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Janine had spent the afternoon in town on the High Street, shopping; when she came back to the cottage on her Vespa he was already there. She knew him instantly, of course. Who could mistake that long, tall silhouette or the coat flapping in the wind off the sea? He was standing in front of her place alone, but for the calico moggie who’d come with the place and which had apparently decided she’d do well enough as resident humans went.
Janine would have taken minor comfort if the moggie’d been sharpening her claws on his damned elegant trouser legs, but no. The silly fat beast was apparently as vulnerable to his charms as she herself was…and less familiar with his wiles. Spatterpatch flopped on her side on the wide stone wall and waved her feet in the air as he systematically ravished her whiskers and stroked her belly.
“Y’ great trollop,” Janine said, with an exasperated sigh as she pulled up in front of the gate. “You’re already up the duff by that great rangy tom from up Barnsley’s place, y’ dafty. Now you’re fallin’ on your back and droppin’ your knickers for Sherlock Fuckin’ Holmes? Grief, I tell you, girl—that way lies grief, y’ tart.” She sighed, then, and flipped the chin-latch on her helmet, tucking it under her arm. She cocked her head and grinned ruefully at Himself. “Long way from London, Shay-Shay. Been a murder nearby?”
“No,” he said, pertly, “but if you want you can take a whack at me. I always did think if I couldn’t solve the mystery I’d just as soon be it.”
She snorted, and hooked her free arm through the handles of the cotton totes she used as carrier bags. “I’d not manage anything up to your high standards, Sherl. You’re a hard man to please. Best you find someone in your league. Lessee: criminal masterminds are your thing, right?” She was just twisting her wrist to bump the gate latch before hip-shoving her way through, when Sherlock reached past her and opened the gate, holding it quite politely to let her pass. She glowered at him. “And don’t expect more than a ‘thank you kindly’ for that, either. I’m still keeping a list of minor vengeances to take on you over the next decade or so, and good manners won’t get you off the hook.”
“Of course not,” he said, cheerfully. “Not to be expected. Come up with any particularly good ones?”
“I did think suggesting I’d given birth to your daft love child was a possibility,” she said. “Genetic, and tied to your line, of course. Tragic: poor thing couldn’t manage his ABC, much less deduce his way to the end of the block. But I thought better of it. Didn’t seem fair to make the poor tad daft and your bastard.” She shoved the two bags of groceries toward him without even asking, then dug in her pocket for her keys, opening the front door. “Come on, then. Make yourself useful. Bring the bags back to the kitchen, and I’ll even brew us up a cuppa.”
“Strychnine in the sugar? Ground glass in the biccies?”
“No, but I’ve a nice box of laxatives disguised as choccies. Thought I’d let you run through the box,” she snapped back. “Eh, put the bags on the table, y’ great lummox. That’s right. Now, get to work. Bread in the bread box, chops in the fridge along with the eggs and cheese. Milk on the top shelf while you’re there.” She rummaged in her cupboards, and came out a second later with a box of mince pies. She waved them at him. “You still mad for these?”
“Utterly.”
“Yeah, well. Got a pack you might as well rip through while you’re here,” she said, and slit the package open and piled them on an old plate decorated with misty bunches of violets rimmed with their heart-shaped leaves. He reached out to grab one, but she rapped him on the knuckles. “Not till I’ve brewed the pot, y’ damned gobshite. Regular sneak thief, you. Can’t leave a mince out ten seconds but you’re there trying to steal it.”
“Piracy,” he said, grinning, and slipped fast as an eel past her guard, grabbing a pie. He chuckled as she muttered and called him, names and threatened him. “Before you brew a pot, why don’t you show me what you’ve bought yourself with your vile media-whoring ways?”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Y’mean take you on my own private victory lap? Sure. Why not?” She opened her arms. “Kitchen, of course. Th’ place is old, but the kitchen’s been redone. Had to fight the historical buildings folks tooth and nail to hear the former owners talk, but they got running water, a nice aga, and a microwave out of the battle, and there’s new wiring throughout. Every time I wake at night and start to repent my wicked ways I think of the microwave and fall back into sin and error. Wrote an entire expose on your sock index last week in hopes of adding an espresso machine, but so far no one’s buying.”
He chuckled as he followed her into the next room. “I’d offer to have Mike get one for you and send it down, but that would deprive you of half your fun,” he said. “What good are the wages of sin if you can’t commit the sins first, after all?”
