You Buy Bones (21 page)

Would he still be around? Would he still be on the recruiting corners?

Watson leaned his head backwards, staring with eyes that did not want to
quite focus on the dirty scenery as it rattled past. He clenched his teeth as
the cab turned to a rougher cobblestone; electric threads of pain charged
his nervous system. Putting his injured leg straight out helped, but he
hated how it bent the rest of his body like an old man's.

The cab ground to a slow halt inside a pillow of sloughed-off snow and sluggish pools of melt. Watson stepped out with his hands death-gripped upon every support he could find, but when he turned around to hand up the fare he was unprepared when the driver hopped down and helped him with his parcels. Flustered attempts to pay him extra were met with a firm no and a nod. “Not at all, sir. We remembers our soldiers.”

Watson was left standing, staring after the vanishing man and his horse with his goods neatly set upon the door-step. He did not know the man... but somehow the man had known him. Was he on display? He shook himself and took the key to the lock.

Strange how his bachelor lodgings felt like they were home; and his moody, wonderfully brilliant, disputatious lodger with their already long-suffering landlady, family.

Perhaps I feel that way because my own family would have never understood.
Not that what he was doing would be
illegal
; Watson could not imagine himself performing any such activity. It was hard enough to see himself defeating a lifetime of upbringing to enter a man's household - a man once respected - as a guest under subterfuge. He was very glad his parents hadn't lived to see this day. Their own personal sense of honesty would have never noticed the
purpose
of his actions; they would have only noticed that he was operating under false pretence. From such actions, they held, no good would come. Dishonesty begat dishonesty.

They had been blessed with the comfort of a narrow outlook. Small wonder they had not turned a hair when their second son, the son who must make his own way, went to medicine for his career, and from there the Army. A bullet in the desert, or a falling brick off a roof - one's destiny was all the same.

Perhaps it was the new awareness of Bradstreet's own estrangement, but the doctor was worried about the Runner. The man's bereavement was clear. As a doctor, Watson had granted his name to many a babe by grateful parents without knowing if the child would ever survive. He knew one of Bradstreet's twins had been named after Lestrade. What a loss for everyone.

The doctor wrenched his mind back to the business at hand as he took his packages one step at a time to his rooms. He had no sister himself, but if anything had ever happened... he was not certain he could be as contained and controlled as the big man.

You've plenty to do without taking on another's problems
, he scolded himself; Bradstreet would not welcome that sort of kindly invasion. He tried to make himself as comfortable as possible in his usual corner and waited for the familiarity of Baker Street to settle into his bones. If Bradstreet - or Lestrade - had seen him at that moment, they would have been surprised at how silent and still he had suddenly grown.

For his part, Watson had learned the art of doing nothing the hard way; it is very difficult to come to a useful plane of mental power when one is near-mindless with pain and blood-loss and thirst in the heart of a desert war. Later on in the Army hospital he began to recollect some sense of himself, but all the hard efforts were laid waste with enteric fever (enteric fever - what an ironic term for a man who did nothing ‘enteric', but laid insensible three out of every four days of his illness!).

The third blow had come when the Medical Board deemed him unfit for serving again; logically, Watson could not blame them. He would have rejected himself out of horror. But the Army had been his chosen world, and one he had thrived in with an unknown sense of self-worth. Losing that world had been painful in the extreme. At the same time, he was facing another form of rejection in terms of what family he had left.

After a certain amount of disaster,
one more
severance of the past becomes nothing more than flat and two-dimensional. Faced with his inability to prevent the dissolution of his relationship with his brother, Watson merely swallowed that along with all his other imagined failures. Whilst he would have never admitted to it, being the second son with low prospects had set him up to accept this sort of thing years ago. Hamish had been the bright star, promising and intelligent. Hamish had been the only sensible choice of heirs.

And now, Hamish was... what Hamish had chosen to be.

And he was... not what he would have chosen.

He could not help but feel that rising above his brother (however accidentally) was somehow a refutation of their parents' hopes.

It was the lot of his life.

