Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

by Paul Cornell

  ‘No, that’s what I mean by proof. Look.’ Bates rolled up his sleeve and showed Costain the tiniest of needle marks in the crook of his arm. ‘He said he wanted some of my blood in return. I asked the boys who knew about this and they said, yeah, that’s the sort of deal they make – he wasn’t taking the piss. So I got some works and he took the blood and that’s what he fucking used to set me up.’

  ‘What about the CCTV footage?’

  ‘Come on, man, he can walk through fucking walls! He could make that camera see whatever it wanted to, couldn’t he?’

  Costain admitted to himself that Bates’s story was starting to sound plausible, though the boy’s idea that a pinprick in his arm was ‘proof’ was typical prisoner bollocks. ‘Didn’t you stop to wonder what he was doing in here if he could get out? Bigger question: why are you still here?’

  Bates looked incredulous. ‘Mate, if you can get out, this is a fucking hotel. Food and bed and your mates. I used the chalk to go out, come back. I thought that’s what that bloke was doing too. I thought he had loads of these. I thought everyone was into it, or maybe they’d been in the last place this bloke was inside. I got out after lights out, had a smoke, got laid, back for breakfast. Easy fucking life. But I never used it to kill nobody; this fucker did. He took that blood to set me up for it.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Dean Michael. No, being serious.’

  That sounded a bit like a job name, which was going to make finding the prisoner on the jail’s records that much harder. Costain got the relevant dates from Bates, and a description: black, maybe some Latin too; six foot or so; goatee; tattoo of something like a dragon down the side of his neck.

  Bates looked worried again as Costain stood to leave. ‘Give me the chalk back.’

  ‘Like I’m going to do that.’

  ‘That’s my property! I’ll tell them you stole something from me.’ He sounded suddenly like the frightened child who was underneath everything else he was.

  Costain was sure Bates knew as well as he did that the authorities here wouldn’t care what he’d taken, especially if the item in question turned out to be a piece of chalk. But what else could the boy do? He was losing the key to his freedom. He took a sudden pace towards Costain, force being his next option. Costain faced him down and he finally turned away.

  ‘You better fucking catch him, then,’ said Albie Bates.

  After Bates had been taken back into the main body of the jail, Costain went to the prison officer on duty at the end of the row of interview rooms and asked about what this lot called ‘the establishment’ of the jail. It took him a couple of hours in the office to go through all the records on the C-NOMIS system, and thankfully he found a skilled operator to help him. They kept a specific record of tattoos. No prisoner of the description Bates had given had been through here during the time Bates had been in Wandsworth.

  Costain was sure the frightened child inside the no-hoper hadn’t been lying to him. Which left him with lots of loose ends to add to the ops board. He headed for the exit and tried not to speed up as he did so.

  As he walked the corridor back towards reception, he saw out of the corner of his eye the beaten-down figure of Wilde looking at him from a corner, caring for another lost child. He shook his head and dismissed it.

  He could have said something to Bates, couldn’t he, told him he could have his chalk back after the investigation? Of course not – that would be letting a dangerous prisoner escape, despite the fact that it had made no difference to the world when he’d been coming and going. Still, Costain was always a stickler for the rules, right?

  He got out, reached his car, found he was leaning heavily on it without opening the door. The building behind him mocked him with its weight and his complicity, its shadow lying on his back. It wasn’t his job to redeem every prisoner who was a little shit because of the shit done to him and so on and so on back to the start of time, was it? He’d decided a while back to stop living in fear of Hell, and he wasn’t planning to return to that, but again he thought about how he was going to bring these new points of information back to Ross, and how she would resent it being him who brought them. How they could never, as it stood, do their job together in peace.

  He wasn’t a saint. Maybe, though, he could do better about how he was, about the choices he made. He wanted desperately to do better for Ross. He took the chalk from his pocket and wondered about using it to step out of this life and be someone different, someone good. He could just be that, couldn’t he? He could just decide to change. He put the chalk back in his pocket, with a question not an answer in his mind, got into his car and drove too quickly out of the prison.

