Desperate (6/9)
BBC Sherlock
Rating 15 (explicit slash, swearing)
Summary: Why had Greg spent so many years believing Sherlock could ever change?
Many thanks to The Small Hobbit for betaing.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
The next time Greg saw Sherlock, it was because a plane had fallen out of the sky over Dusseldorf. But one of its passengers hadn't; instead John Coniston was dead in a car boot in Southwark. Very dead. It was the kind of impossible case that Sherlock loved. Greg didn't hear a squeak of protest out of his team when he suggested they called him in: they were so far out of their depth with this one it was almost funny.
It wasn't funny seeing Sherlock again. Greg decided to play it brusque, act as if Baskerville hadn't changed anything. Just stick to telling Sherlock the facts about the case. Only to find, of course, that that was all that Sherlock was interested in. Sherlock walked away from the crime scene saying something vague about two ideas, ignoring Greg completely. Still, as long as he came up with the goods...
No word from Sherlock for almost a week, but then if it was terrorists who had brought down the plane, he might be onto something really big. Then a text arrived from John:
Greg, fancy a pub night? I could do with a break from 221B. JHW
***
"You OK?" he asked John once they were sitting in St Thomas Street, with a pint of Directors each.
"Fine," John said unconvincingly. He looked frazzled, but it always took at least half a pint for him to open up. "Just wanted to see how you were. You're back with Ruth, are you? Sorry, I should have said something before. I saw you were wearing your ring again."
The other thing about John was that he was the world's worst liar.
"Sherlock saw the ring last week and he only thought to mention it to you today," Greg supplied, and John grinning ruefully and drank some more of his beer. You couldn't hope to hide things from Sherlock; Greg hadn't worried about that.
"We're giving it another try," he said. "I mean marriage isn't easy, but being on your own, it's no fun either. Not at my age."
"Not at any age," John said. Greg wondered if he should ask about his girlfriend, but he wasn't sure of the name of the current one. Still, even if John's girlfriends came and went, he always had Sherlock as a constant. Which reminded him...
"Any progress on the Coniston case?" he asked, and then could have kicked himself. Couldn't he just forget work for one evening? But he couldn't, of course, and from John's slow smile, he'd expected that.
"No," John replied. "Sherlock's baffled. None of his hypotheses hold water. Whatever happened to the man wasn't just improbable, but impossible."
"There must be some leads. I hoped he might be able to get something at the airport end."
"He's given up on the case. He's doing some chemical experiments at the moment, something about classifying mould residues."
"He's given up?" It wasn't the first time Greg had known Sherlock be stumped, but it was a pretty rare occurrence.
"I put a blog post up saying he was stuck. And he complained about me doing it, but he didn't tell me to take it down."
"You put a blog post up saying Sherlock Holmes couldn't solve a case?" Greg said. That was...Christ, John knew how to put the boot in, didn't he? You thought he was too forgiving to be true and then he did that to Sherlock's ego.
"People want to know that Sherlock's human," John said. "They're interested in him. I had over 100 hits in the first ten minutes after I put that post up. And you should see the comments."
There was more to it than that, there had to be. He'd been too busy in the last couple of days to check John's blog, but there'd been something that had bothered him the last time he'd looked.
"You haven't posted anything about Baskerville yet," he said. John's smile faded and he looked down gloomily into his beer.
"Mycroft won't let me," he said. "Said if I didn't wait till he'd had my post officially cleared, he'd get me blacklisted by every internet service provider in Britain."
"But everybody knows there was something fishy going on at Baskerville."
"Yeah, but it's all still rumour," John replied. "Mycroft tells me there are cabinet ministers reading my blog now. He says I can only post about the case when he can promise the Prime Minister that Baskerville's been sorted out fully. So I suspect he's going to be up to his ears in luminous rabbits for months."
"Luminous rabbits?" Greg demanded. "What do they do to you?"
"Well, they might nibble your fingers, I suppose. It's not the animals down at Baskerville you need to worry about, Greg. It's bloody mad scientists with no idea about ethics." There was an edge to John's voice now. "Do you know what Sherlock did when we were down there?"
Oh fuck, Greg thought. They'd all got gassed that evening, hadn't they; if he'd started fantasising about Sherlock, what the hell had John done?
No, John was implying it was something Sherlock had done to John, not the other way round. But that still left all kinds of worrying possibilities.
"The gas screws with your mind," he said hastily. "You know it does. Whatever Sherlock did, he didn't mean it."
"Oh, he meant this," John said wearily. "He didn't know it was the fog making us see things, he thought Frankland's drug was in the sugar from Henry Knight's house. So he dosed me with that without telling me and then locked me up in a lab at Baskerville to see what happened."
Fucking hell, Greg thought, what kind of man does that to his friend? Then he worked it out. "So the sugar didn't affect you?"
"No," John said, draining the last of his pint. "But there were faulty pipes in the lab and I inhaled some of the gas from them. Then I freaked out, thought the hound was after me, and ended up locking myself in a cage and begging Sherlock to rescue me." He paused. "You know what the stuff's like, and he deliberately tried to give it to me. Not sure if I should put that in my blog post."
What was it he'd told John once? If they were lucky one day Sherlock might be a good man. Wasn't going to happen, was it? Stupid to think it had ever been possible.
"You're his best friend - his only friend - and he does that?" Greg demanded. "Why the hell do you put up with him?"
John was silent for a moment, and then he said slowly. "Same reason you do, I guess. What would either of us do without Sherlock?"
"Get to finish my holiday in Spain," Greg replied, because it was only turning it into a joke that made it bearable.
