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"You're getting fat again," Sherlock said without looking up from his microscope. It was childish, of course, but more importantly Sherlock hadn't been expecting him because he hadn't fished out his violin and started playing funeral dirges, which was his most recent passive-aggressive sulk in the face of Mycroft's visits.
Interesting that he was so sloppy.
"Sherlock, really," Mycroft murmured, pretending to be very slightly self-conscious but trying to hide it. He watched the back of his brother's head as Sherlock made a point of staring at his blood samples or semen samples or whatever he'd felt moved to pour over this time; it was flattened at the back, and as The World's Only Consulting Detective (and didn't he just love to blow his own trumpet, typical younger child) rarely slept voluntarily it suggested he had been bored for long enough to have slumped into his habitual sulk.
And if he was bored, then there was no point in the microscope, and it was only another of Sherlock's petty attempts at irritating him without actually doing anything so obstructive as making a real nuisance of himself.
"Really," said Sherlock, staring at the empty petri dish with dogged determination so typical of him, "the third stair has gone up four semitones from the last time you very deliberately squeaked it on your way in."
Sherlock ostentatiously refocused the microscope and said as if it had only just occurred to him:
"What exactly are you expecting to irrupt that you think it's worth giving me a warning that you're here?"
"You have shot at me before," Mycroft reminded him, examining the flattened patch of hair. Mummy would probably have required him to flatten the rest of it, but neither of the Holmes boys were especially prone to unthinking obedience.
"I was nine ," Sherlock said dismissively
"Ah yes, and of course it would be foolish of me to hold a grudge. Especially for that long," Mycroft said in his silkiest voice.
"I'm not doing it," Sherlock muttered. "it's boring, and you have your own army, so you can go, now, please."
"You're bored," Mycroft said with a smile he usually reserved for new junior ministers who thought they outranked him. "And I hardly think dinner with Mummy would cut into your punishing regime of shooting the plaster and snapping at your boyfriend."
"I'm not hungry."
"Dear me, do I have to have the police raid your flat again?" Mycroft asked, leaning carefully against the fridge. Sherlock's flat, while disgusting and poky and apparently furnished by Sherlock's disturbed superego, was a perfectly excellent place in which to adhere to his diet, as his dear baby brother very rarely had any food in and the kind of things John ate weren't palatable to sophisticated human beings.
"They won't find anything," Sherlock muttered, his face apparently glued to the eyepiece of his microscope.
"They will if I tell them to," Mycroft said with the same smile as before. He caressed the head of his umbrella thoughtfully.
"I'm not coming," Sherlock said in what sounded very much like a petulant whine - it was a familiar sound - and Mycroft watched him fidget the petri dish onto the table with a very slight set of resignation in his shoulders.
"Your decision entirely, of course, but you don't normally like to upset your mother," Mycroft said sadly, inspecting his manicure. There was no need - it had been done in the morning and was without a blemish - but the gesture, perfunctory as it was, was part of the dance.
“Why does she want to see us?” Sherlock asked at last, making no move to tidy up or turn anything off (typical of him) but instead stumbling sullenly to his feet and reaching for a coat that wasn’t there. “JOHN, WHERE DID YOU PUT MY –“
“He’s not here,” Mycroft murmured. “But your coat is.” He gestured with his eyes only to the back of the door.
“You’re avoiding the question. It’s not her birthday, why does she want to see us?” Sherlock sighed, pulling on his coat with his usual indecent haste and lack of care for his belongings. “You’ve brought your umbrella and it isn’t raining so you’re obviously nervous about it. You need something to lean on.”
“You’re only asking to be a nuisance,” Mycroft said in his most honeyed and spiteful tones, stepping aside to let Sherlock go first; it had been decades since either of them had been quite petty enough to trip the other downstairs, but he had a long memory and a scar on his left kneecap to remind him of why it was better to let his little brother go first. “I’m sure you’ll work it out.”
He stepped over the squeaking step with great deliberation and kept a healthy distance on the way down the stairs.
“You’re not dusty except for the very bottoms of your trouser cuffs, which suggests you haven’t walked far, and have in typical fashion probably had someone drive you to my flat; you don’t have your coat with you which means you’ve left it in the car and they’re waiting outside, where you intend to have us driven back to the house – that normally takes about three or four hours at most so it’s going to be an early dinner, you don’t like hanging around in Watchet any more than anyone else does…” Sherlock rather obligingly, in Mycroft’s view, kept up a steady stream of obvious and showy deductions as he stamped down the stairs, pulling his coat up around his ears and his shoulders up with it.
Mycroft was quite certain he was in possession of the bigger picture already, but if there was anything outside of challenges, being right, and talking to dead things that Sherlock truly derived any enjoyment from (as opposed to managing to tolerate it without insulting someone), it was labouring a point in order to get him his brother’s nose. And also, Mycroft acknowledged, playing things deliberately out of tune, refusing to put his clothes on, and leaving experiments in places they shouldn’t be, in order to get up his brother’s nose. Mycroft had a long and successful career in very clearly not being annoyed by his deeply aggravating behaviours, and Sherlock had a long and almost as successful vocation in stepping up his irritations in an arms race of petty grudge-holding.
“… and she never eats before at least nine unless she’s been to hospital,” Sherlock concluded, whipping the front door open with a dramatic motion. “Which means,” he paused on the step, “she thinks she’s dying. Again.”
“Or she is actually dying this time,” Mycroft suggested, with a tight grimace. Arnold was reading the Express in the driver’s seat, and a traffic warden was hovering uncertainly by the car, clearly determined to hand out a ticket and just as clearly unnerved by the spectacle of a very armed man in the driver’s seat.
“She’s been dying for the last thirty years,” Sherlock said with a dismissively sigh.
The traffic warden raised his hand to knock on the window beside Arnold’s face, and Arnold lowered his paper enough to mouth, Piss off, without closing the pages.
“She’s going to die eventually,” Mycroft said, stepping around his brother and walking as briskly as was dignified to the rear of the car. “Everyone does. Why not now?”
Sherlock ignored him and slid across the black leather seats without looking him in the eye. Mycroft, with a sour recollection of childhood car trips belching in the back of his throat without nostalgia, closed the car door behind him and gave Arnold the nod in the mirror.
