Echoes of Sherlock Holmes
Page 5
Shaz steps outside the Euston office tower at 7:30 A.M. The sun blazes in a blue sky. She stretches her back and removes her earbuds, the ones she found in a rubbish bin in the HSBC canteen. Birds sing in the chestnut trees.
At the bus stop shelter, the video screen plays a news update. The Mayfair bank. The Mercedes, a yellow tarp spread across its windshield. Suspected suicide . . . Holly Kendrick . . . security breach at MCB . . .
Her bus rolls up, a red wall. She hesitates. She has taken assignments from Michael Croft for two years. Been happy for the money. But this one—glitter and glass brilliance and twisted death. And the look in Harry’s eyes. Her throat thickens.
The bus pulls away without her.
She walks through the gleaming morning to the Marylebone Flyover. On the elevated roadway, rush hour traffic drones past. The trailer park sits beneath it. She jogs across the roundabout.
The Whalens’ trailer huddles on a rough patch of asphalt. A dog rises at her approach, chain clinking. Inside, teacups and spoons clatter. Shaz knocks.
Harry’s mum opens the flimsy door. “You missed him. He’s off down the road walking the girls to school.” Sleepily, Mrs. Whalen nods towards Wormwood Scrubs.
Ten minutes later Shaz rounds the corner across the street from the school. Harry and his sisters are outside the gate. From his lunchbox he hands one girl an apple, the other a juice box. His uniform is rumpled, tie askew. Shaz thinks: He looks spent. He’s ten.
She calls and waves. He shoos his sisters through the gate. As Shaz cuts across the street towards him, he checks for traffic and steps off the curb.
The roar of an engine comes out of clear air. A black car speeds up the street, sunlight burning against its windows. It veers over the center line, straight at her.
Shaz lunges across the road. Harry watches the car for a frozen second, and dives for the curb.
The thud is sickening. He spins and lands in a heap. The car squeals away.
“Harry!” Shaz drops to his side. He groans. Fumbling with her phone, she snaps the fleeing car but it rounds the corner, heading for the A40, a roadside fire, or the bottom of the Thames Estuary.
The crossing guard comes running, awkward in her bright yellow coat, lollipop stop sign flailing. “Oh, my God.”
Shaz kneels by Harry’s side. “Hold still.” She rings 999 with trembling fingers.
He sits up, dazed. “It’s okay. I think it’s okay. It only hit my rucksack.”
The rucksack lies in the road, ripped off his back. Shaz wraps shaking arms around him.
At Croft Security, the receptionist looks twice when Shaz storms in. Street team isn’t supposed to come through the front door during daylight. The woman says, “Hey, you can’t—”
“Hit and bloody run. I can.” Shaz sweeps past her.
Marching up the stairs, she hears voices in Croft’s office. She slows. Fallon sounds hot.
“Nic Ramsey’s a liar. Holly couldn’t have accessed the roof. The police confirm that. And ‘thrown’—by whom? Jeroen Dijkstra? Holly landed on him.”
“Dijkstra was an accessory, but not the criminal kind. He was Amelia Gordon-Lennox’s arm candy for the party. Boost her profile, let guests rub elbows with a celeb,” Croft says. “No. Only one man admits to being in the building when Miss Kendrick fell. Ramsey himself.”
“If Ramsey killed her . . .”
Shaz stops.
“If so, he was involved in the account data theft,” Croft says. “Either alone or with her. But there were no signs of a struggle in her office. Have the police found her phone?”
“No.”
No phone. No signs of a struggle in her office.
Shaz knocks. At his desk, Croft frowns, surprised.
She walks in. “A car just tried to run me down. And nearly killed Harry.”
“Good God,” Fallon says.
She fills them in. “The cops think it was a careless driver, or a drunk.”
Croft says, “You don’t believe that.”
“Not a chance.”
“Why would someone target you? Because of this case? Really, Shaz.”
She bears their stares, and approaches the desk. “If you’re saying I need to find out, then all right. I will.”