"I always thought..." John said and ground to a halt. "All the name-calling and taking the mickey out of Sherlock at Scotland Yard, I always thought it was just coz Anderson and Donovan were petty-minded little so-and-so's. I didn't realise...there are times I want to kill him. There are times I want to hurt him, just to prove that he can be hurt."
He looked intently at Greg. "Don't you feel that as well? When you've been working with him for what, five years, and he claims he can't even remember your first name?"
"He is what he is," Greg said automatically, and it was suddenly, oddly, as if his mind was finally registering what he was saying. Why had he spent so many years believing Sherlock could ever change?
"He isn't human," John protested.
"He's more human than he lets on," Greg said. "He cares about you, you know that. He's prepared to work with me."
"Is that enough?"
"You said it yourself," he replied. "I need his help, you get a kick out of chasing round shooting things. If we want that, we have to put up with him being a prat." He sighed. "Shit, we shouldn't be spending the evening sitting round and belly-aching about Sherlock. Let's have another pint and talk about the football instead, for god's sake."
***
He went home after the second pint, because he didn't want to wind up Ruth by coming home late. Or get pissed in case he said something rash. Though John doubtless wouldn't bat an eyelid if he told him about Plymouth. John'd been in the army, he'd probably seen his share of confused soldiers who'd had sex with a bloke for the first time.
Except Greg wasn't confused anymore; it all seemed clearer now. It had been good with Alec, but he still fancied Ruth as well. Maybe he was bisexual, but that didn't make any difference when he was married. And as for Sherlock...
As for Sherlock, it was as if all the subconscious excuses his mind had made over the years had vanished. He couldn't have Sherlock because of Ruth. He couldn't have Sherlock because he was a bloke and Greg was straight. He couldn't have Sherlock because Sherlock didn't want anyone close to him.
The real reason was that Sherlock wasn't interested in sex. Maybe it was being with Alec that had made Greg realise that, remembering what young men were normally like, alive with hormones, whether they were gay or straight. If Sherlock had wanted someone, he'd have found a boyfriend or girlfriend in the years Greg had known him. He could have anyone he wanted, looking like that. But Sherlock hadn't found anyone, because that wasn't what he wanted. All that mattered was the same faces around him as he concentrated on a crime scene. And having John at his side so he didn't make too big an idiot of himself.
Well, as far as he was concerned, John was welcome to the prat. Greg had his own life to lead; better things to do than hold Sherlock's hand and try and look out for him. He had a family; he had a job. Sherlock could do what the hell he liked. It was time for Greg to stop worrying about him.
***
John was right - making fun of Sherlock was a way to let off steam when it all got too much. Greg avidly read the ever-accumulating comments on John's Sherlock Holmes Baffled blog post; he sniggered at the "Hat-Man and Robin" headline. He even took a video of a dopey Sherlock sitting in the gutter outside Irene Adler's house in Belgravia discussing cases with a woman who wasn't there. Then he helped John get Sherlock back to Baker Street and up seventeen stairs - Sherlock tripping over every damn one of them, so it seemed. A joke was a joke, but Sherlock damaging himself permanently wouldn't be so funny.
"So why did Sherlock go and see Irene Adler?" he asked John, once Sherlock was safely tucked up in bed. There was an obvious reason why any other man might be going to see her, but if Sherlock was into "recreational scolding", he'd surely have shacked up with DS Donovan years ago.
John collapsed into his chair and looked warily at Greg.
"I won't arrest you, whatever you've done," Greg told him hastily. "But if Sherlock's mixed up in something dangerous, I need to know."
"We didn't think it was going to be dangerous," John said, and Greg could swear that for once the mad bastard actually meant it, that they hadn't been looking for trouble. "Sherlock had a client who wanted us to retrieve some compromising photos Irene had taken. We got there, we were about to get our hands on them, and some gang jumped us and Irene."
"Looking for the same thing?"
"Don't think so." John frowned. "They were Americans, our client's English."
"And you fought them off. Who was the one who shot the bloke dead and where's the gun?" Funny how he was always have to cover up for Sherlock and John getting their hands on guns. Well, not funny, so much as infuriating.
"Irene," John replied, which was a surprise. "She had some kind of weapon rigged up to fire when the safe was opened."
"You and Sherlock weren't doing any shooting?"
"Sherlock fired one of the pistols to alert the police. We didn't use them otherwise, and we were just acting in self-defence. Irene's the one you should be charging, after what she did to Sherlock."
"One more thing I need to know." Greg folded his arms and stared down at John. "Who's your client?"
As he expected, he just got a mulish look in reply.
"Well, tell me this much," Greg went on. "Is it someone in the Met?" He saw the momentary surprise on John's expressive face, before it closed back into its frown.
John shook his head. "No, he said. "Important, but not connected to the police." He paused and then added, "Why did you think she...they might be?"
"Because Irene Adler has clients in the Met, which is why we've never been able to do anything about her." She'd been thumbing her nose at the Vice Squad for the best part of ten years; she was older than she looked.
John was staring at the carpet now. "Maybe in your team, Greg," he muttered. "She knew all about the hiker case, and she said something about getting the information from a policeman."
Shit, thought Greg. "Anything more specific?"
"No," John said. "And I suppose it doesn't have to be the Met that was leaking rather than the Thames Valley guys..."
"Not necessarily my team either. It was an impossible murder, that was why DCI Carter asked our advice. Everyone on our floor was talking about it, trying to come up with a solution." He tried to think back to the morning; had anyone he knew been behaving suspiciously - well, more suspiciously than usual? It'd be impossible to check who might have talked to Adler, but he was pretty certain Sally wasn't her type. Anyone else he could rule out?
"Can't be Anderson, at least," he said.
"Why?" John replied. "I mean Irene said policeman, but she may have been speaking loosely..."