“Brush your hair,” he said at last, while Sherlock stared at the passing shops fading into the undirected chaos of the crossroads.
“And that’ll stop her dying, will it,” Sherlock sneered, apparently fascinated by the tourists; Mycroft somewhat doubted that this was actually the case.
“I was under the impression that you didn’t mind,” he pointed out.
“I don’t.”
“Good,” Mycroft said, taking a comb from his breast pocket and laying it on the empty seat between them with a precise, soft clip of plastic on leather. “Because if I thought you’d developed some sort of familial sentiment I would have Arnold take a sample for DNA testing.” He took his phone from his hip pocket. “Comb your hair.”
“Suppose she is dying,” Sherlock said after another long pause, in which the car failed to make any headway against the traffic beyond the junction at all. “Why would she want to see us? This doesn’t make any sense.”
Mycroft scrolled idly through his text messages, leaving the unspoken ‘I don’t know’ to hang in the air between them and leave his upper hand unassailed. His text messages were predominantly of no interest, but the game of ‘I’m not looking at you’ that he understood from observation to be a popular one among cat owners as well as Holmes siblings demanded that he give his attention to something other than Sherlock’s refusal to comb his hair or the infuriating air of mystery surrounding the summons.
“Mummy has many great qualities,” Mycroft acknowledged after a long enough silence had passed between them – speaking of a woman who had spent most of their lives in bed, picking at their failings, and refusing to speak to, let alone touch either of her children for as long as Mycroft had ever been able to remember – as Arnold nipped between two accelerating vans as if he was flicking the last of the shaving foam from his face, “making sense has not been among them for some time.”
“She doesn’t want to talk about her will,” Sherlock said.
“I know,” Mycroft said irritably, pretending a renewed interest in the contents of his phone. “Bailhache has been reporting back on the matter for the last eight years and thus far she is entirely content to leave everything to chance.”
“Or Bailhache is lying to you,” Sherlock muttered, as the Marlybone flyover crept under them.
“Not if he values his practice and continued liberty.” Mycroft thumbed his way surreptitiously from his inbox to the stop-watch function and began keeping count of how long, precisely, it would take his brilliantly obnoxious little brother to complain of being bored.
The afternoon traffic roared and whizzed around them, and as Mycroft watched the red numerals on the app ascend a millisecond at a time, he noted Arnold nudging the car gently above the speed limit in some form of masculinity challenge to the soft-topped gold Audi in the fast lane. He left the impropriety unmentioned and let Arnold continuing affirming his penis size with the accelerator. It was unlikely that Sherlock would complain, typically viewing the laws of the road in the same way that Mycroft did, and was hardly as though they’d be arrested.
“This is boring,” Sherlock grumbled, peering out of the window.
“45 seconds,” Mycroft said, turning off the stopwatch app and smiling without any of his teeth. He’d had them whitened repeatedly until his dentist pointed out that they were going to crumble if he continued weakening the enamel, and offered to coat them instead. The result was, in Mycroft’s opinion, unsatisfactory (although it was the considered opinion of all those around him who were neither dentists nor his brother that it was completely unnoticeable). “I should commend you on your self-restraint.”
Silence settled over the interior of the car like a deadening blanket of snow, and Mycroft watched the inhabitants as Sherlock stubbornly watched the passing cars. Arnold was uncomfortable, of course; he preferred to drive with the radio on, because it reminded him of Iraq and if there was one thing that could be said for Arnold outside of his commendable and so far unflinching discretion, it was that he had an unnaturally sentimental attachment to the period of his life when he’d been legally required to shoot civilians. Mycroft, however, hated the radio, and in his experience the only music Sherlock liked was either performed by him or in the Royal Opera House.
“You needn’t worry about John,” Mycroft said with another calculatedly wide but tooth-hiding smile.
“I wasn’t.”
“Oh you were, don’t be ridiculous. The only real friend you’ve succeeded in making in your whole life? I imagine you barely stop worrying about him.” Mycroft checked the time, and slid his phone back into his pocket, leaving his hands folded in his lap as if they were at dinner already. “I imagine it makes a circuit of your head every thirty seconds: what will I do if he dies?”
“Your imagination is exceptionally vivid and entirely inaccurate,” Sherlock informed the car window as a white Ford Focus zipped past them, breaking the speed limit with abandon. He added almost under his breath, “You’ve told him, I suppose.”
“It would have been a shame to worry him,” Mycroft said with a shake of his head that he didn’t even try to make seem sincere.
“What did you ask him to take out of my room this time?” Sherlock asked. “Did you tell him it was for the good of the nation again or has he stopped swallowing that one in your little tête-à-têtes?”
“Do I detect a note of jealousy?” Mycroft murmured.
“You may imagine one,” Sherlock snapped. “What have you got him stealing from me now?”
Mycroft kept his smile stretched across his face and tried not to allow himself a single thought about all the wrinkles it was causing. “Now what would you have tucked away in your squalid little masionette that I would want to steal, Sherlock?”
Sherlock didn’t rise to it – he rarely did – but Mycroft could see the retort simmering in his abrupt twist of the lips and he dogged determination with which he applied his gaze to the endlessly-rushing asphalt.
“No,” Mycroft continued, as if he’d answered. “I left your … flatmate … no instructions at all. Well, I might have suggested that he tidy up a bit in there, but other than that and a perfunctory scan for the more detailed evidence notes for that unfortunate young PERL coder’s death –“
“The one John insists on referring to as the ‘Geek Interpreter’?” Sherlock said at last. “He’s not going to find anything, I didn’t write them down.”
“It was only a secondary measure.” Mycroft winched down his smile very slowly, in case it was needed again. “And you’re here, so you might as well.”
“Why would I bother telling you anything,” Sherlock said, maintaining his well-practiced ‘I am not going to look at you’ posture with the effortless ease of a life-long champion.
“Because,” Mycroft said, ignoring the fact that it was clearly a rhetorical question, and prodded the plastic comb gently toward Sherlock with the very tip of his finger, “you want someone to show off to; your blog readers are morons, and while John is effusive in his admiration and an excellent pet for you – don’t interrupt – you need someone on your own level to pat you on the head occasionally.”