The library closes at eight. Shaz is there until they turn off the lights. She walks home down the weedy lane, rattles her key into the lock, and squeezes into the flat, past her sister’s partner and kids. She drops onto her bed. Her notebook is crammed with information from a Dummies book and company records she found online. The noise from the other room, laughter and arguments and the TV, skates over her as she reads her notes.
Her little niece pokes her head around the door to say good-night, then asks Shaz what she’s doing.
“Deducing.”
“Ick.”
Shaz feigns throwing her library book at the girl. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which has proved enlightening. She smiles, but thinks: It was no accident. Not the hit-and-run. Not Holly plunging from the MCB building.
She looks at the time; it’s late. She grabs her things and runs out of the flat. Hurrying towards the tube station in the twilight, she sends a text, then rings Harry. Over the phone she hears traffic on the flyover.
“Glad you’re okay, sprog. Get your mum, I need to talk to her,” she says.
Not long afterwards, she gets off the tube and jogs through Mayfair. The wind is rising and her nerves hum. Harry is in danger.
The hit-and-run was aimed at him, not her. Because he can provide evidence that somebody killed Holly Kendrick.
The Mayfair Capital Bank is quiet this evening. The Mercedes is gone. From across the street Shaz watches the bright lobby. Fluorescents, marble, a guard at the desk, looking alert. Her courage falters. This op doesn’t have Croft’s blessing. If they nick her, she’s toast.
But she thinks of Holly. Broken, forever stilled. Shaz knows now—she thinks—why Holly died. But she has to find proof. To do that, she has to get into the bank.
When she sweeps through the door, the guard looks up. “Who’re you?”
“Cleaner.” She gestures at her CLEAN-TEQ shirt.
His glasses shine. And his polyester company blazer. And his suspicion. He purses his lips. “You’re late. They’re on the third floor.”
She hustles to the lift. The guard says, “Three, mind. Don’t let me catch you sniffing around the floor where that bird jumped.”
Shaz nods with a servile expression. Servile, word of the day. “Yessir.” She steps into the lift and pushes Three. When the doors open again, she dashes to the stairs and climbs to the top of the building.
She catches her breath in the echoing stairwell. The door to the roof is dead ahead. Locked. Just like Harry, and the cops, said it would be. Brand-new keypad.
She presses a few keys. The display flashes. Seek assistance.
The building’s security upgrade hasn’t been activated. Holly couldn’t have entered a passcode to unlock this door, since there is no passcode—not yet. The door’s locked. Period.
Except that can’t be right. She scrutinizes the keypad. Runs her fingers along its edges. Rises on tiptoe.
Yes. At the top nestled where the keypad screws into the wall is a thin slot for a keycard. A master key. Or a maid’s key.
From her pocket she takes the keycard she palmed from Croft’s desk earlier. She inserts it. The lock flips.
She pushes the door open and steps outside. The wind hits her in the face.
She props the door open. The roof is a jumble of pipes and ventilation units. Why would Holly come up here, except to jump?
Because she was lured here, to meet somebody. Somebody who betrayed her.
Holly hadn’t stolen from the bank. She’d uncovered the breach. She discovered that an intruder had compromised MCB’s computer system, and she wanted to expose it. She was killed before she could reveal the truth.
She came up here in secret to meet the person she thought she could confide in.
Holly came up here on her own, and she opened the door. How?
Shaz thinks: There’s a master keycard. There’s probably a master code for the keypad too. A code somebody gave Holly.
The cops haven’t found a master code, though. And they haven’t found the device that would logically contain one—Holly’s phone.
Carefully, Shaz walks the roof. The killer could have taken the phone from Holly and got rid of it, but . . . she stops.
Near the edge of the roof is a rain gutter, and a drainage grate. Shaz crouches down. Under the grate is a mobile.
She pulls on rubber gloves and pries up the grate. When she presses a button, the phone lights up. A message is on the home screen.
4321#
The master code. She lets out a breath.
The voice comes from behind her. “I’ll take that from you now.”