"He's on holiday," Greg replied. "Bird-watching in the Scottish Highlands somewhere - I think he said the island of Uffa. Point is, he was going to be impossible to contact; mobiles don't work up there and there's only one landline on the island." It was odd he thought of Anderson immediately, but he was the only one of his team he could think of who was screwed up enough to get involved with a dominatrix.
Though maybe that was just him being prejudiced, he reminded himself. People did all kinds of surprising things sexually; he was proof of that.
"So what happens now?" John asked.
"You tell me. I take it you didn't get the photos off Irene?" John shook his head. "I'll try and get an arrest warrant issued for her. We could go for actual bodily harm, for doping Sherlock, if you're prepared to give a statement. Or are you gonna want to protect her?" John was quite capable of being stupidly chivalrous if there was a beautiful woman involved.
"No," John said firmly. "Irene could have killed Sherlock if she'd got the dosage wrong. And she didn't give a toss about her maid, the tall redhead who got knocked out. Is she OK, by the way?"
"There didn't seem to be anything we could hold her for, so she got taken off to hospital. Dunno if she's been discharged yet. I suppose you want to stay here tonight and keep an eye on Sherlock, rather than come down to the Yard now and give a statement?"
"I...you've seen the state he's in. I don't want Mrs Hudson to have to deal with him."
"Fair enough. I may need you in tomorrow, but I suspect I'm going to be told to leave Ms Adler well alone." Greg headed for the door and then turned to say, "And if Sherlock does have any ideas about how we can track down the mole in the Met, let me know, would you?"
***
"How was your day?" Ruth asked when he got home.
"Bit mixed," he said, trying to think what he should tell her. Ruth asked conscientiously every day about his work now, just as Greg carefully checked what the kids had been up to at school. But there was something more important to ask about today.
"How was the class?" he asked. Ruth had decided that now Emily was in Year 1, she was going to do a Return to Nursing Practice course.
"Terrifying," Ruth replied, as she stuck his dinner in the microwave to reheat. "The IT system made me feel a complete ignoramus. Nursing never used to be like this: it's all filling in the paperwork and no time for the patients now."
"It's twelve years," he told her. "It's gonna take a bit of time to adjust, but I know you can do it."
"I suppose so," she said. "So what was the bit mixed at work about?"
"New death this afternoon in central London," Greg said, clearing himself a space to eat on the kitchen table. "Bloke who got shot was a foreign national, don't know if we're going to get it or Counter Terrorism are. But Thames Valley asked us for help with a suspicious death this morning and we've probably cracked their case."
"Already?"
"We think it was death by misadventure; passer-by hit with a boomerang. Have to check up on it, of course, see if someone was around with one at the time." Well, the first thing to do was check that Sherlock still thought it was the right solution when he wasn't off his face. But it was the most plausible suggestion Greg had heard so far.
"Someone wandering around southern England with a boomerang?" Ruth said. "That's weird." She handed him a plate full of homemade shepherd's pie; one of his favourites.
Not the weirdest thing about today. But he didn't want to say anything about Irene Adler, let alone about Sherlock's encounter with her. So much he didn't feel he could tell Ruth; sometimes it seemed that every conversation with her was about what was not said. Maybe it was inevitable when you got back together again; you know how thin the ice was still.
"So has Katy heard about the school orchestra?" he asked instead, and they were back on the safe ground of family discussions. The children they shared, even when they didn't seem to share much else. More important than Irene Adler, after all, or even Sherlock Holmes.
***
Sherlock's Christmas present for Greg was a stabbing. Well, it was solving a stabbing a week before Christmas and not calling Greg an idiot while doing so, which was practically a present in itself. An art student had had a quarrel with his boyfriend and got a penknife in the guts. Sherlock found the murder weapon, hidden in a piece of pottery, of all the bizarre places, so they were able to charge Beppo Rovito with murder.
When Mycroft Holmes turned up unexpectedly in Greg's office the next day, Greg presumed it was something to do with that. Maybe the dead man hadn't just been an art student with a juvenile taste in projects and a complicated love-life. Maybe he'd been a spy or a terrorist. But instead, Mycroft plonked down on Greg's desk a piece of paper that looked oddly familiar.
"Have you seen this?" Mycroft demanded, in his normal talking-to-the-mentally-inadequate tone.
"Invitation to a Christmas party at 221B," Greg replied. "Surprised you got sent one as well; John must have got a bit carried away with the Christmas cheer."
"Why is Sherlock agreeing to this tomfoolery?"
"Because John and Mrs Hudson are twisting his arm," Greg said. "Look, I know it's not Sherlock's idea of fun, but John said he wasn't doing anything else this Christmas. If he was supposed to be spending it with you, I suggest you talk to him directly. It's nothing to do with me."
"Are you attending this party?"
Greg leaned back in his chair. It was very tempting to tell Mycroft it was none of his sodding business, but he did have to work with the man sometimes. And if there was some kind of Holmes family bust-up all of Sherlock's acquaintances were bound to catch the flak somehow. Sherlock wasn't good at being quietly unhappy.
"I wasn't planning to go. We're off down to Dorset Boxing Day morning to see Ruth's parents, so we'll probably still be packing the evening beforehand."
"Is anyone else from Scotland Yard going?"
"Doubt they've been invited. But I can't see them going even if they were, to be honest. Your brother's not exactly popular."
"Despite the fact that without him the Met would have an even more abysmal clear-up rate?" Greg had forgotten that in his own slightly more refined way, Mycroft could be every bit as obnoxious as Sherlock.
"I haven't got time to sit around here all day playing guessing games with you," he told him, glaring up at the snooty git. "What do you want me to do and why?"