“Well when I meet someone like that I’ll be sure to let them in on the details,” Sherlock said, sparing at last a brief glance in his brother’s direction. “Stop pushing that at me.”
“Try me,” Mycroft said without a trace of the insincere smile. “And comb your hair while you’re trying.”
“What for?”
“So that Mummy doesn’t have quite so much to criticise when we get there,” Mycroft sighed, giving Sherlock the full force of the ‘I am only doing this for your own good’ face; it worked on generals, ministers, prime ministers, and presidents, but he couldn’t pull a single episode from his memory when it had worked on the silly spoilt little boy with the unruly haircut.
“I’m sure she’ll be much more interested in how fat you’re getting,” Sherlock muttered, now fixated on the comb. Mycroft was quite sure he determining whether it was new (it was) and if Mycroft had done anything to it (which was pointless; Mycroft had stopped dropping things in animal faeces before letting Sherlock have them even before they left Somerset). It was a step closer to winning the fight; he might not ever actually concede it, but he would absent-mindedly swipe the comb through his hair on arrival.
Mycroft patted his stomach theatrically and said, “One of us is doing what she wanted. Greatest consulting detective. Really. It’s not even a real job.”
He watched the absence of conflict on his brother’s face, but imagined it within his oddly-shaped skull. There were far too many possible return shots from that starting point for him to readily select the most hurtful one, and Sherlock was far better at accidental savagery than calculated viciousness when there was no puzzle involved. With anyone else Mycroft might have steered them toward the response he wanted to use, but with his brother it was usually best to confound him with choices.
Sherlock didn’t deign to answer this admittedly childish jibe, and only muttered something inconclusive about heart failure and body mass index. When he had finished, and turned back to the window with an expression redolent of having scented sewage in soup, Mycroft reached for the packages on the front passenger seat, and returned to a more comfortable position with a packet of corner shop fairy cakes (12) crinkling and crackling in their cellophane wrapping on his thighs.
“Cake?”
“I’m not hungry.”
Mycroft wasn’t hungry either, and the cakes were pointedly unappetising: plain yellow hillocks without icing or flavour, designed for further adulteration in the home, although half a glace cherry had somehow sneaked into the packaging and lay loose and forlorn half on and half off the lip of one of the cakes. He reached into the backseat pocket of the seat in front and extracted his nail scissors, snipping at the cellophane. Hunger had no relationship to when and what Mycroft ate.
“What happened to your diet?” Sherlock added, without looking around, as Mycroft extracted the besmirched fairy cake and flicked the clinging cherry back into the packaging with a sniff.
What had happened to his diet was that Mummy had issued her summons a month ago, and Mycroft knew very well that giving Sherlock any warning about the appointment would just lead to him finding a way of not being available at the time, and what had happened to his diet was that Mummy would be more interested in his minutely expanded waistline than in what either of her sons had been doing, and whether Sherlock had actually been chemically castrated or if he was intending to get married like his brother had, or what the hell he thought he was doing with his life, and what had happened to his diet was that it was on temporary hiatus.
“Are you sure you don’t want some?” Mycroft asked around a mouthful of dry, tasteless yellow confection, handkerchief in hand, briefly revelling in being able to speak with his mouth full.
“I’m not hungry,” Sherlock snapped.
“Of course,” Mycroft said, wiping the crumbs from the corner of his lips with the folded tip of his handkerchief. “I think I will have your flat raided while we’re in Watchet. It’s good practice for them.”
“I’m still not hungry.”
“I’m sure Mummy will accept that explanation without any further question,” Mycroft said serenely, removing a second cake. He wanted it even less than the first cake.
“I’m sure she’ll be adequately distracted by the sight of your distended abdomen,” Sherlock said, radiating revulsion. John had said he could be coaxed into eating about once every three to four days, which seemed about normal for him, and as his nasal skin seemed a healthy hue it was a good bet that he’d returned to Cole for the cocaine suppositories.
Attempts to bribe Cole into providing Sherlock with placebos had come to a disdainful end when Sherlock sent him an angry text at four in the morning explaining in no uncertain terms that he was not stupid and that he had a bloody degree in chemistry and he knew the difference between sugar suppositories and cocaine ones and that Mycroft could bloody well mind his own business.
“Where did you leave them this time, the fridge or the toilet cistern?” Mycroft asked, removing the brittle paper cup from the bottom of the cake with difficulty. A flake of toxic-yellow confection came away and landed on the top of the cellophane.
“The cistern is the first place any self-respecting policeman would look,” Sherlock sniffed. “If they employ any self-respecting policemen, which I doubt, they’re not going to find anything in there.”
“Well,” Mycroft said, regarding the cake without an iota of enthusiasm. “You won’t leave them in the butter dish, the loose plank under John’s bed, or inside the sofa cushions again this time, so I can only assume you have them in your left hip pocket. Wrapped up in a glove. Really, that’s just asking for sniffer dogs.”
“It would be if I was stupid enough not to soak the glove in aniseed oil,” Sherlock said, his attention once more supposedly directed along with his gaze out of the window, although his near shoulder was still angled toward Mycroft.
Mycroft ate the cake slowly. It had the consistency of insulating foam and the taste of sawdust, and were he not eminently practiced in the art of shoving unpalatable foodstuffs into his oesophagus without breaking his expression of polite contentment – and also a former boarder in one of the nation’s illustrious public schools, where food typically resembled a form of punishment – he might have felt sick. As it was he gamely swallowed the barely-food and examined his teeth with his tongue for hangers-on.
Arnold slammed on the brakes as an articulated lorry pulled into the middle lane without warning, and Mycroft caught the cakes before they had a chance to slide off his lap and cause a mess; the comb slid to the edge of the centre seat but did not overbalance, and Sherlock jerked his head back from the window just in time to prevent him from slapping his forehead against it.
“For Christ’s sake,” Sherlock said, while Arnold said something a lot more profanity-laden about the driving abilities of artig-drivers.
“Leave the horn alone,” said Mycroft with borrowed serenity. “I’m sure Sherlock has their numberplate by now.” He took the pill box – plain, plastic, opaque, a recent purchase from one of the high-street shops, he’d been thoroughly specific about it – from his jacket pocket and laid it on the middle seat beside the plastic comb. The central seat, he thought without much humour, looked rather like the contents of a neurotic’s handbag.