“No good at all,” she agreed, decisively. She dragged him through the little cottage a room at a time, the two exchanging snark and sass the whole way. Then she hauled him out into the gardens. “View of the Seven Sister’s Cliffs, though rather distant,” she said. “Lovely long view over the hills, though.”
“Where were the hives?”
“East side,” she said. “Bad placement, too: exposed to the wind something awful. Farmer up the way’s been trying to sell me new hives, real straw skeps, all winter, but he says I should put it on the south face of the lot, near the fence line.”
Sherlock scoffed. “Skeps? Skeps?! Idiot. Moron. No one uses skeps these days expect for reenactment or some other historical hobby. Basic Langstroths work well and are easily come by, or if you want to experiment, try some Warrés. Southern exposure’s not bad, but provide shelter.”
“Know-it-all,” she laughed. “Didn’t go to all the trouble to get rid of the wicked things just to let Farmer Edwards and you talk me into a new lot of creepy crawlies. What would I do with them, anyway?”
“Harvest honey?” he said, as though it was entirely sensible. “A good hive can give you quarts and quarts in a good year.”
“Like I need the calories,” she said, snorting. She opened her arms and turned, showing every inch of a well-padded figure in jeans and a well-worn Aran cable-knit sweater. “Not a pound lighter than when you last saw me. Not in need of honey—not from a hive, and not from your sweet-talkin’ self, Sherlock Holmes.”
His eyes sparkled. “Not even a little? You do look good—though you’re wrong. You’ve lost five pounds and ought to put it back on. I’m going to put sugar in your tea and make you eat a mince pie while I’m here, just to start you on the right path.”
“The grief you give Mikey over his weight, and him slaving to keep it off—and here I am already a good stone or more over optimum and you, you wicked man, are threatening to fatten me like a Christmas goose. Bastard.” She sighed, then. “A man’s a trial and a grief, and there’s no getting around it. What are you here for, Sherl? I was just getting to the point where I could go an entire week without wanting to throw myself down a well or off those cliffs thinking about what a fool you made of me. Couldn’t you have left me be, y’ feckin’ cute hoor?” And, for the first time since she’d seen him standing tall and graceful at her gate, the reality of him hit—hit like a hundredweight of grief, so she was suddenly fighting back the tears she’d refused to show him even once since she’d learned what he’d done to her. She didn’t intend to show him now, either—though damn the man, she could count on him deducing it regardless.
She still turned away, stomping furiously along her back fence line until she reached the corner that gave the best view of the shoreline and the white chalk cliffs. She folded her arms and leaned them on the iron palings set in the coarse field stone wall, and propped her chin on her wrists. A few minutes later she’d managed to send the tears away…though the tight pain in her throat lingered.
He approached from behind, quietly, and said, hesitantly, “I’ll make tea. Strong and black, right?”
She nodded. “Black as the devil.”
He stood, waiting; then, uncertainly, he tucked his hand under her elbow. She sighed and let him draw her away from the fence. He put his arm around her shoulders and walked her in. Gently, he pulled out a chair at her kitchen table for her, before wandering to the counter and collecting her electric kettle. He filled it at the sink, put it on its stand, and turned it on. Then he turned toward her, straightened, and said, formally and quietly, “I’m sorry. What I did was wrong. I…was stupid, and cruel, and unkind.”
She frowned. “Oi…you gone off your trolley? Sherl…”
“No.” He set his jaw. “I don’t much like myself for it. It made sense when I thought it up…but by the end I should have known I was being a bastard. I probably did know I was being a bastard. I just didn’t want to stop. I abused you as badly as Magnussen ever did…and I know he did abuse you. And I…need to make it better. I need to make up for it.”
She narrowed her eyes, studying him. After a while she sighed, leaned an elbow on the table and her head on her hand. “Sherl, you’re a right bastard even when you’re trying to behave. You know that? I could have gone all my days without you apologizing and meaning it, you obnoxious twat. Now what am I supposed to do wi’ you? An apology doesn’t make up for anything, no matter how much you mean it. Can’t take back one tear or wash away a single moment of wishing I’d died before I ever met you. Can’t take away the embarrassment of…” She gritted her teeth. “I lay with you, damn it. I…I came for you, Sherlock Holmes. I lay naked in your arms and moaned and begged for it… And I let you pass because I thought it only kind…a matter of time, and patience. Such a sweet boy. Just learnin’. I thought you loved me. Clever though you may be, it never occurred to me you were that sort of clever—the mean kind.”