"I would like you to go to the party. And reassure me afterwards that Sherlock is in a stable condition."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
Mycroft's face took on a constipated look as he said, reluctantly, "I want to be sure that he is not using any illegal substances."
"What?" Greg thought back frantically. Had there been anything odd about Sherlock's behaviour the last time he saw him? Well, odder than you'd expect from Sherlock.
"I have no evidence," Mycroft said hastily. "I...if I say that's why I worry, it would doubtless sound ridiculous."
He was a snooty git, but he also must have had a grandstand seat for Sherlock Holmes: The Junkie Years. And it was Mycroft who'd got Sherlock to stop using, however, ham-fistedly. Maybe that entitled him to be paranoid.
"Why now?" Greg asked, scanning the stiff figure in front of him. "What are the risk factors for him using?"
"Boredom. Frustration. He always used to find Christmas stressful. Too much interaction with other people."
"If you're worried, talk to John. He lives with the man and he's a doctor. If there's something wrong, he'll be the first to know."
"John doesn't trust me."
"So you want me to be your spy?" He'd almost felt sympathetic to the arsehole for a moment.
"I'm asking you for a favour," Mycroft said patiently. "John would like you there, even if Sherlock is unlikely to be grateful. If you go, I don't feel obliged to, and everyone will be much happier."
"I'm not spying on him."
"Please," Mycroft said, and it wasn't fair how human he could suddenly sound. "I have a bad feeling about this party. I'd like someone there who I can rely on."
"I'll see if Ruth's OK about me going," Greg said, "but if I do, you'll owe me big time, Mycroft."
***
Ruth was fine about him going off: leave her to pack in peace, she said.
"We'll get far more in the suitcases if I do them all," she said, turning it into a joke. Strong, dependable, competent Ruth. He wished suddenly that she could come to the party, that he could show everyone at 221B how wonderful she was. But if she did, Sherlock would doubtless deduce something embarrassing about her, and it would all turn sour.
He'd forgotten that Sherlock didn't need someone present to deduce everything about them. And the best of his deductions - when you heard them, you knew at once he was right. The pattern of Ruth's behaviour had always been there; he'd just never seen it.
He didn't make a scene, just slid away soon after Mycroft phoned to say they'd found Irene Adler's corpse. He wasn't the only person to be having a crappy Christmas, then.
***
Ruth was watching television when he got home, but she switched it off when he came in the door.
"I wasn't expecting you back so soon," she said, and then suddenly added, "You look terrible. Was Sherlock being a pain?"
"Sherlock said..." he began, and then forced himself to go on. "He said you were having an affair. With that PE teacher at Robert's school. Mr Morgan, isn't it?"
Ruth sat on the sofa and stared down at the remote, as if working out what button to press to stop her life, rewind it.
"It's over," she said at last. "I don't know how he knew, but it's over."
Greg sat down heavily in the big armchair, his legs feeling unsteady. "You did have an affair?" He kept his voice quiet, because if he shouted he would fall apart.
"A few months," Ruth said, and her voice was desperately quiet too. "I...he paid attention to me. He made me feel I mattered."
"And I didn't?"
"The work comes first with you, it always has." Ruth's voice started to choke now. "But you know what? It was the same with Gareth. The school found out, and the head-teacher was furious. Breaking up a parent's marriage - not setting a good example, she said. She was talking about him having to change jobs and he loves that school. So he broke it off."
"The school knew as well? Did everyone? Was it just me who didn't realise?"
"The children didn't know. I wasn't sure, you see. I didn't know what to tell you."
"The truth?"
"How could I tell you I didn't know what I wanted!" Ruth burst out. "It felt so good with Gareth sometimes but so wrong, as well. And then he told me it was all over."
"That was why you came back was it, because you'd been dumped?" Greg snarled. He could feel the urge to hurt building in him, to scream and yell, call her every filthy name under the sun...
"I came back to try and make it work," Ruth said quietly. "Because if it kept on going wrong, maybe it was me that was the problem, not you or Gareth. Maybe if I could just try harder..." She came to a halt, and he knew she was close to crying.
Suddenly his anger was gone, to be replaced by infinite weariness. He didn't want to have to do this any more. He didn't want Ruth to have to do this, to pretend it was all fine.
"It doesn't work like that," he said, and Ruth nodded. "We can't...we've been kidding ourselves, haven't we? It's over."
Ruth nodded again. She looked up at him at last and said, "I'm sorry."
There was probably something more he should say, but he didn't know what. They sat in silence for a few moments, as he concentrated on not crying, and then Ruth said:
"Do you want to come down to Dorset with the rest of us tomorrow?"
"No."
"I'll go and unpack your stuff," she said, getting up hastily. "I'll talk to the kids while I'm down there. Tell them everything. We can work out what to do when we get back."
"OK," he said, and that was it. Ruth went upstairs to the suitcases again; Greg sat there in the living room and wished he was dead.
***
It was 9 p.m. on Boxing Day before Greg cracked and texted Sherlock. He sat in the silent kitchen and slowly typed out:
The affair only lasted a few months. How did you know about it? GL
Sherlock's reply was prompt:
A PE teacher called Gareth Morgan agrees to meet a pupil's mother on the afternoon of the England-Wales rugby match? Highly suspicious. SH
Sherlock had overheard one phone call of his to Ruth - back in the spring, it must have been. And he'd worked that out.
Why didn't you tell me then? GL
We had a bomber to catch. Didn't seem a priority. SH
Greg switched off his phone before he said something unforgivable to Sherlock. He ought to eat something. He ought not to drink anything more. He was going to go into work tomorrow and catch whoever had killed Irene Adler. That was the first thing to do. Once he'd got going on a case, it would all seem better.