“I’m not taking that,” Sherlock said, without touching the pillbox.
“You’re bored, and irritating. Go to sleep.”
“Sleep is also boring.”
“Less boring than staring out of the window for three hours,” Mycroft suggested. There was a moderately good chance that Sherlock would be a little more pliant about sharing information while dozing off, although not so good a chance that he intended to leave this his primary route to enlightenment. “It’s just Zimovane. A very modest little non-benzodiazepine hypnotic, hardly anything to be concerned about.”
“I’m not concerned,” Sherlock said, sweeping up the pill box and squeezing it open in one gesture. He had a pianist’s hands, Mycroft’s dear wife had often remarked, and she seemed quite disappointed to discover he was a violinist. Not as disappointed as she’d been when it transpired that her dear husband had been quite capable but entirely unwilling when it came to music. “(RS)-6-(5-chloropyridin-2-yl)-7-oxo-6,7-dihydro-5H-pyrrolo[3,4-b]pyrazin-5-yl 4-methylpiperazine-1-carboxylate,” Sherlock added, holding up the pill.
“We’re both well aware of your compendious recall of compounds,” Mycroft said with a smile which he knew always made him look as if he was holding back vomit. It was reserved for his in-laws most often.
“This has a six-hour half-life,” Sherlock said, holding the pill up between thumb and forefinger as if both digits made the tip of tweezers or tongs. He barely seemed attached to them. “The journey takes three hours.”
“Then take half,” Mycroft said with exasperated patience. He knew perfectly well how long it took to wear off; did his brother really think he’d never had to put security guards, secretaries, or ministers to unexpected mid-afternoon dozes before?
“That’s not how it works,” Sherlock snapped, closing and pocketing the pill box with his other hand. For a man professing to be interested in the upholding of the law, Mycroft’s little brother had a definite flare for petty criminality. Well, pettiness in all fields.
“I would have thought a little sedation would have rendered the visit more palatable to all involved,” Mycroft said with, for once, unadulterated honesty. Of course the ideal circumstance for a potential reunion of his immediate family would have involved Mummy in one of her chemical comas and Sherlock either asleep or similarly dosed, but one could hardly have everything. He watched Sherlock toy with the single pill, examining it with his fingertips under the guise of fiddling with it.
“Take it yourself, then,” Sherlock suggested, making no move to pass it to him.
“And I’m sure you can be relied upon to behave in a responsible manner and conduct family affairs with grace and aplomb and not have the car turned around and disappear back into your foetid little flat like a rat going to ground,” Mycroft murmured. “But on the basis of previous experience I would say that was highly unlikely.” He took another of the sickly yellow fairy cakes from the cellophane wrapping, and subjected it to a lacklustre examination. The light outside the car was the petulant grey of an incoming rainstorm, and in the darkening interior the cake looked almost malevolent. “In fact Bayesian inference would suggest it was bordering on the impossible.”
“If I take this,” Sherlock informed the pill, ignoring Mycroft’s face entirely, “I will stop having to listen to you pretending you know anything about probability mathematics.”
Mycroft refrained from making any protest regarding just how much understanding of probability was vital for a job like his and how firmly it underpinned the majority of his decision-making, especially when it came to funding and defence. He only smiled a smile as sickly as the cake in his hand, and said, “Precisely.”
He laid the cake on the centre seat, on the exact spot which had previously held the pill box, and sat back with his hands folded in his lap once more, as if they were both back in the village primary school and Mycroft was affecting not to have heard of the boy a few years below who shared his surname, while Sherlock was giving one of his loud and unwanted lectures about bacterial colonies to everyone else in 2B.
Sherlock said, “She’ll want to know why I’m drooling and insensible.”
“She won’t notice any difference.”
Sherlock scowled at him, placed the pill on his tongue, and pocketed the comb as casually as if he’d intended to take it the entire time. He swallowed: Sherlock had a far greater ease in taking medication than Mycroft had, but then he supposed that until age caught up with him a little and doctors started making requests, Sherlock had significantly more experience in the swallowing of pills. In both ends.
“And now,” Mycroft said, making a point of taking out his phone and checking the time again, “I should have about half an hour before you stop being so rigidly conscious. Anything you’d like to talk about?”
“I’m not telling you about the dead coder,” Sherlock said waspishly, settling back on the seat leather. Even in supposed relaxation he still contrived to look as if he’d been carved out of a bad-tempered piece of wood – a description initially offered by Mrs Holmes, but one which Mycroft was happy to adopt. He himself sat up straighter at the memory of Mummy’s voice, before she could get to the part of his recollection when she told him to. “Work it out for yourself.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t spent my life’s work on memorising the precise consistency of carpet fluff under different species of duress,” Mycroft admitted, with a sarcastic, tight-lipped smile. “And I must defer to your expertise in this field. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t need you to tell me I know more than you, I know I know more than you,” Sherlock muttered, drawing his coat around himself like some form of woollen armour, and sinking his chin into the collar.
“Of course you don’t need me to,” Mycroft agreed, lacing his fingers together. They felt cold to each other’s touch. “But you want me to.”
It was a dangerous inference. ’Want’ was a verboten notion in Wyndham House: every thought, word, and deed the product of ‘because it is right’ or ‘because Mummy said so’, and on rare occasion ‘because it is necessary’. ‘I want to’, for example, might have led Mycroft somewhere other than marriage and the service of his country, and God alone knew where it would have taken Sherlock. Mycroft gave his brother a brief, appraising look; prison, probably. Or where Jim Moriarty stood now.
He took his gloves from his coat pocket, and pulled them on slowly. The interior temperature of the car, according to the dashboard thermometer, was twenty-two degrees, as it always was; there was no call for Sherlock’s indignant coat-wrapping, nor for Mycroft’s freshly-entombed fingers. He scarcely needed imagine what a psychologist might make of it all.
“Nothing I want has anything to do with you,” Sherlock said into the collar of his coat.
