtle threats and bribery. Sherlock never knew his hand in their abrupt departures. At least, Mycroft doubted very much that he knew.

Without a gang of flatmates to kick him to the kerb, Sherlock usually ended up retaining the flat, making the disgruntled flatmate move house instead of him. Usually, but not always. He moved frequently enough himself, as if he were making of each new flat a long hotel stay at which he treated flatmates and landlords as hotel staff. It certainly wasn't a home. Sherlock Holmes didn't nest. A year or so in this flat or that, and after he had run up the bill or caused enough fire damage, he left, often to a different part of the city, but sometimes even abroad (once to Miami, once to Lyon, and twice to Vienna). But London always called him back.

It was the work, he said, though only when pressed. His only concern, his only love, his only devotion, was to the work. The science of deduction, he called it, and Mycroft laughed. When he looked into Sherlock's work himself, though, he stopped laughing. Sherlock had been thorough and accurate, though unsystematic, in his explications, and the techniques he described were not far different from those Mycroft himself employed in reaching swift and useful conclusions about those around him. It was also obvious that Sherlock had taken for granted that these techniques required a high-functioning brain and intense powers of observation to join dots the average mind was not likely to join.

But Sherlock was not trying to educate or train—he was showing off what his brain could do. And how? By offering demonstrations in the form of solving mysteries. And there it was again, his self-chosen title: consulting detective. Mycroft had never heard of such a thing. So this is how his little brother had chosen to employ his intellect? Not in any respectable profession, not engaging in work that actually generated money, but as a private detective? Finding people's lost puppies and uncovering sordid love affairs?

Only, that's not what he was doing at all. Observing from a distance (and mostly in silence, except for those occasions when he couldn't resist poking fun at the way Sherlock raced all over the city), Mycroft noted how Sherlock snubbed a host of potential cases in favour of the bizarre, grotesque, and perplexing. It was hardly the sort of behaviour he could approve, especially if it worried his fellow Big Boys with whom his opinion of Sherlock as risky had gradually, over the years of working as one of Them, aligned.

Mycroft wasn't sure when it had happened, precisely, but his intent was no longer to get Sherlock's name off the watch list. Obviously, he was on it for a reason. His goal, instead, was to keep Sherlock's risk status as low as possible. That was all.

But They were . . . placated. For the most part. Sherlock was solving crimes, not committing them. He was working hand in hand with the police (well, more like dragging them around by their noses, sometimes). One in particular: a Mr Gregory Lestrade, whom Mycroft first got wind of in 2003. Lestrade was a newly commissioned inspector, and for some reason Mycroft couldn't quite suss out (his deductive skills failing him on this particular), Sherlock seemed to favour him out of all the officers. That is, he made a point of involving himself in Lestrade's cases more than anyone else's. Perhaps it was Lestrade's unusual tolerance that attracted him. True, he threw the occasional fit when Sherlock tampered with evidence or started investigating a crime scene before he had a chance to show up, but he bore the insults to his own intellect well enough and actually listened to what Sherlock (a man quite a few years his junior) had to say. So maybe there was simplicity in the mystery after all: Sherlock wanted an audience, and Lestrade and his team grudgingly provided.

Once Sherlock's new hobby gained traction, he and Mycroft rarely saw each other. In fact, if ever contact was required, Mycroft was the one to initiate, though he seldom made as much as a phone call. He was one of Them, after all—he had governments to run. Sherlock's antics seemed . . . trivial to him, now. He was fine, more or less. And even if he wasn't, Mycroft had people monitoring him and reporting any troubling observations. He needn't concern himself. What was more, his relationship with his brother was now so strained that any encounters they did have the misfortune of inflicting upon one another left him with a sour taste in his mouth and stronger resolve to leave the annoying prick to his own devices, just as long as they didn't land him in a jail cell, or worse, a coffin.

London, January 29, 2010

It was evening when Mycroft got the call.

'He got ousted from another flat,' Anthea said.

'Lord,' Mycroft groaned. 'Didn't last two months, did he? What was it this time?'

'Exposed the landlady's affair.'

'Never learnt how to shut up about those.' He sighed. 'Let him sort it himself. Call me when he finds a new—'

'He already has done, sir. He's half moved in already.'

'Is that so? What's the address?'

'221B Baker Street.'

He huffed. It was a good location. Too good. 'He can't afford that.'

'The landlady is giving him good rate. Owes him a favour, apparently.'

'Her name?'

'Hudson.'