  SEVEN

  Mark Ballard had been incarcerated on remand in HM Prison Brixton, somewhere Sefton had never previously set foot. He did so now with a mixture of dread and interest, a mixture in which, he had to admit, he’d started to find great satisfaction.

  As he walked down the corridors that howled with history, he wished his colleagues could be where he was now, emotionally: explorers in a new world, not victims of it. He hoped this case might still help get them there, no matter how much simpler it suddenly seemed to have got.

  Ballard, as the team’s reading for Operation Dante had left them in no doubt, was a real piece of work. He made the Keel brothers, those hardcore entrepreneurs who’d forced their peers to start dealing in cash, look like amateurs. He’d profited from the sudden absence of law in hidden London in the last few years, and he’d done it in secret, without showing off, either aware that some new law would come along or anticipating it might. He wouldn’t be overawed by anything Sefton could present him with. So Sefton was planning on taking a different approach.

  Ballard was lounging in the interview-room chair, in that same expensive suit he’d worn for the bank job, which was now looking a little crumpled. He was sipping from a cup of coffee. Sefton sat down opposite, aware he was a bloke who shopped at JD Sports. He opened his faithful holdall and, without ceremony, put onto the table, still in its evidence bag, the blade that had killed Sherlock Holmes. ‘Mr Ballard,’ he said, ‘we’d like your professional opinion.’

  ‘Yes, I was expecting something like this.’ He glanced at the weapon, then looked back to Sefton. ‘I didn’t think that, having caught me, you’d let me go to waste. Who are you people?’

  ‘We’re what replaced the Continuing Projects Team.’

  ‘Who?’

  Sefton knew from previous dealings with the occult underworld in London that it had been known there was law out there, but they’d been seen more as a limiting force than a team with a name and a base. Maybe that said something about how they’d operated. Way in the background, most likely. ‘We’re the new law for our sort of London.’

  ‘The new Shadow Police?’

  So some of them at least had given this force in their lives a name. Sefton gave Ballard a few bare details about what they’d done so far. It was enough of the truth, he hoped, to gain some trust. Ballard said immediately he hadn’t known anything about what had preceded them, only that everyone had said there was something, and that around the point where he’d started to flex his muscles, everyone started saying it had gone away. ‘I wondered what the Mora Losley case was about. I was out of London for the Ripper, thank God. I only came back when I heard the riots were over.’

  ‘People like us, we’re always going to come back, though, right?’

  Ballard laughed, as if noting Sefton’s on-the-nose attempt at fellow feeling. ‘Yeah, but who’s this “we”, kemo sabe? What exactly are you offering me here?’

  ‘I was thinking about the sort of deal sometimes offered to hackers. You become a white hat, consult for us, stop committing crimes. You get to live off your previous immoral earnings, no questions asked.’

  ‘I don’t know, I was looking forward to the trial.’

  ‘Yeah, so were we. We got a narrative sorted before the raid that doesn’t include anything a jury woul
d find impossible to believe.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Ballard’s expression remained placid. ‘You’d never keep me inside.’

  ‘Because of that stick of chalk of yours? We’d put a watch on what you took in and what got in to you, and, between you and me, if you did a runner, you’d find yourself with some serious off-the-books shit on your tail.’ Not that Sefton had anything of the sort at the ready, but he was pretty sure the threat would seem credible.

  ‘Oh. I note this interview isn’t being recorded.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  Ballard considered for a long time. Longer than anyone would really consider anything. Sefton took that to be a good sign and allowed himself a smile that slowly grew. Finally, Ballard let out a long breath that was almost a laugh. Yeah, he was going to take the offer. Of course he was. ‘I’ll need to talk to my brief about this. For that, I need you to make a formal offer that anyone reading it who’s not involved in our world isn’t going to baulk at.’

  ‘We’ll get that sorted. Right now, give me something I can tell my chief, a show of good faith. Something about the dagger, something about the chalk.’