“Quite,” Mycroft said, setting a countdown on his phone. The half-hour interval wasn’t entirely precise - chemical intervention so rarely was – but the ticking red numbers provided at least an outline of where in the road to unconsciousness Sherlock’s mind lay, much like the animated data map on a different app told him how far away from Watchet they were.
“It’s pathetically simple,” Sherlock added, most of his scorn lost in the inside of his coat collar.
“Undoubtedly,” Mycroft said, watching the red numbers change.
“You have the coroner’s report,” Sherlock said stiffly, reaching into his coat pocket.
“Sulphur inhalation,” Mycroft agreed, as the red numbers counted down.
“Work it out for yourself,” Sherlock said. He fiddled with his own phone with long, brisk fingers, and Mycroft could not help thinking that had mobile phones been readily available at this level of technological capability when they were children their car journeys would have been infinitely less fraught. That said, they might have required someone else to connect to by phone, and that was no more likely to happen with an iPhone than it was with only headed letter paper.
“If you insist,” Mycroft sighed.
His phone bleeped.
He thumbed across to the SMS inbox. There, addressed to ‘John Watson’, was Sherlock’s message, ‘Temporarily kidnapped and drugged by brother. Lose the GI notes. Permanently. SH.’
Mycroft didn’t need to look up from his phone to know that Sherlock was glaring at him; his brother was quite intelligent enough to know that an incoming text message immediately after he’d sent one wasn’t any sort of coincidence. At least, not in Mycroft’s car.
“We use this car for driving the more recalcitrant of our overseas guests,” Mycroft said happily, putting his phone away and giving Sherlock’s icy rage a polite smirk. “We let them keep their phones.”
“It’s under the middle seat,” Sherlock muttered, clearly extremely angry with himself for not realising.
“I’m astonished that you missed it,” Mycroft admitted. “A lot on your mind?”
“More than you will ever know,” Sherlock said under his breath. Mycroft doubted this somewhat, but there was little point in expressing it; they’d had virtually the same conversation so many times now that he’d assigned it an alphanumeric code, SIB205, and only mentally ran through the usual exchange of vitriol before moving onto whichever avenue of conversation logically presented itself in the aftermath.
For the next forty miles, Mycroft busied himself sending out instructions to Anthea and her less capable compatriots, clearing his inboxes, and redirecting three calls to a recorded line; all the while he listened to Sherlock’s infuriated breathing become regular, and relaxed. As the car passed the turning for Maidenhead, he made a quick check and confirmed that Sherlock had indeed shut both his eyes, and was in fact dribbling a little into his coat.
An insignificant little holiday town on what the West Country tourism board liked to call the “Somerset Riveria” for reasons unrelated to reality, Watchet was the kind of place that visitors and holiday programs referred to as “picturesque” because they didn’t have to live in the stultifying dullness all year round. Mycroft watched the low buildings and narrow streets creep by the window of the car and maintained a severe distance between the architecture slipping slowly past and the unnecessarily pin-sharp memories of childhood. He’d noticed that other people tended to acquire a softening filter over their recollections prior to a certain age, but it seemed to go hand-in-hand with an overall fuzzy-headedness and he didn’t envy it at all.
They bypassed the marina entirely, but he still remembered: the boy who drowned (piquing Sherlock’s interest, if he remembered correctly; and he always did), and Michael Fielding, who got sent to a school for ill-behaved children and was never heard from again (Mummy had threatened, after that, that if they were not exemplars in every field they would be joining him).
Gulls circled overhead, and Mycroft’s phone dropped to one feebly wavering bar of reception.
Wyndham House slogged ever-closer.
“Wake up,” Mycroft instructed the film of rain speckles on the window. “I can hear your breathing, you might as well open your eyes.”
He watched the reflection in the window glass as Sherlock struggled to open and keep open his eyes, and pushed leaden limbs about feebly, trying to sit up straight. An entire imagined conversation passed between them, filled with recrimination and accusation, but when he turn from the window for a better look Sherlock only fixed him with bleary eyes: a sea of discontent muffled by somnolence and the strong likelihood that if he stopped fighting the effects of the pill he would be back asleep in seconds.
“We’re almost there,” Mycroft said, fully aware that this was unnecessary. If he knew his little brother – and for his pains, he certainly did – Sherlock had been monitoring the bumps and turns in the road as he dozed, keeping himself in the picture.
After an involved struggle with uncooperative muscles, Sherlock snapped, “I KNOW,” with rather less force than he probably intended.
Arnold brought the car into the courtyard at the back of the house at a speed that disregarded the large black and yellow sign reading “5 miles per hour” by some considerable amount, and brought it to an immaculate halt that pranged chunks of gravel at the carefully-tended flowerbeds.
“Stay in the car,” said Mycroft to Arnold, opening his door. One of the few pleasant things about Sherlock – it was a very short list, in his opinion, if ‘pleasant’ were indeed the word to use at all – was that he was unlikely to object to what other, more sociable people might deem unnecessary rudeness in treating Arnold as an inferior rather than pretending that he would be in any way welcome inside the house.
After a rather amusing moment’s striving like an encephalitis-ridden calf to find his feet, the door handle, and the ground, Sherlock followed. Mycroft thought he himself did an excellent job of refraining from any excessive giggling, although he was moved to cover his teeth with a gloved hand as they made for the door and Sherlock’s stumbling footsteps almost sent him flying.
The door must have been painted in the intervening years since Mycroft’s last visit, but it seemed to have been painted the same colour, in the terrible continuity of the back door from his earliest memories down through to this moment.
“Evening, Mummy,” Mycroft called, unlocking the door and ignoring Sherlock’s stony glare boring into the back of his head.
“You’re late,” Mrs Holmes’s voice rang through the ground floor of the house and startled him; she was a fixture of upstairs still in his mind, and although he’d overseen the installation of the stairlift himself she sounded out of place.
“Some lorry-drivers were apparently in possession of a different copy of the Highway Code to the rest of us,” Mycroft said, trying to locate her by the echoes, like a bat. She wouldn’t be in the living room. She never went in the living room.
“Stop making excuses for your bad driving,” said Mummy, who had never seen Mycroft drive and therefore had no inkling that he absolutely didn’t if he could possibly avoid it.