Back at the Yard, the two policemen were still a little shaky at the magnitude of their looming project.

“He had it all figured out!”

“Roger... how many times have you said that?” Lestrade asked in his exasperation.

“I'm still not completely believing it. After all of that... that...” His large hands winged through the air like so many baffled birds. “That... plotting and scheming we did... he'd already figured out what to do!”

“Man thinks quick; perhaps because he cuts to the quick.” Lestrade stared into his empty cup. “Nice trick. I wonder if he's always like that.”

“God Alone Knows.” Bradstreet was slightly horrified at the notion. Such thinking was for paranoid malcontents, criminals, and strategists - not decent law-abiding folk.

“So we get his statement filed - you'd be the best man to let the Chief know about it. He's less likely to fuss at
you
.” Lestrade gnawed on what little was left of his thumbnail as he thought aloud. “And I'll pick up the rest of the papers... we can meet up with our fellows in Edinburgh... and stand back and let Watson go into the lion's den.”

“That's no ordinary lion.” Bradstreet pointed out.

“Quite all right. I'm sure that's no ordinary Watson.”

Edinburgh.

Watson had once thought (not so long ago) that he would never return to the Athens of the North. The bad memories remained bad, and the good memories were painful as his now-constantly throbbing leg and the duller weakness of his shoulder.

His last visit had been largely under the hours of night; “Auld Reekie” (Old Smokey) was its most well-deserved name then, for the stench and infernal glow of the coal fires created huge glowering bellies in the sky above the city.

But, in the light of day he surprised himself. He'd forgotten the impression of the city's vast collection of medieval structures.
Auld Greekie
was another name, a pun on its intellectual capacity and thriving subculture.

Robert Burns called it
Edina
for its Latin name; Ben Johnson called it “
Britain's Other Eye
” (tho' he was less poetic in his treatment of the oats eaten there), and Sir Walter Scott, descendant of the Wizard Scott, won all the prizes for linguistic tomfoolery when he called it
Yon
Empress of the North
.

He could not have lost himself in these
streets. He was too well known by his face, his actions and his surname. Even the subterranean catacombs of Old Town wouldn't have let him lie quietly buried from prying eyes. He'd no choice but to choose another large cesspool, and only London fit that description.

And it was working;
he thought bitterly.
It had been working
.
But yet... here he was back in this, with a trained accent that fooled no one. A Northerner knew another Northerner by his face and his name and his mother. How he spoke as judgement was a queerly English conceit.

John Watson lifted his head to the murky sky above, feeling the weather on the skin of his face. Since the 1500's they'd been building multi-storied structures,
lands
, as tall as fourteen stories in the days before the refinement of iron. He could not lose himself in aerial worlds either.

He crossed the broad street cautiously, his step uneven and awkward on the cobbles; a paper-hawker was chaunting his public to buy and thus support the Scotland National Rugby Team. Watson hesitated, but found himself unable to resist. The game was his only honest addiction, and it had been part of the city since ‘71. He passed on a coin without checking its value and took the newspaper that warmed his palm.

There had been a time when he'd counted every tiny coin that came his way. The war had taken that from him too. He knew of course that his depleting funds were due to his inability to hold on to money... but Maiwand had taught him the worthlessness of cash. Cash meant nothing when the throat clenched up for water. The month's pay in his pocket couldn't purchase a lost limb, or ease the pain of the man screaming next to him for morphine (God, the screams were with him yet). Money, then, was only the means to the end - one should criticize those ends, but not the means.

It gave him a new perspective to the definition of money being the root of all evil. Money was the coin of need and desperation. Even when his spendthrift ways curbed his livelihood, he couldn't justify himself to think much of the losses. As long as he could work, he could bring enough in to live on.

Although he was relying more on his pen than he'd ever imagined...

