The Quiet Man

Myna Bird

Someone’s been trying to get my attention.

Who?

Greg holds his pint in one hand and the paper in the other, he squints a little at it. He’s like me, he’s starting to need glasses in order to read that tiny print. We get older, we fall apart. It’s in the nature of people to disintegrate slowly, if you let us. If you don’t exit early. Some of us don’t die young, we just fall to pieces and mourn ourselves. And that’s the best case scenario.

Mary won’t die young, either. She’ll grow old with someone, drink tea, do crosswords. She’ll grow old with someone, but I don’t think it will be me. No: it certainly won’t be.

God: that chap has a voice on him. His mate must have said something very funny, because the whole lot of them are hooting. Some after work crowd, tech support, accountants, or something. I can’t tell. They’ve loosened their ties, they’re drinking too much. They talk too loudly, but it’s all right. They’re drowning us out. No one will hear us. They’re a good cover.

Not that anyone’s watching us, of course. But someone might be. Have I grown so paranoid? All the CCTV cameras used to turn and follow us as we stomped around London in the wee hours, I remember. It wasn’t paranoia then. It was just workaday reality.

“There’s more?” He seems incredulous.

“Yes.” I pull out the rest of them. “See? Here. There’s a dozen of them that I’ve found, though some of them are just repeats. I’m not done digging for them, though. These are from three different newspapers, I haven’t checked the rest of them yet.” I’m excited: I wonder how many more I’ll find. Excited and filled with regret at all these lost opportunities.

Mary won’t stand for it. She’s getting on me about the wall again. She’s started paying more attention to it. She wants to know why I want so many murderers on the wall. She says I’m becoming obsessed. She’s demanding more from me, too; she wants to see my manuscript. It’s blank; it’s a blank file. I haven’t started yet. I have nothing to show her; I have nothing to show the editors. This is more important, but I can’t tell her that. She won’t agree.

“This is...” He shakes his head. “I mean, I should be concerned because there’s clearly a leak somewhere, but I’m not sure where to start looking for it.” He hands the paper back to me like it’s precious. I appreciate that: I do. Because it is. “There are so many moving parts, and so much I don’t know about. We don’t get warning for these arrests, we just get the call. None of us would even know anything in enough time to put an ad in the papers like this. Our orders are coming straight from the government.”

When he says the government I know who he means: Mycroft, of course. His orders are coming from Mycroft. I don’t ask. I know he can’t tell me. He shouldn’t tell me any of it, by rights. He should tell me to piss off. He should confiscate the papers and swear me to secrecy. He should shut down the classifieds in all the papers, or track all their incoming calls and find their mole. But he just shakes his head at me.

“I have to be honest with you,” he says. He draws his pint up to his lips, as if it will cover over what he’s about to say. He looks uncomfortable. “There’s only one person I can think of who might do something like this.”

I know. I know what he means. I’ve been avoiding thinking about it, but he’s right.

There’s only one person who would ever do something like this to me. I can’t let myself imagine that, though: that’s a dangerous thought. Even taking comfort from it is dangerous, and I know that. It keeps me on edge, the push and pull between delight and frustration, joy and terrible anger, because who would toy with me like this? Who would be so cruel to remind me, to make me feel like you're still in the world, taunting me a little, inviting me out to crime scenes with you again? Who would do that to me?