She was in the dining room (of course), with the curtains drawn against the remains of the day, and every single one of the pre-EU light-bulbs turned on and blazing heat as much as light. Mycroft did not remove his gloves.
“What have you taken?” Mummy asked, addressing herself to Sherlock.
Sherlock glared at them both, but said nothing. He only pointed a slower than usual accusatory finger at Mycroft, and pulled out his chair at the table as if pulling it through some glutinous substance, like treacle.
“What did you give him?”
“A light sedative,” Mycroft said soothingly, sitting opposite Sherlock and regarding him for a second with poisonously soft half-lidded eyes.
“Was he having hysterics?” Mummy was not in her wheelchair, which she loathed, detested, and refused to use despite the alternatives being painful and impractical; she sat at the table in the high-backed dining chairs that afforded little in the way of comfort to anyone, especially the long-term bed-ridden, and she stared at them with the quick, sharp eyes of a bird of prey. Mycroft had always though her a hawk, but Sherlock insisted she had more of the owl about her.
“Merely being obstructive, as is so often his wont,” Mycroft said, settling his hands on his lap carefully. If Mummy spotted the gloves she would make him take them off, thinking that he was mocking her in this affectation. Sherlock, he noticed, had retained his coat, although Mummy wouldn’t allow that for much longer.
“Then there was no need to turn him into a drooling simpleton,” Mummy said crossly, sitting up even straighter than Mycroft – he hadn’t forgotten her poker-straight back, but he had perhaps forgotten a little how to imitate it so perfectly as before – with her hands hidden away below the edge of the table. “I asked you both here because I wanted to talk to you, I can hardly have a conversation of any merit with Sherlock all but choking on his tongue.”
Mycroft carefully discarded everything he might conceivably reply with were she not present, and settled for the de-fanged and politely harmless, “He can still listen, Mummy.”
“Neither of you have ever been capable of that,” said Mummy, fixing her stare to the wall opposite her and sparing nary a glance for either of them.
Mycroft proceeded to prove her wrong about this over the next hour, as she buried him under a mound of details about the catering company, the ins and outs of the town as she saw it from where she perched at the top of the house, several political gripes which Mycroft wasn’t involved in and one or two which he had been quietly instrumental to, and several pointed remarks about his lack of children and Sherlock’s lack of wife.
What Mummy manifestly failed to mention – as had been the case on every one of Mycroft’s carefully-rationed visits – was why she had been so strident in her demands for their presence in the first place. Mycroft could see the disinterest, impatience, disgust, and absence of attention moving through Sherlock’s supposedly blank expression in tides, and knew that while his own mask of attentive care was better, it was still obviously a mask.
Half-way through main, which Mycroft didn’t taste and Sherlock didn’t eat, each transported back to paralysing boyhood by the familiar surroundings and the ungentle tender pitch of Mummy’s voice, Mummy said, “Take those gloves off, you’re indoors.”
Mycroft laid down his knife and fork very carefully on his plate, a decisive click for each implement, and removed his gloves with deliberation. He watched not Mummy but Sherlock, across from him at the table, waiting for any inkling of triumph in his glazed eyes.
“And the coat,” Mummy said, apparently addressing the wall.
“I’m cold,” Sherlock said crossly, turning over a slice of meat with his fork and no evidence of any enjoyment to be found anywhere upon his bony face.
“No, you are not,” Mummy said without inflection.
There was, conventionally speaking, no reason why Sherlock should be cold; like many invalids, Mummy kept the house at a temperature that the well might find uncomfortable, but she also brought a chill into whichever room she entered, and all Mycroft’s childhood memories were tinged with frost. However, if Mycroft was any judge, his brother hadn’t eaten anything for three days and subsisting on cocaine suppositories and amphetamine-laced coffee was not commended as a method of warming the extremities.
He watched the silent power struggle impassively, his gloves lying atop his napkin, in his lap, conveying mouthful after mouthful of untasted meat mechanically into his throat. Sherlock buttoned up the collar of his coat, thrust his hands in his pockets, and stared down at his untouched meal with a firmly-locked jaw.
Mummy said, “You are being very rude.”
Mycroft thought, That is rather the point of him, but continued eating as if the tension in the room (and regression to points in time more than two decades ago) were not there at all.
He reached the end of his helping before the tension broke, and considered, for a moment, absconding for a second helping from the kitchen. The kitchen was warm, familiar, and entirely unrelated to Mummy. He could take his time, fill his plate, pretend to be concerned with the renovations that he’d paid for. But Sherlock and Mummy would continue their battle of wills regardless, and if they reached completion while he wasn’t there, he would be made overall loser in absentia.
And he wasn’t remotely hungry.
Mycroft began eating a slice of bread from the central board.
Mummy’s plate was spirited away. Mycroft’s plate followed, leaving him with nothing but a side plate full of crumbs and a glass of water to build a rampart between himself and Sherlock’s stubborn, tight-jawed refusal to take off his coat.
As the catering woman in her plain black nylon shirt dithered over whether to remove Sherlock’s clearly uneaten dinner or not, Mycroft rearranged his gloves on his lap and used the pretence of bread-generated thirst to drink half of his water.
“While you are here,” Mummy said, gesturing for the catering woman to take Sherlock’s plate – he dragged his coat tighter about himself as if the woman, who was barely in her twenties, might try to make off with that, too – and straightening her head almost imperceptibly, “I wonder if you might have a look through your belongings in your rooms, and separate them into which you wish to take away with you, and which you can stand to see thrown out.”
It was almost, almost inaudible in her voice, but Mycroft knew Mummy, and the unspoken everything is to be thrown out, I will not tolerate sentiment was as loud in his mind as if she’d shouted it at him.
“Is that all you dragged us down here for?” Sherlock muttered, digging his chin into his coat.
Mummy did not dignify this with an answer.
The catering woman vanished into the corridor, and returned with two bowls of raspberry pavlova. Under ordinary, less familial circumstances, Mycroft professed to love raspberry pavlova. It was a light, fruit-flavoured pudding which conveyed in his supposed love for it a sense of frivolity and gentleness, but with connotations of the old school-tie network which would only be spotted by that network, rather than blatantly emblazoned upon choices like treacle pudding. He had employed careful though in declaring it a favourite. The fact was, it might as well have been constructed from sawdust and cardboard for all he cared.
