Charlotte set down her teacup, then rose and started toward the stairs.
Russell blinked, caught off guard, and got up after her without thinking.
"I'm a little tired," Charlotte said. "So I'm going to bed."
She had not put it any more plainly than that.
Russell raised an eyebrow and glanced at the clock on the wall.
"It isn't even nine yet."
"Is there a problem?" Charlotte said. "Weren't you the one always telling me to stop staying up so late? Now I want an early night and that's wrong too?"
"...I just think there's something on your mind." Russell met her eyes, and his voice carried real concern. "Did something happen while I was away?"
Charlotte's step faltered. She didn't turn around.
"Nothing." The girl's voice drifted back from the stairwell, softer than usual. "I'm only tired."
She kept climbing without looking back.
Russell stayed where he was, watching her retreating figure, and half formed a word he wanted to say.
In the end he only nodded along with her.
"Well. Get some rest, then."
"Mm." Charlotte nodded. "Goodnight, Watson."
Her footsteps grew fainter on the stairs and finally vanished into the second-floor corridor.
Second floor. Charlotte's room.
The door closed.
Not locked. Simply closed.
It shut out the light from the corridor, and it shut out the person downstairs just as thoroughly.
A single ceiling separated the two of them, and it may as well have been the whole of London.
Charlotte crossed the cluttered bedroom, walked straight to the bed, and lay down.
The window was unlatched. Moonlight came spilling in and lay across the sheets.
She lay in that patch of moonlight without moving.
[I'm a little tired.]
[So I'm going to bed.]
That was what she had said, and it was a lie.
Charlotte had never in her life been more awake.
Russell's voice still seemed to hang in her ear, so light, so easy, as though the whole thing were a trifle not worth mentioning.
But yesterday's scene replayed itself in front of her too, every detail sharp as glass.
That had been Pilsen.
Pilsen, who had served in the army, who had blood on his hands, who had scraped his way through more than a decade in the underworld.
Down in the cellar, she and Russell together had barely managed to hold him off.
Upstairs, alone against him, how could Russell possibly have gained the upper hand?
How exactly had he won?
No. That wasn't right.
Russell hadn't won. By the time she arrived, the fight was simply over.
Pilsen was dead, dead at the muzzle of a gun belonging to the killer The Professor had sent.
And before that, Russell had done nothing but trade blows with him.
Then, once Pilsen was dead, he had been standing there perfectly intact, splashed with red wine and blood, without a single wound worth the name.
He'd even had the strength left to sprint fifty metres after spotting the shooter.
How?
Charlotte's mind began to turn on its own, past all restraint.
He had received no professional training and had no combat experience — probably not even theoretical knowledge of it.
He was an ordinary university student, nothing more.
And yet the reaction speed he had shown, the Fighting technique, the way he read danger before it arrived...
Could it be that Pilsen had already been cornered by then, worn down to nothing?
No. That wasn't right either.
A man driven into a corner tends to unleash the most terrifying strength of all.
Then perhaps Russell simply had an extraordinary natural gift for fighting?
That didn't work either.
Talent is not experience. A recruit who has never set foot on a battlefield, however gifted, cannot go blow for blow with a veteran of a hundred fights.
And Russell was only a boy out of an orphanage, who had never even had a proper education.
Martha, the director there, was a gentle woman, much like Mrs. Hudson.
What she taught those children was how to meet the world with love and kindness. Not with fists. Not with violence.
Which was why Charlotte had never once seen Russell angry, or seen him raise a hand to anyone — Pilsen didn't count.
Looked at that way, only one answer remained.
A question she had no wish to face, and no way to avoid.
Phantom Thief Moriarty.
Unbidden, that figure surfaced in her mind: the white mask, the strange costume.
The man who had moved like a ghost through the moonlight over Buckingham Palace.
The criminal who, under the gaze of countless eyes, could finish his performance without hurrying a single step, and then leave a taunting card behind.
He was skilled. Skilled enough that both she and Mycroft found him a genuine problem.
Yet he rarely used violence. Even with vicious bank robbers, he limited himself to teaching them a lesson.
If Russell truly had some connection to him, then all of it would fall into place.
Not the simple relationship of Phantom Thief and messenger, but something a layer deeper. And a layer deeper than that.
— What if Russell Watson was Moriarty?
The instant the conclusion took shape, Charlotte shot upright in bed.
She was breathing in great ragged gulps, one hand pressed to her chest, as though she couldn't draw enough air.
And for some reason, in the moment she reached that conclusion, something like panic rose in her. More than panic. Dread.
She was afraid her reasoning was correct.
She was afraid of what would be waiting for her once she fitted every clue together and arrived at the one conclusion that pointed to the truth.
She was afraid that if she carried that answer to Russell and put it to his face, she would watch that mild, smiling face of his blur, slowly, and resolve itself into an indistinct face behind a mask.
And then he would say to her —
[The game of detective and assistant is over, Charlotte.]
Charlotte slumped against the windowsill. The slanting moonlight washed her face bone white.
She breathed hard, staring at her faintly trembling hands, feeling her heart slam against her ribs, and for a moment her thoughts went nowhere at all.
What was she actually afraid of?
That Russell was Moriarty.
No. Not something so shallow as that.
What frightened her was this: if Russell was Moriarty, then everything he did now might be false.
The breakfasts he made her. The coffee he brewed. The milk he warmed.
The way he looked at her, the way he smiled at her, the resigned helplessness when they bickered.
What Charlotte feared was that all of it was a fake.
Nothing but a prank staged by Phantom Thief Moriarty at the expense of the detective Charlotte Holmes.
Exactly the way he treated Scotland Yard, and Buckingham Palace, and the whole of London.
Every good memory she had was changing shape inside her head, turning into so many unseen hands, dragging her down into a lightless sea.
And then another thought lit up in her mind.
Like a lighthouse in the dark. Blindingly bright.
— There's no evidence.
Charlotte's thoughts stopped dead. Her breathing steadied, and her heartbeat with it.
That was right. There was no evidence.
All of it was conjecture. Every detail could be explained by coincidence. Every discrepancy was nothing but her own wandering imagination.
She had not one piece of direct proof that Russell had anything to do with Moriarty.
Not one.
And as that settled, something in Charlotte's eyes shifted, fast.
From suspicion, through torment, and at last into relief. Into rescue.
The way a drowning woman takes hold of a floating spar.
She lay back down. The colour crept slowly into her pale face.
No evidence meant no proof he was connected to Moriarty.
And if he couldn't be connected to Moriarty, then he was still Russell Watson.
Her assistant.
Her own Watson, and nobody else's.
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