John Watson knew Sherlock Holmes better than any person alive. The man's intellect may have towered above his own, were you to ask the detective, but John understood people, and Sherlock in particular, with the same intuitiveness that his friend applied to crime solving.

So it was with great surprise that John observed his friend that February day. In the years since his return from Afghanistan, he had used his blog as a means of catharsis, not only for the enumeration of his and Sherlock's frankly ridiculous adventures. There were dozens of hidden entries. Saved, not to the blog service servers, but in a word processing document on his laptop. A digital journal the world would never see, where his thoughts and feelings were unfiltered and unedited. He knew that Sherlock had read them - the man had no respect for boundaries - but until today, that hadn't mattered. John sat staring at his newest composition and realized that it couldn't be left where his friend and former flatmate might discover it.

He selected the entirety of the text and hit backspace, deleting it from the screen. With a sigh dredged from the deepest part of him, John looked around his small, neat desk, and pulled out a new composition book. Opening it to the fly page, he wrote in his steady but nearly illegible hand;

"The Personal Journal of Dr. John H. Watson."

He turned to the next page and on the pale blue lines began to record his thoughts.

We'd just had a message from Greg that he had a case for us. Since Sherlock's return from his abbreviated exile, there haven't been any leads on the Moriarty message.

John had paused before writing about Moriarty. While he fully intended to hide this book and make no one aware of its existence, he knew enough that no information that existed as a physical recording was ever fully safe. The experience with Magnussen taught him that. He had to lay false trails, even here. So he wouldn't mention that they had managed to identify a cell of freelance hackers with a loose association with Moriarty's network. John couldn't do anything to compromise the work being done to take them down.

He went on to describe the day that weighed heavily on his mind.

Lestrade hasn't been allowed to consult with Sherlock on active cases for a long while, even though his name was cleared. But he's had some older cases that he has allowed Sherlock to tidy up for him. We met him on the site of a rather grisly double murder. It was in the papers last year.

A professor and his mistress were found dead in his home. Their bodies had been hung by meat hooks and butchered like cattle. The scene, for all its gore, had been clean of evidence linking the crime to anyone. The professor was well-liked amongst his colleagues and students. His wife hadn't been surprised to discover the affair as she'd been having her own; the momentum of the twenty-five year marriage and a punitive prenup kept her and her husband together, their union extant only on paper and there was no resentment from her. The mistress was a schoolteacher, a beloved only daughter, and had no enemies.

The professor's wife had been living with her boyfriend and had wanted to just sell the house. Because of a suit brought by the professor's parents against his widow, the property had remained empty in the year since Dr. Brown's death.

An estate agent had gone to the house because it was finally going to be sold. When she got to the house, the room where the bodies had been found was completely stripped to the framing. The plasterboard, the copper piping in the walls, the electrical wiring, the white oak flooring - every bit of it was gone, only the framing and subfloor remained. Lestrade called in Sherlock when the Met decided to treat the case only as one of many copper pipe thefts and shelved it. Something didn't seem right to him.

Sherlock and John exited the cab and made their way up the short stone walkway that ran through the neglected front lawn of the property. They didn't stop to knock but pushed open the door and walked in to the back of the house where Lestrade awaited them. Without saying a word, he pulled out his magnifier and started examining the room. Lestrade and John stood fixed in the entry, eyes following Sherlock's movements.

"How's Mary?" asked Greg quietly.

"Miserable. Why do you think I'm here?" John favoured the Detective Inspector with a half-smile. His eyes slightly ringed from exhaustion caused by his heavily pregnant wife exiting their bed multiple times a night. John was a light sleeper after his time at war and the frequent breaks in his sleep were taking their toll. He was beginning to wonder if the third trimester was simply practice for having an infant.

Greg's face broke into a wide grin. "Better you than me. The wife and I are glad to be past those years now."

Sherlock turned to the pair and opened his mouth to comment. Lestrade held up a hand "Shut up, Sherlock. I don't want to hear it."

"I need to see the basement," he said quickly, biting down on his comment about the fact that Lestrade's wife had recently met with a lawyer. Sherlock was just trying to warn him to expect the divorce papers in a few days. People never seemed to appreciate his help with their personal lives.

In the basement, Sherlock found a handful of screws with some wood bits on them,and a sliver of oak flooring, only a few centimetres wide. He pulled on a glove and ran his hand over the joists that held up the subfloor of the murder room then removed it and put it in another envelope.

"Not a single cobweb. Completely clean. This basement has been in continuous use for months. Scratch card from a lottery game that just started in September is under the stairs. There are no spiders, no webs, no mildew which would have been expected based on the wet autumn and the recent rain we've had, with the condition of the foundation. Someone has been living here, and they've gone to quite extraordinary lengths to erase any evidence of who they are. Squatters aren't known for leaving the place clean."

He spun around, eyes darting about, observing the basement for anything else. "Two ideas, Lestrade. I'll text you. Come, John."

Not five minutes after their arrival, Sherlock swept out of the house. John bade goodbye to Greg and followed his friend to the kerb where, with his unnatural ability to find a taxi in London, Sherlock was already entering a cab.

"Barts' hospital," he told the cabbie before he turned to John. "It might be linked to the Habit case. I'll explain in the lab." He'd used the codeword he and John had devised to be able to discuss the Moriarty network in public. John nodded and dropped into silence for the short ride. They didn't discuss anything to do with that case where they might be overheard.

Sherlock suspected a meth lab had been moved out days before. He had caught a whiff of an organic solvent in the air and was taking his samples to test for traces of the chemicals used in the manufacturing process to confirm his suspicion. It was late when we got to Bart's lab. I went to push open the door and it resisted opening. Sherlock peered through the long window and paled.

I've seen my friend jump off a four storey building. I've seen him kill. It is in the moment a man takes another life that you see who he really is. At least I had always believed so, until this moment. In the fraction of a second before he pushed the door open a bit and squeezed his way into the room, I saw a look in Sherlock's eyes I'd never seen before.

"John! John get in here, it's Molly!"