He swallowed. “I know.”
The stood there, unsure what to say, until the kettle screamed. Sherlock built them a pot of tea in a fat blue pot Janine had found at a local church sale. He brought it over, collected milk and sugar, and put together a cup for her, living up to his threat to add extra sugar and milk. He put a mince pie on a plate and shoved it across the table to her, before snatching one himself and biting into it.
She grinned crookedly. “You do love those quite dreadfully.”
“Best,” he agreed through crumbs. He poured himself tea, added two sugars and milk, and seemed to put down roots into his chair, settling deep into it. He was still in his Belstaff, the collar turned up, the flash of red stitching brightening the lapel. He drank down his mug, prepared another, then said, “I really didn’t understand. Some things I don’t, until it’s too late. But then I don’t like who I’ve been, and I have to fix it.”
“Not much fixing to be done,” Janine said. She smiled. “You’ve been a pip about the papers and the talk shows. And look—nice house. Nice bit of money in the bank. New start. I suppose I could complain. But I won’t. I always did know you are…whatever you are. We’re good, Sherl.”
“I killed him for you,” he said, suddenly.
She blinked. “Thought that was some spree killer.”
He shrugged. “Mikey’s been revising history for us. I killed him. For you.” He rolled his eyes, then, horse face grimacing as he said, “All right, not just for you. For John and for Mary and because he was a proper bastard and because he was out to destroy Mikey if he could, and because really, he was ruining Christmas for everybody. But…” he met her eyes. “I killed him for you, too. Because he hurt you and he knew it. He understood it and wanted it. I killed him.”
She frowned, studying that long, funny face—so beautiful, so silly, so homely and sweet. Whatever he was, he was both brilliant and an idiot, and both shone in his eyes—confusion and certainty. Strength and fear.
“You killed him?”
“SIG Sauer P226R service semi-automatic, though it’s been mistaken for a Browning L9A1. Single shot through the forehead,” he said, and she noticed his hands, clutched tight around his mug, were shaking and white-knuckled. “Then Mikey had to arrest me.”
“I can see that,” she said, seriously. “He got you off?”
“It’s a long story. Yes and no. He bought me six months, and then Moriaty came back.”
She’d heard about Moriarty during long, rather cocaine-addled nights at Baker Street. “You’re not just…that’s not drugs talking?” She examined his face again. “Are you using?”
He shrugged. “Was. Off again. It’s true. Just a long story and most of it Mike would kill me if I told you.”
She grinned. “Ah, at last a practical revenge. I’ll get you to tell me everything and then watch Mike disappear you.”
“He’d disappear you, too, though.”
“It would be worth it,” she said, chuckling, then said, more seriously. “No. It wouldn’t. I’m glad he’s dead, love. Sorry you had to do it. Wouldn’t have wanted that of you.”
“You never told me what he did to you.”
She shrugged. “Before you were shot….it was too humiliating. After you were shot it would have been worse. Like letting you know you’d both shamed me.”
His lips tightened in a straight, hard line. He met her eyes. “I want to make it right. Or at least make it even. Whatever it takes. Poke at my eyes. I won’t stop you. Use me however you want. I want to make it right.”
She frowned. “What?”
“Turn about. Do as you’ve been done by. I earned the embarrassment. Turn the tables.” He huddled in that big charcoal grey tweed coat, too clearly at the far end of his own endurance. “I was wrong, Janine. I don’t know any way to make it right, but you can at least make it even.”
She stared at him, caught in horror and anger. “You…you…idjit. You daft, dim berk. You…gobshite.” She stood, then, and backed away, shaking her head. “You’re insane. What? You want me to order you to strip down and let me ‘do as I’ve been done by?’ That was sick enough the first time, Sherl. Rotten of you to do. It’s going to be better as turnabout? Poke at your eyes like that damned bastard Magnussen? Keep it going and going? Bollocks. You can take that idea and shove it up your…” she cut herself off, then. “It doesn’t work that way, Sherl. Do you really not understand that?”
He shrugged, and said in that lunatic logical voice, all confused little boy wrapped in forced rationality, “I don’t know what else to do. This is at least a time-honored, recognized system of administering justice: an eye for an eye.”
“A humiliation for a humiliation?” She shook her head. “Bollox. Double-bollux. Bollux with sprinkles and a cherry on it.”