The bowls were laid pointedly in front of Sherlock and himself. Mummy, of course, did not eat puddings. They made you fat. Mummy had reached her sixties in whippet-thin form despite her bedridden status not because of genetic predisposition but because she was disciplined. That was the case. That was the reason.
Sherlock gave a disdainful sniff and pulled his shoulders up around his ears as if he was sitting in the middle of an igloo instead of a well-heated room filled with heat-emitting light-bulbs. The dining room bore a certain resemblance to a vivarium by now, but Sherlock’s pose gave no indication of it.
Mycroft began to eat the pavlova.
“You’ve abandoned your diet again, then,” Mummy said. Of course the bloody bloody pavlova was a bloody bloody test. She added, “The ability to see things through to the end is invaluable in a public servant, Mycroft.”
Mycroft hastily swallowed his mouthful, rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to be on the safe side, and said, “Yes, Mummy,” as obligingly as if he were handling an aggrieved foreign general; it was, after all, where he had learned that diplomatic skill – on his mother’s knee, as he liked to tell people, although the reality was that Mycroft had probably never touched her knee since he was lifted past it by a midwife.
He would have to finish the pavlova now, though. If he discarded it he would be upbraided for being easily-swayed and wishy-washy, and Mycroft hadn’t wanted the wretched thing in the first place. He was very careful not to meet his brother’s eye over the sickly pudding as he shovelled another mouthful into his face and the oppressive and icy silence descended once more.
“There’s nothing I want here,” Sherlock said, as Mycroft manfully masticated pavlova.
“Then put it all in the bin bags,” Mummy said.
“I’m sure you don’t need me to do that.”
“I’m sure you don’t need to be so lazy,” Mummy said sharply. “I am an elderly woman, Sherlock, and my body is failing me. Your belongings are taking up space and doing no one any good. If you don’t want to take them with you, throw them away, but don’t leave them to fester in a room I could otherwise be using.”
“No one is going to come here,” Sherlock said, standing up abruptly. “There are more than thirty other guesthouses in Watchet and the rest of them aren’t run by mad old vipers.”
Because Mycroft had been waiting for some sort of outburst for the entire meal, he was prepared, and didn’t choke on his unwanted pavlova. Instead he laid the spoon down inside the half-finished red-and-white carnage, and carefully dabbed at his face with his napkin, holding his gloves in his other hand.
Sherlock pushed past his chair and out of the dining room, leaning enough to the left as he went that Mycroft knew he would take the stairs rather than the back door back to the car. Had he not leaned, Mycroft would still have been sure; Sherlock had never been one for storming off into the wind with no recourse to a proper exit, but he was even less fond of sitting in cars with strangers and waiting.
“Excuse me,” Mycroft said, dropping his napkin on the table and getting to his feet before he could find out whether Mummy had excused him or not. The refusal to remain made his spine itch, but he told himself it was entirely understandable when the alternative was to leave Sherlock unaccompanied and in a bad temper, potentially investigating Mummy’s bedroom.
The staircase – which Sherlock’s footsteps still echoed upon – was in need of hoovering, and the stairlift, which he had paid for, looked out of place among the pale blues and blue-whites of the rest of the stairwell. Mycroft put on his gloves as he ascended to the landing, and made sure to avoid the bannisters altogether. There was still a chip in the paintwork from An Incident when he was 14.
Mycroft turned toward his own room on some long-repressed instinct, but the door was still shut and the dust settling in the cream carpet said it had been shut for some time. There was nothing of any value in there as far as he knew, and while it might have been safer to destroy things than allow someone else to take them away, he drew himself up, turned his back on his own room, and slipped soft as a slightly fat shadow down the corridor to Sherlock’s room. While his own lay opposite Mummy’s, Sherlock’s was opposite the bathroom, and left him with ample excuse for being there.
“Nothing in here you want to keep?” Mycroft echoed, taking up the doorway while Sherlock patiently pried up one of the floorboards with a red-handled screwdriver. God alone knew where he’d hidden it before now.
“Nothing here I care about,” Sherlock corrected, setting the half floor-board aside and rolling up the sleeve of his coat and his expensive purple shirt in one messy action.
“Of course not. The only thing you care about is even now diligently ransacking 221B Baker Street for notes that you only carry about inside your abnormally-shaped head,” Mycroft said, watching Sherlock extract a blue exercise book with S. Holmes precisely penned on the cover in a child’s handwriting - his handwriting, since Sherlock had been constitutionally incapable of labelling his own belongings and was perpetually having them stolen.
Sherlock laid the exercise book beside the floorboard and thrust his hand deeper into the crevice. His sour look to Mycroft seemed almost a by-product of the process, rather than further evidence of his smouldering animosity. “Shouldn’t you be incinerating teenage diaries full of incriminating evidence?”
Mycroft let the jibe pass him uncontested. He had never kept a diary – his memory was quite sufficient – and of the two of them, Sherlock’s experiments with the decomposition of roadkill were more likely to qualify as ‘incriminating’ than Mycroft’s casual manipulations of impressionable youth. Instead of protesting, he picked up a wooden ruler from the bookshelf beside the door, and made a great show of examining it.
It was the spit of every other wooden school ruler in existence, blackened up one side from contact with hundreds of pen nibs, a foot long, and liable to make a twanging noise if held and struck. It was also his, which would have led him to wonder quite how it had ended up in Sherlock’s room had he not known his brother all his life and known him for a petty thief from the outset.
“Put that down,” said Sherlock, narrowing his already small eyes, frozen with his hand inside the guts of the house.
“It’s my ruler,” Mycroft said, tapping it against the end of one gloved finger.
The room was as overheated as any other in the house, in theory, but in practice it had the stale, unused smell of a crypt and the warmth of one, too. Sherlock scowled at him from his crouch alongside the juvenile hiding place of his early work, and very slowly rolled down his shirt and coat sleeves again, hiding a wrist dirty with cobwebs and masonry dust.
Mycroft tapped the tip of his gloved fingertips with the ruler again, and smiled beatifically at his brother. The smile had little to do with good humour – Mycroft had heard about good humour and as far as he could tell it got in the way of doing an efficient job, with the added impediment of making the owner of it look foolish – or warmth, and he wore it rather as a reflexive cover.