  ‘Isn’t the chalk obvious? You saw how it worked at the bank.’

  Sefton kept a poker face. Ballard sat down again and picked up the dagger. It had already been examined for fingerprints. They’d only found glove marks. Similarly, the envelope and photo had yielded nothing meaningful. ‘This is made in London, of course.’

  ‘Yeah, we can read.’

  ‘“Wilkinson and Son, Pall Mall, London,”’ Ballard read out loud. ‘The company that became Wilkinson Sword. This is a bowie knife, dates from around 1840 to 1860, fake-ivory grip, in very good condition. If you had the original leather sheath, this would be worth a small fortune, but a copper could retire on this as is.’

  ‘We really wanted a bit more detail than you’d get on Antiques Roadshow.’

  ‘The stick men carved into the blade aren’t an original feature; they look to have been added recently. Nothing supernatural about them, but there is much of interest about the knife itself. I don’t have the Sight, but I suspect this object feels meaningful to those that do.’

  Sefton carefully didn’t confirm or deny his own status. ‘Why do you suspect that?’

  ‘Because look at the notches on the grip here. Very small, but each of them will have been cut with a sacrifice and lined with blood. This is a “fetch kettle”, an object that’s been modified, long ago, to host a particular “spiel”, a way of keeping useful sound and gesture handy without having to replicate it yourself. This being a knife, I’d say the effect would probably be activated when it was stabbed into something.’

  That was more detail than Sefton had ever previously heard about hidden London, framed in a language of professional use that went far beyond anything his unit had ever come up with. It was, obviously, the tip of a dirty great iceberg of data. He kept his expression steady. So the knife might well have had some sort of ghost-killing power imbued into it, be a ‘ghostkiller’, as the coded inscription named it. ‘What effect would that be? In detail.’

  ‘Ah, no.’ Ballard laid the knife carefully back on the table. ‘Get that paperwork sorted.’

  ‘And about the chalk?’

  Ballard shrugged. ‘Not much to tell. I’ve seen two or three sticks of it in my time . . . pretty rare, but not unique. Don’t know where it comes from, just that, with the proper gestures, it works.’

  Sefton decided to go with another tack that he’d considered in advance. ‘OK, we’ll get into that. In the meantime, as a show of good faith on our part, is there anything about unseen London you’d like to ask us?’

  Ballard didn’t look incredulous, thank Christ. He considered for a moment. ‘It’s changing, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’ Sefton wished he could have a straightforward conversation with this guy. Maybe before long they would. ‘We think something major changed about five years ago.’

  ‘When the old law went away, right. But what about since?’

  Sefton had already considered what he was going to reveal. ‘Our investigations point to events moving in a particular direction. A worrying direction.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ballard waited to hear more, then visibly realized he wasn’t going to. He sighed. ‘I’d really enjoy having the time and space to work with you. But only after I get my deal.’

  Ross had gone to see Ann Stanley, assistant curator at the Holmes Museum, at home at her parents’ house in Rickmansworth. She’d been given leave while the museum was a crime scene, and she didn’t like it at all. ‘It sort of feels like I’m meant to be in shock, or that I did something wrong,’ she said, handing Ross a cup of tea.

  ‘There’s no reason to think that,’ lied Ross.

  The museum had shown the main investigation their post room, an office downstairs with a dedicated secretary who answered all the letters that came in to 221B. A standard reply was printed on stationery that bore the detective’s profile in silhouette, complete with a pipe and deerstalker cap. As if Holmes would have allowed the use of those symbols in ‘real life’. The form letter thanked people for writing and fobbed off requests for help with the phrase ‘In his own words, Mr Holmes has given himself up entirely “to that soothing life of nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years amid the gloom of London”.’ Certainly, a sentient Holmes with an interest in his own mail, assuming he had the power to come downstairs and to lift things, could have found a specific parcel and taken it back to his study.

  ‘What sort of mail did Sherlock Holmes get?’ Ross asked.