'Run a full background check on the woman, see if she was ever involved in anything criminal, and figure out how they're connected, what this favour is all about. That's quite a deal, if he can afford to live on Baker Street all by himself.'

'Not entirely by himself. He's already secured a flatmate to help with the rent.'

'Has he now?'

'Nearly, I should say. But I suspect it the man will agree. He seemed charmed in print, at least.'

'And who is the next sorry sod to get tangled up with my brother?'

'His name is John Watson.'

Mycroft exhaled slowly as he leant back in his chair, the thick file for Dr John H Watson still spread open on the desk in front of him.

Not Sherlock's usual, this one. He wondered whether Mr Deduction himself had any idea what he had stumbled upon. Likely not. He had discerned Watson's medical practice and military training at a glance (child's play), without giving the man a chance to divulge the information himself, and maybe he had even cottoned on to the psychosomatic limp as well (he fingered the report hacked from the therapist's computer—keeping electronic files, password protected or not, was really quite foolish). But there was no way Sherlock could know about the rest, not without access to the files the Big Boys kept.

He couldn't know that, like Sherlock himself, John Watson was on a government watch list, too.

So, his predictably unstable ex-drug addict of a brother, and an invalided, insubordinate ex-soldier, were sharing the same bit of rug. It seemed like a potentially volatile combination.

For the first time in many years, his suspicions had been pricked, and he had his concerns about Sherlock's newest flatmate. He needed more data. He needed to get the measure of the man, assess his threat level, and determine whether this little arrangement between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson would need to be . . . frustrated. He would have to handle this one himself.

Lord, how he hated field work.

London, January 30, 2010

The man in question came forward with a limp and a wry tongue. For having just been abducted, he seemed remarkably composed. With the air of one who had no intentions of complying with anything, however politely suggested, he declined the invitation to sit in the chair Mycroft had thoughtfully provided. He also refused to be intimidated, but in this Mycroft read not bravery but recklessness. But if he failed to impress Dr Watson with subtle intimidation and implied threats, he couldn't help but be impressed himself—impressed at how easily the man snubbed his trick bribe to spy on Sherlock, as though the money held no temptation for him whatsoever, even though his finances were in a miserable state (Mycroft had seen his pathetic bank account and knew the pittance that was his pension).

Loyalty, or integrity? Or was there really such a line between the two? The therapist had written that Dr Watson had trust issues, and reviewing his history, Mycroft was hardly surprised that such was the case. He was a man who did not make friends easily, and Sherlock was one who did not make friends at all. An interesting combination, to be sure. How had they stumbled across one another?

And yet, there they were, like two old war buddies, scoping out the scene of a serial killing. He knew Sherlock would be interested—he was always interested, and he had been following this case for months. But why was Watson there?

And therein lay Mycroft's concern. The others had been so easy to read, so easy to manipulate. John Watson was a question mark: he was not afraid of Mycroft, whereas all the others Mycroft had deigned to meet had practically pissed themselves in his presence; when Mycroft tried to provoke Watson by mentioning his left hand, he had halted his departure out of curiosity, not anger, despite the fire in his eyes; he had pointedly held his ground, making Mycroft (who was not accustomed to not having control over everyone in the room) cross the distance to him, and yet he didn't hesitate to respond to texted summons from a man he'd met only the day before; and though he shirked from being touched initially, he allowed Mycroft to prove a point by touching his perfectly steady hand, simply because he had wanted to know what was wrong with himself. Interesting.

He left Dr Watson to Anthea's care, knowing, even as he departed via a different town car, that he would take the necessary actions to drive Dr Watson away. A question mark, though intriguing, was an invitation for trouble, and he would not allow his brother to get tangled up with it. Two men on two separate watch lists treading the same rug? It wouldn't do. Getting rid of Dr Watson would be easy. Everyone had a pressure point. He just needed to discover it.

But then an unexpected thing happened. That very night in fact, mere hours after Mycroft's encounter with the curious army doctor, his mobile rang. It was Anthea.

'Roland-Kerr Further Education College,' she said.

'What about it?'

'That's where Sherlock is now. Someone just tried to kill him. Shall I bring the car?'

No one had ever made an attempt on Sherlock's life before, and Mycroft wasn't prepared to feel his heart racing as it did at the mere thought that such an attempt might have been successful. His first thought was of Watson. Damn him, he should have snuffed him when he had the chance! He had known (and felt deep in his gut—not that he gave heed to such feelings) that Watson was dangerous. During the car ride over, he carefully composed himself while Anthea briefed him on exactly what had transpired, everything from Sherlock being lured away by the serial killer to the business with poisonous pills to an unknown shooter who had, well, who had saved Sherlock's life.