She’s a foot from the edge. She grits her teeth to keep her voice steady. “If you throw me off the roof, you can’t make it look like a second suicide. Not this soon, Fallon.”
She rises. Fallon kicks the door shut.
All his jolly enthusiasm is gone. His eyes are flat. “Don’t be daft. Hand over the phone.”
Don’t cry. Don’t beg. Don’t let him see your hands shake. She stuffs the phone in her front pocket. “Throw me off and it goes with me. You’d have to retrieve it from the street, in full view.”
“Of whom? The guard in the lobby? Who do you think alerted me?”
“You’re the one who breached the bank,” she says. “But Holly only figured that out once you lured her up here to meet you.”
“Brava, my little urchin. Now come with me.”
“She didn’t know who to blow the whistle to. She worried the breach was an inside job, and she was afraid to go to the police. Why? Because the thief used her login credentials?”
“I said, come with me. Or it won’t be you who suffers. It’ll be Harry.”
A chill washes through her. Fallon’s phone rings.
He smiles thinly. “As I was saying.” He answers with a curt, “Hold on.”
Shaz frantically scans the rooftop. Looking for weapons, at the locked door, at various pieces of security kit half-installed. All of it labeled Croft Security. Like the door lock. Like the guard’s company blazer.
Play for time. “Yeah, Holly’s login accessed the data, pointing the blame at her. So she called the person she thought could help her handle the nightmare of going public. You.”
“You’re a right little genius. Come with me or Harry will pay.” He raises his phone. “Put Harry on.”
Shaz’s back tingles. The edge is so, so close behind her.
Phone to his ear, Fallon steps towards her. Stops. “What do you mean, gone?”
Shaz’s pulse pounds as she says, “Harry. And his family. They’re gone.”
He glances at her sharply. She thinks: Thank God. Her warning to Harry’s mum took hold. “Get out of central London. Leave now.”
She says, “When you live in a trailer, you can turn it into a safe house as easy as hitching it to your car and driving off.”
Fallon’s voice roughens. “You’ll never prove it. So you need to come with me and—”
“Let you disappear me?”
“Let me employ you. I have plans, and you’re clearly clever enough to be part of them.”
Inching sideways, she takes out her own phone to ring 999. The sensation of air and nothingness expands behind her. “What plans? Taking over Croft Security?”
“That’s stage one. Stage two is using that platform to expand my influence over every business in London that has a connection to Croft. And you can join me. You have something. Brains. Pluck. Disregard for the law.”
He creeps closer. She’s so near the edge that he seems leery of charging at her. He might want to shove her off, but he doesn’t want to go over himself. She hits speed dial on her phone.
Nothing happens.
Fallon smirks. “You’re smart, but only street smart. You don’t know about devices such as this.” He holds up a black case the size of a cigarette pack. “Mobile phone jammer.”
Her knees soften. Fallon’s shoulders bunch, like a wrestler preparing to lunge.
“But I don’t need to phone the police.” The wind threads her hair across her face. “They’re coming.”
“Bollocks.”
She nods at the security camera above the doorway. “CCTV.”
“Is inactive.”
“Was. Before I came here I texted Croft. I told him activate it remotely. He’s watching this, live.”
From the stairwell, voices sound. Footsteps pound on the concrete.
Fallon reddens like a boil. “Stupid girl.” In his eyes, she sees him prepare to attack. “They won’t get it open in time.”
She throws herself flat on the roof and grabs a pipe. “Help.”
Fallon charges and grabs her. Though she fights him, he rips her loose and tries to dig Holly’s phone from her pocket.
The lock rattles. She yells, “Four-three-two”—kicking, punching—“one-hash.”
The lock beeps and the door flies open. Cops swarm through, followed by Croft.
Fallon hauls Shaz to her feet and shouts, “I captured the killer.”
Croft says, “We have everything on video, Richard. It’s over. Let her go.”
Shaz braces herself. Fallon grips her arms. Then, abruptly, she’s free. She spins to see his coat flapping as he leaps from the lip of the roof. The cops shout and dash for him, but he plunges silently from view.