  ‘People asking if he was real, or if he’d run for president in the US. Sometimes they had mad theories about the books they wanted him to confirm. Some of them were written like . . . like a kid believing in Father Christmas. Sort of half thinking of him as real and half not. Like people you’d think were completely normal write to characters in Coronation Street. They asked him to solve crimes too. A lot wanted him to find Bin Laden. That’s a bit sick, isn’t it?’

  Ross didn’t express an opinion. ‘Were there any ghost stories about the museum?’

  Stanley looked puzzled. ‘Well, no, but . . . it was me on the evening shift a lot, clearing up after the day, and . . . you heard things. Other people did too. Like there was someone moving around. And things got moved. Small stuff. You’d put something back where it was supposed to be and then it’d be somewhere else. That sounds stupid. You’re not writing that down, are you?’

  Ross had been. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘That’s all useful information.’

  When she got back to the Hill, Ross found that Sefton and Costain had returned too. Quill seemed to have spent the time staring at the ops board and making tea. They all listened to each other’s stories, and Ross felt she could now just about support the idea of at least a mobile and perhaps a sentient Holmes who might have taken the envelope from the post room. She went to the ops board and added a suspect line between the three murders and ‘Dean Michael’, which she kept in speech marks to indicate a possible alias.

  Ballard’s deal was in progress, Quill having put a request in with Lofthouse. Enquiries to the Sherlock Holmes Society and the Baker Street Babes podcast had revealed that Conan Doyle hadn’t been terribly precise about what Holmes kept on his bookshelves. Ross suspected that, despite her warnings about secrecy, being contacted by the police for expert advice in the midst of the ‘Rache’ killings would result in a few stray tweets of glee from those organizations. Of the few book titles named in the stories, none was missing. The museum didn’t regard anything as being missing. They had the same number of blank prop books as their records said they’d had before. Recent pictures from visitors to the museum, as seen on Facebook, right up until the day of the Holmes ‘murder’ also revealed nothing that shouldn’t be in the museum, no astronomical charts on the walls, the standard number of books all shoved up next to each other with gaps only left at the end of the shelves.

&n
bsp; ‘Is it . . . just us that can see this stuff?’ asked Costain. They went to have bacon sandwiches in the Gipsy Hill canteen and awkwardly showed a photo of the astronomical map to a lid, who, looking puzzled at them, said that he liked to stargaze sometimes, like.

  ‘So,’ said Sefton, bewildered, ‘did this sentient and mobile Holmes . . . set up his rooms differently after everyone went home, like something out of Night at the Museum?’

  ‘That does sound like him,’ said Quill, weakly, as if he felt he ought to contribute something.

  Ross went back to the ops board and tried to sum that grey area up in a couple of added notes.

  After they’d got back to the Portakabin, Quill took a phone call from the main inquiry and reported to them the results. ‘So, Bates’s girlfriend confirms that she’s been seeing him lately, didn’t even try to conceal the fact, because he’d told her he was out.’

  ‘Which,’ said Sefton, ‘using Occam’s razor, puts him right back in the frame, whatever story he’s telling us. He had the opportunity, and with the chalk he had the means.’

  ‘Which is why,’ said Quill, ‘I felt obliged to share the first of those details with the main investigation. Not that I could tell them how he got out. Still, that’ll cause havoc at Wandsworth.’

  ‘He had a frigging staggering lack of motive,’ said Costain. ‘Nothing was stolen from those two murder scenes, and what’s he got to do with killing Sherlock Holmes?’

  ‘Maybe he was working for someone else?’ said Sefton.

  ‘So whatever mastermind put together this baffling mystery was stupid enough to hire Albie Bates?’ asked Costain.

  ‘Bates was lying about not knowing anything about the Holmes stories.’ Ross hated replying directly to him, but at the same time she now felt weirdly able to. It was like Costain was so caught up in the case now he’d stopped having artificial reactions to her. ‘His mum’s Facebook page includes pictures of him aged eight, in the deerstalker, in his primary-school production of Hound of the Baskervilles.’