CHAPTER 21: NEVER LEAVE LOOSE ENDS

When the cab stops in front of the bank, Sherlock shoves a couple of banknotes in the cabbie's hand, hoping to put an end to his incessant complaints about "those bloody state visits" and "those damn political meetings that paralyse the streets of London".

Has he been blabbering and grumbling throughout the whole ride? Sherlock thinks, realising that he didn't even acknowledge his presence. He was too busy skirmishing with his brother on the phone to pay the slightest bit of attention to the world outside.

He crosses the street and checks out the entrance of the bank: the place is closed, deserted. However, the moment he raises his eyes to the camera positioned above the threshold, the sliding doors open swiftly. Someone was waiting for him. He walks warily across the place plunged into darkness and silence.

"I'm here," he announces as his voice echoes in the empty hall. "Isn't it what you wanted, having me here, inside this bank? Show yourself now."

Suddenly, a single lamp on the ceiling turns on, shining a beam of light on a muscly man standing at the far end of the room.

Sherlock squints his eyes at him, baffled. He doesn't know this person, or at least he doesn't recognise him. He was expecting someone slightly more memorable given the reference he made regarding a past encounter.

"Welcome, Mr Holmes. What a delight to finally see you."

"Delight isn't the term I'd use. Now tell me where Giulia is." Sherlock's voice is granitic.

The sweeping gesture of the man's left hand accompanies his words. "Right next to me."

At that moment, one more lamp switches on a few feet away from him, casting a pitiful light on Giulia tied to a chair. As soon as Sherlock glimpses at her, his ears get assaulted by an inexplicable hammering ringing. Is it really his heart that he hears pounding in his head?

He disregards all the faulty reactions of his body and springs forward.

"Giulia, are you hurt?"

"Stop right there, Holmes. Don't take another step. I'm not alone, and I'm armed," the man says, gesturing toward a tall guard next to him, right at the margin of the light cone. The guard's arm is now clearly visible: he is pointing a gun at the detective's head.

Sherlock stops in his tracks and shows his hands peacefully.

"Unlike you, apparently," the man adds with a sneering grin, getting closer to Giulia.

Sherlock studies his movements and clenches his fists, trying to regain his calm.

"Let her go. Whatever you want, this is between you and me."

"Indeed, but I still need her. She must stay, I insist." He smiles creepily, stepping next to her to caress her shoulder as she struggles against the restraints to elude his touch.

Sherlock's jaw tightens as he follows his moves. This man is enjoying himself. He is likely to be a psychopath and clearly has a well-designed plan. There are no other options but to play by his rules.

"Who are you?" He barks.

"I'm Kevin Rummer. Don't you remember me?" He fakes a hurtful look.

"Rummer," Sherlock lets the name slide on his tongue with a pensive expression. "I've already heard your name once, but I can't remember when, where, or on which occasion. I suppose you were quite inconsequential," he teases him.

"Forgive him, he's not very good with names," Giulia lampoons his friend just to let him know that she is okay—or at least strong enough to pretend to be okay.

"But I'm a very special person. I am a criminal, and he is the man who put me in jail ten years ago. Just for a little domestic tiff." A challenging flash sparkles in his eyes as he stares at Sherlock, who quickly processes that new information, trying to recover everything he knows about that man.

"Now I remember: you murdered your girlfriend and made it look like an accident. It seemed quite an ordinary case, but during verifications of your past, it was discovered that you were a former CIA agent who had disappeared after a terrible accident while on duty. At first, you were considered MIA with very thin chance of survival. After a while, though, everyone believed you had died on the field," he recounts.

"I'm impressed. You had researched me thoroughly."

"I'm just mentioning the records of the investigations, which didn't neglect to mention the suspicion that you might have gone off the grid willingly, after the accident. It was implied that you always had the tendency of going rogue." Sherlock dusts off his memories of that case.

"Those colleagues of mine, such goody-two-shoes always ready to judge me," Kevin complains, wrinkling his nose.

"You must have given them a terrible impression, then. You were suspected of fraud against the US federal government, as well as high treason, corruption, and conspiracy. And the funny thing is, of all the crimes you could have been charged with, you were only proven guilty of your girlfriend's murder," Sherlock snorts. Not his fault, though: the Pentagon refused to give him full access to the classified documents, so he could only stick to the case that Scotland Yard was fumbling around with, at the time.

"And yet you couldn't understand why I killed her," Kevin taunts him.

Sherlock raises a brow, taken aback by that useless trip down memory lane.

"Let me get this straight: did you come back and summon me here to dig up a cold case?"

He smirks. "No, Mr Holmes, I'm here to take care of unfinished business and give you all the answers."

"Not interested, thank you," Sherlock fakes indifference as if he was turning down a door-to-door salesman.

"Are you sure? Because I remember that something kept eluding you about my crime. You couldn't understand what my motive was, could you?"

Giulia tilts her head, studying her kidnapper. He is playing with Sherlock's pride to get him to accept his challenge. Smart move.

Sherlock groans, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of catching him out.

"It was described as a crime of passion. Allegedly, you found out that your girlfriend was having an affair. You got madly jealous and killed her."