Part 7
Rating 15 (explicit slash, swearing)
Summary: Why had Greg spent so many years believing Sherlock could ever change?
Many thanks to The Small Hobbit for betaing.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
The next time Greg saw Sherlock, it was because a plane had fallen out of the sky over Dusseldorf. But one of its passengers hadn't; instead John Coniston was dead in a car boot in Southwark. Very dead. It was the kind of impossible case that Sherlock loved. Greg didn't hear a squeak of protest out of his team when he suggested they called him in: they were so far out of their depth with this one it was almost funny.
It wasn't funny seeing Sherlock again. Greg decided to play it brusque, act as if Baskerville hadn't changed anything. Just stick to telling Sherlock the facts about the case. Only to find, of course, that that was all that Sherlock was interested in. Sherlock walked away from the crime scene saying something vague about two ideas, ignoring Greg completely. Still, as long as he came up with the goods...
No word from Sherlock for almost a week, but then if it was terrorists who had brought down the plane, he might be onto something really big. Then a text arrived from John:
Greg, fancy a pub night? I could do with a break from 221B. JHW
***
"You OK?" he asked John once they were sitting in St Thomas Street, with a pint of Directors each.
"Fine," John said unconvincingly. He looked frazzled, but it always took at least half a pint for him to open up. "Just wanted to see how you were. You're back with Ruth, are you? Sorry, I should have said something before. I saw you were wearing your ring again."
The other thing about John was that he was the world's worst liar.
"Sherlock saw the ring last week and he only thought to mention it to you today," Greg supplied, and John grinning ruefully and drank some more of his beer. You couldn't hope to hide things from Sherlock; Greg hadn't worried about that.
"We're giving it another try," he said. "I mean marriage isn't easy, but being on your own, it's no fun either. Not at my age."
"Not at any age," John said. Greg wondered if he should ask about his girlfriend, but he wasn't sure of the name of the current one. Still, even if John's girlfriends came and went, he always had Sherlock as a constant. Which reminded him...
"Any progress on the Coniston case?" he asked, and then could have kicked himself. Couldn't he just forget work for one evening? But he couldn't, of course, and from John's slow smile, he'd expected that.
"No," John replied. "Sherlock's baffled. None of his hypotheses hold water. Whatever happened to the man wasn't just improbable, but impossible."
"There must be some leads. I hoped he might be able to get something at the airport end."
"He's given up on the case. He's doing some chemical experiments at the moment, something about classifying mould residues."
"He's given up?" It wasn't the first time Greg had known Sherlock be stumped, but it was a pretty rare occurrence.
"I put a blog post up saying he was stuck. And he complained about me doing it, but he didn't tell me to take it down."
"You put a blog post up saying Sherlock Holmes couldn't solve a case?" Greg said. That was...Christ, John knew how to put the boot in, didn't he? You thought he was too forgiving to be true and then he did that to Sherlock's ego.
"People want to know that Sherlock's human," John said. "They're interested in him. I had over 100 hits in the first ten minutes after I put that post up. And you should see the comments."
There was more to it than that, there had to be. He'd been too busy in the last couple of days to check John's blog, but there'd been something that had bothered him the last time he'd looked.
"You haven't posted anything about Baskerville yet," he said. John's smile faded and he looked down gloomily into his beer.
"Mycroft won't let me," he said. "Said if I didn't wait till he'd had my post officially cleared, he'd get me blacklisted by every internet service provider in Britain."
"But everybody knows there was something fishy going on at Baskerville."
"Yeah, but it's all still rumour," John replied. "Mycroft tells me there are cabinet ministers reading my blog now. He says I can only post about the case when he can promise the Prime Minister that Baskerville's been sorted out fully. So I suspect he's going to be up to his ears in luminous rabbits for months."
"Luminous rabbits?" Greg demanded. "What do they do to you?"
"Well, they might nibble your fingers, I suppose. It's not the animals down at Baskerville you need to worry about, Greg. It's bloody mad scientists with no idea about ethics." There was an edge to John's voice now. "Do you know what Sherlock did when we were down there?"
Oh fuck, Greg thought. They'd all got gassed that evening, hadn't they; if he'd started fantasising about Sherlock, what the hell had John done?
No, John was implying it was something Sherlock had done to John, not the other way round. But that still left all kinds of worrying possibilities.
"The gas screws with your mind," he said hastily. "You know it does. Whatever Sherlock did, he didn't mean it."
"Oh, he meant this," John said wearily. "He didn't know it was the fog making us see things, he thought Frankland's drug was in the sugar from Henry Knight's house. So he dosed me with that without telling me and then locked me up in a lab at Baskerville to see what happened."
Fucking hell, Greg thought, what kind of man does that to his friend? Then he worked it out. "So the sugar didn't affect you?"
"No," John said, draining the last of his pint. "But there were faulty pipes in the lab and I inhaled some of the gas from them. Then I freaked out, thought the hound was after me, and ended up locking myself in a cage and begging Sherlock to rescue me." He paused. "You know what the stuff's like, and he deliberately tried to give it to me. Not sure if I should put that in my blog post."
What was it he'd told John once? If they were lucky one day Sherlock might be a good man. Wasn't going to happen, was it? Stupid to think it had ever been possible.
"You're his best friend - his only friend - and he does that?" Greg demanded. "Why the hell do you put up with him?"
John was silent for a moment, and then he said slowly. "Same reason you do, I guess. What would either of us do without Sherlock?"
"Get to finish my holiday in Spain," Greg replied, because it was only turning it into a joke that made it bearable.