The paper was advertising the next-season's ice hockey recruitment. Watson scanned the slightly-bizarre language of the article and decided ‘
haranguing'
was not too strong of a description, but hockey-players were like that. He snorted at a critical assessment of the last bout of cricket. Yes, of course;
everyone
knew it took Scotland 80-some years to even join the tournaments, but when they did... every schoolboy knew Scotland trounced Surrey by 172 runs! Watson bitterly regretted the end of the Scottish Cricket Union's clear demise; by next year it would be gone. He didn't know what would happen after that...

He stuffed the folded paper under his arm and this time, crossed the street without reversal or interruption. His satchel swung awkwardly from his good hand. A wind from the dry, cool east was coming up. He welcomed. His appetite stirred, ready to replenish after an entire day of switch-overs and delays on the rail - The Flying Scotsman had been unusually inefficient.

Watson picked a promising Old-City tavern that advertised “clean rooms and water” as well as its ability to treat the illustrious clientele of the Royal Observatory. A solid table was chosen against the battle-scored oak wall that let him face the world. He set the paper aside and dickered for a plate of savoury oatmeal sausage and a tankard of roasted barley beer (ignoring the vile Shandy-gaff
[1]
being swilled not far away). The innkeeper set both down with considerable pride, stared Watson's too-thin body up and down with a scathing look, and sniffed, offended that his guest had let himself go. “S mairg a ni tarcuis air biadh,” He leveled the challenge.
“He who has contempt for food is a fool.”

Watson dipped his head. “I agree,” he held up his fork with a genuine smile, mouth already watering from the rich odours of lovage, sage, coins of leek and razor-thin slivers of carrot and parsnip into the ground meat and a goose egg to hold it all together. Peppery winter savoury coated the top of the dish with dried thyme and the barest dash of lemon zest. The mound of buttermilk and mashed potatoes was only a gild upon the lily after that masterpiece.

The innkeeper nursed his scowl, turning skeptical and solicitous under this thick beard. “Cockaleekie tomorrow,” he answered. “T'won't last long. Barley bread too.”

Watson enjoyed having control over his eating. Back at Baker Street, meals were often taken hastily and in the process of running, engineered by a man who felt his pipe-tobacco a more necessary source of sustenance.

Not that Watson would ever call Holmes a fool. Not in anything. But Watson had never seen him approach a meal with anything less than a perfunctory obligation. He took his pleasures in other areas... all of them were either cerebral or a manifestation of the cerebral... such as his running down clews in a mud-drenched field...

His strength aggravated by the trains, full of a good meal with dark ale, Watson took to his room. It was a simple, basic fifteen-square foot affair with the luxury in the small things: the quality of the bed, and the silence of the thick walls. The window was small and solid, masking a good-natured polemic on the street between elderly draughts-players. Candle-sticks provided illumination (it was clear more modern illumination would enter this establishment in full protest). The maid brought warm water and supplied the location of the nearest Turkish bath. Watson thanked her, and passed on a tip for her troubles.

Alone, he satisfied himself that the satchel was safely underneath the bed... his face dulled with dread for the future, but the true agony did not know what would actually happen tomorrow when he paid his calls.

He missed Holmes, but he was also glad he was not here. This was like standing in a battlefield all over again; invisible cannons yawed before the doctor, full of terrible promise and he didn't know which would fire first.

He did miss Holmes, but they were alike in the oddest of ways.

Neither liked to ask for help; it was better to offer it before putting the other in the quandary.

And in this...

Just as Holmes did not include his friend on cases for his own good... so Watson ought to return that courtesy.

Watson slid the satchel deep under his bed with his foot, and was asleep almost as soon as the clean sheets were drawn over his chest.

Sleep he needed. The hard work was about to come...

Bradstreet and Lestrade had taken a later train. It gave them time to arrange the possible hasty search of Dr. Jonas Q. Parker's English residence at a moment's notice. This of course meant Bradstreet had to wax his most persuasive and invoke a large amount of trust with the superiors - Lestrade knew better than to try such tricks. The Chief was a fine man and a hard worker, but his loathing for Lestrade was rooted deep in a quarrel going back at least three generations and six wars. If he approved anything, it would be in the hopes that his hated little officer would be on his way to disgrace and dismissal.