The Quiet Man

The Danger of True Things

“That’s Greg. That’s Greg Lestrade.” Mary doesn’t know who I mean. I point him out to her; he’s right in the middle. He’s the one who’s going to speak; he’s the one hovering nearest the microphone. It’s obvious. “There.”

“Which one?”

“There, the–” Pointing really doesn’t help; the telly isn’t that big. “The one with the blue jacket, reaching for the– yeah. That’s him. That’s Lestrade, DI Lestrade.”

She nods. “Ah, right. I see.”

But she doesn’t. She doesn’t see at all. She takes a sip of her tea and curls her toes against my thigh. She’d rather we were watching something else, I know. But she won’t say so. She knows this is important. It’s about Sherlock. My friend. It’s important to me. She understands that. She’s listened to me go on about it since dinner and hasn’t complained, she hasn’t tried to stop me or change the subject. She even asked me some questions. She wanted to know about “this Moriarty character.”

She asked if I’d ever met him.

How is it that I’m living with someone who doesn’t know that Moriarty strapped a bomb to my chest? How does that even happen?

Maybe I’ve been sleepwalking through the last three years, and I’m only waking up now that Moriarty is dead.

Greg looks out at the press and stares out at us, and it’s like I’ve caught his eye, sitting here on Mary’s sofa, watching Mary’s telly. But I know I haven’t; it’s just the evening news. But I feel like he’s about to recognise me even through the screen and call me over, John, where’s Sherlock? Give us a hand, would you?

“That’s Greg, yeah. I know him.”

I feel compelled to say it out loud; he’s on the telly, right there, in front of a sea of cameras, and I know him. This isn’t live footage, obviously: there’s some weak sunlight through the window behind him, but the sun went down hours ago. It’s dark outside, it’s raining. Of course it’s not live: they don’t save press conferences for the evening news hour. It’s probably some video from far too early this morning, just after the papers came out, the crack of dawn. Where was I about then? I was in the kitchen thinking nothing strange had gone on in the night other than a weird phone call.

It must have been an exciting night: swarms of special forces, watching monitors and tracking every move and every bit of heat in the night. Waiting for the critical moment, pulling the trigger. I remember that feeling: holding your breath, waiting. Ready to strike. And last night I was dead to the world, sleeping next to Mary. Probably snoring. Probably dribbling. It didn’t used to be this way.

There was a time I would have known everything Lestrade would say before they had even called a press conference. Footage on the news at night would never have surprised me; we rarely even bothered to watch unless it was to mock them for it. By the evening it was all old news; we’d be on to the next thing by the evening, if we were lucky. The press conference is how stories end, generally; not how they begin. There’s rarely a press conference in the thick of it. I’d get a beer from the fridge, sit down on a different sofa, and watch them stumble through the details on the telly. And Sherlock would scan the website for anything new, scratching at the patch on his arm, pin things to the walls, mumble to himself.That’s another lifetime. It feels like it might have been someone else’s life. I’ve turned it all into fiction.

Well, not all of it. Not quite all of it.

This press conference has probably been on repeat all day with newsreaders talking over it. Greg looks a little dazed, frankly. He’d probably been up all night. When did it happen? How? They won’t go into the details, not the interesting ones. Not in front of the press. They won’t say who pulled the trigger. They won’t show photographs of the body. I already know that. Still: I’m waiting to see it, like an idiot. What’s he going to say? He’s squinting down at some paper, the camera is panning all over the place. Stay still, stop mucking around, for God’s sake. Let me watch. Let me see his face. Christ: the incessant yapping of that woman in the pink suit is layered over the whole thing. Her stiff-looking blonde hair is cluttering up the screen. Can we mute her? Is there a button for that? Shut it, lady: let me hear what’s going on.