Paranoid, the Great Detective can trust no one, least of all himself. Who taught him to fear the Other, after all? What were they hiding about the Self? Who is he working for? Who is anyone working for? What does working mean in this instance? Who is a boss, and who is a laborer, when the only produced good is ephemeral information of, at best, dubious accuracy?

Still, and despite his best efforts, he lives in a society, if not quite a state. He speaks, because he is handed a microphone, and they listen, or at least stand on the grass in front of the podium; they cheer when he pauses, applaud when he stops for breath, laugh at what he is only dimly suspicious are jokes. He promises them anything that comes to mind: more freedom, more health, more money, more leisure; less fear, less surveillance, less linguistic drift. Progress is regression is progression, after all, like the wheel on a penny-farthing.

He tries to break away, and they are waiting with flags and banners with his face on them. He drinks himself into a stupor and tries to drown himself in a fountain, and when he awakes, face up in six inches of mondegreen water, the press is there on the pavement to get his latest statement. He plays along, and they quote him; breaks away and they cheer. When he is elected, he stabs buttons in a mania, desperate to find the one that shatters the system, that rains fire down upon this idyll.

False hope, as they all are: the power he was promised was always only ever contingent. The cap of the pyramid cannot escape the stones laid below.

There are long periods of time in which no one is killed and no one needs saving, and the Great Detective does indeed savor those moments, but only ever in retrospect. Life is more vibrant, more real, somehow, when the Rule is broken. He can almost feel, like the turning of the seasons, all the various parts of his long and colorful history shivering briefly into synthesis with this more contemplative life. He is never so devoted to the order as when he is flouting its strictures, never so passionately in love with monastic life as when he is breaking curfew to ride through the woods with a lean and lissome deputy sheriff in hopes of saving some poor doomed idiot or other.

But he does cherish the quiet times; the long months of growth and harvest, the placid nights of plainsong, the unmemorable merriment of a feast day, the hushed chill of an icy winter. Even in the midst of civil war, he has found, clung to, a peace everlasting.

His Archnemesis, never one to be outdone, has anticipated him, wormed his way into the abbey before the Great Detective’s calling had even come upon him. But he, too, is made mild by the unchanging hours of the liturgical day, rendered no more venomous than any other toadying subprior trotting along behind a marmoreal and unregarding bore. They snipe at each other in chapter, but what of it? Their swords are sheathed, always sheathed, in the presence of the divine.

The Great Detective is many things to many people, but she is absolutely not a cop.

Violence is deplorable, sure, murder vile, she scorns these as any member of a society might do, but really she’s in it for the solve; hooked on crosswords at a young age, she graduated to the harder stuff when the pleasure ebbed. A nice theft, some swindling, a kidnapping or two, arson here and there, the occasional bit of barratry, all merely opportunities to excercise a soul quaked with idleness, a chance to pit herself against the invisible mind of another.

But she has no calling for conviction. Once the solve has been achieved, the pleasure is over, the world dims again, some of the sparkle goes out of her eye, some of the spring out of her step. The game is over with the reveal. More, as an amateur, she has a world of latitude in how she acts. She has discretion.

Her Archnemesis, in this moment, is smaller than ever before, less clever; if they have thwarted all the yeomanly efforts of the nation’s constabulary that is beginner’s luck more than anything. There was no premeditation to their latest murder, if quite some malice; pushed to the brink they merely snapped.

“I do not think,” says the Great Detective, slowly, “that the police will ever find you out. Go; I will not stop you.”

And like that Her Archnemesis is gone. This is justice, of a sort: the Great Detective knows that some people need killing, and the state has no monopoly on violence.

The bees are long dead, John and Mary more recently, and his fame, such as it was, is a long-banked fire he warms himself on on short winter days. Time has stolen his height and his appetite, and most days he sits quietly by the southern window watching the sun move across the valley. He boasted once to John that he neither knew nor cared if the sun revolved around the earth or the earth around the sun, as neither case could affect the solution of a crime; now, however, he cannot watch a sunrise without thinking of it.

They must have been young, then, but it was all so long ago he cannot conceive of what youth must have been like. He remembers the anxiety and the desperation of his idle times, but not the pith of the experience—remembers it as a story to be told. How it felt to be so despairingly understimulated that he would rather throw himself from the top of the falls than not eludes him. He is as precise with dates and times and distances as ever, but without the vital interest in humanity that once drove him, those points of data are as sterile and drily pleasing as a railway schedule.

He had not expected to live so long, to so far outlast not only the dead but even himself. He does not begrudge the passing time, but he cannot bring himself to care about it, either.