Sherlock twisted his face into an expression that had even less to do with a smile than Mycroft’s, and stared venomously at the floor. “Get on with it.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it,” Mycroft said, inching closer across the uncarpeted floor, as if approaching an unbroken horse. There it was again, that illegitimate concept, the verboten notion; enjoyment, pleasure, want. Of course, Mycroft did none of this because he wanted to, particularly; it was done for Sherlock’s own good, a burden that he was required to bear since Mummy was incapable and everyone else not to be trusted…
“Shut up,” Sherlock hissed, not deigning to use his name. “Shut up and get it over with.”
Mycroft edged closer, holding the wooden ruler at both tips, balanced lightly between his hands. “You will need to remove your coat.”
“No,” Sherlock told the floor, with some force.
“You need to raise your coat,” Mycroft amended, stopping a careful foot and a half from Sherlock’s shoes – he was balanced upon the balls of his feet, still frozen in mid-crouch – with the ruler held lightly between his fingertips.
By the time Sherlock reached back with the fingers of one hand – steadying himself with the other, against the floor – to flick the tails of his coat up over his shoulder and expose a rumpled expanse of purple cotton, Mycroft had counted to forty-seven.
Sherlock said nothing else about getting it over with. Mycroft curled his fingers around the wood of the ruler and made sure of his grip; the thickness of the glove fabric was hardly so great that he was unable to judge that correctly, but it paid to be certain in all things. The rising dust from the floor cavity tickled his nostrils and made him screw up his face, but there was no danger of his sneezing without wanting to.
Unlike London, where the ambient sound of lives lived permeated every supposedly meditative quiet with felt-and-not-heard rumbles, the constant crackling of wires, the dirty heartbeat of the city, Watchet’s silences were silent. In the seconds before he moved, Mycroft could hear both heartbeats as loud as a marching band in the empty room, both pairs of lungs pulling in air as noisily as if they were powered by jet engines.
Mycroft cracked the wooden ruler hard across Sherlock’s back, just over his kidneys, and rocked him on the balls of his feet.
Sherlock made a sound like, Hnk as some of his breath was driven from him, but other than this and righting himself gently with the fingers of one hand, so that he did not fall, he hardly reacted.
Listening for the tell-tale electric whirr of the stairlift, all Mycroft could hear was the increase in his own pulse.
He snapped the wooden ruler across Sherlock’s lumbar again, driving a second, less startled Hnk from between his teeth, and knocking him less off-balance. The vibration of the ruler stung even against the glove.
Mycroft lifted his arm higher, and brought it down harder, for the third time. Having begun with no set target in place, he behove him to impose a round number, if only in his own mind, at which to stop. Mycroft settled on fifty with rather more optimism than was characteristic – rarely had he ever ventured above twenty – purely because forty-somethings had leapt into his countdowns twice already that day.
He brought the ruler down again.
Sherlock’s hnk sounded a little looser.
Mycroft strained to keep an ill-constructed smile on his face; the corners of it kept stretching into an ugly snarl as he lifted the ruler, exposing his teeth, and the heat of triumph rising in his face must turn it an unattractive shade of red. He leant concentration to timing each downward blow to match an outward breath.
Sherlock’s hnk sounded open-mouthed.
Mycroft plied the ruler with careful precision over the same spot; there was no profit in scattershot lashing about, like a drunk trying to fight the air around his opponent. Perhaps if he were trying to undermine Sherlock’s position he’d have had more luck that way, snapping at his heels, but – Mycroft almost smiled – the exercise was after all intended to keep him on his toes.
His cheeks were so hot that he felt sure Mummy must have turned up the thermostat.
As Mycroft laid the twentieth stroke, Sherlock made a limp, wet-edged variant of the hnk, half-swallowed it. The damp wail of a drowning kitten was swiftly rescinded, and when Mycroft – very close himself to emitting a sound he was neither proud of nor intending to make – went to bring down the ruler for the twenty-first stroke he found Sherlock’s hand in the way, twisted up behind his back with the fingers splayed outward to ward off the wood.
“Enough,” Sherlock said in a quiet, breathless voice, doubled over his own knees with his legs shaking. “Enough.”
Mycroft brushed the end of the ruler over the tips of Sherlock’s fingers, and laid it very slowly upon the floor beside his crouching brother. For a long, long moment neither of them said anything else. Mycroft waited for the red flush to retreat from his cheeks and the … other side-effects … of this strenuous activity to fade; he listened to Sherlock’s breathing as it levelled out, became regular and slow once more; he watched the tremors fade from Sherlock’s thighs.
When he was quite certain he wasn’t going to fall over and strike his head on something, Mycroft stepped backward and put his hands in his pockets.
“I will be in the car,” he said. “Bring anything you intend to keep.”
“I don’t intend to keep anything,” said Sherlock, apparently talking to his own knees. His hand, still splayed outward against his back to ward of further ruler blows, crept slowly up his own spine and twitched his coat back down over his shirt. At least that hadn’t come untucked, this time.
“Then bring nothing,” Mycroft said, backing out of the room. He still had the occasional twinge on chilly nights to remind him of what happened when he turned his back on Sherlock after this kind of … occasion. Not, he admitted, that it had been entirely unwarranted or indeed unwelcome, but he did not look forward to coming up with an explanation for a limp in the near future. “Those notes,” Mycroft added.
Sherlock straightened up slowly, his back to Mycroft.
“Are they in your head, or in your home? You have been … inconsistent.”
Sherlock sighed in the most childishly put-upon fashion, and stretched like a pensioner afraid of throwing out a joint. Night had crept up through the garden he faced and smothered the familiar lawns with an equally familiar thick black nothingness, but Sherlock scowled out at them all the same. “What do you want them for?”
Mycroft picked up a copy of A Boy’s Guide To Knots from the bookshelf by the door and, leafing through it without looking at the pages, said, “Mostly to see if you were prepared to give me them.”
“No,” said Sherlock.
“Pity,” said Mycroft, “because if you check your phone in about, oh, fifteen minutes, you’ll see the case has rather repeated itself with someone a lot more important.”