Mycroft saw it at a glance, as they approached, the two of them together, shoulder to shoulder like . . . like old friends. Friends? It startled Mycroft, the concept, at least in connection to Sherlock. There was an unexpected expression of glee and unadulterated wonder on the face of his little brother, something he had not seen since they were children, something he hadn't realised he had missed so dearly until this moment. But it was directed at the man who strode beside him. Watson.

Watson had shot the cabbie. He saw it plain as day. Had it been recklessness and lack of conscience? Would he prove to be a peril to Sherlock, in the end, spurring the horse onward, down darker and more dangerous roads than those he had already chosen for himself? Or, contrarily, were his actions indicative of a high moral character and protective instincts? As it was, Sherlock's feet were already set to walk that treacherous road. Perhaps what he needed, then, was a protector. John Watson's companionship could prove to be . . . beneficial.

The smile on Sherlock's face vanished the instant he saw Mycroft, and by the time they had made curt introductions and exchanged the usual diatribes, Mycroft had come to a new decision. He would use this John Watson to keep a watchful eye on his brother, to keep him not only alive, but safe.

For the time being, he would simply upgrade their surveillance status: Grade 3, Active.

Undisclosed, Summer 2010

They handed him a note, a corner ripped from a larger sheet, inscribed with a dull pencil.

You and me, Mr Holmes. Just you and me.

'I'll talk to him,' he said.

It had been nine years. Nine years of searching, nine years of holding the file in suspension, and nine years during which Mycroft had speculated on the possibility of his having died in a drug den, leaving them all none the wiser. He still couldn't shake the feeling that James Moriarty had a little too much in common with a certain younger brother. But it was both illogical and wrong to superimpose the details of Sherlock's life onto this case.

Moriarty—as far as anyone had been able to discover—was not an addict. Not that sort, at least. Rather to the contrary, he was masterfully in control. He hadn't been ferreted out into the open. No, he had reappeared quite on his own, right at the time They were busy with the Greece bailout, the 771 project, and the Bruce-Partington Plans. He had returned, not out of interest of any of these pending disasters, but to dangle a carrot in front of Sherlock Holmes, and watch him dance.

Then, two explosions and four Semtex recoveries later, he disappeared again.

But they caught him, this time, not knowing, then, that he had had every intention of getting caught.

'Good afternoon, Mr Moriarty,' said Mycroft Holmes, closing the heavy, steel door behind him. His voice reverberated like tin in the hollow room. 'We've been looking for you for a long time. A long time indeed.'

James Moriarty sat, cuffed, on a metal chair on the opposite side of the table. Shoulders slumped and knees widespread, he glanced up from where his head was quirked at a low-hanging angle, and smiled. 'I've been looking for you, too.' His voice suddenly pitched into a tune: 'Found you!'

Mycroft sat and folded his hands together on the table. 'I understand you're not talking to my people.'

Moriarty threw his head back, rolled his eyes. 'Boring. They're so boring. Not like you. I bet you're more fun. I bet you have stories. I bet you have loads of good stories.'

'I'm no storyteller. I'm here to get information, Mr Moriarty, and until I get it, you're not going anywhere.'

'But that's not exactly true, is it? You're working on a clock. A countdown. Boom!' His feet lifted off the floor and slammed down again dramatically. Mycroft didn't so much as flinch. 'Can't charge me, can't hold me, and let's face it, Mr Holmes: you ain't got nothing on me. Clean hands, you see.' He spread his cuffed hands and cocked his head innocently with a closed-lipped, big-eyed smile. 'So I don't have to give you anything. I'll just bide my time and not say a word.'

'Oh, you'll talk.'

'Will I?'

'You and me, Mr Moriarty. Just the two of us. You want to talk.'

'Yes, yes, good, good. Because I have stories. See? Stories you want. And you have stories I want. So how about we make a game of it?'

'You do like games.'

'I adore them. When I have a worthy opponent, that is. You'll do for now.'

'So what's your game?'

'Eye for an eye. Tit for tat. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Capisce?'

Mycroft thought it about, thought it through. It took him one-and-a-half seconds. He would glean whatever insights he could into this madman's mind and machinations, even if it meant playing his games. 'Very well. I'll play. Why don't you start?'