"I always thought..." John said and ground to a halt. "All the name-calling and taking the mickey out of Sherlock at Scotland Yard, I always thought it was just coz Anderson and Donovan were petty-minded little so-and-so's. I didn't realise...there are times I want to kill him. There are times I want to hurt him, just to prove that he can be hurt."
He looked intently at Greg. "Don't you feel that as well? When you've been working with him for what, five years, and he claims he can't even remember your first name?"
"He is what he is," Greg said automatically, and it was suddenly, oddly, as if his mind was finally registering what he was saying. Why had he spent so many years believing Sherlock could ever change?
"He isn't human," John protested.
"He's more human than he lets on," Greg said. "He cares about you, you know that. He's prepared to work with me."
"Is that enough?"
"You said it yourself," he replied. "I need his help, you get a kick out of chasing round shooting things. If we want that, we have to put up with him being a prat." He sighed. "Shit, we shouldn't be spending the evening sitting round and belly-aching about Sherlock. Let's have another pint and talk about the football instead, for god's sake."
***
He went home after the second pint, because he didn't want to wind up Ruth by coming home late. Or get pissed in case he said something rash. Though John doubtless wouldn't bat an eyelid if he told him about Plymouth. John'd been in the army, he'd probably seen his share of confused soldiers who'd had sex with a bloke for the first time.
Except Greg wasn't confused anymore; it all seemed clearer now. It had been good with Alec, but he still fancied Ruth as well. Maybe he was bisexual, but that didn't make any difference when he was married. And as for Sherlock...
As for Sherlock, it was as if all the subconscious excuses his mind had made over the years had vanished. He couldn't have Sherlock because of Ruth. He couldn't have Sherlock because he was a bloke and Greg was straight. He couldn't have Sherlock because Sherlock didn't want anyone close to him.
The real reason was that Sherlock wasn't interested in sex. Maybe it was being with Alec that had made Greg realise that, remembering what young men were normally like, alive with hormones, whether they were gay or straight. If Sherlock had wanted someone, he'd have found a boyfriend or girlfriend in the years Greg had known him. He could have anyone he wanted, looking like that. But Sherlock hadn't found anyone, because that wasn't what he wanted. All that mattered was the same faces around him as he concentrated on a crime scene. And having John at his side so he didn't make too big an idiot of himself.
Well, as far as he was concerned, John was welcome to the prat. Greg had his own life to lead; better things to do than hold Sherlock's hand and try and look out for him. He had a family; he had a job. Sherlock could do what the hell he liked. It was time for Greg to stop worrying about him.
***
John was right - making fun of Sherlock was a way to let off steam when it all got too much. Greg avidly read the ever-accumulating comments on John's Sherlock Holmes Baffled blog post; he sniggered at the "Hat-Man and Robin" headline. He even took a video of a dopey Sherlock sitting in the gutter outside Irene Adler's house in Belgravia discussing cases with a woman who wasn't there. Then he helped John get Sherlock back to Baker Street and up seventeen stairs - Sherlock tripping over every damn one of them, so it seemed. A joke was a joke, but Sherlock damaging himself permanently wouldn't be so funny.
"So why did Sherlock go and see Irene Adler?" he asked John, once Sherlock was safely tucked up in bed. There was an obvious reason why any other man might be going to see her, but if Sherlock was into "recreational scolding", he'd surely have shacked up with DS Donovan years ago.
John collapsed into his chair and looked warily at Greg.
"I won't arrest you, whatever you've done," Greg told him hastily. "But if Sherlock's mixed up in something dangerous, I need to know."
"We didn't think it was going to be dangerous," John said, and Greg could swear that for once the mad bastard actually meant it, that they hadn't been looking for trouble. "Sherlock had a client who wanted us to retrieve some compromising photos Irene had taken. We got there, we were about to get our hands on them, and some gang jumped us and Irene."
"Looking for the same thing?"
"Don't think so." John frowned. "They were Americans, our client's English."
"And you fought them off. Who was the one who shot the bloke dead and where's the gun?" Funny how he was always have to cover up for Sherlock and John getting their hands on guns. Well, not funny, so much as infuriating.
"Irene," John replied, which was a surprise. "She had some kind of weapon rigged up to fire when the safe was opened."
"You and Sherlock weren't doing any shooting?"
"Sherlock fired one of the pistols to alert the police. We didn't use them otherwise, and we were just acting in self-defence. Irene's the one you should be charging, after what she did to Sherlock."
"One more thing I need to know." Greg folded his arms and stared down at John. "Who's your client?"
As he expected, he just got a mulish look in reply.
"Well, tell me this much," Greg went on. "Is it someone in the Met?" He saw the momentary surprise on John's expressive face, before it closed back into its frown.
John shook his head. "No, he said. "Important, but not connected to the police." He paused and then added, "Why did you think she...they might be?"
"Because Irene Adler has clients in the Met, which is why we've never been able to do anything about her." She'd been thumbing her nose at the Vice Squad for the best part of ten years; she was older than she looked.
John was staring at the carpet now. "Maybe in your team, Greg," he muttered. "She knew all about the hiker case, and she said something about getting the information from a policeman."
Shit, thought Greg. "Anything more specific?"
"No," John said. "And I suppose it doesn't have to be the Met that was leaking rather than the Thames Valley guys..."
"Not necessarily my team either. It was an impossible murder, that was why DCI Carter asked our advice. Everyone on our floor was talking about it, trying to come up with a solution." He tried to think back to the morning; had anyone he knew been behaving suspiciously - well, more suspiciously than usual? It'd be impossible to check who might have talked to Adler, but he was pretty certain Sally wasn't her type. Anyone else he could rule out?
"Can't be Anderson, at least," he said.
"Why?" John replied. "I mean Irene said policeman, but she may have been speaking loosely..."