"Yeah, this is exactly what the prosecution told during my trial, and everyone agreed with it, even my solicitor. But we both know it wasn't true. I would never commit a crime of passion," Kevin spits out that definition, almost disgusted.

"There's no such thing, anyway. Passion is not a killer instinct. Love can make people do silly things, but you don't kill someone out of love. Hate, anger, vengeance: those are more plausible reasons for a murderous rampage. Not to mention that you never loved your girlfriend; that was quite obvious," Sherlock points out.

"But if it was a false accusation, why didn't his solicitor try to beat the charges?" Giulia intervenes, striving to keep up with them.

Sherlock blinks repeatedly at her as if he was reminded just now of her presence and the threat against her life. He draws one quick conclusion.

"Because his real motive was way worse than a jealous rage, obviously."

"I was positive I had committed the perfect crime."

Holmes rolls his eyes at him. "That is utopia."

"It is, with you in the spotlight; you made it quite clear, ten years ago. Had it not been for you, I'd have walked away free. I could have got away with everything," he stresses the last word in a fit of nostalgia.

"No, you really couldn't. There were far too many clues in your house, even for Scotland Yard. Thinking it over, it wasn't perfect at all. It was a messy and clumsy crime. You rushed it: that's a rookie mistake for a CIA agent," Sherlock mocks him.

If he intended to belittle and irritate him, he gets an unexpected reaction: Kevin gives him a condescending look instead.

"Oh, Mr Holmes, but I wasn't talking about the murder of that dull woman."

Sherlock furrows his brow, puzzled. The killer savours his confusion for a few seconds and goes on, "It's no surprise that you still don't get it. You never solved my case, after all. But I'm feeling generous, and I want to give you a second chance."

"It's kind of you, but I must refuse. I'm not in the mood." Sherlock looks daggers at him. He is dying to prove his worth, but not at the expense of someone else's life. And yet, he feels uncomfortable: an old sense of defeat gets hold of him. Shreds of memories of that case haunt him like wakeful ghosts of an unburied past. He solved it and had him convicted, but the killer is right: he never really got to the bottom of the case, he never found all the answers. He won the game but didn't beat his adversary.

"Too bad. You're not really in the position to bargain, either. Besides, I thought you hated leaving loose ends. What a massive failure would it be if you weren't able to solve a case in front of such lovely audience?" He leers at Giulia with a predatory gaze.

"Now, shall we begin?"

Meanwhile, in a cab heading to St Barth's

John looks out the window as the taxi speeds along the streets of London. He has almost reached the hospital when he takes a glance at his watch and a sudden thought strikes him: Sherlock really underestimates Scotland Yard's resources. He always complains about the slowness of the officers, but this time they have been surprisingly fast in locating a missing person and rescuing her from her kidnapper. A bit too fast.

He feels an ominous tingling at his fingertips as he quickly phones Lestrade; a sense of foreboding constricting his chest.

As soon as the DI picks up, John doesn't even give him time to speak.

"Greg, how did you find out that Giulia was held hostage at that bank? I know you told Sherlock that you started a search as soon as I phoned you, but it took you less than ten minutes to call us back with all the information—" he is still speaking animatedly when the inspector interrupts him.

"What on Earth are you talking about? Do you know where Giulia is? Is she being held hostage?" Greg blurts out, confused.

"She was, that's what you said. And of course, I know where; you confirmed the address of the Italian bank at the corner of King William Street. You were the one who told Sherlock about the hostage situation and the shooting inside the bank," John sums up, getting more and more anxious as Lestrade proves to be completely in the dark.

"A shooting? Dear God, I didn't know anything about it. I never said such a thing," Lestrade almost shouts in the receiver. John can hear him in the background barking orders to his officers and gathering his squad.

Watson frowns, perplexed, and tightens his grip on the phone, making his knuckles turn white from the pressure.

"So, why did you phone Sherlock?"

"I never did. Your previous call was the first and last report I received. We've immediately started a search, of course, but I regret to say that we're getting nowhere. Did you say King William Street?" the D.I. insists, eager to extract from him as much information as possible.

He didn't phone Sherlock, John reflects as he realises what truly happened.

"Yeah, that's right. I gotta go." He hangs up. He takes his head in his hands, furious. That bastard lied just to get rid of me and go there alone. Oh, Sherlock, what have you done?

In the meantime, inside the bank

"You want to play? Very well, let's start from the beginning. Ten years ago, you killed your girlfriend and arranged everything to make it look like an accident. You created a solid alibi—or so you believed, but when I got to the scene, the clues were unmistakable," Sherlock patronises Kevin.

"But it wasn't until you saw me for the first time in the interrogation room that you felt that something was wrong. I could read the doubt and confusion in your eyes. So, tell me: what was so unsettling about me?" The kidnapper arches a brow at him, exhorting him to unearth everything that he stored away about that case.

At his words, Sherlock closes his eyes and enters his mind palace. He walks down a hallway and steps into a room where he finds himself face to face with a younger version of Kevin. These are his memories of that case.