Moriarty shook his head slowly. 'White goes first.'

Controlling his impatience, he asked, 'And just what story do you want me to tell?'

Moriarty suddenly sat straighter, drew his knees together, then crossed one leg over the other and folded his hands on the table, mimicking Mycroft's position like a mirror. 'Oh, where to begin? How about this: What was little Sherlock's favourite bedtime story?'

Mycroft blinked. His teeth clenched. Sherlock? This was, admittedly, not the direction he had expected this conversation to take, and it dredged up all the questions from six weeks before that had gone unanswered. Why had Moriarty targeted Sherlock with whom to play his little game with the pips in the first place? Sherlock was a nothing, a nobody, a play-acting detective with a silly little website and no money. How he had developed an ego the size of all London was anyone's guess. And why it had attracted the notice of a man like James Moriarty was even more perplexing, unsettling. And it didn't rest well with Mycroft.

Though his expression did not alter and his body remained still, Moriarty sensed the tendril of trepidation, and he smiled. 'Or did he not have bedtime stories? That might be a story in itself.'

'Le Morte d'Arthur,' said Mycroft tersely. Not wishing to elaborate in the slightest, he turned it back around. 'My turn. You're going to tell me where you've been for the last nine years.'

Moriarty grinned. 'Spinning webs, Mr Holmes. Spinning my pretty, pretty webs.'

London, June 2011

No one answered the bell, so it was Mrs Hudson who let him into the flat. For the first time since he had come to know her, she said nothing to him. She couldn't. She saw him upstairs, then excused herself, dabbing at her eyes, trying to keep herself together. Mycroft refused to be stirred and offered no consolation. This was hard enough as it was.

He stood silently for a moment, in the centre of the sitting room, looking round at the remnants of Sherlock's life: books, papers, experiments, laptops. Nothing had been touched. It hadn't been much more than a week now, but already the dust was beginning to accumulate in his absence.

'You didn't come.'

Mycroft turned and saw John standing in the kitchen, overnight bag grasped in one hand; the other was clenching and unclenching at his side.

To the funeral, John meant, but how could he know that Mycroft had made a promise to himself about funerals? He hadn't gone to his own mother's, even. Besides, he had already seen Sherlock in a coffin. Once in a lifetime was enough for such a sight. Steeling himself against the hatred he could feel emanating off of this grieving man, Mycroft shrugged and looked away. 'What good would it have done? The dead can't see. They don't hear.'

What few words that passed between them were harsh and unforgiving. They had been counting on one another to protect this man they both loved, and they both had failed him. There could be no forgiving that.

In the end, John told him to leave and then walked away, back through the kitchen, to the hall beyond. Mycroft waited until he heard a door close. Then he moved softly to the window. Against the wall, protected within its case, was the violin he had given his little brother for Christmas, so many years ago, when no one else had given him anything. He took it back.

London, 2011–2014

London had lost its glimmer, and Mycroft had lost his purpose. Everything he was, all he had ever striven to be, had always orbited Sherlock. He saw that now, more clearly than he ever had before. And in the end, it hadn't mattered. It hadn't been enough. Sherlock had died anyway. And though Mycroft did not believe in fate, he could see the long path of consequence and knew, now, hindsight always sharper than foresight, that Sherlock had been bound to his end from the start, as sure as landing after a fall. If Mycroft had done anything useful at all, it was, perhaps, to delay the impact. Perhaps he had protected him from the Big Boys Upstairs, perhaps, but he had been impotent against that madman Moriarty. Worse, he had fed the madness himself. He had fed his own little brother to the beast in exchange for a few useless hints to a larger scheme. Tit for tat, and Sherlock was dead.

But however illogical, however fuelled by the sentiment he had so long abhorred, Mycroft found it impossible to let Sherlock be dead. So he turned whatever energy and devotion he had left to protecting the closest thing to his brother still left in the world: John Watson.

London, October 27, 2014

'So he's alive.'

Mycroft cleared his throat and tilted his head up. 'Yes.'

He stood with his back to Them, hands folded behind him, staring out of the window. His reflection revealed nothing of the equal parts trembling joy and paralysing trepidation he felt every time he thought those words: he's alive. Though it had been mere days, he knew he would feel the shock of seeing Sherlock again in that hospital hallway echoing in his bones until the day he died himself.

'How are you feeling about that?'