The sound comes a moment later from the street.
It’s hours before the cops let her leave. She sits in MCB’s marble lobby, staring at the screen set up in the street by the Scenes of Crime team. She nurses a cup of tea that has cooled to lukewarm.
Croft walks over. He’s pale, his assurance splintered. “I should ask how you knew.”
“Fallon made a mistake. He sent the car to run Harry down.”
“Harry. Not you?”
“The car was waiting outside the school when I got there. Harry had to be the target,” she says. “Although I’d probably have been next on his list. After Holly died, Harry and I both came here to MCB. We both came to your offices. Talked to you. But on the way out, only Harry spoke to Fallon, and got a pat on the shoulder, and got handed a twenty direct from Fallon’s hands. Which had glitter on them. Glitter Fallon got from grabbing Holly and pitching her off the roof. Glitter that was not on the windowsill in Holly’s office. Fallon transferred it to Harry. I wiped it off Harry’s face. That was the proof.”
“Glitter.”
“Once glitter touches something you can never get it off. Every cleaner knows it.” She sighs. “It had to be Fallon. When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is going to be the truth.”
Croft looks unsettled, but eyes her with fresh respect. “Why did you steal the keycard from my desk? Why didn’t you simply tell me your suspicions?”
“I had to prove it. Holly told Croft Security about the breach. And look what happened to her.”
He nods reluctantly. “Why go to such lengths? Surely not for fifty pounds.”
“For Harry,” she says. “And because I want in.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Me, working full time for Croft Security. Seems I have an eye for things that are out of place. Such as your name,” she says. “I spent the afternoon at the library. The Companies House register lists the owner of Croft Security as Freddy Phelps, ‘Trading As Michael Croft.’ Mike Croft—as in Mycroft Holmes, the detective’s brilliant brother. You deliberately gave your business the Baker Street aura. Sweet.” She raises her cup. “Pleased to meet you.”
“My word.”
She smiles. “Street Team. We can ‘go everywhere, see everything, overhear ev
eryone.’ Sherlock Holmes for Dummies, page one hundred twenty.”
He leans back. “All right.”
“After I get my degree at university, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll join your staff as a paid intern whilst I do my studies. Unless the firm prefers to directly fund my university fees.”
“We’ll work it out.” He looks stunned, yet ready to smile. He turns to go.
“One other thing.”
He turns back. “What’s that?”
“Harry. His family is probably safe, though Fallon had confederates.”
Word of the . . . well, the hour, confederates.
“We’ll make sure.”
“Harry needs a safe school. He and his sisters. Fairfield Park is ideal. You’ll see to their fees and transport. Uniforms, supplies, everything. Lunch.”
“Of course.”
She searches his face for sincerity or signs of duplicity. Extends her hand. They shake.
A cop strolls over, a Detective Inspector. He nods to her. “I hear you helped close this case. We should be thanking you.”
“No call for that. It’s done.” Done, dusted, gone. Like Holly Kendrick.
“Nevertheless, well spotted, Miss . . .”
“Call me Shaz. It’s Sharon, actually. Sharon Hill.” She glances at Croft. “But from here on I’ll be trading as Shar. Shar Locke.”
“That’s . . . unexpected,” Croft says.
“I think you mean irregular.”
Word of the year.
WHERE THERE IS HONEY
by Dana Cameron
Writing settles my mind. Getting the thoughts out of my head and onto the page, with the accompanying smell of ink and the scratch of the pen across fresh paper, has become a daily habit, especially when we are working on a case. Once committed to paper, my whirlwind ideas cease to plague me so terribly. I hate the persistence of memory, questioning the actions I took or did not take on a case, what I observed or did not observe—and always, what might have been. These “might have beens” stretch to eternity, a litany of failure. I have observed a marked lowness of spirits when I do not keep to this ritual, and so try to be constant in it. On some occasions, since my discharge from the army, I have found myself unnerved by new worries, and the ordering of my rampaging thoughts, corralling and quieting them, helps.