"He's on holiday," Greg replied. "Bird-watching in the Scottish Highlands somewhere - I think he said the island of Uffa. Point is, he was going to be impossible to contact; mobiles don't work up there and there's only one landline on the island." It was odd he thought of Anderson immediately, but he was the only one of his team he could think of who was screwed up enough to get involved with a dominatrix.
Though maybe that was just him being prejudiced, he reminded himself. People did all kinds of surprising things sexually; he was proof of that.
"So what happens now?" John asked.
"You tell me. I take it you didn't get the photos off Irene?" John shook his head. "I'll try and get an arrest warrant issued for her. We could go for actual bodily harm, for doping Sherlock, if you're prepared to give a statement. Or are you gonna want to protect her?" John was quite capable of being stupidly chivalrous if there was a beautiful woman involved.
"No," John said firmly. "Irene could have killed Sherlock if she'd got the dosage wrong. And she didn't give a toss about her maid, the tall redhead who got knocked out. Is she OK, by the way?"
"There didn't seem to be anything we could hold her for, so she got taken off to hospital. Dunno if she's been discharged yet. I suppose you want to stay here tonight and keep an eye on Sherlock, rather than come down to the Yard now and give a statement?"
"I...you've seen the state he's in. I don't want Mrs Hudson to have to deal with him."
"Fair enough. I may need you in tomorrow, but I suspect I'm going to be told to leave Ms Adler well alone." Greg headed for the door and then turned to say, "And if Sherlock does have any ideas about how we can track down the mole in the Met, let me know, would you?"
***
"How was your day?" Ruth asked when he got home.
"Bit mixed," he said, trying to think what he should tell her. Ruth asked conscientiously every day about his work now, just as Greg carefully checked what the kids had been up to at school. But there was something more important to ask about today.
"How was the class?" he asked. Ruth had decided that now Emily was in Year 1, she was going to do a Return to Nursing Practice course.
"Terrifying," Ruth replied, as she stuck his dinner in the microwave to reheat. "The IT system made me feel a complete ignoramus. Nursing never used to be like this: it's all filling in the paperwork and no time for the patients now."
"It's twelve years," he told her. "It's gonna take a bit of time to adjust, but I know you can do it."
"I suppose so," she said. "So what was the bit mixed at work about?"
"New death this afternoon in central London," Greg said, clearing himself a space to eat on the kitchen table. "Bloke who got shot was a foreign national, don't know if we're going to get it or Counter Terrorism are. But Thames Valley asked us for help with a suspicious death this morning and we've probably cracked their case."
"Already?"
"We think it was death by misadventure; passer-by hit with a boomerang. Have to check up on it, of course, see if someone was around with one at the time." Well, the first thing to do was check that Sherlock still thought it was the right solution when he wasn't off his face. But it was the most plausible suggestion Greg had heard so far.
"Someone wandering around southern England with a boomerang?" Ruth said. "That's weird." She handed him a plate full of homemade shepherd's pie; one of his favourites.
Not the weirdest thing about today. But he didn't want to say anything about Irene Adler, let alone about Sherlock's encounter with her. So much he didn't feel he could tell Ruth; sometimes it seemed that every conversation with her was about what was not said. Maybe it was inevitable when you got back together again; you know how thin the ice was still.
"So has Katy heard about the school orchestra?" he asked instead, and they were back on the safe ground of family discussions. The children they shared, even when they didn't seem to share much else. More important than Irene Adler, after all, or even Sherlock Holmes.
***
Sherlock's Christmas present for Greg was a stabbing. Well, it was solving a stabbing a week before Christmas and not calling Greg an idiot while doing so, which was practically a present in itself. An art student had had a quarrel with his boyfriend and got a penknife in the guts. Sherlock found the murder weapon, hidden in a piece of pottery, of all the bizarre places, so they were able to charge Beppo Rovito with murder.
When Mycroft Holmes turned up unexpectedly in Greg's office the next day, Greg presumed it was something to do with that. Maybe the dead man hadn't just been an art student with a juvenile taste in projects and a complicated love-life. Maybe he'd been a spy or a terrorist. But instead, Mycroft plonked down on Greg's desk a piece of paper that looked oddly familiar.
"Have you seen this?" Mycroft demanded, in his normal talking-to-the-mentally-inadequate tone.
"Invitation to a Christmas party at 221B," Greg replied. "Surprised you got sent one as well; John must have got a bit carried away with the Christmas cheer."
"Why is Sherlock agreeing to this tomfoolery?"
"Because John and Mrs Hudson are twisting his arm," Greg said. "Look, I know it's not Sherlock's idea of fun, but John said he wasn't doing anything else this Christmas. If he was supposed to be spending it with you, I suggest you talk to him directly. It's nothing to do with me."
"Are you attending this party?"
Greg leaned back in his chair. It was very tempting to tell Mycroft it was none of his sodding business, but he did have to work with the man sometimes. And if there was some kind of Holmes family bust-up all of Sherlock's acquaintances were bound to catch the flak somehow. Sherlock wasn't good at being quietly unhappy.
"I wasn't planning to go. We're off down to Dorset Boxing Day morning to see Ruth's parents, so we'll probably still be packing the evening beforehand."
"Is anyone else from Scotland Yard going?"
"Doubt they've been invited. But I can't see them going even if they were, to be honest. Your brother's not exactly popular."
"Despite the fact that without him the Met would have an even more abysmal clear-up rate?" Greg had forgotten that in his own slightly more refined way, Mycroft could be every bit as obnoxious as Sherlock.
"I haven't got time to sit around here all day playing guessing games with you," he told him, glaring up at the snooty git. "What do you want me to do and why?"
