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Shite, Janine thought as she gingerly held an ice pack to the back of her head in a small treatment room in the Royal London’s A&E. And the evening had started off so promisingly.
She hadn’t been too keen on having to work this evening, but she expected to have to be on hand as support while Magnussen attended the Marketing Council of Great Britain’s dinner meeting. Magnussen had been preparing to leave from his upstairs flat when Janine was surprised – no, shocked was more the word – to see that Sherlock was attempting to get her to buzz him up from the lobby, which was seventeen kinds of “not allowed” in the CAM News tower. Magnussen took his security seriously.
“Sherlock, you complete loon, what are you doing?” she asked over the intercom. In spite of the fact that Magnussen had asked her to investigate Sherlock and report back her findings, he would probably take a pretty dim view of finding the detective himself standing at Janine’s desk.
“Don’t make me do it out here; not in front of everyone,” Sherlock wheedled, giving her his best set of puppy dog eyes over the camera.
“Do…what in front of everyone?” Janine asked, comprehension slowly replacing bewilderment. Her mouth dropped open as she saw Sherlock open and display an engagement ring box in front of the camera, the grainy connection doing nothing to dim the sparkle of the stone. Against all the rules, Janine pressed the button to buzz Sherlock up, hoping to recover her wits a bit in the ninety seconds it would take the lift to reach Magnussen’s office level.
To say that this was unexpected was quite the understatement. Janine didn’t know quite how she felt. In the past five weeks, Sherlock had been something of a difficult boyfriend to understand. At some moments, she felt such a flood of genuine connection and even vulnerability come from him that her heart melted. At other times, she knew that he was holding her at arm’s length, attempting to distance himself from their growing intimacy.
In no place was this more evident than in their odd but surprisingly tender love life. Janine had been surprised when it was Sherlock who consistently called a halt to their intimate interactions, telling her that he considered it ungentlemanly and that he would feel like he were taking advantage, even though she assured him that she was giving her consent with her eyes wide open. Indeed, she found herself very much wanting to make love with the mysterious detective.
It was Sherlock who set the limits, but that didn’t mean that either he or Janine were going unsatisfied. In fact, Janine had grown to like their intimacies, luxuriating in the slow focus on one another’s pleasure without worry about reaching a predetermined end. And, she blushed to think, Sherlock was quite talented, clearly using those famed deductive abilities to figure out what she liked and how to give her the most satisfaction.
Somehow, without intending, she found herself feeling something akin to the first stirrings of love. And that was a problem. She had been pursuing this relationship with Sherlock for Magnussen, attempting at his request to learn more about the famed detective for reasons that Janine was increasingly glad she didn’t know. She had grown uneasy with this double life, and she knew she couldn’t say “yes” to any serious proposal as long as she was in thrall to Mangussen. Somehow, she had to figure out a way to break ties with him and with CAM News if she truly wanted to pursue things with Sherlock Holmes.
That was the last thing she thought before she saw a smudge of a black-clad figure reflected hazily in the mirrored surface created by the expansive windows and the black London night. Then, a painful strike to the back of her head, and she was waking up God-knows-how-long later to John Watson’s voice calling her back to a disoriented consciousness, where she floated until she was later roused by the medics and taken to the A&E with the mother of all headaches.
“Janine. I take it you are unharmed?” Magnussen walked into her examination cubby, sporting a growing bruise across his own cheek and jaw. He gingerly touched the bruise as he talked, the only clue of its painfulness.
“As well as can be expected, I think,” she said. “What happened? Did you talk to the police?”
“No, no, I think the police will be unnecessary for us in this case. I have seen to that,” Magnussen said.
“Wha-? Why don’tcha want to talk to the police? Surely we need to catch whoever was breaking into your offices?” Janine said blankly.
“No, I think I have all the information I need,” said Magnussen smoothly. “And so do you. I understand you had a little visit from your boyfriend tonight.”
“Yes, well, um,” Janine stammered. “Sorry about that. He caught me off guard and asked me,” she stopped to rephrase. “…needed to ask me something.”
