Chapter 2: Holmes Refuses the Upgrade

I want to be direct about one thing before I tell you about the argument.

I have, in the years since, described my first encounter with Sheridan Holmes to a number of people who asked — colleagues, a journalist once, my neurological consultant at King's who said it sounded like a dissociative episode and was gently corrected. In every retelling I have instinctively begun with some contextualizing observation: about the precinct's architecture, the grey November light through the upper windows, the particular smell of Southwark station's ground floor, which was recycled air and machine lubricant and the faint scorched-plastic residue that every building with a density of active surveillance nodes eventually develops, a smell I have since come to associate with being watched.

I do this, I think, because the argument is the thing, and I am still not entirely certain how to frame it without making Holmes sound unreasonable. She was not unreasonable. That is the problem. She was the most thoroughly reasonable person I have encountered in a professional context, and the argument was simply the medium through which that became apparent.