"I would like you to go to the party. And reassure me afterwards that Sherlock is in a stable condition."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
Mycroft's face took on a constipated look as he said, reluctantly, "I want to be sure that he is not using any illegal substances."
"What?" Greg thought back frantically. Had there been anything odd about Sherlock's behaviour the last time he saw him? Well, odder than you'd expect from Sherlock.
"I have no evidence," Mycroft said hastily. "I...if I say that's why I worry, it would doubtless sound ridiculous."
He was a snooty git, but he also must have had a grandstand seat for Sherlock Holmes: The Junkie Years. And it was Mycroft who'd got Sherlock to stop using, however, ham-fistedly. Maybe that entitled him to be paranoid.
"Why now?" Greg asked, scanning the stiff figure in front of him. "What are the risk factors for him using?"
"Boredom. Frustration. He always used to find Christmas stressful. Too much interaction with other people."
"If you're worried, talk to John. He lives with the man and he's a doctor. If there's something wrong, he'll be the first to know."
"John doesn't trust me."
"So you want me to be your spy?" He'd almost felt sympathetic to the arsehole for a moment.
"I'm asking you for a favour," Mycroft said patiently. "John would like you there, even if Sherlock is unlikely to be grateful. If you go, I don't feel obliged to, and everyone will be much happier."
"I'm not spying on him."
"Please," Mycroft said, and it wasn't fair how human he could suddenly sound. "I have a bad feeling about this party. I'd like someone there who I can rely on."
"I'll see if Ruth's OK about me going," Greg said, "but if I do, you'll owe me big time, Mycroft."
***
Ruth was fine about him going off: leave her to pack in peace, she said.
"We'll get far more in the suitcases if I do them all," she said, turning it into a joke. Strong, dependable, competent Ruth. He wished suddenly that she could come to the party, that he could show everyone at 221B how wonderful she was. But if she did, Sherlock would doubtless deduce something embarrassing about her, and it would all turn sour.
He'd forgotten that Sherlock didn't need someone present to deduce everything about them. And the best of his deductions - when you heard them, you knew at once he was right. The pattern of Ruth's behaviour had always been there; he'd just never seen it.
He didn't make a scene, just slid away soon after Mycroft phoned to say they'd found Irene Adler's corpse. He wasn't the only person to be having a crappy Christmas, then.
***
Ruth was watching television when he got home, but she switched it off when he came in the door.
"I wasn't expecting you back so soon," she said, and then suddenly added, "You look terrible. Was Sherlock being a pain?"
"Sherlock said..." he began, and then forced himself to go on. "He said you were having an affair. With that PE teacher at Robert's school. Mr Morgan, isn't it?"
Ruth sat on the sofa and stared down at the remote, as if working out what button to press to stop her life, rewind it.
"It's over," she said at last. "I don't know how he knew, but it's over."
Greg sat down heavily in the big armchair, his legs feeling unsteady. "You did have an affair?" He kept his voice quiet, because if he shouted he would fall apart.
"A few months," Ruth said, and her voice was desperately quiet too. "I...he paid attention to me. He made me feel I mattered."
"And I didn't?"
"The work comes first with you, it always has." Ruth's voice started to choke now. "But you know what? It was the same with Gareth. The school found out, and the head-teacher was furious. Breaking up a parent's marriage - not setting a good example, she said. She was talking about him having to change jobs and he loves that school. So he broke it off."
"The school knew as well? Did everyone? Was it just me who didn't realise?"
"The children didn't know. I wasn't sure, you see. I didn't know what to tell you."
"The truth?"
"How could I tell you I didn't know what I wanted!" Ruth burst out. "It felt so good with Gareth sometimes but so wrong, as well. And then he told me it was all over."
"That was why you came back was it, because you'd been dumped?" Greg snarled. He could feel the urge to hurt building in him, to scream and yell, call her every filthy name under the sun...
"I came back to try and make it work," Ruth said quietly. "Because if it kept on going wrong, maybe it was me that was the problem, not you or Gareth. Maybe if I could just try harder..." She came to a halt, and he knew she was close to crying.
Suddenly his anger was gone, to be replaced by infinite weariness. He didn't want to have to do this any more. He didn't want Ruth to have to do this, to pretend it was all fine.
"It doesn't work like that," he said, and Ruth nodded. "We can't...we've been kidding ourselves, haven't we? It's over."
Ruth nodded again. She looked up at him at last and said, "I'm sorry."
There was probably something more he should say, but he didn't know what. They sat in silence for a few moments, as he concentrated on not crying, and then Ruth said:
"Do you want to come down to Dorset with the rest of us tomorrow?"
"No."
"I'll go and unpack your stuff," she said, getting up hastily. "I'll talk to the kids while I'm down there. Tell them everything. We can work out what to do when we get back."
"OK," he said, and that was it. Ruth went upstairs to the suitcases again; Greg sat there in the living room and wished he was dead.
***
It was 9 p.m. on Boxing Day before Greg cracked and texted Sherlock. He sat in the silent kitchen and slowly typed out:
The affair only lasted a few months. How did you know about it? GL
Sherlock's reply was prompt:
A PE teacher called Gareth Morgan agrees to meet a pupil's mother on the afternoon of the England-Wales rugby match? Highly suspicious. SH
Sherlock had overheard one phone call of his to Ruth - back in the spring, it must have been. And he'd worked that out.
Why didn't you tell me then? GL
We had a bomber to catch. Didn't seem a priority. SH
Greg switched off his phone before he said something unforgivable to Sherlock. He ought to eat something. He ought not to drink anything more. He was going to go into work tomorrow and catch whoever had killed Irene Adler. That was the first thing to do. Once he'd got going on a case, it would all seem better.
Part 7