“What can I do to fix what I broke?” he asked, popping with frantic need, then. He was out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box, hurtling around the kitchen, Spatterpatch racing to avoid his long, elegantly shod feet. He gesticulated. “I don’t like me. I don’t like what I did. I don’t like that I hurt you. What can I do to fix it?” He was leaning over her, as angry as he was desperate. “What can I do to fix it, Janine?”
She glared back, just as angry. “You can’t, you great idjit. Some things don’t fix. You can’t take it all back. You can’t make it so you loved me when you touched me. You can’t make it so you cared how you’d hurt me when you tricked me into trusting you. You can’t undo a single kiss you never meant, or make one single time I screamed your name anything you cared about or valued. Don’t you understand? If you’d loved me, it wouldn’t have mattered. And since you didn’t—it can’t be cured.” She stood. “Stay the night if you want. Sofa’s good to sleep on, and the taxis don’t come out this far most nights. Eat what you like from the kitchen. I’m…going upstairs.” She swept up Spatterpatch and stormed away to her little room under the eaves.
She cried, face buried in pillows in the hope he wouldn’t hear her: he owned enough of her pride already. She slept—restlessly, clutching onto unconsciousness like it was a life-saver in high seas. She woke and lay in the dark, hearing him thundering around her cottage like a mutant bumble bee the size of an elephant. He’d never really been a quiet man to live around, she thought. Not when he was straight, not when he was higher than a kite. Not happy and giggling or brooding and sawing at that fiddle like something out of an old horror movie. He was a thunderstorm crashing over the rooftop. He was a squall coming up just as you were hoping to head to shore. He was wit and vision and…oh, God. He’d seemed…
Tender. He’d seemed tender, his hands careful, his eyes huge as she responded. His erection hard against her side, convincing her that someday, if not then, she’d have it all. Not just the few tentative times he let her bring him to climax as they rocked against each other, rutting on the sofa.
Once, she thought. Once would have been nice. It wasn’t even as though he hadn’t liked it enough to get hard for her, or hadn’t liked her enough to shove and sigh against her before he came. It had seemed so little a thing he held back.
“Saving it till we were married,” he’d said in the hospital, and saying it had made a mockery of that very hope.
No. He hadn’t been a quiet man. Loud. Flambouyant. A beautiful, brilliant splash of color in a life spent working for a sadistic bastard in a bleached out, sterile modern hell of an office.
A shame he’d been a lie.
She was hungry.
She thought of the lamb chops down in the fridge. She’d planned to broil them till their edges were crunchy, and eat them with salad and reheated colcannon zapped in the micro. With her luck the Berk in the Belstaff was ripping through her chops like she’d bought them with him in mind….
She sighed.
She was hungry.
Damn, she was hungry.
She stood, then, and resigned herself.
She walked down her stairs, working for a bit of regal elegance, but suspecting she looked like what she was. A healthy girl with good hair and a great personality—always a losing combination in this world.
He was in the kitchen, in his shirt sleeves. He’d made a mess. Onion peels everywhere. Egg shells heaped and dripping in the middle of the table. No sign of anything green and fresh and healthy and vegetable-ish, other than fried potatoes sizzling in a pan on the Aga.
“You leave me any chops?” she asked.
“Yep.” He popped the terminal p, and she couldn’t help a little smile, remembering how the silly man liked that trick.
“If I broil the chops and make a salad, will you share your fried eggs and potatoes? Hell of a dinner they’d make.”
“Sounds like a deal.”
“Good, then.” She got to work. They’d been good in his insane kitchen at Baker Street, she remembered. Soon they were sitting at the table, and she was beginning to feel less like a starved locust ready to plague old Pharaoh and devour Egypt’s harvest.
“Salad cream?” she asked.
He pushed it across the table to her. “Salt?”
She returned the kindness.
“There’s a new show at the Science Museum,” he said. “On the Puffing Billy. Steam locomotive.”
She almost said she’d love to see it—then limited herself to saying, “You should enjoy that.”
He looked at her, eyes anxious, and she felt like a mean old bitch who tormented kittens. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Take along a friend.”
“You like science exhibits.”
“So would your friend at the Morgue.”
“Only biology. And some chemistry.”
She looked at him. “I live in Sussex, for goodness sake.”
“You could take the train up and stay over at Baker Street.”
“I’m not your girlfriend any more, Sherlock. I never really was.”
He poked at his chop. “I don’t know,” he said, softly. “You were my first. So—I got some bits wrong. I got some bits right, too.”