“Did he, now?” Magnussen said. “I think it is worth you considering why Sherlock Holmes would be visiting my offices at night, when there are so few staff there. Clearly, he wanted to see one of us. I would ask myself, if I were you, what motive he had and who, exactly, he wanted to see.”
Janine stared at Magnussen dumbly. If, as Magnussen suggested, Sherlock had an agenda in visiting, then why visit on the same night he proposed. Unless…”
Magnussen turned to glide out of Janine’s cubicle. “Think, Janine,” he said as he left. “Is it possible that you were not the only one on assignment?”
“I will assume that you will not be at work tomorrow. I imagine you will have quite a headache,” Mangussen said. His words were not ones of comfort.
***
Janine walked out of the A&E into the hallway, still clutching her ice pack and deep in thought, when she almost literally ran into John Watson. John was pacing up and down the hallway outside the A&E, his hair ruffled from running his hands through it, and what appeared to be blood staining the front of his shirt and the undersides of his fingernails.
“John, what are you doing here? Are you OK?” Janine asked in surprise, taking in his rumpled appearance.
“Janine, um, hi,” he said, looking around distractedly. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s just….” His voice trailed off as his eyes darted from Janine to a trauma bay littered with medical waste from a recent patient to the doors of the lifts and back, as if he were still haunted by what he had seen there.
“John, what’s wrong? Slow down, you look like you’re gonna fly to pieces,” Janine said, putting her hand on John’s arm.
“It’s Sherlock,” John said, dragging his focus back to Janine. “When we were in your office, something happened, I don’t know what, and he was shot. He was bleeding out, went into shock, and I found him, just lying there in Magnussen’s flat. They took him up to surgery a while ago, but he was in pretty bad shape.”
Janine’s hand flew to her mouth. “God! Is he going to be OK?” she stammered, and then, “But I guess you don’t know that.”
“No, I…Christ. I just don’t know,” John said. “But you, you’re OK, I take it?” John said, his hand reflexively going to almost brush the back of Janine’s head as if to assure himself that she, at least, was in one piece.
“So you were there,” she said. “I was wondering if I had hallucinated you. John, what were you doing in Mr. Magnussen’s office?” Janine asked, thinking over what Magnussen had just hinted in the exam cubicle.
“We were on a case and…well, I guess I can’t really say,” John said, still distracted.
“No, I guess you can’t,” Janine said, cold realization dropping into her stomach. “But maybe you can answer this: Was Sherl in my office tonight to propose to me, or were you both there to propose because you needed to get at Mr. Magnussen for some reason?”
John looked back at her, his focus finally completely on Janine. “Yeah, about that, well…” John faltered. “Janine, I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s my place to say.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again softly, an apology rather than a pleasantry this time.
“OK,” Janine said, “I get it. Bastard.”
Janine turned to go, but before she did, she put her arms around John and hugged him lightly. “You should go check on that bastard,” she said softly. “You tell him he has to be OK so I can kill him myself.”
***
Janine arrived at The London Monday morning, after quite a full weekend. After crying herself to sleep Thursday night, she woke on Friday with a purpose. She systematically called the celebrity reporters at every tabloid rag run by one of Magnussen’s competitors, introducing herself as the recently-spurned girlfriend of Sherlock Holmes and asking if the paper would like an inside look at what dating the “hat man” detective was really like. Several papers were interested, offering to pay her enough for her story that she had some flexibility in her life for the first time since she had moved to London.
The problem, of course, had been deciding what to tell the papers. Thinking back on her time with Sherlock, nothing seemed sensational enough to command the kinds of fees she hoped to get for her story. Everything that had truly characterized their relationship – if, indeed, it could still be called that – was too ordinary. No one would pay for stories of shared evenings of telly and slowly growing intimacy.
At the same time, she couldn’t bring herself to make up stories that would damage Sherlock’s reputation or humiliate him. In spite of his duplicity, she still felt some amount of affection for him, aided in no small part by her knowledge of her own artifice in the relationship.
