“Yes,” I said.
My brother colored, and I watched as that great mind of his went to work mastering his passions. “I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re talking about. It comes of being too close to the trees, too far from the forest. Human intelligence is fine as it goes, but when you conduct your investigations retail, you miss the patterns that we find in the wholesale end of things.”
“When one conducts one’s affairs at the retail level,” I told him, “one must attend to the individual, human stories and costs that vanish when considered from the remove of algorithmic analysis of great mountains of data.”
He sighed and made a show of being put upon by his brother. I expect that there are Whitehall mandarins who quake in their boots at such a sigh from such a personage. I, of course, stood my ground and ignored his theatrics.
“Come now,” I said. “There’s nothing to discuss, really. One way or another, the truth will out. That young man will not sit on his hands, whether or not I offer him a safer route to his disclosure. It’s not in his nature.”
“And it is not in mine to have my hand forced by some junior intelligence officer with a case of the collywobbles.” Mycroft’s voice was cold. “Sherlock, your client is hardly an innocent lamb. There are many things about his life that he would rather not have come out, and I assure you they would come out.” He made a show of checking his watch. “He’s already been told as much, and I’m certain that you’ll be hearing from him shortly to let you know that your services are no longer required.”
Now I confess it was my turn to wrestle with my passions. But I mastered them, and I fancy I did a better job of it than Mycroft had.
“And me?”
He laughed. “You will not betray a client’s confidence. Once he cries off, your work is done. Done it is. Sherlock, I have another appointment in a few moments. Is there anything further we need to discuss?”
I took my leave, and you have found me now in a fury and a conundrum, confronting my own future, and that of my brother, and of the way that I failed my client, who trusted me. For as you’ve seen, I kept my erstwhile client’s bit of paper, and the names of the boys he feared so much for, and have made inquiries with a lady of the press of whom I have a long and fruitful acquaintance. The press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it. I have been most careful, but as I have said on more than one occasion, my brother Mycroft has the finer mind of the two of us.”
He filled his pipe and struck a match. There was a sound at the door.
“I fancy that’s him now,” he said and puffed at his pipe. Someone who did not know him as well as I did may have missed the tremor in his hand as he shook the match out.
The door opened. Mycroft Holmes’s face was almost green in the bright light that lit it like the moon.
“You brought Watson into it,” he said, sighing.
“I’m afraid I did,” Holmes said. “He’s always been so diligent when it came to telling my story.”
“He is a veteran, and has sworn an oath,” Mycroft said, stepping inside, speaking with the air of a merchant weighing an unknown quantity in his scales.
“He is a friend,” Holmes said. “Sorry, James.”
“Quite all right,” I said, and looked at Mycroft. “What’s it to be, then?” I was—and am—proud of how steady my voice was, though my heart trembled.
“That is to be seen,” he said, and then the police came in behind him.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS