Games of Grief

by C. J. Strange

  Across the flat from me, Sherlock almost pouts. Call me crazy, but I find it only exenuates her kooky, asocial charm.

  “What did you say the name of your contact was again? Lestrade?” I carry over her own brew in her favorite mug—the chunky blue one from the Sparrow Cafe. She became so obsessed with drinking from them she begged the owners to let her purchase one and, when they refused, half-hinched one forn herself. “Big, blond bloke with a beard?”

  “No—big, blond bloke with a booty,” she says, reaching out from her armchair to make an arse-grabbing motion with her hands.

  I snort as she repurposes her hands to take her tea. “Definitely not the fella I met then,” I say as I sink happily into my own chair after hectic back-to-back shifts. “Unless ‘booty’ suddenly means urgent need for an attitude adjustment.”

  “I believe I met junior,” murmurs Sherlock over her tea. I know that face; she’s inhaling the scent of it. I’ve learned to take these small, intermittent signs as compliments for certain jobs well done.

  “And his informant,” she adds in hesitant afterthought, and it’s the hesitation itself that concerns me the most. “One Professor James Moriarty, of the University College.”

  I nod. Of course I know the bloke—he’s something of an urban legend around campus, especially in the emergency services divisons.

  “I know of him. Former Detective Chief Inspector, investigative and scientific genius, and veteran of almost nineteen years with New Sovereign Yard.” I sip my beverage cautiously, but it’s still a bit too hot. “From the student gossip-mill, he retired early due to a bullet wound he refuses to talk about. One rumor claims patella, another renal, another cranial. All speak to severely shattered masculinity.”

  She smirks, in that way she does when I’ve learned she’s hiding something from me. “I’d say he seems the type,” she deadpans. She sighs, sipping her tea again. I imagine hers is the same temperature as mine, but she drinks it easily, as if it were several degrees cooler.

  “There’s talk of vampires about the town, Dr. Watson.”

  I nearly snort into my tea, having been partway through taking another cautionary sip. “Good grief,” I sputter, shaking my head. “One more time?”

  “Vampires,” she repeats for my benefit. “In the space of twenty-four hours, I have been approached by not one, not two, but four independent sources confirming a similar event occuring at this god-awful bloody festival thing all the kids were at the other night.”

  “Night before last,” I confirm, before catching myself. “Um, I think.”

  “I agree.” Sherlock is sitting forward in her chair, more upright and alert. I daren’t ask if she’s feeling any better, for fear it may drive her back into her depressive slump.

  “Am I one of these sources?”

  She grins without glancing up at me. “Jonathan, you are always my most decisive and dependable source.”

  Whether she meant it as a compliment or not, like many of these other signs, I’ll take it.

  “A doctor, a cop, a poorly-disguised renegade, and a half-eaten ghost girl.” Sherlock quirks her head to the side all of a sudden to address the space to her ten o’clock. “No offense, love.”

  I pause, mid-sip.

  “Uh—” I start uneasily. “Is—is she seriously still here?”

  “In and out. She’s confused.” Sherlock snaps her head up to affix me with one of her milder glares.

  “Why are you being annoying?” she asks, with all the finesse of a sledgehammer. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” I lie, at first. But I know better than to lie to someone as tenacious and deductive as Ms. Sherlock Holmes, and so I quickly retreat for the truth.

  “I—I could’ve saved her, Sherlock.” My voice may be gritty and baseline, but one would have to be emotionally impeded to not notice the tremor of emotion threaded through it.

  To be fair, Sherlock may indeed be that emotionally impeded.

  “I could’ve used my abilities.”

  “Your Magicks?”

  “Don’t call it that,” I snap, with a touch more edge than I mean to. The fine line between science and spirituality is one I’m not entirely comfortable with as a man. The idea that I may be one of these so-called ‘Anomalies’ with supernatural powers is a bluff I have yet to find the courage to plummet over.

  Sherlock is smirking at me over the rim of her pilfered mug. “I’m sorry,” she says, with about as much affability as I’ll ever get from her. “I didn’t mean to step on your extremely emotional moment.”

  “I’m not having a bloody emotional moment.”

  “Your three-eighths’-life crisis?”

  “Sherlock—”

  She pauses, lowering her brew to peer up at me with enormous, cobalt-blue eyes.

  “Of course you didn’t save her, Jonathan,” my flatmate says earnestly. “To do so would have been illogical. Irrational. Completely and spectacularly absurd, might I add. You work to save hundreds of lives daily. You concurrently lend guidance to over a dozen interns, all of whom will save thousands more. Why on earth would one jeopardize such an arrangement to save a single life?”

  I’m blown away by not only her bluntness, but her reasoning. The vanilla-berry scent of her blends with bergamot tones from my tea. My breaths become soothing, intoxicating.

  “That makes a load of sense,” I say gingerly. “I just never realized I could be so… cold. Even subconsciously.”

  Sherlock’s smile is grim. “On occasion, the answer we seek is staring us right in the face and screaming our name, if we can only shift our egos aside long enough to see it,” she says, lifting her tea again, and all I can do is shake my head in disbelief at my own avoidance of the painstakingly obvious.

  “Extraordinary,” I mutter breathlessly, sinking deeper into my armchair.

  “Elementary, dear Jonathan,” is her short and simple response.

  We sit in silence for a minute or two, sipping our individually-crafted teas and pondering the meanings of our own mutual existence. Well, that’s what I’m doing, anyway. I have no idea what the heck Sherlock’s daydreaming about—and frankly, I don’t want to. More often than not, what goes on in her head terrifies me.

  “Many other tropes have been tossed about, too,” she says after a while, the conversation no more comfortable than the lack of. “Chasms—five of them, I believe. And a book, a mystical book. The Opus Veritas.”

  I regard her with both admiration and amusement. Ironically, the same reaction I give her cluttered-boho sense of interior design. “For a paranormal consulting detective, you certainly do take a rather skeptical view of the supernatural.”

  “I happen to excel in the fields of deductive observation, logical reasoning, and six different sciences,” she states smartly. “The above, coupled with a knack for uncovering mundane causes behind supposed supernatural events—and a love of doing so—are the building blocks of a spectacular paranormal consulting detective, if I do say so myself.”

  “You have an answer for everything,” I say with affection. She curls her lips at me, in her version of something similar.

  “Everything,” she says, “except what to wear to the show tomorrow night.”

  I blink at her in confusion. “Did I miss something important while I was basking in your glory?”

  “There’s a K.O.T.A. Wrestling event down the Royal Albert Hall,” she says off-handedly. “It’s Monday Night: Release the Beast!, or something equally as tacky and pseudo-soap opera pantomine. I was pondering whether or not to wear my hair up or down.”

  I’m beginning to follow her, and purely because I’ve had to endure my students’ discussions of it on Tuesday morning shifts. “Kings of the Air?” I confirm, and when she nods, and laugh in bemusement.

  “Whatever floats your boat,” I say. “I’m just glad to see you out and about.”

  Then, I hesitate. Mrs. Hudson meows from down in the foyer, and the sound of her paws padding up the stairs tell us
she’s finally interested enough in what we are discussing to abandon her important duties of guarding the front door.

  “Wait,” I say, slow and measured, as the small cat leaps up onto the arm of the enormous chair beside her master. “You aren’t bloody booked to perform or something, are you?”

  Sherlock Holmes of all people attempts to feign sweet, wide-eyed innocence with me. I’ve pulled her back from the precipice more times than I can count on both hands. I’ve had to employ the use of an abacus.

  “I,” she avows, and the way she’s stroking the cat does nothing to vouch for her lack of guilt, “have not set foot nor planned to set foot in a single fighting ring of any destinction since the incident at Picadilly Circus at the start of the summer.”

  I wince. “Oh, right. Why did you have to go and remind me about that?”

  “I’m doing reconnaissance,” she says, tipping her head to the side and watching me as I try to decipher whether or not she’s being fully transparent. “I saw several flyers at the location I believe the cult are inhabiting. Ergo, I imagine members would be present.”

  “And you would be walking right into the lion’s den?”

  “Nobody used any striking metaphors, Jonathan,” she’s quick to interject. “I imagine one or two of our less-discerning delinquents are fans of the British wrestling circuit.”

  I remain as impenetable as possible, knowing at any point one of us could crack and shatter at the will of the other.

  “Unfortunately,” I say mildly, “I have to work another double. Otherwise, perhaps I too could enjoy the delinquent life for a night.”

  “Oh, just bloody say it. You don’t want me to go.”

  My frown becomes dark as I feel every crease and line in my face deepen. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “By virtue of?” she presses, irritably.

  I huff out every square inch of breath that I’m holding, throwing my proverbial hands in the air.

  “I don’t trust you to stay on this side of the ropes if you think one of the wrestlers is a cultist,” I admit, fully ready to start listing off the reasons now she’s presented me with the invitation. I’m beginning to understand why folk refer to us as an old married couple. “I don’t trust you not to get arrested on more trespassing and assault charges, and not cost me another twenty-thousand sterling in bail. I don’t trust you not to get your throat ripped out by some vampire-wannabe chav for ‘the rush’, Sherlock.”

  My tone softens considerably by the end of my sentence, and she smiles up at me.

  “You’ll come out.”

  “I told you, I’m working the double.”

  “You’ll come out,” she insists. “I know you. You worry too much about me.” The devious grin has by now spread all over her pretty face. I want to reach out and touch her, tease her, maybe even try to kiss her—

  But, no.

  Sherlock isn’t that type of girl. She doesn’t do romantic.

  And so, I draw away, and return my attention to my cup of earl grey.

  “Up.”

  “Mm?”

  “Up,” I say again, sipping my tepid tea. “If you’re wanting to allure, um, vampires, then you’ll want to show off more of the clavicle area.”

  “Extraordinary,” she breathes out, in a way I cannot help but interpret as sensual. And as we sip our tea in sync, and Mrs. Hudson chirps in agreement, I return the heat in her eyes with a wink of one of my own.

  “Elementary,” is my borderline rakish response. At current, it’s as far as I’m willing and able to go.

  But we always have time.

  And for once, I’m determined not to rush.

  11 Lestrade's Sting

  Royal Albert Hall, Borough of Kensington & Chelsea

  November 7, 9:44pm

  I think I must’ve been about thirteen or fourteen years old when my old man brought me here to see a band whose music is no longer relevent and no longer legal—The Killers. Most teenage boys would’ve been embarrassed to be seen at a rock concert with their dad, but all I cared about was sharing the moment with him, the music, and hoping it helped him understand me at least a tiny bit better.

  A heck of a flippin’ lot’s changed since then.

  The country shifted in a violent (and often volatile) anti-globalistic direction, first terminating free migration and between itself and other parts of Europe, then all movement entirely. William Wentworth, who I’m proud to say I voted for, swooped in with his Sovereignty party and saved our economy from total collapse. New laws have been implimented; the entire police force I was trained to serve in as been rewritten almost from scratch.

  But we’re safer for it. We must be. I know we are, even in the aftermath of a more morally muddled evening of police work.

  “K.O.T.A. cosmos!” an amplified female voice declares, bouncing about the Hall ceiling’s distinctive acoustic discs. “You better be ready for us to release! The! Beast!”

  I’ve shamefully watched enough professional wrestling in my adult life to know all about the Beast. I’m more interested in the faces of the crew. The info that was passed to me through our tip line related several members of the tech team with those who’d worked Pyronamix on the weekend.

  Across a sold-out crowd of five-thousand plus, mobile phone lights strobe on and off out of sync with each other. If I was a more metaphorical kinda geezer, I would probably see it alongside the colorful, hand-made signs and understand the reason they call their fans as a collective the ‘cosmos’.

  “Excuse me, love,” I say, finally deciding to approach the young, bubbly blonde in a K.O.T.A. crew bomber jacket at ring-side. She’s been quietly observing everything since the opening match-up, which she spent the duration of fervently photographing and posting said photos and videos to the Net.

  I give her a discreet flash of my badge, before tucking it away into my jeans.

  “Just wondering if you’d seen any faces ‘round here you wouldn’t normally recognize.”

  “Other than your own?” is her fiery response, her voice a tone or two lower than I’d expected. I chuckle sheepishly.

  “Look,” I say cooly. “I’m not here to cause a fuss. In all honesty, I’d rather just take the chance to enjoy a free show. But in essence of at least pretending to do my job, is there anyone I should have my eye on?”

  The spunky blonde glances this way and that before, to the dulcet backing music of one enormous man powerslamming another through a folding table, sighing in agreement.

  “If anyone backstage tells you off for being there,” she says quickly and quietly, “you say Kady asked you to look into the right wankjob who says she’s jobbing in the main event.”

  “I’m looking into a right wankjob?”

  “I don’t reckon she’s jobbing in the main event,” Kady scowls. “And I ain’t ever seen her on crew before tonight. She’s got white-blonde hair all balled up at the top like this, and a patent leather jacket over blue ring gear.”

  Kady lets me go, and I head in the direction of the backstage area of the grand and glamorous event space, which is slowly being adapted to suit the needs of Britain’s only official pro-wrestling promotion. She probably assumes if security has an issue with me being back there, they’ll toss me out again.

  I don’t wind up needing to test her theory.

  On the far side of the ring behind the barrier, I see a flash of black-and-blue I soon allocate to the woman Kady has alleged ‘shady’, to paraphrase. She’s already taken off, darting through the crowd. For all I know, she’s seen me too, or I’ve done something to spook her.

  Without thinking, I take off in hot pursuit.

  My police-issue boots beat my path hard and heavy beneath me as I bolt doggedly across the foyer. She vaults a beverage counter and disappears through a staff-only door; I’m a step-and-a-half behind her. A fire door slams shut at the end of a long industrial corridor, and I make a sprint for it, reaching beneath my plainclothes jacket for my sidearm.

  Get it, get it, g
et it—

  I near yank the door off its hinges. Beyond it, another is easing itself closed. I burst through both into the crisp, cold, November night, my eyes frantically looking around for my perp.

  There!

  “Stop—POLICE!” I bark, but before I can decide whether or not to take the shot, the door opens again behind me, knocking me for six and then some. The gun goes off as I hit the gravel of the parking lot, dazed and confused. Whoever blindsided me leaps over my downed body and makes a break for the main road.

  I would once again be in pursuit, were it not for the weary groan of pain that freezes me mid-rise.

  Oh, flippin’ heck. That is not a noise I want to hear right about now.

  My original perp is lying prone on the tarmac, her curvy, scantily-clad frame half-sprawled up onto the curb. Her head is turned away from me, curled inward, and she’s gripping her upper left arm with the opposing hand through the leather.

  I recover my firearm and cautiously advance on my target. It’s not until I’m practically on top of her that I recognize who it is.

  “Ms. Holmes!”

  “Ugh…” She’s cradling the wound, keeping me from seeing the full extent of the damage. “Bugger fuck, fuck and balls! You trigger-happy bastard, Lestrade—”

  A surge of guilt washes over me. The second perp all but forgotten, I click the safety onto my weapon and drop to my knees on the pavement. My hands are shaking as they reach to assist in any way they can.

  “What are you doing, Lestrade, you absolute spanner!?” she hisses, peering at me through the pained tears clinging to her lashes. “You’re a copper! Do you really want to be caught with me like this?”

  I hear the sound of shoes scuffing over concrete. My head snaps up, and I see the silhouette of a possible witness standing at the edge of the street.

  “But, I shot you—”

  “’Tis but a scratch, you bloody adorable pillock,” she strains out, rolling onto her knees. The witness is approaching us, and fast picking up his pace. “Now get out of here. Before I pull out my own gun and shoot you back.”