No, what she needed was something that would show Sherlock that she could strike back, but leave his reputation intact. In fact, she thought, it would serve him right if she made his reputation just a little bit better than it had been before. She chuckled as she began to think of how Sherlock might react to seeing tales of his romantic prowess announced in two-inch type….
As Janine climbed the steps to the second floor of The London, her heart skipped a beat as she steeled herself for what she was likely to see. John had warned her by text that, while Sherlock was up to taking visitors, he was still in pain and on a great deal of medication to help him manage it. He had even coded in the operating theatre, John had told her. He had encouraged her to wait until today to visit in hopes that Sherlock would be better able to talk, although whether that was for Janine’s benefit or his own, Janine was unsure.
Janine arrived at the door to Sherlock’s room and eased her way in after a quiet knock. The light streamed in from both the exterior window and the window to the hallway, and several bouquets of flowers decorated every flat surface.
Sherlock’s head rolled toward the door, taking in Janine but clearly not fully recognizing her through the haze of drugs.
“Hi, Sherl,” she said softly, coming over to perch on the bed.
“Janine?” he asked, voice heavy with sedation. She glanced over at the PCA standing next to his bed and saw that his morphine was set as high as it could go. No wonder he acted like he was stoned. He was.
Suddenly, Janine felt a thrill of anger run through her. If she wanted to talk to him, he would bloody well pay attention, she thought, reaching over to set the morphine at zero, then sitting back to wait for his mind to clear.
It didn’t take long for intelligence to flood back into those familiar, perceptive eyes, as Sherlock turned his gaze on her. Slowly, she began to hold the tabloid headlines up for his inspection: SHAG-A-LOT HOLMES; 7 TIMES A NIGHT IN BAKER STREET; HE MADE ME WEAR THE HAT. That last one she was particularly proud of, given that Sherlock had always expressed his dislike for the deerstalker and the way it had attached to his celebrity. Let every woman from now on think that it was a kink of his, she thought.
Sherlock took in the headlines, and Janine knew she had pitched the content of the stories exactly right when he refused to react to the notion of her selling stories of his sexual prowess but instead went to the heart of the case he was obviously using her to investigate.
“You didn’t give these stories to Magnussen, did you?” he asked, his voice deep with disuse.
In spite of herself, Janine laughed. “God, no; one of his rivals. He was spittin’!” For a moment, they shared an unspoken thrill at having united to strike out at Magnussen, and it fueled Janine’s anger even more. Had Sherlock said that he was investigating that moist-palmed blackmailer, Janine could have helped him, and neither of them would be in this situation.
“Sherlock Holmes, you are a back-stabbing, heartless, manipulative bastard,” she said with all the venom she currently felt.
“And you, as it turns out, are a grasping, opportunistic, publicity-hungry, tabloid whore,” he countered, raising the back of his bed to be more even with her eyes.
And just like that, they were even. She knew that sharp mind had computed the damage he had done to her and that she had done to him, compared the two, and zeroed out the balance. It was one of the things she liked most about Sherlock; his love of the game extended far beyond the crime scene, and he knew a tie when he saw one.
But what she didn’t like was his insistence on being alone, his continual stance that he could handle every circumstance better by himself than he could with another person. Clearly, John had made some headway into gaining Sherlock’s trust, but that seemed to be as far as the detective would go. Once again, she pondered how they could have joined forces to fight against Magnussen. If only Sherlock would have told her some – any – of the problem he was solving, she could have come to his assistance.
“You lied to me, Sherl,” she said, both sadness and anger weighting her voice. “You lied and lied.”
“I exploited the fact of our connection,” Sherlock replied in a sentence that sounded just a little too rehearsed. Janine wondered if he believed it any more than she did.
As she later stood up to go, she turned back at the door, wanting to be sure that Sherlock understood just a bit of what he lost every time he refused to trust someone who cared for him. “Just one thing,” she said. “You shouldn’t have lied to me. I know what kind of man you are, but we could have been friends. I’ll give your love to John and Mary.”
And with that, she walked out of the hospital room and strode off to finalize arrangements for her new home in Sussex Downs, far away from Magnussen and his head games. Maybe she would think about keeping the bees, after all.