He stares at the past version of the killer seated at the interrogation table, then talks as if he was in a trance.

"Your posture. You held yourself in an odd, lumbering way, hiding certain body parts and groaning at the slightest shift in your seat. Most logical assumption: you were covered in bruises, and the only way you could have been beaten up so badly was while fighting with your victim. The marks on your body were very unusual, though, as if they resulted from a peculiar combination of several martial arts and combat training."

The present Kevin—the one standing in the bank, smiles fondly at Sherlock's memories.

"You're finally reasoning. That girl was a fury; she hit me hard until the very end."

Sherlock comes back to reality and raises a brow.

"This doesn't come as a surprise. I perfectly remember the victim's toned and muscular body. I thought she could be some sort of gym rat, but that wasn't the case: no gym membership or badge in her wallet, no gym bag in the house, no sign of workout equipment anywhere," he lists methodically. "The question was: if she tried so hard to fight her boyfriend-assailant showing such a vast knowledge of martial arts, where did she learn those moves? Who taught, or better trained her?" He isn't addressing anyone specifically; his questions are for himself only.

Kevin nods. "Good, you're getting closer. So, my bruises made you suspicious, but I bet they weren't the only thing not adding up. Think about her, Mr Holmes, about that dull, insignificant girl," the killer encourages him, and the detective's mind travels again back in time.

Another door in his mind palace opens to reveal the crime scene that he examined ten years ago. He looks at the victim's body as if it was in front of him again at that very moment and speaks aloud, describing what he sees through the eyes of memory.

"Her clothes: manifestly shabby. Wait, too shabby. No one would make so many wrong choices at once. It was not by chance: it was intentional. But to what end?"

Sherlock squints his eyes and rubs his temples, deducing the corpse.

"She had fresh asphalt under her shoes, and so did you. Oddly enough, there were no road works near the house you shared."

"I followed her to another part of the city and found out that she was cheating on me," Kevin justifies himself.

"That's a lie. During the trial, you said you discovered she was cheating on you when you went through the texts on her phone that she had left at home. But here's another thing that doesn't quite make sense. No one who is having an affair would ever leave their phone at home," Sherlock objects.

"And yet you still can't understand why I killed her," Kevin mocks him.

Sherlock takes a deep breath and closes his eyes: he is on the crime scene once again.

"I remember one detail: her camera. She was passionate about photography, and the day she was murdered she went out for a walk and brought it with her. She had just come back home when you killed her. I found her camera in the bedroom."

"But?" Giulia intervenes. She is terrified but is intrigued, as well.

"But there weren't any photos on it. Nothing at all," Sherlock says, dusting off that specific detail from the recess of his memory.

"It makes no sense," she protests.

"He had already deleted them," Holmes concludes, cracking his eyes open.

Giulia turns her neck to scrutinise the killer standing to her right. "He? Why?"

Sherlock focuses on her question while the image of those traces of fresh asphalt under the victim's shoes flashes through his mind once more.

"Because it wasn't him that followed her; she followed him and took incriminating photos," he asserts, finally sorting some pieces of the puzzle.

"Incriminating? Why would she spy on her boyfriend?" Giulia asks, confused.

Spy. That verb echoes in Sherlock's head as the shabby corpse of the murdered girl appears again in his mind palace.

"Because that was her mission," he whispers, giving voice to a sudden epiphany.

He turns to Kevin and shoots him a challenging look.

"You were wrong: she wasn't dull at all. She dressed like the most insignificant girl in the world because she knew you were looking for a mediocre person to use as an anonymous, ordinary facade, while you were planning something terrible. But she wasn't ordinary. She was an agent, just like you."

Something is not quite right, though: if she was CIA like Kevin, he could have had access to her profile inside the agency and blown her cover. It didn't matter that everyone believed him dead: he must have kept some useful resources to check whether anyone in the agency ever decided to go after his ghost.

"The theory of soulmates, how romantic," Kevin jests, interrupting his string of thoughts.

"Your romance lacks a happy ending, though." Sherlock tries to make sense of all the facts and the timeline.

"She was tasked with keeping an eye out on your every move and collected enough evidence to lock you up for the rest of your days. But you found out the truth, you fought fiercely, and you killed her right when she discovered what your plan was."

"Which in fact was—?" The killer questions him expectantly.

At that instant, every sentence and every event of that day cross Sherlock's mind.

If the victim was an agent but not the CIA, she must have been with the British Secret Service, then. But the British Secret Service only means... Mycroft. Why did his brother call him earlier? He said that he had some suspicions: what suspicions, about who or what? Mycroft is not a paranoid person; it must be a serious matter.

Extremely serious, indeed: he said that he didn't have any single agent to send to rescue Giulia. Where does he need all his agents and why?

All these questions are storming in his brain when suddenly shreds of half-sentences resonate inside his skull. The cabbie who drove him to the bank had tried to make small talk, complaining about the traffic caused by some State visits and political meetings. And there's only one place where a foreign head of government would go for a meeting in Britain.

Sherlock freezes as every single piece falls into place, and the solution slips from his lips, "An attack at the Parliament."