Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Paper Journal (SAMPLE)

CHAPTER THREE: THE ADVENTURE OF CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON (Part 4)

I rolled out of bed, exited my room and tripped over Sherlock who was sitting in the hallway outside my door.

"Sherlock! You almost gave me a heart attack!" I exclaimed.

"I heard you shouting. Sometimes you... I didn't want you to hurt yourself. I'm sorry." He got up to head down the stairs. I hated the contrite tone of his voice, his defeated posture. For a moment, though, I wondered if it was all an act, part of some manipulation. Even if it was, I certainly wasn't clever enough to suss it out.

"I'm not leaving," I said, needing to cut through all the doubt and uncertainty thickening the air around us and get right to the heart of things. Sherlock stopped so suddenly it was almost cartoonish.

"You're not?" he asked in disbelief, spinning around to face me.

"No," I replied.

"But I thought you hated me now." I could hear the unspoken "like everyone else". During the night he had shaved off the silly blond hair and removed the brown contact lenses. While the close-cropped hair was a novelty, and his eyebrows were still lighter than usual, being able to see his bright grey eyes filled me with relief. He looked like Sherlock again.

"I don't hate you, Sherlock," I said. "But what you did to that woman... I won't lie; it frightens me that you can't see what's wrong about it."

"I can now," he replied thoughtfully. "I thought all last night about why it upset you so much when you don't even know her, when you know what is at stake with Milverton, how many people he's destroyed."

"Did you put yourself in her place?" Sherlock gave me his "why would I ever do something so absurd?" look, and I almost laughed aloud. Of course he wouldn't have done that. Sherlock had managed to convince himself he didn't have emotions – especially not the type that would let him do anything as pedestrian as fall in love with anyone.

"No," he replied. "I put you in her place, and I thought about how much I would despise anyone who hurt you like that, what I would do to punish them." I was afraid to think of what that meant – Sherlock being unable to use himself as the subject in an exercise in empathy and employing me as a replacement for his conscience. I didn't want to become his Jiminy Cricket, the voice in his head telling him right from wrong. But even I could see that it really wasn't much different from the way he helped to keep the edge off my post-traumatic stress, how so much of what animated me and kept me moving forward seemed to come from him. Good Lord, I thought, were we co-dependent?

"It's good that you understand now," I finally said. "Promise me you won't do anything like that again." Sherlock hesitated.

"When you say 'anything like that' what exactly do you mean?" he asked carefully.

"You've got something else morally reprehensible planned, haven't you?" Sherlock nodded reluctantly. "What?" I demanded.

"Burgling Milverton's house."

I discovered I was a terrible substitute conscience because instead of gainsaying the illegal act, I smiled and asked, "Can I come along?"

That is how that night I came to be with Sherlock in Milverton's study when a series of incredible events took place.

Through his betrothed and his role as a Latimer's courier, Sherlock had learned a great deal about Milverton's habits. Mary reported that Milverton stored his important paper files in a safe in the study outside his bedroom. He was a demanding employer who often kept her working late, and she came to learn that he was a heavy sleeper who was very nearly impossible to wake. He also kept regular hours, going to bed at just after ten o'clock each night unless he had specific plans to do otherwise. Milverton's desire for privacy and fear of break-ins were connected to a fondness for the arcane. Most thieves had never seen a purely mechanical lock. They had stopped being manufactured decades ago. Decryption algorithms or biometric circumventions were the lock picks of contemporary burglars. Milverton used thoroughly outdated technology from the second half of the twentieth century to secure his home, and its obsolescence was surprisingly effective in stymieing the criminal elements. Unluckily for him, Sherlock had been the president (and sole member) of an amateur mechanical safe-cracking club he founded when he was thirteen, and he was quite adept at getting past complicated tumblers and the like. We broke in through the garden door and quietly made our way upstairs to the study. Sherlock worked on the safe using an intricate process that required a stethoscope and graphs while I kept watch. After about half-an-hour of listening carefully as he rotated the dial and made notations on his graphs, Sherlock had the combination and opened the safe. We rifled the contents which all seemed to be legal documents and financial instruments. Paper bearer bonds were becoming rare, but there was still a demand from a class of people who wanted to trade without much scrutiny.