She snorted, and stared at him. “Sherlock…”
He cut a piece of lamb and ate it, not looking at her.
“You can’t ‘fix’ it by asking for a do-over,” she said, exasperated.
“Why not? I know what I did wrong, this time.”
“So…what? You’re going to magically start loving me this time out?”
He cut another piece of lamb.
She sighed, and ate her salad.
“It’s a good dinner,” she said. “Chops and potatoes and eggs and salad. Nice.”
He nodded.
It was quiet, except for Spatterpatch prowling at their feet, mewing.
Sherlock cut the fat from his chops into bits and then held one up, waiting for the cat to stretch high and snatch one.
“You shouldn’t spoil her,” Janine said.
“You do, or she wouldn’t beg.”
“Second-hand cat,” she pointed out. “Came pre-spoiled. Not my fault.”
He proceeded to spend five minutes proving quite categorically that the habit may have originated with a prior owner, but that Janine pampered the cat outrageously.
She snorted when he finished. “Done, now, genius?”
He met her eyes, wide mouth tightening in a grin. “For now.”
“Good. Finish feeding her your scraps so I can start teasing her with mine,” she said. “Then we clear off and do the dishes. You want to wash or dry?”
“You’re still a slave master?”
“Whiny baby. Slave mistress, by the way.”
“Does that mean you’ll come up for the exhibit after all…mistress?”
She rolled her eyes and fed the cat scraps. “You’re impossible. Sherlock, we’re done.”
“End round one. Begin round two.”
“What international magnate do you need to gain access to this time?”
He shrugged. “No one. Consider it an investment in case of future opportunity.”
“Really, Sherlock. Why are you doing this? Starting over won’t fix what happened any more than apologies or regrets or idiotic turn-about plans for letting me take vengeance on you.”
He stood and started clearing the table without even being asked. He took three trips back and forth to the sink, before coming to stand in front of her. When he spoke, it was slow and careful.
“John and I went out to Appledor hoping to force Magnussen to give us access to his secret files. It…went wrong. Went wrong in ways I’m not able to tell you. Went wrong in horrible ways. I…lost.” He shifted, uneasily, all that long thin body restless with remembered dismay and embarrassment. “Janine—I lost. Totally, completely, absolutely. I lost so badly that John and I were going to be going to prison. So badly that Mycroft was going to be compromised by that bastard for the rest of his life. I…” He met her eyes. “I fucked up. Janine, every single thing to do with Magnussen I fucked up, including what I did to you. I got it wrong. Completely wrong. Couldn’t have done much worse if I’d been trying to. And Magnussen had the upper hand. We were out on his terrace, waiting for Mycroft to arrive so Magnussen could give him the good news that I'd…lost everything for all of us. And he started tormenting John.”
She swallowed hard. “Tormenting?”
His eyes didn’t leave hers. “The eye game.”
She flinched and looked away. “I’m sorry. John didn’t deserve that.”
“No. He didn’t. But I told him to wait. To hold out. Not to fight.”
“Because?”
“Because Mike was coming. I thought if anyone could fix it, Mike could.”
She nodded, not out of shared faith, but out of understanding how much faith he seemed to have in the brother he sparred with, screamed at, tormented—and idolized.
“Then he said he’d done it to you.”
She nodded.
“Janine, I broke. Not for John. When he said he’d done it to you.”
She turned and looked at him, frowning.
“You were my first. I…got things wrong. Really wrong. But when he said he’d done that to you, it broke my heart.”
She shivered. “Sherl, if this is another game…”
“No game.” He bit his lower lip, and said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m feeling half the time. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. But…it broke my heart. And I miss you. And it keeps hurting, knowing what I did to you. Is…is that a start? Something to be getting on with?”
She thought about it, and sighed. “Wash or dry, Shay-shay?”
His mouth flicked in a tiny grin. “Wash. You dry—you know where to put it all away.”
She nodded, and took up the towel. “We’re not finished with this, Sherl.”
“That’s better than ‘we’re done, Sherl.’”
“I suppose it is,” she admitted. “But we’re not an item again. Not…yet.”
“We will be,” he said, a flash of his normal smugness shining through at last. “I’m really very good when I set my mind to it.”
She snorted. “I’ll hold you to that, you prat.”
Three weeks later, after they’d seen the Puffing Billy exhibit, she let him kiss her again.
“Understanding is different,” he said afterward, and walked her to Baker Street holding her hand all the way.