This was the question he had prepared himself to answer, even though They hadn't asked him how he felt about his brother since the start, since long before he rose to prominence among Them, valued for his icy logic and unflinching resolve to ensure the safety of the nation by any means necessary, even at great personal sacrifice. Queen and Country, before all. Always.

They were asking, now, if anything had changed in that regard.

'Amazed,' he answered, which was true enough. He would admit to no other feeling.

'Yes, as are we. He fooled us all,' They said.

'For three years, we were deceived,' They said.

'One wonders how else he has deceived us,' They said.

'Or how he might again, in future.'

They were already thinking it. More evaluations. A new watch list. It was starting over. Mycroft's empty stomach clenched unpleasantly.

'One cannot help but wonder if he was ever what he once claimed to be. After all, given his intellectual profile, we had expected him to use his brilliance for something grander than detective work. It is possible that this charming hobby of his is just a front for more complex machinations. After all, it appears he did plot to take out James Moriarty, and with success.'

Mycroft turned and answered sharply. 'He did not kill Moriarty.'

And with those words, he made his first mistake since becoming one of Them. To speak with passion was to speak with tainted logic. It was evidence of thawing ice. He knew this because he knew exactly how They thought. Because at some point, before Sherlock's death, he had stopped thinking of Them as They but as We. He no longer thought that. And if They suspected it . . . He had to recalibrate, sharpen his flint and harden his steel. 'The man committed suicide,' he said levelly.

They regarded him calmly, calculating, and said, 'We did not say kill. There are other ways to drive men to destruction, as we know. We expect your brother might know them, too.'

Your brother. Something had shifted. Something was wrong. They had called him Mycroft's brother.

'We need to know,' They said, 'where he has been, what he has seen. Three years is a long while to play dead.'

'I will find out everything.'

'Yes. You will. Because, Mycroft.'

He felt his face go pale. In his entire history, the Big Boys Upstairs had never once used his given name.

'His return will draw the eyes of the largest crime syndicate on the planet to London. That's a threat, and we can't have it. It is the security of our country that concerns us most. You understand.'

Of course he did. As one of Them, he understood perfectly. Emergency Protocol 68.

London, November 2014

Moriarty had constructed a web. And along its many threads, he had stationed operatives—men and women, dancing on his string—to perform his work. So if something went wrong, anything, someone was set up to take the fall.

Mycroft needed a similar model, on a much smaller scale, to perform a different kind of work. A small operation, clandestine and inscrutable, subversive yet submissive, the parts of which only he could see, only he could direct. They would be the cogs in the wheel, and he would remain the iceman in the watchtower.

He began his work by choosing Greg Lestrade.

London, February 2015

Mycroft Holmes had never been more frightened. And when he became frightened, he got angry.

'Just what the hell were you thinking, Sherlock?' he said. He wanted to reach across the table where Sherlock sat in silver cuffs and ring his neck for all he was worth.

'I—'

'You weren't. And that's the problem. That's always been your problem. You're an emotional idiot, Sherlock, allowing yourself to be compromised like that.'

Trying to placate him, Lestrade said, 'I told you what Anderson said. Any man would be hard-pressed not to react like—'

'Sherlock isn't allowed to be any man,' Mycroft seethed. He glared at his idiot little brother, seeing the child who had frightened schoolteachers and goaded peers to violence and driven Mummy to madness because of his refusal to think. 'He's too deeply mired in greater things, so even his slighter actions have large consequences.'

He was letting his tongue get carried away with him, and he was saying things he should not have said. So when he turned away, it was to hide his face, because he worried Sherlock would see the fear in his eyes. As for himself, Sherlock presented a mask of stoicism, an impression of indifference belied only by his tongue as he gave directions for John's care while he was stuck in jail. So while he spoke and Lestrade made his promises, Mycroft quickly determined what needed to be done.

He dismissed Lestrade curtly, saying, 'I'd like a private word with my little brother,' and after the man was gone, he pulled back the chair opposite Sherlock and sat.

Then, he waited, until Sherlock at last lifted his weary, grey eyes to his.

'I'll say it one more time,' he said, barely managing to breathe normally. 'You need to leave England.'

Sherlock's eyebrows pinched in bewilderment. 'You're not serious.'

'I'm dead serious. I can help you start a new life, I can hide you indefinitely, no one would ever—'

'No.'

'Sherlock—'

'I've already told you, no. Why are we having this debate again? You know—you know, Mycroft—what they'll do if I disappear. They'll go after John again—'

'I'll send John with you, if I must.'

'—or Lestrade, or Molly, or god knows who. London is where they want me. They've as good as trapped me here. So London is where I'll stay.'

'Then you're damned no matter what you do.'

Sherlock shifted crossly in the chair; his cuffs rattled on the table. 'Are you finished? I have walls to stare at.'

'Sherlock. Listen to me very carefully. You really don't understand the precariousness of your position. You can't even begin to fathom the gravity of what you almost did. If you had caused that tuft of a copper more serious injury, that would it have been it. No mercy. They would have locked you away forever. Why? Because you scare Them. Once, They were afraid of who you would become. Now They fear who you are. Who you are is someone They don't understand and can't control. Who you are is the target of the most dangerous criminal organisation on the planet. Your very existence makes all of London a target, don't you see? Look at these men and women who have already died, while Moran has been playing his game with you. Look at all the suffering you drag in your wake. Even if you don't see it, They do. So They need to nullify you as a target. Are you hearing me? They want you gone, and They'll push you to criminality, if They must. They will fashion justifiable cause to get rid of you, once and for all. And They can do it, because They know your weak point. They know exactly what will incite you to madness. And They will exploit it.'

But no.

He didn't say that.

It was what he wanted to say, what he felt Sherlock deserved to know. But he couldn't say those things! He couldn't say all he really knew, and not only because of the oath he had made those many years ago when he had joined Them. No, it was because, if They ever found out he had revealed Them, he would be permanently removed, and then there would be no one, no one at all, in the Tower who knew how great the danger to Sherlock really was, and no one who was willing to stop it. Already he walked treacherous ground.

Instead, he said this:

'Sherlock. Listen to me very carefully.' He waited, again, until Sherlock had lifted his eyes. 'I spoke to John. I suggested that he leave. On his own.'

Sherlock's teeth suddenly set on edge. 'What the hell is wrong with you?'

Deduce it, Sherlock. I can't tell you, so deduce it.

'I told him you were toxic and he'd be better off moving in his own direction.'

'How dare—'

'He didn't listen. Do you know why?' Without giving Sherlock a chance to answer, he said, 'Because he believes himself to be the toxic one. And is he so wrong? He is the reason you fell.'

Sherlock's eyes burned, and his jaw was tight. He looked ready to throttle Mycroft. But that didn't stop Mycroft from going further.

'If not for your love for John Watson, Moriarty would have had no hold over you. You would have had no weakness for him to exploit. You wouldn't have had to spend years playing dead and pretending John meant nothing to you. You would have had no one to protect, and so no one to lie to. You and Moriarty would have been perfectly and evenly matched.'

'No. No, I'm not—'

'Shut up and listen to what I am telling you. Because there are those who don't learn how a bird flies by tearing its wings apart, Sherlock. They observe it in flight. And when they figure it out, they believe they know how all birds fly.'

At first, Sherlock looked furious, embarrassed. But then a new light in his eyes flashed. The cryptic metaphor had done its job. Good, little brother. Keep thinking. Let those wheels turn.

'Moriarty didn't have a John Watson. And he was one of the greatest dangers of our time. So. He needed to be eradicated. If he had not shot himself, he would have been eradicated. Understand?'

'Yes,' said Sherlock, softly, but the cogs were spinning rapidly.

'Him, and all birds of like feather.'

'Yes.'

'No matter the collateral damage.'

'Collateral . . .'

'Because collateral damage is justified. If one man perish to spare two, it is justified. And if one man perish to spare hundreds, even thousands, then it is morally right. Morality is mathematics. Tell me you understand.'

Sherlock swallowed and his eyes shone with fear. Good, thought Mycroft. He should be afraid.

Silence hung between them like the air ringing in the aftermath an explosion. It was discomfiting, the way it stung their bones but kept them paralysed, hearts burning in frozen caverns. And it was then that Mycroft almost said it. I'm sorry. Sorry that he hadn't destroyed either Moriarty or Irene Adler, when he had had the power. He almost confessed his sorrow that John was to Sherlock what Mycroft should have been, might have been, but now could never be. In that resonant quiet, he almost admitted that he was ready and willing to sell out his own country, for Sherlock's sake. When his lips parted, he almost said, 'I've never forgiven them, our parents. You deserved so much better than what they gave you.'

Instead, he pushed back the chair. It scraped noisily along the floor. 'I have people watching Baker Street. Try to sleep tonight. I'll see what I can do about getting someone to take off those cuffs.'

He would have done it himself, but he didn't have the key.